Cinco anos para a porta fechar

O gráfico acima está incluído no World Energy Outlook 2011 da Agência Internacional da Energia (IEA) e mostra que em 2017 se atingem os 450ppmCO2 (se não se quiser ultrapassar esse valor, o consumo de energia terá que diminuir).

A aposta

Este é o último artigo que aqui é publicado. Consiste na descrição da aposta que fiz com o meu irmão, iniciador deste blog.

Eu aposto que no dia 1 de Janeiro de 2030 a população humana na Terra estará, pelo menos, 5% (cinco por cento) abaixo do seu máximo de sempre.

O meu irmão aposta que no dia 1 de Janeiro de 2030 a população humana na Terra estará no seu máximo conhecido.

Se a população humana na Terra, no dia 1 de Janeiro de 2030, estiver menos do que 5% abaixo do seu máximo de sempre, nenhum de nós ganha ou perde a aposta.

Aquele que perder a aposta proporcionará um almoço no que fôr considerado o melhor restaurante de Portugal para a totalidade de ambas as respectivas famílias.

Esse almoço terá lugar num dia a combinar do primeiro trimestre de 2030. Considera-se restaurante qualquer casa onde sejam servidas refeições a troco de dinheiro ou géneros. Portugal é considerado com as fronteiras de hoje. Considera-se família todos os nossos ascendentes, todos os nossos descentes e todos os que forem considerados companheiros de vida nossos e/ou dos nossos descendentes no máximo de um companheiro por cada um de nós e/ou dos nossos descendentes. Poderão ser admitidas pessoas adoptadas na família através de processos devidamente legalizados.

Esta aposta resulta da minha crença firme no colapso e na observação de que a medida mais fiável de colapso é a população.

Um cheirinho do porquê desta aposta:
THE TIGHTENING CONFLICT: POPULATION, ENERGY USE, AND THE ECOLOGY OF AGRICULTURE
"The End of the Line"
Dead Pool -- Imagining the Future of the American Southwest
The Crash Course
A River of Books
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Gelo fundido no tecto do mundo

The effects of climate change are dramatically illustrated at the world's "third pole", so-called because the mountain range locks away the highest volume of frozen water after the north and south poles.

The 1956 photograph of the Imja glacier, then one of the largest glaciers at an altitude of around 5,000m, shows a layer of thick ice with small meltwater ponds. But by the time Byers took his shot in 2007, much of the glacier had melted into a vast but stunning blue lake. Today, the Imja glacier, which is just 6km from Everest, continues to recede at a rate of 74m a year - the fastest rate of all the Himayalan glaciers.

Nepal's average temperature has increased by 1.5C since 1975. A major UN Environment Programme report last year warned that at current rates of global warming, the Himalayan glaciers could shrink from 500,000 square kilometres to 100,000 square kilometres by the 2030s - a prediction supported by the rate of retreat seen in Byers' pictures.

Imja is one of 27 glacial lakes in Nepal classified as potentially dangerous. If the moraines which dam the lake are breached, thousands of lives in the most densely populated Sherpa valley in Nepal are at risk from flooding and landslides.

Himalayan glaciers also feed into major Asian river systems including the Ganges, Indus, Mekong and Yangtze. If glacial meltwaters turn to a trickle, widespread droughts will threaten the 1.3 billion people that depend on water flowing in those rivers.

Captured On Camera: 50 Years Of Climate Change In The Himalayas

Visionar o futuro

Catastrophe is not the end. Unless you are a monster, the future we've inherited will break your heart. But broken hearts can be mended; life goes on, and when it does, a fierce beauty is sometimes born. The world, when all is said, is always remade by broken people who refuse hopelessness, who refuse to be overcome with sorrow, who refuse to pass on that which broke them.

As we come to grips with the awful fact that we are already committing ourselves to centuries of crisis, loss and burning, we can hew close to the knowledge that while disaster is our inheritance, transcendence can yet still be our legacy. We are all Caryatids now, and we can all dare to hope for the best.

Bruce Sterling's The Caryatids: A Review

Contabilizar a energia e a toxicidade

Some naysayers argue that solar panels don't make sense because it takes so much energy to make them--mining, smelting or refining, processing, etc. Do they really save fossil fuel energy and greenhouse gas emissions over the long run? The simple answer is yes. They save a whole lot. But then the question is: what kinds of solar panels are better than others?

