What Will Climate Change’s Hiroshima Be?

Hiroshima, Kyoto, and the Bombs of Climate Change

Bill McKibben, April 27, 2018 (The New Yorker)

“…Hiroshima has a special grip on the planet’s consciousness…[It] has become symbolic shorthand for the nuclear horror that still haunts humanity…It’s not as if we have solved the nuclear issue, but at least we understand that it is a crisis…[With climate change, the] explosion of a billion pistons inside a billion cylinders every minute of every day just doesn’t induce the same tremble…Scientists estimate that, each day, our added emissions trap the heat equivalent of four hundred thousand Hiroshima-sized bombs, which is why the Arctic has half as much ice as it did in the nineteen-eighties, why the great ocean currents have begun to slow, why we see floods and storms and fires in such sad proportion…

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[The most important explanation is probably that the fossil-fuel industry] has spent billions of dollars defending the precise practices now wrecking the planet…[Their disinformation and lobbying campaigns] have been spectacularly effective… Every single day, climate change is the most important thing happening on the planet—there’s nothing even remotely close…[And unlike the more dramatic headline grabbing events, climate change is the one problem that comes with an absolute time limit because past a certain point] it won’t have a solution…Perhaps the free-falling price of solar and wind power will be enough to spur the necessary transition…[But without a Hiroshima moment to make us acknowledge reality,] it’s possible that as a species we’ll slide straight into a new, hotter, more desperate world…” click here for more

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