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This is only after visiting a museum of natural history that l & # 39; We note that all the most interesting mammals have disappeared
Of course, we are surrounded by dogs, cats, cows and pigs. And many other humans. But what happened to the big, megafauna of the past? Why are there no more lazy giants, Irish elk, woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers?
We got there. New research reveals how humans have altered and shaped the earth for millennia – beginning, it seems, by hunting for the collapse of large mammals. No need, then, to quibble about our impact today as it was about something new; The Anthropocene, the new name given at this time of human influence, goes back in time much further than is commonly done. Our influence has not been isolated for just a few hundred industrial years.
The closer we look, the more we must conclude that we dominated life on earth from the beginning. It is not that the extinctions did not occur before humanity; of course that they did it. But when we are there, other things disappear more quickly, in a blink of an eye geological.
In the case of megafauna, a recent study published in Science says that if the trend continues, "The largest mammal of the Earth in a few hundred years may well be a domestic cow. " And this cow can live in a very different world – a world much warmer and changed by climate change.
not only do we affect other living things with which we share the planet, we also modify the physical systems of the planet itself. To monopolize fresh water, transform ecosystems into farms and cement and, even more alarmingly, alter the natural greenhouse effect – overall heat balance by carbon dioxide (CO) emission 2 ) and methane gas in the atmosphere, we have in some sense geo-engineering the world without even knowing it.
" Now, in the Anthropocene, we must add nature herself to the list of things that are not natural.In all respects, the world we inhabit will now be the world we created. "
Today, geoengineering, in this case a deliberate attempt to control the global climate, is taking root – a plausible option. The Royal Society's report "Climate Geoengineering: Science, Governance and Uncertainty" highlighted the growing problem ten years ago: "Increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and land conversion for agriculture, have disrupted this delicate balance [heat] as gases limit a little more heat radiation emission in the air. 39; es "
is simply that this added heat is distributed across the globe, and temperatures increase. The report continues: "To restore this imbalance, the lower atmosphere has warmed up and emits more heat (long waves), and this warming will continue as the system evolves to a new equilibrium [warmer]." Knew?
Much of our impact on the planet was made without forethought about the consequences. It's a good bet that cavemen did not know that lazy giants might disappear. There were no reports of environmental impact, no Pleistocene Royal Society. But what about the current potential of CO 2 that changes the global climate – was this a surprise?
We have suspected so much for more than 150 years.
The Irish naturalist John Tyndall (1820-1893) was the first to explore the qualities of heat absorption of gases, including water vapor and CO 2 . In 1861 he noted that the properties of both affected the climate: "The differential action, with respect to the heat of the sun to the earth and radiated from the earth into space, is considerably increased by the aqueous vapor from the atmosphere. . . . . [And] an almost invaluable mixture of any one of the hydrocarbon vapors [such as carbon dioxide and methane] would produce great effects on the Earth's rays and produce corresponding climatic changes. "
Near & # 39; a century later in 1950, a Saturday Evening Post [Lebademplesqu'ilaracontéssontparallèlesàcequenouslisonsaujourd'hui:ladisparitiondesglacierslesvaguesdefroidetdechaleurrecordles"saisonscapricieuses"lafontedelamerlaglacel'élévationduniveaudelamerlesplantesetlesanimauxquimigrentdanslesrégionsnouvellementchaufféesetlalistecontinue"Lemondeseracapabledeplanifieraveccertitudesuraumoinsplusieurscentainesd'years-PerhapsthewholeworldwillnotbecometropicalbutBaffinland[Canada] will be as warm as Minnesota, Greenland as hot as the Carolinas, Vladivostok as hot as Calcutta. "
In 1959 the climate-carbon dioxide link and our responsibility were made clear in Scientific American ." Over the last century, a new geological force has begun to exert its effect on the planet. 39, the equilibrium of the Earth's carbon dioxide, "wrote physicist Gilbert Plbad.He argued that using the new space technology of the time, scientists could now distinguish between the factors The response to our current experiment to add CO 2 to the air could be decided. "If carbon dioxide is the most important factor, records of long-term temperature will increase continuously as long as man consumes fossil reserves from the earth. "
A 1965 US Presidential Report:" Restoring the Quality of Our Environment "was apparently the first document Government acknowledging that CO levels were climate-related: "Throughout its global industrial civilization, humans unintentionally conduct extensive geophysical experimentation. In a few generations, it burns fossil fuels that have slowly accumulated in the earth over the last 500 million years. . . . In the year 2000, the increase in atmospheric CO 2 will be close to 25%. This may be enough to produce measurable and possibly marked changes in the climate, and will almost certainly cause significant changes in temperature and other properties of the stratosphere. In 1965, the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii recorded 319 parts per million (ppm) of CO 2 in the United States. atmosphere in 2000, 369 ppm, not quite an increase of 16%.
