society's changing climate

First post of 2012.

With the past couple weeks of warm weather, I've heard a lot of passerby conversations about global warming and arguments about "this is what it's going to be like." There are people saying that it's just a warm winter, while others say that the 50 degree afternoon on January 5th is strictly because of a rising global temperature. I'm apprehensive to take sides but always think about why I'm concerned about climate change.

In my opinion, climate change cannot be viewed in a regional or short-term scale. The severity of the situation has nothing to do with my winter being warmer or cooler on a year-by-year basis. It has nothing to do with whether I'm scraping off ice on my windshield in October or driving with my windows down in January. It has to do with our global economy that has been built in an environment predicted to stay the same ever since the melting of the glaciers 10,000 years ago. Currently, the infrastructure of our world relies on the environment staying the same. Global warming, because of an increase in greenhouse gases, isn't changing our lives on a day-to-day scale. This extremely slow-paced change is exactly what won't catch the attention of society. In a world if impatience and on-demand television, talking about a phenomena measured in centuries and millennia means nothing to a person whose life is measured in years. It's an unfortunate reality. Yes, it's easy to say you can think on a much broader scale, but living your life in a broader scale is vastly different thing and beyond difficult. It's impractical to think past your life.

Here's the connection: our environmentally rigid economy combined with our impatient society will inevitably continue to neglect the tragedy of global warming. My warm summers and brittle winters are pointless considerations when the real catastrophe exists in polar regions. Glaciers and ice sheets have been continually melting over time, but only recently (the second half of the 20^th century onwards) have they been melting at a faster rate. Along with thermal expansion of ocean water because of increased temperatures, the seas' levels are rising at similarly increasing rates. Cities on the coasts, as well as islands and regions developed under sea level are at high risk. These cities make up the nodes of our global trade. The global market cannot afford their non-existence (ironically the global market can barely afford it's own existence).

My opinion of humans' place in the climate change debate exists in more of a realistic viewpoint. Yes, climate change has been given a pot of coffee by humans, but because of our current capitalistic global economy, changing the change isn't going to happen as quickly as it needs to. Because of our lack of flexibility, we need to start focusing on places that will be affected and preparing them for the future or lack of future. We DON'T need to worry about arguing whether this winter's lack of cold weather is because of my car. We already know that the far worse scenario of melting ice caps is happening, whether it's because of my car or because of the earthly climate cycle that is warming itself.

To conclude on a tragic note, Coca-cola recently put out its new regular Coke can that portrayed some polar bears and ice on the sides. In response to the changing habitat in the North Pole, they've decided to start a donation matching campaign to combat against the bear's shrinking environment, ice. The same ice that is affecting our coasts around the world. It's a great way of getting people to see a more relatable way of how the melting ice is affecting us and species that we idolize. Now is when it gets really bad. The cans with polar bears look like diet coke cans. THEY LOOK LIKE DIET COKE CANS. Because our impatient selves couldn't spend an extra five seconds reading the package description to look for the already hugely oxymoron word "diet" on a soda box, people complained to Coca-cola about their inability to tell whether they were buying diet coke or regular coke. The label campaign was quickly suspended.

Our society won't allow for climate change to become a part of our lives. Our economy that isn't able to adapt to a changing climate sits and waits for an inevitable disaster. Eventually we must bear the weight of this phenomena, whether we want to or not. Preparations must be taken globally to equip ourselves with the resources and tools necessary for a new world. Maybe 2012 IS actually the year for life as we know it to change (thanks Mayans), for our society to become ubiquitous with its environment, instead of trying to create it.