The Event Horizon: Homo Prometheus and the Climate Catastrophe

The Event Horizon: Homo Prometheus and the Climate Catastrophe PDF

Author: Andrew Y. Glikson

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-10-08

Total Pages: 142

ISBN-13: 3030547345

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With the advent of global warming and the nuclear arms race, humans are rapidly approaching a moment of truth. Technologically supreme, they manifest their dreams and nightmares in the real world through science, art, adventures and brutal wars, a paradox symbolized by a candle lighting the dark yet burning away to extinction, as discussed in this book. As these lines are being written, fires are burning on several continents, the Earth’s ice sheets are melting and the oceans are rising, threatening to flood the planet’s coastal zones and river valleys, where civilization arose and humans live and grow food. With the exception of birds like hawks, black kites and fire raptors, humans are the only life form utilizing fire, creating developments they can hardly control. For more than a million years, gathered around campfires during the long nights, mesmerized by the flickering life-like dance of the flames, prehistoric humans acquired imagination, a yearning for omnipotence, premonitions of death, cravings for immortality and conceiving the supernatural. Humans live in realms of perceptions, dreams, myths and legends, in denial of critical facts, waking up for a brief moment to witness a world that is as beautiful as it is cruel. Existentialist philosophy offers a way of coping with the unthinkable. Looking into the future produces fear, an instinctive response that can obsess the human mind and create a conflict between the intuitive reptilian brain and the growing neocortex, with dire consequences. As contrasted with Stapledon’s Last and first Man, where an advanced human species mourns the fate of the Earth, Homo sapiens continues to transfer every extractable molecule of carbon from the Earth to the atmosphere, the lungs of the biosphere, ensuring the demise of the planetary life support system.”

Handbook of Research on Green, Circular, and Digital Economies as Tools for Recovery and Sustainability

Handbook of Research on Green, Circular, and Digital Economies as Tools for Recovery and Sustainability PDF

Author: Ordóñez de Pablos, Patricia

Publisher: IGI Global

Published: 2022-03-11

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 1799896668

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Global society has simultaneously faced several unprecedented health, social, and economic challenges. Countries need to recover economic growth quickly, boost productivity and job creation, invest in smart healthcare systems and services, and work toward a climate-neutral and circular economy. The Handbook of Research on Green, Circular, and Digital Economies as Tools for Recovery and Sustainability explores new and emerging frameworks, tools, and strategies to support companies and economies toward a green and digital transformation. It analyzes the role of disruptive technologies, innovative green technologies, and emerging practices all over the world. Covering topics such as corporate sustainability, digital banking, and national innovation systems, this major reference work is an essential resource for educational administration, politicians, government officials, global business leaders, managing directors, libraries, researchers, academicians, educators, and students.

Storms of My Grandchildren

Storms of My Grandchildren PDF

Author: James Hansen

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2009-12-10

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1608192571

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An urgent and provocative call to action from the world's leading climate scientist-speaking out here for the first time with the full story of what we need to know about humanity's last chance to get off the path to a catastrophic global meltdown, and why we don't know the half of it. In Storms of My Grandchildren, Dr. James Hansen-the nation's leading scientist on climate issues-speaks out for the first time with the full truth about global warming: The planet is hurtling even more rapidly than previously acknowledged to a climatic point of no return. Although the threat of human-caused climate change is now widely recognized, politicians have failed to connect policy with the science, responding instead with ineffectual remedies dictated by special interests. Hansen shows why President Obama's solution, cap-and-trade, which Al Gore has signed on to, won't work; why we must phase out all coal, and why 350 ppm of carbon dioxide is a goal we must achieve if our children and grandchildren are to avoid global meltdown and the storms of the book's title. This urgent manifesto bucks conventional wisdom(including the Kyoto Protocol) and is sure to stir controversy, but Hansen-whose climate predictions have come to pass again and again, beginning in the 1980s when he first warned Congress about global warming-is the single most credible voice on the subject worldwide. Hansen paints a devastating but all-too-realistic picture of what will happen in the near future, mere years and decades from now, if we follow the course we're on. But he is also an optimist, showing that there is still time to do what we need to save the planet. Urgent, strong action is needed, and this book will be key in setting the agenda going forward to create a groundswell, a tipping point, to save humanity-and our grandchildren-from a dire fate more imminent than we had supposed.

