Today, as they say, things are dramatically different. The “reality” we are faced with is this, we get only one chance to do this right, and if we fuck it up, humanity is toast. Got it?
I know that might seem like hyperbole, alarmist even, but truly it is not. I posted a comment the other day in another diary indicating that, if we stay on our current course, humanity has about 5 generations (100 to 120 years) left before we become extinct. Someone replied that I'm engaging in hyperbole and that even if temperatures rise as much as 36 degrees Fahrenheit, sure places around the globe would be hard hit, but humanity would still survive.
I'm more than likely preaching to the choir about climate change here, but this reply I received to my comment was a little startling, especially coming from someone in this so called, “reality based community”. (Face Palm)
It's these kinds of replies that don't give me much confidence in humanity, because it displays that the “reality” has not sunk in yet. This is a very real and dangerous development, especially within the “party” that has been pushing for climate change for a very long time.
We have enough people in this country who don't even believe climate change is real, and it's kind of freighting to me that some people that do believe in it, don't really “get it”.
I'm No Scientist – It shouldn't be Required
While I’m no scientist, I do have over 15 years of professional experience in systems theory and design. My function has been to help large corporations and organizations incorporate people, process and technologies to create better “systems”. Basically transition from manual based systems, into more technological hybrid systems. The over riding philosophy was to simplify, or eliminate before we automate.
My clients have included some of the largest corporations on this planet, some of our largest government organizations including the D.O.D., not to mention NASA, as well as Berkeley Laboratories. While I was at Berkeley Labs, I worked with the Advanced Light Source group. A bunch of particle physicists. Talk about smart people, wow, just wow.
To toot my own horn for a moment, over my career as a systems consultant, I met 3 basic criteria for every project I managed over those 15 years, with some projects with budgets as high as 100 million annually. I consistently (ever single one) delivered on time, on budget and exceeded customer satisfaction. One of my previous clients saved over 200 million annually, just in inventory costs from “systems” I designed and developed. Terms like golden boy, Guru, man with the plan, were not uncommon when sales people were presenting me to their clients. No pressure.
CLIMATE CHANGE REALITY CHECK
We are already close to the tipping point1 of run away climate change now, but “humanity” is failing to respond in a “responsible” manner. While I know many are pleased by our president's effort's toward this end, as well as the recent signing of the Paris Climate agreement by so many countries was encouraging, however the “reality” is that the Paris agreement falls woefully short in many areas, but most importantly, the target of reducing global emissions to limit temperature rise:
The agreement sets out a global action plan to put the world on track to avoid dangerous climate change by limiting global warming to well below 2°C. (They target 1.5°C as the “magic number”)
First and for most what do they mean, avoid dangerous climate change? Heck, that is already happening now.
Take Syria for example. The country wasn't thrown into turmoil because of the Arab spring, as many pundits like to claim, it was the huge drought2 they experienced starting on 2006, that forced tens of thousands of farmers and their families, into the cities, which over loaded their “systems” ability to deal with the huge influx of people and all the ramifications that influx brought with it.
From ClimateSecurity.Org:
From 2006-2011, up to 60% of Syria’s land experienced, in the terms of one expert, “the worst long-term drought and most severe set of crop failures since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent many millennia ago.” According to a special case study from last year’s Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR), of the most vulnerable Syrians dependent on agriculture, particularly in the northeast governorate of Hassakeh (but also in the south), “nearly 75 percent…suffered total crop failure.” Herders in the northeast lost around 85% of their livestock, affecting 1.3 million people.
Got that?
“the worst crop failures since the agricultural civilization began in the Fertile Crescent many millennia ago. “
Also according to the same article:
The reasons for the collapse of Syria’s farmland are a complex interplay of variables, including climate change, natural resource mis-management, and demographic dynamics.
A NOAA study published last October in the Journal of Climate found strong and observable evidence that the recent prolonged period of drought in the Mediterranean littoral and the Middle East is linked to climate change. On top of this, the study also found worrying agreement between observed climate impacts, and future projections from climate models. A recent model of climate change impacts on Syria conducted by IFPRI, for example, projects that if current rates of global greenhouse gas emissions continue, yields of rainfed crops in the country may decline “between 29 and 57 percent from 2010 to 2050.”
(bold emphasis mine)
Well from my understanding, we haven't hit the “magic number” yet, but climate change is already having seriously dangerous, and not to mention deadly impacts. With a 1.5°C or 2°C rise in global average surface temperatures, we will see more and more of this. Social and government systems will overload to the point of collapse and possible chaos.
