(Special readers note: You are about to read some very alarming facts about our current global warming extinction emergency (aka climate extinction emergency, Holocene extinction, sixth mass extinction event, climate crisis, climate emergency.) We trust you will make up your own mind about what to do after thinking carefully about the facts that we are presenting.
We have learned that not everyone decides to take the same remedial or protective actions once they get over the initial shock of what they are about to read. Because we all are different and have different circumstances, we have provided the new Job One for Humanity Global Warming Reduction Plan which contains many options for very different kinds of individual or collective responses to our current global warming emergency.
And finally, if you do not at all understand what global warming is or how it works, we strongly advise you click here first and then continue with the rest of this document.)
"You cannot be called an alarmist if there really is something to be alarmed about." Unknown
Welcome to a not-so-happy summary of the current global warming extinction emergency which we all now face within our lifetimes. Before you read the global warming details provided below, it is critical to first read this critical new article which fully explains:
1. why we are already in an undeclared state of a global warming extinction emergency and,
2. what we must now do.
Once you have read the above new article, in the rest of this article you will discover additional stark facts and science about how fast global warming is escalating.
While reading all of these disturbing materials, keep calm and keep in mind that if we act wisely, together and with urgency, there is still a remaining window of opportunity (up until 2025.) in which we can slow down the global warming extinction emergency enough, so that far more of us will be able to survive it.
Why 35 years of global warming and fossil fuel reduction failure?
In spite of almost 35 years of warnings by credible scientists and the work of the environmental movement, plus a preponderance of collaborating scientific evidence, as well as numerous conferences and previous treaties, the carbon dioxide and methane pollution of our atmosphere, has not stopped, slowed, or even leveled off. On the contrary, it is getting worse faster than ever before!
As you can see, we are not doing very well.
Leading climate scientists like James Hansen, who originally warned us about the global warming danger 35 years ago, say we would remain safe if carbon in the atmosphere did not go over 350 parts per million (ppm). As of June of 2019 we are at about carbon 414 ppm and increasing at about 3 ppm per year in a near exponential progression.
When you combine the heating effect of carbon with the other greenhouse gases, it is called the CO2e ppm rating. CO2e, or carbon dioxide equivalent. CO2e is a standard unit for measuring all greenhouse gases in terms of the amount of warming they create compared to CO2.carbon footprints.
When you include atmospheric methane and the other greenhouse gas pollutants, our current adjusted CO2e rating has already risen to the shocking level of 430 ppmv of CO2e! Worse yet, we will be at carbon 450 ppm in 10 years or less when we include atmospheric methane in our calculations.
To put this in a time-lapse perspective, from 1850 to about 1950, the increase in carbon pollution was steady at about 1 ppm per year. From 1950 to 2000, the increase rose to 2 ppm per year, and now in its current exponential curve, it is at about 3 ppm per year and rising rapidly toward 3-4 ppm per year. If carbon continues to rise in this exponential, nonlinear way, virtually unchecked by our ineffective previous actions, the increase could easily reach a level of 4-5 ppm per year by 2025.
As you can see below, carbon has been rising since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England.
Image via Stephen Stoft at zfacts.com
According to James Hansen, a carbon 450 ppm level would eventually correspond and develop into an average global temperature increase of 6° Celsius (10.8° Fahrenheit) in this century and the end of human civilization as we’ve come to know it. Based on carbon ppm levels already in the system and reaching the 450 mark, this also means at least another 2.7° Celsius (4.9° Fahrenheit) global temperature increase beyond where we are now is the eventual and inescapable future reality.
This 2.7° Celsius would also be the most realistic minimal temperature increase to project as part of any future planning over the next 10-30 years. Bear in mind that even this scenario applies only if everything goes perfectly and we cross no additional global warming tipping points.
Unfortunately, it is already certain that because of our ongoing denial and delay in addressing escalating global warming, atmospheric carbon in parts per million will most likely continue to rapidly rise beyond the carbon 450-550 ppm total, which translates to a 3° to 4° plus Celsius increase (5.4° to 7.2°+ Fahrenheit) up to as much as a 6° Celsius (10.8° Fahrenheit) increase in average global temperature. (A 4° Celsius increase [7.2° Fahrenheit] in average global temperature would become “Hell on earth” as Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, has stated. Additionally, anything at or above a 4°Celcius increase in average global temperature would be incompatible with an organized global society and would be beyond adaptation!)
