Hoot to Climate Change
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Interesting, new evidence of climate change via The Atlantic Wire:
A study carried out over thirty years and published recently in the journal Nature Communications showed that while grey tawny owls had higher survival rates in colder environments, brown owls were becoming more common.
Dr. Patrik Karell from the University of Helsink, the leader of the journal study, tells the BBC that they’ve gone from around 30 percent of the tawny population in Finland to around 50 percent, despite the fact that the grey color trait is the dominant gene when mixed.
The brown owl’s “survival has improved as winters have become warmer,” says the Dr. Karell, as quoted in the BBC. “…climate-driven selection has led to an evolutionary change in the population.”
Bird in hand.
(Illustration found here).
And another important side issue of global warming is the sneeze.
From the New York Daiy News:
Climate change has lengthened the ragweed allergy season in states like North Dakota and Minnesota by 16 days and up to 27 days in parts of Canada, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reveals.
The same researchers published an earlier study showing global warming in urban areas like New York spawned ragweed with five times more pollen than that of their rural cousins.
“This is a caution light. Pollen seasons may be getting longer,” said Lewis Ziska, the USDA plant expert who headed the research team.
On the flip side, Ziska’s research shows hay fever season getting shorter in Southern states such as Arkansas and Texas.
He said climate change has delayed the winter’s first frost in the Northern states, allowing ragweed to grow longer.
Ziska and his colleagues based their results on 15 years of pollen data. Hay fever allergies afflict 35million Americans annually.
The medical enviornment view of that: Higher carbon dioxide (CO2) levels associated with global warming may have doubled the amount of pollen that ragweed produces, mostly over the past four or five decades. Another doubling could occur by the end of this century. Pollen production rose almost 400% with a 200% increase in the amount of CO2. Findings show that high CO2 levels have increased the potential production of ragweed pollen and may produce pollen earlier.
And another way to get some kind of grip on climate change and diet — eat bugs, at least according to a new study.
Entomophagy, the eating of insects, is fairly gross to most of us, but according to a 2006 report by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, the livestock sector accounts for a sizable portion of humans’ greenhouse gas emissions — nine percent of CO2 emissions (much of this originates in changes in land use), 37 percent of methane and 65 percent of nitrous oxide emissions.
Bugs, however, are high on protein and don’t take much to live — insects generally produced less methane, nitrous oxide and ammonia both per unit of body mass and per unit of mass gained than pigs or cattle.
Hamburger or a bug? Alan Dangour, of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, one of the researchers in the new study, has his doubts on the menu shift: “It is clearly worthwhile investigating alternative sources of high-quality protein,” Dangour wrote. “However, the practical barriers to eating insects (in Westernized societies) are extremely large and perhaps currently even likely to be insurmountable.”
Birds and bugs and man.
Climate change — President Obama’s people have tried to raise the drama by calling it ‘global climate disruption‘ — and is by far the biggest shit-storm facing man, birds and bugs today.
And yet, US peoples are the most ill-informed folks on the planet about this enormous threat — Only 35 percent of Americans saw climate change as a serious problem, according to a 2009 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.
The future will not repent.
From Climate Central in a post on Monday:
Now, many scientists insist that recent human activity, beginning about 250 years ago, is having such a significant environmental impact on the Earth’s climate, geography, and biological composition that we have actually entered into a new period of geologic time.
That means this change to the “age of man” — or the “Anthropocene” epoch — could be distinctly recognizable when future geologists sift through tiered cakes of rock thousands of years from now.
…
None of these (skyscrapers, the highways, and the suburban sprawl) are likely to leave as indelible a mark as the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is causing global climate change, sea level rise, and ocean acidification.
And though deforestation is rapidly transforming vast swaths of the planet’s landscape today, Kolbert points out that the most serious and noticeable consequence of this in the future could be a mass extinction event caused by the clear-cut.
It may be thousands of years before our particular era can be truly verified as a new epoch, but scientists say the measurable transformations that are happening now are so rapid and distinct they make this time a good candidate for a name change.
