 |
Without a doubt, the incredibly enlightening video provided below should be seen by powerful leaders all over the world, particularly the highly influential scientific, executive, economic and legislative decision makers.
In a word. It was riveting.
Published first in November of 2020, it was re-launched last month -- and has still been viewed by an incredibly small sliver of the adult population of the world. I am stunned and immensely disappointed that the entire world is not talking about it.
In the feature video below, a cofounder of Extinction Rebellion (Roger Hallam) interviews Dr. Peter Carter of the IPCC.
Dr. Carter is founder of the Climate Emergency Institute and serves as an expert reviewer for the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).
He has presented on climate change issues (especially the implications of global climate change on food security for the world's most vulnerable regions and populations) at science and policy conferences in Canada, the United States, Europe, Asia and South America. He is a former family and emergency medicine practitioner before retiring to focus on the climate crisis for the sake of his sons and their children.
Before sharing the feature video, I want to introduce you to Dr. Carter via this 3-minute video. A link to it also appears in Chapter 4 of Outcry, where we encouraged our readers to:
Watch it. Share it. Raise hell about it!
As you can see from the signage behind Dr. Carter, this short video was recorded at the COP 25 UN Climate Conference in December of 2019 -- sixteen months ago.
Click on Image to watch.
In case you don't have three minutes to watch this video right now, at least take a look at his first few sentences:
"This is very, very, very bad. We've seen this coming for a while now. We're on this absolute critical crux of emissions and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, whereby as one of the scientists said this morning -- Every Year Matters! So, COP25 is yet another circus but the acts are absolutely terrible in this circus.
It's another delay. Right now, all three atmospheric main greenhouse gas concentrations -- the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere -- they're all accelerating. Carbon dioxide and methane since the year 2000 -- and now, according to a paper released this year, nitrous oxide is also on the move. So, all three are on an accelerating trend.
The Feature Video (41 minutes)
As mentioned earlier, Dr. Carter is interviewed by Roger Hallam, a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion. Click on image to watch.
Knowing that many readers may not have time to watch this complete video right now, I am providing a bit of a preview in the form of some representative content:
1:13 OMG, we are in a climate emergency within an unprecedented Earth emergency. We're in an emergency of our climate AND an emergency of our oceans...This is not one of many challenges, this is THE challenge right? THE challenge for all of humanity.
3:07 The main point of our discussion is what's happening in the real world? How bad is it? And why is it so much worse than a lot of people would like to believe? I suppose it's worth saying that there have been 26 of these conferences - and during this period - you've seen a 60% increase in carbon omissions.
8:37 Recent research that was published a few weeks ago - atmospheric carbon dioxide is now the highest in 23 million years. That's insane. That's absolute climate crazy.
9:22 It's now bringing us into a warm period that affects the survival of our children - not grandchildren anymore - we're looking at all children the world over. And I stress, not just in the poor, most vulnerable developing world. Oh no, no...also in the USA and in Europe.
9:55 The world's leading expert on ocean heating took the trouble to work out how many Hiroshima bombs would need to be exploded to be equivalent to the amount of heat that we've added to the oceans in recent years. It's now the equivalent of exploding three of those atomic bombs per second. It's now FIVE of those bombs per second when it comes to the real amount of energy we're adding to our oceans.
20:49 We are going to lose food production and the latest models all show this in scientific terms. As I put it, all the accelerating data trends together result in the trend that the biosphere is in a state of collapse. That means that the human species -- although there's a heck of a lot of us -- and although we still live on a beautiful planet -- it means that nature is not going to support us.
30:14 The most definitely, immediately effective, readily doable action that everybody in the world can do is go vegan. In theory, we can all do that and, if we do, emissions drop immediately.
31:27. Then we have the unavoidable social evidence of the last six months with Covid. When decision makers so wish, they can reduce carbon emissions in a matter of weeks by 25%. That's a fact; there's no dispute about that - which brings us back to the collective responsibility we have as human beings and as citizens to make sure this happens.
32:00 There are now enormous changes in our personal lifestyles that are now necessary if we wish to survive.
Near the end of the video, Dr. Carter concludes:
We're talking about what's going to be happening to people. We love our children, our grandchildren, our relatives and people in our communities. They're all going to be starving at some point if we don't deal with this.
This is not something that will happen in the year 2100, this is happening in the next ten to twenty years.
So, how do Dr. Carter's remarks compare to the other ten "big picture" scientists in Chapter Four of Outcry.
The consensus opinion of the eleven scientists featured in that chapter seems to be that we're not likely to make it long-term as a species.
I should note that two of the nine scientists pictured below died before the end of 2010 -- and both of them were even more adamant in their conclusions regarding our near-term demise than most of the other scientists.
As for some being more adamant I feel that many of the world's scientists are just reluctant to predict "doom and gloom." Instead, they choose their words carefully as they strive to hang onto their jobs along with some modicum of hope.
That said, none of them have a great deal of confidence that we will survive longterm as a species.
Explaining my Hope. I choose to believe that all of those scientists may be wrong about their dire conclusions. I say that based on four powerful disciplines with which many of them may not be familiar.
If all of these disciplines listed below start working in favor of our survival real soon, then I believe that we still have a decent chance.
1. The Protein Myth. I suspect that the majority of the scientists featured herein have little appreciation for what a rapid, global shift to plant-based eating by all humans would do for the health of our biosphere.
2. Systemic Change. Also, many of them may have no concept of widespread systemic change (as in a successor civilization) in the way we live and the tremendous positive impact it could have on our long-term survival.
3. AI. This is a fairly new technology with which most of these scientists are not that familiar -- thereby rendering them unable to assess the potential of well-leveraged artificial intelligence to assist us in developing sustainability solutions that far exceed our collective imaginations in 2020.
