"The understanding of [human] warming and cooling influences on climate has improved since the Third Assessment report, leading to very high confidence that the globally averaged net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming." Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
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The "net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming". That is the center of the question, "since 1750". That means the Industrial Revolution, which in turn means everything we mean by the word, "modern" and especially the word "progress".
To give an example of how far reaching this is, consider that the two most confronted "modern" ideologies, Capitalism and Communism are only two sides of the same coin. They are in fact just an argument about how to industrialize and who was to get the benefit; neither of them questioning for a moment either industrialization or "progress" themselves.
Someone wrote into the BBC, "Who is going to tell a billion people that they can't have air-conditioning or an automobile?". That is certainly the immediate political question. Telling the whole world that everything we dream of is killing us. Someone is going to have to bell that cat and at the same time offer an equitable vision of this post-post-post world. If the idea is that a few people are going to continue to live with "all mod cons" while the majority are dying of thirst or inundated by the rising seas, than we are going to see universal chaos. Rioting, death, destruction and certain distortions of the business cycle. In a previous post I used the simile of shipwrecked sailors sharing out their provisions in a lifeboat. Dare I say "from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs"? The alternative could be no other than universal homo homini lupus.
So all you disillusioned Utopians, dust off your adolescent dreams of universal brotherhood and justice. It is either your dreams or the hecatomb. DS
Humans blamed for climate change - BBC News
To give an example of how far reaching this is, consider that the two most confronted "modern" ideologies, Capitalism and Communism are only two sides of the same coin. They are in fact just an argument about how to industrialize and who was to get the benefit; neither of them questioning for a moment either industrialization or "progress" themselves.
Someone wrote into the BBC, "Who is going to tell a billion people that they can't have air-conditioning or an automobile?". That is certainly the immediate political question. Telling the whole world that everything we dream of is killing us. Someone is going to have to bell that cat and at the same time offer an equitable vision of this post-post-post world. If the idea is that a few people are going to continue to live with "all mod cons" while the majority are dying of thirst or inundated by the rising seas, than we are going to see universal chaos. Rioting, death, destruction and certain distortions of the business cycle. In a previous post I used the simile of shipwrecked sailors sharing out their provisions in a lifeboat. Dare I say "from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs"? The alternative could be no other than universal homo homini lupus.
So all you disillusioned Utopians, dust off your adolescent dreams of universal brotherhood and justice. It is either your dreams or the hecatomb. DS
Humans blamed for climate change - BBC News
Abstract: Climatic changes seen around the world are "very likely" to have a human cause, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concluded. By "very likely", the IPCC means greater than 90% probability. The scientific body, in a report released in Paris, forecasts temperatures will probably rise by between 1.8-4C (3.2-7.2F) by 2100. But another study released on the eve of publication suggests its previous reports may have been too conservative.(...) In 2001, it said that it was "likely" that human activities lay behind the trends observed at various parts of the planet; "likely" in IPCC terminology means between 66% and 90% probability. Now, the panel concludes, it is at least 90% certain that human emissions of greenhouse gases rather than natural variations are warming the planet's surface. "The understanding of [human] warming and cooling influences on climate has improved since the Third Assessment report, leading to very high confidence that the globally averaged net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming," observed the scientists. READ IT ALL
2 comments:
I would hold my horses on the doom and gloom.
The various parties went into world war 1 in the knowledge that Germany only had sufficient nitrates stockpiled to make 6 months worth of gunpowder and explosives. Nitrates at the time had to be imported from Chile, and the Royal Navy ruled the waves between Chile and Hamburg. But during those six months, Fritz Haber devised a way to extract nitrogen from the air, and Germany never ran out of nitrates for gunpowder. (Some 750,000 Germans are supposed to have died due to the blockade of foodstuffs going to Germany.) Obviously, the discovery was not a pure plus for Europe. (This discovery also allowed the earth to grow food to feed another 2 billion people, and China to take off as an economic power.)
But the point is that when the political will comes together, there often are new technologies out there that the general public doesn't see.
I think dramatic changes may be necessary, but, perhaps optimistically, that the obstacles are in no way insuperable.
An interesting development is that the idea of "progress" is out of date. This is "Sorcerer's Apprentice" time.
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