From the Independent3:
“It means hotter global temperatures, more extreme weather events like heatwaves and floods, melting ice, rising sea levels and increased acidity of the oceans. This is happening now and we are moving into unchartered territory at a frightening speed,” said Michel Jarraud, the secretary general of the WMO.
“Every year we report a new record in greenhouse gas concentrations. Every year we say that time is running out. We have to act now to slash greenhouse gas emissions if we are to have a chance to keep the increase in temperatures to manageable levels,” Mr Jarraud said.
A 2°C rise in global average surface temperatures across the planet, in reality, is going to have a huge impact on our civilization. A prolonged drought in Syria, help along by climate change, led to over a million people mass migrating to the cities, which as a result of the government and society inability to respond, lead to a civil war, that has opened the way for ISIS, and more mass migrations to Europe, which is threatening to destabilize Europe. Does that qualify for a dangerous impact?
It started as a drought and in just ten years, over 200K are dead. Some estimate a figure as low as 150K, while some put the figure as high as more that 470K4. How about hundreds of thousands of innocent people, dead?
Another example of already happening dangerous climate change, From RollingStone:
Historians may look to 2015 as the year when shit really started hitting the fan. Some snapshots: In just the past few months, record-setting heat waves in Pakistan and India each killed more than 1,000 people.
(bold emphasis mine)
Dangerous climate change, WTF are you talking about, it's already happening and we haven't begun to mitigate anything. Heck, we are already balancing precariously on the edge of climate Armageddon (multiple positive feed back loops), and 2°C rise in global average surface temperatures will bring about unimaginable chaos across large swaths of our planet.
Not to mention this magic number in the Paris agreement, is nothing but fiction. A number developed through political consensus, not science. But we are in uncharted waters, the blind leading the blind as it were.
Systems Overload
The effects of climate change we are already experiencing NOW, are over loading our “systems” to effectively deal with the unimaginable consequences that are currently unfolding. Social upheaval, mass migrations, food shortages, the rise of nationalism as a result of mass migrations all across Europe, rising temperatures, mass crop failures, all spell disaster.
In general, systems are comprised of five basic components. Input, output, processing, controls and feedback. Systems also impact other systems. The output of one system could be the input to another system. For example, at one the major plants where I was consulting, they produced plastic parts to be utilized in the manufacture of vehicles. So the output of that plant (system for producing plastic parts), were the input to a different system, the assembly of vehicles.
Each individual system can, and does, interact with other systems to produce specific results, but, as in the case with many of the “systems”, we as a civilization have created, not only interact with other human made systems, but impact our climate system, ecological system, the food chain system in a seriously negative way.
While systems can be thought of as separate and distinct in and of them selves, in terms of our natural, global systems, they actually fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. The tiniest impact in one system, can dramatically affect other systems, which in turn affect even more systems.
Our global climate system has a “natural” balance for “processing” the output of carbon dioxide, and other green house gases which is produced by both natural systems and man made systems. Prior to humankind's technological and industrial development, our global climate system function properly. That is, the “system” could effectively “process” the vast output of carbon dioxide that occurs naturally within our overall planetary environment.
Within our global systems, we have natural carbon sinks, that is, these carbon sinks absorb carbon dioxide that occurs naturally. Our oceans are one example, vegetation (trees and plants) are another example. Vegetation breaths in Co2 and exhales O2, that is oxygen, which humans and animals need to survive.
However, since the arrival of human industrialization, the huge amounts of carbon dioxide and other green house gases we have released into our natural system for “processing” our atmosphere, has essentially overloaded the natural “system” for processing the massive output of green house gases from our industrialization, and naturally occurring output.
Right now only about 40% of the carbon dioxide we produce, as output, can be processed by our natural carbon sink systems5. So, 60% of our output of carbon is accumulating in our atmosphere on an annual basis and is not being processed.
This accumulation of green house gases in our atmosphere is what affecting our natural global climate systems. And it is already creating the foundations for, not just one “positive feedback loop”, but several, and combined together, these positive feedback loops will create a tipping point from which there will be no going back, and we get run away climate change. Meaning once we hit that “tipping point”, humanity will be on a trajectory to extinction. Hell on earth is a lot closer than we think.
