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When talking about the current economic crisis, climate change, man’s negative impact on the planet, etc, it is often the case that the truth is massively complicated. Climate change, as an example, requires one to understand compliex chaotic interrelationships across much of the planet. The fact that we still have such poor weather forecasting, even over short time periods, is evidence that the systems are so complicated and chaotic that we don’t yet fully understand them. Explaining to people that past average global warming has caused northern Europe to disappear under two meters of ice is tricky, they can’t accept that a lot of the warmth we enjoy comes from the Gulf of Mexico via the Gulf stream. It seems counter intuitive to them that increases in warming over the planet may cause come areas to suffer from incredible freezing incidents.
Doubt, however, is easy. You pick one facet of an idea and take a liberal sprinkle of misunderstanding, whether deliberate or not, and then package it in certainties. You don’t follow the scientific language model, using qualified and uncertain terms. No, you make use of that scientific language in entirely the wrong way. You nit-pick, you poke holes, you highlight where scientific language makes it seem like there is a lot of uncertainty (it doesn’t matter that good science is full of such language, even when reasonably certain). Doubt is easy to generate, because science doubts itself all the time. The scientific method doesn’t prove, it dis-proves. You come up with how you think things are, what would be the case if they weren’t and then experiment. The experiment never proves that things are a certain way, only that they aren’t. If a statement can’t be disproven then it’s not science, it’s a tautology or it’s non-sense. If you have no criteria which would compel you to change your position, then you’re not engaged in science, you’re engaged in dogma and religion.
Both sides of a debate can often be accused of dogmatic adherence to their personal beliefs. Often it’s the case that they don’t admit what it would take for the other side to convince them that they are wrong. Often they don’t admit to themselves that there’s even a chance they are wrong. They believe they have arrived at their position by examining all the evidence critically, so how could they possibly be wrong?
I’ve said it before, but I’d love to be wrong. I’d love it if someone were able to show conclusively that CO2 isn’t a greenhouse gas. That the nuclear industry is safe. That the economy can grow exponentially forever without negative side effects. That mankind is smarter than yeast. I long for these things to be the case, because it would mean a much, much nicer future to look forward to. Hell, if I’m wrong then there is actually a future to look forward to! Wouldn’t that be great?
Having read the FAQ page for COyou2, and having seen the side pannel of on of their pages advertising COyou2 Petz, I am almost certain this is supposed to be a spoof or satirical website, possibly even some kind of study in how amazingly stupid people can be.
I am unsure if there is actually a product to be bought. I am a little wary of providing my name and e-mail details. After all, I’d not sign a book which had “signitories of this book are morons” at the top of the page, and that does seem to be the implication of ordering a catalogue.
“The fact is that big businesses simply can’t afford to make the same sacrifices we can as individuals. We rely on them to make the huge profits that keep our economies alive. [...] BHP recently committed 0.2 per cent of their net annual profit to reduce its emissions and now reimburses its staff for half the cost of energy-efficient light bulbs in their home!” – FAQ page for COyou2
I don’t rely on them to make huge profits, and neither does anyone else. Some people may rely on them to make reasonable, sustained profits, but huge profits are what they want, not what is relied on. It’s also not desireable. Huge profits means huge exploitation. Reasonable profits imply reasonable exploitation, sure, and I’m not supporting that, simply pointing out that some people think it’s good.
I personally don’t think that 0.2% of their profits being devoted to reducing emissions is actually worthy of an exclamation mark. I think it’s worthy of derission and ridicule for being a pathetic and lousy amount. 0.2% is possibly as low a figure as they could possibly make it while still having the money actually buy anything at all. 0.2% is possibly even a government mandated amount.
Like beauracracies, the economy started as a tool for the use of people but has expanded to become something people are supposed to be enslaved to. We can’t possibly ask companies to not exploit people, because of the economy. The economy is more important than those people. We can’t possibly ask companies to take realistic, decisive, sustained action to prevent anything, because it might be bad for the economy. The economy is more important than animals or humans or the planet we live on. We can’t do anything to change anything if the change has even the slightest negative impact on the economy, because the economy is too important for us to risk anything happening to it. The Earth, on the other hand, that can be sacreficed at every turn, at ever step, because it’s not the economy and we don’t rely on it. Right? … Right?
Mankind lived for hundreds of thousands of years without economies. We wouldn’t last a year without the biosphere that supports us. But, maybe the economy is like Pandora’s box and can’t possibly be closed? Once it’s there it’s too important to lose? Once we have an economy, we no longer need biodiversity in our biosphere, because the economy replaces it?
