How Bad Is Global Warming?

[Elihu]

showing up every couple of months to drop deposit your barbs before disappearing again, we have nothing to discuss. I can learn nothing beneficial from you.

it's not like that Iam. I apologize.

[Rory]

Beryllium electrodes. If things work as predicted it will help them demonstrate net gain. It won't result in a finished fusion reactor, but it will serve as a proof of concept. Worth 50 bucks if you ask me.

Use that $50 to buy your home compact fluorescent lightbulbs. You'll save more energy that this fusion project will ever produce.

[DrEvil]

Probably, but if you can afford fifty bucks, why not?

Worst case scenario: You loose $50, and the researchers probably learn something useful.

Best case scenario: It works. A working, compact fusion reactor is the holy grail in energy (other than anti-matter). It could literally change the world (and space).

Optimistic? Absolutely, but I think the potential pay-off is worth it.

[Luther Blissett]

Let's see if this rally takes off.

A Call to Arms: An Invitation to Demand Action on Climate Change

By BILL MCKIBBEN | May 21, 2014 AT 09:00AM
This is an invitation, an invitation to come to New York City. An invitation to anyone who'd like to prove to themselves, and to their children, that they give a damn about the biggest crisis our civilization has ever faced.

My guess is people will come by the tens of thousands, and it will be the largest demonstration yet of human resolve in the face of climate change. Sure, some of it will be exciting – who doesn't like the chance to march and sing and carry a clever sign through the canyons of Manhattan? But this is dead-serious business, a signal moment in the gathering fight of human beings to do something about global warming before it's too late to do anything but watch. You'll tell your grandchildren, assuming we win. So circle September 20th and 21st on your calendar, and then I'll explain.

Since Ban Ki-moon runs the United Nations, he's altogether aware that we're making no progress as a planet on slowing climate change. He presided over the collapse of global-climate talks at Copenhagen in 2009, and he knows the prospects are not much better for the "next Copenhagen" in Paris in December 2015. In order to spur those talks along, he's invited the world's leaders to New York in late September for a climate summit.

But the "world's leaders" haven't been leaders on climate change – at least not leaders enough. Like many of us, they've attended to the easy stuff, but they haven't set the world on a fundamentally new course. Barack Obama is the perfect example: Sure, he's imposed new mileage standards for cars, but he's also opened vast swaths of territory to oil drilling and coal mining, which will take us past Saudi Arabia and Russia as the world's biggest petro producer.

Like other world leaders, that is, he's tried, but not nearly hard enough. Consider what he told The New Yorker in an interview earlier this year: "At the end of the day, we're part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right." And "I think we are fortunate at the moment that we do not face a crisis of the scale and scope that Lincoln or FDR faced."

We do, though; we face a crisis as great as any president has ever encountered. Here's how his paragraph looks so far: Since he took office, summer sea ice in the Arctic has mostly disappeared, and at the South Pole, scientists in May made clear that the process of massive melt is now fully under way, with 10 feet of sea-level rise in the offing. Scientists have discovered the depth of changes in ocean chemistry: that seawater is 30 percent more acidic than just four decades ago, and it's already causing trouble for creatures at the bottom of the marine food chain. America has weathered the hottest year in its history, 2012, which saw a drought so deep that the corn harvest largely failed. At the moment, one of the biggest states in Obama's union, California, is caught in a drought deeper than any time since Europeans arrived. Hell, a few blocks south of the U.N. buildings, Hurricane Sandy turned the Lower East Side of New York into a branch of the East River. And that's just the United States. The world's scientists earlier this spring issued a 32-volume report explaining exactly how much worse it's going to get, which is, to summarize, a lot worse even than they'd thought before. It's not that the scientists are alarmists – it's that the science is alarming. Here's how one Princeton scientist summarized the situation for reporters: "We're all sitting ducks."

The gap between "We're all sitting ducks" and "We do not face a crisis" is the gap between halfhearted action and the all-out effort that might make a difference. It's the gap between changing light bulbs and changing the system that's powering our destruction.

In a rational world, no one would need to march. In a rational world, policymakers would have heeded scientists when they first sounded the alarm 25 years ago. But in this world, reason, having won the argument, has so far lost the fight. The fossil-fuel industry, by virtue of being perhaps the richest enterprise in human history, has been able to delay effective action, almost to the point where it's too late.

So in this case taking to the streets is very much necessary. It's not all that's necessary – a sprawling fossil-fuel resistance works on a hundred fronts around the world, from putting up solar panels to forcing colleges to divest their oil stocks to electioneering for truly green candidates. And it's true that marching doesn't always work: At the onset of the war in Iraq, millions marched, to no immediate avail. But there are moments when it's been essential. This is how the Vietnam War was ended, and segregation too – or consider the nuclear-freeze campaign of the early 1980s, when half a million people gathered in New York's Central Park. The rally, and all the campaigning that led to it, set the mood for a planet – even, amazingly, in the Reagan era. By mid-decade, the conservative icon was proposing to Mikhail Gorbachev that they abolish nuclear weapons altogether.

The point is, sometimes you can grab the zeitgeist by the scruff of the neck and shake it a little. At the moment, the overwhelming sense around the world is nothing will happen in time. That's on the verge of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy – indeed, as I've written in these pages, it's very clear that the fossil-fuel industry has five times as much carbon in its reserves as it would take to break the planet. On current trajectories, the industry will burn it, and governments will make only small whimpering noises about changing the speed at which it happens. A loud movement – one that gives our "leaders" permission to actually lead, and then scares them into doing so – is the only hope of upending that prophecy.

