Bad News on Greenhouse Gases

The news a couple days ago said that targets for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions have not been met. On the contrary, they've risen, rather than fallen. The figures for greenhouse gas emissions for 2009 were 5 percent higher than the figures for 2008. And thus the "tipping point," the time by which something has to be done before there is an irreversible problem, is coming sooner than had been thought (I think the original date was 2020).

So it looks like Mankind has not been taking this problem seriously enough. This calls into question, in my mind, whether Man is going to prove to be smart enough to avoid wiping himself out.

Well, actually, we do not really know what the consequences of global warming will be, beyond the simple fact that ocean levels will rise and that will cause flooding of coastal areas (and even of whole nations in the case of some small Pacific island nations). Of course that will be a disaster, and clearly we have not even been looking closely at just what that scenario will involve, because we haven't seen anything that would scare us enough, that would jolt us into more energized (or maybe I should say "panicky") action.

I wrote, in another posting, that I was reassured, in my view of humanity, by the fact that we have thus far not blown ourselves and each other up with atomic and hydrogen bombs. The statistics are that the US has produced 70,000 nuclear bombs—which could have destroyed the world several times over. Currently, "The USA and Russia each have 2,000 to 2,500 nuclear weapons on hair trigger alert right now." That sounds encouraging, as to our having enough wisdom to avoid destroying each other; but (to go on to give the bad news): first, the same article (http://www.rense.com/general47/global.htm) also says that's only the number on hair-trigger alert.

The five major nuclear powers currently have more than 20,000 nuclear warheads in their arsenals. . . . But this does not include a number of intact Russian nuclear warheads of indeterminate status--possibly as many as 10,000. Of the more than 30,000 intact warheads belonging to the world's eight nuclear weapon states, the vast majority (96 percent) are in U.S. or Russian stockpiles. About 17,500 of these warheads are considered operational.

Also,

There have almost been accidental nuclear wars several times in the past. There can be an accidental nuclear war anytime.

I suggest reading this article (link above). To include more of it would be getting off my subject. Maybe my bottom line vis-à-vis nuclear weapons is that the jury is still out. So maybe even there we should not heartily declare "Well we were sensible enough to avoid disaster"; and it's less clear that we're going to do the right and necessary things to avoid a global climate crisis.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein