Thanks to all commentators!

I read your observations with care and learned from them.

Reflections on your thoughts are posted at blistered orb 1/22/08.

Cheers,
The Mad Hun

TM KOWAL -- Thank you.

Please despair not for Gaia, nor our souls, as these jewels have existence beyond time itself.

The reflection of our own lives, in the waters that run as blood through this planet, and go where nothing else will (thanks Lao Tse), are a klaxon call.

What perishes is the dross and weight of grave attachment, while the LIGHT is set free. We'll be judged soon, and upon the scales reward, I look forward to your presence.

Namaste

T M KOWAL: Most eloquent and profound posting.

TM KOWAL -- Yes we're all (6x109) in a single LIFEBOAT,

with some plugging holes, and bailing -- while others drill new ones,

and some are even making an inside swimming pool …

What matters most is that each of us do on balance good, and help others in this life.

Namaste … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … Mahatma Gandhi … … … … … … … … … …
« We must be the change we wish to see in the world »
« There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed »

"That's not to say that war and caring don't exist in social systems. They can."

If you say so, but I think we should look at any foreign aid policy beyond pure altruism. It's a tool for global politics, etc.

An essay on Global Heating …

A week or so ago I was driving on a very cold, and entirely still, English morning, beetling along the M4 motorway after dropping someone off at Heathrow airport. The sky was a pale colour blue, strangely whitish - as if the sun had no energy in mid-winter to draw out any azure into the planet's ceiling. Dense cold mists draped the frosty fields in sheets, the white fog coiling and curling up aimlessly across the landscape, the earth releasing nebulous breaths, the land responding to the lukewarm sun as the cold life ever so slightly unfroze.

The air pressure was so very high there was no breeze whatever. So the stench and exhaust of the snarled-up traffic that surrounded me had nowhere to go but slowly upwards.

As I headed west and came up to a major intersection of the M4 motorway, I could see the M25 snaking across in front of me fully congested by every kind of vehicle across it's 4 lanes. What arrested me was the sight of how distinguishable the vehicular smoke was from a distance, a dark, long and perfect shroud of fumes. A dark pall lifted well above the motorway like a linear mushroom - curved and thick grey and absolutely stationery.

Then I peered up along my own line of travel and could see that the dim solar rays were just as much weakened underneath our own personal motorway carbon cloud.

As I passed factories and offices on both sides of the motorway, the cityscape around London was one of countless chimneys belching steam and smoke. How else could the people be kept warm and all that stuff that they make, be made?

Further on I stopped at a nature reserve high up on the edge of the Chiltern Hills. Sitting on a frosty hillside with glorious views, I could easily see across the Oxford Plain, a flat area on which Didcot coal-fired power station sits, producing necessary electricity for a wide locality. Not a huge station compared to others, but even so at 15 miles away its bulk was impressive, highlighted by its own manufactured microclimate.

In the still air, Didcot power had generated it's own impressive clouds, each hanging above the vast cooling towers - four fat, concave cylinders. What had been clean vapour had settled into distinct clouds, billowing tall, turned a dark grey colour by the carbon-laden smoke roiling forth from the main tall chimney emerging from the heart of the plant. Shadowy patches mottled the dirty-white cooling towers, the sun blocked by these micro clouds.

On my mobile, a friend with intimate and deep knowledge of the planet's biodiversity tells me to forget the term 'climate change', let alone 'global warming' – he is certain that we should now speak about 'global heating'- as when you turn a 500 watt light on, and are surprised by just how much heat you get, alongside the expected light.

And within our children's lifetimes, our orb will be blistered.

But I am in a car, and operating in a globalised world. I just dropped off my wife and daughter, en route to Miami and Central America, their own fractionally additional emissions as much their responsibility as are mine from my tiny though inefficient car.

Bringing up another view on this broiling globe, I reflect on past times when I worked in the tropics.

As a social forester and conservationist, I've spent quite some time in indigenous communities, often amongst forest people. What did I see?

First item on their agenda once some trust has been established, indigenous people I have come across are almost always terribly upset and hurt by outsiders screwing up their lands. In fact only once did I come across an indigenous group more-or-less content with the benefits of interacting with wider society.

