Monday, March 11, 2013

IT JUST GETS WORSE












I will soon reach the point where I will have to stop reading environment predictions or lose my mind as the profit motive and the energy barons eat the fucking planet.  

"Under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios," the world is on track to surpass temperatures not seen since the dawn of civilization, according to new research.
Confirming "unprecedented" global warming, the new study published in Friday's issue of the journal Science shows that the earth's temperatures catapulted in just the last century at a rate that had previously taken 4,000 years.
"In 100 years, we've gone from the cold end of the spectrum to the warm end of the spectrum," said climatologist Shaun Marcott, lead author of the study. "We've never seen something this rapid. Even in the ice age the global temperature never changed this quickly." Marcott said that current "global temperatures are warmer than about 75 percent of anything we've seen over the last 11,000 years or so." By 2100, he said, global temperatures will be "well above anything we've ever seen in the last 11,000 years."
"The climate changes to come are going to be larger than anything that human civilization and agriculture has seen in its entire existence," NPR quotes Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, as saying. "And that is quite a sobering thought."

4 comments:

Sparky said...

Currently (?), the alternative to losing your mind is starving and/or freezing to death.

Jan Hagel said...

You mean, if we want to survive, the planet needsto become needs to heat up until it's impossible to live here? Now that's an interesting thought ...

Sparky said...

What I mean is that at the moment tens of millions of people rely on the fossil fuel energy industry to stay alive. We may not like it, but to deny it is irrational and merely whining about it doesn't change it (well, so far it hasn't)

Jan Hagel said...

There's a zillion things we could do now to change the direction we're heading, but I think it'srather too late now. So there.