Look, this won’t affect me; I’ll be dead. But if you’re 20-something you really ought to have noticed by now that our snow season is stuffed. By the time you’re my age there won’t be one. No debate, data doesn’t lie:
Spencers Creek integral snow depth trend
The main contenders for this election both promise the same grossly inadequate short term emission reductions. Only one offers a mechanism with a chance of working at any sort of adequate level, though there’s miles to go from what they’re proposing. The climate system doesn’t care much about emission rates anyway; it deals in aggregates. And it’s capacity to deal with CO2 is seriously finite. Eventually, that rate needs to be zero or negative. (Around a third of this year’s CO2 increase will still be in the atmosphere in 10,000 years. That is right, 10,000 years*.)
Australians are per capita the worlds worst polluters, and we’re also some of the wealthiest people on the planet. If we can’t lead on this, then who?
(* “… generally accepted modern understanding of the global carbon cycle indicates that climate effects of CO2 releases to the atmosphere will persist for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years into the future.” Archer, Eby, Brovkin, Ridgwell, Cao, Mikolajewicz, Caldeira, Matsumoto, Munhoven, Montenegro and Tokos (2009) “Atmospheric Lifetime of Fossil Fuel Carbon Dioxide” Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Vol. 37: 117 -134
Completely agree