Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

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4 introduction
frequent, and many species will disappear. Maple syrup will no
longer be made in Vermont. With still another degree, coastal cities
like New Orleans, Miami, and Baltimore will eventually be
fl ooded, the Everglades will disappear, Appalachian forests will be
replaced by scrub trees and grasses, and a great human migration
away from coasts and mid-continental regions will have begun 6
(Lynas, 2007). By then we will have created what climate scientist
James Hansen describes as a “different planet,” one we won’t like.
The upshot is that we now have every reason to believe, as scientist
Wallace Broecker once put it, that the climate system is “an
angry beast, and we are poking it with sticks” (Linden, 1997). We
are now in a close race between our capacity to change at a global
scale and the forces that we have unleashed.
Climate change, like the threat of nuclear annihilation, puts all
that humanity has struggled to achieve—our cultures, art, music,
literatures, cities, institutions, customs, religions, and histories, as
well as our posterity—at risk. Unless we are led to act rapidly and
wisely, we are on a course leading to an Earth of greatly reduced
biological diversity populated by remnants and ruins. Had we
acted sooner we would have had a far easier path and would have
saved much more. But now problems are becoming a planetary
crisis brought on by our own relentless growth, which affects the
large numbers that govern the biosphere.
As the evidence mounted over the last three decades, the political
response nonetheless was a combination of denial and delay.
Confronted with evidence of the growing risks of planetary destabilization,
many in positions of infl uence in government, media,
business, the academy, and the far right of U.S. politics ignored
and then later denied the facts. When the facts could no longer be
denied, they quibbled about the details of the scientifi c evidence
and the costs of action necessary to head off the worst possibilities.
In the meantime, months, years, and decades slipped away. Some
chose to dismiss the evidence in its entirety as “doom and gloom,”
but as individuals they lived by an entirely different calculus. They