Spying on Ice

NASA has released satellite measurements of the thickness of Arctic sea ice, comparing 2004 to 2008. From The Guardian:

The Earth is going thin on top. A new study has revealed that the Arctic Ocean's permanent blanket of ice around the North Pole has thinned by more than 40% since 2004.

Scientists said the rapid loss was "remarkable" and could force experts to reassess how quickly the Arctic ice in the summer may disappear completely. They blame the loss on global warming, which has driven temperatures in the Arctic to record highs and summer ice extent to recent lows.

...Ron Kwok, senior research scientist at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said: "Even in years when the overall extent of sea ice remains stable or grows slightly, the thickness and volume of the ice cover is continuing to decline, making the ice more vulnerable to continued shrinkage."

Selling Us Out in L'Aquila

They've done it. The major greenhouse gas emitters, including China and India, have killed off an effort for a 50 per cent cut in carbon emissions by 2050. From AFP news service:

Major polluting nations watered down their ambitions to tackle global warming at a G8 summit in Italy on Wednesday despite growing pressure to set tough targets to cut pollution.

The Group of Eight leading industrialised nations and other major economies -- including China and India -- dropped a pledge to halve global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, a European Union official said.

"There is indeed a very strong commitment to identify the global goal for substantially reducing global emissions by 2050, but there is no 50 percent" mentioned in a draft declaration, the official said on condition of anonymity.

Leaders face mounting pressure to make ambitious commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions at the summit in L'Aquila with the clock ticking for a key December meeting in Copenhagen to set international targets.

Meanwhile the Europeans are suspicious that Washington is negotiating a backroom deal with Beijing on emissions that will fall far short of what's needed if there's to be any hope of avoiding catastrophic climate change. Harper will undoubtedly be delighted to drink from the same bowl, especially if Washington and Beijing hold the seat up.

According to The New York Times, the draft resolution of the G8 calls for an "aspirational global goal" of a 50% cut by 2050. That's the same flim flam Bush agreed to at the G8 summit last year in Japan.

Stephen Harper - Enemy of the State?

I don't know if this is true but Avaaz.org is claiming that Stephen Harper intends to try to derail the global warming initiative at this week's G8 summit. The organization maintains that Harper, allied with the Russians, will seek to block the adoption of a warming target of 2 degrees Celsius, a move that could fatally undermine the Copenhagen summit in December.

If this warning is true and if Michael Ignatieff wants something powerful on which to attack Harper, this is it. All he'd have to do is unglue his ass from that fence he's been straddling since he assumed the Liberal leadership.

Stop Treating Us Like Children!

Why is the British government willing, even eager, to discuss the expected coming effects of climate change with its people while Canadian political leaders don't even want to mention it?

The British government is talking to its people, telling them what to expect, initiating discussion on how to deal with change. They're telling their people they have to plan - now. From BBC News:

The UK needs to plan now for a future that will be hotter and bring greater extremes of flood and drought, says Environment Secretary Hilary Benn.

Launching the UK Climate Projections 2009 report (UKCP09), Mr Benn told MPs that the UK climate will change even with a global deal on emissions.

By 2080, London will be between 2C and 6C hotter than it is now, he said.

Every part of the UK is likely to be wetter in winter and drier in summer, according to the projections.

Summer rainfall could decrease by about 20% in the south of England and in Yorkshire and Humberside by the middle of the century.

The government hopes UKCP09 will allow citizens, local authorities and businesses to plan for future decades.

"Climate change is going to transform the way we live," said Mr Benn.

"These projections show us the future we need to avoid, and the future we need to plan for."

Is it just us? Maybe a people who managed to tough out the Blitz can be trusted with a bit of rough news that we're too soft to handle. Maybe Messrs. Harper and Ignatieff and Layton figure we're way too jittery, we'd all go sticking our heads in ovens and turning on the gas.

The Brits want to plan for a London that could, within three generations, be 6 degrees Celsius warmer. That's a lot but they're not afraid to lay it out before the public so that they can do what they need to do - plan for their future.

Here's something to think about. Worrying as the Brit outlook may be, those of you in central, southern Canada are insane if you think you're going to be any better off than the Brits by 2080. So don't you think it's past time for our leaders to either give us the information we need to begin to plan for our own future or explain why they won't or can't? If they're going to treat you like children, act like children - don't vote (for them anyway).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8107014.stm

Well, This Will Certainly Piss'em Off in Biloxi

Get out the white hoods and light that cross. This time it's not the Jews or the negroes - it's those damned Catholics!

If there's one thing American rednecks hate, it's the idea of a world government. They're positively xenophobic about it and you'll find plenty in the halls of Congress who'll happily take up the call to arms. These are the guys who see the United Nations as a conspiracy against the United States.

