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PLAN A: GLOBAL SOLAR NOW By Evan Anderson Register for Future in Review now to take advantage of our summer pricing at $4,900. The price jumps up to $5,900 starting Sept 1. _______ Why Read: This summer, the beginning of an El Niño cycle has heralded a new climate shift on our planet. As we enter an era of rapidly intensifying climate change, it is clearer with each passing month that something must be done, and without delay. This week, we cover what that can and should be in the immediate future - our Plan A - and introduce the CTO Design Challenge topic for our Future in Review (FiRe) 2023 conference in November. We are now in a fight for our livelihoods and our lives. If you have thoughts, resources, or applicable skillsets to offer (energy, solar, batteries, policy, finance, international business experience, etc.), reach out to the SNS Team to work with us on the fight. And join us at FiRe 2023 to contribute to the challenge live and help formulate our plan of attack to get us down from the ledge of climate crisis: our Plan A.
Introduction Fire that's closest kept burns most of all. - William Shakespeare, "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" The world is too much with us; late and soon. [. . .] - William Wordsworth For decades, we have been warned. By biologists deep in the Amazon; by oceanographers in the atoll reefs of the South Pacific. By ornithologists, entomologists, zoologists, glaciologists, firefighters, farmers, and forecasters. We are burning up. Between deforestation, the rampant burning of fossil fuels, industrial output, and the increasingly severe resulting feedback loops in the natural world, the world is indeed too much with us. The year 2023 has seen countless climate disasters, lives lost across many species, and records broken. We are on a rapidly accelerating downward spiral. Our carbon emissions are now directly tied to what stays in the atmosphere: the planet's ability to keep up was left behind at the turn of the last century:
This spiral is most easily understood by looking at the planet's energy balance. In raw energy alone, it is important to note that our pale-blue dot is taking on far more energy than it did before we came along and began to burn things. (In the following graphs, ZJ=1021 joules.)
Source: von Schuckmann et al., 2023 How fast, exactly, are we spiraling? As the onset of a new El Niño cycle has begun, the first half of 2023 has seen the most extreme effects of anthropogenic climate change ever measured, across a broad swathe of categories, packed into a six-month period. Let's first discuss the implications of what we're seeing on the ground today, and then (I promise, dear readers) we will get to the most interesting part: the solution.
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