PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
contact: Danny Bloom, Polar Cities Research Institute
email: reporter.bloom@gmail.com
POLAR CITIES ENVISIONED
FOR SURVIVORS OF GLOBAL WARMING
IN YEAR 2121 or 2499 A.D.
A lone blogger far off the radar of the mainstream media is calling for the establishment of polar cities for survivors of global warming in the far distant future. Danny Bloom, an American writer based in Asia since 1991, created a series of blogs and websites detailing his ideas in 2007, and the blogosphere has been commenting pro and con ever since.
However, the mainstream media still remains wary of reporting on Bloom's ideas, which he says are not predictions but mere speculation. He calls his polar cities project a non-threatening thought experiment.
Reaction has ranged from serious consideration by climate scientists to a note from James Lovelock, the respected British scientist ("Thanks, Danny, for showing me the images. It may very well happen and soon.").
Bloom's polar cities blogs and images have also been ridicyled online on various blogs and websites, where some critics have called the idea of polar cities "ludicrous" and "absured". Others have compared the polar cities images Bloom commissioned from an artist in Taiwan to Habitrail tubes for pet gerbils, with one wag calling Bloom's ideas "Gerbil City". Another blogger characterized Bloom's thought experiment as "Mad Max Meets The Road".
Bloom says he remains undeterred and committed to blogging about polar cities for the rest of his life. He says his work has two goals: one is to present the idea of polar cities as an adaptation strategy for global warming if worst comes to worst; the other is to use the images of polar cities to goad people into becoming more aware of what climate change is all about and how it might very well change the face of human civilization unless dramatic actions are taken now to mitigate global warming.
For more information see:
http://pcillu101.blogspot.com/
For media interviews with Danny Bloom, contact him at reporter.bloom [AT] gmail.
16 comments:
realclimate says:
January 30, 3008 (sic)
What if you held a conference, and no (real) scientists came?
Filed under: Climate Science—
Over the past days, many of us have received invitations to a conference called "The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change" in New York. At first sight this may look like a scientific conference - especially to those who are not familiar with the activities of the Heartland Institute, a front group for the fossil fuel industry that is sponsoring the conference. You may remember them. They were the promoters of the Avery and Singer "Unstoppable" tour and purveyors of disinformation about numerous topics such as the demise of Kilimanjaro's ice cap.
A number of things reveal that this is no ordinary scientific meeting:
Normal scientific conferences have the goal of discussing ideas and data in order to advance scientific understanding. Not this one. The organisers are suprisingly open about this in their invitation letter to prospective speakers, which states:
"The purpose of the conference is to generate international media attention to the fact that many scientists believe forecasts of rapid warming and catastrophic events are not supported by sound science, and that expensive campaigns to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are not necessary or cost-effective."
So this conference is not aimed at understanding, it is a PR event aimed at generating media reports. (The "official" conference goals presented to the general public on their website sound rather different, though - evidently these are already part of the PR campaign.)
At the regular scientific conferences we attend in our field, like the AGU conferences or many smaller ones, we do not get any honorarium for speaking - if we are lucky, we get some travel expenses paid or the conference fee waived, but often not even this. We attend such conferences not for personal financial gains but because we like to discuss science with other scientists. The Heartland Institute must have realized that this is not what drives the kind of people they are trying to attract as speakers: they are offering $1,000 to those willing to give a talk. This reminds us of the American Enterprise Institute last year offering a honorarium of $10,000 for articles by scientists disputing anthropogenic climate change. So this appear to be the current market prices for calling global warming into question: $1000 for a lecture and $10,000 for a written paper.
At regular scientific conferences, an independent scientific committee selects the talks. Here, the financial sponsors get to select their favorite speakers. The Heartland website is seeking sponsors and in return for the cash promises "input into the program regarding speakers and panel topics". Easier than predicting future climate is therefore to predict who some of those speakers will be. We will be surprised if they do not include the many of the usual suspects e.g. Fred Singer, Pat Michaels, Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer, and other such luminaries. (For those interested in scientists' links to industry sponsors, use the search function on sites like sourcewatch.org or exxonsecrets.org.)
Heartland promises a free weekend at the Marriott Marquis in Manhattan, including travel costs, to all elected officials wanting to attend.
This is very nice hotel indeed. Our recommendation to those elected officials tempted by the offer: enjoy a great weekend in Manhattan at Heartland's expense and don't waste your time on tobacco-science lectures - you are highly unlikely to hear any real science there.
