Posted by: JohnnyRook | July 11, 2008

UPDATE: Bridge to Wilkins Ice Shelf Faces Imminent Collapse

The European Space Agency released stunning images today showing that the breakup of the ice bridge anchoring the Wilkins Ice Shelf to Charcot Island is imminent. (Observe how the ice bridge shrinks and cracks as the photos progress.) Between February 28 and March 8 of this year, the ice shelf lost 2717 km2. (See this diary for background information and a discussion of the earlier breakup). According to Dr Matthias Braun of the Center for Remote Sensing of Land Surfaces at Bonn University, in this most recent event another 1350 km2 have broken off. Between 500 and 700 km2 will be added to that if the ice bridge collapses completely.

The total area of the ice shelf which would be exposed by the collapse of the ice bridge is 13,680 km2.

The Wilkins Ice Shelf is located on the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula. See map here.

According to Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center:

The scale of rifting in the newly-removed areas seems larger, and the pieces are moving out as large bergs and not toppled, finely-divided ice melange…

The persistently low sea ice cover in the area and data from some interesting sources, electronic seal hats [caps worn by seals that provide temperature, depth and position data] seems to suggest that warm water beneath the halocline may be reaching the underside of the Wilkins Ice Shelf and thinning it rapidly – and perhaps reaching the surface, or at least mixing with surface waters.

In response to the news of recent events, David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey declared.

Current events are showing that we were being too conservative, when we made the prediction in the early 1990s that Wilkins Ice Shelf would be lost within thirty years – the truth is it is going more quickly than we guessed.

Increasingly, this is what we are hearing from scientists around the world. Contrary to what Climaticide denialists maintain, scientists’projections regarding the progress of global warming generally have been too cautious. Events which were projected to take place within in 30 or 40 years are happening NOW. Another prime example is the melting of Arctic sea ice. While earlier projections had the North Pole completely free of sea ice in summer by 2040, we now know that Arctic sea ice is melting so fast that scientists believe it will be all gone by 2012. Some even think it may all melt this year.

Meanwhile, the Bush Administration is proposing that the US begin to stop the growth (not reduce emissions, just stop their growth) of carbon emissions by 2025.

Any bets on how many Connecticuts, New Jerseys or maybe Texases will have broken up and fallen into the sea by then?

[Crossposted at Daily Kos]

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Posted by: JohnnyRook | July 10, 2008

Censoring science: a few not-so-random quotes

On April 9, 2008 Howard Frumkin of the Center for Disease Control submitted the uncensored testimony to Congress of CDC Director Dr. Jule Gerberding on the consequences for human health of continued global warming. Dr. Gerberding’s original testimony was censored by the Bush Administration when she originally tried to give it in October 2007.

Yesterday, on his blog, Climate Progress, Joe Romm reprinted in full an excellent report by the Center for American Progress Action Fund detailing the relationship between the censorship of Dr. Gerberding and the White House’s refusal to accept the EPA email on regulating greenhouse gases. The common element: Dick Cheney and opposition to the Clean Air Act. I highly recommend you check out his post.

For this diary let’s focus on what the White House and other more objective sources have told us recently about the censorship of science, particularly science relating to Climaticide.

Regarding the censoring of Dr. Julie Gerberding.

[All emphases are mine]

Dana Perino said:

…there are public health benefits to climate change…

MS. PERINO: Sure. In some cases, there are — look, this is an issue where I’m sure lots of people would love to ridicule me when I say this, but it is true that many people die from cold-related deaths every winter. And there are studies that say that climate change in certain areas of the world would help those individuals. There are also concerns that it would increase tropical diseases and that’s — again, I’m not an expert in that, I’m going to let Julie Gerberding testify in regards to that, but there are many studies about this that you can look into.

New Scientist said:

The increase in extremely hot summers predicted by climate change models will lead to a higher death toll that will not be offset by fewer deaths during warmer winters, say researchers.

“The increase in mortality when you have one extra cold snap is 1.59%, but the increase in mortality for an additional heatwave is 5.74%,” explains Mercedes Medina-Ramón of Harvard University’s School of Public Health in Massachusetts, US.

The Center for Disease Control said:

“It was eviscerated,” said a CDC official, familiar with both versions [of Dr. Gerberding’s report], who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the review process.

The official said that while it is customary for testimony to be changed in a White House review, these changes were particularly “heavy-handed,” with the document cut from its original 14 pages to four. It was six pages as presented to the Senate committee.

[You can see PDF’s of Dr. Gerberding’s testimony before and after censorship here.]

Dana Perino said:

CDC’s specific responsibility is on public health, and [Dr. Gerberding] testified about that yesterday. And one of the things that she told us this morning, late morning, is that she, at the Atlanta Press Club, is going to reiterate that she in no way felt inhibited or hindered by what she was going to say. But when you take a very complicated issue, like climate change science, and you have the International Panel on Climate Change, which reported last spring — this is a study that the United States largely funded, and that we embraced in its conclusions — as I understand it, in the draft there was broad characterizations about climate change science that didn’t align with the IPCC.

Former EPA Deputy Associate Administrator, Jason Burnett(PDF) said:

In a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), former EPA deputy associate administrator Jason K. Burnett said an official from Cheney’s office ordered last October that six pages be edited out of the testimony of Julie L. Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Gerberding had planned to say that the “CDC considers climate change a serious public health concern.”

“The Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and the Office of the Vice President (OVP) were seeking deletions to the CDC testimony,” Burnett, 31, a Stanford-trained economist and a Democrat, wrote in response to an inquiry from Boxer’s committee. “CEQ requested that I work with CDC to remove from the testimony any discussion of the human health consequences of climate change.”

I have recently resigned from my position at EPA having reached the conclusion that no more constructive work responding to the Supreme Court could be accomplished under this administration.

Senator Barbara Boxer said:

At the news conference, Mrs. Boxer strongly chided Dana M. Perino, the White House press secretary, for asserting last year that the changes in testimony were justified because the statements did not comport with the influential review of climate risks by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “This was a lie,” Mrs. Boxer said.

[For a powerful statement from Senator Boxer on the relationship between the stonewalling of the EPA email and the censorship of Dr. Gerberding’s testimony click here.]

The Union of Concerned Scientists and the Government Accountability Office said:

A new report presented to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Government Accountability Project shows 435 instances in which the Bush administration interfered into the global warming work of government scientists over the past five years.

[Crossposted at Daily Kos]

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Posted in Bush Administration, climate change, climate science, Climaticide, environment, global warming, health, Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: JohnnyRook | July 9, 2008

It’s getting personal in Australia: thoughts on activism

Apparently, some people in Australia don’t agree with this recent post by Daily Kos front pager, Georgia10.

From Climate Ark:

Environmentalists plan to block one of two rail lines into the world’s biggest coal export port in Australia at the weekend, amid wrangling by rich nations over efforts to combat climate change, they said on Tuesday.

Any disruption to coal shipments from the Newcastle port could give another boost to benchmark coal prices that are already near record highs at nearly US$195 a tonne, having more than trebled in a year

In a curiously, contradictory bit of reasoning a couple of days ago, Georgia10 defended Millennials (sic) (By the way, isn’t having a new label for young people every decade just another tactic to divide us?) against suggestions that they need to get up from behind their keyboards and take their activism out onto the streets by arguing that young people DO indeed engage in offline activism BUT don’t really need to because this is the digital age and such tactics are out of date.

