Judgment was delivered on Monday, April 4: the judgment on whether this world of ours will live or die.
That is, the third and final part – the summary – of the massive review by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was published, in the name of 195 governments.
Publication had been delayed by hours of wrangling late into the Sunday night between the scientists and some of the governments, notably Saudi Arabia, India, and China. No wonder. Much more coal and oil must be left in the ground.
Are governments jumping to comply? At present, in response to rising fuel prices and dependence on Russian gas, many, including the US, UK, and EU, are planning to do the opposite.
“They [governments that claim to be on track for climate targets] are lying.” United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterrez.
The other main things are that investment in clean energy must go up sixfold; that we must consume less; and that poor countries must get financial help if they are to cope and cooperate.
When must all this start? Yesterday! Greenhouse gas emission must peak by 2025.
“It’s now or never.” Jim Skea, professor at Imperial College London, co-chair of the working group that prepared the report.
I’m stating it somewhat more simply than the Guardian article, which has some nuances about the time frame and inevitability.
Morning Star
Venus is now rising about an hour and three quarters before sunrise.
Ancient and mediaeval people, for whom this glorious lamp personified love and fertility, and who celebrated her with ardent poetry, were spared the knowledge that our sister planet is a dead hell, the ultimate victim of greenhouse heating. If there was ever a civilization on Venus, it is now ashes.
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This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
I’ve become a glass half empty sort of fellow.It’ll die I’m afraid and this is why we don’t see evidence of life anywhere in space because like us the burn up the resources of their planets putting the needs motor vehicles first and the have nowhere to go.They might lie to themselves for a bit with fake futureism like we do….”we’ll go and live on Mars!”Or the media favorite at the moment nuclear fusion is just around the corner….the same corner it was behind 75 years ago?!But then maybe come to realize that even if you could get to Mars,or their equivalent,it couldn’t sustain anything more than a tiny population.They only way I see around the problem is A/never invent the car,B/having two Earth like planets in one star system and even that assumes one is unhabited at least that gives you longer to figure out how to travel between stars within a human,or alien, lifetime.
a lovely illustration of a scene supplementing this dire warm of impending doom
Susan Solomon of MIT and late of NOAA says the carbon already in the atmosphere will be there for 1,000 years give or take. It appears to me that 1.5 degrees C is a fait accompli and we need to figure out the best mitigation and adaptation strategies.