Climate Change

This bears reading. Thomas Homer-Dixon is one of the best voices on the issue of climate change. He is not a scientist, but a political scientist. He understands the ramifications of what climate scientists are saying is happening to our planet as a result of our own mismanagement of mother earth, and he's trying to develop ways to avert the impending crisis of global climate change through policy changes. We have according to him 30 years in which to curb our greenhouse gas emissions or otherwise face catastrophe of the biblical kind. A number of presidential candidates have signaled that they will put policies in place to do this, but the public needs to become more aware of the dangers posed by our continued reliance on fossil fuels for energy production in order to get the kind of immediate changes we really need.

*Update* This report on NPR gives some local perspective on what climate change means for ordinary people. It's on potato farmers in Peru and how climate change is affecting how they practice their profession. Interestingly, Homer-Dixon predicts that the agriculture will be the first area affected significantly be climate change. This anecdote would seem to confirm that prediction.