Gee, maybe if Martin Luther King and his allies had had the Internet they could have just written essays and signed petitions instead of getting their heads broken open in Selma. Perhaps they could have just voted Civil Rights into being. (Interestingly enough, about a decade ago during the dot.com boom people told each other stuff like that: “Hey, this is a new economy. Forget how they used to analyze companies, all those outdated concerns about whether they made a profit or not… The old rules just don’t apply now.”–funny how that all worked out.)

About the only thing that I agree with in Georgia10’s post is that it’s unfair to single out young people in this regard. I don’t know which is worse, never having taken to the streets to protest or patting yourself on the back while sitting on your fat ass in your air-conditioned office because once, a long time ago, you did. But one generation’s hypocrisy is not an excuse for another generation to fail to meet its challenges. The simple fact is that all of us who care, young, old and in-between need to be protesting in the streets.

What I find most egregious in her post are these two paragraphs.

Yes, it is certainly true, our generation has generally avoided protests and sit-ins, the twin hallmarks of traditional activism. But it must also be recognized that unlike activists in the past, we do not have the draft nipping at our heels, a factor that unquestionably led so many in the 1960s to leap into action. In other words, politics decades ago were intensely personal – from civil rights struggles to being drafted – and there is no greater incentive for action than policies which have a direct and palpable effect on the individual. In this sense, although Kohn claims it is our “hyperindividualism” that shackles us, it is the closer connection between politics and the individual in the decades past that prompted youth to take action.

More critically, however, it is a fallacy to urge us to use tools from the 1960s activist toolbox in this digital age.

So, politics today aren’t so “personal”. “Personal”, here, obviously means to affect me personally. According to Georgia10, in the 60’s people took to the streets to oppose the Vietnam War because they had been pushed into activism out of fear of being drafted. That was indeed a factor but was it the principal factor? What about all the women protesters who weren’t in danger of being drafted? What about Civil Rights? What incentive did white people have to take to the streets in support of African-Americans, other than a burning sense of revulsion at the injustice of the system? Was that personal? Well, yes, it was, but it was a sense of personal that saw one’s person as ineluctably connected to others, so connected that sometimes one felt obliged to risk ones health or freedom in order to do what was right.

Most fallacious in all of this though is the idea that today’s threats are not personal, that the dangers are not “nipping at our heals.”

Take, for example, the following from Dr. James Hansen, perhaps the world’s leading climate scientist.

The consequences of continued increase of greenhouse gases extend far beyond extermination of species and future sea level rise.

Arid subtropical climate zones are expanding poleward. Already an average expansion of about 250 miles has occurred, affecting the southern United States, the Mediterranean region, Australia and southern Africa. Forest fires and drying-up of lakes will increase further unless carbon dioxide growth is halted and reversed.

Mountain glaciers are the source of fresh water for hundreds of millions of people. These glaciers are receding world-wide, in the Himalayas, Andes and Rocky Mountains. They will disappear, leaving their rivers as trickles in late summer and fall, unless the growth of carbon dioxide is reversed.

Coral reefs, the rainforest of the ocean, are home for one-third of the species in the sea. Coral reefs are under stress for several reasons, including warming of the ocean, but especially because of ocean acidification, a direct effect of added carbon dioxide. Ocean life dependent on carbonate shells and skeletons is threatened by dissolution as the ocean becomes more acid.

Such phenomena, including the instability of Arctic sea ice and the great ice sheets at today’s carbon dioxide amount, show that we have already gone too far.

Climaticide, you see, isn’t nipping at our heals. No, Climaticide already has its teeth sunk deep into our ankles and is getting ready to bite off our legs while we continue to act as if its just barking at us from the front porch. If you don’t see that, you simply not paying attention.

If we don’t take immediate action we run the imminent risk of pushing climate change beyond tipping points, which will lead to the deaths of millions of people and untold misery for tens of millions of others. Some of those people are us (rather personal don’t you think), some live in far-away countries, many are generations yet unborn.

To save them and ourselves will require “real-world” action beyond blogging and making You Tube videos, as useful as those tools are. It will take action that is not nearly so much fun.

Georgia10 says that our political leaders no longer care what we want so:

What the people do in the voting booth is the only thing that matters anymore.

It is simply false that politicians in the past cared more about what the people wanted than they do now. If it were not there wouldn’t have been all those protests and sit-ins. People voted in the 60’s, but the people they elected ignored them, which is why those with a conscience took to the streets and campuses of the country to make it impossible for the powerful to ignore them. The failure to keep that kind of pressure on is one of the reasons that we have the miserable government that we have today.

In Australia, which is beginning to burn up, where wheat crops wilt and die in the fields, where it now rains 50% less than it did in the 1950’s, people are starting to see Climaticide as personal politics. That’s why they’re starting to block trains and ports, not just carry signs.

Up to 1,000 protesters are planning on Sunday to block the Carrington rail line into Newcastle port, north of Sydney. The port plans to ship 95 million tonnes of coal over the next year.

“You could say it’s drastic action but it’s simply because these are drastic times. We need to actually start taking serious action,” Friends of the Earth spokesman Cam Walker said.

I don’t know if Cam Walker is a “Millennial” or a “Baby Boomer”, but he obviously walks his talk. That’s enough to earn my respect.

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Posted by: JohnnyRook | July 6, 2008

James Hansen to Prime Minister Fukuda: Take the Lead!

Tomorrow the G8 leaders will begin 3 days of meetings in Toyako Japan. Climaticide is one of the topics on the agenda, although analysts are holding out few prospects of any substantive agreements.

The indefatigable and ever optimistic James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has written a letter to Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, who is under pressure at home to set limits on greenhouse gas emissions, stressing the urgent need to cut CO2 emissions and eventually roll them back to 350 ppm or less. The key element in Hansen’s analysis is that to do this we must phase out coal emissions.

Below are excepts from Hansen’s letter. However, I recommend that the reader read the full text (PDF), which contains many excellent charts and graphs.

Global climate is approaching critical tipping points that could lead to loss of all summer sea ice in the Arctic with detrimental effects on indigenous people and wildlife, initiation of ice sheet disintegration in West Antarctica and Greenland with progressive, unstoppable global sea level rise, shifting of climatic zones with extermination of many animal and plant species, melting of most mountain glaciers with loss of freshwater supplies for hundreds of millions of people, and a more intense hydrologic cycle with stronger droughts and forest fires, but also heavier rains and floods, and stronger storms driven by latent heat, including thunderstorms, tornados and tropical storms.

Earth Apollo 17

Coal is central to solution of the climate problem. Coal is not only the main cause of excess CO2 in the air today; it has the greatest potential for future emissions (Fig. 2a). Due to coal’s dominance, solution to global warming must include phase-out of coal use except where CO2 is captured and sequestered. If coal is phased out uniformly between 2010 and 2030, except where CO2 is captured, atmospheric CO2 will peak at 400-425 ppm and then begin to decline (Fig. 2b). Maximum CO2 depends upon whether EIA (Energy Information Administration) or IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) oil and gas reserve estimates are more realistic.

Coal and oil differ fundamentally. Oil is used mainly in vehicles, where CO2 cannot be captured. Extractable oil is nearly half gone. Most remaining oil, much of it in the Middle East, surely will be used with the CO2 injected into the air. Limitations on drilling in the Arctic, off-shore areas, and public lands can help keep exploited reserves closer to the IPCC estimate than the larger EIA estimate, but most readily available oil will end up as CO2 in the air. In contrast, scenarios that keep coal in the ground, or used only where the CO2 is captured, are feasible.

