We are still screwed: the coming climate disaster

Upside: Trump’s considering getting back into the Paris accords.

Downside: WTF does it mean that icecaps are ‘setting records’?

Polar bear population size is a particularly lousy way to assess the impact of warming over the past few decades. Through much of the mid-20th century their populations were enormously depressed by unsustainable hunting (until a 1973 treaty “The Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears”) and they have spent the time since recovering.

"Currently, the global population is cutting down trees faster than they regrow, catching fish faster than the oceans can restock, pumping water from rivers and aquifers faster than rainfall can replenish them and emitting more climate-warming carbon dioxide than oceans and forests can absorb.

The report concludes that today’s average global rate of consumption would need 1.5 planet Earths to sustain it. But four planets would be required to sustain US levels of consumption[…]"

That’s an old report but very much worth reposting.

It’s utterly devastating to me that we have lost so much in just 40 years. Especially since 1978 wasn’t a great period for the earth’s environment either.

I am reading a book at the moment about the first hundred years of Australian history, and how there were millions of whales swimming in the nearby oceans and every beach/bay in the south-southwest coast of Australia had massive seal and sea lion colonies. It really does boggle the mind how ruthlessly destructive we have been in such a relatively short span of time. At least we got the iPhone out of it.

While I have no wish to die any time soon, it does bring me a small amount of comfort that if we end up destroying the planet through any number of mechanisms, that I probably will not live to see it. I do not think my soul could withstand the anguish to be living on a dying world, know we caused it, had plenty of warning, and did little to nothing to stop it.

Though I do wish that the old, white, American bozos who actively try to stop us from doing something about it could live long enough to see what becomes of the earth…

This is pretty much what I’m going to tell my kids.

I almost didn’t spot that it was The Onion.

Not looking great for the penguins. :(

Well done to us humans, through our ingenuity and higher reasoning faculties we have finally found a way to decimate animal populations that are too remote to kill off by hunting or land use.

Well, we are the Sixth Extinction.

:(

Related news from today:

I have been listening to recently released song called “Augie March - When I Am Old”, and it includes these lines:

When I am old
There will be no more whaling
Oh you cannot go whaling
When there are no more whales
in the tepid sea

I remember when I first heard it, the second line immediately made me think ‘wow he’s optimistic, I hope whaling disappears in a couple of decades’, but then, oh, the gut punch. It made me very sad. Sorry to emotionalise the thread, it’s a good thread to vent in sometimes.

Better hope that slingshot around the sun thing actually works or Earth is doomed.

Not climate change, but illustrates those dystopian futures depicted in science fiction where the world is run by corporations has pretty much arrived. Libertarians must by giddy.

Reddit post on the abuses done by Shell in Nigeria.

I was hoping in that case there would be more skyscrapers, and neon.

At this rate, it’s going to take 363 years to transform the energy system. In fact, we would have to add the equivalent of a new green nuclear plant every day to achieve the Paris Agreement objectives by 2050.

Arguably the most crucial step to accelerate energy development is enacting strong government policies. Many economists believe the most powerful tool would be a price on carbon, imposed through either a direct tax or a cap-and-trade program. As the price of producing energy from fossil fuels grows, this would create bigger incentives to replace those plants with clean energy (see “Surge of carbon pricing proposals coming in the new year”).

“If we’re going to make any progress on greenhouse gases, we’ll have to either pay the implicit or explicit costs of carbon,” says Severin Borenstein, an energy economist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Everything is just so relentlessly depressing.

On the bright side, we’ll always have Planet Earth, right? Think how lucky we are to have video footage of all these extinct animals. The dodo and the dinosaurs weren’t so lucky!

That article is from 2006 though… I don’t think we are going to see Extinction of all the ocean species by 2048… That seems exceedingly unlikely.