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<i><font size="+1"><b>June 10, 2020</b></font></i><br>
<br>
[Recounting coal]<br>
<b>Britain goes coal free as renewables edge out fossil fuels</b><br>
By Justin Rowlatt - 9 June 2020<br>
Britain is about to pass a significant landmark - at midnight on
Wednesday it will have gone two full months without burning coal to
generate power.<br>
<br>
A decade ago about 40% of the country's electricity came from coal;
coronavirus is part of the story, but far from all.<br>
<br>
When Britain went into lockdown, electricity demand plummeted; the
National Grid responded by taking power plants off the network.<br>
<br>
The four remaining coal-fired plants were among the first to be shut
down.<br>
<br>
The last coal generator came off the system at midnight on 9 April.
No coal has been burnt for electricity since.<br>
<br>
The current coal-free period smashes the previous record of 18 days,
6 hours and 10 minutes which was set in June last year...<br>
- - <br>
The remaining three coal plants in the UK will be shut down within
five years.<br>
<br>
Then the fuel that sparked the industrial revolution here in Britain
almost two centuries ago will be a thing of the past.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52973089">https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52973089</a>?<br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[Graphics library]<br>
<b>2020 Hurricane Season</b><br>
Rising temperatures are causing hurricanes to become more intense,
produce more rainfall, and create higher storm surges.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://medialibrary.climatecentral.org/resources/2020-hurricane-season">https://medialibrary.climatecentral.org/resources/2020-hurricane-season</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Dr James Hansen more - draft chapters of an excellent book ]<br>
<b>Chapter 15. Greenhouse Giants</b><br>
The greenhouse effect was described in Chapter 10 in comparing the
Goldilocks planets:<br>
Venus, Mars and Earth. The greenhouse effect was understood
qualitatively two centuries ago,<br>
as there are numerous references to it in the literature during the
first half of the 19th century.<br>
Joseph Fourier, a French mathematician and physicist, wrote in 1824:
"The temperature [of<br>
Earth's surface] can be augmented by the interposition of the
atmosphere, because heat in the<br>
state of light finds less resistance in penetrating the air, than in
re-passing into the air when<br>
converted into non-luminous heat."<br>
<br>
Fourier was describing the natural greenhouse effect. Sunlight
readily penetrates Earth's<br>
atmosphere, heating the surface. In contrast, heat (infrared
radiation) from Earth's surface is<br>
largely absorbed by the atmosphere, with some of this energy
radiated back to the surface. Thus<br>
the atmosphere acts like a blanket, additionally warming Earth's
surface.<br>
If Earth had no atmosphere, and still absorbed 70 percent of
incident sunlight as it does today, its<br>
temperature would need to be -18C to emit enough infrared radiation
to yield energy balance.<br>
But the blanket of greenhouse gases forces Earth to warm to a point
that the radiation emitted to<br>
space equals the absorbed solar energy. That results in the actual
surface temperature of +15C.<br>
So the natural greenhouse effect on Earth is 33C, which is about
60F. Absent the greenhouse<br>
effect, Earth would be uninhabitably cold. Any human-made increase
of global temperature,<br>
usually called 'global warming,' is surely small compared with this
natural greenhouse effect.<br>
Can the smaller human-made effect really be important? That question
has a long history.<br>
John Tyndall, an Irish physicist, is the father of the greenhouse
effect, in the sense that he<br>
made the greatest contributions to the science...<br>
- - -<br>
My interest was in what Dr. Jastrow called End-of-Century
predictions. My proposal to<br>
the stratospheric research program at NASA Headquarters had been
approved. The funding<br>
helped support development of the coarse resolution climate model.
Specifically, it allowed me<br>
to pay the salary of Gary Russell, who did not want to move to
Maryland.<br>
We were still early in our work on the three-dimensional (3-D)
coarse resolution model, so I did<br>
not have results for end-of-century climate simulations. All that I
could show was calculations<br>
that we had done with a simple 1-D (vertical column) climate model,
while we were working on<br>
the 3-D climate model.<br>
These calculations were for the natural climate experiment that was
playing out over our heads in<br>
1963, when Andy and I were taking the Ph.D. qualifying examination.
