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 5 February 2007

DOOM AND GLOOM MERCHANTS

The pushers of the black stuff, the coal and oil peace-criminals, actually sell climate-ruin, disease, death, smog and solar-dimming, Doom and gloom.
RUIN NOT CHANGE; OVER-HEATING NOT WARMING

An old, wise, Roman saying says, 'When men cannot change things they change words', and Winston Churchill said, 'We build our houses then our houses build us.' The words we choose for things are very important, because they shape our thinking on them and generate our actions, or lack of action.

'Climate-change' and 'global-warming' sound so comfortable, so non-threatening. After all, a change is as good as a rest, variety is the spice of life, we are taught by advertising to thirst for the new. and everyone wants to be warm.

The truth is that we have climate-ruin and global-overheating. We have turned the sky into a weapon of mass-destruction; we are the cancer afflicting the planet.

Saturday 3 February 2007

IPCC AND THE MET OFFICE SCIENTIST

BBC News put a very revealing article beside the latest IPCC report, which makes even more gloomy reading than what the IPCC said. The IPCC report is of course a much tugged-at piece, a climate camel assembled by a committee, a throttled-back compromise. But Dr Vicky Pope, Head of the Climate Programme at the UK Met Office's prestigious Hadley Centre, puts things very plainly: 'Man-made climate change is established beyond reasonable doubt and further climate change is inevitable.'

'The latest climate models predict similar possible global average temperature changes to models used five or 10 years ago, ranging from 1.6-4.3C (2.9-7.7F) in the current best estimates using a mid-range emissions scenario.

'However, we are much more confident about these ranges. Using Hadley Centre models we have even been able to start to assign probabilities to more dangerous high temperature changes at the upper end of this range that could arise if climate turns out to be very sensitive to increased greenhouse gases.'

Which means they are not sure. And the actual readings are tracking along the top of the official predictions, which means we are veering towards the worst scenario, certainly not the best nor even the head-in-the-sand middling stuff. Because in a world hooked on the black stuff you can forget the mid-range scenario. So prepare for the worst (which on-the-edge computer models put at 10-14C round 2100).

Thursday 1 February 2007

SYDNEY, GLACIERS, GREAT BARRIER REEF DOOMED

The bad news on this ruined planet keeps coming at an accelerating pace. This week alone we have already been told that the world's glaciers are melting three times faster than they were in the 1980s, that Sydney is headed for almost permanent drought and a temperature rise of 5 degrees Celsius above the new global average, whatever that will be, and that the IPCC says the Great Barrier Reef will become a dead zone.