Tipping Point
We are at tipping point with Climate Change and quite frankly it terrifies me!
I’ve just read an article in The Guardian which highlighted that “Temperatures in Antarctica reached record levels at the weekend, an astonishing 40C above normal in places. At the same time, weather stations near the north pole also showed signs of melting, with some temperatures 30C above normal, hitting levels normally attained far later in the year.”
These are unprecedented temperatures… and yet there is so little coverage of this very worrying situation anywhere that I can see. The article states that scientists are worried, but we should ALL be extremely worried, the message that we are at tipping point clearly doesn’t seem to be landing with us.
What will it take I wonder for us to wake up to the huge problem we are all facing and take action, actually take our heads out of the sand and our fingers out of our ears and realise this shit is real and it isn’t going away?!?! Maybe we are a species that performs better when faced with immediate pressure and deadlines? If so then we haven’t yet realised the deadline is now and the pressure is on!
If I allow myself to dwell on the current state of our planet, the very real tipping point we find ourselves at, and the seemingly tiny number of people overall that actually give enough of a shit to take action, then I find myself feeling so overwhelmed emotional and angry that it’s almost unbearable.
So I don’t allow myself to dwell on it.
Instead I’m remaining positive and optimistic knowing that we humans can achieve amazing things once we put our minds to it, and we do still have a small (but closing) window of opportunity in which we CAN still halt the current runaway global warming and begin to repair the damage we have done.
I think one of the things I find so frustrating is that we could all make such a huge impact if we worked together to take some very simple steps to reduce the daily impact we are all having on the planet, but trying to get us to come together and take these very simple steps together, for the benefit of all, can sometimes seem nigh on impossible…
BUT… one thing that COVID-19 has shown us is that in a crisis we CAN come together and work together, and make and adapt to dramatic changes pretty much overnight if we truly believe there is no choice. And to be clear, the climate crisis gives us no choice. We have reached the tipping point. We have to change, innovate, create, act and come together. I think we just need to this message to truly hit us all in the face and make an impact on us that we can’t ignore.
As many a changemaker will tell you it takes passion, determination, optimism, a strong sense of belief, accountability, and a bit of risk taking thrown in for good measure, to move away from old and often unconscious mindsets like ‘but we’ve always done it like this’ or ‘but what difference can I really make’. But the idea of change is often a lot more painful than the change itself.
We can all be changemakers, doing nothing is worse than doing something.
Let’s not leave everything up to ‘someone else’ and instead start to think consciously about how we live, what we buy, what we do, and what we want to achieve.
At Achieving Greenness we are dedicated to helping you become that changemaker and make a difference.
