Climate Politics Is Like Playing Ping Pong With A Soap Bubble

Washington Post - Tom Toles

(Tom Toles)

What are the signals that will tell us when it’s time to start taking climate change seriously? Sorry. It’s basically too late already.
There are already people who have died from climate change’s effect on weather systems. There are already droughts, crop failure and refugees from climate change. Ocean reefs are already massively bleached, glaciers already deteriorating. And that’s just from the carbon dioxide that we’ve ALREADY pumped into the atmosphere. The debate now is about how much WORSE we plan to make things.
And what a debate it has been. In the United States we haven’t even begun to debate solutions, because we’ve been on history’s largest fool’s errand of listening to a deliberate campaign to deny that there is even any problem at all. There ought to be a special place in hell for those who have cynically sowed grotesque confusion on this subject, but in truth the hell in question will be right here, and the people in it will be us, and moreso our kids.
But enough awfulizing. We are where we are, and it’s always time to do what we can do. The first order of business is to support candidates in the 2016 election who are sane and plan to help, rather than continue to dissemble and obstruct.
We can’t afford to spend another minute on the stupid, stupid debate about whether there is evidence that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere has significant effects on our climate. The debate up until now has been as frustrating as playing ping pong with a soap bubble. Except we are living on that soap bubble.