4. Superior Leadership. These are scientists who are not familiar with leading complex projects. Hence this could be the most powerful variable of all -- as we should never doubt the almost miraculous impact of this key variable. I wrote about it last month: Gates, Biden, Mandela and LEADERSHIP
The Bottom Line. I choose to believe that during the next few decades, we will somehow grasp the power of the above four variables -- a move that will enable us to create an "all-green, successor civilization" that will be necessary for us to live in harmony with nature.
To maximize our chances, I strongly believe that we must strive to live even greener than Mother Nature is demanding -- and we must begin treating our situation as the "mother of all emergencies" that it most definitely is. And, for that, we need exceptional leadership.
This SOS Memo is not some long-range forecast about what might happen to our civilization over the next two or three hundred years. This is happening now -- and all we hear from world leaders is about the need to "fight climate change" by cutting back on our use of fossil fuels.
Not a single world leader is talking about building a totally new civilization, where only "green" lifestyle options exist.
An analogy. To me, their collective responses are somewhat like responding to your rapidly burning home in the middle of the night -- by rolling over and telling your spouse to remind you to take an upcoming course at the local community college -- a course about preventing and/or fighting house fires.
Instead, we should be getting the hell out of that house immediately and replacing it with a home that will not burn.
A troubling explanation I want to share. Some scientists believe that many of the most powerful world leaders already know that, no matter what we do, the chances are almost non-existent for our longterm survival as a species.
Those scientists believe that those in power wish to stay in power and don't really want to stir up the masses by engaging in an incredibly-disruptive process of designing, building and populating a successor civilization that may not be able to save us anyway.
To be sure, we are nowhere close to living in harmony with nature. We're not even having robust conversations about such a goal. For that reason, I must conclude that without an entirely new "successor" civilization coupled with a new economic model for "keeping score" on this planet, we Homo sapiens are probably on our last legs.
In closing, at the risk of being perceived as self-serving, I sincerely believe that the more people who read Outcry -- the greater are the chances that we will survive as a species. The more people who read it, the louder this essential "conversation" will become.
And with no loud, widespread conversation, this task will never get done.
Previewing my next SOS Memo. Wanting to end today on a positive thought, I wrote two weeks ago about an idea that just might help us move rapidly toward a more sustainable civilization.
The idea features the new Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg and you can access it here: A promising new "Sunrise for Humanity". Next week, I am going to write more about how we can make that happen.
SOS Memo #104 will focus on Biden's plan to spend $2.3 trillion on infrastructure. Maybe he should invest just 1/10th of one percent of that number ($2.3 billion) during the next six months -- and use it to delve deeply, and transparently, into the relevant scientific data so that we don't spend all of that $2.3 trillion on replacing infrastructure that would almost certainly not lead to a fully-sustainable society.
"Willy-Nilly" spending will create a lot of jobs, but will have almost zero chance of saving us. This slide from my public presentations, in person or on Zoom, speaks to that point. We must delve deeply into the details before we can develop a realistic vision and plan for giving us the best possible chance of saving our species.
Watch for SOS Memo #104 next Tuesday, as I explore more thoughts on this crucial topic.
What can you do? We feature a "big picture" view of humanity's current dilemma in our book Outcry. As stated earlier, I am convinced that the more people who read that book, the greater are the chances that we will figure out how to get back on the right track before it's too late. I call it:
Radical thinking for desperate times
Hopefully, our straightforward book will help to open more minds as to what might be possible when it comes to living far more sustainably than we could ever imagine -- at least 5 to 10 times more efficiently than we are living now.
To our knowledge, Outcry remains the only book ever published that features an envisioned, totally-green, ultra-sustainable, super-desirable habitat for humans -- along with steps for how we might get there as soon as possible.
Please circulate this memo widely. Want to send a link to a friend? It is #103 on this list of SOS Memos. Finally, contact me directly at the email below if you would like to discuss.
PS: Free Zoom Conferences. In the interest of jump-starting the urgently-needed global "conversation" about the dilemma we are in, I am now offering to conduct private Zoom conferences free of charge to groups of almost any size. I look forward to ZOOM-ing with you and your group sometime soon.
In preparation for those Zoom visits, I have developed a one-hour format consisting of an opening statement followed by a 20-minute slide show and then ending with a discussion and Q&A with the attendees. The sessions you organize will be far more interesting and productive if attendees have read Outcry in advance.
Our book, for a host of environmental reasons, is only available as an e-book on Amazon. As such, it contains hyperlinks to hundreds of references and videos, is less expensive, does not kill any trees and does not have to be manufactured and delivered.
You can join my mailing list and/or find all of my previous postings by visiting the SOS Memos page on my website. Here are a few of them where you can see how my vision has evolved since that first "creative idea" on 9-21-18:
As always, I am just trying to spark a global conversation about what is needed. By sharing a vision of what I believe is possible, I hope to influence others to think bigger, better and bolder.
********************
What else can you do to help? Two things:
1. Live as greenly as possible while doing all that you can to raise the awareness of "big picture" solutions that are crucially necessary for saving our civilization.
2. Share this BSB and my "Mama Ain't Happy" BSB with prominent journalists, thought leaders and/or elected officials whom you respect. They need to learn a lot more about the many reasons why Mama ain't happy.
Promoting health, hope and harmony on planet Earth
If you got this blog from a friend or found it on our website and want to receive more of these Bite-Size Blogs? Join Our Mailing List
Want to get started nurturing your own health and the health of our planet? Take our survey at 4leafsurvey.com
Click here to learn more about this free online dietary assessment tool.
|
|
|
|
|
|
