In "Hubris" Rachel Maddow does a wonderful job of pointing out the failure of intelligence not only among politicians but among the media in lying our way into war in Iraq.
I can't help but think we are going the same route as regards Climate Change. Once again we are just accepting the lies and failing to look at the consequences of allowing our leaders and pundits to mislead.
Most people are still behaving as if they think climate change was a hoax or something that wasn't going to happen until some distant future a lifetime away.
The truth is its here now and rapidly becoming something like armed intelligent drones, a science fiction weapon of mass destruction that we had the "Hubris" to go ahead and actually create only to discover that now we no longer have any control over it.
The Timeline for climate change being recognized and ignored goes back to the 1950's
The IPCC's V assessment report is due to begin release in September 2013. It turns out that the worst case analysis from the last report has been exceeded and instead of 1m of sea level rise by 2100 we may see 4m by 2050 and 6 m by the end of the century. That would suggest that over 100 major east coast cities with populations of over 100,000 need to be relocated back to the Appalachians ASAP
In 2016 we may no longer have sea ice in the Arctic
In Maine the temperature at which lobster thrive is 45 degrees, but we are already at 54 degrees and the lobster along with other fish stocks are moving north off the grand banks looking for colder weather.
The Pine Island Glacier (PIG) has become like the cork in a champagne bottle holding back the flood which will wash away the ice in Western Antarctica.
The speed of Pine Island Glacier increased by 73 percent from 1974 to the end of 2007, with an 8 percent increase over the last 16 months of this period alone. This speed up has meant that by the end of 2007 the Pine Island Glacier system had a negative mass balance of 46 gigatonnes per year,[6] which is equivalent to 0.13 mm (0.0051 in) per year global sea level rise.[12] In other words, much more water was being put into the sea by PIG than was being replaced by snowfall. Measurements along the centre of the ice stream by GPS demonstrated that this acceleration is still high nearly 200 km (120 mi) inland, at around 4 percent over 2007.[13] It has been suggested that this recent acceleration could have been triggered by warm ocean waters at the end of PIG, where it has a floating section (ice shelf) approximately 50 km (31 mi) long.[3][4][14]
As the ice stream accelerates it is also getting steeper.[13] The rate of thinning within the central trunk has quadrupled from 1995 to 2006.[13][15]
I'm interested to know what effect people think all of this is going to have on their lives as opposed to those of their grandchildren.