We’ve Been Risking Everything By Ignoring Climate Change, So Maybe It’s Time For A Different Kind Of Gamble

Washington Post - Tom Toles

(Tom Toles)

When a battered woman walks into an emergency room, is it inappropriate to find out how she got hurt? Or is it enough to treat her cuts and broken facial bones and send her back for more?
With regard to climate damage, we survey the cataclysm on Puerto Rico and treat the wounds. Actually, we are hardly doing that, because the wounds are so astonishingly severe. It's as though we don't know even how to think about it, because we don't. We won't ask how it happened; we never ask. We simply suggest that people turn the other cheek and brace for more of the same.
Let's saunter back a few years to the balmy days when climate change was widely considered nothing but a source of easy joshing. "If this is climate change," we would say on a warm winter day, "I'll take it!"
Now we have an entire U.S. territory, shredded from end to end, without power or agriculture left functioning. This is climate change. Are we going to take this?
Maybe. Because somehow even the most stunning and painful evidence of warming doesn't register as compelling. Back in the jokey days, it was considered tiresome in the extreme to point out that, yes, this is a beautiful day, but eventually this will turn into devastation. Oh, Gloomy Gus! Oh, Debbie Downer! Oh, Crabby Cassandra!
For our elected officials, it is still a big joke. They still have cover from the denier industry. Climate changes all the time! This way and that! Too hot, too cold, always something! This kind of talk is very cheap — in the sense of a fool's economy. It's cheap now, but bankrupting later. (See price tag on fixing Puerto Rico.)
Maybe it's time to make this cheap talk more costly. Maybe we should require elected and appointed officials to put their own money on the line along with their assurances.
With something more costly than ordinary dissembling involved, and an actual price to pay, they might suddenly see that pricing carbon looks like a far better bet.

Links

• Hedge Fund Asks Climate Deniers To Put Their Money Where Their Mouth Is
• Climate projections
• New climate change projections for Australia 
• Get ready for 60-day heatwaves as Australia warms up — the dire climate predictions
• Longer, hotter summers predicted in extreme weather report by Climate Council
• Coastal Risk Australia