Comments newnoah has made

“I am not a doomsayer,” said Bell. “I am not one who wants to say we are beyond the tipping point. But I am afraid that we are getting close to that.”

As Joseph Romm eloquently describes our predicament faced with Hansen's new vision of climate change:

1. Staying below 450 ppm is technologically doable, but would be the greatest achievement in the history of the human race, by far. It would require a global effort sustained for decades comparable to what the U.S. did for just the few years of World War II (the biggest obstacle is not technological, but political ­ conservatives currently would never let progressives and moderates pursue such a strategy).

2. If 350 ppm is needed (and I’m not at all sure it is) then the deniers and delayers have won, since such a target is hopeless.

But hopeless is not an option if Hansen is right. If the climate change diagnosis is now akin to a possible terminal illness then we must get out of denial and make the drastic, radical, unthinkable, impossible life style changes necessary or were toast.

http://www.countercurrents.org/henderson180408.htm

Or do we just rely on Waxman-Markey and the Western States Initiative?

"The first, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in February, showed that the climate change we cause today will be "largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop". About 40% of the carbon dioxide produced by humans this century will remain in the atmosphere until at least the year 3000. Moreover, thanks to the peculiar ways in which the oceans absorb heat from the atmosphere, global average temperatures are likely to "remain approximately constant … until the end of the millennium despite zero further emissions"."  It's time to alter course  Monbiot

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/01/global-warming-emissions-fossil-fuels

bill (at) pacificfringe.net

There is a local Gibsons band called Sweet Cascadia and they play a locally written song called Riding my Bike that is every bit as good as BOTH SIDES NOW and BIG YELLOW TAXI, a could be classic for today - but they haven't recorded it yet. Most of the band members are enviro educators and most of their songs are about being the change. Somebody should record them and make the bits available carbon free cause they're singing our song. (not much on net but pictures http://www.lagoonsociety.com/sweet-cascadia.php )

Isn't Waxman-Markey confirmation that "Climate policy is characterized by the habituation of low expectations and a culture of failure. There is an urgent need to understand global warming and the tipping points for dangerous impacts that we have already crossed as a sustainability emergency that takes us beyond the politics of failure-inducing compromise. We are now in a race between climate tipping points and political tipping points."
David Spratt, Philip Sutton, Climate Code Red, Australia, Published July, 2008

"These scientific imperatives are incompatible with the realities of politics as usual and business as usual. Our conventional mode of politics is short-term, adversarial and incremental, fearful of deep, quick change and simply incapable of managing the transition at the necessary speed. The climate crisis will not respond to incremental modification of the business-as-usual model."
http://www.civicus.org/new/media/climatecodered_1.pdf

Isn't Waxman-Markey one more hard to ignore lesson that those committed to climate change solution need to solve the broken / captured government problem first: How to get out of BAU where needed change isn't possible? Instead of just mis-educating the public and helping the delayers?

"...(T)he critical factor for leadership and organizations is no longer whether one accepts the reality of abrupt climate change, as it was for the last 10 years, but whether one believes in the possibility of abrupt political change and is willing to work for it." Ken Ward
http://www.grist.org/article/2009-03-19-u.s.-groups-desert-precaution/

bill  (at) pacificfringe.net

Clinging, flabby, consensual thinking of the late twentieth century (Lovelock http://www.conservationmagazine.org/articles/volume-10-number-2/war-peace/ )

"Worse, the bill locks us into a framework that will fail. Science tells us that immediately is not soon enough to begin repairing the planet.  Waiting another decade or more will virtually guarantee catastrophic levels of warming.  But the bill does not require any greenhouse gas reductions beyond current levels until 2030

"Today's bill is a fragile compromise, which leads some to claim that we cannot do better.  I respectfully submit that not only can we do better; we have no choice but to do better.  Indeed, if we pass a bill that only creates the illusion of addressing the problem, we walk away with only an illusion.  The price for that illusion is the opportunity to take substantive action."     Dennis Kucinich  www.opednews.com

Waxman-Markey and the present climate change lack of leadership is 'crowding out' what increasingly looks like our last chance for effective mitigation before it is too late.

