2050, 2050, 2050!! 2050?..More precision is becoming steadily more possible for pinpointing the date at which it will be "too late" for life, as we know it, on planet Earth. We are not talking about the period by which we need to dramatically brake industrial capitalism in order to maintain our living ecosystem, but the point at which our failure to do so will bear startling, fatal consequence. Think of this as the concise period of impact, the short sharp splat of unconscious arrogance meeting concrete wall - terminal fate after headlong, inhuman freefall. Such is cumulated wisdom to date. The objective, of course, is to rally effective global economic intervention as soon as possible before this date. i.e. Starting today! Our species survival depends critically upon identifying this oh so real-timeframe. Within it, no other human activity has meaning that can last. Let us focus. We seek an answer to these fundamental questions: Where is global warming heading, as a symptom of what? What? - gross mammalian extinction, from catastrophic anthropogenic photosynthesis shutdown (loss of oxygen). Similar effect extincted the dinosaurs, attributed to asteroid impact so clouding the atmosphere as to exclude sufficient sunlight for years - 'nuclear winter'. Ice age follows the event, while organic life reconfigures its mass and chemical environment. Why? - human consciousness has not progressed far enough to save itself, remaining materially deluded for just too long. Top level evolution gets set back millions of years. How? - to fix it, use the Internet to coordinate awareness and readiness for economic change, to evolve production and ourselves in time for continued species advancement. Who? - everyone combined, of one egalitarian purpose, for the first time, can turn this around. When? - 2050, earlier or later, is beyond too late. Evidence supporting this interpretation mounts daily. While '2050' represents mostly a common projection date for much scientific modelling and analysis, the news it returns is consistently bad. So let us read it accurately.. Big-Fish Stocks Fall 90 Percent Since 1950, Study Says [National Geographic News 15May03], 'Only 50 years left' for sea fish and Sayonara, sushi... Time could be running out for seafood [news.bbc.co.uk 2Nov06] says the news. NZ Penguin numbers in decline "remains a mystery.. are they starving because they're ill, or.. ill because they're starving"? [tvnz.co.nz Nov06]. Small ocean creatures filter and maintain water purity, helping stabilise foreshore soils too. Habitat destruction and pollution add to the pillaging that risks this foodchain. Carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is absorbed here, acidifying the water, which dissolves calcium shell and exoskeleton. The approximate date of 2050 has been forecast as when ocean life will be gone, which matches precisely when the human population curve will have peaked by - at c9 billion (from 6 in 2006) - inducing precipitous decline to well below Earth's sustainable population load, of 2-3 billion it is said. The drastic nature of this impending calamity is grasped, once we remember ourselves as fish that eons ago crawled out of the sea. Poisoning the primordial home is the poisoning of ourselves - literally and symbolically. This is the deep-level evolutionary fracture that humanity cannot survive: 'killing' the sea. Another species will, in our weakened moment, take up the carbon we have liberated and replace us. That is chemistry, and where the chain of raw life leads. Our evolutionary task is to cease being 'raw' in our joint social organisation, or to perish like dinosaurs - but amongst toxins of our own creation - so to feed new life. Anaerobic? Source of Half Earth's Oxygen Gets Little Credit: synthesised by ocean-surface phytoplankton. [news.nationalgeographic.com 7Jun04 - "According to one 2002 study.. phytoplankton concentrations have declined by as much as 30 percent in northern oceans since the early 1980s" - they are shifting from the poles to the equator and industrialised coastlines; Plankton Levels in the Ocean are Significantly Depleted The Starving Ocean fisherycrisis.com 02; Nines Years of Ocean Chlorophyll earthobservatory.nasa.gov 97-06]. Nov06 forecasts put complete Amazon Rain Forest destruction too as early as 2050: Loss of Amazon Rain Forest May Come Sooner Than Expected + Amazon destruction accelerating & Rainforest loss shocks Brazil + Deforestation in the Amazon FAQ & "Global warming could cause catastrophic die-off of Amazon rainforest by 2080" [nationalgeographic.com Jun01; news.bbc.co.uk + guardian.co.uk May05; mongabay.com Oct06; + Tropical Deforestation Fact Sheet NASA's Earth Observatory Library + Amazon Rainforest Wikipedia]. Oxygen itself is thus mortally threatened - and air-breathers like mammals along with it - when forest plant and sea plankton life loss are synchronised. Arctic sea ice 'faces rapid melt' "may be close to a tipping point that sees all-year-round ice disappear very rapidly in the next few decades, US scientists have warned.. American Geophysical Union.. Arctic may be free of all summer ice by as early as 2040.. 