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human power wrote:
We pretty much need to cut climate-changing emissions by at least 75% over the next 15-20 years or risk being unable to reverse the worst (potential extinction) of climate change. We are already at CO2 levels that are putting us at risk and every year that we allow them to increase is another nail in our collective coffins.
You are absolutely correct here. The time for nonsense has long passed. We are now in a national emergency even if dunderheads like Inhofe don't see it. The deniers must be treated no differently from traitors, and the prescription offered by David Suzuki (to lock them all up, like the Holocaust deniers in Germany and the UK) strongly considered.
The deniers' appeal to the "harmful effects" to the economy is also egregious. They are assuming that leaving global warming unchecked will be a minor cost. In fact, all the evidence points to it being a major one. One UK study last year estimated the cost of doing nothing at more than $2 trillion over the next 25 years.
It is a grievous misstatement to assert there must inevitably be massive costs and sacrifice to rectify global warming. I suggest deniers (as on this forum) get hold of The Wall Street Journal, April 8, the Op-Ed page for the article Climate Change Opportunity by Fred Krupp. Krupp notes that “Solving global warming will be an added cost – but a bargain compared to the economic costs of unchecked climate change. And fixing this problem will create an historic economic opportunity”
Krupp even goes so far as to say that whoever solves the problem to find suitable sources of clean energy will make a “megafortune”. Indeed, Europe has already shown the way to green profits in many respects. The trick is to get on board sooner than later, because the longer the delay the greater the inevitable costs for transfer in the end.
Prognostications from the Global Climate Modeling (GCM) project disclose a projected increase in Arctic surface temperature over the next century of five degrees Celsius. This is a critical threshold, especially as the Arctic is our “icebox” – if it “defrosts” the whole planet is in for it. In addition, as the late Carl Sagan has pointed out (see his essay, 'Ambush - the Warming of the World', p. 98, in Billions and Billions, Random House, 1997) the threshold for unstoppable warming change is 6 Celsius.
It it time to get serious, as I said. What is more important, the abominable "free speech" of the deniers, or the salvation of the people of this planet - who in a few short years will see how bad it gets when power grids go down like tenpins, and the fires we now behold in CA are occurring nationwide. At least where the floods aren't washing commnities away!
