Buchanan Tipping Over

A Novel Pondering the Value of Hope
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4835-7717-3
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 204 Seiten

It's the fall of 2024. The world's climate scientists announce to the world that a climate tipping point has been exceeded, over ninety percent of life on Earth will go extinct, including man. Five gentlemen and three ladies retreat to an abandoned castle to discuss their reaction to the news and sort out what it all means. Given fifty years warning, how did over seven billion people sit back and allow such an outcome to come about?

Autoren/Hrsg.

Buchanan, James

Leseproben

CHAPTER THREE – SUSTAINING LIFE

Life – © 2014 James Buchanan

Husam Taylor

An olive-skinned man with dark hair, a thick beard, and brown-rimmed glasses says, “This will be a report on civilization, from what I have been able to discover. There is still reporting going on.”

~~~~

I’ve compiled a status report on the state of affairs of some of the world’s cultures. Happily, those who did such things before our loss of hope have now begun to report without editorial interference or political influence. In many instances, people have a sense of duty to keep up communication channels. In many places where communication was limited in the past, it is now being made available to everyone.

Food is the same problem it has come to be in this warm climate. There is either flooding or drought in food-producing areas. This makes food availability intermittent. The rooftop gardens that so widely spread before the Announcement still remain a viable source of food, for both humans and insects alike. Bee populations are still increasing in some areas. This has been steady, since the organic rooftop projects began. Halting fertilizer production some years ago has not yet rejuvenated the waterways and the oceans. There is still a persistent decline in seafood availability. This is one of the most serious shortages identified in the last decade. We will mostly likely never see ocean life recover, because it has been identified as an original tipping point. Coral reefs were once the birthplace of a quarter of all ocean life, and that life fed much of the other 75 percent. Cold-water life might persist, but it is uncertain how healthy that eco-subsystem will remain. Without the Arctic, specialists in that discipline don’t give cold-water species much longer to exist. I suspect the last of them will find their way to the Antarctic.

Actually they do this as the seasons change, much like migratory birds and even Monarch butterflies.

In any case, many fishing cultures will see higher stresses than they already have. The nomad or refugee masses continue to grow. Some leave drought-stricken locations and try to migrate to the good areas, which exist between the drought areas and the flooded areas. This is viable for now.

It should be noted that the flooded areas are being stripped of useful soil, so changing weather patterns often don’t help. Floodwaters wash good soil to other areas. An area that has been subjected to flooding for too long, only to reveal dirt without soil nutrients when the water subsides, isn’t viable to support a refugee herd. Productive land is shrinking rapidly.

High sea levels have had the same effect as they did prior to the Announcement. So much of humanity had been drawn to the coasts since before recorded time that relocation goes poorly. The second-highest population centers have always been along the world’s major rivers. Those rivers originated at the base of glaciers, back when glaciers were healthy. At present, some of these important rivers are sporadically being filled by heavy rain and flooding in spots. This is nothing short of lifesaving for hundreds of millions of people in India and Asia. Those floods redistribute soil, but the people adapt well and are holding their own.

We have serious areas of drought, but some experts hope that the polar vortex and the ocean currents could possibly shift and allow the dryness to be manageable. Some peoples, here in North America and in Africa and Australia, had already adapted to a more nomadic lifestyle before the Announcement and are actually doing as our ancient ancestors did: they are following the migrations of animals and birds. Somehow, the wild creatures know where the plants will grow.

Many people have died from both floods and drought, and that trend is unlikely to subside. Life has gotten harsh in spots, and you all know it gets worse every year, even in the best areas. Still, the weather oscillates, and nobody knows what will be going on in any particular location a few months into the future.

Solar and wind are still the predominant forms of electricity generation, and many governments did well in building that infrastructure. The U.S. dams for hydroelectric power are having problems from low water levels, as has been shown out West, or from having too much water to handle—for example, on the East Coast, where it is also much flatter. The same goes for South America, Australia, Asia, Europe, and Africa. South America has problems that stem from having cleared land in the Amazon and in Patagonia. I think Australia has had major fires and floods, but information from that continent has been inconsistent.

