My introduction to Peak Oil was a comment from someone on a blog that we are in a race between PO and Climate Change and we really only have a chance if Peak oil gets there fast enough, because we sure as hell wont make the necessary changes voluntarily.
lets face it, w\e haven't even started talking about PO in the main stream yet and every report on Climate Change comes froofed up with hedges and qualifications that undermine anything else that is said. But maybe this is a start: Climate crisis 'diabolical'..
Professor Ross Garnaut 600-page draft report on climate change, of which the make-up of an emissions trading scheme (ETS) is a major focus, was released today. (Actually July 4 but I'm really slow)
Speaking at the report's launch in Canberra, Professor Garnaut said climate change was a "diabolical'' policy problem.
"While an effective response to the challenge would play out over the many decades, it must take shape and be in place over the next few years,'' he said.
"Without early and strong action, some time before 2020 we will realise we have indelibly surrendered to forces that have moved beyond our control.''
Professor Garnaut said climate change was the hardest policy problem in living memory.
"Climate change presents a new kind of challenge,'' he said.
"It is uncertain in its form and extent, rather than drawn in clear lines.
"It is insidious, rather than directly confrontational.
"It is long term, rather than immediate in both its impacts and its remedies.''
In other words, its a test of our intelligence and understanding. Damn.
Remedies will require global co-operation of unprecedented complexity and dimension, he said.
AND a test of our ability to share, collaborate and agree; double damn. But at least its a start.
sadly, as with peak oil, all the research shows the human drama of climate change to be a nonsense. yes, we love drama. OH how we love drama! but the observations of fact show otherwise.
the simplest, most profound, most unarguable fact:
if the current warming climate change was caused by the greenhouse-effect (carbon), the atmosphere would be warming up faster than the earth, since the atmosphere warms the eath.
exactly the opposite is the case.
i could point out the other material effects which decry the delicious self-flagelating self-important drama of the carbon apocalypse, such as that the first ever test of CO2's atmospheric effects showing an absorption 80 TIMES higher than modelled (or to put it another way: CO2 absorbs 99.9something% of radiated heat within 10m of the earth's surface: buy a 3rd story flat if you want to maintain last century's climate if the CO2 level doubles); or that mars and jupiter (recently closely studied) are showing the same (distance-proportional) heating as the earth, or that we are so far inside the historic maximums of both heat and CO2 it's not funny (and, tellingly, they are separated by millions of years at a cyclical time), or that for the current CONSERVATIVE climatechange models to work we must all have grown up with regular frostbite as adabiatic -50° winds blast groundlevel daily, or that...
etc
etc
etc
as i have said elsewhere: climate change is very real. but the current bandwagon of self(other!)flagellation is not related to what's happening.
but on a human perspective, if this is what it takes to get a majority of humans FINALLY fucking paying SOME attention to the effects their actions have on the world around them, and then working to minimise that, then i'm happy to wear the stupidities, on the basis of: getting the right answer for the wrong reasons.
Posted by: Saltation | September 27, 2008 at 11:56 AM