By Terry Field
With
the change in regime in Washington, a dam has broken concerning climate change. The scientific and
eco-marketing community have become a little more emboldened, and there is more
assertion in public concerning a reality that may overtake human and non-human
life. In addition, there is a new dawning awareness by some in the chatterati
that not only are these accelerating climate changes becoming ever-more
difficult to cope with, but that there may be an unavoidable end point that is
incompatible with advanced much remaining mammalian and other advanced life on
earth. Quite clearly, were such to be experienced, would exclude any future for
human life in any sort of scale at all.
I heard Secretary Kerry suggest that there may not be
time to do anything meaningful. Such public utterance from the
near – top of government of the United States is unprecedented. He is clearly
listening to the real, not the politically moderated science coming out of the
UN IPCC information washing-machine.
The
realities have been well reported by serious science for well over twenty
years, and in the last decade, a sea of ever-more alarming data and conclusions
has emerged from the universities and institutes of the world.
The
sum of the research is portentous, dreadful. A few of the realities can be
described in the following, but there is much more, and none of it even
slightly good:
1.
Some of the many positive feed backs that accelerate and intensify the changes
are triggered now and cannot be reversed.
2
Some feed-back loops have not been fully triggered, and if they are then very
rapid severe climate change will entirely destroy human civilisation, by way of
starvation and crop failure on a global scale, along with any form of order and
much advanced life as the planet becomes rapidly desert with far less
vegetation coverage.
3
Species collapse accelerates as species interdependence condemns total loss of
large groups if mutually supporting species of even small numbers are removed
from the system.
4 There
is very little ‘biomass’ left that is not agriculture. There is very little
mammalian life left now when compared to 100 years ago, and of that, what is
left is in large measure domesticated for human farming usage. Genetic
variation is greatly reduced, nearly everywhere.
5. It
is probable that, for much of the effect, there is a 50 year lag between
greenhouse gas emissions and the effect felt in atmosphere. Not 10 years as the
IPCC suggests.
6. The
September arctic will be ice free in 2-3 years, not in 70 years from now as per
the IPCC. This adds 25-30 years of COP2 emissions in its effect on climate
change.
7. Methane
release is rapidly accelerating, may pause and
cause super rapid heating. NOT modelled by the IPCC.
8. It is not enough even to entirely cease CO2
output to avoid catastrophic decline in livable condition across the planet.
CO2 needs to be abstracted, in vast quantities, from atmosphere.
9. As of today, we are 1.56 degrees C
above preindustrial temperatures defined properly as 1750, and as it WAS
before the IPCC cynically moved the date to a pre-industrial of 1900! Since
when was 1900 pre-industrial?!? El Nino alone will make that + 1.85 in three or
so years. SO much for the nonsense coming from the UN climate politics
department UN of saying that below 1.5 C is the objective for 2100. Marketing
liars do not change physical reality.
10.
None of the above is yet known in general human society. Populations simply
have no idea, or where there is some dim knowledge, are taught it is nonsense,
or behave to pretend continuity is possible. The nine points above are the tip
of the informational iceberg, all of which reinforces the central message. The
hydrocarbon mass-human population society is not viable as it is, and one way
or other will be greatly reduced in total scale, or functionally removed, and
in relatively short order.
I
cannot be bothered to discuss if this general ‘scene’ is ‘true’, and anyone who
wants to do so must find another ear to listen to them. For me, the issues are
simple. IF, and that is now not at all certain, this horror can be diminished
to allow us to live reduced lives with reduced numbers, what must be done? Not
what can be done in conventional terms, not what do we feel like doing, not
what our third-rate, ecologically illiterate left / right political divisions
can imagine our doing. Simply, what MUST be done to survive at all.
That
is easy to state. Here are some of the bullet points. Execution details are
irrelevant here; they are for the groups able to plan and perform.
- Cease all military production and activity. In
every country. Immediately. Transfer the effort and the resources to carbon
capture and storage. Carbon dioxide and methane needs to be removed from
atmosphere. That vast industrial enterprise needs to be commenced NOW. Today.
At the time of writing. ALL nations need to disarm rapidly totally permanently.
That 7,000 year old cycle of self-abuse needs to end NOW. All essentially
‘tribal’ foreign policy matters tending to disagreement need to be dealt with,
and ALL societies need to remove conflicting claims on all matters that
generate disagreement. That is a luxury that will rapidly kill us all if we do
not stop NOW and re-direct our fast-diminishing available resources.
-
Offer science and the best scientists the globe can provide
control of event planning, needed resource allocation and direction of
action. To do this all political systems will have to surrender dangerous
bigotries of politically blinkered people, found in every parochial society in
every country on earth, be they ‘right wing, left wing, ‘greens’, Greenpeace,
and all other flavours of local bigotry born of ignorance. Even with this, to
achieve anything concerning mitigating climate catastrophe, the clear
objectives need to be agreed. If it is to re-establish and maintain, for
instance, CO2 levels at 280 ppm, then ALL nation states of significance on
earth must explicitly state their agreement with this. They should also agree a
time frame. Which in present circumstances needs to be decades not hundreds of
years. No objective, no agreement, no directing science, no success. The
result. Mass death in a few decades. Or earlier.
