Footnote to Copenhagen

Bill McKibben's report on the Copenhagen conference appears in the new New York Review of Books (March 11, 2010; not free online.) It's a masterful overview with excellent reportage, and fairly restrained in its tone and conclusions, that the weak outcome was the result of political heavyweights gambling with the future.

There was enough blame for everyone, in McKibben's view, including President Obama. The last hope for Copenhagen rested with him, but according to McKibben, "And almost from the moment Obama began to speak, it was clear that there would be no dramatic surprise agreement..." His proposals for the U.S. were weak, he writes, just as Hilary Clinton's offer of financial aid to the poorest countries likely to be most damaged by climate change were vague and inadequate by orders of magnitude. McKibben notes that Obama "helped negotiate" an accord, which "some inside-the-Beltway environmental leaders hailed [it] as a 'breakthrough' because it commited China to doing something..."

At the end of his report, McKibben points readers to the online NY Review blog, and another post on the Copenhagen accord by Tim Flannery. I found it, and it offers a different emphasis on Obama's participation, including an incident I didn't see reported elsewhere. Here are the graphs(I've added the boldface):

When he spoke afterward, President Obama was clearly both frustrated and surprised at the limited progress that had been made toward a resolution. Nor did things go terribly well after that. The key objective for Obama in his meeting with Premier Wen was to secure greater transparency on Chinese emissions targets, and Wen signaled his dissatisfaction by dispatching increasingly junior emissaries to meet with Obama.

Then, much to the annoyance of the Chinese delegation, Obama burst uninvited into a meeting between Wen, Manmohan Singh, Lula da Silva of Brazil, and South African President Jacob Zuma. It was at that meeting—in which no European leaders were present—that the final touches were put on the three-page document that would become known as the Copenhagen Accord. In this agreement, despite Chinese resistance, Obama could claim to have—in principle at least—achieved his key objective of obtaining greater international transparency and accountability for emissions reduction targets;"

This tells a different story. Obama may have had too restricted a goal, and domestic politics may have weighed too heavily at that moment, but it seems that he made damn sure he got something.

Massive fires are only the most visible reason that California is a state of emergency. See post below.

State of Emergency

The Terminator returned from the East Coast to declare California in a state of emergency, due to the tremendous fires in the L.A. area. Apart from the immense damage, the loss of life (2 firemen so far) and the cost of trying to fight them (with no success so far) these fires threaten the Mount Wilson Observatory, and have caused the evacuation of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which means among other things that the Mars rovers have stopped in their tracks.

That the effects of the CA fires extend to Mars is just one of the operative metaphors for this state's plight. Schools are reopening, and starting to cope with budget cuts, and no one involved in them--students, teachers, administrators apart from the highest ones--is being affected. Mandatory furloughs and across the board pay cuts are just the beginning.

The spiral downward is accelerating due to these cuts. The CA economy, particularly hard-hit because of high participation in the housing market bubble, started to falter, and to send less in taxes to Sacramento. Refusing to raise revenues, the Terminator terminated or disemboweled programs mostly for the poor, old and sick. Very heroic. Already the CA economy appears resistant to the improvements seen elsewhere--the official unemployment rate rose to nearly 12%, the highest in more than 60 years. Despite the federal recovery act, construction jobs fell, as did tourist related jobs, the combination hitting the Latino community hardest. But that was even before the decline in pay for state workers, and the loss of jobs because of cut programs. Those effects are now rippling through the economy as well as the society.

Since the Terminator gave in so bravely to the quaint but unaffordable anti-gubment hysteria, the state is helpless when it is clear that government is going to be needed more than ever--and these fires are Exhibit One.

First of all, look at them. These are very powerful fires. And as this eloquent diary attests, this is not even yet fire season. These fires aren't supposed to happen in August, not in southern California. But the entire southwest is parched, in the midst of a multiple year drought. The Climate Crisis is coming to get them, and it's not going away.

Just as these fires threaten the air, the water, the business and public resources of the region and beyond, California's economic tailspin will affect the rest of America and the world economy. But the Terminator plus the perfect storm of a helpless state government and a total leadership vacuum in the state, together forestall much hope that California can fix itself any time soon.

Today's Notes


Andrew Sullivan's blog continues to be an excellent source of news on the continuing protests in Iran.


And thus it must follow as the day the night... A day after several stories on the ramping up of lobbying mega bucks by insurers etc. on health care, there are stories about how the House or Senate proposals are in trouble. With remarkably little substance. Meanwhile, the Senate Health committee Kennedy/Dodd plan cuts costs and includes more people than earlier plans, and Speaker Pelosi promises a bill in August with public option passed by the House. She delivered on cap and trade.


Speaking of which, an excellent, precise analysis of the cap and trade bill by a Harvard economist in an oddly titled interview in Salon.

60

After all these months, it got settled in a day: the MN Supreme Court's unanimous verdict on all counts, the Governor ready to certify, Coleman's concession and so: Senator Al Franken.