Nope, the economy should be a tool. We should treat it as something to serve us, not something we must serve. It should have always been setup as such, but for some reason[1], we’re slaves to it and that is the way it is designed. The discourse of our society doesn’t even acknowledge the possibility that the economy is a tool. The economy is alive and hungry, and must be fed. It only eats lives, they’re cheap, right?
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[1] A reason that’s not too hard to work out, honestly. Power, those with it wanting to keep it.
So, I recently got directed to this site. Basicly it’s a ‘new innovation’ aimed at one of the ‘major emitters’ of CO2. Breathing!
As the site hypes, each of us are responsible for approximately 1 kg of CO2 per day, 0.38 tons a year! Multiplied by 6.7 billion, the site tells us, and you have a lot of CO2 being emitted. Now, I’m all for population reduction, as anyone who has read my blog will no doubt be aware. However, saying we need to be responsible for capturing our own breath with some gadget is just ludicrous.
1 kg of CO2 per day to continue to exist? I think we can afford that one, thanks. 700,000+ kg of CO2 from one company’s unhealthy snack foods per day?[1] That we can live without. The CO2 emitted by short-haul flights we can live without. The CO2 emitted by long distance commuters we can live without. Breathing is actually vital.
COyou2’s little device is such a waste of effort that I can’t imagine it being for real. I looked at the site and my first thoughts were “Oh, satire, how cute.” However, some people seem to be taking it seriously, so I’m worried that they’re actually a real company selling actual products to retards. Even if one were to accept that the CO2 from breathing were a problem worthy of innovation, this device doesn’t look comfortable. It would be a gadget which you might use once or twice and then just leave alone. Almost certainly causing a net increase in CO2 emissions.
I think one of the major gripes I have with the site is the contained implication that governments and business are doing all they possibly can, so much so that your pesky breathing is now a big enough contribution to CO2 emissions that you’re irresponsible for not capturing your own CO2. As if any part of that were even skirting the truth, or could even see truth with a high powered telescope.
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[1] Walkers’ crisps, a UK based company, sells over 10 million bags of crisps per day, each bag responsible for twice its weight in CO2 emissions.
Further to my previous post I would like to add some facts which are interesting and relevant to the discourse of whether one year’s growth in ice on the North Pole is of any interest unless it establishes a pattern.
Those who track the news will probably have heard the phrase “The hottest X on record” a lot. It’s becoming one of the things which defines modern news broadcasting. This is represented in some facts and figures (‘on record’ means ‘in the last 125 years, since good records began being kept’):
- 2005 was the hottest year on record.
- 2007 was the second hottest year on record, tied with 1998.
- The top 14 hottest years on record occurred since 1990 (18 years).
- The top 24 hottest years on record occurred since 1980 (28 years).
This is a pattern which needs to be acknowledged.
A few people suggest that the cause of recent warming is down to activity on the sun. However, unless the models (which have been able to accurately model historic climate variations and so must have at least some accuracy) are insanely, massively inaccurate then the influence of the variations in the sun are about 1/30th of the influence of greenhouse gas emissions by humans. In other words, quite small and not significant enough to generate 24 of the top 25 hottest days on record.
If you want a more professional version of the information above, along with graphs and much more data, then watch this presentation by John Holdren (can take a few minutes to load).
I’ve posted before about my dislike of the term ‘global warming’ because of the implications of it being so gentle. I’ve expressed a preference for ‘climate change’ because it contains a truer indication of the likely expectations, since while some areas are going to get warmer, some will get colder. While some areas will get dryer, others will get wetter. Etc.
However, I’m coming around to the terms ‘catestrophic climate change’, ‘global climatic disruption’, or ‘global climatic crisis’. The reason being because ‘climate change’ sounds so benign. Like ‘global warming’ it sounds so safe. It sounds like something which can be fixed easily, can be adapted to easily. Change is a part of life, after all. Resisting change can cause problems in itself. As such it must be made clear that the change isn’t benign, it’s dramatic and dangerous.
“Holdren explains that the term “global warming” is actually a misnomer. The term implies that the problem at hand is gradual, when in truth it’s quite rapid; uniform when it is highly inconsistent across all of Earth; mainly about temperature, but it encompasses everything about climate; and potentially benign, although it is entirely harmful.” – Strategic Sustainability Consultant’s Blog.
For anyone wondering how I can write climate change entries with the Arctic seeming to be freezing over again, it’s because one year doesn’t make a trend. The trend is very different. One year of ice growth isn’t a good sign since one year of ice growth can be expected to melt in one year. Persistent multi year ice is the stuff that we have been getting rid of. Losing muti year ice is bad news as it’s more resilient than single year ice, it’s harder to melt, yet last year alone saw a large volume of it melting away.
