Time to confront the invisible enemy that threatens us all

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/time-to-confront-the-invisible-enemy-that-threatens-us-all-1832081.html

Time to confront the invisible enemy that threatens us all

Even the world's politicians believe in global warming. But they can do little without popular support, says Michael McCarthy

Wednesday, 2 December 2009

You could be forgiven for thinking it's not happening – and there, in fact, is the heart of the problem. Climate change, according to one view the greatest threat that human civilisation has ever faced, may seem a particularly nebulous danger to many people who look around them and see no evidence whatsoever of it taking place.

If you gazed out of your window last July – or in July 2008, or July 2007, for that matter – what did you see? Rain, most of the time. People in raincoats. Chilly grey skies. You saw no signs of the swelteringly hot super-summers we have been told to expect these past 20 years, since UN scientists began making their predictions of the future course of global warming.

Same with the winters. Supposed to be getting warmer, aren't they? But last winter was the coldest for more than a decade, and the snow in early February in London the heaviest for an even longer period, and clumping your frozen feet through it and blowing on your icy fingers, you could hardly be blamed for thinking: global warming, schwarming. These guys who are saying it's all a gigantic con are probably right.

How are we to relate the evidence of our own senses to what we are told is happening, when the one in no way supports the other? Here we have the central difficulty that our society faces in dealing with the potentially catastrophic threat of the warming climate: it takes place in the future.

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[The2ndWheel]

1. It's not the energy

It's what we do with the energy.