We need to accept this moral responsibility. The following article which appeared in the Guardian I believe comes straight from James’s heart. Do you care enough to take an activist stance while we have the time?

Thank you – Bob Williamson Founder & Chair Greenhouse Neutral Foundation.

“How did you become an activist?” I was surprised by the question. I never considered myself an activist. I am a slow-paced taciturn scientist from the Midwest US. Most of my relatives are pretty conservative. I can imagine attitudes at home toward “activists”.

I was about to protest the characterisation – but I had been arrested, more than once. And I had testified in defence of others who had broken the law. Sure, we only meant to draw attention to problems of continued fossil fuel addiction. But weren’t there other ways to do that in a democracy? How had I been sucked into being an “activist?”

My grandchildren had a lot to do with it. It happened step by step. First, in 2004, I broke a 15-year self-imposed effort to stay out of the media. I gave a public lecture, backed by scientific papers, showing the need to slow greenhouse gas emissions – and I criticised the Bush administration for its lack of appropriate policies. My grandchildren came into the talk only as props – holding 1-watt Christmas tree bulbs to help explain climate forcings.

Fourteen months later I gave another public talk – connecting the dots from global warming to policy implications to criticisms of the fossil fuel industry for promoting misinformation. This time my grandchildren provided rationalisation for a talk likely to draw ire from the administration. I explained that I did not want my children to look back and say: “Opa understood what was happening, but he never made it clear.”

What had become clear was that our planet is close to climate tipping points. Ice is melting in the Arctic, Greenland and Antarctica, and on mountain glaciers worldwide. Many species are stressed by environmental destruction and climate change. Continuing fossil fuel emissions, if unabated, will cause sea levels to rise and species to become extinct beyond our control. Increasing atmospheric water vapour is already magnifying climate extremes, increasing overall precipitation, causing greater floods and stronger storms.

Stabilising climate requires restoring our planet’s energy balance. The physics is straightforward. The effect of increasing carbon dioxide on Earth’s energy imbalance is confirmed by precise measurements of ocean heat gain. The principal implication is defined by the geophysics, by the size of fossil fuel reservoirs. Simply put, there is a limit on how much carbon dioxide we can pour into the atmosphere. We cannot burn all fossil fuels. Specifically, we must (1) phase out coal use rapidly, (2) leave tar sands in the ground, and (3) not go after the last drops of oil.

Actions needed for the world to move on to clean energies of the future are feasible. The actions could restore clean air and water globally. But the actions are not happening.

At first I thought it was poor communication. Scientists must not have made the story clear enough to world leaders.

So I wrote letters to national leaders and visited more than half a dozen nations, as described in my book, Storms of My Grandchildren. What I found in each case was greenwash – a pretence of concern about climate but policies dictated by fossil fuel special interests.

The situation is epitomised by my recent trip to Norway. I hoped that Norway, because of its history of environmentalism, might be able to take real action to address climate change, drawing attention to the hypocrisy in the words and pseudo-actions of other nations.

So I wrote a letter to the prime minister suggesting that Norway, as majority owner of Statoil, should intervene in its plans to develop the tar sands of Canada. I received a polite response, by letter, from the deputy minister of petroleum and energy. The government position is that the tar sands investment is “a commercial decision”, that the government should not interfere, and that a “vast majority in the Norwegian parliament” agree that this constitutes “good corporate governance”. The deputy minister concluded his letter: “I can however assure you that we will continue our offensive stance on climate change issues both at home and abroad.”

A Norwegian grandfather, upon reading the deputy minister’s letter, quoted Saint Augustine: “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.”

The Norwegian position is a staggering reaffirmation of the global situation: even the greenest governments find it too inconvenient to address the implication of scientific facts.

It becomes clear that concerted action will happen only if the public, somehow, becomes forcefully involved. One way citizens can help is by blocking coal plants, tar sands, and the mining of the last drops of fossil fuels.

