by From Ikonoclast (originally a comment) . . . what really counts is the amount of coal, oil and gas we are burning and thus how much CO2 we are releasing into the atmosphere. The benign Holocene is ending. Scientists have declared we have already entered a new era, the Anthropocene. The climate, and thus weather patterns, of the benign (for humans at least) Holocene were a resource for human civilization. It is common mistake, and one I long made, to pay attention only to primary input resources. Thus we were obsessed about peak oil, peak coal and peak gas, imagining that the supply of these primary input resources would be the constraint for our global civilization, civilization being so energy dependent. However, it turns out that the major constraint on civilization involves not our
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from Ikonoclast (originally a comment)
. . . what really counts is the amount of coal, oil and gas we are burning and thus how much CO2 we are releasing into the atmosphere. The benign Holocene is ending. Scientists have declared we have already entered a new era, the Anthropocene. The climate, and thus weather patterns, of the benign (for humans at least) Holocene were a resource for human civilization.
It is common mistake, and one I long made, to pay attention only to primary input resources. Thus we were obsessed about peak oil, peak coal and peak gas, imagining that the supply of these primary input resources would be the constraint for our global civilization, civilization being so energy dependent. However, it turns out that the major constraint on civilization involves not our inputs but our wastes. Our wastes wreck ecological, biosphere and geosphere systems.
Climate change is the best case in point of the above (though not the only case). Climate change melts ice caps and glaciers, raises sea levels, raises temperatures and exacerbates both floods and droughts, generating wilder swings between the two and periods where regional climate remains stuck longer in one phase. It changes growing seasons affecting food production.
It is extremely troubling that coal, oil and gas still contribute so much to our energy mix. To save the world from catastrophic climate change we should have already reduced our use to the point that we could reach zero use by 2030. We have already used up almost all of our carbon budget.
https://www.dw.com/en/have-we-already-blown-our-carbon-budget/a-39878925
https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/our-carbon-budget-is-all-but-spent-but-who-is-counting
From the second link above;
“After doing the sums, humanity has only 95 billion of the original 1000 billion tonnes left to spend on carbon dioxide emissions. To put that in perspective, globally humans emit 10 billion tonnes of carbon every year.
That means that in less than 10 years, without dramatic action, humanity will have spent all of its remaining 2-degree budget. At that point, the chances of holding warming to 2 degrees will drop below 2/3, and we might as well flip a coin to estimate whether the climate will exceed boundaries maintained for over a million years.” – ANU, 6 May 2019.
That puts us at exceeding our carbon budget by 2029. And we are still doing nothing substantive to stop this. Indeed, CO2 emissions are still rising. When will people realize the emergency has already started?