The Threat of Abrupt Climate Change - Peter Schwartz

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/fora/showthread.php?t=477

Futurist author and Global Business Network co-founder Peter Schwartz discusses global warming, arguing that the most likely scenario is also the most dangerous - an abrupt climate change over a period of a few decades.

-----

The Long Now Foundation presents a discussion between Peter Schwartz and Ralph Cavanagh: Nuclear Power, Climate Change and the Next 10,000 Years

It is the threat of "abrupt climate change" that converted him to support new emphasis on nuclear power, Schwartz said. Gradual global warming is clearly now under way, and there is increasing reason to believe that human activity is driving it, mostly through the burning of coal and oil. If warming is all that happens, it will be an enormous problem, but some regions of the Earth would gain (Russia, Canada) while many others would lose.

In the event of abrupt climate change, though, everyone loses. The most likely change would be a sudden (in one decade) shift to a much colder, drier, and windier world. The world's carrying capacity for humans would plummet, driving human population from the current 6.5 billion to as low as 2 billion, with most of the losses from war. It would be a civilization-threatening catastrophe. From research Schwartz has led for the Pentagon as well as from his own training in fluid dynamics, he thinks that continuation of the current warming is very likely to trigger the kind of radical climate instability that has been the norm in Earth's past, except for the last 10,000 years of uncharacteristically stable climate. Therefore everything must be done to head off the shift to climate instability.

Meanwhile, Schwartz said, world demand for energy will continue to grow for decades, as two billion more people climb out of poverty and developing nations become fully developed economies. China and India alone will double or quadruple their energy use over the next 50 years. We will run out of oil in that period. That leaves coal or nuclear for electricity. Conservation is crucial, but it doesn't generate power. Renewables must grow fast, but they cannot hope to fill the whole need. Nuclear technology has improved its efficiency and safety and can improve a lot more. Reprocessing fuel will add further efficiency - Stewart Brand, The Long Now Foundation

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• global
• warming
• co2
• greenhouse
• gas
• ice
• age
• sea
• level
• glaciers
• nuclear
• power
• energy
• inconvenient
• truth
• war
• fora
• tv
• fora.tv
• foratv

[JonThm]

Green plants metabolise all the available carbon dioxide.  No possible effect on the weather, as no more carbon dioxide left in the air after photosynthesis.

[JonThm]

The world climate has cooled naturally fall last six years

[JonThm]

Biology teaches that green plants sink all the available carbon dioxide. Harvard University has confirmed there has been no increase in free carbon dioxide in the air for last 200 years. Though there has been a 15% increase in crop yields. So no man made climate change-that is all lie from nuclear power

[uknowispeaksense]

@JonThm I was just get in on your act of making unsubstantiated claims.

[JonThm]

@uknowispeaksense No. I am not in their pay of any power company

[uknowispeaksense]

@JonThm and you are a paid denier by Exxonmobil.

[JonThm]

Climate change is a paid fiction from nuclear power

[isocrate27]

Anything goes when it comes to scare people off for a profit.

[AspiringPotato]

Simply cryogenically freeze 6 billion people. Problem solved.

But seriously folks, the self-contained sustainable arcology is a project that we need to get on. Not just for colonizing Mars, but possibly for remaining secure on Earth.

[isawanangel2]

the place looks like a bad science project, are you kidding, we don't need to use any more chemical weapons either