As the Northeast is battered by a gigantic winter storm, a reminder from the past of what can happen with sharper temperature differentials in a warming world.
Sea level rise is a force multiplier.
https://twitter.com/CristelaGuerra/status/948993874831306752
Psychlone. I luv it.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lR96ZSBgTYw?rel=0&w=560&h=315%5D
=> 2020: The Climate Turning Point
Nicely done video, with a good message,but it looks like we’re not going to be on time with the necessary actions.
I have been watching CBS, ABC, and NBC network world news as well as the local affiliates over the past couple of days, and NO ONE is reporting an info linking the extreme weather we’ve been facing to climate change.
“Bomb Psychlone” is an apt title—the media are just “psyching” us with spectacle and “Oh Wow” barometric pressure bomb crap and making no effort to really educate. Same with the hurricanes and wildfires—–couldn’t they have found ONE scientist to speak to climate change rather than interview all the folks who “lost everything, have never seen anything like this, will hang together and rebuild” etc etc?
PS Have friends in Scituate, MA, and have visited them periodically since 1966. I have stood in the exact spot where the video was made, as well as been on the street on the north side of town that features in so many TV news clips—-the waves slamming into the sea wall and splashing higher than the 2-story houses behind it. Scituate is a nice little town that we will likely be too late to save.
Well, here we are => Ice Loss and the Polar Vortex: How a Warming Arctic Fuels Cold Snaps
The loss of sea ice may be weakening the polar vortex, allowing cold blasts to dip south from the Arctic, across North America, Europe and Russia, a new study says.
To lie to people saying we’ll live happily ever after if we reach zero emissions by 2050 is a gross lie, that will backfire long before then when it becomes obvious no one is going to live happily for hundreds of years at least. We need to cut emissions at least 90% in the next 7 years to avoid horrific unimaginable global catastrophe. Then we need to cut the rest very rapidly after that, in the harder areas like steel, concrete, shipping, etc.
We need to get serious now, immediately implementing a global climate mobilization like the one the US used to help its allies win WWII. We need to nationalize and shut down the fossil fuel corporations, coordinated with the planetload of solar panels and wind turbines we need to build, unused dams we need to empower and geothermal plants we need to install. Efficiency and wiser lives must reduce US energy use by at least 75%; we need to reforest the world and transform agriculture to small-scale, low-meat local organic permaculture. The rich have created this crisis, so we need to radically equalize politically and economically. And over the longer term we need to reduce population and heal the mental illness at the root of all our problems.
I agree with your sentiments, and favor a shift of budgets toward energy research and renewal in the order of magnitude of current military budgets (which makes it easy), but the last two sentences, while laudable statements, stack the odds against you agenda to close to infinity.
You don’t say the last 2 statements are untrue, and they’re not, so the odds are simply what they are, whether I say those things or not. The rich have created this crisis, and continue to fuel it; without solving the problem that’s the problem how are we going to solve the problem? If we focus mostly on reducing the number of people who do virtually nothing to cause the problem what will that get us? (That’s the problem with thinking the problem is population. It’s also the problem with thinking the problem is capitalism when the problem is actually what causes capitalism, communism, fascism, and all our other problems.)
So if we don’t correctly diagnose the problem we have zero chance of fixing it. Whatever the chances of fixing it if we do diagnose it correctly, they’re better than they are if we do it by trying to solve something that’s not the problem.
The better we do with equalizing (which will solve the population problem even faster than it’s solving itself now) the faster we’ll solve the GHG and larger ecological problem. We can’t, and don’t have to, equalize completely in time to meet the GHG-reduction needs. We also can’t heal the psychological problems in time; that’s a project of generations. The more conscious we get about the psychological system we’re all part of the faster our problems will go away.
But simply having enough people acknowledge that that’s the ultimate problem will help a lot, like just deciding to go to therapy often helps alleviate symptoms.
I like the implication that we should reduce military spending as we boost spending on the solutions—wiser lives, efficiency, clean safe renewable energy, reforestation, ecological production systems. And of course we need to increase R&D into all those. But the technology and knowledge we have now is enough to solve the problem and provide all we need, providing we focus on needs and give up luxuries like US levels of meat consumption, flying, private vehicles, and rich people. (And denial and other symptoms of the Wetiko disease.)
(and thanks for ignoring the awkward bit at the beginning. I was tired and not thinking clearly.)
