It Moved Me: #ActOnClimate
I looked it up, the United States has faced 178 weather and climate disasters since 1980 according to the National Centers for Environmental Information. These 178 severe enough weather events to be classified as climate disasters have inflicted more than $1 trillion in directly measurable economic costs, and have been accompanied by incalculable costs in human suffering.
Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, our two well known recent extreme weather events to hit the United States, together cost in excess of $200 billion dollars in addition to claiming more than 2,000 lives. Other less dramatic climate impacts can still be quite destructive. California’s now many-years-long drought, which scientists say has certainly been exacerbated if not primarily caused by climate change, will cost more than $2 billion in economic damages this year alone. Most of these damages coming from the Agricultural sector.
A direct result of climate change here in Studio City, California September 30th, 2015 #ActOnClimate
As the planet warms, other forms of extreme weather, including heat waves, heavy downpours, and floods, are also expected to increase in frequency and intensity. Here in Los Angeles, we’ve already got the heatwaves and could sorely use a couple more downpours. This year is the most severe drought conditions in recorded history in California. Time to #ActOnClimate.
A very large, and quite old, Pine covers Valleyheart Drive in Studio City, CA on September 30th, 2015 #ActOnClimate
Unchecked, the end of a continued lack of legitimate climate solutions is obvious disaster, and likely the collapse of civilization as we know it. Likely not in my lifetime, but certainly a distinct possibility in my grand children’s. There is a finite end point in planetary climate, beyond which there is no turning back the clock, not without irreparable harm having been needlessly caused.
We can’t be another generation to kick the can down the road for a future generation to deal with, as my parents generation did and the two generations before them. Like it or not, this present generation, the one alive right now, is the final hope; the last chance to turn it around, to #ActOnClimate before it is too late. Once irreversible damage begins, everybody looses, in the extreme possibly the ultimate race for human survival. We all need to collectively, as one world, #ActOnClimate. Now. While there is still time.
But how do you get as large a concept as this into your head? For me, I’ve lived long enough to remember drinking from pure mountain streams, and catching fish as a kid in an unpolluted West Virginia lake. The world is a very different place today than was the world I was born into. Technologically so far advanced, but environmentally far poorer with falling Pines in Studio City.
