Climate Change and Hopelessness

The latest findings on the rate of climate change and the failure of humans to curb greenhouse gas emissions suggest that we’re approaching a tipping point. 

On this side of the tipping point is the reality that efforts to institute conservation and convert to alternative  energy production have been so sluggish and desultory that we (the people of the world) would have to take immediate drastic action to arrest the accelerating trend –– still in its early stages but clearly established in its trajectory -– toward an uninhabitable world.

On the other side of the tipping point is a sense of hopelessness; a consensus that nothing can be done; resignation that our species is doomed and will probably take all or most macroscopic living organisms along with us.

This doesn’t mean that life can’t be wonderful for most people; that inspiring developments can’t still occur. But on the other side of the tipping point life will be in some respects like life on the Titanic after it hit the iceberg, after it passed its tipping point.

We’re a lot better off than passengers on theTitanic who couldn’t get off the ship, which remained afloat for only two or three hours. Even if we do next to nothing to arrest climate change, much of the Earth will remain habitable well into the next century, and possibly for hundreds of years.