While people like Free Water here are mumbling about Algore and hockey stick graphs, right here in the US, we're in the middle of the single costliest environmental disaster in our history, the 2012 North American Drought. The only reason we're not having a repeat of the Dirty Thirties and our very own homegrown famine right now is because modern tech and modern farming techniques are staving them off. If we're very, very lucky, all we're going to get is a massive rise in food prices and a metric shitton of cheap farming equipment turning up on Ebay from ruined farmers turning trying to stay afloat any way they can.
I live deep in the Southeast. For the last few years running, we've gotten to enjoy several months' worth of hundred-plus with dew point temperatures in the mid-80s by night during our summers...with virtually no rain, even in spite of the overwhelming humidity. Sure it's hot down here, it's supposed to be because we're living in a subtropical climate. But this isn't normal. Every summer we're breaching more daily high temperature records in more places, and even in the places where our temps aren't exceeding historical highs, we're still approaching them and we're still setting records for sheer duration of heat and high nighttime temperatures. Last winter, we barely had a winter. The winter before was icy, but we were STILL breaking temperature averages for the region--you don't need record-breaking cold for snow, just record-breaking humidity levels. Temperature were STILL comparatively mild for the rest of the country. Even if we're having cold winters from time to time, the average is STILL trending up, and even in places that are still receiving enough rainfall to keep from turning into deserts, it's finally beginning to fuck with food production in a major way.
I'd really like to be convinced that there isn't a problem, or that it's something we're going to be able to deal with without any sort of major problem. I really would. Because I'm becoming more and more afraid that we've finally managed to bust something really vital, that we've managed to knock out enough planetary negative feedback systems to ensure that there's nothing left capable of controlling and maintaining the conditions humans need to survive--or that our food requires to survive, which is really the same thing. And that now that we're actually seeing it, it's too fucking late to do anything except try to ride it out. Because I would like to be wrong. I really would. If I AM, all I have to do is eat my own words with a little salt. But if I'm right, it means I might actually get to live just long enough to watch the whole bloody mess of the civilization we've spent centuries painstakingly constructing collapse back down into nothing, and most of the people I love die along with it. And nobody even remotely sane wants to be right about that. I'd like to believe I'm still at least remotely sane.
