Accelerating Towards Hell

I've posted a version of this video once before, but I'm going to post it again, because Ryan Cooper has taken Dave Robert's TED talk, "Climate Change is Simple", and jazzed it up with cool music & visuals to make his bleak news even more exciting to see.  So here it is:



Roberts has a post giving all the slides along with links to studies, etc, here, if you want more detail.

But the basic point is summed up in his sentence "our present course leads to certain catastrophe".  We are headed -- we are accelerating -- towards a situation where, in a few generations, half the Earth's surface will be so hot that you will die simply by going outside (170º Fahrenheit).  We are heading -- we are accelerating -- towards a situation where feedback loops means that climate change will become self-sustaining and will continue indefinitely even if humans stop emitting carbon tomorrow (which we won't).

WE ARE RACING TOWARDS DEATH, AND WE NEED TO STOP.

And I respectfully suggest that if you think this is too horrible to contemplate, or if you think other political issues are more important or more urgent, or, really, if you are more concerned about ANYTHING ELSE, then you haven't really grasped the magnitude and urgency of this.

(Oh, the election?  Well, climate change is being ignored by both parties (h/t).  I think it's quite, quite clear that Obama will be better than Romney -- but "better" here means not anywhere near good enough to save us, but more susceptible to being influenced by the massive direct action campaign that we need.  Obama won't save us: but he might -- might -- give us enough room to save ourselves.  If we accomplish a level of political mobilization that seems, at this point, miraculous to contemplate.)

We need to do something drastic, and to do something now.  To borrow a phrase from another writer speaking of another crisis, "if this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, [human beings] may have no future on this earth."