Details
are not for here. The actions needed will themselves remove the possibility of
democratic social order, will directly result in enormous numbers of human
dead, but that is now unavoidable. It is the lesser of the two evils. The
intention should be simply to allow the human and other equally important
species to survive in a world we recognise. All governments will need to direct
and control societies as they quickly diminish in numbers in dreadful
circumstances. To pretend otherwise, to suggest all can be done in steady-state
human populations is simply to lie. To self-delude.
Where are we now? How big the gap?
IN
all societies there is the assertion slight changes can ‘do the trick’. That is
a simple lie.
Slight
change condemns our living offspring to early death. Starvation, war, collapse,
cannibalistic societies, mass slaughter all will roll across the globe in a
totally uncontrolled, unmanageable way if the present ideas of current
politicians prevail. An illustration. Biden has Kerry saying it may be too late
to act. That same administration, however, spends, today, 2 trillion dollars making Americans able to buy MORE, to survive
in immense comfort BETTER, to BEAT COVID (John Wayne like), to RECOVER
PROSPERITY.
That is a knife in the guts of even denting climate
change. Since these aided Americans will spend and not save their Bidenloot,
the effect on the climate is Worse than giving 2 trillions to 10 multi
billionaires, since they would simply save, reserve, park the asset, and not
consume more goods directly. After all, how many yachts, aircraft and
private islands does a fellow need? Once they are acquired, the palate becomes
jaded. The idea that social equality and the removal of global poverty reduces
the risk of severe climate change is a nice conceit, but in reality, is it
fantasy. Adding low-level primitive consumer power to five or more billion
previously marginal-living people does nothing to preserve any part of the
biosphere. Overlaying political and social preferences on climate physics is a
bizarre form of self-delusion. Despite the chorus of cries to the contrary.
That most readers will laugh at these last few
sentences should cause them to pause, to think and to reflect. Their laughter
simply confirms that local political deeply held preferences, relevant to
steady state societies in comfortable unthreatened times. That is far from the case
now. Social preferences are a deep impediment to rational thinking when it
comes to thinking about climate problem.
As for the Biden stimulus, well, in terms only of
climate change and confronting it, it really is entertainment for people who
live their lives without reflection.
And what is nice Mr Biden also doing? He is
also creating hypersonic missiles, vast space war systems, vast naval weapons
platforms, millions of battlefield drones, robot-soldiers, the list goes on and
on. It is all simply more of the same. SO stopping the military machines today?
What chance? You can work that one out.
I hear central bank governors saying an ‘electrified
world’ is the answer. People will be consuming 1/8th the carbon
of their ancestors.
Maybe fifty years ago I would have worked. Now? Well,
they are amusing, and should perhaps be on the stage. Where will the gigantic
tonnage of burnt energy needed to construct such a vast universal electrified
world in all continents go as it is burned? Into the atmosphere! Into the seas!
Complete fantasy, pretending physics
does not exist. Mr. Carney (then Bank of
England governor) said this and did not deny his probable move from Bank
governor to politician. So he invents a palatable fanciful scenario that may
also propel his career. Yet this is the best our hopeless ‘leadership’ can
manage!
Even
with his obviously political positioning, this ex-global banker is ahead of
nearly ALL others now in power! AT least he began with a narrative that there
is a dire problem. He just flunked everything after that.
The choices will be simple. Change
and reduce our scale, our numbers, our total damage to the earth before
catastrophe is clearly here. That means doing it now. Not tomorrow. Or wait,
then watch the wave of horror overtake us with, then, no prospect of affecting
the outcome.
From
what I know, I think we are well beyond the point where we can slow the change to a decertified, hot-state world. A world that will
remain like that for hundreds of thousands of years. Where the cycle of the ice
ages is removed and deferred. Where desertification is the face of the earth
save for thin bands of reduced vegetation in the two
tropics, and at the poles.
Unfortunately,
now, every single politician possessed of real power spends ALL his or her time
working to actively avoid anything that must be done, indeed what HAS to be
done in order to give us and all other life a slightly greater chance of
surviving and reproducing into the future.
I end, therefore, with a
repetition. To slow or stop this global mass death of plants, insects, mammals,
and other life, we need to see our numbers and our economic activity rapidly
plummet. By billions of people. Yet at the time we add one billion mouths every
15 years. We try to reverse course, our effort should be to create technology
for sucking vast quantities of greenhouse gas from atmosphere. Democracy,
floating on the final century of excess, is done. It cannot begin to survive
what is to come, even in the next quarter of a century, nor should it. Details
of how to try to save complex life are for the best, the brightest, and future
autocratic brutal coercive governments single function is to support the
scientists and engineers and to protect them as they battle against
probability to try to succeed. Just as the brute power of Napoleon entrenched
the feeble French revolution, so brute power is needed now to facilitate the
heroes of the day – scientists – engineers, as they are finally allowed to do
what MUST be done.
Or
our grandchildren and perhaps great grandchildren will die in unimaginable
horror.
Terry,
France, Ventose, 2021
