hope y'all like swimming

Let’s start with a little history of something totally unrelated. Cigarettes.

Smoking and global warming have very little in common, except this. They both show that human beings are not too great at getting a message. It was in the early sixties that a definitive link was made between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer. And yet here we are forty-five years later with people dying in their droves the world over. Sure, communication is better than ever, as are the scare tactics, let alone the evidence, but cigarettes are still a very profitable business.

There’s only one reason for that, and it can be summed up in a few very simple words. “It ain’t gonna happen to me”.  Humans are eternal optimists. Half a million people a year are dying of smoking-related diseases each year. But it ain’t gonna happen to little old me. Right.

Now let’s take global warming. For years a vast preponderance of experts have been telling us that global warming is coming. Only a few days ago, the Intergovernmental Panel and Climate Change (IPCC) said that they’d got it wrong in their earlier reports which they pretty much said were politically watered-down to make their recommendations even remotely workable. Turns out that they’d figured we’d be more energy efficient by now, and stop with our coal addiction. But efficiencies flattened out and coal is now the fossil fuel du jour for China and India. Their forecasts for serious global warming just got way more dire.

Sadly, there is nothing the IPCC could say that will make more than a tiny dent in the problem. The train has left the station, and we’re on a one way ticket to Palookaville. Not enough. The ice-caps are melting. Eah, heard that one before. The Maldives are one big puddle. The what-dives?  Sure we’d all like to see global warming put back in the box of nightmares, but we’re not too sure about having to cut our carbon emissions by 10% let alone 50% or 75% that will be required to seriously put the brakes on the feedback loop we’re sliding into.  That will basically put an end to the world economy as we know it.  Recycling grocery bags, drinking tap water, and driving a Prius are not going to cut it. Not to mention the fact that the Chinese and Indians think it’s our problem, while we think it’s everyone’s problem.  Plus there’s the whole question of whether it actually is a problem. I mean it’s only a bunch of egg-heads telling us this stuff. What do they really know? The sun’s still shining. And not that many people are dying. So who gives a whoot?

It’s a good point. We talk a good game, and use everything green to sell more stuff, and our polticians come up with some pretty smart plans to combat global warming, but the truth is simpler. Until billions are dying of thirst, billions more are fleeing their low-lying countries in panic, malaria makes a comeback in what’s left of Manhattan and tsunamis, water wars, floods, hurricanes and other plagues brought upon us by this or that “told you so” deity are everyday occurences, will something – and maybe not that much, be done.

It may sound cynical, but the human race will only come together and combat global warming, when it’s quite literally knee-deep in it.

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