Just Do It! Debating How Much Time We Have to Avert Climate Disaster is a Waste of Time
Megafires in Canada’s
Northwest Territories in 2014 scorched more than 7 million acres of forest,
releasing half as much carbon back into the atmosphere as all the plants and
trees in Canada typically absorb in an entire year.
The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, or IPCC, released a
report earlier this month regarding the effects of the rise in global
temperatures on land and agriculture and found that 25 percent of the rise in
CO2 emissions comes from deforestation and farming. A consensus of some
700 scientists from around the world agreed that 1.5 degrees Celsius has
already baked into the land. They said the earth is dangerously heating up as a
result of feeding ourselves in the most inefficient ways (wasting 25 percent of
the food produced).
The IPCC is expected
to release another report in September on the effects of man-made CO2 emissions
on the oceans. We get 50 percent of our oxygen from oceans, and oceans have
thus far absorbed 93 percent of human CO2 emissions. In October
of 2018 the IPCC advised that to avoid irreversible changes to the
environment, “human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall
by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching ‘net zero’ around 2050.
This means that any remaining emissions would need to be balanced by removing
CO2 from the air.” The 2016 Paris Climate Conference was based on holding
global temperatures to an increase of no more than at 2 degrees Celsius, but
the 2018 report showed that we need to cap the rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. (Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change)
Missing Factors: These IPCC findings,
while alarming, still don’t take many things into account. For instance, none of
the IPCC studies consider how much methane gas is being released from fracking
sites in the U.S. and elsewhere. And methane gas is 30 times more potent as a
heat-trapping gas than carbon dioxide....https://www.juancole.com/2019/09/debating-climate-disaster.html
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