{"id":11320,"date":"2013-12-21T07:30:23","date_gmt":"2013-12-21T11:30:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=11320"},"modified":"2013-12-20T10:31:05","modified_gmt":"2013-12-20T14:31:05","slug":"the-world-in-a-wheelchair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/the-world-in-a-wheelchair\/","title":{"rendered":"The World in a Wheelchair"},"content":{"rendered":"

An interesting, scary &, I believe, accurate article by\u00a0Eric Holthaus<\/a>\u00a0on where we are at concerning global warming was just published by Quartz<\/strong>. Below, the opening paragraphs & the graph:<\/p>\n

\n

So it\u2019s come to this.<\/p>\n

Last year,\u00a0a researcher presented a paper<\/a>\u00a0on climate change at the American Geophysical Union\u2019s meeting entitled\u00a0\u201dIs Earth F**ked?\u201d which advocated \u201cenvironmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last month, the\u00a0Philippines climate commissioner and\u00a0self-styled\u00a0revolu-tionary<\/a>\u00a0Naderev \u201cYeb\u201d Sa\u00f1o\u00a0held a 13-day fast<\/a>\u00a0in the midst of an international climate summit, just hours after Typhoon Haiyan ravaged his home country. In a tearful speech quoting Gandhi,\u00a0he said<\/a>: \u201cWe cannot sit and stay helpless staring at this international climate stalemate. It is now time to take action. We need an emergency climate pathway.\u201d<\/p>\n

And only last week, a conference of climate scientists in London\u00a0explored the theme<\/a>of \u201cradical emissions reduction\u201d after noting that \u201cnothing that we\u2019ve said or done to date about climate change has made any detectable dip whatsoever\u201d. Via a weblink, author Naomi Klein compared the fight against climate change with the struggle against South African apartheid, and said, \u201can agenda capable of delivering radical emissions reductions will only advance if accompanied by a radical movement.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fed up with slow (or in some cases,\u00a0backwards<\/a>) progress on climate change, environmental advocates are mulling desperate measures.\u00a0Emerging at the head of this pack is arguably the world\u2019s most prominent climate scientist:\u00a0James Hansen,\u00a0a former NASA researcher turned activist.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0a provocative study<\/a>\u00a0published earlier this month,\u00a0Hansen and a group of colleagues make the case for why radical action is needed. The now commonly embraced international\u00a0target of keeping global warming\u00a0at a maximum of\u00a02\u00b0C<\/a>\u00a0above pre-industrial levels\u2014a hard-won, but politically negotiated goal\u2014is actually much too high, Hansen says, and we should instead aim for 1\u00b0C. That would be barely a blip higher than current levels of global warming (around 0.8\u00b0C), but still\u00a0the highest level ever experienced over the 10,000-year course of human civilization<\/a>.\u00a0\u201dOur objective is to define what the science indicates is needed, not to assess political feasibility,\u201d the paper says. [… ctd\u00a0here<\/a>]<\/p>\n

\n<\/blockquote>\n

The article’s graphics are worth meditating on too:<\/p>\n

\n

Environmentalists have dubbed this acceleration of warming \u201cthe wheelchair curve<\/a>\u201c:<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"temperature_record-wheelchair\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
Because the world is going to end up in a wheelchair if this happens. Jos Hagelaars\/Max Edkins\/World Bank<\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An interesting, scary &, I believe, accurate article by\u00a0Eric Holthaus\u00a0on where we are at concerning global warming was just published by Quartz. Below, the opening paragraphs & the graph: So it\u2019s come to this....<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,41,46,49,50,67,77,86,783,105],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climate-change","category-environment","category-fossil-fuel","category-global-warming","category-greenhouse-gas","category-man-made-disaster","category-oceans","category-permafrost-climate-change","category-permafrost","category-unnatural-disaster"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11320"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11320\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11329,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11320\/revisions\/11329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}