The “feedback”, we are receiving from our global climate system shows up in a variety of ways. For example, the melting sea ice around the Arctic, the melting of Glaciers around the globe, but most pronounced in the giant glacier in Greenland6, which in 2012 produced flash floods that wiped out concrete bridges and tossed around heavy equipment front loaders, like they were plastic toys floating in a bathtub.
From the National Snow and Ice Data Center:
Greenland’s 2012 melt season started early, surpassing the 30-year average for melt-covered area in mid-May, and remaining far in excess of typical conditions for June, July, and through mid August. For the peak melt days in early July and again in early August, more than 70% of the surface of the ice sheet experienced some melt, and the peak melt event on July 10 to 11 occurred over 97% of the ice sheet.
It also shows up in the from of more and more extreme weather events and increased global record temperatures, which have been rising for at least the last decade7. Not to mention the increase in carbon dioxide emissions by 24%, just in the last 58 years.8 (Hello!)
Since 1958, the Mauna Loa Observatory has been gathering data on how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide has increased by about 24 percent since the beginning of this record.
While we experience more extreme weather events around our planet, the effects of rising temperatures in the Arctic9 are more pronounced, because of the melting sea ice, which reduces the amount of radiant heat energy reflected back into space, which increases the amount of heat absorbed by the dark blue waters of the ocean, and the land masses that are no longer covered by bright white snow and ice.
The temperature of the air in the Arctic was recorded at it's highest levels since 1900 in 201510. A 2.9°C since the beginning of the 20th century.
The mean annual surface air temperature anomaly (+1.3°C relative to the 1981-2010 mean value) for October 2014-September 2015 for land stations north of 60°N is the highest value in the record starting in 1900 (Fig. 1.1). This is an increase of 2.3°C since the 1970s and 2.9°C since the beginning of the 20th century. The global rate of temperature increase has slowed in the last decade (Kosaka and Xie 2013), but Arctic air temperatures have continued to increase. Currently, the Arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of lower latitudes. (Bold emphasis mine)
Think about that. The Arctic has already passed the “magic number” of 1.5°C specified in the Paris Agreement. How are we going to hold the entire planet to 1.5°C?
People seem to think, and this is just observation, that turning off an extra light, drive a few miles less, turn off a few lights when you leave work, are going to help reduce green house gas emissions. Well, it's hasn't done much yet, what makes us think it will now or in the future?
Permafrost — Perma-what?
All across the Northern hemisphere of our planet, which includes parts of Russia, Alaska, Northern Europe and Canada, is what is called permafrost. This permafrost, which is basically frozen earth that is thousands of years old, contains twice as much carbon than what is currently in our atmosphere. (Yikes)
In simple terms, as the Arctic warms, the permafrost in our Northern hemisphere thaws and releases carbon dioxide as well as melts frozen Methane, called Methane Hydrates, another greenhouse gas.
As a greenhouse gas, Methane has a “hidden” danger, molecule for molecule, it traps approximately 30 times more heat in our atmosphere than carbon dioxide. While Methane is detected at much smaller levels than carbon dioxide, what has many scientists worried11 is how the Methane is being released into our atmosphere, the thawing of permafrost by rising Arctic temperatures on land, sea and the air, which all play a role in unbalancing our natural carbon “processing” system, and directly impacting other “systems”, affecting human survival. (plants / animals / fresh water)
One of the really worrisome scenarios about permafrost, is it’s potential for what’s called a sudden release that could trigger a significant tipping point of run away climate change.
Think about it, if our current natural carbon sinks can only process 40% of the additional carbon dioxide generated by human activity, how will our natural systems handle the additional release of carbon dioxide and methane that is generated by thawing permafrost?
Now, in one sense, since new land is exposed by melting snow and ice, more plants and vegetation are produced, which eat C02 (input) thus in part reducing carbon dioxide, that is apart of the natural system of carbon dioxide processing. But human's activity that produces additional carbon dioxide, an un-natural amount, over load our natural “processing” systems.
Additionally, the newly exposed dark blue oceans naturally absorb carbon as well, but in doing so, this process reduces the amount of oxygen in the oceans, which affects plant and animal life in our oceans and also help push the PH level, which is normally in the Alkaline range into a more acidic PH range, which further impacts plant and animal life in our oceans, which impact human life.
Not to mention contribute to the warming of the oceans around the Arctic, which creates more ice melting, but also reduces the amount and thickness of ice that is created during the winter months.