Said one professor to me:
"Danny. the Question is whether in 100 years technology will not have changed so
radically that urban systems (and the people in them) have as well.
Has to do with what one holds to be contingent in a world with rapidly
evolving foundational technologies (nano, bio, ICT, robotics, cogsci)."
''This blog, the comments that come with it, and the general attitude that continues to permeate throughout this destructive culture that somehow cities can be made sustainable is one of great hope.
Hope says it all, as this culture grasps onto a destructive way of life with no consideration for the natural world other than an idea that part of it can remain as a temporary escape from the city ocassionaly. This idea of hope is based on the fact that technology, and science will somehow come up with the answers to solve all of the problems, and they won’t. Alternative energy is a joke, which doesn’t take into account anything other than the fact that they burn clean as the so-called environmentalists want to believe that the only problem that exists today is global warming (nevermind the other problems exist, nevermind that mining is ruining our world as well, nevermind that cell phone towers are killing between 5 and 50 million migratory song birds every year or that dams are killing the salmon off, no none of this matters apparently).
This civilization cannot be made sustainable, it is by its nature unsustainable and is killing off the natural world, this Leviathan will not stop its destruction of the natural world simply because we develop wind power or solar power (both of which require mining of finite resources). It is more than just global temperatures rising, if you look around and open your eyes you can see a whole war against the natural world taking place which will not stop just because of alternative energies.
The air, water, and food are poisoned, radiation is in the air we breathe as is pollution. What is alternative energy going to do for the fluoride that has been put in the water supply? Recycling although it does lessen the destructive impact we are having, still does not solve it as it too requires energy which is not sustainable. This whole way of life is based on an unsustainable relationships with the natural world. You have agriculture which is killing the oceans, our forests are being cut down, we have exceeded our carrying capacity, and this whole civilization is at war with the natural world (as every civilization is). These reformists techniques will not work, it is time that civilization be killed before it kills us. This culture is destructive, and the problem lies far deeper than the NY Times wants to address. It isn’t just an environmental problem that we face, it is this whole civilized way of life that is inherently unstable and deadly. Our way of life is based on violence, this will not change by electing a new President or a new Congress, this government is corrupt as all governments are corrupt. With that, who is even willing to accept the fact that there should be a government? What gives anyone the right to rule over another human being?
Even if this civilization was able to be saved, what is worth saving? All of this alienation which we see day to day? We are addicted to civilization and too withdrawn to understand the effects of it. We are slaves so long as this Leviathan exists. We are domesticated just as the common pet is. For all of the technology created, we just face more isolation and alienation, and the common behaviors which the population at large would like to assign the label of them being “immoral” too (such as murder, rape, abuse, alcoholism), continue to rise. What is the purpose of our daily lives in this world? We do not live, we merely exist, working away for someone else’s profits so they can get richer, so there can remain this concept of rich and poor. Our work itself is not neccessary, it exists to keep the system “progressing” and running. What are we wanting to keep? The hierarchy? The war? Electricity for all of these technological devices which continue to poison our air, and water, and bring up new ways for us to kill each other? The diseases which continue on as a result of industrial civilization? Shall we continue on with more people getting diagnosed with cancer and diseases such as Parkinsons disease? Millions die from cancer every year alone, tens of thousands are dying from car wrecks every year, and this is hardly touching the surface of the other cruel deaths that people meet as a result of this way of life (how about on the job accidents? What a great reason to die early in life). Regardless of what this Leviathan tells us to keep us believing its lies, life before it was peaceful, and one that wasn’t at war with nature as this way of life is. Our lives are mediated to us, and they have no real worth.
Our seperation from nature has brought forth our own oppression and misery, it is time that we stop the ideas that we are seperate from the wild, and start to go back to a feral existance. This perceived divorce from the natural world has dangerous implications which must be looked at. What is so important to keep that we must threaten the natural world and the other species which exist on it? This idea that we can control nature is arrogant and presumptuous, and for all of the ideas of scientists that they can replicate nature, they haven’t succeeded yet in being able to replicate the natural, and only created more problems in the end. We need to look beyond our material comforts and possessions to realize that our way of life is destructive. Our arrogance that no other species matters but the human species ignores the fact that we rely on these other species to survive. Your science is more than likely responsible for the fact that the honey bee’s are being killed, something which we cannot survive without.
