Andrew Wheeler has been well compensated for his willful ignorance. A hack. A worshiper of mammon.
Anthropomorphically-caused climate change is the greatest crisis facing humanity. If it is not an extinction level crisis for us, it is a civilization destroying crisis. In order for humanity to survive long term, we must adapt by dramatically changing our civilization. With each passing year, this will become more and more apparent, and the cost in suffering will be staggering.
We must very quickly find methods for extracting massive quantities of carbon from the ecosphere, and we must resequester this carbon, effectively terraforming Earth. And thatâs just for the start. Weâre going to lose a lot of land ice, and the oceans will continue to warm. We will lose the glaciers in the Himalayas, and this will lead to the great rivers of Asia becoming only seasonally flowing; thatâs a lot of thirsty people. The ocean âriseâ from reduced water density due to greater temperature and the melted land ice will be severe. (For example, the Outer Banks of North Carolina will be permanently underwater.) The oceans are acidifying (H2O+CO2 yields H2CO3, carbonic acid, see bleaching corals where temperature also plays a role) and the organisms in the water that photosynthesize CO2 to O2 are producing less O2 due to these changes. We are anticipating extremely significant extinction events in the ocean, leading to food chain collapse. That will be a more serious problem in the âshort termâ than land temperatures. The desalination of the ocean waters near the poles will dramatically reduce ocean currents, leading to severe winters and summers for areas normally moderated by ocean currents; Europe will experience Siberian winters. Previously rare winter events such as a descending polar vortex moving off the poles will become more frequent due to the reduction of jet stream velocity and a reduced thermal gradient between the polar and temperate regions. Because of the slowing jet streams, we will experience longer periods of drenching rains followed by longer periods of extreme drought.
Even now, methane contained within permafrost is being released at accelerating rates due to thawing permafrost. Methane is around 13 times worse as a greenhouse gas than CO2. The only good thing about this is that methane eventually breaks down into CO2.
Homo sapiens releasing of all this previously sequestered carbon (fossil fuels) into the environment is returning the environment to the way it was before the carbon was previously sequestered. Damn hot.
If we do not change quickly enough, âMad Maxâ will look like a cartoon.
