Wining The Battle, Losing The War

This blog had been pretty inactive as well as the usual reason of being busy with work I also got re-married in that I have now been married for 25 years and decided to do it all again but this time In Las Vegas,  with Elvis of course,  which took a lot of organisation.

I also treated myself to a Nexus 7 tablet which I am slowly writing this on, using an app.  The irony is that I am now probably on the internet more but in less convenient position to knock up a post.

But during my sabbatical I have been thinking that the battle to get the problem of climate change raised and publicly accepted has been won. Unfortunately not purely by the science but the ever increasing record number of weather events now being called Global Weirding or the New Normal. Even before Tropical Storm Sandy caused so much loss in the climate denial stronghold of the US, polls show that concern about climate change was high and most believed that anthropogenic causes do have some responsibility. With Sandy that level of acceptance has only increased and unless we enter into an unlikely prolonged period of climate stability, what the weather will most likely have in store for us will only harden those views. That battle is effectively won.

But the cynic in me worries that the war is being lost or may even already be lost. Even the re-election of Obama,  the only choice if anything can be done to tackle climate change globally,  is little comfort as there seems little appetite with politicians to do anything.  We are in the same position we were in decades ago.  Adaption rather than any attempts at mitigation seems to be favoured and Sandy shows just what we can expect with adaption.

People like me don't need to be alarmist, the conclusions of the science are alarming enough. What to do? We can keep on raising awareness,  keep on confronting denial,  keep on tackling ignorance in the best way we know, but in the end all that effort will pale beside what people are going to experience first hand with floods, droughts, storms and other extremes that are lining up to convince people where sound science has failed for decades. By then the door to mitigating solutions will have closed and adaption will mainly be one of repairing after the damage and the pain has occurred.

Am I wrong to feel that I am looking at the horse bolting?