Environmental D-Day
The recent interview with Laurence Smith (“Northern Lights,” page 13, Sept. 22) about how climate change might positively impact nations that lie north of 45 degrees latitude was well reported. Smith’s book, The World in 2050, is an important one, too. When it was reviewed last year in the Seattle Times, the reviewer said that Smith in the final analysis “comes up with some bleak conclusions.”
The Taipei Times asked Smith if he had read the Seattle Times piece that concluded that the future looked grim and if he agreed.
“I’m optimistic,” Smith told the reporter, adding: “There are lots of reasons for optimism … That being said, looking at climate change, I am actually quite pessimistic.”
The Seattle Times said that the book was “an important book, a wake-up call for doubting Thomases who believe it’s OK to drive gas guzzlers because they can afford it. As I read it one thought I never had before kept reoccurring: Thank goodness I’m old.”
While Smith remains an optimist in his public lectures and on his international book tour, as he told the Taipei Times, he is in fact “quite pessimistic” when looking at what’s happening to our world in terms of climate change.
Smith is right to feel pessimistic about what we are doing to this Earth, and it is high time that everyone becomes grim and despairing about the future because of what we are doing with fossil fuels.
While Smith believes that nations in the northern regions will benefit in the short term from climate change — longer summer agricultural seasons, shorter shipping routes through an ice-free Arctic — he also says that in the long term, if there is to be a long term, we must stop using fossil fuels, tone down our luxurious lifestyles and start living in a more -environmentally friendly way.
I myself am a pessimist and I feel that by 2050, 2080, 2100 for sure, the Earth’s population will have been decimated by catastrophic climate events that will see more than 8 billion people die and leave only 200,000 souls eking out a sad existence in those regions above 45 degrees latitude. It’s not going to be a pretty picture and we have to stop fooling ourselves and pretending that everything is going to be okay.
Everything is not going to be okay.
How loud must one shout from the rooftops to alert the world to the fact that we are in dire straits? We are looking at life in “polar cities” by the year 2080, and not a sanitized Hollywood view of such a science fiction scenario.
Indeed, we are headed to hell on Earth. Smith does not want to say this in public because he is a respectable professor from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a book and a career to promote, and I salute him for his probing research.
I am glad he came to Taiwan to speak at the Lung Yingtai Cultural Foundation’s MediaTek lecture series, as he has an important message.
However, Smith’s message is not enough. It is time to drop the optimism and become realistic about humankind’s future.
If we do not collectively act right now, then we will be doomed. What does it take to wake a sleeping planet? Do people think that life in polar cities is going to be fun — and a financial boost to economies?
We are headed to hell on Earth. We will live, those of us who survive, that is, in desolate polar cities. Enough of this pretty academic rigamarole about a happy future in what Smith calls “northern rim countries.”
Sure, optimism will help sell books and further one’s career. All professors take this route. However, it no longer serves the public good or the future of the human race. We have arrived at a crossroad and it is time to take action. We must stop the burning of coal and oil today. Yesterday, in fact. Time has run out.
Dan Bloom
Chiayi City
Weeks into the craze, nobody quite knows what to make of the OpenClaw mania sweeping China, marked by viral photos of retirees lining up for installation events and users gathering in red claw hats. The queues and cosplay inspired by the “raising a lobster” trend make for irresistible China clickbait. However, the West is fixating on the least important part of the story. As a consumer craze, OpenClaw — the AI agent designed to do tasks on a user’s behalf — would likely burn out. Without some developer background, it is too glitchy and technically awkward for true mainstream adoption,
Out of 64 participating universities in this year’s Stars Program — through which schools directly recommend their top students to universities for admission — only 19 filled their admissions quotas. There were 922 vacancies, down more than 200 from last year; top universities had 37 unfilled places, 40 fewer than last year. The original purpose of the Stars Program was to expand admissions to a wider range of students. However, certain departments at elite universities that failed to meet their admissions quotas are not improving. Vacancies at top universities are linked to students’ program preferences on their applications, but inappropriate admission
On Monday, a group of bipartisan US senators arrived in Taiwan to support the nation’s special defense bill to counter Chinese threats. At the same time, Beijing announced that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had invited Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) to visit China, a move to make the KMT a pawn in its proxy warfare against Taiwan and the US. Since her inauguration as KMT chair last year, Cheng, widely seen as a pro-China figure, has made no secret of her desire to interact with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and meet with Xi, naming it a
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) took the stage at a protest rally on Sunday in front of the Presidential Office Building in Taipei in support of former TPP chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), who has been sentenced to 17 years in jail for corruption and embezzlement. Huang told the crowd that Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) had sent a message of support the previous day, saying she would be traveling from the south to Taipei: If the protest continued into the evening, she had said, she would show up. The rally was due to end
RSS