Lake Oahe before and after a six-year drought // Credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/Japan Space Systems and the U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team
Global Climate Change : A four part discussion on long-term global socioeconomic goals and the impact those goals will have on climate change.
When the right-hand image was taken, the Missouri River was six years into a severe drought. Because of reduced snowpack in the Rocky Mountains in Montana, where the river has its headwaters, less water was flowing through the river. In North Dakota, Lake Oahe (at 374 kilometers or 232 miles long, the nation's fourth largest reservoir) shrank so much that it withdrew from the state. From Bismarck to the South Dakota border, more than 100 kilometers (62 miles) where the lake was once 8 kilometers (5 miles) wide reverted to a narrow river. Weedy mudflats were left behind and boat ramps were stranded 2 kilometers (more than a mile) from water. Both images are centered along the border between North and South Dakota.
Is this an effect of permanent climate change?
Most officials now recognize that, whatever the cause of climate change, be it a natural phenomenon or human misuse, we've gone beyond the point of no return. They are now holding discussions and using terminology changed from the political rhetoric of how to prevent it to the new; how to manage a world in which climate change as inevitable.
Michael Mastrandrea and Stephen Schneider, co-authors of “Preparing for Change” describe the inevitability of climate change and the disastrous results it will bring to all humanity unless we prepare and prepare now by accepting real global social change.
Yet, here we are, gripped in self-destructive panic, paralyzed by sheer terror as we hold tight the ideas embedded so deeply within our psyche, looking to our “leaders” for all the answers to the world’s problems. Sadly, those leaders have less of a clue how to fix the very frightening scenario in which humankind now finds itself than you do; they have no idea how to govern climate change.
We have resigned so much of our autonomy, our rationale, our brilliant minds and our critical thinking abilities over to our leaders that we, like the mythical lemmings, are following them to their doom. But the sad thing is; lemmings are in fact far more intelligent; they discover after a few quick errors that jumping into a river, or over the proverbial cliff is unhealthy and, despite the common misconceptions, they change course, thereby preventing total catastrophe.
We must now ask ourselves; are we? Are we as intelligent as lemmings, capable of changing the course of climate change in the name of self-preservation? As for me, I place very little hope in any government’s ability to do much, other than continue to promulgate the jaded monetary-based economic system like pre-programmed road crews designed to maintain the road for those who already know the road well.
And frankly, I think all humans are aware that our tired old ways are reaching that dead end.
Virtually everything governing bodies do is designed to protect the “system;” the governments of the United States, China, United Kingdom and even North Korea have been empowered by us, the people, to guard a system that will eventually be the very unraveling of the human race.
Governing bodies are the antithesis of global survival, success of the human race and the welfare of the planet and they will continue to guard the system until no system is necessary, either because the race is extinct or because we finally wake up and realize that we are empowering them to usher in our own demise.
A self-destructive monetary exchange style of socioeconomic rule has been tried and retried repeatedly throughout the millennia; socioeconomic orders which have failed as many times as they have been reborn under the guise of different names; capitalism, socialism, communism, Marxism, etc. are all but one system with new tricks up their sleeves and they’re on a disastrous course leading the entire human race to the edge of the cliff. Our collective governments, the "system guards" will lead us over the edge never understanding for a moment what they've done as they jockey for global power and wealth. They will hold the line until they've exhausted virtually every resource our precious planet can provide. At which time, humanity will cease to exist.
Perhaps the lemmings will have the last laugh after all.