Meanwhile, in Australia, they're battling a seemingly endless succession of heatwaves with temperatures at some places in the high 40s and no end in sight. One Australian utility blamed the suffering on the closure of coal fired power plants. Right, blame renewables. It's hilarious.
This reminds me of a story from several years ago about a pastoral herder in Africa's sub Sahel region. He lost half his herd to heatwaves and drought one summer. He lost the remainder to flash flooding a year later. With that he gave up the range his family had occupied since time immemorial and moved to the city to try to scrape out some sort of existence.
We still will not grasp the role the gentle climate of the Holocene played in the establishment and steady growth of human civilization over the course of 11,000 years. It took mankind 11,000 years to hit a global population of one billion. Another century doubled that. When you and I were born the Earth had a human population of about 2.5 billion. Today, in just one lifetime, that figure has tripled to 7.5 billion on course to 9-billion by mid century. What could possibly go wrong?
Contrasted to the Holocene, the volatile climate of the Anthropocene will prove insurmountable to mankind. Cyclical yet sustained droughts and floods, sea level rise and storm surges, heat waves and our now clearly broken hydrological cycle are civilization wreckers.
All the evidence is there for us to see, Mound, yet the blinders remain firmly in place. We in the developed world are getting exactly what we deserve, some would say.
Meanwhile, in Australia, they're battling a seemingly endless succession of heatwaves with temperatures at some places in the high 40s and no end in sight. One Australian utility blamed the suffering on the closure of coal fired power plants. Right, blame renewables. It's hilarious.
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of a story from several years ago about a pastoral herder in Africa's sub Sahel region. He lost half his herd to heatwaves and drought one summer. He lost the remainder to flash flooding a year later. With that he gave up the range his family had occupied since time immemorial and moved to the city to try to scrape out some sort of existence.
We still will not grasp the role the gentle climate of the Holocene played in the establishment and steady growth of human civilization over the course of 11,000 years. It took mankind 11,000 years to hit a global population of one billion. Another century doubled that. When you and I were born the Earth had a human population of about 2.5 billion. Today, in just one lifetime, that figure has tripled to 7.5 billion on course to 9-billion by mid century. What could possibly go wrong?
Contrasted to the Holocene, the volatile climate of the Anthropocene will prove insurmountable to mankind. Cyclical yet sustained droughts and floods, sea level rise and storm surges, heat waves and our now clearly broken hydrological cycle are civilization wreckers.
All the evidence is there for us to see, Mound, yet the blinders remain firmly in place. We in the developed world are getting exactly what we deserve, some would say.
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