Founders Imperative

 

Founder's Imperative: Intro         Our Disease         Our Diagnosis         Our Prognosis         Our Options for Survival         Our Legacy

 

 

Our Prognosis

 

NOTE: The info on this page is dated and will be updated as soon as we are able.  Unlike the IPCC reports, this aesthetically enhanced graph based on an original by the Met Office, Hadley Centre DOES incorporate estimates of carbon cycle feedback loops and the projected estimates of global average temperature rise over land suggest that things will get MUCH HOTTER, MUCH SOONER.

Graph


     CLICK ON GRAPH TO SEE CONSEQUENCES OF PROJECTED TEMP. INCREASES
     Source: Click here to see source graph(s) and info from the Met Office, Hadley Centre

 

2100 indicates an alarming potential of +8 C – HELL ON EARTH!

2080 shows at least +6.4 C, when almost all life on the planet, including most humans, would be exterminated – (Global Warming: The Final Warning).

In 2070, at +5.4 C, world food supplies run out.

NOTE: Climate extremes will have direct, negative impacts on people and the environment MUCH SOONER than this average temperature timeline indicates. At present, WORLD AGRICULTURE IS ALREADY IN DECLINE (See item 1 below). FOOD PRODUCTION, DISTRIBUTION AND GENERAL SURVIVAL WILL BECOME INCREASINGLY DIFFICULT AND PROBLEMATIC LONG BEFORE THESE DEADLINES.

As if all that doesn't sound bad enough, numerous recent studies and analyses have already rendered the specific findings of the IPCC reports COMPLETELY OUT OF DATE.

 

 

  1. HUMANS FAILING THE SUSTAINABILITY AUDIT

    With its GEO-4 report, the United Nations tells us that MOST ASPECTS OF THE EARTH'S NATURAL ENVIRONMENT ARE IN DECLINE; and that the decline will affect us…in some pretty important ways.

  2. ANTARCTIC'S 'FULL SINK' ALARMS SCIENTISTS

    The journal Science reports an "alarming" discovery that the Southern Ocean around Antarctica (15% of the global carbon sink – and the world's biggest) is not only already full of carbon dioxide, but it has been COMPLETELY SATURATED SINCE THE LATE 1980's.

  3. SUDDEN MELTING IN ANTARCTIC SEEN BY SATELLITE

    NASA has observed that AN AREA THE SIZE OF CALIFORNIA MELTED from persistent 41 degree summer temperatures and then re-froze.

  4. IMPACT OF MELTING SNOW AND ICE DIRE: U.N. REPORT

    A recent United Nations report says BILLIONS OF PEOPLE face dramatic risks and changes to their livelihoods if snow cover, sea ice, glaciers and permafrost continue to melt.

    This includes the imminent threat of bubbling, Siberian methane (at least 25 x greater influence on heating than CO2) being released into the atmosphere from melting permafrost and new estimates indicate that the quantities emerging from these thermokast lakes is up to 5 x higher than previously supposed.

  5. ARCTIC SUMMERS ICE-FREE 'BY 2013'

    Summer melting this year reduced the ice cover to 4.13 MILLION SQ KM, the smallest ever extent in modern times. Remarkably, this stunning low point was not even incorporated into the model runs of Professor Maslowski and his team, which used data sets from 1979 to 2004 to constrain their future projections.

    "Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007," the researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, explained to the BBC. "So given that fact, you can argue that maybe our projection of 2013 is already too conservative."

  6. THE METHANE TIME BOMB

    The first evidence that MILLIONS OF TONS of Methane, a greenhouse gas 20 x more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists…

    Many scientists fear that ITS RELEASE COULD ACCELERATE GLOBAL WARMING IN A GIANT GREENHOUSE GAS POSITIVE FEEDBACK where more atmospheric methane causes higher temperatures, leading to further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane…

    At some locations, methane concentrations reached 100 times background levels. These anomalies have been seen in the East Siberian Sea and the Laptev Sea, COVERING SEVERAL TENS OF THOUSANDS OF SQUARE KILOMETRES, AMOUNTING TO MILLIONS OF TONS OF METHANE, said Dr. Gustafsson. "This may be of the same magnitude as presently estimated from the global ocean," he said. "Nobody knows how many more such areas exist on the extensive East Siberian continental shelves."

  7. U.N. LEADER ON GLOBAL WARMING: WE NEED U.S. LEADERSHIP

    The leader of the United Nations did not pull any punches. "If we take action now, it MAY not be too late," U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said in an interview today in the garden of U.N. headquarters in New York. His "may" gave this correspondent pause. His words were clearly carefully considered.