Comprehensive all-out environmental despoliation is what most groups have come to expect, as soon as the modern world enters their own dimension.

Mine tailings, tree loss, forest burning, disease and social breakdown, polluted rivers, sudden over-hunting, wholesale attack on their culture by an unfriendly and uncomprehending state – all this carried out by a thousand malignant emissaries, officials, profiteers and despoilers.

An exception - I remember the Makushi people isolated along the Rupununi river in southern Guyana - with their antiquated old English Christian names still perpetuated since missionary times across generations (Ethel, Gertrude, Roderick and Philimena were common for newborn babies) - living on their expanding and rapidly-drying savannas, just north of where the Brazilian rainforests begin. They are agile users - since time immemorial - of the rich land where rivers, forest margins and open parklands generate a productive patchwork, full of opportunity for useful goods, served by the protection of tall forest.

Well-educated and willing to prosper, they spoke of the modern world as full of deceit, of needing to play a political game with shadows. Family leaders that had lived and worked in modern towns spoke eloquently of the illusion of prosperity, about a world unhinged from their own reality of looking after a local patch of varied lands, actively productive of a proper bank of stuff to live from, used to build homes, cook, eat, all sourced locally.

Their knowledge and skills as cultivators make the land re-grow and stay green full of life, despite what is taken for use. To them life just can't continue if you don't look after your patch, if instead you abuse it, take too much - so you must fertilise, replant, take proper care.

Lives lived unlike ours - we have huge and dispersed footprints, having sourced it all out, so that the damaging impacts of our consumption are far out of eyesight. Our sense of being in touch with nature, of having a patch of land, is met - if we're lucky - by ineffectual fussing about in our own English garden to achieve a yearly show of flowers.

Indigenous peoples are human canaries screaming - if we could hear them - as our invisible carbon toxins from the North swill across their ancestral terrains. Those of them that know about the climate science and feel the growing impacts in their blood, sense an upwelling of fear as they look into all our futures…

Familiar with examining the sky, they are forced by rapid change to view the wider picture. For a time they ignore the local hackers and sponsored smashers of their own forests.

But we are all in the same boat – fitting onto one planet - alongside the IPCC scientists, the Bali conference attendees, all citizens of this globe. Ecuadorian farmers who see their own glaciers retreat behind mountain corners, contemplating farming without summer irrigation. The Kyrgyz herders noticing with alarm the permanent shift of ice and snows 500 metres further up the mountain - never to come down again.

Then there are the Inuit, turning to growing potatoes and veggies along southern Greenland. That is their adaptation -for now.

Worry about our cumulative hurting of this fragile sphere is becoming profound. We feel foreboding in our entrails, concern for this wonderful shell of diverse life that we live alongside, from the forest sloth in the Lacandon forest, the smart meercats banding teaming-up to eke out a living in south African deserts, the New Guinea Birds of Paradise, the Madagascan lemurs dancing in unison to show off their black and white furry tails.

Then we look to our own fellow animals, my progeny in my own tribe - my parents, brothers, nieces and future grandchildren…

I would like to shake myself up to do more, much more, to stop this coming climate chaos. Somehow help get us ready for these huge impacts approaching our cocooned lives from all directions, with greater frequency and enhanced extremes of intensity. Every kind of climate surprise is coming our way - and these upcoming events are not Christmas presents, unless Santa is a devil.

I believe in opening the minds of all and sundry to the rock-hard, unequivocal and incontrovertible evidence from thousands of scientists who understand just how concretely solid the proven facts really are. The manufactured uncertainty is now beyond being passé.

But I'm no longer interested in arguing with fools who want to believe in alleged 'conspiracies', the paid-up brainwashed loons, who want to make out that this isn't really happening, people who indulge in the perversion of truth by wilfully believing in imaginary bugaboos and supposed debunkings of proven earth-systems science.
Let's cut to the chase like Kevin Conrad at Bali, urging the contrarians to get out of the way when their only goal is to confuse, deny and delay. Somehow we must overcome collective blindness and denial of the dangerous and threatening impacts that our ways of life are causing our planet.

