Tag Archives | Climate Change

I stumbled across this terrifying thing thanks to a link on Kottke, one on the great blogs (it’s where I nicked this morning’s Cruise Ship video from). This news, reported in Mother Jones, is not so great:

Say what you want about the Obama administration’s relative ignoring of climate issues: Many of his top scientists are paying rapt attention, and they think we’re about to get our butts kicked—although dumping the news at 4 p.m. on a Friday gives some indication of where it sits in federal priorities.

The National Climate Assessment is produced by the US Global Change Research Program, which is tasked with collating climate research from a wide variety of federal agencies and, every few years, distilling it into one major report. The latest, a first draft, is the third such report (the last was in 2009), product of a 1990 law that requires the White House to produce semi-regular updates on climate science to Congress. Today’s report echoes the themes ofearlier editions, and paints a picture that is all the more grim for being an unsurprising confirmation of the dangers we’ve come to know all too well. Here’s the top six things for you to worry about this weekend, according to the report

1. Climate change is definitely caused by human activities. Always nice to hear government officials acknowledge this essential fact. And the report concedes that our only hope of curbing warming is to kick our addiction to greenhouse-gas spewing fossil fuels.

2. Extreme weather is increasing, and that’s our fault, too.  In particular, searing temperatures, heavy rain, and prolonged drought.

The rest is here.

Related: last week I had a barstool conversation with a friendly-seeming  guy who wasn’t positive climate change was as scary as scientists are saying it is. I did my best to bring him up to speed/make him shit his pants in terror by running through some of the well-known impacts: melting Arctic, drought, erratic weather, extra-powerful storms that require tons of money to repair (i.e., New York a few months back), etc. The report Mother Jones discusses covers the same ground except it’s much more thorough than Barstool Steve and it comes directly from scientists working in the field, not just some semi-informed drunk running an alt. paper.

David Suzuki says this stuff all the time and it’s true: we’re in trouble.  We should have started cutting emissions and researching alternative energy on a massive scale more than two decades ago. We’re paying a price for delaying action (which happened thanks to misinformation, propaganda and flat-out lies from climate change deniers, who often have vested interests in the fossil fuel industry).

The global warming bill is only going to go up the longer we ignore it. At some point, it might be too high to pay.

The 18th session of the Conference Of The Parties opened this week in Doha, Qatar. Its mission: find the political consensus to save the planet from catastrophic warming in the little time we have left before shit gets right out of hand (grim note: it might be too late to prevent calamity, although we can probably still mitigate total apocalypse, woo).

It says something about the total failure of morality, vision and courage of the world’s political and business leadership that no one expects anything actually significant to come out of this round of negotiations. I seems pretty reasonable to just give up and stop paying attention. Well fuck that despair shit. Climate change is fact, it’s having real impacts NOW and we need to find international agreement on what to do about it and not ignore it like a bunch of “la-la-I-can’t-hear-you”-ing sissies.

How nasty are things getting? From the Guardian:

While the diplomats dither, time is running out. Global greenhouse gas emissions are still rising, having barely registered a blip from the financial crisis and recession. As a world, we are doing worse than ever on climate change, just when we need to be doing better – if emissions do not peak by 2020, scientists have warned, we may lose forever the chance to contain climate change to manageable levels. On current trends, the world is headed for 6 Celcius of warming, a level not seen for millions of years and that would cause chaos, according to the International Energy Agency. Fatih Birol, chief economist, says: “I don’t see enough of a sense of urgency. We do not have time to waste. We need progress at these talks.” Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN environment program, warns: “While governments work to negotiate a new international climate agreement, they urgently need to put their foot firmly on the action pedal.”

This isn’t alarmist malarkey. This is real. You should be terrified and angry. You should share that terror and anger with your politicians, your friends, your relatives and everyone else you know.

Get on it!

Anyway, The Guardian will probably be the best place on the Internet to follow daily Doha news although I’d suspect good ol’ reliable Desmog Blog will have mandatory reads as well. And you’re welcome to visit the United Nation’s Doha page. They’ve put it on the Internet just for you.

MEANWHILE! Like I suggested in the headline,  Canadians are the bad guys are at Doho. How could we not be? We’re the only country that quit Kyoto! We suck!

(Well, the Conservative government and the Canadians who support them quit Kyoto and dragged the rest of us along. I’m not sure most of us wanted to bail on the treaty. I hope not.)

How suck? ALL THE SUCK. Here’s The Guardian on how much Canada blows:

The cornerstone of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s policy has been to try to approve key pipelines, such the Keystone XL, from Alberta to Texas, the Enbridge Northern Gateway, from Alberta to the West Coast, and Enbridge Line 9, an eastbound pipeline reversal that could see tar-sands crude pumped to Quebec and the Atlantic coast. Harper’s 2012 budget bill, called C-38, replaced the entire Environmental Assessment Act in order to “streamline” approval of major oil and gas pipelines. The 2011 budget slashed funding for Environment Canada by over $222m (£140m), with cuts specifically to departments dealing with climate change, clean air, waste management and water resources.

“The environment assessment regime put in place in the past year would be a laughing stock in a developing country,” said Elizabeth May. “We have a government that is less concerned about climate than the CEOs of major oil companies.”

So that’s where we’re at with climate change. It’s really bad, eh? Happy Friday!

Sorry for this crankypants post. I’ll toss up some animal videos shortly after 3:00 to cheer you up.

A top NASA scientist says this summer’s crazy weather is caused by global warming. From an Associated Press story on the Globe And Mail’s website:

The relentless, weather-gone-crazy type of heat that has blistered the United States and other parts of the world in recent years is so rare that it can’t be anything but man-made global warming, says a new statistical analysis from a top government scientist.

The research by a man often called the “godfather of global warming” says that the likelihood of such temperatures occurring from the 1950s through the 1980s was rarer than 1 in 300. Now, the odds are closer to 1 in 10, according to the study by NASA scientist James Hansen. He says that statistically what’s happening is not random or normal, but pure and simple climate change.

“This is not some scientific theory. We are now experiencing scientific fact,” Hansen told The Associated Press in an interview.

John Gormley is skeptical about global warming. A real scientist working in a relevant field isn’t. Nearly ALL scientists studying climate accept that human activities are warming the planet and the consequences are frightening.

Who are Saskatchewanians going to believe? The answer will say a lot about us.

The mighty George Monbiot has an observation:

They bailed out the banks in days. But even deciding to bail out the planet is taking decades.

Nicholas Stern estimated that capping climate change would cost around 1% of global GDP, while sitting back and letting it hit us would cost between 5 and 20%. One per cent of GDP is, at the moment, $630bn. By March 2009, Bloomberg has revealed, the US Federal Reserve had committed $7.77 trillion to the banks. That is just one government’s contribution: yet it amounts to 12 times the annual global climate change bill. Add the bailouts in other countries, and it rises several more times.

This support was issued on demand: as soon as the banks said they wanted help, they got it. On just one day the Federal Reserve made $1.2tr available – more than the world has committed to tackling climate change in 20 years.

Much of this was done both unconditionally and secretly: it took journalists two years to winkle out the detail. The banks shouted “help” and the government just opened its wallet. This all took place, remember, under George W Bush, whose administration claimed to be fiscally conservative.

But getting the U.S. government to commit to any form of bailout for the planet – even a couple of billion – is like pulling teeth. “Unaffordable!” the Republicans (and many of the Democrats) shriek. It will wreck the economy! We’ll go back to living in caves!

It says everything you need to know about the our society that we literally invest more to keep banks healthy than we do to keep the planet healthy. Scary.