CHARMING ANSWER TO CLIMATE CHANGE IN SOIL?

Is this is a magic, climate-fixing triple bullet? Does the answer, literally, lie in the soil? Is a little charring all we need? Can we just 'char'm the global mess away with three simple steps?

You pyrolise biomass, which (1) generates renewable energy, and (2) makes 'agrichar' a material that reduces greenhouse gases, and (3) makes your soil far more productive (the only problem is that at the moment the supply of agrichar is miniscule). For details, go to this ScienceDaily article.

(Agrichar is a black-carbon byproduct of pyrolysis, in which green waste or other biomass is heated without oxygen to generate renewable energy.)

BUSINESS AS USUAL MAKES EARTH UNUSUAL

China shows itself to be as incredibly stupid about the planet as America in this BBC report. What a wonderful way to mark World Environment Day!

Business-as-usual condemns the planet to become increasingly unusual, i.e., decreasingly good for human life. This NZ Herald cartoon says it all.

NASA SAYS CLIMATE TIPPING-POINT CLOSE

NASA's Goddard Flight Centre and Columbia University's Earth Institute say that the Earth's climate is dangerously close to a number of tipping points. Just 1 degree Celsius more above the average global temperature we had in 2000 will be enough to send things over the edge. Read the report on their latest research in Science Daily. Another report on the same research is here and the May 30 NASA article is here.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that we will be there soon. Nations are banking their futures on oil, huge investment is being put into oil pipelines, coal-fired power-stations are being built at a furious rate in China, America is tearing mountains to pieces to get vast quantities of coal to feed its power-stations, tens of millions of planet-trashing Black Stuff cars are being added annually to the 900 million already infesting the planet, etc., etc.

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC'S ICE MELTDOWN SHOCK

The cover story in the latest edition of the National Geographic magazine (June 2007) is 'The Big Thaw.' It should be required reading for every in-denial-prat of a politician and petrol-head, every pusher of the Black Stuff (oil and coal), and every pusher of fossil-fuelled machines.

It talks of projections of ice-cover, which predict huge reductions, and the consequent rise in the sea-level, but it also says that the meltdown is happening far faster than former projections ever expected. Greenland and West Antarctica and glaciers all over the world are melting at an alarming rate.

Excerpts: 'But lately, the ice loss has outstripped the upward creep of global temperatures.'

'Eric Rignot, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who has measured a doubling in ice loss from Greenland over the past decade, says: "We see things today that five years ago would have seemed completely impossible, extravagant, exaggerated." '

'At the rate the Arctic is now warming [temperatures three to five degrees Celsius higher could be back soon]--"by mid-century, no problem," says Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona, who has studied the ancient climate [130,000 years before the last ice-age]. "There's just unbelievable warming in the Arctic. It's going much faster than anyone thought it could or would." '

'The latest signs from Greenland have persuaded many ice researchers that sea level could rise three feet [a metre] by 2100. Rignot, who has measured the rush of glaciers to the sea, says even that figure may turn out to be an underestimate. Greenland, he notes, could ultimately add ten feet to global sea level. "and if this happens in the next hundred years instead of the next several hundred years, that's a very big deal."

Indeed. Enjoy your coal-fired electricity. Enjoy your fossil-fuelled life-destroying vehicle. Enjoy the remains of Earth as we have known it for all of human civilisation. Enjoy your share of trashing the only planet we can live on in the entire universe.

SMITHSONIAN WATERS DOWN CLIMATE SCIENCE

If you want to keep your funding, you don't upset the politicians, even at the expense of scientific facts, and even if you are the prestigious Smithsonian. The full report can be read in the
International Herald Tribune.

Money and the maintenance of old habits and institutions are always more important than the planet and the people who live on it. Well done, Smithsonian! You've junked science.

DEADLOCK FOR UN CLIMATE MEETING.

So ran the BBC headline in an appropriately mortal pun.

Dead. Lock.

Locked in the habits of death. So goes the planet...

That should read unclimate, not UN Climate.

JANUARY-TO-APRIL WAS WARMEST ON RECORD

The National Climatic Data Centre of the National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration in the United States has posted the preliminary data for
April 2007. Its summary says, 'globally averaged combined land and sea surface temperature was the warmest on record for January-April year-to-date period and third warmest for April. Global land surface temperature was warmest on record in April.'

Precipitation anomalies were all over the place, and the extent of northern sea-ice continues to decline.

The global temperature average on land for January-April was 1.35 degrees Celsius above the 1961-1990 baseline, and the global land+sea average was 0.69 degrees above, both the highest figures on record. Yet the IPCC says we must not go above a 2-degree increase if we are to avoid catastrophe. And this is only 2007.

SIMPLE WAY TO MAKE HYDROGEN ON DEMAND

An engineer at Purdue University, Jerry Woodall, has developed a stunning new way of making hydrogen from an alloy of alumunium and gallium. You just add water to pellets of it and out pours hydrogen. The waste products are gallium, which can be recycled back into the making of new pellets, and alumina (aluminium oxide), which can be recycled back into pure aluminium, and thus also into new pellets.

The Purdue process would eliminate the need to have hydrogen-storage systems using high-pressure tanks or those problematical metal-hydrides. You can have tanks of pellets and water and produce gas on demand, at a reasonable cost. The aluminium would, of course have to be produced using a planet-friendly source of power, such as hydro, solar or wind, but the process looks ideal. It has been patented. A new company in Indiana, AlGalCo LLC, has an exclusive licence to commercialise it.

If the process is as simple as it seems, it would be ideal for the EStarCar. The central bay in the car's chassis, instead of containing high-pressure hydrogen bottles, would have tanks for pellets and water. You get about a kilogram of hydrogen (12,000 litres) from every litre of water, so not much would need to be carried.

A GOOD OVERVIEW OF CLIMATE-MODELLING

This link on the BBC World Service site is a good general look at today's sophisticated climate modelling. The one used at the Hadley Research Centre (part of the UK Met Office) is one the world's best.

DEEPLY SHOCKING NEWS ON C02 EMISSIONS

Climate scientists have long feared that the oceans, which have been soaking up vast amounts of the carbon-dioxide that we have been pumping into the atmosphere, would reach the point where they had taken all they could take, and would start spitting it back. They would change from carbon-sinks to carbon-sources, and global-overheating would therefore accelerate. Now that process has begun, as the BBC World Service reports--forty years ahead of 'schedule.' This is the
Times' report on the same research findings. And the Guardian's, which is perhaps the best of the three. Australia's Courier Mail makes clearest the fact that the former sink is now a source, that the planet's ability to soak up our stupidity is coming to an end.

The Southern Ocean, the ocean that surrounds the Antarctic, accounts for 15% of the absorption, so the change is signicant. The fear is that all the world's oceans are not far behind in choking on our 9.2 billion tonnes per year of CO2 sewage. Other carbon-sinks also have the potential to turn to carbon-sources, or at very least cease to be sinks. Forests can absorb only so much (see the sidebar stories at the BBC site given above).

As this blog has often warned, things are going to get much worse much faster than the official line would have us believe. We are well past the point of no return. The most we can hope for now is to knock the top off the worst of the effects of this global Black Stuff insanity.

Meanwhile, from the Homer Simpson kingdom of General (which has made more planet-trashing machines than anyone else) there has been an announcement that a million fuel-cell vehicles might be rolling off their production-lines after 2012. That is the very same GM that a few years ago was boasting that it would have a million FCVs coming off those same mythical production-lines by 2010. Nice to see such planet-friendly honesty spilling from the honest mouths of honest-to-goodness peace-criminals.

DNA PROVED MORE THAN WAS THOUGHT

As this blog daringly postulated in November 2006, purely from gedunken processes, empirical research has now established that the so-called junk DNA processes genes. But that ScienceDaily report (derived from Nature magazine) shows there is still a long way to go. The full power and detailed processing function of the 'junk' has yet to be revealed and understood.

