From a physicians viewpoint the approach to global warming by the public, by politics and some media and leading climate professionals seems rather strange: From the beginning of his training a physician is made aware that he will go before court and even to jail if found faulty of malpractice. Possible mistakes could be that you miss a grave, a worse or worst condition. These bad possibilities may be rare, but this will not help you in court. An often cited example is bleeding from the end of the bowel: Most frequently and most probably this is caused by harmless hemorrhoids. But what counts for a physician is the worst case, and this is carcinoma of the bowel. If you do not rule this out before treating haemorrhoids (which indeed also may be there) it may become a case for court. That’s why for a physician in any situation the worst case is of constant concern, we look and prepare for it, and the harmless and most frequent causes are an aside.
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| Forgotten scissors |
This is in
contrast to the behaviour of the experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): They present us with some probable or
plausible middle-of the road projections. A physician would be more
interested in worst cases. Anyway - as became clear last year - IPCC omits
several known aggravating factors and feedback loops (*) and therefore does not
even take into account the most probable outcomes, not to speak of the worst,
which however really should determine our behaviour. IPCC being a
semigovernmental body this is not at all surprising: all governments want to
stay in the saddle, that’s why as a rule they never report the full scandal.
Everybody
mentions tipping points and the point of no return which both of course are to
be expected anytime if they did not already happen: If I consider the
accelerating temperature curves, last summers nearly 400 broken temperature
records and also last September, October and May being the warmest ever measured as well as the reports
about Methane bubbling out of lakes and permafrost, the still rising output of
CO2 and SUV’s, the burning Australia and the still general taboo on discussing population size my internal
algorithms tell me that the impending dissolution of civilisation in the next few decades is not anymore a worst-case scenario but the most probable one. The
worst case would be that it already happens in the next years. If you measure
the attitude of official bodies towards such outcomes by the standards routinely applied
to physicians this would be a case for court. Because this concerns the whole
world and ends in a sort of Holocaust 2.0 one could consider something like a
world Nuremberg tribunal. Now one could object that the worst outcomes have not
been confirmed yet. But if they will be confirmed it will be too late for
a court.
To put the
theme on the table one could imagine a mock tribunal (similar to Ferdinand von
Schirachs successful drama “Terror") in a theatre. Accusers could be children,
animals, plants and their lawyers etc. Defendants could be governments,
corporations, experts etc. The public should be the jury. Perhaps such a staging
would rise awareness about the urgency of the situation.
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(*) Some aggravating mechanisms and feedback loops not accounted for by the IPCC: - Disapperance ice and snow reduces the reflection of the earth which can increase the predicted temperature raises by 20 or more percent.
- The CO2-concentration and the CO2-immissions are not stable but increase year by year.
- Since several years there is a raise of methane concentration in the air. Sources include warmed wetlands and permafrost, agriculture and fossil industry. In the worst case this can cause a dangerous raise of the temperatures within years or even months.
- Large-scale destruction of rainforests by clearing, drought and wildfires reduces their capacity to bind CO2 and at the same time invalidate the concept of climate certificates by CO2-compensation.
- Since 2019 year several climate models predict a reduced cloud cover of the earth with further warming, which could self-reinforce further warming.
Some other posts in English:
