Teach Your Children (to swim) Well

Politically and diplomatically, the word is doing a much better job addressing the looming threat of global climate change-- cheers for humans-- but, unfortunately, we may be past the point of no return, and the mainly self-enforced emissions regulations countries are placing on themselves are probably a drop in the bucket . . . this isn't one of those catastrophes like a pandemic, where if you get the vaccine to half the people then you save half the people-- which isn't perfect, but it's better than nothing . . . but with global warming, if the ice melts-- and it's melting-- then there's not much you can do to reverse that . . . so while you should find inspiration and solace in the cooperative spirit of mankind, you'd also better check the elevation of your house; I live right next to a floodplain: best case scenario, I'll have a fishing dock off my back porch (and possibly a great view of the park, if the house just below me gets flooded out . . . not that I'm rooting for this to occur, but if we're already past the point of no return, then you've got to find the silver lining) and worse case we're completely swamped and get cholera from contaminated drinking water . . . anyway, we should probably let Donaldson Park return to being a wetland, so it can absorb some of this water (and the soccer fields are so awful that this would be no great loss) but I think we'll avoid doing radical things like this until it's too late, because that's just the way people the American people operate (or at least according to Winston Churchill, who famously said, "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing-- after they've tried everything else . . .  Hurricane Sandy wiped out the Jersey Shore and people went and rebuilt their houses-- with government and insurance money-- right back in the same places, hoping they won't have to do it again in their lifetime) and while we may eventually use a fairly simple and sound Carbon Emission Tax, which I learned about while listening to this 2013 Planet Money podcast, but we probably won't do that until things get really dire, and by then most of the readers of this blog will be old or dead, and it's fine if our grandkids have to deal with the problem, in fact, I've heard that a bit of flooding builds character, which is just what our robot-reliant  grandkids will need in spades.