Humanity, is Time Running Out? Caught Between a Bowl of Rice a Day and Armageddon

Las Vegas, NV, April 20, 2012 --(PR.com)-- Interviews: C.S Goldsmith Author of “UNINHABITABLE a case for caution” (published by Goldstar Publications) a book about the hidden Dangers of rising Co2 combined with Methane. Reply to: scgold711@aol.com

Earth Day is April 22, 2012

We have 5 years left before we reach an irreversible tipping point in Co2 emissions according to many scientists and author C.S Goldsmith book "Uninhabitable, a case for caution" states, "We have perhaps 35 years before increased oceanic temperatures and deteriorating PH condemns much of marine life to extinction. Overfishing is projected to collapse all commercial wild fisheries a decade before that. In just 40 years the human population will reach between 9 and 11 billion people while still adding 214,000 more mouths to feed each and every day. Each new person will generate 800 lbs of Co2 for every year of its life."

Some excerpts from the book are:

At that birth rate we will double the current population in just 58 years to 14 billion people. At those population levels It has been calculated that if we were to use every acre of ground capable of agriculture on the entire planet we could only grow enough food for the equivalent of a bowl of rice per person per day. The present population already consumes one and a half times the earth’s sustainable resources, at 9 billion we will consume double our sustainable resources, and at 11 billion the consequences will be disastrous, meaning the collapse of our planets ability to sustain us becomes almost inevitable.

In just 32 years we will have an ice free Antarctica condemning to extinction Polar Bears, five species of seals, Emperor Penguins, Pacific Walruses, Arctic Foxes, Beluga Whales and countless other arctic wild life.

More than 20% of the Amazon Forrest is already gone, considered by many to be the lungs of the planet, in the next 25 years we could lose 2/3 of what’s left from deforestation, agriculture, mining, urban development and the impact from climate change.

At least 80% of our coral reefs will dissapear in the same time frame. Coral reefs are the incubators for 90% of all marine life in the oceans. Coral reefs are already suffering from thermal stress making them bleach out and die. Coral cover will decrease 95% by the middle of the century.

We are rapidly dismantling the web of life that sustains us all.

But still we are doing everything we can to sell 69 million more gasoline powered automobiles and commercial vehicles this year to add to the 600,000,000 that is estimated to already be on the world’s roads. We know that each gallon of gas they use sends another 19lbs lbs of Co2 up into the atmosphere. Every year a single gasoline powered automobile produces between 11,000 to 17,000 lbs of Co2.

They are going to build hundreds of new coal fire burning plants in China, India, South America and the United States each one emitting at least 2.6 billion tons of Co2 each year along with 40 tons of mercury, arsenic and other toxic chemicals into our air and water supplies. Coal (Clean Coal) is responsible for 30% of all carbon emissions and will increase Co2 emissions by 30% in the next 18 yrs. We now have 394 ppm (parts per million) of Co2 in the atmosphere, but if you add in the other green house gasses like Methane and Nitrous Oxide, it’s really 440 ppm and we are adding 3 ppm more every year. Somewhere between 450 and 550 ppm scientists tell us will trigger runaway global warming. Warming that feeds upon itself and creates more warming in a continuous upward spiral.

At 1000 ppm of Co2, humans and other oxygen breathing animals will not survive; if you doubt those statistics try leaving your car running in a closed garage for a while. We will push 30 to 50% of our fellow species into extinction over the next 50 years and we could easily follow them within just two generations if we continue to allow Co2 to build up in our atmosphere.

Increasingly warmer temperatures are melting glaciers around the world threatening fresh water supplies and irrigation of crops to a third of the world’s population and 10 of the world’s mightiest rivers, like the Ganges, Danube, Yangtze and Rio Grande are drying up.

