This is Part 3 in a series of Cheat Sheets geared at getting us engaged fully in the very real truth of global warming. This post deposits factlets that I’ve found tend to get people woke, scared, hopeful and engaged.
A Woke to Climate Cheat Sheet
This list isn’t comprehensive, I just tend to find they make folk stop and think when I drop them into chats at bus stops and the like. I used to go gentle on this stuff. But we’re running out of time. We have to slap heads and poke and get woke together.
- We have already killed off 60 per cent of the world’s wildlife since 1970.
- Orang-utans will be extinct in 10 years. Open this link to view a very scary image.
- All insects will be gone within a century on current warming trends. “The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems, according to the first global scientific review.” More than 40 per cent of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles.
- The world warmed just 1 degree Celsius since the 1800s. The emissions path we are on today is likely to take us to 2 degrees of warming by 2040 and very probably four degrees Celsius by 2100. Just for perspective.
- Within the next 80 years, 2 BILLION PEOPLE will be endangered due to the melting of the Himalaya Ice Cap alone. And that’s if we meet the 1.5 degree Celsius temperature increase limit. Which as I explain here is not even likely. “This is the climate crisis you haven’t heard of,” said the scientist who authored the report.
- The extra heat that we trap near the planet every day is equivalent to the heat from 400,000 bombs the size of the one that was dropped on Hiroshima.
- To date every single warning regarding warming rates has been 100% correct. As this op-ed points out that climate change denial is ludicrous.
- Sea warming in Tasmania is occurring at twice the global average. Read this New York Times op-ed for a full picture. And take away this factlet: “Southern Hemisphere oceans are absorbing most of the extra heat generated by global warming. Sea surface temperatures in the Australian region have risen around one degree Celsius since 1910, with eight of the 10 warmest years on record occurring since 2005. The starkest evidence is the rate of warming in the seas around Tasmania, which is occurring at more than twice the global average.”
Feel free to add more below. And I’d also love to know – as there is conjecture on this point – if scary factlets like this wake us all up a bit more, or shut us down (due to the overwhelmingness of it all)?
