by Eric Zuesse, The Duran:
A major report from Berkeley Earth research scientist Zeke Hausfather was published as a NYT Op-Ed on October 13th headlining “I Study Climate Change. The Data Is Telling Us Something New.” This “something new” is the most-convincing evidence yet that the many in the scientific community who have been assuming that the proper equation to model global warming is linear — increasing in a straight line from year to year — are wrong, and that, instead, during the past 15 years, the data have been making increasingly clear that the global temperature-rise is actually an exponential function, by means of which the rate-of-change accelerates each year so as to become faster and faster each year. He summarily presents this evidence there.
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If what he says is correct, then this “acceleration means that the effects of climate change we are already seeing — extreme heat waves, wildfires, rainfall and sea level rise — will only grow more severe in the coming years.” He places his hopes upon increased usage of improved forms of solar and wind power; but, in my recent book, I already was assuming that it’s an exponential function, and I presented this more pessimistic statement of its implications for such non-revolutionary technological fixes or improvements:
Waiting yet longer for a technological breakthrough, such as fossil-fuels corporations have always promised will happen but nobody has ever actually delivered (and such as is exemplified here), is doomed, because if and when such a real breakthrough would occur, we’d already be too late, and the uncontrollably spiraling and accelerating feedback-loops would already be out of control even if they weren’t uncontrollable back then. We’d simply be racing, then, to catch up with — and to get ahead of — an even faster rise in global temperatures than existed at that previous time. Things get exponentially worse with each and every year of delay. Consequently, something sudden, sharp, and decisive, must happen immediately, and it can happen only by a fundamental change becoming instituted in our laws, not in our technology. The solution, if it comes, will come from government, and not even possibly come from industry (technological breakthroughs). For governments to instead wait, and to hope for a “technological breakthrough,” is simply for our planet to die. It’s to doom this planet. It’s to abandon the government’s obligation to the future (its supreme obligation). The reason why is that what’s difficult to achieve now (preventing the murder of our planet), will soon be impossible to achieve.
I have also presented my basic argument online, under the heading, “The ONLY Way That Global Warming MIGHT Be Able To Be Stopped”, which article opened: “There is only one way that might work — all others (as will be documented here) can’t even possibly work: Outlaw the purchasing of any stock or bond — any investment securities — in fossil-fuel extraction companies, such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal: any such company at all.” That would effectively terminate further investments in exploring for more and more fossil fuels and for increasingly efficient ways to process and market them, and it would also skyrocket R&D into potentially revolutionarily cleaner and safer forms of nuclear-energy production, such as fusion power, or, maybe, thorium, or else BREST, reactors. The IAEA has been becoming increasingly supportive of escalating global R&D into the possibility that thorium-nuclear might be a viable solution to the biggest of all energy-problems, which is the very real and now emergency threat of global burnout that fossil fuels present. But the investments that are needed into this skyrocketing thorium-nuclear R&D, a potentially revolutionary technology, can come ONLY from investors who no longer can invest in fossil fuels (and who recognize the inability of solar and wind power to replace those). Ambrose Evans-Pritchard was right when he headlined on 29 August 2010, “Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium”, but nothing was done, because Obama, like the Republican Party’s Trump, was owned by billionaires who were invested into either fossil and/or solar-based ’solutions’. And then, there’s also BREST reactors, which Russia is pioneering. These are just three nuclear-future possibilities, but whatever the future will be if it won’t be global burnout, will NOT be an existing technology. And this means that all R&D into the existing technologies must immediately stop and be invested instead into possibly revolutionary new technologies. The ONLY way to achieve that is: “Outlaw the purchasing of any stock or bond — any investment securities — in fossil-fuel extraction companies.”
Right now, a huge problem is that virtually all of the developing world is located in the parts of our planet that are OUTSIDE the developed West, and THOSE underdeveloped nations are precisely the ones that will be suffering the most from global burnout. Here is an informative ranking (as-of 13 October 2023), from Notre Dame University, of the national vulnerability to global warming (ultimately could become burnout), starting with the least vulnerable nation, which today is #1 Switzerland, all the way to #185 Somalia, which is the most vulnerable:
