What will the pols say after we miss the deadline?

[Tom Adams]

The leaders are saying that it's almost too late to avert a climate
disaster. And, it is darn obvious that we are not going to act
quickly. So, what are we going to be hearing in the future?

Can look forward to a global consensus that we are going down the
tubes?

All leaders, except for a few right-wingers, will sound like Alastair
does now. And even some of the right-wingers will take this position
just to argue that action of futile.

I doubt that I will live to see the disaster, but this interesting
turn in the political dialog should be just around the corner. Right?

[Piotr Gutwiński]

You're right, but as you can see the policy on climate change and
disasters is often overlooked. Who cares enough now to the problem of
environmental protection, climate, etc. Maybe this topic will appear
in the political arena when these changes relied upon so far, that the
lack of response on our part will mean a catastrophe in itself

[hgerh...@yahoo.co.uk]

> The leaders are saying that it's almost too late to avert a climate
> disaster.  And, it is darn obvious that we are not going to act
> quickly.  So, what are we going to be hearing in the future?

It's obviously rhetoric. There is no deadline of 01/01/2012 by which
we have to turn a switch, and if we do, everything is dandy, and if we
don't every human will die on 01/01/2120 and there is nothing we can
do about it anymore after 01/01/2012.

And because it is merely a rhetorical device to emphasise "the urgency
of action" (itself a pretty vague concept), politicians and
environmental activists can still use it in 2030, maybe after focusing
on some other rhetoric in between.

[The Cunctator]

Mostly, politicians will continue to wonder why the global economy just seems to keep having problems, farmers will be upset that their five-year drought is a ten-year drought, and every month a few hundred to a few thousand people will die in some catastrophic flood/drought/fire/typhoon/heat wave.

And in ten to twenty years time, this will all add up to millions of people suffering or dying, the collapse of more economies and nations, and increases in conflict and war.

Humanity did pretty well for thousands of years with fewer than a billion people on the planet.

Realistically, it's hard to imagine that we didn't pass the threshold for arctic sea ice collapse and Arctic permafrost melt in the previous decade or so. The only reason for optimism is the long lag time gives us time for adaptation and/or radical geoengineering measures twenty years down the road.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/10/02/world/main5358294.shtml

The flood-ravaged Philippines is bracing for what could be a super typhoon (a category 4 or 5 in the U.S.), even as residents of the capital and outlying areas have barely recovered from last weekend's record rainfall that killed at least 293 people in the country.

[Alastair]

I dropped in yesterday for the first time in quite a while and saw my
name mentioned so I can't resist responding :-) Moreover, how the
sceptics would react when the shit hits the fan was something I had
been curious about. The answer I came to was that it would be no
different from now!

All men, and probably all women, will not admit that they are wrong.
The earliest citation I have found for that fact is in Dale Carnegie's
"How to Win Friends and Influence People." The driving force behind
all people is prestige. As Milton wrote "Fame is the spur that the
clear spirit doth raise (That last infirmity of noble mind)".
Therefor they cannot admit that they are wrong because they will "lose
face", and so lose prestige. Carnegie says that even if you win an
argument, your opponent will still believe that he is right, and would
have won if only he was better at arguing or had thought of the killer
argument which is ther if only he could think of it.

So the situation is that we have already passed the tipping point, but
people in general are still saying the same things. Here is Clive
James, an Australian by birth, now a British Broadcaster, praising
scepticism
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8322513.stm
yet the scientists are saying that "three of these boundaries [leading
to abrupt global environmental change](climate change, biological
diversity and nitrogen input to the biosphere) may already have been
transgressed."
http://www.stockholmresilience.org/planetary-boundaries

Ten years ago I was told by a friend of Wally Broecker that they
thought we had twenty years to put thing right. Two years later he
told me that some scientists believed that Greenland had already
passed the point of no return. In other words the effects of climate
change are happening much faster than it was believed before. Within
the last ten to fifteen years the live expectancy of the Greenland ice
sheet has change from thousands to hundreds of years, and of the
Arctic sea ice from 100 years to only 10.

But nobody is speaking out, except for Gordon Brown, who having seen
Al Gore's Nobel Prize, is obviously hoping he will be rewarded in that
way when he too is rejected by the voters in the forthcoming general
election.

There is a right wing mentality that we all share to some extent,
which says that disaster won't happen to me, and any one who warns
about it is just chicken. They are not the sort of people who change
their minds, so if they do suffer disaster it will not be their fault,
just a freak of nature or due to the scientists speaking with forked
tongue. See Clive James.

> I doubt that I will live to see the disaster, but this interesting
> turn in the political dialog should be just around the corner.  Right?

Wrong, the disaster is only a few years away. You will see it. Abrupt
changes happen with little warning by definition. Think of the Boxing
Day tsunami. So when the Arctic sea ice vanishes that will be the
global air conditioning system broke, and we can't fix that! But then
nobody could have predicted that, or at least that is the cry that
will go up.

