For Our Children

A Video of Global Warming

the greenhouse gas pollution-driven climate emergency

By the ever increasing burning of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution, their emissions of heat-trapping/greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, have increasingly polluted and trapped the sun's heat in our air. This has raised temperatures world-wide as shown in the video, causing global warming which is the original but no longer sole driver of the greenhouse gas pollution-driven climate emergency.

also interconnected are the biodiversity emergency and the sixth mass extinction we're causing

please ignore this "silly front page"

... as it's an excellent video on our biodiversity emergency.

What We Also Face ...

... are the colossal fires of Siberia!

Siberia has the world's largest forests containing around 640 billion trees! Recently it's also seen some of the world's largest forest fires and they're increasingly burning not just trees but permafrost and peatlands, all three of which store huge amounts of carbon and methane! From 1982 to 2020, nearly 23 million acres burned but almost half of that occurred in 2019 and 2020. Then in 2021, Siberia's fires became larger than all the other fires on Earth combined. (See video)
Since 1988, researchers say that Russian forests absorbed around 1.7 billion tons of carbon annually. In the past three years, however, that storage has been reduced by more than three-quarters to 400 million tons. Forest fires emit greenhouse gases as the carbon inside the trees is released. Moreover, trees that have burned and died obviously can no longer absorb greenhouse gases, which leaves more carbon to warm the air, which speeds up their drying, death from insect infestations, burning, and global warming everywhere else. Yet another vicious circle.
Not only are these fires hotter and more destructive, they are becoming more challenging to fight, burning underground during winter (!) and spring, and resurfacing again in wildfire season. Siberia's thawing permafrost, burning forests and peatlands are in short, a triple ecological time bomb ticking away and threatening unbridled destruction.

We Also Face Sperm Count Dropping & Health Declining ...

... all around the world!

We now know, as new research shows, that sperm counts worldwide have dropped by 52% over the past five decades, and the pace of the decline has more than doubled since 2000! This meta-analysis looked at 223 studies based on sperm samples from over 57,000 men across 53 countries including Latin America, Asia, and Africa.
We also know that at least several quite probable causes have been identified so far. Given around 92% of humanity lives in areas with unsafe levels of fine particle pollution, two links have been made between inflammation from these particles; from both boys and their mothers breathing polluted air while pregnant with them. This also helps explain why it's world-wide.
In addition, a large Danish study now suggests that in utero exposure to PFAS, known as "forever chemicals" because they persist in the environment for an incredibly long time, may also be affecting sperm count and quality.
Finally, the Mayo Clinic reports that extended exposure to benzenes, toluene, xylene, herbicides, pesticides, organic solvents, painting materials, lead and other heavy metals might also contribute to low sperm counts.
Bottom line: In regards to what the lead author of the meta-analysis described as "a serious problem ... that, if not mitigated, could threaten mankind’s survival", we know we don't know enough about its causes, and we also know we don't know at all about any possible causes still unexamined.

We Also Face Climate Problems Worse Than Predicted

the ipcc'S prediction and carbon budget problems

WARNING -- THIS MIGHT BE DISTURBING TO MANY AS IT WAS TO US

How many times have you heard or read that "What's happening is worse than (the scientists) predicted!" The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose modeling, biases, and mentality drives most governments' assessments and goals, including our own, unfortunately and consistently underestimates the future.

Here are some of the reasons why:

