Wednesday, February 19, 2014

A World Without End or the End of the World?


A World Without End or the End of the World?

Climate change will be with us for a long time. The best we can hope for is some degree of mitigation as a result of our efforts to reduce the anthropogenically emitted greenhouse gases. But that is just part of the problem and we must include climate change in a holistic approach to stabilizing our impact upon our planet. Climate change is one of the critical components to be addressed in this holistic approach as increasing annual global temperature destabilizes our climate in a very negative way for human survival. Parts of the world are projected to have hotter and longer droughts or greater and longer periods of precipitation. The destabilization of weather patterns will even affect the intensity and duration of winter weather as a result of polar air being forced further towards mid-latitudes as a consequence of shifting jet stream patterns. Getting your butt frozen off or being buried in a “freak” snowfall does not mean climate change is not with us – quite the contrary.

As we are experiencing the impact of climate change we are also facing food insecurity, water scarcity, loss of productive land, massive reductions in the larger species of our ocean fish, loss of biodiversity through extinction and logging, salinization of farm land, nutrient depletion of farmland, loss of soil, air pollution and more. All of these other impacts are a result of our efforts to feed the seven billion people in the world today and satisfy the material demands of those people who have acquired the means to consume material goods. Meeting these demands requires enormous amounts of energy and most of this energy is derived from burning fossil fuels. Meeting these demands is the cause of global warming. The trade that results between producers and consumers is our economy. It is universally accepted that our global economy must continuously grow and consequently every regional economy must grow to prevent the collapse of society. If you consider this requirement to grow in the face of the impact of that growth we have nothing less than a doomsday scenario.

If all these threats caused by mankind’s actions were not enough we throw in the big one - climate change. Climate change will act as a threat multiplier and exacerbate many of problems that are well on the way to being disasters in their own right. Individually they are regional disasters and collectively they are a global disaster.

Scientifically we seem to live in a reductionist world. Each of the problems illustrated is considered in isolation from all the others when we are considering strategies for mitigating or reversing the trends. If we step back for a holistic view and consider what is or are the common cause(s) we can clearly identify that it is over production in a finite world. Over production requires the depletion of non-renewable resources and exceeding sustainability in renewable resources. Why are we engaged in over production? Two reasons: for survival and for enhancing quality of life of a population size that exceeds sustainable levels of renewables. We are massively reducing our planets store of non-renewables. To accomplish these excesses we burn vast amounts of fossil fuel for energy and that causes climate change.

What to do? Logically the solution is education. If everyone, or at least most people, understood the problems we are causing, the relationship between those problems and the ultimate projected outcome on humanity we would collectively move to resolve the situation. This means nothing less than abandoning fossil fuels and reducing the population. We will have to change our culture to live lightly on the planet. Is this possible? Well, educating the masses in things scientific has always been difficult. Understanding the causes of climate change and the complex interactions of climate, weather, oceans, biology and the impact of all these on humanity is a challenge. To illustrate the scope of that challenge and the probability of success consider the following:

 A quarter of Americans surveyed could not correctly answer that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, according to a report out Friday from the National Science Foundation.

The survey of 2,200 people in the United States was conducted by the NSF in 2012 and released on Friday at an annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.

To the question "Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth," 26 percent of those surveyed answered incorrectly.

That does not give me hope but we have no choice but to try to educate everyone about our lifestyle and its impact on the planet so we can collectively attempt to reverse the situation we find ourselves in. We have to understand it isn’t a world without end but it could be the end of the world.




February 19, 2014
Bill Cave

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