Ekologija

No Country wrote:Нисам још стигао да прочитам чланак, али мислим да људе (у крајњој инстанци) треба плашити. Оно у принципу не треба, треба им разумно скренути пажњу на чињенице... но шта да радиш када то доказано не помаже?

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/07/is-the-earth-really-that-doomed/533112/

Are We as Doomed as That New York Magazine Article Says?
Why it's so hard to talk about the worst problem in the world


No one knows how to talk about climate change right now.

I don’t have an idea about where to begin, and I write about it professionally. On the one hand, the natural consequences of climate change seem increasingly severe and devastating. Just in the past two years, I’ve written about how global warming will probably cause more mega-droughts in Arizona and New Mexico; how dangerously sweltering summer days are three times likelier to occur today than they were in 1900; and how even slightly warmer oceans will destroy the Great Barrier Reef.

On the other hand, a strategy for addressing climate change is coming together. The cost of solar and wind energy are plunging worldwide; carmakers are promising to take more of their fleet electric, and the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere from human activity has stabilized over the past three years. Decarbonizing will be an arduous and difficult global project—but technological development and government policy are finally bringing it into the realm of the possible.

But on the other, other hand, the Trump administration is methodically and successfully undermining the substance of American climate policy. It has spread untruths about climate science, abandoned the Paris Agreement, and stricken dozens of climate-focused EPA rules from the law books. Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton professor who has observed climate diplomacy for 30 years, told me that this is one of the most dispiriting moments he can remember—and that he believes Earth is now doomed to warm by more than two degrees Celsius.

That’s the state of the world right now. There are three ongoing shifts and no easy way to synthesize them. The facts don’t lend themselves to an overwhelming vision. Instead, they suggest that the planet’s economic system is in the middle of a difficult and supremely important political battle with itself. As Brad Plumer, a New York Times climate reporter, tweeted last week: There are “two radically opposed visions of the future; [it’s] not yet clear which one will win out.”

It’s into that morass that this week’s New York magazine walks. In a widely shared article, David Wallace-Wells sketches the bleakest possible scenario for global warming. He warns of a planet so awash in greenhouse gas that Brooklyn’s heat waves will rival Bahrain’s. The breadbaskets of China and the United States will enter a debilitating and everlasting drought, he says. And millions of brains will so lack oxygen that they’ll slip into a carbon-induced confusion.

Unless we take aggressive action, “parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century,” he writes. “No matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough.”

It’s a scary vision—which is okay, because climate change is scary. It is also an unusually specific and severe depiction of what global warming will do to the planet. And though Wallace-Wells makes it clear that he’s not predicting the future, only trying to spin out the consequences of the best available science today, it’s fair to ask: Is it realistic? Will this heat-wracked doomsday come to pass?  

Many climate scientists and professional science communicators say no. Wallace-Wells’s article, they say, often flies beyond the realm of what researchers think is likely. I have to agree with them.

At key points in his piece, Wallace-Wells posits facts that mainstream climate science cannot support. In the introduction, he suggests that the world’s permafrost will belch all of its methane into the atmosphere as it melts, accelerating the planet’s warming in the decades to come. We don’t know everything about methane yet, but the picture does not seem this bleak. Melting permafrost will emit methane, and methane is an ultra-potent greenhouse gas, but scientists do not think so much it will escape in the coming century.

“The science on this is much more nuanced and doesn’t support the notion of a game-changing, planet-melting methane bomb,” writes Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State, in a Facebook post. “It is unclear that much of this frozen methane can be readily mobilized by projected warming.”

At other points, Wallace-Wells misstates what we know about the climate change that has already happened. Satellite data does not show that the world has warmed twice as fast as scientists thought, as he says; rather, the observed warming has tracked pretty close to what the models predicted. Carbon-dioxide levels only get high enough to seriously depress brain function in indoor spaces, though he implies it will become a global problem. Most importantly, we do not know nearly as much about climate change and war as he claims—an idea that I will return to in a moment.

This isn’t to say that his piece is worth discarding in its entirety. Wallace-Wells paints a vivid and frightening version of a doomed world. Many scientists just don’t think we live in that world—and they don’t think it’s helpful to tell people that we do.



Over the past decade, most researchers have trended away from climate doomsdayism. They cite research suggesting that people respond better to hopeful messages, not fatalistic ones; and they meticulously fact-check public descriptions of global warming, as watchful for unsupported exaggeration as they are for climate-change denial.

