Month: July 2011

“…but, sandbags and nuclear power should never be in the same sentence.”

Tom Friedman of the NYTimes writes:

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

“The only answer can be denial,” argues Paul Gilding, the veteran Australian environmentalist-entrepreneur, who described this moment in a new book called “The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.” “When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required.”

“If you cut down more trees than you grow, you run out of trees,” writes Gilding. “If you put additional nitrogen into a water system, you change the type and quantity of life that water can support. If you thicken the Earth’s CO2 blanket, the Earth gets warmer. If you do all these and many more things at once, you change the way the whole system of planet Earth behaves, with social, economic, and life support impacts. This is not speculation; this is high school science.”

It is also current affairs. “In China’s thousands of years of civilization, the conflict between humankind and nature has never been as serious as it is today,” China’s environment minister, Zhou Shengxian, said recently. “The depletion, deterioration and exhaustion of resources and the worsening ecological environment have become bottlenecks and grave impediments to the nation’s economic and social development.” What China’s minister is telling us, says Gilding, is that “the Earth is full. We are now using so many resources and putting out so much waste into the Earth that we have reached some kind of limit, given current technologies. The economy is going to have to get smaller in terms of physical impact.”

We will not change systems, though, without a crisis. But don’t worry, we’re getting there.

Tim DeChristopher, the young climate activist who monkey-wrenched an illegal federal land give-away, is due for sentencing later this month.  Just in time, this documentary will be premiering with stories and video of a new, more militant breed of climate activists, who aren’t waiting to see if the “system”, so horribly gamed by fossil funded disinformation, will ever take action on the scale necessary to stave off catastrophe.

It’s the young people that get it, like the young people got civil rights. It’s been the young people who have moved this country out of slavery, out of child labor, into women’s rights, worker’s rights, a 40 hour week, and a decent wage.

It’s the young people who don’t ask if our soldiers are gay, just if they can do their jobs. It’s the young people who get environment, and get climate change.  Look around at the geriatric tea-party brigades denialism, and you’ll understand that this is a fight we are going to win.  But patience may not be sufficient – we may not have enough time. If we want this to happen, we may just have to stand up and yes to what’s right, and no to what’s wrong.

Rolling Stone has it:

This question of how far to take the fight to stop global warming has haunted activists for years.  But now that more conventional solutions, such as a global treaty to cut greenhouse-gas pollution, are dead, the issue is more pressing than ever.  As the crisis grows, the temptation to turn up the volume with more dramatic and attention-grabbing protests will only increase.  Climate activists often speculate about who will emerge as the Martin Luther King of the climate movement.  But it may be equally relevant to ask who will emerge as the Malcolm X.

No surprise to those who saw this video last year, Dr Willie Soon, one of the most frequently cited climate deniers with any science background, (although his Phd is in aerospace engineering, not climate..) is in the news, as a new Greenpeace report shows where the bodies are buried.

Soon has admitted the details are correct, that he has received a million dollars in funding from a rogues gallery of climate criminals – according to Desmogblog,

“The documents show that Willie Soon has received at least $175,000 from Koch family foundations (Soon is a key player in the Koch brothers’ climate denial machine, as Greenpeace documented previously), $230,000 from Southern Company, $274,000 from the American Petroleum Institute, and $335,000 from ExxonMobil, among other polluters.”

Soon is also well known as one of the authors of the pathetically flawed and inaccurate “study” originally mailed to scientists with the so-called “Oregon Petition”  documents, wherein Dr.Arthur Robinson mocked the document up to make it appear to be from the august National Academy of Science, drawing a rare and stern rebuke from the Academy.

That sordid affair, of course, was the topic of yet another video, below.

Continue reading “Willie Soon: Powered by Exxon”

The Winnepeg Free Press:

A 500-kilometre walk over treacherous Arctic terrain has resulted in a possible explanation for why sea ice in northern waters is melting so much more rapidly than anyone thought it would.

“We’re trying to understand why the ice is melting so fast,” said Simon Boxall of the Catlin Arctic Survey. “It’s not just down to simple warming. There are more complicated processes.”

Continue reading “Yet another Feedback. Why Arctic Ice is melting so fast.”