Global Warming High Priest: We Need Fascism Before We Start Melting In 2000 Years
Mar 19, 2009 9 Comments ›› Pat Dollard
Leading climate scientist: ‘democratic process isn’t working’
by David Adam
Protest and direct action could be the only way to tackle soaring carbon emissions, a leading climate scientist has said.
James Hansen, a climate modeller with Nasa, told the Guardian today that corporate lobbying has undermined democratic attempts to curb carbon pollution. “The democratic process doesn’t quite seem to be working,” he said.
Speaking on the eve of joining a protest against the headquarters of power firm E.ON in Coventry, Hansen said: “The first action that people should take is to use the democratic process. What is frustrating people, me included, is that democratic action affects elections but what we get then from political leaders is greenwash.
“The democratic process is supposed to be one person one vote, but it turns out that money is talking louder than the votes. So, I’m not surprised that people are getting frustrated. I think that peaceful demonstration is not out of order, because we’re running out of time.”
Hansen said he was taking part in the Coventry demonstration tomorrow because he wants a worldwide moratorium on new coal power stations. E.ON wants to build such a station at Kingsnorth in Kent, an application that energy and the climate change minister Ed Miliband recently delayed. “I think that peaceful actions that attempt to draw society’s attention to the issue are not inappropriate,” Hansen said.
He added that a scientific meeting in Copenhagen last week had made clear the “urgency of the science and the inaction taken by governments”.
Officials will gather in Bonn later this month to continue talks on a new global climate treaty, which campaigners have called to be signed at a UN meeting in Copenhagen in December. Hansen warned that the new treaty is “guaranteed to fail” to bring down emissions.
Hansen said: “What’s being talked about for Copenhagen is a strenghening of Kyoto [protocol] approach, a cap and trade with offsets and escape hatches which will be gauranteed to fail in terms of getting the required rapid reduction in emissions. They talk about goals which sound impressive, but when you see the actions are such that it will be impossible to reach those goals, then I can understand the informed public getting frustrated.”
He said he was growing “concerned” over the stance taken by the new US adminstration on global warming. “It’s not clear what their intentions are yet, but if they are going to support cap and trade then unfortunately i think that will be another case of greenwash. It’s going to take stronger action than that.”
NPR:
Antarctic Ice May Melt, But Not For Millennia
by Richard Harris
A huge chunk of Antarctic ice can’t withstand nonstop global warming, according to a new study published in the latest Nature magazine. And if it melts, the ice will raise the global sea level by 15 or 20 feet — or more.
The only good news here is the catastrophe isn’t likely to unfold quickly.
The ice in question is called the West Antarctic ice sheet. In some ways, it’s the planet’s Achilles’ heel. It holds a vast amount of water, locked up as ice, and it’s sitting below sea level, so it’s inherently unstable.
Research On The West Antarctic Ice Sheet
David Pollard at Penn State University says there has been intense research recently to figure out how the ice sheet has behaved over the past 5 million years.
“Before there was only a vague idea of how the West Antarctic ice sheet grew and decayed over those time scales,” he says.
Now, a scientific drilling project has brought back sediment samples taken from underneath the ice sheet, allowing scientists to study the mud layers, like so many tree rings, to show what ice there has done over history.
“It’s really exciting,” Pollard says. “They’ve shown it really has collapsed and re-grown, multiple times.”
Pollard and a colleague have taken that detailed information and asked what it portends for the future of the West Antarctic ice sheet.
“The main reason that it collapsed in the past is the ocean has gotten warmer around the periphery of Antarctica, increasing the rate of melting of these floating ice shelves which fringe West Antarctica,” Pollard says.
These floating ice shelves act like buttresses to keep the much larger ice sheet pinned back. And whenever the shelves melt away, the ice behind them flows into the sea and sea levels rise.
Warming ocean water around Antarctica, by a maybe 2 to 5 degrees Celsius, could trigger that chain of events, Pollard says. That degree of ocean warming is not forecast for this century, but at the rate the planet is heating up, it seems inevitable at some point. But Pollard’s study indicates that the West Antarctic ice sheet won’t melt away too rapidly. He figures that will take at least 1,000 years, and more likely 2,000 to 3,000 years.
But instead of being reassured by this long time horizon, Pollard says, “I’d say I feel more nervous.”
That’s because there’s now a clear history showing this massive ice sheet has melted before, under conditions that the Earth may soon experience. And while the full effect may not unfold for thousands of years, it would transform the planet into a place we would not recognize today.
