There is a new book out that specifically explores how our human-induced warming will be changing things for 100,000 years.

It is written by Univ. of Chicago geophysics prof. David Archer and it is called "The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing The Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate." Excellent, clear, short read. Highly recommended!

James Hansen writes: "This is the best book about CO2 and climate change that I have read. David Archer knows what he is talking about."

These conclusions agree with James Lovelock's climate heating predictions. Here, in Australia, we already have a very serious water deficit in the Murray-Darling river system, Whilst the North is getting a heavier rainfall than ever!

Long Thaw is a great book, and so is Thin Ice by Mark Bowen. It's about Lonnie Thompson the expert on tropical glaciers.

Also Ice,Mud and Blood by Chris Turney.

If only you knew how much I appreciate you posting these articles and short essays on these most important issues of our time.

This latest one about climate change/global warming being twice as extreme as we thought has inspired me to get in gear and make big time progress on my local community projects to resolve these issues and create the future we wish to see!

I hope you continue to write these blunt short-essays more often.

Thanks!
Patrick from California

More and more of the feedback mechanisms need to be explained here, instead of just the predictions. Some of the big ones are collapse of rainforest, dry up and oxidation of peat bogs (both tropical and arctic), methane hydrate decomposition, albedo flip which is already well known, and plankton die off.
These mechanisms are important partially because they speak to partial solutions. For instance if forests are doomed by temperature increase already in the pipeline, then saving those forests is the not the main key in the "solution". Maybe burning some of the wood instead of securely stored coal and oil shale and tarsands is more plausible. Likewise instead of removing dams to protect migratory fish doomed by future warm climate, and burning hydrocarbons to replace this energy, maybe we need more dams and less coal burning. Maybe instead of protecting the trees currently in rainforest and already doomed, we need to find those trees and plants most suited to future warm conditions.

The family of humanity appears to be in clear & present danger because the Masters of the Universe among us are willfully denying one of God’s greatest gifts: humankind’s carefully and skillfully developed science on human-induced climate change.

Faulty reasoning, contrived logic, ideological idiocy, arrogance, material obsessiveness, greed, linear thinking and a mechanistic world view, all of which we see pervading the predominant culture in our time, could result in the children following their misguided elders down a patently unsustainable “primrose path” only to be confronted by a colossal ecologic and/or economic wreckage, the likes of which only Ozymandias has seen.

Can it be that acceptable standards for determining what is real and true in our culture today have not much to do with science? Consider that whatsoever the Masters of the Universe instruct their minions to proclaim vociferously, share widely, consensually validate and judge to be economically expedient, politically convenient, socially agreeable and religiously tolerated is true and real…. scientific evidence of the biophysical conditions of the natural world we inhabit notwithstanding.

At least to me, it seems that God’s science is censored, gag rules imposed and countless distractions presented whenever reasonable and sensible evidence comes into conflict with what the economic powerbrokers and their bought-and-paid-for politicians prescribe to be real and true. Perhaps science does present the leaders of the predominant culture on Earth with evidence of inconvenient truths.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176

That's so scary!

and its true that even when delivering bad news we sugar coat it. nobody wants to know the worst case scenario. That way you can pretend its not happening or that its not your problem.

I'm campaigning to prevent climate change and have made the following video to create awareness.

Watch it and please RATE it : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zs7aZ4KIL3k

Also pass it on to other like-minded individuals who want to change the world for the better.

I just finished "The Long Thaw" by David Archer. I agree with Andy Caffey. This is a seminal, eminently readable and highly lucid work. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand what, exactly, we are allowing to happen to the only life support systems we have.

Dr Glenn Barry, you are worried about what will happen in 200-500 years, but this is a very distant time for us. More important, if the median temperature will be 9 degrees C higher in 2100, what about temperatures in 2050 or 2025 or 2015?

Good question Jorgeef,

Any thoughts Glen?

Thanks for the post

If we do not have broad and open discussions like this one regarding the human population, how on Earth are we going to avoid a distinct possibility: that humans seem destined, despite our intelligence, to play out a scenario of reproduction that is much like that of other species. We know better.

It appears that humans not only know better, we will not have the chance to do what we know if leaders in my not-so-great generation of elders continue to treat certain vital topics as a taboo.

We have many leaders with ubiquitous opportunities to speak what is true to them, whatever that may be, regardless of what is politically convenient, economic expedient, social agreeable, religiously tolerable and, therefore, in one way or another culturally prescibed. The leaders of recent years have been doing as they have because they have not possessed a fundamental appreciation for either intellectual honesty or scientific facts.