Cheers, Alastair.

[Tom Adams]

On Oct 25, 7:39 pm, Alastair <a...@abmcdonald.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> I dropped in yesterday for the first time in quite a while and saw my
> name mentioned so I can't resist responding :-) Moreover, how the
> sceptics would react when the shit hits the fan was something I had
> been curious about.  The answer I came to was that it would be no
> different from now!
>
> All men, and probably all women, will not admit that they are wrong.
> The earliest citation I have found for that fact is in Dale Carnegie's
> "How to Win Friends and Influence People." The driving force behind
> all people is prestige. As Milton wrote "Fame is the spur that the
> clear spirit doth raise (That last infirmity of noble mind)".
> Therefor they cannot admit that they are wrong because they will "lose
> face", and so lose prestige. Carnegie says that even if you win an
> argument, your opponent will still believe that he is right, and would
> have won if only he was better at arguing or had thought of the killer
> argument which is ther if only he could think of it.
>
> So the situation is that we have already passed the tipping point, but
> people in general are still saying the same things. Here is Clive
> James, an Australian by birth, now a British Broadcaster, praising

> scepticismhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8322513.stm

I was beginning to think I had mentioned your name in vain :-)

There is apparently not a single popular book or article on exceeding
the nitrogen input boundary. We the people did not even notice. We
didn't even have a chance to be apathetic or go into denial about
reaching a global change tipping point. Kinda breathtaking. Could that
be?

[Alastair]

There are pretty few popular books about abrupt climate change, but it
did happen in the past. See "the Two Mile Time Machine" by Richard
Alley. The fossil fuel and associated industries have put up such a
smoke screen with discaussion on whether climate change is happening,
abrupt change hardly gets a mention.

But the financial sector relied on computer models, and that has
crashed. The climate is also modeled using computures, and it too is
a dynamical system, so it is quite possible that the climate will
also crash unexpectedly.

The point is that no-one will believe you if you say the end of the
world is coming. They equate you with a man carrying a sandwich board
with the slogan "Prepare to Meet Your Doom." Therefore the scientists
know what is happening, daren't speak out or they will be ridiculed.
That is exactly what James Lovelock found when he visited the Hadley
Centre, which he describes in "Gaia's Revenge".

But abrupt climate change is not even mentionsed in the Stockholm
paper http://www.stockholmresilience.org/planetary-boundaries So
you see what a dire situation we are in

The main problem is over population. With a population of 650
million rather than 6.5 billion we might be able to cope. There
would be no global warming because there would be less industry.
The forests would not need clearing, water would not be a
problem, etc.

But we are still expecting the population to continue rising
during the 21st Centruy. That will make cutting back on CO2
emissions impossible. But if we don't cut back on the
population, Mother Nature will do it for us with wars,
epidemics, droughts, floods, and famines.

Cheers, Alastair.

[Don Libby]

> Mother Nature will do it for us with wars,
>epidemics, droughts, floods, and famines.

Mother Nature causes wars?

What the pols will say is quite trivial to predict: those outside the US
will blame the US and those inside the US will blame each other.

-dl

[Tom Adams]

On Oct 25, 7:39 pm, Alastair <a...@abmcdonald.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:

> I dropped in yesterday for the first time in quite a while and saw my
> name mentioned so I can't resist responding :-) Moreover, how the
> sceptics would react when the shit hits the fan was something I had
> been curious about.

The answer is already in evidence.

The warmer temperatures in Helena Montana are wiping out the pines due
to mountain pine beetle, and it's mostly pines there. People are
shelling out $1000 per acre to address the resulting fire hazard. And
the area is a Republican stronghold, infested with deniers well before
the beetles started surviving the winters in droves.

Some deniers are trying to blame insufficient thinning or fire
suppression policies. But the most common denier response is to
accept climate change as the cause, but to continue to deny that
climate change is man-made. These Republicans will never admit that
Al Gore was right decades ago. They still hate what they view as
Democratic Party propaganda about man-made global warming.

[Alastair]

Yes, I had already realised that the rednecks would never accept the
blame. I was critisied for using the term redneck which is of course
pejorative. "Reds" are of course communists, so perhaps I can define a
new term "brownecks" which are people with right wing views
(conservatives) which range from hill-billys to international
entrepeneurs such as the Australian Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox TV
and the British newspapers; the Sun and the Times. With these
newspapers steady drip, drip, drip of anti European news, he has
alienated the UK electorate from the European Union, and he is
applying the same techneiques in the US to persuade people that AGW is
a scam. Being a browneck, he believes he is working in the interests
of humanity. but he is ensuring its destruction.

And so to bed,

Cheers, Alastair.