However, fossil fuel addiction can be solved only when we recognise an economic law as certain as the law of gravity: as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy they will be used. Solution therefore requires a rising fee on oil, gas and coal – a carbon fee collected from fossil fuel companies at the domestic mine or port of entry. All funds collected should be distributed to the public on a per capita basis to allow lifestyle adjustments and spur clean energy innovations. As the fee rises, fossil fuels will be phased out, replaced by carbon-free energy and efficiency.

A carbon fee is the only realistic path to global action. China and India will not accept caps, but they need a carbon fee to spur clean energy and avoid fossil fuel addiction.

Governments today, instead, talk of “cap-and-trade with offsets”, a system rigged by big banks and fossil fuel interests. Cap-and-trade invites corruption. Worse, it is ineffectual, assuring continued fossil fuel addiction to the last drop and environmental catastrophe.

Because the executive and legislative branches of our governments turn a deaf ear to the science, the judicial branch may provide the best opportunity to redress the situation. Our governments have a fiduciary responsibility to protect the rights of young people and future generations.

I look forward to standing with young people and their supporters, helping them develop their case, as they demand their proper due and fight for nature and their future. I guess that makes me an activist.

• The full version of this essay, entitled “Activist”, will appear in the book The Day After Tomorrow; Images of Our Earth in Crisis by J Henry Fair, to be published in November by PowerHouse Books. Dr James Hansen’s latest book is called Storms of my Grandchildren.

August 24, 2010

No doubt that some who take the ongoing global climate change challenges seriously have from time to time had visions of others fiddling while Rome burns.

It’s just too obvious. Atlanta Journal Constitution editorial cartoonist Mike Lukovich used another popular metaphor August 24 to make the same point. Picture this:

Two frogs sitting in a slowly simmering pan of water atop a range. The caption on the pan: “Global Warming.”

So one big-eyed frog says to the other: “I’m peeved about that Mosque …”

There you have it. A picture, again, worth a thousand words. Maybe more.

That comment in a recent article along with the following adaptation (from the French) of a story sent to me by a colleague in Quebec Canada made me reflect on why the global community is not focused and active on pushing for immediate reductions in greenhouse emission.

We don’t see it as affecting us directly today. We know the world is warming at a rate that will cause a radical shift in the way we live in the coming decades, still we don’t act. The question to be asked and for you to answer is when will you? Does it need to hit you personally, to devastate your life and that of those you love?

From the frozen north, now warming at an alarming rate comes this observation by Par Moukmouk le jeudi of the village of Pohenegamouk, not far from Montréal – I pay all credit to his observations.  

I am not alone in giving news about North. The newspapers are full. But why the focus on what happens elsewhere?

In France, Betancourt’s case occupies journalists; here is a change in the law on the census. Yes, there are many fires in Russia and floods in Pakistan, but that’s not going to pay the mortgage, or find the love of my life.

Caribou by tens of thousands are moving slowly in the treeless plain bordering the Arctic Ocean. There were mountains here, but the glaciers have crashed, it remains as soft undulations as small breasts of young women. There is not a single tree as far as the eye. Here, the permafrost layer under a few inches when pushing the moss and grass particularly abundant this year, there are tens of meters of ice mixed with soil of moraine rock crushed as finely as flour by the friction of glaciers.

A caribou walks a bit away to a clump of grass that seems appetizing. Suddenly, he sinks into the ground; he struggles to swim and wants what does widens the pool of mud around him. You hear shouting, call and then nothing, his head sank, he disappeared. The other caribou have pretended not to hear, have had nervous tremors like to hunt mosquitoes too abundant. I think they know that danger is now standing still on the ground may open under their feet and they disappear with no hope of relief. The caribou are pretending not to know.

Our small planet saw the warmest year since we are able to measure temperatures. The boreal forest burns, permafrost melts at high speed releasing billions of tons of methane much more active than the CO2 in the development of the greenhouse effect. The earth opens up beneath our feet.

Because of the current La Nina, next winter will probably be a little colder than average. This will be a good opportunity to burn more oil. The loudmouths on the radio to enjoy laughing doomsayers who talk about global warming. And we’ll pretend not to know.

Sometimes the most important news is what is not happening.

