I agree paradox. Without a discussion of what seems the inevitable ruination of our environment, and most Dems avoid it like the plague, I just don't see the point of discussing "frontrunners."
Gore '08
Posted by Sharon at June 2, 2007 08:10 AM... and what is that tehy say in the grocery store? "Cleanup in Aisle One" (I think someone vomitted)
Posted by Sharon at June 2, 2007 08:12 AMWhen the NASA Administrator can say in an interview that doing anything about climate change would be "arrogant", and there's barely a blip in the media, and he still has his job the next day, it's hard to avoid the thought that we are all doomed.
I want a candidate who'll get the troops out of Iraq, but I'd REALLY, REALLY like a candidate who was serious about trying to keep the North Atlantic Current from failing.
Posted by biggerbox at June 2, 2007 08:43 AMhere you have nailed it to the wall. there has been a great deal of discussion..... I should say, a couple weeks ago, a discussion was being raised about the sacrifices asked for and undertaken by americans during this "war" that discussion has gone away again, in favor of ignorance.
perhaps someone far smarter than I would put a scenario together about what happens when 15% of the oil supply goes away suddenly. this is that ghost in the closet that our politicians are not going to talk to us about. the possibility of this happening? consider how many nations in the middle east and elsewhere could at any point cause one or more oil fields to cease production. remember what hussein did to the oil fields?
if this happens, the world is plunged into depression, that will change all aspects of life. if you don't believe that the supply will always be less, then you don't know "dick" cheney. the profits will be higher, the fences will get larger, the lines for 10 buck a gallon gas will be longer and longer.
perhaps 1% of us in this country can survive without oil now, and that is probably being generous. do you hear your state legislature doing anything more than talking about future independence? the feds? total contradictions.
so, I submit that those in the know are so scared of the chaos to come that they will not discuss it outside of the "let's conserve, shall we?" mode. they know how bad it will be, and they have contingency plans to protect themselves, leaving us to find out how to survive.
I certainly hope I am wrong, and I think there is a 1% chance this is the case. if anyone disagrees, I sure would like to see a positive horizon to sail toward. looking around me, I see no movement en masse toward carrying on without the magic oil.
"we've always had oil, what happened" is a terrifying sound byte for the near future.
watch a couple of the films that predict such future events. science has always been based on science fiction. that is how we learn.
Posted by oldtree at June 2, 2007 08:54 AMwe're getting into real dire straits here
and on a political note, no matter who the candidate is in 2008, it's the people who have to wake up and change their habits. there's lots of people who are trying, in many different ways....i don't look too much to these so-called political leaders as they don't lead very well. democrat or republican. they're very well and permanently tied in to this military industrial fossil fuel addiction fetish. even gore....
keep up the good writing, and sounding those alarms, paradox, i love the read... and the links
Posted by michael72 at June 2, 2007 11:07 AMWell, maybe Prof Hulbe will comment on this new NASA report, but "we" were definitely told by the climate scientists in the UN IPCC 1995 report what was going on with CO2 and global warming, and what needed to be done.
America decided to ignore it, and wouldn't have dreamt of joining even the hopelessly inadequate Kyoto Treaty.
1995 was 5 years before the Greenland glaciers were moving at even the 6 feet a year rate in 2000. Now--seven years of inaction later--they're advancing at 75 feet a year, apparently.
Conservative Repubs denied every aspect of this crisis from Day One and now we're at the end of the rope, where massive draconian intervention will be our only hope. And what are we as a nation paralyzed over? Iraq, Iraq, Iraq!
I believe Edwards has listed global warming as one of the four most crucial issues that he says needs immediate attention, to his credit. Every Dem candidate would sign the Boxer/Sanders bill, which is the strongest global warming legislation in the Congress. Repubs? Not a one would sign it.
As Paradox implies, very, very few people have changed their fossil fuel behavior, mostly because our society was set up to be a fuel/energy squandering system and there are precious few alternatives for many people. Those that have are saints. Changing the incentives and the whole system will require significant government regulations and new carbon taxes.
I'm sure our conservative friends will be as helpful as ever in supporting such measures and not seeking political gain out of a monumental planetary crisis.
Posted by euzoius at June 2, 2007 11:39 AMIf the reality of global warming does suddenly lurch forward through a horrendous hurricane season or the collapse of significant ice shelfs and glaciers, where it becomes impossible to deny that something has to be done, then Gore may be drafted to the presidency. The second half of that if/then formula has appeal to me, the first does not. But I don't see humans taking necessary steps without a lurch forward that makes it impossible to ignore the need to address global warming as the global crisis that I think it is. If it does not lurch forward, we may be like frogs in the pan of slowly heating water, we may never have sense enough to try to fix the problem.
Conversely, a lurch forward could set up a feedback loop where runaway conditions start to pile up. If we wait until that time to deal with global warming, we may be looking at a die-off on this planet. It won't be endangered species disappearing, it could be a major reshuffle of human population as the planet changes and its capacity to sustain 6 billion human beings falls away. You connect the dots, kemosabe.
Posted by angel at June 2, 2007 12:19 PMYeah, and the Icecaps on Mars are melting too.
Devil's Advocate
http://copiousdissent.blogspot.com
There are only two things that will change an adicts' behaviour: When it's all gone and when the descent into rock bottom is complete.
How is this petrol dependency any different?
Posted by shirt at June 2, 2007 03:38 PM"A Guardian investigation has found evidence of serious irregularities at the heart of the process the world is relying on to control global warming.
