I haven’t always had good words to say about US President Barak Obama but today, hot off the press this is, he (thank you Sir) has issued an Executive Order titled ‘PREPARING THE UNITED STATES FOR THE IMPACTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE’.
Like I said, this is very good news. It appears he is finally getting his head screwed on right.
I am especially grateful that he is ordering something other than the useless climate mitigation and carbon reduction measures that the rest of the world is toying with. The time has past when those things were of any importance or could have any real effect (short of stopping carbon emissions altogether immediately, plunging the world into economic chaos, the worst recession ever experienced and a total collapse of all of our societal institutions).
No, his plan is to put in place, covering all aspects of government activity (or so it appears from a quick read, which I must say caused my heart to jump with glee), ‘plans to prepare the Nation for the impacts of climate change by undertaking actions to enhance climate preparedness and resilience’.
Did you get the import of that?
ACTIONS TO ENHANCE CLIMATE PREPAREDNESS AND RESILIENCE.
Climate preparedness and resilience. There is a world of difference between that and climate mitigation. A world of difference.
These words speak of ADAPTATION not mitigation; of changing how we do things, how we live, where we live, how we provide for ourselves and how we ensure that we can continue to exist in an altered world.
It is an acknowledgement that it is too late to try to turn the heat down.
It is a positive statement that our only hope for survival is to get ready for what we have unwittingly unleashed on our world, from past thoughtless activity, as best we can.
Can’t put it any plainer than that. We must adapt, and soon, or perish, before too long.
Make sure you click the link above or here to read the President’s order for action. I believe this is an important document that may have a bearing on how well or otherwise all of our lives progress into a frightening future. I think very few people understand just what that future entails at the present moment.
I hope for all our sakes that something positive comes out of this move, and that the US takes a leading role that the rest of the world can follow, because nobody else has a clue what to do (or the will to do it if they did).
Here in Australia, anywhere else in the world for that matter, whatever we are doing or not doing about climate change, it is all traveling along on the wrong track. A track we must abandon for one that brings us to a state of preparedness and resilience. To a position where we are able to adapt as possibly endlessly changing needs dictate.
Postscript Added After Initial Publication:
Allow me to attempt to open your eyes a little to what I have described as adaptation.
It is not unlikely that before the present century expires, that the whole continent of Australia becomes uninhabitable. Unable to support life. Good only for solar farming or wind farming, if it is good for anything at all. Assuming that there is anyone around to need such facilities or those folk have the resources to construct such enterprises.
This situation may be repeated on similar latitudes around the globe both north and south of the equator.
The home that you live in now, the town or city where you may now live and work, may become a crumbling lifeless ruin returning to the earth it came from. Reclaimed by nature.
The institutions and infrastructure that provided the framework around which you constructed your life, disappeared forever, or at least for longer than it matters to you personally. Your means of sustenance, income, social structure, taken away as part of the general collapse when businesses and government could no longer function in such conditions.
Where will the people go? Will they all die? Where will you go? Will you die?
Thankfully, it seems that Tasmania and maybe a few spots in the far north of the continent remain habitable. At least for a while. Perhaps you may think that a slightly warmer Tasmania is preferable to a crocodile infested far north. Tasmania may have its own problems though. Perhaps even crocodiles. Similar havens may be found at other spots around the globe
Maybe people will eventually need to migrate (paddle, swim or sail) to Antarctica. Will this be the last bastion of habitable land on the globe? Perhaps there may be high enough mountains there after the land rises from under the weight of the kilometers thick melted ice, to escape the turbulence of the much deeper tumultuous seas continually trying to escape their bounds, allowing survivors to construct or excavate underground bunkers or inhabit existing caves as temporary shelter from the elements.
Perhaps even the Antarctic will eventually succumb to the ever increasing surface heat of the planet as the waters of the Earth boil off into outer space leaving a ball of furnace-like inferno to be a twin to the next planet closer to the Sun, Venus.
All of this is by no means beyond the range of possibilities for the future of our planet. A future that we, the human race, has brought upon itself.
But then again, perhaps we (a few of us) will be smiled on by nature and permitted to eke out a simple existence on a world only slightly warmer than it is now. To begin again, with a fresh start, the failed human experiment that went before.
Nothing about the future is guaranteed.
Not Something Else 
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