We all have a future. But if we don't reduce carbon emissions quickly, using unconventional thought, the future is not pretty.
I'd love to take the truth into schools - might wake people up! FFS, kids used to deal with worse news than this...what about WW2? Living through the great depression? We need to be honest with our future - our future is our kids!
The solutions in that documentary are tweaks to the current regime. Either way, CC science determines the outcome.
Can I please go into my local school & deliver this message? Direct quote from a mate of mine...
“Regarding the mirage, I was referring to green capitalism being too slow to adequately mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss. This is opening a very bleak can of worms and you might want to be wary of how much you learn.
Referring to BP’s energy stats that begin in 1985, and is the conventional reference, the net annual change of world fossil fuel energy has only reduced once - in 2009 due to the GFC, so not by design. The addition of fossil fuel energy in 2019 was equiv to 95% of the low-carbon added, and 20% greater than that of renewables. Even if you were to consider only electricity (only a fifth of world energy), fossil fuelled generation only reduced in 2009 and 2019; twice. And so our CO₂ emissions continue to rise, as does atmospheric concentration, which is at its highest level since the mid-Pliocene 3 million years ago and is increasing at a rate unprecedented in the last 66 million years and ten times faster than any known rate.
Why’s all that a problem? We’re still carbonising at a warming of 1.2˚C. The previous warm period, prior to the last ice age is known as the Eemian. Our max estimate of the max temp during this time is 1.5˚C. So we’ve either left the Eemian temp range or are about to. During the Eemian, seas were 6 to 9m higher than now. So we’ve locked in that sea level rise but we don’t know how soon. NOAA in the US uses a max projection this century of 2.5m. The IceBridge program in Antarctica is monitoring the ice sheets and has detected a speedup of the glaciers that drain the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. It’s now out of mass balance, loosing more ice to the ocean than accumulates from snow. Imagine the turmoil on financial markets due to multimeter sea level rise? The melt would be highly nonlinear because WAIS’ bedrock is retrograde - so it’s shaped like a big soup bowl - “a giant soup bowl filled with ice” to quote one scientist. As the ice sheet melts, taller and taller ice cliffs are exposed to warm ocean, and the melt enters a positive feedback loop, melting ever faster. To make matters worse (and it always gets worse and worse), a study published in Jan found the max temp of the water column in the southern ocean is becoming more shallow, with implications for basal (underneath) melt of the ice sheets. There’s a lot more to this issue.
Higher global warming brings more severe and frequent heat waves to land and water. 3 billion animals died in our fires last summer. Then there’s coral reefs. Since 2016, half the corals on the GBR have died, and all would be dead at 2˚C. The Aus federal government was told in 2017 that to protect all biodiversity on GBR, global warming would need to be limited to 1.2˚C (that’s on the web).
A study was published two weeks ago that stated the Amazon (and much of PNG and Indonesian rainforest) would be in a death spiral by 2050. So much for planting trees to manage our carbon, despite that our management of land is in fact still a net carbon-source (not a sink), about the size of a third of our fossil fuel emissions.
Oh and Arctic sea ice… and on and on I could type.
This is all published mainstream science - no David Ike like BS here.
And yet we think we can simply turn this all around on a dime by building green tech, planting more trees and relying on capitalism? Bit late for that, unless you endorse a 2˚C+ catastrophe. But this is what’s being pedalled by the bullish Bloombergs of the world running about on too much red cordial. 'Net zero by 2050’ as you’ve probably heard of would take us to 2.1˚C if all the governments currently considering it did pledge it. Disaster.
Sounds fatalistic? Maybe. Unless the world realises that the change needed is not a tech one, but a massive social one. I think we’d have to ditch GDP. Little chance of that, so I’ll buy a nice low-impact bike to pass the days with, and try to ignore that the habitat I’m cycling amongst is going very quiet - what happened to the insect and bird populations? Oh and there’s climate change triggered nuclear war…
In short, the world’s a sham; it’s untenable, even what’s being sold by the net-zero crowd. We might change and quickly enough, but I see no reason to hope for that. Some people are telling the truth: James Hansen, Greta, Kevin Anderson of Manchester Uni, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber (Pope’s scientific adviser), Eric Rignot and David Spratt, to name a few. The Guardian tries but messes it up too frequently and doesn’t join the dots.
That’s more than enough for me, but difficult to convey the problem meaningfully in just a sentence or two.”
We really are in the shit. We need to speak the truth.
As they say, you can't fix the problem until you acknowledge it.
