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Living within a living, loving planet
Posts tagged climate change skeptics
Methane Damage Greatly Underestimated
Feb 21st
Methane emissions from fossil fuels ‘severely underestimated
19 February 2020
https://www.carbonbrief.org/methane-emissions-from-fossil-fuels-severely-underestimated
This happens in amazing regularity. Surely we cannot be blamed for being sceptical!
Is it the media or those feeding the media? Are scientists penalised for submitting “honest” predictions? By honest I mean predictions based on peer reviewed data. Valid in other words. Or, is it that “honest” prediction data doesn’t even get reviewed because of fear of retribution?
A Religious Left
Sep 30th
A religious left
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/24/684435743/provoked-by-trump-the-religious-left-is-finding-its-voice
“Activists on the left should welcome the emergence of a religious core in their ranks because when political activity is morally inspired, it becomes more passionate — as conservatives already understand. Liberals are famous for being cerebral. A religious left may bring more energy to the progressive movement.”
“Democrats got a jolt of that passion at their last national convention with an appearance by the Rev. William Barber, an African-American preacher from North Carolina who started the “Moral Monday” movement in that state.
“Jesus, a brown-skinned Palestinian Jew, called us to preach good news to the poor, the broken, the bruised, and all those who are made to feel unaccepted!” Barber thundered, bringing the delegates to their feet.
Describing himself as “an evangelical Biblicist,” Barber said the nation is need of “moral defibrillators” to work on its weak heart.
“We must shock this nation with the power of love. We must shock this nation with power of mercy. We must shock this nation and fight for justice for all!” Barber said, in the most rousing speech of the convention.”
I have no problem with concern for the poor, the broken, the bruised etc. However, to ignore the health of the Earth, to ignore an emphasis on “other than humans” is to invite extinction. We truly have a “climate crisis.” CO2 in the troposphere is increasing at an increasing rate. The increase is non-linear and unpredictable. A tipping point has been reached.
Definition of tipping point: the critical point in a situation, process, or system beyond which a significant and often unstoppable effect or change takes place. The process at work here, and that imperils us, is un-predictable and poorly understood positive feedback. We must remember that with a CO2 reading of 414.7 ppm, in May, from the Mauna Loa Research Station on the big island of Hawaii, we have reached levels never before experienced by humans. Notice the caveat “often.” We don’t understand the Earth behaviour triggered by a “runaway” increase of CO2. We must consider that the “often” is probably a “certainly.”
Greta Thunberg’s Speech
Sep 25th
Greta Thunberg’s Speech
Greta Thunberg’s Speech at the UN Climate Action Summit
By Greta Thunberg, originally published by PBS News Hours
September 24, 2019
“People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing.
We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”
“How dare you pretend that this can be solved with business-as-usual and some technical solutions. With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than eight and a half years.”
“There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today. Because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.
You are failing us. But young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us I say we will never forgive you.
We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.”
It takes courage to tell it as it is. It takes courage to speak out when your neighbours are speaking with their heads in the sand. Our exploitative economic system sucks us into such a subservient system – a “company store” – binding that we are compelled to shut up and put up. The ecosystem is still a misunderstood theory to many, boundless, loving Earth energy is credited to God and disaster is too often credited to God’s will. The environment is understood by many to be something “other” than us that we are at the mercy of. Many pray as if they think that the creator needs our praise and dishes out favours to selected followers. Some, hopefully a growing number realise that we “are” the planet. Thus, as the planet suffers so do we.
“It is not a matter of being “close to nature.” The relationship is more one of identity, in the mathematical sense, than of affinity. The Earth is, in a very real sense, the same as ourself (or selves), and it is this primary point that is made in the fiction and poetry of the Native American writers of the Southwest.” Paula Gunn Allen. Maybe that’s why a homespun, behavioural, saying goes: You must love yourself before you can love others.
As long as we see the Earth as “other” there is very little chance that we will change our behaviour or our destructive lifestyle.
Publishing Disinformation about climate change and tobacco
Jun 1st
“MIT Associate Professor David Hsu analyzed organisations in DeSmog’s disinformation database and the Guardian’s tobacco database and found 35 thinktanks based in the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand that promote both the tobacco and fossil fuel industries’ interests.”
On this web page one can find details and company names and who subsidised them. Our poor mother Earth has a weighty adversary with
these disinformation companies.
https://www.desmog.co.uk/2019/02/19/how-tobacco-and-fossil-fuel-companies-fund-disinformation-campaigns-around-world
The Truth Sometimes Hurts
Aug 12th
The Truth Sometimes Hurts
We scientists need help to communicate in a post-truth world
By Kate Marvel on August 8, 2018
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/hot-planet/the-truth-sometimes-hurts/
“More seriously, every time I talk about the uncertainties inherent in climate projections, I feel attacked from all sides of the climate mitigation debate. I admit that in the current landscape, any expression of uncertainty is immediately weaponized by those who want to delay climate action.”
