February 26, 2014

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences and its British counterpart, the Royal Society, issued a report (.pdf link, may take a few seconds to load) addressing twenty issues in question/answer format, among them the recent slowing in the increase of world temperatures, the connection between greenhouse gases and extreme weather, melting glaciers, the acidity of the oceans, and rising seas. The report warns of dire consequences, including an impending threat to food production, freshwater supplies, coastal infrastructure, and the lives of millions of people currently living in low-lying areas.

While comprehensive, blunt and realistic, the report stops short of recommending a specific blueprint mankind can agree on to simultaneously stop burning fossil fuels to generate electricity.

Our proposed solution does that and more. It is designed to manufacture drought-proof water anywhere, even in inland deserts, generate a surplus of green energy as part of the process, and create millions of non-temporary, well-paid middle class jobs that cannot be outsourced or relocated.

The report concludes that ordinary citizens and governments will have to choose from an unpleasant palette of alternatives to counteract this developing calamity, among them “unproven geoengineering solutions.” That is of course correct, not because any or all of these choices are necessarily unsound but because humans have never been in a  predicament -man-made or natural- of this magnitude and scope. The same line of reasoning could have been used when the beautiful English countryside was first darkened by ugly soot at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, itself uncharted territory at the time. Instead, everyone welcomed the wealth and power it created, and now its time to face the music.

It is our ability to reason that sets us apart from other animals; therefore every new invention or course of action we take may have unforeseen consequences -favorable or detrimental- far into the future. Clearly there’s no turning back. Whatever we do or don’t do as a species in the context of climate change will determine whether we tame this problem or become extinct as our other Homo cousins did.

To paraphrase president Johnson: we can and should do our best; that is all we can do.