They do this not because they think that climate change will be peachy. They do it because they want to be exceptionally careful with facts for such a vital issue. And many of them, too, think that a climate-changed world will look less like a starved wasteland and more like our current home—just more unequal and more impoverished.

What does that world look like? We got a fairly good look late last month, actually, when a new consortium of economists and scientists called the Climate Impact Lab published their first study in the journal Science. Their research looks at how global warming will afflict Americans economically, on a county-by-county level. It tells a frightening but much more mundane story.

Climate change, they say, will not turn us into idiots before broiling us in our sleep. Instead, it will act as a kind of ecological reverse Robin Hood, stealing from the poor and giving to the rich. It will impoverish many of the poorest communities in the country—arrayed across the South and Southwest, and especially along the Gulf Coast—while increasing the fortunes of cities and suburbs on both of the coasts.

“This study—the climate equivalent of being informed that smoking carries serious risk of lung cancer—should be enough to motivate us,” says Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and professor of political science at Texas Tech University. “The NYMag article is the climate equivalent of being told that everyone in the world’s life will end in the most grisly, worst-case possible scenario if we keep on smoking.”

The Climate Impact Labs’ accounting is a much likelier view of what is “much more likely to occur than the doomsday scenario,” she added.

Other communicators reject Wallace-Wells’s approach for a third reason: He glosses over the many reasons that climate advocates now have hope. Many of these criticisms came not from researchers but from other climate communicators. “Through combo of exaggeration and hopelessness, [the NYMag piece] turns away those in the middle we need to persuade. It makes action harder,” tweeted Ramez Naam, a technologist and novelist. “We’ve made huge climate strides. Business-as-usual used to mean six or seven degrees Celsius or warming. Now it looks like three to four, and [it’s] trending down.”

Chuck Wendig, another novelist, called the story irresponsible. “It leans very hard on the EXTINCTION PORN angle, and almost not at all on the BUT HERE'S WHAT WE DO angle,” he said on Twitter.

I’m not so sure about this last angle. I have been writing about climate change nearly full-time for several years now. I don’t think journalists should frame the truth to better inspire people—that’s not our job.

But I vacillate considerably on the doom versus no-doom question. Consider what Wallace-Wells writes about climate change and war:

Researchers like Marshall Burke and Solomon Hsiang have managed to quantify some of the non-obvious relationships between temperature and violence: 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.

That final sentence is simplistic; we cannot wield careful social science conclusions like an abacus. It is also too certain: While Burke and Hsiang have found links between conflict and climate change, another group of researchers from Oslo have found far weaker connections. They observe a link between natural disaster and war only when a country is divided by ethnicity.

Yet this is worrisome by itself. Consider the world that climate scientists say is more realistic: a place where sea levels cause mass migration within and without the developed world; where the economy is never great but isn’t in shambles either; where voters fear for their livelihoods and superpowers poke at each others’ weaknesses.

Does that world sound like a safe and secure place to live? Does it sound like a workable status quo? And how many small wars need to start in that world before they all fuse together? Who needs planet-killing methane burps when nine different countries have 15,000 nuclear weapons between them? In short, there are plenty of doomsday scenarios to worry about. They don’t need to be catastrophic on their face to induce catastrophe.

Filipenko wrote:

No Country wrote:Нисам још стигао да прочитам чланак, али мислим да људе (у крајњој инстанци) треба плашити. Оно у принципу не треба, треба им разумно скренути пажњу на чињенице... но шта да радиш када то доказано не помаже?

Jel tako radite i sa staljinizmom? Ono, ako ih već ne možemo ubediti u lepotu demokratizma, daj barem da pljujemo i klevetamo da ogadimo ljudima slobodu, narodnu demokratiju, socijalizam?

‘Personally, I Would Rate the Likelihood of Staying Under Two Degrees of Warming As Under 10 Percent’: Michael Oppenheimer on the ‘Unknown Unknowns’ of Climate Change
By   [url=http://nymag.com/author/David Wallace-Wells/] David Wallace-Wells[/url]  
 
This week, to accompany our cover story on worst-case climate scenarios, we’re publishing a series of extended interviews with climatologists on the subject — most of them from the “godfather generation” of scientists who first raised the alarm about global warming several decades ago.
Now a professor at Princeton, Michael Oppenheimer was the longtime chief scientist of the Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate and Air program, and was an early force in the U.N. efforts on climate change that resulted, ultimately, in the Kyoto protocol. He has also been a long-standing participant in the U.N.’s IPCC climate-reporting project, including serving as the lead author of its 2007 Fourth Assessment. But he has also, over the years, spoken out about the limitations of the IPCC process and the reports it produces.


