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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (234817)	10/16/2013 5:44:37 PM
From: Asymmetric	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 543106

> At least we'll be dead, but I feel sorry for my children and grandchildren. We've been sucky stewards of the Earth. I think if we're lucky, we'll be dead. Once we've gone past the tipping point, these articles seem to be saying that things will be changing very, very fast.

To: epicure who wrote (234817)	10/16/2013 6:18:12 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 543106

"We've been sucky stewards of the Earth." That we have been. We really need to implement some form of population control, yesterday. It would just solve, in one stroke, so many of our societal ills. There is no animal as destructive to the natural world as modern technological humans. We don't know what the level is, but we can be sure it's less than the 7 billion of us now on the planet. I have faith in the ability of nature to come back, but it may take us limiting our own numbers through a catastrophe for our own kind.

To: epicure who wrote (234817)	10/16/2013 8:07:53 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 543106

Start planting trees for them; lots and lots of trees. “The planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil.” “A thing which I regret, and which I will try to remedy some time, is that I have never in my life planted a walnut. Nobody does plant them nowadays—when you see a walnut it is almost invariably an old tree. If you plant a walnut you are planting it for your grandchildren, and who cares a damn for his grandchildren?” ? George Orwell

To: epicure who wrote (234817)

10/17/2013 10:31:03 AM

From: No Mo Mo

Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 543106

"I read a recent article on that. Depressing. Very depressing.

At least we'll be dead, but I feel sorry for my children and grandchildren. We've been sucky stewards of the Earth."
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Certain self-help books suggest that writing your own obituary can be a constructive and enlightening exercise.

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Carbon Pollution is Creating a New World, And Not in a Good Way

Posted October 16, 2013
Dan Lashof, Program Director, Climate & Clean Air, Washington, D.C.

Research recently published in the scientific journal Nature is receiving a lot of attention, and for good reason. It puts a specific date – 2047 – on when we will be living in a new world due to unlimited dumping of heat-trapping pollution into our atmosphere.

From this date onward the researchers project that every subsequent year will be warmer than any year in the historical record (1860 to 2005) for more than half the locations on earth. Think about that for a minute. It means that well within my children’s lifetime they will be living in a climate that, despite natural variability, has no overlap with the climate when they were born. That’s why I call it a new world.

Here is the key figure from the paper (as reformatted on the author’s website):

This is actually a very conservative definition of a new world. The historical record has already been significantly affected by carbon pollution. If that were not the case the warmest year in the historic record would be significantly cooler and the departure date from the historical range would come 11.5 years sooner, or in 2036, according to the paper.

The other key finding of Mora et al. is that the new world will begin sooner in the tropics than at higher latitudes. This may seem surprising because global warming (measured as the absolute change in temperature) is taking place faster toward the poles. But natural variability is also much greater outside the tropics, so measuring global warming relative to the historical range of temperatures at a given location changes the picture. For example, while New Yorkers will experience a completely new climate by 2047 (the same as the global average), residents of Kingston, Jamaica will be living in a new world by 2023. What this means is that people with the fewest resources, who are concentrated in the tropics, will face unprecedented climatic conditions soonest.

Results for many cities around the world are provided on the author’s web site. Here are the departure dates for the U.S. cities listed, assuming unabated carbon pollution.

Anchorage	2071
Austin	2058
Chicago	2052
Dallas	2063
Denver	2048
Detroit	2051
Honolulu	2043
Houston	2050
Los Angeles	2048
New York	2047
Orlando	2046
Philadelphia	2047
Phoenix	2043
San Diego	2046
San Francisco	2049
Seattle	2055
Washington	2047

These projections are not destiny. Mora et al. also looked at a scenario in which heat-trapping pollution is stabilized at a level equivalent to doubling the preindustrial concentration of carbon dioxide and found that the departure date was delayed until 2069. That would buy some time for people and ecosystems to try to adapt, but it would still mean bequeathing our children a fundamentally disrupted climate.

We can and must do better.

theenergycollective.com