Understanding Our Own Tomorrow

Try explaining global warming to high school students and they look at your explanation with vacant expression, try explaining it to the common house wife and you will get a distressful and skeptic look and by the time we reach out to the working population they consider the information all but irrelevant in their perfect little spheres of personal lives. As far as the general public is concerned, global warming is techno-babble.

Today we stand on a precipice where one side is a ravine of annihilation of the human species through the dangerous nuclear race and the other side is chasm of environmental degradation and as we have witnessed time and again our leaders have specialized at falling of the tight rope time and again.

Either way we simply cannot afford to play roulette with our future or endanger our entire species. The main issue is how to make the common man understand the grim future that is staring us in our faces? Our scientists and environmentalists spend millions of dollars on researching and analyzing weather patterns inventing new eco friendly technology but all of which unfortunately is understood by a mere 1% of the educated population.

Admitted CFC’s were banned in 1980s under the hue and cry that it leads to ozone layer depletion but what the same avarice ridden bespectacled “elite society” does not tell us that instead of CFCs this world has been using CHCS (chlorohydrocarbon) in refrigeration and air conditioning which has a more drastic role to play then the actual CO2 emission which everybody so keenly focuses on all the time.

The fact is that no matter how educated a person is, simple logic is more effective than dramatic speeches and lectures that go over the head because it is effectively understood by a majority of the population. It dispels illusion that a world is still happy go lucky. For Example, tell a child that the reason that soon he won’t be able to play video games anymore because there isn’t going to be enough electricity left and he will start switching of his lights from the next day itself. Tell a kindergarten child that the only reason he would not be able to eat ice cream anymore as they would melt right of their sticks its just because his mum and dad leave the tap open in the morning while brushing and we have a fair chance of drastically reducing the water consumption of the whole house from the next day.

What we humans do not realize is that this is an ecological calamity not an invasion by another greedy civilization no matter how much money you have or throw at it to entice it into stopping its carnage it will simply not work. It is truly said “we realize the importance of what we have when we don’t have it anymore” and soon we will be left without a planet a home and then our “humble” race will cease to exist.
Shubhi Vijay

[Image source:http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuartpilbrow/3567157863/]