The upshot is that large climate change, with consequences discussed above, can be avoided only if coal emissions (but not necessarily coal use) are identified for prompt phase-out. A corollary is that a strategy based on 20%, 50%, or 80% CO2 emission reduction is doomed to failure, because it would allow substantial coal emissions to continue indefinitely. Once CO2 emissions are in the air, they cannot be retrieved. The only practical solution is to avoid coal emissions.

Prime Minister Fukuda, I hope that you will look at the fossil fuel facts that I have presented above and consider the possibility for leadership in this topic, which will be so important for our children and all the inhabitants of our planet.

Finally, Prime Minister Fukuda, I would like to thank you for helping make clear to the other leaders of the eight nations the great urgency of the actions needed to address climate change. Might I make one suggestion for an approach you could use in drawing their attention? If the leaders find that the concept of phasing out all emissions from coal, and taking measures to ensure that unconventional fossil fuels are left in the ground or used only with zero-carbon emissions, is too inconvenient, then, in that case, they could instead spend a small amount of time composing a letter to be left for future generations.

This letter should explain that the leaders realized their failure to take these actions would cause our descendants to inherit a planet with a warming ocean, disintegrating ice sheets, rising sea level, increasing climate extremes, and vanishing species, but it would have been too much trouble to make changes to our energy systems and to oppose the business interests who insisted on burning every last bit of fossil fuels. By composing this letter the leaders will at least achieve an accurate view of their place in history.

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Posted by: JohnnyRook | July 5, 2008

Another Grab as the Rats Pack Up: Forest Service Turns Wilderness into Subdivisions

The Bush Administration’s final rush to loot and pillage as much of America’s national heritage as it can before leaving office is proceeding full steam ahead. On the heals of its plans to lift the ban on offshore drilling and its refusal to abide by the Supreme Court ruling on EPA’s responsibility to regulate greenhouse gases comes this.

From today’s Washington Post:

The Bush administration is preparing to ease the way for the nation’s largest private landowner to convert hundreds of thousands of acres of mountain forestland to residential subdivisions.

The deal was struck behind closed doors between Mark E. Rey, the former timber lobbyist who oversees the U.S. Forest Service, and Plum Creek Timber Co., a former logging company turned real estate investment trust that is building homes. Plum Creek owns more than 8 million acres nationwide, including 1.2 million acres in the mountains of western Montana, where local officials were stunned and outraged at the deal. [My emphasis]

So, why were local officials stunned and outraged? Because Rey has blown them and the public off.

As the Missoulian reported a couple of months ago:

Missoula County officials have asked federal land managers to break off closed-door talks with Plum Creek Timber Co., at least until the public has a chance to review the paperwork.

Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, however, refused to release the documents which had been requested under the Freedom of Information Act. The result is likely to be a court battle and, given today’s announcement, soon.

The issue here has to do with access to millions of acres that Plum Creek wants to develop. Much of Plum Creek’s holdings form part of a checkerboard with Forest Service land. Plum Creek’s original easements only gave it the right to cross public lands for the purposes of logging, specifically denying access to the public for any other purpose than use as trails. Plum Creek wants that changed and is counting on Rey to help them do it.

Again the Missoulian:

… Mark Rey says he is not yet prepared to hand over critical documents to Montana counties, despite increased calls that he do so, and his refusal is forcing a federal land use dispute ever closer to the courts.

“It’s still under consideration,” Rey said. Previously, however, he had said expecting him to provide the paperwork was unrealistic.”

There are probably two reason that Rey does not want to release the documents.

Reason 1–A need to hurry: Scrutinizing the documents in a open, public process will take some time making it unlikely that the potentially very lucrative deal that Plum Creek wants can be closed before the Bush Administration leaves office. If isn’t closed before Bush leaves office it’s unlikely to happen under an Obama administration.

The question is not whether Plum Creek has access to its property – federal law guarantees that. The problem, rather, is whether the scope of that right is assumed, or will be established through a public process. [My emphasis]

If universal access is assumed, as Rey suggests, then the value of the company land increases considerably, and the path is paved for wholesale conversion of forest into subdivision.[my emphasis]

In response to concerns in the county Senator Jon Tester “fired a letter to Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, asking that the access negotiations stop until local stakeholders can be included”.

Plum Creek, [Tester spokesperson, Aaron] Murphy said, owns 1.2 million acres in Montana, about 8 million acres nationwide, and is the country’s largest private landowner. The company has identified some 2 million of those acres for possible sale (estimated value $5.7 billion), but won’t say exactly which acres those are. Another million acres soon could be added to the “for-sale” list, according to Plum Creek’s 2007 annual report.

That same report shows the company’s real estate revenue tripling over the past five years, to more than $330 million annually. Some lots sold for more than $10,000 per acre, surely meeting the company’s stated goal of “determining the highest value of an acre of land then capturing that value – that’s what we do!”

Remote corners of Swan Valley are selling for $11,000 an acre, with broker inquiries arriving from Europe. By comparison, the “net present value per acre of forest” runs at most $500, said Larry Swanson, director of the O’Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana.

Let’s see, 10,000 dollars an acre versus 500 dollars an acre. And Plum Creek owns 8.2 million acres… Seems we’re talking some big money here.


Reason 2–A need for secrecy: The documents will show that the easements are limited.

From the Missoulian:

Rey has pointed to original easement language guaranteeing Plum Creek access for “the protection, administration, management and utilization” of the land. He has left out the rest of the paragraph, however, which says “but not including the right to permit use of said road by the public, except for use as a trail.”

So, Plum Creek, the country’s largest land owner and, Rey, the former lobbyist who is now in charge of the US Forest Service under the most corrupt, pro-corporate administration in the history of the country want to do a deal that promises fantastic profits, and the reason they want to do it fast and without the bother of public scrutiny is because people realize they’re getting screwed and if they can get their act together in time might possibly derail the entire deal.

Who are the losers here then?

There are a number of them. At a local level it’s Montanans, specifically residents of Missoula County. They stand to lose access to hiking, fishing, hunting and other recreational lands because as Plum Creeks properties are sold and developed the new owners will restrict access (by closing the former logging roads) to Forest Service lands that abut on their property. Quality of life for local residents will drop as forest land is replaced by gated communities full of McMansions.

According to the Washington Post:

Most are the second, third or even fourth homes of wealthy newcomers who have transformed the local economy — 40 percent of income in Missoula County is now “unearned,” from, say, dividends — and typically visit only in the summer.

Traffic will worsen, water quality will be impacted and endangered species will be put at further risk.

Under the new agreement, logging roads running into areas controlled by Plum Creek could be paved — and would thrum with the traffic of eight to 12 vehicle trips per day to and from each home, according to O’Herren. Critics say that will further imperil grizzly bears, lynxes and other endangered species in the Crown of the Continent ecosystem, a region of rugged peaks, glacier-carved valleys, and sparkling rivers and lakes that straddles the border between Montana and Canada — and that in parts remains as Lewis and Clark found it.

Environmental groups such as the Nature Conservancy and the Trust for Public lands have worked out a deal with Plum Creek to save some of the land, about 280,000 acres, which they have purchased at market price (about $1,800 an acre–compare that with the $500 an acre value of the property as timberland.) In order to raise the funds, Montana Senator Max Bacus (D), inserted a public financing mechanism for 500 million dollars into this years Farm Bill. In other words the taxpayers, in order to protect land, are going to pay a market price that would not exist if Rey were not giving away public easements to Plum Creek for nothing.

