How dire a picture do we need? In a couple decades when the children of today are in middle age, they will look back at you and me, the citizens, business owners and political leaders of first world nations during the first decades of the 21st Century, with dumbfounded outrage at our willful ignorance. Every successive scientific report screams alarming data at us with increased certainty about our decreasing hope. Our ineffectual political language insists that we not exceed 2˚C global warming, but our trajectory is pointed at 11˚C — and WE ARE ACCELERATING! Our civilization, perhaps our entire species is in grave danger past 7˚C or so, and of course well take down every other living species along the way. But while we pat ourselves on the back for finally producing a larger iPhone, our collective ignorance about the basic physics of mass and momentum, of disappearing carbon sinks and increasing exponential feedback loops, and about global timescales and tipping points, blinds us to what we are setting in motion for the next couple hundred or even a thousand years.
Posted on: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 23:05:08 +0000
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