A loud movement is, of necessity, a big movement – and this fossil-fuel resistance draws from every corner of our society. It finds powerful leadership from the environmental-justice community, the poor people, often in communities of color, who have suffered most directly under the reign of fossil fuel. In this country they're survivors of Sandy and Katrina and the BP spill; they're the people whose kids troop off to kindergarten clutching asthma inhalers because they live next to oil refineries, and the people whose reservations become resource colonies. Overseas, they're the ones whose countries are simply disappearing.

Sometimes in the past, trade unionists have fought against environmentalists – but unions in health care, mass transit, higher education, domestic work and building services are all beginning to organize for September, fully aware that there are no jobs on a dead planet. Energy-sector unions see the jobs potential in massive solar installation and a "just transition" off fossil fuels. Here's a banner I know you'll see in the streets of New York: CLIMATE/JOBS. TWO CRISES, ONE SOLUTION.

There will be clergy and laypeople from synagogues and churches and mosques, now rising in record numbers to say, "If the Bible means anything, it means that we need to care for the world God gave us." And there will, of course, be scientists, saying, "What exactly don't you understand about what we've been telling you for a quarter-century?"

And students will arrive from around the country, because who knows better how to cope with long bus rides and sleeping on floors – and who knows better that their very futures are at stake? They're near the front of this battle right now, getting arrested at Harvard and at Washington University as they fight for fossil-fuel divestment, and shaking up the establishment enough that Stanford, with its $18.7 billion endowment, just agreed to get rid of its coal stocks. Don't worry about "kids today." Kids today know how to organize at least as well as kids in the Sixties.

And then there will be those of us plain old middle-class Americans who may still benefit from our lives of cheap fossil fuel, but who just can't stand to watch the world drift into chaos. We look around and see that the price of solar panels has fallen 90 percent in a few decades; we understand that it won't be easy to shift our economy off coal and gas and oil, but we know that it will be easier than coping with temperatures that no human has ever seen. We may have different proposed solutions – carbon taxes! tidal power! – but we know that none of them will happen unless we open up some space. That's our job: opening up space for change on the scale that physics requires. No more fine words, no more nifty websites. Hard deeds. Now.

You can watch the endgame of the fossil-fuel era with a certain amount of hope. The pieces are in place for real, swift, sudden change, not just slow and grinding linear shifts: If Germany on a sunny day can generate half its power from solar panels, and Texas makes a third of its electricity from wind, then you know technology isn't an impossible obstacle anymore. The pieces are in place, but the pieces won't move themselves. That's where movements come in. They're not subtle; they can't manage all the details of this transition. But they can build up pressure on the system, enough, with luck, to blow out those bags of money that are blocking progress with the force of Typhoon Haiyan on a Filipino hut. Because if our resistance fails, there will be ever-stronger typhoons. The moment to salvage something of the Holocene is passing fast. But it hasn't passed yet, which is why September is so important.

Day to day this resistance is rightly scattered, local and focused on the more mundane: installing a new zoning code, putting in a solar farm, persuading the church board to sell its BP stock. But sometimes it needs to come together and show the world how big it's gotten. That next great moment is late September in New York. See you there.

This story is from the June 5th, 2014 issue of Rolling Stone.



Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ne ... z32N5z0Fud

[Wombaticus Rex]

Glad to see things calming down -- it would be a shame to consign another 50+ page thread to the Fire Pit. This thread was not "getting close," it has been far over the line for many pages.

I apologize for the uneven moderation, but I don't read every thread. (The AGW debate bores me to f'ing tears so I never would have checked this without posts being reported.)

[NeonLX]

I'm sitting in my office, looking out at the busy, 6-lane city street right now. Thousands of vehicles drive by here every hour, in both directions. Most of them have single occupants inside. People coming from all over that are going to places all over. Work. Shopping. Child care. Doctor appointments...

There goes a Civic with a peace sign on one side of the bumper and an "Obama 2012" sticker on the other side.

This dude in the Prius is thinking, "well, at least I'm not using as much petrol as that guy next to me in a Chevy pickup".

All this in my little snapshot ain't gonna change. Until it has to. Ya, it should have changed long ago. But it didn't. And it won't.

Even most environmentally-conscious people still have to drive here and there for this, that and the other reason. "I drive because I have important stuff to do, but all the other people should be biking, riding transit or whatev".

[Sounder]

smiths wrote...

to paraphrase Bill Hicks, is there anyone here who denies humans are destroying the biosphere? kill yourself

Would you have told that to George Carlin? Surly, just because George did not ‘believe’ in AGW, it does not follow that he did not recognize that we are living on the inside of a big wackadoodle contest.

We are destroying the biosphere, but questions and answers must revolve around an accurate account of the destructive elements and as any sane person will admit, CO2 is but one of many impacting elements. People can say what they want, but what they do tells lots more about the reality behind their story. Coca-cola, as a transnational corporation naturally might get tired of all the graft required to function in various countries. Fair enough, but to ‘harmonize’ trade laws to put ‘threats’ to a corporations’ profits that may result in fines to be assessed to the general tax base, well then, it’s no longer ‘business’, it is pure coercion. How does one soft drink company produce so many policy level intellectuals?


It’s not Capitalism that commodifies everything, coercion does the real work. An object oriented consciousness (basically, scientific materialism) is the insurance that maintains the specter of coercion being so commonplace that we fail to notice it.

At any rate it’s pretty plain that CC is being used as a conformity enforcement device, when folk think that a convincing discussion tactic is to write backwards, logically and syntactically incorrect sentences with schoolyard epitaphs for vulgar spice.

It’s as plain as the nose on your face, social conformity is sanctified coercion.

[seemslikeadream]

A Big Political Fight Over Climate Change is Coming
BY CHUCK TODD, MARK MURRAY AND CARRIE DANN
The coming climate fight

Over the last six months, Democrats and Republicans have battled over the budget (where there’s now a truce), the health care law (which has died down), the minimum wage (ditto), and even Benghazi (with Democrats deciding to participate on the select committee). But it’s very possible that the summer will dominated by a different partisan fight -- over climate change and the environment. Next month, the Obama administration is expected to unveil new Environmental Protection Agency rules to limit greenhouse gases from existing power plants, which would represent President Obama’s biggest action on climate (far greater than whatever he does on the Keystone Pipeline). And as New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait writes, the politics of these EPA rules could rival the battle over health care. After all, what was Senate Minority Mitch McConnell attack on Alison Grimes about Tuesday night? He was tying her to Obama’s “war on coal.” Well, that war -- via the EPA rules -- is coming. Meanwhile, as we just reported, a Super PAC funding by Democratic environmentalist Tom Steyer has announced it will spend as much as $100 million this election season attacking Republicans in seven key states who it says are climate-science “deniers.” The seven states, which are all blue and purple ones: Colorado (going after Cory Gardner), Florida (Gov. Rick Scott), Iowa (Joni Ernst and Mark Jacobs), Maine (Gov. Paul LePage), Michigan (Terri Lynn Land), New Hampshire (Scott Brown), and Pennsylvania (Gov. Tom Corbett).

And which party holds the upper political hand here?

This campaign by Steyer’s Super PAC, NextGen Climate, comes after Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said he doubted scientists’ claims that humans are responsible for climate change. “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it,” he said. NextGen Climate argues that the Republicans it has targeted have said something similar. “I have not been convinced," Rick Scott said of global warming when he was campaigning in 2010. Steyer’s advisers believe this “anti-science” label is damaging to the Republican Party’s long-term brand. But the effort could backfire on Democrats. While NextGen Climate will play only in the blue and purple states Obama won in 2008 and 2012, we won’t be surprised if Republicans try to make the group an issue in the red states. “Mary Landrieu and the Democrats are benefitting from anti-Keystone Pipeline Tom Steyer!!!” the GOP will likely charge. Likewise, the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent says that the Obama administration’s EPA rules could put the 2014 red-state Dems in a tough spot. “Dem strategists believe the EPA regs will be politically dicey, but – just as in the case of Obamacare — will also provide another occasion for red state Dems to prove their independence of national Dems. That, of course, has pluses and minuses: It achieves distance from Obama, but also reminds red state voters why they don’t like Democrats.”

Will the Democratic dam break over the VA story?

President Obama on Wednesday addressed the growing outcry over the alleged misconduct at VA hospitals, and he said he was outraged. “When I hear allegations of misconduct -- any misconduct -- whether it's allegations of VA staff covering up long wait times or cooking the books, I will not stand for it. Not as commander-in-chief, but also not as an American. None of us should.” But the president didn’t buy himself a lot of time, especially now with some red-state Democrats criticizing him. “I listened to the president today, and I was very disappointed with President Obama today,” Rep. David Scott (D-GA) said. “There was no urgency. Mr. President, we need urgency, we need you to roll up our sleeves and get into these hospitals!” Another Georgia Democrat, John Barrow, became the first Democrat to call for Shinseki’s firing. And this is the question for the White House: Will the Democratic dam break? Will Scott be followed by Sens. Mary Landrieu, Mark Pryor, and Kay Hagan? If that happens, the White House won’t have a whole lot of time to get to the bottom of this and fix it. They’ll need to make a symbolic move quickly if they don’t want to find themselves on a political island.

In an era of fake political outrage, the VA story demands true outrage

Slate’s John Dickerson writes that our politics has witnessed plenty of fake outrage over the years. But this VA story demands true outrage. “Fake umbrage taking and outrage production are our most plentiful political products, not legislation and certainly not interesting solutions to complicated issues. We are in a new political season, too—that means an extra dose of hot, high stakes outrage over the slightest thing that might move votes. How does something get recognized as beyond the pale when we live beyond the pale? What makes the VA scandal different is not only that it affected people at their most desperate moment of need—and continues to affect them at subpar facilities. It’s also a failure of one of the most basic transactions government is supposed to perform: keeping a promise to those who were asked to protect our very form of government.” Well said.

All eyes turn to Mississippi

Folks, the next GOP establishment-vs.-Tea Party fight will take place on June 3 in Mississippi -- between Sen. Thad Cochran and challenger Chris McDaniel. For the Tea Party and Club for Growth, A LOT is riding on the contest because they need a win after Tuesday’s primaries. And the race has attracted even more national attention after questions about whether the McDaniel campaign had any involvement or prior knowledge of a blogger’s arrest for taking footage of Cochran’s bedridden wife. But here’s a question to ponder: What happens if McDaniel wins, especially with Democrats having a semi-credible candidate for the general election (former Rep. Travis Childers)? Almost everything has gone the GOP establishment’s way lately in getting the general-election candidates it wants. But McDaniel winning -- and the race has been very competitive (at least before this blogger story surfaced) -- could upend that applecart. And considering just how aggressively the NRSC and the Mississippi GOP establishment crowd have gone after McDaniel, can they all really do a 180-degree turn and support McDaniel if he wins? Going to be tough.

All tied up in Wisconsin

Finally, don’t miss this Marquette poll out of Wisconsin, which shows Gov. Scott Walker (R) tied with challenger Mary Burke (D) among registered voters, 46%-46%. Remember that Walker’s 2016 hopes hinge on winning re-election first.

