Bleeding Edge

When dopey people tell me that am a do-gooder out to save the world, I simply shrug and say am only out, to save their sorry ass.

When well meaning people ask what motivates me to get up and going every morning, am simply telling them — my kid.

When useful idiots deny Climate Change — am simply crossing to the other side of the street…

And when young people ask me if we’ve crossed the threshold the Environmental Parliament calls the “Berkeley line” — I simply tell them, it doesn’t matter. Because if I tell them its’ too late to reverse the inevitable catastrophe, they are bound to do nothing. And if I tell them there is time and reason to do something to stop climate change, they again will not do a thing, and instead go out and get an MBA to make money in a big Accounting firm or become toy soldiers in the wars of business to gain market share for their useless products….

So what I do, instead is show them the scientific evidence and the empirical reasons behind Climate Change and then allow them to draw their own conclusions. Because I firmly believe that only when intelligent people reach their own findings, they will be motivated enough to follow their vision.

And my vision lately has been apocalyptic.

The Moratorium on offshore drilling in the Arctic that was presented by the Environmental parliament over the last three years, to the European leaders in Brussels was completely rejected by the European Parliament vote Wednesday night amid the most intense lobbying effort done by the oil industry ever in it’s vociferous history of buying up political officials.

And yet the evidence should have been overwhelming to allow for the ban on Arctic drilling:

Because the level of Arctic sea ice loss this end of summer was at it’s lowest level in the last 13 million years… So now the ones responsible the most about the Arctic destruction are readying to drill for oil and gas deep under the Arctic seabed because all of a sudden now — they can…

So we had a knife fight in Brussels where the Environmental Parliament threw down a challenge to institute a Moratorium for all Arctic deep sea drilling to avoid a disaster in the making following the precautionary principle. The Gulf of Mexico oil spill had given us some measure of hope the Europeans would act on this and ban the Arctic to the oil drillers and thus over the last three years and placed all of our energy on the line. And we fought an impassioned battle to win the vote for this ban on Arctic oil drilling. Yet this battle was fought far away from the North Pole and from the Arctic and instead it was waged in the polite halls of Brussels. And it was there were we were decimated.  No blood was spilled but the planet was wounded mortally. And he is enraged now…

Still we fought valiantly, but we lost. We lost yet again. Not only we were outgunned and out-lobbied, but we were also ambushed when the commissioner changed the voting rules for the Europarliamentarians on this issue alone, thus allowing the Fossil Fuel lobby to have their way with all of the MPs. So the European Parliament yesterday voted to allow oil drilling in the much maligned Arctic with nary any controls for the major oil and gas companies.

— What a shame…

This vote represents a turning point and a uniquely sad day for humanity.

Now I feel the end and am exhausted. Dead tired. And  tired men make mistakes…

So am taking a break, going to China for a couple of weeks. Not to rest mind you but to continue a series of intense political meetings with the high leadership of the Politburo and doing also some Low Carbon Economy Summitry. And even though Hu Jintao is retiring end of year, he is an engineer as are most of the fellows in the Politburo and they understand big problems and how to solve them….

And maybe He will want to be kind. And he might also want to leave behind a policy legacy for his successor. And this represents a good opportunity for the Environmental Parliament to place a new China Climate Change policy initiative at the desk of the next guy to come to lead Beijing.

And its a good thing, for the fact checkers of the Chinese leadership, because our policy papers are full of empirical realpolitik, based on simple science, and their assessment is not ideological like it is in Washington. That’s another thing you didn’t know about Beijing. They are evidence based leaders…

Evidence of this situation in the Arctic, where layers of ice and snow are disappearing at a rapid clip, has raised serious alarms among climate scientists. Last month, at the conclusion of the seasonal thaw, scientists discovered that the amount of sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean had reached its lowest point — roughly 1.32 million square miles — since satellite observation got underway more than 30 years ago.But the 13 million years lowest record comes from ice core samples examining in an Environmental Parliament sponsored study the ice formation record and the geological evidence of this change last seen 13 Million years ago. And roughly from those times all religions and mythic books of the peoples and cultures of this Earth speak of the time of the terrible floods. Not just Noah’s flood from the Bible, but all the religious texts make mention and so has empirical evidence from the Earths peoples history. The old floods are scheduled to be repeated and our unwillingness to learn the lesson assigns us to repeat it.