'open water absorbs more sunlight, further accelerating the rate of warming and leading to the loss of more ice'.. 'My gut feeling is that it might be around the year 2030 that we really see a rapid decline of that ice. Now could it occur sooner? It might well. Could it occur later? It might well'" [news.bbc.co.uk 12Dec06]. Melting of the ice pack on top of Greenland alone will add 20 feet to sea levels. The majority of glaciers worldwide are receding, including Antarctica's. Icebergs off the Canterbury NZ coast? - Unheard of! Yet fact: Icebergs just north of Banks Peninsula [tvnz.co.nz 15Dec06 + Giant icebergs land in glacial lake on land big melt 2Dec06]. Big area of Antarctica melted, satellite finds "in 2005 when temperatures warmed up for a week in the summer in a process that may accelerate invisible melting deep beneath the surface" [nzherald.co.nz 16May07]. Climate change brings early spring in the Arctic Independent 19Jun07 & Arctic summers ice-free 'by 2013' "In the end, it will just melt away quite suddenly" BBC 12Dec07 & Glaciers suffer record shrinkage "1.5 metres in 2006" 16Mar08. Joining the dots means seeing that sea expansion - added to by water heating as well as ice melt - will cover lowland Earth in biblical Flood. This will remove bulk vegetation, further escalating temperature rise - temporarily - cutting into oxygen supply: the 50/50 balance between ocean and atmospheric oxygen must be affected, causing what? The 'methane mega-burp'? - our 14C sea had risen to 30C millions of years ago causing one of these. And how will the ice/water weight shifts across ocean and continent affect techtonic plates? - Increased earthquakes and vulcanism? [Global warming to trigger volcanic eruptions, scientists warn ABC News 14Sep07; Melting Ice Sheets Can Cause Earthquakes, Study Finds National Geographic News 14Mar08] - More toxic fumes and tinder ignition. Fire would consume the last oxygen in the air. Evolution is reversed. Finally returns the big freeze, like never before. Life is starting over. |
Climate change impacts on fire weather "new study provides important new info about possible increased bushfire risk across south-east Australia.. climate change scenarios for 2020 & 2050" Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation CSIRO + Climate Change & its Impact on the Management of Bushfire "combination of climate, topography & vegetation in many areas of Australia, and in parts of NZ, combine to produce one of the most severe fire environments in the world" Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre BushfireCRC & Australasian Fire Authorities Council AFAC Melbourne + More bushfires - another likely product of climate change "under 2050 conditions there was an increase in bushfire risk of around 25 per cent compared to today, primarily driven by increased temperatures and lower atmospheric humidities.. simulated 2050 and 2100.. So it should not be interpreted that this terrible future only arrives in 2100 - it could easily happen in 2070 or 2060, within our own lifetimes.. The large-scale bushfires in the huge expanses of bush in the national parks, you probably can't stop those under the climate we model for 2050 and 2100" Macquarie Uni + Campaign against Climate Change /Au + Dec06 SthAu super-fires.. + Climate change warning for Sydney "city will become unsustainable.. life here could be completely transformed by the year 2070, if climate change goes unchecked" [news.bbc.co.uk 31Jan07]. This problem is only about energy, and its use and shifts by human beings: fuel; climatic. It is largely due to the individual fires that drivers control, and their unrestricted multiplication. There is no solution to it other than, in an organised manner, curtailing mass transport to a sufficient degree while emission-free technologies are substituted into the transport fleet. So it is a matter of rapid economic transformation alone, to the nature and systems of work operating globally. Let us start planning the transition. Even more significant are the inefficient and polluting protein sources that are cattle stock - it is us or them. China's Rare River Dolphin Now Extinct, Experts Announce: "'the goddess of the Yangtze'.. If [August] Pfluger's team is correct, the baiji