A number of serious global warming, science based bloggers have had it with trying to convince “skeptics” of the facts surrounding our changing climate and our changing biosphere. They are tried of brick wall head banging, so have decided to move on.
No more rehashing ancient idiot circular arguments… the science is settled… big changes are coming and in fact big changes have begun, just gotta open your eyes!
Time for juvenile willful ignorance is over, Generation [A]daption is here, like it or not.
So these folks want to start talking about what we are going to do about it!
A few of these fine citizens have created a couple new blogs dedicated to mitigation strategies, collection, dissemination, and discussion.
Shaping Tomorrows World.org
From climate change to peak oil and food insecurity, our societies are confronted with many serious challenges that, if left unresolved, will threaten the well-being of present and future generations, and the natural world. This website is dedicated to discussion of those challenges and potential solutions based on scientific evidence and scholarly analysis.
Our goal is to provide a platform for re-examining some of the assumptions we make about our technological, social and economic systems. The posts on this site are generally written by domain experts, specialists and scholars with an interest in these problems and we hope they will generate informed and constructive debate. We will archive seminal papers and posts for future reference.
Generation [A]daptation
While I have been waging open warfare on the denial movement, secretly I have been plotting with a couple of others a new blog dealing with the variety of challenges our civilisation faces:
* climate change
* peak oil
* food and water security issues
* energy
We have called it Generation [A]daption because those alive today and those born over the next 100 years will be living on a different planet.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Gen[A] is a group already convinced by the overwhelming scientific evidence behind our changing climate, growing food, water and energy insecurities and biodiversity loss. For this reason, debate over the reality of these problems will not be permitted on this site. No big loss really – for the blogosphere seems overpopulated with places willing to accommodate such discussion. The debate we crave regards our next steps;
* How best can we meet these challenges so future generations are provided a world as wonderful, if not more so than that which we are familiar with?
* How can we ensure that our children, our grandchildren and those that follow can have a standard of living that we would expect for them?
* How can we maintain diversity of lifestyle, ecology, food and culture under increasing resource and environmental stress?
These questions and many more will be the focus of our discussions and we encourage constructive debate to help enrich innovative thinking. We will not, however, allow pointless and irrelevant debate, nor will we tolerate ad hominem attacks aimed at contributors.
For some of you old timers, Mike from Oz is one of the driving forces behind “Generation [A]daption”
The North Pole’s ice skull cap shrank to an historic low this week. Shrinking to its lowest point since satellite observations began in 1972, the area covered by the Arctic sea ice shrank to 4.24 million square kilometers (1.637 square miles) on Sept. 8, according to the University of Bremen’s Institute of Environmental Physics.
The historic low measurement is about a half-percent below the previous record low set in September, 2007, the institute said.
The shrinking Arctic ice cover has also become significantly thinner in recent decades, but the institute says it’s not possible to measuring in thickness as specifically as they can on the surface area.
Meanwhile in the Austin area we are forecast to have our 85th 100 degree day of the year. The historic average is 12, and the old record was 69. Texas overall had the hottest summer ever; not just for Texas but for any state. Hotter than Oklahoma in the Dust Bowl. The Midwest is baking while the Left Coast is experience the coolest and wettest summer on record, and the Northeast is flooded.
The night before the Texas drought began we recorded 17 inches of rain at our house. That was Sept. 7, 2010. I doubt we have had more than 10 inches since. Austin has had a few storms that missed us. Climate scientists’ computer model predicted these weather extremes at least 20 years go, yet denialists still insist we cannot accurately forecast climate trends.
It certainly appears as if climate mitigation strategies will be forced upon us by the failure of the world to address increasing emissions of CO2. The problem here is that reducing emissions requires negative action—preventing people from emitting—and that will never happen because there will always be somebody, somewhere, emitting more CO2 than they should, and everybody else will point to that party and scream, “If he can do it, why can’t we?” The Doha round of WTO negotiations has been a disaster, yet those issues are simpler and easier to resolve than climate change issues. Throw in the political ideologues, funded by fossil fuel companies, spreading thick layers of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, and you’ve got a hopeless situation.