How do you think about the IPCC process and their estimates? I know you’ve been critical in the past.
I’ve been involved in the IPCC since the first assessments, and while I have criticisms of the way certain aspects of the climate system have been assessed by the IPCC and the way the judgments were reported, I certainly think the whole process has done what it was supposed to — to give government a basis for proceeding to develop policy rather than spending their time arguing about the science. All the governments accept the science. So IPCC has done a good job, but it could do a better job.
My own involvement in the question you’ve asked goes back 30 years —more than that, actually. The key question: What are the risks that we really ought to worry about, what are the risks that ought to frame policy including outcomes that might be unlikely but, were they to occur, would have massive impact. These are the kinds of things that I’ve long thought that policy makers ought to be paying attention to, they are the kinds of things that the intelligence community and the Defense Department has long focused on.
They are not focused on the average of what might happen, they worry about the surprises — what Donald Rumsfield notably tried to distinguish when he talked about the “known unknowns” and the “unknown unknowns.” We have both categories with climate. There are things we can identify as potentially happening but can’t really quantify very well — those are the known unknowns. And then are the things that we are constantly challenged by, that happened and which we didn’t really predict or even identify as a possible outcome — the unknown unknowns. In the latter category you might put the speed at which ice has been lost in Greenland and Antarctica, by processes that were not anticipated and barely thought about at all in the early IPCC reports. The classic surprise in all of this wasn’t in climate, it was in the ozone — the appearance of the ozone hole.
That’s really the best example of an unknown unknown showing up.

What are the frontiers of understanding right now as you see them? What are the things we should be trying to study more, or things that haven’t yet been integrated into our understanding?
For a long time — going back at least to 1983, the ice sheets and the potential for rapid loss of ice was thought about, and attempts were made to quantify the likelihood. In fact there was enough attention early on it that I shouldn’t even have called it an unknown unknown — that should be in the category of known unknown.
For decades, scientists have tried to model the ice sheets better, and to observe them better. The field has grown over time, and we’ve started to accumulate a lot of data and started seeing these bizarre things happening in the mid-1990s. The scientific consensus had landed on the idea that ice sheets couldn’t move fast, they could only move glacially, to make a little joke. It turned out that things were happening rapidly in both ice sheets. The old picture was that it was going to be millennia. And if the West Antarctic ice sheet were to disgorge its ice sheet, which would result in something like four meters, if it did that over the course of a century that would be huge. That idea was totally disfavored, until we started to see, over the last 20 years or so, we started to see that ice sheets were beginning to move fast in various parts, and some very surprising things were happening, like the collapse of a gigantic part of an ice shelf in the course of a few weeks in 2002.
That was important not just because it showed how fast ice can disintegrate, but also because the ice behind that ice shelf began discharging faster into the ocean, causes a faster sea-level effect. Other things like that began to happen quite a lot. But it remains, to a large extent, an unknown unknown. There is no well-accepted way of incorporating ice melt into climate models. That, to me, remains, of the things we have reason to believe have a fairly good chance of happening over time as the world warms, that remains the most risky. Because we know if we warm the world enough, it’s going to happen.
And the reason we know that the last time the world was two degrees warmer, sea levels were between six and nine meters higher. And that could only happen if parts of Antarctica and the Greenland ice sheet had melted. So we know it’s going to happen with only a relatively modest warming, we just don’t know how fast, and that’s critically important.

What kind of warming is likely? I know that there are so many factors that go into that, including how we adapt; what is the likelihood we stay below two degrees?
I think the likelihood that we stay below two degrees even with diligent efforts was relatively small — maybe 20 percent, in my view — before the Trump withdrawal from Paris. And the likelihood is now increased markedly that we’re not going to make the two degrees. Personally I would rate the likelihood as under 10 percent. So I think we need to be prepared for a world where we are going to have eventually a large sea-level rise, for a world in which we have extended episodes of unbearable excess heat, for a world where eventually crop yields will decline significantly in parts of the world and cause food-security problems that go over the edge at least periodically, and that means more starvation and malnutrition. Where natural ecosystems like coral reefs, some of them, are going to be doomed. We’re probably already bought into a world we’re not going to like very much — and the likelihood of other surprising outcomes is increasing markedly. One of the ones that’s already been pointed to that is of special concern is a shutdown or slowing of the ocean conveyor belt.

