By Prensa Latina,
Washington : No scientific obituary has been published, but according to a recent report resumed by Mike Davis of alternative media Tomdispatch.com, humanity is entering the “Anthropocene”, epoch defined by the emergence of urban-industrial society as a geological force.
The Geological Society of London defines that the new age shows a heating trend and a radical instability expected of future environments.
They warn that “the combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal.
These effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks.” Evolution itself, in other words, has been forced into a new trajectory.
The incoming Anthropocene coincides with growing scientific controversy over the 4th Assessment Report issued last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The IPCC is mandated to establish scientific baselines for international efforts to mitigate global warming, but some of the most prominent researchers in the field are now challenging its reference scenarios as overly optimistic, even pie-in-the-sky thinking.
The current scenarios were adopted by the IPCC in 2000 to model future global emissions based on different “storylines” about population growth as well as technological and economic development.
Some of the Panel’s major scenarios are well known to policymakers and greenhouse activists, but few outside the research community have actually read or understood the fine print, particularly the IPCC’s confidence that greater energy efficiency will be an “automatic” byproduct of future economic development.
Indeed all the scenarios, even the “business as usual” variants, assume that at least 60 percent of future carbon reduction will occur independently of greenhouse mitigation measures.
All wishful thinking, as market-driven progress toward a post-carbon world economy is unfeasible according to most experts.
The International Energy Agency recently estimated that it would cost $45 trillion to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Kyoto-type accords and carbon markets are designed to bridge the shortfall between spontaneous decarbonization and the emissions targets required by each scenario.
Critics argue, however, that this represents a heroic leap of faith that radically understates the economic costs, technological hurdles, and social changes required to tame the growth of greenhouse gases.
European carbon emissions, for example, are still rising (dramatically in some sectors) despite the European Union’s much praised adoption of a cap-and-trade system in 2005.
Most energy researchers believe that, since 2000, energy intensity has actually risen; that is, global carbon dioxide emissions have kept pace with, or even grown marginally faster than, energy use.
Coal production,in fact, is undergoing a dramatic renaissance, as the nineteenth century has returned to haunt the twenty-first century.
Hundreds of thousands of miners are now working under conditions that would have appalled Charles Dickens. Meanwhile, the total consumption of fossil fuels is predicted to increase at least 55 percent over the next generation, with international oil exports doubling in volume.
The United Nations Development Program (UNDP), which has made its own study of sustainable energy goals, warns that it will require “a 50 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by 2050 against 1990 levels” to keep humanity safe.
Yet the International Energy Agency predicts that, in all likelihood, such emissions will actually increase in this period by nearly 100 percent, enough greenhouse gas to propel us past several critical tipping points.
As Mike Davis would agree, governments have to impose severe regulations on oil companies, transportation and all other big CFC gas emitters to achieve the UNDP goal of halving emissions by 2050 and fastly developing renewable energy sources.