This feedback process, melts more ice than normal and leads to less ice being created during the winter months. But, and what is really important about this, is that as the land mass warms, the permafrost thaws and releases additional amounts of both carbon and Methane, which gets tramped in our atmosphere, which produces more heat, and when a tipping point is reached, it will become completely uncontrollable, hence the term run away climate change and the death of humanity won't be to far off after that.
Think of it this way, only about 40% the carbon emission from human activity can be processed by our natural systems. So 60% is remaining in our atmosphere and our planetary systems are already overloading by this additional carbon. Add a healthy dose of methane and carbon release from permafrost, and hell on this planet is just a few years away. (Like it’s not here already in many part of the globe)
It's simple, our natural planetary systems can only handle so much and they are already overloaded, but we don't have “circuit” breakers to be able to mitigate that systems overload (tipping points), like we do with our home's electrical system.
Paris Agreement – Politics as Usual. (Controls)
Much of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change is about “mitigation” and the potential for a technological solution, such as technologies extracting CO2 from our atmosphere, which we have known about since humans developed submarines, to kill one another.
While the Paris Agreement is a step in the right direction, the reality is this, everything we basically know today, maybe not in as much fine detail, we knew 25 years ago and not much has changed, especially since carbon levels have risen since then, to over 400 ppm. Something not seen in the past 2-3 million years. Hello, anyone home?
One of the findings12 from the Paris Agreement I find completely and utterly hypocritical is this:
Extend the current goal of mobilizing $100 billion a year in support by 2020 through 2025, with a new, higher goal to be set for the period after 2025;
That is pennies on the dollar compared to what kind of financial effort that will be required, if we are going to try and shoot for only a 1.5 C rise in global average surface temperatures.
Think about it. 100 Billion dollars a year might seem like a lot of money, which it is, but it pales in comparison to the amount money governments around the world spend to subsides the fossil fuels industry, which the IMF estimated13 at $5.2 trillion US dollars in 2015.
Let that sink in, if your natural “data sink” is not overloaded enough already, like our climate systems are.
Now, I'm not the most educated person, but I'm smart enough to realize that subsidizing the very industries for the exploration, extraction, processing, production, transportation, and distribution of fossil fuels, to the tune of $5.2 trillion dollars, in one year alone, is a slap in the face to the rest of humanity, especially considering we are very close, if we haven't already passed one or more “tipping points”.
We should have been spending 100 Billion a year, 25 years ago, when climate change was on the world14 agenda. We have known about this for a very long time and have not made any real, meaningful progress.
From International Energy Agency15:
Four-fifths of the total energy-related CO2 emissions permitted to 2035 in the 450 Scenario are already locked-in by existing capital stock, including power stations, buildings and factories. Without further action by 2017, the energy-related infrastructure then in place would generate all the CO2 emissions allowed in the 450 Scenario up to 2035. Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.
We are two and half decades behind in transforming our energy infrastructure and haven't really done much, other than change a few regulations and improve energy use in some products (cars, appliances and such), to stem the tide of climate change in any meaningful way. This doesn't bode well for assessing humanity's ability to respond to this crisis.
The Status Quo is killing us All
I hate to say it, I know many will think I'm attacking a certain candidate, but reality is reality, and there is no denying it, incremental change or the continuation of the status quo, will simply kill off humanity.
For the last 25 years it has been business as usual, with run away capitalism. If it is not obvious that the “status quo” hasn't worked, well you must be blind or deluded and need mental counseling. I'm not being snarky, I'm being totally serious!
How will this impact business? Guess what, I really couldn't give a shit and neither should you. If we are all dead, there will be no consumers, no one to man the factories, no one to run the robots, no one to produce the electricity business need to open their doors, got it?
Whether business profit or not, should not even enter the equation of saving humanity at this point, because 1) we have let things go too long without any meaningful, dramatic action that has been, and is currently, required for just achieving, much less sustaining a 1.5 C rise in average global surface temperatures and 2) we get only one chance to get this right, otherwise we’re toast.
Economic Elites — The Oligarchy
Multinational corporations and the world billionaire class are holding humanity hostage. These two forces keep the status quo in place. Both hide large sums of money (trillions) in tax havens across the planet and both exploit people, and nations, for their own personal profit.