We will still need to get used to unexpected events and unprecedented variability becoming usual. Face up to the fact that the averages themselves are changing.

Sadly in 2007 we can just ask the British families still coping in caravans long after the two extreme floods in Hull and Tewksbury; the citizens of Athens and California looking across the desolate scenes of ash; this year's millions of flooded-out Sahelian Africans, Bangladeshi Asians and southern Mexicans made homeless, their precarious livelihoods made almost impossible to resume. And more.

Faced with such corroboration, scientists I speak with are now so highly alarmed that only their customary reticence stops them tearing their hair out and running naked down the streets….

At present almost everyone - individuals, companies, nations - is simply inclined to preserve their little niche of collective consumption, selling out for personal advantage.

That goes for:

·us smart-ass Europeans, making out that we are the low-carbon angels;

·the trinket-producing Chinese, needing more and more power stations to manufacture more and more crappy stuff to sell us;

· Russia under Mr hard-chest Putin, deftly by submarine laying an underwater flag to stake a claim to the just-accessible Arctic seafloor;

·millions of middle-class Indians, suddenly mobile as cow-free freeways now link the big cities, and production of cheap cars begins to flood the countryside;

·of course the big player laden with historical responsibility - greedy oil-sucking Americans;

·Australians waking up from the John Howard nightmare to view the marching deserts;

·the orangutan-murdering Indonesians, engaged in their decades-long orgy of peat-burning and forest-trashing, so kindly supplying us with palm oil;

·complemented by the frontier-defender Brazilians, industrialising the Amazon.

No one should be excused - but how hard we all wriggle to plead our special cases!

Back to basics.

If we don't open our minds and fight to change our habits, we do the equivalent of denying our own mortality. Just as one day you will die, and I will too, so our planet faces the same fate in the shape of inevitable, huge, transforming spasms. The very unpredictability of the changes that are now sure to occur will be pretty much the only thing that stays constant around us.

Trouble is that humanity, like a cancer, is speeding up change on a scale beyond precedent save, perhaps, the Eocene warming 55 millions years back. We are now the soon-to-be pathetic originators of a new age, the bastard Anthropocene, the upcoming result of our inability to cherish the Earth, as humankind evolves into a powerfully malignant geological agent.

But this isn't a furry, hippy kind of Millenarian New Age – this will be a time during which Gaia tries to get rid of us, she will wipe us out, so as to have a hope of recovery. To do so, she'll soon ratchet down the provision to human communities of vital products and the services of ecosystems.

As irresponsible heirs, we will be cut off, progressively deprived of what we had long taken for granted.

Those of us who still survive after the coming couple of decades of destruction, mass migration and hostilities, we'll look back at the idiocy of corporate-sponsored denial in the same way that post-war Germans viewed the years leading up to WW2 – with deep shame, a sense that back then we - as an entire folk - had gone collectively mad, were blinkered to our now obvious depravities.

I am not alone in predicting that the name 'George Bush' will, in the future, be cursed with as much deep rancour as Hitler has been for the last 70 years, standing as he will for a period of crass war-mongering and environmental despoliation – representing the choice to remain wilfully ignorant, despite vast oceans of evidence.

It beggars all belief that after being stared straight in-the-eye in Bali by a furious world community, that this stupid little man can still make out that the 'Road Map' is no good for the White House. All chins hit the floor. Bush undermines, and then pre-emptively denounces, this non-agreement - despite the content being so watered down it reaches homeopathic concentrations. His oil-burning cohort is clearly unhappy to agree even to these predictable and terribly limited 'negotiations-about-negotiations'.

We already know that led by US example, the actors listed above will endlessly beggar their neighbours and dice with our future. Set-up by Bush, we now face years of tooth-and-nail resistance on every front by every country and interest group, as we all endlessly evade responsibility and avoid real direct action to cut down the carbon.

So Bush, along with his band of neocon and corporate backers, will be decried, despised by each generation through the coming centuries. Yet unborn children will unbury his broken bones, urinate on his grave and curse him for ever having lived – for having been such a prize idiot, a fool's fool, bending his cracked knee subservient to his elite, sneering and smirking like a mad jester. As if Frodo never chucked that ring into Mount Doom, Bush grabbed it.