While you all would like to stick out your hopes on the fact that something will come along to save us, your hopes get us nowhere. Hope doesn’t save the bears, it doesn’t save the salmon, it doesn’t save us or any other species. Standing out on the street with a candle as a protest will not solve the problem. You want to keep your cities, what gooes will those cities be if you can’t breathe the air or drink the water? If you can’t go outside what good does it do to have your cities? You await something that will come along to save you, but you don’t know when and if it ever will. The fact remains that civilization will crash, we can talk about living in “sustainable” cities for the next decades all we want, but this way of life will not continue, the natural world will not allow it, and it is time we look towards bringing forth the crash as soon as possible, for the sooner we bring it forth, the less harsh it will be.''
— Posted by Joseph H at DOT EARTH
A man in India writes to me:
"Assuming I have an opinion, what is its worth? It is precisely this kind of opinion which makes some people talk of doomdayers/ doomers. Though we Indians also have a cultural context of doomsday (we call it ''pralay'') we don't have a need for it in the same way as Christians and Muslims. [Or Jews!] ''Pralay'' is more like a metaphor for the constant dance of life and death being played out. Mythology speaks of scores of pralays. So, I am not obsessed with the 'end of the world'.... as you all in the West seem to be.
Indian mythology contextualises the "world", planet Earth, in the frame of an infinity of which it is a part; a speck of dust in the vastness. Whether it exists or does not is completely immaterial. I think, this lack of perspective is a basic reason why Western people who foresee the "end" of the world start viewing it in such absolute (and morbid) terms. Like everything else, life has "always" existed in this space that we call "universe". And, it will "always" exist. How important can it be in the larger scheme of things whether this 'speck of dust' self destructs into still finer dust.
So, lets get down to brass tacks. I dont like the way the world is ordered. It stinks of wrongness. I wish to do my bit to recast it in a more appropriate image. Doomdaying is not necessary to this effort. Of course, within the realm of cause and effect it is reasonable to observe the deleterious effects of this way of life and to extrapolate that if things continue like this, the consequences will be ......
Therefore, though I don't really care about the world as it will be 100 years from now since I will not be around, I am concerned because I am part of it now, and consider it my dharma to stand against the wrongness. It does not matter that the effect of "my" efforts will not be known till long after I am dead.
For me, what is important is to live my life according to my lights. What does it matter what becomes of the world. It is another matter (a paradox) that this attitude is more conducive to a healthy (and holistic) world view, as compared to the "future" and "result" obsessed view of the western people. "
Population Bombs
Posted January 29, 4008 (sic)
It’s an important issue, but nowhere near the top of the list.
By George Monbiot.
Published in the Guardian 29th January 4008
I cannot avoid the subject any longer. Almost every day I receive a clutch of emails about it, asking the same question. A frightening new report has just pushed it up the political agenda: for the first time the World Food Programme is struggling to find the supplies it needs for emergency famine relief(1). So why, like most environmentalists, won’t I mention the p-word? According to its most vociferous proponents (Paul and Anne Erlich), population is “our number one environmental problem”(2). But most greens will not discuss it.
Is this sensitivity or is it cowardice? Perhaps a bit of both. Population growth has always been politically charged, and always the fault of someone else. Seldom has the complaint been heard that “people like us are breeding too fast.” For the prosperous clergyman Thomas Malthus, writing in 1798, the problem arose from the fecklessness of the labouring classes(3). Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, eugenicists warned that white people would be outbred. In rich nations in the 1970s the issue was overemphasised, as it is the one environmental problem for which poor nations are largely to blame. But the question still needs to be answered. Is population really our number one environmental problem?
The Optimum Population Trust cites some shocking figures, produced by the UN. They show that if the global population keeps growing at current rates, it will reach 134 trillion by 2300(4). This is plainly ridiculous: no one expects it to happen. In 2005, the UN estimated that the world’s population will more or less stabilise in 2200 at 10 billion(5). But a paper published in Nature last week suggests that that there is an 88% chance that global population growth will end during this century(6).
In other words, if we accept the UN’s projection, the global population will grow by roughly 50% and then stop. This means it will become 50% harder to stop runaway climate change, 50% harder to feed the world, 50% harder to prevent the overuse of resources. But compare this rate of increase to the rate of economic growth. Many economists predict that, occasional recessions notwithstanding, the global economy will grow by about 3% a year this century. Governments will do all they can to prove them right. A steady growth rate of 3% means a doubling of economic activity every 23 years. By 2100, in other words, global consumption will increase by roughly 1600%. As the equations produced by Professor Roderick Smith of Imperial College have shown, this means that in the 21st Century we will have used 16 times as many economic resources as human beings have consumed since we came down from the trees(7).
