Earth’s long-term warming trend can be seen in this visualization of NASA’s global temperature record, which shows how the planet’s temperatures are changing over time, compared to a baseline average from 1951 to 1980. The record is shown as a running five-year average: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio/Kathryn Mersmann

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

THURMONT, Md. — If I had the power to change the national debate away from Trump’s distracting tweets, this is what I would have us all talking about.

In recent years, with all the climate change related coverage of impacts from global warming, including massive hurricanes and powerful tornadoes, widespread wild fires, damaging droughts and deadly floods, the mass migration of people around the world away from coastal areas going under water due to rising sea levels, and the mass extinction of animal species due to changing weather, the entire discussion now focuses on what major problems this will cause by the year 2050, or maybe 2100.

If average global surface and ocean temperatures go up 2 degrees by 2050, or 4 degrees by 2100, the world’s food supply will collapse, islands and coastal areas will be under water, forests will burn to the ground in places like California and the Amazon rain forests, millions of people will die, more than all the wars in human history, and hundreds of animal species will go extinct.

But if all of this will happen by 2050 or 2100 — if we don’t begin to do something to cool the planet and soon — what will happen after that?

Is the presumption of human extinction itself so unthinkable — in this century — that there really exists some hope that science fiction will come true and we will have a solution to the intractable problems of traveling to and living in space — in only 31 to 81 years from now?

Really?

Or is it just that even scientists and government planners cannot see past a 50 or 100 year window into the future?

At the same time amazing breakthroughs are occurring every year in human health science that are already allowing people to live longer than ever before, politics prevents us from considering all the things that could cancel out all those improvements in health care.

Is this secretly why Republicans, including President Donald Trump, actively talk about canceling health care for millions of Americans and fight to prevent more immigrants from coming to the United States?

In recent days, even Democrats and environmentalists have made comments on my Facebook pages saying the real problem is over population, even though there is still plenty of arable land on this planet where more people could live — if the planet was not being over heated by greenhouse gases due to the burning of fossil fuels for energy. The only reason we burn oil and gas and coal to create electricity is to make human lives more comfortable. Without it, and air conditioning, much of the American South and West would be uninhabitable.

Presumably, if we put our minds to it without political intervention by oil and power companies like Southern Company and Alabama Power, we could come up with solutions to creating energy without burning coal, drilling for more oil in places like the Arctic or fracking for natural gas in communities across the country, potentially ruining otherwise perfectly livable land.

It is laudable that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and NASA want to continue exploring the possibilities of space travel for what we can learn from it. Perhaps one day we will travel to the stars like our pop culture heroes from Star Trek.

But we should not suffer under an illusion that we can all be moved to another planet in the next 31 to 81 years. That is worse than a fictitious pipe dream. If we don’t spend some of these billions coming up with ways to cool this planet down, and soon, we can kiss those dreams goodbye, forever.

Am I the only news commentator in the world who is thinking along these lines? Am I some kind of kook who only publishes on the web, not in print or on TV, and thus fake news?

People who know me and have followed my work for the past 39 years know that I have a way of predicting the future, putting my finger on the pulse of what we should be thinking about. Just because the mainstream corporate news people will not put me on television is no reason to think I am wrong.

I would like to think I am wrong. I wish I could prove it. The goal of science, including social science, is to try to prove a theory wrong to see if a hypothesis is true. I welcome any comments from anyone who can counter this doomsday scenario and tell us all how we are going to be saved in the next 31 or 81 years — especially since we are not even talking about the possibilities.

The planet itself might live on, taken over by the ants and cockroaches. But if we are so damn smart, why can’t we overcome the political inertia to have a real discussion and debate about how we go about saving ourselves?