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THE PLANET IS EMITTING GHG – it’s called FEEDBACK & it accounts for 85% of NEW emissions
The planet is in self-destruct mode and actively in the process of obliterating all life without ANY further worsening of the problem by mankind.
We need to seriously consider that, say, since it’s too late to build a hood over the entire arctic to capture methane, Government may simply realize the overwhelming intractability of our fate and can do nothing more than try to keep people calm for as long as possible. Knowing full well that not only is the bunker crowd not going to make it, but also any attempted remedy like global dimming is going to result at the very least in a similar if not worse fate than we already face. And, yeah, they know the pie in the sky year of 2100 is malarky – its all going to be done and dusted well before that, as in the next 10 to 15 years.
Peter Carter:
“Peter Carter's main point seems to be that people aren't aware of the significance of feedback loops. I'll add a little bit to that. I'm a retired professor of mathematics; I taught calculus dozens of times. Feedback loops cause exponential acceleration. You don't need to know the equations for that, but just to impress people, here they are, from second semester calculus: The solution of the equation p'(t) = kp(t) is p(t) = p(0)exp(kt). A lot of our society has been misusing the word "exponential" -- they seem to think that it just means "big." It's much bigger than just "big." It gets bigger and bigger, faster and faster, and it doesn't level off until the cause of the feedback is gone. In our case that would be when all the trees have burned, all the ice has melted, all the phytoplankton has died -- but by then all the people will have died too. Look in Wikipedia or in Google Images for the graph of exponential growth -- the curve goes off the diagram at the top instead of on the right, because it grows too fast to exit on the right.
Carter keeps saying "in the year 2100." I think that's a mistake. I'm not a climatologist, but I can see trends. Bigger and bigger, faster and faster, means that we're already seeing some crop failures and I expect to see them growing quickly; I'm guessing worldwide famine by 2030. Or maybe by 2024, now that NATO is preventing Russia from exporting grain and fertilizer to poor countries. Anyway, talking about the year 2100 doesn't get people excited.-- that date is so far away that most people don't think about it. I'm already 72 years old, and I imagine Carter is of a similar age; neither of us would live to see 2100 even if there were no war or climate change. Heck, even my children wouldn't live to see 2100. Talk about 2030. Faster and faster.
16:15 "... so these feedbacks being triggered and spewing out greenhouse gases alone, that's a dire dire emergency that any sane intelligent civilization or society would say 'okay we've got to get on that right away,' you know, we've got to really hit that, and do whatever we can, you know, to control that, stop it, mitigate it -- but it's not happening"
-- that brief excerpt includes the word "we" three times. That may be the biggest problem, and climatologists aren't talking about it: We have to get more people saying "we." This spaceship carrying us all has just one life-support system, and if WE don't fix it, WE are all going to die. Poorer countries first, of course, but the rest of us close behind.
23:33 "The absolute main thing that governments must be made aware of is the existence of these feedbacks and the state of the feedbacks."
I would say instead that
the absolute main thing that climate activists and the general public must be made aware of is that GOVERNMENTS AREN'T LISTENING and are not about to start listening. They haven't listened for decades, and there's no reason in sight why they should be about to change. Look at all the fossil fuel lobbyists who show up at the COPs. The governments have been trading bribes with the fossil fuel companies for decades and they're not about to change that.
No, they have changed a little, they're replacing outright denial with greenwashing, which is still a way of lying, still a way of postponing doing anything about the problem.
The rich and powerful will only listen to the rich and powerful. They have no respect for anyone else, and they are only interested in what makes them more rich and powerful. They cannot plan for the future, because they must focus on the short-term private profits that will keep them in power one more day.
And CLIMATE ACTIVISTS AREN'T LISTENING to, or talking about, these economic / political arguments. I think that's because they don't want to risk their reputations. When they talk about climate, they are backed up by their expertise and the certainty of physics, and they feel safe there. But it's not enough for them to be saying "here are the physical measures we need to take." They also need to be asking WHY those measures aren't being taken. It's not possible to answer that question as scientifically as you can answer questions about climate; there are no real "experts" on this matter. Ethical politics means acting on what you believe to be true, even when you do not have absolute, scientific certainty about it.
So put down your climate diagrams and pick up a placard that says "end the profit system -- it's killing us all."”
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