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Driving Straight Into Catastrophe
PARIS - Despite repeated warnings by environmental and climate experts that reduction of fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions is fundamental to forestalling global warming, disaster appears imminent. According to the latest statistics, unprecedented climate change has Earth hurtling down a path of catastrophic proportions.
The Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the global consumption of primary energy in 2010 reached some 500 exajoules (EJ), a number just under the worst-case scenario formulated ten years ago by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC's Special Report on Emissions Scenarios, published in 2000, calculated the worst-case scenario as 525 EJ consumed in one calendar year.
The IEA found that coal was one of the largest sources of energy consumed in 2010, comprising approximately 27 percent of the total energy consumption. Coal, one of the cheapest sources of energy, is considered the filthiest of all, as far as greenhouse gases emissions (GHGE) are concerned.
Correspondingly, the global GHGE, measured as equivalent to carbon dioxide, reached at least 32 billion tonnes last year, only one step below the most pessimistic scenario imagined by the IPCC in 2000: 33 billion tonnes of CO2.
The results for 2010 were conditioned by the present global economic crisis - meaning that under normal economic circumstances, the numbers would have been higher. In other words, total consumption of energy in 2010 would have been worse than the most pessimistic scenario the IPCC formulated ten years ago had the global economy been in better shape.
These findings have prompted leading environmental experts to warn that humankind is racing towards destruction.
"The year 2010 was the hottest ever measured since the beginning of the recordings, 130 years ago," Anders Levermann, professor of climate system dynamics at the Physics Institute of the Potsdam University told IPS.
Levermann referred to the newest global temperature measurements carried out by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 2010.
According to the NOAA, "For the 2010 year (January-November), the combined global land and ocean surface temperature was 0.64 degrees Celsius above the 20th century average - the warmest such period since records began in 1880."
Levermann explained that, contrary to appearance, the arctic winter in Western Europe is just another negative consequence of climate change.
"Global warming is melting the ice in the Kara Sea, in the Arctic Ocean," he explained. "This leads to a high pressure area above Siberia, which drives extremely cold winds towards Europe."
Levermann pointed out that the extreme global weather conditions experienced in 2010 - very cold weather in Western Europe during the winter, massive floods in Pakistan and Australia, extremely hot summers in Russia and Western Europe - illustrate the limits of even the most expert climate predictions.
"The more greenhouse gases we emit, the more the global climate gets out of control," Levermann said. "But the weather extremes that we cannot predict, such as the floods in Pakistan and Australia and the fires in Russia, are the ones that set the limits to human life."
According to the newest IPCC estimations, global temperatures may rise as much as eight degrees Celsius by the year 2200.
Levermann explained that the temperature difference within an interglacial period, such as the one we are living now, have historically reached about five Celsius degrees.
"The transition between these temperature extremes lasted some 50,000 years in the past," Levermann said. "But at the present rate of GHGE we are reducing such a transition by 50 times."
He added that the rapid rising of global temperatures could provoke extreme weather catastrophes that humankind won't be able to survive.
"The rising frequency of weather extremes, with their enormous social and economic consequences, would not allow public budgets to recuperate, nor give societies the time to breathe again," Levermann said. "Nor would insurance companies be able to compensate for the damages."
Levermann echoed earlier warnings that climate change could destroy countries such as Bangladesh, cities situated near the oceans, such as New York and Amsterdam, and make large parts of Africa uninhabitable.
"Climate change would destroy drinking water supplies, agriculture, habitats, and provoke giant waves of migration and mass mortality," he explained.
Levermann compared the consequences of global warming to a wall hidden in fog. "We cannot see the wall, but it is there. And we are driving at the highest possible speed towards it."
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322 Comments so far
Show AllIt is so tiresome listening to all this mumbo jumbo about the "global warming" fairytale. Even if it were true, our free market system (which has a history of making the world a better place for everyone) will fix the problem in plenty of time. As the President explained, the people who run our corporations are very smart and very good.
Our President is also very smart and worries about the common people every minute of the day. I guarantee you that he would never let any situation get out of hand.
On second thought, we are as doomed as doomed can be.
Minus our ability to choose change, the climate change can be a blessing for us all. We will be forced to change by the forces of nature. I did a senior project on climate change, the professor at a near by college told me that it was too late to change for humans. This was back in the 80's. I don't know about that but we will change, one way or another, that is something we cannot avoid forever.
New order often arrives on the back of chaos, that is history. Perhaps we cannot change that fact.
We will either change or a whole lot of us will die! Even if there were no such thing as climate change, overpopulation will get us eventually. Nature has a habit of thinning the herds every now and then ....