Baucus praised Plum Creek for “being such a good partner,” adding, “Clearly, Plum Creek wanted to do the right thing.”

The praise from the timber giant was mutual, with Hank Ricklefs, Plum Creek’s vice president of northern resources and manufacturing, thanking Baucus for making the deal possible.

County officials say taxpayers will subsidize Plum Creek’s profits if Rey’s easement amendment paves the way for wholesale development of company lands.

Local governments complain the conversion of timberland into residential neighborhoods hurts taxpayers, as counties scramble to provide urban services to the far-flung homesites. Others worry about increased firefighting costs as homes pop up in the forested fringe.

Agriculture Undersecretary Rey has suggested that Counties change their zoning laws if they are concerned about Plum Creek’s development plan. The problem is that under Montana law, Plum Creek which owns 57@ of the private land in Missoula County can veto any zoning legislation that it disagrees with.

Other negative consequences will affect us all.

And what about the loss of revenue to the United States treasury if the easements, which were intended originally only to be used for logging are given away for development to Plum Creek at no charge? Why should the American taxpayer subsidize making Plum Creek any richer than it already is?

And finally, what about the biggest issue of our time: Climaticide? Forests are carbon sinks absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering it in their roots, branches and trunks. If Plum Creek develops even half of its lands it will be adding significant amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere, all subsidized by the American taxpayer.

As is usual with the traditional media, there is no mention in any of the articles that I have read of this problem. Yet it is a classical case of abuse of the commons. The beneficiaries of the development will be Plum Creek and a small class of wealthy, SUV-driving, vacation home owners. The losers will be other citizens who see their taxes rise while losing their access to public lands. Climaticide will intensify, imposing additional costs for mediation and adaptation on us all.

Of course, none of this may occur, if the citizens of Missoula County file their lawsuit in time to reign in Mr. Rey and the Bush Administration. Even if that happens, though, expect more of this kind of behavior for the next six months. The hirelings of crony capitalism realize they are soon to be thrown out of office, and they plan to steal as much of our national china and silver as they can carry and we will let them get away with before they go.

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Posted in Bush Administration, climate change, Climaticide, environment, global warming, Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: JohnnyRook | July 3, 2008

Book Review: What We Know About Climate Change by Kerry Emanuel

As books go, this one is very short. That, however, is one of it’s strengths. By leaving out the details of climate change, which one can find in many other books and reports, and focusing instead on a synthesis of our current knowledge of climate science, Dr. Emanuel has written an extremely useful summary.

I have read many books on global warming, climate change, or, to use the term that I prefer, Climaticide. This volume is one of the most useful for the non-scientist because it presents all the major concepts in a concise, clearly written, yet comprehensive account.

In the first five chapters Dr. Emanuel informs us about two competing views of nature and climate, the physics of greenhouse gases, how we know that climate change is occurring, what the role of humans in causing current climate change is, and what the probable consequences are. Each o these chapters are small gems of exposition and explanation.

Chapter six, which is about the relationship between science and the media, is less useful, probably because it is more political and the author is trying so hard to be evenhanded. The results of this attempt at a balanced description is actually to distort somewhat the history he is recounting.

In attempting to explain why the public still thinks that there is a scientific controversy over the basic facts of anthropogenic climate change, Emanuel points out that “…a dwindling number of deniers [are] constantly tapped for interviews by journalists who pretend to look for balance. Unfortunately, he then does the same thing himself writing that “On the left, an argument emerged urging fellow scientists to deliberately exaggerate their findings to galvanize an apathetic public…”. This is an awkward statement by a normally deft stylist, and one is left wondering which, if any, scientists made this “argument”.

Chapter seven on “The Politics of Global Climate Change” contains some equally odd attempts at balance. For example, there is a very irrelevant reference to Senator Ted Kennedy’s NIMBY opposition to offshore windmills. The afterward by Judith A Layzer and Willia R. Moomaw presents a much more accurate depiction of the current political complexities involved in stopping Climaticide.

The weaknesses that I mention do not affect the book’s overall value. The first five chapters alone make it worth owning and, as I think you will find, it can be profitably reread many times.

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Posted in book review, climate change, climate science, Climaticide, global warming, Politics, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , ,

Posted by: JohnnyRook | June 30, 2008

White House Ignores SCOTUS By Sticking Fingers in Ears and Shouting La, La, La, La

My apologies to mnemosyne9 at Daily Kos for the similarity to the title of his/her diary. I did not discover it until after having published this one. Mea culpa.

Let’s start with some background:

In April 2003, in a move consistent with the hostile approach that the Bush Administration has taken toward public health, the environment and environmental regulation, the US Environmental Protection Agency denied a petition from the International Center for Technology Assessment and a number of other organizations to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles.

As a result, 12 states, three cities and 13 environmental groups filed suit against the EPA to force it to comply with its obligations under the Clean Air Act.

On April 2, 2007 the United States Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, that the EPA had the authority under the law to regulate greenhouse gases as an air pollutant under the Clean Air Act.

EPA denied 1) that it had such regulatory authority and 2) that even if it did have it, it would not exercise it because of scientific uncertainty over cause and effect.

As Justice Stevens pointed out in his opinion:

EPA reasoned that climate change had its own “political history”: Congress designed the original Clean Air Act to address local air pollutants rather than a substance that “is fairly consistent in its concentration throughout the world’s atmosphere,” 68 Fed. Reg. 52927 (emphasis added); declined in 1990 to enact proposed amendments to force EPA to set carbon dioxide emission standards for motor vehicles, ibid. (citing H. R. 5966, 101st Cong., 2d Sess. (1990)); and addressed global climate change in other legislation, 68 Fed. Reg. 52927. Because of this political history, and because imposing emission limitations on greenhouse gases would have even greater economic and political repercussions than regulating tobacco, EPA was persuaded that it lacked the power to do so. Id., at 52928. In essence, EPA concluded that climate change was so important that unless Congress spoke with exacting specificity, it could not have meant the agency to address it.[my boldface -JR]

Even assuming that it had authority over greenhouse gases, EPA explained in detail why it would refuse to exercise that authority. The agency began by recognizing that the concentration of greenhouse gases has dramatically increased as a result of human activities, and acknowledged the attendant increase in global surface air temperatures. Id., at 52930. EPA nevertheless gave controlling importance to the NRC Report’s statement that a causal link between the two “ ‘cannot be unequivocally established.’ ” Ibid. (quoting NRC Report 17). Given that residual uncertainty, EPA concluded that regulating greenhouse gas emissions would be unwise. 68 Fed. Reg. 52930. [my boldface -JR]

Justice Stevens responded to these arguments as follows:

These policy judgments have nothing to do with whether greenhouse gas emissions contribute to climate change and do not amount to a reasoned justification for declining to form a scientific judgment. Nor can EPA avoid its statutory obligation by noting the uncertainty surrounding various features of climate change and concluding that it would therefore be better not to regulate at this time. If the scientific uncertainty is so profound that it precludes EPA from making a reasoned judgment, it must say so. The statutory question is whether sufficient information exists for it to make an endangerment finding. Instead, EPA rejected the rulemaking petition based on impermissible considerations. Its action was therefore “arbitrary, capricious, or otherwise not in accordance with law [my boldface -JR]

In short 1) EPA does have the authority to regulate greenhouse gas and it’s concerns about “policy judgements” were irrelevant to the question at hand and 2)if EPA cannot rule because of scientific uncertainty it must clearly state this.