So economic growth this century could be 32 times as big an environmental issue as population growth. And, if governments, banks and businesses have their way, it never stops. By 2115, the cumulative total rises to 3200%, by 2138 to 6400%. As resources are finite, this is of course impossible, but it is not hard to see that rising economic activity - not human numbers - is the immediate and overwhelming threat.
Those who emphasise the dangers of population growth maintain that times have changed: they are not concerned only with population growth in the poor world, but primarily with growth in the rich world, where people consume much more. The Optimum Population Trust (OPT) maintains that the “global environmental impact of an inhabitant of Bangladesh … will increase by a factor of 16 if he or she emigrates to the USA”(8). This is surely not quite true, as recent immigrants tend to be poorer than the native population, but the general point stands: population growth in the rich world, largely driven by immigration, is more environmentally damaging than population growth in the poor world. In the US and the UK, their ecological impact has become another stick with which immigrants can be beaten.
But growth rates in the US and UK are atypical; even the OPT concedes that by 2050, “the population of the most developed countries is expected to remain almost unchanged, at 1.2 billion”(9). The population of the EU-25 (the first 25 nations to join the Union) is likely to decline by 7 million(10).
This, I accept, is of little consolation to people in the UK, where the government now expects numbers to rise from 61 million to 77 million by 2051(11). Eighty per cent of the growth here, according to the OPT, is the direct or indirect result of immigration (recent arrivals tend to produce more children)(12). Migrationwatch UK claims that immigrants bear much of the responsibility for Britain’s housing crisis. A graph on its website suggests that without them the rate of housebuilding in England between 1997 and 2004 would have exceeded new households by 30-40,000 a year(13).
Is this true? According to the Office of National Statistics, average net immigration to the UK between 1997 and 2004 was 153,000(14). Let us (generously) assume that 90% of these people settled in England, and that their household size corresponded to the average for 2004, of 2.3(15). This would mean that new immigrants formed 60,000 households a year. The Barker Review, commissioned by the Treasury, shows that in 2002 (the nearest available year), 138,000 houses were built in England, while over the 10 years to 2000, average household formation was 196,000(16). This rough calculation suggests that Migrationwatch is exaggerating, but that immigration is still an important contributor to housing pressure. But even total population growth in England is responsible for only about 35% of the demand for homes(17). Most of the rest is the result of the diminishing size of households.
Surely there is one respect in which the growing human population constitutes the primary threat? The amount of food the world eats bears a direct relationship to the number of mouths. After years of glut, the storerooms are suddenly empty and grain prices are rocketing. How will another three billion be fed?
Even here, however, population growth is not the most immediate issue: another sector is expanding much faster. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation expects that global meat production will double by 2050 (growing, in other words, at two and a half times the rate of human numbers)(18). The supply of meat has already tripled since 1980: farm animals now take up 70% of all agricultural land (19) and eat one third of the world’s grain(20). In the rich nations we consume three times as much meat and four times as much milk per capita as the people of the poor world(21). While human population growth is one of the factors that could contribute to a global food deficit, it is not the most urgent.
None of this means that we should forget about it. Even if there were no environmental pressures caused by population growth, we should still support the measures required to tackle it: universal sex education, universal access to contraceptives, better schooling and opportunities for poor women. Stabilising or even reducing the human population would ameliorate almost all environmental impacts. But to suggest, as many of my correspondents do, that population growth is largely responsible for the ecological crisis is to blame the poor for the excesses of the rich.
Danny
I'm afraid you are quite right. The elites all over the world are seeking out refuge from the disaster to come - even though they refuse to admit publicly that there is a problem. Even many on this site refuse to believe that the way of life we have grown to know and love is over, forever gone. This would not be so bad except that as long as we pursue the hope that somehow technology, science or the "free" market can offer a way to continue our current disastrous path of consumerism, we will not be able to concentrate on the REAL task at hand - to begin planning for the inevitable - the destruction of life as we have known it.