And if nothing else, some say that adopting the Anthropocene name will raise awareness of the fact that humans are having enduring affect on the planet.
And that, as they say, is no hoot.
Obvious — Yet, Maybe Not
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Watching daylight turn into rain, there comes a feeling that what is perceived as reality is just noise to a lot of people, creating a blip in the mojo, a trip in the ether, and forcing disaster onto the multitude.
In casual observation, the statement, ‘fish need water,’ requires no explanation, either for it’s actual-factual basis, or it’s pure absurdity in sight, sound and emotion — the seemingly apparent message, however, like a shitload of other stuff nowadays, remains oddly like a variation in that old standard, it’s all in-the-eye (or, the-brain) of the beholder.
One telling segment in the original movie (the first one), ‘The Matrix,’ occurs within a training program when Morpheus explains a bottom-line about the system: “You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it. Were you listening to me, Neo, or were you looking at the woman in the red dress?”
Thus it is in soon-to-be 2011 A.D., distractions — sex, lies and videotape — keep the obvious out of sight, or if seen, the vision is so twisted and distorted, people question its validity.
And in this mega-information age, even a rational near-sane person would have trouble.
So beware the source of information.
(Illustration found here).
UGLY VOICES, UGLY FACES
One obvious source is Fox News.
As I explained in a post last week, a survey from World Public Opinion, a project at the University of Maryland, disclosed a shitload of US voters were sorely misinformed on the issues involved with last month’s midterm elections — a major reason is there’s no real, credible MSM as none of the usual media suspects are worth a shit, especially in the faux form of Fox News.
The poll found 9 in 10 voters said that in the 2010 election they encountered information they believed was misleading or false, with 56% saying this occurred frequently. Fifty-four percent said that it had been more frequent than usual, while just three percent said it was less frequent than usual…
Not at all surprising, if one understands Fox News.
And it’s not really all that surprising either how Fox News responded to the validity of the survey — once again the old moniker of attack the messenger, not the message.
From the New York Times:
Asked for comment on the study, Fox News seemingly dismissed the findings.
In a statement, Michael Clemente, who is the senior vice president of news editorial for the network, said: “The latest Princeton Review ranked the University of Maryland among the top schools for having ‘Students Who Study The Least’ and being the ‘Best Party School’ — given these fine academic distinctions, we’ll regard the study with the same level of veracity it was ‘researched’ with.”
And not a whit about the results.
An obvious blowback onto US peoples from Fox News is Sarah Palin and the Tea Party — the country seems to have lost decades in just a few months.
THE ‘GOOD’ UGLY WAR
Another obvious situation is Afghanistan — which might just be much-more obvious than even Iraq at its inglorious peak.
President Obama’s so-called ‘review’ of the war last week was pretty-much pure bullshit and obviously oblivious to the real situation as all kinds of different venues report horror at the doorstep, from the Red Cross reporting the country is more dangerous now than in the last 30 years (covering a lot of killing ground), to US intelligence services, and even from the so-called enemy: In an e-mailed statement, Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said the last nine years of war had proven that increased troop levels had no effect.
“It is a failed strategy, not only on the military side but also in civilian and administrative affairs,” he said. “Public services in Afghanistan have failed. Corruption, insecurity and also the civilian casualties are a result of failed American strategy.
“President Obama is also talking about progress, but it is clear for everyone that the reality is completely the opposite of what he says,” he added.
Obviously the opposite.
If one is not curious about facts and figures and reality, one is doomed.
One horrific view of Afghanistan comes from one of the best reporters literally in the field, Patrick Cockburn, who always takes an off-the-beaten-MSM-path to present an obvious reality — there’s indeed been important changes on the ground this year, but most in favour of the Taliban, and, how the Afghan situation is becoming a repeat of US blunders in the Vietnam saga.
