Climate Change

“It is not about the Science, it is not about mitigation, it is not about projections… it’s about all of that, on top of the current adaptation gap”. This is what I was thinking as I left the NAS/NASA workshop Walking the talk: Climate Science in Service to Resilient Federal Properties. This workshop, incidentally, was canceled a few hours short of its original date, October 31st, due to Sandy. On the second attempt, it was again almost cancelled, due to exceptional wind and rain conditions in DC. That pretty much summarizes my take-away from the meeting. ...

Climate change is what we deserve were the exact words I heard from an otherwise well educated and reasonable scientist. The logic was something like: Climate has changed in the past. Yes there might be a significant change lately but so has happened millennia ago, for natural reasons, like volcanoes and other stuff. If you look at the long term climate, it's full of variations. *Climate changes* Therefore this change, that is doubtfully due to humans, is not really worrisome. Climate changes and we have to deal with it. And if we are the cause of it, more so. Why fight against the consequences we deserve? We are too many, we harm the environment too much. If we indeed are the cause and we disappear due to climate change, it's the natural thing. Like if we were a virus and Earth needs to heal. The earth will come back into its equilibrium afterwards. This logic comes from a highly educated person, doing basic research science. And the fact is this is not the first time I hear a similar catastrophic argument of cosmic justice. On this particular case, few others around the table agreed on it. ...