THE REAL CAUSE OF GLOBAL OVERHEATING

Under the heading of global overheating, as in so many things, governments are a bunch of do-nothing prats, fiddling while the planet goes to hell in a hand-basket. Why? For the answer, go look in the mirror, go look in the street. You and people like you vote the damn fools in.

Goverments do nothing because they know that the people who voted for them do not want anything done. If they ever think of doing anything they quickly pass on to another thought, because what really needs to be done is to ban the use of fossil fuels and all the devices and machines that run on them, arrest the CEOs of the companies that peddle all that stuff and lock them up for committing massive crimes against humanity. But the majority of people do not want that. They want to keep living as they have always lived--the global-overheating way. So the governments they vote for act accordingly.

Today, in one of those interesting discussions that can arise in bus-stops on this island, an elderly woman came out with a brilliantly simple idea. She said she had often thought that voting papers in democracies should have an extra box for people who want to exercise their right and duty to vote but want to express their dissatisfaction with everything on offer--for all the people who want to say 'I do not agree with what is being done or proposed, I do not want what is being done or proposed.' The election result, if that option got a majority, would be a revolution. Revolution by ballot. No bloodshed, no guns, no guillotine. Democratic revolution.

The politicians, of course, would never allow such a simple, wonderful system. They have no wish to find out that we loathe their guts, that we only vote for them because they seem marginally less likely than the other lot to do us harm, and that we are therefore not voting for them, just against what seems an even greater evil.

Footnote: Aha! Thailand already has an abstention/protest box on the ballot papers. And it seems that if that box gets the majority in any electorate no one wins that seat. And the Thai constitution says that all the seats in parliament must be filled before a government can be formed. so the protest vote has enormous power. What a wonderful system! May the whole world adopt it! Real democracy :-))

GLUG GLUG -- THE GLOBAL TIDE IS RISING UNSTOPPABLY

A report on BBC News underlines what this blog has been saying all along. We are for it. We have trashed the normality on which we have predicated our decisions public and private for 10,000 years. The sea is rising. We cannot stop it. We have gone past the point of no return.

The figures given in that article are based on a rise of 1 degree Celsius 130,000 years ago. But we are headed for at least 3-4 degrees by 2100, perhaps 10-14. Factor that into your foreshore thinking. Every centimetre of reclaimed land, thousands of airports, port facilities everywhere, coastal roads all over the place, etc., etc., will be drowned.

Expect over a metre and a half of increase in the level of the world's oceans by the end of the century.

And note the point about earthquakes, which is what this blog warned about long ago.

COOLEST STRATOSPHERIC TEMPERATURE

Oh dear! The temperatures for the stratosphere for February 2006 and the period December 2005 to February 2006 were both the coolest on record, as you can see on NOAA/NCDC's site.

The hotter the troposphere gets (the lower atmosphere, the bit we live in), the cooler the stratosphere gets. And the cooler the stratosphere gets, the closer we get to that terrible tipping-point, the one at which the ice-clouds form that accelerate the destruction of ozone (the temperature we don't want to reach is -78 Celsius).

GLOBAL CO2 LEVEL ACCELERATING UPWARD

This report, from the BBC says it all. Anyone with half any eye can see that we have really mucked it up. Global overheating has got away from us. And no one is doing a blind thing worth a ducat. A 2.6ppm rise in a single year, and it hardly rates. The headline is about the death of Milosevic...!

But there may be a small hope. A pig flew recently, as this report in the New Zealand Herald proves. One pig isn't much. But it's a start... ;-))

ANTARCTIC IS MELTING DOWN--DO SOMETHING USA!

In the same month that the National Geographic magazine showed America raping its own landscape rotten ('America, the beautiful....huh!?), and spewing a quarter of the world's planet-overheating carbon-dioxide out of its power-station chimneys, comes a report from NASA (reported on the BBC and in the Washington Post) that the Antarctic is losing a net of 152 cubic kilometres of ice per year (36 cubic miles for the metrically challenged). That alone causes the global oceans to rise 0.4mm per year, added to the 1.8mm we have so far from thermal expansion, and to the melting of the Greenland icecap (224 cubic kilometres a year--0.9mm a year) and glaciers all over the world.

If we lose all Greenland's ice, and all West Antarctic's, the oceans will rise about fourteen metres. And not in the few centuries' time that the optimists and the wilfully blind like to believe. A significant amount of it this century. The IPCC has just admitted that its previous predictions of only a 1-2 degree rise this century have to be revised up a tad, perhaps as high as 5.8 degrees Celsius. Computer models show even that to be optimistic. How long will it be before everyone realises that we are long past the point of no return,--that the normality on which we have predicated our decisions for 10,000 years has gone, because we have destroyed it. In the most scientific age that has ever been we have got the basic science of life on earth so hopelessly wrong that billions of people are going to die and vast tracts of the earth are going to be made uninhabitable.

America, please stop trashing the only planet humans can live on in the entire universe (even if there is another habitable one it would be such a vast distance away as to be unreachable). This is it. The only one. And you are trashing it. Look at that gas-guzzler at the head of that Washington Post page. Someone just does not get it.

Get a decent, planet-friendly car, and get it soon. You won't get that from GM, or Ford, or any of the other fossil-fuel dinosaurs that are bent on wrecking the planet. Dump them. They are in the way of human life. Get a workaround and get a life. ASAP.