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WASHINGTON – We waited too long.
We thought that technology would save us. We were wrong.
Millions will lose their homes. Millions will lose their livelihoods. Millions will suffer from illness, poverty and starvation. Species will disappear. The divide between the haves and the growers grow exponentially. Autocracies will rule. Killer storms will become routine. Small island nations will cease to exist.
It will be like those bad sci-fi disaster movies from the 1950s.
Not 1,000 years from now. Not 100 years from now. Beginning just 20 years from now. Most adults and children living today will witness it.
The United Nations has issued the directive for the human race in its history.
Climate change is happening nowadays with a massive global effort. It is not a political theory to be breezily dismissed by right-wing power brokers who do not want the status quo to change. It is not a left-wing tool to raise mass hysteria. This is pure science, agreed upon by the world's most preeminent scientists.
There is little we can do to prevent a massive loss of life, destroying millions of acres, dead coral reefs that feed the seas, food shortages, homelessness, rootlessness, droughts of biblical proportions, floods the likes of which we have not yet seen. The most popular U.S. beaches will simply disappear. The Midwest Breadbasket will become a desert.
All because of the world inevitably will get one to two degrees warmer in just a few years. The U.N. report, which even climate change scientists said they found "shocking," with 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit or 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2040.
It sounds preposterous. How can one degree or one-half of one degree do so much inconceivable damage?
It's the butterfly theory of "Jurassic Park" fame. A butterfly flaps its wings and thousands of miles to a hurricane is born. It's the fabled tipping point. It's the straw that broke the camel's back. As the Earth warms, melt glaciers, weather patterns change, coral reefs die, species die, wither crops, coasts flood.
The New York Times figured out that if the world warms 1.5 degrees, 350 million people will live in severe drought. If the Earth warms two degrees, 411 million people will not have enough water. Unbearably hot weather will afflict us. We are all connected; we just do not realize it yet.
One hundred and ninety-four countries are signatories to the Paris Climate Accord which set a goal of containing more than 3.6 degrees above preindustrial levels.
The United States – the biggest contributor to man-made carbon dioxide, which is a change in the face of the agreement. The United States officially does not endorse the specific findings or underlying concept of the new U.N. report. The White House has cut funding for global climate mitigation by two-thirds and is trying to stop funding climate change research.
Without America's leadership, other countries find they have the incentive to make fossil fuels. They give lip service to the concept but throw up their hands in frustration. How can a tiny country of a few million people make a difference if you can not recognize the danger of oil and mining?
Even if puts, the goals of Paris will not be enough to stave off some disaster for millions of people. The earth will warm 2.7 degrees.
Future societies, in their underground shelters and pockets of safety, will wonder why we were so ignorant of the facts, why we were so little about our Earth and the future, why we were blasé and did so little to save the planet.
It really is like science fiction; The world's leaders refuse to believe that the alien spaceships mean us any harm. By the time the nukes go off, it is too late.
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