All the work-at-home, bicycling and electric cars help the climate, and I urge support for personal, community, regional, national, and international efforts to reduce GHG. But at the same time there need to be strong government-funded climate/weather change adaptation projects, programs, and policies that allow people and nations to stay viable in the decades ahead.
Why you ask? Because temperatures will keep going up. GHG reduction efforts to reduce global climate and weather extreme events are now mostly going to fall short because these action programs were too little and too late, and still often are. Our planetary civilization and its human wants and behaviors puts Earth behind the curve for fixing the problem. As shown in Brad's essay above, we have a global-scale climate problem already happening that we will need to deal with.
Unfortunately, the ongoing failure sometimes expands unnecessarily because of leaders ignoring the full life-cycle GHG impacts of large scale civil construction projects that generate more GHG in building a "sustainable" solution than will be saved by that solution after implementation. Looking at you ST3. Even the electric car trend in OECD countries needs to have upstream and downstream impacts managed carefully with global sustainabilty kept in focus.
Thanks for the comment, John. I agree. We need an energy transition AND we need an infrastructure transition. We need flexible resiliency against ever changing and intensifying effects of meteorological mayhem that will impact not just energy and transportation, but water, communications, urban development, and agriculture. This isn't getting near enough attention especially relative to EVs.
Which, as you point out, are still just cars! They take insane amounts of energy to produce, own, and recycle will continue to pollute (tire and brake dust) and clog roadways despite being touted as being 'good for the environment'. Yes, they reduce local tailpipe emissions, require less maintenance, stem reliance on fossil fuels for propulsion, and are required for many to exist in our societies, but we must find more ways to reduce trips and addictions to overuse.
Thanks, Sharif, for the kind words and for commenting. No doubt van Gogh never had any idea either! Or did he?! He *was* very tuned to weather patterns and often captured the shifting light caused by changes of the rotating earth, shifting clouds, and rainfall. And who knows what he was seeing while enduring fits of hallucinations caused by any one of the 30 different post-hoc diagnoses! Perhaps he was sensing naturally occurring fractal-like patterns and behavior not accessible to us. 🤷🏼♂️
The limited ability of the current human civilization to knock down GHG emissions was ironically illustrated by the worldwide drop in 2020 caused by the unexpected pandemic, then followed by a rebound in emissions beginning in 2021, shown in the IMF GHG dashboard posted a year ago at https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2022/06/30/greenhouse-emissions-rise-to-record-erasing-drop-during-pandemic and more recently at https://climatedata.imf.org/pages/re-indicators#re1 .
All the work-at-home, bicycling and electric cars help the climate, and I urge support for personal, community, regional, national, and international efforts to reduce GHG. But at the same time there need to be strong government-funded climate/weather change adaptation projects, programs, and policies that allow people and nations to stay viable in the decades ahead.
Why you ask? Because temperatures will keep going up. GHG reduction efforts to reduce global climate and weather extreme events are now mostly going to fall short because these action programs were too little and too late, and still often are. Our planetary civilization and its human wants and behaviors puts Earth behind the curve for fixing the problem. As shown in Brad's essay above, we have a global-scale climate problem already happening that we will need to deal with.
Unfortunately, the ongoing failure sometimes expands unnecessarily because of leaders ignoring the full life-cycle GHG impacts of large scale civil construction projects that generate more GHG in building a "sustainable" solution than will be saved by that solution after implementation. Looking at you ST3. Even the electric car trend in OECD countries needs to have upstream and downstream impacts managed carefully with global sustainabilty kept in focus.
Thanks for the comment, John. I agree. We need an energy transition AND we need an infrastructure transition. We need flexible resiliency against ever changing and intensifying effects of meteorological mayhem that will impact not just energy and transportation, but water, communications, urban development, and agriculture. This isn't getting near enough attention especially relative to EVs.
Which, as you point out, are still just cars! They take insane amounts of energy to produce, own, and recycle will continue to pollute (tire and brake dust) and clog roadways despite being touted as being 'good for the environment'. Yes, they reduce local tailpipe emissions, require less maintenance, stem reliance on fossil fuels for propulsion, and are required for many to exist in our societies, but we must find more ways to reduce trips and addictions to overuse.
Fascinating. Never thought of Van Gogh had anything to do with fractals and climate change. Good post. thanks for writing this.
Thanks, Sharif, for the kind words and for commenting. No doubt van Gogh never had any idea either! Or did he?! He *was* very tuned to weather patterns and often captured the shifting light caused by changes of the rotating earth, shifting clouds, and rainfall. And who knows what he was seeing while enduring fits of hallucinations caused by any one of the 30 different post-hoc diagnoses! Perhaps he was sensing naturally occurring fractal-like patterns and behavior not accessible to us. 🤷🏼♂️