Green billionaire prepares to attack 'anti-science' Republicans
By Peter Hamby, CNN National Political Reporter
updated 7:36 AM EDT, Thu May 22, 2014
Watch this video
Bill Nye battles with CNN host

Washington (CNN) -- An environmental advocacy group backed by hedge fund tycoon Tom Steyer is set to unleash a seven-state, $100 million offensive against Republican "science deniers" this year, a no-holds-barred campaign-style push from the green billionaire that could help decide which party controls the Senate and key statehouses come November.
The Steyer-backed outside group, NextGen Climate, has billed itself as a progressive, pro-environment counterbalance to the wealthy oil and gas industry -- as well as the primary foil to the pro-business Koch brothers and their well-funded conservative donor network.
The outfit, launched last year by the San Francisco billionaire, has already pledged to spend heavily this midterm year in Iowa to assist the Democratic Senate nominee Bruce Braley, and in Florida, where Gov. Rick Scott is facing a difficult re-election fight against Democrat Charlie Crist.
Red news, blue news: Climate change Rubio: Scientists wrong on climate White House: Climate change to get worse
Steyer's 2014 map now includes Senate races in Michigan, New Hampshire and Colorado as well as governor's races in Maine and Pennsylvania, home to two of the most endangered Republican governors in the country, Paul LePage and Tom Corbett.
"This is the year, in our view, that we are able to demonstrate that you can use climate, you can do it well, you can do it in a smart way, to win political races," said Chris Lehane, the longtime Democratic consultant advising Steyer.
Lehane and NextGen political strategist Sky Gallegos revealed their 2014 strategy Wednesday in a briefing with reporters in Washington.
'Pro-climate action' vs. 'anti-science'
Absent from their list of 2014 targets: must-win Senate races for Democrats in conservative-leaning states such as Arkansas, Alaska, North Carolina, Louisiana and Kentucky. That's because Democrats on those ballots have expressed support for the Keystone XL pipeline, the coal industry, offshore drilling or hydraulic fracturing -- all nonstarter issues for environmentalists.
Instead, Lehane said the 501(c)4 group will play in races that feature a stark choice between "pro-climate action" candidates -- all Democrats -- and "anti-science" Republicans who have questioned the veracity of climate change or supported the interests of the oil and gas industry.
GOP candidates in the NextGen cross hairs -- Scott in Florida, Terri Lynn Land in Michigan, Scott Brown in New Hampshire and Cory Gardner in Colorado -- hew closely to the "Republican troglodyte brand," Lehane argued.
"They are anti-immigrant, anti-women, anti-science," he said. "It's a tough brand to win elections around."
The group said that climate can be successfully used as a wedge issue -- Lehane framed it as a moral clash between "right and wrong" -- to boost turnout among Democratic voting groups that tend not to show up in midterm election years, specifically young voters, Hispanics and African-Americans.
Cutter presses Graham on climate change Climate change is here Climate change in the Northeast
As in the Virginia governor's race last year -- when Steyer spent nearly $8 million on a campaign to disqualify GOP nominee Ken Cuccinelli with a combination of TV, mail and field operations -- the efforts will extend beyond the TV airwaves and include what they call "nano-targeting" to tailor messaging to discrete voting groups.
"We are not some super PAC that's going to come in, throw up some ads and leave," Lehane said. "You can come into these states and really run a total campaign."
Focusing on hyper-local issues
Lehane said the effort, which is budgeted at around $100 million but could grow, will focus attention on hyper-local issues -- such as drought in Iowa or flood insurance costs in Florida -- that could influence voter perceptions in key pockets of each state. Pollution-related health concerns such as asthma and clean drinking water hit home for lower-income voters, he said.
It wasn't lost on reporters that the NextGen map featured multiple states that figure prominently in presidential races -- Iowa, New Hampshire and Florida among them. Lehane said that was by design. "Almost all of these states align with being really important presidential states either in the primary process or the general election," he said, promising that Steyer will be active throughout the 2016 campaign.
When the 2016 presidential primary campaigns lurch into overdrive next year, NextGen will continue to call attention to turnout-driving local issues -- and on attacking Republican candidates. Steyer has already funded an ad in Florida attacking Sen. Marco Rubio, one of many possible GOP White House aspirants, as a tool of oil lobbyists. "We look forward to a conversation with the Rubios of the world," Lehane said of the group's 2016 plans, without revealing specifics.
The outside air cover should come as welcome news to Democratic candidates in their target states who are drowning in a flood of TV ads from conservative groups such as the Koch-endorsed Americans for Prosperity. But the campaign may put some Democrats in a bind.
In Colorado, for instance, Lehane said NextGen will attack Gardner by showcasing his support for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and the adverse health effects of natural gas extraction on suburban communities. But the strategy could force Democratic Sen. Mark Udall to take a definitive stand on a divisive state issue that pits the business community against environmentalists, an important slice of the Democratic base. Meanwhile, the state's Democrat governor, John Hickenlooper, has been cautiously supportive of the gas industry as a revenue and jobs creator.
Charges of hypocrisy
Ann Coulter defends Pat Sajak tweets Sajak climate change tweet causes stir Should fracking be legal in California?
As the founder of the hedge fund Farallon Capital Management, Steyer made part of his fortune from investments in fossil fuels, including foreign coal investments, which has prompted charges of hypocrisy from the Koch-affiliated groups he's fond of condemning.
"Tom Steyer's investments at Farallon have lined his pockets with millions of dollars from the foreign coal industry," said James Davis, a spokesman for Freedom Partners, the Koch-backed political network. "Now he wants to burden the American people with new energy regulations to protect his current green energy investments. He's already attempting to buy the votes of Senate Democrats on Keystone, which will cost America thousands of good-paying jobs. Surely the media will call him out on the hypocrisy of his claims."
Lehane said Steyer ordered his investments be diverted from coal and tar sands when he stepped down from Farallon in 2012 but was not aware if he had investments in other energy sectors.
But the primary difference between Steyer and conservative mega-donors, Lehane said, is that Steyer is not personally profiting from his political efforts. "He is giving all the money away," he said. "He doesn't have stand to gain some economic benefit by spending money that translates into his own personal economics."
Lehane added, "We are spending a drop in the big oil bucket as compared to the fossil fuel industry, especially the Koch brothers. All Tom is trying to do is try to balance and level the playing field. We are never going to have as much money as the other side."

