CLIMATE IN THE HUMAN EPOCH

The decisions we make about climate change today will reverberate for millennia; No pressure.

David Roberts, February 15, 2016 (Vox)

“…[T]he quantities, numbers, and timespans involved in climate change are so gargantuan that they dwarf our workaday human experience…That's why those green ‘change your lightbulb’ campaigns always feel faintly ridiculous…[because a lightbulb’s energy] is a drop of water in the ocean of current human energy use…Because we have such trouble connecting the vastness of climate change to the limited horizons of our lived experience, we have trouble caring…[Yet, scientists tell us again and again that the one small thing is] the time we have left to effectively act…[So let's connect] long-term climate consequences] to our current political moment…Climate change is, for all intents and purposes, forever…[Analyses go to 2100 but] time is not going to stop in 2100…

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“…[Scientists recently observed that much of the carbon already emitted] will remain in the atmosphere for tens to hundreds of thousands of years…[and] argue for taking a longer view, modeling the previous 20,000 and the next 10,000 years, to put the climate changes being initiated today into proper geologic context…[That means the] US presidential election [and who appoints the new Supreme Court Justice and how the Court rules on the Clean Power Plan] will matter for 10,000 years…The terror of the Anthropocene — our new geologic epoch, in which humans are the primary driver of global change — is that we have now grown in scale and power so much that our decisions echo across centuries. But our brains and moral instincts remain as tribal and parochial as ever…” click here for more

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