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Theme for this month February 2021:
Global Civilizational State: the application of the Scale of Global Rights to the most important global issues threatening humanity's survival worldwide.
Global Issue 2, sections 1,2,3, and 5 affected: Human activities are responsible for the greenhouse effect, global warming, and climate change, mostly through our use of fossil fuels, and could be catastrophic, and a tragic end to our present human evolution, without effective mitigation.
The greenhouse effect is the way in which heat is trapped close to the surface of the Earth by “greenhouse gases”. In the last century or so, human activities have been interfering with the energy balance of the planet, mainly through the burning of fossil fuels that give off carbon dioxide which has been rising consistently for decades and trapping extra heat near the surface of the Earth, thus causing temperatures to rise and warming the planet, which in turn is causing the climate to change, the effects of which have a direct impact on fragile ecosystems.
The climate system is causing several tipping points, a threshold beyond which rapid and irreversible changes will occur. These will create a cascade of devastating effects. There are already several observable tipping points which have been reached. Until now, the tipping points of greatest concern have been the rapid melting of Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Should they melt ever more quickly with all that water flowing into neighboring oceans, a sea level rise of 20 feet or more can be expected, inundating many of the world’s most populous coastal cities and forcing billions of people to relocate. Other distinct tipping points include the cascading impacts triggered by the die-off of the Amazon rainforest particularly given its critical role in the global hydrological cycle, and the melting of the Arctic ice cap. Both are already under way, reducing the survival prospects of flora and fauna in their respective habitats. As these processes gain momentum, entire ecosystems are likely to be obliterated and many species killed off, with drastic consequences for the humans who rely on them in so many ways for their survival. Many species, perhaps insects and microorganisms highly dangerous to humans, could occupy those spaces emptied by extinction.
The thawing of permafrost either from global warming or industrial exploitation of circumpolar regions are threats to human health. In the Arctic the melting permafrost steadily releases the hundreds of gigatons of methane, a greenhouse gas nearly 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide, stored in soil, lakes and sediment in Canada and Siberia. Methane boiling up from underneath the Arctic Ocean is estimated to contain thousands of gigatons of methane. Melting permafrost could potentially yield viruses from long-extinct hominin species like Neanderthals and Denisovans, both of which settled in Siberia and were riddled with various viral diseases.
Losses of biomass through deforestation and the cutting down of tropical forests put our supply of oxygen gas at risk. Today forests are being destroy at an astronomical rate. No oxygen is created after a forest is put down, and more CO2 is produced in the process. In the tropics, ants, termites, bacteria, and fungi eat nearly the entire photosynthetic oxygen. The oxygen content of our atmosphere is slowly declining. Combustion of fossil fuels destroys oxygen.