We’re half a million square miles short of Arctic ice extent today, or twice the size of France.
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
March is a particularly bad month to be short of ice extent. All spring that blue water is going to be absorbing solar heat, and all summer too. Then the Arctic Ocean will have even less ice next year.
Worldwide grain harvests are suffering. The world’s deserts are expanding. World seafood production is also suffering. These trends will become terrible in perhaps 70 years.
Mass extinction is like Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s steals the “you” of you away slowly, and then afterwards you’re going to grieve dearly. Mass extinction will be permanent for everybody’s great-grandchildren. Don’t go there! Eaarth is losing maybe 200 species per day right now.
The solution:
As the Arctic slowly melts, climate change feeds on itself. Preventing the Arctic from melting down is now just as important as our displacing most or all major uses of natural gas, oil and coal. We’re now fighting an extremely slow planetary megafire that slowly builds on itself and that eventually can be horribly destructive.
Corporations have already performed the world’s cheap and quickly profitable energy research. Too often nobody on earth is funding the critical research and product development that will only come to fruition in perhaps ten or twenty years. Therein lies a primary solution. Humanity must somehow come up with major and well-spent funding in transit R&D, in solar heat R&D, in stored solar-based electric generation and in Arctic-centered climate change inhibition. Just as a previous generation developed solar power and wind turbines, we have some specific and well-defined technological races sitting in front of us, waiting for our hands, for our thoughts and perhaps for our simple courage.
We need ideas, simple experiments, more ideas, peer review, more ideas, product development and ramping up of key products. Did I mention ideas yet? Our entire world economy seems to be built to crush or stifle new engineering ideas. As a matter of planetary life or planetary half-death we as a civilization must nurture critical path ideas, we must learn to pay inventors their rent money and food money for these critical ideas and we must learn to teach invention as a college course or major to a new generation of inventors. As long as the next billion-dollar idea costs a thousand dollars (my best estimate for the effort I put in versus what I get out, your persional invention ratio may differ), we should think about getting our bright ideas wholesale and throwing out the bad ones.
Moral injury
Moral injuries can lead to a person becoming unable to cope with life. I’ve seen at least one scientist suffer from despair over climate change, and then she eventually became an activist.
We need activists. We also need all sorts of organizers and workers for the important climate R&D push. We need philanthropic organizations without their heads on backwards, and the same goes for universities and state governments.