Though in his victory speech, Franken made a point of saying that he views himself not as the 60th Senator in the Dem caucus (enough to stop a GOPer filibuster), but the second Senator for Minnesota, he did begin his list of priorities with health care and clean energy. So this 60th Dem could not have arrived at a better time. It changes the calculus on healthcare and climate/energy legislation, just as they both are being hammered out.

It doesn't guarantee anything really, but it's a lot bigger than just one more vote. This could turn out to be one of those pivot points of history.

Specter-graph

Arlen Specter's defection from GOPer to Democrat is the political buzzer button of the day. While it has positive psychological effect for Democrats, and the opposite for GOPer prospects, its ultimate effects are apt to be a lot more complicated, and won't be known for awhile.

Specter will get the Dem nomination in the primary for reelection to the Senate, since the support of Gov. Rendell (who was Specter's assistant when Arlen was Philly DA back in the day) was probably part of the deal, along with holding on to his seniority. With a big Dem majority in PA, he seems likely to win reelection. But...

Either he'll have to do it without organized labor or his candidacy is going to cause problems between Dems and Labor, owing to Specter suddenly backing off supporting the Employee Free Choice Act. Since Specter's primary concern is--as it has always been--his own political skin, he may find a face-saving way to support it with some minor molifying change in the legislation.

Specter's votes in the Senate are hardly in the bag for the Dems, especially on the big ticket items. He'll vote for the budget, but his effect on health care may be complicated. He's against using budget reconciliation to require only a majority on health care, and if the party moves in his direction, thinking that (with Franken seated) they have the 60 votes needed to neuter fillibuster, he's in better position to water down the legislation.

He's also not likely to vote for meaningful cap and trade or any climate crisis legislation. Since that's the most troubled area--partly because the Dem leadership says it isn't applying reconciliation to cap and trade--I don't see Specter's new-found Demhood as all that useful. He's just another quarrelsome conservative Dem.

There are significant unknowns in all of this. It's not an absolute given that the PA GOPers will nominate ultra-conservative Pat Toomey, currently polling so far ahead of Specter for the GOP primary that Arlen had to check out of the GOPer hotel. If Tom Ridge gets into the Senate race, then everything is shaken up, including Specter's reelection. Whereas if Specter had stayed a GOPer, he would have lost the primary, and Toomey would have lost the election to Any Democrat.

If the Dems are smart they will keep the pressure on Arlen, by letting someone run to the left of him for the primary, at least for awhile, until he's made a few meaningful votes. Similarly, the Dem party coffers should not open up to Specter until he's demonstrated that he is a Dem in more than name. Specter has a history of managing to find his principles flexible enough to do what is politically best for himself. The Dems need to use that kind of self-interest in the interest of the Obama agenda.

Class War Revisited

There's no doubt the execs of the Big Three U.S. automakers have screwed things up. They fought the future by spending money to suppress innovation, and to lobby and sue against mileage regulations they could easily have met with known technology.

But their workers didn't do that. And even if those U.S. companies did, the trouble they're currently in does not make them unique in the world. Canada, England, Italy and other nations have had to bail out their own carmakers, or are trying to figure out how right now.

And another big shoe dropped (or was thrown) on Monday when Toyota announced that for the first time in its history it is losing money. This is one of the companies with plants in the U.S. South paying their workers slightly less than union workers get in Detroit. And that sure isn't saving them. Nor is anybody complaining that they make lousy cars.

Once again, the news is rubbing our noses in the difference between the vilified car companies and the sainted banks, which got tens and hundreds of billions with no strings attached. Sunday we learned that more than one and a half of those billions went directly into the pockets of bank execs. And Monday we learned that the rest of it--well, we have no idea where the rest of it went, and the banks are refusing to say. (If you're having trouble expressing your outrage at this, you can always let Cramer do it for you.)

Paul Krugman's column forecasts "months, perhaps even a year, of economic hell" no matter what Obama does, and his previous column lays the responsibility at the feet of these same rich assholes and their tools who were temporarily in the government, helping them loot the treasury to boot, before they return to getting their considerable payoffs in the "private sector."

What Obama can do, as Krugman says, and what he must do is create the track for the transformation of the American economy, and give it a jump start. Part of that will be the programs and the partnerships, to re-industrialize and make conservation and social service revolutions into professions and employment. But part of it will be intellectual and moral leadership, because as Krugman shows, the spending money to fuel a basically insane consumer economy just won't be there. Nor will the world's environmental and economic health permit it.

The change is gonna come. And bringing to a close the super rich and ruling class warfare on everybody else will be part of it, beginning immediately.

A Long Way to Go

The long-term and more permanent damage that global heating will cause has seeped into even American consciousness, though other more pressing problems keep shoving it to the back of the line. Fortunately perhaps, the more proximate crises involving energy and energy costs may well be playing out in a way that, however sideways in intent, does something at least to lessen greenhouse gas emissions.

But the Climate Crisis is also causing--or making worse, or otherwise contributing to--bad stuff that is happening right now, and is very probably going to happen more in the near future, like extreme weather and its consequences. The more familiar crises these patterns cause are paradoxically the ones we seem unequipped to face or understand. Katrina is the poster child for poor government response and comprehension. But the Midwest floods this week exemplify the weakness of our public information systems, particularly our preposterous news media.

