Astronomer royal calls for 'Plan B' to prevent runaway climate change

[politicat]

38. +10000.

We have to try the big projects, the small scale individual behavioral shifts, the cultural transitions, everything. Because we screwed this up, so we have the responsibility to make restitution. Or to atone, if that language works better.

I honestly don't get the pre-millenial dispensationalist theory that the End times are coming so why bother. By Biblical text, humanity was told to be good stewards pretty much first thing, and according to Jesus himself, faith without the work is dead. Not to mention how utterly pissed this mess would make both the OT Jehovah (you messed up MY stuff?!?111!!! I smited Sodom for being RUDE. I sent a BEAR to eat little kids for sniggering at an old crank's bald head. SRSLY?, you think I'm going to let trashing my creation slide!?!) and NT Jesus (clean up after yourself being a basic piece of Do unto others...) Since the PMD god seems to be pretty badass, it seems a PMD believer would not want to be caught crapping on the carpet...

And I don't get the despair that drives the Clean Up This Place Before We Go Elsewhere crowd and the Can't Fix It, Why Bother, Better Die side. It's not like we've TRIED fixing it, and going elsewhere is still in the early stages, so cleaning up while we build the interplanetary Conestoga is totally reasonable. Is it mass depression? Fear-based paralysis? Or something like the executive function dysfunction that is at the root of the hoarding variety of OCD -- too many options and too many decisions for the executive function to cope.

I read science fiction because it offers hope that we can, and will. And if that means flooding the Sahara, the Gobi and the Mohave with sea water to kick-start the rain cycle and lower sea levels, I'll take a job laying pipe or assembling pumps. If it means converting suburbia to tiny-house co-housing and urban farming and tending a household biodiesel tank, let's go. If it means bioengineering tree lichen to help trees take up more carbon and growing our protein in vats and giving up on factory grain farming, okay. But my solar panels and conservation and minimal consumption and biking and limited travel and backyard garden and local foods aren't enough. It's time to take 2% of the world's wealth (not income, not real property) and fund this stuff, big and little.