The Plutocene: Blueprints for a Post-Anthropocene Greenhouse Earth

The Plutocene: Blueprints for a Post-Anthropocene Greenhouse Earth PDF

Author: Andrew Yoram Glikson

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-07-10

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 3319572377

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This book presents projections and blueprints of the future geologic period, climate and biosphere, based on our current understanding of the Earth’s history and recent developments in the atmosphere-ocean-cryosphere system. By the second decade of the 21st century it has become clear that, rather than channel its efforts into protecting its planetary biosphere and living species, Homo sapiens continues to sink its remaining resources into weapons, including nuclear missiles – thus increasing the risk of intentional or accidental spread of radioactive nuclides on land, oceans and atmosphere. With time, possibility becomes probability, and probability becomes certainty ‒ heralding a transition from the Anthropocene to a new geological period, named here as Plutocene after the element Plutonium. During the Plutocene the biosphere is dominated by elevated temperatures, analogous to the Pliocene (2.6 – 5.3 Ma ago) or the Miocene (5.3 - 23 Ma ago) when mean global temperatures were 2 to 4 degrees Celsius warmer and sea levels 20 to 40 meters higher than pre-industrial levels. High levels of radioactivity will persist for at least 20,000 years and acid oceans will severely limit biological activity to the hardiest species. Atmospheric CO2 higher than 500 ppm with residence time on the order of thousands of years will delay the subsequent glacial cycle. These factors restrict comparisons of the Plutocene with biosphere conditions during the Miocene and Pliocene periods, partly because the flora and fauna evolved more gradually during these periods, unlike the abrupt climate shift of state during the second half of the 20th century and first part of the 21st century. Following a long lull in biological activity dominated by radiation-resistant organisms, especially Arthropods, a resumption of glacial cycles and decline in radioactivity will lead to the re-emergence of descendants of burrowing mammals and other genera. Depending on the intensity of radioactive pollution, hunter-gatherer humans may survive in northern latitudes, relatively cold high-altitude mountain valleys and elevated volcanic islands. In some areas subsistence farming may be possible. A new cycle will commence.

Storms of My Grandchildren

Storms of My Grandchildren PDF

Author: James Edward Hansen

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 9781408807453

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n Storms of My Grandchildren, Dr. James Hansen the nation s leading scientist on climate issues speaks out for the first time with the full truth about global warming: The planet is hurtling even more rapidly than previously acknowledged to a climatic point of no return. Although the threat of human-caused climate change is now widely recognized, politicians have failed to connect policy with the science, responding instead with ineffectual remedies dictated by special interests. Hansen shows why President Obama s solution, cap-and-trade, which Al Gore has signed on to, won t work; why we must phase out all coal, and why 350 ppm of carbon dioxide is a goal we must achieve if our children and grandchildren are to avoid global meltdown and the storms of the book s title. This urgent manifesto bucks conventional wisdom (including the Kyoto Protocol) and is sure to stir controversy, but Hansen whose climate predictions have come to pass again and again, beginning in the 1980s when he first warned Congress about global warming is the single most credible voice on the subject worldwide.

The Fatal Species

The Fatal Species PDF

Author: Andrew Y. Glikson

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-06-24

Total Pages: 133

ISBN-13: 3030754685

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This book presents a history which is nearing its nadir, where a species of warlike primates is destroying the delicate web of life perceived by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species, committing a war against nature and the fastest mass extinction in the history of nature, with global temperatures incinerating the biosphere by several degrees Celsius, within a lifetime. Despite of this knowledge, Homo “sapiens” is proceeding to transfer every accessible molecule of carbon from the Earth crust to the atmosphere and hydrosphere, an auto-da-fe ensues of the terrestrial biosphere. As amplifying feedbacks to global warming—including fires, methane release, ice melt, and warming oceans—are intensifying, at a pace exceeding any recorded in the geological past, societies are pouring their remaining resources into wars. These include likely nuclear wars triggered by arsenals many thousands of missiles strong, posing an equal threat to human existence and that of many other species. Humans, having mastered fire, which allowed them to survive the extreme ice ages, have emerged in the current interglacial as major civilizations coupled with major bloodsheds, called “war”, engulfing multitudes of innocent yet betrayed humans. Long suffering from illusions of omnipotence and omniscience, paranoid fears, a warlike mindset, aggression toward the animals and disrespect of females, coupled with artistic excellence and technical brilliance, humans have become victims to a tragic conflict between the mind and the heart, with fatal consequences.

