When the industrial revolution began in the 18th century, we humans appeared to be headed toward another Ice Age.

But from the looks of the graph below (from last week's SOS), that cooling trend seems to have been reversed about one hundred years ago, just as the human population and the industrial revolution were expanding rapidly.

We humans, inadvertently reversed climate change and, In so doing, prevented a cooling trend that could have ultimately wiped out most of life on Earth.

That cooling was reversed due to a combination of human-driven factors such as population growth, over-consumption, deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels.

Temperatures kept rising steadily until 1970, when the global average temperature started rising exponentially. CO2 levels of concentration have been following closely with that same curve for the last forty years.

Now as of 2022, we are definitely in the era of runaway climate change -- and we have caused it. In the chart below, beginning in 1750, the blue line tracks CO2 levels in the atmosphere. The gray line tracks the annual CO2 emissions (in Gigatons) which dropped slightly in 2020 due to Covid.

It is clear that human activity over the past few hundred years has caused the extreme warming that we are experiencing today.

Since we now know how our behavior has caused the rapid heating of the planet, maybe we can figure out what kind of human behavior it will take to bring us back to living in harmony with nature.

If we cannot, she will take matters into her own hands.

Since the Industrial Revolution began in 1750, humanity has been directly responsible for quickly driving atmospheric levels of CO2 to its highest level (by far) in the past 800,000 years.

This climate.nasa.gov chart below is a bit dark, but notice how the CO2 ppm (parts per million) levels have fluctuated for almost a million years. Notice that prior to our current record level of just over 420 ppm, the previous record was 300 ppm about 300 thousand years ago.

Since the Industrial Revolution began in 1750, humanity has been directly responsible for quickly driving atmospheric levels of CO2 to its highest level (by far) in the past 800,000 years.

As you probably know, we humans are Johnny Come Late-lies on this planet. Earth is over four billion years old and has supported life for over three billion years. We humans emerged as a species about 300,000 years ago -- and, within a mere blink in the eye of history, we have stopped an impending ice age that would have wiped out most life on Earth.

Now, in just a half-century after stopping that ice age, our incredibly harmful and wasteful way of living has brought us to the brink of destroying all life on Earth.

Although there is a silver lining regarding our current situation, we must act quickly if we want to save humanity.

I sincerely believe that we can. It won't be easy at first, but it is a relatively simple process that can happen.

Without realizing what we were doing at the time -- since the beginning of the industrial revolution in 1750, we humans have completely changed everything -- from stopping an ice age to rapidly bringing us to the precipice of runaway overheating of the planet.

Our population began to explode at about the same time we learned how to harness the power of fossil fuels to build a way of living that no one would have ever thought possible. Now, we must learn from history and realize the awesome power that we have when it comes to climate change.

That said, Dr. Sailesh Rao and I believe that stopping runaway climate change is possible. It may even be possible to reverse it. But given where we are and the many obstacles in our path, neither scenario is likely.

We know that animal agriculture is, by far, the #1 driver of climate change. We know that it does far more damage than all other drivers combined -- and we have been talking about that fact constantly for the past ten years.

We also know because of the aerosol masking effect (aka global dimming) -- that if we were to drastically curb carbon emissions -- the lost cooling effect from those particles in the air would rapidly warm up the atmosphere even faster.

So, it's all about timing. That simply means that we must tackle animal agriculture first for three reasons:

In the video below, entitled Humanity's True Purpose, Dr. Rao explains how we humans can become a "thermostat" species -- one that can learn to help Mother Nature maintain the fragile ecological conditions that support life on this planet.

In case you don't have time to watch this powerful video now, here are a few excerpts that will make you want to watch the entire nine minutes:

As the earth entered its most recent interglacial period, humans began deforesting the earth to fuel their native civilizations. It is calculated that more greenhouse gases were released into the atmosphere through deforestation than all the gases emitted from the burning of fossil fuels.

When we choose to stop eating animals, the land used for raising those animals can be restored to forests and those forests can sequester all of the greenhouse gases we've emitted during the fossil fuel age -- bringing us back within the safe zone where life as we know it can thrive.

