Earth being ‘pushed beyond its limits’ as energy imbalance reaches record high
"Our home planet is struggling with a record energy imbalance, which is warming oceans to unprecedented levels, making weather more extreme and threatening health and food supplies." How we react matters.
[Jonathan Watts in The Guardian]
My mental model is that a lot of what’s happening in the world right now is driven by this:
“The United Nations body confirmed 2015 to 2025 were the hottest 11 years ever measured, but a still bleaker message was that the rising temperature experienced by humans on the surface was only 1% of the faster-accumulating heat in the wider Earth system.
More than 90% of that excess is absorbed by the oceans, which experienced the highest heat content in history last year. The rate of ocean warming has more than doubled over the past two decades, compared with the average over the previous 45 years.”
We’ve been experiencing the tip of the iceberg and making policy based on that, while the oceans have been absorbing the vast majority of the heat difference. That heat will continue to radiate back to us, committing us to more warming even if we drastically change now.
The result is inevitably fewer resources. Fewer livable areas on Earth, plus agricultural upheaval, lead to increased migration, more competition for less land, less food, and, as an obvious outcome, more conflict. For those that seek to maintain control over resources, authoritarian governments are an easier path: a rigidly-controlled population is easier to keep in line. When we could be co-operating and building more equitable societies to deal with the crisis in collaboration with each other, many of the very wealthiest are encouraging the opposite in order to shore up their own positions.
You can see it in right-wing governments moving away from renewable energy back to fossil fuels; in erosion of democratic norms; in backlashes to equity and inclusion policies that could lead to more equity and collaboration; in the surprising embrace by politicians of end times rhetoric from religious extremists. And you can see it in some of the very wealthiest buying land in places like New Zealand where they can maintain their own control and safety.
We can still say no. There are people on the ground who are fighting for something better. Activists — often from vulnerable communities that have the most to lose — are showing the way. I hope that we can demand the more equitable societies that will bring more of us through the crisis and allow us to get through it together by sharing resources and working on science-based solutions. But there’s a window of opportunity, and it won’t stay open forever.
[Link]