In 1988, however, NASA scientist James Hansen announced that the predicted measurable change in the greenhouse effect had been detected and "changed the climate now." On the anniversary of his testimony in the US Senate, many climatologists have agreed that he was right.In the middle of the year 2018, the concentration rose to 411 ppm , an increase of 29% over 1965. And since 1965, 2 increased concentration, global temperature has risen by about 1 ° Celsius.The report on geoengineering from the Royal Society noted in 2009: "Climate models generally indicate that The stabilization of atmospheric CO 2 at about 450 ppm would be necessary to avoid a warming above 2 ° C. Emissions continue on current projections, we will cross this threshold around 2030.
© NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
The implementation of the necessary reductions "poses significant technological, economic, social and institutional challenges" Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2014. These will only increase "with delays in additional mitigation and if key technologies are not available."
So notice that global temperatures increase with increasing concentrations of CO 2 is not a surprise. Now what? If climate change is a real threat to the continued existence of civilization (a so-called existential threat), can we do something about it?
Climate change on purpose
Climate geoengineering was once considered B – a set of fantastic schemes for extracting CO 2 from the atmosphere or changing the reflectivity of the Earth , or a combination of both. Plan A was supposed to be the easy, obvious and easiest way: to stay within this 2 ° C increase ceiling by reducing CO production 2
As noted the IPCC report, "there are several mitigation pathways likely to limit warming to less than 2 ° C from pre-industrial levels.These routes would require significant reductions in 39, emissions over the next decades and emissions of CO 2 and other long-lived greenhouse gases by the end of the century.Fossil fuels, the largest source of carbon emissions.
A wide range of scientific organizations is in agreement: the Royal Society ("it is still physically possible to achieve reductions in Middle-of-the-century issues "); the American Geophysical Union (" the editors deep uctions of these emissions must be at the heart of any political response to the dangers of climate change "); the Bipartisan Policy Center ("this working group strongly believes that climate clean-up technologies can not replace risk control with climate change mitigation [i.e., reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases . . .]"); and Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences ("neither solar geoengineering nor CDR [carbon dioxide removal] can provide a definite reduction in the environmental risk of reducing greenhouse gas emissions "). With rising temperatures, increasing greenhouse gas emissions and growing global population, we may be on the brink of a global climate crisis. What will we do? Doing nothing or too little is clearly wrong, but actually too much.
But again, as noted by the Royal Society, it will be difficult to move away from fossil fuels. This "would require a revolutionary transformation of global systems of energy production and consumption. . . . There is little evidence to suggest that such a transformation is occurring. "
The first steps of this change would be a global agreement to change course, but from the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 (which the United States would not ratify) to the current Paris Agreement on Climate Change ( on which the United States waived in 2017), a consensus was established to limit CO 2 emissions.
It is as if coal, oil and gas were opiate in a growing energy dependency. "Unless the future efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are much more successful than they have been up to here," reported the Royal Society "Additional measures may be needed if it became necessary to cool the Earth during the century."
According to scientists such as David Keith of Harvard University, it is therefore necessary to begin to work on plan B. We need to change our app Rock to slow the warming by other means.
" Looking Further," wrote Keith in 2000, "I think the view of the CO 2 – climate problem could change from the current view that the emission of CO 2 is considered as a pollutant to be eliminated, although polluting with a thousand-year time scale and an overall impact, towards a conception in which the concentration and the climate are considered as elements of the Earth system to actively manage. "
Embrace Your Monsters
This time to manage the atmosphere has apparently come. Even so, Keith warned 17 years later that CO-free geoengineering 2 would not work: "Solar geo-engineering is not a substitute for reducing emissions. We can not continue to use the atmosphere as a free discharge of carbon and expect to have a safe climate, no matter what we do to reflect sunlight. "
Implementation From a technological solution to the climate to the real task of reducing emissions? It is the moral hazard to go forward with the manipulation of the climate.It is clear that the good the thing to do is to reduce the use of fossil fuels, does the Geoengineering Plan B prevent us from doing the right thing, is Plan B a miracle or a distracting monster that could easily get away from it all? control
Bruno Latour, Senior Researcher at the Instit ut Breakthrough, argues that the use of technology we have is the right thing to do. In his essay "Love Your Monsters", Latour argues that depriving oneself of our inventions is self-destructive. That's the problem, he believes, that Mary Shelley warned in her book Frankenstein . Our invented technology only becomes a monster when we abandon it; when you let go without training, bad things happen.
