Thursday, January 8, 2015

There is no Middle Ground

In an article today on climate change (http://tinyurl.com/pfmw6ke) by Christina Nunez, a figure is reprinted which shows our problem with horrifying detail:

Graphs of unburnable coal, gas, and oil

These are the reserves of fossil fuel that must be left in the ground by 2050 if we want to stay at the warming of 2 degrees C.already pre-determined by inaction.  And then, to get a feeling for the idiocy out there, look at the Comments on  this article. My God. As the writer stated: "Your friends are not climate scientists, they are weathermen".

 So is this at all possible and if so how can it be done? My answer to the first question is simply "no" and that makes  meaningless the second question. But my friends tell me that I am too pessimistic, so lets explore this a little. First of all, the response must involve every country on earth and I do not believe that this can  be accomplished for anything, not to speak of an action that will cause enormous problems for most countries, especially when there are a large  number of people who deny that the problem actually exists.

An anecdotal personal story illustrates the problem in a small way: I decided to disinvest my retirement accounts from fossil fuel stocks, which would crash all at once when they could not be removed from the earth and lost all value. When I asked my financial advisor, he looked incredulous and then laughed, saying it was not possible since my retirement accounts were mainly in mutual funds which contained multiple types of stocks and bonds and on which the solitary investor has no influence at all. And  he said "We are out to make money, not to save the world". There are a very few "green" mutuals but they are only tokens.

Some obvious  possible answers would be to immediately mandate solar power on every roof of every house world-wide, to begin government sponsored  mega-projects to recover wind energy, tidal energy and thermal energy and to construct "smart" electric grids to handle this type of distributed energy. Combined with these projects would be government mandates to immediately stop exploring for new fossil fuels and to stop using existing ones and completely move over to renewables.  And finally comes the ultimate undoable project - to immediately stop population increase in every country on earth by controlling the number of offspring. Otherwise no matter what is done, the exponentially  increasing number of people will just eat it up.

And there is no middle  ground. That would be the same as not doing anything, it will just postpone the horror by a little. Bioengineering is currently not feasible. Of course the warming might be slowed down by increasing light-blocking aerosols in the atmosphere or by doing what I suggested in my Blog - of bringing a asteroid into the Lagrange Point between the earth and the sun, large enough to block only around 5% of the sunlight which is enough to prevent warming. But neither would prevent the ongoing CO2-caused acidification of  the world's oceans which would kill the food chain and thereby cause enormous starvation and mass migrations.

As it is, we are heading towards  a runaway warming leading to a Venus-like planet which can not sustain any life at all.
          No there is just no middle ground.



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