Luckily for us, during the three million years or so of our tenure on Earth, no cosmic or terrestrial incident of mega-catastrophic proportions has ever occurred. No planet killer asteroids or comets have landed during our time. No periods of pan-volcanism have killed off sunlight, crops and us. Fortunately, up until the last hundred years or so we've been too puny a presence in earth's corpus to do it much real damage. Our dung campfires, even in the millions, never amounted to much in the vast moving volume of the atmosphere. But now they do, it seems.
Everything matters in policy, but nothing matters more than attention paid to the issue of climate change. At the G8 Summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s bold agenda has just been parried with a “let’s avoid mandatory benchmarks” strategy by our President. Another in a long list of stunning misperceptions. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that as long as George W. Bush is President, the oil markets will hum along as the fossil fuels run out, notwithstanding constant exploration, new discoveries and reclamation methods. And real money put toward real science will be stymied. He’ll be gone by the time we enter the last twenty-five years of the Age of the Great Fossil Fuel Economies. Problem is, if there's a car in every driveway in China and India soon, and those cars still run on oil and not on something else, then that last twenty-five years will arrive a lot sooner than we think.
It’s an ironic double-whammy. Running out of oil and climate change.
Katrina was just a shot across the bow. The Dust Bowl of the Thirties was a temporary snapshot compared to the movie we're about to see if drought across America's breadbasket takes wider hold due to climatic shifts. It’s not a pretty sight to imagine our amber waves of grain turned to permanent desert, aquifers pumped dry. Think how much precious fresh water from mountains where snow pack is diminishing still goes to fill the dancing fountains of Vegas.
So please, policymakers, do your best to slow climate change. Or in the alternative, if you policymakers don’t care and are just fat cats looking to invest, then hunker down, await God’s wrath, but buy property further inland, because either way, the Storm Age is here. And according to our scientists, it will get worse before it gets better, even if we halted civilization today.
