{"id":60,"date":"2015-02-10T12:19:59","date_gmt":"2015-02-10T12:19:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/letthesunwork.com\/?page_id=60"},"modified":"2015-02-12T07:57:45","modified_gmt":"2015-02-12T07:57:45","slug":"climatechangefutility","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/letthesunwork.com\/challenge\/climatechangefutility","title":{"rendered":"Digesting the Distressing Reality of Futility in Our Response to Climate Change"},"content":{"rendered":"

When it comes to catastrophic climate change<\/a>, we humans in general, and we Americans in particular, have a filter that makes us discount, ridicule, and reject data that makes us uncomfortable while at the same time we soak up, cling to, and embrace data that makes us feel better. We all do it to one extent or another, and it’s probably healthy in many contexts, because it allows us to cope with bad news and not lose hope. When an entire civilization does it together, however, and with an issue that threatens that civilization, it stops being healthy and becomes dangerous in the extreme. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our global response to climate change.<\/p>\n

The Kyoto Protocol (which neither China nor the US has yet adopted) expires after 2012. The UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen will assemble in the fall of 2009 and continue the laborious process of give and take, compromise and obfuscation designed to produce a successor climate change treaty. Every indication is that the treaty produced by this process will be as futile as the Kyoto Protocol has been and that we humans will continue to pump more greenhouse gases into the earth’s fragile atmosphere until we can’t find any more to pump.<\/p>\n

So where will that leave us? Most analysis of climate change stops at the year 2100; we suspect we stop there not because what comes later is impossible to estimate but because what comes later is too painful to contemplate. The Institution of Mechanical Engineers<\/a> (IME) in the UK estimates in a February 2009 report – unfortunately no longer available online –\u00a0that global treaties to control greenhouse gases will be fundamentally unsuccessful in reducing the worst effects of climate change. This is a report produced by engineers, so it sees the problem of climate change through engineering eyes. Moving past attempts to control greenhouse gases, the report expects the control of greenhouse gases to be futile and predicts what will happen if we humans do in the future what we have done in the past. In doing so, it seems not to account for the depletion of fossil fuels resulting from peak oil <\/a>and peak coal, so we’re not sure to make of the predictions. Assuming for a moment, however, that the rosiest predictions of peak oil deniers come to fruition and we manage to produce endless quantities of cheap fuel from algae, tar sands, French fry grease, and sunflowers, the IME report has to be taken seriously. Unlike rosier predictions in the past, the IME report assumes that our present level of global response will continue. It predicts the following:<\/p>\n