Our collective future is bleak. As we carry out a destructive planetary experiment, generations alive today will establish beyond doubt that by continued, carefree, collective burning of forests and fossil fuels, we are easily capable of ending the social and economic prosperity that we - in the developed world - have temporarily enjoyed over the idyllic last few decades.

That will be a terrible legacy for our children. They will look back at these current times as an impossible-to-imagine period of stability and plenty.

I would dearly like to live out the rest of my years knowing that there will be a planet available to sustain our race, with humanity living in balance alongside the rest of the global biota.

But very little is actually happening to flatten out our carbon emissions and bring us some hope of a prosperous future. We are incredibly far off-track from applying a genuine, evidence-based collective response, which would work in time to reduce the likelihood of ever-widening catastrophes.

We instead exactly follow the worst-case IPCC scenario, Business As Usual, which curves us steeply upwards on all fronts. Our year-on-year rate of addition of CO2 into the atmosphere is already 200 times faster than ever occurred over recent natural cycles. The planet has never had to cope with so much carbon, so fast.

The Kyoto Protocol and the emissions trading systems are straws in vast fields of tinder-dry haystacks – still not yet actually flattening out at all the vast volumes of carbon added and increasingly retained by the atmosphere.

To prevent dangerous climatic destabilization, all credible advice shows that the UK, for example, working rapidly and in concert with all other major emitters, would have to reduce its emissions by 60% below its 1990 levels within the next 20 years, and by 90% by 2050.

All countries must eventually make concerted and very deep cuts. There is no doubt about that whatsoever. If we don't do exactly that, we fry.

But The Majority still just refuse to believe those risks are real. They act as if they simply do not wish to be informed; yes, we have decided to stay stupid.

Modern civilisation is blindly careening towards catastrophe, fuelled by market failure, the absence of leadership, a lack of foresight and grossly-deficient societal decision-making.

If we don't and can't act, as global average temperatures rise more than 2 degrees C above pre-industrial, key planetary processes are bound to enter the feared positive feedbacks. Initial climate change will beget more climate change, just as when the planet warmed up and emerged from earlier ice ages.

For the first time in history, every population, culture, ethnic group and region faces a future under threat, unless we develop a planetary response that engages all sectors, governments and societies to control our petrochemical dependence and reduce our footprint. We should be aware that if we don't face up to that colossal challenge, within 10 to 15 years we will face an unravelling of our economic systems and a surprisingly rapid decline in our ability to supply even our basic needs. This will drive a drastic deterioration in the quality of our lives. Beyond 20 years from now, what we will bequeath our children will most likely be terribly hard and desperate lives.

So - I hope I've not made you despondent, but this is reality. I wish it weren't so.

It's up to you and to me to work out what the hell we are going to do about it.

Governments and armies don't wage war either, individual combatants do.

But the reality is that our language just lacks the proper verbs for outputs of organized actions, systems, backdrops, etc. So we anthropomorphize or utter what linguists call a syndecdoche: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche.

That's not to say that war and caring don't exist in social systems. They can. Call it something else if you wish.

It's semantics I guess, but it's hard for me to think of organizations such as governments as having a capacity to "care" anyway, that seems to be the province of an individual.

"Scandinavian countries usually seem to care about everyone, "

Most of them have pretty tight immigration policies.

to jakenewton,

it is on thing to put america first quite another to ONLY care about America(the top of the population). Scandinavian countries usually seem to care about everyone, their ODA (official Development Assistance) to countries are without strings attached or exploitative purposes. On the other hand, US has never given assistance without getting whatever it wants namely resources, UN votes, kind of government they want, etc...

