Climate change is real and humans are causing it. More specifically, existing economic and financial arrangements, which we have allowed to develop, are causing ever more destructive weather events. Blow by blow, Neil deGrasse Tyson defeats every single argument made against the idea of human-made climate change. Then, to add salt to our self-inflicted wound, he tells the tale of two scientists who long ago brought solar-powered generation of electricity to the world -- way back in the 1800s!
If you don't have a chance to see this episode, check out the accomplishments of Augustin Mouchot(who presented his solar-powered steam engine to Napoleon in 1868, and also, a few years later, at the Universal Exhibition in Paris, where he won a Gold Medal for having the best and most important invention . Then too there was Frank Shuman (who created an entire solar-based power plant in 1913).
America could have gotten solar-power technology going a whole lot sooner, and could probably be quite advanced with it by this time, if not for the emergence of our booming coal-, and then also petroleum-based, economy. But because of the huge fortunes being made by a powerful few, with the sale of millions of tons of coal and oil, America dropped solar energy technology and research, and began to pollute the environment big-time, and continued this at an accelerating pace for the next hundred years, leading to many hundreds of thousands of premature deaths and enormous amounts of illness, all as a result of the continuous breathing of carbon-based exhaust fumes by millions of people, but which allowed huge fortunes to be made by our financial elite.
In an unusual twist for the series, the 'doomsdaying' lasts for most of the episode, including cites of Carl Sagan's warnings from 1980. At the core, it's a presentation of the science behind the tragedy that's unfolding, and an explanation of how we knew this was going to happen, decades in advance, and yet we did nothing about it. It's only in the last ten minutes of the program that Tyson offers any hope, and it can be summed up thusly: Humans are adaptive and we can persevere through dark times until we arrive at solutions.
The episode
ends with JFK's speech about putting a man on the moon. It was an impossible feat, but we did it. Now, to adequately address the mire that the
carbon-based industrialized world and the hyperconsumption, hyperproduction treadmill
society has put us into, we are going to have to step up to the plate and do
the impossible once again. Link
Some of us prefer dreaming and talking about possible solutions to the problem of global climate change and environmental destruction, rather than quietly resigning ourselves to ecocide and the death of civilization as we know it. Watch the most recent installment of Cosmos on public television (or at the first link presented above) if you want to get a better idea of what I'm talking about.
Re: the certainty that our carbon-fueled manufacturing processes and hyper-consumption habits are causing more than 90% of the global warming that is playing hell with the ecosphere (causing ever more violent storms, tornadoes etc.) and helping to kill thousands of species, Tyson makes the most compelling and easy-to-understand argument I've heard. His graphic demonstration of how the planet Venus is thought to have lost its oceans through the excessive CO2 coming from volcanoes is quite sobering: There was so much CO2 in the atmosphere that almost no sunlight could escape after it bounced off the surface of that planet, and eventually the temperature there got hot enough to melt lead. (The CO2 molecule in their trillions have the unusual property of reflecting sunlight right back to earth after it bounces up from the earth.)
Proof of Tyson's thesis
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