UN Says Climate Genocide Is Coming. It's Actually Worse Than That.

[sl8]

From http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/un-says-climate-genocide-coming-but-its-worse-than-that.html

UN Says Climate Genocide Is Coming. It’s Actually Worse Than That.

LIFE AFTER WARMING | OCT. 10, 2018
By David Wallace-Wells


You now have permission to freak out. Photo: George Rose/Getty Images

Just two years ago, amid global fanfare, the Paris climate accords were signed — initiating what seemed, for a brief moment, like the beginning of a planet-saving movement. But almost immediately, the international goal it established of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius began to seem, to many of the world’s most vulnerable, dramatically inadequate; the Marshall Islands’ representative gave it a blunter name, calling two degrees of warming “genocide.”

The alarming new report you may have read about this week from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — which examines just how much better 1.5 degrees of warming would be than 2 — echoes the charge. “Amplifies” may be the better term. Hundreds of millions of lives are at stake, the report declares, should the world warm more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, which it will do as soon as 2040, if current trends continue. Nearly all coral reefs would die out, wildfires and heat waves would sweep across the planet annually, and the interplay between drought and flooding and temperature would mean that the world’s food supply would become dramatically less secure. Avoiding that scale of suffering, the report says, requires such a thorough transformation of the world’s economy, agriculture, and culture that “there is no documented historical precedent.” The New York Times declared that the report showed a “strong risk” of climate crisis in the coming decades; in Grist, Eric Holthaus wrote that “civilization is at stake.”

If you are alarmed by those sentences, you should be — they are horrifying. But it is, actually, worse than that — considerably worse. That is because the new report’s worst-case scenario is, actually, a best case. In fact, it is a beyond-best-case scenario. What has been called a genocidal level of warming is already our inevitable future. The question is how much worse than that it will get.

Barring the arrival of dramatic new carbon-sucking technologies, which are so far from scalability at present that they are best described as fantasies of industrial absolution, it will not be possible to keep warming below two degrees Celsius — the level the new report describes as a climate catastrophe. As a planet, we are coursing along a trajectory that brings us north of four degrees by the end of the century. The IPCC is right that two degrees marks a world of climate catastrophe. Four degrees is twice as bad as that. And that is where we are headed, at present — a climate hell twice as hellish as the one the IPCC says, rightly, we must avoid at all costs. But the real meaning of the report is not “climate change is much worse than you think,” because anyone who knows the state of the research will find nothing surprising in it. The real meaning is, “you now have permission to freak out.”

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More at link.

[WestMichRad]

1. The Nightmare Logic of Scarcity Capitalism

https://www.alternet.org/capitalisms-final-solution-nothing-less-complete-ecological-collapse

Hey, there's money to be made! Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!!

From the Alternet article:
The Editorial Board of theWashington Post writes that future “Historians will look in absolute astonishment” that not only did our governments and corporate elite fail to halt climate change, but that our policy makers “actually pushed in the wrong direction.” That’s assuming that there will even be any historians left after the climate change horseman of pestilence, famine, war, and death gallop across the scorched and burning world, their riders named “Deregulation,” “Bottom Line,” “Market,” and “Profit.”

Perhaps the human species deserves extinction if we can clearly see the coming problems that will cause catastrophic change to the planet and yet fail to prevent their occurrence.

[BeckyDem]

2. +1

[2naSalit]

4. +2

[Hortensis]

5. Take away capitalism, and you're still left with industrialization,

giant leaps in population growth (7 billion and still another few decades before growth reverses), and urbanization. And with populaces who refuse to vote to solve this problem the only way it can be -- with regulation to reverse emissions.

After all, an automobile operated by the socialized-medicine VA puts out the same emissions it would if operated by GE. And 2 degrees of warming with ANY economic system is still 2 degrees.

"It's the carbon, stupid."

"It's the voters, stupid."

We will regulate when it gets so bad a majority vote to regulate. With modern communications, neither GE's sales force nor our senators need to fly all over the country to do their jobs, after all. And when cities burn, we can regulate rebuilding on new formats that require sustainable power sources and make owning a car, no matter how powered, more of a nuisance than most care to bother with.

"It's planning for sustainable and enjoyable lifestyles for 7 billion people, stupid."

[Uncle Joe]

8. Not quite, there is evidence that progressive socialism can buy humanity more time.

Of course that's not the only dynamic in play, elevating women in society and technological advances to name just a couple.

(snip)

"We know of cities in low-income nations that emit less than one tonne CO2-equivalent per person per year," says Satterthwaite. "Cities in high-income nations [can] have six to 30 tonnes CO2-equivalent per person per year."

Citizens of more affluent nations leave a much greater footprint on our planet than people living in poorer countries – although there are exceptions. Copenhagen is the capital of a high-income nation – Denmark – while Porto Alegre is in upper-middle-income Brazil. Living standards are high in both cities, yet per capita emissions are relatively low.

(snip)

This fits with a general pattern that has played out over the past century or so, explains Will Steffen, an emeritus professor with the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University. It is not the rise in population by itself that is the problem, but rather the even more rapid rise in global consumption (which of course is unevenly distributed).

This leads to an uncomfortable implication: people living in high-income nations must play their part if the world is to sustain a large human population. Only when wealthier groups are prepared to adopt low-carbon lifestyles, and to permit their governments to support such a seemingly unpopular move, will we reduce the pressure on global climate, resource and waste issues.

(snip)

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160311-how-many-people-can-our-planet-really-support

But so long as the wealthiest, most powerful nations in the world and the people of those nations hold to the maxim that "greed is good" humanity won't stand a chance.

[BeckyDem]

3. I realize there are so many issues, numerous wrongs to right since Republcians

control the levers of government but we must make this our main focus. The window of time has been decreased and we must act.

[BigmanPigman]

6. The other night on CNN they were discussing climate change

and a pundit said, "Politics is personal" meaning that people vote only when it directly effects them. Since climate change is so slow most people don't put much of a priority on it. Perhaps people/human civilization should go extinct if this is how their advanced brains "think".

[Haggis for Breakfast]

7. As the late George Carlin once said:

Smallpox is fast. Evolution is slow.

God, I miss him.