That's why they're bound to be thrown into a headlong tizzy by the latest encyclical from Pope Bennie released on the eve of the G8 summit. From The New York Times:

Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday called for a radical rethinking of the global economy, criticizing a growing divide between rich and poor and urging the establishment of a “world political authority” to oversee the economy and work for the “common good.”

...Indeed, sometimes Benedict sounds like an old-school European socialist, lamenting the decline of the social welfare state and praising the “importance” of labor unions to protect workers. Without stable work, he notes, people lose hope and tend not to get married and have children.

But he also wrote that “The so-called outsourcing of production can weaken the company’s sense of responsibility towards the stakeholders — namely the workers, the suppliers, the consumers, the natural environment and broader society — in favor of the shareholders.”
And he argued that it is “erroneous to hold that the market economy has an inbuilt need for a quota of poverty and underdevelopment in order to function at its best.”

Benedict also called for a reform of the United Nations so that there can be a unified “global political body” that allows the less powerful of the earth to have a voice, and called on rich nations to help less fortunate ones.

Gee, that should go down well with the Group of 8, aka the Group of 8 Only. I can't begin to imagine what the likes of Glenn Beck will make of this.

WTF? CTV Wants Me to Pay Tribute to Michael Jackson?

Dear Conservative Television Network:

I've never placed an excessive confidence in your judgment. You do, after all, employ the living dead to anchor your newscasts and permit tiny porcine Yoda figures to shill for Stephen Harper before they're whisked away to the great Upper House.

But, to "invite" me and all Canadians to "pay tribute" to the King of Pop, Michael Jackson? Don't you think that's just a tad over the edge? Even for CTV?

Didn't the Romans start this nonsense by making their conquered countries pay tribute to them, the conquerors? Now explain to me why I should pay tribute or pay anything for that matter to a once highly talented but now even more highly dead, reputed child molestor who overdosed on prescription meds? After all, I was never conquered by Michael Jackson. Those kids might have been, but not me.

CTV thanks but no thanks. I'm going to pass on your invitation.

But What If They're Right?

The past year has seen a dark and ominous change sweep through the science of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming.

For years the leading scientists in the field have been issuing predictions and forecasts and warnings only to see their conclusions overtaken by unanticipated change and proven far too conservative, too optimistic. By the time their research is assembled, reviewed and digested into IPCC reports, it's usually outdated and grossly understated.

As Gwynne Dyer noted, climate scientists he interviewed for his book Climate Wars, seemed shell-shocked at the unexpectedly rapid pace of global warming. For years they've muttered about "tipping points" conditions that might occur even without our noticing that could trigger runaway global warming of a scale catastrophic to mankind.

In the last six months, they've shed that last sliver of wishful thinking. One of them, Britain's James Lovelock, believes we're either in freefall or we'll be there soon. Another, America's James Hansen, believes we're Hanging Ten on the abyss and staring at our very last chance to act.

In an article in the June 29th edition of The New Yorker, Hansen says they got it horribly wrong. For some time they've estimated that the key to limiting planetary warming (to the target of two degrees celsius above pre-industrial levels) was to keep CO2 in the atmosphere within 450 parts per million. We're at 380 now. Those numbers were wrong, says Hansen. He maintains that the latest studies and warming evidence from around the world shows that the magic number isn't 450, but 350. In other words, the needle's already bouncing around in the red. Our only hope now, says Hansen, is to shut down the world's coal-fired power plants and replace them with renewables within twenty years. His warning pulls no punches. Get it done by 2030 or our civilization is essentially finished.

Across the pond, old James Lovelock (he is 90), isn't such a gushing optimist. He figures we're already well past the point of no return. He sees mankind's numbers falling from the current nearly 7-billion to a mere several hundred millions by the end of the century living in the few pockets of the planet capable of sustaining civilization. From Alternet:

Lovelock is cautiously hopeful that as many as several hundred million humans will survive the century and carve pockets of civilization into the coming hot state. Our current global civilization is about to end, but there is every reason to “take hope from the fact that our species is unusually tough and is unlikely to go extinct in the coming climate catastrophe.”

...Those who survive will be responsible for maintaining a high-tech, low-impact, low-energy society advanced enough to keep the flame of progress alive but small and smart enough to carefully husband what arable land remains. Lovelock guesses the rump human race will cluster around a few temperate islands in the far northern hemisphere, including his native U.K. He believes that if emergency preparations are made in time—he compares the present moment to 1939—and if the worst-case scenarios of geopolitical conflict are avoided—namely resource scrambles leading to global thermonuclear war—then something resembling a modern and even urban lifestyle could await the survivors.

Now the good news is that we live in one of the few places where life could be sustainable. Maybe we'll bring palm trees back to the Arctic and remake Beach Blanket Bingo on the tropical shores of Ellesmere Island. Maybe - if we're lucky enough to survive "resource scrambles leading to global thermonuclear war." Maybe.