In a commentary Saturday in the Guardian, Cockburn rightfully acknowledges the only real, obvious path is through a political conclusion, not a military one — though the US and NATO have no formulated political plan in hand to do just that — and how much NATO and the US are detested among Afghan peoples:
The generals, diplomats, aid workers, security men and all the others who make up a sort of colonial elite in Kabul may be dancing on thinner ice than they imagine.
Afghans may work for them but do not like them.
One highly educated Afghan who worked for a US aid agency recalled bitterly how “they treated us Afghans as third-class citizens, packed five or six to a room while each foreigner earned five times what we did and had a room of his own”.
Afghans are adept at concealing their real views.
A government official was giving me a bland account of his ministry’s activities.
Bored, I asked if there was anything he would like to say to me unattributably.
“Well”, he said, without changing his smooth tone of voice, “there is no chance of any progress here so long as our country is run by gangsters and warlords.”
But it is to keep these same people in power that the US and Britain are now fighting a war.
And there’s only one obvious end here: The US and NATO to get the shit out of Afghanistan.
However, one knows there’s going to be a shitload more blood and treasure spilled before the big pull out, but it will come, sooner or later, no matter the-then-current situation there, it will come.
UGLY WEATHER
The biggest, most dangerous, and most compelling obvious entity currently facing everybody sucking wind on this planet right now is climate change — no one can hide from it, buy it off, or dismiss it.
The just concluded Cancun, Mexico, climate talks is an example of the terror, with an answer to the quickly-mounting problem still far down the road even with some obligations worked out: Just as much uncertainty hangs over the legal status of the Cancun commitments, which are voluntary — a price paid for reaching consensus. Unless agreements can be turned into legally-binding requirements, there is genuine concern that many countries will only pay them lip-service.
And it will more than the lips caught in the crack.
Read this post at Climate Progress and the comments section to get a feel of how near-futile the attempt to get a handle on climate change.
Climate change/global warming manifests itself, as far as I can tell from the reading, in weather.
Deniers are obviously bullshitting — assholes! Look out your windows!
In the Middle East, of all places, abnormal winter storms have lashed the entire area — climate change has even been involved with those inferno-like forest fires in Israel earlier this month — and in Europe right now, the whole region is being pounded by “freak weather conditions,” creating chaos.
And it’s only going to get worse.
A study from Duke University released in October indicates the big winter snow/rain storms and the summer heat/dry weather for the US comes from global warning via changes in the Bermuda High, an area of high pressure that forms each summer near Bermuda — warm air holds more moisture, as witness the current heavy storms in the mid to eastern part of the country, or the 1,000-year flooding last spring in Tennessee.
Money quote from the study:
The team’s analysis found that as the NASH intensified, its area enlarged, bringing the high’s weather-making western ridge closer to the continental United States by 1.22 longitudinal degrees a decade.
“This is not a natural variation like El Nino,” says lead author Wenhong Li, assistant professor of earth and ocean sciences at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment.
“We thoroughly investigated possible natural causes, including the Atlantic Multivariate Oscillation (AMO) and Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which may affect highs, but found no links.
“Our analysis strongly suggests that the changes in the NASH are mainly due to anthropogenic warming,” she says.
See — seems obvious to me.
Cancún Canard
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Environment, Politics, Weather | Leave a Comment
Hope is a dim bulb for “CopenCun” — so nicknamed the UN climate summit which begins Monday in Cancún, Mexico — in that maybe some of the agreements wished-for during last year’s Copenhagen confluence disaster would be finalized, or even discussed again.
Don’t bet the farm.
(Illustration found here).
As the chief UN official on climate change in Copenhagen stated recently that to expect any kind of accord out of Cancún would be “a bridge too far.”
What we’re seeking/looking for is any kind of bridge.
And from what I’ve read about the upcoming summit, not much will be done, other than to hold onto the flimsy agreements reached in Denmark without any new kind of approach to the most-greatest threat now facing the planet — the probable result in Mexico will allow the climate-change can to be kicked further down the pot-holed road to the meeting in South Africa next year.