[NeonLX]

But what am I supposed to do with this here 5000 square foot McMansion that's located 30 miles away from where I work? And what about this here Lexus SUV that gives me a comfy ride back 'n' forth every day ('sides, it looks cool in the Target parking lot)?

Fvcking cable bill went up again this month.

May have to switch to a different brand of buttwipe because this kind plugs the terlit easier.

Crap. Looks like I have to drive all the kids to soccer practice again next week after school. MaryAnne got sent on a business trip to Asia or somewhere and she won't be back until the week after.

Gotta remember to call Amazon to find out what happened to my order for a new Ipad. I mean, the charge showed up on the credit card bill.

[82_28]

We also have to get rid of vital transit options in Seattle because of the delicate sensibilities of those most likely to own guns. Read: conservatards who invariably deny climate change and also own guns and don't give a fuck about the larger community.

Metro cuts: the first wave

King County Metro Transit has released its first phase of proposed service reductions, to take effect in September. (Route numbers below 100 serve Seattle, 100-199 serve South King County, 200-299 the Eastside, and 300-399 the north suburbs. 900 routes are minibus routes in outlying areas.)

Discontinued routes: 7 Express, 19, 47, 48 Express, 61, 62, 82, 83, 84, 139, 152, 161, 173, 202, 203, 205 Express, 209, 210, 211 Express, 213, 215, 243, 250, 260, 265, 280, 306 Express, 919, 927, 935.

Reductions: Trips discontinued middays and after 7 p.m. weekdays, and discontinued all weekends, for Routes 27 and 30; trips discontinued after 7 p.m. for Routes 236, 238, 331, 909; discontinued after 6 p.m. for Route 249; midday trips reduced or eliminated for Routes 204, 208, 903, 931; peak trips eliminated on Route 200.

Consolidations: A few trips added to 204, 212, and 312 Express, to carry riders from discontinued routes.

http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/ ... tsxml.html

This isn't quite on topic with the climate change issue, but is related. Those conservatives who walk the walk as to what they are told are motherfucking idiots. So can be liberals, but conservatives time and time again prove themselves to totally rule when it comes to not doing something good for our shared fellow entities.

[NeonLX]

Public = BAD
Private = GOOD

We all know who rides on transit anyway.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Would you have told that to George Carlin? Surly, just because George did not ‘believe’ in AGW, it does not follow that he did not recognize that we are living on the inside of a big wackadoodle contest.

Sounder, I'm responding to your post not because I have any interest in rehashing any of the old shit that's been dragging this thread into the pit of asshattery, but because I'm a huge George Carlin fan. Do you have a quote you could link where he actually said that he "did not ‘believe’ in AGW"? Because while I am quite familiar with his rant against "self-righteous environmentalists" on Jammin' In New York, I don't recall him saying that there or anywhere else.

I recently wrote a blog entry where I covered that Jammin' in New York bit. My understanding of that piece is that as much as he's ripping "white, bourgeois liberals" for their "narrow, unenlightened self-interest" in thinking that recycling will "save the planet", it's not because human industrial activity isn't causing global warming. It's because human industrial activity isn't going to destroy the planet - it's going to destroy us because the planet will use global warming, to quote Carlin, to "shake us off like a bad case of fleas."

[seemslikeadream]

Published on Thursday, May 22, 2014 by TomDispatch
The 95% Doctrine: Climate Change as a Weapon of Mass Destruction
Is climate change a crime against humanity? Let's go with... Yes.

by Tom Engelhardt

The fossil fuel industry is waging a war on the planet's ecosystem and her people. It's not only unnecessary and obscene, but should be considered a crime. (Image: public domain)
Who could forget? At the time, in the fall of 2002, there was such a drumbeat of “information” from top figures in the Bush administration about the secret Iraqi program to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and so endanger the United States. And who -- other than a few suckers -- could have doubted that Saddam Hussein was eventually going to get a nuclear weapon? The only question, as our vice president suggested on “Meet the Press,” was: Would it take one year or five? And he wasn’t alone in his fears, since there was plenty of proof of what was going on. For starters, there were those “specially designed aluminum tubes” that the Iraqi autocrat had ordered as components for centrifuges to enrich uranium in his thriving nuclear weapons program. Reporters Judith Miller and Michael Gordon hit the front page of the New York Times with that story on September 8, 2002.

Then there were those “mushroom clouds” that Condoleezza Rice, our national security advisor, was so publicly worried about -- the ones destined to rise over American cities if we didn’t do something to stop Saddam. As she fretted in a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer on that same September 8th, “[W]e don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” No, indeed, and nor, it turned out, did Congress!

And just in case you weren’t anxious enough about the looming Iraqi threat, there were those unmanned aerial vehicles -- Saddam’s drones! -- that could be armed with chemical or biological WMD from his arsenal and flown over America’s East Coast cities with unimaginable results. President George W. Bush went on TV to talk about them and congressional votes were changed in favor of war thanks to hair-raising secret administration briefings about them on Capitol Hill.

