[Coral-List] 1.5 C not plausible anymore

Sat Oct 22 17:12:42 UTC 2022

Hello Peter , Franziska et al:

I would like to add to your posts. The fact that there is zero chance to keep global warming below +1.5  oC is way long gone (aren't we near +1.4 oC  already?). I think it is well recognized by most scientists who care to be informed, including many well informed non-scientists (tough to reach the people who are uninformed because they don't care and have no interest in becoming informed). Thus I am not clear who your intended audience is. And as I have expressed so many times before on Coral List, I have no hope that humanity at large has the will to make the sacrifices essential to keep warming below +3 oC.

Peter indirectly alluded to one of them which I will address directly, and I will elaborate on a second major one.

Human overpopulation (along with people everywhere wanting a reasonable standard of living) is the primary cause of climate change. Climate change is much more than fossil fuel burning for energy producing green house gasses (GHG). It is the sum of all activities that every human alive undertakes in daily life, some consuming more than others. Many on Coral List harp away about some people consuming more than others, and the need for social justice in consumption (basically wealthy people and nations consuming less). But the United Nations Millennial Goals are not to impoverish the majority of humanity but rather improve the standards of living of the billions of people living in poverty, which by necessity will lead to much more consumption. The super-rich billionaires with mega yachts etc are very few, only 3811 worldwide. There are another 6% globally who are millionaires,  which is less than 5 million out of 8,000 million, about 0.0625 % of humanity. While there is certainly much unfairness in the distribution of wealth that needs work to correct from a fairness and ethical standpoint, that's not the reason for climate change. In the US, over 40 % of the population lives at levels that are not luxurious by any means, so low an income that they don't even pay taxes (the infamous 47 % that Mitt Romney referred to when he was running for US president). The average per household income per capita was $36,000 in 2021 and life on the US is expensive compared to many countries. Over 50 % of HOUSEHOLDS (families) had less than $75,000 per year to spend on basics which is not a lot of consuming at US prices when that income has to cover food, housing, transportation, education and clothing. There are only a few % (less than 5 %) of the US population who earn more than $450,000 per year. So excess consumption, while uneven among income groups and nations, is not the main cause of anthropogenic climate change. It's the sum total of all the activities by the increasing number of humans on Earth. The cutting down of trees to make charcoal or grow crops for people to eat. The conversion of land to growing food for cattle and other food livestock. The deforestation to build more houses and cities for the increasing urban populations. Few leaders or organizations have the guts to tackle this problem head on. So we are doomed.  Even Peter gently side-stepped the issue.

Couple that with the energy costs of maintaining a global society that reasonably resembles what the millennial goals want to provide for even human being. A recent book by Dr. Mark Rowlands, a professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami titled "World on Fire: humans, animals and the future of the planet" makes the case, based on the Energy Return on Investment (EROI), that unless humanity gives up meat and dairy (i.e. becomes a global vegan community) there isn't a way to generate enough energy to support all of the energy required to support a global humanity of 8 billion people and counting with a stand of living "reasonable recognized as our own".  He calculates the true energy yield for every type of fossil fuel and renewable resource and reports that the energy yields of fossil fuels have decreased because of the increasing complexity and cost of obtaining this kind of energy from gas, oil, coal, given that the easy deposits have been exhausted and more difficult and energetically costly sources have to be exploited. Use of fossil fuels releases CO2 and other GHGs, which have to be eliminated to prevent further climate change and global warming. Given the need to include in the true cost of using fossil fuels the cost of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS, when/if it becomes available, prohibitively expensive right now), fossil fuels are now less able to provide the energy needs to fuel human society. He also does the calculations for the various types of renewables and nuclear, including the costs of producing and consuming each, and none of them can support the energy needs to maintain a "society reasonable recognized as ours". I'm not going into the details of his 237 page book, but his message is that industrial production and consumption of animal meats has been calculated to be responsible for up to 40 % of climate change and global warming depending on how the calculation is made, plus it's the major cause of deforestation and loss of wilderness and wildlife. He proposes this is the easiest low-hanging food and easiest to switch off for humanity to control climate change. He wrote that switching to a vegan diet would release up to 60 % of land now used for animal agriculture for rewilding. By afforesting all of the excess land now used for rearing cattle and other meat animals, the trees grown on this rewilded land would provide a cheap and natural means of CCS and help counter global warming and climate change.  But giving up eating meat and dairy is seen as too big of a sacrifice to protect the planet and our future by most people. Even the recent ICRS meeting that tried so hard to be climate friendly included dairy in most of its lunch options and served sausages at the banquet. So I don't have much hope humanity will embrace this idea either.