One hundred ninety countries to be represented in Cancún.
In face of the above-mentioned ‘most-greatest threat,’ mankind’s entire attempt to secure a handle on this living-environmental nightmare is complete gobbly-gook, laced high with toxic, near-about-incomprehensible bullshit.
Check this intro nonsense from UNFCCC:
The United Nations Climate Change Conference to be held in Cancun, Mexico, from 29 November to 10 December 2010, encompasses the sixteenth Conference of the Parties (COP) and the sixth Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP), as well as the thirty-third sessions of both the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI) and the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA), and the fifteenth session of the AWG-KP and thirteenth session of the AWG-LCA.
WTF!
Yes, one can follow the whole spiel if one knows the proper alphabet sequence.
And this from The Ecologist — a quick “five-minute” guide to the 14 days of Cancún babble — and the Copenhagen more-than-disaster event:
Last year’s meeting saw the largest-ever collection of people come together for a climate change meeting, with 4,000 reporters and more than 120 heads of state in attendance, including US president Barack Obama and UK prime minister Gordon Brown.
The BBC sent 20 reporters to cover the event, but is reported to be sending just one to Cancun.
No heads of state are expected to attend, with energy secretary Chris Huhne and climate change minister Greg Barker due to represent the UK.
No actual agreement was reached, but instead a two-page accord was produced.
This called on industrialised countries to list their emissions targets, for all countries to monitor their emissions with complete transparency, to promote low-carbon technology and stated an ambition to keep global temperature rises below 2C.
An agreement is needed to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which was the last major international agreement for industrialised countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
This protocol expires in 2012.
No countries signed the so-called Copenhagen Accord, so it is not legally binding, though they did agree to ‘take note of it’.
‘TAKE NOTE OF IT’ — question mark.
Not only is the fight against quick-evolving climate change itself, but humanity’s complete survival scheme is also greatly hampered by another man-made burden, Climate Zombies.
People who actually deny climate change are either so-damn ignorant they should be institutionalized, or they’re greedy, dumb-ass lovers of big oil, big money and big-lipped arrogance.
And what makes these deniers so infuriating to me is the glaring factoid that they’re obvious liars as all one has to do nowadays is look out one’s window, or on occasion go outside, to actual witness climate change — it’s the freakin’ weather you assholes!
And for the first time it seems, science and actual weather events coincide.
From Newsweek and Science Nails the Blame Game.
Finally, climate scientists see a way to stop being so wishy-washy and start assigning blame, through a technique called “fractional risk attribution.”
This technique uses mathematical models of how the atmosphere would work if we had not goosed carbon dioxide to 389 ppm (from 278 before the Industrial Revolution), plus data about ancient (“paleo”) climates and historical (more recent) weather.
The idea is to calculate how many times an extreme event should have occurred absent human interference, explains climate scientist Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and the probability of the same extreme event in today’s greenhouse-forced atmosphere.
Result: putting numbers on extreme weather.
In their biggest success, climate scientists led by Peter Stott of the British Met Office analyzed the 2003 European heat wave, when the mercury rose higher than at any time since the introduction of weather instruments (1851), and probably since at least 1500.
After plugging in historical and paleo data, and working out climate patterns in a hypothetical world without a human-caused greenhouse effect, they conclude that our meddling was 75 percent to blame for the heat wave.
Put another way, we more than doubled the chance that it would happen, and it’s twice as likely to be human-caused than natural.
That’s one beat shy of “Yes, we did it,” but better than “There’s no way to tell.”
In that scenario, ditto the amazing Russian heat wave this past summer and the seemingly-endless flooding in Pakistan — climate change and major weather events.
And for you climate zombies/deniers/liars there’s even “crazy, extreme weather” right now right in the good-ole-USA.
And in the vernacular maxim of the age, the ‘new normal,’ will be the horror of these continually-expanding weather acting-badly events.
In Saturday’s New York Times, an opinion piece by Minnesota farmer, Jack Hedin, which depressingly describes arrival of the future, and it ain’t pretty.