----

I'm not asking you to believe these guys. I can't ask you to do that because I can't say they're right. But I can quite reasonably ask you to accept that they may be right and, judging by their track record over the past four decades, there's a very good chance they may be right.

Using the "they could be right" test, don't you think we should be discussing these things now? Don't you think we should be examining what Canadians need to do to position themselves to fully benefit from the extraordinarily lucky geographical position we hold? If these guys are right, you can count on one hand the countries that will be able to sustain civilized life and, when it comes to that world, there's no country luckier.

As pointed out in the Alternet article, what we need most and need right now is some clear-headed, hard-nosed political leadership. While you're reading this next passage, I want you to keep in mind "Tar Sands Michael":

[Lovelock] has been ruthless in his attacks on politicians and businessmen who peddle hope in the form of meaningless but potentially profitable gestures like cap-and-trade. This has deeply antagonized his fellow greens still scrambling to generate public support for bold solutions to the climate crisis.

Lovelock’s impatience with feel-good “Yes, we can” liberal environmentalism borders on contempt. There are passages in Vanishing that, were it not for their eloquence, could have been uttered by Glenn Beck. The delusional rhetoric about “sustainable development” peddled by green politicians and businessmen, writes Lovelock, just shows that we have “weaved the sound of the alarm clock into our dreams.” In one of the book’s many memorable passages on the green politics of hope, Lovelock compares sustainable development to deathbed snake oil peddled by an alt-medicine quack.

“Just as we as individuals try alternative medicine,” writes Lovelock, “our governments have many offers from alternative business and their lobbies of sustainable ways to ‘save the planet,’ and from some green hospice there may come the anodyne of hope.”

Those who are booking us rooms in the "green hospice" are those who peddle us nonsense about carbon capture, clean coal and cap and trade emissions controls.

Even if Lovelock and Hansen have overstated the threat facing mankind from AGW, unless they're dead wrong and unless all the climate change evidence we're seeing in front of our eyes is not happening, then climate change is the overwhelmingly paramount issue to Canada and the Canadian people.

Yet we're stuck with a self-proclaimed leader who thinks we'll be needing the Tar Sands to hold our country together throughout this century, to ensure our continued prosperity for decades to come? That's the thinking of a total failure, of a man unwilling or unable to see much less lead Canada through the existential challenges we surely will not be able to avoid, much less avert. Maybe Michael needs to ask "what if they're right?"

Break Out the Ritalin

And the dog ate her homework. I only just watched the Palin resignation announcement. If you haven't watched it, you really should. This is a woman in full blown panic.

As Shannyn Moore put it on Huffington Post, "Sarah Palin's political ambition combined with her intellect is like putting a jet engine on a golf cart; lots of horse power and no steering capabilities. Today she proved it."



Meanwhile, never one to leave a turd unvarnished, the Weekly Standard's clown prince William Kristol showed just how hard he can spin this one:

If Palin wants to run in 2012, why not do exactly what she announced today? It's an enormous gamble - but it could be a shrewd one.

After all, she's freeing herself from the duties of the governorship. Now she can do her book, give speeches, travel the country and the world, campaign for others, meet people, get more educated on the issues - and without being criticized for neglecting her duties in Alaska. I suppose she'll take a hit for leaving the governorship early - but how much of one? She's probably accomplished most of what she was going to get done as governor, and is leaving a sympatico lieutenant governor in charge.

And haven't conservatives been lamenting the lack of a national leader? Well, now she'll try to be that. She may not succeed. Everything rests on her talents, and on her performance. She'll be under intense and hostile scrutiny, and she'll have to perform well.

Bill, go sit down in the corner and give you brain a rest.

The Powerful Pitfalls of Positive Thinking

Canadian researchers have discovered that a lot of the hype about positive thinking is just that - hype - and can even backfire for some people. Bad news for the multi-billion dollar "self help" publishing business. From BBC News

The researchers, from the University of Waterloo and the University of New Brunswick, asked people with high and low self-esteem to say "I am a lovable person."

They then measured the participants' moods and their feelings about themselves.

In the low self-esteem group, those who repeated the mantra felt worse afterwards compared with others who did not.

However people with high self-esteem felt better after repeating the positive self-statement - but only slightly.

The psychologists then asked the study participants to list negative and positive thoughts about themselves.

They found that, paradoxically, those with low self-esteem were in a better mood when they were allowed to have negative thoughts than when they were asked to focus exclusively on affirmative thoughts.

In other words, if you don't need it, self-help techniques are wonderful. If your self-esteem is in the toilet, not so much.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8132857.stm

Tasers Worthwhile Sometimes - Well, Duh!

