Author: steve austin

From The Guardian:  Humanity’s ongoing annihilation of wildlife is cutting down the tree of life, including the branch we are sitting on, according to a stark new analysis.

More than 300 different mammal species have been eradicated by human activities. The new research calculates the total unique evolutionary history that has been lost as a result at a startling 2.5bn years.

Furthermore, even if the destruction of wild areas, poaching and pollution were ended within 50 years and extinction rates fell back to natural levels, it would still take 5-7 million years for the natural world to recover.

Many scientists think a sixth mass extinction of life on Earth has begun, propelled by human destruction of wildlife, and 83% of wild mammals have already gone. The new work puts this in the context of the evolution and extinction of species that occurred for billions of years before modern humans arrived.

“We are doing something that will last millions of years beyond us,” said Matt Davis at Aarhus University in Denmark, who led the new research. “It shows the severity of what we are in right now. We’re entering what could be an extinction on the scale of what killed the dinosaurs.

“That is pretty scary. We are starting to cut down the whole tree [of life], including the branch we are sitting on right now.”

Read more here

Our President’s views on climate change,  which I believe reflect a significant portion of American society, will doom the planet.  But I do not view this as a completely partisan issue, as the previous president, despite lip service, did little to address our dire predicament either.  Perhaps the President’s admission that climate change is not a hoax could be worth a lot when discussing the issue with the general public.  That might be outweighed, however, by his statement that he “doesn’t know if it’s manmade” and implying that the climate will “change back again.”

Via Huffington Post (From Trump’s 60 Minutes Interview with Leslie Stahl):  Stahl specifically asked the president if he still believed climate change was a hoax (he said no), but Trump refused to agree with a majority of scientists who say humans are directly causing the phenomenon.

“I think something’s happening. Something’s changing and it’ll change back again. I don’t think it’s a hoax,” he said. “I don’t know that it’s manmade. I will say this. I don’t wanna give trillions and trillions of dollars. I don’t wanna lose millions and millions of jobs. I don’t wanna be put at a disadvantage.”

The president’s comments come on the heels of the devastating Hurricane Michael and a new report from the United Nations’ climate change body that predicted dire consequences unless the planet dramatically scaled back greenhouse emissions.

Trump, firing back at Stahl’s question if he had listened to his own climate researchers, said that scientists were politically motivated.

“You’d have to show me the scientists because they have a very big political agenda,” he said.

The UN Climate Report is the final call to save the world from “climate catastrophe”

“Scientists might want to write in capital letters, ‘ACT NOW, IDIOTS,’ but they need to say that with facts and numbers,” said Kaisa Kosonen, of Greenpeace, who was an observer at the negotiations. “And they have.”

A spokeswoman for the state department said the US is “leading the world in providing affordable, abundant, and secure energy to our citizens, while protecting the environment and reducing emissions through job-creating innovation.”

This is absolute nonsense.

“Affordable, abundant and secure.” In fact our energy supply is none of those things.  And before you say, “well it is affordable, at least” remember the external costs that are unaccounted for in the price we pay for energy.

“Protecting the environment.” That one is laughable.  The Trump administration wants to drill and mine in every conceivable place in the US, while rolling back environmental protections.

And somehow, the US is “reducing emissions through job-creating innovation.” This, like the rest, is untrue, but vague sounding enough to be be reassuring.

Finally, the US is doing its part by  outlining an approach to climate change that has “unburdened communities, individuals, and industries by allowing them to develop and implement policies that fit their needs.”  Yeah.  Communities “unburdened” by government always do the right things.

“We’ve got to stop burning fossil fuels. So many aspects of life depend on fossil fuels, except for music and love and education and happiness. These things, which hardly use fossil fuels, are what we must focus on.” Mayer Hillman in The Guardian

He also says in the same piece….“We’re doomed,” says Mayer Hillman with such a beaming smile that it takes a moment for the words to sink in. “The outcome is death, and it’s the end of most life on the planet because we’re so dependent on the burning of fossil fuels. There are no means of reversing the process which is melting the polar ice caps.”