" Dr. Frankenstein's crime was not that he invented a creature by a combination of hubris and high technology," says Latour, "but rather than he abandoned the creature to itself .When Dr. Frankenstein meets his creation on a glacier in the Alps, the monster claims that it was not a monster, but that he became a criminal only after left alone by his horrified creator, who fled the lab once the horrible thing shook to life. "
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
[1945] 9017] " Written at the dawn of the great technological revolutions that would define the 19 ] and 20 centuries," Latour continues, "Frankenstein provides that The gigantic sins that were going to be committed would hide a much greater sin. We did not fail to take care of Creation, but we did not take care of our technological creations.
The Tower of Technology
It seems that nothing is out of our reach when it comes to conquering the physical. world, but we are unable to deal with moral issues.
This has a two-fold meaning: we should not abandon the ugly world of climate change that we have created, and we should not leave it alone now. If our lifestyle has affected the planet, we are forced to use our intelligence to handle the next steps. If the climate is our child, so to speak, we must feed it, make it good and whole. Similarly, "our sin is not that we have created technologies," says Latour, "but that we have failed to love and take care of them. if we decided that we were unable to follow the education of our children. "
Latour pursues the biblical theme, asking," If God did not abandon his creation and sent his Son to redeem him " Why do you, a human, a creature, believe that you can invent, innovate and proliferate, and then run away in horror from what you have committed? … God has fled into the world. Horror after what humans have made of its creation? "
This certainly calls into question the idea of moral hazard
Difficult decisions
If we simply proceed with no change in collective behavior, we Let's face some bigger problems ahead. "Another Bible theme comes to mind: repentance, which means simply relies on a change of mind or purpose. But he does not gain much traction. Meanwhile, NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) continues to report record temperatures. CO 2 emissions increase, do not fall. The conclusion of the NOAA? "If global energy demand continues to grow and be satisfied primarily with fossil fuels, atmospheric carbon dioxide will likely exceed 900 ppm by the end of the century."
Such levels would obviously exceed the theoretical limit of 450 ppm to stay below a shift of 2 ° C. At this point, we seem to be sitting on some kind of collective C plan: complacency. Whether we like it or not, of all appearances, whether we sit, drifting or acting, our world is heading for a new climate regime. And some form of climate geoengineering is coming to the horizon.
According to the philosopher Christopher Preston in The Synthetic Age we cross a new threshold in our creative intervention in the functioning of the earth and its future. "This would mark a whole new period in history," he writes, "where humanity is deliberately taking control of the geophysics of the planet." [Canada] " Many aspects of climate change and badociated impacts will continue anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are halted."
" Climate change presents humankind with an enormous economic and moral headache, "says Preston. Once we begin to intervene, it will be almost impossible to stop. If geoengineering works, we will have to continue; If that fails, we will try something else, then something else. "As an indefatigable potter forever shaping his clay," he warns, "humans will become responsible for the perpetual modeling of the climate. . . . People would badume the continued management of everything under the sun. "
These thoughts and those of Latour and the climatologist Keith relate to this presidential report of 1965. There, after recognizing the" vast geophysical experience "that we were then and continue to make, he suggested that he should be able to do so. take a more pro-active approach Like climate change, "opportunities to bring about compensatory changes by deliberately altering other processes affecting the climate can then be very important."
Recognizing climate change and its relationship to climate change CO 2 is not new.The idea that we could finally repair what we broke is also not.This also finds its origin in the scriptures: Nothing what they intend to do will not be impossible for them.
Preston speaks convincingly of the steps that will lead us to do even what seems impossible: "If you take seriously If you recognize that these damages will fall disproportionately on the world's poor, if you recognize that these people are not only the least well-equipped economically to cope with climate change, but are also the least involved in the world. First, if we admit the undeniable reality that conventional climate change mitigation strategies are not implemented quickly enough, it seems that there are strong moral reasons to do so. something dramatic. [19659008] There also seems little doubt that it is our nature to change the world to our needs and pleasures. But will geoengineering create a new level of surprising habitability? How far can we go before unraveling the planetary systems that support us or join the megafauna that we have led to extinction? We really do not know the answer to one or the other question.
We should understand, however, that we will never discover nor create perpetual equilibrium. Nature is never really tamed. as we push, pull, plan and work, nature changes and forgives in her own lively and responsive dance.
As Preston concludes, even in a world we believe to be under control, there will be new surprises. recognize, and things will happen that we would never have imagined: "Redoing the earth will always be a game of chance, and when we insert ourselves so deeply into the functioning of a planet, it is unlikely that we We can predict all the consequences of our actions There are serious risks to be seduced by the sublime beauties of technology. "
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