Yeah, with you all the way Dave. So long as it’s the bastards who caused the mess and allowed it to continue that get it in the neck. But, I bet it will be innocents who suffer the most…
May God damn the right-wing envirovandals all to Hell.
May God damn the right-wing envirovandals all to Hell.
Well, I don’t think our place in God’s Kingdom is ‘marked’ by our environmental record… but I do think that love of money corrupting many motives could be a biblical perspective that is brought to bare on this issue and would explain a lot of what is going on. Also, love of self and not others… a callousness towards the poor.
Yes, I think there will be much to answer for. But my understanding of God’s judgement is that it will be first in terms of how we responded to God Himself and his Son, and then in terms of the lack of love for our fellow human beings, with some of that being demonstrated by our greedy ‘externalising of costs’ by dumping all sorts of environmental problems on the poor.
...I do think that love of money corrupting many motives could be a biblical perspective that is brought to bear on this issue and would explain a lot of what is going on. Also, love of self and not others… a callousness towards the poor.
Agreed, 100%.
But my understanding of God’s judgement is that it will be first in terms of how we responded to God Himself and his Son, and then in terms of the lack of love for our fellow human beings, ...
Ah, but isn’t it the case that the latter lack is indicative of a lack of love for God? One can’t have one without the other…
Yes, but defining that too stringently via environmental protection measures might be tempting to me personally, but ultimately I can’t do it on the grounds that God can forgive even the ignorant. Their heart might be loving towards God and others, but their minds might not quite understand the consequences of all this environmental stuff, especially when their daily struggles occur in the midst of a super-sized human habitation. They don’t get to see any ‘nature’ to even be aware of what we are doing to it.
Christians faced with the enormity of the environmental crisis, the enormity of world poverty, the enormity of social and medical crisis like aids, etc, often shrink from the TV news images in horror. “What can I do?”
Damning someone because they are not as ‘green’ as I am might be equivalent to someone damning me for not being as concerned about AIDs or Chocolate Slavery or orphans as they are. See where I’m coming from?
Sure, Dave - of course. In any case, the creatures I had in mind are probably non-believers anyway.
They don’t get to see any ‘nature’ to even be aware of what we are doing to it.
En passant, I’ve long argued that the West’s technological fetish, particularly for electronic gizmos, has resulted in our increased alienation from nature.
The thing that really bugs me about all this is that if the general public really knew how close we were to peak oil, gas, and coal, they’d be screaming for us to just do whatever it takes to become energy secure as soon as possible! The University of Newcastle has studied world peak coal and concluded anywhere from 2010 (next year!) to 2048. http://www.newcastle.edu.au/news/2009/10/peakcoalforecast.html
Peak coal won’t save us from climate change as the median peak forecasts predict we’ll be burning coal 30% higher per annum than we are today. That’s just way too much coal for too long, and will push us through the feedbacks.
There is evidence that the USA has already reached peak energy from coal, but volumes keep going up as they move to the lesser quality, less energy dense forms of coal. In other words, they are working much harder and faster to produce about the same amount of energy! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_coal#United_States
So even if one’s politics lean one towards thinking it is all a conspiracy… this cartoon sums it up.
In light of your link (and the responsory comments therein), Luke, I think the answer is ... buy less crap, particularly that which is “Made in China”. REDUCE CONSUMPTION!!!
Maybe, but remember that old equation Paul Ehrlich came up with, IPAT?
Impact = Population times Affluence (consumption) times Technology.
Being “Bright Green” I’m optimistic that the T in IPAT can really turn the equation around. At the moment, being fossil fuelled and using mainly once-through resources, that T is a terrible multiplier of the damage of Population and Affluence / Consumption.
But as the T changes to renewable energy, and our resources used are increasingly recycled in a “Cradle to Cradle” (worth googling) infinitely recyclable industrial feedstock, then the T may become a divider.
