Carl Sagan Warned Us About Climate Change Decades Ago
The torch of reason and knowledge is dead
Climate Change
Carl Sagan Warned Us About Climate Change Decades Ago
My childhood hero was Carl Sagan and my classmates made fun of me for it. “Carl who?” They’d ask. Instead of idolizing a baseball player or superhero, I idolized Carl Sagan and the Cosmos program. I was almost ten years old when Cosmos aired on PBS and I would sit, glued in front of the television, for one hour every week and imagine myself traveling thru space.
I credit Carl Sagan as the inspiration that set me down a path of science and engineering, one that has kept the flame of my childhood curiosity alive to this day. I consider him the scientific Mr. Rogers, patient and able to teach us complex scientific works in an easily approachable way. It would come as no surprise that he took a great interest in climate change and issued stark warnings about its effect on us.
Did we listen? Nope. Of course not.
Why? Because we humans are selfish pricks. All of us, myself included. Yes, I share a bit of the blame, I drive a car, I use electricity, and I’ve bitcoin mined.
I need resources to survive and thrive in civilization, there’s no going around that. We’ve built our world on consuming and not thinking about the consequences of it. We shirk sustainability for convenience.
Remember in Mad Men when Betty and Don go picnicking on the side of the road? They set out the blanket and all their plastic plates and plastic forks. When they’re done, they flip the picnic blanket up and let all their plastic cutlery roll down the hill.
When I saw that scene I was horrified but I remembered that doing this was normal back then. Commercials touted this! Throw it away for convenience and never have to worry about the environmental debt you are accumulating!
Use and throw away.
We do this all the time. We do this with our resources. We do this with our friends and lovers, we just consume and throw it all away without a care in the world where all this garbage and damage ends up.
Carl Sagan was right. Scientists were right. They’ve all been ringing the warning bells for decades.
Will we listen, finally? I don’t believe we will.
We’ll continue to ignore them because ignorance is bliss. We don’t want to deal with the debt that we owe the world and each other because we’re selfish apes.
Most of us operate on the “fuck you Jack, I got mine” attitude. We revel in it and tout the perverted virtue. They go to church and listen about paradise. They can’t wait for it to come to earth one day but they don’t realize that it’s already here.
They don’t realize that paradise is slipping away faster and faster every year.
All climate models point toward a warming earth, the only thing in dispute is by how much. As a former civil engineer, I would prepare for a world that will exceed the wildest climate projections.
I would expect mass human migrations as a result of rising sea levels. I would prepare for massive crop failures and ecosystem destruction. I would expect more flooding. I would prepare myself for political and societal upheaval.
It doesn’t take a scientist to see that these are outcomes as our life support systems start to shut down. Look at the migrations of people out of Syria and all the stress it put on Europe. That was one country.
Now add in all the countries with shorelines. Where are they going to go? Further inland. Some countries like the USA will be better equipped to absorb their citizens but the poorer nations will just let them flood out into neighboring countries. Nationalism and violence will rise and the specter of nuclear war will become more prominent.
Such gloom and doom! Just ignore it, Jack, go back to complaining about how the Covid19 vaccine is a government conspiracy and how Trump won the election in 2020. Bury your head in the sand because scientists are dumb and climate change is a liberal commie plot.
We’ve failed as humans. The masses ridicule the smartest amongst us. It’s like grade school all over again but on a massive global scale. That’s what we are, a bunch of global brats that are bullying the ones that are warning us about impending doom.
I can hear them now, laughing and pointing at us, “Haha! What a bunch of nerds! Bet you never kissed a girl before Poindexter!”
If Carl Sagan were alive today he’d be out front, carrying to torch of reason and knowledge for all of us. Some of us will come out of our caves and see the way forward illuminated by that torch. The rest of us? They’d still hide in their caves.
But he’s dead and the torch died with him.
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