Climate change is
affecting the world. The world’s mountain glaciers lost mass for
the 20th year in a row, according to the State of the
Climate 2010
report.
Greenland glaciers lost more mass last year than any other year
on record. The report states that “water from melting glaciers
and ice sheets around the world contributes to acceleration of
the water cycle and sea-level rise.” Levels of greenhouse gas (GHG)
continued to increase. Carbon increased at a faster rate last
year than in 2009, and faster than the average rate over the
last 30 years.
Last year an atmospheric climate change
phenomenon called the Arctic Oscillation switched to its
negative phase, and that switch caused frigid air flows out of
the Arctic. That switch caused warmer temperatures in the
Arctic, but brought colder weather to the Northeastern U.S.
Examples cited by the recently released State of the Climate for
2010 include the unusually heavy snow in northeastern states
last year. Several cities, including New York City, had their
snowiest months on record in February. The Arctic Oscillation’s
negative switch also contributed to Britain’s coldest winter
since the winter of 1978/79. However, it caused Canada to have
its warmest winter since records began in 1948.
Other highlights of the report include:
A La Nina climate pattern brought
heavy rains which caused floods in Australia, which
experienced the wettest spring in 2010 since record keeping
began 111 years ago. In December, rain in the state of
Queensland was more than double the average amount.
Russia had a heat wave from late June
through mid-August, with 62 days of above-average heat, and
Russian officials attributed almost 14,000 deaths to the
high temps. However, the good news is that the report
attributed the heat wave to a “persistent blocking pattern,
which climate scientists do not currently see as part of any
repeating or trending climate pattern.”
“There is a clear and unmistakable signal
from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans,”
said Peter Thorne of the Cooperative Institute for Climate and
Satellites, North Carolina State University.
We Are Marching Off the Cliff- And It May be Too Late to Save Our Bacon.
Contains excerpts from an article published by: Noam Chomsky, on truth-out.org December 6, 2011
DURBAN
CONVENTION
A task of the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change, now under way in Durban, South Africa, is to
extend earlier policy decisions that were limited in scope
and only partially implemented.
These decisions trace back to the U.N. Convention of 1992
and the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which the U.S. refused to
join. The Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period ends in
2012. A fairly general pre-conference mood was captured by a
New York Times headline: “Urgent Issues but Low
Expectations.”
As the delegates meet in Durban, a report on newly updated
digests of polls by the Council on Foreign Relations and the
Program on International Policy Attitudes reveals that
“publics around the world and in the United States say their
government should give global warming a higher priority and
strongly support multilateral action to address it.”
Most U.S. citizens agree, though PIPA clarifies that the
percentage “has been declining over the last few years, so
that American concern is significantly lower than the global
average – 70 percent as compared to 84 percent.”
“Americans do not perceive that there is a scientific
consensus on the need for urgent action on climate change
â(euro) [ A large majority think that they will be
personally affected by climate change eventually, but only a
minority thinks that they are being affected now, contrary
to views in most other countries. Americans tend to
underestimate the level of concern among other Americans.”
ENERGY
COMPANIES LAUNCH CAMPAIGNS OF LIES ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE
These attitudes aren’t accidental. In 2009 the energy
industries, backed by business lobbies, launched major
campaigns that cast doubt on the near-unanimous consensus of
scientists on the severity of the threat of human-induced
global warming.
The consensus is only “near-unanimous” because it doesn’t
include the many experts who feel that climate-change
warnings don’t go far enough, and the marginal group that
deny the threat’s validity altogether.
The standard “he says/she says” coverage of the issue keeps
to what is called “balance”: the overwhelming majority of
scientists on one side, the denialists on the other. The
scientists who issue the more dire warnings are largely
ignored.
One effect is that scarcely one-third of the U.S. population
believes that there is a scientific consensus on the threat
of global warming – far less than the global average, and
radically inconsistent with the facts.
US
GOVERNMENT NOT HANDLING CLIMATE PROBLEMS RESPONSIBLY
It’s no secret that the U.S. government is lagging on
climate issues. “Publics around the world in recent years
have largely disapproved of how the United States is
handling the problem of climate change,” according to PIPA.
“In general, the United States has been most widely seen as
the country having the most negative effect on the world’s
environment, followed by China. Germany has received the
best ratings.”
To gain perspective on what’s happening in the world, it’s
sometimes useful to adopt the stance of intelligent
extraterrestrial observers viewing the strange doings on
Earth. They would be watching in wonder as the richest and
most powerful country in world history now leads the
lemmings cheerfully off the cliff.
Last month, the International Energy Agency, which was
formed on the initiative of U.S. Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger in 1974, issued its latest report on rapidly
increasing carbon emissions from fossil fuel use.
The IEA estimated that if the world continues on its present
course, the “carbon budget” will be exhausted by 2017. The
budget is the quantity of emissions that can keep global
warming at the 2 degrees Celsius level considered the limit
of safety.
IEA chief economist Fatih Birol said, “The door is closing
â(euro) [ if we don’t change direction now on how we use
energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the
minimum (for safety). The door will be closed forever.”
2010
EMISSION FIGURES JUMPED BY LARGEST AMOUNT ON RECORD
Also last month, the U.S. Department of Energy reported the
emissions figures for 2010. Emissions “jumped by the biggest
amount on record,” The Associated Press reported, meaning
that “levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the
worst-case scenario” anticipated by the International Panel
on Climate Change in 2007.
John Reilly, co-director of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology’s program on climate change, told the AP that
scientists have generally found the IPCC predictions to be
too conservative – unlike the fringe of denialists who gain
public attention. Reilly reported that the IPCC’s worst-case
scenario was about in the middle of the MIT scientists’
estimates of likely outcomes.
U.S. MIGHT
BECOME ENERGY INDEPENDENT BY NEW TECHNOLOGY FOR EXTRACTING
FOSSIL FUEL, THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT BE DAMNED!
As these ominous reports were released, the Financial Times
devoted a full page to the optimistic expectations that the
U.S. might become energy-independent for a century with new
technology for extracting North American fossil fuels.
Though projections are uncertain, the Financial Times
reports, the U.S. might “leapfrog Saudi Arabia and Russia to
become the world’s largest producer of liquid hydrocarbons,
counting both crude oil and lighter natural gas liquids.”
In this happy event, the U.S. could expect to retain its
global hegemony. Beyond some remarks about local ecological
impact, the Financial Times said nothing about what kind of
a world would emerge from these exciting prospects. Energy
is to burn; the global environment be damned.
U.S.
LEADING THE WAY BACKWARDS!
Just about every government is taking at least halting steps
to do something about the likely impending catastrophe. The
U.S. is leading the way – backward. The Republican-dominated
U.S. House of Representatives is now dismantling
environmental measures introduced by Richard Nixon, in many
respects the last liberal president.
This reactionary behavior is one of many indications of the
crisis of U.S. democracy in the past generation. The gap
between public opinion and public policy has grown to a
chasm on central issues of current policy debate such as the
deficit and jobs. However, thanks to the propaganda
offensive, the gap is less than what it should be on the
most serious issue on the international agenda today –
arguably in history.
The hypothetical extraterrestrial observers can be pardoned
if they conclude that we seem to be infected by some kind of
lethal insanity.
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Climate change is affecting the world. The world’s mountain glaciers lost mass for the 20th year in a row, according to the State of the Climate 2010 report. Greenland glaciers lost more mass last year than any other year on record. The report states that “water from melting glaciers and ice sheets around the world contributes to acceleration of the water cycle and sea-level rise.” Levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) continued to increase. Carbon increased at a faster rate last year than in 2009, and faster than the average rate over the last 30 years.
