Closing time for Climate Control: you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here

The Huffington Post featured a blog post by David Goldstein titled No Option: An Adult Response to Climate Change, a heartfelt plea calling for the citizens of the world to take responsibility and work towards addressing climate change. Goldstein argues that our climate change situation is no different than his personal experience dealing with a liver transplant, an “adult choice” between following expert advice to get better or ignoring said advice and (probably) dying. He urges his Huffington Post audience, generally liberal leaning news conscious individuals, to wake up to climate change by citing the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research: “A 4 degrees Celsius world is likely to be one in which communities, cities and countries would experience severe disruptions, damage, and dislocation, with many of these risks spread unequally. It is likely that the poor will suffer most and the global community could become more fractured, and unequal than today. The projected 4 degrees Celsius warming simply must not be allowed to occur -- the heat must be turned down. Only early, cooperative, international actions can make that happen.” Goldstein believes both our resistance to acknowledge facts and refusal to be proactive about the situation can be broken down into three categories: 1) avoidance of reality, 2) inversion of rationality, and finally 3) ignorance and/or lying. The first is evident when you consider that even though scientists have warned the aforementioned 4 degree Celsius warming constitutes a global emergency, carbon emissions continue to rise 3% annually and the US state department has fast tracked the Keystone XL pipeline. When confronted with such facts, many climate change doubters begin to (in Goldstein’s words) “invert rationality,” equivocating accepted science with “blind, inflexible orthodoxy.” Finally, whether it be through outright lying or mere ignorance, detractors will resort to “[broadcasting] misinformation about a topic that is projected to cause great suffering and hardship,” as Goldstein claims Texas Governor Rick Perry did during the 2012 GOP primary. What I admire most about Goldstein is his call to change: “Embracing the reality of 'no option', however challenging the viable option may be, allows us to finally open to new possibilities, to see obstacles as challenges to be overcome not as justifications to delay and dissemble.” It is a way to turn our negative outlook on climate change by shining it in a positive light, without ignoring the fact that it is an obstacle he chooses to look at these issues as opportunities to work together as a global community and find solutions.