So hypothetically: Impact =
Population is 6 billion “units”
Affluence (at first world standards) is 1 billion “units”
Technology (with fossil fuels and “once-through” mined industrial feedstocks) would be a multiplier, like 2 “units”
= 12 billion “units” of Impact on earth which I don’t think the world can possibly supply to all people on earth today.
But then the “T” changes to renewable (and nuclear) technologies of tomorrow, and recyclable industrial feestocks, and maybe the “T” becomes a divider like 0.5 = 3 billion “units” of consumption, which maybe the world CAN supply?
The point is that while Population is a worthy goal to campaign for and Affluence is also something we can beat ourselves over the heads with guilt, maybe if we all campaign for better Technology to supply our needs we’ll end up with a fairly abundant life for all.
I have many, many examples of the “T” changing… it’s a bit of an obsession. One of the biggest examples is the “Technology” we use for planning our cities. I’ve seen plans for attractive modern cities with the BEST of the modern world, yet in cities that require only about 10% of the energy in today’s cities.
Self destructing Supernova explosion may wipe out earth
By Paul Sutherland From: NewsCore January 06, 2010 9:29PM
A STAR is primed to explode in a blast that could wipe out the Earth, according to American astronomers.
A new study shows the star, called T Pyxidis, is much closer than previously thought at 3,260 light-years away - a short hop in galactic terms.
It is set to self-destruct in an explosion called a supernova with the force of 20 billion billion billion megatons of TNT.
The blast from the thermonuclear explosion could strip away the Earth’s ozone layer that keeps out deadly space radiation, scientists said.
The doomsday scenario was described today by astronomers from Villanova University in Philadelphia.
They said the International Ultraviolet Explorer satellite has shown them that T Pyxidis is really two stars, one called a white dwarf that is sucking in gas and steadily growing. When it reaches a critical mass it will blow itself to pieces.
Related Coverage
Our stunning universe Courier Mail,
Scientists spot 13bn-year-old ‘black hole’ Daily Telegraph, 28 Oct 2009
NASA’s best look at our biggest neighbor Adelaide Now, 18 Oct 2009
Final frontier NEWS.com.au,
Astronomers discover massive supernova Daily Telegraph, 8 Jul 2009
It will become as bright as all the other stars in the galaxy put together and shine like a beacon halfway across the universe.
The experts said the Hubble space telescope photographed the star gearing up for its big bang with a series of smaller blasts or “burps”, called novas.
These explosions came regularly about every 20 years from 1890, but stopped after 1967.
So the next blast is very overdue, said scientists Edward M Sion, Patrick Godon and Timothy McClain at the American Astronomical Society in Washington.
Robin Scagell, vice-president of the UK’s Society for Popular Astronomy, said, “The star may certainly became a supernova soon - but soon could still be a long way off so don’t have
Interesting. Maybe our grandchildren will learn to build big space ‘windows’ of super-nano material that blocks out cosmic rays from supernovae. It’s the stuff of Science Fiction, but I’m still blown away every time I use my microwave or the internet! We live in a Sci-Fi world.
There’s discussion of various space-windows the size of Mars to stop the solar wind blowing away any Martian atmosphere we ever managed to create in terraforming that planet. The material would have to work a bit like sun-block, and let light through but stop the radiation and solar wind…. not quite sure of the physics of that, but I’m in a science forum asking.
Anyway, we’ve got to get through peak oil & global warming first, which will hopefully stimulate enough global solutions to these matters that we come together a bit more as a species to solve these ‘mere’ matters and then we might have a fighting chance at solving the biggies.
Does any scientist know whether the change in the globes magnetic flow, the expected and predicted small ice age, or the global warming phemomenom will ultimately win out?
Or a meteor crashing into Earth will destroy all mankind.
Take your pick. Does anyone know Centrebet’s odds? I bet Dave’s political party has an each way bet on the outcome.
Meanwhile, we will run out of oil, according to the people who have invested their money in oil shares.
Jorja Orreal From:The Sunday Mail (Qld) January 17, 2010 3:10PM
AUSTRALIAN scientists are hoping to breed burp-less sheep in a bid to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The agriculture sector is the nation’s second biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions behind the energy sector, producing about 16 per cent of Australia’s total emissions, The Sunday Mail reports.