But more importantly, they hold tremendous political power that can effectively cripple government's ability to act, not to mention load them up with debt in the process, with the predatory financial product they sell to our city, state and federal governments. Can anyone say Flint, Detroit, Chicago, Puerto Rico? (Hello, financial crisis of 07-08)
According to the Global Risk Index16:
The Global Risks Report 2013 analyses 50 global risks in terms of impact, likelihood and interconnections, based on a survey of over 1000 experts from industry, government and academia.
Snip
This year’s findings show that the world is more at risk as persistent economic weakness saps our ability to tackle environmental challenges. The report highlights wealth gaps (severe income disparity) followed by unsustainable government debt (chronic fiscal imbalances) as the top two most prevalent global risks.
(bold emphasis mine)
Did you “get that”? The top two global-risks, are inequality and unsustainable debt. Our current national government debt is over 19 TRILLION. Cities all across our country are loaded with unsustainable debt.
Only one of our presidential candidates has correctly diagnosed the greatest threat to saving humanity, the Billionaire class (Oligarchy).
Because the Billionaire class holds such vast political sway within our country, but even more so with other countries, meaningful legislation to mitigate or reduce green house gas emissions typically get watered down or never get enacted. We have scientific studies17 proving that our government enacts legislation that benefits the top 10%, and the bottom 90% have a statistically insignificant impact on legislation.
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
(bold emphasis mine)
As a result of this lopsided impact on government policy, which enacts legislation to benefit the “Billionaire class”, who own and run the energy industries, governments across this planet are actually working at cross purposes of mitigating climate change, by subsidizing the fossil fuels industries by over 5000 times what they are “pledging” to contribute to global climate change efforts. This is completely and utterly, not only absurd, but fucking insane. (if we are to save humanity)
From the World Resource Institute18:
Meanwhile, greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, loss of natural resources, and other environmental problems cost the global economy $4.7 trillion annually.
Nothing like efficient markets that over burden society with their externalized costs.
Capitalism it's self, is an impediment to making any real progress because we are too concerned about costs and profits, while ignoring the mass human suffering already taking place. Whenever our political or business leaders discuss climate change, it is always with the underlining assumption, capitalism will not fundamentally change and the quest for never ending profits will continue.
Especially when hedge fund managers can demand repayment of predatory loans, while a country's people starve, and are stripped of any means, political or otherwise, to be able to save themselves from their status as a 3rd world country, not to mention the devastating effects climate change is having on their country, and population.
I've tried to shy away from many of the most horrifying aspects that climate change will inflict on our planet, like pandemics from new diseases and our ineffective ability to respond to out breaks. The disruption to food production, famines, mass starvation, resource and water wars, not to mention the ever persistent threat of “terrorism”, as all our political and TV pundits claim is our number one enemy. (face palm)
We only have a very short window of time to get this right and save humanity. I'm talking 10 to 20 years. What have we accomplished over the last 25 years? Sure, we have some new tech, but the political will, has not only decreased, but the denial of climate change is higher than it has even been. We can’t take the risk of wait and see or let’s let the markets decide.
Not only that, but one of the leading energy companies, Exxon19, who in the 80's was actually a pioneer in cutting edge climate change science, has been funding climate change denial think tanks for the past couple of decades, all the while receiving billions in annual government subsides, tax breaks, write off, loop holes, not to mention the utilization of tax havens reducing needed tax revenues to mitigate climate change. (We, as a society, might have to go back and re-imagine the law about Crimes Against Humanity.)
The top 1% in America has a carbon foot print thousands of times higher than the global average. America it's self is one of the worst producers of carbon dioxide emissions, and we are not doing nearly enough to have an impact.
It's rather ironic our military recognizes that Climate Change is the greatest threat to our national security, but fail to address that our military is one of the largest consumers of fossil fuels or how to effectively deal with that conundrum. With over 7000 military installations world wide20, we're going to have to re-think about our military's role in the world.
The Bright Spots – While Pandora's Box Maybe Open, There is Hope
One of the bright spots I see in all this doom and gloom, is that climate change IS the global enemy, not some space faring aliens depicted in Hollywood movies. Climate change has the potential truly bring this planet, and all of humanity together, to clean up the world we live in now, and to insure we have a habitable world for our generations to come.
Climate change doesn't believe in religions, economics or ideologies or anything for that matter, it is a unbiased killer. Whether you're a member of ISIS or any national army, climate change has no friends, will cause all of us to no longer to exist.