In science, there is no place for leaders who pose as hysterically blind or willfully deaf; posture as if electively mute; discredit or misrepresent good evidence; create the illusion of serious debate; manufacture controversy; and spread uncertainty where none would otherwise exist. Science is an honest and straightforward presentation of carefully and skillfully obtained evidence using scientific principles and methods and nothing more.

Scientific research is supposed to be done independent from political, legal, economic, social and religious considerations. All of these "considerations" can give rise, either singularly or in combination, to what is called “cultural bias” in science. Unfortunately, the phenomenon of cultural bias that has led many of our brothers and sisters inside and outside the community of scientists to extensively research, widely share and consensually validate factoids based upon faulty reasoning, contrived logic, inadequate theory and mountains of unsufficiently understood data.

Scientific facts need to be adequately and more accurately distinguished from politically convenient and economically expedient, preternatural factoids.

Steven Salmony,

Hahahaha wow. That was a beautiful post. Did you flow that one just as you thought of it in the moment? A beautiful and scientific poem that was, indeed!

Well, the continue this thread, as it has been one of the most inspiring I have read, I would like to say a few things.

Well, the first is, connecion. We have to get inspired in this movement, and right now I m deeply inspired, and I want to pass that on to all who read this post and this comment. The needs of the times in which we live are so great (as refereed to very succinctly in this post) that we spiritually, or whatever you may call it, need to become very alive. Our wellbeing as a people needs to rise tremendously.

I do not want to say unfortunate, but it is to a large extent that spirituality has been so disconnected from science. The sacredness, the love, the divineness, the oneness with our Earth. The place we call we home, and the only home (besides the universes that is) we have!!!!

It's the only one we have folks. Whether or not you believe in climate climate change, peak oil, habitat destruction, species extinction, wars, water and food crisis and more. ALl of which are fundamental to life, liberty, happiness of all things.

Love what the Earth is. And if you have not found love in yourself or the Earth, go to a National Park, a State Park, or a place that you feel good in, and just sit and admire the surroundings. Fall in love with the environment that you are in. Fall in love with each other leaf, each sound, each roots, each drop of water, each grain of sand. The whole.

For the fact that we are here today is a miracle in itself. So let us be who we really want to be, love the moment we are in, and help all others around us.

For the need is here, and so is the desire. So let us grow what is at hand and do what needs to be done. And have FUN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Global Warming is a biological process. The Gaia proposal describes a biological balance of inputs and feedbacks but the mathematics describing this is not the linear equations of constancy but the calculus of 'change' and more importantly 'rate of change'. These projections are assuming a constant 'percentage' change but it's biological. That's calculus.

Not enough scientists have been willing "to speak truth to power". It seems that too many experts have chosen elective mutism and, thereby, allowed science to be suppressed, censored, gag rules imposed and countless distractions presented whenever reasonable and sensible evidence would come into conflict with what the economic powerbrokers and their bought-and-paid-for politicians determine, out of their own selfish interests, to be real and true.

Science appears to present the leaders of the global political economy with evidence of politically inconvenient and economically inexpedient truths. If that is so, who knows, perhaps the super-rich and powerful people among us might learn something that leads them to exemplify values other than the goodness of greed and personal aggrandizement as well as the false rightfulness of living unsustainably large and irresponsibly free in the planetary home God blesses us inhabit.

Coal plants are/have bankrupted the Climate.

We have got to nationalize the Coal Power plants and start phasing them out right NOW!

climate portals
climateportals.com

Global warming will continue to go up and up. Eventually, the whole planet will like when boiling clay in a pot. There is hope for those that want to overcome. A free gift for humanity is available. No group to join, no money required. Any human being, regardless of color, religion, political or religious position has the potential within. Please ask for a free book at: www.hercolubus.tv. It has the practices to prepare yourself for what is coming. No one can do the job for you. You and you alone can prepare for what is already happening: Floods, Earthquakes, Global Warming, Pandemics, World Wars etc

global warming will keep going up until people think green. I mean just mowing your lawn is a contributor to global warming. Alot of man made machines need to be reinvented greener. Really no one is doing anything now, and it could take decades to take us off most of the gas products.

Today, global warming has become such a threat that if all the religious leaders and citizens of the world do not come together to fight this, a day would come when all the beings on earth will come to an end. So, together we must take this forward