Can you walk me through what that would mean, if that slowed down significantly?
It’s called the MOC, and it performs several functions — it basically transfers heat, humidity, and salinity from the southern latitudes to the high latitudes. That’s one factor in keeping parts of Europe warmer than they would otherwise be, another factor is that a bunch of Europe has a semi-maritime climate. Projections do show that the extreme parts of NW Europe, under simulations that shut-down the circulation, do show a colder climate, rather than a warmer climate. Other parts of Scandinavia could get much colder. Depending on how fast that happens, it could be very damaging. Changes can occur over the course of a decade, or less in some cases. But we don’t know how fast those switches can happen. In a warm period like we’re in now, or even in a “super warm” period like it looks like we’re gonna be in in the future. That’s one of the big known unknowns. And, potentially, it could be quite threatening, because if it happens as rapidly as it did in the distant past it would be difficult for societies to adapt.

You were talking about things we need to prepare for. You mentioned significant sea-level rise and unbearable heat … 
Yeah. Let me talk about the unbearable heat a little bit. It’s an emerging area. It focuses on what’s called the wet-bulb temperature — a combination of heat and humidity. Humans simply cannot survive outdoors above a certain wet-bulb temperature doing any sort of even normal levels of work, like construction jobs, farmer jobs, children playing. Normal levels of effort can be life-threatening in a situation where the wet-bulb temperature gets too high. And there are now starting to be projections showing that beginning with brief periods, and then expanding to many days at a time, potentially — when you get beyond the end of the century — eventually getting to most of the summer, in some areas, you’re looking at wet-bulb temperatures that are just too high for humans to carry on normal outdoor activity. That would be shocking for more areas.
It wouldn’t happen overnight. We would have some chance to adjust. But it would make the world a totally different place in those areas than it is now. During the warm season, you’d have to live in a bubble. And some people might argue that it’s in currently air-conditioned environments.
Some places, in very hot parts of the world, many people do live in air-conditioned environments. But I don’t like to live that way. It’s clearly destructive to ecosystems, and in addition in much of the developing world people can’t afford air-conditioning. In the future — 50 years from now, say — many people still won’t be able to afford it. That’s true in parts of the United States as well. So we’re talking about the development of a life-threatening situation.
That’s the most extreme case, but even with the garden-variety heat increases that middle-of-the-road climate projections show, you’re going to get big increases, even in the immediate projections. If you look at what’s projected for even 35 years from now, in the mid-latitudes, for business-as-usual scenarios, we see that the number of days that used to be the 10 percent hottest — the 90-degree days in NYC in 1950s — by 2040 or 2050 they become 30 percent of the days. So the days that used to be the 10 percent hottest now occur 30 percent of the time. The former 10 percent is now recorded 15–17 percent of the time. The number of days that now occur 5 percent of the time are gonna occur maybe 15 or 20 percent of the time by the time you get to 2040 or 2050. These are huge changes, and they’re not in some weird future world, they’re in your lifetime. Think about the children. Think about the changes in the world of our children. It’s humongous. That isn’t if something really weird happens that we don’t expect. That’s just garden-variety climate change that we can project.

Are there things that seem to you like unlikely possibilities that you don’t think we’ve paid enough attention to — or should be thinking of as more likely than conventional wisdom holds?
Conventional wisdom doesn’t have a good reputation anymore. In the climate business there isn’t very much conventional wisdom, simply because a lot of times a lot of the predictions have been … Some of the predictions have been smack-on. Some have been a little too high. But maybe the more interesting ones have been too low. And so ice sheets and sea-level rise, those features and the Arctic, the way the icy parts of the world have behaved, have changed more rapidly than expected. And that has massive implications.
The only things we have delivered wisdom about are the relatively simple and straightforward parts of the problem where there’s been a consensus for a long time. Like “Is the Earth warming?” and “Is the Earth’s warming caused by the buildup of green house gases?” and “How much will we have to cut emissions in order to stabilize and eventually return the climate to something that resembles what it was in the recent past?”
But for these sort of edgy parts of the problem there is no delivered wisdom, so everybody has a very open mind about these questions — the periphery of the problem, whether it’s things that we’re not sure about or we don’t have good ways to model them but where they could have very high impact outcomes. You talk about, for instance, the feedback in the system if this generation of the permafrost ecosystem leads to a lot of methane being released into the atmosphere — methane being a powerful greenhouse gas that would further amplify the warming. Somewhat more unlikely but also less known is what happens if the so-called methane hydrates that are on the continental shelf at the sea bed or even in deeper waters get liberated as warming penetrates. How much methane will that put into the atmosphere? That whole feedback system is not well understood. That lack of understanding has disturbed and energized a lot of scientists, so there’s now increasing focus on it.

