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Please "Check In" here to the The Wizard and the Prophet discussion!

#168: Dec. - March 2020 (Non-Fiction)
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Chris OConnor

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Please "Check In" here to the The Wizard and the Prophet discussion!

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Everybody benefits by knowing who else is planning to read and discuss the book so please make a brief post here checking in and letting us know of your intention to join the The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World book discussion. Thank you!
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Please "Check In" here to the The Wizard and the Prophet discussion!

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Hi Chris

Hope you and all have a happy New Year, but things are rather catastrophic with the devastating fires in Australia, luckily not that close to me, although we are surrounded by dense smoke and could still get fires. 1200 houses burnt down so far and thousands of summer holiday makers stranded.

So far we have DWill, Geo, Taylor and me involved in the Wizard and Prophet book. It is a superb read.

Link to the book conversation is https://www.booktalk.org/the-wizard-and ... -f289.html
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Chris OConnor

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Hi Robert,

I've been watching the fires on the news and I see it is indeed catastrophic. People actually stranded on beaches with fire all around them. We have wildfire problems in California but not of this magnitude. I'm glad to hear the fires aren't currently posing a serious threat to you. I'll keep watching.
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geo

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I haven't started yet, but I will try to jump in here pretty soon. Australia seems to be on the leading edge of climate change. It's very real for them.
-Geo
Question everything
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Robert Tulip

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The Australian fires illustrate the accelerating feedbacks of climate change, with warming causing drying, and drying in turn causing burning, which then creates a vicious feedback loop to increase the warming, directly through the loss of vegetation and rain and more slowly through the massive new release of CO2 and soot.

The scale and intensity of these fires is part of the planetary sixth extinction, with the heedless indifference of our industrial civilization threatening the very fabric of life on our fragile planet. Australia's wildlife cannot possibly recover from this onslaught. The canary in the coalmine is dead.

With warming expected to steadily worsen, such catastrophes will become more constant and bad and universal. This is why it is so urgent, as I have argued for the last ten years, to systematically remove the large quantity of CO2 that we have added to the air. Just cutting our new emissions is marginal to the climate problem, far too small, slow, difficult, expensive and divisive to possibly have a material effect on global warming. A Manhattan-Apollo type of mobilisation needs to aim for planetary Net Zero By 2030, by ramping up carbon removal to equal total emissions.
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This may bring a tiny bit of solace. It's from a summary of climate and energy news I receive from an organization here in the Shenandoah Valley.
In an opinion piece in The New York Times (NYT), Jochen Bittner of Die Zeit in Germany argued that moving away from nuclear energy could turn out to be one of the gravest mistakes of the Merkel era. In the U.S., a line item in the recently passed $1.4 trillion budget provides NOAA with at least $4 million to study the impacts of placing materials in the stratosphere to counter global warming, i.e., geoengineering. In the last of a four-part series, David Roberts discussed how carbon-capture-and-utilization could be used to build a circular economy around carbon.
https://climateactionallianceofthevalley.org/
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