Drastic action is required to avoid dramatic climate change over the next century, an annual UN report says — action that the world’s biggest polluters continue not to take.
Most Americans should either put away their car keys or find ways to not look their children and grandchildren in the eye.
Greta Thunberg says what???
There is no way the world will start driving less or dramatically change its energy consumption without us being offered a better alternative. It doesn’t have to be what we’re doing now, consumers seldom foresee what they will want in the future…
“ “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”. Henry Ford
I know people some people will hate this, but historically, changes in the use of energy have come from new technologies disrupting old paradigms. I don’t see how this problem gets solved other than with a shift to some sort of clean energy or some technologies that disrupt our current use of fossil fuels. I really think that attacking consumption or expecting major changes in consumption without offering something equal or better is fruitless.
You are correct. The problem, of course, is that not only is the government not promoting those increasingly affordable technologies, the current Neanderthals are trying to take us back to the coal age. Imagine where we would be if the Kochs and all of the oil extraction industries did not control a majority of our elected reps. Imagine where we could be if we actually started thinking beyond the next election cycle.
The future is weeping.
Haven’t you heard, America lives in a Fox News/Fossil Fuel Bubble separate from the rest of the world. Nothing to worry about in this report. It only applies to Planet Earth, not America. Nothing to see. MAGA. Move along to your lifeboat.
Global heating is existentially grave and existentially depressing. So discouraging that even at TPM it’s too abstract, or something, to generate much response.
…the globe is on track to warm by as much as 3.9 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels by 2100.
That’s Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Caused by human activity. We have fundamentally altered the chemical composition of this planet’s atmosphere. Limiting our further causation of future changes is a worthy challenge, but i strongly urge we consider something much stronger than that, and that is global geo-engineering. If you apply the same definition as AGW, we’ve engaged in global geo-engineering, and have been actively altering this planet’s balance of chemical stability since the dawn of the industrial age. It’s time we not just limit further damage to our home planet, but actively reverse that damage, as well. Simply limiting AGW to a 7 degree F rise in temperatures still means famine and disease and ecological disaster and death for billions of people. If we really wanted to, we’d scale-up CO2 capture technologies, and re-engineering those technologies to capture methane, and every other greenhouse gas in an effort to restore the earth’s balance system. The earth has proven itself quite capable of taking care of itself for hundreds of millions of years. Then along came humans, and ruined everything in the blink of an eye. We might be damned if we do try to restore earth’s balance, but we’re certainly damned if we don’t. I’m not a fan of simply trying to limit any further damage. We need to undo the damage we’ve caused.
The Earth will continue no matter what humans do to it, and life will survive and adapt even if we all die off. The danger is to human society, and it should be obvious to everyone now that we need to change how we live if humanity is going to continue to occupy this rock. People won’t change unless there is a reason to do so…in some ways we have that, as things like solar and wind power are already competitive with fossil fuels, and other energy sources are coming along. What we really need is batter technology that allows electric vehicles to operate like our current cars, and at a low enough price to get everyone buying them…that step will make a huge dent in CO2 production worldwide. Getting off a facility grid, so each building generates some part of its own power, will be another one.
Systemic changes happen slowly…it took a long time for cars to take over, and for a long time it seemed like they never would make it. Now, we’re in the phase where change is starting but taking time to take hold. It will happen, and sooner than we think. When it does, we’ll have to see how much it does change the system…my prediction is that we will need to figure out how to extract CO2 from the atmosphere in order to save Earth for humanity, without that nothing is going to change and conditions will get worse even if we stopped producing CO2 today. See, CO2 stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years, and we’re still below the stable temperature for what is there now; if we don’t get the CO2 level lower we’re facing the warming. We need an intervention to stop the warming, otherwise we’ll stabilize at a warmer planet no matter what else we do, it’s just basic physics.
But without governmental authority and investment and research, it’s not gonna happen. The fine details, which are completely off limits given the current raving international conspriacty to destroy democracy, are fantasy. By the time humans awaken to this and are forced to act, our species and almost all of life will be extinct or on its way. The Earth and life will survive in some form, but we won’t.
We have no idea how bad it’s gonna get, and it is already guaranteed that humans are just being shepherded to death by the right wing. Until we get it, this whole discussion is worthless.
We have altered the global ecosystem in ways we can not yet imagine. Whether modern civilization persists in it’s current form is doubtful. Dramatic and drastic changes WILL be forthcoming. The dislocation of millions of humans has begun and will be growing from now on.
Our current political leaders do not have the capacity to meet these challenges. New leaders need to be voted into office, the sooner the better.
Uhh…The danger is to bout 90% of all living species on earth. Yes, those surviving species will adapt and evolve into other species, but we’re now on the leading edge of a massive global extinction event.
Understatement for all of human existence. The overshoot predator will wreak havoc on humanity, and humanity will take down everything else.
FYI, the overshoot predator is the Malthusian cliff.
That’s what I said…you may not know but I’m an astronomer, so I know exactly what’s going on and where it leads if we don’t figure out a way to get around what we have done to the atmosphere over the past two centuries. The Earth has gone through this before, and life managed to survive…it will survive humanity as well, even if it’s pared back to the minimum of existence. The clock is ticking on the Sun warming the Earth enough to make it uninhabitable in a billion years or so (and deep bacteria may survive even that), but until then life will find a way to evolve through whatever gets thrown at it.
It’s a shame we may not be around to see it…humanity is adaptable though, it’s possible that we figure this out in time and get past our need to destroy the planet for profit. Time will tell.
an annual UN report
This one is an obituary.
Republicans really hate children.
Hey, Catholic anti-secularists…
What sin is it when one thinks he or she is the last human God wants alive?
So clean coal isn’t the answer?
Who’da thunk?