Rising temperatures are also melting the permafrost in the Arctic regions where 195 billion gig-a-tons (a gig-a-ton is a billion tons) of one of the strongest green house gasses on the planet lies dormant. Methane Hydrate is 25 times more powerful than Co2 and lies in vast quantities in shallow oceans around the globe and in the lakes region of Siberia, Alaska, and in Northern Canada kept in check by cold temperatures and permafrost, waiting for warmer temperatures to unleash it; Methane represents an unimaginable 10% of the entire biomass of the planet. The last 11 years have been the warmest years on record surpassing even the worst case scenarios of the (IPCC, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) just a few years earlier. Melting permafrost that releases even a small percentage of the vast storehouse of Methane could easily spike up temperatures another 4 to 16 degrees higher than the current climate models are predicting, well outside of our threshold to survive. We know this is not only possible, but the predictable consequences of rising Co2 levels, we don’t even have to imagine what would happen because it’s happened before.

Basalt volcanism in the Siberian Traps sent trillions of tons of Co2 into the atmosphere triggering a massive Methane release during the Permian Period 250 million years ago. The Extinction Events that followed saw 90% of all life on Earth die off, The Great Dying as it’s called, or the mother of all mass extinction took nature a hundred and twenty five million years to recover the diversity of life.

There is simply not that kind of time to evolve another human species. We are the very last of at least 24 hominids that have gone extinct before us and if we go extinct like our cousins the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons did not that long ago, then our species like that of the dinosaurs will be gone forever.

They had no choice they could not adapt in time; we do have a choice because it’s our energy, transportation and reproductive choices that are the root cause of all these environmental problems and unless we are too blind to see it or to selfish to act, then we may still be able to fix it before we to join the 99% of all species that have gone extinct before us.

People will look to our politicians, business leaders, rabbis, priests, mullahs and, of course to God for answers instead of to our scientists. If there is one thing that we have learned in the long history of calamities that have befallen numerous civilizations in the past, it is that none of those had the answers that would save them when the threats unveiled their true nature of starvation, death and destruction. It was the leaders, the politicians, and priests that the crowds turned on first before turning upon themselves.

If the Mayan calendar predicating the start of our demise on Dec. 21, 2012 and the other prophets of doom are to be proved wrong, it will be because realistic pragmatic people listened to the scientists and gave them the tools and money they needed to attempt to save the world as we now know it, before ecocide for us and countless other species becomes a foregone conclusion.

The only solution to Climate Change is to slow the flow of Co2, then to stop it altogether and re-absorb the green house gas emissions.

Human activity is currently producing 35 gig-a-tons of Co2 every year one gig-a-ton equals twice the weight of all the people on earth so 35 gig-a-tons is 70 times the combined weight of all of humanity. You cannot have a cause without having an effect and the effect is we now have the highest concentration of Co2 in the atmosphere than in the last 15 to 20 million years, an increase of 100 ppm of Co2 takes nature somewhere between 5000 to 20,000 years to accumulate, human activity has increased it that much is just 120 years. We are slowly cooking our planet and ourselves along with it.

With a tiny fraction of the billions of dollars we waste on a multitude of questionable programs, we could give our brightest scientists and best entrepreneurs what they need to try and save us from ourselves. It will not be easy nor is success a foregone conclusion. We have wasted too many decades ignoring, concealing, debating and denying that the problem even exists.

It is understandable not to believe that something that is invisible and slow moving could possibly be a threat to our survival, but coming to that realization too late could be fatal. Some action now could save hundreds of millions if not billions of lives later. The plague that wiped out 25% of the earth’s entire population was invisible, slow moving and misunderstood by the masses. Is it such a stretch then to believe that rising Co2 combined with Methane has the potential to destroy us along with most of the other life on the planet?

The 1746 people who died at Lake Nyos in Cameroon, Africa certainly would not have believed it. Lake Overturn caused by a landslide pushed large quantities of Co2 up from the bottom and silently but quickly killed every man women and child as well as every domestic and wild animal in its 14 mile path. They simply blacked out, fell over, and suffocated to death. Co2 is 1.5 times heavier then oxygen and displaces oxygen, with just 10% of Co2 in the atmosphere we simply will not be able to breathe.