He’s 86 and feels like he can speak the truth.

By Steve Austin

Reading this from Market Watch “5 ways for your stock market investments to from profit climate change” I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.  Can American capitalistic entitlement ever be subverted? Here’s the lead: “But amid the commentary about how this  [climate change] will affect the S&P 500 and specific sectors, it’s worth examining discussing the broader trend of extreme weather brought on by climate change and considering which stocks and investment themes are best positioned to profit from this.”

This is the crying part:  Is thinking that profiting from human misery and death is ok a bug or a feature of our society? Does expecting to profit from the destruction of the only ecosystem in the universe that can support human life derive from ignorance or evil?  I mean seriously, there is a recommendation to buy water stocks “as it is increasingly apparent that providers of clean and reliable water sources are in a growth industry.”  Really.

This is the laughing part:  The moron that wrote this thinks that electric cars are a great investment, little understanding that if we stop using fossil fuels there wont be any electric cars as they are impossible to make without them.

Thinking like this is why that in 100 years there will be no internet on which to read such heartless ignorance (or evil…).

SA: Climate change is far worse and happening far faster than anyone can believe. The UN’s IPCC has issued a shocking new report outlining the danger looming over us. We must reduce fossil fuel burning and land use changes enormously by 2030 to avoid the absolute worst of climate change impacts:  we have 12 years to save ourselves. If we do not, then the next best hope is to limit warming by 2C – with all the incredibly negative impacts that come with it.  Any future beyond a 2C increase is not worth imagining. This report says with the most clarity ever:  the fossil fuel era must end within 30 years.

From The Guardian:

The world’s leading climate scientists have warned there is only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.

The authors of the landmark report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released on Monday say urgent and unprecedented changes are needed to reach the target, which they say is affordable and feasible although it lies at the most ambitious end of the Paris agreement pledge to keep temperatures between 1.5C and 2C.

The half-degree difference could also prevent corals from being completely eradicated and ease pressure on the Arctic, according to the 1.5C study, which was launched after approval at a final plenary of all 195 countries in Incheon in South Korea that saw delegates hugging one another, with some in tears.

“It’s a line in the sand and what it says to our species is that this is the moment and we must act now,” said Debra Roberts, a co-chair of the working group on impacts. “This is the largest clarion bell from the science community and I hope it mobilises people and dents the mood of complacency.”

READ MORE HERE

FROM THE AP:  To limit warming to the lower temperature goal, the world needs “rapid and far-reaching” changes in energy systems, land use, city and industrial design, transportation and building use, the report said. Annual carbon dioxide pollution levels that are still rising now would have to drop by about half by 2030 and then be near zero by 2050. Emissions of other greenhouse gases, such as methane, also will have to drop. Switching away rapidly from fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas to do this could be more expensive than the less ambitious goal, but it would clean the air of other pollutants. And that would have the side benefit of avoiding more than 100 million premature deaths through this century, the report said.

MORE From The Guardian:  Political leaders have been urged to act on the landmark special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has warned that strong efforts would be required to prevent disastrous consequences from dangerous levels of climate change.

Christiana Figueres, the former UN climate chief who led the historic Paris agreement of 2015, said: “There is nothing opaque about this new data. The illustrations of mounting impacts, the fast-approaching and irreversible tipping points are visceral versions of a future that no policy-maker could wish to usher in or be responsible for.”

Figueres said the need for urgent action was clear: “Emissions reductions today are much more important than emissions reductions tomorrow. The sooner we bend the curve of global emissions, the more options we will have on the table for safely reaching the necessary, desirable and achievable carbon neutrality by 2050.”

The decisions taken in the next few years will be crucial because the investment cycle for power plants and transport systems is at least 10 years. Infastructure built now will continue to burn up carbon for decades to come if it is not re-engineered.

“This is the decisive decade,” said Johan Rockström, chief scientist at Conservation International and co-author of the recent Hothouse Earth report, which warned of a domino-like cascade of melting ice, warming seas, shifting currents and dying forests beyond which human efforts to reduce emissions will be increasingly futile. “Any investment in energy has a 10-year lifecycle. Even a family car: 1.5C has become real.”