Hansen’s projections for “ending human civilization as we know it” are not the same as mass human extinction (as much as 70-90 % of humanity dying in as little as 30-50 years,) as we approach carbon 500 ppm and carbon 600 ppm which turn into the the 5° or 6° Celsius (10.8° to about 12° Fahrenheit) temperature levels. In Hansen’s 6° Celsius rise coming from eventually crossing the carbon 450 ppm mark, what would be considered normal, stable, comfortable, or predictable daily life in developed nations will become severely impaired and dysfunctional to say the least.
In undeveloped nations, there will be a high and consistent level of chaos and breakdown that will rapidly render most of these nations politically and economically unsustainable. As it is already occurring, the chaos of existing less-developed nations destabilized by factors such as war and the global warming extinction emergency will then affect the more developed and stable nations far beyond just the current massive migrations of climagees escaping the suffering and heat.
In spite of all the media PR, 21 United Nations climate conferences, endless warnings from credible scientists over the last 30 + years, and national reduction pledges and treaties, things are worsening in a nearly exponential progression (2,4,8,16, etc.). There is no way to deny we are not only losing the escalating global warming battle, and we are losing it at a progressively faster rate!
Instead of enacting the needed changes when they were far easier, more gradual, and far less costly, we must now take radical, painful, and costly tough medicine if we are going to save the future. The changes that would have been merely inconvenient 35 years ago will now become nearly unbearable.
Some of today’s most disturbing global warming facts
We are not receiving adequate accurate facts about how bad global warming is now, or how bad it will REALLY become. The heavily lobbied global media decline to alarm us to the real dangers in order to allow the fossil fuel industry to continue business as usual. Click here to see how bad we are actually doing in reducing fossil fuel use globally.
Current atmospheric fossil fuel burning-related carbon ppm values are now at 413. This is higher than at any other time in the last 1 million years (possibly higher than at any time in the last 25 million years). This new carbon pollution record represents an increase of 85 carbon ppm in the 55 years since David Keeling began making his revolutionary atmospheric carbon pollution measurements at Mauna Loa. (See graphs in this and previous chapters).
Carbon pollution accumulating in the atmosphere has been increasing even faster over the last few decades. It is now nearly certain that if we refuse to take immediate, effective measures to resolve global warming, future increases will happen at even faster rates.
Global average temperatures have the potential to rise far faster than what we normally experience. For example, about 9600 BC, in the Boreal climatic phase, global temperatures rose 7° C (12.6° F) in less than a decade, pushing the ice sheets into rapid collapse and sending sea levels soaring.
Our 35-year inability to control the global warming extinction emergency is due in part to:
The lack of national and international verifiable and enforceable international laws that would make continued large-scale carbon and methane pollution of the atmosphere a strongly punished activity or crime.
The physical time lags in developing and deploying the infrastructure needed for the new green energy technologies. As we are progressing now, it will likely take another 30-50 years.
But, if everyone on the planet and every government simultaneously agreed to scale up green energy generation immediately and there were no budgetary or resource restrictions in completing this life-critical project, it would still take many many decades to put that infrastructure in place.
If escalating global warming and its consequent climate destabilization proceed to the levels currently being predicted, it will eventually cost the global society hundreds of trillions of dollars in crisis recovery, as well as soaring insurance rates, massive real estate losses and depreciation, and massive coastal and other infrastructure losses, in addition to the vast amount of human suffering and death.
Right now, most nations are struggling with debt and their economies are in trouble with anemic annual growth. How will many of these nations, particularly the weakest ones, remain politically or financially viable, stable, or even continue to exist if another 5% or more of their total GDP (the Stern Review) is drained off each year into the continually escalating costs of global warming-caused climate destabilization? Current estimates from a book called Climate Shock project all global warming consequences will cost 10 percent and maybe far more of the world’s total GDP by 2100.
The global warming extinction emergency is already here! Its superstorms, flooding, seasonal disruptions, wildfires, heat waves, migrating insect infestations, and droughts will continue increasing in magnitude and frequency. According to a recent analysis from scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), "[t]he worst-case projections for global warming may be the most likely.”
The next battle now lies in keeping global warming from rising to an extinction-level event where human-caused carbon dioxide and methane levels in the atmosphere push the global temperature increases to 4°-6° Celsius (7.2°-10.8° Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels and beyond. How we can survive and fix this is found in the new Job One for Humanity Plan found on this website.
The following Illustration is From the new Climageddon book:
There is far more information about the escalating warming emergency in the new Climageddon book.
In this new book, you will find out why anything at or above a 4°Celcius increase in average global temperature would be incompatible with an organized global society and would be beyond our ability to adapt to it!