This is serious, but I sometimes wonder whether we talk about environmental change as though the Earth is supposed to stay in one fixed configuration.
Sea levels have always risen and fallen. Ice ages have come and gone. Continents move. Volcanoes create land and destroy it. Coastlines change.
Change itself is not the problem. The Earth has always changed.
What matters is the speed of the change, how much of it we are causing, and whether ecosystems and human societies can adapt without enormous suffering.
Perhaps we need to stop treating CHANGE as the enemy and get much clearer about which changes are dangerous, why, and what we can realistically do about them.
Change itself is not the problem. The Earth has always changed. What matters is the speed of the change, how much of it we are causing, and whether ecosystems and human societies can adapt without enormous suffering.
Correct. That’s how most should view it. But for some reason, politics and money seem to get in the way. Which is annoying.
Exactly. And perhaps that is the maddening part. The physics doesn’t care about our politics, and the atmosphere doesn’t negotiate with our economic system. We can argue about it for another twenty years, but the planet won’t be attending the meeting.
