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Lawrence Wollersheim is the Executive Director of Integrative Spirituality. He brings an extensive 30-year background in day-to-day technology and business operations across profit and non-profit sectors to his work at US. Comments on the essay below are deeply appreciated and can be sent to: [email protected]

Catastrophic Climate Destabilization Tipping Points

An Integral Evolutionary Update

Lawrence Wollersheim

Are our families, businesses and nations prepared to adapt to the coming planetary climate changes, economic losses and resource shortages?

One can hardly turn on the news and not hear about another catastrophic drought, wildfire extreme storm or flood breaking all previous records. According to a leading climate scientist on global warming these are NOT just natural weather anomalies! (A link to this research is at the end of this copy.)

The climate destabilization problem is rather simple at it core. Human caused carbon pollution of the atmosphere is causing a greenhouse effect trapping more energy in the form of heat inside our atmospheric greenhouse. This additional increase in heat energy is available to be used in the planet's weather systems (monsoons, hurricanes, storms/ storm surges, droughts etc.) This increasing greenhouse trapped heat energy is what is and will continue to create increasing destabilization and weather extremes.

This means new and extreme problems for the world. Our current infrastructure (dikes, dams, levies, water and sewage treatment plants and much of our other infrastructure,) has most often been designed to withstand the extreme climate events that occur about once every hundred years (century storms.) The coming more extreme storms caused by increasing human caused atmospheric carbon pollution will eventually create and become millennial storms --- climate events of such an extreme in severity that there has been nothing like them on the planet for thousand of years...

Even leading global warming critics are also changing their long held positions in the face of more verifying science. Additionally, the terms global warming and climate change have recently evolved into the new terms of climate destabilization or catastrophic climate destabilization (CCD) to better reflect the true reality of human caused pollution problem of climate destabilization immediately before us.

Because research on CCD is still so poorly funded, the world still does not know the critical catastrophic climate destabilization tipping points. (The points where where recovery from CCD in less than centuries of massive human suffering is possible.) Unbelievably, when it comes to the climate destabilization tipping points we are still flying nearly blind --- even with the full future of humanity's evolutionary experiment at stake.

Current research cited in Six Degrees: Our Future On a Hotter Planet by Mark Lynas has projected that CCD related damage and losses will soon cost nations 5% of their total Gross Domestic Product (GDP,) and will likely continue rising far beyond there with each new level of CCD's unfolding. This additional 5% GDP drain can hardly be afforded by a planet still struggling to get out of the current global recession and near depression.

Many countries are already experiencing spikes in food costs. The US will likely follow soon because of the year to year averaging of the resilience-reducing effects of CCD. Not surprisingly, few individuals in the integral evolutionary community have worked out even basic preparation and adaption plans for themselves, their family's and their businesses to cope with the increasing scale, severity and frequency of the effects of catastrophic climate destabilization.

What is most scary is that research is so sparse right now on accurate CCD tipping points that no one can yet conclusively tell us:

1. is the global average temperature going to go up an additional maximum of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 or 8 degrees Celsius? No one can tell us yet exactly, which of those temperatures will we be at in 5, 15, 25, 50 or 100 years?
   
   
2. Is sea level going to go up less than one meter, 1-3 meters, 8 meters (if Greenland melts,) or up to 25 meters (if all the other polar and glacial ice melts too.) No one can tell us yet exactly, which of those sea level ranges will we be at in 5, 15, 25, 50 or 100 years?
   
   
3. At what level of carbon pollution in the atmosphere measured in parts per million (ppm) will produce which above degree of temperature increase and sea level rise --- and once again most importantly, when? (We are currently at about 400 carbon ppm right now.)
   Some [of] our best scientists warn that anything over carbon 350 is courting climate catastrophe and that carbon 450 is near certain and potentially irreversible CCD. (We are currently adding approximately 2 ppm of carbon to the atmosphere per year to our near 400 ppm total, but that annual ppm amount appears to be rising in an non linear, exponential curve as well.)
   
   
4. How will the many game-changing negative feedback variables effecting the speed of temperature rise and sea level rise --- potentially occur faster and more unpredictably than anyone could have imagined or, have we already crossed these tipping points? These negative climate feedbacks would be things like massive loss of the atmospheric carbon eating forests because of heat, drought and wildfires, massive releases of methane from the warming and decaying of the permafrost near the polar areas, massive loss of carbon eating sea plankton because of the growing carbonization and acidification of the oceans, loss of white polar and glacial ice that reflects much earth-heating solar heat back into space and, the greatest threat of all --- at what level of rising ocean temperature will thaw and release the gigatons of frozen methane hydrate crystals trapped along the continental shelves of our oceans.
   This sudden mega release of carbon into the atmosphere from methane from methane hydrate crystals is predicted to be to what could be the last great planetary extinction event that will leave either no one left or as few as 200 million of us left living close to the poles. (Scientists have theorized this massive methane release occurred once before millions of years ago and was the most probable cause of one of the 5 previous great mass extinction events of planetary history called the PETM extinction event. See Six Degrees: Our Future On a Hotter Planet by Mark Lynas for more information on this. The 200 million survivor scenario is from The Vanishing face of Gaia by James Lovelock.)

Some researchers have implied that the human-caused pollution of increasing carbon in the atmosphere (that is the controllable and main cause for increasing Catastrophic Climate Destabilization,) has the potential to cause more human suffering and death as well as political, social and economic destabilization than the total sum of all wars in all of human history. In spite of this shocking prediction, as of yet, no national intelligence agency in any country with all their supercomputers and unlimited budgets has either discovered or published the accurate missing tipping point answers to any of the tipping point questions mentioned above. This in itself should by viewed by citizens all over the world as the greatest single national security failure by the world's intelligence agencies in the 21st century to protect its populations and respective national security interests from a real, imminent and potentially game-ending threat to all of humanity.

Catastrophic climate destabilization is complex. Some experts fear we may find ourselves already or soon beyond critical tipping points and experiencing vastly worst climate extremes in as little as 5-15 years. Others say 20-30 years while others say it will take 50-100 years. The CCD tipping point research is just not there yet to rule any of these experts right or wrong.

It takes real effort and dialectical systems thinking skill sets to read and understand the current science and its lack of reliable information concerning the correct time frames and evolving locations and conditions of the life-critical CCD tipping points. Even for the gifted and heady integral evolutionary community it is overwhelming. Once I really understood what is inevitably coming with increasing CCD due to atmospheric carbon pollution and our current state of lacking understanding and consciousness, I realized how unlikely it is that our governments will address CCD in time to avoid catastrophe. Because of this realization I became deeply saddened for months.

In our integral evolutionary community there are still many CCD deniers, ignorers and uninformed members. Either individually or collectively there are still far to many of us who have no real preparation and adaption strategy for this emerging ecological, economic and societal nightmare.

To help resolve this vital problem our integral and evolutionary organization has created a special web page and a few short blog posts that help you understand the scale of the CCD problem in more detail, particularly the tipping points as well as strategies to resolve, prepare for or adapt to CCD.

The web links below contain short videos to make it all more simple as well as some of the most current research found in books like, Six Degrees: Our Future On a Hotter Planet by Mark Lynas or, Our Last Chance to Save Humanity, by James Hansen. (Please feel free to forward this CCD information to other integral evolutionary individuals and organizations.)

To get the basic overview of the CCD challenge, click here.

To go to the Universe Blog and have much more information about CCD tipping points and strategies for preparing for catastrophic climate destabilization click here.

Click here to see the article on the direct connection of our current extreme weather to global warming.