Coral reefs are not isolated from the rest of the biomes on Earth, and there is no way to save the part without saving the whole. Humans are to0 self-involved and stuck on their ways to have much hope for the future. Cleaning up toxic waste discharge, or reducing eutrophication, out-planting coral nubbins, etc, are just band aids on a victim that's bleeding to death.  Not a hopeful outlook I know but just wishing for optimism is sticking one's head in the proverbial sand.

Alina Szmant

-----Original Message-----
From: Coral-List <coral-list-bounces at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> On Behalf Of Peter Sale via Coral-List
Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2022 3:12 PM
To: coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
Cc: franziskaelmer at hotmail.com
Subject: Re: [Coral-List] 1.5 C not plausible anymore

To: CoraL-LIST
Thank you, Franziska Elmer for reminding us that the world is not heading towards 1.5 degrees and that doing so is (or is rapidly becoming) an impossibility.

Over past decades, the coral reef community has tried doom and gloom.  And it has tried ocean optimism.  Neither approach has led to significant change in perspectives and action on the global environmental crisis.  Yes, lots of people have worked locally, or joined the global conversation, in an effort to change where we are headed, but little change has been achieved.  We have not even lowered the rate of increase in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

I support signing the letter as Franziska suggests.  But I also think it is time for a new approach to communicating what we know of the likely future of this planet - a planet without any functional coral reefs and degraded in many other ways besides.  That new approach is called telling the whole truth, rather than just parts of the truth, or sugar-coated parts of the truth.

The whole truth, in my view, is that we have been deluding ourselves, since well before the days of the Rio Declaration, that it would be possible for an ever-increasing number of humans to raise their level of prosperity towards median advanced nation norms in an environmentally sustainable way.  This was not possible in 1992 and it is even less possible in 2022.  The extent to which we have already degraded the natural world is substantial.  The fact that we are eliminating coral reefs very rapidly through a combination of actions - warming of the planet, overfishing, inappropriate coastal management and pollution are the most egregious - is just the most conspicuous of many deleterious impacts.  These broader impacts range from deforestation, land use capture by agriculture, urbanization, over-production of biologically accessible nitrogen, and massive removal of glacial ice reserves to a whole host of other slights, such as the immense shift of biomass and energy flow into humans
  and their handful of food organisms.

Even if we rapidly transition away from use of fossil fuels, our degradation of the planet in these many other ways will continue.  As we simplify the natural world, we erode its capacity to be resilient and continue to supply the goods and services that sustain human life.  To pretend that we can address all these threats while also ensuring a march towards heightened quality of life for a rapidly growing number of us, and do this with only modest changes to lifestyles of those of us already fortunate enough to live on more than $2 per day has to be denounced as perhaps the biggest lie out there.  A lie in which those of us struggling to articulate the need to live within the means of the planet are (almost) as complicit as those others of us who maintain that the state of the planetary system is irrelevant to human progress.

I personally believe there is still a lot that humanity can do to lessen the impact of the Anthropocene.  But we will not get very far until we recognize that we and all other creatures share this planet and depend on it for our survival.  With that recognition, perhaps, we can mount the kind of all-out, global attack on the environmental crisis that has to happen, and which shows no signs of happening by itself.

Peter Sale
University of Windsor (emeritus)
sale at uwindsor.ca<mailto:sale at uwindsor.ca<mailto:sale at uwindsor.ca<mailto:sale at uwindsor.ca>>
www.petersalebooks.com<http://www.petersalebooks.com/<http://www.petersalebooks.com<http://www.petersalebooks.com/>>

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