DAIMLER-CHRYSLER'S CRIMINAL WASTE OF MONEY

Daimler Benz bought Chrysler nine years ago for $US36 billion. Now it is selling it for $US7 billion. $US29 billion down the toilet. Even at GM's grossly outrageous figure (read off-the-wall fictional figure) for developing a fuel-cell car--$US2 billion--that would have done the job fourteen times over. And at the human-scale, real-world costing for the EStarCar it would have done it 58,000 times over.

Hubristic corporate games, once again, have got between humanity and keeping this planet fit for human life. The people responsible for this kind of shemozzle should be tried for in the International Court in the Hague for crimes against humanity and imprisoned for the rest of their lives.

(It is fitting that the outfit that has bought Chrysler is called Cerberus, which in Ancient Greek mythology is the name of the monstrous three-headed dog that guarded the gate of hell, because black-stuff-burning cars are turning the earth into an anti-human hell.)

CAPITALIST DEMOCRACY & OVERHEATING EARTH

What we call democracy is not a true democracy--'government of the people, by the people, for the people.' It is actually an elected dictatorship, in which a small group uses an occasional popularity contest to win power over the majority. The resulting system is necessarily backward-looking and interested in maintaining the status quo for fear of losing popularity. Capitalism, too often a financial dictatorship, complete with marketing propagandists, is also backward-looking because it tends to keep doing what was profitable yesterday because of its invested interest and its fear of losing money in any change--even a change for the good of the planet.

The combination of 'democracy' and capitalism therefore has massive inertia against change, at the very time when we need very rapid change because the major product of that combination has messed up the planet irreparably. As Einstein said you cannot fix a problem using the same kind of thinking that caused it.

The length of time and the amount of space needed to stop an oil-tanker is an excellent and very apt analogy of the problem. Which is why it will not be solved in time.

Where there is a will there is a way. But bad habits prevent the operation of good will.

THE FUSE IS LIT AND DETONATION COMETH

Winston Churchill might have been speaking of global-overheating when he said: 'Things do not get better by being left alone. Unless they are adjusted, they explode with a shattering detonation.'

UNLIMITED FUSION ENERGY AVAILABLE NOW

A simple system for converting unlimited fusion-power to electricity has been operating for several decades in what has to be called nothing more than a global pilot scheme. Now that its success has been amply demonstrated it is well past the time it should be used to the hilt.

Virtually every building can be fitted with the system. There is a small drawback in that the only functioning fusion-reactor, albeit huge, is not close enough to the points of consumption to allow easy transmission by conventional means, such as wires, or even microwave beams. But, thankfully, the reactor itself operates a staggeringly powerful transmission system. The result is that enough power arrives every day at the sum of all the surface-points on earth to satisfy the energy-needs of all its inhabitants for over twenty-five years. And the technology used to tap this power is very simple. It is made from purified sand. There are no moving parts. The underlying principle was discovered by a Frenchman in 1839 and the first functioning device was built at Bell Labs in the United States in 1952. If the technology were in use everywhere the use of Black Stuff could cease (except for aircraft exhausts), and the planet would be a far better place.

(For those who have not yet seen the tongue-in-cheek point, the giant fusion-reactor is called Sol, aka the sun; the staggeringly powerful transmission system is sunlight; the device discovered in 1952 is the photovoltaic cell, aka the solar cell. Fusion power is staring us in the face. So why bother with that profligately expensive ITER project in France? If the same amount of money were spent on solar cells that were then given to millions of households we would achieve vastly beneficial results immediately. That 'fusion' dream-or-delusion keeps receding into the distance. The planet cannot afford to wait on its snake-oil peddling.)

IPCC REPORTS AND ALL THOSE WASTED YEARS

IPCC reports are dangerously conservative because they are predicated on mid-range projections and are outrageously watered down for the sake of a careless political consensus, but it is still an enormous pity that no one took any real notice of them. The IPCC was formed in 1988, and issued its first report in 1990. It was not till its second in 1995 that any action was taken--and that was only the Munich Agreement of global-overheating: worthless Kyoto.

UNREAL CARBON-FOOTPRINTS FOR GUILT-TRIPPERS

Someone who flies is often accused of having a huge carbon-footprint, but the reasoning is false.

First, the entire airline industry accounts for only about 3% of the total greenhouse-gas emissions. If that was all we had we would have achieved a 97% cut, and the planet could easily handle what was left.

Second, whether that person flies or not does not affect the flight. It will still happen; its fuel will still be burned. There would have to be a mass, ongoing boycott to stop it. And most of the weight is in the aircraft and its fuel, not the passengers. In total they account for no more than about 10%, so adding one individual makes only a very tiny difference to the fuel-consumption.

In contrast the carbon-footprint created when that person drives to the airport is huge. So people who point accusing fingers at the airlines should reserve their venom for what is in their own garages and over at the coal-fired power-stations that generate their power. Or is that too close to home? Better to shift the blame to that extremely horrid 3% up there than face the fact that you are part of the catastrophic 97% right here. Otherwise you might have to think about giving up your own planet-wrecking habits. You might even have to turn thought to action. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaarggh!

IRAQ IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE PLANET

A nice contrast! Last week we had two international conferences. One in Egypt on Iraq, the other on the planet in Thailand. The first ended with mortal warnings and a pile of recommendations, but no promises, no commitments, no money. The second ended with billions of dollars of promises and commitments.

We could handle a meltdown in Iraq. A meltdown of the planet does not bear thinking about. Three cheers for getting the priorities right!

IPCC REPORTS ARE DAMNED, DANGEROUS, CRIMINAL LIES

The problem with reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is that they begin as science and end as committee politics. The truth gets watered down--i.e., changed to lies of the vested-interest kind. The latest batch of IPCC recommendations, however dire, underlines that, because they are all based on the message that as long as we don't go past a global carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere of 550 parts per million all will be well (see this BBC report).

Bunkum.

This article in the New Zealand Herald (amongst many others that can be found by searching on "400ppm carbon-dioxide") shows that we cannot go past a mere 400ppm without guaranteeing catastrophe. We are now at 383ppm, increasing at over 2ppm per year (see the NOAA site). That gives us less than ten years to quit, absolutely, producing billions of tonnes of carbon-dioxide, which obviously will not happen, given the global addiction to the black stuff (coal and oil). The fictitious deadline of 550ppm will underline that sad fact in vast quantities of blood, sweat and tears.

There is also the small but important fact that the IPCC bases its science on computer modelling, and takes the mid line through the data. The actual readings are tracking along the top, heading for the worst.

The mountains at both ends of the earth are telling the terrible truth--see these reports in the New Zealand Herald on the permanent damage that climate ruination has done and is doing to glaciers on Mount Cook (NZ's highest peak) and Mount Zugspitze (Germany's highest).

But the vested interests are not interested. How long do they think we will listen to their falsified reports instead of to the planet?

BUY SOME GLOBAL POLLUTION: VERY CHEAP

China's industrial revolution is causing massive pollution, and it is on course to overtake the filthy United States as the world's worst. Pollution has no borders. Therefore every time we buy cheap Chinese goods we are buying another chunk of global pollution, and asking for more. Global overheating is thus for sale in every High Street. Very cheap. Roll up, roll up!

MOST HABITABLE PLANET IN THE UNIVERSE FOUND

It is called Earth. As it was in 1790. Before we started burning the Black Stuff (that's fossil fuels, if you're new to this blog). Sadly, that planet no longer exists. Even more sadly, there isn't another one we can all go to. The problem is that Earth was invaded by aliens. Half were disguised as businessmen, but after two hundred years their voracious appetite for Black Stuff blew their cover at last. The other half were disguised as politicians, but so far their very clever camouflage (that voting for them is democracy) is holding up. Meanwhile Earth is becoming less habitable by the minute.

