Certain Places Are Already Becoming Unlivable
by John Lawrence
Today it's supposed to be 121 degrees in Palm Springs, 115 degrees in Phoenix, 108 degrees in Athens. If you don't have air conditioning in those places, you are at high risk of dying. Thousand year floods are becoming annual events. And yet last year the human race pumped more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than ever before. Is this nuts or what? The human race will not become obsolete due to Artificial Intelligence; there is another much more deadly and imminent scenario - global warming. The Washington Post reported in an article entitled Floods, fires and deadly heat are the alarm bells of a planet on the brink:
The world is hotter than it’s been in thousands of years, and it’s as if every alarm bell on Earth were ringing.
The warnings are echoing through the drenched mountains of Vermont, where two months of rain just fell in only two days. India and Japan were deluged by extreme flooding.
They’re blaring from the scorching streets of Texas, Florida, Spain and China, with a severe heat wave also building in Phoenix and the Southwest in coming days.
They’re burbling up from the oceans, where temperatures have surged to levels considered “beyond extreme.”
And they’re showing up in unprecedented, still-burning wildfires in Canada that have sent plumes of dangerous smoke into the United States.
Scientists say there is no question that this cacophony was caused by climate change — or that it will continue to intensify as the planet warms. Research shows that human greenhouse gas emissions, particularly from burning fossil fuels, have raised Earth’s temperature by about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. Unless humanity radically transforms the way people travel, generate energy and produce food, the global average temperature is on track to increase by more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit), according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — unleashing catastrophes that will make this year’s disasters seem mild.
It's the problem of the frog in warm water. As the temperature of the water is increased, the frog doesn't jump out because the water warms so gradually. Eventually, the water gets so warm that the frog wants desperately to jump out but he can't. The water is too hot for him to move so, as the temperature keeps on increasing, he eventually boils to death. This is the exact metaphor for what is happening to the human race in its relatively short existence on planet Earth. As the human race developed and urbanized, towns and cities were built adjacent to water sources. This means that every babbling brook is potentially a source of catastrophic floods because such immense amounts of water are dumped out of clouds that the babbling brook infrastructure cannot contain it. As sea levels rise many great cities also will soon be under water as soon as the Antarctic glaciers melt.
Meanwhile, the human race is amusing itself to death. Instead of an all hands on deck effort as was seen in World War II, we are seeing increasing demands for tourism, entertainment and increased consumption in the developed world. That world will just crank up the air conditioning as the world warms until such time that the electric grid fails. Then those without a personal generator will be doomed. In the undeveloped world, they don't even have adequate potable water or a decent sewage system let alone any kind of air conditioning. They will be the first to succumb. Eventually the human race will run out of options even as those in more favorable locations continue to consume and amuse themselves. Then later only the rich will survive.
