ApocaDocuments (15) for the "Climate Chaos" scenario from this week
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Sun, Dec 5, 2010
from Los Angeles Times:
At climate summit, they're feeling like deserted islands
...As the 12-day [Cancun] summit moves into high gear this week, small island nations may be the noisiest critics, but they are hardly alone in their frustration that a legally binding agreement to reduce planet-heating pollutants has no chance to be concluded here.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said Wednesday that the Cancun talks "won't result in anything" because no major leaders are attending.
Climate negotiations in Copenhagen ended in acrimony last year, with 120 heads of state, including President Obama, in attendance. This year, except for a few leaders of smaller nations, ministers and diplomats are doing the talking.
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So... leaders showing up doesn't work, and leaders NOT showing up doesn't work. What on earth will work?
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Sun, Dec 5, 2010
from Toronto Globe and Mail:
Who will pay for the environmental mess we're in?
Many leaders from the developing world and Western activists are demanding trillion-dollar reparations for the developed world's damage to the Earth's atmosphere at the expense of the poor. Their argument is an extension of the anti-globalization, anti-corporate credo that assigns moral blame for the vast gap in global living standards.
Representatives from developing countries arrived at Cancun determined to hold rich nations to account for their role in causing what scientists say is a growing climate crisis, one that will hit poor nations the hardest.
However, the United States and the European Union are mired in the worst economic slump since the Great Depression. The heightened level of economic insecurity -- and the perception that China is overtaking Western economies -- will make it increasingly difficult for those governments to win public support for massive climate-related transfers to developing countries that would have been politically problematic even before the global slump. ...
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Unfortunately, we're all gonna pay!
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Sat, Dec 4, 2010
from New York Times:
Shrugging Off Criticism, Europe Will Keep Trawling
European nations will keep trawling the deep sea bottom, officials said this week, confounding hopes that they would honor commitments made to the United Nations General Assembly to stop the destructive practice. The Council of Fisheries Ministers, made up of officials from the 27 member nations of the European Union, said on Monday that there would be little change in deep-sea quotas for the next two years, despite strong objections from the conservationist camp.... A British study published in September found that bottom trawling commercial fishing fleets have a more negative impact on the seafloor than all other major human activities combined. ...
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Scraping the very bottom of the barrel of earth.
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Sat, Dec 4, 2010
from Associated Press:
As climate talks drag on, more ponder techno-fixes
Like the warming atmosphere above, a once-taboo idea hangs over the slow, frustrating U.N. talks to curb climate change: the idea to tinker with the atmosphere or the planet itself, pollute the skies to ward off the sun, fill the oceans with gas-eating plankton, do whatever it takes.
As climate negotiators grew more discouraged in recent months, U.S. and British government bodies urged stepped-up studies of such "geoengineering."... Schemes were floated for using aircraft, balloons or big guns to spread sulfate particles in the lower stratosphere to reflect sunlight, easing the warming scientists say is being caused by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emitted by industry, vehicles and agriculture.
Others suggested assembling gargantuan mirrors in orbit to fend off the solar radiation. Still others propose -- and a German experiment tried -- seeding the ocean with iron, a nutrient that would spur the spread of plankton, which absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide. ...
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Hey, if we can't get real work done, we might as well fire up the bong!
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Sat, Dec 4, 2010
from Associated Press:
Ft. Wayne billboard to herald Jesus' return in May
A Christian group is proclaiming Jesus' impending return in billboards going up Fort Wayne and other U.S. cities for the holiday season.
Allison Warden, one of the founders of Raleigh, N.C.-based We Can Know, said Wednesday that an analysis of Scripture, particularly the genealogies, shows Jesus will come in May.
"God actually provides a calendar that points to May 21, 2011, as the day for Christ to return," she said. ...
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As an ApocaDoc, I gotta say May can't come soon enough!
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Fri, Dec 3, 2010
from Haaretz, via Perry:
Never-ending summer sends rabbis, imams, priests to pray for rain
Chief rabbis Yona Metzger and Shlomo Amar have decreed special days of fasting and prayer in response to the drought. The first of the fasts was yesterday, and the second will be on Monday.
The rabbis also wrote a special prayer for rain and urged worshipers to insert it into the daily prayer service on every day when the Torah is read (Monday, Thursday and Saturday ).... "The summer is over, but we still haven't been saved by a blessed rainfall," the rabbis began the letter they sent this week to municipal and neighborhood rabbis both in Israel and abroad. "The water situation in the Land of Israel is one of great need and distress, especially because this is not the first year in which there has been a drought and the land has dried up, due to our multitude of sins. This requires us to seek out the reason. Our obligation in this situation is to examine and scrutinize our actions, to draw nearer to God with all our hearts and to pour out our supplication to him with a broken and downcast heart."... Two weeks ago, Jewish, Christian and Muslim religious leaders conducted a joint prayer for rain in the Muslim village of Wallaja. The drought has also brought a rare moment of unity among the various Orthodox Jewish sects - all of whom issued a joint call to their followers to add "Ve'anenu," a special prayer for rain and for God's mercy in general, to the Amida, the central prayer of the thrice-daily service.
