Climate scientists warn Earth systems heading for ‘dangerous instability’
Forecasts about the negative effects of human-caused climate change are not uncommon, but new research published Tuesday makes even more dire claims, declaring that “life on planet Earth is under siege” and that “we are pushing our planetary systems into dangerous instability.”
The study, titled “The 2023 State of the Climate Report: Entering Uncharted Territory” and published in the journal Bioscience, points to specific climate events in 2023 to support its findings, including exceptional heat waves across the globe, historic and record-breaking warm ocean temperatures, and unprecedented low levels of sea ice surrounding Antarctica.
The 12 international scientists who created the report indicated that in so far in 2023, there have been 38 days with global average temperatures more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service earlier this month indicated that 2023 will likely go on record as the hottest year ever recorded.
As Kiwis we are a very laid back culture and we are fastidious about ignoring things that might lead to conflict, until conflict is upon us and then we are unrelenting in fighting for a righteous egalitarianism.
I believe we are at a turning point on climate change and we need to start being honest that nothing we can do now will stop what is coming.
For many of us, climate change has been a theoretical argument about something that might happen in the distant future.
It is no longer that.
It is now a present on going risk factor that poses an existential threat to us as a species and it is here now.
I’ve been following the IPCC reports on climate change from the beginning, and the criticism made against the IPCC was that due to its strict need for only unilaterally agreed science to make the official report, it was always underplaying the urgency and severity of the climate crisis.
There was always a section in each report where the science was presented that wasn’t universally accepted but included to show the reach and scope of debate.
Increasingly over the years, the worst case scenarios in the IPCC are playing out in real time.
The scientists were wrong, but only in their optimism.
You understand that each year that passes now will get worse or remain as starkly bad as they are now right?
You get that it doesn’t go back to normal after this right?
The extreme weather will get worse and worse.
More extreme than these extremes now.
Consider the baseline extreme current normal.
Look at this heat chart…
..we have generated heat in the space of 3 centuries that takes hundreds of thousands in the natural world. That spike in heat is the age of consequences upon us.
Sure the war in Ukraine is hurting food prices, but that’s damage on the baseline reality of a mega drought that has interrupted the agricultural calendar of major food producers globally!
The radical adaptation required to get us ready for what’s coming will splinter the political spectrum whether we like it or not.
NZ has to radically become more self sufficient.
We need a basic pharmaceutical industry.
Engineering industry.
Green Power.
The supply side shocks caused by Covid and war are not going away, and they are being compounded by catastrophic climate change.
Radical adaptation and communal community resourcing alongside a Big State approach to lynchpin infrastructure for basic self-reliance as an Island country facing enormous economic shockwaves is the only means to build the muscle mass to respond to the ever intensifying external disruption of late stage capitalism.
The need to increase military spending to 5% alongside the new costs for this infrastructure must be funded via new taxes aimed at corporations and banks.
A financial transaction tax and windfall profit tax would take the yoke of taxation off working people and place it upon the shoulders of the wealthy.
National and ACT see mass immigration as a means to create fake growth at a time when we should be focused on de-growth.
Climate Crisis is here and adaptation is now.
We need to start rethinking Isolationism as a strength and Hyper-Regional Think Big as Economic Sovereignty.
The geopolitical shock waves are only getting more intense from here on in.
As you look around at the devastation these extreme weather events have caused, doesn’t being carbon neutral by 2050 look pathetic now?
We need a far larger vision than Luxon can produce, we need a far larger vision than the Left are even currently thinking.
We are beyond the tipping posts now: Greenland ice melt, the entire West Antarctic ice sheet, the Atlantic current failure, the changing of the jet stream, total biodiversity collapse, FFS what actually needs to happen before you sleepy Hobbits wake up!
I remember when the idea of instability in West Antarctica was a ‘never’ prospect, now in barely decades that has been turned on its head…
Meltdown of West Antarctic Ice Sheet unavoidable, study says
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet will continue to melt this century regardless of how much the world slashes planet-warming emissions, research from the British Antarctic Survey has found, locking in further sea level rise over the coming decades.
The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change on Monday, found no matter the degree of warming this century, the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will speed up as warmer water in the Amundsen Sea erodes ice shelves bordering the ocean.
…the melt will happen regardless, no matter what we do now meaning we are fucked!
We need a vastly different vision for this country now, and it will require a revolution at the Ballot Box.
A specific plan to get elected with a radical agenda, force other Parties of the Left to agree, a 100 day plan to force it through and a strategy to hold the changes in place.
The next 3 years will start seeing climate change events beyond the ability to ignore and will terrify the electorate.
We as a movement must have a plan and an ability to articulate that or we perish as a movement, as a people and as a country.
This is now an existential threat to our species playing out in real time.
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Unfortunately the deniers, minimisers and deflectors are now in power – watch as they roll back the minimal measures implemented by Labour/Green government and most of the country burns. All this while the said deniers, minimisers and deflectors are able to minimise the negative impacts on themselves and continue to perpetuate the myth of scientific discoveries to save the planet.
Unless the damage can be contained to one term the longer term in NZ is not great for most of us – bar the wealthy who never have to face the shit they put the rest of us in.
That’s the old sticking your legs up in the air approach denying we can’t do anything about it,a defeatist attitude typical of the left.
You seem to think that the effects of climate change hinge on what NZ does or doesn’t do.
Sorry to break this to you but if NZ sank into the sea tomorrow, the effects of climate change would continue without us.
One wonders where the left will go when the average citizen realizes it’s mostly a con.
We will pay the price, much like everyone else (bar the billionaire class). Shame that the measures that are in store for us in order to combat this ‘crisis’ are never talked about. Meanwhile, the billionaire class are still buying up waterfront land as much as they ever have….makes you wonder huh, whom among us is more in the know, typically closer to the corridors of power, we plebs or the billionaire class!
Globalism is over, and global boiling is the major factor which means that current global trade is going to come to a very quick end.