Actually, that's one option, not either/or. A lot will die AND, if any remain, they will change dramatically.
re: "the climate change can be a blessing for us all"
I didn't read this earlier, or somehow missed it. It's a real doozy there, I gotta say. Not generally a position espoused by progressives.
This climate change will mean extinction for countless species. It would definitely force countless millions of people to migrate into our already sliced-up and ecologically overburdened land-areas. No doubt, change and chaos as you mention have been constants throughout our, and the Earth's evolution. But when we see change and chaos arising at such speed, and with such force, that is not a creative opportunity for nature or humanity to evolve to meet take advantage of. That is a certain recipe for disaster, and is laden with unnecessary and ugly hubris to boot.
re: "the professor at a near by college told me that it was too late to change for humans."
And so what? We just give into our baser natures? ... Go out in an orgiastic drug-hazed party to end all parties? That probably sounds great to a number of people out there. But their unbalance and recklessness is what we are trying to avoid, right? We're trying to spread the idea that there is a better, and even a sustainable way to have a good time, on a regular basis, while not tearing the place to shreds, because that's the nature of having a blast.
re: "New order often arrives on the back of chaos, that is history. Perhaps we cannot change that fact."
What you say is not untrue, but to emphasize it or to even imply that this constitutes a valid excuse, or even silver lining to our irresponsibility is itself somewhat rash imho. You may have good intentions in trying to preserve a hopeful outlook, but it could just as well come across as conceding defeat to an inevitable outcome that we'd be best served accommodating. I don't see it that way. Instead of seeing the silver lining in a massacre that is about to begin, we should be doing everything we can stop the massacre. Sounds dire, but there really is no reason to sugar-coat what we're up against.
Cheers Leea
Salusa, you did a good job of projecting into my comment a bunch of stuff I did not say or even think. I was thinking of the past, not the future. Everything you write about the future as you see it above is pretty scary. I live in the now, it is the only place to effectively make any changes from. I say calm down and look around you, feel your breath, watch the clouds. You are safe until you are not, but focus on safety and you will probably stay safe much longer than if you focus on calamity. My little reverie was not intended to have the effect it did on you.
Cheers back my friend all is well that ends well.
Sorry Leea,
I'm just not able to take a cheery or light and breezy attitude about global climate change and the destruction of our biosphere's diversity and integrity.
I see it as a profound tragedy what is happening in the world today and am seriously livid every time I hear or even think of another species going extinct due to our collective malfeasance. There is no optimistic spin in my mind.
Biological integrity is a religious/spiritual sentiment for me. I would risk my life gladly if I knew it was effectively stopping the destruction of an ecosystem, a major habitat or the extinction of a important species (we're talking above the invertebrate level).
We are either at the end times, or perhaps the beginning.
Do we play the violin, or do we run for the buckets and start fetching water?
Prince Charles said a couple of years ago that we had 100 months. We're getting to that envelope soon.
Eschatology at it's finest.
We have been predicting our downfall since we could write.
Hate to rain on your parade people, but most likely we are going to adapt and survive.
Now for the entertainment part of this post.......
So, everyone's right. There is a downfall approaching (with or without rain on the parade), and some will almost certainly survive, but in a severely degraded environment. A little less self-satisfaction is always becoming.
That's entertainment....
a bacteria detects killing heat and wiggles it's little flagella to move away
we're not even wiggling
Yes, but presumably the bacteria have somewhere to wiggle TO!
Dedication to the common welfare and the future of humanity by the corpo-plutocrats in charge is all that stands between us and ultimate catastrophe. Holy crap.
I have noticed a change in my own feelings about time, but can never be sure that aging isn't also responsible, along with our devastating industrial and chemical ways...
I have ceased engaging 'entertainment', trying to maximize each working day's remaining hours for pleasure, finding the idea of posterity fading...
we are in a rare window of space-time, and the window is closing...
we have altered what was, and are watching it become what it will...foreign to our life form...
the rest is but 'negotiation' over dwindling resources...what negotiations they will be...
facilitated by drones...
we can still go rogue...Global Start Date: September 22, 2012...shut it all down...
My prediction, is on September 22, 2012 won't look that much different from today, except that day's news will be even more indicative of the decline. You'll still make a trip to the grocery store, post on CD about another drone strike, yadda yadda.
Perhaps I'm wrong, and 2012 is THE END. I just don't buy that hype.
What do you envision it would mean if we "go rogue"?
