Stuff That I Have Noticed #36 – The Last Generation?
If you do an internet search for “climate change point of no return” you will find scores of scholarly articles. Some say we are beyond that point already, others say we’re close. No one (with the exception of a few extremely unenlightened politicians) says don’t worry about it, we’ll be just fine. The years 2035 and 2050 show up a lot as the time when, unless we – and by “we” I mean humankind in total – have taken all possible measures to curtail and reverse the rising global temperatures, will find the planet to be virtually uninhabitable.
I am not a scientist but I’m reasonably intelligent and I read and I listen. Based on what I’ve read and heard it seems possible, perhaps even likely, that those of us who were born between 1935 and 1950 could be the last generation to exist in an inhabitable “natural” environment.
Just recently (15 September 2020) a huge chunk of the Greenland ice cap broke off and floated into an unnaturally warm Atlantic ocean where it will melt causing more sea-level rise. There are already places in Florida where the water table is very near (and in a few spots above) ground level.
By any estimation, Florida is drowning. In some scenarios, sea levels will rise up to 31 inches by 2060, a devastating prediction for a region that already deals regularly with tidal flooding and where an estimated 120,000 properties on or near the water are at risk. The pace of the rise is also hastening, scientists say – it took 31 years for the waters around Miami to rise by six inches, while the next six inches will take only 15 more. At such a rate, many of Miami Beach’s landmarks, the world famous South Beach, and the picturesque art deco hotels of Ocean Drive, will be lost within three decades, according to some studies.
According to AP: “The main goal of the 2015 Paris climate accord is to limit the rise in global temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, but scientists say the world is on track to soar past that. A new study found that if the world warms another 0.9 degrees Celsius (1.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the West Antarctic ice sheet will reach a point of irreversible melting. It has enough water to raise global sea levels by 5 meters (16 feet).”
Much of this heating of the earth’s surface is due to the burning of fossil fuels and (per Wikipedia) because of that, carbon dioxide has gradually accumulated in the atmosphere, and as of 2019, its concentration is almost 48% above pre-industrial levels. The National Geographic wrote that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is this high “for the first time in 55 years of measurement—and probably more than 3 million years of Earth history. The current concentration may be the highest in the last 20 million years.”
This is not good. An environmental scientist I saw on the news recently said that 400 ppm (parts per million) of carbon in the atmosphere for a sustained period might be the “point of no return” for human beings to reverse global warming. This is not a direct quote (I didn’t know I’d be writing this when I heard her say it.) but she seemed to be more than somewhat alarmed. Also saying that on that day the reading was slightly above 400 ppm.
For the sake of this essay, let’s assume that I remembered more or less correctly. That’s where I got the above date of 2050 for our planet to be virtually uninhabitable.
Should that be the case and assuming a ninety or one hundred year lifetime for our generation (current 70 to 85 year old folks) which means that the youngest survivors of this group will be 100 when the environment becomes “uninhabitable”. And that means that from around 2030 onward the weather related migrations, floods, famines, wildfires etc. will be much worse that they are now which is not exactly balmy.
In 2019 weather related deaths in the USA alone were 1,043. Worldwide that figure is over 15,000. Given the current pandemic those numbers seem paltry but projected forward for ten, twenty or thirty years they are expected to increase exponentially. Saskia Heijnen of Wellcome Trust, a London-based biomedical research charity, told attendees of the Global Health conference at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in Scotland that an estimated 250,000 deaths will be directly attributed to climate change by 2050. And those figures do not include the mass migrations from arid and heavily populated parts of the globe to more temperate regions.
From EcoWatch.com:
“The report found that the world is on a worrying trend line as natural disasters become more frequent and more expensive. In the last 20 years, there were more than 7,300 natural disasters worldwide, accounting for nearly $3 trillion in damages. That’s almost double the prior two decades when there were just over 4,200 natural disasters that totaled $1.6 trillion in economic losses, according to the statement.”
“The report said that the world’s current trajectory that has us heading towards a 3.2-degree Celsius increase in temperature will trigger such extreme climate disasters that the improvements to disaster response will be rendered obsolete in many countries …“
Solar panels, anyone?
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