It happened in a park in Surrey, B.C. on Thursday night. Officer responds to call about drunken teenager wielding a knife. Hears an argument. Confronts the 15-year old who has his hands behind his back. Kid brings his hand forward revealing a 15-cm. blade. When the suspect refuses to drop the weapon, cop stuns him with a single taser burst. Problem over.

Afterward, RCMP spokesman Sergeant Roger Morrow jumps all over the incident. "Despite all of the discussion and to some degree controversy over the use of Tasers, they are a very valuable weapon."

Memo to Morrow: the controversy is over the improper use of Tasers, not where they're employed like this as an alternative to a firearm. Please tell me that a sergeant in the RCMP grasps that distinction. Please?

Obama's Fourth of July

"...there are those who would have us try what has already failed; who would defend the status quo. They argue that our health care system is fine the way it is and that a clean energy economy can wait. They say we are trying to do too much, that we are moving too quickly, and that we all ought to just take a deep breath and scale back our goals."

...These naysayers have short memories. They forget that we, as a people, did not get here by standing pat in a time of change. We did not get here by doing what was easy.

These are a couple of passages from Obama's Fourth of July address. As I read his powerful rebuke to the "naysayers" I was reminded of the rank cowardice that has permeated Canada's political leadership - a gaggle of naysayers each trying to outshout the others in saying "not now, we can't, we musn't, let's maintain the status quo, we need to 'just take a deep breath and scale back our goals.'"

They say there is no noise in a vacuum. Perhaps that explains the eerie silence surrounding the vision of our leaders. They all deserve the sack, the lot of them.

CanWest's Quirky Take on Climate Change

It's a bad year for prairie farmers. Severe drought has already sent them running for their crop insurance benefits. It's bad enough in Alberta that farmers no longer have to wait for a visit by crop insurance inspectors. The province has announced they can just call it in.

The question on many lips is whether the droughts are the result of climate change? It's impossible to tell just yet. Climate change isn't a seasonal, annual or even decadal phenomenon. It's long-term in scope, multi-decadal. But that hasn't stopped CanWest's Edmonton Journal from speculating:

...The drought has swept through huge areas of the province leaving virtually all farmers in its dust. It's not as if there's any lucky, unscrupulous farmer hiding a lush bumper crop.

To make matters even bleaker, some weather experts say: "We haven't seen the worst of it."

Nobody can point with any authority to global warming as the culprit. It does not move from normal weather to abnormal weather in a straight line. One bad year does not climate change make. But there is a disturbing trend here that meshes with predictions from climatologists who fear we're headed into more and more climate trouble--2008 was a particularly bad year for hail damage in both Alberta and Saskatchewan. If this is indeed evidence of climate change, farmers must feel as if they're the canary in the mine shaft.

...Seeing a group of fellow Albertans, such as farmers, suffering the effects of climate change first-hand makes the issue real and immediate rather than an ethereal concept affecting someone in a far off country who might face a flood sometime in the future.

If the Alberta government really does want to fight the war on greenhouse gas emissions its stance is bolstered with each drop of rain that doesn't fall.

Our farmers as victims of global warming also raises something of a dilemma for the province. Alberta has been targeted once again --this time by the World Wildlife Foundation--as a growing source of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. Our emissions might be tiny on a global scale, but they are huge at the per-capita level. And per capita is where we lose the moral ground to countries such as China that have enormous emissions, but only because they have so many more people. Based on the per-capita argument it would appear the economic winners in our energy industry are making losers of our farmers.

Pretty heady stuff coming from a CanWest branch plant, an organization that has done just about everything they could conceive of to portray global warming induced climate change as a great hoax. Maybe going broke has helped them come to their senses.

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/Technology/climate+change+behind+drought/1755824/story.html

Sarah Palin to Resign

The New York Times is reporting that Sarah Palin has announced she'll resign as governor of Alaska before the month is out.

At a press conference in her home town of Wasilla said she'll not seek another term as governor because - wait for it - “We know we can effect positive change outside of government.”

Observers believe Ms. Palin's idea of "positive change" means trying to get the Republican Party's presidential nomination in 2012.

Behind Cheney's Obsessive Secrecy - Oil, Oil and More Oil.

Much of what Dick Cheney did during the Bush years was hidden from the public's eye. The Dick did a lot of quirky things to keep it that way. Remember when he claimed he didn't have to disclose anything because the office of the vice president wasn't even part of the government, not even the executive branch? This guy didn't merely operate beneath the radar, he took a sledgehammer to the radar screen.

One activity the Dick worked furiously to keep secret was his White House Energy Task Force especially during the early years when Enron's Ken Lay actually had a desk in the White House.

Bit by bit, we're beginning to learn what made Cheney tick. People talk, long buried documents surface, dots are connected.