First of all, only major newspapers and the broadcast network news (plus certain shows on CNN) paid much attention. And their coverage was silly. John Stewart made fun of the "human dipstick" approach--focusing on reporters standing in flood waters to indicate how high they were--but that really seemed to be the general level of coverage. It was stupid.

Buried in print reports and blog reports were such facts as 25,000 homeless in Cedar Rapids alone, 24 deaths, billions in damages, toxic waters flooding homes, businesses and schools. Serious stuff, you would think.

What is it about the weather that makes people talk and act so dumb? Is it repressed fear? The cheery weather person dancing in front of the map, sing-songing about record this and not-quite-record that. Temperatures in excess of 100 for days on end, and "it's going to be another hot one out there." And so on. Either that, or it's alarmists breaking into programs to sow fear of a thunderstorm. Are these people that weak-minded?

Meanwhile, people die and weaken in the heat, power grids tremble, drought spreads and kills, fires burn trees (killing their carbon-holding capacity, and spewing carbon into the air), while a sudden tornados ambush Boy Scouts and tear through homes, and floods wash away crops (while perhaps poisoning the ground) and destroy homes and businesses.

It's refreshing that at least one presidential candidate--Barack Obama--heeded the request of overstretched law enforcement in Iowa not to come to be photographed looking at the flood. (He filled sandbags in Quincy, Illinois earler.) John McCain however could not pass up the photo op, ignoring the real needs.

We need a lot more of that maturity and judgment. We need media that can actually report on what's going on objectively, and as comprehensively as possible. Because as these events happen more frequently, and they are more damaging, the fact that they are unpredictable results of a predicted pattern can't come as a surprise, or the capacity of government and other agencies to deal with them to decrease suffering and longterm damage will be severely hampered.

Not Safe

Making us safe has been a Bushite mantra, but it's mostly been very expensive marketing for a nonexistent product. When it comes to protecting citizens from the effects of disasters and emergencies at home, a new study by the nonprofit Trust for America's Health concludes, "the United States is not safe."

Individual states and the federal government are at fault: Many states still lack a stockpile of drugs, masks, gloves and other equipment needed to battle a pandemic of diseases, despite five years of constant and detailed warning, the Trust for America's Health said in its report. Overall, federal funding for state and local preparedness will have declined by 25 percent in 3 years if the president's FY (fiscal year) 2008 request is approved," the report reads.

The report focuses on pandemics and public health consequences of emergencies. Also out this week, a Washington Post story that lists some (but by no means all) of the possible consequences for health of the climate crisis."We are not dealing with a single toxic agent or a single microbe where we can put our finger with certainty on an exposure and the response," said Jonathan A. Patz, a physician and epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "Climate change affects everything."

It is the complexity of climate crisis effects that would test even a system ready to respond to known kinds of emergencies--and we still aren't anywhere near that. Public health is still in shambles, and the general infrastructure for emergencies found wanting in the above report applies to more than the health aspects. These effects are already happening, and they will happen more and more in our immediate future.

Months ago, Keith Olbermann quoted Winston Churchill: "The responsibility of government for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact, the prime object for which governments come into existence." This basic civics lesson is also a question for 2008 candidates. What will you do to truly prepare, to truly try to make America safe?

What Losing Arctic Ice Means

In his Nobel speech, Al Gore referred to the melting of Arctic ice, and the prediction that summer ice will be gone in seven years. But apart from the likely extinction of polar bears--which is a grim enough legacy-- what does this mean in the context of Climate Crisis effects?

The AP had a story on this, because some scientists, who initially "shocked" the community by predicting that summer Arctic ice could be gone as soon as 2040, are now saying it looks like it could be pretty much gone by 2012--in five years. The story explains some of the significance.

Jay Zwally is a NASA climate scientist: "The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming," said Zwally, who as a teenager hauled coal. "Now as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines."

The story goes on:

What happens in the Arctic has implications for the rest of the world. Faster melting there means eventual sea level rise and more immediate changes in winter weather because of less sea ice.

In the United States, a weakened Arctic blast moving south to collide with moist air from the Gulf of Mexico can mean less rain and snow in some areas, including the drought-stricken Southeast, said Michael MacCracken, a former federal climate scientist who now heads the nonprofit Climate Institute. Some regions, like Colorado, would likely get extra rain or snow.

Melting of sea ice and Greenland's ice sheets also alarms scientists because they become part of a troubling spiral. White sea ice reflects about 80 percent of the sun's heat off Earth, NASA's Zwally said. When there is no sea ice, about 90 percent of the heat goes into the ocean which then warms everything else up. Warmer oceans then lead to more melting. "That feedback is the key to why the models predict that the Arctic warming is going to be faster," Zwally said. "It's getting even worse than the models predicted."

