{"id":255,"date":"2009-04-16T09:52:41","date_gmt":"2009-04-16T13:52:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/?p=255"},"modified":"2009-04-24T17:32:59","modified_gmt":"2009-04-24T21:32:59","slug":"daddy-what-did-you-do-in-the-climate-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/2009\/04\/daddy-what-did-you-do-in-the-climate-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"“Daddy, what did YOU do in the climate wars?”"},"content":{"rendered":"

When my children grow up, the world they live in is likely be very different from ours. There’s a small chance that humanity will rapidly come to its senses, start massive program of emissions reductions, and avoid the worst climate change scenarios. The Hadley Centre gives us about a\u00a050\/50 chance<\/a>\u00a0if<\/em> carbon emissions peak by 2015, and then fall steadily at a rate of 3% per year (They are currently rising by nearly 3% per year). If we manage to pull this off, and also win the 50\/50 bet, our children and grandchildren will ask us how the hell we managed it.<\/p>\n

If we can’t stop emissions growth in the next five years, things look much more grim. Perhaps the simplest way to explain it is the picture painted by the New Scientist:\u00a0How to survive the coming century:<\/a>\u00a0a world that is 4\u00b0C warmer, 90% of the human population wiped out, the rest relocated to dense cities in Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia. Uninhabitable deserts across the subtropics. Virtually no life in the oceans. And that’s the good part. The New Scientist article glosses over the climate wars<\/a> that are\u00a0almost certain if large parts of the world become uninhabitable. If they survive, our children will demand to know what the hell we were doing: we knew it was coming, we knew how bad it would be, and still we did almost nothing to prevent it.<\/p>\n

\"What<\/a>When my kids ask me these questions in decades to come, I need to be ready with an answer. I’d like to say that I did everything I could possibly do. I’d like to say that what I did was effective. And I’d like to be able to say that I made a difference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When my children grow up, the world they live in is likely be very different from ours. There’s a small chance that humanity will rapidly come to its senses, start massive program of emissions reductions, and avoid the worst climate change scenarios. The Hadley Centre gives us about a\u00a050\/50 chance\u00a0if carbon emissions peak by 2015, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":392,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,62],"tags":[30,67,38],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/392"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":274,"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions\/274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}