{"id":6097,"date":"2021-11-27T17:33:18","date_gmt":"2021-11-27T17:33:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=6097"},"modified":"2021-11-27T17:33:20","modified_gmt":"2021-11-27T17:33:20","slug":"saving-the-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=6097","title":{"rendered":"Saving the Planet"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I can accept &#8220;Saving the Planet&#8221; as a political slogan for those who advocate taking action to combat climate change &#8211; political slogans don&#8217;t have to be entirely accurate although I might argue that &#8220;Saving People&#8221; is more accurate. Because no matter how serious climate change gets, the planet will carry on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Don&#8217;t get me wrong, I think climate change is <em>really<\/em> serious &#8211; we <em>will<\/em> see millions of deaths at least; quite possibly <em>billions of deaths<\/em>. And climate refugees will make the Syrian refugee crisis seem like just a tiny taste of what the real thing will be like. And some historians put the collapse of the western Roman empire down to climate change refugees &#8211; I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s that simple but it was certainly a contributing factor. <em>That<\/em> is the level of disruption from climate refugees that we can expect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And if you&#8217;re one of those inhumane nasties that imagines military level forces using lethal force to stop refugees, you can forget it &#8211; not only are there enough of us bleeding heart liberals who will shout &#8220;fuck that shit&#8221;, but it is doubtful that any level of military force could stop millions of refugees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Climate change won&#8217;t destroy the planet; it won&#8217;t even destroy the environment. It will <em>change<\/em> the environment catastrophically and humans are to blame. Whole species will become extinct, but probably not humans; we&#8217;re too adaptable and we&#8217;ve survived through extinction events before (although sometimes only just). <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But before anyone gets too complacent, if we don&#8217;t do anything, humanity will survive by the skin of its teeth &#8211; if just 90% of us are killed, we&#8217;ll be lucky. If we act today to make drastic changes, we <em>might<\/em> keep things down to just a few million dead; if we had acted back in the 1980s, that would be considerably less. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"683\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/really.zonky.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010-11-07-Walking-The-Beach.jpg?resize=683%2C1024&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4953\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/really.zonky.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010-11-07-Walking-The-Beach.jpg?w=683&amp;ssl=1 683w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/really.zonky.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010-11-07-Walking-The-Beach.jpg?resize=200%2C300&amp;ssl=1 200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 683px) 100vw, 683px\" \/><figcaption>Walking The Beach<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I can accept &#8220;Saving the Planet&#8221; as a political slogan for those who advocate taking action to combat climate change &#8211; political slogans don&#8217;t have to be entirely accurate although I might argue that &#8220;Saving People&#8221; is more accurate. Because no matter how serious climate change gets, the planet will carry on. Don&#8217;t get me <a href='https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=6097' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7,3],"tags":[1838,60,1054],"class_list":["post-6097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-politics","tag-climate-change","tag-environment","tag-green","category-7-id","category-3-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1f2KI-1Al","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6097"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6099,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6097\/revisions\/6099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}