But if you clicked on the link to this post expecting to find something about Gliese 581c, then try this well-written article in the Daily Athenaeum, the paper of West Virginia University. Well said, that man. His four points near the end are, sadly, too true.

HUMAN-BEINGS CANNOT CHANGE THE CLIMATE

So someone said in a recent debate on 'climate change' (read climate ruin) on the New Zealand Herald's site (click here for the paper's homepage).

Really!?

What is the climate? It is the state of the sky. Can humans change the sky? Of course. The excretions from every exhaust-pipe and chimney-stack change it. The weather is an activity that takes place in the sky; the characteristics of a mixture have the characteristics of all its components; and we have changed the mix in the sky to one that has never before existed in the entire history of the planet. Only fools could think that that has had no effect on the climate and the weather. Ditto those who cannot see that there ARE weapons of mass-destruction (WMDs) in Iraq. They are called oil-wells. The excretions of countless oil-wells and coal-mines are turning the global sky into a WMD.

No, trumpet the fools, that is not true. No, no, that is not true. No, no, no that is not true. Yet every breath they take to utter that lie is a breath of changed air.

IS GLOBAL OVERHEATING WRITTEN ON CLOUDS?

A new satellite study aims to find out if the unsettling spread of 'night-shining' clouds is a sign of global overheating. Details in this Science Daily article.

SOLAR DEVICE THAT TURNS CO2 INTO FUEL?

If this thing can be made to work, and if we can build the vast numbers needed to remove 10 billion tonnes of carbon-dioxide from the sky annually, until we have wound the concentration back to 280ppm, which is what it was before we started burning black stuff, we will be OK.

IF and IF. Very, very big IFs. But watch that space.

SO-CALLED LIFE FUELS WILL KILL 10,000

Why can none of their addicts see that so-called 'bio' fuels (bio means life) are nothing to do with life. They still pollute, and, worse, they take food out of people's mouths, so they are nothing more than a blind attempt to keep the damn machines that mess up the planet.

As this
BBC report points out, the 10,000 who will still die from air-pollution if everyone used E85 would be fine if we changed to electric cars. And see this site for a comparison of CO2 generated by electric cars, which shows them far superior, even if the power comes from filthy coal-fired generation. They are also far cheaper to run, a point that has not been lost on the French Post Office, La Poste..

But ignore all that, because if you do--O goody, goody, goody!--you can carry on killing 10,000 people--three hundred times as many as were killed at Virginia Tech. Every single year. Without having to buy a gun. Just carry on using morifuels (mori means die).

THE EASY FIX FOR GLOBAL OVERHEATING?

The United Nations Security Council has now recognised global overheating as the greatest threat to global security, and it is a fact that the United States is the world's worst polluter. It is therefore obvious that the US must be recognised as an evil empire, that it must be attacked by the rest of the world, and for the global good reduced to carbon-free rubble.

;-) ;-) ;-)

EVEN THE US GOVT SAYS PEAK OIL COMING

This report by the US Government Accountability OFFICE was headed 'US Needs A Peak Oil Strategy.' It says that when peak oil will occur is hard to pin down, but the consensus of various studies is somewhere between now and 2040. The report has drawn praise for its un-biased, no-nonsense approach.

So we have yet another reason to stop using the black stuff ASAP. But, of course, no one of any consequence will take a blind bit of notice. Carry on as if the world has not changed. As if there will always be a succession of tomorrows just the same as all our yesterdays. Until it is far too late.

THE ESTARCAR AIMS AT THE AUTO X-PRIZE

If sufficient sponsorship can be found in time the EStarCar is to be entered for the prestigious X-prize. Click here for more details.

NEGOTIATE IPCCC TEXT BUT DAMN THE PLANET

The governments of over a hundred countries were prepared to work like galley-slaves for a week, then right through the night, to negotiate the text of the latest IPCCC report, but they they aren't prepared to negotiate the state of the planet and the quality of human life on it (see the BBC's news item, which includes a link to a PDF of the IPCCC's report).

In spite of some gerrymandering and watering-down the report makes clear that global overheating is already having a demonstrable, serious, negative impact on the climate of the entire planet, that the damage is lasting, and that the consequences will be dire. Between the lines it is clear that we have gone well past the point of no-return.

The stark truth is that the best conditions for human civilisation have gone. The worst are on the way. There is no good future for the human race. Increasingly, life will become nasty, brutish and short. Billions will die.

India encapsulates the state of the world. Its economy is booming, its technology is racing ahead, it is becoming a global power. But its environment and climate are going backwards. A vital example is that the Ganges is shrinking as the glaciers that feed it melt away. The tension between the forward and backward movements is inexorably rising, as if they were tied together by an enormous, unbreakable, rubber rope. Ultimately the regression that man is forcing on the planet will snap backwards his progress in economy and technology.

But don't worry about it, politicians. Just worry about hanging on to power at the next election. Don't worry about it, bureaucrats. Just worry about the next pettifogging committee meeting about regulatory trivia. Don't worry about, businessmen. Just worry about your market share and the size of your profits and bonuses. Don't worry about it car-owners. Just worry about getting from A to B regardless of the poison pouring from your exhaust-pipes.

Everybody, please continue to ignore clean solar-cell/fuel-cell technology, because that will keep their prices high and thus keep them unaffordable. Instead, please keep using planet-trashing technologies to the hilt, thus keeping their prices low. In short, please keep being murderous, suicidal fools. Carry on being the lemming-generation.

If you want to do something for this tattered planet and its polluted sky, click here. The EStarCar doesn't cost megabucks and decades to develop, it doesn't pollute the sky, its body can have whatever shape and function you want, it can be manufactured by small teams in small premises than can be rapidly multiplied all over the planet, most of it can be recycled (except for such things as tyres and rubber door-seals), and being alloy it will last decades longer than the heavy, rusting planet-trashers made by the Big Iron carmakers. Their bottom line is money and greed. This car's bottom line is the planet, which means life and the quality of life.

THE AMAZON FACES MORE DEADLY DROUGHTS

That headline, on the BBC's website, should strike a chill of fear into every sentient human being. Sadly, few will notice, few will care, and nobody will do a blind thing about trying to stop the slow death of the largest portion of the Earth's lungs.

IS GLOBAL OVERHEATING OVERPLAYED IN THE MEDIA?

Perhaps, but far better overplayed than under, because the fight against it is being so underplayed as to be virtually non-existent. And with the quality of life of the whole human race at stake, plus the vitality of the whole biosphere, any 'overplaying' is entirely appropriate.

But every do-nothing politician, business, vehicle owner, coal-merchant, oil-baron, etc., is certainly guilty of grossly overplaying power, money, stupidity and ignorance. By their sins of omission and comission they militate against everyone who wants to do something. They thwart them at every turn by carrying on gearing things for profligate planetary ruin instead of the continuance of optimal human life.

FAR TOO BUSY FOR THE PLANET!

It sounds crazy, and it is; it beats all the insanities that human beings commit against themselves. But 'too busy for the planet', combined with the insane addiction to the black stuff, is why virtually no one is doing anything effective about global overheating and climate ruination. Certainly not the rich and powerful.

A rich man who was asked recently to spend a couple of hours considering investing in the EStarCar said he had too much on his plate. That includes preparing to sail round the very planet he does not have time to bother his stupid head with. He should look down at his feet, consider what supports them and consider whether its state of health has anything to do with his.

Insanity varies with the cube of wealth...

Wordsworth was right:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we have in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours
And are upgathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not...

EARTH'S NEGATIVE NEWS GETS WORSE AND WORSE

Yet another authoritative study shows that we have really messed up this planet for human habitation, and that there is a lot worse to come, as this media summary shows, backed by the NOAA report on which it is based).