There has been no rain at all this month, and most forecasters expect this dearth to continue through at least the beginning of December, and possibly even all of it. The drought covers the entire eastern Mediterranean region. Western Europe, in contrast, is suffering a plethora of precipitation. ...
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I often pray that prayer might be enough.
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Fri, Dec 3, 2010
from CBC:
2010 set to be Canada's warmest year
The year 2010 is expected to be one of the three warmest years worldwide since the collection of reliable climate data began -- and Canada's on track to record its hottest year yet.
The data released Thursday by the UN's weather agency, the World Meteorological Organization, provides further evidence of a warming trend that has been seen for many years. Scientists blame a steady rise in man-made greenhouse gases, which have been building up in the atmosphere, trapping heat in.
During the first 10 months of 2010, the global combined sea surface and land surface air temperature was 0.55 degrees C above the 1961-1990 annual average of 14 degrees C....
The final ranking of 2010 won't be known until data from November and December are examined early next year. But measurements from the first 25 days of November suggest global temperatures continue to track record levels.
"Canada had its warmest winter on record, with national temperatures 4 degrees C above the long-term average," said the WMO.
"Winter temperatures were 6 degrees C or more above normal in parts of [Canada's] North."
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Why, that's practically winter in Cancun!
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Fri, Dec 3, 2010
from TalkingPointsMemo:
US House Republicans kill climate change committee
US President Barack Obama's Republican foes in the House of Representatives said Wednesday they were disbanding the chamber's committee on battling global warming, calling it a waste of money. Democrats immediately assailed what they branded the "very disappointing" decision to dismantle the Select Committee on Global Warming, which did not have the power to approve legislation.
"We have pledged to save taxpayers' money by reducing waste and duplication in Congress," said a spokesman for Republican House speaker-designate John Boehner, Michael Steel.
The committee "was a clear example, and it will not continue in the 112th Congress," he told AFP by email.
A spokesman for outgoing Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, set to hand Boehner her gavel when a new US Congress convenes in January, said the panel had played an important role in the debate on climate change and energy. ...
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Is it true we elect the politicians we deserve?
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Thu, Dec 2, 2010
from Politico:
GOP plans strategy to stymie EPA
...GOP lawmakers say they want to upend a host of Environmental Protection Agency rules by whatever means possible, including the Congressional Review Act, a rarely used legislative tool that allows Congress to essentially veto recently completed agency regulations.
The law lets sponsors skip Senate filibusters, meaning Republicans don't have to negotiate with Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) for a floor vote or secure the tricky 60 votes typically needed to do anything in the Senate...A spate of contentious EPA rules that are soon to be finalized could be prime targets, including the national air quality standard for ozone, toxic emission limits for industrial boilers and a pending decision about whether to regulate coal ash as hazardous waste. ...
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The GOP must be suffering from Nature Deficit Disorder.
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Tue, Nov 30, 2010
from The Washington Post:
Greenpeace accuses Dow Chemical, Sasol and P.R. allies of corporate spying
A federal lawsuit filed Monday alleges that Dow Chemical, Sasol North America and their contractors waged a two-year campaign of illegal corporate espionage against the environmental group Greenpeace and its allies. The 56-page suit, filed by Greenpeace in U.S. District Court in the District, said the chemical companies and public relations firms Dezenhall Resources and Ketchum hired former executives at a private security firm to spy on Greenpeace from 1998 to 2000 and to perform a range of "clandestine and unlawful" actions to undermine its anti-pollution efforts against the chemical industry.... the lawsuit alleges, among other things, that agents trolled through Greenpeace's privately secured garbage and recycling dumpsters at least 120 times, including 55 times using an off-duty District police officer. ...
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That 56-page suit better be printed on recycled paper.
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Tue, Nov 30, 2010
from NUVO Newsweekly:
A ringside seat at the end of the world: 127 Hours
...Once I worked through the trauma of having watched this film, I began to think of its larger, metaphoric aspects. For those of you who thought there'd be some respite from the theme of this column, sorry!
Ralston is somewhat of a Peter Pan loner, afraid of commitment, doing whatever the heck he wants, whenever he wants, never telling anyone where he's going (a key theme of the film). Meanwhile, there's a comeuppance to his arrogance in the form of the accident, and Ralston has to do something inconceivable to survive.
Now consider the USA in terms of our hero's predicament: four percent of the world population, burning 25 percent of its energy, going it alone in its nascent, Peter Pan stages as a nation, and there's the ongoing accident called climate change. The country is going about its business (business, first!) and even under a we-can-change Obama administration, climate change policy has been put on the back, increasingly hot burner as we turn our attention to more immediate needs. ...
