This means Jesus is coming! No going back now — yeehaw!
The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported on Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years.
Scientific monitors reported that the gas had reached an average daily level that surpassed 400 parts per million — just an odometer moment in one sense, but also a sobering reminder that decades of efforts to bring human-produced emissions under control are faltering.
The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this high for at least three million years, before humans evolved, and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea.
“It symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that reported the new reading.
H/t Kush Arora.
Which do you think will be worse, the food riots or the water wars? Or maybe the refugee crisis?
I’ll take water for $200, Alex.
Water wars will take a bit longer, be more existentially important, and be fought initially with “diplomacy,” then all out wars. Initially, the water wars will be sold to public as either part of the Terror Wars or as humanitarian actions to be achieved through “kinetic military action.”
Syria may well have a strong water component in the West’s estimation, with Israel having a major goal of getting more access to water — and disallowing it to indigent Arab populations. I imagine that if Syria is broken up, as the US seems at times to proffer as a solution (with the Turkey/Turkish Kurds new agreement being the initial step to doing that), then current water treaties will be open to renegotiation or legal actions.
Food? Much more noticeable in the short term, but most nations will probably find ways to ameliorate it somewhat. Food riots will be met with militarized police attacks and there will be deaths from that. The long term malnutrition will further disadvantage the lower economic quintiles who survive. The One Percenters will tsk-tsk about the poor not practicing good nutrition and, alas, it’s all their fault.
A BBC discussion of effects of climate change I heard last night (not all as I did doze off, then woke up yet again) had an economist from Illinois say that food shortages would be a quite likely a good thing in the long run as it would force conservation of food usage and there would be less waste if it’s more expensive.
The IL guy probably supports as well the Chained CPI, aka Lowered Standard of Living measurement. Austerity in any form is all good to some of these running dog Corporatist lackey economists.