WE ARE NOT MOVING FAST ENOUGH t

Two frightening and enlightening new books

Jeff Goodell tells his story of accompanying Barack Obama on the first trip by an American President to the Arctic for Rolling Stone.  Obama candidly expresses his fears in a private conversation speaking of his concern for Sasha and Malia as the two of them walk the shoreline in Arctic Alaska. He spoke of recently having read THE SIXTH EXTINCTION by Elizabeth Kolbert and the effect that was having on his thinking.

 “Climate change is no longer some far-off problem; it is happening here, it is happening now,” Obama said. In perhaps the starkest language he has ever used in public, Obama warned that unless more was done to reduce carbon pollution, “we will condemn our children to a planet beyond their capacity to repair: submerged countries, abandoned cities, fields no longer growing.” His impatience was obvious: “We’re not moving fast enough,” he repeated four times in a 24-minute speech (an aide later told me this repetition was ad-libbed).

Goodell takes the Rolling Stone article as part of his detailed study of the implications of sea-level rise across the planet. The IPCC’s estimated some 3.2 feet of sea level rise by 2100 in it’s 2013 report climate scientists admit was extremely conservative. The latest report doubled the estimates but many well-known climatologists believe that estimate to be well below what will come as early as 2050 and the sea level rise will reach between 5 and 9 meters or 16 to 29 feet.  see Mar 22 2016 report to Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 

Goodell’s look at the future is frightening but his focus on sea level alone is tame compared to THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH Life After Warming by David Wallace Wells discussed in Feb 16, 2019’s New York Times opinion piece “TIME TO PANIC”. Wallace Wells believes the relatively slow moving threat of rising seas lulls us into a false complacency when it’s really the other effects of increasing heat that pose the greater threat to all life on Earth.

FEAR MAY BE THE ONLY THING THAT SAVES US.

We have gone from an intelligent well read leader who worked to get the Paris accords and who thought daily about the effect of warming for his children, to a moron who reads nothing but tweets and who declares the greatest crisis in the history of humanity “A CHINESE HOAX”.
Perhaps the only silver lining in this disaster of an administration is the fear we all should feel and communicate to get our families and friends into action.
addendum:
An interesting development has been Bill Gates TERRA POWER. A wave reactor that eats spent nuclear fuel solving one of the worst problems with nuclear power plants in the past. Terra Power entered into an agreement in China in 2015 and began construction of their first plant to help stop the proliferation of coal-fired plants going up in China by the dozens.  Read Bill Gates's Experimental Nuclear Power Plant Halts Construction in China  Gates cites the Trump Administration's aggressive stance for having to pull out.
After Trump halted the effort in China to please his coal and oil supporters this happened: Top Trump appointees promoted selling nuclear power plants to Saudi Arabia over objections from national security officials
Despite misgivings about nuclear power, a smaller safer wave reactor that eats the problematic spent fuel rods while replacing coal burning plants seems like a win-win.