Today, In 2023, Humanity is facing a catastrophic human-induced climate crisis which seriously threatens our very survival.
Fundamentally, Humanity is faced with this climate crisis for a few principal reasons, which are important to understand in order to advocate the best solutions.
Pollution (including that of overpopulated species, which can be seen from the point of view of Earth as a form of toxic pollution) does not recognize national boundaries and borders while Earth is subdivided politically into self-regulating nation-states, which regulate, or fail to regulate, pollution and population for their own people and territories.
At the Planet Under Pressure conference in London, Diana Liverman and Will Steffen present something of a contrasting couple.
The two professors have been working together on a State of the Planet report, which has involved trawling through numerous reports and scientific papers. At the end of it all, the message of one appears somewhat optimistic, the other fundamentally pessimistic. They agree that changes to the world since about 1950 have been startling - rapid spread of the human population, accelerating exploitation of forests and marine resources, surging economic growth in successive waves across the world, and so on. This radical reshaping of the natural world by a single species is certainly unprecedented in Earth history, which a few years back led to scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer coining a special name for our epoch - the Anthropocene.
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