VIII. Earth Earns: An Open CoCreative Earthropocene to Astropocene PediaVerse

A. The Old World: Its Archaic, Polar, War Torn, Rapacious Critical Life Support Condition

Mora, Camilo, et al.. Broad Threat to Humanity from Cumulative Climate Hazards Intensified by Greenhouse Gas Emissions. Nature Climate Change. November, 2018. A 23 person team mainly from the University of Hawaii with others in Sweden, the UK, Japan and the USA summarize an immense study of historic deleterious impacts upon some 100 food, water, health, economy, infrastructure, security concerns. See also “Like a Terror Movie:” How Climate Change Will Cause More Simultaneous Disasters about this study by John Schwartz in the New York Times for November 19.

The ongoing emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs) is triggering changes in many climate hazards that can impact humanity. We found traceable evidence for 467 pathways by which human health, water, food, economy, infrastructure and security have been recently impacted by climate hazards such as warming, heatwaves, precipitation, drought, floods, fires, storms, sea-level rise and changes in natural land cover and ocean chemistry. By 2100, the world’s population will be exposed concurrently to the equivalent of the largest magnitude in one of these hazards if emissions are aggressively reduced, or three if they are not, with some tropical coastal areas facing up to six simultaneous hazards. These findings highlight the fact that GHG emissions pose a broad threat to humanity by intensifying multiple hazards to which humanity is vulnerable.

Nicholson-Lord, David. Planet Overload. New Statesman. March 9, 2009. An intensify of environmental warnings fill magazines and newspapers today, and rightly so. But a topic once at the center of debate, that of human population levels, is now out of favor, off the table. Amongst so many cries, we note this article because it marks a deep dilemma. At its base are religious reactionaries who claim that life and human liberties are sacrosanct, thus no limits should constrain. A fine sentiment for the first millennium when it was not known the earth was finitely round. But we remain locked into that mindset, for it has not been repealed or advanced, such is our urgent task.

Nocera, Daniel. Living Healthy on a Dying Planet. Chemical Society Reviews. 38/1, 2009. The MIT Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy introduces a special issue on Renewable Energy as this imperative project may be advanced by chemical nanoscience. Free access is granted to this editorial and the sophisticated, wide-ranging, contributions such as New Approaches to Hydrogen Storage, Photochemical Fuel Production, and Photosynthetic Energy Conversion.

Nolan, Connor, et al. Past and Future Global Transformation of Terrestrial Ecosystems under Climate Change. Science. 361/920, 2018. Some 39 coauthors at universities, laboratories and institutes across the USA, UK, France, China, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Germany, Chile, and the Netherlands, a composite planetary sapiensphere it might seem, achieve a retrospective, quantified survey of prior paleoclimates as the biosphere passed through cooling and heating stages. On this reference looking ahead, it is said that unless present uncontrolled levels of greenhouse gases, are brought under mitigated control right now, they will surely lead to drastic atmospheric, vegetative, and weather calamities.

Impacts of global climate change on terrestrial ecosystems are imperfectly constrained by ecosystem models and direct observations. Pervasive ecosystem transformations occurred in response to warming and associated climatic changes during the last glacial-to-interglacial transition, which was comparable in magnitude to warming projected for the next century under high-emission scenarios. We reviewed 594 published paleoecological records to examine compositional and structural changes in terrestrial vegetation since the last glacial period and to project the magnitudes of ecosystem transformations under alternative future emission scenarios. Our results indicate that terrestrial ecosystems are highly sensitive to temperature change and suggest that, without major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere, terrestrial ecosystems worldwide are at risk of major transformation. (Abstract)

Northcutt, Michael. A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2007. The University of Edinburgh ethicist and Scottish Episcopal priest argues, in part, that the root of our deep dilemma is the vested, erroneous worldview of mechanical materialism, rather than a relational and holistic sense of a viable yet much stressed Gaia.

NRC, Committee on Abrupt Climate Change. Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Changes. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2002. A major report by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences on the potential for sudden, dramatic shifts in global weather.

The report does not focus on large, abrupt causes–nuclear wars or giant meteorite impacts–but rather on the surprising new findings that abrupt climate change can occur when gradual causes push the earth system across a threshold. Just as the slowly increasing pressure of a finger eventually flips a switch and turns on a light, the solw effects of drifting contentents or wobbling orbits or changing atmospheric composition may “switch” the climate to a new state. (v)

Ojeda, Diana, et al. Feminist Ecologies. Annual Review of Environment and Resources. 47/149, 2022. We record this chapter essay by Universidad de los Andes, Colombia, Anticolonial Practititoner, Rhode Island, and Clark University in mid 2023 when most of central Canada is ablaze and the northern hemisphere blanketed with smoke. In real regard, one can view a 2016 TED talk (Google) by the British Columbia forester Suzanne Simard about how rapacious clear cutting by logging companies is setting up such a conflagration.

