Finding hope amid the hopeless doom of climate change

After another frigid Canberra winter, I've welcomed the warmer weather with joy. Yet it's increasingly too warm to leave a lasting smile. We are told to brace for punishing summers.

In a new book, Blueprints for a Post-Anthropocene Greenhouse Earth, the Australian National University's Dr Andrew Glikson says there's no turning back the greenhouse clock. He foresees mass extinctions and a breakdown of civilisation. In his book, Defiant Earth, Clive Hamilton of the Canberra-based Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics foresees something even worse: the possibility of our own extinction by an untameable Earth.

Hamilton writes it will probably be hundreds of thousands of years before most of the large reserves of carbon released during the human age can be rendered immobile again. People have rivalled the great forces of nature so much that we have changed the functions of the planet for an era. The Arctic is vanishing as is the Greenland ice sheet. This won't be reversed for tens of thousand of years.

While drifting into unparalleled catastrophe, I want to cling to hope, be slow to admit that all the facts are in, that all the doors have been tried and all is defeated. But how?

Read the comment by Toni Hassan in today’s Melbourne Age - “Finding hope amid the hopeless doom of climate change.”

Climate change brings inexplicable and confusing weather

Climate change brings with it weather conditions which to most people are inexplicable, confusing and so far beyond our experience that we struggle to make sense of them.

Climate change, or global warming, is about a base warming of the planet and that brings multiple disruptions to earth’s weather system and subsequently unsettles centuries of human experience about what is normal.

The benign weather system that has allowed humanity to tighten its grip on earth is vanishing and we are now seeing events that are beyond traditional experience to explain.

Mashable talks about these contradictory happenings in its story: “Despite frigid conditions in the East, U.S. seeing more record warmth this winter”.

It says: “The U.S. is experiencing one of the most unusual winters in years, with a pronounced and enduring bubble of warm, high pressure over the West, and blast after blast of frigid Arctic air and heavy snow in the eastern two-thirds of the country.”