NASA scientist James Hansen, the lone-wolf researcher often called the godfather of global warming, on Thursday was to tell scientists and others at the American Geophysical Union scientific in San Francisco that in some ways Earth has hit one of his so-called tipping points, based on Greenland melt data. "We have passed that and some other tipping points in the way that I will define them," Hansen said in an e-mail. "We have not passed a point of no return. We can still roll things back in time — but it is going to require a quick turn in direction."

It's Not Just the Heat

It's also the humidity, among other things. The planet is getting more humid as well as hotter, according to a new study. "This humidity change is an important contribution to heat stress in humans as a result of global warming," said Nathan Gillett of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, a co-author of the study. According to this AP report:

The finding isn't surprising to climate scientists. Physics dictates that warmer air can hold more moisture. But Gillett's study shows that the increase in humidity already is significant and can be attributed to gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.

And that's just One More Thing. The same story says that climate scientists have now seen the man-made fingerprint of global warming on 10 different aspects of Earth's environment: surface temperatures, humidity, water vapor over the oceans, barometric pressure, total precipitation, wildfires, change in species of plants in animals, water run-off, temperatures in the upper atmosphere, and heat content in the world's oceans.

The Climate Crisis will continue to offer surprises to nonscientists and scientists alike, because one big shift like this leads to consequences that result in other changes. Some, like drought, are big and obvious. Others, like excessive pressure on plants (including trees) and animals, play out over time, but when plants and animals leave an ecological niche, a cascade of effects can follow fairly quickly.

High humidity causes physical stress to humans, but as we all know it also shows up in behavior---people get short-tempered and miserable, and their judgment is often impaired. The Nobel committee officially recognized the part that the Climate Crisis can have in causing warfare over resources. But it is also likely to cause other stresses that can make warfare an impulsive choice, when cooler heads don't prevail, because there might not be any.

Right now humidity isn't rising everywhere. Australia, South Africa and the western U.S. are getting very dry. There's drought in the American southeast and now in the Great Lakes region (although that is probably caused by warmer winters and less ice melt.) But the humidity is getting higher in the eastern U.S.--you know, where New York and Washington are.

Fix It AND Stop It

This is what I've been afraid of. This is what I saw coming: A debate among climate change experts has some researchers now suggesting that we focus on limiting the damage done by climate change, rather than on passing laws intended to prevent global warming.

This piece by Kate Raiford chooses two advocates to represent these opposing views. On the Fix It side is Sterling Burnett, an environmental ethicist and senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a conservative nonprofit organization in Dallas dedicated to free market solutions. On the Stop It side is J. Drake Hamilton, science policy director at Fresh Energy in Minnesota.

Burnett says we should concentrate on efforts like building seawalls on threatened coasts and innoculating people in Africa who are in greater danger of malaria because of the spread of mosquitos in the regions getting hotter: that is on dealing with the consequences of the Climate Crisis, and even preparing for what effects we anticipate in the short term. Hamilton says that we must reduce greenhouse gases by 60% by 2050 to "protect against the most dangerous consequences" farther in the future, which according to scientists could include the end of civilization and a planet scoured of most life as we know it.

This is not an academic or even political argument (though it has elements of the latter), nor is it just a trumped up debate for the sake of a story. It is a battle for commitment, attention and resources, with the explicit premise--at least in Burnett--that there is only enough to do one or the other.

As consequences of the Climate Crisis become more obvious, more frequent and more serious (even when not everyone agrees to the causal link) the demand for action to respond to effects will grow. We are learning as we go, as we have already in the Californa heat wave of July and early August; there are problems (and solutions) few have anticipated.

The demands to concentrate on Fix It will grow louder. But can we really afford to concentrate only on that? Burnett argues additionally that we don't know enough about what might happen in the future to act now, especially on large scale changes such as dramatically scaling back greenhouse gases and switching to alternative energy.

Hamilton argues that we can't afford not to act to Stop It--stop the heating from reaching the tipping point of global catastrophe-- for scientists are telling us how horrendous the future is likely to be if we don't. Morever, by its very nature we must anticipate it, because the greenhouse gases we'll send into the atmosphere now and in the next decade will affect the climate years later. Once we find out the tipping point is passed and the accumulating climate changes are feeding on themselves, it will be too late to stop it.

Hamilton also maintains that action towards stopping it will improve the present: cleaner energy reduces dependence on foreign oil, reduces pollution and can help create a stronger economy and a healthier world.

Hamilton is right that many of the necessary steps to stop it in the long term will be of benefit in the short term. But those steps alone will not fix it. Wind turbines will not attack malaria; solar power doesn't help elders endangered by heat stroke.

Burnett is right that we have to pay attention to the effects of the Climate Crisis in the short term, in the now. But he is wrong that we would be wasting resources or taking an unnecessary risk by working to stop it. Both are necessary.

They are in fact equally necessary. But the reason I have been pounding on this theme of fix it and stop it is that very soon there is going to be a lot of pressure to fix it, and this is likely to be a right wing theme. Working to stop it has become identified as a left wing theme. Neither side so far embraces both, even though both are crucial. We must be here for each other now. And we must work and sacrifice for our children and grandchildren and the future.

