We’re under attack from climate change—and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII.

[Fast Walker 52]

https://newrepublic.com/article/135684/declare-war-climate-change-mobilize-wwii

by Bill McKibben

A really great piece that makes a compelling point.

In the North this summer, a devastating offensive is underway. Enemy forces have seized huge swaths of territory; with each passing week, another 22,000 square miles of Arctic ice disappears. Experts dispatched to the battlefield in July saw little cause for hope, especially since this siege is one of the oldest fronts in the war. “In 30 years, the area has shrunk approximately by half,” said a scientist who examined the onslaught. “There doesn’t seem anything able to stop this.”

In the Pacific this spring, the enemy staged a daring breakout across thousands of miles of ocean, waging a full-scale assault on the region’s coral reefs. In a matter of months, long stretches of formations like the Great Barrier Reef—dating back past the start of human civilization and visible from space—were reduced to white bone-yards.

Day after day, week after week, saboteurs behind our lines are unleashing a series of brilliant and overwhelming attacks. In the past few months alone, our foes have used a firestorm to force the total evacuation of a city of 90,000 in Canada, drought to ravage crops to the point where southern Africans are literally eating their seed corn, and floods to threaten the priceless repository of art in the Louvre. The enemy is even deploying biological weapons to spread psychological terror: The Zika virus, loaded like a bomb into a growing army of mosquitoes, has shrunk the heads of newborn babies across an entire continent; panicked health ministers in seven countries are now urging women not to get pregnant. And as in all conflicts, millions of refugees are fleeing the horrors of war, their numbers swelling daily as they’re forced to abandon their homes to escape famine and desolation and disease.

World War III is well and truly underway. And we are losing.

For years, our leaders chose to ignore the warnings of our best scientists and top military strategists. Global warming, they told us, was beginning a stealth campaign that would lay waste to vast stretches of the planet, uprooting and killing millions of innocent civilians. But instead of paying heed and taking obvious precautions, we chose to strengthen the enemy with our endless combustion; a billion explosions of a billion pistons inside a billion cylinders have fueled a global threat as lethal as the mushroom-shaped nuclear explosions we long feared. Carbon and methane now represent the deadliest enemy of all time, the first force fully capable of harrying, scattering, and impoverishing our entire civilization.

[hunter]

1. It's cheaper to build walls and let the climate change refugees starve.

I don't know why, but the wealthy and powerful always seem to think they'll be safe behind walls up until the moment they're not.

[riderinthestorm]

2. I am heartsick about this. My deep despair about our fate hits me every day

As I walk out into our beautiful world....

We need unprecedented aggressive global action and mobilisation now to mitigate the oncoming climate and environmental catastrophic events (it's too late to reverse events anymore. Best we can hope for is to avoid nthe).

[FreakinDJ]

3. Won't do any good until China and India stop too

And the whole Kyoto treaty would have done nothing but shuffle pollution around the globe and make Western countries pay for it

[Fast Walker 52]

4. we need to lead on this... and China and India are seeking climate solutions now

[FreakinDJ]

11. We need to lead by taxing goods produced by dirty factories

Other than that your pissing in the wind

[Fast Walker 52]

12. that's a great point

[The2ndWheel]

5. Is climate change an objective problem?

No. We think it's a problem, because we have this abstract imagination that creates values, but the planet and universe don't care if human beings are around. 500 of us, 500 billion of us, whatever it is that we call existence doesn't care.

Humanity may value life too much in terms of "sustainability". We want to have our cake and eat it. We want to be able to do whatever we want to do, become all that we can, without the downside. We don't get to do that. We want everything to live, except of course the forms of life that we want to eradicate, as they are a threat.

In terms of an honest and objective assessment, if we're "fighting" climate change, there need to be fewer people doing less. We have 4 options:

1) More people doing more
2) More people doing less
3) Fewer people doing more
4) Fewer people doing less

Option 1 is what we've been doing, for however many years, decades, centuries, millennia. That's how society functions. That's where business gets customers, and where governments get taxes. Option 2 is basically the developing world. Option 3 is basically the developed world. Option 4 isn't society, so it's not really an option.

Humans started changing things when we planted a seed, and hunted with sharp sticks. We now want to fight climate change by changing the climate. We can't stop, but we can't continue.

[Fast Walker 52]

6. Yes, it is a subjective problem that we should address for a great many reasons

and putting aside your odd and fairly demeaning categories.

[The2ndWheel]

8. Right, it's a subjective problem and nobody can agree on what to do about it

What's odd and fairly demeaning about the categories? It's just math. We want more and more people hooked into the global economy, and the global economy, and all that supports it, is what is giving humanity the ability to increasingly amplify our ability to change the climate.