Now Jason Leopold, editor of The Public Record, reveals that one of the issues high on the agenda of Cheney's energy task force was invading Iraq:

Two years before the invasion of Iraq, oil executives and foreign policy advisers told the Bush administration that the United States would remain "a prisoner of its energy dilemma" as long as Saddam Hussein was in power.

That April 2001 report, "Strategic Policy Challenges for the 21st Century," was prepared by the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy and the US Council on Foreign Relations at the request of then-Vice President Dick Cheney.

By March 2001, Cheney's task force had prepared a set of documents with a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as two charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and a list titled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," according to information released in July 2003 under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.

So, when Bush and Cheney and everybody else in the criminal enterprise known as the Bush Administration assured Americans and the world that the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with oil, they were merely doing what they did best - they were lying through their teeth. It wasn't weapons of mass destruction that Cheney wanted to pry from Saddam's fingers, it was Iraq's oil.

Read more here: http://www.truthout.org/070309J?n

He's Back - The Return of El Nino.

We only just managed to bid adieu to his ugly stepsister, La Nina. Was it too much to hope for a few years of normal conditions? Maybe so because he's back. El Nino is back and his oceanic presence is already being detected as far north as the Baja.

And what does El Nino hold in store for our fellow human beings? According to the United Nation's Office for Humanitarian Affairs, nothing good:

Rising sea surface temperatures across the central and eastern Pacific Ocean herald El Niño, which could disrupt the rains in major cereal producing regions, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has warned.

"Typically, an El Niño has the potential to disrupt the rainy seasons and cause lower rainfall in India, Australia, Southeast Asia - Philippines and Indonesia - southern Africa and Central America," said Robert Stefanski, a WMO scientific officer who works on agriculture-related weather and climate issues. "In past El Niño events, droughts have occurred and lowered food production in many of these regions."

In contrast, La Niña is the cooling of sea surface temperatures; both El Niño and La Niña are part of the normal climate cycle in the Pacific Ocean and occur once every four to seven years. According to WMO, "Recent changes are consistent with the early stages of a developing El Niño event in the second half of 2009."

It seems like we did indeed once get these phenomenon every seven years but that has changed over the past decade. Now, it seems, we're hit by them more often than not. They once were "part of the normal climate cycle in the Pacific Ocean" but now they seem to have become not just part but the climate cycle of the Pacific.

So what does all this mean for Canada? Here's a handy explanation from the University of British Columbia:

During the winter of an El Nino event, the air temperature tends to be warm over most of Canada, with the greatest warming centred around Manitoba-western Ontario, where a temperature anomaly of up to +3 degrees Celcius (averaged over the last nine El Nino events) can be found (Hoerling et al., 1997; Shabbar and Khandekar, 1996). Southern Canada also tends to be drier during an El Nino winter (Shabbar et al., 1997). Southern British Columbia tends to receive less snow (Hsieh and Tang, 1999).

In the case of the cold La Nina event-- the opposite of the warm El Nino event-- the coastal waters off British Columbia tend to be cool. In a La Nina winter, the Canadian air temperature (especially west of Quebec) tends to be below normal (Hoerling et al., 1997; Shabbar and Khandekar, 1996), while the precipitation in southern Canada tends to be above normal (Shabbar et al., 1997). Southern British Columbia tends to receive more snow (Hsieh and Tang, 1999). Poor Canadian prairie wheat harvests often follow La Nina events (Garnett and Khandekar, 1992; Hsieh et al., 1999)

Great, just what I didn't want to hear. Glancing at the CBC website I found an item suggesting that there's a new generation of El Nino emerging, a lot different from the old familiar phenom we were just getting to understand:

Changes in the nature of global weather phenomenon El Niño may be causing an increase in the total number of hurricanes as well as their likelihood of hitting land, new research suggests.

El Niño forms in the Pacific, but it affects circulation patterns across the globe — from drought in Australia, to the Indian monsoon and the number and severity of hurricanes in the Atlantic.

Conventional El Niño events involve warming in the eastern Pacific. But a new wrinkle might be emerging as a phenomenon dubbed El Niño Modoki (from the Japanese meaning "similar, but different") shows warming in the Central Pacific — similar to that which is seen during La Nina years.

"
Normally, El Niño results in diminished hurricanes in the Atlantic," said Peter Webster, a professor at Georgia Tech's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, who led a research team studying the issue. "But this new type is resulting in a greater number of hurricanes with greater frequency and more potential to make landfall."

Warming in the central Pacific Ocean is associated with a greater-than-average [hurricane] frequency and increasing landfall potential along the Gulf of Mexico coast and Central America, the report said.

Changes in the characteristics of El Niño could have huge ramifications for the insurance industry, as well as making storm-ravaged areas better able to avert catastrophe.

"
This new type of El Niño is more predictable," said Webster. "We're not sure why, but this could mean that we get greater warning of hurricanes, probably by a number of months."