First, scientists are people and like other folks they have biases and emotions. As scientists, in general they have a bias to err on the side of least drama and to adhere to scientific norms of restraint, caution, objectivity, skepticism, precision, rationality, certainty, dispassion, and moderation.
Now as a clear but scary example of the IPCC's tendency to underestimate the future, it's completely left permafrost out of its predictions and assessments!
Permafrost with 1.7 trillion tonnes of carbon and around 60 billion tonnes of methane, is arguably the biggest eco-time bomb of all! As the Woodwell Climate Research Center put it, permafrost "has historically been excluded because of gaps in data that make existing estimates of emissions less precise."
Its president, Dr. Max Holmes, went on to say it's “especially alarming… that permafrost carbon is largely ignored in current climate change models.” That’s because permafrost thaw emissions could take up 25-40% of our remaining emissions budgeted to cap warming at 2°C. Imagine leaving the cost of rent out of your household budget. It doesn’t mean you don’t have to pay it, it just means you won’t be prepared when that bill arrives."
Equally unrealistic is the IPCC's view that future outlooks are "unlikely" if they're outside the middle two-thirds of all probabilities! Would you get on a plane with a one in three chance of crashing?
We could go on as there are many other aspects of the disfunctionality of the IPCC, well laid out in the sobering study, What Lies Beneath, but in the interest of brevity, we'd like to examine the current and predominant concept of a carbon budget, mentioned by Dr. Holmes, and its ramifications.
A carbon budget is the cumulative amount of greenhouse gas emissions permitted/allowed over a period of time to keep within a certain temperature threshold or cap considered okay if we get close to and even right underneath it but don't hit it -- but we're not really sure.
First, the very mental and emotional attitude of "permitting/allowing" more greenhouse gas emissions in our view insidiously grants some subtle degree of approval to them and lack of urgency in lowering them. This general attitude, in our view, like previous Congressional bills and the most recent one, the IRA, is usually a cover for "business as usual, as much and as long as possible". In our view, this is probably one of the major reasons why all the U.N. COP climate conferences had lots of voluntary pledges, promises, "goals" and caps but no financial incentives and disincentives to get there!
Contrast that with reducing greenhouse gas emissions ASAP in a "full court press" with accelerating and increasing financial incentives and disincentives like True Cost Transformation Fees and Green Economy Rebates, seen in our Petition's Plan.
Second, Dr. Holmes' metaphor of a household having a budget with fixed income and a landlord needing a fixed rent is in our view not quite right. That's because with the pollution, climate and biodiversity emergencies and humanity, nothing is fixed! Everything is in motion, nothing is certain; the household income, the rent, the utilities, the cap might turn out to need to be lower, much lower because of new research, observations etc.
Bottom line: There are things we know, things we think we know but find out we didn't know, lots of things we know we don't know about (like the tens of 1000s of untested chemicals), and things we don't even know we don't know. Like who could have conceived or predicted that propellants in a spray could destroy the life-protecting ozone layer high up in the atmosphere? Or that coastal deforestation affects interior rainfall? Or that burning fossil fuels could lower sperm counts?
While the universe of what we don't know we don't know is possibly infinite, there are a couple of things we do know. Logic, experience and the law of unintended consequences tells us the more greenhouse gases we emit, the more chemicals we recklessly use without tests, the more changes we recklessly make to degrade the Earth’s major ecosystems, the more unintended consequences we’ll have to deal with. If we continue this uncontrolled experiment on ourselves, our children and our world, we’ll continue to discover after the fact new problems we often had no idea could even emerge.

The Human Race For a Healthy World or WWIII?

Tweaking Thomas Friedman’s metaphor, humanity's in an overcrowded bus, conducting an uncontrolled chemistry and ecological experiment on ourselves and our children, while a number of different gas pedals/tipping points are jammed to the floor, making each other speed the bus up even more, while we’re tearing through a fog towards the edge of a cliff. We don’t know exactly where this cliff edge/point of no return is, be it unstoppable global warming aka Hothouse Earth, world-wide male sterility, or some other irreversible change we don't know about yet, but we’re rapidly approaching it.
Once we go over the cliff's edge there will be little if anything we can do to stop the following from increasing: temperatures, spreading deserts, drying, dying and burning forests, droughts, new plagues of insects, crop failures, mass starvation, epidemics of new and old diseases, ecosystem collapses, and various unintended consequences from all the above --- including those from the sixth mass extinction of life since life began, this time man-made with a projected 30-40% of all species going extinct this century.
Nor will we likely be able to stop WWIII — a perfect global storm of catastrophes with failed states, mass migrations, riots, terrorism, nuclear blackmail and yes, wars, conventional but maybe even nuclear, for increasingly scarce water, oil, food, arable land, and other natural resources. Or there will be wars that are really about these scarcities but are disguised as wars over politics, religion, nationalism, borders, etc.
But all this isn’t inevitable! If we mobilize now, we can and must prevent this veritable World War III described above or we and our children will experience it first hand. In fact, we’re already beginning to experience it. Anything less than our best effort may not be enough, so for the sake of all the world's children, we need to give this our all and mobilize to save civilization with post-Pearl Harbor urgency. Please spread the word about the Petition, then afterwards, please visit Yes, You Can Help! and encourage your friends and family to sign and forward it and Join the Human Race for a Healthy and Sustainable World! We thank you, the children in your life will thank you, as will future generations.

We Also Need to Make Peace with Nature/Creation!

Climate, Pollution & Biodiversity Emergencies