[MCN] Reality check on climate situation : 3 people tell it like it is

[Lance Olsen]

“I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to act like our house is on fire. Because it is.”

“We should panic. And by panic I don’t mean running around screaming. I mean stepping out of your comfort zone. Because when you’re in a crisis your behavior changes.”

Greta Thunberg
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The New Yorker Interview

Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert on the U.N. Extinction Report

While the political tide could be turning on climate change, both writers worry that it is too late.

By The New Yorker3:17 P.M.

Excerpts:

Elizabeth Kolbert : It’s not something where you can say, at the moment you don’t like things, let’s undo them and have a chance of undoing them. There’s a lot of time lag in the system, there’s a lot of inertia in the system.

The system, meaning science?

kolbert: No, in the climate system. So we have not yet experienced the full impact of the greenhouse gases we have already put up there. And once we do, you know, in whatever, a decade or so, there’s a sort of a long tail to that, we will have put up that much more. So we are fighting a very very, very uphill battle. And I think the point that Bill has made, and I agree with it, is maybe we can avoid the worst possible future. But I don’t think at this point we can avoid a lot, a lot, a lot of damage.

And we’ve been seeing it already.

kolbert: And we’re seeing it, but it’s just beginning. And it’s not just beginning and then we can turn it around, it’s just beginning and a lot more is built in.

What can be held back, Bill, and what can’t be held back at this point?

mckibben: Well, look, Betsy’s right….So we’re not playing for stopping climate change. We’re playing maybe for being able to slow it down to the point where it doesn’t make civilizations impossible. That’s an open question. … But Betsy is right, an already very difficult century is going to become a lot harder no matter what we do. It’s at this point trying to keep it from becoming not a difficult and even miserable century but a literally impossible one.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/bill-mckibben-and-elizabeth-kolbert-on-the-un-extinction-report


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