Now we could use the<br>
measurements that we had made on a cold winter night in Iowa in
1963, as the moon was<br>
obscured by the sulfate aerosols produced by the massive eruption of
Mount Agung on the island<br>
of Bali, Indonesia.<br>
The idea was to use this volcanic eruption as a natural climate
experiment. The stratospheric<br>
aerosols produced by the Agung eruption reflected sunlight to space,
reducing solar heating of<br>
Earth so much that it should have a discernable cooling effect on
Earth. <br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2020/20200609_SophiePlanet10.pdf">http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2020/20200609_SophiePlanet10.pdf</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[because it was under snow and ice for 400 years]<br>
<b>Kedarnath temple opens for pilgrims: Why this temple in
Uttarakhand is famous</b><br>
India Today Web Desk May 9, 2019<br>
The tourist season in Uttarakhand is on and the historic temple in
Kedarnath re-opened for pilgrims on Thursday. The temple, which is
dedicated to Lord Shiva, is said to be more than 1,200 years old. It
was built by Adi Shankaracharya and is among one of the 12
jyotirlingas in India...<br>
- -<br>
<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: OpenSans-Regular;
font-size: 17px; font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures:
normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400;
letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start;
text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal;
widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;
text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial;
display: inline !important; float: none;">Located at a height of
nearly 3,500 meters above the sea level, the Kedarnath temple
remains covered in snow for the most part of the year.</span><br>
- -<br>
The website says that the temple is built of extremely large, heavy
and evenly cut grey slabs of stones, it evokes wonder as to how
these heavy slabs had been handled in the earlier days...<br>
- - <br>
In 2013, the temple town was badly damaged during the Kedarnath
floods which wreaked havoc across Uttarakhand. The floods were
triggered by heavy rain and a breach of a massive glacial lake that
was situated just above Kedarnath.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/kedarnath-temple-opens-for-pilgrims-why-this-temple-in-uttarakhand-is-famous-1520807-2019-05-09">https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/kedarnath-temple-opens-for-pilgrims-why-this-temple-in-uttarakhand-is-famous-1520807-2019-05-09</a><br>
photo
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kedarnath_Temple#/media/File:Kedarnath_temple_1880's.jpg">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kedarnath_Temple#/media/File:Kedarnath_temple_1880's.jpg</a><br>
20 min Video documentary <br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.indiatoday.in/programme/long-story/video/the-long-story-price-of-pilgrimage-1267751-2018-06-23?jwsource=cl">https://www.indiatoday.in/programme/long-story/video/the-long-story-price-of-pilgrimage-1267751-2018-06-23?jwsource=cl</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[Long text with difficult conclusions]<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-06-08/collapse-of-civilisation-is-the-most-likely-outcome-top-climate-scientists/">https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-06-08/collapse-of-civilisation-is-the-most-likely-outcome-top-climate-scientists/</a><br>
<b>'Collapse of Civilisation is the Most Likely Outcome': Top
Climate Scientists</b><br>
By Asher Moses, originally published by Voice of Action<br>
June 8, 2020<br>
Australia's top climate scientist says "we are already deep into the
trajectory towards collapse" of civilisation, which may now be
inevitable because 9 of the 15 known global climate tipping points
that regulate the state of the planet have been activated.<br>
<br>
Australian National University emeritus professor Will Steffen
(pictured) told Voice of Action that there was already a chance we
have triggered a "global tipping cascade" that would take us to a
less habitable "Hothouse Earth" climate, regardless of whether we
reduced emissions.<br>
<br>
Steffen says it would take 30 years at best (more likely 40-60
years) to transition to net zero emissions, but when it comes to
tipping points such as Arctic sea ice we could have already run out
of time.<br>
<br>
Evidence shows we will also lose control of the tipping points for
the Amazon rainforest, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and the
Greenland ice sheet in much less time than it's going to take us to
get to net zero emissions, Steffen says.<br>
<br>
"Given the momentum in both the Earth and human systems, and the
growing difference between the 'reaction time' needed to steer
humanity towards a more sustainable future, and the 'intervention
time' left to avert a range of catastrophes in both the physical
climate system (e.g., melting of Arctic sea ice) and the biosphere
(e.g., loss of the Great Barrier Reef), we are already deep into the
trajectory towards collapse," said Steffen.<br>
<br>
"That is, the intervention time we have left has, in many cases,
shrunk to levels that are shorter than the time it would take to
transition to a more sustainable system.<br>
<br>
"The fact that many of the features of the Earth System that are
being damaged or lost constitute 'tipping points' that could well
link to form a 'tipping cascade' raises the ultimate question: Have
we already lost control of the system? Is collapse now inevitable?"<br>
<br>
This is not a unique view - leading Stanford University biologists,
who were first to reveal that we are already experiencing the sixth
mass extinction on Earth, released new research this week showing
species extinctions are accelerating in an unprecedented manner,
which may be a tipping point for the collapse of human civilisation.<br>
<br>
- -<br>
Steffen used the metaphor of the Titanic in one of his recent talks
to describe how we may cross tipping points faster than the time it
would take us to react to get our impact on the climate under
control.<br>
<br>
"If the Titanic realises that it's in trouble and it has about 5km
that it needs to slow and steer the ship, but it's only 3km away
from the iceberg, it's already doomed," he said.<br>
<br>
'This is an existential threat to civilization'<br>
Steffen, along with some of the world's most eminent climate
scientists, laid out our predicament in the starkest possible terms
in a piece for the journal Nature at the end of last year.<br>
<br>
They found that 9 of the 15 known Earth tipping elements that
regulate the state of the planet had been activated, and there was
now scientific support for declaring a state of planetary emergency.
