Global Warming

From what I read, though perhaps a wise energy policy might slow down global warming (and might not), we are headed for a climate change significant enough to alter if not end our tenure on the planet. No one seems able to measure whether the change will come over the next thousand or more years, or in the next few decades. The big surprise among climatologists is the discovery that huge climate changes oner the geologic hisotry of the earth have taken place very rapidly, in years, not centuries. The Greenland icepack has changed so much in the past generation that there are towns that will soon be underwater. The change in the salinity of the seas can divert currents whch in turn could turn northern Europe into an iceberg in a brief period. The climate history, determined by boring into the icepack, is very accurate, and shows that the normal cycle is 150,000 years of ice followed by 10,000 years of the sort of life supporting climate we have enjoyed for a little more than the past 10,000 years (with one brief return to a cold period when the glaciers last extended deep into the North Smerican continent, as far south as Connecticut.)

If the coming ice age doesn't get us, meteor watchers tell us we're likely overdue for a major collision that could stir up a dust storm so large and for so long it would cut off our sunlight and make life as we know it untenable.

So, if this is inevitable, nothing we can do, what might our stance be?

I confess to having little to nothing to suggest. Eat, drink and be merry comes to mind. But that has always left us a little flat. I am most drawn to a sort of Buddhist stance of acting as if we still could work out ways to make life here work, by cooperating and extending our probing into more subtle dimensions of being. And always being ready to surrender, trusting that this existence is a gift for which we can be grateful and on which we can count, in some way, no matter how it unfolds, for eternity.