Grimly he watched America walk by.
A precipice that we might have already passed.
Who were these people who could live so placidly while the world fell into an acute global environmental crisis.
Permafrost bubbling methane.
Experts at denial.
Acidification of the oceans.
Experts at filtering their informatioon to hear only what made it seem sensible to behave as they behaved.
Ever more extinct species.
Many of those walking by went to church on Sundays, believed in God, voted Republican, spent their time shopping and watching TV.
Disrupted agriculture globally.
Obviously nice people.
Melting glaciers and dwindling ice caps.
The world was doomed.
Ever faster increases in the growth of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Sometimes fiction gives voice best to our concerns.
The quote above come Kim Stanley Robinson’s 
We are at a precipice.Forty Signs of Rain, the first book of a trilogy dealing with the challenges of Global Warming.
To be honest, that paragraph encaspulate my frustrations as I live my life, sometimes walking like a zoombie, without comprehension at people’s evident lack of concern for the challenges we face. How can people do X? Or, Y? Or …? Aren’t they concerned about tomorrow?
Forty Signs of Rain is a realistic look at the changing world via the perspectives of scientists and knowledgable people caught up in their own lives, even while prepared and working to try to foster a better world for the future — including trying to create paths to tackle global warming challenges.
A visiting scientist at the National Science Foundation has a vision for changing the NSF to change the world for the better.
‘We can go to them and say, look, the party’s over. We need this list of projects funded or civilisation will be hammered for decades to come. Tell them they can’t give half a trillion dollars a year to the military and leave the rescue and rebuilding of the world to chance and some kind of free market religion. It isn’t working, and science is the only way out of this mess.’” – Forty Signs of Rain, page 294
Perhaps that they can’t give $700 billion (and counting) to ensure that Wall Street brokers can keep drinking the best champagne rather than using the funds to create a “national infrastructure bank” (here also) to foster the move toward a clean energy future, a prosperous, climate-friendly society.
Earlier in the book, the same scientist began a memo as follows.
… NSF is simply too small to have any real impact.
Meanwhile humanity is exceeding the planet’s carrying capacity for our species, badly damaging the biosphere. Neoclassical economics cannot cope with this situation, and indeed, with its falsely exteriorized costs, was designed in part to disguise it. If the Earth were to suffer a catastrophic antrhopogenic extinction event over the next ten years, which it will, American business would continue to focus on its quarterly profit and loss. [p 193]
Or on a Wall Street bailout. And, most citizens on the latest TV show.
There is no economic mechanism for dealing with catastrophe.
Sometimes “fiction writers” capture truth better than any journalist obsessed with being “fair and balanced” in a search for ever-elusive “objectivity”.
A Congressional staffer, engaged in fighting for global warming legislation, reacted to such press reporting.
The morning Post included an article informing Charlie that a chunk of the Ross Ice Shelf had broken off, a chunk more than half the size of France. The news was buried in the last pages of the international section. So many peices of Antarctica had fallen off that it wasn’t big news anymore … [scientists] were saing tha tthe possibility was very real that the whole mass of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would break apart and flat away … sea level worldwide could rise by an eventual toal of about seven meters. “This could happen fast,” one glaciologist emphasized, “and I’m not talking geology fast here, I’m talking tide fast. A matter of several years in some simulations.” … And yet the Post had it at the back of the international section. People were talking about it the same way they did about any other disaster. …
But, time to focus on his son in the stroller …
Life goes on.
Life goes on even for those frantic about the issue of global warming and its threat to our future.
Life goes on … but not indefinitely and, quite likely, not as we know it.
As per these quoted sections, Kim Stanley Robinson captures Global Warming and the intersection of global warming with individual lives in a powerful and compelling manner. Forth Signs of Rain … recommended.