Is economic growth fuelling climate change? | Crunched financial growth

What will the value got by – GDP*(1-(Gini Coefficient)) tell us? Will it tell us how much of a country's economic growth has been wealth unequal? One issue I have with this value is that economic growth almost always results in pretty natural wealth inequality, so this value could give us a false depiction of how well the citizens of a nation are doing. Or, what if we replace the GDP in the formula with Green GDP? This is just an arbitrary thought I had got one random day. Could anyone tell me what they think about this?
Thank you

El Presidente said he preferred the TRUTH over facts.

The only way we could have economic growth without environmental destruction would be to mine on other planets and asteroids… Just logically how do you imagine that to work?

According to the Vostok Ice Core Records, CO2 level changes have followed Earth's overall temperature changes at an 800 year lag for the last 800,000 years. That means that our current CO2 levels are the result of Earth's overall temperature 800 years ago. World leaders have convinced their dependents that this works in the reverse order, relatively quickly, and that we are to blame, so that they can tax us out of a false shared guilt in order to be able to afford to "fight" climate change, an unstoppable natural cycle. The following is the source of this information:

Historical Carbon Dioxide Record from the Vostok Ice Core

Investigators
J.-M. Barnola, D. Raynaud, C. Lorius
Laboratoire de Glaciologie et de Géophysique de l'Environnement,
CNRS, BP96,
38402 Saint Martin d'Heres Cedex, France

N.I. Barkov
Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute,
Beringa Street 38, 199397,
St. Petersburg, Russia

Period of Record
417,160 – 2,342 years BP

Methods
In January 1998, the collaborative ice-drilling project between Russia, the United States, and France at the Russian Vostok station in East Antarctica yielded the deepest ice core ever recovered, reaching a depth of 3,623 m (Petit et al. 1997, 1999). Ice cores are unique with their entrapped air inclusions enabling direct records of past changes in atmospheric trace-gas composition. Preliminary data indicate the Vostok ice-core record extends through four climate cycles, with ice slightly older than 400 kyr (Petit et al. 1997, 1999). Because air bubbles do not close at the surface of the ice sheet but only near the firn-ice transition (that is, at ~90 m below the surface at Vostok), the air extracted from the ice is younger than the surrounding ice (Barnola et al. 1991). Using semiempirical models of densification applied to past Vostok climate conditions, Barnola et al. (1991) reported that the age difference between air and ice may be ~6000 years during the coldest periods instead of ~4000 years, as previously assumed. Ice samples were cut with a bandsaw in a cold room (at about -15°C) as close as possible to the center of the core in order to avoid surface contamination (Barnola et al. 1983). Gas extraction and measurements were performed with the "Grenoble analytical setup," which involved crushing the ice sample (~40 g) under vacuum in a stainless-steel container without melting it, expanding the gas released during the crushing in a pre-evacuated sampling loop, and analyzing the CO2 concentrations by gas chromatography (Barnola et al. 1983). The analytical system, except for the stainless-steel container in which the ice was crushed, was calibrated for each ice sample measurement with a standard mixture of CO2 in nitrogen and oxygen. For further details on the experimental procedures and the dating of the successive ice layers at Vostok, see Barnola et al. (1987, 1991), Lorius et al. (1985), and Petit et al. (1999).

Trends
There is a close correlation between Antarctic temperature and atmospheric concentrations of CO2 (Barnola et al. 1987). The extension of the Vostok CO2 record shows that the main trends of CO2 are similar for each glacial cycle. Major transitions from the lowest to the highest values are associated with glacial-interglacial transitions. During these transitions, the atmospheric concentrations of CO2 rises from 180 to 280-300 ppmv (Petit et al. 1999). The extension of the Vostok CO2 record shows the present-day levels of CO2 are unprecedented during the past 420 kyr. Pre-industrial Holocene levels (~280 ppmv) are found during all interglacials, with the highest values (~300 ppmv) found approximately 323 kyr BP. When the Vostok ice core data were compared with other ice core data (Delmas et al. 1980; Neftel et al. 1982) for the past 30,000 – 40,000 years, good agreement was found between the records: all show low CO2 values [~200 parts per million by volume (ppmv)] during the Last Glacial Maximum and increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations associated with the glacial-Holocene transition. According to Barnola et al. (1991) and Petit et al. (1999) these measurements indicate that, at the beginning of the deglaciations, the CO2 increase either was in phase or lagged by less than ~1000 years with respect to the Antarctic temperature, whereas it clearly lagged behind the temperature at the onset of the glaciations.

References
Barnola, J.-M., D. Raynaud, A. Neftel, and H. Oeschger. 1983. Comparison of CO2 measurements by two laboratories on air from bubbles in polar ice. Nature 303:410-13.

