Diary Of The Last Age

I have been writing and telling people for some time now about the dire consequences of doing nothing about global warming.  I have started a novel, the last chapter of which was going to be hopeful that humanity would survive, albeit bereft of civilization, reduced to something like North America three hundred years ago, tribal groups surrounding the Arctic Circle. In the past year or so, I've been driven to greater positive thoughts.  While it remains true that the American politicians like Oklahoma Senator Inhofe corrupted by oil money continue to prevent any serious actions preventing global warming, there are many other people acting to make a difference in small ways, inventing , developing , distributing, and putting into action alternative energies.  And other people gathering together to talk about what needs to be done.  People are demonstrating .  The United Nations is acting . Local groups around the world are meeting to confront the challenges ...

Extreme weather has already had effects on crops, e.g., wheat in Russia in 2010 and in Australia in 2012, both from lack of rainfall.  And this year olive crops in France , Spain, and Italy .  These events mattered a lot to the farmers affected but had little impact on the world supply of wheat and olives.  But this is only a hint of what will come if nothing is done about global warming.  Extreme weather will have a widespread negative effects on crops.  The Guardian reports that the climate change panel, IPCC, says that "global warming is fueling not only natural disasters, but potentially famine - and war".   If nothing is done, the 8 billion people on this planet fifteen years from now will have less food than we have now for 6 billion people.  There is no other implication we can take from this than that there will be mass starvation. But there's a worse food problem.  It turns out that "the global livestock industry actually produces t...

The NY Times lead article this morning is on the climate talks in Lima.  Their conclusions are grim: they warn that it now may be impossible to prevent the temperature of the planet’s atmosphere from rising by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. According to a large body of scientific research, that is the tipping point at which the world will be locked into a near-term future of drought, food and water shortages, melting ice sheets, shrinking glaciers, rising sea levels and widespread flooding — events that could harm the world’s population and economy. 3.6 degrees would be serious, but the problem is While a breach of the 3.6 degree threshold appears inevitable, scientists say that United Nations negotiators should not give up on their efforts to cut emissions. At stake now, they say, is the difference between a newly unpleasant world and an uninhabitable one. Yes, uninhabitable.  From the start I've made dire predictions about the consequences of global warming, but they are bas...

From ThinkProgress.org: Scientists and policymakers have generally settled on 2°C as the amount of global temperature increase, over pre-industrial levels, the climate can take without creating truly dangerous upheavals. Because the effect of carbon in the atmosphere is cumulative, staying below that threshold requires a hard limit on the amount of carbon the world emits between now and 2100. We’ve already blown through a bit over half of that “carbon budget.” Last week’s World Energy Outlook 2014 from the International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that , on our current course, we’ll chew through the rest by 2040. The bottom line is we cease all CO2 emissions by 2040, which won't happen.  So 2 degrees Celsius is not going to happen. While IEA projects that renewables will grow aggressively between now and 2040, overtaking coal as the globe’s leading source of electricity, and that coal and oil use will effectively plateau by that point, fossil fuel use — and thus carbon emis...

My friend believes that my thoughts on global warming, for example , are pure hysteria. When I was in college, scientists began to point out a serious problem with population growth, that food resources might be outpaced by the world's population.  The people bring this to the public's attention were called hysterical.  Some scientists sprung into action, and we had the green revolution  which without exaggeration saved the lives of billions of people. During that time I followed Science Magazine as my way of being a scientist.  In 1979 I started reading about a strange kind of cancer, Kaposi Sarcoma in gay men.  After several articles over months, I began to realize that gay men needed to pay attention to this.  The science was clear, something very bad was going to happen.  Something had to happen fast. But gay men continued their usual social activities, including public baths.  They didn't believe in the science.  Two years later the...

The Keystone Pipeline is an environmental disaster.  Besides what is being done to Canadian land to dig up the tar sands oil, if the result is to burn that oil somewhere is to exacerbate global warming.  But that aside, why are American Republicans so ardent about approving the pipeline?  What is that pipeline going to do for Americans?  Very little.  Something like 50 permanent jobs.  And that's it.  Everything else is a loss.  Several thousand miles of pipeline that could burst and destroy land and pollute water.  So why are Republicans making such an issue about it? Senator Cruz of Texas stated that this was about American oil dependence, but that isn't true.  It's Canadian oil, how does this make us independent?  This has to make us wonder about Senator Cruz' mental agility. Here is my theory.  Republicans often blame liberals for their world patriotism, and that is true. Liberals think about all people in the world and...

The IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is essentially a conservative organization because it is composed of country representatives with disparate interests with regard to climate change.  Nevertheless, they have just come out with a report describing inaction on greenhouse gases as immoral .  With inaction the consequences, they state, are irreversible and catastrophic.  What makes it immoral is that the costs of preventing this outcome is so very small relative to the consequences, a point I've made in a previous post .  The Republicans have taken over control of the U.S. Senate.  This means Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma will be the new Chair of the Committee on Environment and Public Works.  He has already stated that any action on global warming would be immoral : His favorite Bible verse, Genesis 8:22 is: “ As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease. ” A...