A Change of Plans

Many of us have big plans for the future.  We're saving for a house, planning a family, retirement, or sending the kids to college, or perhaps planning the trip of a lifetime.  It may be time to rethink those plans, because our future isn't likely to be what we'd hoped for.  It's long past time to resize our consumption to that of our ancestors, if we're to have any descendants.

Remember a few years ago, when talk of a 2 degree C limit was bandied about in Copenhagen as the limit which cannot be crossed without triggering feedback loops that would set off a spiral of uncontrolled (and likely unsurvivable) changes to our planet? The same threshold which was cited by many scientists as being arbitrary and much too high, considering that we had already triggered numerous feedback loops? The same threshold which wasn't supposed to be a risk until mid-century?

Well...  NASA says we've just reached it, at least in the northern hemisphere (be sure to read the update at the bottom of the article). This hemisphere just happens to have the most potential feedback loops, whether that's increased albedo over an ice-free arctic, or shallow arctic seas with lots of clathrate deposits.

The changes are coming faster than anyone had anticipated just a few short years (or even months) ago. If you're not willing to make significant changes to your life, prepare yourself to say goodbye to everything and everyone you love. As is becoming increasingly clear, the choice between our cars (among other things) and our future is not one that we'll have to make a few decades from now.  It needs to be made now.