In the end, it turned out that Saddam had no weapons program, no nuclear bomb in the offing, no centrifuges for those aluminum pipes, no biological or chemical weapons caches, and no drone aircraft to deliver his nonexistent weapons of mass destruction (nor any ships capable of putting those nonexistent robotic planes in the vicinity of the U.S. coast). But what if he had? Who wanted to take that chance? Not Vice President Dick Cheney, certainly. Inside the Bush administration he propounded something that journalist Ron Suskind later dubbed the “one percent doctrine.” Its essence was this: if there was even a 1% chance of an attack on the United States, especially involving weapons of mass destruction, it must be dealt with as if it were a 95%-100% certainty.

Here’s the curious thing: if you look back on America's apocalyptic fears of destruction during the first 14 years of this century, they largely involved three city-busting weapons that were fantasies of Washington’s fertile imperial imagination. There was that “bomb” of Saddam’s, which provided part of the pretext for a much-desired invasion of Iraq. There was the “bomb” of the mullahs, the Iranian fundamentalist regime that we’ve just loved to hate ever since they repaid us, in 1979, for the CIA’s overthrow of an elected government in 1953 and the installation of the Shah by taking the staff of the U.S. embassy in Tehran hostage. If you believed the news from Washington and Tel Aviv, the Iranians, too, were perilously close to producing a nuclear weapon or at least repeatedly on the verge of the verge of doing so. The production of that “Iranian bomb” has, for years, been a focus of American policy in the Middle East, the “brink” beyond which war has endlessly loomed. And yet there was and is no Iranian bomb, nor evidence that the Iranians were or are on the verge of producing one.

Finally, of course, there was al-Qaeda’s bomb, the “dirty bomb” that organization might somehow assemble, transport to the U.S., and set off in an American city, or the “loose nuke,” maybe from the Pakistani arsenal, with which it might do the same. This is the third fantasy bomb that has riveted American attention in these last years, even though there is less evidence for or likelihood of its imminent existence than of the Iraqi and Iranian ones.

To sum up, the strange thing about end-of-the-world-as-we’ve-known-it scenarios from Washington, post-9/11, is this: with a single exception, they involved only non-existent weapons of mass destruction. A fourth weapon -- one that existed but played a more modest role in Washington’s fantasies -- was North Korea’s perfectly real bomb, which in these years the North Koreans were incapable of delivering to American shores.

The "Good News" About Climate Change

In a world in which nuclear weapons remain a crucial coin of the realm when it comes to global power, none of these examples could quite be classified as 0% dangers. Saddam had once had a nuclear program, just not in 2002-2003, and also chemical weapons, which he used against Iranian troops in his 1980s war with their country (with the help of targeting information from the U.S. military) and against his own Kurdish population. The Iranians might (or might not) have been preparing their nuclear program for a possible weapons breakout capability, and al-Qaeda certainly would not have rejected a loose nuke, if one were available (though that organization’s ability to use it would still have been questionable).

In the meantime, the giant arsenals of WMD in existence, the American, Russian, Chinese, Israeli, Pakistani, and Indian ones that might actually have left a crippled or devastated planet behind, remained largely off the American radar screen. In the case of the Indian arsenal, the Bush administration actually lent an indirect hand to its expansion. So it was twenty-first-century typical when President Obama, trying to put Russia's recent actions in the Ukraine in perspective, said, “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors. I continue to be much more concerned when it comes to our security with the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan.”

Once again, an American president was focused on a bomb that would raise a mushroom cloud over Manhattan. And which bomb, exactly, was that, Mr. President?

Of course, there was a weapon of mass destruction that could indeed do staggering damage to or someday simply drown New York City, Washington D.C., Miami, and other East coast cities. It had its own efficient delivery systems -- no nonexistent drones or Islamic fanatics needed. And unlike the Iraqi, Iranian, or al-Qaeda bombs, it was guaranteed to be delivered to our shores unless preventative action was taken soon. No one needed to hunt for its secret facilities. It was a weapons system whose production plants sat in full view right here in the United States, as well as in Europe, China, and India, as well as in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, and other energy states.

So here’s a question I’d like any of you living in or visiting Wyoming to ask the former vice president, should you run into him in a state that’s notoriously thin on population: How would he feel about acting preventively, if instead of a 1% chance that some country with weapons of mass destruction might use them against us, there was at least a 95% -- and likely as not a 100% -- chance of them being set off on our soil? Let’s be conservative, since the question is being posed to a well-known neoconservative. Ask him whether he would be in favor of pursuing the 95% doctrine the way he was the 1% version.

After all, thanks to a grim report in 2013 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we know that there is now a 95%-100% likelihood that “human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming [of the planet] since the mid-20th century.” We know as well that the warming of the planet -- thanks to the fossil fuel system we live by and the greenhouse gases it deposits in the atmosphere -- is already doing real damage to our world and specifically to the United States, as a recent scientific report released by the White House made clear. We also know, with grimly reasonable certainty, what kinds of damage those 95%-100% odds are likely to translate into in the decades, and even centuries, to come if nothing changes radically: a temperature rise by century’s end that could exceed 10 degrees Fahrenheit, cascading species extinctions, staggeringly severe droughts across larger parts of the planet (as in the present long-term drought in the American West and Southwest), far more severe rainfall across other areas, more intense storms causing far greater damage, devastating heat waves on a scale no one in human history has ever experienced, masses of refugees, rising global food prices, and among other catastrophes on the human agenda, rising sea levels that will drown coastal areas of the planet.