The Uninhabitable Earth

The Uninhabitable Earth PDF

Author: David Wallace-Wells

Publisher: Tim Duggan Books

Published: 2019-02-19

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 052557672X

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • The Economist • The Paris Review • Toronto Star • GQ • The Times Literary Supplement • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD “The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times “Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist “Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times “The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post “The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books

Climate Leviathan

Climate Leviathan PDF

Author: Joel Wainwright

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2018-02-13

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 1786634317

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**Winner of the 2019 Sussex International Theory Prize** -- How climate change will affect our political theory - for better and worse Despite the science and the summits, leading capitalist states have not achieved anything close to an adequate level of carbon mitigation. There is now simply no way to prevent the planet breaching the threshold of two degrees Celsius set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. What are the likely political and economic outcomes of this? Where is the overheating world heading? To further the struggle for climate justice, we need to have some idea how the existing global order is likely to adjust to a rapidly changing environment. Climate Leviathan provides a radical way of thinking about the intensifying challenges to the global order. Drawing on a wide range of political thought, Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann argue that rapid climate change will transform the world's political economy and the fundamental political arrangements most people take for granted. The result will be a capitalist planetary sovereignty, a terrifying eventuality that makes the construction of viable, radical alternatives truly imperative.

Earth 2020: An Insider’s Guide to a Rapidly Changing Planet

Earth 2020: An Insider’s Guide to a Rapidly Changing Planet PDF

Author: Philippe Tortell

Publisher: Open Book Publishers

Published: 2020-04-22

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 1783748486

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Fifty years have passed since the first Earth Day, on 22 April 1970. This accessible, incisive and timely collection of essays brings together a diverse set of expert voices to examine how the Earth’s environment has changed over this past half century, and what lies in store for our planet over the coming fifty years. Earth 2020: An Insider’s Guide to a Rapidly Changing Planet responds to a public increasingly concerned about the deterioration of Earth’s natural systems, offering readers a wealth of perspectives on our shared ecological past, and on the future trajectory of planet Earth. Written by world-leading thinkers on the front-lines of global change research and policy, this multi-disciplinary collection maintains a dual focus: some essays investigate specific facets of the physical Earth system, while others explore the social, legal and political dimensions shaping the human environmental footprint. In doing so, the essays collectively highlight the urgent need for collaboration across diverse domains of expertise in addressing one of the most significant challenges facing us today. Earth 2020 is essential reading for everyone seeking a deeper understanding of the past, present and future of our planet, and the role of humanity in shaping this trajectory.

Our Final Hour

Our Final Hour PDF

Author: Martin Rees

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2009-03-17

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0786740698

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A scientist known for unraveling the complexities of the universe over millions of years, Sir Martin Rees now warns that humankind is potentially the maker of its own demise -- and that of the cosmos. Though the twenty-first century could be the critical era in which life on Earth spreads beyond our solar system, it is just as likely that we have endangered the future of the entire universe. With clarity and precision, Rees maps out the ways technology could destroy our species and thereby foreclose the potential of a living universe whose evolution has just begun. Rees boldly forecasts the startling risks that stem from our accelerating rate of technological advances. We could be wiped out by lethal "engineered" airborne viruses, or by rogue nano-machines that replicate catastrophically. Experiments that crash together atomic nuclei could start a chain reaction that erodes all atoms of Earth, or could even tear the fabric of space itself. Through malign intent or by mistake, a single event could trigger global disaster. Though we can never completely safeguard our future, increased regulation and inspection can help us to prevent catastrophe. Rees's vision of the infinite future that we have put at risk -- a cosmos more vast and diverse than any of us has ever imagined -- is both a work of stunning scientific originality and a humanistic clarion call on behalf of the future of life.