In other words the only way that EPA could refuse to regulate greenhouse gases would be if it were to reject the conclusions of the scientific community as expressed in documents such as the reports of the IPCC and the National Academy of Sciences. Obviously, the EPA did not want to do that as it would have made the agency look like the Kansas of the scientific world.

As the New York Times revealed last week, in November, 2007 EPA attempted to comply with the Supreme Court’s decision by sending an email to the White House in which it stated its conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be regulated. The White House responded by telling EPA officials that it would not be opening the emailapparently based on its philosophy of email no evil, read no evil, there is no evil.

So what did EPA do? Storm over to the White House in righteous indignation to hand over the document in person? Of course not. Instead Bush’s environmental lapdog, EPA head, Stephen L. Johnson, tucked his tail back between his legs, (where it has been 99% of the time since his appointment to head the EPA in January 2005) and ordered the report toned down and reissued without a conclusion.

Check out this Daily Show coverage of the unopened email.

So, what was it that was so threatening in the report that the White House stuck their collective fingers in their ears and trilled la, la, la, la, la to make it go away?

This:

This week, more than six months later, the E.P.A. is set to respond to that [Supreme Court} order by releasing a watered-down version of the original proposal that offers no conclusion. Instead, the document reviews the legal and economic issues presented by declaring greenhouse gases a pollutant.

Over the past five days, the officials said, the White House successfully put pressure on the E.P.A. to eliminate large sections of the original analysis that supported regulation, including a finding that tough regulation of motor vehicle emissions could produce $500 billion to $2 trillion in economic benefits over the next 32 years. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

Both documents, as prepared by the E.P.A., “showed that the Clean Air Act can work for certain sectors of the economy, to reduce greenhouse gases,” one of the senior E.P.A. officials said. “That’s not what the administration wants to show. They want to show that the Clean Air Act can’t work.”

As DarkSyde pointed out on the front page of Daily Kos today, this analysis by the New York Times was confirmed by the Wall Street Journal in today’s edition [subscription only].

The Bush Administration does not want to cut greenhouse gas emissions because although it would be good for the American (and the world’s) people in terms of our health, our economy and our civilization, it would be harmful to the profits of Bush’s cronies in the oil, gas, coal, electrical utility and automotive industries. Just as they have since day one, this administration continues to sacrifice the public good to it’s own sense of entitlement.

The administration and its corporate sponsors want people in this country to see the switch to a sustainable economy as inevitably causing hardship and suffering, rather than understanding that such a switch not only offers us the possibility (shrinking every second that we fail to act) of avoiding (in cooperation with the rest of the world) the catastrophe of Climaticide, but also of stimulating our economy by creating millions of good paying jobs in myriad new industries.

la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la…

[crossposted at Daily Kos]

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Posted in climate change, climate science, Climaticide, global warming, Politics | Tags: , , , , , , ,

Posted by: JohnnyRook | June 28, 2008

Why Global Warming is a Lie

Global warming must be a lie because, if it were not, it would take large scale government action to deal with it, and big government and the loss of our freedom is the greatest danger that we all face.

As I have argued elsewhere understanding that bit of nonsense is fundamental to understanding how Climaticide denialists think and why they care so little about science.

I have defined four principle categories of denialists.

1) Plutocrats
2) Shills
3) Literate conservative/libertarian ideologues
4) The right-wing booboisie

Today I propose to illustrate my earlier argument with a selection of denialist quotations from these four categories. You can find these quotes all over the web. For the most part I present the quotations in no particular order. I trust you will have no trouble either identifying the common elements in each of the quotes nor in linking the quote to the appropriate category of denialist.

Still, for what it’s worth, I will give you my take on how the categories relate to each other below.

For the plutocrats, ideology is mostly a cover for their greed and a thin salve for whatever conscience they have left. For the shills (scientists and academics paid by the plutocrats to deny global warming), ideology is an indispensable tool, required by their corporate masters, and useful in providing intellectual ammunition to categories 3 and 4 and for bamboozling the uninformed public at large. For information on the relationships between the plutocrats and the shills follow this link and click on MAP EXXON’S NETWORK.

And now for the quotes: [NOTE: All emphases are mine. Other than that, all quotes are unedited. I didn’t have the time to place a “sic” after every misspelling.]

From biblebelievers.com

If the Humanists really believed the world was getting warmer, they would be telling us not to be alarmed because “Man will rise to the occasion!” Instead, they huddle in the corner like terrified mice. Why? Because they want Americans to huddle in the corner like terrified mice so they can gain more power over us. Humanists hate America.

I have said it time and time again. The goal of environmentalism and animal rightism is not to “save the earth.” Their goal is to destroy the American economy. Why? Because a strong America is a detriment to a One World government! That’s why over 160 nations were exempted from the environmental restrictions placed on the U.S. at Kyoto, Japan. The nations with the dirtiest air were exempted while stricter regulations were imposed on America–the nation that has done the most to clean up its environment.

From TennesseeFree.com

At some point the average guy on the street will have to wise up and realize that this is all just a bunch of idiocy, conjured up for the purpose of empowering government and reducing liberty.

In the United States, we even have people on the federal government’s payroll, calling for oil company executives, who are guilty of the crime of engaging in a debate, to be tried and convicted of “high crimes against humanity and nature”.

We live in dangerous times folks. These big government authoritarians want to run every part of your life. They want to control everything you do. People wake up.

From the reader comments at Political Punch (MSNBC.com)

You simple minded fool.The idea that global warming is man made has not been determined beyond a reasonable doubt.It’s what is called a theory (look up the definition).You call people who don’t believe in this junk science numbskulls.You sir/madam are an idiot and have bought the lie hook line and sinker.I could give you a list as long as your arm of scientist who disagree with the so called prevailing attitude that global warming is man made but I am most confident that you are to blind and ignorant to do any real thinking of your own so I will not waste my time. If you want to be taxed at a higher rate and give up your individual freedoms to the “Almighty Government Bureaucracy” ,who preach this nonsense ,then by all means DO IT. As for me I will not be lead like a sheep down the road of propaganda and lies.And please stop with the nonsense that everyone who disagrees with this lie is somehow a right wing nut.Surely you are more intelligent than that.But then again…….maybe your not.

From syndicated columnist and Fox News Watch panelist Cal Thomas at Real Clear Poltitics

Instead of buying into the claims of global warming alarmists who seek more control over our lives through big government intrusion, McCain should demand a debate on the issue. Global warming cult leaders won’t debate. Al Gore has refused every debate challenge, asserting the facts are undeniable and that global warming is real. That’s another mark of a cult leader; he will tolerate no doubters.

From Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic on CBSNEWS.COM

Centralized planners with “megalomaniac ambitions” are now working to restrain democratic development and economic activity under the guise of environmentalism, said Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic. He spoke Tuesday morning at conference in New York City

From Freedom Advocates

The Big Lie: The notion that global warming is man-made is a big lie.

The science of worldwide climate is complex. That makes the opportunity to take advantage of this lie great:

* Complex science issues are easy to selectively define as a crisis.
* Big government advocates and politicians looking for more power need a crisis to ‘save us from’. Global warming is that.
* Environmental non-government organizations (NGOs) need something to save…global warming lets them save the world.
* Many big business interests join environmentalists and politicians to form PPPs (public-private partnerships). They gain access to power and public funds.
* The current Democrat and Republican presidential candidates buy into man-made global warming crisis as agents of the new world order.