From two scientific studies just released, for example, comes the news that the West Antarctic ice sheet, one of the great ice accumulations on the planet, has now begun a process of melting and collapse that could, centuries from now, raise world sea levels by a nightmarish 10 to 13 feet. That mass of ice is, according to the lead authors of one of the studies, already in “irreversible retreat,” which means -- no matter what acts are taken from now on -- a future death sentence for some of the world's great cities. (And that’s without even the melting of the Greenland ice shield, not to speak of the rest of the ice in Antarctica.)

All of this, of course, will happen mainly because we humans continue to burn fossil fuels at an unprecedented rate and so annually deposit carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at record levels. In other words, we’re talking about weapons of mass destruction of a new kind. While some of their effects are already in play, the planetary destruction that nuclear weapons could cause almost instantaneously, or at least (given “nuclear winter” scenarios) within months, will, with climate change, take decades, if not centuries, to deliver its full, devastating planetary impact.

When we speak of WMD, we usually think of weapons -- nuclear, biological, or chemical -- that are delivered in a measurable moment in time. Consider climate change, then, a WMD on a particularly long fuse, already lit and there for any of us to see. Unlike the feared Iranian bomb or the Pakistani arsenal, you don’t need the CIA or the NSA to ferret such "weaponry" out. From oil wells to fracking structures, deep sea drilling rigs to platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, the machinery that produces this kind of WMD and ensures that it is continuously delivered to its planetary targets is in plain sight. Powerful as it may be, destructive as it will be, those who control it have faith that, being so long developing, it can remain in the open without panicking populations or calling any kind of destruction down on them.

The companies and energy states that produce such WMD remain remarkably open about what they’re doing. Generally speaking, they don’t hesitate to make public, or even boast about, their plans for the wholesale destruction of the planet, though of course they are never described that way. Nonetheless, if an Iraqi autocrat or Iranian mullahs spoke in similar fashion about producing nuclear weapons and how they were to be used, they would be toast.

Take ExxonMobil, one of the most profitable corporations in history. In early April, it released two reports that focused on how the company, as Bill McKibben has written, “planned to deal with the fact that [it] and other oil giants have many times more carbon in their collective reserves than scientists say we can safely burn." He went on:

The company said that government restrictions that would force it to keep its [fossil fuel] reserves in the ground were 'highly unlikely,' and that they would not only dig them all up and burn them, but would continue to search for more gas and oil -- a search that currently consumes about $100 million of its investors’ money every single day. 'Based on this analysis, we are confident that none of our hydrocarbon reserves are now or will become "stranded."'
In other words, Exxon plans to exploit whatever fossil fuel reserves it possesses to their fullest extent. Government leaders involved in supporting the production of such weapons of mass destruction and their use are often similarly open about it, even while also discussing steps to mitigate their destructive effects. Take the White House, for instance. Here was a statement President Obama proudly made in Oklahoma in March 2012 on his energy policy:

Now, under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. That's important to know. Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75% of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some.
Similarly, on May 5th, just before the White House was to reveal that grim report on climate change in America, and with a Congress incapable of passing even the most rudimentary climate legislation aimed at making the country modestly more energy efficient, senior Obama adviser John Podesta appeared in the White House briefing room to brag about the administration’s “green” energy policy. “The United States,” he said, “is now the largest producer of natural gas in the world and the largest producer of gas and oil in the world. It's projected that the United States will continue to be the largest producer of natural gas through 2030. For six straight months now, we've produced more oil here at home than we've imported from overseas. So that's all a good-news story.”

Good news indeed, and from Vladmir Putin’s Russia, which just expanded its vast oil and gas holdings by a Maine-sized chunk of the Black Sea off Crimea, to Chinese “carbon bombs,” to Saudi Arabian production guarantees, similar “good-news stories” are similarly promoted. In essence, the creation of ever more greenhouse gases -- of, that is, the engine of our future destruction -- remains a “good news” story for ruling elites on planet Earth.

Weapons of Planetary Destruction

We know exactly what Dick Cheney -- ready to go to war on a 1% possibility that some country might mean us harm -- would answer, if asked about acting on the 95% doctrine. Who can doubt that his response would be similar to those of the giant energy companies, which have funded so much climate-change denialism and false science over the years? He would claim that the science simply isn’t “certain” enough (though “uncertainty” can, in fact, cut two ways), that before we commit vast sums to taking on the phenomenon, we need to know far more, and that, in any case, climate-change science is driven by a political agenda.

For Cheney & Co., it seemed obvious that acting on a 1% possibility was a sensible way to go in America’s “defense” and it’s no less gospel for them that acting on at least a 95% possibility isn’t. For the Republican Party as a whole, climate-change denial is by now nothing less than a litmus test of loyalty, and so even a 101% doctrine wouldn’t do when it comes to fossil fuels and this planet.

No point, of course, in blaming this on fossil fuels or even the carbon dioxide they give off when burned. These are no more weapons of mass destruction than are uranium-235 and plutonium-239. In this case, the weaponry is the production system that’s been set up to find, extract, sell at staggering profits, and burn those fossil fuels, and so create a greenhouse-gas planet. With climate change, there is no “Little Boy” or “Fat Man” equivalent, no simple weapon to focus on. In this sense, fracking is the weapons system, as is deep-sea drilling, as are those pipelines, and the gas stations, and the coal-fueled power plants, and the millions of cars filling global roads, and the accountants of the most profitable corporations in history.

All of it -- everything that brings endless fossil fuels to market, makes those fuels eminently burnable, and helps suppress the development of non-fossil fuel alternatives -- is the WMD. The CEOs of the planet's giant energy corporations are the dangerous mullahs, the true fundamentalists, of planet Earth, since they are promoting a faith in fossil fuels which is guaranteed to lead us to some version of End Times.