China and the developing world are watching and we are already over a tipping point to failure at Copenhagen. Waxman-Markey will probably become the example:

"far too little emission reduction because systemic change is off the table; a weak semi-agreement on paper which most will understand as subvertable. It might be the best deal that negotiators can achieve but it will be failure for even those that still cling to 450 as the ceiling, 2050 as the target date, and still believe that mitigation is possible with instruments and regulation still firmly within BAU."
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/49264

Australian Green senator Christine Milne was talking about Waxman-Markey as well as Labour's not nearly good enough new climate change legislation in her recent very significant speech:

"Incrementalism is worse than useless in the face of the climate crisis. Just as you cant be a little bit pregnant, you cant stop climate change by doing 5% of what is necessary. Or even 25%. If we trigger tipping points, the heating process will gather its own momentum and there will be nothing we can do to stop it. Doing too little to avoid those tipping points is functionally equivalent to doing nothing."
Australia senator Christine Milne
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/49255

Science (but still same system) is back

"There are currently many plans for sustainable use or sustainable development that are founded upon scientific information and consensus. Such ideas reflect ignorance of the history of resource exploitation and misunderstanding of the possibility of achieving scientific consensus concerning resources and the environment. Although there is considerable variation in detail, there is remarkable consistency in the history of resource exploitation: resources are inevitably overexploited, often to the point of collapse or extinction."

Carl Walters, Donald Ludwig, Ray Hilborn

"The evolutionary paradigm is different from the conventional optimization paradigm popular in economics in at least four important respects (Arthur 1988): 1) evolution is path dependent, meaning that the detailed history and dynamics of the system are important; 2) evolution can achieve multiple equilibria; 3) there is no guarantee that optimal efficiency or any other optimal performance will be achieved due in part to path dependence and sensitivity to perturbations; and 4) `lock-in' (survival of the first rather than survival of the fittest) is possible under conditions of increasing returns. While, as Arthur (1988) notes "conventional economic theory is built largely on the assumption of diminishing returns on the margin (local negative feedbacks)" life itself can be characterized as a positive feedback, self-reinforcing, autocatalytic process (Kay 1991, GŸnther and Folke 1993) and we should expect increasing returns, lock-in, path dependence, multiple equilibria and sub-optimal efficiency to be the rule rather than the exception in economic and ecological systems."

Costanza et al. Modeling Complex Ecological Economic Systems. BioScience 1993On Integrating science with management and policy at the Puget Sound Georgia Basin Ecosystem Conference posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago 2 Responses

What is reasonable?

Dear Bill,

Something important is happening tomorrow.

In a speech in Washington, DC, Nobel Laureate and Former Vice President Al Gore will issue a major challenge, essentially pressing the "reset" button on how we think about energy and climate, and how we can create prosperity in America.

His speech will generate a great deal of attention. Since you are a We campaign member, we wanted to make sure you heard about it in advance. We'll email you when we've posted the video highlights, action steps and other resources -- so stay tuned for breaking news!

Sincerely,

Cathy Zoi
CEO
www.wecansolveit.org

Let's guess what degree of major challenge Al will be making tomorrow. What's reasonable? Careful, you're risking your credibility if you think he'll actually challenge us to do something appropriate to an actual 'crisis'. We..???
On Climate action requires leadership beyond political 'reasonableness' posted 1 year, 4 months ago 5 Responses

350 - impossible - possible

350 it has to be and thanks to Ken for his leadership.

But re-read Climate Code Red and consider Joseph Romm's evaluation of 350:

"staying below 450 ppm is technologically doable, but would be the greatest achievement in the history of the human race, by far. It would require a global effort sustained for decades comparable to what the U.S. did for just the few years of World War II (the biggest obstacle is not technological, but political ­ conservatives currently would never let progressives and moderates pursue such a strategy).
If 350 ppm is needed (and I'm not at all sure it is) then the deniers and delayers have won, since such a target is hopeless."

To get to 350 in time we need to throw a switch: we need to agree that 350 is impossible without escaping BAU first. The politics of climate change is not a level playing field; the policy topology has sinks and valleys; path dependence will keep us to car culture paths (for only one example)till we are over the climate flip. Governments and business are severely constrained:

"As your country puts on the Golden Straightjacket two things tend to happen: your economy grows and your politics shrinks... [The] Golden Straightjacket narrows the political and economic choices of those in power to relatively tight parameters. That is why it is increasingly difficult to find any real differences between ruling and opposition parties in those countries that have put on the Golden Straightjacket. Once your country has put on the Golden Straightjacket, its political choices get reduced to Pepsi or Coke - to slight nuances of taste, slight nuances of policy..."
Thomas Friedman The Lexus and the Olive Tree

We have to return to 350 but we can't get there in BAU. Escape BAU and as Lester Brown points out in PlanB 3.0 80% by 2020 becomes possible.

5 keys to a safe-climate future

1. Our goal is a safe-climate future - we have no right to bargain away species or human lives.
   
2. We are facing rapid warming impacts: the danger is immediate, not just in the future.
   
3. For a safe climate future, we must take action now to stop emissions and to cool the earth.
   
4. Plan a large-scale transition to a post-carbon economy and society.
   
5. Recognise a climate and sustainability emergency, because we need to move at a pace far beyond business and politics as usual.