From Frontiers of Freedom (See more at the ExxonSecrets Factsheet)

What these political global warming useful idiots ignore is the earth is actually in a cooling cycle that even government agencies have acknowledged. Furthermore the simple scientific truth is that the earth’s atmosphere contains 0.038% carbon dioxide and water vapor makes up most of the rest. If the earth is warming, and obviously it has not during the last decade, any role played by carbon dioxide is negligible. But of course the politicos and leftists won’t accept that because their entire agenda depends on selling it to a gullible public.

From S. Fred Singer at International Society for Individual Liberty

In the past few years there has been increasing concern about global climate change on the part of the media, politicians, and the public. It has been stimulated by the idea that human activities may influence global climate adversely and that therefore corrective action is required on the part of governments. Recent evidence suggests that this concern is misplaced. Human activities are not influencing the global climate in a perceptible way. Climate will continue to change, as it always has in the past, warming and cooling on different time scales and for different reasons, regardless of human action. I would also argue that – should it occur – a modest warming would be on the whole beneficial.

From Peter Ferrara at National Review Online

Global warming has nothing to do with climate or science. What it is all about is the great, historic class struggle between working people and the ruling classes.

Global warming is a great excuse for a massive expansion of government power. That, not science, is why the overlords, from the New York Times to the United Nations to Al Gore, so heartily embrace it.

The U.N. thinks global warming is a perfect reason for the U.N. to be transformed into a world government. So how long do you think it took for the world-class bureaucrats at Turtle Bay to conclude that global warming was real and caused by humans?

CORRECTION: June 29, 2008 Thanks to the alert reader who emailed me to point out that shelleytherepublican.com, quoted immediately below, is actually satire. I apologize for not having caught this myself. I do find it interesting that a satirical site like STR, at least at first glance, is nearly indistinguishable from many genuine right-wing sites (witness the other quotations in this diary.) But that’s no excuse. I should have checked my facts more carefully. Please accept my apologies. Here’s a link to an article about the guy behind shelleytherepublican.com and other similar sites.

From shelleytheRepublican.com

If you check who is believing in the modern big lie that is global warming you will see that it’s almost exclusively liberals. It’s a well known fact that liberalism is a sickness of the mind just like pedophilia and autism. Liberals are unable to live the good life, like normal Americans can. They can not enjoy the freedom, the wealth and justice the homeland offers to all of us. They have to create a climate of fear and mistrust in order to justify their own paranoia. The latest liberal invention is global warming, which is fake of course. There is no such think. The globe is much to big as to be influenced by us humans and God would never allow it to happen.

From Sheldon Richman at the Foundation for Economic Education (Although Richman as a libertarian rejects government action against Cimaticide, his analysis of how fear of government causes conservatives and libertarians to deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change is generally dispassionate and thoughtful.)

For advocates of individual liberty it is tempting to believe the skeptics are right because the other side is associated with statist solutions to climate change. Most solutions call for government control over the burning of fossil fuels. No advocate of free markets can be comfortable with a position that entails substantial taxes and subsidies to achieve a political objective — reduction of carbon emissions — especially when the solutions promise no more than negligible reductions in temperature.

From Joseph Farah at WorldNetDaily (More on Farah here.)

But think about the real absurdity of fighting “climate change” – the new apocalyptic menace.

As a political ax, it can’t be beat. Any variation in the weather represents a reason for controlling human behavior by any means necessary and to any extent necessary.

In a few years, it will be evident to one and all they have been hoaxed by the doomsday salesmen about global warming. But there will always be shifts in the weather. And any time we experience those shifts that have occurred from the beginning of the world, there will be justification for draconian actions by government.

From Canadian “property rights” activist Ron Ewart at Climate Change Fraud

To illustrate the brainwashing of our kids, here is a short story. A while back we taught a science lesson to 10-year olds once a week. One of our subjects was the weather. We know quite a bit about the weather because of our experience as a pilot. When we asked the students what four things affect the weather, thinking we would get answers like the Sun, ocean currents, humidity, jet streams and the like, we were taken back when the first suggestion by one of the kids was global warming and the second was man-made pollutants. The term brainwashed instantly came to mind.

The basic premise of these pod invaders is that all humans are a stain on the Earth and must be regulated and taxed to keep them from harming themselves and the planet. They do not deserve freedom, much less property rights. To them, government is best suited to accomplish the task of enforcing the regulations, taxing the people, managing the land and water and saving Mother Earth. And government has grown to mean a small cadre of elite world individuals who control the money, the food, the water, the land and the energy (oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear). The rest of the 6.5 billion people are just pawns in the grand scheme of world domination.

From the Minnesota Free Market Institute

“Climate change” is not something induced by human beings or a “crisis” to be avoided; it is simply the reality of living on earth. To the extent that human activities may contribute to climate variability, the same can be said of termites, trees, and even the slow action of plate tectonics. It’s true, but what’s your point? Literally everything changes the state of the earth, all the time. Fighting change is like fighting gravity; good luck! Call me when you succeed.

The steady drumbeat of fear mongering has nothing to do with a “crisis” of climate change, because climate change is not a crisis. It was reality before human beings existed, and will be long after we are all buried.

However, it has everything to do with promoting the solution to the crisis of climate change: the demotion of individualism and liberty and the promotion of collective solutions and collectivism in general.

From Edwin J. Feulner, President of the Heritage Foundation (More on the Heritage Foundation here.)

Few Americans understand what’s really going on. Hint: The conservative revolution has robbed liberals of a vehicle for expanding the size and power of government. But a long-term environmental crisis, even one manufactured by alarmists, could change that.

The global-warming scenario provides advocates of big government with an excuse for tapping into the lifeline of the U.S. economy for the foreseeable future. Better yet, the current president will be long gone before most of the belt-tightening begins to pinch.

From
Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post

Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but — even better — in the name of Earth itself.

Environmentalists are Gaia’s priests, instructing us in her proper service and casting out those who refuse to genuflect. (See Newsweek above.) And having proclaimed the ultimate commandment — carbon chastity — they are preparing the supporting canonical legislation that will tell you how much you can travel, what kind of light you will read by, and at what temperature you may set your bedroom thermostat.

This final quotation, an excerpt from the NYT’s, is interesting because it makes so plainly obvious that, for or the plutocrats, ideology is merely a convenient disguise to be slipped into when it is to their advantage and cast off when it is not. Note that in this quotation there is no condemnation of big government and no worries about loss of freedom. All there is is greed and an urgent concern that the plutocrats (in this case, Peabody Energy) get as big a slice of the big-government pie as possible.

From the New York Times

Coal executives say that they need government help primarily because oil prices are so volatile and the upfront construction costs are so high. “We’re not asking for everything. All we’re asking for is something,” said Hunt Ramsbottom, chief executive of Rentech Inc., which is trying to build two plants at mines owned by Peabody Energy.

But coal executives anticipate potentially huge profits. Gregory H. Boyce, chief executive of Peabody Energy, based in St. Louis, which has $5.3 billion in sales, told an industry conference nearly two years ago that the value of Peabody’s coal reserves would skyrocket almost tenfold, to $3.6 trillion, if it sold all its coal in the form of liquid fuels [my link].

Coal industry lobbying has reached a fever pitch. The industry spent $6 million on federal lobbying in 2005 and 2006, three times what it spent each year from 2000 through 2004, according to calculations by Politicalmoneyline.com.

Peabody, which has quadrupled its annual lobbying budget to about $2 million since 2004, recently hired Richard A. Gephardt, the Missouri Democrat who was House majority leader from 1989 to 1995 and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and 2004, to help make its case in Congress.

