A global temperature review of 2024 confirms the trend that has been so concerning to climatologists. The last 10 years have been the warmest on record, and 2024 has been the warmest yet. The European Copernicus calculation measured 2024 as 1.6°C above the pre-industrial temperature, with most days being above the 1.5°C aspirational target set by the Paris Agreement (COP21) in 2015. Other organizations measured a slightly different temperature for 2024: NASA at 1.47°C, NOAA at 1.46°C, and Berkley Earth at 1.62°C. The differences are technical but the trend is the same. Global temperatures are rising in concert with our greenhouse gas emissions.
Continue reading The Quadra Project: Uninhabitable – Part 1All posts by Ray Grigg
The Quadra Project: Changes Causing Changes
We live in a time of rapid change. Such periods have been recorded in our earlier history, but nothing quite compares to the present. If this change could be represented in a graph, it would indicate a nearly vertical rise in almost everything from technology and population to species extinction and climate change. We are remaking the world, from the micro to the macro, with consequences that are unprecedented.
Two book reviews in the Atlantic magazine of December 2021 by Rebecca Giggs identify some of these changes.
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The Quadra Project – The Syrian Situation
Climate abnormalities are increasingly becoming a cause of political unrest and the resulting social chaos that is sending record numbers of the world’s people in forced migrations as refugees. The United Nations estimates that more than 30 million people are presently displaced on the planet because of environmental factors, either directly related or lurking behind in some secondary but pivotal role. For example, the civil war that has wracked Syria for almost 14 years was triggered by a drought.
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The Quadra Project – The Carbon Cost of Flying
Global climate change caused by our fossil fuel emissions is forcing us to assess many aspects of our behaviour. Flying is a particularly sensitive example because we have become accustomed to hopping on an airplane and dashing off at 700 or 800 kilometres per hour to some foreign country for the taste of another culture, for a change of scenery, for a family gathering, for an exotic adventure, or for a routine business deal. Not only are we destroying the uniqueness of the place that we came to experience by homogenizing the entire planet—the source of Yogi Berra’s oxymoronic comment that, “Nobody goes there any more. It’s too crowded.”—but flying happens to be the single most polluting activity over which any single individual has control. This is because flying is a choice. So the subject of flying and its contribution to the 37.4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions in 2023, although uncomfortable, deserves some consideration.
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The Quadra Project – Flying Into the Future
Boeing, an American builder of aircraft, estimates that the increasing demand for flying will require 44,000 additional commercial planes during the next 20 years. These new planes will be added to the current fleet of about 25,500 presently serving the flying public. Of course, Boeing expects to build a generous portion of these planes, while competing with Airbus and a rising Chinese aviation industry.
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