We call this process “Palepfuture” and it has been elevated to a science study at the Environmental Parliament.

Empirical evidence from good science also suggests that the annual snowmelt across the Arctic is accelerating…

The implications here are myriad and, by now, familiar: Rising sea levels, inundation of communities in low-lying areas and potentially the wholesale obliteration of some island nations. What’s more, the retreat of all this Arctic ice and snow — important natural reflectors of the sun’s heat — could prove dangerously self-perpetuating. Bare land, after all, absorbs more heat. As more bare land is exposed for longer periods, the planetary thermostat gets nudged upward, causing yet more ice and snow to disappear.

Many scientists fear a similarly dangerous feedback loop should large parts of the Arctic permafrost begin to thaw. This thick layer of soil, normally frozen year round, holds large stores of methane, a planet-warming gas significantly more potent, at least in the short term, than even carbon dioxide. Already researchers have begun to document increasing methane releases in the Arctic. Should enough methane enter the atmosphere, the Arctic itself, currently a natural “sink” for greenhouse gases, could become an aggregate — and enormous — source of the stuff.

Some observers have called it an Arctic “time bomb” that, after a certain melting point, will send a giant pulse of climate-altering methane into the atmosphere. Others suggest that the impacts will be dire but slow, measured in decades or centuries. Either way, the steady reduction in Arctic ice and snow, most scientists agree, is an expected byproduct of increased planet-warming gases in the atmosphere.

Potential signs of a changing climate are multiplying elsewhere. In the lower 48 states of the U.S., for example, the month of July was the hottest month ever recorded — that is, since official record-keeping began nearly 125 years ago. As noted in a recent compilation of data prepared by Democratic Reps. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Henry Waxman of California, ranking minority members of the House Natural Resources and Energy and Commerce committees, respectively, some 64 percent of the continental United States was experiencing drought in recent months. Wild fires have burned through huge swaths of the West and the dust bowl effect is taking place reducing the American corn, wheat and all food staples production to a quarter of what it usually was. And in Russia’s vast wheat fields the story is the same — and so it is in the Punjab, India’s bread basket and elsewhere. Famines are imminent and you best consider this, because you cannot eat ideology and BS coming down from Brussels and Washington when your children go hungry.

During the first half of this year, surface temperatures in the northeastern Atlantic Ocean shattered a record dating back to 1854 when we first started measuring and the acidification of the same oceans has reached a new record too…

From the pure accountancy economic analysis record we can glean this:

The number of natural disasters has increased steadily over the past 30 years with natural disasters in 2011 resulting in the most costly toll in history — $154 billion worth of worldwide losses from floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, and other extreme weather events. In the United States alone, 2011 extreme weather events caused almost $60 billion in damages. This total does not include expenses associated with sickness or injuries triggered by the disasters. Given the number and severity of extreme events that have thus far occurred this year, weather-related costs in 2012 could equal or exceed those in 2011. According to Aon Benfield, a global reinsurance company, insured losses associated with natural disasters have totaled at least $22 billion through August 2012.

And from the human accountancy record we glean the following: Upwards of 12 million people have lost their lives last year alone due to a warming planet and Climate Change. That’s a grand total of a city like Paris. Imagine a cemetery this big for climate Change victims…

More than sixty seven million Climate refugees have lost their homes and all possessions and are now wandering the deserts going from refugee camp to bigger refugee camps and on to new places in an uncertain search to find a place to call home…

Yours,

Pano

PS:

Do you want your children to become the wandering Jew of the future, fully knowing there is no longer a promised land to be reached, but just the damn desert…

Had you had this nightmare recently?

I had ever since I visited the Horn of Africa refugees last year… and the Sahel.

And my old visions from Darfur and Southern Sudan all came back to haunt me.

Because what we did in Africa will follow us in our homes soon enough…

Chicken have a peculiar way of coming hoe to roost