It IS Happening Faster Than Projected
One of the truest statements about our climate crisis, and an attempt at humor amidst crisis, is:
No one has ever attended a Climate Change conference and returned to say, “Wow! Global warming is happening slower than expected.”
The painful truth is that global warming and our resultant climate crisis is happening faster than climate scientists projected… and it seems to be accelerating.
A key thing to remember is that what is happening is unprecedented. It has never happened before during our time on Spaceship Earth. In the absence of any history on our climate crisis, scientists had to use their best judgment regarding projections. Initially, most scientists used linear projections. Then when many projections proved to be too conservative, geometric increases were used. Now, in some instances, those have been discarded and replaced with exponential rates of increase.
Recent news has only confirmed this depressing trend. Recently, there have been several reports on the Earth’s oceans. In April it was discovered that the oceans were two degrees Celsius above the 1971-2000 average. In two places, one in the Pacific and the other in the Atlantic, temperatures rose almost 14 degrees over this same average. To dive deeper, here’s an insightful analysis by David Wallace Wells.
This Spaceship Earth has just posted a Quartermaster’s Report 2023 update on our website, and some of the numbers are staggering:
Population
Human population: 8,036,357,257 (at 13:05 ET, 1 June 2023 )
In 2015 the world population was 7,426,597,537.
So, the net population change has been 609,759,720 individuals.
Currently, 56% of the world’s population lives in cities. To put that into perspective, more people live in cities today than were alive on the planet in 1980.
Pollution [primarily from GHG Emissions]
99% of the global population breathes air that exceeds World Health Organization (WHO) air quality limits.
In 2015, 1 in 8 global deaths was attributable to air pollution exposure.
In 2023, 1 in 5 deaths worldwide was attributable to air pollution.
More people die from air pollution exposure than die from breast, lung, and colorectal cancers combined.
So we have brought more than 600 million people into the world in the last eight years, and all have a 20% chance of dying from fossil fuel pollution. Crazy!
One of the key effects of pollution, population, and planetary degradation is that almost all of the damage has been caused just in the last 70 years:
Resident CO2
Today the PPM is 424.
The data above is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s much more in the Quartermaster’s Report which we will be updating on an ongoing basis.
For much of the last 70 years, humanity has been aware of the concept of global warming, and certainly, in this century, most people have at least heard the term, and have seen the evidence. Yet, our species’ suicidal trajectory continues.
We are on a mission to convert one billion passive passengers on Spaceship Earth into one billion active crew members. Join us!
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