Salient excerpts from the media summary make grim reading:

'Oceans worldwide absorbed approximately 118 billion metric tons of carbon between 1800 and 1994 according to a report published last year by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and NOAA, resulting in increased ocean acidity, which reduces the availability of carbonate ions needed for the production of calcium carbonate structures. In the past, changes in ocean acidity have triggered mass extinction events. According to a study published in the September issue of Geology, dramatically warmer and more acidic oceans may have contributed to the worst mass extinction on record, the Permian extinction. During the extinction event, which occurred some 250 million years ago, about 95% of ocean's life forms became extinct. The same fate could befall modern day marine life.'

'A draft U.N. report obtained by Reuters on Thursday said warming is expected to turn the planet a bit greener by spurring plant growth, but crops and forests may wilt beyond mid-century if temperatures keep rising. That report, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will be released on April 6.'

'The conclusions are negative for agriculture: it appears that the global warming process has produced damages to almost every commonly grown grains over 20 years. The damages are estimated at $5 billion.

'Warming temperatures from 1981 to 2002 cut the combined production of wheat, corn, barley and other crops by 40 million tonnes per year.'

SETTING CARBON CAPS IS INSANE

We do not set the maximum amount of carbon-dioxide and methane etc., that the atmosphere can take. The planet does. And we were told at the big scientific conference in London at the beginning of 2005 that 400ppm is it--and that 'there is no safe increase' from the 380ppm that we were then at. Which means we have reached the planet's cap. Any figure dreamed up by brain-damaged politicians is therefore irrelevant, and dangerous (because it looks like useful action), and very stupid.

Setting 'carbon caps' is like a doctor telling a cancer patient that he has to have a certain amount of cancer. Just live with it, sir. And die.

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.

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).

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.

IPCC SAYS GLOBAL DOOM INEVITABLE

Now, at last, the IPCC is it seems going to tell us that we have passed the point of no-return, as the quotations below from The Observer, London, dated January 22nd, make chillingly clear.

'Global warming is destined to have a far more destructive and earlier impact than previously estimated, the most authoritative report yet produced on climate change will warn next week.

'A draft copy of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows the frequency of devastating storms will increase dramatically. Sea levels will rise over the century by around half a metre; snow will disappear from all but the highest mountains; deserts will spread; oceans will become acidic, leading to the destruction of coral reefs and atolls; and deadly heatwaves will become more prevalent.

'The impact will be catastrophic, forcing hundreds of millions of people to flee their devastated homelands, particularly in tropical, low-lying areas, while creating waves of immigrants whose movements will strain the economies of even the most affluent countries.

'The really chilling thing about the IPCC report is that it is the work of several thousand climate experts who have widely differing views about how greenhouse gases will have their effect. Some think they will have a major impact, others a lesser role. Each paragraph of this report was therefore argued over and scrutinized intensely. Only points that were considered indisputable survived the process.

' "This is a very conservative document -- that's what makes it so scary," one senior UK climate expert said.

'Although the final wording of the report is still being worked on, the draft indicates that scientists now have their clearest idea so far about future climate changes, as well as about recent events. It points out that: twelve of the past thirteen years were the warmest since records began; ocean temperatures have risen at least 3km beneath the surface; glaciers, snow cover and permafrost have decreased in both hemispheres; sea levels are rising at the rate of almost 2mm a year; cold days, nights and frost have become rarer while hot days, hot nights and heatwaves have become more frequent.

'And the cause is clear, say the authors: It is very likely that [man-made] greenhouse gas increases caused most of the average temperature increases since the mid-20th century, the report says.

'To date, these changes have caused global temperatures to rise by 0.6 degrees Celsius The most likely outcome of continuing rises in greenhouses gases will be to make the planet a further 3 degrees hotter by 2100, although the report acknowledges that rises of 4.5 to 5 degrees could be experienced. Ice-cap melting, rises in sea levels, flooding, cyclones and storms will be an inevitable consequence.

'The report reflects climate scientists' growing fears that Earth is nearing the stage when carbon dioxide rises will bring irreversible change to the planet.'

Really? As anyone with half an eye can see we have already passed that stage.

Underlining the point is the resetting of the Doomsday Clock, which now says global-overheating is as serious a threat to the human race as nuclear weapons. The clock now say it's five minutes to midnight. More than a tad optimistic obviously, but tick, tick, tick...

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IS PSYCHOLOGICAL ABUSE

But it is now far more subtle and lot less messy than when the Nazis did it. Instead of Auschwitz and Buchenwald we now have concentration camps of the mind and gas-ovens of the heart. But the result is the same. Good society goes up in smoke and generations are ruined.

In the story of the Emperor's new clothes, it was politically correct to say that his clothes were magnificent--'only fools cannot see them.'

The wise avoid the trap of allowing such psychological abuse to distort their vision and judgement, and their duty to cry out the truth.

CHRYSLER SCOFFS AT GLOBAL OVERHEATING

Van Jolissaint, Chrysler's chief economist (obviously a very learned scientist!), says
in this BBC item that climate-change is 'way, way in the future, with a high degree of uncertainty.', He was also scathing about the Stern Report, which put the cost of doing nothing at $US10 trillion.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, there is the prediction for 2007--that it will be the hottest on record (since 1860, that is). Is that 'way, way in the future'?

But Van Jolissaint knoweth better. For--behold!--he is the chief economist at Chrysler.

As this article in the New Zealand Herald shows, New Zealand's weather went very pear-shaped last year--and that is a country that used to have a stable climate. Before, that is, all the Van Jolissaints wrecked the planet. Is 2006 'way, way in the future'?

But Van Jolissaint knoweth better. For--behold!--he is the chief economist at Chrysler.

Then there is this dire
scientific prediction for Europe, which the EU takes very seriously.

But Van Jolissaint knoweth better. For--behold!--he is the chief economist at Chrysler.

No, he is a just another of the damned peace-criminals that have made hundreds of millions of planet-trashing machines, and called it good business. He, like them, is guilty of gross crimes against humanity. The number of deaths they have caused, and will cause, make Saddam Hussein look like a jolly saint.

But Van Jolissaint knoweth better. For--behold!--he is the chief economist at Chrysler.

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.

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.

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.]

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.

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.

MASSIVE ICE-SHELF COULD COLLAPSE ANY TIME

This New Zealand Herald article spells it out. The whole Ross Ice Shelf could collapse at any time, with a significant effect on global sea-levels, and the huge West Antarctic iceshelf could follow it. The latter would raise the oceans at least 5 metres--perhaps as much as 17 metres.

Meanwhile, as the BBC reports, carbon emissions have been increasing two and half times faster since 2000 than in they were towards the end of the twentieth century.

We never learn. We refuse to connect the dots.

THE MYTH THAT BIO-FUEL IS SAFE


There is an old Roman saying, 'When men cannot change things they change words.' In our age there are countless examples of that arrant dishonesty. 'Bio-fuels' is one. It sounds good, because 'bio' means life, so it looks as if we can have our cake and eat it too: we can carry on with that abysmally crude nineteenth-century technology--the internal-combustion engine (ICE)--we can carry on getting from A to B on serial explosions, but without messing up the global environment.

Really? The test of whether something really does have human life at heart is to see if you can breathe, drink or eat the exhaust. If you survive, and healthily, you know it was good for you. If you end up sick or dead it was probably a bad idea.

What comes out the exhaust-pipe of a bio-fuelled vehicle is certainly not going to make you delirious with joie de vivre. Depending on the fuel, you may have no vivre at all. And the planet is unlikely to benefit one iota. For example, the incomplete combustion you get in ICEs gives you soot, which fouls the sky; and the particles are so fine they can pass straight through the walls of your lungs and lodge in your tissues, such as heart tissues. The label on the tank may say 'bio' but the soot is just as ruinous, not matter what the label says.

