My pet peeve is people who rush to find a culprit before thinking about a problem; sometimes the culprit doesn’t even fit the problem. We see it with software developers who terrorize their coworkers whenever a bug scares them; we see it with Asia Bibi being crucified to appease the general unrest of a population that still remembers a lost paradisiac homeland but without the legal rights to hope for it again.
We see it in climate change too. Climate is the average weather across the globe. We thought it was constant, at least at the human timescale. We were wrong, seriously wrong. It is alarming because many key infrastructures were based on incorrect assumptions about catastrophic but rare climatic events. Very profitable facilities from yesterday must be reexamined in light of drier climates or altered sea levels, think Fukushima.
True to ourselves, we look to shift blame, whether it is the white western elite, the developing world, or perhaps some secret conspiracy. Valid as these may be, blaming will never fix a global issue. What happens instead is that factions vie for culprits that fit their agenda; words fly across party lines, nations sign treaties, money flows, while the real and necessary work, which takes real moral courage, it goes to the dogs.
judimalus 