For many years, Deep Green Resistance has argued that it’s not “too late” to stop global warming, because scientific predictions for the future never assume that emissions may fall to zero. Now, science has backed up our assertion.
The following is excerpted from a longer article by Bob Berwyn, published on Inside Climate News, and re-posted here with permission from the author.
This is, in our estimation, the most important climate change story of the decade.
by Bob Berwyn / Inside Climate News
Recent research shows that stopping greenhouse gas emissions will break the vicious cycle of warming temperatures, melting ice, wildfires and rising sea levels faster than expected just a few years ago.
There is less warming in the pipeline than we thought, said Imperial College (London) climate scientist Joeri Rogelj, a lead author of the next major climate assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“It is our best understanding that, if we bring down CO2 to net zero, the warming will level off. The climate will stabilize within a decade or two,” he said. “There will be very little to no additional warming. Our best estimate is zero.”
The widespread idea that decades, or even centuries, of additional warming are already baked into the system, as suggested by previous IPCC reports, were based on an
“unfortunate misunderstanding of experiments done with climate models that never assumed zero emissions.”
Another recent article, this one in Columbia Journalism Review, quotes climate scientist Michael Mann discussing this new science:
Scientists used to “treat carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as if it was a simple control knob that you turn up” and temperatures climb accordingly, “but in the real world we now know that’s not what happens,” Mann said. Instead, if humans “stop emitting carbon right now … the oceans start to take up carbon more rapidly.” The actual lag effect between halting CO2 emissions and halting temperature rise, then, is not 25 to 30 years but, per Mann, “more like three to five years.”
All of this reflects a critical understanding. Climate change is a symptom. It is not the root problem. A doctor who treats only symptoms of an illness, without addressing the underlying root cause, can never expect to cure the disease.
The same is true of global warming. The root cause of global warming is the contradiction between civilization and the natural world. More simply, our relationship with nature is broken. This root cause must be addressed if we wish to solve the ecological crisis. This research shows what we have long known to be true: global warming should not be our focus. Rather, we should focus on halting the destruction of the natural world. If we do this successfully, the climate will heal.
As with disease, addressing the root cause is the way to fundamentally resolve an illness.
Let’s hope this is true. But whether it is or not, we can also remove C02 from the atmosphere by massive forest and grasslands restoration. If crimes against nature (deforestation and fossil fuel use being the principal offenders) were correctly recognized and punished as murder, we would quickly be on the road to global recovery.
yes.
exactly!
Climate Disruption is not the only looming consequence of our psychosociopathic eco-cidal cronyCorpiratist dominator cult-ure
Emissions-reduction may be the path of greatest resistance – due to sheer habituation and petulance
All of the solutions identified by Project DrawDown have social and economic and ecological benefits quite apart from their potential effect on climate.
Our hyper-consumptive hyper-emissive culture is well past its best-before date.
DeGrowth,
DeIndustrialization of monocrop agriculture
Doughnut Ecnonomics
De-colonization
DeepAdaptation
in various permutations are required regardless of their climate effects
Thanks for commenting and mentioning Project DrawDown. I hadn’t heard of it until now. I am interested in possible realistic solutions that are not afraid of the N word.
Sorry to say most science is clueless as to the real cause of global warming, its significance or how to reverse it. We’re going down a slippery slope.
… He says without the slightest whisper of evidence or coherent compelling argumentation…
As soon as the billionaires around the world start losing their waterfront mansions we will see some real action.
I also think that, just as there are negative climate feedback loops, there will be positive regenerative feedback as we start healing some of the broken parts of our global ecosystem. I’ve been starting to explore this idea with a few future oriented scientists.
No matter whether we have a chance or not, we must, as scientists have demanded years ago, transform our whole way of producing and consuming at a speed like in world war times…
Though, the difference to the world war situations is that in world wars huge fortunes could and can be earned by the material battles (in a way it’s a kind of ‘planned obsolescence’); wars were and are completely in the sense of capital systems to produce and sell as many products as possible, which have only a short life span or durability, as well as after the destructions everything has to be rebuilt or produced, can be sold anew….
For the fight against the climatic disaster the effect of capital systems, the compulsive financial generation would have to be completely abolished and turned around.. as if every customer gets out more money for his purchase than he has in his wallet or wants to pay, so that producers and business owners are not tempted to sell as much as possible to gain a competitive advantage….
Only through the global networking, mainly on the basis of the digital systems, can the extreme competition that monetary systems exert on today’s determinant production & distribution structure, respectively on these companies [https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2012/full_list/index.html] or [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_revenue] and respective financial holding & banks, be resolved…
In fact, the seemingly impossible would have to be achieved, that those consciously take leave of the monetary constraints.. otherwise it comes to the collapse, in many respects, which means very probably the end of mankind…
One must also imagine, if the big software companies pick this up and lay the foundation, how fast an implementation could be initiated… and if people worldwide understand, accept and make it their task, to want higher life forms to remain here… then it would be a matter of months….
There is simply no choice but to try to make the seemingly impossible possible, or to give up life on this planet….
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Survival war measures of Humanity – Our last ditch hope !
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ti5jw_EJbqejWg9LeSnD7ifRdDdSB-9ZeZl86INQmHs/edit?usp=sharing]