JUNE 7, 2019 – If we don’t materially alter our course now, big portions of the world’s 7.7 billion people will find themselves in areas so environmentally compromised as to be uninhabitable. Mass migrations will increase, threatening existing political and economic structures around the world.
Consider, for example, rising average temperatures in most of India (population 1.3 billion); chronic water shortages affecting Egypt (population 98 million); advancing desertification of Africa below the (traditional) Sahara; chronic drought in Central America (population 42 million).
The resulting political and economic disruptions will drive the receiving nations increasingly into a “wall and barbed wire” mentality. But “Maginot Lines” such as a wall on our southern border or between Morocco and Ceuta (Spain) have limited efficacy—desperate people will continue to take desperate actions. As long as there’s seawater and boats that float, migrants will be hell-bent. Until the developed nations figure out how to offset the drastic changes in arability and habitability of migrant homelands, human beings will continue to flee their untenable conditions.
Meanwhile, the “haves” themselves will feel the same conditions—heat and drought. Our own Southwest will thirst—and fight—for water. The Ogallala Aquifer of America’s breadbasket Great Plains, already stressed, will reach crisis mode. Lower Manhattan and coastal Florida, meanwhile, will face inundation.
Yet we still have among us—many in powerful positions—who steadfastly deny the reality of climate change or that the causes are fossil fuel consumption and rain forest destruction. Deniers reject the verdict of the overwhelming percentage of published, peer-reviewed climate scientists worldwide. Climate scientists—not airplane pilots, English teachers, dermatologists, football players, leftie entertainers, or progressive Democrats but climate scientists. Scientists whose conclusions are based not on a wet finger in the desert air, an interpretation of Holy Scripture, or a cynical propaganda campaign funded by billionaires with financial interests to protect but upon billions upon billions of data collected worldwide and subjected to rigorous testing and analysis.
When the world was flat, it was irrefutably so based on common observation. But along came math, science and data. The earth became spherical and remains so today.
Meanwhile, math and science and enormous quantities of analyzed data have tripped an alarm. For whatever reason—religious belief, political expediency, economic gain, or contrarian smugness—we chose to ignore the alarm, its cause and effect trigger remains inexorably real. Life as we know it could well be closing in on its close.
And yet hope abounds . . .
Yesterday along the sidewalk my wife and I encountered “HELP SAVE GORILLAS” written in chalk. Soon we encountered the perpetrators—six kids fresh out of kindergarten and first grade. With great earnestness they schooled us in what products to avoid to save the gorilla’s habitat. When we inquired further, they informed us that one of the group had brought back materials from her trip to Como Zoo less than a mile away. We were amazed—and heartened—by their informed, sidewalk proselytizing.
Together we can change the world.
© 2019 Eric Nilsson