How Emerging Economies Will Fight Us on Climate Change

It's no secret that the Third World and the emerging economies see the entire global warming issue far differently than we in the West. In fact, they often see global warming as a plague inflicted on them by our greed and gluttony. An article in today's Times of India gives a glimpse into the anti-Western slant being taken to climate change:

"If the current fleet of 25-40 million gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles (SUVs) in the United States were to shift to more fuel-efficient cars such as those available in Europe, more than 1.6 billion people in the world currently living in the dark can be provided electrification without any increase in the levels of greenhouse gases that lead to climate change.

Phasing out the oversized, power-packed SUVs, considered the hallmark of a Midwestern dream in the US, would reduce global emissions by a whopping 36 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, according to the World Bank's yet-to-be-released World Development Report 2009.

This is only one example of the "duplicity" of the industrialized nations that the WDR highlights to prove that "carbon space" is inequitably powering the luxurious lifestyles of the rich at the cost of the poorer nations. Carbon space is an individual's or a country's share of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere.

The report, the draft overview of which was seen by TOI, now points out that the 1 billion people living in the high income countries are using 63% more carbon space than is their fair share on a per capita basis if one were to analyze the emissions since 1990.

India, for decades, has demanded at the UN climate negotiations that it must be given a greater 'carbon space' in the atmosphere to allow its 600 million poor access to electricity. The industrialized nations have argued that if India grows and powers its poor, the already limited space left in the atmosphere to spew out GHG gases would lead to irreversible and dangerous climate change.

It's a good argument, unwelcome perhaps but damn good. It takes our cherished principles of fairness and equity and beats us over the head with them. It's not just that the West has and continues to take more than its "fair" share but, in the process, the Third World (which the emerging states are mustering behind them) are paying the price for it. Ouch, burn, sizzle.

The global warming argument is now indeed coming around to "carbon space." Here's a hint - that's not good for us. At least two credible research papers released this year have approached the climate change problem from fudgy numbers about percentage reductions over proposed timetables to a hard assessment of just how much carbon dioxide we've actually pumped into the atmosphere and how much more the atmosphere can carry before we absolutely exceed our 2 degree target. The remainder can be called "carbon space" and the emerging economies want to ensure they get their fair share of it.

The problem with their argument is that for the West to give the emerging economies (and presumably the Third World) their fair share of the remaining carbon space, we'll have to immediately slash our carbon emissions by 63%. Not 80% of some notional figure by 2050. 63% tomorrow. And then they poke their pointy stick in our eye by pointing to our precious SUVs.

It looks as though the West has two choices. We either come up with some argument to refute the complaints of the emerging nations or we ignore them and maintain that we must continue to have a superior right to the residual carbon space. After all, we are the West, aren't we? Just who do they think they are?

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Earth/US-SUV-ban-may-light-up-lives/articleshow/4714141.cms

Happy Canada Day - We're Number, er, Last!

Now I know certain political leaders would prefer we not mention the issue but Canada is doing such a lousy job on the greenhouse gas front that we're dead last among the G8 nations. That's last as in worse than anybody else, bottom of the barrel. From CBC News:

"Nowhere else on Earth do fewer people steward more resources, yet Canada now stands dead last amongst the G8 nations in protecting our shared home from the threat of dangerous climate change," said Keith Steward, director of WWF-Canada's climate change campaign, in a statement Wednesday.

Canada's greenhouse gas emissions are steadily increasing, and its per capita emissions are already among the highest in the world, says the study, conducted by Ecofys, a renewable-energy consulting firm.

Now I know His Igness thinks Canada's economic problems are so bad that we really can't, daren't, mustn't even contemplate meaningful climate change initiatives such as carbon taxes. Best not to point out that all those other countries whose economic woes are as bad or, in some cases, far worse than Canada's aren't letting that stand in their way.

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/07/01/tech-climate-scorecard-wwf.html

Arnie - California's Real Life "Terminator"

Arnold Schwarzenegger's legacy as California governor may be written by events to unfold in the coming months. The Governator is determined to reform California's hapless political system and is willing to take the state down trying.

It's Arnie versus the California legislature in a game of high-stakes, Russian roulette. The latest budget leaves the state facing a $24-billion deficit, money that is nowhere to be found. When the government failed to get the necessary super-majority required to pass the budget, it was left to voters to say whether the government could borrow the shortfall. All it took was a ridiculously small percentage of the electorate, a bare majority of the 19% turnout, to say "no." As a result, California's government runs out of cash next month.

Legislators are looking to issuing IOUs rather than permit the state to default on its bills but the governor isn't buying it. Schwarzenegger says he'll veto any measure that fails to close the state's deficit. From the LA Times:

In doing so, Schwarzenegger has sent the message that he would rather allow the state to begin shutting down than let lawmakers push its troubles off for months by closing only part of the shortfall. The latter prospect could swallow up the rest of his governorship.

