On January 11, 2022, I posted on this site an article proposing that the only option that may be left to us for reducing CO2 quickly enough to avert global annihilation, was to use the Pandemic Shutdown as a model and partially shut things down again (but with a different configuration).
Freeze the Warming. An Emissions Moratorium Proposal.
It would appear that I am not alone.
I’ve read a number climate articles in the last month, several of them here, which essentially stated that some in the climate science community have come to the conclusion that the reduction in CO2 during the Pandemic Shutdown was sufficient enough to start to get the climate under control and suggesting that we need to get back to shutdown levels as fast as possible.
On Sunday,August 7th, Angmar for CimateBrief posted “Climate Brief ‘Why there is still a rational case for climate optimism’” which contained a link to this:
Climate Brief:
'Environmental Lockdown'?
(It's coming to your future!)
Angmar’s post of 5/12/22 above essentially mirrored my proposal. It in turn contained a link to this from The Hill:
Coming soon: Climate lockdowns?
BY KRISTIN TATE, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 02/02/22 9:30 AM ET
thehill.com/...
As important as all this content was, because it was climate related Angmar’s post got just 16 recommendations and 15 comments.
The article I posted back in January got even less recommendations (5) and only 3 comments. None were encouraging
I have provided the link to “Freeze the Warming” because
I believe it contains material that remains relative and valuable. It also presents an attempt at a general game-plan that may help others better comprehend its feasibility.
When this idea of shutting down again first occurred to me about a year ago, it seemed to me to be something of a ‘no brainer’.
I fully understood that many others had most likely thought of it or would all over the world. I was also immediately struck with the magnitude and potential of it, but deciding how to proceed with it took time.
Before writing “Freeze”, I spent a couple of months with whatever spare time I had trying to poke holes in this idea while searching for other similar ones and was unsuccessful on both fronts. During this time I was also processing as much of the its implications as I could comprehend from my environmental knowledge and the effects that the Pandemic shutdown had on climate. The latter was drawn from my own observations and inferences during the shutdown as well as information available from the scientific community. Because the collected data was still being processed, I often had to rely on informed intuition and reading between the lines to glean what scientific analysis might ultimately provide. This approach seems to have served me well. When I did begin writing my post, I made every attempt to cover all bases thoroughly and sent the resulting essay out to be vetted by a half dozen academically trained friends who are highly cognitive, informed and straight shooters. All are very successful in their chosen field and their input was enormously helpful.
After all this time,
I remain firmly convinced of the soundness of my proposal, but this should not be confused with my being convinced we will do it or that it will be successful.
In the current cacophony of information swamping us daily, ideas, even extraordinary ones like this can get buried and forgotten, never reaching the right ears. Sweeping and highly disruptive ideas of this type are especially vulnerable to being dismissed out of hand as grandiose delusions.
Nevertheless, Angmar’s and Kristin Tate’s articles and my earlier one propose an idea that if implemented might become the most important and substantive in history. This proposal is nothing less than a potentially viable plan for saving the world, when, to my knowledge, no others exist. There is no longer time for incremental change alone to save us. What is more, from a number of sources, it has become clear to me that various climate scientists are now thinking along the same lines.
In “Freeze” I talk about the necessity for a radical shift in the global zeitgeist in order for us to collectively find the will to ‘suffer’ another shutdown. Since I posted it, I have learned about the atmospheric condition called “wet bulb”. In a nutshell, this happens when temperatures go above 103 F and humidity above 35%. After this threshold, sweat can no longer evaporate, and we loose our ability to regulate body temperature. When this happens, if you can’t get into an air conditioned space quickly, you die. If the heatwave in Europe and Britain had been accompanied with high humidity untold numbers of people would have perished, along with pets, livestock, wildlife , etc.
For those of you who think another shutdown can never happen, it is likely that when a catastrophic ‘wet bulb’ event does take place, you and the rest of the world will think differently. A drowning man will grasp at anything that floats.
At the core of collective climate denial is perhaps the fundamental reason the vast majority of us are not being aggressively proactive at this point, which is simply that we do not want to give up our current comfort zone and the illusion of security it provides. When our sweat no longer evaporates, our comfort zone will. After that we will be willing to do anything it takes to survive. Catastrophe makes sacrifice acceptable.
These links were lifted from Sunday Angmar’s recent post…
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/7/2106119/-Climate-Brief-Why-there-s-still-a-rational-case-for-Climate-Optimism
…and another recent and very important post by Pakalolo.
If you’d like to learn more about these very positive recent developments, I recommend
you take the time to dig in…
The mainstream media goes there - humanity should prepare for the 'climate end game.'
Pakalolo’s post
Climate change targets achievable by keeping global emissions to COVID levels, scientists say
amp.abc.net.au/
.
Local Lockdowns Brought Fast Global Ozone Reductions, NASA Finds ...
A new study finds that reduced fossil fuel burning due to lockdowns in American and Asian cities caused a global drop in ozone pollution