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Climate Scientist: Humans Will Go Extinct if We Don’t Fix Climate
Change by 2023
A
top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out
all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five
years.
22
June, 2018
In
a recent speech at the University of Chicago, James Anderson — a
professor of atmospheric chemistry at Harvard University — warned
that climate change is drastically pushing Earth back to the Eocene
Epoch from 33 million BCE, when there was no ice on either pole.
Anderson says current pollution levels have already catastrophically
depleted atmospheric ozone levels, which absorb 98 percent of
ultraviolet rays, to levels not seen in 12 million years.
Anderson’s
assessment of humanity’s timeline for action is likely accurate,
given that his diagnosis and discovery of Antarctica’s ozone holes
led to the Montreal Protocol of 1987. Anderson’s research was
recognized by the United Nations in September of 1997. He
subsequently received the United Nations Vienna Convention Award for
Protection of the Ozone Layer in 2005, and has been recognized by
numerous universities and academic bodies for his research.
While
some governments have made commitments to reduce carbon emissions
(Germany has pledged to cut 95 percent of carbon emissions by 2050),
Anderson warned that those measures were insufficient to stop the
extinction of humanity by way of a rapidly changing climate. Instead,
Anderson is calling for a Marshall Plan-style endeavor in which all
of the world takes extreme measures to transition off of fossil fuels
completely within the next five years.
Recovery
is all but impossible, he argued, without a World War II-style
transformation of industry—an acceleration of the effort to halt
carbon pollution and remove it from the atmosphere, and a new effort
to reflect sunlight away from the earth’s poles.
This
has do[sic] be done, Anderson added, within the next five years.
“The
chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after
2022 is essentially zero,” Anderson said, with 75 to 80 percent of
permanent ice having melted already in the last 35 years.
Anderson’s
prediction of Arctic sea ice disappearing by 2022 may be closer to
reality than a lot of us would hope. In 2016, University of Reading
professor Ed Hawkins compiled global temperature data dating back to
1850, prior to the Industrial Revolution of the early 20th century
and the oil boom, and turning the data into a time-lapse GIF. The
most alarming part of the data showed that temperatures began rising
exponentially faster at the start of the 21st century and show no
signs of slowing down:
Spiralling global temperatures from 1850-2016 (full animation) climate-lab-book.ac.uk/2016/spirallin…
The
good news is there are a relatively small amount of culprits
responsible for the vast majority of carbon emissions, meaning
governments know who to focus on. As Grit Post reported in July of
2017, more than half of all carbon emissions between 1988 and 2016
can be traced back to just 25 fossil fuel giants around the world. 10
of those 25 top emitters are American companies, meaning the onus is
largely on the United States to rein in major polluters like
ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Marathon Oil. Other
offenders include Chinese companies extracting and burning coal, and
Russian oil conglomerates like Rosneft, Gazprom, and Lukoil.
However,
the bad news for humanity is that as long as Donald Trump is
President of the United States, swift action to combat climate change
seems unlikely prior to 2020, given that Trump pulled out of the
Paris Climate Accords and refuses to even acknowledge the threat of
climate change despite warnings from U.S. government agencies like
the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense.
Yes governments are just sleepwalking to our destruction, with their imbecilic target dates of some small percentage in 20 years time. It is just postponing dealing with the problem to a time when it will be too late.
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