The Carbon Thread

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yeah yeah, I'm just saying that their presentation isn't very good. At the start of the piece they make all these "since records began" claims, then at the bottom they slip in that that was in 1978. Just undermines a worthwhile point I thought.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Ah right, I hadn't seen that bit. But that must just refer to 'official' records, since it's well known that people searched for but failed to find the NWP for hudreds of years.
 
Monbiot on climate change again: Civilization Ends with a Shutdown of Human Concern. Are We There Already?, via a look at both the UN's latest report and Cormac McCarthy's ravaged-earth, dystopian vision of the future in his novel, The Road.

Two of the problems he raises are worth a comment. Firstly, the media's increasing depoliticization of climate-change via gliberal 'commonsensical' capitalist realism, much as it does with, for instance, the banning of famine relief ads that mention a possible political origin to the problem ie famine has to be presented as a 'natural catastrophy' which the generous and sacred West will attempt to alleviate, the indigenous victims being forever grateful for such profound beneficence.

Extract

The BBC drops Planet Relief for fear of breaching its impartiality guidelines: heaven forbid that it should come out against mass death. But it broadcasts a program - Top Gear - that puts a match to its guidelines every week, and now looks about as pertinent as the Black and White Minstrel Show.

The schedules are crammed with shows urging us to travel further, drive faster, build bigger, buy more, yet none of them are deemed to offend the rules, which really means that they don’t offend the interests of business or the pampered sensibilities of the Aga class. The media, driven by fear and advertising, are hopelessly biased towards the consumer economy and against the biosphere.

It seems to me that we are already pushing other people ahead of us down The Road. As the biosphere shrinks, McCarthy describes the collapse of the protagonist’s core beliefs. I sense that this might be happening already: that a hardening of interests, a shutting down of concern, is taking place among the people of the rich world. If this is true, we do not need to wait for the forests to burn or food supplies to shrivel before we decide that civilization is in trouble.​

Impartiality guidelines ... I can imagine a future BBC panel discussion of rape and murder, the panel being composed of 3 in favour and 3 against. Must remain 'impartial' and post-political at all times: the political as uncivilized plague to be replaced by the 'neutral' administration of all social affairs ...

The second point of interest was the public's disavowal of any real problem and its continued belief in a magical Big Other that will somehow solve any possible crisis without anyone having to actually do anything, that status quo capitalism need not concern itself, being a flawless, infallible ideology:

Last week we learned that climate change could eliminate half the world’s species; that 25 primate species are already slipping into extinction; that biological repositories of carbon are beginning to release it, decades ahead of schedule. But everyone is watching and waiting for everyone else to move. The unspoken universal thought is this: “If it were really so serious, surely someone would do something?”​

The flipside of this naivete - fatalism - is equally disasterous, equally a self-fulfilling fait accompli: "If everything's ultimately fucked, then why shouldn't I fly on an aircraft as much as I like? Everyone else is. What difference would it make to anything if I stopped? Why should I be singled out? And why shouldn't I consume whatever I like? What's the point in all this 'recycling' nonsense if we're all doomed anyway?"

Any collective response as unimaginable, impossible, alien; any individual response as pre-emptively impotent.
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
amen, there's nothing more disappointing than the "left"'s response to the global climate crisis...flagrant hypocrisy in the ranks
 

turtles

in the sea
There's currently an ad running for the "enviro card" visa offered by a local credit union which features a couple getting ready for their work day in the washroom, with the wife busily hairspraying her hair and hubby dumping on the spray-on deodorant, all the while discussing the advantages of the new enviro card the wife just picked up. As you watch you start saying to yourself, "jesus! that's a lot of aerosol! don't these people realize their hypocrisy!" Then the kicker, the commercial ends with the line "The Vancity enviro card: for people with good intentions"

just...WOW. They're explicitly putting forward pretty much the arguments given here, and then saying hey don't worry, buy it anyway. I still can't get over it. It's just too fucking meta-hypocritical or whatever you'd want to call it. Scares the hell out of me.
 

Gavin

booty bass intellectual
Carbon credit schemes writ small -- the new indulgences -- purchase your guilt away. The next level of commodity fetishism -- WE WILL ABSOLVE YOU.

In related news, oil companies advertising like crazy on liberal cable channels like Bravo and BBCAmerica. Chevron touts its research into solar power (spends more than anyone don't you know); BP its geothermal energy programs. Footage of pristine nature, and oil company employees kitted out like antiglobalization protestors and hippies trekking through the wilderness in search of elusive energy (the tobacco-company-financed Truth campaign was an early incorporation of this "lifestyle"). The slogan: "It's a start." Practically delivered with a shrug, and then a middle finger. Trust in capital, it's bigger than you.
 

ecohook

ecohook
solid state go bye-bye, oh wait...

