Overcast and cool this way-early Monday morning on California’s northern coast, an apt start to another grind-employment week, and a tale-tell online crank-off to cyber business.
Disavowing Black Friday’s horror, and since consumer spending accounts for about 70 percent of U.S. economic activity, business folks are wow over Cyber Monday — even the day after Thanksgiving US consumers spent more than $1 billion on the InterWebs for the first time.
Ka-ching!
(Illustration found here).
Or more like it — ka-clang!
The UN opens yet another conference on climate change today, this one in Doha, Qatar, but there’s so much “hot air” in the industrial environment the talks will most-likely be just another bullshit party of kick-the-can-down-the-road.
And holding the event in toxic Qatar (50 tons a year of carbon dioxide for each of its 1.6 million residents) could be considered a way-cruel joke.
Jamie Henn, co-founder of the environment group 350.org, said “it is hard to avoid the irony” of Qatar hosting the event. “This is a little bit like McDonald’s hosting a conference on obesity,” Henn told Al Jazeera.
This ongoing masquerade started in 1992 at the highly-touted Earth Summit, from which emerged the Kyoto protocol, the first agreement by earth nations to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, and was finalized in 1997, taking force in 2005. Nearly all nations have now ratified the treaty, with the notable exception of the United States.
And has it worked?
No, and no:
And the two biggest emitters of all — the United States and China — churned out more than enough extra greenhouse gas to erase all the reductions made by other countries during the Kyoto period.
Worldwide, emissions soared by nearly 40 percent from 1990 to 2009, according to the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.
And further no:
Overall, the result is that global emissions have showed no sign of slowing down, as the chart below shows.
In that sense, the Kyoto protocol has been a failure.
But it was unquestionably an important first step in global climate diplomacy.
The question is whether a more ambitious second step will follow in time to avoid unacceptable risks of devastating climate change.
While these assholes wrestle with themselves in Qatar, another nasty sign of the times.
From TG Daily:
The first hard evidence has emerged that the shells of marine snails in the seas around Antarctica are being dissolved by ocean acidification.
These tiny animals are a valuable food source for fish and birds — meaning that their decline could affect the entire marine food chain — and play an important role in the oceanic carbon cycle.
…
“The corrosive properties of the water caused shells of live animals to be severely dissolved and this demonstrates how vulnerable pteropods are,” says Dr Nina BednarÅ¡ek of the NOAA.
“Ocean acidification, resulting from the addition of human-induced carbon dioxide, contributed to this dissolution.”
…
“Climate models project a continued intensification in Southern Ocean winds throughout the 21st century if atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to increase.
In turn, this will increase wind-driven upwelling and potentially make instances of deep water — which is under-saturated in aragonite — penetrating into the upper ocean more frequent,” says Dr Dorothee Bakker from the University of East Anglia.
“Current predictions are for the ‘saturation horizon’ for aragonite to reach the upper surface layers of the Southern Ocean by 2050 in winter and by 2100 year round.”
Now these dates mentioned above are just dates — climate change is way, way faster, and to have a sense of it, just think, day after tomorrow.
And this a sound from yesteryear — Emily Dickinson’s “A Cloud withdrew from the Sky:”
A Cloud withdrew from the Sky
Superior Glory be
But that Cloud and its Auxiliaries
Are forever lost to meHad I but further scanned
Had I secured the Glow
In an Hermetic Memory
It had availed me now.Never to pass the Angel
With a glance and a Bow
Till I am firm in Heaven
Is my intention now.
My intention, too, Emily.