One of the most vociferous champions of coal-to-liquid fuels is the Southern States Energy Board, a group organized by governors from 16 states. Last year, the group published a study, which cost $500,000, that concluded that coal-to-liquid fuel could and should replace almost one-third of imported oil by 2030.

As it happens, the coal industry supplied much of the financing for the study and subsequent marketing. Peabody Energy contributed about $150,000 and the National Mining Association added $50,000, officials at the Southern States Energy Board said.

The inducements under discussion would not only subsidize up to 10 coal-to-liquid plants, but also guarantee a minimum market through long-term contracts with the Air Force and minimum prices for at least some producers.

“There is financial uncertainty, which is inhibiting the flow of private capital into the construction of coal-to-liquid facilities,” said Mr. Boucher, who supports most of the proposals and is drafting portions of the energy bill.

Deny, lie, deny, lie, deny, lie until the danger is so patent and urgent that it can no longer be denied nor the lie believed, then, express your concern and offer to fix the problem with a solution (clean coal) that is in itself a lie, and, finally, lobby your heart out to make certain that the taxpayer billions go to you instead of to real sustainable energy companies.

Hmm, could this be a crime against humanity?

[Crossposted at Daily Kos]

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Posted in climate change, Climaticide, global warming, Ideology, Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: JohnnyRook | June 25, 2008

Full Text of James Hansen’s Statement to Congress (with Dr. Hansen’s permission)

Today I emailed Dr. Hansen, requesting his permission to post the full text on Daily Kos and here on Climaticide Chronicles of the written statement that he made yesterday to the National Press Club and the House Select Committee on Energy Independence & Global Warming.

He responded immediately, saying graciously:

[C]ertainly. My aim is to communicate.

So, here it is.

Global Warming Twenty Years Later: Tipping Points Near

James Hansen

My presentation today is exactly 20 years after my 23 June 1988 testimony to Congress, which alerted the public that global warming was underway. There are striking similarities between then and now, but one big difference.

Again a wide gap has developed between what is understood about global warming by the relevant scientific community and what is known by policymakers and the public. Now, as then, frank assessment of scientific data yields conclusions that are shocking to the body politic. Now, as then, I can assert that these conclusions have a certainty exceeding 99 percent.

The difference is that now we have used up all slack in the schedule for actions needed to defuse the global warming time bomb. The next President and Congress must define a course next year in which the United States exerts leadership commensurate with our responsibility for the present dangerous situation.

Otherwise it will become impractical to constrain atmospheric carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas produced in burning fossil fuels, to a level that prevents the climate system from passing tipping points that lead to disastrous climate changes that spiral dynamically out of humanity’s control.

Changes needed to preserve creation, the planet on which civilization developed, are clear. But the changes have been blocked by special interests, focused on short-term profits, who hold sway in Washington and other capitals.

I argue that a path yielding energy independence and a healthier environment is, barely, still possible. It requires a transformative change of direction in Washington in the next year.

On 23 June 1988 I testified to a hearing, chaired by Senator Tim Wirth of Colorado, that the Earth had entered a long-term warming trend and that human-made greenhouse gases almost surely were responsible. I noted that global warming enhanced both extremes of the water cycle, meaning stronger droughts and forest fires, on the one hand, but also heavier rains and floods.

My testimony two decades ago was greeted with skepticism. But while skepticism is the lifeblood of science, it can confuse the public. As scientists examine a topic from all perspectives, it may appear that nothing is known with confidence. But from such broad openminded study of all data, valid conclusions can be drawn.

My conclusions in 1988 were built on a wide range of inputs from basic physics, planetary studies, observations of on-going changes, and climate models. The evidence was strong enough that I could say it was time to “stop waffling”. I was sure that time would bring the scientific community to a similar consensus, as it has.

While international recognition of global warming was swift, actions have faltered. The U.S. refused to place limits on its emissions, and developing countries such as China and India rapidly increased their emissions.

What is at stake? Warming so far, about two degrees Fahrenheit over land areas, seems almost innocuous, being less than day-to-day weather fluctuations. But more warming is already “in-the-pipeline”, delayed only by the great inertia of the world ocean. And climate is nearing dangerous tipping points. Elements of a “perfect storm”, a global cataclysm, are assembled.

Climate can reach points such that amplifying feedbacks spur large rapid changes. Arctic sea ice is a current example. Global warming initiated sea ice melt, exposing darker ocean that absorbs more sunlight, melting more ice. As a result, without any additional greenhouse gases, the Arctic soon will be ice-free in the summer.

More ominous tipping points loom. West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are vulnerable to even small additional warming. These two-mile-thick behemoths respond slowly at first, but if disintegration gets well underway it will become unstoppable. Debate among scientists is only about how much sea level would rise by a given date. In my opinion, if emissions follow a business-as-usual scenario, sea level rise of at least two meters is likely this century. Hundreds of millions of people would become refugees. No stable shoreline would be reestablished in any time frame that humanity can conceive.

Animal and plant species are already stressed by climate change. Polar and alpine species will be pushed off the planet, if warming continues. Other species attempt to migrate, but as some are extinguished their interdependencies can cause ecosystem collapse. Mass extinctions, of more than half the species on the planet, have occurred several times when the Earth warmed as much as expected if greenhouse gases continue to increase. Biodiversity recovered, but it required hundreds of thousands of years.

The disturbing conclusion, documented in a paper2 I have written with several of the world’s leading climate experts, is that the safe level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is no more than 350 ppm (parts per million) and it may be less. Carbon dioxide amount is already 385 ppm and rising about 2 ppm per year. Stunning corollary: the oft-stated goal to keep global warming less than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is a recipe for global disaster, not salvation.

These conclusions are based on paleoclimate data showing how the Earth responded to past levels of greenhouse gases and on observations showing how the world is responding to today’s carbon dioxide amount. The consequences of continued increase of greenhouse gases extend far beyond extermination of species and future sea level rise.

Arid subtropical climate zones are expanding poleward. Already an average expansion of about 250 miles has occurred, affecting the southern United States, the Mediterranean region, Australia and southern Africa. Forest fires and drying-up of lakes will increase further unless carbon dioxide growth is halted and reversed.

Mountain glaciers are the source of fresh water for hundreds of millions of people. These glaciers are receding world-wide, in the Himalayas, Andes and Rocky Mountains. They will disappear, leaving their rivers as trickles in late summer and fall, unless the growth of carbon dioxide is reversed.

Coral reefs, the rainforest of the ocean, are home for one-third of the species in the sea. Coral reefs are under stress for several reasons, including warming of the ocean, but especially because of ocean acidification, a direct effect of added carbon dioxide. Ocean life dependent on carbonate shells and skeletons is threatened by dissolution as the ocean becomes more acid.

Such phenomena, including the instability of Arctic sea ice and the great ice sheets at today’s carbon dioxide amount, show that we have already gone too far. We must draw down atmospheric carbon dioxide to preserve the planet we know. A level of no more than 350 ppm is still feasible, with the help of reforestation and improved agricultural practices, but just barely –
time is running out.

Requirements to halt carbon dioxide growth follow from the size of fossil carbon reservoirs. Coal towers over oil and gas. Phase out of coal use except where the carbon is captured and stored below ground is the primary requirement for solving global warming.

Oil is used in vehicles where it is impractical to capture the carbon. But oil is running out. To preserve our planet we must also ensure that the next mobile energy source is not obtained by squeezing oil from coal, tar shale or other fossil fuels.

