Susan Solomon on climate change
Reducing emissions is a climate change issue. (Credit: cjohnson7.Some rights reserved.)
NOAA atmospheric scientist Susan Solomon spoke with Earth & Sky’s Jorge Salazar just hours after flying back from Norway, where she and her colleagues with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change accepted the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace.
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Dear Susan Solomon,
Congratulations to you on winning the Nobel Peace Prize. You, Rajendra Pachauri (with whom I and others had lunch just last week) and all the other IPCC scientists richly deserve this award.
After listening to and speaking with Dr. Pachauri, something is becoming more clear.
The leaders of the global political economy appear to be shirking their moral obligations to humanity by at least trying to assure a viable future for our children. Instead, they are choosing to pay lip-service to the scientific evidence of climate change on the one hand and to proceed recklessly with economic industrialization and big-business expansion on the other. That is to say, too many leaders of the world’s economy are, in effect, turning a blind eye to human over-consumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities that can be seen resulting in the relentless dissipation of natural resources and the dangerous degradation of the environs of our planetary home. The Earth is being ravaged before our eyes; but it appears many leaders are willfully refusing to acknowledge what is happening.
Because emerging and converging global challenges that could soon be confronted by humanity appear to so many responsible and scientists to be human-induced, political leaders and economic powerbrokers have responsibilities to assume and duties to perform.
Perhaps political leadership in our time has too often chosen to spurn whatsoever is somehow real in order to believe whatever is politically convenient, economically expedient, socially agreeable, religiously tolerated and culturally prescribed. When something real, like human-driven climate change, directly conflicts with what leaders wish to believe, that reality is denied. Many too many leaders appear content to widely share and consensually validate specious thinking about the Earth as some sort of endlessly providing teat at which humanity can eternally suckle, simply because it serves their personal interests to do so. Is it conceivable that human thinking, judging and willing have become egregiously impaired by our leaders’ unabashed, outspoken idolatry of the artificially designed, manmade, global political economy?
Always, with thanks for good science, great scientists and Earth & Sky,
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
Are many too many leaders of the global political economy spurning their moral obligations by turning a blind eye to human over-consumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities that can be seen recklessly dissipating the natural resources and drastically degrading the environs of our planetary home? The Earth is being ravaged; but it appears too many politicians, CEOs and institutional executives are willfully refusing to acknowledge what is happening.
Because the emerging global challenges that could soon be confronted by humanity appear to so many responsible, able and courageous scientists to be human-induced, many of our political leaders and economic powerbrokers have evidently been eschewing unwelcome responsibilities and unexpected duties which must be assumed now if life as we know it and the integrity of Earth are to be preserved for our children and coming generations.
Can anyone name anything in the human world that is more sublime than a responsible, able and courageous scientist who eschews political convenience, economic expediency and the hoarding of endless wealth in order to speak out loudly and clearly for new and unexpected science, especially when the unforeseen, good evidence has great explanatory power and profound implications for the future of the family of humanity on Earth?
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
Dear Jessie Guthrie,
I also have questions to ask that some people might consider silly. Even so, you and others are invited to comment.
It appears to me that the family of humanity is beginning to come face to face with a growing myriad of global challenges — air pollution, sea and land contamination, global warming, peak oil, diminishing global supplies of grain, overfishing, the dissipation of Earth’s scarce resources, desertification, deforestation, urban sprawl and autoban congestion are examples — the sum of which could soon become unsustainable, given a finite planet with the relatively small size and make-up of Earth. What people generally appear not yet to see clearly enough is that these looming threats to human wellbeing and environmental health can be directly related to the current huge scale and anticipated growth of skyrocketing absolute global human population numbers.
That is to say, the unrestrained increase of per-capita consumption of limited resources, the unbridled global expansion of human production/distribution capabilities, and the rapid rise of numbers of Homo sapiens worldwide are occurring synergistically and could be fast approaching a point in history when these distinctly human, global “over-growth” activities are patently unsustainable.
Question One:
What do you think about this view of the ominous, human-forced predicament that is looming on the far horizon?
Question Two:
What additions, deletions other changes would you make to this admittedly brief and general description of humankind’s forbidding global circumstances?
Always,
Steve