Despair + Hope.
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ALLIGATORS basking off the English coast; a vast Brazilian desert; the mythical lost cities of Saigon, New Orleans, Venice and Mumbai; and 90 per cent of humanity vanished. Welcome to the world warmed by 4 °C.
Thinking “that won’t happen, Heresy! Come off it!”. Oh really? See below. That’s China. Mongolian deserts are marching south as China experiences desertification. You can read more in the New Scientist Article.
The last time the world experienced temperature rises of this magnitude was 55 million years ago, after the so-called Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event. Then, the culprits were clathrates – large areas of frozen, chemically caged methane – which were released from the deep ocean in explosive belches that filled the atmosphere with around 5 gigatonnes of carbon. The already warm planet rocketed by 5 or 6 °C, tropical forests sprang up in ice-free polar regions, and the oceans turned so acidic from dissolved carbon dioxide that there was a vast die-off of sea life. Sea levels rose to 100 metres higher than today’s and desert stretched from southern Africa into Europe.
Sound scary? It is.
Sounds insurmountable? Might well be.
Should you act anyway? Absolutely.
These figures are not crazy. If we don’t act, we will probably warm the earth by more than 4 degrees (that’s probably more than a 600 metre rise in snow lines. Goodbye snow season in a lot of places. Snow guns? Ineffective.
It makes me uncomfortable to still need to link this to snow seasons. I shouldn’t have to, really. From the article at New Scientist (have a read, it’s really eye opening):
The African monsoon, although less well understood, is expected to become more intense, possibly leading to a greening of the semi-arid Sahel region, which stretches across the continent south of the Sahara desert. Other models, however, predict a worsening of drought all over Africa. A lack of fresh water will be felt elsewhere in the world, too, with warmer temperatures reducing soil moisture across China, the south-west US, Central America, most of South America and Australia. All of the world’s major deserts are predicted to expand, with the Sahara reaching right into central Europe.
Glacial retreat will dry Europe’s rivers from the Danube to the Rhine, with similar effects in mountainous regions including the Peruvian Andes, and the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges, which as result will no longer supply water to Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, Bhutan, India and Vietnam.
Along with the exhaustion of aquifers, all this will lead to two latitudinal dry belts where human habitation will be impossible, say Syukuro Manabe of Tokyo University, Japan, and his colleagues. One will stretch across Central America, southern Europe and north Africa, south Asia and Japan; while the other will cover Madagascar, southern Africa, the Pacific Islands, and most of Australia and Chile (Climatic Change, vol 64, p 59).
And Hope? A precious commodity, but I offer to you Mr Barack Obama. Obama is the man. He gets it (read his State of the Union address, it’s not very lengthy). We’ve gone from a complete luddite douchebag who was helping drive us off the cliff, to Obama. Poles apart.
It begins with energy.
We know the country that harnesses the power of clean, renewable energy will lead the 21st century. And yet, it is China that has launched the largest effort in history to make their economy energy efficient. We invented solar technology, but we’ve fallen behind countries like Germany and Japan in producing it. New plug-in hybrids roll off our assembly lines, but they will run on batteries made in Korea.
Well I do not accept a future where the jobs and industries of tomorrow take root beyond our borders — and I know you don’t either. It is time for America to lead again.
Thanks to our recovery plan, we will double this nation’s supply of renewable energy in the next three years. We have also made the largest investment in basic research funding in American history — an investment that will spur not only new discoveries in energy, but breakthroughs in medicine, science, and technology.
We might just survive this farking debacle yet.
Similar Posts:
- Obama gets it (green jobs)
- The Effects of Climate Change – a reality check
- Obama: saving the snow and the planet
- Obama: “The science is beyond dispute. Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response”
- Snow Season: Situation – not normal
