William E. Rees is professor emeritus of human ecology and ecological economics at the University of British Columbia. He is a founding member and past-President of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics. Rees is also a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, a co-investigator in the "Global Integrity Project" aimed at defining the ecological and political requirements for biodiversity preservation, a founding director of the One Earth Initiative, and a Director of the Real Green New Deal project.
So when William Rees says, "Our ruling elites’ inaction and lies on climate change will lead to climate turmoil, mass starvation, and general societal collapse in this century," then we had better pay attention.
In a long, detailed, and all too convincing article, Rees lays out the evidence to justify these shocking and perhaps unthinkable claims. Don't read it if you're looking for hope rather than honesty.
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One thing the climate crisis underscores is that Homo sapiens are not primarily a rational species. When forced to make important decisions, particularly decisions affecting our economic security or socio-political status, primitive instinct and raw emotion tend to take the upper hand.
This is not a good thing if the fate of society is at stake. Take “hope” for example. For evolutionary reasons, humans naturally tend to be hopeful in times of stress. So gently comforting is this word, that some even endow their daughters with its name. But hope can be enervating, flat out debilitating, when it merges with mere wishful thinking — when we hope, for example, that technology alone can save us from climate change.
Keep in mind that scientists are reluctant, for professional reasons, to go far beyond the immediate data in formal publication. Moreover, organizations like the United Nations, including even its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are so dominated by economists’ concerns and bent by political considerations that extraneous noise obscures the scientific signal.
Prominent climate scientist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director emeritus of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, argues that, in these circumstances “a trend towards erring on the side of least drama has emerged” and “when the issue is the survival of civilization is at stake, conventional means of analysis may become useless.”
It seems that in mainstream scientific publications and official reports, the truth about climate change and the fate of civilization may be buried deeply between the lines.
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FULL ARTICLE -- https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/09/18/Climate-Crisis-Wipe-Out/
#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency #Collapse
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