WORST GREEN HOUSE GAS LEVELS IN 800,000 YEARS

From the London Independent courtesy of AlterNet:

The rapid rise in greenhouse gases over the past century is unprecedented in at least 800,000 years, according to a study of the oldest Antarctic ice core which highlights the reality of climate change.

Air bubbles trapped in ice for hundreds of thousands of years have revealed that humans are changing the composition of the atmosphere in a manner that has no known natural parallel.

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So, the way I manage to keep from falling into a deep depression over global warming is by intellectualizing it all. With that in mind, it will be very interesting to see if the human race is actually able to get its act together in time to do anything about it. I saw a NASA climatologist on Sixty Minutes a while back asserting that we have about ten years before it's too late. What makes it interesting to me is that in order to do what needs to be done we're going to have to totally alter the way pretty much everything in our society, the world really, works. That is, we can't have the highly consumptive, fossil-fuel based, ever expanding economy that is utterly ingrained in the minds and attitudes of the wealthy elite; with such a change must necessarily come a radical alteration of infrastructure, as well as the way that individuals live their moment-to-moment lives. Everybody's going to lose something in some way or another. But the rich, who are the true rulers of the planet, stand to lose the most, which is why they are the most resistant.

If I were betting, there's no fucking way I'd ever put my money on pulling it off, but if we do successfully reverse this awful downward spiral, it will be one of the most amazing accomplishments in the history of humanity. See? It's interesting.

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