Year 4, Month 4, Day 16: What About Appliance Repair?

The Bozeman Daily Chronicle (MT) describes an interlude of career counseling:

Climate change will affect much of the future, so young people might do well to turn the results into opportunity.

That was the message Nobel Laureate Steve Running gave to the more than 150 students and Bozeman residents that almost filled Reynolds Hall at Montana State University.

Running has lectured at MSU six or seven times in the past five years on climate change, so he said a better topic for this appearance would be how students can take advantage of the global change that is already occurring.

Running couldn’t help but reprise some of the work that he and other climate scientists continue to produce, showing how a continuing increase in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide corresponds with a warming climate and an increasing number of annual weather disasters.

High-school guidance counselors unite! April 3:

At first glance, the notion that global heating will open a plethora of new jobs seems fairly obvious. Whether it’s renewable energy technology, sustainable agriculture, the developing field of carbon sequestration, or a host of other vocations, there’s no doubt that a transformed climate will have impacts on employment everywhere throughout America and the world, which makes advice like that of climatologist Steve Running very important.

But there is a necessary caveat. A stable climate is the stage upon which our civilizational drama unfolds, and the notion that our economy will remain stable and absorb its consequences is just that: a notion. Far more likely in the years to come is the kind of systemic collapse which will render all our economic preconceptions outdated and irrelevant.

Young people of course need to consider their futures — but a metastasizing greenhouse effect is a planetary disaster, not a career opportunity.

Warren Senders