Then there is the notion that 'bio-fuel' is 'carbon-neutral.' True? No. The theory says that the next crop of the bio-fuel feedstock will remove from the atmosphere all the carbon-dioxide and carbon-monoxide produced by burning the fuel from the last crop. That assumes that it goes into the atmosphere and stays there. But it is not intelligent, it does not understand English, so it may not. It may go into the oceans. If so it will stay there for a thousand years, making them more acidic; then it will come out into the atmosphere and stooge about for an average of a century.

There is also a lag between when the fuel it burnt and when the next crop reaches maturity, and it is only at that point that could take out all the carbon produced from the previous year's mature crop. There may be some evening-out over the globe, but in that long lag there is a vast amount of carbon busy having its greenhouse effect. So the 'neutral' bit, even if it is there, is not there constantly; it goes up and down, like any feedback effect. There is no instant subtraction to blance the addition.

The blunt, inconvenient truth is that we have to stop pumping carbon into our sky, in any form. We already have far too much for optimal human life.

A major problem with adding more is that the effect is cumulative,; volcanic eruptions add yet more; and major ones add huge quantities. That means adding a huge amount on top of whatever we have put there. So the more we put there, the greater the peaks that we make through our additions, the more likely it is that anything added by Nature will take us over a climatic tipping-point, known or unknown.

Then there is the very tiny, very unimportant fact that human beings have to eat. Every square metre of land that is producing 'bio-fuels' is a square metre not producing food. But don't worry about starvation. So long as your bang-bang car can run you'll be fine. Dead behind the wheel, but still mobile, so you'll be fine. Yessir, fine. O goody! There is not way we have enough land to supply more than a fractio of the fuel we need.

On top of that, producing 'bio' fuels takes a huge amount of water. A lot is needed to grow the plant feedstock and a lot is needed to process it into whatever fuel you want.

If the process of producing the fuel involves fermentation that produces a lot of carbon-dioxide, the very gas we should not be producing. You also have to transport the feedstock and the fuel to where it is to be burnt, which consumes fuel, adding to the carbon-neutral falsehood.

Then if the fuel produced is ethanol or butynol or something else that can only be used as a blend with fossil-fuels, you will only have saved 10-20% fossil-fuel.

And having gone through all the process of getting the stuff to the pumps, you then put it through your bang-bang engine which the laws of physics in the form of the Carnot Cycle says cannot possibly be more than 33% efficient. Add to that all the losses in the mechanical linkages getting the power out to the wheels and you get only 16% where the rubber meets the road--you lost 84% of what you put in the tank. A huge effort and energy-investment for very little return.

'Bio-fuel', in short has nothing to do with life. It should be called 'morifuel' (mori means death).

HUMAN ENEMIES NUMBERS ONE AND TWO


China, which is fast overhauling the Number One Enemy of Humanity (the world's worst polluter, the United States of America, in case you haven't heard), is adding a new coal-fired power-station every week, according to the BBC World Service. Goody! Just what we needed: a second USA on filthy steroids.

ANY MURDEROUS FOOL CAN MAKE MONEY


Only the wise can make a habitable planet.

This article by James Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Adjunct Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University's Earth Institute, lays out the stark horror of what all the murderous black-stuff addicts have unleashed upon this planet.

And unless draconian action is taken against them, such that they are stopped in ten years at most (hah!), we shall thus, amongst other things, have set the world's oceans rising unstoppably to where they were three million years ago, the last time the global temperature was the least we are now heading for. They will be 24 metres higher (80 feet). And they could get there at up to a metre every twenty years, which has happened in the ancient past: half a metre a decade for centuries.

A metre rise every twenty years till the water is 24 metres higher might even make a few thieving murderers sit up. Might...

Of course, all that will start with a trickle. Perhaps the fact that the sea has risen 45mm since 1995, more than double the rate in previous decades, is the trickle starting to gather pace...

OCEANS AND GREENHOUSE GASES STARE DOWN THE BARREL


Collapse Of Ocean Fisheries Looming:

If we keep abusing the oceans the way we have been there will be no wild fish, no fish in the open oceans, worthy of mention by the middle of the century. That is the conclusion of a major, four-year, international study.

Different Trading World:

Global-overheating plus the inevitable end of the oil-supply will mean a huge change in oceanic trade, unless the thousands of ships plying the trade-routes get a different source of power. Without that, any country that cannot import and export over land will have to produce all its needs itself, or go without.


But Two Things Are Universal: Hydrogen and Stupidity

In spite all that, the greenhouse emissions from rich countries are rising and rising and rising and rising.... BBC News

DNA IS FAR MORE THAN WAS THOUGHT


Genetic researchers have long dismissed as 'junk' stretches of DNA that were not genes, a view I always refused to accept. But during the past year it has been found that the 'junk' has been faithfully reproduced generation after generation after generation, thus showing that it has an important function. Nature would not bother to take great pains to replicate junk. Also during the past year other researchers built a simple computer from DNA.

It is therefore obvious that DNA is not what the traditional view would have us believe. To see it only as genes is, literally, like seeing a computer as nothing but program and dismissing the rest as junk. Genes are only part of the story. DNA is far, far more. It is integrated processor, data-storage, program and power-source. It can therefore be seen as intelligent; it has design-intelligence; it is design-intelligence: stored design with the intelligence and power to manufacture it.

That applies not only to DNA: cell-proteins in general are processors. Which explains why the folding that is so critical alters the way that protein processor functions. Folding affects the shape and therefore the function of the processor; it also affects its internal power-level because it alters the electrical potential of the molecule. When the processor and its level of self-power are different the function of the molecule are different.

It has been found that bacteria communicate with chemicals and by that means intelligently co-ordinate their actions. Therefore DNA and other complex proteins also communicate using lesser chemicals, thus forming processing molecular networks, just as computers communicate with packets of data over networks; there is also electrical communication. Thus there is an intelligent processing network at the level of complex bio-molecules, literally making the cell; on top of that is the network of cells, together making up simple organisms, or organs in higher organisms; on top of that is the network of organs together making up the organism.

A computing analogy is that the complex molecules are the components in a computer, with DNA being the CPU; on top of that computers are formed into local networks; on top of that they are formed into the global Internet.

DNA is not only a programmed computer, complete with memory, data-storage and a power-source, it is self-programming, self-improving, exploring, like T-cells, for a better 'fit' to the external needs of the organism.

The few-percent different in genetic instructions between chimps and humans (although significant in such a huge total) is therefore only a fraction of the story. The processors are different, so the resulting organisms are different. A different design-intelligence, a different level of processing power, implements a different design. The DNA processor of a human being is far more intelligent and complex than the DNA processor of an insects or bacteria, so we are far more intelligent and complex. Even when the same code or data is processed the result is different. To adapt Marshall McLuhan, the processing is the organism.

That is true not only of the making on an organism it is also true of its behaviour and activities. For instance, a bird is not taught how to build a nest or rear young, etc.. It just knows, because its molecular processing informs its actions. There is behavioural intelligence, stored behavioural design at molecular level.

The same applies to memory--indeed to thinking in general. It is essentially molecular. Above that is the neural level, the functioning of neurons; above that is the functioning of the brain, all the neurons acting in concert, firstly in the sub-networks that are the discrete areas of the brain, then in the complete network.

A thought or a memory may thus be a unique network of neurons identified by marker proteins stored only in that neural set. Then to recall the memory would just be a matter of re-establishing the same network by establishing the start of it, or sufficient of it to begin the trace, then that starter neuron would interrogate all the ones linked to it to establish which have that protein, and so on, till that entire 'thought-net' has been searched out, retrieved and be firing. Any neuron could be in thousands of thought-nets, each very different, because each cell can have thousands of different proteins; it would just be linked to a different neural set characterised by the marker protein unique to that set. Modification of a thought or memory would be then the addition or deletion of neurons from a thought-net by making or eliminating the relevant marker neuron specific to that net.

