Climate Change
The Climate Camping season has begun in earnest today, 3rd August 2009.
Here’s a few of the links below. If you’r bored, curious or otherwise ungainfully unemployed, why not come and pitch your canvas alongside the radical Carbon-free thinkers and doers of the future ?
The Campaign against Climate Change has been running a very thought-provoking extending compendium of ideas on how to reduce British Carbon Emissions by ten percent by (the end of) 2010, to which you are all welcome to contribute :-
https://portal.campaigncc.org/content/10-10-ban-domestic-flights
https://portal.campaigncc.org/content/10-10-ban-domestic-flights-0
https://portal.campaigncc.org/content/10-10-50-reduction-cost-public-transport
A momentous report in from Dorset, which seems to be one of Britain’s most radioactive frontlines in the battle between Climate Change Denial and Renewables common sense.
Susan Chapman, Green Party candidate, a colleague from the small but highly informational Take Global Warming Seriously campaign, and an active member of Poole Agenda 21, writes about the tedious, unforgiving work of campaigning for a Carbon-free energy future.
Image Credit : Scott Kinmartin
Over the course of aeons of archeaological time, there has been a lot of death, I mean mass extinction, periods of natural hyper-slaughter and climate mayhem, atmospheric toxicity and ocean wipeout.
It’s all in the fossil record, except where those dead things have decomposed or chemically transposed into other things, like petroleum oil.
Little boy and girl engineers across the globe are starting a lifetime of fascination with wind turbines, playing with Trademarked miniature construction kits :-
https://hertenberger.co.za/?p=4831
https://legosip.blogspot.com/2009/04/120409-lego-7642-garage-7686-helicopter.html
Durable plastic toy manufacturers can see which way the wind is blowing, even if rich landowners, Mr-Deal-or-No-Deal [1] and certain members of the CPRE [2] cannot :-
[ UPDATE : I need to make clear that there is a lot of partially decomposed and undecomposed biological material in the iced-over regions of the planet. This is not producing Methane yet, but as it Globally Warms, it will. ]
Interestingly, today I have been accosted by e-mail, by a small collection of Peak Oil devotees, begging me not to waste my time on Climate Change : for, as they claim with some foundation, Fossil Fuel depletion rates may well mean that emissions stop short of causing dangerous Global Warming.
“I see the oildrum is part of your background reading!! I was therefore a little disturbed to see that along with most of the rest of the intelligentsia of my beloved home country, you are going to devote your professional future to being a “low carbon activist”. I hope you will reconsider this.”
“Any theory is ever only as good as its assumptions. The assumptions used by the IPCCC to develop future projections of run-away CO2 emissions are enormously “optimistic” about the future availability and price of oil, gas and coal.”
“In fact, we probably saw peak oil flows last year, will soon see peak gas flows, brought forward by Russia’s (and OPEC’s) need to maximize the price of gas and minimize current upstream expenditure. There are soundly based theories that we may be on the cusp of peak coal production. As someone said, it is not the size of the tank that matters, it is the size of the tap! The taps are not getting bigger but smaller, all over the World.”
Social engineering is simple : if you don’t want something to happen, starve it of funding, create lots of dodgy Press, and create artificial divisions between factions.
Climate Camp has been a hoot, until an accidental bystander got pushed to his death caught in a “kettle” formed by Riot Police in London, England in April 2009 on Fossil Fools Day. Some of the protest actions have been daredevil, some truly revolutionary, most have been properly educational.
In fact my main interest and energy in the Climate Camp has been the Workshop Programme, trying to increase general awareness, circulating information, encouraging people to lead workshops, bringing research from their diverse fields.
The basic stereotype of a research scientist is pretty accurate, actually. Somebody male, with an introspective demeanour and poor communication skills, maybe a little on the Asperger’s spectrum.
What these white coats cannot do is roar. They cannot cause an organisation to jump to attention, scurry to find solutions, demand definitive decision-making emergency conferences, in fact, these guys (because it is mostly chaps, after all) have got “humble entitlement culture” all worked out : they don’t create problems and their employers keep them in the job. Mostly.
Scottish historians can correct me on this : was it Robert the Bruce or William Wallace who first coined the phrase “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” ?
Well, it seem the “life sciences” industry, producing genetically modified organisms, is doing just that, this time in the fields of Energy and Climate Change.
I was at a conference not long ago where during one of the breakout sessions I found myself sitting next to an “ad chick”, you know, a woman in advertising.
We passed the time of day, and I found I needed to challenge her on her naive belief that cars will progressively continue to get less Carbon hungry. “Within 20 years,” I soothsayed, “each adult will only have a Carbon ration for a fifth of a car”. Her face had an expression on it that was akin to painful disgust : like I was denying her her human rights, or something.
Out on the wild and windy moors, a battle for the wuthering heights of Middle England is coming to its apogee.
For what seems like aeons, certain branches of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE), and their “enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my” friends in the misnamed Renewable Energy Foundation (REF), have been jousting with stirred-up local passions, fighting the feared onslaught of Wind Power.
Recalling the first Apollo moon landing, Ed Miliband tries to make the noble, heartwarming case for spending lots of public money in The Guardian :-
https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/20/climate-change-low-carbon-economy
There was a rash, a veritable rash of media articles last week about Ed Miliband’s Low Carbon Transition :-
https://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/publications/lc_trans_plan/lc_trans_plan.aspx
It was an overwhelming torrent of fairly helpful and semi-accurate information, and it’s taken me a few days to wade through it to fish out some relevant threads.
