Inside Story – Climate change: Can disaster be avoided?

Plenty of false hopium found here (can’t post the video directly): Inside Story – Climate change: Can disaster be avoided?

The cities of the future are prominent. No discussion of course of limiting human growth levels. And the ‘climate deniers’ in a ‘limited number of countries’ just happens to include some of the worst polluting countries on the planet, the United States, Australia and England. You’d think we were actually all just one country, following the Orange Monkey to Disneyland.

Most speakers (if not all) found within the climate awareness discussions, never mention anything about reduced human survival, or the need to reduce human numbers or slow down economic activity. Inherent to their perspectives about the future, is growth. Nobody mentions why this just might be a bad idea. Supposedly, “our choices we make together” will cumulatively be sufficient to “change the climate“. Which is as you should know by now, utter bullshit.

What I would like to see a lot more of, is the actual and real discussions about how hard it is going to be to remove existing levels of carbon, which is entirely different then any optimistic discussions about a “low-carbon future”. It’s a staggering amount of carbon that needs to be removed too – 550 gigatons by some estimates. It is an amount that exceeds anything humans have EVER done.

Of course it is highly doubtful (still) that any significant part of this figure can be removed from the global atmosphere or oceans. There is a plan (not being broadly adhered to) to remove “current emission levels” by planting millions and millions of trees and modifying agriculture significantly and many other tweaks and adjustments to human society – but this does nothing to remove existing levels of atmospheric carbon causing global warming. They are not the same things.Current emissions and past emissions represent two entirely different targets and problems.

It is a critical point you will not read about without intensely looking. This is such a huge and glaring omission in most mitigation / adaption discussions and papers that it indicates that either

a) this is a deliberate attempt at misinformation; or worse,
b) or this is somehow an accidental oversight.

If a) is the real answer, then at least they’re aware of the problem, they just don’t want the public to be aware.
If b) is the real answer, then they’re not the sharpest knives in the drawer and well, we’re pretty well fucked. Which we might be anyway (read on).

The failure to address past and present levels of emissions is this:

Defeat, because the planet continues to warm up for a 1,000 years or more (which is well known), eventually exceeding wet-bulb temperatures (plant and human and animal survival).

Existing emissions, past and present carbon dioxide levels (and methane, even more potent then CO₂) will stay in the atmosphere up to a thousand years, trapping more and more heat all this time, raising temperatures, melting ice and pretty much screwing up life on this planet for good. This is why future temperature projections are so dire (if you found them here and a few other places). This warming is now unstoppable, even if we went to zero emissions yesterday. Even if we “trap / sequester” all future emissions (and we are light years away from being able to do that). The critical key here is we HAVE to sequester (remove) PAST emissions if we intend to survive. And THAT is what is MISSING from nearly all discussions and plans.

So far, the public is not being informed of this issue. You can find it, if you look very hard, but in general, it is not a discussion point at all. Buzzwords about “this is not sustainable” and “strategies for the future”, etc., don’t include removing past emissions from the atmosphere (and oceans, if possible). The concern about “business as usual” only includes limiting future emissions to a optimistic and dishonest “zero-emissions” desirability. It’s not even remotely going to be enough – even if it were possible (and it’s not, zero emissions claims are not really “zero”). When deconstructed from the disingenuous use of false meaning and false claims, it always boils down to trading the growth / economic paradigm with the need to stop using fossil fuels, and fossil fuels / growth / economy wins, every single time.

Netflix has another documentary about nuclear energy, and the narrator was breathlessly claiming that this was “carbon free” energy, which is similar “zero-emissions” lies. So far, there are no carbon free energy sources devised by man available on the planet, and probably never will be. All energy sources still rely upon fossil fuels for their creation, fabrication, maintenance and support. The alternative energy movement does not want this glaring fact revealed either, so this is another hidden “bomb” waiting to explode with the myth-builders and those that believe them. Those wind farms, solar panels or wave generators or nuclear power plants are really just shell games, “hiding” their carbon footprints because their source energy and maintenance requirements from fossil fuels are not being counted. They cannot even be created without fossil fuel.