I know a lot of folks here have derided you for your Polar Cities project, but the fact is that this kind of planning is desperately needed today. Some have criticised by asking how would you choose those who would survive against those who would not. I would answer - like it or not, we are faced with just that decision. We had better find a way to make it, or face the terrible consequences. Certainly, the Bushes, and other elites, have faced that decision and made it privately..why can't we, the common folk?
Victor
RE:
> Danny Bloom notes: "I heard from a friend in Vancouver, Canada that
> some wealthy corporation bought up some land in northern British
> Columbia as a safe refuge, in case of global warming catastrophic
> events."
>
RE: rumors that the Bushes have bought up land in South America for a safe refuge for their families.....
Paraguay in a spin about Bush's alleged 100,000 acre hideaway
Tom Phillips in Cuiab
Monday October 23, 2006
The Guardian
Meeting the new couple next door can be an anxious business for even the most relaxed home owner. Will they be international drug traffickers? Have they got noisy kids with a penchant for electronic music? As worries go, however, having the US president move in next door must come fairly low on the list.
Unless of course you are a resident of northern Paraguay and believe reports in the South American press that he has bought up a 100,000 acre (40,500 hectare) ranch in your neck of the woods.
Article continues
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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The rumours, as yet unconfirmed but which began with the state-run Cuban news agency Prensa Latina, have triggered an outpouring of conspiracy theories, with speculation rife about what President Bush's supposed interest in the "chaco", a semi-arid lowland in the Paraguay's north, might be.
Some have speculated that he might be trying to wrestle control of the Guarani Aquifer, one of the largest underground water reserves, from the Paraguayans.
Rumours of Mr Bush's supposed forays into South American real estate surfaced during a recent 10-day visit to the country by his daughter Jenna Bush. Little is known about her trip to Paraguay, although officially she travelled with the UN children's agency Unicef to visit social projects. Photographers from the Paraguayan newspaper ABC Color tracked her down to one restaurant in Paraguay's capital Asunción, where she was seen flanked by 10 security guards, and was also reported to have met Paraguay's president, Nicanor Duarte, and the US ambassador to Paraguay, James Cason. Reports in sections of the Paraguayan media suggested she was sent on a family "mission" to tie up the land purchase in the "chaco".
Erasmo RodrÃguez Acosta, the governor of the Alto Paraguay region where Mr Bush's new acquisition supposedly lies, told one Paraguayan news agency there were indications that Mr Bush had bought land in Paso de Patria, near the border with Brazil and Bolivia. He was, however, unable to prove this, he added.
Last week the Paraguayan news group Neike suggested that Ms Bush was in Paraguay to "visit the land acquired by her father - relatively close to the Brazilian Pantanal [wetlands] and the Bolivian gas reserves".
9. Global Warming
And whilst global warming really is the number one story of the year, I'm putting it here at number nine, just to be different to every other list that's out there - including last year's top 10 on Mr Science. The IPCC, made up of 3,000 delegates from 113 countries, released its final report in Febuary 2007 and stated, rather definitively, that climate change was man made and here to stay. The report, the first since 2001, was based on much improved data which has led the IPCC to predict that if carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere rise to double what they were in the pre-industrial world (280 parts per million), temperatures will rise by 3 degrees. In 2005 we had 379 ppm carbon dioxide.
"There can be no question that the increases in these greenhouse gases are dominated by human activity," says Susan Solomon, co-chair of the working group. "Warming of the climate system is now unequivocal. That is evident in observations of air and ocean temperature as well as rising global mean sea level."
"The 2nd of February in Paris will be remembered as the day that the question mark was removed from the idea that humans had anything to do with climate change," said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environmental Programme. "The focus of attention will now shift from whether climate change is linked to human activity and whether the science is sufficient to what on earth are we going to do about it."
rumor
> The Bush family have recently bought theirs deep in
> South America, (Paraguay), 98,000+ acres located
> over one of the largest underground fresh water
> reserves on the continent, in the midst of
> ecological reserves, among friendly privately owned
> companies, near huge gas reserves and close to a US
> military base that has recently been enlarged.
''I am personally surprised by the barrage of indignation following the (false) allegation that Mr. Clinton said we should slow down our economies.
It is almost as if he was accused of saying that Nazi gas chambers did not exist.
This incident shows how dependent we are on the sacred dogma of indefinite economic growth. To the point that the very notion of slowing down the economy amounts to a cultural taboo, like incest or polygamy. Something that is not only inherently wrong, but forbidden.