    When this reporter pointed out that some scientists are writing books and saying in public that they believe this crisis is so serious that if humanity goes on with business as usual — not significantly cutting overall greenhouse gas emissions — it could seriously lead to the COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION, EVEN IN THE LIFETIMES OF TODAY'S CHILDREN, he replied:

    "I think that is a correct assessment. People say that action should have been taken yesterday. If we take action today, it may not be too late."

  8. GLOBAL WARMING 'IS THREE TIMES FASTER THAN WORST PREDICTIONS

    A study published by the US National Academy of Sciences shows that CO2 emissions have been increasing by about 3% a year during this decade, compared with 1.1% a year in the 1990s.

    MUCH FASTER THAN EVEN THE HIGHEST SCENARIO OUTLINED IN THIS YEAR'S MASSIVE REPORTS BY THE IPCC – this suggests that their dire forecasts of devastating harvests, dwindling water supplies, melting ice and loss of species are likely to be understating (we suggest, GROSSLY UNDERSTATING) the threat facing the world.

    The same article mentions another study by the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center that shows that ARCTIC ICE HAS DECLINED BY 7.8% A DECADE over the past 50 years, compared with an average estimate by IPCC computer models of only 2.5%!

  9. THE EARTH TODAY STANDS IN IMMINENT PERIL

    …and nothing short of a PLANETARY RESCUE will save it from the ENVIRONMENTAL CATACLYSM OF DANGEROUS CLIMATE CHANGE. Those are not the words of eco-warriors but the considered opinion of a group of eminent scientists writing in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

  10. THE RICH WORLD'S POLICY ON GREENHOUSE GAS NOW SEEMS CLEAR: MILLIONS WILL DIE

    "Our governments have set the WRONG TARGETS to tackle climate change using outdated science, and they know it." "…our governments appear quietly to have abandoned their aim of preventing dangerous climate change. If so, THEY CONDEMN MILLIONS TO DEATH. What the IPCC report shows is that we have to stop treating climate change as an urgent issue. We have to start treating it as an INTERNATIONAL EMERGENCY." – George Monbiot

  11. THE PERILS OF PLAYING NICE

    In shooting for the political mainstream, the climate movement has shot itself in the foot, argue David Spratt, policy analyst with Carbon Equity, and Philip Sutton, Director of the Greenleap Strategic Institute, in this excerpt from their new book, Climate Code Red: The Case For Emergency Action.

    Ken Ward, an environmental and communications strategist and former deputy executive director of Greenpeace in the USA, believes that the people who lead ENVIRONMENTAL FOUNDATIONS AND ORGANIZATIONS PLAY A CRITICAL PART IN RECONSTRUCTING THE ISSUE AS A CLIMATE AND SUSTAINABILITY EMERGENCY – ONE THAT TAKES US BEYOND THE POLITICS OF FAILURE-INDUCING COMPROMISE.

    With the rapid loss of the Arctic summer ice cover, Ward says that the opportunity for these leaders to adjust their position is narrow, and this is due, in some part, to THE DELIBERATE DECISION, A DECADE AGO, BY ENVIRONMENT ORGANIZATIONS TO DOWNPLAY CLIMATE CHANGE RISK.

    He says: "[They did so] in the interests of presenting a sober, optimistic image to potential donors, maintaining access to decision-makers, and operating within the constraints of private foundations, which has blown back on us. By emphasising specific solutions and avoiding definitions that might appear alarmist, we inadvertently fed a dumbed-down, Readers Digest version of climate change to our staff and environmentalist core. Now, as we scramble to keep up with climate scientists, we discover that we have paid a hefty price."

    For those who have, in the past, downplayed the risks, changing position is now a matter of urgency, because WHAT NOW NEEDS TO BE DONE IS NOT INCREMENTALLY REASONABLE. The desperate measures required to advance a functional climate-change solution at this late date, says Ward, "CAN ONLY BE CONCEIVED AND ADVANCED BY INDIVIDUALS WHO ACCEPT CLIMATE CHANGE REALITIES AND [WHO] TAKE THE LESS THAN 10-YEAR TIMEFRAME SERIOUSLY".

    He believes that we will need to actually confront the terror of the situation before we can come to a real solution. "WE ARE NOT ACTING LIKE PEOPLE AND ORGANIZATIONS WHO GENUINELY BELIEVE THAT THE WORLD IS AT RISK. THEREFORE, WE CANNOT TAKE THE MEASURES REQUIRED, NOR CAN WE BE EFFECTIVE LEADERS."


Not the best situation, is it?

And we haven't even touched on the insanity of extreme deforestation, ocean acidification, soil depletion, dwindling fresh water supplies, the threat of mass extinctions, intangibles like the proliferation of disease(s) or something as unexpected as a massive bee die-off, for instance (pollination).

I'm sorry to say, there's plenty more where these came from in the SEE: Essential Articles section of this website.

Watch this 9-minute clip from Call of Life produced by SpeciesAlliance.org.