Meanwhile, they’re being built to perpetuate the human growth and expansion paradigm, which can only possibly have one final outcome. Collapse of the global biosphere, which is overloaded with heat-trapping greenhouse gases spiraling towards more and more extreme temperatures and climatic events. Species rapidly die off and the human ability to survive on the planetary surface rapidly diminishes.

There are more problems not mentioned in this post, such as permafrost melting, deforestation and carbon saturation, methane releases and albedo effects, ocean circulation, salinity, species extinctions and many more, all affecting a rise in temperatures. Ocean warming has been recently reassessed and is considered significantly warmer then realized by all past assessments. We just took a massive jump for the worse and how this will affect future predictions and time scales is going from bad to worse. This, plus ocean acidification is having a tremendous impact upon sea life and is only expected to get worse.

Here is the horrible truth: Reducing our yearly emissions (eventually – taking many decades, best case scenario), does nothing to mitigate these problems (which have been caused by past emissions – which will still be there). This is a critical point that is missing from discussions.

There appears to me to be a deliberate attempt to “under notify” the general population about the escalating dangerous risks related to climate change and a warming planet and how we’re still committed to dangerous temperatures no matter what.

I’ve blamed the media, the government and the scientists at different times for this. All three are responsible. The honest and real discussions about what we are facing and what, if anything, can be done about the whole topic still remains almost entirely absent. This is an extinction-level event (ELE) that should be a top-priority, and declared as a global emergency.

I believe, and until proven wrong, will continue to believe, that we are facing a issue of extinction-level importance. For this reason, I’ve devised what I call the LIFE project, with the realization of reduced human survival is in our near-term future. It seems extremely unlikely to me, if not impossible, for the current population of the world to continue to exist with the projected rise in global temperatures and corresponding extreme climatic events affecting economy, agriculture, food production and global commerce. I further believe that I’m decades ahead of most others with this early understanding of the real human future on this planet.

The reason why this is being brought up again here is there is a critical need to prepare the young generations of the world for the real future that they are facing. Not the false optimism, hopium-laced addiction to endless growth and techno-solutions of tomorrow (which as of yet, still do not exist on the essential and required scale), but the real, down-to earth reality that rising temperatures actually means to human civilization and how we can, or cannot survive on this planet.

The message is unpopular, but then again, so was every other earth-shattering, paradigm breaking message of past thinkers. They’re widely rejected, ignored, ridiculed, ostracized and attacked. Generally after they’re long dead and gone do their ideas gain respectability, having truth and honesty eventually win the day. I doubt we have that kind of time. We’re looking at a situation that is rapidly accelerating and could be realized well within a single human lifetime. It doesn’t take much to tip the survival limits “over” to “extinction” as we are now discovering. Just a few degrees is all it takes.

And guess what? That is exactly where we are headed. Projected temperature rises now being slowly embraced by science is catastrophic – and will cause the extinction of mammals, humans, fish, amphibians and most plant life. But before that happens, food sources globally collapse as agriculture and food production fail. This is what will really cause extinction – starvation. Other regions will experience catastrophic drought and dehydration, and some extreme flooding and extreme weather events. The atmosphere is heating up, holding far more water vapor now, which causes these extreme events.

These climatic effects are not something we can just “fix” with simple tweaks or technology. Their power dwarfs anything humans have ever faced. It will be like trying to stop a hurricane by pissing into the wind. The underlying problem is global energy imbalance caused by carbon loading of the atmosphere and oceans. Even if we had “zero-emissions” technology, all those gigatons of carbon are still in the atmosphere, still creating warming, still causing ocean acidification and global ice melt, still increasing atmospheric water vapor, still unleashing hellish storms, still destroying infrastructure, agriculture and crops. In other words – we’re now stuck with THAT future unless 550 gigatons of carbon can be removed and stored away safely.

And we don’t have any idea how that can be done. Not really. Most projections indicate that we can at best figure out a way to reduce current emissions, and maybe (just maybe) store what we still create, but we’ve got nothing in our arsenal to capture and store 550 gigatons of emissions already out there.

That’s why climate disaster cannot be avoided. It’s too late. Therefore, we can only prepare for it – and nobody seems to be able to have an adult discussion about it. Or what to do. This is a big, big deal – an extinction level event already unfolding. We need to step up to the plate on this and deal with the hand we’ve got. We don’t have any choice.