will be the first large aquatic mammal to have gone extinct since hunting and overfishing killed off the Caribbean monk seal in the 1950s." [news.nationalgeographic.com 14Dec06]. Making every drop count - FAO heads UN water initiative "By 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world's population could be living under water stress conditions" fao.org 14Feb07 132 million in Asia 'face starvation' / Warming may cut harvests by 30% in 2050s "leading to skyrocketing food prices.. if fossil fuels continue to be consumed at the current rate.. The melting of glaciers in the Himalayas.. could threaten the life of more than 700 million people who rely on meltwater.. at the current speed, they will have almost vanished by 2035" Yomiuri Shimbun 29Mar07 + "95% of Japanese feel climate changes" Ten-year warming window closing "We could be seeing the carbon cycle feedback kicking in, which is good news for scientists because it shows our models are correct. But it's bad news for everybody else" smh.com.au 12May07. Polar ocean 'soaking up less CO2' "atmospheric CO2 levels may be higher in future than predicted.. The breakdown in efficiency of these sinks was an expected outcome, but not until the second half of the 21st Century..'They have remained the same as they were 24 years ago even though the emissions have risen by 40%'.. cause of the decline.. is a rise in windiness since 1958" news.bbc.co.uk 17May07 & Amazon carbon sink effect 'slows' 10Mar04. NZ Warm, dry May heads for the record book "12.6C, almost 2C higher than the average.. warmest Mays on record were.. 1962 (12.3C), 1999 (12.2C) and 1950 (12.1C).. also many sites around the country where lowest-ever rainfall records were likely to be set, mostly down the east coast" nzherald.co.nz 29May07 "Fact: If nothing is done to stop climate change, economic losses from extreme weather will be larger than global GDP, by 2065 ..next five years will prove decisive.. a short window of opportunity in which we need nothing less than a revolution" Our Approach The Climate Group 2007 Paper: Earth in Imminent Peril of Initiation of Devastating Sea-Level Rise "authors explicitly disagree with the conclusions of the IPCC, which forsees little or no contribution to 21st century sea-level rise from Greenland and Antarctica" greencarcongress.com 19Jun07 Independent - "a feasible strategy for planetary rescue almost surely requires a means of extracting greenhouse gases from the air" & The fragile planet: Thoughts of a green prophet "If you ask what you are going to do about global warming, the only rational answer is to change the way in which we do transportation, energy production, agriculture and a good deal of manufacturing. The problem originates in human activity in the form of the production of goods" Barry Commoner Climate change and the fight for resources 'will set world aflame' "The world was already experiencing its first war partly caused by climate change.. Dramatic changes to the environment in the Darfur region of Sudan helped lay the ground for today's conflict which has displaced more than 2.5 million people and killed at least 200,000" Independent 21Jun07 An End being Nigh - a standing post-WW2 joke - of old: Chicken Licken Apocalypse now: why we shouldn't fear if the end is nigh "One of the jokes against religion appears in cartoon form, a little raggedy man holding up a sign that says, 'The End is Nigh'" onlineopinion.com.au 9Nov05 cartoonstock.com/directory/T/The_end_is_nigh The End Is Nigh! + end-is-nigh.blogspot.com "official blog of the official magazine of the apolcapyse" & "5 years.. until we reach the Mayan 'End of the World'" + archive copy 2050 snippets Coast 2050 Feasibility Study "One Voice, One Mission ..Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (FPEIS) & the final Louisiana Coastal Area (LCA), Louisiana - Ecosystem Restoration Study, which identifies the most critical natural & human ecological needs" Learning, Learning Organizations, and Leadership: Implications for the Year 2050 "The nations that lead the world into the next century will be those who can shift from being industrial economies based upon the production of manufactured goods to those that possess the capacity to produce and utilize knowledge successfully" New Horizons for Learning international Region 2050 "Sustaining the Quality of Life in the Southern Willamette Valley of Oregon" US Strategy to the Year 2050 NZ Govt renewable energy policy 11Dec06 WaterPlanner.swf game "Without thoughtful planning and conservation, by the year 2050 many Texans will not have enough water, especially during times of drought" Texas Water Development Board 1997 State Water Plan Projections twdb.state.tx.us |