The Message No One Wants To Hear

It is better to have eyes wide open now than to be unprepared for what is on the horizon

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

A few days ago on a zoom meeting, I said to a man who lives on an island in Maine, that 2023 was the year climate change hit Antarctica and he laughed as though the South Pole was too distant a region to affect him.

Days later MSNBC reported about the glacier activity that scientists have been observing. I have been following developments on scientific websites and social media but when the reports from mainstream media have headlines such as 2 degrees, 40 feet: Scientists who study Earth’s ice say we could be committed to disastrous sea level rise, it’s a wake-up call louder than any previously issued, in advance of the 2023 Climate Agreement meetings commencing n November 30 in Dubai.

“We might be reaching these temperature thresholds that we’ve been talking about for a long time sooner than we were thinking about years ago,” said Rob DeConto, the director of the University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Earth & Sustainability and an author of …