Roresishms

A Virtual World of Live Pictures.

If it’s going to come, everyone wants to know when. “It” couldn’t mean climate change itself, because that has been here and growing for nearly five decades. I think “it” must mean some kind of plateau in the development of climate change where everything starts to go to hell. Whatever it means, no one really knows the answer because this is our first walk down this surreal path, but some educated guesses might provide some useful insight.

The “it” thing seems to have a lot to do with how we have organized ourselves in a society. I say that because the interwoven connections of a globalized economy and culture make them more susceptible to disruption from extreme weather events. An extreme weather event can cause devastating damage wherever it occurs, but that damage will likely be minor compared to what will happen when people in areas repeatedly hit by extreme weather events lose their last hope that climate change can be stopped. and start migrating to other parts of the country, by the millions. The place they leave will go out of business for lack of their presence, and their destination cities will be overwhelmed by their numbers. The Gulf Coast with its hurricanes (87 million) or the Southwest with its drought and forest fires (28 million) seem very susceptible to this scenario.

No one really knows when the really damaging parts of climate change will show up. The scientific community continually tweaks their predictions, and the dates are always getting closer as they express surprise at how much faster things have developed than they originally thought. To make my crystal ball estimates, I have used a very simple approach. The tops of the lines that have been added each year to the global temperature graph have established an angle of increase. By placing a ruler along the top of those lines, I was able to approximate the angle and extend the line well beyond the last year shown on the graph. The exercise tells me that if the annual temperature rise continues to grow at the same rate as it has for the last twenty years, the increase to date (so far 0.6ºC) will double to 1.2ºC by 2026. What that could mean in terms of the actual consequences are not so easy. Tornadoes increased from 7,000 per decade to more than 21,000 as that 0.6C rise unfolded. Does that mean that doubling the temperature will also double that result to 42,000 tornadoes? Could be.

Is 0.6ºC of additional heat a lot? Yes it is. So much so that reaching that number guarantees that all the ice on the planet will melt, and short of huge, planet-wide engineering programs that could “clean” the extra CO2 out of the atmosphere and sequester it underground, there is nothing. we can do about it, but wait for it to happen. Feeling skeptical, I get it, but consider the significance of something that has already happened: The temperature graph I’ve been using to tell the future tells us for sure that it’s been warming for almost two decades (2009) – that’s a lot. enough to be called a trend. Over the same time period, the total amount of ice on earth has been declining, as annual snowfall on polar ice caps and glaciers has been insufficient to replace the ice that melted during that year. That is also a trend. The trend is more heat, less ice. Add to that the fact that the extra CO2 we produce that is causing this trend will remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years and will have a trend that will continue, indefinitely, well past the time when the last bucket of carbon melts. ice.

(Peer-reviewed research, which supports the claims made in this factoid, can be found on the website)

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