By Bob Williamson – Greenhouse Neutral Foundation

The reality of that welcome to us would be our reply, “I’m not getting on this flight!”

Yet we are all in fact on that flight with climate change and the plane has taken off.

Much has been promoted in the media lately that climate change science is somehow conspiring to concoct data and the conspiracy theories abound from ‘Climate Gate’ and timeframes for the disappearance of glaciers in the Himalayas. There has been little said to the fact that the glaciers in the Himalayas will in fact disappear. This is a forgone conclusion with climate change. That plane will crash. As we watch impassively at the Arctic thaw and the recent reports of glacial melt and iceshelf collapse in Antarctica, we can see too that this plane is flying on one engine. As we observe species extinction reports and look at the lonely figure of the polar bear on the ever shrinking ice flows that they depend on for their very existence, we can see their plane has crashed and is slowly going down.

There is accelerated thawing of the permafrost in northern latitudes with recent observations of methane emissions being on a dramatic rise adding further to the possibility that this climatic tipping point has been breached. That plane is on vertical takeoff.

The Foundations main mission is ‘To broaden the understanding of the choices made that impact or increase depletion of finite resources resulting in environmental and ecosystem damage.’ Enshrined in this environmental educational message is environmental and ecosystem damage, so climate change as a direct result of our unsustainable consumption of finite fossil fuels with the resultant pollution of our atmosphere daily of heat trapping greenhouse gases is a part of that massage. This plane also will crash unless we take some immediate action to perform some maintenance. Would you get on that plane if no maintenance had been carried out since it was commissioned?

In the last six months or so, while still reporting the observed effects of climate change that are coming daily, much to the surprise of the scientific community ahead of the date they thought those changes might occur, we have moved the messages more to inevitable finite resource extinction. Yes extinction; because just like the polar bear with climate change and its ecosystem damage, our future relies as much on sustainable resource consumption as theirs does on ice flows. And there is a certainty that can be predicted when this will happen. Maybe we can’t get people to think of the impact their actions today will have on their children and grandchildren in 100 years time when the climate change plane inevitably crashes, but within my lifetime and yours the plane of consumption you and I are sitting on will crash.

Consumption Airlines will crash and it’s time we all thought about getting off the plane. Check the back of your ticket, it’s written there in plain language. If you need further convincing, then see the simple math of when.

Anyway should scientists have to give us the date that the plane will crash? They know it will; it’s only when the impact will take place that is in doubt.

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