The only argument left between the ungodly and the godly is whether that fundamental DNA and molecular intelligence arose spontaneously from nothing or was put there. If put there, was it processed into being by the quantum computer called Earth (Gaia, if you prefer), a subset of the quantum computer called the Universe? Or was it all put there by God?

But both sides of that puerile ID argument (i.e., 'intelligent design' versus evolution) have to accept that absolute proof, and also therefore absolute disproof, of the ultimate source are beyond the reach of human science. Neither side can absolutely prove the existence of anything, not even their own existence.

Relative proof, however, which is knowledge of communication, or knowledge of sensory awareness both internally with oneself and externally with others, is another matter. We all do that every day. And as Winston Churchill neatly put it: Men often stumble over the truth. Most of them manage to pick themselves up and carry on as if nothing had happened.

BUSINESS IS NOT THE ECONOMY, STUPIDS

These five paragraphs by the BBC's Science Corrrespondent, Richard Black, should be required reading for every politician, especially those with their heads in the Arabian sands on the subject of global-overheating, more especially those who refuse to act because it would be 'bad for business,' such as George W et alia:

'And while [Blair] warns of "catastrophic" consequences of climate change in one breath, in the next he can say, as he did at the Davos economic forum last year and again last week, that no climate action will be taken which damages business.

'There are two big problems here. One is that Mr Blair is mistaking "business" for "the economy"; the other is that he is neglecting the trans-generational nature of climate impacts and solutions.

'Business is not the only driver of a healthy economy. It is affected by war, disease, storms, global events: even (if you live in north Africa) by plagues of locusts.

'Stern's fundamental message is that business as usual is doing a certain amount of harm to the economy - not too much now, but much more later unless things change.

'If a mild pinprick for business now will save it from wholesale cauterisation later, we surely need a level of politics rather more subtle than a simple ban on moves which are "bad for business".'

The economy is the planet, life, society. Business is only money.

The full text of Black's item can be found by clicking here.

OUR WRECKED WORLD HAS LEARNT NOTHING

Hard on the heels of Sir Nicholas Stern's epochal report on the dire consequences of global-overheating comes a UN report that shows greenhouse-gas emissions are rising, particular from the worst offenders, the rich, industrialised nations. Emission levels are up 3.3% since 1990. The USA is far and away the worst. It pumps out 25% of the world's emissions.

We never, ever learn. But we will not be able to say we were not told. We have been: plainly, unequivocally. Sternly.

How long will it take to get through the brain-damaged skulls of those responsible for the mess, the Black Stuff pushers and the inept politicians, that we now live on a different planet. The Earth that the human race has lived on for the past 10,000 years has gone, because we have destroyed it. The normality on which we have predicated our decisions for 10,000 years has gone because we have destroyed it.

We must therefore predicate our decisions on the new, damaged reality. If not, we will make it unimaginably worse. As the teenagers say, 'Get real.'

The only question to ask of any proposed action is ' Will it profit the planet or push it further into climatic debit?' Nothing else. Because the real bottom line is life. Not money. It has always been so, but now our noses have been forcibly rubbed in that fundamental truth.

Get real.

SIR NICHOLAS SAYS THE WORLD HEADING FOR RUIN

Sir Nicholas Stern, a former head of the World Bank, in a 700-page report commissioned by the UK government, says global-overheating (he actually uses that damnable euphemism global-warming) will cost the world up to seven trillion dollars in the next decade unless governments take drastic action now.

That would be, and because we are hardly likely to take that action it means that will be more than World War I, World War II and the Great Depression of the 1930s rolled into one. A 20% contraction in the global economy. Without action floods from rising sea-levels could displace up to 100 million people; melting glaciers could cause water-shortagee for a sixth of the global population--over a billion people; up to 40% of wildlife could become extinct; drought may create ten or hundreds of millions of climate refugees.

At last. Someone has told us the terrible truth. Now, please, all you brain-damaged politicians and all you car, oil and coal companies take note. Stop wrecking the planet. Stop your crimes against humanity. Get on the side of life. Stop your murderous policies.

Sir Nicholas also calls for Kyoto to be dumped ASAP and replaced with something better. About time. That thing is useless. The Munich Agreement of the 21st century.

Click here for a BBC summary of the report, and here for its business analysis.

OUR SYSTEM MAKES CORRUPT POLITICIANS


We have a political system that could hardly be better designed to generate corruption. Blithely, every few years, we trot off to vote a small number of people into power. We even use that phrase--'vote into power'--although we well know Lord Acton's dictum that all power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

So, very deliberately, we put people into positions that are likely to corrupt them. And we plume ourselves on how good our system is. We even go to war to defend it and spread it about.

But, making matters worse, such positions attract the wrong kind of people, people who are dysfunctional, people with low self-esteem and weak personalities who compensate with power and position, people who have little love for other human beings, people who instead of attending to their inner deficiences and fixing them by changing themselves try instead to change everyone round them. And we give them a whole country to play with...

So they start with internal corruption, and we put them in positions that tend to make them externally corrupted. Once, when the Divine moral compass was generally steered by, there was constant correction militating against malign internal and external forces, but all that was biffed overboard, so now we are dependent on politicians having good wiring between their ears. Few do. No wonder we end up with corrupted countries.

The only way out of that, short of a miracle, is to change the system. Ditch the system that breeds corruption, the elected dictatorship, and use the Internet to change to a national plebescite. Let the people be self-governing.

A prime example of this corruption phenomenon is the Prime Minister of New Zealand. If ever a PM was a chronically messed-up human being it is her. Small wonder that New Zealand is going down the social tubes. And small wonder that her party was caught with its fingers in the public till, having made off with $750,000 with which it bought the last election by funding a last-ditch advertising push that got the few percent it needed. Published interviews show that she was psychologically abused as a child and is now a mess inside. But her way of dealing with the resultant abnormality, instead of fixing it, was to claw her way to topmost power and shift the whole country towards her abnormality so that she could call herself normal. Weird 'logic', but that is how the dysfunctional function. The abused abuse: she is abusing a country. Yet 33% of the populace, although down from teh former 62%, still think she is the bee's knees and the best bod for the PM's job. Another case of the Stockholm syndrome, where the hijacked end up siding with the hijackers. Or, to use an older analogy, another case of PC-fearful, sycophantic supporters cheering on the naked emperor as he struts his stuff down the High Street.

GET OUT OF IRAQ? NO, GET OFF THE PLANET!

The USA is once again castigated for its greedy, selfish, profligate way of living, this time in a WWF report, which not surprisingly shows it to be the worst on earth--BBC News article.

So why bother telling it to get out of Iraq? We would all be better off if it got off the planet.

More nasty details are here, also at BBC News.

If nothing changes, the WWF says global ecosystems could collapse by 2050.

OZONE HOLE OVER ANTARCTIC SETS BIG RECORD

As this BBC News report blaringly headlines it: Ozone hole is 'biggest on record'--'bigger than North America.' NASA's Aura satellite says so, backed up by ground-based readings using high-altitude balloons.

Ain the layer between 13 and 21 kilometres above the earth, there was virtually no ozone; almost all had been destroyed. And at the 20km mark there were extremely high levels of ozone-destroying chlorine chemicals. Scientists say that levels of the nasty chemicals peaked in 2001. This latest peak, between September the 21st and 30th, must not have read their report. They also expect the ozone-layer to make a slow recovery and be back to normal in about 2065...

Keep the sunblock handy. In New Zealand the UV level is at 9, out a of a possible 10.

