Thick ground fog and chilly this way-too-early Wednesday here on California’s north coast, and really quiet.
This the first day of 2014 — and your point?
This past year, it seems to me, has to have been one of the fastest on record. The Boston Marathon bombings — April 15 — feels as if it were yesterday, or maybe the day before, and the rest of the surging months appear to have just flown into right now. Time doesn’t really care for calendars, or even clocks, it just keeps on keeping on, and apparently it’s up to us to stay up.
And there’s no getting ahead of time, no matter the circumstance.
A lot of shit was kicked down the road, and most of it was bad. One most-major circumstance is climate change, and in the telling, might have doomed us all.
(Illustration: Salvador Dali’s ‘Alice’s Evidence‘ found here).
In November, the UN held its bullshit climate-change conference in Warsaw, Poland, and the affair ended like all the previous such endeavors, a near-total bust. Or maybe, even worse.
Via CounterCurrents:
A distressing aspect of the conference came when four major developed countries took actions in contradiction to fighting global warming.
• Japan — the fifth largest carbon polluter — announced it was breaking its pledge to reduce greenhouse gases by 25 percent of 1990 levels by the year 2020, blaming the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster.
• Canada and Australia recently declared they would not support the Green Climate Fund — the UNCCC program to transfer money from the developed to the developing countries to assist them in dealing with climate change.
• Conference host Poland, a major coal producer, worked with the World Coal Association to simultaneously host the International Coal and Climate Summit in Warsaw. (Greenpeace and others protested outside the coal meeting.)
COP19 was permeated with corporate lobbyists from “fossil fuels, big business groups, carbon market and financial players, agribusiness and agrofuels, as well as some of the big polluting industries,” according to the oppositional “COP19 Guide to Corporate Lobbying.”
Corporations appeared at previous COP meetings but witnesses say never in such large number.
No one in power gives a fat-rat’s ass. Even as the environment goes to shit. And as I’ve stated here before, just about every new climate report carries a disclaimer of sorts, saying in about the same words, this shit is happening/occurring faster than anticipated — I’ve seen this for years, now.
And so this week — from the Guardian just yesterday:
Temperature rises resulting from unchecked climate change will be at the severe end of those projected, according to a new scientific study.
The scientist leading the research said that unless emissions of greenhouse gases were cut, the planet would heat up by a minimum of 4C by 2100, twice the level the world’s governments deem dangerous.
The research indicates that fewer clouds form as the planet warms, meaning less sunlight is reflected back into space, driving temperatures up further still.
The way clouds affect global warming has been the biggest mystery surrounding future climate change.
Professor Steven Sherwood, at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, who led the new work, said: “This study breaks new ground twice: first by identifying what is controlling the cloud changes and second by strongly discounting the lowest estimates of future global warming in favour of the higher and more damaging estimates.”
“4C would likely be catastrophic rather than simply dangerous,” Sherwood told the Guardian.
“For example, it would make life difficult, if not impossible, in much of the tropics, and would guarantee the eventual melting of the Greenland ice sheet and some of the Antarctic ice sheet”, with sea levels rising by many metres as a result.
The research is a “big advance” that halves the uncertainty about how much warming is caused by rises in carbon emissions, according to scientists commenting on the study, published in the journal Nature.
Hideo Shiogama and Tomoo Ogura, at Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies, said the explanation of how fewer clouds form as the world warms was “convincing”, and agreed this indicated future climate would be greater than expected.
But they said more challenges lay ahead to narrow down further the projections of future temperatures.
Looks bad, and this makes it worse:
The anti-climate effort has been largely underwritten by conservative billionaires, often working through secretive funding networks.
They have displaced corporations as the prime supporters of 91 think tanks, advocacy groups and industry associations which have worked to block action on climate change.
Such financial support has hardened conservative opposition to climate policy, ultimately dooming any chances of action from Congress to cut greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet, the study found.
“I call it the climate-change counter movement,” said the author of the study, Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle.
“It is not just a couple of rogue individuals doing this.
“This is a large-scale political effort.”
Hello, new year, and fuck you — and some advice for both us and Alice: “My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.”
Duh!