Big Picture : Science and Media often concentrate on one tiny element of a problem, ignoring the radioactive elephant in the room.
The Global Warming sceptic-o-sphere is alight with loud complaining again, from one calling herself Joanne Nova.
When I first encountered this name, I was convinced this wasn’t a real person. I now know that there is a real person behind the name, but I still think it’s a made-up one. A stage name. After all, this person was an employee in a travelling theatrical show, ostensibly about science, run by the Shell corporation.
An Irritating Truth
by Jo Abbess
17 September 2009
Essay to answer the question : ‘Which technical solutions offer the best potential for decreasing Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions over the next 50 years?’ based on the key text, Chapter 4, entitled “Energy Supply” of the mitigation volume of the Working Group III (WG3) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) published in 2007.
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg3/ar4-wg3-chapter4.pdf
Sometimes a plan is just so wrong that it has to be resisted.
Tesco want to build a rather large retail store in my very local area, implanting a supermarket that looks more than twice the size of any other building here, and shoehorning in over 200 “residential units” to boot.
It may be legal, and it may even pass some of the planning guidelines and strategies, but it’s clearly a resource grab – trying to put as many profit-generating assets as possible into a limited space.
Whenever you hear government ministers or public figures telling the people that technology will save us, remember this : the word “technology” is synonymous with the word “business”.
“Technology” is Big Engineering, and this is what is done by large companies and corporations. Large organisations that make profit by selling manufactured products and Energy always have a surplus set aside for their communications budgets, and that includes persuading government people that their business is invaluable and needs promoting.
Environmentalism has trudged a long, winding, often silent road, with many cul-de-sacs of defeat, desperation and despair.
In the last few years there has been a raising of the collective consciousness about how many problems are interrelated with an obscure corner of gas chemistry, which offers grave prospects for the whole of Life on Earth.
Ecologists and treehuggers of all varieties have started to gather round the camp fire of Climate Change, finding that people will pay attention to the destruction of Nature if they pay attention to their own fate first.
Talking About a Revolution : Tracy Chapman
When are the intellectual and political ranks going to stop trying to apply universal guilt ? The real question to ask is not, “how are we going to get average emissions down ?” You can’t treat all the people in the United Kingdom as one blurred lump. Around 20% of consumers are conscious. Another 20% to 30% are going to be hit directly by any measure designed to put an environmental tax on Carbon, and will have no choice about responding.
Climate Change worldwide is affecting the poorest first and hardest – an expression used by everyone from Nicholas Stern through to Christian Aid. But it’s a stratification of impact that isn’t just global. The poorest in the industrialised countries are suffering hardship too : people who cannot get their homes renovated after floods, people who have to apply for Fuel Poverty assistance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unNZDByYHzw : The Power of Persuasion
https://evelynrodriguez.typepad.com/crossroads_dispatches/clear_and_resonant_marketing/
“Not Converts, But Consorts”
Despite what the psychologists evidence and the psychotherapists cogitate, there’s no getting through to some people, and I really think we just ought to accept that, stop with the guilt trip and the navel-gazing and admit it : the people with leadership authority have got to start telling people that things will change, whether they come along with it or not.
Everybody knows that there’s no secret to persuasion, no “how to win friends and influence people” magic techniques : you just need to have enough money to guarantee yourself the widest possible audience and the dominant narrative, and your product gets all the sales it needs, and overrides “what if” critique. TV was made for it. The Hollywood film industry is its highest and finest embodiment.
What would you do if you met a Climate Camper face to face ? And how could you be sure ? Would they have dreadlocks ? A facepainted clown face, raggedy, dirty clothes ? Would they be shouting ?
More to the point, would they be getting in your face ? Or in your way ? Would they be threatening or violent or extremely negative ? Or would they offer you a cup of tea and a nice wholemeal organic flapjack ?