Two-thirds of that figure is produced by livestock, and 66 per cent of those emissions are released as methane from the guts of grazing livestock such as sheep and cattle.
Australia’s Sheep Co-operative Research Center is conducting a world-first study into 700 sheep with 20 different genetic lines – each is fed, then shepherded into a booth where scientists measure their burp outputs.
One study leader, Dr Roger Hegarty, said sheep burped large amounts of methane and there was environmental pressure to see whether that could be minimized.
“We’re looking into how to reduce emissions from sheep – all over Australia teams are testing different approaches: changing the microbes in the gut, changing their diet, or changing the genetics of the animal,” he said.
“Our sheep studies are (primarily) aiming to find out if there is genetic control over methane production and, if so, is that a good thing to pursue?”
Dr Hegarty said researchers were wary not to produce other problems in their bid to reduce the animal’s carbon footprint.
“Methane is the exhaust from livestock, and – just as you can’t put your hand over the exhaust pipe of a car and expect it to keep running – we’re treading carefully to reduce emissions without causing other problems,” he said.
Hi Kevin,
how you doing with the basic, repeatable, empirical physics of what Co2 does with certain bandwidths of energy, and how they measure Co2 and count the retained energy? How are you going disproving the whole global warming thang on the physics front?
I appreciate that burping sheep seems a bit funny, but if God is letting us reap the consequences of our actions in tinkering with the climate (just as He lets us experience the consequences of our actions if we act stupidly in other areas of life, like swimming in shark-infested waters or drinking water with lead in it), and the basic physics of Co2 actually turns out to be REAL, then what do you recommend?
Hello Saint Mary McKillop, please pass this prayer further up the chain ...
“Dear God,
Please explain why you made us humans to breathe in oxygen and then to breathe out Co2 ?
You obviously didn’t know what you were doing, do you ? Go on - admit it. You really should have checked it out with Dave you know…. “
Not being further side-tracked, I now present page 1 of today’s “Australian” :
United Nations’ blunder on glaciers exposed
Chris Hastings and Jonathan Leake From:The Australian January 18, 2010
THE peak UN body on climate change has been dealt another humiliating blow to its credibility after it was revealed a central claim of one of its benchmark reports - that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 because of global warming - was based on a “speculative” claim by an obscure Indian scientist.
The 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming, appears to have simply adopted the untested opinions of the Indian glaciologist from a magazine article published in 1999.
The IPCC report claimed that the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish inside 30 years.
But the scientists behind the warning have now admitted it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s report.
It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.
Mr Hasnain, who was then the chairman of the International Commission on Snow and Ice’s working group on Himalayan glaciology, has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research.
The revelation represents another embarrassing blow to the credibility of the IPCC, less than two months after the emergence of leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, which raised questions about the legitimacy of data published by the IPCC about global warming.
One email written by a scientist referred to ways of ensuring information that doubted the veracity of man-made climate change science did not appear in IPCC reports.
Several emails also revealed that some scientists at East Anglia tried to bully colleagues who challenged the theory of man-made climate change.
Murari Lal, who oversaw the chapter on Himalayan glaciers in the 2007 IPCC report, said on the weekend he was considering recommending that the claim about glaciers be dropped.
“If Hasnain says officially that he never asserted this, or that it is a wrong presumption, then I will recommend that the assertion about Himalayan glaciers be removed from future IPCC assessments,” Professor Lal said.
The IPCC’s reliance on Mr Hasnain’s 1999 interview has been highlighted by Fred Pearce, the journalist who carried out the original interview for New Scientist. Pearce said he rang Mr Hasnain in India in 1999 after spotting his claims in an Indian magazine.
“Hasnain told me then that he was bringing a report containing those numbers to Britain,” Pearce said. “The report had not been peer reviewed or formally published in a scientific journal and it had no formal status so I reported his work on that basis.