Fossil fuel reservoirs are finite, which is the main reason that prices are rising. We must move beyond fossil fuels eventually. Solution of the climate problem requires that we move to carbon-free energy promptly.

Special interests have blocked transition to our renewable energy future. Instead of moving heavily into renewable energies, fossil companies choose to spread doubt about global warming, as tobacco companies discredited the smoking-cancer link. Methods are sophisticated, including funding to help shape school textbook discussions of global warming.

CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of long-term consequences of continued business as usual. In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.

Conviction of ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal CEOs will be no consolation, if we pass on a runaway climate to our children. Humanity would be impoverished by ravages of continually shifting shorelines and intensification of regional climate extremes. Loss of countless species would leave a more desolate planet.

If politicians remain at loggerheads, citizens must lead. We must demand a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants. We must block fossil fuel interests who aim to squeeze every last drop of oil from public lands, off-shore, and wilderness areas. Those last drops are no solution. They yield continued exorbitant profits for a short-sighted self-serving industry, but no alleviation of our addiction or long-term energy source.

Moving from fossil fuels to clean energy is challenging, yet transformative in ways that will be welcomed. Cheap, subsidized fossil fuels engendered bad habits. We import food from halfway around the world, for example, even with healthier products available from nearby fields. Local produce would be competitive if not for fossil fuel subsidies and the fact that climate change damages and costs, due to fossil fuels, are also borne by the public.

A price on emissions that cause harm is essential. Yes, a carbon tax. Carbon tax with 100 percent dividend3 is needed to wean us off fossil fuel addiction. Tax and dividend allows the marketplace, not politicians, to make investment decisions.

Carbon tax on coal, oil and gas is simple, applied at the first point of sale or port of entry. The entire tax must be returned to the public, an equal amount to each adult, a half-share for children. This dividend can be deposited monthly in an individual’s bank account.

Carbon tax with 100 percent dividend is non-regressive. On the contrary, you can bet that low and middle income people will find ways to limit their carbon tax and come out ahead. Profligate energy users will have to pay for their excesses.

Demand for low-carbon high-efficiency products will spur innovation, making our products more competitive on international markets. Carbon emissions will plummet as energy efficiency and renewable energies grow rapidly. Black soot, mercury and other fossil fuel emissions will decline. A brighter, cleaner future, with energy independence, is possible.

Washington likes to spend our tax money line-by-line. Swarms of high-priced lobbyists in alligator shoes help Congress decide where to spend, and in turn the lobbyists’ clients provide “campaign” money.

The public must send a message to Washington. Preserve our planet, creation, for our children and grandchildren, but do not use that as an excuse for more tax-and-spend. Let this be our motto: “One hundred percent dividend or fight!”

The next President must make a national low-loss electric grid an imperative. It will allow dispersed renewable energies to supplant fossil fuels for power generation. Technology exists for direct-current high-voltage buried transmission lines. Trunk lines can be completed in less than a decade and expanded analogous to interstate highways.

Government must also change utility regulations so that profits do not depend on selling ever more energy, but instead increase with efficiency. Building code and vehicle efficiency requirements must be improved and put on a path toward carbon neutrality.

The fossil-industry maintains its strangle-hold on Washington via demagoguery, using China and other developing nations as scapegoats to rationalize inaction. In fact, we produced most of the excess carbon in the air today, and it is to our advantage as a nation to move smartly in developing ways to reduce emissions. As with the ozone problem, developing countries can be allowed limited extra time to reduce emissions. They will cooperate: they have much to lose from climate change and much to gain from clean air and reduced dependence on fossil fuels.

We must establish fair agreements with other countries. However, our own tax and dividend should start immediately. We have much to gain from it as a nation, and other countries will copy our success. If necessary, import duties on products from uncooperative countries can level the playing field, with the import tax added to the dividend pool.

Democracy works, but sometimes churns slowly. Time is short. The 2008 election is critical for the planet. If Americans turn out to pasture the most brontosaurian congressmen, if Washington adapts to address climate change, our children and grandchildren can still hold great expectations.

1 Dr. James E. Hansen, a physicist by training, directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a laboratory of the Goddard Space Flight Center and a unit of the Columbia University Earth Institute, but he speaks as a private citizen today at the National Press Club and at a Briefing to the House Select Committee on Energy Independence &Global Warming.

2 Target atmospheric CO2: where should humanity aim? J. Hansen, M. Sato, P. Kharecha, D. Beerling, R. Berner, V. Masson-Delmotte, M. Raymo, D.L. Royer, J.C. Zachos, http://arxiv.org/… and http://arxiv.org/…

3 The proposed “tax and 100% dividend” is based largely on the cap and dividend approach described by Peter Barnes in “Who Owns the Sky: Our Common Assets and the Future of Capitalism“, Island Press, Washington, D.C., 2001

UPDATE: Here is a link to Dr. Hansen’s web site where you can find further links to the slides that accompany this presentation (in both PDF and PP formats)

[Crossposted at Daily Kos]

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Posted in Activism, climate science, Climaticide, Dr. James Hansen, global warming, Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: JohnnyRook | June 23, 2008

Crimes Against Humanity: James Hansen Calls for Trials of Oil, Coal Chief Executives

Kudos to James Hansen for once again having the courage to say what others are afraid to even think.

From today’s UK Guardian:

James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

That’s right, Hansen, the self-proclaimed “moderate conservative” is calling on Congress to put oil and gas companies CEO on trial for the crime of knowingly lying to the public about the danger that Climaticide poses for billions of the world’s population and at least half her species of flora and fauna. In other words for attempting to block action on a global holocaust.

Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, will testify before Congress today on the 20th anniversary of his historic, groundbreaking testimony to Congress. Analysis of those remarks here. Full text of Hansen’s 1988 remarks here (PDF).

Over the last two decades Hansen has gone from being a reluctant public figure to a committed climate activist. While continuing to carry out his scientific research, he has become increasingly outspoken despite attempts by the Bush administration to muzzle him (and many of his colleagues.) See Mark Bowen’s book Censoring Science for the full story. Also check out this NPR interview with Hansen and Bowen.

Last Friday Hansen set down with Dot Earth’s Andy Revkin to discuss his historic testimony and the urgent need for action to stop Climaticide now.

So, will Hansen’s call for a Nuremberg for oil and coal CEO’s actually lead to trials? Not likely, not right away, given Congress’s inability to stop the Iraq War, protect the constitution, or hold telecoms accountable for their crimes, but it is a good thing to start talking about. Our current situation is dire and it is time to take off the kid gloves (the Climaticide denialists have had theirs off for decades now).

Let the CEO’s and their denialist minions bluster, threaten and whine. But let them sweat a little too because this is just the beginning. Once again, James Hansen is out in front, but others will soon follow. Allow me to be one of the first to express support:

Put the bastards on trial on national television. If they are found guilty, lock them up until hell freezes over, or better yet until we get back down to 350ppm, the ice stops melting, and billions of people ceased to be threatened by increased flooding, drought, hurricanes, tornadoes, and famine.

Unless we act as quickly and dramatically as Hansen suggests, Climaticide will impose cruel and unusual punishment on us and our descendants for many, many generations to come.

UPDATE: Here is a link to Dr. Hansen’s prepared remarks–Global Warming 20 Years Later: Tipping Points Near (PDF and PowerPoint) given today, June 23, 2008 to The National Press Club and The House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

[Crossposted at Daily Kos]

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Posted in climate science, Climaticide, Dr. James Hansen, global warming, Politics | Tags: , , , ,

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