PowerSwitch

I went to a lecture at UCL's Energy Institute last night given by Kevin Anderson of Uppsala University on whether or not we can reach the 1.5C target of the Paris Climate Meeting. He said we can but it will involve a huge effort which, at the moment, governments aren't making. He also criticised the IPCC and climate scientists for not giving governments the full scale of the problems and for only giving them what the scientists thought that the politicians could bear.

There may be some salvation, in a sense, from these reports by Nafeez Ahmed, one over seven years old, which basically say that the world economy is running out of steam and we're headed for economic collapse from a mixture of resource depletion, a collapse of the economy because of a lowering of the Energy Return On Energy Invested (EROEI) of fossil fuels, and the greed of the Kleptocracy, the 0.1%, who are breaking the economy upon which their extreme wealth is based by taking the lions share of the wealth generated in the world. This may be our only saviour from global warming being inflicted on us by the Kleptocracy and by our own reluctance to accept the major changes required to combat climate change.

Inside the new economic science of capitalism’s slow-burn energy collapse

NASA funded study

The End of the World As We Know It? The rise of the post-carbon era

The last one, from 2010, says

By 2018, converging food, water and energy shortages could magnify the probability of conflict between major powers, civil wars, and cross-border conflicts.

So it will be interesting to see just how accurate he is.

I was speaking to one of the senior UCL staff present after about the problems of resource depletion, climate change and sea level rise and its effect on world food supply and he bought up the subject of Jared Diamond and how climate fuelled migration had hastened the demise of the Viking colonies in Greenland. It's not just people on this obscure forum who are thinking unpalatable, to some, thoughts on migration.

Migration might be just about ok for the younger ones, but mass migration is associated with significat increases in cardiovascular disease and it’s attendant myocardial infarction. i.e. heart attacks. If there is mass migration it will mean either people dying in large numbers where they are, or large numbers of people squeezing into smaller spaces, with limited food supplies, and, er.........dying.

woodburner wrote:Migration might be just about ok for the younger ones, but mass migration is associated with significat increases in cardiovascular disease and it’s attendant myocardial infarction. i.e. heart attacks. If there is mass migration it will mean either people dying in large numbers where they are, or large numbers of people squeezing into smaller spaces, with limited food supplies, and, er.........dying.

Very few people succumb to heart disease at an age before they will have had what children they choose to have so an increase in heart disease will not have any effect on birth rates or total population.

woodburner wrote:Migration might be just about ok for the younger ones, but mass migration is associated with significat increases in cardiovascular disease and it’s attendant myocardial infarction. i.e. heart attacks. If there is mass migration it will mean either people dying in large numbers where they are, or large numbers of people squeezing into smaller spaces, with limited food supplies, and, er.........dying.

I have heard any tales of large numbers of older people dying on the migrant routes through Europe. If they had been I'm sure the press would have picked up on it to fuel their pro immigrant stance.

They don’t die en route, it is a statistic that appears up to a couple of decades after the event.

woodburner wrote:They don’t die en route, it is a statistic that appears up to a couple of decades after the event.

How do you then sort out the stress of the trip from the realities of the new living environment? A man moves from the sub Sahara Shalalie where he is starving and to a western metro area where he begins to eat at the MickyD's three times a day for a decade before succumbing to a heart attack.
Was it the trip or the french fries?

Or the lack of Vit D on darker skin?

Agree, Kevin Anderson is a great speaker, if you can get to hear him....

He's also Deputy Director at the Tyndall Centre in Manchester:
http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/people/kevin-anderson