Climate Disaster

DECISIONS  :  WE ARE ALL CONCERNED ABOUT THE FUTURE OF OUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN, FOR OUR GREAT GRANDCHILDREN, THERE MAY BE NO FUTURE!!

Why do people tend not to believe the Scientific evidence of Climate change? We need to change!

IN AN AGE OF ECO UN-CERTAINTY (Utne Reader, Sept-October 2010) when we are struggling with flood, drought and wildfires, most one in 100, to one in seven hundred year events, way above the norm , MacKinnon says, “The greatest enemy of change is apathy” we see the potential impact of serious harm to our grand children, but above all it is “ our need to be innocent of a troubling recognition” of hurting our grand children that prevails. So we accept rumour and highly contrived fraud rather than the scientists accurate work to keep our old lives stable.

“If one sees nothing but white swans one is liable to predict that all swans are white. But the sudden appearance of one black swan proves the faultiness of this judgment. Seeing many white swans does not prove that all swans are white.” (SMART PEOPLE DUMB DECISIONS, Michael Mauboussin, THE FUTURIST, March-April, 2010). This relates to our experience with climate. We expect that having lived through a golden age, that life will continue on as it has. There is “A Bertrand Russell story, of a turkey that is fed 1,000 days in a row. The feedings reinforce the turkey’s sense of security and well being, until one day before thanksgiving an unexpected event occurs. All the turkey’s experience and feedback is positive until fortune takes a turn for the worse….. Humans have a large appetite for forecasts,” But these are often past based. The stock market crash of 2008 is case in point. The challenge is to create a model that is useful for day to day problems, but also captures the accurate longer term possibilities. Good outcomes lull us into a sense of confidence. But “systems are more complex and the idea that these many years of small good outcomes can be a set up that directly creates a phase change” toward a disastrous outcome is not conceived of.

“Put a tray of water into your freezer, and the temperature drops to the threshold of freezing. The water remains a liquid until — ah-whoom– it becomes ice. Small incremental changes in temperature lead to a change of form from liquid to solid. A phase change.” ( Mauboussin)

What the ecological systems of the earth are about is a phase change. We have had many centuries of good outcomes of the ecological processes of the earth in many habitat types. But over the last century in particular we have been imposing a new set of impacts on the bio system and we are now setting up the earth for a phase change. Dr. Hansen Storms of My Grandchildren, describes it in terms of the atmospheric changes about to occur and Alana Mitchell, Sea Sick, describes it in terms of the ocean ecosystems about to make a phase change.

“The accuracy of forecasts in systems with phase changes is dismal” (Mauboussin). So the continuance of the same year round environmental climate is now tending toward a phase change, and this knowledge of phase change is not built into our ability to manage the earth biosphere we live in. We see it in the sudden extremes of events: ice storms, floods, wild fire, drought, loss of species, and in many events we don’t see, loss of oxygen producing phytoplankton in the oceans.

During the Triassic there were a huge number of active volcanoes. This increased the release into the atmosphere creating a sulfur dioxide laden atmosphere. This rapid event created a toxic atmosphere and a huge extinction, the Triassic extinction. But one would call this a phase change in the atmosphere.

During the Permian, as with other areas of the world there was a huge layer of coal formed during the carboniferous period. When they looked for coal in Siberia , they could not find it. What they found was first a vast meteor Crater in Siberia, and they also found a very extensive layer of ash. They extrapolated that a meteor impact had lit fire to the vast coal deposits that burned for years, producing a huge amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. This carbon dioxide atmosphere was a phase change. Animals could not adapt fast enough. It caused a great Permian extinction There were hundreds of millions of years between these two extinction events so that animals evolved to become new species.

What is disconcerting, is that through studies of fossil atmosphere, from bubbles of air in the layers of ice in the ice caps, scientists have found that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere during that extinction was similar to what it is today. Natural Resources in the Ontario Government says that, “there is 32% more CO2 in the atmosphere today than there was at the time of the beginning of the industrial revolution.”

We have been expecting that climate will stay within a forty per cent range of long term thousand year normals. Year after year, century after century we have seen fall, winter, spring and summer average temperatures rotate within a normal tolerance. Now we have a change, a phase change that we are not ready for. “If air pollution were halted instantly, it would take an estimated 200 years for CO2 ad other green house gases to return to preindustrial levels.” (Cetron and Davies, Trends Shaping tomorrow’s World, The Futurist, July-August 2010. p.42)

We can react to this quickly if we all know what is happening! If we have honest information!

The thing is the deniers attempt to set up confusing messages because they expect to profit from continued use of oil. We accept it because it fits with the many white swans or the turkey being fed for 1,000 days. We are not ready for the phase change, a phase change that is triggered at 450 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere and perhaps is underway now in the oceans, according to Alana Mitchell.

Similarly we have come to believe the CBC and other broadcasters. However they are also perhaps in a controlling situation. Big oil owns some media outlets. Broadcasters have not been free about reporting on Climate warming. They are controlled by corporations and by government and the consequences of sulfide gases have never been so severe, so the impact of hiding information has never been so serious. So people are not informed we are on the slippery slope of climate change. The phase change is the sudden seriousness of the event that they keep hidden. During an interview around May 16, 2011, the Slave Lake fire was commented upon by Todd who advised it was a product of the climate warming drying and the great amount of fire fuel consequently available. The CBC interviewer did not inquire or confirm that yes, science shows climate warming is creating such drying conditions. He was silent on a very important point for confirmation. Was he so advised to keep quiet about global warming? Surely he has read the science on it, since he had just finished reporting on the Manitoba flood , another climate event.

The new government has been selected on the basis of providing a solid economy with a solid majority, but we now have a less democratic government with only 40% of voters having a voice in Parliament, not a majority. Secondly the solid economy description did not take into account of the Jones Town massacre syndrome. Jones believed the “end of days” was coming so they poisoned off their whole community assuming they would all go to heaven. If Harper believes the end of days philosophy, (does it appear so?), then he holds no responsibility for the likely phase change, will not act upon the warming and will lead us into a catastrophe. Is this our future solid economy? The CO2 symptoms are all around us and Hansen, Mitchell, Suzuki, Friedman, Brown, the IPCC and a host of scientists have proven that.

People say well, “prove it to me.” Scientists have. We are headed toward higher death rates and perhaps uncontrollable death rates. The 175 tornadoes in the US around April 18, 2011 killed about three hundred people. May 21, US, 90 killed by tornadoes. The IPCC says that events that are 40% outside of the long term 1,000 year normal are climate warming events. Of course it is also the speed off the event that creates impact. The Pakistan 2010 Indus River flood killed perhaps 20,000 to 50,000. The World Health Organization stated that in the year 2,000 – 150,000 died from global warming. Time magazine reported in March- April 2010 that one third of a million died from global warming. Yet we hold onto the white swan theory as if phase change is impossible. We are wrong and we may well have the wrong leader to change things. We possibly have an “end of days” believer. If he did not believe in the end of days, with all the scientific evidence, he would work hard to save his children and get us immediately off the fossil fuel energy dependency. The first step is a national energy policy and /or a class action suit against politicians for not taking on the responsibility for the nation. Will you help?