David Wallace-Wells divides his book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, into four sections, each dealing with the effects of a warmer planet on human life. The first, “Cascades”, deals with the general notion that every single climate event will trigger a multitude of effects. For human civilization, this will mean a multiplying of stresses all amplifying the seriousness of each other in a “cascade” of complex problems, none of which can be solved without solving all the others. Once problems reach some unspecified level of disruption, they become so interconnected that they overwhelm our ability to address them. This means that we regress rather than progress. And just as progress tends to amplify itself, the same applies to the deconstruction process, until the structure of a civilization is so riddled with dysfunction that it is no longer viable.
Continue reading The Quadra Project: The Uninhabitable Part 2Tag Archives: Sea level rising
On the Threshold of a 1.5°C World
While there is some disagreement as to whether we have crossed the 1.5°C threshhold set at COP 21 in Paris, scientists agree that we are on the brink and 2024 was the hottest year on record.
At COP 29 last November, Jim Skea, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) explained, “Children born today will not know a world without climate change. The IPCC has shown that we, and furthermore they, will live in a world marked by more intense storms, exceptional heatwaves, devastating floods and droughts, a world where food chains are disrupted, and where diseases reach new countries.”
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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: Sea Level Rise
When we think of sea level rise, we probably have a fairly simple explanation for what happens. The glaciers and polar icecaps melt, the resulting water flows into the world’s oceans and they rise accordingly. But, in actuality, the process is far more complicated than that. Consider Antarctica as an example—usually neglected because of its remoteness and the incorrect assumption until recently about its relative stability.
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Quadra Project: The Panama Canal
The Panama Canal and the Suez Canal are both magnificent feats of engineering that allow marine shipping to move east and west across the mid-latitudes without having to make the long journey around the continents of South America and Africa, respectively. The Suez is mostly a big ditch that was dredged in the sand to connect the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. No locks are required because the two seas are at the same elevation. Building the Panama Canal, however, was a much more complicated engineering problem, solved with remarkable ingenuity.
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