[MCN] Heat has many consequences: "It is, I promise, worse than you think."

[Lance Olsen]

Excerpts from the introductory paragraphs:

Peering beyond scientific reticence.

"It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today."

"Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.


"Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope."

"Maybe you know that already — there are alarming stories every day, like last month’s satellite data showing  <https://www.carbonbrief.org/major-correction-to-satellite-data-shows-140-faster-warming-since-1998>the globe warming, since 1998, more than twice as fast as scientists had thought.”
<<https://www.carbonbrief.org/major-correction-to-satellite-data-shows-140-faster-warming-since-1998 <https://www.carbonbrief.org/major-correction-to-satellite-data-shows-140-faster-warming-since-1998>>>

"But no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough. Over the past decades, our culture has gone apocalyptic with zombie movies and Mad Max dystopias <http://www.vulture.com/2016/07/the-present-worse-than-fictional-dystopias.html>, perhaps the collective result of displaced climate anxiety, and yet when it comes to contemplating real-world warming dangers, we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination. The reasons for that are many: the timid language of scientific probabilities, which the climatologist James Hansen once called “scientific reticence” in a paper chastising scientists for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was; the fact that the country is dominated by a group of technocrats who believe any problem can be solved and an opposing culture that doesn’t even see warming as a problem worth addressing; the way that climate denialism has made scientists even more cautious in offering speculative warnings; the simple speed of change and, also, its slowness, such that we are only seeing effects now of warming from decades past; our uncertainty about uncertainty, which the climate writer Naomi Oreskes in particular has suggested stops us from preparing as though anything worse than a median outcome were even possible; the way we assume climate change will hit hardest elsewhere, not everywhere; the smallness (two degrees) and largeness (1.8 trillion tons) and abstractness (400 parts per million) of the numbers; the discomfort of considering a problem that is very difficult, if not impossible, to solve; the altogether incomprehensible scale of that problem, which amounts to the prospect of our own annihilation; simple fear. But aversion arising from fear is a form of denial, too.

"In between scientific reticence and science fiction is science itself. This article is the result of dozens of interviews and exchanges with climatologists and researchers in related fields and reflects hundreds of scientific papers on the subject of climate change. What follows is not a series of predictions of what will happen — that will be determined in large part by the much-less-certain science of human response. Instead, it is a portrait of our best understanding of where the planet is heading absent aggressive action. It is unlikely that all of these warming scenarios will be fully realized, largely because the devastation along the way will shake our complacency. But those scenarios, and not the present climate, are the baseline. In fact, they are our schedule."

Full story :
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html <http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html>
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“How does one justify trying to cope with what may be intractable problems? 
The very nature of the question belies its origins in the assumption of science 
that one has to believe that all problems are solvable.”

Seymour Sarason. The Nature of Problem Solving in Social Action. 
American Psychologist. April, 1978
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“ Ecosystem management must avoid two traps: falsely assuming a tame solution and inaction from overwhelming complexity. “

Ruth DeFries, Harini Nagendra. Ecosystem management as a wicked problem. Science  21 Apr 2017 Special Issue: Ecosystem Earth
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"What would happen to the climate if we were to stop emitting carbon dioxide today, right now? Would we return to the climate of our elders?

"The simple answer is no.”

https://theconversation.com/if-we-stopped-emitting-greenhouse-gases-right-now-would-we-stop-climate-change-78882



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