The left so far is largely ignoring the fix it side. And they leave that issue to the right, which will sooner or later take it up, and run with it hard. Some will use it to end efforts to stop it. This is an early indication of that. But we can't let that happen. It is defeatist to say we don't have the resources to do both, before we've tried to do either. But we will certainly waste the precious resources of time and energy by getting into a political war about doing one and only one, take your pick.

We must work simultaneously to fix it AND stop it. Doing both is the test of our civilization. Even if we fail to see this we will surely fail as a civilization, and we will deserve to fail.

Climate Crisis Denial--Lucrative but Lonely

Climate Crisis denying is a lucrative job, but it's getting very lonely. In recent days, scientists who authored the two studies principally used by deniers to support their claims have written opeds saying the deniers are misusing and distorting their data, and that they fully accept the reality of global heating as caused mostly by our years of dispersing greenhouse gases.

One is in the New York Times today. Peter Doran is the coauthor of a 2002 study that found some cooling in Antarctica, which deniers Michael Crichton and Ann Coulter (among others) have cited as proof that heating isn't happening, or that scientists don't agree, or that scientists don't know what they're talking about.

Here's what Doran says...

Our study did find that 58 percent of Antarctica cooled from 1966 to 2000. But during that period, the rest of the continent was warming. And climate models created since our paper was published have suggested a link between the lack of significant warming in Antarctica and the ozone hole over that continent. These models, conspicuously missing from the warming-skeptic literature, suggest that as the ozone hole heals -- thanks to worldwide bans on ozone-destroying chemicals -- all of Antarctica is likely to warm with the rest of the planet. An inconvenient truth?

Another scientist, whose data was misused by the Wall Street Journal and others, corrected the record in a Los Angeles Times oped reprinted here. This was a study of studies by Naomi Oreskes:

My study demonstrated that there is no significant disagreement within the scientific community that the Earth is warming and that human activities are the principal cause.

Papers that continue to rehash arguments that have already been addressed and questions that have already been answered will, of course, be rejected by scientific journals, and this explains my findings. Not a single paper in a large sample of peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 refuted the consensus position, summarized by the National Academy of Sciences, that "most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.

Of actual deniers, one in Virginia, it was revealed today, is on the payroll of coal-burning utilities. A secret coal industry memo calling for more financing of deniers admits that most deniers, scientists or not, have "no involvement in climatology."

As is documented in An Inconvenient Truth, most climate crisis denying research was financed by the fossil fuel industry. And with another $10 billion+ in just the last reported three months soaked in by Exxon-Mobil alone, that financing is likely to grow. Considering all the available cash and the few folks with the credentials to claim it, if climate crisis denying were a stock, every broker in the world would be advising clients to buy it---a high growth opportunity. For as long as it lasts.

How Hot Is It?

Armageddon will start next week said the supermarket tabloid I passed at the checkout. Maybe I should have checked the date. What's going on in the Middle East looks like the start of it.

Meanwhile, most of the U.S. is gripped by the other apocalypse--just as this story asserted that this year so far has been the hottest in the U.S. ever, and it's not even August yet, most of the nation was broiling. Our little coastal strip is foggy but cool, so I wasn't that aware of the high heat elsewhere today, until I posted Climate Crisis "Fix It and Stop It" piece on the usual community blogs, and got some comments at dkos about how insanely hot it was today in the high Rockies and upper Michigan. Southern California is choking, and vast forest fires continue.

So I looked at the Weather Channel tonight for the first time in awhile, and saw a weather map that was solid red--all 80s, 90s and over 100 degree F highs in the east, midwest, south, southwest, west, north, everywhere but a few coastal strips. And the forecast for the coming week is equally brutal. DC over 100, and Detroit mighty close. Boston and New York, Pittsburgh and Philly in the upper 90s.

There is now ongoing drought, the above cited article says, in 45% of the US. And though 2006 may turn out to be the hottest year on record, it would only be beating out 2005.

So how is the Weather Channel, and hence the nation, handling this? They are now outfront about linking global heating to longer, hotter and more frequent heat waves, with thousands of deaths because of them. But that report comes and goes. While we're looking at the very red map (meaning all heat, though it does give a certain meaning to that other red signification on US maps), the weather man is cheerily advising ways to "beat the heat," like playing with water balloons.

After the forecast (cheerful delivery to horrendous information), we return to the ongoing taped dramas of super storms, the Weather Channel's equivalent of horror movies, or maybe reality shows.As bizarre as this schzoid imagery is, it looks familiar. Where have I seen this before?

Then it hits me--this is America in the 50s and 60s, coping with nuclear weapons that could obliterate life as we know it in a second. But the government assured us there was nothing to worry about, nuclear weapons were our friend, and so we were officially cheerful about them, while we were told to duck and cover. In the meantime, the movie theatres and drive-ins were showing horror films about radiation monsters and invaders from space with invincible heat-rays.

This is how we behave in the face of official denial. Our government won't admit or face the problem and so obviously is not going to do anything about it, so our only defense is to not think about it. Or we'd go crazy. Although in trying to pretend we aren't thinkng about it, and we don't know the government is failing us, we are going crazy anyway.