Perhaps we need a new category of weapons with a new acronym to focus us on the nature of our present 95%-100% circumstances. Call them weapons of planetary destruction (WPD) or weapons of planetary harm (WPH). Only two weapons systems would clearly fit such categories. One would be nuclear weapons which, even in a localized war between Pakistan and India, could create some version of “nuclear winter” in which the planet was cut off from the sun by so much smoke and soot that it would grow colder fast, experience a massive loss of crops, of growing seasons, and of life. In the case of a major exchange of such weapons, we would be talking about “the sixth extinction” of planetary history.

Though on a different and harder to grasp time-scale, the burning of fossil fuels could end in a similar fashion -- with a series of “irreversible” disasters that could essentially burn us and much other life off the Earth. This system of destruction on a planetary scale, facilitated by most of the ruling and corporate elites on the planet, is becoming (to bring into play another category not usually used in connection with climate change) the ultimate “crime against humanity” and, in fact, against most living things. It is becoming a “terracide.”

[Luther Blissett]

Trillions of Plastic Pieces May Be Trapped in Arctic Ice

By Eric Hand Thursday, May 22, 2014 - 5:30pm
Humans produced nearly 300 million tons of plastic in 2012, but where does it end up? A new study has found plastic debris in a surprising location: trapped in Arctic sea ice. As the ice melts, it could release a flood of floating plastic onto the world.

Scientists already knew that microplastics—polymer beads, fibers, or fragments less than 5 millimeters long—can wind up in the ocean, near coastlines, or in swirling eddies such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. But Rachel Obbard, a materials scientist at Dartmouth College, was shocked to find that currents had carried the stuff to the Arctic.

In a study published online this month in Earth’s Future, Obbard and her colleagues argue that, as Arctic ice freezes, it traps floating microplastics—resulting in abundances of hundreds of particles per cubic meter. That’s three orders of magnitude larger than some counts of plastic particles in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. “It was such a surprise to me to find them in such a remote region,” she says. “These particles have come a long way.”

The potential ecological hazards of microplastics are still unknown. But the ice trap could help solve a mystery: Industrial plastic production has increased markedly in the last half-century, reaching 288 million tonnes in 2012, according to Plastics Europe, an industry association. But ecologists have not been able to account for the final disposition of much of it. The paper shows that sea ice could be an important sink—albeit one that is melting, says Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, who was not part of the study. “There could be freely floating plastics, in short order.” The authors estimate that, under current melting trends, more than 1 trillion pieces of plastic could be released in the next decade.

Obbard and her colleagues based their counts on four ice cores gathered during Arctic expeditions in 2005 and 2010. The researchers melted parts of the cores, filtered the water, and put the sediments under a microscope, selecting particles that stood out because of their shape or bright color. The particles’ chemistry was then determined by an infrared spectrometer. Most prevalent among the particles was rayon (54%), technically not a synthetic polymer because it is derived from natural cellulose. The researchers also found polyester (21%), nylon (16%), polypropylene (3%), and 2% each of polystyrene, acrylic, and polyethylene. Co-author Richard Thompson, a marine biologist at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom, says it’s difficult to pinpoint the source of these materials. Rayon, for instance, can be found in clothing, cigarette filters, and diapers.

Abundances are likely to grow as scientists learn to sift more finely. Law points out that microplastic estimates for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch are based on phytoplankton nets that catch only particles bigger than 333 microns. Obbard, who used a much smaller 0.22 micron filter, says she still probably missed many particles herself; searching by eye, she easily could have missed brownish or clear plastic particles that were masquerading as sand grains.

What is the consequence of all this plastic floating around? At this point, it is hard to say. Plastic is chemically inert. But the plastic can absorb organic pollutants in high concentrations, says Mark Browne, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Browne has performed laboratory experiments with marine organisms showing not only how the microplastics can be retained in tissues, but also how pollutants might be released upon ingestion. “We’re starting to worry a bit more,” he says.

[Sounder]

Sounder » Wed May 21, 2014 6:59 pm wrote:Would you have told that to George Carlin? Surly, just because George did not ‘believe’ in AGW, it does not follow that he did not recognize that we are living on the inside of a big wackadoodle contest.

stillrobertpaulson wrote...

Sounder, I'm responding to your post not because I have any interest in rehashing any of the old shit that's been dragging this thread into the pit of asshattery, but because I'm a huge George Carlin fan. Do you have a quote you could link where he actually said that he "did not ‘believe’ in AGW"? Because while I am quite familiar with his rant against "self-righteous environmentalists" on Jammin' In New York, I don't recall him saying that there or anywhere else.

I looked at that vid again and agree that he never spoke directly to the AGW issue. His sub-text there seems to be that we all talk a good game but we do little to actually change our situation. Some folk that are represented as being ‘deniers’ feel that CC is an overblown issue and that other elements impacting human viability are larger yet sublimated while using CC to front run a narrative.

George felt we all live in all kinds of denial. As far as I can tell he may have included CC in this denial package. (So a hard core denier should skip using George to bolster their case.)

I recently wrote a blog entry where I covered that Jammin' in New York bit. My understanding of that piece is that as much as he's ripping "white, bourgeois liberals" for their "narrow, unenlightened self-interest" in thinking that recycling will "save the planet", it's not because human industrial activity isn't causing global warming. It's because human industrial activity isn't going to destroy the planet - it's going to destroy us because the planet will use global warming, to quote Carlin, to "shake us off like a bad case of fleas."

I pretty much agree with your take but would feel better if 'global warming' were replaced with 'the many deleterious effects of industrial activity'.