The consequences are clear
Heatwaves and the heavy rains that cause flooding have become more intense and more frequent since the 1950s in most parts of the world, and climate change is now affecting all inhabited regions of the planet. Drought is increasing in many places and it is more than 66% likely that numbers of major hurricanes and typhoons have risen since the 1970s…
And the consequences of humanity’s massive act of atmospheric interference are now clear: what is hot today will become hotter tomorrow; extreme floods will become more frequent, wildfires more dangerous and deadly droughts more widespread. In short, things can only get worse.
And they can only get worse faster. It’s happening fast. The massive wildfires are not a gradual thing.
Indeed, by the end of the century they could become threatening to civilisation if emissions are allowed to continue at their present rate.
If you ask me they’re threatening now.
In fact, they could become utterly catastrophic with the occurrence of world-changing events – such as continent-wide forest die-backs or collapsing Antarctic ice sheets, says Prof Andrew Watson of Edinburgh University. “The IPCC report gives a comprehensive update on the knowns of climate change, and that makes for grim reading. But it also makes the point that climate models don’t include ‘low probability-high impact’ events, such as drastic changes in ocean circulation, that also become more likely the more the climate is changed. These ‘known unknowns’ are scarier still.”
Or the collapse of the Gulf Stream, as we saw the other day.
The rest of the piece is about the need for radical action starting right now, and…we all know that’s not going to happen. It’s as if there are two planes, that don’t meet at any point. On one plane the earth is heating up like a skillet on a hot burner and we have to make drastic changes starting immediately, and on the other plane we can’t get people to wear masks during a pandemic, we can’t get people to drive less and walk more, we can’t get people to stop throwing litter out of their cars as they barrel down the freeway. Yes we have to make drastic changes immediately, and no there’s no way anybody can make that happen.
If we can’t get people to see the relationship between breathing out and spreading viruses so that they’ll wear masks, we’re not going to get them to cut back on energy usage as long as they can afford to pay for gas, diesel and their rising utility bills.
I think part of the reason that Carter didn’t win a second term was that he asked us to wear warmer clothes in the winter and keep our thermostats at 68F. And we haven’t changed since then. (And it takes a lot of time to explain that the reason that some scientists were predicting global cooling back then was because of particulate emissions and thought that pollution would have a greater effect than carbon emissions.)
Oh, dear, so setting my thermostat at 65 in the winter is too low? I better jump on board! ;-)
On another note, it wasn’t the scientific community that was predicting global cooling. That was a media phenomenon based, as usual, on finding some scientist saying something they thought sounded interesting and working up a media storm. It was not in the scientific literature of the time, which was already working on global warming, and was not widely accepted.
I didn’t mean to imply that it was a consensus position at the time, but that there was uncertainty. While some studies indicated there may be a cooling trend, most science organizations were saying “more study needed.” And yes, the reporting on it was overblown.
There was speculation about nuclear winter.