Solar Carbon Payback

Medir o impacto na biosfera

Grande parte das acćões humanas andam à volta do par consumir - criar valor, ou seja, andam à volta do dinheiro. A humanidade vê-se agora confrontada com a necessidade de mudar de paradigma. A natureza tem que regressar ao centro da atenćão humana. Comecemos já a analisar as nossas acćões em termos do impacto que têm sobre a biosfera.

Save the Holocene!

The Anthropocene is a proposed new geological era, meant to signal the idea that we've changed the Earth's biosphere and climate so dramatically that we've left the Holocene, the interglacial period that began 12,000 years ago. It's a catchy (if grim) concept, but one whose utility I find myself seriously questioning. I don't doubt the magnitude of human impact on the planet. Quite the opposite. I think we consistently underestimate the degree of disruption we've already caused by altering the raw biological function of nearly every corner of the Earth and changing the chemistry of its atmosphere, oceans and soils. Very little "wild" anything remains, and all that does remain exists at our sufferance and will endure only with our conscious commitment. None of this, it seems to me, is really a matter of much debate. It's just how the world is now. I get the utility of using the idea of the Anthropocene to provoke recognition of the mind-bending reality that we are transforming the very planet on which we walk. Where the Anthropocene as a concept breaks down, it seems to me, is in the implications it raises, particularly among certain crowds who seem to be saying with increasing frequency, "well, dude, we're in the Anthropocene, anything goes." The first troubling implication is that we can sketch the blueprint of an era better than the Holocene -- the era that produced the planet on which agriculture, civilization and cities arose -- and that we can geoengineer the climate at will to fit that (or any other) blueprint. Because we're really not up for the job. The reality is that modern humanity and human civilization are the fruit of a very tightly banded set of interconnected climate and biological conditions. We need a certain kind of world in order to thrive, and that world is essentially the mild, moderately wet, biologically abundant world of the Holocene. We've never left that world, and in fact we are still intimately dependent on its plenty for our very survival. We don't know of another set of conditions that would allow us to thrive on this planet. There is no human-designed set of planetary conditions that we know of that will suit us better. We don't want the Holocene to end: the whole point is that we want to go back to lower greenhouse gas concentrations in order to continue the Holocene climate indefinitely, as long as we possibly can. The second implication is that we know what we're doing well enough to get the results we want from planetary engineering, even if we don't have a better climate blueprint. We don't. The magnitude of our ignorance about even the most fundamental aspects of the planetary systems on which we depend staggers the informed mind. We're just coming to understand the climate system. We've discovered only a tiny fraction of the planet's species. We are almost still in the age of alchemy when it comes to truly understanding all the interplay of influences that make up an ecosystem. We are simply not up to the task of running the biosphere as a whole like a machine, because we don't have a copy of the operating manual, and we're probably still illiterate anyways. This may be true for generations to come. That doesn't mean that we aren't being forced to make all sorts of choices about how the planet functions. We are, effectively, choosing to screw the climate system up in some unpleasant predictable ways and some potentially disastrous unpredictable ways. Wild nature now pretty much only exists where we protect it and garden it (and this will be more true as climate change shifts habitats). A great many species will only survive if we make saving them a priority (for some, the best we can do may be to find them, freeze them and archive them, but we're not even doing that). What the planet looks like is now largely a matter of our choices. But that doesn't mean that we can choose to do anything. There's a crazy mistaken logic out there that assumes that because we're having to make real choices about the planet's climate and biosphere, we can choose anything we want, redesign the planet in any way we see fit; even that no environmental problems are even problems, because between terraforming and bioengineering, we can figure out how make new planets. I've heard the sneering comments about how environmentalists think natural systems are better because they're natural. But the reality is this: natural systems are better not because they're natural but because they're better at being ecosystems than anything we could possibly come up with in the foreseeable future -- they're more complex than we're able to understand, with creatures and relationships between creatures that have evolved into marvelous particularities of place. These elegant solutions are profoundly more intricate, complex and resilient than anything we know how to make. Preserving those ecosystems, and the species in them, is the best thing we know how to do. Humble and attentive restoration -- through a multitude of interconnected careful efforts crafted to a particular place and alive to the adaptations climate change may demand; each small, but in aggregate massive and planetary -- is the next best. Everything else is a distant, almost wishful, possibility. Our goal, in essence, is to preserve and restore the Holocene biosphere, wherever we can (and in some cases, that might mean looking back to restoring systems and relationships damaged long before the industrial era even began, through re-wilding and resurrection ecology). So, do we need to take responsibility for the planet? Yes. Do we need to take the climate in hand, and aim to release zero or less-than-zero greenhouse gasses? Yes. Do we need to garden nature, greatly reducing our demands on ecosystem services and preserving wild biological hotspots but also practicing adaptive restoration and so on? Yes. But our goal in all of this ought to be clear: preserve the planet on which humanity evolved, and, even more importantly, the planetary era whose attributes underpin everything we now are. Our goal should be, simply, to save the Holocene. Alex SteffenApril 6, 2009 9:07 AM

