I got your Financial Crisis right here

h/t to occams hatchet

$700 Billion is chicken feed….ok, make that fish feed. How much is THIS going to cost?

WASHINGTON — The world pumped up emissions of the chief human-produced global warming gas last year, setting a course that could push beyond leading scientists’ projected worst-case scenario, international researchers said Thursday.

The new numbers, which some scientists called “scary,” were a surprise because experts thought an economic downturn would slow energy use. Instead, carbon dioxide output rose 3% from 2006 to 2007.

That amount exceeds the most dire outlook for emissions from burning coal and oil and related activities as projected by a Nobel Prize-winning group of international scientists in 2007.

When do we start planning for the economic crisis  disaster that accelerated Warming IS bringing us?

What are the economic implications of, in the worst case scenario, the loss of housing stock on the low lying coasts, increased storm strength and frequency, crop failure, drought, major port cities underwater?

Best case scenario? World economic upheaval as we change to a non-oil based world society fast enough to prevent the worst case scenarios, if indeed they are preventable at this point.

Has anyone else noticed that just about EVERY new report on Climate Crisis contains the words “worse than the most alarming predictions of past studies?” Or some variation thereof. We can see the chaotic, clueless, guesswork reaction to the comparatively tiny ‘crisis’ the economy is now facing. This is the direct result of people seeing the upcoming crisis, jumping up and down yelling about the upcoming crisis, , publishing stern warnings that the upcoming crisis was coming…..and yet no one actually DOING anything to stop the crisis.

People are talking about and viewing this as all something that will happen far in the future, but every single indication that we are NOT reducing but increasing emissions, every tiny indication of acceleration of warming (which are now constant) brings the crisis aspect closer and closer, let alone the effects we are already feeling. Which WILL accelerate exponentially in a suicidal feedback loop. Every day we do not reduce CO2 accelerates the process, and not only are we not reducing, we are increasing.

And yet we do nothing meaningful to address the major problem we face as a planet. And, I hate to say, even when Obama is elected we will still not be doing nearly enough. It is becoming apparent that we will have to suffer some truly major catastrophe, some sort of ‘financial crisis,’ type event before we as a planet start to truly tackle this reality with some sort of urgency. Before we REALLY start to pay attention.

How long do we have before a catastrophic loss of life and capital spurs us into something resembling even the relatively small effort being put into the current ‘crisis?’ Even as the most alarming of the alarmists is proven to be understating the case over and over, as the warnings and urgency mount on a daily basis? Certainly not as long as people think, because the people who can actually spur us into the change we need simply are NOT thinking. The are putting out fires instead of planning, and the fires are only going to spread faster and faster and become harder to put out as Climate Crisis exacerbates and affects every other crisis and, indeed, every facet of life as we know it.

As one of the scientists quoted in the story says….”scary.” But apparently, not scary enough.

We are making lemmings look like frikking geniuses.