Fed Up With Denial

The denialists are having a field day with the recent spate of gaffs by climate scientists.  Even though there aren't any, they are perceived as such.  I believe, at this point, it is politically impossible to effect meaningful change.  The denialists win by default.  The stupid rule the day.

If you haven't seen it, there is a report that the glaciers in the Himalayas are not actually going to be completely melted by 2035.  Never mind that the original speculation was for 2350 and likely got mangled in translation.  The mangled version is what made its way to the IPCC report.  So, to the discredit of the IPCC, and spilling over to climate scientists everywhere, and piling on top of the climate-gate stolen emails, the denialists claim victory.

It appears likely that the public that matters (those in the US which use approximately 5 times as much energy per capita as the average of the rest of the world, there are worse offenders and they are also denialists) now are turning against support for doing something about AGW.

So, perhaps Carl Sagan's conjecture about the difficulty of a civilization such as ours surviving this stage of development is insurmountable is accurate.  Perhaps future generations of humanity are doomed to live squalid little lives because our generation in its selfishness used up all the fossil fuels before finding replacements, because we destroyed our climate so that growing crops that sustain our populations cannot be done, and because we created such religious divides that no common ground is possible.

It makes me ashamed to see the degree of our selfishness.  We tout our greatness and largess of heart when we give aid to countries like Haiti after their massive earthquake, or the tsunami that hit Indonesia, but really, we are quite selfish - we can't let the rest of the world have our standard of living (the energy resources of the world wouldn't be sufficient anyway), and yet we refuse to live more reasonable lives.