Just hold on before you start chucking your toys about, I don't deny that our planet is getting hotter, nor that it's a threat to our very existence. Climate change is very real, it's getting worse and we are going to suffer. My point is who's perspective are we looking at this from?
The good news is that Earth is going to survive the global warming that we humans have created. It will change, as it has done so over the vast millennia, but it will survive and slowly rotate on into eternity.
Unfortunately humans are going to find it somewhat tougher to live over the next ten/fifty/hundred/thousand (delete depending how gloomy you're feeling) or so years, but let's face it, we've plundered Earth's resources for our own betterment and didn't appreciate there might be consequences. Or if we did, we didn't care because the money and associated lifestyle improvements were intoxicating. And when presented with the facts of the impending climate disaster, we ignored them. Because things had gone too far. So our time on this planet might be more limited than the time the planet has left. And we hastened our own demise.
As the Smash Martians observed, "They are clearly a most primitive people."
When I have a nest of ants in my garden and I leave it alone, it gets bigger. The number of ants multiplies and they all run around managing their community - foraging for food and building materials. They have lots of babies. Then the nest gets too big (my arbitrary decision) and I pour boiling water into it. The ants run around in a panic, tying to save what they've built. But I pour in more water and eventually the nest collapses and the ants die. I go inside, put the kettle on and forget all about it.
Later another ants' nest starts to build somewhere else in the garden. I go through the same process.
We are the ants. It's getting hotter and we're running around having lots of meetings in a vain attempt to shore things up. The scientists tell us what we need to do, but we just don't have the will-power to do it. It's too hard and things would have to change too much. Our comfy lives would be much worse. Better to have lots of important meetings, make proclamations, blame the poor countries and pretend we're doing something.
So, like everyone else, I'll buy an electric car, build a compost heap and a flood defence, turn my heating down a degree or so, and separate my plastics from my animal bones. Make myself feel better, like I'm making a contribution. There's a niggling feeling it's all a bit futile.
There are elections coming. But I fear Earth has already cast its vote and we're being turfed out.
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