An impressive article appeared some years ago in Scientific American. Remembering only its message but not its title, I was able to retrieve it only by the kindness and long memory of a Sci Am editor. It was “A Plan to Keep Carbon in Check”, by Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, in the September 2006 issue. This graphic suggests the general idea.
There is an upward trend, of increasing greenhouse gas (mainly carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere and of consequent world temperature. If it passes a certain level, it will become catastrophic. The trend needs to be deflected downward, over the next fifty years, by a certain angle, the “stabilization triangle”, to become level. (And, after that, deflected downward more, for a world better than it is now.)
To show how this can be manageable, the authors divided the angle into seven “wedges”. Each wedge can be achieved by emitting one billion tons less a year. And there are strategies each of which can achieve at least one wedge. Six pages of detail explain these strategies, most of which have to do with coal, oil, gas, nuclear, renewables, balances between them, fuel efficiency, carbon capture, and the like. Each strategy could achieve at least one wedge, some more; there is a chart of “15 ways to make a wedge”; so not all have to be achieved – just enough to bring the trend down enough.
And Socolow and Pacal do mention no-till agriculture, deforestation, methane, population growth. (They don’t mention lab-grown meat, or vertical farming.) And they pay attention to the right of poorer countries to reduce their emissions only half as much as richer ones.
I had only vaguely remembered the “wedges”, but there may be some validity in my more homely version.
The trend (carbon, heat) is up, toward the catastrophe point. But every little can deflect it a bit downward. Major changes, like those laid out by Socolow and Pacala, can deflect it downward by major angles. You can deflect it downward too, at any time. If you recycle paperclips, or remember to switch off lights, or take the train instead of the plane from Glasgow to London, the angle by which you deflect the trend is indiscernible; it’s smaller than the parallax of a star. (The parallax of the nearest star is about 1/3600 of a degree.) But if a million of us do it, we have a pull on that trend.
Wavy
My Zodiac Wavy Chart for 2022 may be ready by the time you turn your clock to natural time tomorrow.
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The world population is supposed to stop increasing at some point, as more nations achi4ve higher standards of living—The truly outrageous scandal is the WASTAGE in food production—-half of all food produced is never eaten. eliminate the waastage and even if nothing else improves you can sustain the present day population or even a little more with hallf the resources. We could actually re-wild some areas now used in agriculture. Emmisssion would go down. Couple taht with improvements in methods and we could produce more with less—the vertical farms are a good idea—so are green roofs. The green roofs would also maje cities more appealing.
The 500-pound gorilla in the room is greenhouse gasses; the ignored six-ton elephant pacing around is bloated human population. There is almost no serious world problem that is not ultimately tracable humans having populated far beyond their necessary range, and no problem less likely to be seriously addressed by ecnomy-minded climate negotiators.
You’re right. Humans are now 36% of the world’s mammals, by biomass. Domesticated mammals (mainly the ones kept to be eaten) are 60%.
http://www.universalworkshop.com/2018/05/23/on-and-in-extinction/
Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb (1968( was right. The problem is population multiplied by per capita consumption.
The Socolow and Pacala article included: “Lower birth rates can produce a wedge, too–for example, if they hold the global population in 2056 near eight billion people when it otherwise would have grown to nine billion.”
All hot air, literally, I’m afraid and nobody is going to take any notice.I think that the car industry should be treated like the cigarette industry and banned from advertising and product placements and people ought to realize that electric cars are in a way the car version of low tar cigarettes except that tabacco farmers aren’t about the strip the sea beds to grow tabacco! Plutocrats like Musk are pulling the wool over our eyes by tricking people into thinking we’ll be moving to Mars to escape a ruined Earth.Of course we won’t as his Mars ambitions seem to have been a ruse to launch a load of space junk into low Earth orbit besides Mars and anywhere else in our solar system apart from Earth seems pretty much uninhabitable.Prince William was correct in declaring that we should take care of Earth rather than worrying about short pleasure jaunts into low Earth orbit although perhaps he should have a word with his grandmother about her making the likes of Branson Sir’s before throwing stones?