The Summit in Melbourne demonstrated the way that mainstream politics on climate action is nearly delusional. Mainstream politics basically denies the seriousness of the situation.
Firstly, and this is my opinion obviously, the fires all over the world in the last two years have not only released heaps of excess Greenhouse gases (GHG) into the atmosphere, making our situation leap into the next bracket of bad, but we already have record temperatures all over the world, and more importantly, the melting of the permafrost. This melting will release stored methane, another GHG, and this release will further increase the warming and rate of warming. We are now going into a phase in which natural processes are accelerating human induced warming. The Amazon has apparently become so messed up it is turning from a carbon sink into a carbon source, and this transformation in damaged forest is not rare. Melting of the Antarctic and Greenland land ice, has already begun, and the melting once started, and accelerated by the extra GHG release, will be hard to stop and will increase ‘exponentially’; that is it will start off slow and rapidly accelerate. We can expect a sea level rise of 25 to 50 metres in a fairly small timeframe – probably within a human life time. For reference, 25 m is about a seven story building. Speeds of melting seem massively underestimated in the older literature – it was not supposed to have started yet.
I could expect, with the situation continuing to worsen, that we might even get a couple of metres of rise in the next 10 to 15 years. Most big cities are on the coast, and large populations are also coastal. Billions of people will be dispossessed all around the world. Few countries will be safe as the waters continue to rise. The stress of flooded cities and loss of fertile land, with the sea gradually getting higher, will destroy economies, destroy supply chains and destroy residencies. Even if the displaced people can get to refugee camps, then there will be no organisation, as countries and corporations will be using their resources elsewhere to hold themselves together. Even those people who live above 50 m above sea level will feel the cascading destructions.
Many places in the world will become uninhabitable with a three degree rise. Parts of Australia are already approaching uninhabitable, after a mere one degree, because of the tendency to have strings of really high temperature days with no breaks and no rain – this can kill even the most resilient plant life.
On top of this, we can expect the recurrence of hugely destructive storms and floods, as well as droughts, as the climate system struggles to find equilibrium. It cannot find equilibrium while we keep increasing the stress in the climate systems. This weather will clearly add to the stress on our social systems and our abiilty to be resilient, or make useful change. Insurance bills seem to be mounting, which marks increased destruction.
The current mass extinction is another problem. Collapsing biodiversity will affect all surviving living systems including those of agriculture. Given the change in climate as well, we can expect very different biosystems to begin to start existing around us. This will mean new diseases and new spreads of old diseases.
Tropical disease will move into the first world. Heat stroke is a major cause of death indirectly through heart attacks and so on. At the summit, representatives of the AMA announced they believe that global warming will be catastrophic for human health. On top of this the disorder will promote the collapse of the medical system; hospitals may be underwater, or without power and supplies. You, your children, your siblings, spouse and your parents are more likely to die of avoidable disease if climate change runs away.
The threat is huge. Climate change is no longer in the future but here now and going to get worse.
Given the situation we have described, targets which are to be achieved by 2050 are almost a waste of time. Indeed 2050 targets can be primarily seen as a way of doing nothing now. By 2050 we will be deep into a deadly disorganisation of enforced change. While the disruption will not be reaching its peak by then, it is still extremely likely to be society destroying.
The targets need to start being visibly implemented now, and we need to start carbon dioxide drawdown now. The GHGs we already have in the air are going to increase warming. There is a delay in the effects; how much is hard to predict, but even if we stopped all emissions tomorrow we are still not past the worst consequences of what we have already set in motion – Michael Mann thought it was likely that we are already locked into a 10 m sea level rise. If you try to stop a passenger liner just by turning the engines off, it will still keep going forward.
The next post describes how we probably need to act….
Tags: 'nature', Anthropocene, climate change, politics
Climate, technology and chaos Blog 
Leave a comment