Jacob Brotman
Global warming is real, it’s terrifying and it must be stopped. The science is not only “in” but has been for the past 40 years. Svante Arrhenius was the first to propose a basically correct mechanism for the greenhouse effect in 1896. Greenhouse gases, the chief offender being carbon dioxide, refract Earth’s infrared emissions in the atmosphere and distribute more heat to the surface than would “normally” occur in our atmosphere. This mechanism has been pretty exhaustively proven. Also proven is that human activities are driving the brunt of the current period of warming. It’s worth noting that 97 percent of climate scientists are in consensus on this..
Climate science is certainly imperfect and there are valid criticisms of the models put forth by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But reason dictates that we act with the best information available. That information isn’t going to come from the pundits on Fox, CNN or your favorite think tank. The best information is going to come from people who empirically study a given phenomenon for a living. Talk to any climate scientist, or just about any earth scientist, and you’ll find that they are very scared.
The current UN goal is to limit carbon emissions to levels that would result in a global 2°C temperature increase. Such a goal would rely on widespread reforms unrealistic within the worldwide political sphere. If we extrapolate current trends, we’re looking at a global 6°C increase in temperatures. That is pretty much game over for civilization. I’m not saying that no humans would survive, but organized society simply could not exist to an appreciable extent. Ocean acidification would eliminate much of the world’s food stock, viable farmland would shift geographically and drastically shrink and already threatened ecosystems would be destroyed. It’s hard to articulate what the world would look like in this very likely scenario, but the death of billions is a given.
That seems like something we should be working to avoid. There is no doubt that adopting UN proposals would be extremely difficult and require a concerted, worldwide effort. The economic consequences of abandoning fossil fuels are dire, but the change has to be made eventually regardless of climate concerns – only so much oil and coal exist to be burned. But even if renewables weren’t viable means of harnessing energy (they are), the choice would still be pretty clear: great pain or worldwide apocalypse.