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Xenosmilus hodsonae (Florida Museum of Natural History Fossil Hall at the University of Florida)
Obama, Romney and the parties they represent are jointly responsible for being part of the problem that causes global warming and for refusing to prepare for facing the consequences of global warming. Katrina and Sandy are proof positive.
It’s been clear for decades that industrial and automotive pollutants have been drastically altering the atmosphere and creating extreme, and extremely dangerous, weather patterns and neither party has done much of substance to eliminate the problem.
They’re not alone. From the Christian Science Monitor-
fossil fuel burning, cement and oil production produced 3 percent more carbon dioxide in 2011″…or an ”an all-time 37.5 billion-ton (34 billion-metric tons)”. … China, the United States, the European Union, India, the Russian Federation and Japan rank as the top five emitters, from highest to lowest. Last year’s increase was driven by China and India, which saw their carbon dioxide emissions jump by 9 and 6 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, emissions from the European Union, the United States and Japan all decreased, according to the report,Trends in Global CO2 Emissions.
The report doesn’t include carbon dioxide emitted by deforestation, forest fires and other land-use related activities. These sources could potentially add between 10 and 20 percent to the carbon dioxide emission figures…
Nothing, at this point stands in the way of a rise above 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C) which will produce far more extreme weather, significant sea rise and ecologically devastating species extinctions.
What can be done in the US:
Efforts to limit population growth, ending wars of aggression, capital punishment for exporting arms and conspiring to start wars of aggression, massive reforestation projects, draconian laws and punishments for polluters and a commitment to spend trillions greening the economy – especially agriculture, transportation and the infrastructure – would have the short term effect of ending unemployment and drastically cutting the need for and the production of green house gases.
What can be done internationally:
The creation of a consortium of scientific and technological experts tasked with providing solutions to greenhouse gas production, an international effort to stop deforestation of tropical rain forests combined with global efforts at reforestation, providing technologies to limit over-population, draconian laws featuring capital punishment for persons guilty of exporting arms, efforts to limit the damage of sea rise and to humanely deal with those forced to relocate and an international commission to confiscate the wealth of major polluters.
Those goals cannot be accomplished by capitalist governments or economies. Vote Socialist, write in Brad Manning or just sit it out. Working people don’t have a dog in this race.
Photo by Dallas Krentzel, licensed under Creative Commons
20 Comments
I’ve got some bad news for you: We are in the midst of an extinction event, called the Quaternary extinction. It has been going on since the end of the last ice age, which, not coincidentally, is about the same time humanity had spread to all corners of the globe and began to over exploit the environment. Warming from massive hydrocarbon use is just one, (and perhaps the final), nail in that coffin. The Quaternary event is almost entirely anthropogenic in nature and already rivals the Middle Miocene Disruption but if we don’t want it to rival the K-T event, or FSM forbid, the Great Dying at the end of the Permian, the time to be able to cap the damage is rapidly evaporating.
Thanks for the post.
Right now, lower Manhattan and much of Staten Island and coastal New Jersey are living the low-carbon-footprint lifestyle.
Great read, you get my vote.
Highly rcc’d, Mr. Perdue.
Margaret, info I never knew . . . where’d you get all the geology history detail? Never knew you were into geology . . . very kewl.
I’d love to hear more about the things you mention in your comment. Perhaps a diary with links and YOUR intro’s to the links regarding the things you mentioned?
I’d sure read that, in a heartbeat. Best to you and the gato.
I’d like to see a diary like that too!
I’m currently reading “1493″. I’ve learned a number of fascinating things.
First off, the Little Ice Age (something deniers often point to to argue that it’s natural variation that causes climate change) may have been man-made: when 90% of Native Americans died from European diseases in the 1500s, the vast areas that they had burned to plant crops reforested, taking vast amounts of CO2 out of the air. See http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/335168/title/Columbus_arrival_linked_to_carbon_dioxide_drop
Second, it may have been Ron Paul’s economic ideas (no fiat money, only gold or silver should be accepted as having real value) might have been responsible for China’s collapse in the 1500s. The arrival of vast amounts of silver from the new world touched off massive deflation: the amount of tax due was set in silver, so the state couldn’t function when the value of the money it was bringing in decreased by more than 90%. There simply wasn’t any way to control the money supply, and it took them a long time to notice that there was so much silver that the stuff had become worthless.
