Climate Change and Hurricanes
Climate Change is a topic I’m both interested in and concerned by. I’ve written about it before in relation to my own work in games (e.g. here and here) and it’s also a theme of Dark Future too. I’m thinking about it a lot as the news of the hurricanes and flooding so far in 2017. I wanted share some of the links and articles that I’ve been looking at. What I hope we get is a tipping point in the media/political understanding of climate change – that’s this is what we’ve been warned of for decades. That future is now here.
Not only had scientists and activists warned us of this – writers (and game designers!) had too:
That failure to act is costing us all huge amounts of money and most importantly – lives, the irony being one of the arguments against action was that it would cost too much… Inaction is proving to be far more expensive. For example:
Open land in Florida, with its porous terrain, can suck up the energy of the storm. But when passing over developed land, a storm can retain more of its power. Bochnak, the wetlands scientist, said the Everglades could provide necessary water storage but the marshes have been “half-developed into cities and roads,” cutting down on the ecosystem’s potential to lessen the impact of a storm like Irma.
“It’s bad but it’s the hard reality we live in,” said Bochnak. “When we develop these areas, we lose our natural protection.”
Predatory delay is everywhere. Corruption erodes the very foundations of our democracy. Disinformation floods our media. Civic sabotage and broken governments slow progress to a crawl. Outdated thinking clouds our sense of what’s truly possible. The Carbon Bubble looms. Many who claim to also desire climate action throw up fierce hostility in defense of a destructive status quo. In Blue America, anti-climate politics isn’t about disputing science, it’s about denying what science tells us about the need to act quickly. Delay is doom, but delay has many champions.
A Great Becoming... 