Enjoy it while you can. Earth’s inhabitants have reached the point of losing everything, and in the end it’s all a matter of greed. Capitalists, communists, oligarchs, dictators and warlords do whatever it takes to amass wealth, at the expense of the populations and natural resources and these activities leave a wide swath of destruction in their wake. Once the atmosphere and waters could dilute the pollution, but no more, the toxins are concentrated now, have entered our air, water and food. Plastic waste is easy to see, but biotoxins are not so visible, and unlike homeopathic quack medicines, trace amounts of highly diluted toxins will damage tissue, cells and genes, and there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s too late.

Call it Global Climate Change or Global Warming, the process started a long time ago, is fully underway and there’s no turning back. The “tipping point” wasn’t noticeable on our lifespan timescale because it occurred over several generations, just a “blip” in geological time, set into motion at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution when reliance on wood, then fossil fuels for energy, primarily oil and coal, filled the atmosphere with particulate matter and chemical mists. Every year since then the degradation of out atmosphere grew exponentially.

Imagine an apple. The thin skin of the apple is in proportion to the thickness of our atmospheric layer, about 6 miles thick on a diameter of 8,000 miles. The lowest 2 miles are the zone we live in with breathable air.

Some notice was taken in the industrialized nations, especially in the 1960s when smog filled the cities of New York and Los Angeles and London. Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” woke us up to the dangers of widespread use of DDT, chemicals carried through the air and into the soil and the bodies of every living thing, especially certain birds, whose eggshells were no longer thick enough to support the growing embryo. This sparked the awareness of people’s activities and their effects on the land, water and air. And when the Cuyahoga River, in Ohio, caught fire in 1969, it set the world ready for Earth Day 1970.

Sure, over the years many studies, and lots of time, effort and money have sought remediation, but the energy companies have largely, through political corruption, and making sure ‘their man (or woman)’ is in Congress, made sure no effective solution that might affect their profits can be implemented.

That’s it, and now the Genie is out of the bottle and there’s no stuffing it back in. It’s too late.

Even if we, the United States and Europe, instituted a maximum effort at remediation, the poorer countries won’t, can’t in fact, in some cases being desperate for anything that produces food, income, clothing and housing. The rush to our borders accurately reflects the dire consequences of continuing desertification of South America, and the availability of fresh drinking water is near crisis in some areas.

August 11 UPDATE: Think it’s just so much ‘hot air’? It’s also hot water, Google “AMOC” and read about the changes to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, responsible for out local Gulf Stream, which may lose its driving force.