all things are trivial compared to climate change... [View all]

[Javaman]

I have been slowly been digesting this article: The Uninhabitable Earth that was recently published in New York Magazine.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html

Each part is a torturous description of what is ahead of us all.

The article first qualifies itself by stating, " What follows is not a series of predictions of what will happen — that will be determined in large part by the much-less-certain science of human response. Instead, it is a portrait of our best understanding of where the planet is heading absent aggressive action."

this what happens if we do nothing.

Currently, as reported by The Guardian, "Planet has just 5% chance of reaching Paris climate goal, study says"
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/31/paris-climate-deal-2c-warming-study

And that is just to avoid hitting 2 degree C.

some tidbits from "The Uninhabitable Earth" article that make my cry deep inside:

"For every half-degree of warming, they say, societies will see between a 10 and 20 percent increase in the likelihood of armed conflict. In climate science, nothing is simple, but the arithmetic is harrowing: A planet five degrees warmer would have at least half again as many wars as we do today. Overall, social conflict could more than double this century."


"Our lungs need oxygen, but that is only a fraction of what we breathe. The fraction of carbon dioxide is growing: It just crossed 400 parts per million, and high-end estimates extrapolating from current trends suggest it will hit 1,000 ppm by 2100."
>snip<
"The Chinese “airpocalypse” of 2013 peaked at what would have been an Air Quality Index of over 800. That year, smog was responsible for a third of all deaths in the country."


"The droughts in the American plains and Southwest would not just be worse than in the 1930s, a 2015 NASA study predicted, but worse than any droughts in a thousand years — and that includes those that struck between 1100 and 1300, which “dried up all the rivers East of the Sierra Nevada mountains”
>snip<
"Most estimates put the number of undernourished at 800 million globally. "


"Even if we meet the Paris goals of two degrees warming, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will become close to uninhabitable, annually encountering deadly heat waves like those that crippled them in 2015. At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer."


I'm only a little halfway through the article.


what are we doing?