WE ALL CAN ENLIST IN THE WAR ON CLIMATE CHANGE

GLOBAL WARMING – There are common-sense ways to deal with many of the environmental problems we have created. Let’s get with it

By Stephen Hume

[This article was published in: The Vancouver Sun, February 17, 2007.]




Sixteen years ago, after an international conference in Toronto concluded that global warming posed a threat to humanity exceeded only by thermonuclear war, eight parliamentary standing committees met jointly in an urgent climate change forum.

“We are the first generation in the history of the human race that looking down on coming decades can clearly see that if we do not change we shall not survive, at least as we survive today,” warned John Fraser, Speaker of the House of Commons.

By 2000, Canada’s greenhouse emissions would be pushed back to where they were in 1990, the Conservative government’s then-environment minister announced in 1990.

In 2007, emissions are at record levels and rising.

Just a reminder – as Premier Gordon Campbell promises to cut British Columbia’s greenhouse emissions 33 percent by 2020 – that politicians have played the green card before. Yet here we are having done little to confront climate change beyond talk.

Our best tools, Fraser said in 1990, were information, human adaptability and strong leadership. Instead, we’ve frittered away a decade on disinformation, denial and an absence of leadership.

Clearly, if real changes are to occur, it’s up to citizens to lead from behind. Here’s how, and some objectives:

1. Be engaged citizens: This is a democracy. Let your MP or your MLA or your municipal councilor know that empty rhetoric won’t be tolerated. Tell them to behave as they would if we were at war. Be relentless. Write letters, send e-mails, phone constituency offices, beard them at luncheons and cocktail parties. Raise their discomfort level. Tell they to get with your agenda or get dumped regardless of party.

2. Think globally, act locally: We can’t force China or the United States to act. We can do the right thing instead of the expedient thing. That’s leadership. Nor must we gut the economy to begin. Let’s start curbing emissions incrementally by immediately shifting taxes to provide incentives for good behavior while discouraging bad behavior.

3. Get educated: Don’t take the word of politicians, pundits, ideologically motivated think-tanks or the campaigns of front groups for industrial special interests. Use the Internet to research what national science academies and organizations say. Read the technical reports upon which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change bases its conclusions. Read books. For starters, Jonathan Weiner’s The Next One Hundred Years, Pulitzer prize winner Ross Gelbspan’s The Heat is On, George Monbiot’s Heat, David Helvarg’s The War Against the Greens, and Wayne Grady’s The Quiet Limit of the World.

4. Apply common sense: There are plenty of things we could be doing immediately, but are not. For example, let’s insist politicians make serious investments in public transit. Alternatives to the car must be pleasant, efficient, inexpensive and, above all, convenient. Public transit can be all of those things. Demand that it be made so. Think big. The flat prairie landscape is ideal for high-speed trains. Why don’t we have a network linking Edmonton, Calgary, Regina and Winnipeg? Why don’t we provide incentives for moving truck trailers across Canada by rail? Why aren’t we investigating sail-assisted carriers for bulk trans-oceanic cargo?

5. Hold ourselves accountable: The laws of physics mean heavier vehicles must burn more fossil fuel and thus release more greenhouse gases while causing more wear on road infrastructure. Okay, the heavier the car, the more of environmental and infrastructure costs we should recover in sales taxes and licensing fees; the smaller the car, the less we need to recover. Perhaps it makes sense to subsidize people to drive the very lightest, most fuel-efficient cars.

6. Insist on small: Bigger cars occupy more space. In a city, space is money. So make all downtown parking spaces the size of a smart car. Then, charge for parking according to space occupied. If your car occupies two or three or four spaces you must pay two or three or four times the hourly fee. Treat those free parking spaces at malls and workplaces as taxable benefits. Mandate park-and-ride shuttles – they work fine at airports. What would be the economic impact of a buy-back on fuel-efficient old cars and providing the poor, who rely disproportionately on old vehicles, with interest-free loans to acquire new, small, fuel-efficient vehicles?

7. Attack urban sprawl: Provide tax incentives to develop underused urban space. For example, encourage universities to build residential condos above their classroom, laboratory and office complexes. With their rich intellectual and cultural life, university campuses provide attractive communities for urban dwellers. Let universities use the revenues to enhance applied research activities, Tax property owners at higher rates for undeveloped property and, in inverse proportion, at lower rates for high-density developments.

8. Re-green the world: Plant trees everywhere. A tree represents a ton or more of sequestered carbon. One big tree can sequester it for hundreds of years and releases it slowly when it finally rots. So why are we still cutting the biggest trees? Protect old growth everywhere.

9. Re-think work: Too many managers cling to 19th century models. Information workers needn’t be tied to schedules devised for factories. Reward telecommuters. For those who must attend a worksite, make public transit a benefit.

