The Lucretius Problem
It has been almost amusing to see the eastern news media completely freaking out about the suffocating smoke from forest fires in Canada that has blanketed their cities. This has been going on for several years here in the western part of the U.S. and they have paid it little attention, but let smoke cover eastern cities and it is finally an issue. This has been the one major thing about climate change; we have a very difficult time imagining and coming to terms with things that we do not experience personally. No big heat waves, what climate change? All time record snowfall, what weather abnormalities? Smoke from massive forest fires, couldn’t happen here.
2,000 years ago, a Roman poet and philosopher, Titus Lucretius Carus put the problem in terms that we can understand today. Humans have always had a mental disconnect when it comes to problems that we do not directly experience. In the world we thought we knew, what is going on here? Smoke, heat, cold, fires, drought, floods, storms? It never used to be like that, did it? Despite decades of warnings by respected scientists and climatologists, why are we still being caught by surprise from the changes in climate that causes raging fires in Canada, Massive palls of smoke, record setting rain and snow in California, Fire tornados, massive hurricanes with record rainfall totals. Just last week, super typhoon Mawar, with winds up to 150 mph, slammed into the island of Guam in the central Pacific Ocean. Move on, nothing to see here.
We need to come to terms with changes in our climate, it is going to happen, it is happening. Take the blinders off your eyes, ignoring things will only make climate change more difficult to deal with as more and more extremes continue to pile up. For the past two centuries we have been burning fossil fuels and polluting our atmosphere, the very air we breathe, with CO2 in amounts that trap heat which drives massive changes in the weather and climate. As we head into summer, how many more droughts, heat and storms will impact us around the world? In the Pacific, a new El Nino heat event is starting to impact world weather. Should we be worried? Scientists say yes, be prepared, act on it, start finding ways to reduce CO2 in our lives. Just do something, pull your head out of the sand, denial of, or ignoring the problem will not make it go away.
(In 2020, San Francisco was enveloped in heavy smoke from California wildfires turning their skies orange. New York and other eastern cities are currently suffering from a similar occurrence. Perhaps people in the East will be able to feel and understand one of the more miserable effects of climate change now. Photo courtesy Wikipedia.)