Even if this year’s ice growth does mark the start of a re-laying of multi year ice, that doesn’t kill the idea of climate change. It would kill the idea of global warming, but as pointed out, it’s not about global warming, it’s about the climate changing, which it clearly is doing. Would I be happy seeing multiple year on year gains of ice over the poles? Yeah, it’d be nice. However, it could also indicate a catestrophic slowing of the Gulf Stream, meaning my house would be on the way to being under a few feet of ice in a couple of decades. That wouldn’t make me quite so happy, even if it meant that polabears survived.
One of the many options being seriously considered to halt carbon emissions is the use of bio-fuels.
One of the many options being seriously considered to halt the waste of resources represented by over-packaging is bio-plastics.
Two solutions which believe that making food into non-food is a shiny idea. Brazil leads the way on bio-fuels and is proud of this. Brazil also has a lot of people starving who have been bought or evicted off of their land by large agri-businesses so they can change the crops those lands grow into bio-fuel crops. Sounds great, huh? This is the real-time result of food for fuel.
Most people are more than willing to pay more for fuel than they are for food. A field growing bio-fuels is more profitable than any food crop the land could support. So what is likely to happen, when we already have poor people around the world, going hungry, growing cash crops on land that could feed them? These are uneducated people. They more often than not believe the corporate salesman when he tells them that they will be better off selling all of this years crop and then buying their seed for next year’s crop from the company. While they’re at it they might as well use this new fertiliser and pesticide, it’ll boost their production. Since you’re using our chemicals you don’t need to employ any of your traditional land management techniques, these products remove the need to do that. And if they’re boosting their production they might as well buy the seed for cash crop X and thus make surplus money to afford to send their children to school and to buy things they want. Sounds good, we’ll take it.
Then they might get a season or three of great growth and it might seem like they’ve made the right choice. Then they might start to see the effects of prolonged use of chemicals on their land, they might start to also see a decline in the level of growth they’re getting. They might start to think that it’s not actually so great to buy their seeds from the company and so try to save them, only to find they’re terminator seeds and don’t grow a second season, so they’re now trapped in the buying cycle and are unable to save their seeds. So, they stop buying the chemicals, their fields weren’t that bad before, they grew the food the family needed well enough. They then find out that the seed they are now trapped buying doesn’t grow or grows very poorly without the company’s fertiliser and other chemicals, so they’re locked into buying them too. Eventually they’ve ruined their fields, spoilt the environment they rely on and are almost indentured to the company, needing to buy the seeds and chemicals each year to further ruin their fields in order to keep any money coming in. Conveniently the money they may get is also dictated by the corporation which is selling them the means to ruin their way of life.
Rambling? I know. Off topic? A little. Unlikely? No. This happens and has happened for many years now.
Even as they starve, people will still export food for money. It happened during the Irish potato famine during the 1840’s and it happened during the Ethiopian Famine of the 1980’s. During both famines the respective countries were exporting food to Britain while masses of people starved in their own countries.
The invention of terminator technology was such a vile attack on life that I can’t believe it wasn’t seen for what it is. People who use technology for such gross violations of sanity should be considered criminals, not pioneers of industry. Products made to do such things should be illegal, not profitable.
Agri-fuel industrialists will bleat about how the current food prices aren’t their fault because only 2% of the food of the planet is used for fuel. This isn’t the point, honestly. The current food prices are probably because of the sharp rise in the price of oil, since food is oil now, but wanting to increase the amount of food siphoned off for fuel will have an impact on the global food prices. People consider their cars to be essential (often because they live criminally far away from their place of work), while fresh, healthy food comes in second place. Most people will live on cheap beans and cheap bread when forced to choose between fixing, fuelling and insuring their car or eating well. The choice for them is obvious.
Putting pressure on a dwindling food supply by making it into plastics and petrol when 30 countries around the world have had food riots this year alone isn’t ethical. It’s not right.
In a world where oil prices push up food prices, where climate change looks set to destroy more and more crops around the world, where the population overshoot continues apace, should we really be thinking about converting food into not-food?
“Scientists once tried to build a sealed living world – nicknamed biosphere 2 – from scratch in a big greenhouse in the Arizona desert. They failed. As carbon dioxide levels rose within the sealed greenhouses, Biosphere 2’s human inhabitants must have reflected on the lessons they were learning as they gasped for air. Functioning ecosystems cannot be created artificially. Life keeps us alive, and we lay waste to it at our peril.” — Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Out Future on a Hotter Planet, pg 106.