A couple of bits (h/t Climate Progress):
The news from this Midwestern farm is not good.
The past four years of heavy rains and flash flooding here in southern Minnesota have left me worried about the future of agriculture in America’s grain belt.
For some time computer models of climate change have been predicting just these kinds of weather patterns, but seeing them unfold on our farm has been harrowing nonetheless.
…
In August 2007, a series of storms produced a breathtaking 23 inches of rain in 36 hours.
The flooding that followed essentially erased our farm from the map.
Fields were swamped under churning waters, which in places left a foot or more of debris and silt in their wake.
Cornstalks were wrapped around bridge railings 10 feet above normal stream levels.
We found butternut squashes from our farm two miles downstream, stranded in sapling branches five feet above the ground.
A hillside of mature trees collapsed and slid hundreds of feet into a field below.
…
The 2010 growing season has again been extraordinarily wet.
The more than 20 inches of rain that I measured in my rain gauge in June and July disrupted nearly every operation on our farm.
We managed to do a bare minimum of field preparation, planting and cultivating through midsummer, thanks only to the well-drained soils beneath our new home.
But in two weeks in July, moisture-fueled disease swept through a three-acre onion field, reducing tens of thousands of pounds of healthy onions to mush.
With rain falling several times a week and our tractors sitting idle, weeds took over a seven-acre field of carrots, requiring many times the normal amount of hand labor to control.
Crop losses topped $100,000 by mid-August.
…
Climate change, I believe, may eventually pose an existential threat to my way of life.
A family farm like ours may simply not be able to adjust quickly enough to such unendingly volatile weather. We can’t charge enough for our crops in good years to cover losses in the ever-more-frequent bad ones.
We can’t continue to move to better, drier ground.
No new field drainage scheme will help us as atmospheric carbon concentrations edge up to 400 parts per million; hardware and technology alone can’t solve problems of this magnitude.
Read the entire piece — a literary, articulate farmer.
During weekdays on cigarette breaks out behind the liquor store where I work, there’s always tractor-trailer trucks moving around, backing up, pulling forward, or just sitting at idle, making deliveries at a back loading dock of the 24/7/364 (closed on Christmas Day) Safeway super market next door.
Emblazed across a few of them is the phrase: Safeway — Ingredients For Life.
And what an ironic truth to that — do people, especially US peoples, fully understand and grasp the situational fact of where actual foodstuffs actually comes from, and what an arduous process it is to get those ingredients for life to Safeway shelves?
According to UC Davis: Anticipating a world population of 9 billion people by 2050, global agriculture faces the daunting challenge of increasing food production by 70 to 100 percent in the next four decades, without significantly increasing prices.
How to feed all the freakin’ peoples when the globe adds the equivalent of “two Pakistans or three Mexicos every four years” – along with disastrous regional climate bursts like those recounted above by Minnesota farmer, Jack Hedin.
Despite being late in the game, new research will begin shortly to analyze food production and climate change.
A $200 million, 10-year research project, known as the Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) and operate via the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP) — more alphabet-soup — will seek ways to adapt agricultural needs as the global climate changes.
According to Bruce Campbell, director of CCAFS: “Climate change threatens to alter growing conditions so rapidly and dramatically as to require an intensive effort that draws on the combined talents of all of our centers and partners. We want to bring a sense of urgency to finding and implementing solutions and attracting more support for this effort.”
A decade’s worth of study when the earth needs action yesterday.
In a pre-Cancún conference warning-rally call, the UN’s planning chief, Robert Orr, admonished the planet in saying the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on global warming will be much worse than the last one.
And the last one, the 2007 IPCC, was the first to flash on human’s as the main culprit in a climate change that was “unequivocal” — that report really changed how the vast majority of people viewed climate change and opened the floodgate of deniers/liars.
Orr told reporters last week:
…that negotiators heading for the Cancun conference “need to remind themselves, the longer we delay, the more we will pay both in terms of lives and in terms of money.”
