Alex Baer: Lemmings in Free Fall

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LemmingsTwo billion more people will be added to the planet in the next 38 years.  Food prices will edge up sharply as larders empty.  The next wars will be fought over clean drinking water -- even as we now foul clean supplies and threaten aquifers with fracking and pipelines.

We're suffocating ourselves with CO2 from our ravenous use of energy too dirty to burn anymore.  As tundras warm and thaw, methane is released, too -- many factors more dangerous than killing CO2.

Yes, and sea ice will calve, collapse, and melt.  Oceans will rise.  The lost reflectivity of snow and ice spirals up our heat, too.  Rising CO2 poisons the seas, whose creatures provide half the air we breathe.  Droughts march and wildly imperil anything green -- food stocks, plants and forests trying to trade us poison for fresh air.

Species collapses and mass extinctions.  Genetic mutations and Frankenfoods.  Widespread oil and chemical pollution...

Scientist say our survival, and all life, hangs in a delicate balance:  Everything depends on reversing the long, complex chains of negative effects imprisoning us from human-spawned changes in global climate.  Other researchers say it's already too late, that recovery is no longer possible -- that we lemmings have already slipped, leapt, and jumped off that cliff, and long ago, too.

It would appear we humans are so remarkably unwise, demented, and dense as to scrap with ourselves in mid-air, squabbling and swinging at and with each other, all the way down in our plunging drop -- a last spasm of lemming free-for-all while in free fall.

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