We’ve been lucky, we humans: (click here) For many millennia, we’ve been on a pretty stable — and resilient — planet. As our civilizations developed, we’ve transformed the landscape by cutting down forests and growing crops. We’ve created pollution, and driven plants and animals extinct. Yet our planet has kept spinning along, supporting us, more or less stable and in balance. Going forward, scientists have recently proposed, all we need to do is stay within some limits, nine upper boundaries for bad behavior.
But of course, being human, we haven’t....In the graph to the right Ma is an abbreviation for (mega-annum) is a million years. Decimals are less than a million years ago.
The Planetary Boundary (PB) Framework of Earth Systems (ES):INTRODUCTION (click here)There is an urgent need for a new paradigm that integrates the continued development of human societies and the maintenance of the Earth system (ES) in a resilient and accommodating state. The planetary boundary (PB) framework contributes to such a paradigm by providing a science-based analysis of the risk that human perturbations will destabilize the ES at the planetary scale. Here, the scientific underpinnings of the PB framework are updated and strengthened...
Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability (click here)
This is a formal tool of what scientists have been saying since the early 1960s. This 'idea' helps contextualize the Earth Systems that support life and the insult to them to date. It provides upper and lower limits as a guide to understanding the 'scientific talk' regarding Earth Systems that support life.
Assessing and Managing the Risks of Climate Change (click here)
For those in the public that want to understand how degraded Earth Systems have become, a question to scientists could be; "Where does that place us in the Planetary Boundaries (PB) of Earth's Systems that support life?
I would not assume all scientists would have this conceptual model in mind when they discuss the Climate Crisis. This is a tool developed to help with a clearer understanding of where we are and where we are going. Most scientific work is not put into a model such as this simply because it is not the practice of the science.
A person familiar with this conceptual framework could talk with scientists to discern where their assessments fit into this framework. In other words, this framework requires a specialty to read assessments and apply them.