How hot is it? Our leaders have thrown enough money down the sinkhole of Iraqnam to stop the Climate Crisis in its tracks, and go a long way towards fixing the problems it is causing. They have thrown enough destruction into Iraqnam to destabilize the Middle East, and they've crippled our ability to deal with other countries, including those fighting there, and including allies elsewhere, so the American people can only watch as the world tears itself apart.

Any sane government would have a cabinet level Climate Crisis team working on fixing it and stopping it. But then, no sane government would have lied and blundered its way into the Iraqmire. Both failings are crippling the future, and making a lot of people suffer in the present.

So before you duck and cover, don't forget your water balloon.

Climate Crisis: Some Inconvenient Hunters

While oil companies pour millions into absurd ads singing the praises of carbon dioxide, and rabid right swiftboaters spread their usual false stories (claiming that Al Gore and others used five cars to travel a few blocks to a screening of "An Inconvenient Truth," when in fact they all walked), Gore's movie opens to widespread attention, which for the forces of darkness makes it an inconvenient hit.

But that's not all that's happening in the Climate Crisis. NOAA issued its official prediction for hurricane season: 13 to 16 named storms, with 4-6 hurricanes of level 3 or higher intensity. NOAA's predictions last year were way low. Ocean temperatures are warmer than normal, which feeds the storms. Other stories indicate New Orleans is in the crosshairs again this year, and though levees are repaired, there's not a lot of confidence they would hold under the stress of a major storm.

Longterm, the results of two new studies assert that global heating may be more intense than the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predictions--by as much as 78% higher. According to the BBC, the studies take into account various feedback mechanisms not measured in other studies.

And closer to the ground and to today, there's this story:

A recent nationwide survey shows that it's no longer just radical environmentalists who think global warming is real. About half of America's hunters and anglers -- including many who said they voted for President Bush in 2004 -- told pollsters they are witnessing firsthand, in the outdoors, the effects of some form of climate change, according to the results of a nationwide survey of sportsmen released Tuesday by the National Wildlife Federation, an environmental group based in Washington, D.C.The sportsmen are seeing climate change in the form of lakes that no longer freeze over for ice fishing in the winter, fall-hunting seasons without enough snow to track deer and other drastic environmental changes they consider a threat to wildlife, the group says.Of those who say they have seen such changes, the majority attribute those changes to global warming, and many go a step further to blame the burning of fossil fuels as the cause of the warming.

Bushites Discover What's Wrong with Climate

The Washington Post finds further evidence that the Bushites have systematically interfered with scientists paid by the public from announcing any findings that might contradict their faith-based disbelief in global heating. It extends way past NASA (and climate expert James Hanson) to the weather people---you know, the ones who supposedly believe that the increased ferocity of hurricanes has nothing to do with global heating--at NOAA. As well as other agencies where keeping an eye on climate is part of their job.

Apparently what they couldn't forbid or suppress, they censored. Both happened to this guy:

Christopher Milly, a hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, said he had problems twice while drafting news releases on scientific papers describing how climate change would affect the nation's water supply.In November 2005, they agreed to issue a release on a different climate-related paper, Milly said, but "purged key words from the releases, including 'global warming,' 'warming climate' and 'climate change.' "

They purged key words all right. But what did they put in their place, I wondered, so the release made some sort of sense, and didn't look like one of those Freedom of Information Act FBI files with every word blacked out except "the" and "a"?

Of course I realized the obvious answer. In place of "global warming" or "climate change," the Bushites would substitute "liberal." As in "Sea level may rise 20 feet, due to liberals." Or "The consensus of scientists now is that liberals are real, the unfortunate byproduct of human activity." Or "If left unchecked, liberals may threaten life as we know it on planet Earth."

The creative Bushite censor might vary the pattern with the occasional "Democrat" or "secular humanist," or take a foreign policy approach and use "evildoers" and "terrorists." In this way, Bushites can show they support science, as long as it is politics-based.

OCEANS RISING FAST

was the headline yesterday in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Glaciers and ice sheets on opposite ends of the Earth are melting faster than previously thought and could cause sea levels around the world to rise as much as 13 to 20 feet by the end of the century, scientists are reporting today. If the researchers' estimates are correct, a rise in ocean waters projected by the new studies not only would drown many of the low-lying inhabited atolls and islands that are already endangered by rising ocean waters, it also would threaten coastal cities and harbors on every continent.

Scientists have been warning for decades that greenhouse gases from autos and industry are warming the planet and raising the seas, but the studies appearing today in the journal Science are the first to suggest that sea levels could climb as high as 20 feet as a result of global warming. The studies by two teams of researchers are the first to combine data on long-term climate change and sea ice melting from both the north and south polar regions.

Are we living in a science fiction movie? Because it's this kind of headline that the camera fixes on, with dramatic music underneath. Yet this is a real one.