I am not buying into the 2012 hype, I'm suggesting a date for action...
frankly, the 'end of the world' stuff is approaching the point where any hype is falling behind the reality...hype is not a problem...chemicals are...
going rogue? stop working, stop paying rent and mortgage, stop viewing the store as supply central...start working together with those around you to defend and manage local resources...shut down power plants and factories...
pull the plug...
December 21st 2012 should not be dismissed so easily. It is a time when the earth and sun line up with the center of the Milky Way. This date was chosen as the end of the Mayan Calender for a reason. That date symbolizes death and rebirth. October 28, 2011 is a date of importance. Observe changes after that date before dismissing the potential of December 2012. Keep an open mind and sharpen your spirituality.
yea...looks like the religious fundamentalist zealot illusionists get their bloody delusional armageddon.
Don't forget overpopulation.
It's just silly to posit that it doesn't matter how many living beings inhabit the globe, that there's no limit to the available resources. I'm pretty sure you don't really believe that. Every species has a land base requirement, and humans are no exception. We just think we are.
White racial domination is another story - not unrelated, but different.
If you are greedy then you are overpopulating.
In the very big picture, species come and go, and ours may be the most destructive by far, but I doubt if we will be long lived.
Get a roll of toilet paper and roll it out on the ground. Should be about 400 squares. Square 248 first signs of rudimentary life (cells with nuclei in oceans). Square 380- mass extinction of 99% of all life and age of dinosaurs begins. Square 394, another mass extinction (this time 70% of all living things) and the end of dinosaurs. Square 400, 3.1 centimeters from the end- first proto-humans appear. One MILLIMETER from the end, first humans appear. Human civilization appears 1/10 of one millimeter from the end.
Prediction: Human civilization ends within one thousandth of a mm beyond the end (present time) and human species likely to end not long after that. Cause- another mass extinction, this time caused by one species clever enough to find and burn fossil fuels, but not wise enough to use that precious and amazing and destructive and finite resource with care. In other words, smart but not smart enough.
Wonder what new species will arise after this die-off?
The cockroach will inherit the earth.
Along with Keith Richards.
What about Tom Waits? There lies a constitution!
Damn, so much for me-ha ha!!
Thanks for the analogy. I've come up with and heard others but this one is excellent.
Of course it's hard to say what will survive in total, but you can be sure bacteria will be there.
They are spiritual people of the light. Some are visible already.
the last square is covered with feces. It is not only our species that is threatened. We kill everything that stands in the way of "progress"
Please use a toilet roll that you have not used.
All I can say is I'm glad I'm 65 years old, and not 15!
My wife and I average 68 years of age. We both are glad we got to live in the golden years before it all went haywire.
But aren't we part of the problem? Don't you think our generation could have done better than produce George W Bush? I too am grateful, but I can't help feeling like the flower children dropped the ball somewhere. And if we do come back, what kind of "next life" can we expect? I'm hoping to be a bacterium with a flagellum.
The "flower children" never really had their hands on the ball - it just looked and felt as though we could have or might have. We witnessed big tears in the fabric and revelations occurred. All the truths we observed and experienced were marginalized by the machinery of western civilization in progress. Some of us are still hanging onto a branch of some kind, blowing in the wind, watching with deep sadness the relentless progression of what we saw unfolding forty-some years ago and couldn't stop.
hello
just wanted to compliment you on your statement
poignant and poetic and profound
record it somewhere it's a classic
reminds me of the movie "The Ballad of Jack and Rose"
Wish I was 65; I'm only 61.
The article says, "disaster appears imminent".....
Well we're *already* in global disaster(s) right now in case anybody's not been noticing the news or has been wilfully ignoring it.
The weather still happens whether anyone likes it or not but when the rapidity, severity, frequency, and durations of 'unusual' or 'once in a hundred years' weather events keep occurring then eventually even the most closeted naysayer will eventually admit that something is wrong, although for the most part they then make a foolish assumption that it's just a short-lived temporary thing, doggedly hanging onto the anserine ideas they refuse to relinquish.
Blend vested interests, money & greed, and the arrogance of blatant superiority complex into the mix and of course common sense and valid action will always get waylaid in this current world society we live in.
I forecast a new presentation of all these natural disasters in the media to the people. No longer will they worry about loss of life or personal impact but instead they'll focus solely on economic stances, more concerned with economic losses, affects to GDP's and other much removed from humanity approaches.
You'll be asked (demanded upon) to 'do your bit' to remedy such fiscal harms even though you may very well be in a situation where you can barely live on what you're already existing in.
Governments and countries will vie to compete with each other to have the best figures of economy, still tenaciously clinging to old world dogma of capitalism and rampant consumption even though all around the real world is falling apart from natural disasters and deprivations.