He said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon would make it clear to world leaders in Cancun “that we should not take any comfort in the climate deniers’ siren call.”
“The evidence shows us quite the opposite — that we can’t rest easy at all” as scientists agree that climate change “is happening in an accelerated way.”
“As preparations are underway for the next IPCC report, just about everything that you will see in the next report will be more dramatic than the last report, because that is where all the data is pointing.”
…
If governments “understand the peril that their populations are in, it is much easier to get over the political hurdles to do what you have to do,” he said.
…
Orr said no one should expect “the final deal” in Cancun.
But he said: “The time has come for some decisions on issues and therefore we do want some concrete results.”
Unless it’s too late, of course.
And if the government is broken and unable to create an understanding of ‘the peril’ to its frightened, ignorant populace, than the planet itself is doomed — the US will not be able to move properly against climate change for at least the next two years, even if then.
The old ‘victory gardens’ during WWII will become ‘survival gardens’ in the extreme-near future.
Deniers and Liars
Filed Under Environment, Politics, Weather | Leave a Comment
In the short run (one must remember there’s no long run here), the most dangerous and gruesome aspect of last Tuesday’s elections is the asshole defiance of GOPers to climate change — not only are they turning their brains inward, they dragging the world down with them.
(Illustration found here).
Anyone with any shred of walking-around sense knows that something strange and ominous is happening with the environment, so to deny that goes beyond plain stupid to a spot right at criminal — all this without regard to our children and grandchildren, the ones to really, really experience this horrible shit a-coming.
And up front, too.
Karl Rove is a complete turd-headed, asshole:
“Climate is gone,” said Rove, the keynote speaker on the opening day of a two-day shale-gas conference sponsored by Hart Energy Publishing L.L.P.
And Rove told the trade show, “I don’t think you need to worry” the new Congress will consider proposed legislation to put the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing under federal rather than state regulation. The procedure, known as “fracking,” is responsible for the dramatic growth of shale-gas drilling in formations such as Pennsylvania’s vast Marcellus Shale.
“I think we’re back to a period of sensible regulation,” said Rove, a commentator on Fox News and in the Wall Street Journal.
(H/t ThinkProgress).
And this from Discover magazine:
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is teaming up with Scholastic (which makes bajillions off textbooks and Harry Potter) to produce an “energy” curriculum–one that neglects environmental consequences and climate change, at least in the materials presented so far (PDF).
Scholastic also offers the “United States of Energy,” another lesson plan/educational program “brought to you” in part by the American Coal Foundation.
Meanwhile, in state after state, anti-evolutionists are arguing not only that we should “teach the controversy” around evolution, but that the same goes for other controversial topics as well–and then global warming inevitably gets roped in.
And the strategy has been working.
In the most infamous case, legislators in South Dakota called for “balanced teaching” about global warming in their state.
In one version, their bill justified this assault by noting, “there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can effect world weather phenomena [and] the significance and interrelativity of these factors is largely speculative…”
Speculative my un-washed ass.
Despite all the science, and the eye witness look-see at horrors in weather, from Pakistan to Russia to the heartland of the US of A, the dis-information, falsehoods and jibber-jabber is going full throttle now that the midterm election has supposedly opened the floodgates on being ignorant.
These people do not seem to understand that climate will affect/effect everybody, not just far away lands with its uneducated, poverty-striken peoples, but here in the US, too.
This is an event and its already here for every man, woman and child.
All kinds of related shit, from the ice cap melting, to wildfires going from bad to worse, to just a plain overall science denial are coming together to create a seemingly perfect storm of horror.
In the face of denial, is the constant fact the GOP’s new plan is in reality just shit thrown at the wall of America to see if anything will stick.
Given that US peoples have a short attention span and apparently believe anything on TV, we’re in for some hard times ahead.
To me, it’s unconscionable, immoral and mean-nasty spirited to deny something the rest of the entire, freaking planet knows it happening, and to not only deny it, but make attempts to roll-back efforts to stop or at least ease the damage — all other serious problems could be put aside to wage war against climate change.
