Tell the Awful Truth: It’s Not Just Global Warming, It’s Global Disaster!

Abstract

The awful truth (and a most inconvenient truth) is that the present and future global warming of our common, shared, biosphere represents a global disaster in progress. The last 100 years (and the years of the immediate future) will be written in history (as long as the human race survives) as the period when some humans carelessly jeopardized the security of life on our planet. It will be recorded that we carelessly destroyed our oceans, fisheries and forests while removing immense amounts of carbon in the form of fossil fuels from the Earth and placing the combustion products into the atmosphere and the planet’s waterways. The last century (and this one) will also be remembered as a period of immense human population growth, to the overshoot level, exceeding the capacity of our common biosphere to provide even the essentials for the universal quality of life. The awful, inconvenient truth is that we have created a global preventable disaster without identifying the correct solutions. Solutions other than preventative ones may in fact be impossible to achieve. To correct the ills of our generations may be beyond the capabilities of all of science and technology. We do not know the life span of a technological society. Such corrective solutions may never be brought forward and implemented precisely because the problems we are creating are too immense and complex. Problems are typically created at a much simpler level than the solutions, which are several orders of magnitude higher in complexity and cost. We may have already passed the global tipping point for humanity. A reasonable planetary quality of life – for humans and for other species – may be beyond achievement with our continued population growth. The consequences will be continuously increasing poverty and misery for large segments of the world’s human population, and increasing rates of species extinction. And the faster we destroy nature and use up the available resources, the more pervasive these conditions will become. The end of nature as we think we know it, is completely possible. Good examples include the rainforests, oceans and the drought conditions throughout areas of the world including the USA and Australia. The average standard of living will decline, and resource wars will be commonplace. Even the wealthiest and most greedy industrialists will loose their security. There will be no place for sympathy and humanistic feelings; survival will be the only goal. Let’s list the most important, complex, global problems facing humanity in today’s world and the future world of our children. We are not borrowing Water Air Soil Pollut (2010) 205 (Suppl 1):S39–S41 DOI 10.1007/s11270-007-9473-2