We know we're not living in a science fiction movie because the next scene would have all the world leaders gathered to decide what to do about this crisis. When in the real world they are much more level-headed. Well, level-headed on the greens. On the fairways they bend a little, as their foursome of lobbyists and corporate racketeers chuckles about Miami disappearing under the waves in a few decades. But Jeb will be out of office down there by then, so who cares...

Meanwhile those dizzy scientists, unaware that they are tools of green nazis and the liberal media conspiracy, are saying in relatively plain English:

"This is a real eye-opener set of results," said geoscientist Jonathan T. Overpeck of the University of Arizona, who led one of two teams of university and government climatologists. "We need to start serious measures to reduce greenhouse gases within the next decade, (and) if we don't do something soon, we're committed to 4 to 6 meters (13 to 20 feet) of sea level rise in the future."

The premier climate scientist in the world, NASA's James Hansen's reaction:"The further implication is that we have to get serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions now, not wait 15 years until some magic new technology is available."

Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton geoscientist and member of the university's Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences Program, agreed with Hansen. "These are important papers," he said in an interview, "because they provide new insights into the effects of temperature change on melting ice at both poles. They show how even modest increases in global temperatures could put the Earth in a dangerous spot. We don't have to know for sure how fast the glaciers and polar ice sheets would disappear to realize that this is a serious warning, and by the end of this century we could be locked into an irreversible trend that no technology could reverse."

The conclusions of these scientists came after studies involving several methods of discerning temperatures in the past. The advanced state of glacier melt is confirmed by satellite imagery, the Chronicle story says. The New York Times adds that observation of the glaciers themselves indicates that ice is breaking apart in warming periods, evidence that the process is underway sooner than expected.

"Models are important, but measurements tell the real story," Dr. Zwally said. "During the last 10 years, we have seen only about 10 percent of the greenhouse warming expected during the next 100 years, but already the polar ice sheets are responding in ways we didn't even know about only a few years ago."

But of course these are all delusional radical Muslim Frenchmen who hate our freedom. For the truth on the climate crisis, best check out the sites where rabid right plagarists foam at the mouth on command.But for the sane among us, what does this all mean? This is just--if you pardon the expression---the tip of the iceberg.

This is the interface of the ongoing Climate Crisis we face now with the Earth=Mars doomsday scenario we begin to enter if we don't pay attention and change our ways. From last year to the end of the century, no matter what we do to limit greenhouse gases, we will face Climate Crisis problems. We can ignore them, as we apparently are currently ignoring the prospect of another devastating hurricane season. Or we can deal with them one by one, as if they aren't related, which means we won't anticipate them well enough or in enough time to apply resources most efficiently or even prevent some problems (by protecting cities against sea surges, for instance), or to prepare for them far enough in advance. Only when you see the pattern can you develop a real strategy.

Or we can get over ourselves, stop this immense waste of time and energy, acknowledge the reality of global heating and the Climate Crisis, and do what even those cheap 1950s science fiction films do---get serious about what we can get together and do about it. First, to deal with the problems that could happen because of the heating that is going to happen (caused by greenhouse gases in the past decades), and then significantly lessen the heating we're now creating and will create in the next decade, so that by the end of the century, we might still have coastal cities and a few fellow species to rebuild the planet with.

If you want to get more specific on global heating, what its effects are likely to be and what some "solutions" being researched look like, you can go to this page, where you'll also find more before and after glacier photos.

NO PLACE TO HIDE

It’s the headline we’ve been dreading, yet knew was coming. Warming Hits Tipping Point says the Guardian, because a vast part of Siberia, “ an area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometres - the size of France and Germany combined - has started to melt for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age."

'The area, which covers the entire sub-Arctic region of western Siberia, is the world's largest frozen peat bog and scientists fear that as it thaws, it will release billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere.

It is a scenario climate scientists have feared since first identifying "tipping points" - delicate thresholds where a slight rise in the Earth's temperature can cause a dramatic change in the environment that itself triggers a far greater increase in global temperatures.'

Because of the feedback effect and the resulting release of methane gases, estimates of temperature rises over the next century will probably be revised upward as much as 25% just based on this single finding.

"When you start messing around with these natural systems, you can end up in situations where it's unstoppable. There are no brakes you can apply," said David Viner, a senior scientist at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

"This is a big deal because you can't put the permafrost back once it's gone. The causal effect is human activity and it will ramp up temperatures even more than our emissions are doing."

Various climate scientists and ecologist have been warning that something like this was around the corner. But the oil-drunk Bushheads, soaked in flatulent denial, are so far behind on the climate crisis that the public is also several steps from understanding the nature and dimension of the problem, and especially what must be done.

The argument about how aggressively to curb greenhouse gases that has absorbed everyone now becomes an argument primarily about responsibility to the far future. If we have passed the tipping point in Siberia it means that nothing anyone does now, not even a 95% reduction in carbon dioxide, is going to stop the melting.

That is, any reduction now or in the near future MAY help even in the short term, so it's worth doing, but if people expect it to happen and it doesn't, they must be prepared to know that what they are doing now is really for the far future.

