Unprecedented heat and bushfires are a wake-up call, says Tim Flannery, but we're running out of time.
Kendra King's insight:
In an earlier post, I complained about the changing climate in New England. I would gladly take cold over hot any day given just how much more dangerous brush fires are. I am not using the term dangerous lightly either. The fact that “catastrophic” had to be added as a category is just alarming especially since the name change came after 2009 in which there were 173 deaths due to brush fire. If this isn’t a sign of global warming, I don’t know what will get the republicans to actually believe.
At least, Australians who once doubted the impact of climate change are now changing their stance according to the article. However, the article makes another good point---the rest of the world needs to reduce their emissions too. This reminds me of a concept I learned in one of my poli sci classes at URI called the tragedy of commons. The tragedy is that achieving cooperation for the long term sustainable environmental well being of the world is difficult because there will always be individual countries who want to harm the environment to make a profit. Unfortunately there actions are not contained to just there country. So everyone becomes affected. Also, because one cheated, others are tempted to ignore the environment to remain economically competitive too. So under this concept, the increasing interdependence that the world is experiencing on such a large scale is probably a really bad thing. At least until the short term cost is no longer appealing. I just think that by that point in time, the damage done will be too far gone.
Hopefully, the tragedy of commons doesn't become an even worse tragedy. The fires that affect Australia now are only after a “.9 decree temperature increase and over “the next 90 years” the temperature is supposed to increase “by at least another three degrees” according to Prof. Flannery. Like him, I don’t want to think about what that could mean. Although, I might think about moving out of the country if I lived there.