About China, in the 1500′s. Somehow, awhile ago, I ran across this really interesting article about how Venitian bankers and commodities traders rigged the first global economic collapse which reverberated from Europe to China and left millions of people starving
P.S. Apologies for going off on a tangent on your outstanding post Bill
Thank you.
Only an abstract version of a fuller article is available here, but it’s a start …
What me worry?
Re: #3 & #1
There were a number of warming spikes since the KT which killed dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
National Geographic had great piece a few years ago about the Eocene Thermal Maxima (the two biggest spike ~56 to ~54 million years ago) and similar but smaller ones.
I can’t locate the Nat’l Geog link for that now, but recall there was wonderful artwork depicting before and after, flora and fauna, which changed remarkably over just a few million years probably due to the extremes. It was evolution on steroids.
Wiki has some rather dry reading, but interesting noneless. Not bedtime reading, though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Thermal_Maximum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene_Thermal_Maximum_2
Okey doke. I’d like to do one. After the election then?
Whether the rise in greenhouse gases are natural or anthropogenic is not relevant to the rise in temperatures. The laws of physics works the same for both. The spikes around the K-T event were probably volcanic in nature and now most scientists think that the asteroid and those spikes were the one, two punch that made that event go from bad to catastrophic. There seem to be two schools of denial:
1) Humans are not causing the rise in emissions. This is absurd on it’s face. Of course we are releasing billions of toms of carbon into the atmosphere daily, far more than can be sequestered through natural processes.
2) That these rises in greenhouse gases are not causing the temperature to rise. This is more absurd than the first because CO2 and methane empirically, undeniably trap infrared radiation and dumping those into the atmosphere is going to cause the temperature to go up. Just like if you covered the front of your automobile radiator with duct tape. The heat has no where to go.
Both of these schools are just as absurd as it gets. We know these things are fact. People can say two and two equals six trillion and seventeen but it doesn’t make it true.
Write in Brad Manning?
Why not vote for Dr. Jill Stein, who recently got arrested while re-supplying demonstrators at the Tar Sands Blockade? She’s actually running.
Because the Greens are left centrists, offering a mix of bandaids and nostrums to apply to the gaping wounds of a system in its death agony. It won’t work.
It’ll get worse.
http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS_SC29f5MU2Qyg9kzFZ4m5CdkzR8bCMnAT26kclKezEuodUel_
I hope everyone in Texas doesn’t suffer from your lack of vision.
Germany now gets 25% of it’s energy from renewable (read non-carbon adding) sources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany
Germany, with it’s population of about 90 million is the world third largest manufacturing economy.
Iceland does much better – 91% of it’s energy comes from renewable sources. They also have a high standard of living – and were the first to come out of the economic meltdown of 2008.
I suppose if you were around in 1902, you’d be scoffing at people who suggested we get away from carriages and buggy-whips.
Kevin Costner’s “Water World” may have been prescient.
Republican’s emancipated the slaves. Today’s hybrid party of corporate aristocrats, from both “rethugs” and “demorats,” entitled, “Asselephants,” are beholding to corporate money as Congress was beholding to slave-owners. The common denominator is the perpetuation of a monopoly on “energy.”
Let Sandy’s unfolding lessons underscore reality for America and life.
That’s if we learn anything or even remember the lesson?
Yes, of course.
I’m not downplaying AGW at all but focusing on consequences of warming by any means. There were no humans back then, but other mechanisms in play.
I note that one of those links indicates an onset of 20,000 years for an 11 degree temp increase persisting some 200,000 years, and with evolutionary consequences. It was huge, but on an annual basis it would have been unnoticeable if we were standing there for a lifetime.
In our times AGW is coming on a whole lot faster, within just a few generations. One could reasonable expect extinctions will be much more severe since there is so little time for anything to adapt and change.
I’ve read a lot of sublinks from those links and other articles. Carbon is mentioned often and seems common culprit. How it gets where it shouldn’t be. . . lots of ways that can happen, though.
Maybe AGW is the fastest of all the pills the world has had to swallow. Our own evolutionary consequence would be an expected extinction, no?
more likely this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs56_GqTyIQ