Survivors' Guide to the Last Days of the Coming Climate Inferno
Well, it’s 2022, and we have increased our carbon emissions and methane leaks worldwide, and we are losing the global warming battle as recorded by most of the folks watching the numbers. This is clear from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, August 2021, which signaled an alarm (code red) because of the lack of progress toward reducing global warming since the Paris Agreement, 2015. Also in late 2021, the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) met for the twenty-sixth time but failed to record significant progress toward reducing CO2eq[1] in the atmosphere from the hugest emitting countries.
UN secretary-General António Guterres opened COP26 with an urgent warning: “We are digging our own graves … recent climate action announcements might give the impression that we are on track to turn things around. This is an illusion. Even in the best-case scenario, temperatures will rise well above 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and likely quite a bit higher. We are still heading for climate disaster.”[2]
It is not to say that there is not a broad group of sincere organizations and citizens of the world that have been/are working hard to curb the chemicals that threaten our existence. They are out there, but the job seems to be beyond the good people’s ability to guide the planet into a space that will allow humans to occupy earth for much longer. I know, we are not supposed to talk like that. The sanctioned position has always been blind optimism bolstered by a grin and the call to dig deeper, but today—or maybe it was sometime yesterday—the grin became grim, and the diggers have become reapers.
The simple facts have led us to a realization that must not be mentioned; no, it’s not Lord Voldemort but some equally inconvenient truth. We are not losing the global warming battle—the battle is lost!
Admittedly, this is an unpopular realization, but the forces that have been and are presently in power have little interest in
taking the necessary steps to reign in the established economic barons that rule the air of the world. As a result, we will have a host environment that will not at first be friendly and later will no longer be habitable by present-day homo sapiens.
Oh, I get it; if you believed me or science or the scientists that have been warning of this day for decades, you’d be asking, “What can we do?” “We are (used to be) the most powerful nation in the world, and we will put a stop to this!” But it doesn’t matter because the time has come when we are past the tipping point and there isn’t anything anybody can do to save the planet. Think massive meteor hurling directly at the earth from a galaxy far, far away. It is over for humans. From this point forward, isolated geographic suffering will morph into coastal malaise, grassland dysfunction, and highland congestion before terminal destruction.
So given all this doom and gloom stuff, the real question is, what can/should I do now with the indeterminate time I/we have while I/we have it? And so, we have come to the actual value of this soliloquy. Should we run, give up, fight, or get smart about our remaining options for the time we have left? What do you want to do/see before it’s all gone? What should your kids see today that won’t be here tomorrow? What investments are ripe for the destruction era? Where should I relocate before the masses figure this out? Can I start eating meat, take up smoking, buy a nuclear car?
The global cooling chute did not open for planet Earth, and little now can be done about that. Still, there may be twenty or thirty years of climatic withering that you can enjoy before planetary dissonance makes life miserable.
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[1] The eq after C02 signifies carbon dioxide equivalent. This is a metric measure used to compare the emissions from various greenhouse gases based on their global warming potential (GWP). Other greenhouse gases are methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone. [2] António Guterres, UN Secretary General, opening remarks COP26 (UN Climate Summit) Glasgow, Scotland, November 1, 2021.