Earth on Fire: The Overheating Planet

Earth on Fire: The Overheating Planet

NOTE ON POPULAR POSTS

The reason some popular posts are tagged ‘no title’ is not because they have no title—they all do—but because the old Blogger embedded the title at the top of text, and the new software does not see that. You can see the titles in capitals at the start of each snippet. (It would be nice if Blogger introduced an upgrade program that could fix this little problem.)

Popular Posts

Friday 15 September 2006

ARCTIC ICE SHRINKS 14% IN ONE YEAR

BBC News says NASA has found an enormous loss in Arctic ice--14% in the 2004-2005 year, a huge increase on the former average of 0.7% per year. Because black water absorbs the heat from sunlight and white ice reflects it, the change from ice to water bodes ill for global-overheating. The area lost is the size Turkey or Pakistan.

Add to that this litany of ecological disasters culled from all over the planet, and you must again seethe with fury at the fact that no one of any consequence is doing a blind thing about it.

Wednesday 13 September 2006

MELTING PERMAFROST HERALDS ACCELERATED CLIMATE-CHANGE

Permafrost covers a fifth of the earth's surface. An estimated 200 billion tons of carbon is locked up in it. In Siberia, because of manmade global-overheating, land that has been frozen for 40,000 years is now melting, said a recent report on the BBC World Service (only a verbal report unfortunately, so there is no specific link for it, the nearest being this one, which only skated round the edges of the verbal report).

That makes a vicious cycle. The subsequent increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increases the speed of that melting, which increases the level of greenhouse gases. And so on. The final consequence could be a doubling of greenhouse gases. Double! That is a global catastrophe in the making, bubbling up unstoppably.

So the fuse on the 200-billion-ton timebomb has been lit and cannot be extinguished. As has been said many times in this blog, we have passed the point of no return. Everything is changed, except man's thinking. The planet we grew up with, the planet that mankind has lived on for 10,000 years, has gone. It will never come back; it will keep getting worse and worse; billions will die.

So enjoy driving your fragment of the biggest weapon of mass-destruction every built (the 900 million fossil-fuel vehicles). Enjoy using the electricity generated by those other weapons of mass-destruction, the coal-fired power-stations. Enjoy killing your children, your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren; and if not yours, someone's.

Thursday 7 September 2006

EAT MY ICE YOU 'JUNK-SCIENCE' SCEPTICS

An ice core from the Antarctic shows with absolute, scientific precision that there is more carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere than at any time in the past 800,000 years, and that never during that time has there been an increase anything like as fast as the one we have made by burning fossil fuels for the last 200 years, reports
BBC News

Underlining the point is what is happening at the other end of the planet, where 'permafrost' is melting and releasing ancient methane.

Futher underlining it are the retreating glaciers and disintegrating mountains at the heart of Europe.

Take all that, you dammned fools who have your deluded 'junk-science' heads buried in the Arabian sands and your hearts in your cursed petrol-powered bombs, all you who would deny the existence of your own grandmothers if it meant you could keep your looney addiction to your planet-wrecking lives.

But even you will have to give up sometime in the not too-distant future because addiction is burning through fossil fuels at the rate of twenty million years a year, which obviously cannot last.

So get a fuel-cell, guys; get a high-powered hydrogen future; get your glowing eyes focused on a car that produces humungous torque, even at zero revs: www.estarcar.com. And you can have whatever body you please (car body, that is), even, if you want it, one that looks like a Stealth Fighter.

Tuesday 5 September 2006

NASTY BUGS SPREADING AS WORLD WARMS

A report on BBC News shows that one of the obvious inevitable effects of global-overheating has already begun--the spread of warm-climate diseases into regions that have never seen them before.

O goody! Just what we needed--lots more horrid bugs to worry ourselves sick over.

Friday 1 September 2006

CLIMATE ALREADY IN DEEP STRIFE & PEAK OIL

The president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), John Holden, has told the BBC that the world has already entered a state of dangerous climate-change.

Which is what this scientist has been saying in this blog has been saying all along: we have already passed the point of no return. We cannot roll this one back. The best we can hope for, if we act fast, is to knock the top off the worst of it.

Holden says that one consequence is that the oceans may rise up to 4 metres this century.

An article in Bloomberg sets out superbly the Peak Oil arguments and counter-arguments. But one thing is certain--the liquid Black Stuff is running out at the rate of 85 millin barrels a day. When the wall will hit has yet to be seen, and what the consequences will be, ditto. But hit it will. And this century.