This is borrowed with permission from a FB friend.
That official prophecy of doom is so understated it's a sad joke. The reality is orders of magnitude worse. Let's just take one example of consequence here. Russian wheat.
The massive droughts and fires converted Russia from being a net wheat exporter to a net wheat importer in one year. Starting in 2010, Russia's wheat crop dropped from being 12 point something million metric tonnes to 3 point something million metric tonnes. Who do they export most of their wheat to? The entire Middle East. A year later, as wheat prices soared, civil unrest followed the price spike like night follows day. And finally, one fruit vendor in Tunisia, Mohammed Bouazizi, had had enough of corruption and gouging. And that was the trigger.
By the end of 2013, eighteen Arab countries had either forced rulers from power, had major demonstrations or in a few cases, minor demonstrations. And while no one in the corporate media will admit this, it's all about the price of food. Just wait until food goes over the top in the US...
Oh, and while we are at it, that same year - 2010 - The monsoon rains shifted and Pakistan had the worst floods in history, one fifth of its entire land surface under water, displacing in excess of 20 million people and killing over 2,000.
And now of course, India and China are losing their fresh water supply because the Himalayan glaciers are melting away and soon, the 4 major rivers that start there will dry up.
It's not millions that will be inconvenienced, it's billions that will starve, die of thirst, or die of overexposure to the wet bulb thermal max. And those billions will die in ecosystems and biomes that will die right along with them. These changes will put an end to this industrial civilization and we are so far beyond the tipping points now that there's really not a damned thing we can do about it.
Maybe, just maybe, if every human on the planet left the cities, stopped using fossil fuels, got back on the land, converted every single agricultural hectare back to a fully animal integrated permaculture food forest that could actually support us all, then we might - MIGHT - change the course of global warming. But even then - given the current atmospheric residence time of CO2 - it would be over a thousand years before we would know if it worked.
The last time CO2 got this high it took 200,000 years for the carbon levels to drop sufficiently for a temperate climate to re-emerge. That was the PETM and we lost 90 percent of both benthic and pelagic species and 70 percent of all land plants and animals.
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