A cheery thought for All Hallows Eve, eh?
Actually, the headline was my reaction to seeing the title of this New Scientist article, “Climate change will kill millions but you knew that already” —
“This is the major health threat in the 21st century around the world, and there’s an urgent need for us to address it,” says Hugh Montgomery of University College London, co-chair of the consortium that produced the report, called The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change.
But if we work harder to switch to clean energy sources, we’ll likely see huge health improvements, the report says.
(Image: “Death,” by Robert, from Flickr on Wikimedia Commons.)
The whole thing sounds like idealistic wishful thinking that imagines the status quo as something that has always been in place and that should continue to operate indefinitely, when the historical truth is that change — beneficial as well as detrimental — is the way of things. The natural systems in which we live are dynamic, not static, and the pressure we apply to keep one part steady is likely to produce other changes we have not anticipated. And Death waits for us all.
So the greater question, it seems to me is: what are we doing with our lives?
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