In times of devastating ecological crisis, where can we find collective guidance to halt these destructive forces? In this review, we consider recent contributions by feminist scholars to actively theorize about mediations, emerging ecologies, and multispecies justice. We propose that an avail of feminist political ecology, ecofeminism, and decolonial/anticolonial views can open up spaces for life-affirming values. We refer to emancipatory ecologies always in the process of becoming so to defy oppression based on gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, caste, ability, species and more. (Excerpt)

Oskamp, Susan. Psychological Contributions to Achieving an Ecologically Sustainable Future for Humanity. Journal of Social Issues. 56/3, 2000. An essay on the integral mental faculties needed to adequately face the danger from unbridled population, consumption and underconservation in time.

The most serious long-term threat facing the world is the danger that human actions are producing irreversible, harmful changes to the environmental conditions that support life on Earth. If this problem is not overcome, there may be no viable world for our descendants to inhabit….This article discusses major obstacles to this goal, describes a variety of motivational approaches toward reaching it, and proposes that we should view the achievement of sustainable living patterns as a superordinate goal - a war against the common enemy of an uninhabitable world.

Otto, Ilona, et al. Social Tipping Dynamics for Stabilizing Earth’s Climate by 2050. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. 117/2354, 2020. Fourteen scientists posted in Germany, Ghana, the USA, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Scotland, mainly based at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research including Hans Schellnhuber put together a comprehensive array of planetary and practical energetic and metabolic aspects that need be addressed with popular synchrony over the next thirty years.

Achieving a rapid global decarbonization to stabilize the climate depends on activating contagious and fast-spreading processes of social and technological change within the next few years. Drawing on an expert workshop, and a review of literature, we propose interventions to induce positive social tipping dynamics and a real global transformation to carbon-neutral societies. These initiatives comprise removing fossil-fuel subsidies and boosting decentralized energy generation, building carbon-neutral cities, divesting from fossil fuels assets, strengthening climate education, engagement, and greenhouse gas emissions information. (Significance)

Overbye, Dennis. The Doomsday Clock Keeps Ticking. New York Times. FebruarY 12, 2024. (Are humans the only beings in the universe confronting global self-destruction? Or just the last ones standing?) As if on cue, the veteran science writer notes that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists journal has moved their Doomsday Clock closer than ever at 1.5 minutes, 90 seconds, from midnight because of internecine wars, barbaric warlords, nuclear threats, climate extremes, the list goes on. Overbye scans present opinion upon the possibility of ET civilizations which lately tends to their absence as life struggles to get beyond microbial stages. JWST images at the edges of space and time add more evidence. He then invokes the Great Filter icon of some ultimate event that all techno-civilizations have to safely pass through to survive. See also Observational Constraints on the Great Filter at arXiv:2002.08776.

Yet there is no evidence that Earth has been visited, or even by an interstellar radio signal — the Great Silence, radio astronomers call it. One answer is that other civilizations are too sparse in space and time. Or we truly are alone, despite images from the James Webb Space Telescope of galaxies scattered like sand in the winds of time. Life arose on Earth within half a billion years of its formation, which suggests that generating at least a microbial form is easy. Maybe intelligence is the hard part.

Overpeck, Jonathan and Julia Cole. Abrupt Change in Earth’s Climate System. Annual Review of Environment and Resources. Vol. 31, 2006. Global climate change is misrepresented by the “warming” word, for much more is going on as this critically poised complex system is increasingly stressed. As it has done before, it can suddenly shift on the order of a decade to a warmer or colder state, with great disruptions of biospheric life. Indeed, the variation in hurricane frequency from several major ones in 2005 to almost none in 2006 could be an indication of such extreme swings.

Many aspects of Earth's climate system have changed abruptly in the past and are likely to change abruptly in the future. Although abrupt shifts in temperature are most dramatic in glacial climates, abrupt changes, resulting in an altered probability of drought, large floods, tropical storm landfall, and monsoon rainfall, are all important concerns even in the absence of significant anthropogenic climate forcing. Continued climate change will likely increase the probability of these types of abrupt change and also make abrupt changes in ocean circulation and sea level more likely. Although global warming may have already triggered abrupt change, current understanding and modeling capability is not sufficient to specify details of future abrupt climate change. Improved adaptation strategies are warranted, as well as efforts to avoid crossing climate change thresholds beyond which large abrupt changes in sea level, ocean circulation, and methane-clathrate release could greatly amplify the impacts of climate change. (Abstract)

Pearce, Fred. Doomsday Scenario. New Scientist. November 22, 2003. The environmental effects of last two centuries of the “Anthropocene” era are now having a precipitous global impact. Expectation of a gentle warming are misplaced. The quite real danger is that sudden and irreversible climate change will make the planet much less inhabitable for humans. An integrated Earth Observation System is noted which hopes to study and understand what is going in time.

Previous   1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10  Next  [More Pages]