Fossil Fuel Emissions

What will it take for society to make the deep-rooted changes required to prevent the terrifying and awesome threat of climate breakdown? This summer’s extreme weather events are simply a prelude to a rising tide of chaos that will be punctuated by cataclysmic individual events – floods, heatwaves, superstorms – of increasing severity and frequency. How long before people demand radical action from governments? Or, and this is what is really needed, how long until citizens remove corporate-captured governments from power and introduce genuine democracy?

A recent UK newspaper headline read “The World’s On Fire,” which is literally true as extraordinary continent-wide wildfires consume the planet, accompanied by unbearable, insufferable, oppressive heat. Europe, North America, Japan, and North Africa are all experiencing unprecedented scorching heat.
All of which begs the question of when anthropogenic, or human-caused, global warming will be recognized as a reality by America, the second biggest contributor of greenhouse gases (GHG).

Three monster climatic events are currently shaping up to collide. It’ll be like an asteroid collision. In that regard, this article, in two parts, explores real, already happening, indisputable climate change that is starting to take down ecosystems throughout the biosphere. It’s happening now.

Stuart Scott of Climate Matters.TV recently interviewed Dr. Peter Wadhams, emeritus professor, Polar Ocean Physics, Cambridge University and author of the acclaimed highly recommended: A Farewell To Ice (Oxford University Press, 2017).
In response to the question “what’s your assessment of the state of the climate,” Dr. Wadhams replied:

In a recent article titled “Challenges for Resolving Complex Conflicts“, I pointed out that existing conflict theory pays little attention to the extinction-causing conflict being ongoingly generated by human over-consumption in the finite planetary biosphere (and, among other outcomes, currently resulting in 200 species extinctions daily).

Harken!  A Trump appointee agrees that climate change is not a hoax. Granted, that is unimaginable, but it is the real thing. An ongoing climate crisis in America’s Southwest brings this rare specimen into the limelight.
The climate crisis star of the year is Brenda Burman, commissioner of The Bureau of Reclamation, a division of the Department of Interior, who, in her confirmation hearings, said: “I believe that climate change is not a hoax.” After all, in her youth she did serve as a park ranger at Grand Canyon National Park; she’s an outdoors-person.

Ten years ago Kevin J. Surace delivered a fascinating TED talk entitled “Worst Case Climate Change.”
Based upon credits at the end of his speech, data for his talk came from the following sources:

Ever wonder how the classical philosophers/economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo would view today’s credo of infinite economic growth, forever more, above and beyond yesteryear.  Well, in a word, they would be horrified. Ricardo, similar to the father of capitalism Adam Smith, believed in the concept of a “stationary state” when the land gets fully exploited and material progress comes to an end.

Oh, what fun it truly was to experience the “bomb cyclone” in January in New England: the snowfall gave a sense of peace and calm, the winds were less strong than predicted, and the snow, while heavy, was not dense enough to take down trees and power lines in most areas. The following period of intense cold through February and March in the eastern half of the US, on the other hand, seems a harbinger of climate instability which will most likely worsen in upcoming years.