A new study published in Nature predicts that even modest changes in climate will have significant impacts on crops, water availability, and severe weather events. Most alarmingly, the study predicts that even a 2 degree Celsius rise in temperature, which may already be inevitable with current levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide now exceeding 400 ppm, will affect as many as two billion people with severe food and water shortages. NASA predicts a 2-6 degree Celsius rise in mean global temperatures within the next century. Many climate researchers believe NASA's numbers are a best case scenario. Secretary of State John Kerry's recent response to the latest IPCC Summary for Policymakers as a "wake-up call" typifies the impotency of government to respond to the dire implications of our planet and life support system warming more rapidly than any paleoclimate warming event within the last 800,000 years or more. Twenty-six years ago, James Hansen, testifying before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, was asked when we could expect to see the effects of greenhouse warming. Hansen responded, " We are already seeing it now." What have we done with Hansen's warning to humanity in 1988? Our elected officials have responded with torrents vapid rhetoric, and shameful and cowardly waffling. They have taken millions in campaign contributions/bribes from the polluters and cheered as new technologies such as fracking and deep-water drilling have guaranteed a future world that nobody alive today would recognize. And let us not forget the complicit "anything for a buck" media's fair and balanced approach to educating the public by giving well paid quacks and charlatans endless opportunities to extol the virtues of oil and coal while dismissing the scientific consensus as hysterical and mendacious. How pathetic have we become as an informed citizenry when victory is achieved by passively awaiting Obama/Bush/Clinton/Bush to acknowledge climate change in any public forum regardless of how briefly, ingenuously, or lacking in contextual significance? At the beginning of World War II, W.H. Auden wrote " We must love one another or die." As global ecosystems continue to inexorably decline and anthropogenic greenhouse gases continue to fill our atmosphere, I would humbly alter Auden's words to reflect the sad inevitability of our present time: We must love one another and the natural world more and greed and ignorance less or we will indeed die.
Water Shortages Predicted as Climate Warms
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