Cold Truths

From all over, notes on climate change

©Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/S&E/coldtruths.htm
12/12/07

George Monbiot, the reporter for the Guardian, has a modest proposal to curb global warming. Take all the fossil fuels, and leave them in the ground.

Hmm. Well, if we started that tomorrow (Tuesday) the world economies would collapse, probably by 4pm Wednesday, and by Friday civilization would have collapsed in most of the northern hemisphere. Starvation would begin by Sunday, and on Monday people in the the American south would be killing prey with their bare teeth while their children, naked, chased chickens around the yard. In other words, the South would be the one part of the world left unaffected.

Monbiot wasn’t seriously proposing the world try to quit fossil fuels cold turkey. He was raising the point that the nations that stand to lose the most from global warming (including, whether they admit it or not, China and the US) are working the hardest to increase the extraction rate of those same fossil fuels that are causing the problem in the first place.

The problem, Monbiot argues, is that while people are trying to address fossil fuel consumption in terms of limiting demand – nuclear power, hybrid cars, fluorescent lights – the real solutions will come only from limiting supply.

This comes the day after an article appeared in the Sacramento Bee, written by the brilliant environmental reporter Tom Knudson, detailing the environmental catastrophe that is developing in north central Alberta, deep in the heart of Canada, in the area of the Athabaska oil sands. There, Knudson writes, arsenic, mercury and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are endangering the health of the residents and destroying the environment for hundreds of miles around. Alberta is cursed with an Alliance government, which consist of wannabees who believe in Ayn Rand and the Invisible Hand and dream of becoming American-like plutocrats and being rich and stupid, instead of just plain stupid. So they stand carefully upwind, flutter their hands, and assure everyone that the free market has everyone’s best interests at heart. And nobody mentions that sand oil causes up to three times as much CO2, barrel for barrel, because of the extra energy and chemistry needed to turn what is basically asphalt into some sort of serviceable oil.

Meanwhile, in Siberia, a vast oil boom is taking place, and gleaming, ultramodern cities are springing up in regions once reserved for Stalin’s punishment camps. But the locals are experiencing problems, not only with the emissions caused by oil extraction, but from ever-increasing releases of methane, another greenhouse gas, caused by the melting of the bogs as temperatures warm.

Today, Al Gore gave a stirring speech at the Nobel Prize awards, warning that global warming was a “gathering, ominous and destructive” threat and said, “So today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer.”

Gore, berating both China and the US for each using the other as an excuse not to address the issue of global warming, also decried the demand-side approach to the problem, saying “We must abandon the conceit that individual, isolated, private actions are the answer.”

Stopping one step short of Monbiot’s extreme proposal, Gore urged that all new fossil fuel extractions and productions be required to capture and sequester the CO2 their process emits. Gore wryly noted that the idea wasn’t new, and indeed dated back a century. He said, “One of the very first winners of the Prize in chemistry worried that, ‘We are evaporating our coal mines into the air.’ After performing 10,000 equations by hand, Svante Arrhenius calculated that the earth's average temperature would increase by many degrees if we doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.”

We have nearly doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, of course.

Gore also proposed a “carbon tax”, which would probably be effective in developed nations. Making people pay for ALL the costs of burning carbon would provide a mighty impetus toward cutting usage, and would act as a surrogate supply-side solution. If, of course, the politicians had the courage to stick to it.

The BBC noted the biggest single element leading to global warming: the CO2 imbalances caused by deforestation. The same reporter who detailed the shocking retreat of the arctic sea ice last October was now in the rain forests of Borneo, showing the devastation wrought by the hardwood lumber industry and the wholesale burning of the forest. The tropical rain forests are the main source of the worlds’ carbon transpiration process, and they continue to rapidly vanish. Without them, there is little humanity can do, with or without carbon fuels, to stop the levels of CO2 from rising to levels that threaten the human race. On that, at least, America has a reasonably good track record over the past 25 years, although of course the ever-perverse Putsch junta has been working feverishly to undo the good done over that time. Canada’s record varies from mediocre to just plain dismal.

The elephant in the living room is that there are just too many people. We must begin a world wide comprehensive birth control program now, with resources going to small families in undeveloped nations in order to encourage them to remain small families. The inexorable math of population growth says that we will reach 10 billion people before zero population growth reaches equilibrium, so even ZPG might not be enough.

The alternative is that hundreds of millions and perhaps billions die from the dislocations of global warming; not just the storms, the droughts, and the floods, but from diseases caused by changing vectors as insects find new homes (the people in Iqaluit, on Baffin Island, were astounded by the sight of the first dragonfly ever seen in those parts last summer; luckily for them, dragonflies don’t bite humans and thus are less likely to spread contagion). Mass migrations as people seek food and arable land will lead to more starvation, conflict, and general war.

The only difference between that scenario and Monbiot’s modest proposal is that of time scale – and that is diminishing rapidly.

Last year, there was a shocking computer model released that suggested that the arctic could be ice free in late summer as early as 2035. Next week, the US Navy will release a report suggesting that we might see an ice-free arctic in as little as seven years.


We’re running out of time to avoid the worst impacts from global warming. It’s here. It’s now.

The fools in Washington should be begging Gore for answers, instead of playing juvenile practical jokes on him (Putsch made him walk back to his motorcade, nearly a half mile distant last week) and the rest of the world should be learning to curb fossil fuel production while working cooperatively to reduce consumption.