Climate Change, and Jade

Meet Jade:

jade

My Mom emailed me this morning, as she often does and she talked about a news report last night that said that of the 224 glaciers on Vancouver Island in 1974, only 24 remain, and one of the largest and the one that I identify with, Comox Glacier, will disappear within the next few years.

My Mom asked the question this morning in an email:

what kind of a world will Jade be living in???

My Answer:

I hadn’t heard that about Comox Glacier! It’s funny though because I was just about to write a post on Murkyview about receding glaciers. I just heard that there are tours to Mt. Kilimanjaro now that are sold as “See the Glacier before it disappears!”. It’s sad. Makes me wonder if, in 15-20 years, when the glacier is almost gone, they’ll try to take the last big chunck or whatever away and preserve it in the London Natural History Museum… it would seem an appropriate memorial to how things have changed on our planet in the past hundreds of years…

Take heart though Mom. I think Jade and her children and grand-children will be OK. Climate change happens slowly. Humans are very good at adapting. If we survived an ice age, then we can survive a “sauna” age too. What worries me much more is humanitys’ ability to truly destroy the climate, either through military conflict or terrible accident. We can’t control what Mother Nature or how Mother Nature reacts. She can reverse all these changes on a whim… and She can, given enough time, restore equilibrium to the climate.

I believe that modern society is actually waking up to the fact that we do have an effect on our climate… so I think that over time we will change our habits of consumption and pollution. What I don’t see changing anytime soon is our ability to catastrophically change the climate either through conflict or accident. When you think about it, a Nuclear Winter is still only a button-press or faulty-sensor reading away.

That’s what worries me… and that’s what I hope will change during my lifetime and Jades.

For now, all we can do is leave Jade the best Earth we possibly can.

Chris

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