We can look at our economic systems the same way. Walls on both sides, with:

1) No ceiling, and no floor
2) A ceiling, but no floor
3) No ceiling, but a floor
4) A ceiling, and a floor

What we want modern society to be is #3. No upper limit to what humanity can do, and we can't fall below a certain level. Shockingly, that's the most "unsustainable" of the options we have, the same way when society requires more people to do more in order to function.

That's why there's no real solution. We can't take everything into account. We'll do what we've been doing, perhaps using some different source of energy, hoping that it reduces our impact. If we wanted to do that last part, we could just do less, but that's not progress. That's not why we invest the time and energy to increase the efficiency of technology. We do that in order for more people to be able to do more, because we're not very good at making tough choices. Who gets to make those choices? Why do they get to make those choices? We would rather just give more people the chance to have everything that everyone else has, as the only fair way that we've found to do it is to increase the size of the pie. Once we start slicing the pie thinner, we get into arguments, and fights, and it can get messy. Which is why we've settled on the most unsustainable options possible. This planet belongs to the human imagination.

[Calculating]

7. It's pretty hopeless IMO

1st problem:
In order to get serious about fighting climate change our country would probably need to divert around 3/4 of the military budget into renewable energy development. Good luck getting people to agree with that plan. America LOVES military spending and proudly outspends the next 5+ countries combined.

2nd problem:
We have a large segment of the population who believe the whole thing is just a big hoax, or that it's a natural cycle. They constantly spread misinformation and falsehoods regarding the issue and stall out any potential action.

3rd problem:
Among those who believe in the issue there's still a lack of unity and action. Everybody wants action, but nobody wants to personally sacrifice their standard of living and financial health to help with the problem.

4th problem:
The effects of climate change aren't readily apparent, and tend to hurt those in poor 3rd world countries the most. It's largely an 'invisible enemy' and this makes it hard to instill people with a sense of urgency.

5th problem:
Apathy... Lots of people believe that we're already screwed, and our efforts should simply go towards dealing with the effects of climate change and adapting to a warmer world. I personally think we're screwed because of population growth mainly. Even if we reduced CO2 emissions by 50%, it won't matter if the world has 10+ billion people in 50 years and they all want their own electricity, cars, heated homes and such.

[The2ndWheel]

9. One thing

America LOVES military spending and proudly outspends the next 5+ countries combined.

The US military is basically the developed world's military, but it's just the US taxpayer paying for it. The empires of the past used to go out and get their own stuff. The US, for lack of a better term, won the 20th century, so our government became the world's police by default. European countries have been pretty cool with that, since they can spend more of their money on their own social programs. The US has been pretty cool with it, because no governing body can tell us no. The US doesn't answer to anyone, we're not going to be economically sanctioned, governments won't bomb us, our money still runs the world, etc.

[Fast Walker 52]

13. this is true, and our elites want to keep our supremacy going

BUT, what if our elites actually started to have the US do the right thing on climate change?

[Fast Walker 52]

14. It's not hopeless, but it will be hard. The younger generation at least seems to care about this

in greater numbers. as they should -- they will be around to see the planet's fate.

[malaise]

10. We'd better - check this out

https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=3385
<snip>
As of Tuesday, the deepest cyclone in the Northern Hemisphere wasn’t anywhere near the tropics--it was spinning in the central Arctic Ocean. A surface low located near 83°N, about 500 miles from the North Pole and about 1000 miles north of Barrow, Alaska, deepened to a central pressure of 968 mb at 2 am EDT Tuesday morning, August 16. This is on par with the central pressure you might find in a moderately-sized Category 2 hurricane. Such lows are a common feature of Arctic climate, but they rarely gain such intensity in the middle of summer. The only deeper Arctic cyclone on record in August is the Great Arctic Cyclone (GAC) of 2012, a low that bottomed out at 966 mb on August 6. This was the lowest pressure analyzed across more than 1600 August cyclones in the Arctic since 1979, according to a 2012 study by Ian Simmonds and Irina Rudeva (University of Melbourne).

Wind, waves, and ice
The GAC of 2012 churned across the Arctic for ten days while its central pressure was below 1000 mb. The cyclone had major effects on the distribution of regional ice and appears to have played at least some role in that summer’s record depletion of Arctic sea ice. Normally, low pressure near the North Pole causes ice to spread out (as surface waters and sea ice move to the right of the surface wind). Yet the intensity and duration of the 2012 cyclone’s winds and waves appears to have more than compensated for that effect, leading to an overall loss of ice extent. The extent plummeted in August 2012 en route to a record-low extent in September.