Forget about climate disruption; the models are out by a factor of 400%, and there is no way to stop the process; carbon dioxide is implicated but only a small part.
There is a convergence of end points over the next 20 years. Note that I did not say tipping points; we have passed the tipping points and are now heading for end points. What are they, and what does this mean?
Industry and governments have maintained trade and capitalism by kicking the environmental and climate disruption CAN down the road because it made money, and they thought it made good business sense. Well, it does not make good business sense to wipe out your client base.
There is a great deal of talk about AI being the saviour or terminator of humanity, while the real and immediate threat that will happen with a high degree of certainty over the next 10 to 20 years has been conveniently ignored.
End points include ecosystem collapse, regime shifts, species extinction, and destruction of the life support system of the planet. It will be impossible for technology to save more than 10% of the world’s population, so what’s going to happen?
1. Ocean acidification: when average oceanic pH drops below pH 7.95, most whales, seals, birds, fish, and food supplies for 3 billion people will be gone. Loss of the surface SML will result in extreme wind conditions and torrential downpours. The atmosphere may also become toxic as well as all water supplies due to cyanobacteria and dinoflagellate phytoplankton.
2. Plastic, partially combusted carbon, and lipophilic toxic chemicals are now in every living organism on the planet and every drop of rainwater. They are responsible for more deaths than all the diseases and wars combined, and it’s getting exponentially worse every year. Planetary Health Lancet reports
3. The toxic chemicals and substances are killing nature; from WWF there has been a 73% crash in nature since 1970, a loss of 1% year on year of all life on earth. This translates to about 95% loss of nature since 1900. The catastrophe is ignored due to baseline syndrome and slow rate of change, but not for long because the Allee Effect predicts there will be a crash. This will result in the total destruction of the planets life support system. The 6th mass extinction has already past the death caused by the dinosaur killing meteorite 66 million years ago, but this time the destruction will continue, even without man, due to the toxic chemical legacy left behind. The planet is being sterilised.
4. Will Gaia protect the planet? Over the next 20 years, sterility due to endocrine-disrupting chemicals will increase exponentially, reports by Dr. Shamra and others
Whichever way you look at the problem, it is not good, however. COVID taught us that nature and ecosystems can spring back super-fast. We just have to stop the pollution with toxic chemicals, plastic, and destructive exploitation of ecosystems and do some good for a change.
