We would have to lose a few cities (mostly, ironically if not deservedly, in the South) before Republicans... would start taking a problem like anthropogenic climate change seriously....It's almost exactly like the business with cigarettes and lung cancer...
amen
ReplyDeletehttp://grist.org/list/climate-scientists-its-basically-too-late-to-stop-warming/
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If you like cool weather and not having to club your neighbors as you
battle for scarce resources, now’s the time to move to Canada, because
the story of the 21st century is almost written, reports Reuters.
Global warming is close to being irreversible, and in some cases that
ship has already sailed.
Scientists have been saying for a while that we have until between 2015
and 2020 to start radically reducing our carbon emissions, and what do
you know: That deadline’s almost past! Crazy how these things sneak
up on you while you’re squabbling about whether global warming is a
religion. Also, our science got better in the meantime, so now we know
that no matter what we do, we can say adios to the planet’s ice caps. . .
Here’s what happens next: Natural climate feedbacks will take over and,
on top of our prodigious human-caused carbon emissions, send us over an
irreversible tipping point. By 2100, the planet will be hotter than it’s
been since the time of the dinosaurs, and everyone who lives in red states
will pretty much get the apocalypse they’ve been hoping for. The subtropics
will expand northward, the bottom half of the U.S. will turn into an
inhospitable desert, and everyone who lives there will be drinking recycled
pee and struggling to salvage something from an economy wrecked by the
destruction of agriculture, industry, and electrical power production.
Water shortages, rapidly rising seas, superstorms swamping hundreds of
billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure: It’s all a-coming, and
anyone who is aware of the political realities knows that the odds are
slim that our government will move in time to do anything to avert
the biggest and most avoidable disaster short of all-out nuclear war.
Even if our government did act, we can’t control the emissions of the
developing world. China is now the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases
on the planet and its inherently unstable autocratic political system
demands growth at all costs. That means coal. . .
So, welcome to the 21st century. Hope you packed your survival instinct.
> Global warming is close to being irreversible, and in some cases that
ReplyDelete> ship has already sailed.
‘I withdraw’: A talk with climate defeatist Paul Kingsnorth
By Wen Stephenson
http://grist.org/climate-energy/i-withdraw-a-talk-with-climate-defeatist-paul-kingsnorth/
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6598
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What Love Looks Like
A conversation with Tim DeChristopher
by Terry Tempest Williams
Published in the January/February 2012 issue of Orion magazine
. . .
TERRY: And you were born?
TIM: ’81.
. . .
TERRY: In personal terms, your life has been in limbo for the
last two years. And that’s my word, not yours. But is it fair
to say you haven’t known what your future is going to be?
Because you didn’t know when you were going to go to trial,
or whether you’d be convicted. How has that felt?
TIM: I think part of what empowered me to take that leap and
have that insecurity was that I already felt that insecurity.
I didn’t know what my future was going to be. My future was
already lost.
TERRY: Coming out of college?
TIM: No. Realizing how fucked we are in our future.
TERRY: In terms of climate change.
TIM: Yeah. I met Terry Root, one of the lead authors of the
IPCC report, at the Stegner Symposium at the University of Utah.
She presented all the IPCC data, and I went up to her afterwards
and said, “That graph that you showed, with the possible emission
scenarios in the twenty-first century? It looked like the
best case was that carbon peaked around 2030 and started
coming back down.” She said, “Yeah, that’s right.” And I said,
“But didn’t the report that you guys just put out say that
if we didn’t peak by 2015 and then start coming back down that
we were pretty much all screwed, and we wouldn’t even recognize
the planet?” And she said, “Yeah, that’s right.” And I said:
“So, what am I missing? It seems like you guys are saying there’s
no way we can make it.” And she said, “You’re not missing anything.
There are things we could have done in the ’80s, there are some
things we could have done in the ’90s—but it’s probably too late
to avoid any of the worst-case scenarios that we’re talking about.”
And she literally put her hand on my shoulder and said,
“I’m sorry my generation failed yours.” That was shattering to me.
TERRY: When was this?
TIM: This was in March of 2008. And I said, “You just gave a speech
to four hundred people and you didn’t say anything like that. Why
aren’t you telling people this?” And she said, “Oh, I don’t want
to scare people into paralysis. I feel like if I told people the
truth, people would just give up.” And I talked to her a couple years
later, and she’s still not telling people the truth. But with me,
it did the exact opposite. Once I realized that there was no hope
in any sort of normal future, there’s no hope for me to have
anything my parents or grandparents would have considered a normal
future -- of a career and a retirement and all that stuff -- I realized
that I have absolutely nothing to lose by fighting back. Because it
was all going to be lost anyway.
> And she literally put her hand on my shoulder and said,
ReplyDelete> “I’m sorry my generation failed yours.” That was shattering to me.
"Looking out from the hotel balcony shortly after eight
o’clock, Kerans watched the sun rise behind the dense
groves of giant gymnosperms crowding over the roofs of
the abandoned department stores four hundred yards
away on the east side of the lagoon. . .
So he left the lagoon and entered the jungle again,
within a few days was completely lost, following the
lagoons southward through the increasing rain and heat,
attacked by alligators and giant bats, a second Adam
searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun."
But maybe we've got it all backwards!
ReplyDeletehttp://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/New_Cryonet/message/374
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Ice age imminent.
"rick_potvin"
Mon Aug 22, 2011 9:47 pm
The next ice age is overdue. I've looked into it pretty closely since last
October. Ice ages set in quickly when they begin. This next one could set in
within 100 years. Given the various times estimated need for reanimation, it
appears to me that there is a serious overlap of oncoming ice age with every
estimated cryopreservation time required for reanimation. In effect, I now
believe cryonics is in big trouble. This is a potential "showstopper". It would
behoove everyone in cryonics to investigate this. If I'm right (I think I am),
there are vast implications. How did we all miss this? How did Ettinger miss it?
How did you, the reader, miss it? The next ice age has been a serious blind spot
in cryonics... until this moment when I just revealed the danger of it to you. I
often do not understand the power of my own insight. My ability to detect
significan[c]e in issues startles even me.
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http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/New_Cryonet/message/456
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Re: Ice age imminent.
rick_potvin
Thu Sep 1, 2011 11:32 am
. . .
Your ideas on CO2 are all wrong. CO2 is as low as its ever been and if it goes
much lower will destroy all plant life on earth. If you inject sulfer [sic] dioxide
into the atmosphere to cool the planet, the ice age will come on sooner. Global
warming is a hoax concocted in 1974 to counter act the increasing awareness of
the coming ice age that began in 1957 when the heliosphere began to shrink. Your
information is all propaganda designed to deindustrialize and depopulate the
planet. You've been duped. . .
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YMMV, I guess. ;->