Fear for the future is driving change.

Apologies again for today’s post being largely the republication of other essays but looking after our guests is, as it should be, taking first priority.

Just as yesterday’s post, the essay by Alex Jones, offered hope, so do today’s items.

The first one was something I read on the Cliff Mass weather blogsite.  It was a forecast as to which of the lower US 48 States would remain habitable.  It opens:

Will the Pacific Northwest be a Climate Refuge Under Global Warming?

As global warming takes hold later in the century, where will be the best place in the lower 48 states to escape its worst effects?

A compelling case can be made that the Pacific Northwest will be one of the best places to live as the earth warms. A potential climate refuge.

and offers this conclusion:

So what conclusion does one inevitably reach by studying the IPCC reports, the U.S. Climate Assessment, and the climate literature?

• The Northwest is the place to be during global warming.
• Temperatures will rise more slowly than most of the nation due to the Pacific Ocean (see below)
• We will have plenty of precipitation, although the amount falling as snow will decline (will fall as rain instead). But we can deal with that by building more reservoir and dam capacity (and some folks on the eastern slopes of the Cascades have proposed to do exactly that).
• The Pacific Ocean will keep heat waves in check and we don’t get hurricanes.
• Sea level rise is less of a problem for us due to our substantial terrain and the general elevation rise of our shorelines. Furthermore, some of our land is actually RISING relatively to the sea level because we are still recovering from the last ice age (the heavy ice sheets pushed the land down and now it is still rebounding).
• There is no indication that our major storms…cyclone-based winds (like the Columbus Day Storm)… will increase under global warming.
• Increased precipitation may produce more flooding, but that will be limited to river valleys and can be planned for with better river management and zoning.

The second item was this:

Antarctica’s Point of No Return

POTSDAM – Recent satellite observations have confirmed the accuracy of two independent computer simulations that show that the West Antarctic ice sheet has now entered a state of unstoppable collapse. The planet has entered a new era of irreversible consequences from climate change. The only question now is whether we will do enough to prevent similar developments elsewhere.

What the latest findings demonstrate is that crucial parts of the world’s climate system, though massive in size, are so fragile that they can be irremediably disrupted by human activity. It is inevitable that the warmer the world gets, the greater the risk that other parts of the Antarctic will reach a similar tipping point; in fact, we now know that the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica, as big or even bigger than the ice sheet in the West, could be similarly vulnerable.

There are not many human activities whose impact can reasonably be predicted decades, centuries, or even millennia in advance. The fallout from nuclear waste is one; humans’ contribution to global warming through greenhouse-gas emissions from burning fossil fuels, and its impact on rising sea levels, is another.

Indeed, the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report stated, in uncharacteristically strong terms, that the sea level is “virtually certain” to continue to rise in the coming centuries or millennia. Moreover, the greater our emissions, the higher the seas will rise.

The full article may be read here.

So why do I say that these articles offer hope?

Simply, because the quicker that the awareness of the critical challenges ahead becomes widespread knowledge, right around the world, the quicker that there will be political movements to change our relationship with our planet.

It’s never about not needing governments, it’s always about needing the right sort of governments.