From The Courage Campaign
Santa Barbara, the beachside villa I am fortunate enough to call home, has just become one of the first cities to show, definitively, just how real the climate crisis is. The City Council approved a plan to paint a light blue line on the streets. Officially called an “art exhibit,” the line will run through the city, showing where the new shoreline will be if we don’t stop global warming from melting Greenland and the ice caps.
You may have seen how this works in An Inconvenient Truth: as global temperatures rise, more and more of the ice on Greenland, Antarctica, and in the Arctic is melting, meaning that there’s more liquid water in the oceans. This will cause widespread, permanent flooding across the world, including in lovely places like Santa Barbara. Parts of Santa Barbara (and Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and New York…) will be underwater if we don’t work to slow down our carbon emissions – pollution which increases the greenhouse effect and warms the planet.
As much as I’d like to see the beach move even closer to my house, it’s pretty clear that if flooding on the scale predicted by top scientists happens, we’ll have millions and millions of people displaced, and acres of land will be washed away.
So, I’m going to listen to the message sent by Al Gore and his rock star friends. They’ve sent out an SOS, sounding the alarm so that this light blue line in Santa Barbara remains just a work of art and not a prediction.