Climate: We Are Not Doing Enough
20 July 2021 (Wall Street International)* — Measurements of the carbon dioxide content of the earth’s atmosphere as a function of time have been made ever since 1958 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.
The resulting graph is called the “Keeling Curve”, in honor of Charles David Keeling, who started the monitoring and continued it until his death in 2005.
Despite promises made at the 2015 Paris Conference, despite global concern about the threat of catastrophic climate change, despite massive worldwide protests organized by Greta Thunberg and her Fridays for the Future movement, despite the reduced emissions resulting from the Covid-19 lockdown, the Keeling Curve continues to rise steadily, and the carbon dioxide content of the earth’s atmosphere continues to rise steadily.
The rate at which the curve is rising is even increasing. We must conclude that despite all promises of action, we are not doing enough.
Two time-scales
One important reason why it is so hard to mobilize the political will needed for effective action is a contrast between two time-scales. Immediate action is essential in order to avoid feedback loops and tipping points which would make human efforts to avoid catastrophic climate change useless.
On the other hand, the most serious effects of climate change lie in the distant future. We see what is near to us. We tend to confine our attention to problems that are close at hand.
Source: https://human-wrongs-watch.net/2021/07/22/climate-we-are-not-doing-enough/