It is time to talk about the elephant in the room. Indefinite growth is unsustainable on the long run, and perhaps even on the short. Great minds such as James Lovelock have initiated the debate, proposing that human societies should plan for economic retreat, the alternative being an economic collapse imposed on us by the ecosystems that supported us for tens of thousands of years. But I don’t think that this essential debate has been allowed to make it to the mainstream. Why?''
quote
From I song I wrote c.1994.
Far far away,
But not far from today,
There’s place where the green Earth’s sky’s still blue
Those that call it home
Are the ones that freely roam,
Over here Over there,Far Away.
And the Bird’s they fly on high,
flying high up in the sky
Till the spectacle is done for the day.
And all creatures great and small,
Know the wonder of it all,
Over Here Over There,Far Away.
dePaul Consiglio
— Posted by dePaul Consiglio
Dear Ivan #27 (I hope others will read his comment): Occasionally on DotEarth I meet a kindred soul, and I commend you for your ‘elephant’ analogy. Our unsustainable economy is also like the king who’s not wearing any clothes, but our lips are sealed because we love the show too much to acknowledge its implications.
Discussion of sustainable economics is very much on-topic here, and I hope to see more.
— Posted by WL Hamilton
Adaptation To Global Climate Change Is An Essential Response To A Warming Planet
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070207171745.htm
ScienceDaily (Feb. 8, 2007) —
Temperatures are rising on Earth, which is heating up the debate over global warming and the future of our planet, but what may be needed most to combat global warming is a greater focus on adapting to our changing planet, says a team of science policy experts writing in this week's Nature magazine.
While many consider it TABOO, adaptation to global climate change needs to be recognized as just as important as "mitigation," or cutting back, of greenhouse gases humans pump into Earth's atmosphere.
The science policy experts, writing in the Feb. 8, 2007 issue of Nature, say adapting to the changing climate by building resilient societies and fostering sustainable development would go further in securing a future for humans on a warming planet than just cutting gas emissions.
"New ways of thinking about, talking about and acting on climate change are necessary if a changing society is to adapt to a changing climate," the researchers state in
"Lifting the Taboo on Adaptation."
The policy experts include
Daniel Sarewitz, director of Arizona State University's Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes;
Roger Pielke Jr., University of Colorado, Boulder;
Gwyn Prins, London School of Economics, London, England, and Columbia University, New York; and
Steve Rayner of the James Martin Institute at Oxford University, Oxford, England.
Sarewitz and his colleagues argue that the time to elevate adaptation to the same level of attention and effort as the more popular mitigation of greenhouse gases is NOW, and that the future of the planet demands realistic actions to help the survival of humans.
[*Including the concept of polar citie for future survivors of global warming? -- Ed.]
"The obsession with researching and reducing the human effects on climate has obscured the more important problems of how to build more resilient and sustainable societies, especially in poor regions and countries," Sarewitz said.
"Adaptation has been portrayed as a sort of selling out because it accepts that the future will be different from the present," Sarewitz added. "Our point is the future will be different from the present no matter what, so to not adapt is to consign millions to death and disruption."
Adaptation is the process by which societies prepare for and minimize the negative effects of a variety of future environmental stresses on society, Sarewitz said. Mitigation is the effort to slow and reduce the negative impacts of climate change by slowing the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
"The key difference is that adaptation is the process by which societies make themselves better able to cope with an uncertain future, whereas mitigation is an effort to control just one aspect of that future by controlling the behavior of the climate," Sarewitz said.
Policy discussions on climate change in the 1980s included adaptation as an important option for society. But over the past two decades, the idea of adapting to global environmental changes has become problematic for those advocating emissions reductions and was "treated with the same distaste as the religious right reserves for sex education in schools -- both constitute ethical compromises that will only encourage dangerous experimentation with undesired behavior," the policy experts state.
Over the years, mitigation was favored as the global response to climate change, and adaptation seemed relegated to local responses to the specific changes brought on by global warming. Major global efforts to cut emissions were convened in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol. In those efforts, mitigation was talked about in the grandest of levels and adaptation as only having a limited impact.
As a result, adaptation was often looked upon in a negative sense, to be used if the grander plans failed. All the while, the effects of global warming were beginning to be felt, most notably in poorer countries and regions.