But even all that created aberrant psychosis will eventually fall away.
How we emerge and continue out from the other side of all this is what matters because we all know we're in for very hard times ahead in the foreseeable future. And one thing is certain, society can't continue as it has been on the other side of all this no matter how hard the lords & masters would have you believe in right now. Everything has to change for the better, and not a temporary short-lived 'better' for the opportunists either.
concretely,.. the problem has a lot to do with the ease of metering the process of fossil fuel from extraction to use, and then the metering of the consumed electricity..expressed as numerical units of money-numbers, allowing non-productive extraction of "wealth" which is actually creating entropic poverty. life is synergetic un-meterable functioning. it is syntropic.
Talk by Paulo Roberto Silva e Sousa - anthropologist who worked with the Brazilian government to pass legalization protecting the church of Santo Daime religious practice utilizing the psychoactive sacred plants and the treasure of the biological wisdom threatened by "development".
The spiritual dimension of natural diversity and the sheer scope of knowability.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpvoV6BKxis
"We are like a drunken hippo in the Louvre... like an oedipal fool that has killed the father and is now raping the mother..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpvoV6BKxis
Excellent recommendation, old goat. Thank you!
Dont know why, but your link doesnt work for me.
Is humankind heading for the last roundup? I hope so. Everything humankind does takes the lives of nonhuman beings.
I'm glad I'm turning 65 years old. I don't want to live in a world infested with humans, dominated by humans, consumed and devoured by humans. Even the great dinosaurs were a better class of beings. Whoa!
Like the other "domesticated" animals we exploit in the extreme and push to the max to "meet the needs (demands) of humanity," I didn't ask to be born, nor did I choose the species I was born into. As long as other species still exist, I do have a choice. Accordingly, there are alternatives to humanity, and I'm supporting THEM -- the only worthwhile beings on this planet worth saving, and a better class of beings as well.
I hope the dolphins survive but they probably don't stand a chance in the polluted oceans.
Good post Rodent!
Now all we have to do is wait for Kem Patrick (i.e.Silver Fox) to stop by and give us his usual boilerplate about :
(1) He was right all along and now we have only two years to live.
(2) Anyone who has a slightly different take on the future is one of the dreaded "Deniers" who have been making a fortune as "paid shills" for the big oil corporations. It is the fault of the "Deniers" that we're all going to die in a Methane induced Apocalypse.
(3) If you don't believe him, write your own textbooks on the subject.
(4) KP will remind us for the umpteenth time that there are no "do overs", this was all predicted by Michael Benton in his book, etc...."catistrophic disaster"...etc."Igor Smelletov"..."mumble, mumble", etc...."I told you so but you didn't listen..."
Hi Silver. I'm in that silver age too - and with no grandchildren don't even have a dog in this fight. However, global warming is just a symptom. A symptom of the excessive number of human beings trying to enjoy being alive and to scrape a living on this grain of dust in the universe. The message that this planet will not support the current population, let alone the projected numbers does not seem to concern many people - even many that one might, at first, be tempted to consider as thoughtful and even wise.
The only benign way that I can see for the human race to overcome the present problems that face us all is one child per family, worldwide, for the next several generations and the empowerment of women.
Too late for one child per family and do you mean, by empowerment of women, Palin in 2012? I don't mean to be facetious, but I think we're well beyond benign ways to overcome present problems.
By benign I guess I mean avoiding the worst that nature can throw at us and also what the most vicious of men can inflict upon us. For the paradigm of reducing population to get traction worldwide it would require more understanding and cooperation between nations instead of the current perpetual war and contrived antagonism. Global warming is much more important than our petty differences that have been falsely magnified by those grasping for power.
Empowering women, in the first instance at least, means the removal of artificial barriers to their education and then being encouraged to play a full part in all aspects of their societies. You may end up with some Palins and Bachmans, but then there are gingriches, bushes, boehners, cheneys, and many others that are just as stupid, sociopathic, psychopathic or dangerous fools.
There are far too many cultures that still treat women like baby machines, and the women see their primary responsiblity as producing and nuturing children. Afraid benign isn't going to cut it. The massive die off of homo sapiens (and all the animals depending on homo sapiens) will be caused by a combination of man's folly exacerbating nature's wrath. That there will be a massive die off is inevitable. Even warp drive won't save us at this late hour.
Like yeast in a wine vat.
One child too many for the greedy, over consuming west as they consume much more than the rest of humankind. And, as pointed out in this article, it had to take an economic crisis to reign in their greedy tendencies. Still not enough to make a difference.