lightblueline

I saw An Inconvenient Truth, back in late June, and then walked out of the Paseo Nuevo Cinema and down Anacapa Street towards Cota in the twilight, wondering just where the seven meter sea level rise would cross the street. Marking this with a line seemed to bring the whole global climate change equation into clear focus. I've long wondered why people do not consider climate change to be a threat. In part, it is because they do not know how to value climate stability. But the idea that the Santa Barbara waterfront, which the city and the people have spent decades building into a beautiful recreation zone, could be demolished in a century by rising sea level--this is a real threat. And the benefits of keeping the ocean down at the beach--this is a real benefit for the pain of reducing carbon use. I've been talking to people about painting the light blue lines on the streets, and everybody gets it. From New Yorkers to friends in Japan, they all realize that we are now in the process of potentially destroying really valuable coastal resources, and affecting millions of lives. And if we can paint this future on the streets, just maybe we can find the will to avoid it. We can stop global warming, as Laurie David notes. See: stopglobalwarming