My view is that the world is playing a dangerous game with climate change gambling that we can handle the likely outcomes and bet that what we do today won’t change on the scale it has and will all the things around us. We treat global warming as an unwelcomed salesman that is persistently knocking on our door warning us that we need to buy the things its selling in order to have a better life. When instead we should see it for what it is more like a firefighter warning us that there is no water and our house is on fire and if we don’t get out and help put out the flames we will burn alive and our house will fall down all around us.

       ‘The truth hurts’ as they say and when it comes to this global problem, it kills. People look away, ignore or try to cover up these truths and facts because it means change involving effort, money, and time. Sadly the last thing I mention is something we are quickly running out of. They say that money is the route of all evil and in this problem it is one of the biggest stunting factors why we are resistance to trying to move in a better direction. As they say this problem involves us all and will take all of us to make any sort of progress “from the bottom up and the top down.” People need to weigh what is more important: lives or wealth/convenience. Even after watching Naomi Klein’s new movie “This Changes Everything” in which she narrates that “watching polar bears trying to hunt with glaciers all around them melting during their fight for survival made even me turn away and want to turn off the television.” That is how we all react when we see something ugly our first impulse is to close our eyes or distance ourselves from them instead of looking at it directly and address it with the respect and full attention it deserves.

         If 97% of our most educated, ingenious, and renowned scholars/scientist are not enough to convince us that we are as a people jumping off the cliff together than it’s hard to say what sort of global catastrophe it is going to take for us to open our eyes. Maybe Y2K, the zombie apocalypse, or an alien invasion will have better chances since people actually have acted on those possibilities. Or maybe we all have this sense of impending doom with people holding up signs in the street (common images found in movies and in life) saying “The End is Nye” or “Help me” when for them these “small” changes hit hardest and they have no choice but to see it all around them. Ever since before I can remember, I have had 2/3 of every dream display a natural disaster of one sort or another and I always have had this sense or a cloud hanging over me, understanding it but without the power to prevent it. The few of us holding new signs of “help me and yourself” unfortunately doesn’t win the vote if there is still only the few reading the ballad or taking action to forward that voice. This change and truth has to be heard by everyone, shown with every action, everywhere. My hope that it won’t take a personal kick in the head from Mother Nature to get us all on board.

        I think that seeing the charts, numbers, events, grids of change and inaction should make anyone do a double take. Just in the US the action taken towards changing the CO2 problem is divided. Like our political views if one says one thing the other refuses to listen unless they get that personal kick I mentioned before or enough individuals rise up and demand it. This is the power and the folly of the masses to which we must convince, that this is really happening and by standing up for it they are helping themselves and the rest of us win this battle on pollution that infects everything that makes the world sick. On many levels this can cure a lot of the other diseases the people on this planet suffer, from inequalities in social aspects, location alteration and its sustainability, economic disparity, and resource distribution. We need to see the 14 orders of magnitude and apply it here on the benefits these changes can make. From here to there and all in between the little subscale processes we can proximate reversing the 6 degrees of separation into 6 degrees of unity. What we do here effects the complexity ‘one piece at a time’ where we then are working together on this in unity and in our separation. We need to recognize that all our little kicks at the planet eventually will be rebounded back at all of us for good or ill.

         The evidence doesn’t even need to come from the ‘skillful’ models from the scientist we selectively listen to but from personal experience each and every one of us have had in our lives that we can tie into this truth. I have personally watched them attempt to raise land above sea level as it rose up on the shores I lived near, in futility watching the tax dollars it took to attempt it washing away with the tide in Ocean City, MD. I have used a model speculating the rise in water around the farm I grew up on in years to come and see that barely a 10th of the land will remain above its proxy and shutter to know this could occur in my lifetime. Even if the polar bears don’t do it for everyone to make people see, the ice disappearing under them should sway more with this evidence. Fresh water should be treasured for our survival (which that ice is the majority) and the places on these shores should be fought to keep but in a more likely way. I laugh every time I hear the thoughts of making the cities float as if one intense hurricane won’t wash that area away or sink it to the bottom of deep waters… If we have so much pride in our nation, why don’t we start to take pride in protecting it from this threat and work with the rest of the world against it? This is a new enemy and its one in all of us that takes more than any of us to beat back. ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’ may be the saying but if we do this what could become true is we all become allies with one goal not the many. Don’t just wish for world peace, act on it and find peace for it in our own living and towards all things that reside in this one home of ours.

http://archive.delawareonline.com/article/20120821/NEWS08/308210034/Resort-beaches-rely-pumping-sand.

http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/washington.shtml

This is some of my responses to my classmates relies in the discussion.

To Heather,

       Yes this is called the 6th mass extinction event if the one that happened in Arizona that killed off the Clovis people, the saber tooth tiger and the woolly mammoth ends up being considered one which is still under debate. Pretty sad to think that we ventured so far into our own extinction and most of the world, ourselves included, does nothing or very little to stop it. It’s like poking the bear and hoping it doesn't wake up and eat our heads...We are already seeing how people are fighting for resources or fighting to not allow fossil fuels to bulldoze over the land and livelihood a people knowing what destruction it will bring.
        As far as the debates go and the movement that has been made to decrease our carbon output when you watch congress and the senate at work or local governments its clear to see that our leaders are comprised of dinosaurs for the most part only looking out for #1. I have heard from family, teachers, and many others alike give the saying "well I'll be dead when it happens, if it happens, so what do I care." and toss their hands up with resignment. It makes me so angry because to me it’s like slapping a new born in the face is how that attitude should register. Why not protect the world you have been so lucky to live all your years for your children's sake. The 'if it happens" is even more maddening when so much evidence is all around us. That is like saying 'let’s keep walking on these railroad tracks because I have never seen it come through here.' We are on a one way street here and once its coming there will be no stopping it how bout play it safe and just get off this path. What can it hurt? The benefits of change far outweigh any risk because the risk we are taking means total extinction or a life you tend to see apocalyptic movies and wonder is it even worth living?

To Lee,(or Kevin)

      Do you think the government is responsible for regulating these resources so everyone has equal shares or at least regulate individuals so they don't consume way more they need? What is also funny is the other day I mentioned the Milankovitch cycle to another friend of mine at the U who, in my option is incredibly smart and well informed and he didn't have a clue what I was talking about. But if we go back to when that other professor came in to speak with our class (sorry forgot his name) he said that even with those natural cycles we should be at the end of that 10,000 year interglacieral period and should be cooling down if I remember correctly. So if people know of it or even don't in the case of my friend but are told and it is a natural pattern, it stands to reason that reason has partially nothing to do with it. People know these things are not in the order they should be and the biggest difference from then and now is us. We drag our feet on this because of fear, ignorance, greed and denial. What the world is telling us when we listen that even without what we are doing life as we know it will not remain by either natural cycles or our own design/stupidity. As we have said in our class and its sad that we have wasted so much time and resources doing so "we don't adapt to our environment, we adapt it to us."