Quote from Hazeri;747742:
Kay, let's fill our oceans with nuclear waste and oil, make the sky as dark as the night with the smog and make every inch of land infertile. As long as the rain forest remains untouched. Gotcha.
The rain forest is considerably more urgent.
We have time to correct the emission problems, and we're already on our way to doing just that. Albeit, not nearly fast enough. We need to take it more seriously than we are.
The rain forest however, does not have time. Once it's gone, it's gone. It cannot be fixed. The damage caused to it is irreversible. The habitats lots and animals that lived in them that became extinct will never come back.
Once we lose a certain amount of the rain forest, the entire climate of the planet will change and it will be impossible to repopulate the rain forest with flora. At which point, the planet will have lost a significant amount of oxygen (20%), a massive amount of fresh water (60%!!), and there is no way our planet could possibly filter the levels of carbon dioxide that would be generated, even without any additional pollution whatsoever.
But here's the real kicker: We could keep polluting for
generations to come, as long as the rain forest stayed intact, and we would be fine.
However, the immediate issue, if they do not stop deforesting the Amazon and do not make a significant effort to replant what they've destroyed, we (all 6.8 billion of us) will die.
Even if there were zero pollution, and we had never polluted before as a species, losing the rain forest would
still cause the same extinction event.
They don't have to die, that obviously isn't the first choice here, and not everyone in the affected countries would be killed. That's just ridiculous.
The Amazon itself is in Brazil (60%), Peru (13%), Columbia (10%), and minor amounts in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname & French Guiana.
People don't even need to be significantly displaced, only to a minor effect, and the deforestation and expansion has to stop, and some efforts should be made to restore the Amazon.
Some people would have to be displaced for that, but not 20 million.
Emissions are a problem. There are a lot of ideas to fix it... However, there is growing concern that international attempts to curb rising levels of carbon dioxide could fail. Since the signing of the Kyoto agreement a decade ago, carbon dioxide concentrations have risen faster than even the worst-case scenarios that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested. Some scientists are now saying we should have a back-up, or "plan B."
A survey of climate experts carried out by The Independent at the end of last year found that many now believe that a "plan B" is necessary if global temperatures continue to rise. Just over half – 54 per cent – of the 80 international specialists who responded to our survey said the situation was now so dire that we must consider the artificial manipulation of the global climate to counter the effects of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases.
It's looking like no matter what happens, we're going to have to carry out some kind of geo-engineering... but there's no telling how that would play out. Some of the ideas for fixing that are
here.