I don’t want to pick on Biosphere 2 specifically. I want more to focus on the idea that technologies are going to save us. Biosphere 2 is simply a good example of how limited our knowledge of the world around us is. We believe we are masters of all we survey, that we are special and steer our own destiny, that we are apart from other life on this planet and can therefore do with other life as we please.
We can’t use other life as we please. We don’t know the impacts of what we are doing. We often don’t accept that what we are seeing is an impact from an action we have taken. For too long there was a debate in the mass media which didn’t exist in scientific circles. As Al Gore says on the DVD, Inconvienient Truth, there were no questions against the conclusions of the scientific papers linking global climate change with human activity. Over the same time period around 50% of the articles published in mass media news stated that the findings were inconclusive or that there was a debate over the findings of these scientific reports. In other words, the mass media lied. Nothing new there.
There will not be a technological fix for the problems we are creating. For many of the problems, the really, really big problems, which we are creating, we aren’t even looking for solutions.
“Today, we are sort of in the middle of a mass experiment,” says Bralower. “With the oceans warming, we do not really know what the end result will be, but we can look to the fossil record to see how they were affected in the past. It appears that abrupt climate change affects plankton with selectivity and most of the organisms bounce right back after the change.” — Source: ScienceDaily
The article does tell us the climatic change range that the research considered: 11 degrees over 1,000 years, which is very, very fast in geological time frames. It translates into 1.1 degree every 100 years. In other words 0.11 degreed every 10 years. Mark Lynas believes we are looking at 0.4 degrees of climate change every 10 year, 4 degrees every 100 years or 40 degrees over 1,000 years. Comparable? No. Especially as one of the changes which was studied wasn’t geologically rapid climate change due to increased levels of carbon dioxide, it was the K/T boundry, the extinction of the dinosaurs due to ‘nuclear winter’ effect, or masses of dust and crap up in the atmosphere blocking out the sun.
Why is the lack of carbon dioxide related climate change important? Surely a rapid shift in climate temperature is as bad as the next? Well, no. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is taken out of the atmosphere in a large number of ways, one of which is disolving into the ocean. This raises the acidity of the ocean because the carbon dioxide forms carbonic acid when combined with water (H2O + CO2 = H2CO3). Acidification of the ocean makes it a more hostile environment for shell forming organisms, such as plankton.
If man-made carbon dioxide emissions cause the ocean to become too hostile for plankton then we may be looking at the total collapse of oceanic ecosystems – everything in the ocean needs these little guys for their existence, from the largest whales to smallest fish. This may not be very likely to happen, as water doesn’t disolve that much carbon dioxide and thus doesn’t become very acidic. However, the amount it disolves increases with temperature, hotter water disolves more than cold water. Also the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide influences how much is disolved in the ocean. As I have said previously, we are entering unprecidented levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so it’s impossible to say what will happen.
Just thought I’d post a few of my thoughts about the current climate change debate.
First of all, I hate the phrase ‘global warming’. It’s misleading. Many places will get warmer, sure, but some places will get colder. The global climate is a chaotic system with many strange feed-back systems. Here in the UK climate change could either mean hotter, possibly to the point of stiflingly hot, or it could mean we get so cold that we get buried under 2 meters of ice. Using the phrase ‘global warming’ gives people the wrong idea entirely. Most people in the UK would welcome hotter temperatures.
One of the things I hear quite frequently (possibly jokingly, possibly not) is that it will mean we don’t have to go to other countries for our holidays as the UK will be more like Spain. This isn’t a good thing people. England already has a lot of water shortage problems. Frequently these happen despite good rainfall in the wetter months. A hotter climate will mean more droughts (and crazily, more rain in some areas), lower crop yields, more freak weather occurrences, the possibility of extreme weather in the UK (we are already one of the most frequently hit by twisters in the world[1]) also increases as the UK gets hotter.
Freak weather occurrences, such as tornadoes, are often powered by hot areas of ocean, like the Gulf of Mexico. When these areas get hotter the storms they generate become more intense. Climate change could result in the south east of the US becoming almost uninhabitable due to the frequency and severity of extreme storms. If you own property in such areas it might be a good time to sell it for as much as you can get and move somewhere colder. Within a few decades your new home might even be in a region which is hotter than you just left! Think of all the benefits you’ll experience as you watch your old home be destroyed live on the news!
It was recently my pleasure (misfortune?) to go down the pub with two capitalist industrialists. One owns a factory which makes plastic POS display units for large UK and international companies, the other used to make doll houses in China and ship them to the UK for sale. I say he made doll houses, he didn’t of course. He had people he could pay a few pounds a week do it for him. He then sold the houses for a few hundred pounds each and pocketed the profit. He now charges people £30 an hour to dry-clean their carpets.