Climate change presents humanity with a huge opportunity for political, social and economic change that could truly be revolutionary, like ditching capitalism, at least from our current corrupted from of capitalism and transitioning to a more humane form of quasi socialist-capitalism.
True innovation America is lacking now days, and it is specifically capitalism that has hindered real innovation, for cheap product with high profits. Somewhere we got the crazy idea, make things as cheap as possible, and that last as short as possible, to increase consumer demand and thus profits.
The way we currently design and produce our products, they have a limited useful life and afterward these products are mostly discarded and then replaced. That discarded waste ends up in one of million landfills dotting our planet. Yet, Thomas Edison developed a light bulb that has been burning for over 100 years.
How we design and construct our products impacts many other “systems”, both man made (economic) and natural (environment). Think of the rate at which “consumers” replace their personal vehicles, their clothes and other “things” we use for short periods of time, and then discard to a land fill some where.
If you think about it, Climate-change IS the indictment that capitalism has completely and utterly failed. The evidence is overwhelming, yet we are failing to 1) acknowledge it's utter failure and 2) seemingly unwilling to do anything about it. Especially if our government(s) keeps enacting legislation that only benefits the billionaire class, as has been the case for at least the last 40 years.
Climate change has the real potential to bring about a massive Socialist Revolution that many have indicated that would need to happen in order to over turn the existing status quo of gangster capitalism that currently exists today.
The term revolutionary socialism refers to socialist tendencies that subscribe to the doctrine that social revolution is necessary in order to affect structural changes to society. More specifically, it is the view that revolution is a necessary precondition for a transition from capitalism to socialism.
We, as a species, can no longer afford to continue down the previous path we have been following for the last 150 years. That path has led us directly to the current crisis we find ourselves in, but seem to be frozen to do anything about it, because we the people, have ZERO political influence.
Reality – A tiny group of people are preventing our world from properly responding to this global crisis, and until we remove these impediments to enacting meaningful change, the world will continue to fry, more people will die and humanity will ultimately go extinct, because profits were more important than people. We are facing a do or die moment in this new epoch in our species history. Humanity truly is at stake simply because If we get it wrong, we’re toast!
That will be the obituary for humanity's demise, here lies a dead species that believed profits were more important than people.
VIDEOS
Some videos, for those of you who don’t like to read anything longer than a few paragraphs.
Bernie Sanders in the Senate attacking republicans for their climate change denial.
A video that shows how the government, does not represent the people, but the (let me use the new politically correct term) Economic Elites (Oligarchy) and Business interests (The Billionaire class and multinational corporations).
Thom Hartmann discussing climate change
Amy Goodman with DemocracyNow speaks with one of the experts at the Paris Climate Summit, who indicates climate scientist are self censoring because things are actually worse than we thought.
Professor Richard Wolff explains how the Debt Vultures (my term, I think) worked their magic on Puerto Rico, Detroit and soon many cities across this nation. You might want to go check out Democracy at Work’s youtube site. Prof. Wolff has an excellent video series about Marxism and Capitalism, that is very easy for the layman to understand.
NASA video showing growing warming trend of the planet over time 1880-2015.
References:
1http://www.pnas.org/content/105/6/1786.abstract
2https://climateandsecurity.org/2012/02/29/syria-climate-change-drought-and-social-unrest/
3http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/climate-change-global-average-temperatures-break-through-1c-increase-on-pre-industrial-levels-for-a6727361.html
4http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/world/middleeast/death-toll-from-war-in-syria-now-470000-group-finds.html
5https://www.skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natural-emissions.htm
6http://nsidc.org/greenland-today/2013/02/greenland-melting-2012-in-review/
7http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs266/en/
8http://climate.nasa.gov/400ppmquotes/
9http://climate.nasa.gov/news/958/
10http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/air_temperature.html
11http://whrc.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/PB_Permafrost.pdf
12http://www.c2es.org/international/negotiations/cop21-paris/summary
13http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2015/NEW070215A.htm
14https://unfccc.int/resource/docs/convkp/conveng.pdf
15https://www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/pressreleases/2011/november/the-world-is-locking-itself-into-an-unsustainable-energy-future.html
16http://reports.weforum.org/global-risks-2013/
17http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9354310
18http://www.wri.org/our-work/topics/business
19http://insideclimatenews.org/news/15092015/Exxons-own-research-confirmed-fossil-fuels-role-in-global-warming
20http://ppec.asme.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/CCARprint.pdf