However, climate mitigation strategies are positive actions: nobody can stop those who to decide to go ahead and implement them. If, for example, somebody decides to start injecting any of various chemicals into the stratosphere, that’s pretty much their own business. “If you insist on injecting your CO2 into the atmosphere, we’re going to inject our sulfates into the atmosphere.” The only problem here is the unfairness of one party spending money to correct the problem created by another party that is making money from its emissions: it’s a net wealth transfer from the good guy to the bad guy. Still, it is at least politically plausible.
What will be interesting, I think, is the battle over differential environmental costs. One group will be emitting CO2, causing one kind of damage, while another group will be emitting sulfates, causing a different kind of damage. Those damages will impinge differentially on different parties, causing all sorts of lovely political battles.
Meanwhile, the deniers will continue to insist that nothing is happening.
It certainly appears as if climate mitigation strategies will be forced upon us by the failure of the world to address increasing emissions of CO2. The problem here is that reducing emissions requires negative action—preventing people from emitting—and that will never happen because there will always be somebody, somewhere, emitting more CO2 than they should, and everybody else will point to that party and scream, “If he can do it, why can’t we?” The Doha round of WTO negotiations has been a disaster, yet those issues are simpler and easier to resolve than climate change issues. Throw in the political ideologues, funded by fossil fuel companies, spreading thick layers of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, and you’ve got a hopeless situation.
However, climate mitigation strategies are positive actions: nobody can stop those who to decide to go ahead and implement them. If, for example, somebody decides to start injecting any of various chemicals into the stratosphere, that’s pretty much their own business. “If you insist on injecting your CO2 into the atmosphere, we’re going to inject our sulfates into the atmosphere.” The only problem here is the unfairness of one party spending money to correct the problem created by another party that is making money from its emissions: it’s a net wealth transfer from the good guy to the bad guy. Still, it is at least politically plausible.
What will be interesting, I think, is the battle over differential environmental costs. One group will be emitting CO2, causing one kind of damage, while another group will be emitting sulfates, causing a different kind of damage. Those damages will impinge differentially on different parties, causing all sorts of lovely political battles.
Meanwhile, the deniers will continue to insist that nothing is happening.
It certainly appears as if climate mitigation strategies will be forced upon us by the failure of the world to address increasing emissions of CO2. The problem here is that reducing emissions requires negative action—preventing people from emitting—and that will never happen because there will always be somebody, somewhere, emitting more CO2 than they should, and everybody else will point to that party and scream, “If he can do it, why can’t we?” The Doha round of WTO negotiations has been a disaster, yet those issues are simpler and easier to resolve than climate change issues. Throw in the political ideologues, funded by fossil fuel companies, spreading thick layers of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, and you’ve got a hopeless situation.
However, climate mitigation strategies are positive actions: nobody can stop those who to decide to go ahead and implement them. If, for example, somebody decides to start injecting any of various chemicals into the stratosphere, that’s pretty much their own business. “If you insist on injecting your CO2 into the atmosphere, we’re going to inject our sulfates into the atmosphere.” The only problem here is the unfairness of one party spending money to correct the problem created by another party that is making money from its emissions: it’s a net wealth transfer from the good guy to the bad guy. Still, it is at least politically plausible.
What will be interesting, I think, is the battle over differential environmental costs. One group will be emitting CO2, causing one kind of damage, while another group will be emitting sulfates, causing a different kind of damage. Those damages will impinge differentially on different parties, causing all sorts of lovely political battles.
Meanwhile, the deniers will continue to insist that nothing is happening.
It’s enough to make one despair for the future.
And you haven’t even mentioned nanotechnologies that can react with things in the air and create an entirely new kind of pollution.
The world’s biggest physical changes in the past few years are mostly seen nearest the poles where climate change has been most extreme. Greenland appears considerably browner round the edges, having lost around 15%, or 300,000 sq km, of its permanent ice cover. Antarctica is smaller following the break-up of the Larsen B and Wilkins ice shelves.
