Sam Seder: When Climate Change Becomes "Real," It Will Be Too Late

[WhoIsNumberNone]

[Turbineguy]

1. For republicans this is no problem

since they don't believe in reality.

[Overseas]

2. It is sad that it is real but reported as isolated stories. Fire here. Flood there. Over 100 there.

I saw one quick documentary that flashed all of the climate change catastrophes in a cascade for a few minutes and that made an impact.

But our reporting is so influenced by our not wanting to accept that we have already moved past the mild scenarios of some drought and some floods and some fires, to lots of them all, reported one by one.

It is way too late to be fracking instead of rushing out with all the solar and wind we can, as fast as we can.

Frenzied fracking which uses up too much of our dwindling water suppy and poisons some of it too. Yet we pretend that it is helping us toward energy independence. Instead of pulling us further into more pollution and less clean water.

[Old Nick]

3. "Take it easy. That train isn't coming fast."

[tclambert]

4. It's already too late.

It takes decades for the atmosphere to reach a new equilibrium. The CO2 already in the air won't make its presence completely felt for twenty or thirty years. Yet it will stay in the atmosphere for a thousand years. Meanwhile, we have passed a number of tipping points, thereby activating feedback loops that will continue to make warming worse, even if we stopped burning all fossil fuels this instant.

But what is inevitable in thirty years is invisible today. And people manage to ignore what is visible. They can stand ankle-deep in seawater in Miami Beach and say, "I don't see any evidence of sea level rise."