I’ve spent a lot of time the last few years staring at the diminishing of Arctic sea ice levels due to global warming. This isn’t by any means the only indicator we have of climate change but it is a particularly useful one because we know the Arctic is a very sensitive barometer; small changes in world temperatures manifest themselves as dramatic changes in polar ice. It is also an area where we have had reliable, unambiguous and clear data (from earth satellites) for decades, as well as somewhat less reliable and incomplete data stretching back for centuries. And of course, dramatic changes in polar ice will certainly have unexpected effects on global climate patterns far from the poles.

The trends are inescapable and undeniable. Summer polar ice in the Arctic is disappearing before our eyes, and will probably lead to ice-free summers in a decade or two. Just extend the existing curves and an ice free Arctic seems a certainty by as early as 2030. And this assumes the trends remain linear, or do not change slope. We may get an occasional blue water Arctic summer well before then, and of course, there will always be ice in the winter, but we will almost surely be getting an ice-free Arctic summer consistently and repeatedly by mid-century. We have no reason to believe the curves will flatten out, if anything, they appear to be dropping even faster. This has never been known in recorded human history, and everything we know about the atmosphere and oceans tells us this will lead to a planet very different from the one we have adapted to.

The forces driving this warming are not going to go away, and even if they somehow, miraculously did, the global climate has a momentum that will force it to lag behind any unexpected stop to the warming. This coming climate era will dominate the planet for the rest of our lives, and those of our grandchildren–at least.

I don’t believe the world will head into any runaway scenario leading to a lifeless wasteland like Mars or Venus. The Earth has not slid away into such a catastrophe in the billions of years since life arose here. There are too many interlocking global mechanisms and feedback systems for an asymptotic, apocalyptic climate excursion, at least, in my opinion. We have survived continental drift and meteoroid impacts, ice ages, sea level changes and global volcanic eruptions before, and Gaia will be able to deal with this one as well.

Sooner or later, the climate will stabilize at some new level of equilibrium, a new climate regime, and the biosphere will quickly (in biological terms) adapt to the new conditions. But there will be extinctions, and there will be social changes as human civilization adapts, or fails to adapt. The changes will be fast on a geological scale but still noticeable on a human one. The extreme weather we are seeing now is just a manifestation of these changes. And it will get worse. This is how the global heat engine reorganizes itself to manage the excess heat.

There are those who say these changes are inevitable, whether we are responsible for them or not, and it is pointless to try to stop them; that it is enough that we simply learn to adapt to them as best we can, and rely on humanity’s ability to solve new problems. They may be right. But those same voices seem to be overly confident that we can do this, and they seem to be more concerned about the inconvenience and expense they may be subjected to than the potential destruction these events will inflict on our society and future generations. And regardless of what happens next, or how bad things may get, there are things we can do right now to mitigate the results and prepare for the worst. And the sooner we begin, the less painful and expensive it will be.

Inconvenience and expense seems to be the only thing that concerns these voices. Their inconvenience and their expense. They simply do not care about the rest of us, or about our children. They don’t even seem to care about their own children. They not only fail to do anything, they also seem to do everything they can to make sure no one else does anything. They seem determined to not only ignore the problem, but that no one else even speaks about it. If any human agent can prevent the Earth from achieving a new equilibrium with the thermal environment, it is them. They have become a force for destruction on a geological scale.