Winter                                                            Seed Catalog Moon

Again the even heat is so fine.  Makes this feel like a work space instead of a commandeered backroom.

Most of the time today reading materials for the Climate Change MOOC and then listening a set of lectures by Richard Somerville.  He’s a theoretical meteorologist which means that his work includes creating and running weather prediction and climate models.  He is understandable and dispassionate.  And all the more troubling for it.

(this “ski slope” graph shows the rates at which emissions have to reduce when peak CO2 emissions happen on three different dates, one already past.  And we’re currently accelerating. again, see Great Wheel for particulars.)

It’s bugging me right now that I’m putting up all this negative information on Great Wheel, but the terrain ahead of us has become clearer and clearer the further I go in this course. The world needs to act soon and the developed world needs to show leadership.  The EU has committed to emission goals that will meet the challenges and they have more people and a larger economy than we have.  We need to act.

Then, we have to figure out the issue of sustainable development in the developing world, especially China and India, but in Brazil and Russia, too, the BRIC countries.  And we really don’t have much time.  In order to avert literal disaster (see Great Wheel for particulars) emissions worldwide have to peak no later than 2020 and begin then a very sharp reduction.  By very sharp reduction I mean getting to a world with 80% less carbon emissions before 2050.  80%!!!!!!!!!!!

This, the Great Work of Thomas Berry’s work of the same name, is one on which we cannot fail.  If we do, we consign our grandchildren (Ruth and Gabe) and their children to a world of currently unimaginable extremes in sea level rise, temperature, significant rainfall events, coral bleaching, ocean acidification and probably an increased severity of hurricanes and typhoons.  You wouldn’t want to live in this world and your children’s children won’t want to either.