“Since then I have obtained a copy and it does not say what Hasnain said. In other words, it does not mention 2035 as a date by which any Himalayan glaciers will melt.
“However, he did make clear that his comments related only to part of the Himalayan glaciers, not the whole massif.”
The New Scientist report was apparently forgotten until 2005 when environmental group WWF cited it in a report called An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China. The report credited Hasnain’s 1999 interview with New Scientist. But it was a campaigning report rather than an academic paper.
Despite this it rapidly became a key source for the IPCC when Professor Lal and his colleagues came to write the section on the Himalayas.
When published, the IPCC report gave its source as the WWF study but went further, suggesting the melting of the glaciers was “very likely”. The IPCC defines “very likely” as having a probability of greater than 90 per cent.
Glaciologists find such figures inherently ludicrous, pointing out that most Himalayan glaciers are hundreds of metres thick and could not melt fast enough to vanish by 2035 unless there was a huge global temperature rise.
Julian Dowdeswell, director of the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, said: “A small glacier such as the Dokriani glacier is up to 120m thick. A big one would be several hundred metres thick and tens of kilometres long. The average is 300m thick so to melt one at 5m a year would take 60 years.”
Some scientists have questioned how the IPCC could have allowed such a mistake into print. Professor Lal admits he knows little about glaciers.
The Sunday Times. Additional reporting: James Madden
Hello Saint Mary McKillop, please pass this prayer further up the chain ...
“Dear God,
Please explain why you made us humans need to drink in water, which required there to be LOTS of water which sometimes drowns us humans?
You obviously didn’t know what you were doing, do you ? Go on - admit it. You really should have checked it out with Kevin you know…. “
As for the glaciers, it’s amazing how questions about one individual scientist’s qualifications can reverse what we see with our own eyes.
See how the older photo at the top has this wimpy looking glacier, and then the lower, more recent shot shows how the glacier suddenly restored itself on the news release of your telegraph story? Truly amazing! Oh wait…
Good rebuttal Dave. (Out of curiosity, is this a Himalayan glacier in the photographs?)
It never ceases to amaze me how illogical people can be. KG’s post is like the opinion of somebody who once ate a bad Thai meal, that “All Thai food is bad”. Spare us…
See more here, especially at the base of the wiki where the many glacial studies are documented from the world’s best science academies. (But don’t tell Kevin ;)
“Glacier-gate” seems to be a real case of misinformation or poor-science, and while we are all still awaiting a comment from the IPCC over the next few days, all I can say is “FANTASTIC” because that was one of the scariest global warming scenarios! I was MYSTIFIED as to why the glaciers melting this century didn’t get more attention in the media, and everyone kept harping on about sea-level rise being the worst scenario. The glaciers melting would have meant over a billion people going hungry and thirsty! So while the glaciers ARE still melting, it looks like we may not have to worry about them actually disappearing for 200 to 300 years!
And I for one am glad! This is a case where it seems something got into the IPCC process without being peer-reviewed. It does not kill the rest of climate science, but serious questions are going to be asked about how a non-peer reviewed paper got through. Of course the Denialists will jump up and down with excitement and foam at the mouth that the WHOLE of climate science is now in doubt, but, um… that’s just because they can’t get their own anti-science papers published by the peer-review process isn’t it? Because they’re NOT science but anti-warming dogma funded by the fossil fuel companies. But that’s a whole other conspiracy… ain’t it? ;-)
[null]London 2012 Olympics: 'Snow bird' Skelton finds fabulous form in FloridaTelegraph.co.uk (blog)[{}]... owns most of the top rides of 2004 Olympic champion Rodrigo Pessoa); Tom Tisbo, CEO of Suncast, one of America's largest producer of domestic durables; and Kimberley Boyer, grand-daughter of the billionaire evangelical financier Robert Van Kampen.
[null]Mitt's Muffled SoulNew York Times[{}]Christ or Christianity came up repeatedly. Four years later, he still avoids the word, trumpeting his faithfulness without specifying the faith. What's surprising is that no one around him — not reporters, not rivals — talks about it all that much, ...
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