Feeling faint and fatigued by Climate Change news recently, with its tit-for-tat spats about Policy and Science and most of all the Economics; grappling with the detractors and wreckers on various channels, I decided to turn to another source of information, trusting to uncover a little alternative inspiration.
I wanted to find something that would be unburdened by corporate advertising, untainted by agendas of those with financial or political capital to be made from various shifts in Energy and Carbon; something transparent and sufficiently broad to avoid niche arguments.
I hit upon a Science book for children, you know, with primary colour diagrams and simplified English, and it was quite refreshing. But wrong.
June 2009 doesn’t quite rank with the hottest Junes ever in 130 years of data records, but it comes awfully close.
NASA GISS have this evening released their graphs of the data for June 2009, and it is sobering, nay, disturbing :-
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/
My two favourite charts are the ones that say the most powerful things in the most simple way.
ExxonMobil have a plan : harness the natural lifecycle of billions of little photosynthetic critters and make oil, oil, lots of lovely, slimy, rainbowy algal oil.
It’s a huge shame that the person charged with decisions about Energy in the UK doesn’t have a science or engineering background.
He can’t determine truth from fiction, that’s why.
We can produce report after report and datasheet after datasheet showing how ridiculous it will be to continue with Coal and Nuclear, and he won’t be able to see the wood for the trees.
This is yet again proof of why it is pointless trying to engage with the decison-makers. They don’t have the mental framework to be able to deal with the facts and figures.
The G8 big boys have been in Italy in the last week, sending their trophy wives off on a tour of unremediated earthquake rubble in high heels, while they them-besuited-selves got on with the business of smiling for the cameras, warmly shaking unwashed hands and talking nonsense.
There was a much reported target-setting of reducing Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions by 80%. But there were several qualifiers on this promise, and I don’t think it’s going to look like what they claim it will (and neither does George Monbiot).
Gordon Brown has announced possibly the single most important proposal on Climate Change Adaptation to date.
He went to London Zoo towards the end of June to announce a bold proposal for global funding. [ Why the Zoo ? Something to do with political overtones or biodiversity ? ]
What was heralded with praise and aplomb on that day has now been unpacked as containing some “fake” accounting, in terms of the British publicly funded contribution : funds being merely swapped from budget line to budget line.
Plus, part of the proposed funding is expected from the global Carbon Trade markets, and as we’ve seen so far from the European Trading Scheme, it is by no means certain that this will work as expected.
It might turn out to be not quite the goodie bag that Gordon Brown made out. If so, that’s a real shame, because this was meritable move.
If you’re not doing very much else on 15th July 2009, why not take a look at the Shell Dialogue, asking the question : “can technology reduce Carbon Dioxide emissions ?”.
https://www.shelldialogues.com
https://www.shelldialogues.com/technologiesforco2
You can submit your questions in person to Jan van der Eijk, the Chief Technology Officer at Shell.
There are times in conversation when you know, you just know, that it’s going nowhere, and that you’ll have to fold. Cue lame excuses, mumbling into beard/beer/brassiere, lower eyes, get up and walk away. “It’s not you, it’s me”, you’ll claim, or something similarly limp, obvious and contrite.
So many times in the last six and a half years since I read the British Government’s Energy White Paper of February 2003, I’ve had to bow out of conversations with employees and fans of the Big Energy companies and the World Nuclear Association and some people from the Government as well.
At the Oscars and the BAFTAS and so on, the winners, always bleary, always blubbing, always drunk, always start with an “I’d like to thank” speech, offering genuine (or coerced) gratitude very publicly to those who collaborated (or financed) their venture : “you made it all possible”.
In true TV award ceremony style, the British Government, plus “Special Adjunct” Tony Blair, in amongst their good work pursuing Energy Efficiency and True Renewables, appear to be virtually obliged to mention the Energy and Climate “solutions” of their closest lobbyists and corporate allies, or even relatives, in the case of Gordon Brown’s brother Andrew’s company Electricité de France :-
News just in of some sloppy UK Government photoshopping leading to a serious lack of public confidence and some mild humour :-
Yes, Big Ben’s Clock Tower appears to be leaning to the right (or from Ed Miliband’s point of view, to the left).
[ UPDATE : See the end of this post for proof positive of image modification ]
Despite the fact that there are only about five (and dropping) Climate Change “sceptics” in the British Parliament; and despite the fact that all major scientific and academic bodies, institutions and societies all declare their support for cuts in Global Warming pollution; the Media are still galumphing about in the murky mud of the 1980s in terms of public psychology.
It is essential that there is meaningful debate in the public realm about what Climate Change is doing to our world, and how we can control emissions and work to protect against damaging outcomes.
The evidence is all around us. And gradually, increasing numbers of people are adjusting their mental aerials to tune into the greater ideas and the bigger picture. What we don’t need just now are obfuscation and turbulence and gleeful mischievous wreckers.
The “Standard Fossil Fuel” Peak, that of Coal, Petroleum Oil and Natural Gas, is probably within 10 years.
We really have to avoid “Alternatives”, like Tar Sands, Oil Shale…or we could create Climate Crisis in another 10 years.
When BP branded themselves “Beyond Petroleum”, when Shell expanded its Renewables division briefly, we thought it was Greenwash, we thought it was about a bit of token Renewable Energy…but I think they might be serious – about “Alternative” Energy resources that would be way, way more Carbon-intensive than Coal.
It’s not something David Rutledge at CalTech has factored in, I think. He used to be talking about keeping Coal in the ground, but now he’s more optimistic that standard Fossil Fuels will not bring us to Climate catastrophe…