The Sky IS Falling

I find it hard to believe how many people, especially rich and privileged people can blithely ignore this basic fact. This is mostly in the name of corporate profits, which is always going to be an ongoing issue. But this is a survival issue that involves all of us, rich or poor.

This blind, callous, shameful pursuit of greed at the cost of global catastrophe is no longer just the prerogative of the rich and politically well-connected to decide. The destructive, ongoing onslaught of global warming is slamming everybody, even the fat cats who think they are magically immune. They are not. This is already affecting everybody.

I live in California, which has been ravaged for the last several years by catastrophic wildfires that are not only ferocious but also unprecedented. The entire Western United States has been suffering from this mega-drought for the last 22 years. According to a recent UCLA study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the American West is in the midst of the driest period in the last 1,200 years!

The evidence of climate change is everywhere. Just recently, Northern Europe was recently battered by unusually severe storms with heavy rains and high winds across Ireland, England, and France, killing 16 people. So far, Japan, Germany, and the Philippines are among the most highly affected by global warming.

Glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising, and heat waves are becoming increasingly severe all across the globe. Higher temperatures increase changes in rainfall, causing floods, landslides, drought, and hurricanes of savage ferocity worldwide. The warming of the oceans is steadily rising.

When are people going to wake up and realize we are all in this together? That the whole fragile ecosystem is connected? Extreme damage to both human and animal species is already being impacted by global warming. Erosion of the coral reefs, melting icebergs, forest fires from hell, unseasonal hurricanes, and rises in sea levels are all part of the delicate balance of our planet’s ecosystem.

The Gaia theory that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth, to form a synergistic and self-regulating complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet is chillingly accurate.

China, the United States, and India are the top 3 climate polluters in the world, which are mostly caused by the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas as well as automobile emissions and industrial pollution. This all contributes to the deterioration of the greenhouse effect, the process that traps the sun’s heat and preserves our atmosphere.

The evidence is mounting daily with so many examples of inverted weather conditions all over the world, upsetting the patterns, the seasons, and the rhythms of life on Earth we are all dependent on. This affects us all and there is no logical reason for inaction anymore.

This is not somebody else's problem. It is the problem facing everybody alive on the planet today. There is no getting around it, no ability to deny it, no way out of this mess that we as humans have created except to start cleaning up the atmosphere now.

TODAY IS the tomorrow we have dreaded for so long.

I always thought that climate change/global warming was something that would never happen in my lifetime. Chicken Little was right! I was wrong. It’s already here! And without some serious recalibrations of national priorities by all the major powers, it can only get worse. We are at a pivotal, life-changing point of no return right now.

As we used to say back in the day, “It's not nice to fool Mother Nature!”