Climate scientists, biologists, engineers and others with expertise
have been speaking and writing about our changing planet for a long
time. My own work has focused on how we'll figure out a way to come to
terms with billions more people, limited resources and more extreme
extremes. Droughts will be worse. Floods more severe. Storms
increasingly intense.
I've often felt like a modern Cassandra, writing and speaking about
the dramatic and unprecedented planetary shifts taking place due to
short-sighted policy choices. Deforestation, the burning of fossil
fuels, and the ways we use water and produce food inevitably do take a
toll on the environment, our health and security. As a marine scientist,
I observed firsthand how the pH of oceans has been changing along urban
coasts in a process called acidification due to excess emissions.
The evidence of climate change has been all around us for a long time.
Protecting people and Earth's co-inhabitants from its most devastating
impacts will require institutional reckoning and action.
Doomsday scenarios may generate clicks and sell advertisements, but
they always fail to convey that science is nuanced. Arbitrary "time left
to apocalypse" predictions are not evidence based and the story of
climate change doesn't fit neatly into brief bullet points competing for
your attention in today's saturated media environment. Stoking panic
and fear offers a false narrative that can overwhelm readers, leading to
inaction and hopelessness.
When I worked on Capitol Hill 13 years ago, I faced a cacophony of
staffers and lawmakers choosing inaction on the assumption that climate
change wasn't real. Today many of the same people point to the dire
predictions dominating the news and shrug off better policies with the
excuse that the world is ending anyway.
If history teaches us anything, it's that humans have a penchant for
anticipating our End Times. Ancient mythologies from cultures all around
the world describe catastrophic floods and religious cults continue to
recruit followers with predictions of death by comet or solar flare.
Earth isn't ending in 12 years. It didn't end at Y2K or when the Mayan
calendar predicted the collapse of civilization in 2012.
Earth, as a
whole, will be okay—for at least another few billion years. What's less
settled is how humans and the rest of biodiversity on the planet will
fare in the decades and centuries to come. That's up to us and I hope we
work to highlight hope over Armageddon.
The world will end one day, but not today. And not tomorrow. And not in
2030. Earth will continue to change, but we're not necessarily doomed.
Yet.
Read more at: No, Climate Change Will Not End the World in 12 Years - Scientific American Blog Network
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