And, the meek shall not...
The paradigm has changed.
It’s an unfortunate fact of life that in the very near future, people of modest or no means all over the world will automatically become the most susceptible to the enervating effects of global warming and all its erratic elemental variables. With Planet Earth in its current retrogressive state, essentials like freshwater, clean air and non-arid soil will soon become scarce. Whole countries, indeed whole geographic regions, could erupt in chaos and violence, battling over scant supplies of both food and freshwater.
You think the current wars over fossil fuels are bad... just wait until three-billion starving, thirsty people, mired in desperation, start demanding what they consider their fair share of life-sustaining resources; natural resources already bought, sold, expropriated and hoarded by the privileged few – the "have-mosts."
Hyperbole? You decide.
Production of food in third-world countries is expected to halve in the next two-decades unless wealthy nations drastically cut consumption. So says the Stockholm Environment Institute at a conference this weekend.
The AFP article via Sunday’s Raw Story prognosticates a fractious future:
The livelihoods of more than three billion people in the world are being undermined by the wealth of the privileged few, the institute's executive director, Johan Rockstroem, warned.
"The risk is that we might halve ... food production in sub-Saharan Africa because of our lifestyles," he told AFP on the sidelines of an international conference on climate change and sustainable development, held in the Swedish town of Taellberg.
Rockstroem said that as wealthy countries increase consumption they also increase their exploitation of the world's natural resources, and in turn emit more greenhouse gases.
That ultimately speeds up the desertification of sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the world.
Needless to say, that’s where the proverbial crap hits the fan. Sub-Saharan Africa is just the beginning. The gathering desert storm of famine and drought, disease and pestilence, will spread to North Africa and central Asia at the same time typhoons and floods begin wreaking havoc in the south.
More from the article:
According to scientists and experts, greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to rise by two percent a year despite hundreds of environmental agreements, including the Kyoto Protocol. James Hansen, a climate expert and the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said tree lines moving north and melting glaciers were not only a consequence of global warming, they were also an accelerating factor.
"Forests are moving forward and that ... amplifies climate change. Ice sheets are beginning to melt earlier in the season. They become darker when they become wet and they absorb more sunlight" which warms the planet's temperature, he said.
As an aside, I did a diary - The Cloud Forest: Darker Days to Come – back on June 26 concentrating on one specific region, Costa Rica, currently struggling with the "ascending tree-line phenomenon." Whole species of birds, plants and wildlife too fragile to adapt quickly enough are disappearing in its wake - along with their rainforest eco-system.
As a result of elevated temperatures, experts predict that the world has about a decade to lower emissions before it is too late.
The Stockholm Environment Institute is one of the world's top five research organizations in climate change and it is pushing for a broader dialogue on social and economic change.
"We have come to the end of the road of sustainable development as we know it today. Science alone cannot deal with this. The risk of environmental refugees, the risk of societal collapse is imminent," Rockstroem said.
"We need to make massive changes in the equity and stewardship of the planet which goes way beyond climate change," he added.
Bo Ekman, founder and chairman of the Taellberg Forum, agreed.
"We cannot continue with business as usual, rather we must change our ways to business as sustainable," he said.
Hansen suggested the possibility of introducing punitive measures to help protect the environment.
"Oil and gas, which are being exploited now and will (continue to) be, are going to take us close to the dangerous level and there are huge reservoirs of coal and unconventional fossil fuels. Countries across the world are continuing to build or plan to build coal-fired power plants and we simply can't do that, he said.
"We're going to have to put a price on carbon emissions," he said.
The Taellberg Forum each year gathers more than 500 political leaders, scientists and aid workers in the resort village of Taellberg to discuss world issues in a relaxed atmosphere, with nature walks and music concerts on the agenda.
If we, as a country, allow another Republican administration to ascend to the presidency, the world’s future is indeed bleak. Just the six-years of doing nothing to reduce carbon emissions - since Bush pulled this country out of the Kyoto Treaty - have proved to be a catalyst into full-blown global warming.
Yes, the way we've been burning fossil-fuels in the last hundred years, global warming was bound to happen sometime in the future, but there's no way; not in my wildest imagination can I envision the past with a hypothetical Al Gore presidency in which we hadn’t long ago joined with the international community, and subsequently taken the necessary steps to mitigate this eventual existential threat.
Hell, with Mr. Gore as president, I am confident that private industry would have been well on its way by now to discovering a process or series of processes to reverse some of the damage already done to the environment.
If you haven’t already perused Al Gore’s newest op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times, I must say it's one of his best. He takes a little different tact this time, reminding everyone that it's not the Earth itself that's in a life or death situation. The Earth will eventually heal itself with or without us. It's us. We're the expendable ones.
Here it is:
Moving Beyond Kyoto
And, (if you haven’t already) please click the link below and sign the petition. We're currently at 96,300 signatures. It's not enough. A Dkos "surge" would be nice. Pass the link around. Send it to everyone on your blogroll, email or customer list. Hell, your Christmas gift list.
Listen, we can’t begin to right the egregious wrong committed back in ‘2000. What’s done is done. But we can begin anew by vindicating Mr. Gore - officially
And who knows... we may just save the planet while doing so.
Draft Gore
Peace
P.S. - There are thousands upon thousands of heartfelt, hopeful messages imploring Mr. Gore to run @ Draft Gore. The core emotion is palpable.