The Carbon game’s up : within 40 to 70 years the Petroleum empires will be gone. Even with massive new investment, Hydrocarbon production will be peaking. With supplies of Crude Oil, Natural Gas, and yes, even Coal, starting to fall away, a crucial sub-plot will begin to play out.
Climate Change is a problem quintessentially expressed in numbers : how many degrees of warming, how many parts per million of Carbon Dioxide in the air, how much Carbon Dioxide the Oceans, Forests, Rocks, Plants and Soils soak up, how many lives will be affected by drought, famine and sickness, how much Methane could be released from tundra and hydrates, how many species will be lost, perhaps including our own.
Flickr Image : David Breslin @ b3ta
Not content with having four very similar Planning Applications overturned previously in quiet, suburban Highams Park, London E4, (including one taken to a Public Inquiry), nothing seems to be able to stop Tesco trying again, with a remarkably unchanged plan for a mega-superstore with crowded urban-style blocks of adjacent flats.
Only this time it’s got a “travellator”, you know, the kind of moving walkway normally found at airports, to take you from the ground floor car park atrocity to the first floor store.
This is their attempt to design the plan into our hearts. But not even a brilliant architect can make a catwalk model out of this bloated parasitical plan :-
https://www.highamsgreen.co.uk
The local residents are up in arms, flexing their telephone dialling fingers, and furiously typing letters and electronic mails about this abomination of a Planning Application :-
https://www.highamsparkforum.co.uk/tesco.html
If you yourself live in London E4, you can submit a comment on this plan yourself very easily on the Council’s website, quoting the Application Numbers 2008/1490 and 2008/1491 :-
In his own, special, blond, way, I feel Bjørn Lomborg is as dangerous as Martin Durkin. They both act like incarnations of The Climate Joker in my view, showing different capricious sides to the destructive force of mankind’s inhumanity to man (and beast and tree).
Somewhere in the back of all our minds, we know that cows eat soya and soya and cows are grown where the Amazon rainforest used to be, and the Amazon is one of the last ecosystems controlling the overall Climate of the planet.
So we know beef ranching is intrinsically bad, whatever the discussion about cattle burps actually means.
But a brief dip into the news and views of animal husbandry science experts reveals that there is a very intense and ongoing argument about Methane from farmed animals, and what it implies for Global Warming, and my reaction is that we should make ourselves more aware.
The future looks AV – Almost Vegan.
Atlanta, Georgia is running out of fresh drinking water. I heard about it at second hand from one of my relatives who lives there.
Lake Lanier is suffering from drought. Of course there are a number of factors, not just Climate Change. But the combination of cyclical drought, US Army Corps of Engineers activities, increasing urban population and agricultural take doesn’t seem to be able to explain everything.
Of particular concern is the condition known as anoxia, lack of oxygen in the water. This will be partly caused by chemical run-off from surrounding farming land and any industrial activity, and also changes in composition of the tributary rivers which feed it, which will all be exacerbated by changes in rainfall caused by Climate Change.
He may prowl like a cat and purr like a cat, and make out he’s soft and sweet in interviews, but Peter Mandelson’s ideological positioning gives him the impression of him more resembling a pawn, an eel or a rat, and gives me a shudder of disgust; and I’m glad to hear the Climate Rush non-Pussycat Dolls have seen fit to pounce on him :-
https://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/aug/10/mandelson-climate-protest-vestas
Geoengineering. Sounds great. Treat the Earth like one big motoring machine, get under the hood (bonnet) and tinker with it.
But what if actually this is the equivalent of putting the Planet on a life support system ventilator, and the plug could be pulled at any time ?
How sustainable are some of the Geoengineering proposals ? Are they guaranteed to work ? Won’t they have knock-on side-effects ? Are they reversible if they prove unhelpful ? And how much will they cost ?
Keisha Castle-Hughes has been patronised for her work on Climate Change. I think she’s doing quite well, myself.