Barnola, J.-M., D. Raynaud, Y.S. Korotkevich, and C. Lorius. 1987. Vostok ice core provides 160,000-year record of atmospheric CO2. Nature 329:408-14.

Barnola, J.-M., P. Pimienta, D. Raynaud, and Y.S. Korotkevich. 1991. CO2-climate relationship as deduced from the Vostok ice core: A re-examination based on new measurements and on a re-evaluation of the air dating. Tellus 43(B):83- 90.

Delmas, R.J., J.-M. Ascencio, and M. Legrand. 1980. Polar ice evidence that atmospheric CO2 20,000 yr BP was 50% of present. Nature 284:155-57.

Jouzel, J., C. Lorius, J.R. Petit, C. Genthon, N.I. Barkov, V.M. Kotlyakov, and V.M. Petrov. 1987. Vostok ice core: A continuous isotopic temperature record over the last climatic cycle (160,000 years). Nature 329:403-8.

Lorius, C., J. Jouzel, C. Ritz, L. Merlivat, N.I. Barkov, Y.S. Korotkevich, and V.M. Kotlyakov. 1985. A 150,000-year climatic record from Antarctic ice. Nature 316:591-96.

Neftel, A., H. Oeschger, J. Schwander, B. Stauffer, and R. Zumbrunn. 1982. Ice core measurements give atmospheric CO2 content during the past 40,000 yr. Nature 295:220-23.

Pepin, L., D. Raynaud, J.-M. Barnola, and M.F. Loutre. 2001. Hemispheric roles of climate forcings during glacial-interglacial transitions as deduced from the Vostok record and LLN-2D model experiments. Journal of Geophysical Research 106 (D23): 31,885-31,892.

Petit, J.R., I. Basile, A. Leruyuet, D. Raynaud, C. Lorius, J. Jouzel, M. Stievenard, V.Y. Lipenkov, N.I. Barkov, B.B. Kudryashov, M. Davis, E. Saltzman, and V. Kotlyakov. 1997. Four climate cycles in Vostok ice core. Nature 387: 359-360.

Petit, J.R., J. Jouzel, D. Raynaud, N.I. Barkov, J.-M. Barnola, I. Basile, M. Benders, J. Chappellaz, M. Davis, G. Delayque, M. Delmotte, V.M. Kotlyakov, M. Legrand, V.Y. Lipenkov, C. Lorius, L. Pépin, C. Ritz, E. Saltzman, and M. Stievenard. 1999. Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica. Nature 399: 429-436.

Raynaud, D., and J.-M. Barnola. 1985. An Antarctic ice core reveals atmospheric CO2 variations over the past few centuries. Nature 315:309-11.

CITE AS: Barnola, J.-M., D. Raynaud, C. Lorius, and N.I. Barkov. 2003. Historical CO2 record from the Vostok ice core. In Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global Change. Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge, Tenn., U.S.A.

Revised February 2003

It is infantile and 100% wrong said that economic growth is the cause. The main cause is the Green opposition to nuclear and the destruction of rain forest in Grazil, Africa, Indonesia, Burma, Bolivia, Venezuela

We are at 415ppm CO2 and rising quicker than ever. This stuff stays there for a long time – as in centuries. There is no feasible tech to remove it at scale. Throw in methane and NOx emissions and we are at 450ppm equivalent.

Our emissions have to be negative. Yet our civilisation is 80-90% fossil dependent.

Its nearly 2 deg C on the north pole today.

The first graph is so stupid, it shows fossil fuel use still incresing in 2070 and this guy tries to imply it shows a reduction because the ratio is smaller! Does he actually understand the subject matter of the video?…must try harder

When did China reached 9%gdp??.. This video says in spite of us withdraw from green peace agreement, they are the best in maintaining green energy things..

Population growth and consumption are what destroys the envrionment.

What he said – It is not about the CO2 only. It includes – pollution – deforestation – desertification – animal extinction ( insects included) – water shortage and other stuff. The planet is a resource – we are soon to exceed the overdraft.

How about starting with telling me just where the climate has actually changed. I mean, what a load of twaddle. How many major disasters are there that require massive amounts of rebuilding? Maybe a couple a year, and most of those are in areas that are not heavily built up. All I see here is a couple of morons debating something they really haven't got a clue about. Perhaps they should research that old saying – get a life! rofl!

And the good news is that there are now four times as many polar bears than there were in 1960, and all 73 of the climate models used by the UN/IPCC predicted temperature rises of between 2 and 10 times what they actually were- guessing by rolling dice would have yielded better predictions.
We would be well served by more CO2 in the atmosphere- pollution is the problem. The best estimates suggest that 500,000 people living in Europe are killed each year as a result of toxic emmissions. Nobody is killed by CO2 in the atmosphere, and wouldn't be even at 10 times what it is now.