By now we all know how quickly and severely the Arctic is warming. Nobody's arguing that any more. What we don't know, as yet, is how that's going to impact the majority of us down here by the 49th parallel and below.
David Barberr, a lead author of a new report released by the Arctic Council, tells the National Post that we're in for an unbelievably costly and damaging experience.
“Most people don’t understand how bad it is.”
The report completed for the Arctic Council, the group of eight countries that ring the North Pole, was released last week. It represents the work of 90 scientists from around the world and summarizes the most recent research from 2010 to 2016.
“Cumulative global impacts related to Arctic change are expected to be large,” the document said. “Adaptation costs and economic opportunities are estimated in the tens of trillions of U.S. dollars.”
How much? Trillions? TENS of trillions? That's some serious dinero.
The report concludes the Arctic continues to warm at twice the pace of mid-latitudes and is likely to see warming of up to five degrees Celsius as early as 2040.
By then, the report says, summer sea ice is likely to be a thing of the past. Glaciers and ice caps will continue to melt and contribute to continually rising seas.
...
“We should have started 20 years ago,” Barber said. “We didn’t get our act together and we’re still dicking around trying to figure out how to price carbon.
“These things are costing us. And they’re costing the stability of our planet.”
And it's not just NatPo that may be experiencing a climate change epiphany. Even the Sunday Times is catching on. Now there's even talk of a popular "tipping point" in which the public is coming to accept the powerful scientific consensus on man-made climate change and the urgency for taking effective action. Are you paying attention, you lousy petro-pimps?
But wait, there's more. This time it's Britain's Mirror moaning on about how climate change could cost the UK 75 billion quid a year by 2050. What's next, the Daily Mail? Who am I kidding? Nah, forget the Mail.
2 comments:
I'm just gonna spitball some numbers here. I'm basing it on nothing my than estimation on numbers I've heard bandied about in differing conversations.
The severity of the effects of climate change will grow exponentially the longer it takes to do anything about it, and the further into the future normalization is pushed.
The greater the gap between now and the new normalization, the greater the changes we will see in the interim.
Simple enough. It should be easy for a world leader such as Justin Trudeau to understand, as he is university-educated. Perhaps he just doesn't care.
Led into the future with neglect instead of critical thought as our parameters.
A billion dead, or more, by century's end. If we're lucky. Well, technically, it'd be: population reduction by a billion by century's end (meaning a hell of a lot more than a billion people dying). And if we're kicking changing our own behavior down the road by twenty years, then we should also be moving up the marker when we would see worldwide population decline instead of population growth by that same amount of time: a reduction in worldwide population by 2080 (and again, we need to account for the exponentiality), so it becomes a reduction in worldwide population by 2070).
If the two should ever meet: if we don't do anything by 2040, we can probably expect a worldwide reduction of a billion by 2050 if things continue on as they are now. And a new normalization by 2100. Which would mean five decades of a slow death grind for complex life on Earth. Humanity would be lucky to make it out of that with even thousands of numbers.
Troy I think your numbers are much too optimistic. That's the vexing problem of considering climate change in isolation. When it's seen as not a standalone issue but a component of a larger threat combining anthropogenic climate change with the current and emerging natural feedback loops (tipping points) along with the rapidly worsening freshwater crisis plus our mad dependency on overconsumption of natural resources by almost double the Earth's carrying capacity there's a powerful synergy created that makes the threat considerably worse even than just the sum of its parts. To these elements you also add in the rise of failed states, "new" wars, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, the decline of liberal democracy and the rise of plutocracy (neoliberalism's gift that just keeps on giving) and you have a more complete picture of what confronts us.
All of these forces have been picking up steam over the past half-century. We're now in the throes of what is being termed the "Great Acceleration." Here are a couple of links you might find helpful:
https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2017/11/16/humans-blind-imminent-environmental-collapse/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=161117
http://the-mound-of-sound.blogspot.ca/2017/08/the-great-acceleration.html
From what I've learned over the past 10 years I think our maximum sustainable population is/was somewhat under 3 billion (based on 1970 levels of average consumption). Maybe James Lovelock was right when he wrote of a giant die-off leaving a human population of a few hundred million by 2100. That's hard to grasp, isn't it?
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