How we humans came to be where we are today had a lot to do with stability and the invention of calendars. Before stability, glaciers came and went. Best we and most other animals could do was run around looking for food and shelter. After the Last Glacial Period(LGP), aka as the Last Ice Age, weather patterns became more and more stable. Enough so that humans soon figured out that there was a pattern, an interconnectedness, to it all — all being the weather, plant growth, animal migration, and things like that. Around 10-11,000 years ago, most everywhere that there were humans, calendars of some sort began cropping up. Calendars, perhaps the greatest, most significant invention of humans, allowed humans to be able to predict when and where various
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How we humans came to be where we are today had a lot to do with stability and the invention of calendars. Before stability, glaciers came and went. Best we and most other animals could do was run around looking for food and shelter. After the Last Glacial Period(LGP), aka as the Last Ice Age, weather patterns became more and more stable. Enough so that humans soon figured out that there was a pattern, an interconnectedness, to it all — all being the weather, plant growth, animal migration, and things like that.
Around 10-11,000 years ago, most everywhere that there were humans, calendars of some sort began cropping up. Calendars, perhaps the greatest, most significant invention of humans, allowed humans to be able to predict when and where various fruits might be ripe, seeds be ready to eat, animals were to be found at a given time, … More importantly, calendars allowed humans to successfully plant and harvest crops. The ability to do so brought civilization.
Before, in their hunter-gatherer days, humans basically followed other animals around, and tried to avoid falling prey themselves. Besides being a food source, the other animals were better than humans at predicting where edible food from plants might be found at different times of the year. The calendar was humans way of grasping a year.
The fairly stable weather patterns following the LGP, coupled with the invention of a calendar, meant that humans could not only know where to look for food, they could plant, grow, and harvest their own seed bearing plants and fruit bearing trees; begin to build permanent houses. Followed communities, towns, cities —- civilization.
For the some 10,000 years after the LGP, up until recently, knowledge of how things had always been was all important. Knowledge of the way things have always been was wisdom; key to survival. On the basis of this knowledge, humans found plants that were suitable for the different weather patterns around the world. For some 10,000 years, humans were able to plant, grow, and harvest their own food. From that capability came the writing, thinking, technology, …
Climate change is destroying, has destroyed, the predictability upon which we were dependent. It is no longer about how things had always been. Henceforth, and for the next 200-plus years at best, we will not have the stable weather patterns upon which we have been, still are, most dependent.
Imagine that it’s 2050. The question: What should we have done and when? The answer: We should have done whatever possible, whatever it took, to have gotten off fossil fuels as soon as possible. By 2020 at the latest; preferably by 1985. The price for doing so would have been minuscule to the one we are about to pay. The longer we dawdle, the higher the price.
There is no good excuse.