Please, get The Key Messages!

Copenhagen, Denmark: Following a successful International Scientific Congress Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges & Decisions attended by more than 2,500 delegates from nearly 80 countries, preliminary messages from the findings were delivered by the Congress' Scientific Writing Team. The conclusions will be published into a full synthesis report June 2009. The conclusions were handed over to the Danish Prime Minister Mr. Anders Fogh Rasmussen today. The Danish Government will host the UN Climate Change Conference in December 2009 and will hand over the conclusions to the decision makers ahead of the Conference.

The six preliminary key messages are:

Key Message 1: Climatic Trends

Recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised. For many key parameters, the climate system is already moving beyond the patterns of natural variability within which our society and economy have developed and thrived. These parameters include global mean surface temperature, sea-level rise, ocean and ice sheet dynamics, ocean acidification, and extreme climatic events. There is a significant risk that many of the trends will accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts.

Key Message 2: Social disruption

The research community is providing much more information to support discussions on "dangerous climate change". Recent observations show that societies are highly vulnerable to even modest levels of climate change, with poor nations and communities particularly at risk. Temperature rises above 2C will be very difficult for contemporary societies to cope with, and will increase the level of climate disruption through the rest of the century.

Key Message 3: Long-Term Strategy

Rapid, sustained, and effective mitigation based on coordinated global and regional action is required to avoid "dangerous climate change" regardless of how it is defined. Weaker targets for 2020 increase the risk of crossing tipping points and make the task of meeting 2050 targets more difficult. Delay in initiating effective mitigation actions increases significantly the long-term social and economic costs of both adaptation and mitigation.

Key Message 4 - Equity Dimensions

Climate change is having, and will have, strongly differential effects on people within and between countries and regions, on this generation and future generations, and on human societies and the natural world. An effective, well-funded adaptation safety net is required for those people least capable of coping with climate change impacts, and a common but differentiated mitigation strategy is needed to protect the poor and most vulnerable.

Key Message 5: Inaction is Inexcusable

There is no excuse for inaction. We already have many tools and approaches ? economic, technological, behavioural, management ? to deal effectively with the climate change challenge. But they must be vigorously and widely implemented to achieve the societal transformation required to decarbonise economies. A wide range of benefits will flow from a concerted effort to alter our energy economy now, including sustainable energy job growth, reductions in the health and economic costs of climate change, and the restoration of ecosystems and revitalisation of ecosystem services.

Key Message 6: Meeting the Challenge

To achieve the societal transformation required to meet the climate change challenge, we must overcome a number of significant constraints and seize critical opportunities. These include reducing inertia in social and economic systems; building on a growing public desire for governments to act on climate change; removing implicit and explicit subsidies; reducing the influence of vested interests that increase emissions and reduce resilience; enabling the shifts from ineffective governance and weak institutions to innovative leadership in government, the private sector and civil society; and engaging society in the transition to norms and practices that foster sustainability.

Calculating the Gross National Trash

It’s only a matter of time before the story of GNT gets told, and the public recognizes that for every pound of trash that ends up in municipal landfills, at least 65 more pounds are created upstream by industrial processes -- and that a lot of this waste is far more dangerous to environmental and human health than our newspapers and grass clippings. At that point, the locus of concern could shift away from beverage containers, grocery bags, and the other mundane junk of daily life to what happens behind the scenes -- the production, crating, storing, and shipping of the goods we buy and use. And interested parties may start asking questions.

Carbon Sinks Losing The Battle With Rising Emissions

“Forests, grasslands and oceans are absorbing carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere faster than ever but they are not keeping pace with rapidly rising emissions,” says CSIRO scientist and co-chair of the Global Carbon Project, Dr Mike Raupach.