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Science/Tech See other Science/Tech Articles Title: Global warming – much worse than we thought In 2007 as many as 20,000 politicians, officials, international functionaries, journalists and activists attended the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, better known as the Bali Conference. That was a very great number of Neros assembled in one place complete with their fiddles. Ian McDonald The outcome of this conference, you will recall, was “hailed by governments as a success.” Which governments? And in what way can “a deal to start negotiations to adopt a new climate pact” be counted a success? Anyone can declare an intention to do something – but will it be done? Such deals are fundamentally meaningless. James Connaughton, Chairman of the White House Council on environmental quality at the time, speaking for the greatest Nero of them all, was quoted as saying triumphantly, “We now have one of the broadest negotiating agendas ever on climate change.” Well, hurrah, then, we agreed an agenda. And Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, was quoted as saying that Bali represented “an important basis for a good result.” Well, hurrah again, Bali achieved the basis of a good result. Not therefore a good result. In other words (words!) Bali was a draftsman’s paradise, as such conferences usually are, where the purpose always in the end becomes to stitch up a luxuriant fig leaf to cover complete nakedness. Shakespeare said it all about such windy, grandiloquent, useless conferences when he wrote the dialogue between two noblemen, Glendower and Hotspur, in the play Henry IV, Part One: Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep! Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man. But will they come when you do call for them? Indeed. What we saw at Bali is not a new thing. Throughout history rulers have believed (or pretended to believe) that the announcement of good intentions is the equivalent to the solution of problems. What is perhaps new in our age is that this tendency has hardened and crystallized into a way of life for multitudes of experts, advisers, consultants and other important people who live and work and find their motivation in a sphere remote from the real world. There exists in the world today two entirely separate spheres of activity. One is the sphere of rhetoric, impressive prepared speeches, mutual backslapping, declarations of good intent, and agreed communiqués. The other sphere is the sphere of reality, cold hard facts, military and economic strength, tough commercial negotiations, payment by results, cash down and the bottom line. Each of these spheres function quite separately, has its own apparatus of power and influence, administers its own procedures and proceedings, sets its own objectives and achieves its own successes. They are quite self-contained. There seems to be little, if any, spillover from one sphere into the other. Progress is only made when a way is found to connect the sphere of good intentions with the sphere of practical results. Failing that, the spirits of doable compromise and real progress will always remain imprisoned in the vasty deep of interminable talk-shops. The Bali Conference could only have been judged a success if it had achieved two things leading directly to the reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions, the increase of which is already causing disasters brought about by global warming and climate change and the acceleration of which, unless halted, will in a couple of ticks of historical time lead to worldwide catastrophe, a great if not final extinction. Above all, the conference should have agreed time-tabled targets for cutting the emissions. Europe to its credit was prepared to set such targets but America, the greatest culprit, would not do so while George Bush was President. So no targets were set. There is another way of acting against disastrous climate change. Since tropical de-forestation causes 20% of greenhouse-gas emissions, steps to reduce, halt, reverse this process will obviously be very valuable to the world as a whole. So there should have been agreement to give incentives, a “preservation dividend,” to careful developing countries, like Guyana, for not deforesting our land. But of course no such thing was agreed. Since Bali, precious time has elapsed and the climate change crisis has got much worse much more rapidly than expected. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) now reports that the loss of Arctic ice is well ahead of previous forecasts. And Greenland’s glaciers are now estimated to be melting faster than forecast a short time ago. So while the IPCC projected previously that sea levels would rise 16 inches this century it now forecasts a rise of 39 inches. To make matters worse, experts now despair that global warming can be held to an increase of 2 degrees Celsius which, if exceeded, will cause more widespread droughts and increasingly violent storms, devastate agriculture in many areas and make the planet warmer than it has been in millions of years. The world is flooding and burning up at an accelerating pace. Copenhagen in December 2009 where a deal, and not just a deal to agree a deal, is to be hammered out is now just around the corner. Talking while the world burns will not be enough. By then Nature will have taken another few steps along its own determined way to solve the problem – by the eventual elimination of that rather stupid species, mankind.
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#16. To: buckeroo (#0)
Plant more C02 eating trees. Chomp, chomp. Morenga would be a good one for those warmer, dryer climates, and will help feed yourself and any herbivores you might have as pets.
But the problems are not just a function of CO2 emissions and creating a solution such as spreading MORE trees around like a sponge sucking up water. It is just the opposite as mankind eliminates thousands of hectares/year for plant growth making way for "modern civilization." There is no way to keep the replenishment UP while the chopping and fires are even greater than replacement. And the contributions of the clearing process are not just a matter of some dead trees burning giving off CO2 emissions anyway. It is about methane gases emitted and other noxious reactive elements that are not absorbed. But nice try......
There is no way to keep the replenishment UP while the chopping and fires are even greater than replacement. And the contributions of the clearing process are not just a matter of some dead trees burning giving off CO2 emissions anyway. It is about methane gases emitted and other noxious reactive elements that are not absorbed. But nice try...... So what is wrong with planting a few more trees. You have anything against that? or is it too much like the little guy doing what he can. Methane gas is also formed from normal earth processes as they are also finding is oil, and is found found at the deepest levels of mines and oceans in abundance (where it forms methane lakes held in place by oceanic pressures) and even on Titan where it is a frozen form. I wonder how that can be since these places tend to have very few human inhabitants and definitely no wood fires.
Hewlett and Packard foundations gave over 130 million to Stanford to research extraction of methane hydrates and are directly tied in with Exxon/Mobil in that effort. The idea is that they can use the energy revenues and the carbon credits for removing a principal source of atmospheric methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. They needed Kyoto or this would be a big loser of an investment. Cap and trade anyone?
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