I like the first part of what ullern said: a lot of the problem is that we allow corporations to make our decisions now, and almost everyone has the vague idea that corporations are at least LIKE persons. But they're not--they're like machines. Machines designed to make profit, and that they will merrily do until there are no more humans around to buy stuff--or we finally get them under control, or ban them.
But there is a related problem exemplified in this article and so many others, the error of conflating the collective with a person. Throughout the piece, we are told of the statements and actions of "the US" or "Canada" or "Russia." But how do we know what "Canada thinks" or "America wants"? What does this mean, anyway? Obviously we aren't talking about a body of land. Are we talking about all the human inhabitants of that land? No—they didn't ask us all what we want the US position to be in Bali. They didn't even take a survey. The US representatives in Bali merely represent what the Bush administration wants. This position is a minority position on environmental issues just as it is a minority position on war, on human rights, on torture, etc. Were "our" negotiators representing consensus US opinion when they stonewalled in Bali? No. Now it is true that, GENERALLY SPEAKING, Americans are more ignorant and less engaged than most, and that there is a tendency among us to have a complacent attitude of entitlement and obsessive consumerism. But this doesn't mean we want nothing done about global warming. Furthermore, this tendency is being maintained by an avalanche of advertising and careful control of what goes into mainstream media. Right now we are all being entertained by a long-running show of a democratic election season that is longer, more expensive, and with less substance than ever; the rebellious among us are bought off with a bait-and-switch in which there is a pretense of having a choice, but in the end we are allowed to vote for someone who represents a slightly less toxic business-as-usual than another candidate. And then secret machines count the votes out of sight. Amazing what we put up with, isn't it? Somebody really needs to bring democracy to the US—especially since it is a rogue state headed by a crazy man with thousands of WMDs.
But anyway—we need to work on the sloppy thinking of mixing up "American attitudes" with the actions of the Bush—or some other—administration.

This is so stupid, it's frightening. Well said, Martin.

It may already be too late, and that's the most frightening part. The 2008 elections are certainly too late. Copenhagen 2009 is far too late. Best line in the article: the price paid for talking is a delay of action.

America needs to start pretending the roads are as safe for their SUVs as the roads in Iraq. That excess lights on at night are as safe as they were during the firebombing of London in WW2. That waste and overconsumption are as vile as war and oppression. And they need to do that starting today. Forget the EPA, the DoE, Bali, Kyoto, income tax refunds, and any and all promises made by renewable energies.

Real conservation must begin or nothing else will make a difference.

Edwards wants a moratorium on coal plant construction.
If we up the standards on new building and new building renovations it will benefit us the most. More energy is wasted heating and cooling inefficient houses.
Conservation and increasing energy standards will also be an large asset.
We could freeze King Coal in his tracks! Investing in Green Renewable Technologies will pay off more that sustaining these dirty fossil fuel conglomerates.
Fossil Fuels is the Monkey on our backs!
Simple George is their Jockey!
We must kick the Cor'pirates' out of Government.
That includes Dead Eye Dick and The Shrub.
Since he took stole the election oil has gone from $13 to $100 a barrel!
The National debt has doubled.
He has spent more money than all the other Presidents combined!
End the WAR and oil will drop by half.
There are a few good candidates this time around.
But, the door is closing fast.
The swift boaters are reeving up their engines.
The Faux News is tooting it's own horn.
We have to overcome:
Broken Voting Machines
WAR
Poverty
Unemployment
Privitization
The FAUX NEWS
Mass Media
Debt
The Military Industrial Complex
Propaganda
Prisons
Treason
Torture
Spying
Lying
Hypocrites
FBI, CIA & NSA
The Triple Headed Dragon of oppression!
Global warming
Rising oceans
and
Franken Foods!
Our work is cut out for us.
The Corpirate Stupid State is imploding from The Weight of it's own GREED!
Stand back and prepare for the coming changes.
The Titanic is going down.
Survive and prosper!

The US EIA shows graphs of increased electricity demand between now and 2030, with almost all of the new power supplied from coal. China is building some nuclear power, but coal is still expanding. Its pretty clear that Kyoto and Bali interfere with business as usual, and global warming is still viewed as something between a remote possibility and a "total crock" by the movers and shakers.

Not that it would be good enough, no leading presidential candidate has proposed even a moratorium on new fossil fuel use.

At some point someone will decide we need to be stopped.