NASA SAYS GREENLAND LOSES 101 GIGATONS PER YEAR

NASA's latest measurements show that Greenland is now melting at a fast clip, much quicker than had been predicted and that the pace has accelerated in recent years, even though global-overheating has yet to get a full head of steam. The detail of the bad news, in
this Reuter-based article shows that between 2003 and 2005 it gained 54 gigatons per year in the high interior but lost 155 gigatons round the coast. That is a far cry from the 1990s, when gains and losses were about equal.

Click here for the original NASA site.

The guys who think the place will take thousands of years to melt down will have to have another decko at their myopic optimism.

AS THE FISH GO SO GOES THE CLIMATE

This article in Science Daily gives yet another reason why wiping out marine animals, small and large, is not a very good idea. They provide about a third of the power that stirs the oceans, and are thus a giant, very necessary part of the climate-making mix.

We are busy knocking back these vital stirrers with over-fishing and manmade climate-change. Clever, huh?

Sounds like a title for a book: So long, fish. Thanks for all the good weather...

A giant footnote to that is the news, in the NZ Herald that scientists have found that the smoking gun of climate-change was responsible for the breaking off of the huge Larsen B iceshelf from Antartica in 2002.

We cannot tell a lie, we chopped it off with our little greenhouse-gas axe...

THE EARTH IS NOW OUTSIDE THE BOX

So we have to think outside it, otherwise our thinking will be on the wrong planet. The normality on which we have predicated our decisions, both public and private, for 10,000 years has gone, so we have to be thinking where we are, not where we used to be.

We have to do whatever it takes, we have to try many things that we would not in the old normality have considered, so as to try to fix at least some of the mess we have made through our insane, murderous addiction to the Black Stuff. Global overheating has clearly passed the point of no return (and even if it hadn't that damned addiction would not be given up soon enough to stop it before it did).

During World War II the British were willing to try any idea, to use all sorts of opeople, such as movie directors and sci-fi writers and horoscope pushers, and to do whatever it took to beat the Nazi foe. For example, they set up a full-blown mock army in southern English fields made of wood and canvas and rubber, and even had a general assigned to it, to help fool the Germans into thinking that the D-Day landings were going to be somewhere other than Normandy. They also sent a uniformed corpse to war in a rubber dinghy, with some private letters in his pocket that appeared to hint at a false landing place. Whatever helped, they did. Everything was on a war footing to win the war.

We have to do the same. Guys with money, and government treasuries, have to be ready and willing to tip it into all sorts of schemes. Except looney ones. This is no time for little green men stuff. But if an idea has a chance of helping to make a hole in the problem, and it needs, say, a hundred thousand dollards, or a million, then that should be provided so that it can be tried. This is no time for standing on that traditional work of fiction, the business plan, and saying that if there isn't one there's no deal. Everything has to be predicated on the new reality, the planet as it is, not as it was; and everything that might help it should be done ASAP (which also means doing nothing that would hinder it--such as anything that would generate more carbon-dioxide).

So get outside the box. If you aren't you aren't on planet earth.

NEW ZEALAND GETS ITS GLOBAL WARNING

A New Zealand scientist has plainly told his country how things are and how they will be in a story in the
New Zealand Herald. It is good to see someone saying out loud that the changes we have made in the planet's atmosphere have built a momentum that cannot be switched off. But in New Zealand 89% of those who can have driver's licences (15 and over) also own cars, so they are obviously not listening to the winds of planetary change. They are sowing disaster, and will reap the global-overheating whirlwind.

BACTERIA ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE

They also show us the way to a true democracy.

The September/October 2006 issue of Update, the magazine for members of the New York Academy of Sciences, has a piece headed Microbial Chatter, How Bacteria Talk to Each Other, which outlines the researches of Bonnie Hassler, a molecular biologist at Princeton University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

'She has found that bacteria like to live in complex multi-species communities and their ability to communicate and co-operate is essential to their survival,' says the magazine. Amongst other abilities, they are 'multilingual' (via signalling molecules called auto-inducers), and they have a communications system called 'quorum sensing' in which the majority rules. A single bacteria expressing what might be called an auto-inducer opinion cannot persuade group action; that happens only when a large number express it in unison. There are three main types of auto-inducers. One of them enables cross-species communications: 'An example of this ability for mixed-species consortia to talk among themselves is evident on our teeth: 600 species are there every morning in precisely the same organisation as the night before. The only way they can build their complicated biofilms is to know precisely what other cells are out there and to use the information to function effectively as a working conglomerate.'

Meanwhile, in the brains a few centimetres above those teeth there is touching faith in the notion that our system of government is a democracy, that it truly is 'government of the people, by the people, for the people', when it is nothing but an elected dictatorship--it is government of the people, by a few people, for some people. The bacteria have true a democracy. Every bug has an auto-inducer voice, every voice counts, and the action of the group is decided by the majority in unison. A molecular opinion expressed by only a few bugs is ignored.

Poor people. How sad! They have less organisational sense than the bugs on their teeth.

THIRTY PERCENT OF THE PLANET UNINHABITABLE

As this blog has said many times the worst is yet to be officially told--namely that billions will die and large tracts of the planet will become uninhabitable because of the murderous insanity of burning the Black Stuff (coal & oil), which is overheating the planet. Now, at last, the dire truth is beginning to emerge: see this article in the
NZ Herald from the Independent

PETTY, MUCK-MINDED JOURNALISTS, GET REAL

What was the lead story on Radio New Zealand news the other day, the day the ozone-layer over the country was the thinnest ever measured? Was it that terrible fact--something that affects everyone vitally? No, it was the latest instalment of a media beat-up about some bunch who tried to hire a private investigator to get the dirt on our repellent Prime Mince and her inept cabinet cronies--the gang who haven't done a single useful thing about global-overheating, and who have overseen a steady downgrading of the country's social fabric.

So nice to know that the media has the country's real interests at heart. They dissect an irrelevant microbe oicked from the armpit of politics and ignore the destruction of the planet. There should be an award in that, shouldn't there? Yay!

Putting political shennigans ahead of the planet was one of the bad habits that got us into this environmental mess in the first place. So why not keep up the good work, eh chaps? Let the brain-damaged media rule! Yay 2!!

Actually, that day was the saddest in New Zealand's history, because it marked the end of the beginning, the door slamming on life as this country has always known it, the first overt sign it has had that the planet will never be the same, that the climatic normality of the past 10,000 years has gone for ever. The ozone layer above New Zealand had been anorexic anyway, but that day, and for the next day or two, a gusty stratospheric wind tore the bottom off it. Which shows how little is needed, now that we have pushed the planet to the brink, for things to tip over and seriously threaten human health, even life.

And not just human health and life. We can stay indoors or use sun-block and protective gear to protect ourselves but what about the wild animals and the livestock? They, like us, can get cataracts, and suffer DNA damage. Plants, too, can be irrevocably damaged.

The gusts of change are upon us. But we, as always, are doing nothing.

Click to get to this BBC News page, where a British politician proves that he, at least, is saying some of the right things--'people should be scared...'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

OZONE HOLE BETTER AND CLIMATE CHANGE PROVED

The Montreal Protocol of 1987, is it seems having the desired effect. The Antarctic ozone hole seems to have stopped growing, and 'may' return to normal by about 2060. If so, that is good news. The bad news, of course, is that if we had started trenchant international action in the 1970s or 80s aimed at the far bigger problem of global overheating we could now be overcoming the problem. We didn't. Now it is too late. We attacked the easy problem, we failed to attack the big hard one. Which may mean that the easy one will be negatively affected, because global overheating also affects the ozone layer, due to the fact that as the troposphere warms the stratosphere cools and that makes the CFCs more efficient at zapping ozone. So the Fat Lady of GOH (global overheating) has yet to sing the final ozone aria. It remains to be seen whether it is a song of triumph or doom or an unwelcome mixture.