But the Aral Sea in central Asia, which had previously shrunk to just 25% of its size only 80 years ago, is now larger than it was only five years ago, thanks to Kazakhstan redirecting water into it. Elsewhere in Asia, islands are appearing off the mouths of the Ganges and the Yangtze rivers as the amount of silt brought down from the Himalayas and inland China changes.
It certainly appears as if climate mitigation strategies will be forced upon us by the failure of the world to address increasing emissions of CO2. The problem here is that reducing emissions requires negative action—preventing people from emitting—and that will never happen because there will always be somebody, somewhere, emitting more CO2 than they should, and everybody else will point to that party and scream, “If he can do it, why can’t we?” The Doha round of WTO negotiations has been a disaster, yet those issues are simpler and easier to resolve than climate change issues. Throw in the political ideologues, funded by fossil fuel companies, spreading thick layers of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, and you’ve got a hopeless situation.
However, climate mitigation strategies are positive actions: nobody can stop those who to decide to go ahead and implement them. If, for example, somebody decides to start injecting any of various chemicals into the stratosphere, that’s pretty much their own business. “If you insist on injecting your CO2 into the atmosphere, we’re going to inject our sulfates into the atmosphere.” The only problem here is the unfairness of one party spending money to correct the problem created by another party that is making money from its emissions: it’s a net wealth transfer from the good guy to the bad guy. Still, it is at least politically plausible.
What will be interesting, I think, is the battle over differential environmental costs. One group will be emitting CO2, causing one kind of damage, while another group will be emitting sulfates, causing a different kind of damage. Those damages will impinge differentially on different parties, causing all sorts of lovely political battles.
Meanwhile, the deniers will continue to insist that nothing is happening.
A synopsis that I agree with totally. There isn’t really anything we can do to prevent people from burning fosil fuels; behavioral laws simply won’t allow it. The key is to find multiple ways of proactive things to do which allow people to make money by taking greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere - and the ocean, where the increased acidification is arguably a bigger threat for global food supply in the long run than climate change. Simply storing it underground won’t do, unless there’s a way to allow people to make money that way. Making plastics out of plants grown on farms is a possibility, though, as long as the materials are used long term and don’t get incinerated or otherwise returned to the carbon cycle quickly. Of course, dealing with loads of plastic trash is already a problem. It’s simply a matter of picking the preferred poison.
The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.
The world pumped about 564 million more tons (512 million metric tons) of carbon into the air in 2010 than it did in 2009. That’s an increase of 6 percent. That amount of extra pollution eclipses the individual emissions of all but three countries — China, the United States and India, the world’s top producers of greenhouse gases.
I wonder how much the small rise in ocean tidal level had to do with a local road collapse into the ocean a few miles south of me. You may want to check out San PEdro and Paseo del Mar, the city in which it occurred and the road that was destroyed. I’m sure there are pictures of the story available.
Shock as retreat of Arctic sea ice releases deadly greenhouse gas
Russian research team astonished after finding ‘fountains’ of methane bubbling to surface
Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane – a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide – have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region.
The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years.
In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Igor Semiletov, of the Far Eastern branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that he has never before witnessed the scale and force of the methane being released from beneath the Arctic seabed.
“Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that we’ve found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures, more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It’s amazing,” Dr Semiletov said. “I was most impressed by the sheer scale and high density of the plumes. Over a relatively small area we found more than 100, but over a wider area there should be thousands of them.”
The Independent is known for exaggerating scientists’ claims. Most of the methane is buried pretty deep in the soil, and this area has not been studied extensively until recently. I’d like to see the original publications before jumping off a cliff declaring we’ve reached a tipping point.
Unfortunately, we never recognize the tipping points of historic importance until well after they have tipped.
As for that escaping methane, here’s a fun little clip, and it’s years old. Exploding methane gas bubbles - Earth: The Power of the Planet - BBC
ps. this whole series by Dr Iain Stewart is pretty good viewing
