‘Unsustainable’

June 24, 2015

glob-159676802Fogged-overcast this Wednesday AM on California’s north coast — weather-wise most-likely near-about the same as yesterday. Here in the moist-gray near the shoreline, as well as eastward, and the interior.
We probably top the low-60s today, while just two/three miles away temperatures could be 30-degrees warmer — the nature of the nature.

And when nature is influenced unnaturally? EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy explained on Monday: ‘“Climate change is not a belief system — it is a fact. This is science.”

(Illustration found here).

McCarthy was commenting on a just-released report, or maybe a better word would be, ‘study,’ or some odd-flaked research, from the EPA on effects of climate change under two future scenarios — one in which “significant global action” on climate change has limited warming to 2°C (3.6°F), and one in which no action is taken.
One would go Duh! Or maybe, WTF!
Either we live, or either we don’t — we all should take scenario number one, and there shouldn’t be any debate:

These benefits include a reduction of the frequency of extreme weather events and a lowered risk of extreme temperatures.
According to the report, if the world limits warming to 2°C, 49 U.S. cities could avoid 12,000 deaths associated with extreme temperatures every year by 2100.
Compared to a scenario with no action on climate change, that’s a 90 percent reduction in annual deaths.

My underline for WTF! emphasis.

Under that realm of climate-change fact, California’s drought is a portend-picture of plant life in regions of ever-increasing heat/dry conditions, at least according to a new research/studies published at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the plight of wild flowers on life’s chain.
From Time magazine:

The impact of wildflower loss may be minimal at first, but researchers say effects could spread up the food chain, eliminating a key food source of insects and pollinators and subsequently hurting small animals.
As the habitat changes, it will become more vulnerable to incursions from invasive species.
The researchers evaluated nearly 15 years of data on California plant diversity for the study.
Although plant diversity may change over time for a number of reasons, scientists were able to rule out a number of other factors as the cause of decline in this case, including problems related to grazing, fires and the prevalence of invasive grasses.
“Fifteen years of warmer and drier winters are creating a direct loss of native wildflowers in some of California’s grasslands,” said lead author Susan Harrison, a professor at the University of California Davis, in a press release.
“Such diversity losses may foreshadow larger-scale extinctions, especially in regions that are becoming increasingly dry.”

Not a belief, too, another even-worse scenario of climate change — via the UK’s Independent:

A scientific model supported by the Foreign Office has suggested that society will collapse in less than three decades due to catastrophic food shortages if policies do not change.
The model, developed by a team at Anglia Ruskin University’s Global Sustainability Institute, does not account for society reacting to escalating crises by changing global behaviour and policies.
However the model does show that our current way of life appears to be unsustainable and could have dramatic worldwide consequences.
Dr Aled Jones, the Director of the Global Sustainability Institute, told Insurge Intelligence: “We ran the model forward to the year 2040, along a business-as-usual trajectory based on ‘do-nothing’ trends — that is, without any feedback loops that would change the underlying trend.
“The results show that based on plausible climate trends, and a total failure to change course, the global food supply system would face catastrophic losses, and an unprecedented epidemic of food riots.
“In this scenario, global society essentially collapses as food production falls permanently short of consumption.”

Additional information on the above, Dr Nafeez Ahmed, a security-affairs journalist, tracks it in detail at MintPress News — not pretty reading.
Ahmed’s take on a bottom line:

For the first time, then, we know that in private, British and US government agencies are taking seriously longstanding scientific data showing that a business-as-usual trajectory will likely lead to civilisational collapse within a few decades — generating multiple near-term global disruptions along the way.
The question that remains is: what we are going to do about it?

Duh!

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