I've been writing about climate change for years, and before that reading about it and looking for solutions. The more I learned about climate change the more I understood that the only solution would have to be a whole Earth solution. There are no simple fixes to this extraordinary problem. The reason for that is that climate change is an irreversable, forever problem, which must be understood in order to begin to understand solutions.
David Roberts, writing in Grist gives a brilliant attempt at presenting the problem. He shows how climate change is so different from other environmental problems that it should not even be classified as one. He gives two reasons for that difference:
First is that CO2 is not like other pollutants because it lasts forever. To illustrate that fact he uses the bathtub analogy that is so effective.
National Geographic on flr
Second is that climate change is irreversible and that is due to the long life of CO2 in the atmosphere. A 2009 paper in Nature(pdf) makes it clear:
This paper shows that the climate change that takes place due to increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop. Following cessation of emissions, removal of atmospheric carbon dioxide decreases radiative forcing, but is largely compensated by slower loss of heat to the ocean, so that atmospheric temperatures do not drop significantly for at least 1,000 years.
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my emphasis]
The closest I've come to an overarching idea of the magnitude of action necessary to even give us a chance to leave this Earth in at least its present state of functioning has been the ideas presented in this diary: Climate Change: A Plan For A Way Forward. To summarize:
1) We must stop the use of stored reserves of fossil fuel.
2)We must transition to sustainable energy sources as soon as possible.
3) We must use a fast solution (pdf) to rapidly reduce greenhouse gases by reducing the short lived climate pollutants of Black Carbon, Methane and ground level ozone, to buy us the time to reduce the long living CO2
Chinese writer Lu Hsun:
Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said to not exist
It is just like roads across the earth
For actually there were no roads to begin with
but when many people pass one way a road is made
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Help Us Spread the Word About Climate Change
For those of you on Facebook and Twitter: Please help to spread the word by hitting the FB and Tweet links at the top of this diary and if you have time, join the discussion with comments. Share such postings with friends, family, co-workers, and acquaintances.
Thanks, as all of this helps build the Climate Change movement as well as introducing critically important ideas about renewable sources of energy.
Please use hashtags #climate and #eco to tweet all diaries about the environment.
"Green Diary Rescue" is Back!
After a hiatus of over 1 1/2 years, Meteor Blades has revived his excellent series. As MB explained, this weekly diary is a "round-up with excerpts and links... of the hard work so many Kossacks put into bringing matters of environmental concern to the community... I'll be starting out with some commentary of my own on an issue related to the environment, a word I take in its broadest meaning."
"Green Diary Rescue" will be posted every Saturday at 1:00 pm Pacific Time on the Daily Kos front page. Be sure to recommend and comment in the diary.
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