Just as John F. Kennedy set his sights on the moon, Al Gore is challenging the nation to produce every kilowatt of electricity through wind, sun and other Earth-friendly energy sources within 10 years, an audacious goal he hopes the next president will embrace…
The Nobel Prize-winning former vice president…
Ouch!
… said fellow Democrat Barack Obama and Republican rival John McCain are “way ahead” of most politicians in the fight against global climate change.
Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog (Lambert, where’s my “Department of Analytical Tools”??).
Watch this first amazing video. It is 16-minute long but worth every second (and see this BBC background page):
Those of us old enough to have lived through the 1980s remember Bhopal as a major industrial disaster in 1983. On December 3, 1984, a Union Carbide pesticide plant (UC was bought by Dow Chemical in 2001) released poisoned gas that killed an official estimate of approximately 3,800 people (actually doctors on site claim that 15,000 died within a month). Over 500,000 have been affected by inhaling the gas. Read more
Seasoned polar scientists believe the chances of a totally ice-free North Pole this summer are greater than 50:50 because the normally thick ice formed over many years at the Pole has been blown away and replaced by huge swathes of thinner ice formed over a single year.
This one-year ice is highly vulnerable to melting during the summer months and satellite data coming in over recent weeks shows that the rate of melting is faster than last year, when there was an all-time record loss of summer sea ice at the Arctic.
“The issue is that, for the first time that I am aware of, the North Pole is covered with extensive first-year ice – ice that formed last autumn and winter. I’d say it’s even-odds whether the North Pole melts out,” said Dr Serreze.
If it happens, it raises the prospect of the Arctic nations being able to exploit the valuable oil and mineral deposits below these a bed which have until now been impossible to extract because of the thick sea ice above.
Twenty years ago, June of 1988, Jim Hansen of the Goddard Space Institute presented the first sound data showing human involvement in changing the Earth’s climate. Since then all of his predictions, from temperature rise to melting of the polar ice caps and the glaciers, have come true. With new data, a more comprehensive understanding of the feedback mechanisms and better modeling, he sees much worse to come: sea level rises that will displace hundreds of millions of people, floods and drought on a scope and scale far beyond anything known in human history, extinction of half or more of the species on the planet and collapse of entire ecosystems.
Not to worry, though; we still have twenty years before it all spirals hopelessly out of control.
“Bottom line, decreasing fossil fuel use in the developed world by 30% nets a total increase of carbon emissions of nearly 30% using current trends in India and China alone, not to mention the rest of the underdeveloped world.”
Please feel free to check my sources, assumptions and math. I will gladly revise accordingly.
So, my first post, and first blogwhore, all wrapped up into one! ;-)
One of the questions that came up lately in my dialogue with commentators is that of the reversibility of major ecological disasters induced by human activity and of the feasibility of reversing such disasters with the tools pertaining to our current technology.
This is a serious question, a very serious one, and I intend to use the popularity of my (French) blog to push the issue a far as needs be. I’ve chosen one example – so that we don’t get locked in trivial generalities – that of a possible interruption of the Gulf Stream due to human activity. The consensus is that such an interruption – which I understand already occurred for ten days in 2004 – would make the temperature in Western Europe drop permanently by 5 to 10 degrees Celsius, that is, 10 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Is the interruption a possibility – even remote – and should the event occur, what are our realistic chances of reversing it?
Well, that’s a good question. Damned if I know the answer. Read more
I always enjoy the Left Coaster (especially eRiposte), and here’s an interesting — and distressing — post from paradox:
As a very concerned Democratic Party constituent and citizen I had a natural expectation [Heh, indeedy!] that the 2008 nomination process would yield tangible policy plans for a number of urgent problems: precise extrication plans from the nightmare in Iraq, specific goals to reach in acquiring universal health care, unambiguous 2020 initiatives to combat global warming, and exact taxation proposals for inequality and deficit reduction start a very long list.
With a ludicrous American political propaganda corps obsessed with hair and preachers, a careful, optimistic Democratic candidate and a 2009 Congressional majority that hasn’t been set yet it’s finally dawned on me[*] that my expectations for the American electoral process remain absurdly high, faith will have to do that policy directions in Iraq, healthcare, global warming and inequality will be aggressively reversed by Senator Obama’s 2009 presidential term.
For now we’ll just have to wait on real details of how to get the country out of the canyon of a ditch we’re in.
Perceiving precise change on a number of big policy issues does not mean real progress will be immediately made on a number of smaller policy issues, however, and their diminutive [!!] nature on the agenda should not mask the enormous amount of good that will happen upon policy change and an Obama presidency. It can be credibly argued that great change over a wide policy swath is impossible, no person or country is capable of it, so the small moves of incremental change are what one should expect.
These are just two small vital acts of change among many that will be initiated in 2009, and of course an Obama presidency means critically important judicial and agency appointive choices that will vastly improve life for Americans in a myriad of small ways. Details of how the big issues facing us are going to be attacked are not clear yet, but it is certain even now that with continued hard work to elect Senator Obama president life for Americans, starting in 2009, will immediately start to get better in a lot of incremental, important ways.
Yes, well. (The creative class threw universal health care overboard a long time ago, so that’s no surprise.)