These tipping points can trigger abrupt carbon release back into the
atmosphere, such as the release of carbon dioxide and methane caused
by the irreversible thawing of the Arctic permafrost.<br>
- -<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://voiceofaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/tipping-points-climate-change-nature-comment-1.jpg">https://voiceofaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/tipping-points-climate-change-nature-comment-1.jpg</a><br>
9 of 15 known Earth tipping points have been activated<br>
- -<br>
"If damaging tipping cascades can occur and a global tipping point
cannot be ruled out, then this is an existential threat to
civilization," they wrote.<br>
<br>
"No amount of economic cost-benefit analysis is going to help us. We
need to change our approach to the climate problem.<br>
<br>
"The evidence from tipping points alone suggests that we are in a
state of planetary emergency: both the risk and urgency of the
situation are acute."<br>
- - <br>
Steffen is also the lead author of the heavily cited 2018 paper,
Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, where he found
that "even if the Paris Accord target of a 1.5C to 2C rise in
temperature is met, we cannot exclude the risk that a cascade of
feedbacks could push the Earth System irreversibly onto a 'Hothouse
Earth' pathway."<br>
<br>
Steffen is a global authority on the subject of tipping points,
which are prone to sudden shifts if they get pushed hard enough by a
changing climate, and could take the trajectory of the system out of
human control. Further warming would become self-sustaining due to
system feedbacks and their mutual interaction.<br>
<br>
Steffen describes it like a row of dominos and his concern is we are
already at the point of no return, knocking over the first couple of
dominos which could lead to a cascade knocking over the whole row.<br>
<br>
"Some of these we think are vulnerable in the temperature range
we're entering into now," said Steffen.<br>
<br>
"If we get those starting to tip we could get the whole row of
dominos tipping and take us to a much hotter climate even if we get
our emissions down."<br>
<br>
Even the notoriously conservative United Nations Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has found that already with the 1.1C
of warming we have had to date, there was a moderate risk of tipping
some of these - and the risk increased as the temperatures
increased.<br>
<br>
Steffen believes we are committed to at least a 1.5C temperature
rise given the momentum in the economic and climate system, but we
still have a shot at staying under 2C with urgent action.<br>
- -<br>
<b>+4C world would support < 1 billion people</b><br>
Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director emeritus and founder
of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, believes if we
go much above 2C we will quickly get to 4C anyway because of the
tipping points and feedbacks, which would spell the end of human
civilisation.<br>
<br>
"There is a very big risk that we will just end our civilisation":
Professor Schellnhuber<br>
<br>
Johan Rockstrom, the head of one of Europe's leading research
institutes, warned in 2019 that in a 4C-warmer world it would be
"difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even
half of that … There will be a rich minority of people who survive
with modern lifestyles, no doubt, but it will be a turbulent,
conflict-ridden world".<br>
<br>
Schellnhuber, one of the world's leading authorities on climate
change, said that if we continue down the present path "there is a
very big risk that we will just end our civilisation. The human
species will survive somehow but we will destroy almost everything
we have built up over the last two thousand years."<br>
<br>
Schellnhuber said in a recent interview that the IPCC report stating
we could stay below 1.5C of warming was "slightly dishonest" because
it relies on immense negative emissions (pulling CO2 out of the air)
which was not viable at global scale. He said 1.5C was no longer
achievable but it was still possible to stay under 2C with massive
changes to society.<br>
<br>
If we don't bend the emissions curve down substantially before 2030
then keeping temperatures under 2C becomes unavoidable. The "carbon
law" published in the journal Science in 2017 found that, to hold
warming below 2C, emissions would need to be cut in half between
2020 and 2030.<br>
<br>
Steffen told Voice of Action that the three main challenges to
humanity - climate change, the degradation of the biosphere and the
growing inequalities between and among countries - were "just
different facets of the same fundamental problem".<br>
<br>
This problem was the "neoliberal economic system" that spread across
the world through globalisation, underpinning "high production high
consumption lifestyles" and a "religion built not around eternal
life but around eternal growth".<br>
<br>
"It is becoming abundantly clear that (i) this system is
incompatible with a well-functioning Earth System at the planetary
level; (ii) this system is eroding human- and societal-well being,
even in the wealthiest countries, and (iii) collapse is the most
