"Gone to Smart Phones every one!
..when will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?"

Perhaps they are too caught up with their social media, perhaps their education has let them down, perhaps they find life too comfortable at present.

CST is constantly amazed at the lack of interest that young people have with the key global issues.  They must all know that during their lifetime the world will change so significantly that their lives may well become untenable.  Why do they not care?  Why do they not act?

Our generation were often seen on the streets campaigning for change – ban the bomb to real ale, we made our point and rattled the cages of the politicians and businesses until they took notice.

Climate change is now the key issue for change.  It presents an opportunity for young people because it affects their lives (not ours).  Any young person who is reasonably well educated must already know that increasing disasters from climate change are here to stay and these can only be tackled by concerted world-wide massive change.

CST hoped that Greta Thunberg was going to start a strong & effective young revolution.  But this has not occurred, all we get are sporadic actions with no real pressure or sensible actions to force western politicians to come together and change their moribund thinking.

We all know that without major and prolonged disruption, politicians will take little notice.   Only when it threatens their own stability will politicians act.  This is where the children and young people have nothing to lose.  Unless the politicians make massive changes now, our young people simply have no future in the same way our generations have looked forward to and gained.

Many older people have now either retired or soon will and many live a very complacent, comfortable life without any reason to change anything.  They are small 'c' conservatives with decent pensions, why would they wish to see their lives made more difficult unless they saw an immediate benefit and most older people become risk adverse anyway.  Do not expect anything from our generation, we are happy to leave the youngsters in the 'do da'.

Not so for our younger generations, they face significant economic, social and existential threat from both climate and changing jobs.  So where are they?  What has happened to their fire and natural desire for change – especially when it is so very obvious that they cannot have a sensible future without such change?

Perhaps there will be a profound enough disaster that kicks-off the necessary reaction for reaction and massive change.  Such disaster could be in the form of a global crop failure leading to sever food shortages across the globe, or perhaps the wiping out of a large coastal community due to storm damage.  We have already seen the result of heightened temperature and dryer conditions on Australia, but this has still not led to significant reaction from the young.  Maybe, as the tipping points discussed next unfold, the changes may become the focus that creates a reaction?

What sort of action would we like to see from our young people?  Lets consider a general strike by all 14 to 22 years olds.  Simply refuse to either work or go to school, college or university.  This could be over an extended period and thus gain global action.  The demand should be simple and sensational – until the major western powers derive a legally defined and agreed plan of action to create a carbon neutral world - the strike continues.

This makes sense for young people as it directly challenges the issue that affect them personally and ensures a quantative result.

The Tipping Points

Every day now we see the effects of climate change.  The scientists are hesitant to suggest the worst case scenarios, they have an implicit desire to agree amongst themselves before stepping out of line and telling the world the worst case.   This has left the rest of us with a less damaging view of climate change, a view that means we think we can delay decisions and still achieve a workable medium-term future.  CST now believes that this medium-term benign vision is wrong.  And it’s all about tipping points.

The world had a good mechanism to create a benign climate for most living things.  When the climate tended to move out of sync, some of the worlds inhabitants would throw it back on course naturally.  After all, it has taken billions of years of life to create this nice stable environment and it is chock full of life.

Humans have made such a fast change to the planet that these feedback systems have been overwhelmed.  We have changed not just the atmosphere, we have changed the fauna and flora and reduced nature’s ability to counteract these changes.

So without our natural thermostatic system, the climate changes begin to enter 'runaway mode'.  CST believes we are just beginning to see this happen.  There are potentially numerous tipping points for this runaway process.  One is the ice melt.  As this occurs we see a direct feedback system where less ice means more ground heat and further melting.  Scientists seem surprised at the latest melting data.  It is towards the worst case scenario.  We have also realise that the ice directly affects the tundra permafrost.  This is because the hotter, wetter air precipitates more snow during autumn and heats the tundra due to the blanket effect from the snow.  Unfortunately the tundra creates a potentially massive amount of climate change gasses (as much as already in the atmosphere).  So we may see a runaway effect where methane and CO2 from the warming tundra creates more ice melt… and so on.

What we still do not know are the timescales for these processes.  As they are not like any that have happened before naturally, we have no data.  CST thinks that they will surprise us all.  Our ‘internal model’ suggests that we have already passed some tipping points and the scientists worst case scenarios will look tame in the medium term.  The fact that we are already seeing some significant extreme weather suggests that the world will move towards unsustainability at an ever increasingly pace.

This unsustainability will at first hit the regions of the world that exists outside of western influence and therefore may have little effect on substantial political change.  The quicker the western world has a major disaster the quicker the quest for change may be.  The longer we leave the necessary massive development of infrastructure (to help modify and reverse the damage we are doing) the worse climate change will become.  

CST believes some of the tipping points have now been reached. This means we should not just look towards a carbon neutral world, but to building infrastructure that creates a future ability to suck out the CO2 from the atmosphere and sequest it.  This will require a massive increases in world energy production.   Perhaps covering large parts of the planet’s non-productive areas (such as deserts, tundra) with solar energy systems. Perhaps with a world-consortium we can create such endeavours and also perhaps create a world-wide network of nuclear (safe Thorium) power stations.

In some ways this sort of action would help the younger generations economically by providing massive investment and large numbers of new high level jobs.  We have already proven this methodology – just look at what happened during the two world wars.  This investment cannot sensibly be argued against - unless we do it now, the world is likely not to exist at anywhere near current economic levels in future - so such investment becomes a necessity for the survival of the economic system, - and the lives of the youngest!

 

Thank You,
CST

"Where have all the children gone?
...long time passing"

Jan 2020

Is it not time for the young people to rise up and make their future sustainable?  Why are they not on the streets today?

Will this change as the tipping points become clearer?  Perhaps a world disaster is the only way to lever the younger generations into action to make us all tackle the looming social, economic and physical disaster from climate change...