Schwab: UN report warns of literal existential threat we face
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/schwab-un-report-warns-of-literal-existential-threat-we-face/?utm_source=DAILY+HERALD&utm_campaign=7b5899e115-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d81d073bb4-7b5899e115-228635337snip
But enough. Believe it or not, we’re facing something even worse than Trump: mass extinction.
Commissioned by the United Nations, a summary of the results of a three-year study on the magnitude of the problem has recently been published. Comprising the work of five-hundred scientists and referencing 1,500 research papers, it covers a range of earthly perils. Driving Mercer Street to downtown Seattle lately, one comes to understand. In addition to traffic that allows three cars per stoplight on a good day, high-rise dwellings are sprouting like asparagus, block after crowded block, readying to house more people by the thousands. There are too damn many of us.
“The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed,” wrote the co-chair of the 1,800-page report. “This loss is a direct result of human activity and constitutes a direct threat to human well-being in all regions of the world.”
We’re bludgeoning our planet to a slow but certain death. As we heat it up to intolerable levels, deplete finite resources, cause the elimination of millions of species, we’re destroying the home whose complex ecosystems sustain us. And though it’s obvious what needs doing, it’s increasingly unlikely to happen, for humanity lacks the required collective wisdom, and America’s leadership is no more. Increasingly, we seem to be looking backward, wishfully, not ahead and clear-eyed.
snip
Climate change is a big part of it, but there’s more. We’ve lost eighty-five percent of the world’s wetlands. Two-thirds of ocean waters are stressed; half of the world’s coral reefs are dead. It’s happening hundreds of times faster than millions of years past. We’re clearcutting hundreds of millions of hectares of rainforest, gobbling up rapidly-diminishing, essential elements, as the world population has doubled since 1970. People are already fighting over food and water, fuel and land, to the tune of 2,500 conflicts currently ongoing. It’ll get worse.
Topping the list of required changes are two all-but impossible actions: stopping population growth and decreasing consumption. These would entail entirely re-constituting the developed world, in which all economies are, to a greater or lesser extent, predicated on consumerism: increasing and housing customers, making newer and more irresistible products. Could we abide a less self-destructing economic model? Would we be willing to keep our current smartphones and outdated HDTVs? Not in the irreparably divided, conversation-averse, science-rejecting United States, where our “president” has convinced half of us our biggest problem is immigration.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Run the numbers. You may find your instincts (or beliefs) challenged.
The planet is headed for an average temperature more than 3 degrees higher than anything seen since the beginning of the industrial age, with CO2 levels higher than they have been for over 800,000 years.
This is a geophysical problem, not a geopolitical problem.
Like SamKnause, I've been researching this for a long time - in my case, intensively for 15 years. What we face is not a problem, but a predicament. The best we can hope for at this point is not a solution or even a mitigation, but some degree of rapid, intense social adaptation that may allow a small fragment of humanity to survive the next 100 years. Even accomplishing that is doubtful considering the scale of the predicament and the degree of global opposition to taking the necessary steps in response.
This news sucks - especially to hard-core optimists - but the numbers don't lie. And they're getting worse all the time.
