OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #154, NOVEMBER 20, 2023

OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #154, NOVEMBER 20, 2023 https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2023/11/omni-climate-memo-mondays-154-november.html Mark Lynas, Climate Scholar David Bromwich.  “The Only Issue.”  Basav Sen.  Anyone especiallly responsible?   Mark Lynas, Climate Scholar High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis. 2004. Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet.   2007. The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans.  2011. Nuclear 2.0: Why a Green Future Needs Nuclear Power. 2 014.  The Carbon Calculator.  2016. Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency.  2020. Lynas is one of our most distinguished scholars of climate change.  His first book on the subject was published two decades ago, when a one-degree world lay in the future.  The first edition of Six Degrees  appeared over fifteen years ago; here is how he compared the two editions in Our Final Warning:  “…I am now substantially more pessimistic about the future than I was….While there have been positive shifts…these are dwarfed both by rising emissions and an alarming trend towards denialism….that allows us to keep on living our lives as usual despite…what climate scientists are telling us” (p. xi).  And what they are telling us repeated what Lynas reported in 2007 reinforced by fifteen years more of research by the UN’s global IPCC scientists and additional research and commentary by climatologists around the world.  These studies suggest what each rise in one degree of temperature will bring our planet.  In 2015 the earth’s global mean temperature reached 1 degreeC above preindustrial levels (1850-1900), and we are already “becoming impoverished and reduced“ (fires, floods, rising seas, hurricanes, degraded soils).  Now the temp is about to breach 1.5 degreesC.  “…what was once our future is now the present.  If we don’t succeed in cutting back carbon emissions in time, the increasingly terrifying impacts detailed in later chapters—of two, three, four degrees and even higher—will also one day become our present.”  --D   David Bromwich.  “The Only Issue.”  The Nation (1.10-17,2022).  “The commitment required to avert climate catastrophe is going to be staggering, expensive, and…tedious and ordinary. . . .if we are going to maintain a shred of decent living half a century from now.  If there were ever a cause that demanded single-minded attention, this is it.” Basav Sen.  Anyone especiallly responsible? Janine Jackson Interviews Basav Sen.  Extra! (June 2019). Sen is director of the Climate Justice Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.  Sen: The US “has one of the largest global emissions of any country in the world” and the US has the highest cumulative emissions.  Thus we have a special responsibility to fix what we broke.  It’s a “simple principle of justice.”  The US “owes the world on funding for climate mitigation and climate adaptation.”