But…. This is what the fervor was all about? Incremental changes? Tell me again why people are still so excited about this guy? Read more
In a prophetic moment, Jack Webb speaks as the voice of Hillary Clinton supporters trying to explain to the rest of the Democratic Party why marijuana (Obama) is wrong for the party. Notice how he brings up Koolaid…
Now to find where he prophesies the coming of RuPaul.
Al Gore gave a talk at the recent TED Conference. It’s an updated and abbreviated version of his climate change slide show, with both alarming new data on the increasing speed of climate change and some heartening information on the growing public awareness that we need to act and soon. Read more
James Hansen in the Guardian, using real historical data, not computer models:
In a startling reappraisal of the threat, James Hansen, head of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, calls for a sharp reduction in C02 limits.
Hansen says the EU target of 550 parts per million of C02 - the most stringent in the world - should be slashed to 350ppm. He argues the cut is needed if “humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed”. A final version of the paper Hansen co-authored with eight other climate scientists, is posted today on the Archive website. Instead of using theoretical models to estimate the sensitivity of the climate, his team turned to evidence from the Earth’s history, which they say gives a much more accurate picture.
The team studied core samples taken from the bottom of the ocean, which allow C02 levels to be tracked millions of years ago. They show that when the world began to glaciate at the start of the Ice age about 35m years ago, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere stood at about 450ppm.
“If you leave us at 450ppm for long enough it will probably melt all the ice - that’s a sea rise of 75 metres. What we have found is that the target we have all been aiming for is a disaster - a guaranteed disaster,” Hansen told the Guardian.
The fundamental reason for his reassessment was what he calls “slow feedback” mechanisms which are only now becoming fully understood. They amplify the rise in temperature caused by increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases. Ice and snow reflect sunlight but when they melt, they leave exposed ground which absorbs more heat.
As ice sheets recede, the warming effect is compounded. Satellite technology available over the past three years has shown that the ice sheets are melting much faster than expected, with Greenland and west Antarctica both losing mass.
Hansen said that he now regards as “implausible” the view of many climate scientists that the shrinking of the ice sheets would take thousands of years. “If we follow business as usual I can’t see how west Antarctica could survive a century. We are talking about a sea-level rise of at least a couple of metres this century.”
I have already blogged extensively on the current food price crisis affecting mostly poor countries. Now, via Le Monde, we learn, unsurprisingly, that riots have exploded in parts of Africa in response to the cost of food.
“A deal has been agreed that will place a financial value on rainforests – paying, for the first time, for their upkeep as “utilities” that provide vital services such as rainfall generation, carbon storage and climate regulation. Read more
Bush has gone back to DC. Schwarzenegger is headed back to Sacramento. Keep the folks on the ground — firefighters, residents, homeless (4 badly charred bodies found in a canyon) — and the animals — in positive thoughts again tonight, please.
If you can spare donations, there are people in need.
From a post in the 33rd Liveblog at Big Orange today:
“The National Latino Research Center announced Wednesday that it will begin collecting donations for displaced farm workers and their families in North County. Read more
“This clash is an absurdity because on one hand there is much scientific proof in favor of evolution, which appears as a reality that we must see and which enriches our understanding of life and being as such.”
And climate-change doubters…
“Our Earth is talking to us and we must listen to it and decipher its message if we want to survive,” he said.
Does this mean that John Kerry can have his communion wafers back?
I once had a fight with a radical friend over why it was important to stay active politically despite being in a tiny minority, and in the course of her explaination about why she wasn’t, she said, “a Read more
From, of all the unlikely places, Taegan Goddard’s offshoot called Political Insider. From anybody else I would just say this is nuts…but wasn’t Robert B. Reich, Secretary of Labor during the first Clinton administration, given a great deal of the credit for fixing the US budget after the last time the Republicans looted the place?
He’s got an idea. Not a “carbon tax,” which would workd but would not get passed until about the time the sun expanded to the orbit of Venus…but a carbon auction:
The best idea I’ve heard so far to deal with global warming is not a carbon tax. I can’t imagine any politician calling for higher taxes affecting the middle class, or for that matter the middle class — already squeezed by high energy prices and stagnant wages — putting up with it.
The winning idea isn’t a cap-and-trade system, either. That system would allow companies to continue polluting, just require them to buy the right to pollute more from companies that keep their dirtying to a minimum. Today’s biggest polluters — those who’ve done least to reduce their emissions — would be the biggest winners because they’d get the highest caps.
The best idea I’ve heard is described as a carbon auction. Companies would have to bid for the right to pollute. And, most ingeniously, the money raised in the auction would be shared equally by all citizens in the form of yearly dividend checks — just like the residents of Alaska now get yearly dividends for their share of the state’s oil revenues.
I mean, it’s our atmosphere, right? Think of a national park or a national forest. No company is simply allowed to take what they want from it, free of charge. Why should the atmosphere be any different? Read more
They say laughter is the best medicine, and who better to turn frowns upside down than Dick Cheney?
The man who’s entrusted our energy policy to a cabal too nefarious to name publicly — a man who won’t be satisfied until we daisy-cut and nuke the Middle East back to the stone age — made a funny about Al Gore: Read more
