Sooner Than You Think

Yesterday's NYTimes has a lengthy article, "The Uninhabitable Earth," subtitled, "What Climate Change Could Wreak - Sooner Than You Think."

In a nutshell:

"...the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming ... that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand....Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.... we have, trapped in Arctic permafrost, twice as much carbon as is currently wrecking the atmosphere of the planet, all of it scheduled to be released at a date that keeps getting moved up....the climate window that has allowed for human life is very narrow, even by the standards of planetary history." 

We'll have issues with death by heat, drought and flood induced food shortages, plagues of insects and bacteria that won't die off, suffocating air, constant war, economic collapse, and poisoned oceans.

Why are we so blind to all of this?

"The dilemmas and dramas of climate change are simply incompatible with the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, especially in novels, which tend to emphasize the journey of an individual conscience rather than the poisonous miasma of social fate."

At least, at the very least, this is major mainstream news now. People are starting to listen. But will it make them more closed in with fear, even more flippant and careless, or actually more motivated to change??