The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which is supposed to offset greenhouse gases emitted in the developed world by selling carbon credits from elsewhere, has been contaminated by gross incompetence, rule-breaking and possible fraud by companies in the developing world, according to UN paperwork."
"Other errors are said to be more serious, including conjuring up numbers when projects on the ground failed to provide them; giving a green light to commercial projects which make no contribution to reducing greenhouse gases; and approving existing projects which cannot claim to be part of the drive to cut emissions."
"Most of the concern is around the crucial CDM test of "additionality" - proof that a project is delivering cuts in greenhouse gases that would not otherwise have happened. In an unpublished report, one of the CDM board's expert advisers, Axel Michaelowa, examined all 52 Indian projects which had been registered up to May 2006 and found that a third of them failed this additionality test."
http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,2093835,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=12
So get a clear conscience and invest in those carbon credits and forget about that SUV you drive. You've offset it with your purchase that's all that matters. Who cares that there's another "Bush administration" running the CDM board.
Posted by peter at June 2, 2007 08:20 PMMy recent column about Greenland is here. I don't think "chain reaction" is the correct way to express what is happening. The work that Bill Krabill and his group at Wallops are doing, now in collaboration with a research center at University of Kansas is important. NASA has a long-standing recored of funding research in Greenland and the National Science Foundation supports the research center at KU.
More about the airborne laser technology here.
Your link doesn't work, Christina.
Posted by angel at June 3, 2007 06:08 AMChristina, you don't like chain reaction as a description, but I think "chain reaction" is way of expressing a feedback loop that lots of folks will understand, where the description "feedback loop" would not be understood.
I understand the cautious approach of scientists and the language of science as a discipline, but to the extent that cautious language prevents the global biped population from understanding the slow motion tidal wave impact of global warming, cautious language does a disservice. And of course, the scientists who engage in cautious language to retain their grant funding, their jobs in science will be among the population on the planet who will likely be least impacted by global warming. A scientist working at an Institute of Technology or some think tank is likely to have an easy time of it compared with a subsistence farmer on the mudflats of Bangladesh. Is there a moral imperative that should be considered here or should we just accept the inequities of global warming - that the folks most responsible for the human component of global warming are likely to be among the least impacted, where humans least responsible for the disastrous impact will be consigned to starvation? Can you connect the dots between this inequity and the future wave of "terrorists" who will turn to their industrialized neighbors and say, why did you take our lives so lightly? before they trigger the suicide bombs they carry?
Posted by angel at June 3, 2007 06:20 AMChristina's link is now working.
Posted by Mary at June 3, 2007 12:27 PMGlobal warming debunked
By ANDREW SWALLOW - The Timaru Herald | Saturday, 19 May 2007
Climate change will be considered a joke in five years time, meteorologist Augie Auer told the annual meeting of Mid Canterbury Federated Farmers in Ashburton this week.
"It is time to attack the myth of global warming," he said.
Water vapour was responsible for 95 per cent of the greenhouse effect, an effect which was vital to keep the world warm, he explained.
"If we didn't have the greenhouse effect the planet would be at minus 18 deg C but because we do have the greenhouse effect it is plus 15 deg C, all the time."
The other greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen dioxide, and various others including CFCs, contributed only five per cent of the effect, carbon dioxide being by far the greatest contributor at 3.6 per cent.
However, carbon dioxide as a result of man's activities was only 3.2 per cent of that, hence only 0.12 per cent of the greenhouse gases in total. Human-related methane, nitrogen dioxide and CFCs etc made similarly minuscule contributions to the effect: 0.066, 0.047 and 0.046 per cent respectively.
"That ought to be the end of the argument, there and then," he said.
"We couldn't do it (change the climate) even if we wanted to because water vapour dominates."
Yet the Greens continued to use phrases such as "The planet is groaning under the weight of CO2" and Government policies were about to hit industries such as farming, he warned.
"The Greens are really going to go after you because you put out 49 per cent of the countries emissions. Does anybody ask 49 per cent of what? Does anybody know how small that number is?
That's a good angle, stop growing food to stop emissions. Make sense doesn't it? Kill off a lot of people, starve them off the planet. Then those left have it all. This comes from New Zealand folks. They don't allow our aircraft carriers or subs to port of call there.
Posted by peter at June 3, 2007 01:40 PMI read through Christina's recent article on Greenland. (Thanks for fixing the link, Mary.) As always her science is impressive. But the article makes it clear that the speed of the glaciers has increased significantly. And there are three causes under study: water at the base of the glaciers, collapse/loss of tongues of iceshelf at the margin of glaciers, or the combination of the two. My intuition on this says study the combination of the two causes and possibly more subtle dynamics are at work.
Here is the closer on her article: "All in all, I don't think we know enough to warrant the Greenland alarm bells being rung in some corners but that doesn't mean that the bell ringers are not right. There is too much yet to learn for me to have confidence one way or the other."
It does beg the question, when Christina has seen enough scientific data to have confidence in the alarm bells, is there going to be any way to stop the respond to those alarm bells? I think time is of the essence here and the reticence of scientists to speak frankly and get involved in development of public policy could turn out badly. Hence, the moral question, if/when it becomes clear that cautious climate scientists failed to speak frankly about the global crisis and millions of non-industrialized subsistence farmers are starving or being killed in resource wars, like Darfur, will the scientists have any pangs? feel any responsibility to those consigned to die by the lottery of geography?
(Of course, this is all academic and theoretical now that Peter and Augie Auer have shown conclusively that global warming is not really happening at all. Thanks for that bit of fresh aire, Peter!)
Posted by angel at June 4, 2007 07:30 AM