With the Paris Agreement into effect, and the North Dakota Pipeline being built despite heavy opposition from the inhabitants, I think it’s high time to create a mega topic that allows for continuous discussion on the urgency of combatting Anthropogenic Climate Disruption and the fate of the Fossil Fuel Industry as a whole.
This could be the most important discussion of all of humanity, for the situation is getting dire. FFI were pouring money into elections and proposition to save their own existence; while scientists claims that, if nothing is done, this will be the last century for humanity.
I want to continue this discussion because it’s very well a deciding factor of the fate of mankind.
I had not heard this claim?!? Can you find a link for it! That’s quite alarming to think about, all of us being gone by the end of the decade.
I do agree it’s a deciding factor for all of us, but I had thought it was more a situation where weather patterns get increasingly unstable, leading to more “natural” disasters (which as we know, there is no such thing).
Where I live it’s been literally months since we had rain. Like, I think maybe it sprinkled once here this summer and nothing since.
For the record, I do think it’s our biggest global, collective issue that is going to be a danger to us all. And we (as in the US) is the furthest behind on directly addressing it. I don’t doubt that it will impact the world unevenly and the people best able to cope with climate change are going to be the rich and connected. They will be more easily able to move. But I think that’s only a short term solution for them. We saw a major preview of that reality in New Orleans and the gulf coast in 2005.
I think it helps us to be more alarmist about it, actually, because it’s an alarming situation. Even in a best case scenario, we have to worry about large scale human displacement and major ecological changes that will impact our food and clean water supply. I think that will impact both the third world and the working classes in the first world first.
One of the things that surprises me is the kind of “steady as she goes” mentality. We will need to make some adjustments, of course, but humanity’s future is secure and we can avert serious consequences without really affecting our lifestyle. The same people are often alarmist about the development of places like China and India, with their insatiable appetite for energy. Why shouldn’t they have the same luxuries as we do, especially if they produce them? Where I lived, it got down to -25 C or so for a few months, and up to 40 C for a few months. Why shouldn’t people who live there have air conditioning, fridges, heating, cars, foreign holidays etc.? Sure, it will have serious effects on the environment and it’s unsustainable, but that doesn’t stop us.
On the other hand, I do think it’s alarmist to say that humanity is at risk of ending in the next hundred years or so. It will be very uncomfortable, conditions may well get worse and many people may well die (including in our own families – we are all more vulnerable than we’d like to think), but I think it will take a lot more than that for humans to go extinct completely.
Still though, I get the feeling that many people expect change to happen slowly and predictably, or that there is any precedent in human history for the last couple of hundred years, or the next.
In the Arctic, vast amounts of carbon are stored in soils that are now still largely frozen. As temperatures continue to rise and soils thaw, much of this carbon will be converted by microbes into carbon dioxide or methane, adding further greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
In addition, vast amounts of methane are stored in sediments under the Arctic Ocean seafloor, in the form of methane hydrates and free gas. As temperatures rise, these sediments can get destabilized, resulting in eruptions of huge amounts of methane from the seafloor. Due to the abrupt character of such releases and the fact that many seas in the Arctic Ocean are shallow, much of the methane will then enter the atmosphere without getting broken down in the water.
What makes the situation so dangerous is that huge eruptions from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean can happen at any time. We can just count ourselves lucky that it hasn’t happened as yet. As temperatures continue to rise, the risk that this will happen keeps growing.
I have, quite literally, been having nightmares about this exact scenario on and off for the last three months. Waking in the middle of the night, drenched with sweat, unable to get back to sleep, the works.
And I know I have a tendency to jump at shadows, but with the recent reports of the ‘mysterious arctic ping’, I can’t help but wonder if it might be the sound of the methane deposits starting to thaw.
But what I overlooked in my preparatory reading — perhaps because I wasn’t equipped to feel it myself — was the grief that underpins Dark Mountain. Most festival-goers appeared to have spent their working lives as professional green activists. They weren’t, as Kingsnorth observed to me later, ‘floaty poets’: they were doers, founders of eco-villages, picketers of building works. And as one man who used to develop organic recycling systems told me: ‘We failed.’ The value of Dark Mountain was, he said, psychological. It was a way to cope.
It’s been obvious for many decades, if you directly examine the Mauna Loa and polar ice core datasets.
And while climate change is just one symptom of pollution, and fossil fuels are just one source of pollution, it’s the best point of attack for individual activism toward species survival. Vote with your dollars, choose the least damaging economic options even if that means you have to pay more.
The clathrate gun was always a low-probability hypothesis, and as far as I’m aware the recent research on that particular risk suggests that it probably won’t happen.
We are totally fucked, though. But it won’t be that quick and easy.
