Overcast and quiet this early Monday on California’s north coast — outside my apartment the world seems slow in moving, as if putting off a hardscrabble reality a few minutes longer.
And the forecast does call for more rain this week, starting maybe as early as tonight, and getting fairly heavy by Wednesday — or so they say.
Although hard to believe in its rapid approach time-wise, summer astronomically ends tonight about 7:30 Pacific time, when the autumnal equinox arrives, signaling our slow descent into darkness as afternoon light diminishes for the next three months until winter solstice — a most-incredible, awesome system, huh?
Until mankind started messing around with so, so many fossil-fueled machines.
(Illustration: Detail of M.C. Escher’s ‘Relativity‘ found here).
In 1712, Thomas Newcomen, a British ironmonger, built and marketed the first widely-used steam engine and humanity was off to the material races. When all this industrial revolutionizing started, the amount of a small, but most-potent greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, found in the air was in the 250-275 parts-per-million (ppm) range, and now some 150 years later, our planet is taking hold of 400 ppm — the last time CO2 was this huge, like maybe a million years: ‘One thing that is certain: humans have never lived in a world where CO2 has been this high.’
Even in our current climate-change reality, some people were far-ahead of the curve — in 1957, the discovery by US oceanographer Roger Revelle and chemist Hans Suess revealed the oceans won’t be able to carry the CO2 load as a lot of people had previously figured.
By way of conclusion, Revelle remarked that “Human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.”
Revelle, though, really didn’t fully understand the significance: People’s attitude toward the rise of CO2, he would write in 1966, “should probably contain more curiosity than apprehension.”
Ocean anxiety has given way to not even a simple inquisitiveness — the example is from this week’s UN Climate Summit in New York, where the biggest parts of this planet are near-about ignored.
From the Guardian this morning:
But the summit is guilty of a major sin of omission: the ocean, over two-thirds of the planet, is completely absent from the programme.
It is neither one of the eight “action areas” on which governments and other key players are invited to announce bold new commitments, nor one of the “thematic sessions” where states and stakeholders will share solutions.
The summit is keeping its feet firmly on dry land and is highlighting the huge gap between scientific knowledge and political action.
The Global Ocean Commission is dismayed that the ocean appears to have been relegated to the status of an afterthought, something to bring up occasionally in the context of other, apparently more essential, concerns.
This is particularly shocking coming at the end of a year in which the ocean has been consistently listed among the most critical elements of the climate change challenge, by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), and numerous scientific studies and reports – including our own report released in June.
Science is showing us that there can be no solution to the climate challenge without a healthy ocean, which is currently in sharp decline.
The ocean absorbs a quarter of man-made CO2 emissions, and has taken on 90 percent of the extra heat generated since the industrial revolution.
Without the ocean to clean up our mess, the impacts of climate change would already be far more severe.
…
By omitting the ocean, the summit is sending a very negative message.
As an event billed as an opportunity to catalyse commitments to action in the areas most important for keeping global temperature increase below 2C.
Yet the message is painfully clear: despite the science, for some at least the ocean is not a top priority for climate action.
All reports indicate this so-called summit is a facade of bullshit, anyway. And the above only adds to the BS factor.
Despite yesterday’s ‘People’s Climate March,’ where an estimated crowd of more than 400,000 paraded through the streets of New York — along with thousands more in London, Paris, Berlin — all in protest of non-action from the world’s leaders regarding climate change, which is getting short-changed in the media.
Odd, TV news acted as if the event was a local deal, and not all that important. In a spectacle geared for a wide audience, a slow leak.
Via HuffPost:
Well, so much for that idea.
It seems climate change remains one potentially world-shattering issue that just can’t get any respect on television.
No Sunday morning show except MSNBC’s “Up” so much as mentioned climate change, or the march.
“NBC Nightly News” was the only evening news show to do any segment on it. (ABC devoted about 23 seconds to the topic in its evening show, and CBS spent exactly zero seconds on it.)
Cable news, with the exception of Al Jazeera America, mostly looked the other way, save for a couple of segments on CNN and MSNBC.
Luckily for people who are actually interested in climate change, there were other places to go.
The march received robust coverage online, and “Democracy Now” covered the entire thing live.
Alternate insights into the details of disaster.