I joined the international chorus of voices for last year’s Blog Action Day on Poverty and had a great time of it. The concept is really amazing; much like the planet’s interconnected ecosystems and processes, we bloggers are tied together by the intertubes.
Semantically, I’ve never joined the “global warming” crowd, preferring instead to use “climate change” as my preferred phraseology. Even then, I still lean towards employing “stop polluting the only place we’ve got to live because once we muck it up we’re all going to die”. I can understand why people lean toward one term or another.
Climate change itself could probably more accurately be called planet change. Think about it: rising temperatures, falling temperatures, natural weather disasters, desertification, coldifying (I made this one up), flora-failure, and all things directly connected to ideas about climate change also affect animal populations, human migration, THE WIND ITSELF, the amount of food we have on hand, and pretty much most everything.
The Age of Stupid, a new film starring my friend Pete Postlethwaite, imagines a world a few decades into the future which has been inundated and destroyed by our inaction on climate change. He asks, “How could we have been so stupid?” It’s a great question. The deniers will wave stacks of studies “proving” their point, and the other side will do the same. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions, if not billions of people, watch their skies turn dark and their rivers dry up or flood over and their animals and crops die.
We’re in a strange place now. Some say we’re past the tipping point, others say we’re approaching it. We bicker and we retreat. Then we bicker some more. Climate change requires global action.
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