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Global Weirding excerpt
>> Tuesday, September 23, 2008
I am reading Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded, and while it's heavy stuff, I find it very informative. I found the end of the chapter called Global Weirding especially powerful. It seems silly to make climate change a political issue at all, but I understand that people can be slow to accept daunting news. I hope this issue gets to a point where it is not a political one, but a human one. We all will be affected by climate change no matter our party affiliations, no matter our religious beliefs. In fact, I think it's fair to say we already are.
Read more...Hot, Flat, and Crowded, pages 138-139:What could be more crazy-radical -- more Trotskyite and more reckless -- than standing in the face of an overwhelming consensus among climate experts and saying, "I am throwing my lot in with the minority. I am going to bet the farm, my future, and my kid's future that the tiny minority is right -- all other consequences be damned"?California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has tried to keep the Republican Party from making climate skepticism a plank in the GOP platform, put it to me this way: "If ninety-eight doctors say my son is ill and needs medication and two say 'No, he doesn't, he is fine,' I will go with the ninety-eight. It's common sense -- the same with global warming. We go with the majority, the large majority."I am with the ninety-eight. I am convinced that climate change is real. But we not only need people to accept that it is real, but also to accept just how real it could be -- that the dice may come up sixty if we don't act now to begin mitigating and adapting. We need, as EchoTech's Rob Watson says, to "use the one faculty that distinguishes us as human beings -- the ability to imagine. We need to fully grasp the nonlinear, unmanageable climate events that could unfold in our lifetime. Because if we hit the wall, there will be no seat belts or air bags, and we will end up being a bad biological experiment on the planet."Mother Nature "is just chemistry, biology, and physics," Watson likes to say. "Everything she does is just the sum of those three things. She 's completely amoral. She doesn't care about poetry or art or whether you go to church. You can't negotiate with her, and you can't spin her and you can't evade her rules. All you can do is fit in as a species. And when a species doesn't learn to fit in with Mother Nature, it gets kicked out." It's that simple, says Watson, and that's why "every day you look in the mirror now, you're seeing an endangered species."