likely outcome of the present trajectory of the current system, as
prophetically modelled in 1972 in the Limits to Growth work,"
Steffen told Voice of Action.<br>
<br>
Eternal growth is not possible<br>
Turner ran updated figures through the model again in 2012 for
another peer-reviewed paper, and again in 2014 when he had joined
the University of Melbourne's Sustainable Society Institute.<br>
<br>
"Data from the forty years or so since the LTG study was completed
indicates that the world is closely tracking the BAU scenario,"
Turner concluded in the 2014 paper.<br>
<br>
"It is notable that there does not appear to be other
economy-environment models that have demonstrated such comprehensive
and long-term data agreement."<br>
<br>
Turner semi-retired in 2015 but runs a small organic market garden
on a rural property in the NSW south coast's Bega Valley.<br>
<br>
He and his wife grow most of their own food and live off grid
powered by a solar energy system. Turner said this saved him during
last summer's catastrophic bushfires as his power stayed online but
most people in the area lost power for weeks.<br>
<br>
Turner has continued tracking the data as best as possible since his
last official report in 2014, and last year he helped a Harvard
masters student update the data for their thesis.<br>
<br>
Turner told Voice of Action that under his modelling the business as
usual scenario "ends up resulting in a global collapse from about
now through the next decade or so".<br>
<br>
It was difficult to predict a timeline but Turner said he believed
"there's an extremely strong case that we may be in the early stages
of a collapse right at the moment".<br>
<br>
"Vested interests and corrupt politicians combined with a population
happy to deny problems overwhelm those that are trying to promulgate
truth and facts," said Turner.<br>
- -<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://voiceofaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/file-20181203-194941-1txzrqg.png">https://voiceofaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/file-20181203-194941-1txzrqg.png</a><br>
Fossil fuel emissions continue to rise<br>
- -<br>
'By 2030 we'll know what path we've taken'<br>
Steffen told Voice of Action that it's "highly likely that by 2030
we'll know what pathway we've taken", "the pathway towards
sustainability or the current pathway towards likely collapse".<br>
<br>
"I think the 'fork in the road' will come in this decade, probably
not a single point in time but as a series of events," said Steffen.<br>
<br>
Steffen told Voice of Action he believes collapse "will likely not
come as a dramatic global collapse, but rather as overall
deterioration in many features of life, with regional collapses
occurring here and there".<br>
<br>
"For example, it appears that the USA is entering a long period of
decline in many aspect of its society, with a potential for a more
rapid collapse in the coming decade," said Steffen.<br>
<br>
Samuel Alexander, a lecturer with the University of Melbourne and
research fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, told
Voice of Action that the coming collapse would not be a single black
or white event.<br>
<br>
"With respect to civilisations, what is more likely is that we have
entered a stage of what JM Greer calls 'catabolic collapse' - where
we face decades of ongoing crises, as the existing mode of
civilisation deteriorates, but then recovers as governments and
civil society tries to respond, and fix things, and keep things
going for a bit longer," said Alexander.<br>
<br>
"Capitalism is quite good at dodging bullets and escaping temporary
challenges to its legitimacy and viability. But its condition, I
feel is terminal."<br>
<br>
Alexander, who studies the economic, political and cultural
challenges of living on a full planet in an age of limits, believes
the future will be "post-growth / post capitalist / post-industrial
in some form".<br>
<br>
"The future will like arrive in part by design and in part by
disaster. Our challenge is to try to constitute the future through
planning and community action, not have the future constitute us,"
said Alexander.<br>
<br>
Alexander said that it would never be "too late" to act sensibly as
whether we're trying to avoid or manage collapse there is lots of
work to be done ("a 3 degree future is better than a 4 degree
future").<br>
<br>
Steffen believes the current US mass uprisings are not a sign of
collapse but one of "growing instability".<br>
<br>
Alexander said it was a sign of "steam building up within a closed
system". Without bold grassroots and political action we were
"likely to see explosions of civil unrest increasingly as things
continue to deteriorate".<br>
<br>
"As economies deteriorate and as inequalities deepen, more people
get disenfranchised, incentivising resistance and sadly sometimes
making people look for scapegoats to blame for new or intensifying
hardships (e.g. the so-called alt-right)," said Alexander.<br>
- -<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://voiceofaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/F2.large_.jpg">https://voiceofaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/F2.large_.jpg</a><br>
