Immunity to Climate Change

Every generation has its defining crisis. In the 1980s we had the prospect of global thermonuclear war looming. Luckily, that particular doomsday scenario never became a reality. But it was pretty damn close, I was told. These days the number one worry-inducing topic is Climate Change. Or as The Guardian recently put it:

“Outside of the desperate and the deluded, everyone knows that the world is in the early stages of a truly catastrophic climate change. As Sir David Attenborough told the UN climate change conference in Poland, “the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon”. We have even worked out, with scrupulous care, what we must do to avoid this or to mitigate the effects of climate change. We know what to do. We can see how to do it. There’s only one problem: we do almost nothing”  - (The Guardian, December 5, 2018)

That’s right. We do SHIT, compared to what we SHOULD be doing. Instead, this ultimate global car-crash is unfolding in slow motion right in front of our eyes. Why the hell is that?

When I first heard about Climate Change, I was still a kid. I must have been around 10 years old. I read about it in a German tabloid newspaper (BILD). They included a nice illustration condensing the basic scientific information. The energy of the sun is warming the planet, but the change in the atmosphere traps the energy like a greenhouse. I thought to myself, “oh my god, we’re being cooked alive!” That’s right, back then the language was slightly different. They talked more about “the greenhouse effect”, which is much more illustrative — and actually scarier than calling it “Climate Change”. While it may be technically true, that “the climate is changing” (and some regions may even get colder), by and large, we are slowly being cooked alive like the — by now — proverbial frogs in the slowly heating water. (Thanks, Al Gore, for using that imagery. It gives me nightmares.)

Read the Medium story by Dennis Wittrock - “Immunity to Climate Change.”