Tuesday, 14 April 2009
We should do the world a favour
…by embracing our own extinction for the sake of the planet. Today's Guardian polls climate change scientists. 85% don't believe we can restrict global warming to 2 degrees - though only 39% believe it's scientifically impossible. It's governments, politics and economics which make it impossible. 2 degrees will make things difficult. The expected 4-5 degrees will cause mass extinctions, human misery, economic disasters and huge political instability. As usual, it's the poor, darker, innocent people who'll suffer first. Sadly for me, I probably won't be dead before it starts impacting on us.
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8 comments:
This poll is quite telling. I've now pretty much decided that politicians are not going to be able to make the decisions necessary to deal with climate change, indeed if anything can be done beyond some crazy geo-engineering. That doesn't mean to say GHG emissions shouldn't be reduced but more research needs to go into how to live in a world 3, 4 or 5 degrees warmer. How will ecosystems react? How will we feed ourselves? How should we deal with climate refugees? Thinking about this now could perhaps save a lot of nastiness later on.
There is also clearly much diversity of opinion within the IPCC. In his latest book James Lovelock said he was shocked to hear that the IPCC had reached a 'consensus'. This is not a word from the scientific world, which deals with probabilities, but from diplomacy and politics. Previous IPCC predictions have been overly optimistic for sea level rise and most dramatically Arctic sea ice melt, as you'd expect from a committee of hopeful human beings. Actual measurement is proving to be worse than the models, which cannot hope to match the complexity of the climate system.
The questions now are: By how much? When? And will we see a more linear temperature rise or will it be much more erratic, with a steep rise in temperature over a relatively short period of time as positive feedbacks kick in.
For his book Lovelock created a simple model stripped back of the complexities of the IPCC models, but focusing more on how the biosphere is linked to the climate through negative and positive feedbacks, that he says the IPCC models don't fully consider. At first, as CO2 emissions rise, the system resists the perturbation through negative feedback but as concentrations reach 400ppm signs of instability appear then suddenly between 400 and 500ppm there is a 5 degree rise in temperature as the model moves into a new state, when positive feedback overtakes negative. After this even a cut in concentration to 280ppm does not result in a temperature drop. The model also shows that before the final jump the climate becomes briefly cooler again.
There's obviously a lot of uncertainty in his model so the figures won't be exact but the overall trend could well be correct. Some may think James Lovelock an eccentric old man, but has been proved right many times in the past and as an nonagenarian with no kids he is not blinded by hope, just tells it how he sees it.
It didn't take long for the lemming side of you to show, suggesting mass suicide in the face of human ugliness (incidentally, however, they say that, if anyone, it will be the rodents who will survive).
Among the many fatalists arguing along these lines I remember reading something by someone (I am not the encyclopaedic reader you appear to be) who was in favour not only of atomic energy but of locking ourselves into big cities and leaving the rest of the planet to itself. It was all a bit ironic, but, contrary to most Christians, he did believe that this place is not there for us and should be left alone. Simply to be.
It all makes me sad and gloomy and feel bad about being a human. There is no innocence in our race.
Depressingly, I agree with you both. The world won't miss us - except perhaps with a shudder.
You do know a species only needs forty individuals to have a viable gene pool don't you? The species will be fine. It is civilisation that will collapse. So we go back to punching deer to death for a few generations while we wait for society to reinvent the drive-thru, it's hardly worth getting worked up about.
I didn't know that. Do we get to pick these forty?
Geneticists have worked out that in the past, 100,000 years ago or something, the human population dropped to about 200. We very nearly became extinct.
I don't think the vole should get to choose. We might need a librarian though, the ratio of books to people will go up considerably.
Excellent. Roll on the extinction.
OK. So the world becomes a wasteland and the rabbits take over. But if the world is a wasteland, then there is no 'functional land' to define the wasteland against. Therefore, everything reverts to 'land'. Therefore, even in my area, house prices stabilize. Whoopee. No nasty neighbours either.
Pick me
Pick me
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