The Plain Truth!
The most important assumptions on which international negotiations and national policies are founded—that we can stabilise the climate at some level, that overshooting and returning to a lower target is feasible, and that we can accommodate 2 or more degrees of warming by adapting to it—have no foundation in the way the Earth’s climate system actually behaves.
When one understands these facts, the state of political debate around the world takes on an air of unreality, as do those climate summits!
Rich country policies—including cutting emissions by a few per cent and outsourcing most of the cuts to developing countries; waiting for carbon capture and storage technology to save the coal industry and continuing to pollute at high levels until that happens are so at odds with the scale and urgency of the emission cuts demanded by the science as to be almost laughable.
They reflect a child-like belief that climate change can be averted by ignoring the truth and hoping for the best, a form of wishful thinking whose costs will prove incalculable.
Soon there will be a climatic abnormality which none of us can ignore; will it be the Gulf Stream changing course or even diminishing to the point of extinction, a super heat-wave, a super rainstorm causing massive flooding or a super prolonged ice vortex?
Rich country policies—including cutting emissions by a few per cent and outsourcing most of the cuts to developing countries; waiting for carbon capture and storage technology to save the coal industry and continuing to pollute at high levels until that happens are so at odds with the scale and urgency of the emission cuts demanded by the science as to be almost laughable! They reflect a child-like belief that climate change can be averted by ignoring the truth and hoping for the best, a form of wishful thinking whose costs will prove incalculable.
Soon there will be a climatic abnormality which none of us can ignore; will it be the Gulf Stream changing course or even diminishing to the point of extinction, a super heat-wave, a super rainstorm causing massive flooding or a super prolonged ice vortex?
You can find examples and analogies (and there are thousands out there) on effects, causes and consequences of climate change, but by now even you should realise they are talking to deaf ears. With all the scientific evidence of eminent minds telling you there is global warming and it is dangerous, those whom believe are convinced, those who do not, will never believe until it hits them square in the jaw. Why is a lack of understanding regarding the basics of climate science a universal constant even though people’s knowledge has increased?
The problem is the math in your head because you think 1 or 2 degrees is insignificant! But the world’s oceans do not, neither does the troposphere and
neither do those eager beavers in waiting; the millions of tons of methane hydrates patiently biding their time to raise their ugly heads and use 1 or 2 degrees as the catalyse for 3 degrees, 4 degrees, 5 degrees!
At some point warming will become uncontrollable by creating a so-called positive feedback effect (rising temperatures will release additional greenhouse gases by unlocking methane in permafrost and undersea deposits, freeing carbon trapped in sea ice, and causing increased evaporation of water) this in turn will hold more gasses, causing the oceans to overheat thus going acidic and losing the ability to act as a carbon sink. All this in your and your children’s lifetime!
What can we do about it? Well according to your selfish psychology the real question you should be asking is: What do you want everybody else to do about it?
Now isn't that the plain truth?
