Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumThe idea that the world can stay below +2° C looks increasingly delusional
http://www.vox.com/2014/4/22/5551004/two-degreesConsider: the Earths average temperature has already risen 0.8°C since the 19th century. And if you look at the current rapid rise in global greenhouse-gas emissions, well likely put enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by mid-century to surpass the 2°C limit and soar past the 4°C limit by century's end. Thats well above anything once deemed "dangerous." Getting back on track for 2°C would, at this point, entail the sort of drastic emissions cuts usually associated with economic calamities, like the collapse of the Soviet Union or the 2008 financial crisis. And wed have to repeat those cuts for decades.
The climate community has been slow to concede defeat. Back in 2007, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a report noting that the world could stay below 2°C but only if we started cutting emissions immediately. The years passed, countries did little, and emissions kept rising. So, just this month, the IPCC put out a new report saying, OK, not great, but we can still stay under 2°C. We just need to cut more drastically oh, and also figure out a way to pull lots of carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere. (Never mind that we still dont have the technology to do the latter.)
We're on track for 4°C of global warming and 2°C is increasingly unlikely
Predicted temperature increases under various emissions scenarios:
"At some point, scientists will have to declare that its game over for the 2°C target," says Oliver Geden, a climate policy analyst at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. "But they havent yet. Because nobody knows what will happen if they call this thing off." The 2°C target was one of the few things that everyone at global climate talks could agree on. If the goal turns out to be impossible, the worry goes, countries might just stop trying altogether.
daleanime
(17,796 posts)NRaleighLiberal
(60,014 posts)carry out positive change. Everything is too hamstrung by the insatiable greed of the wealthy, and hubris of the powerful.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)ladjf
(17,320 posts)cantbeserious
(13,039 posts)Control us, nothing will change in the corrupt nation known as America.
For this simple reason, there is only one politician to elect this year - Bernie Sanders.
Hydra
(14,459 posts)They won't let anything happen to rock their boat...so the world keeps burning.
cantbeserious
(13,039 posts)We're on track for 4°C of global warming and 2°C is increasingly unlikely
Predicted temperature increases under various emissions scenarios:
Source: http://www.vox.com/2014/4/22/5551004/two-degrees
Hydra
(14,459 posts)Signs of a major feedback loop are all over the place. Interesting times.
cantbeserious
(13,039 posts)eom
Hydra
(14,459 posts)I do what I can, and have no kids, but if we can't do something soon the young will have to deal with the aftermath.
pscot
(21,024 posts)And there is no effective way of limiting our ever increasing numbers. The right to procreate is non-negotiable. We can't stop. We have met the enemy and he is us.
cantbeserious
(13,039 posts)eom
Hydra
(14,459 posts)More people, more work, more consumption. Negative growth doesn't work in that framework, which we very much need.
cantbeserious
(13,039 posts)Over the last few months a number of people have asked me what books I think they ought to read to help them prepare for the slow unraveling of industrial civilization now getting started around us. This is frankly the kind of question I try my best to dodge. Premature consensus is arguably one of the most severe risks we face just now, and any image of the future very much including the one I've sketched out here is at best a scattershot sampling of the divergent possibilities facing us as the industrial age comes to its end.
Thus anything that tends to encourage people in the peak oil movement, or the wider society around it, to think about the future in any stereotyped way is potentially fatal. Still, several readers have noted that the ideas in The Long Descent and these essays presuppose a worldview and a cultural and intellectual inheritance that aren't exactly widespread in popular culture these days. They've asked, if I may paraphrase a bit, what they should read to make better sense of my ravings. Put that way, it's not an unreasonable request, and since the view of history that shapes those ravings flies in the face of most of the common assumptions of the modern world, a little background may not hurt.
I've thus sketched out a reading list of sorts for those interested in exploring in more detail the viewpoint I've presented here. It contains nearly as many broad categories as specific book recommendations; I have my preferences, and will suggest them, but here again diversity of opinion and information are essential. If everybody in your neighborhood reads and uses the techniques in a different gardening book, the resulting knowledge base will be much larger and more useful than if everybody relies on a single text, with its inevitable omissions and errors.
For similar reasons, most of the books mentioned below are relatively old, and some of them are out of print. There are excellent new books on most of these subjects, and I certainly encourage you to read as many of those as appeal to you, but books written during any historical period mirror that period's presuppositions and habits of thought to a much greater extent than anybody notices at the time. One advantage of older books is precisely that their unthinking assumptions are easier to catch, and this in turn helps foster the awkward but essential realization that thirty years from now, the unquestioned truths and apparently reasonable assumptions of the present will look as outlandishly dated as bell bottom pants and disco music.
Snip ...
pscot
(21,024 posts)Capitalism creates surplus, which drives population, which drives capitalism to create more surplus and so it goes. You can't have growth without surplus and when people are doing ok, they breed. There is no way to regulate population.
Hydra
(14,459 posts)And have access to birth control. In places like that with capitalist systems, they usually offer incentives to have children to keep the growth going.
There are people who are going to want to have children- lots of them at times. Others won't want to. It's one of the most fair ways to address the problem, IMO, since I'm not big on regulating people's family planning.
If by negative we understand actual decline. Russia managed it for a while, with a combination of alcohol and existential despair. China never did stop growth though they tried to enforce it at the precinct level with informers. Biology drives us. We don't control it. We can't even steer it.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)140,000 species have gone extinct without sending us a good-bye card
The oceans have become more acidic
Weather patterns have destabilized around the planet
We have added another 150 million people
We have added another 500 Gigawatts of primary energy consumption, of which over 86% came from fossil fuels
We have emitted another 70 billion tonnes of CO2
Atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased by 5 ppm.
Oh, so screwed.
Hydra
(14,459 posts)Sucks to be right sometimes.