"Whatever needs to be done," Schwarzenegger told reporters outside his Capitol office Friday when asked why he would be willing to delay payments to needy Californians. "I know that there is a history in this building of always being late with the budget, to drag it out and to kick that can down the alley. . . . I don't think we have this luxury this time."

The governor readily admits that he sees the crisis as a chance to make big changes to government -- to "reform the system," he said Friday -- with proposals he has struggled to advance in the past.

Among them: reorganizing state bureaucracy, eliminating patronage boards and curbing fraud in social services that Democrats have traditionally protected. The governor also would like to move past the budget crisis to reach a deal on California's water problems that has so far eluded him.

...if his strategy fails, he could be blamed for unnecessarily subjecting state residents to misery.

"I don't believe the governor wants his legacy to be that he had the opportunity to avoid IOUs for Californians and that he failed to take it because he wanted to play a game of chicken," Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) said last week.

...Gary Jacobson, a professor of political science at UC San Diego, said Schwarzenegger has put himself at risk of antagonizing the public by holding out for some of these ideas while forcing deep cuts and forswearing new taxes that could alleviate some of the pain.

"When it hits people how much damage this budget has done, they are going to say, 'So what that he got some of these things through? Look at what he has done to us in the meantime. State parks are closed. Classrooms are huge. People are being thrown out of the hospital. Medical clinics are shutting down,' " Jacobson said.

"When all this hits," he added, "it is going to be hard to imagine people will look on him favorably because he got some of the structural reforms he wanted."

In fact, the structural changes California desperately needs are constitutional. In a tightly politicized legislature it can be impossible to get the 2/3rds majority approval required to pass a budget. The safety valve for that was to have been a plebiscite called a "special election" to let the public decide whether to allow a tax increase. It's a situation guaranteed to raise more turnout from the "no" camp which is how 10% of the electorate was able to bring their state to the edge of catastrophe.

First Ed, Next Farrah, Then Jackson, Now... It's Bye Billy

The most annoying man in television infomercials is no more. Billy Mays, dead at 50.

Water - Civilization's Trojan Horse

With a rapidly dwindling number of exceptions, nations around the world are consuming water resources they cannot replenish. It's the H2O equivalent of drinking their "seed corn."

Look at it this way. How did the earth's population swell from 2-billion in the aftermath of WWII to the 6.7-billion we number today? The simple answer is by over-exploiting our freshwater resources for everything from crop irrigation to industrial production to basic human consumption.

How can someone over-exploit water? Easy. It's as simple as emptying a bank vault. Bank customers periodically place small amounts of jewelry, stocks and bonds in their safety deposit boxes. It trickles in but after a while there's a lot of wealth amassed in the vault. Then some villain figures a way to blast into that vault and empty those safety deposit boxes and - voila - an empty vault.

Now water isn't just wealth, it's life itself. But a substantial amount of freshwater has, over millenia, trickled into subterranean vaults we call aquifers. From the dawn of civilization man has learned to draw water from the ground by digging wells. A well, a rope, a bucket and you have a public water system. In some cases wells ran dry but in most they didn't because there was enough groundwater seeping down from rainfall to replenish or "recharge" the supply.

In the post-WWII era we've learned to produce a lot of a great many things including an awful lot more of ourselves. All of that growth depended on an abundant supply of water - for sanitation and basic hygiene, for nourishment and hydration, for public safety and to make the stuff we all want to buy. To meet the challenges of mass famine from overpopulation we developed the "green revolution" - new techniques to maximize agricultural production. But there was never enough surface water, enough precipitation, to keep the engine of civilization running so we began tapping groundwater resources on a mega-industrial scale.

Even parts of the United States are running out of water. Take a look at what's happened to the once-mighty Colorado River to get an idea. But the looming problems are even more dire in other parts of the world, especially in the emerging economic superpowers of China and India.

I recently came across an article on the NPR website examining how India's "green revolution" has turned into a national, Trojan Horse:

Farmers in the state of Punjab abandoned traditional farming methods in the 1960s and 1970s as part of the national program called the "Green Revolution," backed by advisers from the U.S. and other countries.

Indian farmers started growing crops the American way — with chemicals, high-yield seeds and irrigation.

Since then, India has gone from importing grain like a beggar, to often exporting it.

But studies show the Green Revolution is heading for collapse.

When India's government launched the Green Revolution more than 40 years ago, it pressured farmers to grow only high-yield wheat, rice and cotton instead of their traditional mix of crops.

The new miracle seeds could produce far bigger yields than farmers had ever seen, but they came with a catch: The thirsty crops needed much more water than natural rainfall could provide, so farmers had to dig wells and irrigate with groundwater.

