Subtitle: “Hey, kids! Guess what time it is?”
”It’s Ecocidal Time, it’s Ecocidal Time!”
Commenting on a guest post by Ron Gremban to Green Car Congress, Bill Young responded to an uneducated objection to arguments from climate scientists with the following, which is well worth repeating:
Regardless of whether you believe an observational science to be true science, it is indisputable that humankind is pumping CO2 into the atmosphere and atmospheric CO2 is increasing. There is laboratory science which shows that CO2 is essentially opaque to infrared radiation. Global warming can be reasonably hypothesized merely based on these two factors. (This hypothesis was first presented over 100 years ago by August Arrhenius.)
Those who model the atmosphere, whom you claim are not doing ‘real’ science, use a multitude of factors and interactions in their attempt to do so rather than just these two.
Humanity is faced with a decision based on the increasing atmospheric CO2.
If you plot temperature versus concentration of carbon dioxide, 2 crucial points about the planet’s current situation become evident:
- 1. There is warming in the pipeline, like it or not. Today (pt. A) lies far outside the cluster of data points from the Vostok core. Those points represent a rough historical relationship between temperature presuming the climate is at equilibrium. Right now, we are experiencing what climate modelers call the transient response to CO2 forcing. If CO2 concentrations froze now, global temperatures would continue to rise until the climate reached equilibrium
- 2. That equilibrium point lies outside any experience the planet has had in the past 420,000 years, even without any future increase in greenhouse gas concentrations (as the current CO2 level is unprecedented). A further increase places the planet in an even farther outside the envelope of anything in the “recent” geological record, to use a geologists warped definition of the word recent.
The choices:
- Do a variety of actions to try and reduce the rate of increase of atmospheric CO2 or possibly to reverse it. For society to do these actions will cost money and be disruptive. If global warming is real and environmentally disadvantageous, this choice will minimize the adverse effect. If GW is not real the money will have been wasted.
- Do not restrain CO2 emissions. Obviously, if global warming is not true, this is the wiser choice. If GW is real and disadvantageous, this choice maximizes the adverse environmental and social impact of GW.
Economists with the UN have projected that atmospheric CO2 can be stabilized at the current level for about 1% of world economic output. This gives an order of magnitude cost for option 1.
What are the costs of being wrong when you say CO2 does not cause GW? Some of the possible consequences of option 2 being incorrect:
The IPCC (Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change) has declared that global warming is ‘unequivocal’ and that human activity has played a significant role in these changes. Of course, some in government know on which side their bread is buttered (whatever that means), It is the side other than to which we would equate Justice and Environment. It is on the cide of killing a planet-wide ecosystem.
- Acidification of the oceans and collapse of fisheries.
- Desertification of the US midwest, currently the national breadbasket.
- Elimination of spring and summer snowmelt in the Rocky Mountains with resulting dramatic reduction of surface water for communities both east and west of the Rockies. Possible collapse of agriculture in irrigated California.
- Loss of land to sea level rising, particularly in low lying places such as Florida and Bangladesh.
- Possible disruption of the Gulf Stream with resulting collapse of agriculture in northern Europe and western Asia.
- Shifting the timing and severity of the Indian monsoons with adverse effects on agriculture in that country.
- Melting of the tundra permafrost in Alaska, northern Canada and Siberia with defrosting of methane hydrate and massive releases of methane.
I believe even for a GW skeptic, a serious investment in CO2 reduction is a good bet.
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In an attempt at fair and balanced representation, I have relayed an observation from Joe “Pay No Attention to the Campaign Contributors behind the Curtain” Romm. There! That was fair and balanced, wasn’t it?
Neither Clinton nor Obama, if elected president of the United States, would have the power to stop global heating. OTOH, “both have solid plans to avoid catastrophic climate change,” Romm assures us. In a new article for Salon entitled, “Obama and Clinton plan to cool it“, he examines their proposals.
O.K., enough with the fair and balanced… Back to frothing at the mouth! Jesse Jenkins heard the following on NPR this morning at 7:30. His comment, “What an awful way to wake up.”
Hillary loves up to Ole King Coal.
Mo Coal Luv
Jesse Jenkins is nonplussed about Hillary’s appeal to the powers at be and her apparent ignorance about the true costs of coal and especially about the destruction mountain top coal mining is wrecking on both communities and ecosystems in Appalachia.
To Jesse, it sounds like Hillary has drunk the (sour) kool-aid being peddled by coal-front group “Americans for Balanced Energy Choices”, which is the front organization for Ole King Coal that has funded televized debates.
My comment to his observation:
Going by a post by Alex Tinker and Jenny Bedell-Stiles, the yoof have yet to accept that no matter who wins in November, Big Coal already has won.
Jeff Biggers suggests an ambitious and risky Appalachian strategy for Barack Obama:
Thanks and a tip of the coal helmet to David Roberts.
Speaking of dispensing kool-aid to all the dodos on the bus, the Sietch Blog is incensed about the belching of lies about coal from the Big Coal front organzation — “Americans for Balanced Energy Choices”.
The last time I checked, climate change did not equal greater security. Yet, as I well know, this is about “hyberbolic discounting” rather than logical thinking.
Hur-rah, Hur-rah, Hur-rah. Step Right Up! The Kool-Aid is going fast and I know that you are jonesing for some more fuel for your SUV.
The pitch goes likes this: “Imagine a world where our country runs on energy from Middle America instead of the Middle East.” So, the pitched, a.k.a., the great unwashed, are supposed to believe that coal equates to energy security. The problem is that there is no such thing as “clean coal”. What ABEC acutally wants, and the pitchmen and pitchwomen are there to get, is your endorsement to continue to destroy life as we know it on the planet… in a “patriotic fashion“, of course.
Because he perceives that the other candidates “all love coal”, Toronto Treehugger Lloyd Alter writes, “Come back, Dennis Kucinich, all is forgiven and we need you.”
“Hillary,” perceives Alter, “is running off about mountaintop removal and now promising coal plants:”
“And,” follows Alter, “so is Obama:“
No mention of Mr. Chipmunk (my spouse’s label for McCain). Still you better believe that he is a minion of Emperor Fossil.
My observation, “Well, Lloyd, they don’t necessarily love coal, as much as they need the money.”
Via Green Car Congress, we learn that a team of researchers warns that the ecological and economic consequences of ocean acidification are difficult to predict but possibly calamitous, and that halting the changes already underway will likely require even steeper cuts in carbon emissions than those currently proposed to curb climate change.
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