The issue of climate change came up and I was told that it was natural. After all, we can’t make or destroy anything since the Earth is a closed system. I didn’t bother to argue, because there are some things that your brain refuses to do. For me one of the things my brain refuses to do is come up with an argument against bull-shit. It just wants to laugh and point and shout wanker. I can’t help it, it’s a compulsion.
We can create and we can destroy. We can dig up carbon which has been locked away for millions of years and introduce it into the atmosphere. We can chop down forests and rainforests. We can pave large areas of land and drain wetlands for housing developments. We can alter the atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide to levels which we have no record for, no way of knowing the consequences of. We are already over the highest level of CO2 we had a record for and we are rocketing to levels so high that the best of our modelling will be useless for.
I had a saddening talk with my little sister while I was staying at my mother’s house. She is nine years younger than me and I have been assured time and again that the younger generation are in the know and are the best bet for changing things. She told me she would choose to drive instead of eat most days. She said she’d find out how many days she could go without food so she could drive on those days instead. She doesn’t need to drive, but she likes doing it. She has a job for her dad for which they could car-pool, but they don’t. They normally choose to go to lunch at the same place but in different cars. I tried to talk to her about it but she was totally disinterested. My mum was more interested in car-pooling but doesn’t live near anyone who uses her works car-pool.
I know I should probably be flattered or something when she wanted to see me so much that she drove from her friends across the city to see me come off my train when I arrived, but my mum was picking me up. We had two cars arrive for three people to use. It made me sick. She had driven such a long way just to stand in the train station terminal and say hello and then drive all the way back.
Mark Lynas in his book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, emphasises that if we don’t stop at 2 degrees of average climate change then we wont be able to stop until we are over 6 degrees of average climate change. He estimates that we have until 2015 to make drastic, life changing alterations to our way of life, or we can kiss that way of life good-bye. I don’t believe the system is capable of making anywhere near that level of change. We should be prepared to kiss our way of life good-bye.
So it’s all doom and gloom? Yes. As adults we should accept that it is. We should accept that it is our fault and that we are the ones who need to do something about it. But we wont. We don’t have the political structures capable of taking action for more than four years in the future. Most political decisions don’t look any further than 1 week into the future. Many don’t even look past the next news headline. If politicians aren’t going to help us, who will? Well, remember how I said we were all adults? Yes? That means we have to help us. We have to change, fundamentally, how we do things.
If you’re worried about the price of petrol and think the government should tax it less so it’s more affordable, you are part of the problem. If you are worried about the price of gas and think the government should place a windfall tax on the corporations which charge for it, you are part of the problem.
The solution to the problem will not come from making fossil fuels cheaper. That is the way towards further, bigger problems. We need to stop burning fossil fuels. We need to use the last of the worlds oil making wind farms and solar farms and tidal barrages. We need to save the last of our petrol for emergency uses. We need to stop living at break-neck speeds, stop throwing out perfectly functional products because we want the latest, and above all stop looking at the world as a collection of resources and look at it as our only home.
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[1] We get approximately 50 per year, America gets approximately 1,170 but is 40 times larger than the UK (using numbers from Wikipedia).
Possibly an odd thing for me to say here, but I would love to be wrong.
I would love for everything I am about to write in the days/months to come to be total crap. I’d love for someone to post a point of view which was well supported with both reason and evidence which showed that oil was not finite, or that it was not filling so many roles which we aren’t even looking for something else to fill, or that we are working on sensible, workable solutions for the peak oil situation. Hydrogen fuel-cells are not a replacement for oil, since there are no hydrogen lakes. Hydrogen is an energy carrier, not an energy source. As such it can’t replace oil. No one even bother suggesting nuclear, the argument there is too easy to bother with.
I would love for someone to show that we are not deforesting the planet. That, year on year, we are not losing anchient forests and jungle and rainforest. Anchient is the key modifier there. New growth is meaningless. A new growth forest contains only a fraction of the bio-diversity of an anchient forest. A new growth forest often only contains one species of tree also, which makes matters even worse.
If someone could come along and prove that we are not spewing so many greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere that there is no other inevitable result than widespread climate change that would be great. If you could even prove that Mark Lynas (Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet) is wrong, that global climate change is not going to reach six degrees (or over) if we make it reach three degrees, or that if the global climate does reach six degrees that this would be inconsequential for non-human life on the planet then that would be something.
Maybe you would even be so good as to disprove the assertion that we are responsible for the destruction and extinction of over 200 species a day.
No, I would love to be wrong. I would love it if business as usual was an option. It would mean I was in the minority of crazies instead of being in the minority of sane people.
