Let’s say you want to canoe a river, but conditions are threatening. You ask 100 professional river guides about it and 98 state clearly that to do so would surely result in your death. However, two others say “no problem.” So what do you choose to do?

That is where we stand today on climate change science, a non-partisan issue.

President Donald Trump and his adviser Steve Bannon foresee a disruptive, tumultuous time ahead, and I agree. But there are differing sorts of tumultuous times. There are disastrous cataclysms, but also peaceful revolutions. For instance, the invention of the printing press vs. world wars and genocide. Our challange is to have the resolve to endure a kind of turbulence and disruption that would ultimately yield a bold future.

Human-enhanced climate change is a growing disruption that is unique. Its effects cannot be reversed. If not essentially stopped, it will make areas of the planet uninhabitable by humans within the lifetime of a child born today. We are doing this to ourselves. There is no debate.

The tragic irony is that with its Islamophobic and isolationist blueprint for warding off a cataclysm imagined as coming from without, the Trump administration, by gutting the EPA, supporting increased levels of fossil fuel consumption, and rejecting the revolutionary but job-creating challange of conversion to clean energy, is daily devoted to destroying our future and insuring that the apocalyptic cataclysm that it fears will actually befall us.

Abbott Meader

Oakland


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