A huge study across Europe, involving scientists from 17 nations and 125,000 studies over 561 species has proved conclusively that the climate is changing, reports the BBC. Spring is coming earlier (six to eight days than it was thirty years ago--and up to two weeks in Spain). Autumn is coming later. The bad news is species that depend on each other can be pushed out of sync, threatening the survival of some.

GREENLAND ICE MELTING THREE TIMES FASTER

Latest measurements by NASA show that Greenland's icecap is melting three times faster than it was two years ago--reported by BBC News. The total loss is now estimated at 239 cubic kilometres a year. If all Greenland's ice melts the world's oceans will be about 6.5 metres higher.

Underlining that bad news are these extracts comes from the New York Times: 'China uses more coal than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined. And it has increased coal consumption 14 percent in each of the past two years in the broadest industrialization ever.'

'The increase in global-warming gases from China's coal use will probably exceed that for all industrialized countries combined over the next 25 years, surpassing by five times the reduction in such emissions that the Kyoto Protocol seeks.'

Oh, goody! Just what we needed. An even worse polluter than the United States...

If all that was not bad enough, yet another global-overheating story on BBC News, based on a huge fifty-model study at Bristol University, paints a gloomy picture of what the planet is in for--especially if you remember that the temperature rises being talked of in those articles are by no means the maximums predicted by some authoritative models.

DESTRUCTION IS GROWTH AND PROSPERITY

What a weird Orwellian world! We know that burning the black stuff will seriously degrade the planet for millennia, and therefore that it will guarantee a future that cannot be as good as the past. Yet country after country is pinning its hopes for economic prosperity on oil, gas and coal. The list is long: Iraq, Venezuela, Russia, Scotland, Norway, Nigeria, Congo, etc., etc.

That is Orwellian double-think. Big Black Stuff is looking after you. Trust Big Black Stuff. Love Big Black Stuff. Happiness is Big Black Stuff.

Stuff and nonsense. But in consequence the addiction that is wrecking the only planet we can live on will not be cured, it will not be given up. Like smokers puffing away in the lung-cancer ward of a hospice, the billions of black-stuff addicts will go to their graves still sucking greedily on the exhaust-pipes and chimney-stacks of their insanity.

....

For an insane (as in way-out) look at global-overheating, read this piece on the BBC News site, written by George Meyer, a long-time writer on The Simpsons. D'oh, we wrecked the planet...

THE WRITING IS ON THE WALL FOR CARMAKERS

Once upon a time computing was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs--IBM and the seven other mainframe makers, because in those days computers were van-sized mainframes, which only big companies could afford to make and support.

Then in 1967 Victor Poor, Harry Pyle and Jonathan Schmidt designed the first computer on a chip, and got a company called Intel to make it (after first trying Texas Instruments, which decided to pass up the opportunity). In 1971 the company that Poor was part of (Datapoint Corporation) produced the first desktop computer using that chip.

Later, as microprocessors multiplied, many bods saw that they could make computers out of them, and the microcomputer was born. A slew of companies started up, including Apple, Commodore, Atari, Acorn, etc., and grew at speed. Apple was soon the fastest-growing company in history.

The inevitable happened. The mainframe ceased to dominate computing, and apart from antediluvian diehards who have yet to discover the power of the LAN (local area network), it has been relegated to history. The microcomputer, now called the personal computer (very PC), reighs supreme. Even the fastest computer on the planet, IBM's Deep Blue, is a vast collection of microprocessors. So is Google's hardware engine.

Now we see the big carmakers having problems. The biggest, GM is sick unto death, which is appropriate, because they and the other Big Iron prats have made the planet sick ditto with the 900 million vehicles they have infected it with, and to which they add another 60 million a year (latest vehicle statistics from Mercedes-Benz's director of diesel engines, Dr Joachim Schommers). But at the same time small companies are starting up to make electric cars. Why? Because they can, and because people want planet-friendly cars. They can, because making an electric car is far easier than making a mechanical one (and the EStarCar has a dispersed-manufacturing model which underlines the point in neon red). With that staring them in the face, no wonder the answer to the question 'Who Killed the Electric Car' is that it was the desperate lust for survival by GM et alia, an attempt to be King Canute and hold back the inevitable, to keep the mechanical status quo in which only they, the carmaker heavyweights, the Big Iron, could make cars to a price--just as only those dinosaur mainframe-makers could make and support mainframes.

The small electric companies are like the beginnings of the shift to PCs, or the inevitable rise of the brainier, nimbler mammals which followed the demise of the dinosaurs. The problems at GM, Ford and other Big Iron carmakers are the first mortal groans of dinosaurs expiring in the misanthropic swamps of perverted history. Or, for a galactic analogy, they are beginning the whirling move down the Black Plughole from which their is no escape. Good riddance! Sooner or later they will no longer be able to put their wallets ahead of the planet we must all live on.

The latest pathetic attempt of the Big-Iron-&-Black-Stuff boys to cling to their monopoly is to spawn a mule, the horrid 'hybrid,' in which there is no future. Like the flesh-and-blood mule (which the Oxford Dictionary defines as a cross between a he-ass and a mare) it can't have kids. No progeny are possible. It can't start a family. A one-shot generation. And it still burns black stuff...


Meanwhile, the latest preliminary official data comming off the satellites shows that 2006 experienced the second-highest global average temperature for June for the land, and for the land and ocean combined (since 1860); and for the northern hemisphere it was for land the hottest June average on record (since 1860). The earth has a higher, and rising, temperature, but no one is calling the doctor; just keep stuffing more poison down its gullet and hope for the best.

ARE YOU PEOPLE-HATING POLITICIANS LISTENING?

When an international survey of 19,500 people shows that 80% are very concerned about how energy is produced and consumed, and the same percentage thinks there should be tax-incentives to encourage wind and solar energy, you could hope that one or two of the hordes of people-hating, self-loving politicians might spare a nanosecond to shut their puffery and get themselves into action for the health of the planet and its inhabitants. Click here for the BBC World Service story.

ONLY BLOOD, TOIL, TEARS AND SWEAT

Rarely do we get a government leader who will promise us nothing but hard times. Politicians never would, even if that was all there was to promise, because they are only in the business of pretending that things will get better. 'If you vote for us, only if you vote for us, everything will be wunnerful. Read my lips.' It is only statesmen, such as Winston Churchill, the pre-eminent statesman of the twentieth century, who are brave enough to face an unpalatable truth and can inspire us to join them and face it together.

That is what we need now. Instead we have contemptible, brain-damaged politicians (who are nothing more than bureaucrats that make speeches), who will never face up to the mess the planet is in from the universal addiction to smoking fossil fuels. That requires draconian action; that requires getting off our deluded chuffs and getting rid of bad technologies; that requires dumping and outlawing fossil-fuel vehicles ASAP; that requires dumping and outlawing inefficient lighting systems; that requires outlawing companies that make planet-destroying products and sending their principals to jail. All that has to be done at high speed, so we should declare the next five years the period in which we will fix this mess as much as it can be fixed, and put the world on a war footing to achieve it.

But that won't happen. Because we are too stupid to give up burning the black stuff, and we underline that by being so inordinately stupid as to keep voting for people who have been genetically modified with the genes of a brick. They will never lift a finger while the planet goes to hell in a hand-basket.

(That was very unfair to bricks, because that GM process degraded their IQ and visionary capacity several orders of magnitude. The process was also a waste of time, because it had no measurable effect on politicians; for even though the brick genes doubled their IQs they still remained below the level of epsilon semi-morons.)

Only blood, toil, tears and sweat would avert the worst of the global catastrophe that is heading our way. We cannot live the life of Riley and fix a colossal mess at the same time.


Post-posting Footnote: After this blog was written the BBC World Service published this, and this, which are the views of James Lovelock and what came out of a recent BBC panel discussion by other scientists on his latest book.