First off, the Greenland melting story is about the carbon emissions that were going up when I was born. Such is the lag time for climate impacts. Verily, we are completely toast.
So, what’s the link? In both cases we have technological systems, of surveillance and oversight and protocols and routines that… aren’t worth that much, are they? We know we are frying ourselves. We do. We’ve just thrown it in the ‘somebody else’s fault/problem’ basket. Our vaunted intelligence is failing us. The simplest ploys get past us. In the latter case, the evidence – an unaccompanied, undocumented child hitching a flight to Rome is good for a giggle. The former case stopped being very funny about 50,000 extinctions ago. Give it another few hundred thousand extinctions and there ain’t nobody who’ll be laughing.
What a species. What a cretinous species.