When all genuine self-respect has been sold off (think our CEO’s, and the shills they hire to run for elections), then as things get worse, the impulse is NOT to sober up, get a grip, raise the level of your awareness, and rise to the occasion. No, those are the actions of those who, regardless of their expertise, have NOT sold off their self-respect. They find a way to try as best they can to do the right thing.
No, what the corporate/politico axis does, is bury their heads deeper up their lower backside orofice, look for someone, anyone else to blame, grab at handy blurbs and bromides and the rest of the BS that’s always worked in the past. That’s what we’re seeing, and that’s what will happen even more so, in spades, in the future. Deeper s**t means deeper denial because the cost of confronting Reality becomes far too high to contemplate. In for a penny, in for a pound when it comes to denial. They’ve nothing to gain by embracing Reality at this late date. BEFORE they’d sold off their self-respect, there WAS something to gain. Not now. I don’t see this transitioning to a better place without a revolution, in so many different ways. And we’re not going to just techno- our way out of this, either. That’s another denial – that we can grow eternally on a very finite world with a very finite number of square miles to exploit.
“People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be, until they have learned to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises.”
-Vladimir Lenin
Where there is a will, there is a way…
Hailed as an example of how concerted global action can help solve a planetary crisis, a new study conducted by NASA scientists documented the first direct evidence that an international effort to ban chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) has led to the recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole.
Published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters on Thursday, the study uses satellite observations to demonstrate that the decline in atmospheric chlorine that resulted from the implementation of the Montreal Protocol, enacted in 1989, has led to “about 20 percent less ozone depletion during the Antarctic winter than there was in 2005—the first year that measurements of chlorine and ozone during the Antarctic winter were made by NASA’s Aura satellite.”
“We see very clearly that chlorine from CFCs is going down in the ozone hole, and that less ozone depletion is occurring because of it,” Susan Strahan, an atmospheric scientist from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and one of the study’s lead authors, said in a statement. …
=> New Study Showing Ozone Recovery Hailed as Model for Tackling Climate Crisis
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVeTJSIbGm8?rel=0&w=560&h=315%5D
Not what it seems on the surface – we banned CFC’s because we COULD, and still have our refrigeration! We instead converted to HFC’s which skotch the chlorine. Not at all the situation with GHG’s. ANY non diatomic symmetric molecule will be a GHG. This focus on “international cooperation” is a ruse, a deceptive focus on what is not the real issue. When there’s national SACRIFICE involved, international cooperation goes out the window and it’s dog-eat-dog. If we haven’t even halted the exponential INCREASE in CO2 in the atmosphere yet, despite knowing about Fossil Fuels and climate for over 100 years, what makes you think suddenly politico’s will all get warm and rational and care about our children and all the rest? Wake up!
Well said!
Where there is denial, there is a way to seek out inappropriate examples of “progress” like CFC’s.
Sorry – what is the “sacrifice”?
Well. We also COULD phase out fossil fuels and keep our electricity grid going. We also COULD phase out fossil fuels and still drive cars. We also COULD phase out fossil fuels and still heat our homes. It’s the almighty fossil fuel lobby that holds politicians up to do the right thing. A lobby far more mighty than the CFC lobby.
We have about three years left to bend global greenhouse gas emissions to a downward trajectory if we hope to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement, a group of leading climate experts warned in the journal Nature last June. In an article that was both urgent and optimistic, they argued that the daunting task can be met using technologies that are already at hand.
“When it comes to climate, timing is everything,” the group, including former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, head of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, wrote. “If we delay, the conditions for human prosperity will be severely curtailed.”
So, as 2018 begins, here are some of the goals for 2020 that the optimists presented:
* Boost the world’s renewable electricity generation to 30 percent of total supply.
* Begin to retire all remaining coal-fired power plants.
* Expand sales of electric vehicles to 15 percent of new cars.
* Provide $1 trillion in financing each year—public and private—for climate action.
Those efforts can help reach a peak in global emissions by 2020, but it’s only a start. …
=> It’s Not Too Late: A Climate Change New Year’s Resolution
The question is now how to get rid of that Donald Duck ASAP.
How to get rid of Donald Duck ASAP?
He is due for his annual medical exam this month. Include a serious and extensive assessment of his mental state. Once it is determined that he is mentally unfit to serve as president (a foregone conclusion), invoke the 25th Amendment. Then begin to worry about the damage Pence will do to the country.
But the Paris agreement is an international corporate-government mass murder-suicide pact. It’s an agreement to do far too little far too late to save civilization or the millions of species threatened by the combination of climate catastrophe, toxicity and war, including nuclear war.
We need to do much, much better.