If we don't stabilise the climate we will fall into an irreversible
Hothouse Earth scenario<br>
- -<br>
Funding dried up after inconvenient truths<br>
When Turner joined CSIRO in the early 2000s the organisation was
working on the Australian Stocks and Flows Framework - a model of
the economy using physical things rather than dollars.<br>
<br>
The work was funded by the Department of Immigration but Turner says
the reports - the last of which was done in 2010 - were buried
because the conclusions did not support high population growth.<br>
<br>
The research found the economic benefits in terms of wealth per
person would be outweighed by social ills including the impact on
quality of life and the environment from resource use and pollution.
The reports warned there would be nil net flow to the Darling River,
loss of habitat and animal and plant species, traffic congestion,
city water deficits and reduced biodiversity due to polluted creeks.<br>
<br>
Turner's findings went against the neoliberal orthodoxies as they
challenged the notion of infinite growth on a finite planet. He said
he and others pursuing similar research in "stocks and flows" models
of the economy "found it harder and harder to get work funded".<br>
<br>
It is no wonder then that the latest Breakthrough National Centre
for Climate Restoration report found "there is no literature that
synthesises the large scale impacts that climate change could have
on Australia's economy, and no reliable snapshot of Australia's
economic vulnerability to future climate warming in a regional and
global context".<br>
<br>
Steffen said he hadn't received any political pressure over his work
"but I probably haven't attacked the growth/capitalism paradigm as
directly as Graham [Turner] has". He says he has not hesitated to
note the incompatibility of the neoliberal economic system with a
stable Earth system in his talks.<br>
<br>
"It seems obvious that very fundamental changes are required, all
the way down to core values - what do we really value in life?,"
said Steffen.<br>
<br>
Turner said the "absolutely immense changes" required to deliver a
sustainable future were just "too hard for the vast majority of
people to contemplate".<br>
<br>
"You'd have to halve the birth rate, you'd have to have net zero
immigration, you'd have to go totally renewable energy and double
efficiencies in every sector of the economy, and the really key
thing is you'd have to reduce the working week over time so that it
would become half of what it is," said Turner.<br>
<br>
"But that would also mean that people wouldn't have the same level
of income and it goes hand in hand with reducing household
consumption by half. And unless you do all of those things, you
don't achieve a steady state, sustainable future, and if you leave
some things out you've got to go even harder at the others."<br>
<br>
Turner believes it would be possible to provide for everyone's needs
in a sustainable way but we would have to live a 1950s or
1960s-style lifestyle with limits such as one car and TV per
household. We wouldn't be living in caves and we'd still have
technology but the rate of change would be a lot slower.<br>
<br>
"I think if we all manage to live a simpler and arguably more
fulfilling life then it would be possible still with some
technological advances to have a sustainable future, but it would
seem that it's more likely … that we are headed towards or perhaps
on the cusp of a sort of global collapse," Turner told Voice of
Action.<br>
<br>
Turner said he fears that the public at large won't take the problem
seriously enough and demand change until they're "actually losing
their jobs or losing their life or seeing their children directly
suffer".<br>
<br>
'Potentially infinite costs of climate change'<br>
The political discourse is about getting back to growth, supported
by taxpayer-subsidised fossil fuels, but evidence shows that even if
the government was committed to renewable energy, "green growth" is
just not possible at a global scale.<br>
<br>
A 2019 IMF Working Paper notes a growing agreement between
economists and scientists "that risk of catastrophic and
irreversible disaster is rising, implying potentially infinite costs
of unmitigated climate change, including, in the extreme, human
extinction".<br>
- -<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://voiceofaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/ipcc2100.jpg">https://voiceofaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/ipcc2100.jpg</a><br>
Slide from Steffen's recent presentation showed the temperature
anomaly over 2000 years<br>
- -<br>
The Australian-based Breakthrough National Centre for Climate
Restoration has spent years publishing reports warning that the
science shows we are headed for civilisational collapse. They stress
there is no further carbon budget today for a realistic chance of
staying below 2C, so there can be no further fossil fuel expansion.<br>
<br>
The Breakthrough reports have been critical of the scientific
community - including the IPCC - for underplaying the full risks of
climate change particularly the tipping points and existential risk.