Stop and think a minute. Many of our professionals work in an atmosphere of uncertainty. Take, for instance, our medical profession. Despite their utmost efforts to “get it right” all the time, the human body doesn’t react to medicine in the same way every day. Why? We are a complex, living organism, not a machine. Earth is a complex, living organism also. As a living organism, our usual measuring instruments miss the mark because they were designed to deal with a machine-like inanimate “things.” Thus there has to be some uncertainty with climate change predictions. Consider weather. The weather forecasts are full of uncertainty and often off centre. So, we live with that. Climate is just weather over a long period of time.
Consider our dedicated and compassionate medical workers do their best with the tools they have available yet they work daily with uncertainty and we accept that.
Climate scientists are often in the best position to analyse and make responsible moral judgements re: climate change. Who knows better? When it comes to risk, I’d sooner believe a few climate change researchers than a spokesperson for an industry that takes profits from CO2 emitting activities.
Society as Ecosystem in a Time of Collapse, Part I
Aug 1st
Society as Ecosystem in a Time of Collapse, Part I
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-07-30/human-predators-human-prey/
By Richard Heinberg, July 30, 2018
First of three parts
Richard Heinberg is the author of thirteen books including: – Our Renewable Future: Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean Energy, co-authored with David Fridley (2016) – Afterburn (2015) – Snake Oil (July 2013) – The End of Growth (August 2011) – The Post Carbon Reader (2010) (editor) – Blackout: Coal, Climate, and the Last…
The Climate Change Denial Industry
Jul 30th
The Climate Change Denial Industry
“ExxonMobil gave more than $2.3m to members of Congress and a corporate lobbying group that deny climate change and block efforts to fight climate change – eight years after pledging to stop its funding of climate denial, the Guardian has learned.”
“Last week Ted Nordhaus of The Breakthrough Institute wrote that the Earth’s carrying capacity for humanity is not fixed. Apparently, we’re living in a magical world that is immune to ecological laws.
As you might imagine, I disagree.
My response to his article was published today in Undark Magazine.
https://undark.org/article/ted-nordhaus-carrying-capacity-ecology/
What warning signs would you expect to see if we humans were pressing at the limits of global carrying capacity? Resource depletion? Check. Pollution? Check. Dying oceans? Check.” Richard Heinberg
Sky: Further – The Breakthrough Institute’s Inconvenient History with Al Gore
April 14, 2014, by Paul D. Thacker
“While sometimes functioning as shadow universities, think tanks have been exposed as quasi lobbying organizations, with little funding transparency. Recent research has also pointed out that think tanks suffer from a lack of intellectual rigor. A case in point is the Breakthrough Institute run by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, which describes itself as a “progressive think tank.”
https://ethics.harvard.edu/blog/breakthrough-institutes-inconvenient-history-al-gore
Too many businesses are treating the Earth like a huge candy store
Jul 29th
Too many businesses are treating the Earth like a huge candy store
“We’re dealing with ‘a highly degraded ecosystem of forests that just get continuously logged over and over again.’”
Danna Smith of the Dogwood Alliance, a nonprofit organization.
“…trees cut down in the Southeast are usually replanted. But it can take a sapling decades to grow large enough to absorb and store as much carbon as the tree it replaced.”
Ten percent Sahara expansion
Jul 29th
Ten percent Sahara expansion
“The desert (Sahara) has expanded southward during summer by about ten percent, so it’s a fairly significant increase in the desert expanse over this 93-year period that we analyzed. Most people in the region depend on the food they grow on small family farms. So losing farmland could have grave consequences, especially as populations continue to grow.”
“Nigam is a professor at the University of Maryland. He says decreasing rainfall is likely a result of both natural cycles and human-caused global warming.”
So there we have the kernel of the problem. Decreasing small farmland and increasing population.
Notable mentions and omissions of climate change
Jul 29th
MEDIA ANALYSIS 26 July 2018 12:36
Media reaction: The 2018 summer heatwaves and climate change
Carbon Brief
https://www.carbonbrief.org/media-reaction-2018-summer-heatwaves-and-climate-change
Carbon Brief looks back at how the media has reported the extreme weather and how the coverage has – or has not – referenced climate change.
The summary below is split into five sections:
Roundup of the recent spate of extremes.
How the media has reported the UK’s heatwave.
How it has covered other extreme events across the northern hemisphere.
Notable mentions – and omissions – of climate change.
Summary of the comment and opinion articles.