Meanwhile, the things that are going to have to be done first to deal with the inevitable in that short term aren’t even being discussed, because the Bushheads and their supporters deny anything truly serious is happening. Another danger we face is the public not understanding that cutting emissions, etc. probably won’t benefit them in their lifetimes (except in terms of healthier air and water, of course) and so they could refuse to continue to switch to clean renewable and sustainable energy, thus condemning the future to even greater horrors, such as the biotic earth as we know it.

That's why we have to begin attending to the future, and thinking about it as clearly as we can. In this case especially, it helps us to focus on what kinds of things we need to do in appropriate time frames: what should be we doing now for the near future, the next 10 or 25 or 50 years, and what must we do now and for a long time, if there is to be a future beyond that.

"Dr. Memory?"
"Y-e-sss"
"Do you remember the future?"
"Yeesss"
"Well, forget it!"
---The Firesign Theatre: "I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus"


This past week, from July 12th to the 15th, a global Technology, Entertainment and Design conference was held in Oxford, England to consider the future, including the roles of politics, the environment and social issues in shaping 21st century life.

Among the more than 300 participating scientists, technologists, thinkers, designers, musicians and playwrights were Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis and Nokia director of design strategy Marko Ahtisaari.

From the fairly sparse reports (mostly from the BBC), this conference seems to represent the usual confusion of which futurism is heir to. There seem to be a lot of technologists plugging their products (as well as plugging them in, except for the wireless of course) and authors flogging their books. Every expert ignores the field of every other expert. And one biotechnologist extols the complexity of life while proposing to apply reductionist techniques to create more artificially.

Though held in Europe for the first time, this has been a high profile event in the U.S.: the first TED conference saw the unveiling of the Apple Macintosh, the Sony compact disc, and mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot's demonstration of mapping coastlines with his discovery of fractals. Bill Gates, architect Frank Behry and musician Herbie Hancock have been featured speakers.

In advance of the event, Oxford announced the formation of its 21st Century School, created from an endowment by computer pioneer James Martin, to study issues such as climate change, technology, disease and aging societies.

"Our century is very, very special, " Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, told the conference. "It is the first where humans can change themselves... Whatever happens in this uniquely crucial century will resonate in the remote future and perhaps far beyond the Earth."

In reviewing recent scientific achievements and challenges, such as genetics and biotechnology, and the conundrums of recent physics, Rees felt that the greatest challenge is posed by the science of complexity.

Rees, a cosmologist, has not been particularly optimistic about the human future. Playing on the Churchillian phrase 'our finest hour', his recent book is called "Our Final Hour." He warns that technology is creating "as escalating variety of potential disasters," from climate change to artificially created epidemics and in the far future, abuses of robotics and nanotechnology.

At the conference he emphasized the human potential. "If you represent the Earth's lifetime in a single year, the 21st Century would be a quarter of a second in June... We are not even halfway through our allotted time on Earth before the Sun itself burns out."

Another speaker, Craig Venter, described the sheer
amount of life on this planet of which we are utterly ignorant.
On an ocean voyage around the world Venter took a seawater sample every 200 miles, and found new species of life each time. In one place, a single barrel contained 1.3 million previously unknown genes, and 50,000 new species.

Yet the lesson Venter drew from this was not appreciation or preservation, but the need to try to create artificial life. "Only by trying to build it will we truly understand it," he says.

It seems Rees' fears are well founded.

According to reports, this year’s tech gadgets seemed to emphasize new uses of wireless technologies. But several speakers also emphasized that the silicon based lifestyle is exceeding the speed of life, and that the explosion of confusing, trivial if not meaningless choices of tech-enabled consumerism may not be all good. There are studies to back some of this up, such as those showing productivity dropping under the onslaught of email, and housework actually taking more time now than a century ago.

Asked about the digital media future, one expert predicted “fifty years of chaos.” With these folks, who could predict anything else?

Scotched in Scotland

The G8 Summit in Scotland is over. As honcho of the convening country that set the agenda, Brit Prime Minister Tony Blair was widely praised for placing world poverty and the climate crisis at the top of the agenda---and he would have been even without the show of support after the terror bombings.

After that things get murky. When it came to farm subsidies reform, European nations stuck close to their self-interest. But on the larger questions, it was Bushcorps that spoiled the apples. Even on the one major accomplishment---doubling aid to Africa---Bush had to brag that it didn't cost the U.S. anything it wasn't already going to spend.

But the Climate Crisis was as usual the main rot.Bushcorps prevented the conference from endorsing real emissions goals, while continuing to argue that Kyoto standards would wreck the U.S. economy, economic studies to the contrary. But the Bushitters had at least a possible point that the emphasis should be placed on alternative energy. But in the end, it was all talk. Bush didn't commit a cent to development or research.

Bush is going to be remembered for many crimes against the country: lying the U.S. into a war of aggression, turning a surplus needed to address pressing present and near-certain future problems into a devastating deficit---those will probably dwarf the others. But one crime against the world, it's people and it's life will be what he's doing and failing to do about the climate crisis. He's the new and global Nero. Bush twaddles while the world burns.