Its latest report, Fatal Calculations, takes aim at economists for
failing to adequately account for costs of inaction in their models,
which in turn has been used by politicians to delay action.<br>
<br>
"Despite the escalating climate disasters globally, not least our
bushfires, this preoccupation with the cost of action -- and a blind
eye turned to overwhelming future damage -- remains the dominant
thinking within politics, business and finance," the Breakthrough
report found.<br>
<br>
"Because climate change is now an existential threat to human
society, risk management and the calculation of potential future
damages must pay disproportionate attention to the high-end, extreme
possibilities, rather than focus on middle-of-the-spectrum
probabilities."<br>
<br>
In a discussion paper released in May, titled COVID-19 climate
lessons, Breakthrough draws parallels between climate change and the
lack of preparedness for the pandemic.<br>
<br>
"The world is sleepwalking towards disaster. The UN climate science
and policymaking institutions are not fit-for-purpose and have never
examined or reported on the existential risks," the paper reads.<br>
<br>
"There are no national or global processes to ensure that such risk
assessments are undertaken and are efficacious. The World Economic
Forum reports on high-end global risks, including climate
disruption, once a year and then everybody goes back to ignoring the
real risks."<br>
- -<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://voiceofaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Global-map-of-potential-tipping-cascades-The-individual-tipping-elements-are-color-coded-1.jpg">https://voiceofaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Global-map-of-potential-tipping-cascades-The-individual-tipping-elements-are-color-coded-1.jpg</a><br>
Tipping points are poorly accounted for in climate change models<br>
- -<br>
Human activity is causing temperature rises beyond the envelope of
natural variability that the biosphere is built to support. Steffen
said there's only been two times in the last 100 million years that
we have seen a spike in temperature like this, the first was when
the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago and the second was
another mass extinction event 56 million years ago.<br>
<br>
The last time atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions were at the
current level was during the early-to-mid Pliocene 3-4 million years
ago, when temperatures were around 3C warmer than the late 19th
century, and sea levels were around 25 metres higher.<br>
<br>
Government failing to meet the challenge<br>
Despite recent bushfires which burnt 35 million hectares, caused 445
excess deaths from smoke and incinerated 1 billion animals -
doubling Australia's annual CO2 emissions in the process - the
government is refusing to commit to even modest emissions reduction
targets and is pushing a "gas-fired recovery".<br>
<br>
It has emerged this week that the government was warned about the
likelihood of severe bushfires but failed to do enough to prepare.
