Climate Disaster

After following environmental issues for 40 years I have discovered four important books that tell us what we need to know about climate change and its impact upon us if we do nothing. These authors are scientists or quote from scientific work. They are not just opinion.

1. Lana Mitchell “Seasick” these four books tell us what we should know

Traveled world wide and examined oceanographers science and concluded we are headed toward an ocean turnover in ecosystems. A switch that we control and that will be deadly for us. There has been a measured 40% reduction of phytoplankton, the bottom of the food chain that has been destroyed since 1950. Phytoplankton produced half the worlds oxygen. At 550 ppm CO2 there will be 70% extinction of animals.

2. Gwyenne Dyer “Climate Wars’

Earth history there were 5 great extinctions

One meteor hit that created the Gulf of Mexico and 4 Ocean turnovers of oxygen based ecosystems to anoxic & eutropic conditions that gave off great clouds of deadly hydrogen sulfide, that killed off 50 to 90% of animal life.

3. Thomas Friedman . Pulitizer prize. “Hot Flat and Crowded” Read by President Obama.“

“We are pushing our planetary systems beyond capacity, but the laws of physics and biology are paramount”

We are at 386 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere the worst it has ever been in earth history. Why? (Dinosaur period and petroleum)

We need to be below 350 ppm but the levels are rapidly increasing. We need a carbon tax.

“It is us! it is now!”

Boston Globe says this is, “a book that deserves wide reading by congress” and all politicians.

4. Dr James Hansen, Director of NASA Goddard Institute

for Space Studies, “Storms of Our Grandchildren-

Climate Catastrophe- our last chance to save humanity”

His scenario,

A spaceship approaches earth over the Pacific.

“What do the temperatures show?”

“The temp seems to be 100 degrees Celsius”

“It seems to be all cloudy and steamy”

It can’t be cloudy everywhere”

Later in the middle latitudes N. Amer, Europe, Asia , they found were all deserts with blowing sand. “””

Hansen says, “The above scenario with earth purged of life

• may read like far fetched science fiction, Yet its central hypothesis is a tragic certainty”,… “we hand our children and grandchildren a situation that is out of their control.”_______________________________

Political systems are very poor at handling problems like this. We have to remember it took forty years to convict the cigarette companies and politics destroyed the cod fish. This new information started about 1970, our forty years are up.

“It is us- It is now!”

A carbon tax of 25 Cents per liter

Volunteers

Committee for Saving Earth From Climate Catastrophe

The Natural Way

I stayed in a condo in Florida. The neighbour left her beloved little dog inside a screened-in back porch backing on an undeveloped trail area in a wetland. When she came home there was a big hole in the screen and her dog was gone, eaten by a hungry alligator. It was at once the evolution of the perfect predator and the misguidance of human judgment of designing a good and prosperous life.

When I started working it was in the Department of Tourism and Recreation, with Parks and Historic Resources included. It had a sense of the importance of human history and the need to protect the environment. Then the department was reorganized. Parks was plucked out and placed in a department of Natural Resources, where the common objective was killing off the resource:

Fisheries Branch was to manage licenses to kill fish by over harvesting species for example, in Lake Winnipeg.

Wildlife Branch’s objective was to hunt and trap wildlife.

Forestry Branch managed only the harvest of forests.

In this atmosphere it was impossible for Parks to meet the preservation objective of parks. Despite the 24 years of effort (I originally had responsibility for wildlife) to attempt to protect wildlife we now have a collapsed duck population, in the Whiteshell, no woodland caribou and almost no moose in Whiteshell Provincial Park. To harvest and kill off totally his is what our management is teaching our children through Program Wild, a Wildlife Branch program and Envirothon a Forestry Branch program, at a time when the earth environment is under heavy attack and degradation. It is time for a change.

WE NEED TO GET THE FUNDAMENTALS RIGHT.

1. Need to know what the disaster is.

2. Need to be able to see that we can restructure how our lives are lived,

What the control systems are and what are the limitation systems.

3. Need to know how we can shift to correct where the major problems are? How we get our leaders to shift the system so we don’t harm the intrinsic livability of our spheres of life? How do we adapt to what is the real condition of life? What is the future of biological productivity and how to improve it? How can all groups of people become involved in the solutions?

THE PROBLEM DEFINED

If one defines a problem in fine enough and narrow enough terms one can justify any action no matter how destructive the broad sweep of it is. This is how much of conservative narrow self serving politics and economy is run.

Because of this we recognize that we are in a terrible state of chaos, millions are forecast to die of starvation, and we destroy species and degrade the livability of the earth. We cannot say, “We need to change .” We have to say, “This, exactly, is how we get our politicians to change, our corporations to change, our mass media to change, our education systems to change and ourselves to change and we are ALL doing it today.”

There is now a host of environmental problems on the earth that in practice the politicians and corporate bosses are taking very little any action on. The result is they get worse each year. Generally we have extremely poor management of our cities, countries and planet.

Scientific forecasts are that there will be ten million people die from starvation, others say there will be a food shortage for 1 billion. The GMO protagonists say we can correct that. But food is only a small part of the problem. The problem is over consumption of all global resources: forests over cut, global fisheries to collapse by 2050, species loss due to over hunting, trapping and fishing and habitat loss to farms, cities and roadways. Fresh water in short supply, aquifers near the end of their capacity, more drought, and global warming, increasing amounts of CO2 July 08, 278 ppm, Dec. 08, 292 ppm and there are thresholds to very severe consequences, We have already passed some according got G. Dyer ‘s Climate Wars. We have overpopulated the planet and expect an increase to 9 billion. Biologists say the carrying capacity was met at one billion about 1900. We need serious population reduction policies and actions. One report climate warming causes 140 million deaths a year. Who do we look to for change?

It has become evident that the politician answer is, “I won’t do it till the guy next door does it”, and business just totally disregards the problem. A few have made changes but they have not affected the outcome. CO 2 increases and conditions are worsening.

Claudine Cohen says,”Extinction is not determined by senescence, hyper specialization, or mysterious predestination, but only by the relations among living beings and their environment. P 239” “Scenarios can be explanatory hypotheses, we might very well be able to test ….which force us to stretch our imaginations ….As a heuristic device they are very useful.” ibid Cohen p220. They can directly assist in problem solving.

We have to make the people who control power responsible. This may mean litigation, threat, media campaigns, and demonstrations. These people are now doing violence to the people of the planet. This future threat Suzuki calls the “cross generational crime”. The offenders have to be dealt with. What needs to be addressed?

I was reading an article in Scientific American. It developed ideas about a biological question. It was attempting to decide if the decisions were ethical or moral. But it was applying an economic model to test and measure.

Is it ethical or moral to stop the spraying of mosquitoes in your yard when that will encourage more mosquitoes in the neighbor’s yard and stop him from having an outdoor barbecue. Is it ethical? If those sprays also kill all the pollinating insects and thereby destroy all pollinated crops that make up about 25% of all our food crops, so more people in other countries starve. Is it ethical?

Is it moral to have a third baby when that more than reproduces the family thereby increasing population in the first world? We know that the first world consumes four times what the third world people consume, so one extra birth here means four must starve in the third world. Morality is the question of breaking a societal custom. Ethics are rules of absolute good and bad, considering that many religions define good and bad in different ways, but communities without religion work on self development, and fair distribution of goods and services and the principle of cooperation, which means we have to be certain of our definitions. Morality is subjective and ethics are objective. But they require much more knowledge and wisdom.

We had to receive much management training in the government. Several times they retrained the whole department. They wanted to have government follow a business model. After the training was over we were to follow their problem solving methods.

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