Anthropogenic climate change: 'We’re all sitting ducks'
Time for climate scientists to go on strike
By Bill McKibben, MSNBC
03/31/14 04:01 PM—Updated 04/01/14 09:50 AM
Late last night Yokohama time, the world’s scientists did once more what they’ve done so many times in the past: issued a thumping big report demonstrating that climate change poses the greatest danger our civilization has ever faced. These regular analyses have been conducted since 1995 under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – by now the papers, indexes, footnotes and drafts would fill the Superdome.
They’ve said it with graphs, they’ve said it with tables. They’ve offered color-coded guides to future decades. They’ve told us about basic science and, when that didn’t work, they’ve tried to explain it in terms anyone could understand. The latest summary, for instance, shows that most studies of food production in a warming world forecast dire trouble – some, by century’s end, show a 50% reduction in crop yields. Both drought and flood will keep on increasing, the number of refugees will climb sharply, and we risk “civil wars and intergroup violence.”
As one of the lead authors, Princeton scientist Michael Oppenheimer, summed it up at the paper’s release: “We’re all sitting ducks.”
They’ve done their job. (And they’ve done it for free – working on these endless IPCC reports is a volunteer job). They’ve warned us, amply. The scientific method, with researchers working hard to disprove each others’ hypotheses, has worked. It’s yielded a concise answer to a difficult problem in chemistry and physics. When you pour carbon into the air, the planet heats up and then all hell breaks loose. That’s basically what you need to know.
(More here.)
By Bill McKibben, MSNBC
03/31/14 04:01 PM—Updated 04/01/14 09:50 AM
Late last night Yokohama time, the world’s scientists did once more what they’ve done so many times in the past: issued a thumping big report demonstrating that climate change poses the greatest danger our civilization has ever faced. These regular analyses have been conducted since 1995 under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – by now the papers, indexes, footnotes and drafts would fill the Superdome.
They’ve said it with graphs, they’ve said it with tables. They’ve offered color-coded guides to future decades. They’ve told us about basic science and, when that didn’t work, they’ve tried to explain it in terms anyone could understand. The latest summary, for instance, shows that most studies of food production in a warming world forecast dire trouble – some, by century’s end, show a 50% reduction in crop yields. Both drought and flood will keep on increasing, the number of refugees will climb sharply, and we risk “civil wars and intergroup violence.”
As one of the lead authors, Princeton scientist Michael Oppenheimer, summed it up at the paper’s release: “We’re all sitting ducks.”
They’ve done their job. (And they’ve done it for free – working on these endless IPCC reports is a volunteer job). They’ve warned us, amply. The scientific method, with researchers working hard to disprove each others’ hypotheses, has worked. It’s yielded a concise answer to a difficult problem in chemistry and physics. When you pour carbon into the air, the planet heats up and then all hell breaks loose. That’s basically what you need to know.
(More here.)
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