A 4 °C rise could easily occur. The 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose conclusions are generally accepted as conservative, predicted a rise of anywhere between 2 °C and 6.4 °C this century. And in August 2008, Bob Watson, former chair of the IPCC, warned that the world should work on mitigation and adaptation strategies to “prepare for 4 °C of warming”.
A key factor in how well we deal with a warmer world is how much time we have to adapt. When, and if, we get this hot depends not only on how much greenhouse gas we pump into the atmosphere and how quickly, but how sensitive the world’s climate is to these gases. It also depends whether “tipping points” are reached, in which climate feedback mechanisms rapidly speed warming. According to models, we could cook the planet by 4 °C by 2100. Some scientists fear that we may get there as soon as 2050.
If this happens, the ramifications for life on Earth are so terrifying that many scientists contacted for this article preferred not to contemplate them, saying only that we should concentrate on reducing emissions to a level where such a rise is known only in nightmares.”
from http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126971.700-how-to-survive-the-coming-century.html
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To offset the specter of continuing the growth economy, a Green Ten key value, Community-based Economics, defines Sustainable Economics and Steady State Economics, as advanced by Herman Daly, a pioneer in ecological economics.
(IV.) Sustainable Economics:
Community-centered, Steady State Economics is a more humanized, environmentally responsible economic alternative founded upon our 10 Key Values and the sub-disciplines of Steady State, Ecological and True Cost Economics.
Steady State Economics retains capitalism's internal flexibility, allowing for both class diversity and individual opportunities to acquire wealth, but it reframes assumptions about the viability of infinite growth and unlimited resources as well as such "inevitabilities" as cyclic recessions and unemployment.
Prioritizing the community, real people, and their environment, so that they are on par with traditional measures of productivity and consumption. Our integrative approach models natural ecological systems' success (noting that ecology actually derives from economics), not only ending wanton, environmental destruction and poverty, but balancing competitive and cooperative qualities with individual and collective elements of our society, so that all may flourish.
Diverging from both orthodox free market and planned economies, our policies are conservative insofar as they conserve limited resources, but progressive in implementing a future oriented society; they are antithetical to both Big Business and Big Government and irreducible to traditional left-right thinking. Our vision is a genuine third way that holistically combines the best features of other models with the practical diversity of our communities, worldly realities, and life's natural order, so that public sector and private enterprise, society and individual, all play interrelated, mutually supporting, and equally important roles in the larger political society, ecosphere, and eco(no)sphere.
Core Principles and the Measurement of Success:
There are several fundamental principles and guidelines that give our economic vision form, including:
1. Assessing economic activity with True Cost Pricing, incorporating its environmental and social effects alongside financial costs in a comprehensive Triple Bottom Line accounting, and similarly measuring our real economic, social, and environmental health alongside traditional markers like GNP and GDP with such indicators as:
i. Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare
ii. Infant Death Rates & Life Expectancy
