Every week I read more articles that talk about drought, heat waves, stronger storms and as I have pointed out in earlier posts, the science is very clear that even if we went to zero emissions tomorrow, the warming of the atmosphere would continue for another 10 yrs before slowing down. This assumes it is solely caused by human releases of GHGs but we now know that with the warming humans have caused, nature is now releasing more CO2 and methane from fires and melting of the permafrost. In addition, loss of ice in the Arctic and darkening of Greenland ice is causing an albedo effect (dark body absorption of the sun’s rays) that creates a tipping point of potentially runaway warming.
I have spent considerable time researching what the scientific models say about how long it will take for CO2 and other GHGs to come down and the earth to start a cooling trend back towards pre-industrial levels. Frankly, there is no clear consensus and it ranges from decades to thousands of years, so in terms of human lifetime(s), chances are it won’t in a meaningful way. That said, do not lose sight that even though things will be very challenging, we can make it worse by not doing everything we can to bring down emissions asap.
I just posted some new links on the resources page: Seaspiracy, a new documentary from Netflix about how humans are killing the ocean that is pretty sobering. And although they tend to sensationalize a bit to get their points across, fact checking has shown it is >90% accurate. Worth watching because the ocean really is a cornerstone of not only food for more than 2 billion people but the engine that controls our climate. The second post was a link to Union of Concerned Scientists website which provides a lot of information on the impact of human activity in a very clear way – a good reference source.
I wish I could tell you when the proverbial sh*t will hit the fan, but I can’t. It is far too complicated to know when enough bad things will happen to trigger the domino’s to start falling. But, just like we know another pandemic will occur in the future, I think we can say with some certainty that our house of cards will eventually come tumbling down. Hopefully we will find a way to muddle through but with continued global population growth (on the way towards 10 billion people to feed and shelter), the challenges get bigger.
Here at CASA we will continue to monitor the situation and post our assessments. Always open to sharing what we learn and continue to encourage everyone to become informed plus take action on minimizing your carbon footprint.
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