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In the 11th hour of his 127 hours, Aron Ralston did the unimaginable!
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Tue, Nov 30, 2010
from TreeHugger:
How Climate Change Threatens the American Farmer
Called An Almanac of Extreme Weather, it's an op-ed for the New York Times written by Jack Hedin, a Minnesotan farmer whose family has been in the business since his great-grandfather homesteaded the land in the late 1800s. He describes the increasingly extreme weather that fits the projections made by climate models, and details the hardship he, his family, and his peers will face as heavy floods become more powerful and more frequent.
Hedin notes that even his great grandfather, who recorded in his memoirs the damage dealt by the tornadoes and droughts of the Dust Bowl in the 30s, would be taken aback by the weather his great-grandson's family is coping with today. He mentions that the state's climatologist has said that there have already been three "thousand-year rains" in the past seven years in his part of the state -- and that the trend is expected to continue.... "Climate change, I believe, may eventually pose an existential threat to my way of life. A family farm like ours may simply not be able to adjust quickly enough to such unendingly volatile weather. We can't charge enough for our crops in good years to cover losses in the ever-more-frequent bad ones. We can't continue to move to better, drier ground. No new field drainage scheme will help us as atmospheric carbon concentrations edge up to 400 parts per million; hardware and technology alone can't solve problems of this magnitude." ...
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Dear God: is there somebody we can bribe to get out of this mess?
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Mon, Nov 29, 2010
from PhysOrg:
Research highlights the 'human face' of climate change
Barry Smit is the Canada Research Chair in Global Environmental Change, and since 2005 he's studied how Arctic communities have tried to adapt to the rising temperatures caused by major shifts in global weather patterns.
The human dimension of climate change has long been understudied, says Smit, who is taking part this week in a panel discussion on the environment and economy at the first ever Canada Research Chairs conference in Toronto.
Over the course of two research projects - one with ArcticNet and another with the International Polar Year project - Smit has seen first-hand how Canada's Inuit have dealt with changing ice levels, wind speed, migration routes, and so on.... Some communities are seeing their dietary patterns evolve because the animals they've traditionally hunted have shifted their migratory patterns, says Smit. That shift has caused those communities to rely on grocery stores for their food - and since the groceries found in Canada's arctic are often no better than "what we in the south would generally characterize as junk food," that's led to teeth problems and higher rates of diabetes, says Smit.... "The ice is their highway. And one of the thing they've noticed is that their highway is collapsing in places it's never collapsed before," he says. ...
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Accidental microcosmic phrases can make me weep.
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Want more context?
Try reading our book FREE online:
Humoring the Horror of the Converging Emergencies!
More fun than a barrel of jellyfish!
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Mon, Nov 29, 2010
from Boston Globe:
Sudden-drought scenario
But according to recent research on the historical ecology of the Andes Mountains, conducted in part by an assistant professor at Westfield State University, those steady changes could reach a tipping point that would, in some cases, flip local ecosystems on their heads.
The scientists examined fossilized pollen in Lake Titicaca on the border of Peru and Bolivia, the world's highest-elevation great lake. That, they said, allowed them to look about 370,000 years back in time.
They found that in two periods of past warming, the lake shrank by as much as 85 percent, and the surrounding grassland ecosystem was turned into a desert.
Based on their work, the group then projected that if temperatures were to rise between 3 and 5 degrees Fahrenheit, parts of high-elevation Bolivia and Peru would become desert-like as early as 2040.
Such a change could be disastrous for the water supply for Bolivia's capital city, La Paz, and for farming.... Scientists have assumed such tipping points would take place, but the study allowed researchers to do something new: project the future.... "The implications would be profound for some 2 million people," said Paul Filmer, a foundation program director. ...
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I'll see your two million and raise you six billion.
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Mon, Nov 29, 2010
from Scientific American:
Worst case study: global temp up 7.2F degrees by 2060s
World temperatures could soar by 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by the 2060s in the worst case of global climate change and require an annual investment of $270 billion just to contain rising sea levels, studies suggested on Sunday.
Such a rapid rise, within the lifetimes of many young people today, is double the 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) ceiling set by 140 governments at a U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen last year and would disrupt food and water supplies in many parts of the globe.
Rising greenhouse gas emissions this decade meant the 2 degree goal was "extremely difficult, arguably impossible, raising the likelihood of global temperature rises of 3 or 4 degrees C within this century," an international team wrote.... One of the papers gave what it called a "pragmatic estimate" that sea levels might rise by between 0.5 and 2 meters (1.64 to 6.56 feet) by 2100 if temperatures rose 4 degrees Celsius.
Containing a sea level rise of 2 meters, mostly building Dutch-style sea walls, would require annual investments of up to $270 billion a year by 2100. ...
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Good news, since our worst case scenarios are much worser.
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