Harvest forests on 300-year cycles to maximize carbon sequestration instead of 30-year cycles. Require everyone who removes a tree to replace it with three. Mandate recycling of wood and paper products

10. Invest in our genius: Let Ottawa set aside $10 billion to fund a center in each province for applied and theoretical research to develop the technology that can mitigate global warming. Each province could tackle a different aspect: Wind power, tidal, solar, geothermal, desalinization technologies, more efficient air, land and sea transportation. Does $10 billion sound expensive? It is less than half the projected spending on the 2008 Olympics. It’s the cost of two pipelines proposed for Arctic gas fields. However, if global warming is indeed a threat to our way of life exceeded only by nuclear war, $10 billion for such a climate change Manhattan Project is a pittance.

shume@islandnet.com

Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming, Scientist Says !

Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet's recent climate changes have a natural—and not a human- induced—cause, according to one scientist's controversial theory.

Mars, too, appears to be enjoying more mild and balmy temperatures.

In 2005 data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide "ice caps" near Mars's south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row.

Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun.

"The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars," he said.

Solar Cycles

Abdussamatov believes that changes in the sun's heat output can account for almost all the climate changes we see on both planets.

Mars and Earth, for instance, have experienced periodic ice ages throughout their histories.

"Man-made greenhouse warming has made a small contribution to the warming seen on Earth in recent years, but it cannot compete with the increase in solar irradiance," Abdussamatov said.

By studying fluctuations in the warmth of the sun, Abdussamatov believes he can see a pattern that fits with the ups and downs in climate we see on Earth and Mars.

Abdussamatov's work, however, has not been well received by other climate scientists.

Amato Evan, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, added that "the idea just isn't supported by the theory or by the observations."

Planets' Wobbles

The conventional theory is that climate changes on Mars can be explained primarily by small alterations in the planet's orbit and tilt, not by changes in the sun.

"Wobbles in the orbit of Mars are the main cause of its climate change in the current era," Oxford's Wilson explained. (Related: "Don't Blame Sun for Global Warming, Study Says" [September 13, 2006].)

All planets experience a few wobbles as they make their journey around the sun. Earth's wobbles are known as Milankovitch cycles and occur on time scales of between 20,000 and 100,000 years.

These fluctuations change the tilt of Earth's axis and its distance from the sun and are thought to be responsible for the waxing and waning of ice ages on Earth.

Mars and Earth wobble in different ways, and most scientists think it is pure coincidence that both planets are between ice ages right now.

"Mars has no [large] moon, which makes its wobbles much larger, and hence the swings in climate are greater too," Wilson said.

No Greenhouse

Perhaps the biggest stumbling block in Abdussamatov's theory is his dismissal of the greenhouse effect, in which atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide help keep heat trapped near the planet's surface.

He claims that carbon dioxide has only a small influence on Earth's climate and virtually no influence on Mars.

But "without the greenhouse effect there would be very little, if any, life on Earth, since our planet would pretty much be a big ball of ice," said Evan, of the University of Wisconsin.

Most scientists now fear that the massive amount of carbon dioxide humans are pumping into the air will lead to a catastrophic rise in Earth's temperatures, dramatically raising sea levels as glaciers melt and leading to extreme weather worldwide.

Abdussamatov remains contrarian, however, suggesting that the sun holds something quite different in store.

"The solar irradiance began to drop in the 1990s, and a minimum will be reached by approximately 2040," Abdussamatov said. "It will cause a steep cooling of the climate on Earth in 15 to 20 years."

Brrrrrrr

This periodic frequency of this cycle is of some curiosity and there are schools of thought that the orbital path undergoes a contraction and expansion due to the orbital resonance.
As the Earth is is orbit, due to the nature of a non perfect match of centripetal force between speed and gravity slope, the speed of orbit increases expanding the orbit which eventually causes a relative slowing and in time a contraction as it falls back into a contracting orbital radius which results in increased speed and through inertial lag never allowing the process to synchronize into a truly stable orbit, to begin the cycle again...
Five peaks in 400,000 years at regular intervals.

This disagreement on the cause of global warming is, in my opinion, a distraction away from the environmental pollution resulting from and contrived slavery to, a system designed not to provide quality of life, but the extraction from the people who are welded to the system, their time and wealth.

Cities are designed at present to mandate commuting as a benefit to the fuel and auto industry by zoning plans that require the entire populations to migrate, herd like, each day, to and from home.
Houses are not designed for efficiency of energy or ease of maintenance but instead construction becomes another method of providing special interests with markets for their plundered resources.

Transportation should be free in an open society provided by efficient rail, and or *other* methods powered by renewable energy.

Any and all of the above problems with present day society could be solved by a fraction of the cost of our military budget.

The purpose is to burn up excess production without raising the standard of living.

Raise the standard of living, and people might have time to.... think.

Eisenhower was right on target regarding the dangers of the Military Industrial Complex.

While warfare is sometimes unfortunately necessary to check the appetites of human nature - it should not be transformed into a profitable cash cow.

-Max
-Aka, The IceMan

The furor over whether or not the burning of fossil fuel is causing global warming distracts from the ruin this industry and the structure that this contrived consumption society is causing in respect to pollution as are all industrial orgies of planetary rape.
Individuals must, as an independent decision, plan for living solutions that minimize their consumption.
Not just accept the convenient set of shackles because they are shinny and new or imbue some sort of social status.
Changing the world is work. Sometimes not so new and pretty work.