Speaking of fires, North America has had an increase in forest fires, and no one is making the slightest effort to manage them now. It seems this has caused big trouble for many of our survivalist groups. It was always unclear how they were doing, and any SOS-type messages from them have likely gone unanswered.

One unexpected revelation was that when temperatures get too hot, the leaves on plants and trees curl up and stop the function of photosynthesis. This has a twofold effect, because trees absorb a full quarter of the CO2 in the air, and they stop absorbing it when, due to an avalanche of CO2, temperatures get too hot. The other effect of extreme heat is on the growth of our food crops: the plants become stunted or die.

The issue of trees is important. There were three trillion trees on earth, as measured in an exhaustive study done in 2015, even after so much deforestation. Subsequently, fifteen billion trees were lost each year, while five billion were planted. Mankind removed the ability of the ecosystem to recover from the damage being done. Children from nine to about sixteen formed an international campaign to help the ecosystem help us, by planting trees. It was a good effort, but they simply could not keep up with corporate demands for turning rainforests into palm oil plantations, which were insufficient to cleanse the air, compared to the benefits of a natural rain forest.

In a stroke of luck, most of the NASA satellites have continued to be controlled and monitored. They have steadily sent back invaluable data, and people who analyze the data are still doing so and passing it along. That’s where I get some of my info.

The prediction came true that methane releases from permafrost would amplify the effects we were already seeing. We are possibly past as many as two solid tipping points, and, like dominoes, more are lined up. The only way to tell what side of a tipping point we are on is to look back at when we might have passed it. Tipping points aren’t hard lines in the sand. This planet is losing species with exponentially increasing frequency.

The scientists and the engineers are continuing to do the only thing they know how to do, and we can be grateful for that, as their information is very helpful. It seems to me that we will see a continuous ramp-up of this whole ordeal. Complex systems will begin to fail under the stresses, and the simple aspects of life will also take a dive from the same stresses.

This is in every way more serious than anybody has stated since the 1980s. Nobody really knew how the many parts of our closed ecosystem were going to affect the other parts, so the scientists who reported on this painted a conservative picture. They thought they were preventing panic, and many feared that overstating the importance of their warnings would make people think they were “crying wolf.” It never mattered in the end, because the financial ideologies were running amuck at the same time. The panicked efforts to increase profits only pushed both the failed financial models and the environment into unrecoverable modes.

Global warming should have become a dire concern at the time of Ronald Reagan and the trickle-down scams. Mankind never really had a prayer after the mid-2000s, and nothing but conjecture of what we might have done will be around in the end. Man wasn’t ready to address the climate; he was busy proving free market capitalism to be a failure.

This is indeed a continuation of something that began with man’s industrial age. It isn’t that we couldn’t have known we would cause this. We could clearly see what was happening from the poor air quality caused by burning coal in London, dating back to 1273. Man’s complete inability to learn was demonstrated in China more than seven hundred years later, in the 2000s, when the Chinese repeated the same excessive coal burning, with the same air quality results.

There was never a significant break in man-caused poor air quality during those seven centuries to suggest that this end would be avoided. No, man knew he would bring this outcome but chose to believe that our own science was either wrong or so good it could cure the problem.

The famous picture of “Earth Rise” taken by men standing on the moon showed us what we would never completely grasp until it was too late. It showed us that we exist on a closed small blue planet, together and alone but for one another. Later advances in DNA would tell us that every single one of us is directly related to every other person on Earth.

Now the Earth is showing us that it has always been a single entity. The extraction of so-called resources has been much like selling our own organs for money to buy dinner. We sold our stomach for a sandwich. When man chose capitalism over survival, wise men would have recognized the error. The oligarchs’ method of dealing with climate...