Jim Kunstler of Clusterfuck Nation discusses The Warming:

While it seems morally upright to inveigh against global warming Al Gore style, personally I don’t believe there is anything we will do about it, or can do about now. The feedback loops are in motion. Something ominous is underway far greater than our measly powers can correct. Even if we started it with about two hundred years of our fossil fuel fires, there is no evidence that can just stop burning coal, oil, and methane gas on the grand scale, or that the warming would stop if we did.

The response of our political leaders is laughable. The most “progressive” among them will demand rapid conversion of the US automobile fleet to hybrid engines. I am confident that this would do absolutely nothing to put the brakes on global warming.

As usual, I am much more interested in how events are likely to turn out than in how we wish them to turn out. My guess is that the weird weather we are getting will increasingly affect crop yields. With populations growing, and weather anomalies increasing, grain surpluses worldwide are now at their lowest point in decades. All the major grain-growing regions have suffered either significant drought (US, Australia, Ukraine, China, Argentina) or flooding (East Africa, India) in recent years. (See this report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.)


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