The system worked well for years, but government studies show that farmers have pumped so much groundwater to irrigate their crops that the water table is dropping dramatically, as much as 3 feet every year.

...Another side effect of the groundwater crisis is evident at the edge of the fields — thin straggly rows of wheat and a whitish powder scattered across the soil.

The white substance is salt residue. Drilling deep wells to find fresh water often taps brackish underground pools, and the salty water poisons the crops.

"The salt causes root injuries," Palwinder says. "The root cannot take the nutrients from the soil."

...In the village of Chotia Khurd, farmers agree that the Green Revolution used to work miracles for many of them. But now, it's like financial quicksand.

Studies show that their intensive farming methods, which government policies subsidize, are destroying the soil. The high-yield crops gobble up nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorous, iron and manganese, making the soil anemic.

The farmers say they must use three times as much fertilizer as they used to, to produce the same amount of crops — yet another drain on their finances.

...Some leading officials in the farming industry wonder when this house of cards might collapse.

"The state and farmers are now faced with a crisis," warns a report by the Punjab State Farmers Commission.

India's population is growing faster than any country on Earth, and domestic food production is vital.

But the commission's director, G.S. Kalkat, says Punjab's farmers are committing ecological and economic "suicide."

If he is correct, suicide is coming through national policies that reward farmers for the very practices that destroy the environment and trap them in debt.

Unfortunately, India's groundwater crisis and the associated soil exhaustion and salination are but one part of what that country is facing. India's other freshwater source, the Himalayan glaciers, are in headlong retreat. Essential agricultural rivers, like the mighty Ganges, are at risk of being transformed into seasonal rivers, full only during the Monsoons when they're not needed for irrigation.

Draining groundwater is like defying gravity. You are bound to fall to earth and your landing can be very, very unpleasant. Over just a few generations you have created a society you simply do not have the essential resources to sustain. When food production fails it triggers a whole set of social reactions and dynamics that can be quite ugly and destabilizing and, sometimes, even impossible to control.

The thing to bear in mind is that much of the world is facing similar problems to those building in India. China is in the same boat. Pakistan is in the same boat. Much of Africa and the Middle East (including Lebanon, Syria, Israel and the Palestinian territories) are in similar peril. Most of the world's global security "hot spots" are facing severe and abrupt freshwater shortfalls.

What is the answer? I don't know and nobody else seems to know either. One potentially ominous solution being floated is to treat water as a commodity of commerce. This is being pitched as an "only way out" solution that in fact means handing over mankind's single most precious asset, literally giving it away, to "for profit" corporations which we're supposed to blindly trust to be both honest and benevolent in distributing the resource fairly and at a fair price. Maybe we could give the water to Halliburton and they could sub-contract the distribution to Blackwater.

But what does this mean to Canada? It means a great deal, more than most could imagine. Social upheaval and political instability throughout East and South Asia, the Middle East, vast swathes of Africa, parts of Latin and most of Central America, will inevitably impact Canada and the rest of the Western world.

The only political party in our country capable of addressing these problems is the Liberal Party of Canada but, sadly, the LPC has lost its way. The next two decades will redefine our world - politically, socially, economically and, unfortunately, militarily. These are challenges of a genuinely existential scope. We need to be exploring these issues now, preparing our nation and our people to meet them. Why, then, are we instead so preoccupied on whether to criticize Harper for spending too much or too little on stimulus and recovery projects or absorbed on how to call an election or prevent Harper from calling one? Harper is a man of low vision. Why do we have to set our sights to meet his?

Some more engaged than I in Liberal politics contend that the current, multi-party parliamentary reality all but rules out majority government. If they're right and that is the case then we have an enormous problem because preparing ourselves and adapting our Canada to the changes that are coming will require strong government leadership. You can't look ahead if you're always looking over your shoulder. If we can't get a majority we had damned well better work on forging a strong, meaningful coalition.

There is ample precedent for coalition governments functioning quite well in times of national difficulty. What is required is a general acknowledgement of unavoidable challenges of a significance dwarfing partisan political interests. What we need is a Liberal leader capable of creating that consensus and, unfortunately, that's not the guy we have right now. That's not to say that the New Democrats have anything better in Layton, they don't. That guy is hyper-partisan.

Somehow Liberals need to find a leader who can reach out to New Democrats, the rank and file, and lead them to understand the need for a genuine coalition, one based on good faith, cooperation instead of capitulation and an acceptance that the times we're entering upon leave a limited scope for partisanship.

We need to come to this epiphany relatively soon. Events around the world are overtaking us. We can't control them but we can prepare for them. Unfortunately there's a shelf life for each of our options for adaptation and remediation. The best options have already expired and are now lost to us. The next best options are steadily being foreclosed. The only way to get the best options remaining to us is to act now. It's tragic that our leaders have no grasp of that.