“Climate change is occurring earlier and more rapidly than expected. Even at the current level of 1C warming, it is painful,” he told the Guardian. “This report is really important. It has a scientific robustness that shows 1.5C is not just a political concession. There is a growing recognition that 2C is dangerous.”

There’s a report coming on Monday, October 8th from the IPCC on the world’s progress in meeting the Paris Climate Agreement’s goals.  Previews are not positive.  In fact they are down right doomer.

From Eric Holthaus at Grist:  Right now, scientists are trying to find the precise words to describe an impending catastrophe and the utterly heroic efforts it would take to avert it.

“We’re talking about the kind of crisis that forces us to rethink everything we’ve known so far on how to build a secure future,” Greenpeace’s Kaisa Kosonen told AFP in response to a draft of the report. “We have to try to make the impossible possible.”

Stay tuned.

UPDATE:  “The report shows that we only have the slimmest of opportunities remaining to avoid unthinkable damage to the climate system that supports life as we know it,” said Amjad Abdulla, the IPCC board member and chief negotiator for the alliance of small island states.

“Limiting warming to 1.5C is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics but doing so would require unprecedented changes,” said Jim Skea, co-chair of the IPCC working group which assesses climate change mitigation.

Meeting the 1.5C limit required “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented” change in land and energy use, industry, buildings, transport and cities, it said, adding temperatures would be 1.5C higher between 2030 and 2052 at the current pace.

 

A dramatic headline from one of the most powerful people in the automotive industry to be sure:  the end of cars! Must be a reaction to the knowledge that ending climate change means the end of the industrial era!

Yeah, no.  This article simply laments the rise of autonomous vehicles and the joyless lives we will lead when they are fully implemented in our society:

“The end state will be the fully autonomous module with no capability for the driver to exercise command. You will call for it, it will arrive at your location, you’ll get in, input your destination and go to the freeway.

On the freeway, it will merge seamlessly into a stream of other modules traveling at 120, 150 mph. The speed doesn’t matter. You have a blending of rail-type with individual transportation.

Then, as you approach your exit, your module will enter deceleration lanes, exit and go to your final destination. You will be billed for the transportation. You will enter your credit card number or your thumbprint or whatever it will be then. The module will take off and go to its collection point, ready for the next person to call.”

How sad for us.  Both with the vision that we will enter the end state of modern civilization as prisoners of our mobility technology, and that our “brightest” minds cannot – will not – understand the peril we face over the next few years.

 

By Steve Austin

Again, in the face of ever more dire climate news, a leading world figure is using his platform to spur humanity to fight climate change as it can lead to a better world.

From The Guardian:  Felipe Calderón, former president of Mexico, called on political leaders to take note: “We can turn better [economic] growth and a better climate into reality. It is time we decisively legislate, innovate, govern and invest our way to a fairer, safer, more sustainable world.”

While I fervently hope that we can achieve a better world in the coming decades, I think that this spirit is misguided.  Fighting climate change should be about ensuring the near term survivability of hundreds of millions of individual humans and preventing the destruction of modern civilizational systems.

If the fight is made about a “fairer, safer, more sustainable world” do we risk alienating a large segment of people in the Western nations that are the leading contributors to climate change?  These sound like political or lifestyle choices.  And if the fight against climate change is seen as that, then will many, perhaps even a majority, in Western democracies tune out?  Will they “choose” not to participate or to put forth their own versions of the politics and lifestyle choices leading to a future they deem appropriate?

Fighting climate change is about ending the burning of fossil fuels as soon as possible, and at the same time using soils and plants to draw down excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  Collectively,  we must be working exclusively on that as it will be our best bet for survivability in the 21st century.  Ultimately I guess this is a moral issue:  should we work to end climate change even if it doesn’t result in a “fairer, safer, more sustainable world?” To me the answer is yes.  For if we do not end climate change now, the ruins that we will inhabit might forever preclude a chance to create a “fairer, safer, more sustainable world.”