Large scale de-salination of the ocean has it's own problems, but in many regions we will need to do it. I am not sure if de-salination operations are more or less harmful to local marine ecosystems than rising temperatures, but I do know that rising temperatures are harmful. Last year's "heat dome" was an extinction level event in the Pacific Northwest. For example, temps were above 40 Celsius, which is highly unusual, and BILLIONS of clams, mussels and other shellfish were wiped out. That is a lot of potential food that just disappeared in a few days. More importantly, will the ecosystem survive, or will this valuable food source disappear from the region?

And I agree the 30s were very bad, although that drought was over in less than a decade. It was so bad on the Canadian Prairies that the Federal Government thought the region would be unable to recover. It did. We also know that, historically, there were much worse droughts in the western American continent than the 30s. We are able to determine the length of periods of drought that occurred over the last few thousand years by observing tree rings and those tree rings show us there were devastating droughts that lasted 30, 60, 80 years!! When a devastating drought will last longer than the typical human lifespan, we are in big trouble. If we want our communities to survive, we need to change the way we do things and improve our infrastructure.

As you say, however, politicians are useless.

I will tell you something though--and this is absolutely real. There are not enough commercially viable deposits of metals available to continue with the global rate of development. It is IMPOSSIBLE for the rest of the world to develop to the same level as North America and Western Europe, and other "first world" nations. This is simply because there are not enough metals to build the required infrastructure.

Sadly, we waste a lot of our metal sources already. Instead of building structures to last, we build temporary structures that are expected to be ripped down after short term use. The steel used to build those structures often ends up in landfills. In fact, there is already more metal in landfills than there is currently in use.

Bottom line? It is poor stewardship of the Earth.