Climate change action: Too little, too late? (BBC)

[eppur_se_muova]

By Simon Hooper
Special for CNN

LONDON, England (CNN) -- "I want to scare you about climate change," says Fred Pearce, veteran environmental journalist and author. "We are probably the last generation to be able to rely on a stable climate."

Addressing a sympathetic audience at the Cheltenham Science Festival, Pearce is preaching to the converted about the reality and risks of climate change.

But it is his fear -- as the title of his new book, "The Last Generation: How Nature Will Take Her Revenge for Climate Change" (it is called "With Speed and Violence" in the U.S.), suggests -- that we still haven't fully realized the apocalyptic forces we have awoken and the reality of what is at stake if global warming continues untrammeled.

This is not just about warmer weather, environmental degradation and a looming refugee crisis, according to Pearce, but "about our survival as a species, as homo sapiens."

This year's series of reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have been broadly welcomed for a sober and sensible tone, which, while acknowledging the dangers of global warming, also suggested that our destiny was still in our own hands.
***
more: http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/07/18/last.generation/index.html

[slackmaster]

1. What is this "stable climate" he speaks of?

What planet is he talking about?

[Dead_Parrot]

2. My grandad showed me some photos, once...

It was warm and sunny in summer, cold and snowy in winter, wet in spring and cool in autumn. Weird.

[hatrack]

6. I believe he's discussing the Holocene

That whole "post-Pleistocene period of unusual stability over the past 10,000 years" thing.

Y'know, the unusually stable current climate that forms the basis for everything we do and grow and build and eat and dream.

That stable climate.

[One_Life_To_Give]

3. Climate will be stable again

when the population climbs back over the 100 million mark.

[phantom power]

4. Yeah, but stable in what new basin of attraction?

[One_Life_To_Give]

5. Won't really matter, with only maybe a million mouths to feed

Once you get past the idea of eliminating 6+ billion people and any technolgy since 1800. The rest becomes just a academic exercise of periodically relocating people to suitable regions.

[phantom power]

7. I'm curious for two reasons....

The first is that -- well, it's my future. To the extent that I have a future, anyway.

The second has to do with the expected effects on the topology of the future fitness landscape. Particularly as it applies to humans and/or our economy. How many people are likely to find adaptive pathways depends a lot on the topology of the fitness landscape we find ourselves on. Particuarly, how high is it's connectivity? That in turn depends on (a) what new basin earth's climate and biosphere finally land, and (b) how fast the transition happens.

[One_Life_To_Give]

8. From stage left enter, Kodos the executioner.

Too sentence all but the chosen million to death. For the good of all humanity.
At least that would be a clean way. But we will probably resort to something more like Mad Max. Take longer but in the end probably leave about the same number of people left alive.

At any rate you and I will be pushing dasies long before the climate stabilizes. And what is a stable climate anyway but a fleeting period of centuries when there is little movement bounded by periods of change.