But, of course, we’re dealing with the party of No.
Nature Marks the End of the Road
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Environment, Politics, Technology | Leave a Comment
Global warming (oops, sorry, “global climate disruption”) is indeed cancer, an illness as hypothesized by a recent report most-likely a man-made disease and like the earth’s hurting environment, a product of the industrial age.
A new Yale University survey shows only 10 percent of US peoples polled say they are “very well informed” on the issue.
Which means in the neighborhood of 90 percent don’t know jack shit about the biggest obstacle facing humanity in the next few months — yes, the word was months, not years — and how mankind is allowing that horrible climate can to be continually kicked down an ugly road.
(Illustration found here).
In advance of the UN meeting in Cancun, Mexico, where peoples from all over the globe will try again to tackle the knotty problem of climate change, I’ve found a real-good summary on what exactly is happening and what tempestuous times lie ahead.
Written by critic of technology and globalization, Jerry Mander, and re-produced by the UK’s the Guardian on Friday, the post examines a most-vital piece of climate change that’s in reality the most obvious.
A few snips (once again, h/t TheOilDrum):
But there’s a missing link in the discussion, ignored by nearly everyone in the mainstream debate: nature. They speak about our economy as if it were a separate entity, its own ever-expanding universe, unconnected to any realities outside itself, not embodied within a larger system from which, actually, it emerged and can’t escape.
Nature cannot be left out of the discussion.
It may be the most important detail of the entire conversation. Leaving it out of consideration is, well, suicidal.
Here’s the point: never-ending growth on a small planet with finite resources is a profound impossibility. It’s an absurdity.
A fantasy. It’s time to wake up.
Look around you.
The clothes you are wearing, the chair you are sitting in, the implements on the stove, the stove, the floor and walls of your room, its carpet, the lights and the switches, the electrical lines in the walls, your mobile phone, the road outside, the car you drive and all its tyres, wires, metals, glass, fabrics, batteries; airplanes, skyscrapers, tanks, missiles, computers … were all once minerals and metals dug up from the earth, then shipped around the world, transformed, assembled, shipped again to a store near you, and sold.
Or else they were living beings: trees, plants, animals, fibres, corals that had their own independent existence.
Even “synthetics” began as natural elements.
Is your shirt made of polyester? Polyester is plastic. Plastic is oil. Oil used to be dinosaurs, trees, plants.
All of it is nature.
The entire material economy began as part of the earth, buried in the ground, or it grew from it, or it was alive before we transformed it.
But it’s disappearing fast.
And within a part of nature is something mankind is required to have in all circumstances.
Perhaps ultimately even more important is the global scarcity of fresh water.
The World Bank already predicts the next world war will be over water.
Healthy topsoils are also seriously diminished, as are agricultural lands, converted to other uses, and global food supplies, which are ever more expensive.
So are forests and their hundreds of crucial byproducts, as well as biodiversity of every kind, life in the oceans, coral reefs, and key minerals, including coltan (for your mobile phone), lithium, phosphorous, lead, zinc, tin, copper, gold, and hundreds of others.
Following two centuries of voracious exploitation of every mineral, metal and biological resource, we will soon be facing what Daly calls an “empty world.”
Read the entire piece, it’s lengthy, but easily lays-out the entire global-human paradox of our age.
And crazy as it reads, the problem is we’ve only got just one globe.
According to the World Wildlife Fund‘s 2010 Living Planet Report, the earth’s indigenous population has been so-living way, way beyond their means.
Natural resources are being consumed faster than the Earth is replenishing them.
We are currently consuming the equivalent of 1.5 planets to support human activities.
If current trends continue, by 2030 we will need the capacity of two planets to meet natural resource consumption needs and absorb CO2 waste.
And like Sheriff Taggart in Blazing Saddles: Somebody’s gotta go back and get a shitload of dimes!