Could global warming have been avoided?

Historians of the future (assuming there will be any such) will probably point to the 2020s as the decade when the world began its short unhappy slide into climate catastrophe. The Greek forest fires of 2021; the Californian ones of 2023, combined with floods in Pakistan in the same year that drowned fully one third of that country, were proof, attributable proof ,[1] that human induced climate change had started to wreak incontrollable and irreversible destruction to the fabric of planet’s surface. A fabric that human beings needed to be intact if they were to survive. They will also ask how it was possible that a society with the most advanced techniques of science and communication had allowed itself to arrive at such a point.

Starting in the 1960s, the warnings had been coming, like the steady rise if a beating drum. The Keeling curve and the concerns of the LBJ administration were early examples. In the 1970s even the CIA (hardly a bastion of Green Woke Communism) had got in on the Act. Through the 1980s and 1990s there were conferences, resolutions and rising alarm. All action was undermined, subverted and rendered null by the fossil fuel industry and the petrostates. Whose actions bore such a resemblance to the tobacco industry and its efforts to deny the links of their product to lung cancer.[3] Perhaps the last reasonable chance to act in time was the Kyoto summit of 1997. Which, if its recommendations had been implemented in full, might have avoided the enormous costs, both economic and in lives, of what was unstoppable by 2020.

And that future was to be? As the temperature gradients warmed through 2⁰, 2.5⁰ and 3⁰C , rising sea levels and wildly fluctuating weather conditions caused whole societies to collapse. The resulting waves of refugees were halted, temporarily, on the borders of safer lands, Until those fleeing returned with armies and weapons which could never be stopped; and the last bastions of order fell. Like a smoker dying of cancer, or a boozer from liver failure: humanity as a whole could just not kick its habit.

[1]https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/

[2]https://earth.org/data_visualization/the-keeling-curve-explained/

[3]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-53640382

#global warming #forest fire #climate change #flood #oil industry #fossil fuel #cancer #tobacco industry #greece #california #pakistan