Fire chiefs were also gagged from talking about climate change.<br>
<br>
The Great Barrier Reef this year was hit with its third mass
bleaching event in 5 years.<br>
<br>
The Australian government, beholden to the fossil fuel industry and
with no corruption watchdog to keep it in check, continues to resist
pressure to increase its climate change commitment. Australia will
not even be able to meet its Paris targets without an accounting
loophole - targets which themselves are inadequate to prevent
collapse.<br>
<br>
It's not just climate change that is leading us to collapse but also
the fact that nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in
human history.<br>
<br>
Around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with
extinction, many within decades. As Steffen notes, the web of life
on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed.<br>
<br>
Humans thoroughly dominate the land biosphere making up 32% of all
terrestrial biomass followed by around 65% in domesticated animals,
leaving less than 3% of vertebrate wildlife.<br>
<br>
There has also been what's called "The Great Acceleration", whereby
human population and economic growth is accelerating leading to
accelerating use of resources like water and energy. This has also
led to exponential growth in: greenhouse gas emissions, ocean
acidification, ozone depletion, surface temperatures, marine fish
capture, terrestrial biosphere degradation, tropical forest lost and
domesticated land.<br>
<br>
Many countries, including parts of Australia, are running out of
water and having to truck in bottled water. It is predicted that 1.8
billion people will be living in water-scarce regions by 2025.<br>
<br>
Steffen says net zero emissions by 2050 would be "too late" and the
only thing that will save us are radical solutions committing to:<br>
- No new fossil fuel developments of any kind from now<br>
- A 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and 100%
renewable energy<br>
- Reaching net zero emissions by 2040<br>
Steffen says it's much, much cheaper not to use fossil fuels in the
first place than to try to capture the CO2 after the fact, as you're
"fighting the second law of thermodynamics when you're trying to
recapture CO2".<br>
<br>
Turner believes the Corporations Act should be rewritten "so that
corporations don't have more legal rights than people, and are not
compelled to make a profit for shareholders".<br>
<br>
'We're possibly gone already'<br>
Associate Professor Anitra Nelson, honorary principal fellow at the
University of Melbourne's Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute,
advocates for "de-growth" policies which would reduce global
consumption and production to sustainable levels. She says we're
currently consuming resources as if there were four Earths and if we
don't change fast we will face conditions that we can't survive
under.<br>
- -<br>
"On the current trajectory we're possibly gone already, and if we're
not, unless we act very quickly and in very serious ways we just
can't get back into a kind of balance with nature," Nelson told
Voice of Action.<br>
<br>
"I do actually think we're already into the collapse and it's just
likely to get worse and more quickly worse as we go."<br>
<br>
Nelson said we have to wholesale change how we live on this planet
and that includes discussions about population control (such as
restrictions on the number of kids people have) and even maximum
income limits.<br>
<br>
Nelson said we also need to get rid of capitalism as fundamentally
that economic system could not survive without growth.<br>
<br>
Instead of firms competing in a global market we need to be
"localising economies" so that "basically people are producing
locally for local needs and only basic needs". This would involve
having "autonomous communities" with "substantive and direct
democracy" and consensus decision making.<br>
<br>
Tim Buckley, director of energy finance studies at the Institute for
Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), told Voice of
Action that our economic model "will have to change or collapse" as
"we are reaching the limits to growth". The health and social costs
were increasingly evident and "we are getting to the point where it
can't be avoided".<br>
<br>
"I think global capitalism is realising that the parasitical nature
that has emerged (where the top 1% own the vast majority of the
world's wealth), can only be sustained for so long," said Buckley.<br>
<br>
"If they kill the host (the bottom 99% of the people), their
position in absolute terms is worse off, even if they own all the
wealth, the total pie will shrink, and they are most impacted. So in
order to protect their 'elite' position, they will allow changes to
make the model more sustainable, so they can remain the top 1%, but
sharing a little more to make the model more sustainable."<br>
<br>
Buckley is more optimistic than most in that he believes the world's
financial elites will reorganise the global economy to become
sustainable out of self preservation.<br>
<br>
"The economics of renewables make this economically sensible. It is
not about saving the poor of the world. It is about an economic
reality - solar is killing coal fired power plant investments.
Technology and economics win, not environmentalism."<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-06-08/collapse-of-civilisation-is-the-most-likely-outcome-top-climate-scientists/">https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-06-08/collapse-of-civilisation-is-the-most-likely-outcome-top-climate-scientists/</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Digging back into the internet news archive]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming -
June 10, 1963 </b></font><br>
In a commencement address at American University, President Kennedy
famously observes:<br>
<blockquote>"For in the final analysis, our most basic common link
is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same
air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all
mortal."<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://youtu.be/0fkKnfk4k40">http://youtu.be/0fkKnfk4k40</a>
at 14 minutes<br>
transcript available for this superb presidential speech<br>
<p>/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/</p>
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