If Humanity is to avoid hitting the wall within the time span of anyone that can envision living at least 5 more years, then we need a very good plan. Perhaps something like Bjorn Lomborg proposed in his documentary “Cool it” a reasonable, workable, affordable plan that we can implement right now. People around the world will need to raise their voices loud enough to overcome the lobbying efforts of the special interest groups and get their representatives to act.

Mother Nature will not negotiate nor capitulate and 10,000 years to her is a blink in geological time. Fighting a war with nature is a war we won’t win. We must solve the problem of Co2 building up in our atmosphere and solve it quickly. We need to find ways to effectively scrub it out of the atmosphere and reduce the amount of Co2 that’s already up there. If we do nothing then we must accept our fate and prepare to suffer the consequences of famine, war, and possible extinction. We are smart and we can certainly do it, but we are not very wise and may wait until it is too late.

Making the tough choices now and if the over 2,700 scientists around the world are all 100% wrong and all we do is waste a few billion dollars trying to insure our survival, well then we’ve lost a little money. However if we are right then we will have saved the environment for future generations; a fair trade off in my opinion, if we simply stand by and do nothing then we must consign ourselves to being used as climate change fodder and environmental guinea pigs for rich people and powerful corporations.

Oil and energy special interest groups desperately want a stalemate to insure the status quo, which of course they have succeeded in doing over the last 30 years since the awareness of the rising Co2 problem was brought to Congresses attention in 1980.

Must we bankrupt our planets natural resources and put our own future in jeopardy just to satisfy corporate greed. Clean coal, cleaner burning gas, cleaner maybe, but clean absolutely not. We are just postponing the same consequences a little while longer to keep the money flowing into the same coffers until it will be too late to change our circumstances. Then the impact will be irreversible for thousands of years and our fate will be sealed along with it.

No matter how they spin it, they are digging up ancient dead decomposed organic deposits that nature in her wisdom has buried safely deep within the earth, in the form of oil, coal, and gas. We of course are all complicit in buying it, burning it and releasing its ancient C02 and Methane contents back into the atmosphere, turning back our atmospheric clock to an earlier geological time when humans would not have survived much less thrived. No matter how much lipstick you put on that carbon pig, it’s still pork.

Climate change is taking lives right now and will increase exponentially. In short they want us to bet the farm, gamble that we can survive a 3 to 6 degree on average increase in temperature and somehow they will control it from getting out of hand and escalating even further.

If the Kyoto accord is any indicator of our ability to control further emissions by international agreements, then I’m betting all my chips on the don’t pass line. Maybe we can and maybe we can’t keep rising temperatures from exceeding 3 to 6 degrees warmer and perhaps we can adapt to a hot new world, The real question is what kind of world will that be? And do we really want our grandchildren and ancestors living in it.

It’s also high time we question the motives of any group that wants to expand by having more and more children that we cannot feed. These keepers of the faith want things to stay as they have for centuries as they rearrange the chairs on the Titanic for the rest of us. As the Irish philosopher Jack Foster wisely said “We are all passengers on the Titanic.”

A tidal wave of concerned individuals around the world must raise their voices and demand carbon containment now and significant Co2 reduction within 5 years. That is what is needed to save the way of life that our species has thrived in for the last 10,000 years.

Future generations will commend us if we act now and curse us if we fail to act.

The book asks the readers to find a way to stop the denigration of our air, oceans, and environment before the opportunity to act has passed us by, as an unknown poet put it, On the plains of hesitation lie the bleached bones of countless millions who upon the verge of victory sat down to rest, and resting died.

The choice is still ours but only for a short while longer, step up and address the problem now or be the catalyst of our own destruction. Add your concerned voice to others around the world. Email: info@reduceco2now.com or at contact@CSGoldsmith.com, Author of “UNINHABITABLE, a Case for Caution” Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com: special Earth Day pricing.