A good article, expressing the mood that is gaining on me more and more (http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/Climate_change/) - never more, cry the crows outside my window, never more. An interesting comment that Canada and Russia expect to do well out of climate change. I'm sure this is right, but it once again reveals a misunderstanding of what is going on reminiscent of the deniers who profess delight that the winters in, say, Chicago, will be a few degrees warmer. The problem is not the average temperature rise in itself, but the effect of this rise on the one hand on weather patterns, and on the other on the ecology of the planet. Both effects are unpredictable in detail, but potentially catastrophic in outcomes. If Canada thinks that all that will happen is that the north west passage will open to shipping, wheat will have a longer growing season, and tourists will flock to the Riviera of Newfoundland, they are deluded and badly advised. All of us are in for a cataclysmic downhill ride to an unthinkable climatic future.

"[T]he USA is responsible for the planet's fever."

That's true, not only in emissions, but also through the exploitative consumerist lifestyles it promotes in the rest of the world.

The "cultural colonialism" pursued by the USA is now the main threat to the collective happiness of the global human community. A world-wide value of economic growth as the main measure for happiness is simply not sustainable and hasn't been for at least the last half century - and that's what we're "warming" to.

Capitalism is in many ways an excellent engine, except there's noone at the wheel. The engine of capitalism is now running for the sake of running. And it's crushing anything or anyone in its path, while the capitalists (meaning most of US consumers in tacit complicity) stoking its engine all say: "Don't look at me, I'm not the driver." Noone is, and can't be for as long as corporate law demands maximum profit as the reason and purpose for corporations to exist.

That's the core of our current human problem, now reflected back at US by the biosphere.

The ones who instigated and wrote that law, i.e. the driver of the engine of capitalism, died a long time ago. That's what we need to realize collectively, and grab the empty wheel.

(There's nothing new about this. It's called a "mixed economy" commanded by the collective interest of people fairly represented. This now needs to be expanded from national scope to international, in order to catch up with our own human activities.)

Greed is a very effective human drive to harness for our activitity in the world. But so is Love, which can be equally harnessed to motivate us in our shared daily activities.

Changing corporate law globally to be content – and much happier – with keeping up with the natural growth happening all around us in the biosphere, in effect harmonizing US all to a stable-state system, is the alternative and the necessity.

Natural human growth is roughly from 0 to 75 kg over 75 years, 1 kg per year. That means an average annual growth of 1.33 %.

1.33 % is nature's blueprint for human economic growth.

That's giving it a name.

Now the task is to "go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations", blissing them in that name.

Psst, hates to tell you this but the USA don't put its own interests first it always puts Israel's first

"America has always put its own national interest before that of everything else."

Curious as to what countries don't do this.

America's behaviour is not weird. It is completely consistent. America has always put its own national interest before that of everything else. Many Americans could not care less about the rest of the world - so long as the US still floats, the rest of the world can sink. Ought to sink, since foreigners are automatically inferior to Americans. Putting the US economy first is therefore the obvious policy for any patriotic administration to pursue (supposing they are scientifically ignorant and no not realise how all parts of a whole are dependent on one another). In any case, the US government is taking the necessary steps. It is building up an obscenely huge military armed with WMDs which it will not hesitate to use. When the time comes, dwindling resources will be channeled towards the USA, while the rest of us are left to die.

The US is may have the most money & the most power. But the rest of the world already knows the US is nothing more than the biggest bully on the block. And they aren't falling for it anymore. Lots of money & power doesn't automatically make a country a world leader.

Kevin Conrad, of the Papua New Guinea delegation in Bali said it best (to much applause) "If for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of the way."

When I was young, we used to hear the usual old-timer talk about how bad the winters were in the old days - then our science teachers would tell us that we shouldn't listen to them, no data indicates the climate has changed - such things only take place over geologically-long periods of time. That was back in the 1970's.

but, that was then.

Now, over nearly all of N. America, the climate is undeniably warming, and you don't even have to be very old to notice it. The warm periods are 20F/10C above average, and the cold snaps what was average. And this isn't a statistical fluctuaton - winters have been consistently warming since the mid 90's.

Once again, we are seeing changes over 15 years that aren't supposed to be noticable over a human life span! And, as the warming accleerates at this possibly geologically unprecedented rate, ther are no contervailing forcings - only positive-feedback ones. Lets get out of this state of denial!