OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #154, NOVEMBER 20,
2023 https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2023/11/omni-climate-memo-mondays-154-november.html Mark Lynas,
Climate Scholar David Bromwich. “The Only Issue.”
Basav Sen. Anyone
especiallly responsible? Mark Lynas,
Climate Scholar Six Degrees: Our Future on a
Hotter Planet. 2007.
The God Species:
Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans.
2011.
Nuclear 2.0: Why a Green Future Needs
Nuclear Power. 2 014.
The Carbon Calculator. 2016.
Our Final Warning:
Six Degrees of Climate Emergency.
2020. Lynas is one of our most distinguished
scholars of climate change. His
first book on the subject was published two decades ago, when a one-degree
world lay in the future. The first
edition of Six
Degrees appeared over fifteen
years ago; here is how he compared the two editions in Our Final Warning: “…I am now substantially more pessimistic about the future than I
was….While there have been positive shifts…these are dwarfed both by
rising emissions and an alarming trend towards denialism….that allows us
to keep on living our lives as usual despite…what climate scientists are
telling us” (p. xi). And what they
are telling us repeated what Lynas reported in 2007 reinforced by fifteen
years more of research by the UN’s global IPCC scientists and additional research
and commentary by climatologists around the world. These studies suggest what each rise in
one degree of temperature will bring our planet. In 2015 the earth’s global mean
temperature reached 1 degreeC above preindustrial levels (1850-1900), and
we are already “becoming impoverished and reduced“ (fires, floods, rising
seas, hurricanes, degraded soils). Now the temp is about to breach 1.5
degreesC. “…what was once our
future is now the present. If we
don’t succeed in cutting
back carbon emissions in time, the increasingly
terrifying impacts detailed in later chapters—of two, three, four degrees
and even higher—will also one day become our present.” --D David Bromwich. “The Only Issue.” The Nation
(1.10-17,2022). “The commitment
required to avert climate catastrophe is going to be staggering,
expensive, and…tedious and ordinary. . . .if we are going to maintain a
shred of decent living half a century from now. If there were ever a cause that
demanded single-minded attention, this is it.” Basav Sen.
Anyone especiallly responsible?Janine
Jackson Interviews Basav Sen. Extra!
(June 2019).
Sen is director of the Climate Justice Project at the Institute for
Policy Studies. Sen: The US “has
one of the largest global emissions of any country in the world” and the
US has the highest cumulative emissions. Thus we have a special responsibility to
fix what we broke. It’s a “simple
principle of justice.” The US “owes
the world on funding for climate mitigation and climate adaptation.”
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