“Maybe we’re not the only ones to hit a sustainability bottleneck. Maybe not everyone — maybe no one — makes it to the other side.” nyt
Tag Archives: climate change
new sustainability research results sound a lot like that new yorker cartoon
updated research shows four of nine planetary boundaries have been crossed. the culprit? a flawed economic system and vast consumption: “It’s clear the economic system is driving us towards an unsustainable future and people of my daughter’s generation will find it increasingly hard to survive. History has shown that civilisations have risen, stuck to their core values and then collapsed because they didn’t change. That’s where we are today.”. so scientists are starting to sound a lot like that new yorker cartoon. see also, if everyone lived like an american how many earths would we need?
the coming ‘instant planetary emergency’?
it’s easy to get numb to the drumbeat of articles on climate change with the same dire message that we’re nearing a point of no return and five minutes to midnight before “…fast running out time to avoid the catastrophic collapse of the natural systems on which human life depends.” and you forget that that message is as close to a generally accepted conservative scientific consensus as we’re going to get. out on the edge, the scenarios are much more dire. it’s terrible to imagine what we’ve done even if the truth lies somewhere in-between.
climate change and overpopulation
james hansen, the director of goddard institute for space studies is about to release a new analysis of the last six decades and concludes, climate change is here — and worse than we thought. and that’s just one of the implications of overpopulation as we hurtle toward adding the equivalent of three more chinas of humans to the world population by 2050.