The leaders of the world are failing us. We are not being told the complete truth about what is driving climate change and what we can do to stop or possibly even reverse it.

Our government leaders are not telling us how we humans can quickly become the Thermostat Species that can keep ourselves alive for as long as our sun continues to shine.

How can that possibly happen? The vast majority of humans in the developed world truly believe that they need to eat lots of animal protein to be healthy. Therefore, that way of eating is wildly popular.

Also, most people love their food and they don't want any organization or large groups of activists to take it away from them.

Meanwhile, the production processes for all of those animal-based products are destroying nature's ability to keep us humans alive. A few key points:

To become that "thermostat species" referred to earlier, we need exceptional leaders with integrity.

As I explained in last week's SOS Memo, we just need a handful of highly regarded leaders with integrity who have the courage to tell the world the truth about how we can become the thermostat species that can oversee the process of guiding all eight billion Earthlings swiftly in the direction of ultra-sustainable living.

Some of what they will be telling us at first will not be well-received by the majority of citizens in the developed world. But gradually, with enough funding, that group will be able to overcome the resistance as they urgently go about laying the foundation for preventing the near-term demise of our species.

That process is all spelled out in last week's SOS Memo:

SOS #164 Taking a Global Rifle Shot at Climate Change

Don't have time to watch the entire Honolulu video? Click here to view all 60 slides in that talk

jmorrishicks@me.com  

We're talking about replacing it with an entirely new, ultra-green civilization of the future -- and we do our best to paint a picture of that envisioned way of sustainable living in OUTCRY. For what one Ohio State professor emeritus of history had to say about that book on Amazon, click here.

In 2014, Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn produced their first documentary film Cowspiracy. Executive producer is Leonardo DiCaprio, it runs 90 minutes and has been on Netflix since 2015. In 2020, I met Kip and Keegan in Sedona where I was honored to be able to speak at the same conference with them and other great leaders in this movement like Dr. Sailesh Rao and Dr. Michael Greger.

Also on Netflix, Kip and Keegan teamed up again in 2017 to produce What the Health, which is also on Netflix. It runs 92 minutes and may be the best documentary ever that focuses on the health reasons for choosing to eat plant-based. Click here to watch the short trailer. You can also watch the full movie for free on Vimeo.

In 2021, Kip Anderson teamed up with British filmmaker Ali Tabrizi, to produce Seaspiracy, an 89-minute film that vividly and alarmingly reveals what is at stake when it comes to the crucial importance of our oceans to our future as a species. Most people have no idea regarding the environmental horrors of commercial fishing -- a disgusting industry that kills dolphins by the thousands and tosses them back into the ocean. It runs 90 minutes on Netflix. Click here to view the trailer.

As our situation becomes more desperate, the documentary films become more terrifying. As alluded to earlier, we are literally Eating Our Way to Extinction, a process that is vividly covered in this 2021 film (81 minutes). Narrated and produced by Kate Winslet, you can watch this great film on Amazon Prime or on YouTube for $3.99. The great ocean scientist and former head of NOAA, Dr. Sylvia Earle lends powerful credibility to such a crucial topic.

The film uncovers alarming information about the environmental and health impacts of the industry -- leading up to the discovery that we are on the edge of the biggest global disruption of food and agriculture in history. This new film is now available for free at waterbear.com

This 83-minute documentary is all about the findings that were documented in Dr. Stephen Emmott's 2013 book. TEN BILLION.

Finally, this half-hour video was published in November of 2021. It was produced by Michael Dowd, a non-scientific researcher like me who does a very fine job of explaining the many facets of the obstacles standing between us and our survival as a species. Dowd focuses on the problem; not the solution. I prefer to focus on both.

I am confident that if a few million people carefully read and digested this book that there would be a more robust conversation around the world regarding our grossly unsustainable way of living in the developed world.

To my knowledge, OUTCRY remains the only book ever published that features an envisioned, totally-green, ultra-sustainable, super-desirable, future way of living for humans -- along with ideas for how we might get there as quickly as possible.

You can join my mailing list and/or find all of my previous postings by visiting the SOS Memos page on my website. 

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