It’s been a little bit hard for me to get a handle on that material, because it seems like a few years ago there was more direct anxiety about it as a short-term risk. There seems to be diminishing fear about that generally speaking. 
What you should do is take a look at the IPCC report. They did about as good a job as they could do. And in that report the IPCC has, I think in chapter six, a substantial section. And that was the first time I think they really tried to incorporate some actual numbers. If you read it you’ll get the feeling that there is a lot that’s unknown about it. What they caution about it is just because we see some bubbles — there’s some bubbling up in Siberia — doesn’t mean that there’s about to be a catastrophe. Because methane has probably leaked from these things for a long time. The question is, how much will and can it accelerate. And we just don’t know. So that’s an important area where progress needs to be made.

Are there any other things in that category that you want to be sure to mention? Other things that we’re unsure about but should be worrying a bit more about?
The next category of things I worry about aren’t physical systems.
These are ecosystems and social systems. When you talk about coral reefs disintegrating, that is an ecosystem disintegrating. You’re not just talking about something that’s pretty. You’re talking about something that’s not only highly biodiverse, but which economies that a lot of otherwise quite poor nations depend on. The coral reefs go to tourism, so it’s fishing boats, the fishing. It’s a lot to worry about.
One of the ones that’s been talked about lately, I think a little bit too loosely sometimes, was the connection between climate change, human migration, and conflict. It’s been sort of a leap: The climate in the Middle East has been unusually dry in the last few decades, that generated problems with food security, and that’s the reason we have a mess right now. It’s obviously a lot more complicated than that. A lot of work has been done recently using entirely new methods on the relationship between both climate change and human migration, and separately the relationship between climate change and human conflict. And there’s a very strong case now that for all types of conflict, running from interpersonal one-on-one violence up to a large-scale war, that there’s a relationship there, and that climate change tends to generate conflict and the hotter the world gets now, the more likely it is that there’ll be conflict at all scales. That research is new. It’s somewhat controversial. But it needs to be paid very careful attention to because we live in a world that doesn’t need anymore conflict.

Is there a researcher focused on that you can point me to?
Solomon Hsiang. He’s at UC Berkeley.
Another thing that needs to be paid attention there — the related problem with migration. I think it’s sometimes framed incorrectly as, we’re gonna have tens of millions migrants globally. That’s not, to my mind, the scale you should look at. We need to look at particular border regions.
Migrants are absorbed very well in some countries for long periods of time without creating difficulty, as has been the case in the United States periodically. What you want to look at is regions where the countries either have difficult absorbing the migrants, as we saw in Europe over the last few years, or where countries that used to be peopled efficiently lose too many of their resources and become unstable. There’s a lot of literature — I contributed a lot to this literature — which shows that in many regions warming has in the past stimulated movement of populations.

There’s the case of Bangladesh where there’s just going to be so many people that it’s hard to imagine.
It depends how fast sea level rises. Bangladesh has already got big problems. Bangladeshis already get shot when they try to cross the border into India. That could turn into a disaster. Again, the complexity of social situations is not just that they’re threatening in some way, because climate changes causes threats that destabilize them. You could reach a tipping point when things get out of control in certain areas. But the opposite can happen. In some cases human societies sometimes do address in appropriate ways.
And I would speculate that sometimes we’ll be surprised in the positive direction, but too often we’ll be surprised in the negative direction. The social tipping points are a key about which we know very little. And there’s got to be an intense focus of expert research in the next decade or two so we can at least get a feeling of where the hot spots may be and we can try and mobilize resources to minimize the risks.
But if you talk to Sol, there’s an even broader issue than just the question of conflict arising from climate change. Some of Sol’s work and the work of others has shown that economic productivity should be on your mind as temperature increases. And the numbers give economic damages due to climate change, which is much higher than any of the other previous models suggested.
Again, this is an emerging area. We don’t have final answers. But if that work is even close to being right, the damage from climate change even in wealthy countries could be much higher than previously imagined. 

