Environment & Energy
Related: About this forum"All Of This Is Happening Exactly As We Have Known It Would Happen" As Climate Disasters Accelerate
The panicked commuters of Zhengzhou, China, could only stand on seats and cling to poles in a desperate attempt to keep their heads above the muddy torrent this past week, as floodwaters from record-breaking rains inundated the subway system. On the other side of the planet, in Gresham, Ore., a 61-year-old maker of handcrafted ukuleles slowly died in June as searing temperatures made an oven out of his lifelong home one of at least 800 victims of what one scientist called the most anomalous heat event ever observed on Earth. Massive floods deluged Central Europe, Nigeria, Uganda and India in recent days, killing hundreds. Junes scorching temperatures, followed by a fast-moving wildfire, erased a Canadian town. More than a million people are close to starvation amid Madagascars worst drought in decades. In Siberia, tens of thousands of square miles of forest are ablaze, potentially unleashing carbon stored in the frozen ground below.
In Italy on Friday, a top U.N. climate official once again pleaded for the world to heed the alarm bells, reminding leaders that these catastrophes are simply the latest in a ghastly string of warnings that the planet is hurtling down a treacherous path. What more can numbers show us that we cannot already see? What more can statistics say about the flooding, the wildfires, the droughts and hurricanes and other deadly events? United Nations Climate Change Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa told a gathering of energy and environment ministers from G-20 nations. Numbers and statistics are invaluable, but what the world requires now, more than anything else, is climate action.
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Speaking before a group of powerful senators, a NASA scientist outlined the grim reality facing the planet: Human carbon emissions had raised global average temperatures to the highest levels in recorded history. Heat waves, drought and other extreme weather were disrupting peoples everyday lives. The greenhouse effect has been detected, James Hansen said, and it is changing our climate now. That was June 1988. Four years later, countries around the globe created the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, in which they agreed to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.
Yet in the decades since, people have emitted more carbon dioxide than they did in the entire century prior. And many of the catastrophes Hansen warned about have come to pass. All of this is happening exactly as we have known it would happen, said Fredi Otto, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford and co-lead of the World Weather Attribution initiative.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/07/24/amid-summer-fire-floods-moment-truth-climate-action/
bahboo
(16,346 posts)and the slow degradation of life on our planet will continue...especially for the non rich. Governments just lack the will to do what needs to be done...
Duppers
(28,125 posts)And this isn't a temporary phase as some folks would like to think. The planet has flipped faster than most models predicted and is only accelerating.
And you're right, even governments have lacked the will - they've only been after-the-fact crisis managers, not planners.
We consumers have a BIG say in this. A few important things:
Stop burning fossil fuels (traveling).
Stop having more than 2 children (better yet, have only one...or NONE, as my only child has decided to do). Because it is we consumers who are the biggest drivers of global warming.
Jim__
(14,077 posts)"Whatever's going to happen will take place after I'm gone, so I'll just keep on doing the same thing to make money."
Except--oops--it's taking place within their lifetimes, much sooner than they anticipated.
CloudWatcher
(1,848 posts)"Happening Exactly As We Have Known It Would Happen" is wrong ... it's been faster than the worst-case estimates.
calimary
(81,321 posts)And their selfishness threatens to take us all down with em.
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calimary
(81,321 posts)And their selfishness threatens to take us all down with em.
,,/, ,/,,
Auggie
(31,173 posts)plus (IMO) the belief by the 1% they could simply buy their way out of any problem or preemptively plan ahead.
spike jones
(1,680 posts)SergeStorms
(19,201 posts)Relinquish all personal responsibility and wish it away. That one burns my ass more than any other.
spike jones
(1,680 posts)and a child got it and killed himself.
The mother said, It was Gods will.
SergeStorms
(19,201 posts)that my foot would be so far up her ass she could read my shoe size?
Religion is a psychiatric disorder.
House of Roberts
(5,177 posts)The dirty effing hippies have been proven right again.
(Proud dirty effing hippie since 1970)
appalachiablue
(41,145 posts)Doc Sportello
(7,522 posts)Damn right!!
SergeStorms
(19,201 posts)'Inherent Vice'. Very entertaining. Great cast. One of the very few movies I can watch again and again, and still be entertained.
Doc Sportello
(7,522 posts)It walks a fine line of humor and animus, while capturing a time and place like nothing else I've seen. Pynchon is a great writer but this is one where I thought the movie was actually better than the novel. Joaquin IS Doc.
SergeStorms
(19,201 posts)Brolin IS 'Bigfoot'. Waterston IS Shasta Fay. The entire cast live their roles perfectly.
As a matter of fact, I probably haven't watched it in a year or so. I haven't watched it AC ( after covid) that I can recall. Guess what's going to be popped in the DVD player tonight?
Doc Sportello
(7,522 posts)I think it is underrated by some critics. It's not just a stoner movie, although I have to admit I do enjoy it after an edible. Enjoy.
RobertDevereaux
(1,857 posts)And Elvis Costello obliged by making it famous.
Doc Sportello
(7,522 posts)To me the song is just such a great counterpoint to the greed is good 80s and cynicism that followed.
rickyhall
(4,889 posts)I caught onto "Global warming" in high school chemistry after a lecture on CO2 and that it continues to accumulate and holds heat in, thus continuing to raise the temperature, etc.
CrispyQ
(36,478 posts)The entire community planned events and all the schools let out. Little kids helped clean & pick up the parks & we high schoolers picked up garbage from the sides of the roads. There was other stuff, too, all week long. I remember Carter's solar panels on the White House & Reagan taking them down almost immediately. There is no political will to change, much less at the pace that needs to happen.
Ford_Prefect
(7,901 posts)The extraction industries and the governments who profit from and by them have only one agenda. The portions of government still beholden to voters and a civil society have fought hard but they cannot stop the Oil Lobby and the Mining lobby and the MIC. When Saudi Oil Princes and Military Arms procurers determine our foreign policy and can remove or muzzle Congressional critics, Prime Ministers and Presidents we are in deep trouble indeed.
One estimate of the impact the "endless wars" has had on the environment was that with all the ordinance fired, exploded or burned, with all the aircraft flying missions or delivering troops and equipment, with all the vehicles, tanks and generators burning millions of gallons of diesel, along with the burning of towns and cities, that the world had been put back more than 2 decades in terms of improvements made to air quality generally. This leaves out comment on the effects of burning the Amazon forests or the whole question of the acrid cloud above industrialized China.
bucolic_frolic
(43,182 posts)received seedlings on the First Earth Day. Mine is about 75 feet tall now. It's doing its job. More so than everyone else.
twodogsbarking
(9,759 posts)Edwin Starr performed. War.
Grokenstein
(5,725 posts)So none of this was happening! Right? /s
Pepsidog
(6,254 posts)Americas failure to lead the world with their crack-pot fake scientists. I hate Fox, Murdoch and rw media.
marie999
(3,334 posts)I am glad that we won't be alive in 30 years. Unfortunately, we have great-grandchildren as young as 2. Their lives will be miserable at best. I feel sorry for the animals.