The northlondonhippy

Archive for September 17th, 2009

The pow­ers that be haven’t really sold us on the com­ing cli­mate apocalypse.

I’m not deny­ing its hap­pen­ing, I can clearly see its effects reg­u­larly on a world wide scale, I just don’t think our politi­cians and sci­en­tists have explained it to us very well.

“Cli­mate change” has a PR prob­lem, but don’t worry, I’m going to attempt to offer a sim­ple solution.

The planet Earth itself is not threatened.

There, I said it.

Cli­mate change is not going to destroy this rock we’re stuck on, regard­less of the atmos­pheric tem­per­a­ture, Earth will keep spin­ning through space for a very long time, prob­a­bly until our Sun turns into a Red Giant or Super­nova or what­ever it is stars do and that’s mil­lions of years away.

Cli­mate change might kill every liv­ing thing on the planet, or at least most of them. That should be a strong sell­ing point, only we don’t really care that much about liv­ing things other than humans.

And it seems we don’t care that much about all the humans any­way, only some of them. You know, the ones that look like us, dress like us, talk like us, ummmm, us.

Not them.

But most of all, we care about our­selves. Self-preservation is some­thing we all seem to have in common.

Tack­ling “cli­mate change” has to be about sav­ing one’s self from the com­ing Armaged­don. Fear is always an excel­lent sell­ing point.

Slow­ing cli­mate change will save your life and the lives of every­one you care about. Not slow­ing cli­mate change will prob­a­bly kill us all.

“All of us” includes you. You might really die from the effects of a warmer planet.

If the global tem­per­a­ture goes up, more peo­ple will die from heat-related ill­nesses. Remem­ber all those old French folks who died in the heat­wave in 2003? There’d be a lot more deaths like that.

Got air con­di­tion­ing? If the energy sup­pli­ers can’t keep up with demand, it won’t mat­ter and you’ll still fry.

Large, cur­rently heav­ily pop­u­lated areas of the planet will become unin­hab­it­able, poten­tially dis­plac­ing mil­lions. All those refugees will have to go some­where, which will increase crowd­ing in more tem­per­ate regions while stretch­ing dwin­dling resources beyond capac­ity. Life will become more dif­fi­cult to sustain.

Trop­i­cal dis­eases with­out known cures will spread out from the cur­rent hot zones to increas­ingly wider areas and even more peo­ple will die.

Food pro­duc­tion will be dis­rupted, prompt­ing star­va­tion on an unimag­in­able scale.

I’ve read that Lon­don has only a 48 hour food sup­ply at any given time, because of the way super­mar­ket stock is man­aged. Food prac­ti­cally goes from lorry to shelf with­out sit­ting long in the back room. Its a deliver-as-required system.

If your local super­mar­kets ran dry, how would you feed your­self and your fam­ily? Even if you stock­pile long-life meals, they’ll run out even­tu­ally. Think you can get a farm up and run­ning before it does? Assum­ing there’s still enough water and the sun’s not so hot that it fries your plants and live­stock before you have the chance to take the first tasty bite.

Unre­strained cli­mate change means death for you.

Its sim­ple math really, if we don’t do some­thing soon, we’re all gonna end up dead.

It won’t be the end of the planet, or the end of the world, but it will be the end of us.

And that includes you.

Sud­denly, those low energy light­bulbs don’t seem so bad and sep­a­rat­ing your recy­clable goods doesn’t seem like such a chore, does it?

A bunch of world lead­ers are head­ing to Copen­hagen this Decem­ber to go through the motions of a Cli­mate Change sum­mit. Per­haps, if they adopted the fol­low­ing slo­gan, peo­ple might finally start pay­ing attention:

Cli­mate Change = Death

And once everyone’s pay­ing atten­tion, per­haps we all can start tak­ing the right steps to slow down cli­mate change. The life you save just might be your own.