And they may also undermine our ability to take large-scale action as a result.
Absolutely. And again that’s an emerging area that we pretty quickly need to be able to land on some numbers — to get a consensus. Each of these is an area where IPCC for instance has looked at it in their assessments previously, but in some cases did not spend enough focus on it. It started moving the ice sheet and sea-level question into high focus somewhat in the fourth assessment, and a lot in the fifth assessment where they did a much better job. I anticipate this might be a point of very intense focus for the sixth, although we don’t know yet what the sixth assessment report is going to look like.

That’s not scheduled until 2022 or something?
That’s right. There was just a scoping meeting, which is where an outline was drafted. I was at the meeting. The outline won’t become final until the whole panel, at the next meeting. I’m not sure when the next whole meeting of the panel is. We’ll approve an outline and then we’ll have some idea.

Well, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me.
If I were you and I was going to emphasize something, I would certainly spend time on the physical parts of the system. But it’s these socioeconomic responses that scientists knew— but there hasn’t been enough attention to it in the past. It’s really emerging as the area where we’re gonna understand whether humans are gonna be able to manage climate change or whether we’re about to really go over a cliff. That’s where the big unknowns are gonna be. That’s where the big surprises are gonna be.

Gargantua wrote:

Poenta je da je  kada je opasnost takva - ogromna - nije lose razdrmati ljude i politicare malo dramaticnijim scenarijom, posto je i onaj "objektivan" u stvari jeziv.

Blind Lime Pie wrote:a one ideje da će "priroda sve to sama regulisati" su apsolutno tačne. nestankom agenta koji uvodi brzu promenu u sistem - on će se stabilizovati. ako je taj agent tehnološka civilizacija koja počiva na fosilnim gorivima, to nam je što nam je.

Daï Djakman Faré wrote:

Blind Lime Pie wrote:a one ideje da će "priroda sve to sama regulisati" su apsolutno tačne. nestankom agenta koji uvodi brzu promenu u sistem - on će se stabilizovati. ako je taj agent tehnološka civilizacija koja počiva na fosilnim gorivima, to nam je što nam je.

vaso ili ako neko drugi zna - jel taj korpus ideja mozda potpada pod tzv gaia hypothesis ili postoji jos neki konkretnija odrednica ?

konkretno za ovaj boldovani deo.

Ointagru Unartan wrote:Ne mora da bude gaia hypothesis. Ima prirodnih mehanizama za skladistenje CO2, koji ce nastaviti da deluju kada ljudi budu prestali da zagadjuju. Postoji doduse mogucnost da globalno zagrevanje dovede do posledica (topljenje leda, dakle manje odbijanja toplote u atmosferu, prestanak upijanja CO2 od strane okeana, oslobadjanje metana iz okeana i permafrosta) koje bi delovale kao povratna sprega i pojacale zagrevanje, sto bi pretvorilo Zemlju u sprzenu pustinju poput Venere, ali to je, kazu, malo verovatno.

...it turns out that much economic growth has been enabled by surplus energy — possibly two-thirds of the growth that is usually attributed to ‘technical change’ is actually due to the availability of cheap energy, much of it easily transportable liquid fuels.

We need to come to terms with the fact that economic growth may be incompatible with abatement targets.

we simply don’t have the understanding of the complexity and feedback processes to confidently project several decades into the future.

The IPCC’s grafting of 20th century growth and productivity data onto future scenarios completely misses the intimate relationship between energy and economies.

Just one litre of petrol provides the equivalent of a week or more of pre-industrial human labour. Having achieved this miraculous transformation, it is not likely that societies will voluntarily turn back.

IDILIČNI prostor današnjih zelenih bregova u 2. veku su Rimljani pretvorili u jezivu golet. Sa površine od oko 60 kvadratnih kilometara posekli su šumu neophodnu za topljenje rude, a brda izbušili hiljadama jama koje i danas vrebaju pod lišćem. 

- Slika iz tog vremena je vrlo tmurna - opisuje dr Crnobrnja. - Kilometri padina golih brda bili su pokriveni stotinama hiljada tona troske koja ni za više od narednih 1.000 godina neće dozvoliti da se obnovi šuma. 

In the next two years we will see a substantial collapse in the installation of new wind parks in Germany  – we will have to react to this.“