There are 195 nations in the world. They have just concluded two weeks of meetings in Bonn, Germany to carry forward the Paris climate change agreement. This year two holdouts, Nicaragua and Syria, joined the Paris agreement.
One nation, only one, the United States, announced it would withdraw although the technicalities of the agreement postpone finality of the withdrawal until 2020 (if we get to 2020).
Why did we withdraw? The deal maker wants a better deal for the United States even though 194 other nations think this is the best deal the planet earth can get and understand the deal is about the planet not any one nation.
As Tillerson said, the man is a moron.
This next is from the New York Times report about the close of the Bonn meetings.
“Still, there is the question of pace. During the second week of talks, climate scientists gave a presentation to the conference on the vast task ahead of them. To stay below 2 degrees Celsius of warming, global emissions would likely have to peak in the next few years and then be cut by half every decade all the way down to zero by midcentury.
“The scale of that transition is staggering. Virtually every coal plant around the world would need to be phased out or outfitted with carbon capture technology within decades. Electric vehicles would need to be the primary mode of transportation, and the world’s power grids would need to be virtually emissions-free. Technology that barely exists today to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere may need to be deployed on a vast scale.”
The Paris agreement took years to accomplish largely under former American leadership. That leadership has now passed to China, Germany, France and a handful of other nations, including the Blue Republic, California. Even malignant Russia accepts the accord.
It will take decades to institute the agreement if it can be at all and even if it can be, as the Times story makes clear, it will be fall far short.
So the fact that there is an accord is not to say that all is well because it is not. This writer is not an expert on the science of the subject. Like you he knows what he reads, sees and hears in the news and from looking around on-line.
Climate science in all its scope is an enormously complex, involved field of scientific history, fact, knowledge and inquiry. Anyone with any sense knows we cannot be skeptical about climate change. It is real, the threat is now, not in the future because that future is being deciding as the polar ice dissolves.
Anyone alive today who will be alive in from 30 to 50 years time will have seen and be seeing great changes in the planet and in their lives because of climate change. We know we are seeing some of those changes now, harbingers of far worse we are told to expect.
At the same time the world’s population is exploding, adding to the climate burden. There are a lot of humans in the world from which we have suddenly withdrawn from leadership as the regime in Washington thrashes back to 1950 and farther back. But it cannot turn the clock back on climate change. Itt cannot turn back the population clock.
How many people are there in the world? How many can the planet sustain and where can it sustain them? How urgent is the problem of population increase?
It took until the year 1800 for earth’s human population to reach 1 billion. Over the next 125 years it doubled to 2 billion.
When WWII began in 1939 it stood at 2.2 billion. Notwithstanding all the deaths in all the wars from 1800 forward — including WWI and WWII in which combined deaths exceeded 80 million, and notwithstanding all the other wars, disasters and epidemics since then — just 30 years later, 1970, world population doubled again to 4 billion people.
Today, not even 50 years later, it has nearly doubled again.
There are now 7 billion people crowded onto planet Earth.
Think about that — in less than 50 years global population has increased 80 percent above the number it reached across the entire span of human life on earth up to 1970.
Many learned sources, scholars, articles and organizations like the United Nations project global population will reach 10 billion, even 11 billion people within 50 years. The projections say there will another 1 billion people on earth only 10 years from now.
Small wonder we see nations failing across Asia and Africa; see a growing wave of migration pressing north from the Southern Hemisphere in Africa, Latin America and Asia toward more developed nations — especially toward Europe: Europe where the same sources show that population growth has stopped or is in a steep negative slide; and presses toward the U.S. and Canada, nations with vast territories but small populations measured against the world total.
The nation with probably the largest land mass is Russia. It too has a shrinking population. Its malevolent leader is no more capable than our malevolent president of turning back time or stopping the growing wave of migrants seeking survival.
Otherwise, population is exploding in parts of the world where natural and man made catastrophes combine with climate change, or are produced by climate change to make sustaining life harder and harder. This is so across sub-Saharan Africa, in the Middle East, on or near the subcontinent, and in Central America, the Caribbean and more and more of South America.
Today China has more than 160 cities with population over 1 million (we have 10). India has a population of 1.35 billion projected to rise to 1.75 billion by 2025. That is a mere 8 years from now when it will surpass China. Soon after that China is likely to surpass the U.S. as the largest economy in the world with all the power that implied and that we have had and expressed now for nearly a century all over the world.
Today China and India each have about 1.4 billion population. One in five people in the world live now in China. One in five now live now in India.
Their governments know they are running out of time to change the climate. So do 192 other governments. Only the United States government is a climate change denier in a world in which population is an escalator without an end step.
Peeling the Onion 