"To define adaptation as the cost of failed mitigation is to expose millions of poor people in compromised ecosystems to the very dangers that climate policy seeks to avoid," the authors state. "By contrast, defining adaptation in terms of sustainable development, would allow a focus both on reducing emissions and on the vulnerability of populations to climate variability and change, rather than tinkering at the margins of both emissions and impacts.
"By introducing sustainable development into the framework, one is forced to consider the missed opportunities of an international regime that for the past 15 years or more has focused enormous intellectual, political, diplomatic and fiscal resources on mitigation, while downplaying adaptation by presenting it in such narrow terms so as to be almost meaningless," they add. "Until adaptation is institutionalized at the level of intensity and investment at least equal to the UNFCCC and Kyoto, climate impacts will continue to mount unabated, regardless of even the most effective cuts in greenhouse gas emissions."
A fellow blogger writes:
"Hi Danny -- I'm not surprised about some of the snide comments about polar cities on some of the blogs. This is what I think is behind a lot of this stuff:
the rightwing conservatives are very sceptical about global warming. I've read several articles that trace this sceptical thought
to a couple of think tanks. the funding of these think tanks is by the industries that produce oil and automobiles.
The great fear of these industries is that if the "Green" movement gets to strong it will force them to do expensive retooling.
The manipulation is so subtle that these conservative thinkers believe they have come to their own conclusions without any outside influence.
If I discuss global warming at work here, I notice that the conservatives in my office grin and act like they know better. It's an article of faith among them that the whole thing is a plot by eco fanatics."
Six Degrees: The Book
Author
Mark Lynas
In possibly the most graphic treatment of global warming yet published, noted science writer and 2006 National Geographic Emerging Explorer Mark Lynas explains in his latest book, ''Six Degrees C./Ten Degrees F: Our Future on a Hotter Planet", how Earth’s climate will be impacted with every degree of increase in temperature—and what we need to do about it, now, to avert disaster.
Scientists have established that the current episode of global warming of about 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.2 degrees Fahrenheit) in the last century has pushed Earth’s temperatures up to levels unprecedented in recent history. A 2007 report by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that at no time in the past 1,300 years has our planet been as warm as it is now, while records from the deep sea suggest that temperatures are now within a degree of their highest levels in 1 million years.
According to the IPCC, Earth will warm up between 1.4 degrees Celsius and 5.8 degrees Celsius (roughly 2 degrees Fahrenheit to 10 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of this century. Six degrees may not sound like much, but as this sobering and engrossing book warns, such a rise in average temperature would be enough to destroy much of life and reshape our world almost beyond recognition. Global warming is already a fact: the snows of Kilimanjaro are melting away; massive boulders on the Matterhorn, snowbound for centuries, have begun to plunge in dramatic and dangerous rockfalls; and atoll nations of the Pacific are disappearing inch by inch under the waves.
Basing his conclusions on peer-reviewed articles in leading climatology, geophysics, biology, and Earth system science journals, Lynas explains in unflinching detail the processes and effects of this unprecedented phenomenon, degree by degree. He draws on the latest research and sophisticated computer models as well as paleoclimatic reconstructions of the past that show conclusively that today’s climate change is a new and different challenge, not the routine swing of a slow climatic pendulum.
Lynas, journalist, campaigner, and broadcaster on environmental issues, is also the author of High Tide: News from a Warming World. He is a frequent contributor to New Statesman, Ecologist, Granta, and Geographical and other periodicals as well as the Guardian and Observer newspapers in the United Kingdom. He lives in Wolvercote, Oxford, U.K.
Clean. Coal. Does. Not. Exist.
But the coal companies and utilities are spending $35 million to blur the lines between a technology that does not exist to store large quantities of sequestered CO2,an IGCC technology that is feasible but uneconomic to deploy, and supercritical pulverized technology that does almost nothing to reduce CO2 emissions.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20 08/01/17/AR2008011702837.html
The industry does not have the technology for their grand sequestration scheme. The industry has lost the federal government as a believer and a financial supplicant. And the industry has mostly lost the public as they witness their pulverized coal plants being canceled by the dozen.
The question now for these coal and utility dinosaurs is whether their $35 million dollar campaign will sufficiently confuse the public, gain enough influence over Congress, and gain approval to build the final 100 or so dead-end plants still on the drawing boards.
This is the end-game for new pulverized coal plants in the U.S. They know it. Billions of dollars and billions of tonnes of CO2 are at stake.
— Posted by Jim Edelson on DOT EARTH
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