The State of the World Forum, having met in Belo Horizonte this week, is pitching for 80% cuts in Carbon Dioxide by 2020, not 2050, and besides launching a “2020 Climate Leadership” campaign, they are to use the services of Brazil’s largest TV station Globo TV to raise awareness.
A cursory Western reader of news about Russia would find curious snippets with little context or explanation. “Russia plants flag on Arctic floor” from 2007 or “Vladimir Putin dives to bottom of world’s deepest lake” from 1st August 2009.
With the new streamlined Russian openness strategy, the information is not withheld, just dumbed-down, it seems. When reported in the Western press, it’s easy for further meaning to erode at this extra remove. But there is a story here. What are they up to ? Staking claims in the Arctic and mining for unconventional Hydrocarbon fuels underwater, that’s what.
Whenever one exchanges words with a representative of the British Government regarding Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), if one deigns to risk asking such a question as “why is the UK spending so much time, effort and resources on CCS demonstrations ?”, the usual, much-trodden answer is “because we need to lead China on this”.
A number of media outlets have been skewered and grilled one more time in the last fortnight by the Nuclear industry and it’s paid-up or paid-to fans. It feels like the poor lamb hacks have been gambolling and frolicking too close to the fire.
Just getting a Press Release in the papers is not equivalent to convincing a critical mass of people to support your energy technology of choice. It’s like roasting and toasting a very dodgy piece of carcase/carcass and adding hot pepper sauce to hide the bacterial slime.
Even recruiting a senior former British Government Minister to the radioactive cause is not sufficiently influential for a good portion of the electorate. That’s like pulling some Amazon-killing soya-fed dead cow out of the freezer and finding it’s several years too old to eat.
Nuclear Power has a bad track record, and the last couple of years have been near-on laughable.
The Public Opinion No is a Government Policy Yes. Carbon is Zero Carbon. Coal is Clean. Sounds like Doublethink to me.
As Orwell put it : “The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them….To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies…”
Where can all our politicians and corporate executive officers from the Big Energy and Engineering companies be found ? At Quibbles Bar where altercation over subsidies and bailouts can be earwigged on a daily basis.
Meanwhile, China and India are still slugging it out with the international community in the Recompense Diner-Restaurant, insisting someone else pays the bill for dealing with Carbon Emissions.
Meanwhile, the pampered and neutered citizen consumers of “The West” are basking in the the Full-Body Entertainment Lounge, with heaps of gadgets and streaming and TV, with nary a care for stories so scary.
Meanwhile, Africa is drying out. I mean, really drying out. Africa is in the Last Chance Saloon.
https://www.peopleandplanet.net/doc.php?id=3605
“Drought threatens future of Kenya’s Maasai people : Posted: 05 Aug 2009 : For the last four years, Kenya has seen far less rain than the long-term average, and today there is total failure. It is a drought that has left the Maasai people with no traditional grassland left to graze their herds. Some of the only remaining alternatives for these pastoralists have been to travel to the far reaches of Kenya in search of proper grassland, or to move illegally into protected areas. While these options may temporarily provide grazing for livestock, the people have experienced starvation and conflict…”
I cannot offer an opinion about the validity of this research, because I haven’t read the science paper with the calculations, I haven’t spoken to the researchers, or entirely understood their model from the news report, but I’ve got to admit the results appear intriguing.
The authors speak to my key annoyances : the proposals for new Nuclear Power and Carbon Capture and Storage. And they say we shouldn’t do it : the net heat from “thermal” power generation is going to be dangerous regardless of what we do with any resulting Carbon Dioxide.
Notes from PA21 Meeting with the Under-Secretary of State for the Environment
Meeting Date : Tuesday 25th March 2008
Meeting Time : 14:05 – 15:00
Meeting Venue: Whitehall
Attendees
Joan Ruddock MP, Under-Secretary of State, Environment
Annette Brooke MP
Tony Hamilton PA21 Chair
Theresa McManus PA21 Secretary
Naomi Matteson
Notes from Meeting