Sustainability: Are We Running Out of Time?
Here’s a short article from Dr. David Katz, an MD from Yale University, who writes on a topic quite familiar to me: we human beings may be running out of time. In particular, we’re in a race that has evolved over a period of tens of thousands of years that now needs to make plans that will affect our very survival as a civilization. But are we equipped to deal with this challenge effectively?
It was a good essay.
Even if we were mentally and emotionally equipped to deal with global warming in a technical sense, it is already too late to prevent some of the detrimental effects. At this point, all we can do is take action to limit global warming to a certain degree in addition to taking action to deal with the warming which can no longer be prevented.
There are two aspects to dealing with the warming which cannot any longer be prevented. One is technical; the other is political. The technical aspects require designing housing that is livable during hotter weather, finding ways to get adequate water to areas where warming reduces rainfall, and changing agricultural practices. The political aspects require finding ways to enable climate refugees to migrate to livable areas with minimal conflict. In theory all this could be done, but I question whether our political systems can adequately deal with it.
In any case, dealing with global warming will require additional energy and, unless that additional energy is mostly free of CO2 emissions, it will provide positive feedback to exacerbate global warming. That is a positive feedback loop which has received little attention.
At my age, I don’t expect to be around when the worst effects of global warming occur since that will probably take another 30 years.