World's first FM/AM nano-radio transmitter (no, not an effin iPod) successfully tested at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. I believe this Marks the first audio signal transmitted via nano-machines.

t/l:
1. Layla - Derek and the Dominoes
2. Beach Boys - Good Vibrations
Listen here

According to Sagan, this sort of rivals the supremacy of Germany's first interstellar TV signal, no? Absolutely and completely swrrrrrrrrrrt.
 

ecohook

ecohook
Apologies. Thought I'd included the links to the news.

Brain vs. digital war was in process. I suppose I'll leave your suspenseful moment in shambles and let you speculate on what it could mean for the carbon fetish community. Still, this can't yet be matched

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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
There's currently an ad running for the "enviro card" visa offered by a local credit union which features a couple getting ready for their work day in the washroom, with the wife busily hairspraying her hair and hubby dumping on the spray-on deodorant, all the while discussing the advantages of the new enviro card the wife just picked up.

I thought aerosol sprays have been more or less environmentally harmless since they stopped using CFCs in the 80s?
 

Chuu

Well La Di Bloody Da
Two of my friends have just set up a company retiring EUA's from the European Union Emission Trading System: http://www.carbonretirement.com/ (NO SPAMO)

Talking to them they have explain to me why they believe it is a better way to reduce carbon emissions than traditional offsetting. Does anyone else think this is actually true? And is this the way we should be reducing our carbon emissions?

I don't just want to follow them blindly but I haven't really heard any of the arguments against their point of view
 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/3869753.stm

Sunspots reaching 1,000-year high
By Dr David Whitehouse
BBC News Online science editor

A new analysis shows that the Sun is more active now than it has been at anytime in the previous 1,000 years...
Dr Solanki is presenting a paper on the reconstruction of past solar activity at Cool Stars, Stellar Systems And The Sun, a conference in Hamburg, Germany. He says that the reconstruction shows the Maunder Minimum and the other minima that are known in the past thousand years. But the most striking feature, he says, is that looking at the past 1,150 years the Sun has never been as active as it has been during the past 60 years.

Turns out, four years later, we're now in an absolute solar minimum. No sunspots at all this month

http://www.dailytech.com/Sun+Makes+History+First+Spotless+Month+in+a+Century/article12823.htm
 
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scottdisco

rip this joint please

:slanted:

i took a train from Toronto to Vancouver last autumn and from about northwest Ontario onward the amount of people getting on with a one-way ticket for Edmonton and that area was notable.

at that point, the great flood of people migrating for work was supposed to be slowing down a little bit compared to earlier times but hearing from people from all over, the risk/reward equation was clearly still favourable, despite the horror stories
 

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
Climate scientists behaving badly?

How high is the standard of epistemic character that [the global-warming] hawks hold themselves to? I fear it is not as high as it ought to be. Even prior to the leaked emails we had evidence of failings in these virtues. The emails give yet more evidence and also show how little hold the enumerated epistemic virtues have on the professional milieu of climate science. Indeed, it appears that within climate science, epistemic vice is practised without shame, and with little awareness that the vicious practices are vicious.
 
D

droid

Guest
In relation to the hacked emails?

A bunch of climate scientists acted like total dicks and seriously damaged the credibility of themselves and the field. 4 or 5 lines of investigation and data out of thousands may be compromised. Right wing cretins and climate change deniers were on it like flies to shit, but even with the already damning evidence they felt the need to misquote and distort the nature of the emails.
More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/nov/25/monbiot-climate-leak-crisis-response
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentis...lobal-warming-leaked-email-climate-scientists
 
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vimothy

yurp
Yeah.

So what is the state of non-wingnut knowledge in the field now? Have any of the revelations changed what we thought we know? I've tried to trawl through the Guardian's website to find out what the actual effect on knowledge is, but everything seems to revolve around this three ring circus of who should get fired and who is to blame. I'm sure that's important, but I just want to know what this means in terms of climate change science. Can I buy that private jet I've always wanted?

Thanks
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I'm not sure, vim. My guess is 'almost certainly not' (in response to 'does it change what we know/thought we knew'). If you can afford a private jet then I'm coming up to Manchester for a pub crawl sharpish, and you are beyond all shadow of a doubt in the chair. In fact I'm close to City aiport right now, could you drop by and pick me up...?

Don't have a lot to add to the serious debate, except that I saw this yesterday in the Times: "World may not be warming, say [some] scientists" (of course, they didn't put in the "some"... :slanted:). One of the comments was priceless - some genius claiming that anthropogenic climate change is a con perpetuated by the NWO in order to bring about mass depopulation of the world to the tune of billions of people. The mind fucking boggles.
 
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