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

Monday 18 December 2006

NOW WE LIVE ON EARTH 2

If your thinking is still on Earth 1, the planet the human race used to live on, your brain is on the wrong planet. Your body is now on Earth 2, and heading for Earth 3, Earth 4, Earth 5....who knows?

The Earth we lived on for the past 10,000 years has gone. We now live on a different planet, and it is getting even more different at an accelerating rate. For one of thousands of examples, look at this BBC Report. Or go to the latest data from NOAA-NCDC which says that the September-November 2006 average temperature on land for the northern hemisphere was the highest on record (since 1880), and that 'anomalously warm temperatures have covered much of the globe throughout the year.'

Earth 1 thinking is wrong, dangerous, stupid. All our decisions now have to be Earth 2 decisions. We need Earth 2 thinking, Earth 2 planning, Earth 2 attitudes, Earth 2 actions. We have to do everything we can to prevent mass migration to Earth 3, Earth 4, Earth 5... Which is where we are all going IF WE DON'T DO SOMETHING FAST.

Wednesday 13 December 2006

ARCTIC ICE MELTING FASTER AND FASTER


In 2004 Arctic research and modelling predicted that it would be free of ice in summer in fifty-five years. Now the prediction has been shunted forward to about thirty-five years from now, perhaps only twenty-five, as this BBC article spells out. See also this article on the same subject in the New Zealand Herald.

As this blog has said many times, we have passed the point of no return in global-overheating, and matters are far worse than most people like to think or officialdom wants to admit (a point given more support by this BBC article).

We are therefore the greatest loonies in all human history, because we are doing nothing about it worthy of the name. We need to go on to a war footing to battle against our own stupidity, so that we at very least knock the top of the worst of the ineluctable effects.

Thursday 7 December 2006

ALGAE, OCEANS, RAIN, 500PPM's NASTY CONSEQUENCES


These excerpts are from the November/December issue of Update, the magazine for members of the New York Academy of sciences, in an article about James Lovelock's latest book The Revenger of Gaia.'

'In 2001, the Amsterdam declaration on Global Change ... said: "The Earth System behaves as a single, self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components. The interactions and feedbacks between the component parts are complex and exhibit multi-sclae temporal and spatial variability." '

'Take the ocean and algae. Above 4 degrees Celsius water expands as it warms, and if it is warmed from above by the sunlight, the top layer of the ocean absorbs the sun's heat and expands to form a lighter layer than the cooler waters running beneath. That layer forms when the sun is strong enough to raise the surface temperature above about 10 degrees Celsius. What then happens is that the surface layer remains stable and does not mix with the lower layers. The surface layer has a depth of only about 30 to 100 metres and it puts a tremendous constraint on ocean life. In the course of a warm season all the nutrients in it can get used up, and their dead bodies sink to the bottom, leaving only small, starving populations of algae. "This is why warm and tropical waters are so clear and blue; they are the deserts of the ocean."

'Algae are unusually influential in the Earth's climate. They remove carbon-dioxide from the air and use it for growth in a process called pumping down. They are also the source of the gas dimethyl sulphide, which oxidises in the air to become the tiny nuclei that seed the droplets of clouds. Algae face threats on several fronts. Besides warming waters, there is a threshold of carbon-dioxide abundance at which they fail to be able to engage the removal process. This occurs at about 500 parts per million (ppm). According to Lovelock, at our present rate of growth we will reach 500ppm within the next 40 years.' [It is now 380ppm, increasing at over 2.5ppm per year, rising.]

Saturday 2 December 2006

EIGHTY PERCENT OF AMERICANS IN DENIAL


This quotation from a BBC News article says it all: 'A recent poll carried out by the Pew Research Centre in Washington suggested that only two out of five Americans think global warming is caused by human activity and only one in five were personally worried by climate change. People in 15 countries, rich and poor, were asked that question. Concern in the US was the lowest of them all.'

The world's worst polluter is also the world's worst sticker of its head in the Arabian sands, down its coal-mines, up its SUV exhausts, etc. Anywhere but into the light of truth.

What a country! Christopher Columbus should have stayed home.

Friday 1 December 2006

CRITICAL ISSUES DOWN UNDER HAPPENING EVERYWHERE

This review in the New Zealand Herald of a book specifically about New Zealand applies to the whole planet. But the rise of 2-3 degrees Celsius being talked of is the most moderate projection, and the consequences even of that make 'alarming reading.' The earth is being pushed by human action from a 14-million-year-old icehouse to a greenhouse in nothing flat, and we can expect the oceans to rise 12 metres.

In Britain, the changes are already being felt. As its Climate-Change Minister says: 'Rising sea temperatures, ocean acidification and melting polar ice and not just predictions, they are happening now.'

Yet we still persist in our insane, murderous addiction to the black stuff. Cold turkey is required. Otherwise we will carry on turning the earth from a benign planet to a killing planet.