Saturday, February 1, 2014

UPDATED: No Longer The Shape Of Things To Come

It's here, and it is very, very bad.

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Tip of the hat to my friend LeDaro, whose regular use of video clips on his blog has done a great job in graphically depicting the ever-growing crisis we call climate change.

UPDATE: Here is some grim reading to accompany the above grim video.

8 comments:

  1. Lorne, thanks for spreading the word.

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    1. I wish we could do more, LD, but educating and informing people about our collective peril, I guess, is the necessary first step.

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  2. It's all the way up the coast this year. Vancouver Island's ski resort, Mt. Washington, ordinarily has the most snow of any resort in the province. It didn't open until after the New Year and it shut down again last week, cancelling the season for lack of snow. While the interior seems to be doing reasonably well, the island's snowfall is 7% of normal for this time of year.

    Meanwhile the NOAA is expecting temperatures in the upper 50s persisting in northern Alaska for the next two weeks. That's northern Alaska as in Arctic Circle and, yes, that's for the period from the last week of January to mid-February.

    I'm pretty sure that British Columbians are more likely than any other southern Canadians to accept the reality of global warming.

    Spreading the word is helpful as LD suggests but, ultimately, we are preaching to the choir. It takes "whole of government" resources to educate the public so they can make informed decisions and yet we have a government that wants to ensure that never occurs.

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    1. I know that you have been doing exemplary work on the climate change file, Mound, and I frequently tweet your posts and put links to them on my Facebook page. I keep living with the hope that those of us who know something about the topic and feel both anger and a measure of despair can communicate some of that anger to a larger audience so that they can start to take up the battle. Perhaps that is a forlorn hope, but I am stumped as to what more we can do. Without a critical mass, there seems little possibility of a change in governmental direction.

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    2. We've been warned from the outset, Lorne, of 'tipping points.' We haven't grasped the hard reality of actual points of no return beyond which we have triggered natural feedback mechanisms beyond our control, beyond reversal, that create runaway global warming.

      Far more dangerous than outright deniers are those who get the reality of climate change but take a 'just not yet' approach to any effective action. It's this group, ostensibly with us, that can postpone action until the options are foreclosed and we find that we have already crossed tipping points.

      Jared Diamond discusses this in "Collapse" as the process of 'rational' short-term decisions that, cumulatively, are lethal, essentially suicidal. As long as we take these decisions and actions individually in a short-term perspective they're perfectly sensible, rational. Today that is the way we prefer our problems served up to us.

      And, even as we muscle our way through this climate change argument, it always comes back to the crashing reality that climate change is but one of several, potentially existential challenges that confront mankind.

      Virtually every problem we face is, to some considerable extent, a function of our intellect which supports the theory that intelligent life may be self-extinguishing.

      When you take the extreme weather events the world has endured over the past five years and extrapolate a somewhat worsening continuation of them over the next two to three decades where do we as a global civilization wind up?

      We've experienced major crop failures in the world's breadbasket countries - Australia, Russia, America - but it's sort of like a boxer absorbing a punch. You can generally take one blow and remain on your feet. We haven't experienced a situation where these failures happen concurrently, the equivalent of a flurry of really hard punches. What then? We're not even willing to prepare for a best-possible scenario.

      Welcome to Easter Island.

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    3. Thanks for this incisive analysis, Mound. I wish I could disagree with some of your assertions, but they all seem deadly accurate. I hope you don't mind, but I would like to take your comments here and make them a guest post so that more people will see them.

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  3. I've lost hope in governmental intervention and any potential collective action. I'm wondering where best to set up an off-grid home for my kids to survive as best as possible. But people say I just worry too much. Communal living anyone?

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    1. I read a story in this morning's Star, Marie, that offers just the faintest measure of hope pertaining to government and climate change. It may ultimately mean nothing, or it could be the start of something very encouraging: http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/02/01/tunisia_embeds_protection_of_climate_in_new_constitution.html

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