Reading the annual ‘State of the Climate’ report in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) has done nothing to help with my anxiety.
If you dare, you too can read it here:
Summary
Imagine learning that your friend was in hospital. You race to the hospital and find your friend hooked up to every conceivable monitoring device.
If your friend is “the Climate”, then reading the BAMS State of the Climate report is like reading their autopsy before they have died.
You can foresee every tiny detail of their future suffering.
And yet the doctors don’t seem to be doing anything. Your friend is on the table, haemorrhaging, and the doctors are in an endless series of meetings!
The alarms on the monitors are beeping and flashing. But nobody comes to attend your friend.
You bang on the windows of the doctors’ meeting room and the doctors turn and glance at you, and then turn back to their conference.
You ask to see the hospital administrator. But they are too busy. An assistant assures you that they understand your distress.
You explain that this is not just A. N. Other Climate. This is the Climate, the one we all depend on for our food and air and water.
And the assistant agrees with you, sympathetically. But they patiently explain that the administrator is busy with IMPORTANT budget meetings right now.
And then you realise that your friend has been on the table for years…
…and that the doctors meeting has been going on all this time.
With each passing year the doctors become more and more certain of the exact manner in which your friend will die. But no treatment has begun.
You begin to feel angry. And depressed. And frustrated. And you consider acting irrationally.
You begin to consider that acting – rationally or irrationally – is the only chance to save the friend you love.
Tags: Climate Change
Protons for Breakfast 
August 18, 2019 at 11:16 am |
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