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Saturday 14 August 2010

by: Mickey Z., t r u t h o u t | Interview

While some humans choose to deny the existence of climate change, many have responded by changing the way they live. However, as freelance journalist and specialist on international affairs and geopolitics Gwynne Dyer warns, it's gonna take a lot more than recycled toilet paper to deal with the mess we've created. "We are heading for the brink very fast," he warns, and that's why his new book is required reading. "Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats" has been called "a truly important and timely book," but I'd go much further than that. In fact, I'll declare that this may be the most important book you'll read this year.

To help spread the urgency, I recently spoke with Dyer and the results are below.

Mickey Z.: Just as it seems Americans are finally catching on about greener living, more and more folks like yourself are warning that CFL bulbs, recycled toilet paper and bringing your own bag to the store is not exactly going to turn things around. What do you feel an eco-minded person can learn from "Climate Wars"?

Gwynne Dyer: Most of the things people do to be eco-minded are useful in various way - fewer trees get cut down, less electricity is used, local pollution is cleaned up - but the problem of climate change is global and it can only be dealt with on the global scale. Changing the light bulbs reduces the amount of electricity you use, but if that electricity is coming from a coal-fired power plant you are still pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every time you turn the light on. Unfortunately, there is a limit to the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that we can put into the atmosphere before we reach the point of no return and we are getting close.

MZ: What do you mean by "point of no return"?

GD: The "point of no return" is where we lose control of the process and the warming goes runaway and most climate scientists reckon it is around +2 degrees C (+3.5 degrees F). Once the warming passes that point, the warmth itself triggers various natural "feedbacks" like the melting of the permafrost around the Arctic, which would release huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. So long as it is mainly our own carbon dioxide emissions that are causing the warming, we are in control, at least in theory, because we could stop the warming by stopping our emissions. Past the "point of no return," nature takes over and cutting our own emissions would no longer stop the warming. Stopping our own emissions is not easy, of course, because the fossil fuels we burn - coal, oil and gas - currently provide about 80 percent of the energy we use. Alternative energy technologies are available, but they are not being put into use fast enough to make much difference. At the moment, human greenhouse gas emissions are still RISING at between 2 and 3 percent a year, where they should actually be falling by about 4 or 5 percent a year if we are to have any hope of stopping before we hit runaway warming.

Via CarbonFund.org

July 29, 2010

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its State of the Climate in 2009, saying a detailed review of 10 climate indicators points out that “global warming is undeniable.”

The indicators reviewed in the government’s report, from surface and sea-surface temperatures to measurements of heat content in the oceans and sea levels, have all trended higher. Moreover, in the past 30 years, each decade has gotten warmer with the 2000′s being the warmest on record.

“The NOAA Report, in confirming the certainty and severity of climate change, is a call to action for policymakers, business leaders and individuals to reduce our climate impact,” said Eric Carlson, President, Carbonfund.org. “What makes this report compelling is that it shows the problem is far greater than rising sea levels and heat waves. World food supplies, public health and the viability of many populated areas are also in jeopardy.”

Over 300 scientists from 48 countries analyzed the climate data. “When we follow decade-to-decade trends using multiple data sets and independent analyses from around the world, we see clear and unmistakable signs of a warming world,” said Dr. Peter Stott, contributor to the report and head of climate monitoring and attribution at the UK Met Office Hadley Centre. You can view the report’s summary by clicking here or download the full report.

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Sunday 25 July 2010

by: Jason Mark, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

Geoengineering Threatens to Save the Planet from Global Warming

The sky would look white, but the sunsets would be an out-of-this world explosion of reds and oranges. The clouds would have a chrome sheen to them. Giant dirigibles might dot the horizon in a kind of Blade Runner set piece - but at least they'd keep the temperatures in check.

Such scenes are what we could expect to see if, as some of the world's top climatologists are warning, we have to resort to what's called "geoengineering": large-scale manipulation of Earth to counteract global warming. Worried that global political systems aren't responding to changes in the planet's physical systems, some scientists and environmentalists say that we might need to artificially reduce the amount of sunlight striking the globe and/or manipulate plants or the oceans to absorb huge amounts of CO2. Having unintentionally warmed the planet, we may have little choice but to intentionally cool it back down.

Since they sometimes sound like science fiction (a space-based mirror umbrella?), geoengineering schemes were, until recently, relegated to the imaginations of the tinfoil hat crowd. But at least two geoengineering approaches are now generating serious discussion. In a planetary version of pulling down the shades, Stanford climatologist Ken Caldeira has proposed sowing the stratosphere with sulfur dioxide to catalyze water condensation that would reflect sunlight away from the planet. This idea enjoys the advantage of a real-world experiment - the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinutabo in the Philippines, which blew 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere and cooled global temperatures by half a degree Celsius. Caldeira and others envision using massive artillery or a fleet of high altitude blimps to inject the sulfur aerosol into the sky.

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Monday 19 July 2010

by: Chris Hedges  |  Truthdig | Op-Ed

The human species during its brief time on Earth has exhibited a remarkable capacity to kill itself off. The Cro-Magnons dispatched the gentler Neanderthals. The conquistadors, with the help of smallpox, decimated the native populations in the Americas. Modern industrial warfare in the 20th century took at least 100 million lives, most of them civilians. And now we sit passive and dumb as corporations and the leaders of industrialized nations ensure that climate change will accelerate to levels that could mean the extinction of our species. Homo sapiens, as the biologist Tim Flannery points out, are the “future-eaters.”

In the past when civilizations went belly up through greed, mismanagement and the exhaustion of natural resources, human beings migrated somewhere else to pillage anew. But this time the game is over. There is nowhere else to go. The industrialized nations spent the last century seizing half the planet and dominating most of the other half. We giddily exhausted our natural capital, especially fossil fuel, to engage in an orgy of consumption and waste that poisoned the Earth and attacked the ecosystem on which human life depends. It was quite a party if you were a member of the industrialized elite. But it was pretty stupid.

Collapse this time around will be global. We will disintegrate together. And there is no way out. The 10,000-year experiment of settled life is about to come to a crashing halt. And humankind, which thought it was given dominion over the Earth and all living things, will be taught a painful lesson in the necessity of balance, restraint and humility. There is no human monument or city ruin that is more than 5,000 years old. Civilization, Ronald Wright notes in “A Short History of Progress,” “occupies a mere 0.2 percent of the two and a half million years since our first ancestor sharpened a stone.” Bye-bye, Paris. Bye-bye, New York. Bye-bye, Tokyo. Welcome to the new experience of human existence, in which rooting around for grubs on islands in northern latitudes is the prerequisite for survival.

We view ourselves as rational creatures. But is it rational to wait like sheep in a pen as oil and natural gas companies, coal companies, chemical industries, plastics manufacturers, the automotive industry, arms manufacturers and the leaders of the industrial world, as they did in Copenhagen, take us to mass extinction? It is too late to prevent profound climate change. But why add fuel to the fire? Why allow our ruling elite, driven by the lust for profits, to accelerate the death spiral? Why continue to obey the laws and dictates of our executioners?