This summer has given us one such example: the climate change bill, for which the US President Barack Obama had pushed so hard, will not even be presented to the US Senate because it stands no chance of passage.

This means the US is about to repeat its “Kyoto experience”. Twenty years ago, the US participated (at least initially) in the first talks aimed at achieving a global accord to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

At the time, the EU and the US were by far the greatest emitters so it seemed appropriate to exempt the world’s emerging economies from any commitment.

Over time, it became apparent that the US would not live up to its commitment owing, as now, to opposition in the Senate. The EU then went ahead on its own, introducing its path-breaking EU Emission Trading System in the hope that Europe could lead by example.

Without the American climate change package, the promises made by the US administration only seven months ago at the Copenhagen summit have become worthless. The European strategy is in tatters – and not only on the transatlantic front.

China’s commitment to increase the carbon dioxide efficiency of its economy by about 3 per cent a year is of no help because annual GDP growth rates of close to 10 per cent mean the country’s emissions will soar this decade.

By 2020, Chinese emissions could be more than triple those of Europe and even surpass those of the US and Europe combined. Exempting emerging markets from any commitments, as the Kyoto Protocol sought to do, no longer makes sense.

Why has every attempt to set prices for global carbon emissions failed? The answer is cheap and abundant coal.

Burning hydrocarbons (natural gas and petrol) yields water and carbon dioxide. By contrast, burning coal yields only carbon dioxide. Moreover, compared with natural gas and crude oil, coal is much cheaper for each tonne of carbon dioxide released.

This implies that any tax on carbon has a much higher impact on coal than on crude oil (or gas). Owners of coal mines and their clients are thus strongly opposed to any tax on carbon.

They constitute a small but well organised group that wields immense lobbying power to block efforts to limit carbon dioxide emissions by putting a price on them, as the planned US cap-and-trade system would have done.

In Europe, indigenous coal production no longer plays an important economic role. Therefore, it is not surprising that Europe could enact a cap-and-trade system that imposes a carbon price on a large part of its industry.

The tax seems to fall mostly on foreign suppliers of coal and to a lesser extend on foreign suppliers of hydrocarbons in the Middle East and Russia.

By contrast, opposition by US states with economies that rely significantly on coal production proved decisive for the fate of Mr Obama’s climate change bill.

The US experience has wider implications. If it proved impossible to introduce a moderate carbon tax in a rich economy, it is certain no commitment will be coming for the next generation from China, which remains much poorer and depends even more on indigenous coal than the US. And, after China, India looms as the next emerging coal-based industrial superpower.

Without any significant commitment from the US, the Copenhagen Accord, so laboriously achieved last year, has become meaningless.

Business will now continue as usual in terms of climate change diplomacy, with its wandering circus of big international meetings, and of rapidly increasing emissions.

The meetings are aimed at creating the impression that the world’s leaders are still working on a solution to the problem. But rising carbon dioxide emissions constitute what is really happening on the ground: a rapidly growing industrial base in emerging markets is being hard-wired to intensive use of coal. This will make it exceedingly difficult to reverse the trend in the future.

A planet composed of nation-states that in turn are dominated by special interest groups does not seem capable of solving this problem.

Unfortunately, there is enough cheap coal around to power ever-higher emissions for at least another century. So the world will become warmer. The only uncertainty is how much warmer.

Determined action at the global level will become possible only when climate change is no longer some scientific prediction but a reality that people feel.

But at that point, it will be too late to reverse the impact of decades of excessive emissions. A world incapable of preventing climate change will have to live with it.

* Project Syndicate

Daniel Gros is the director of the Centre for European Policy Studies.

The entire ice mass of Greenland will disappear from the world map if temperatures rise by as little as 2C, with severe consequences for the rest of the world, a panel of scientists told Congress today.

Greenland shed its largest chunk of ice in nearly half a century last week, and faces an even grimmer future, according to Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University

“Sometime in the next decade we may pass that tipping point which would put us warmer than temperatures that Greenland can survive,” Alley told a briefing in Congress, adding that a rise in the range of 2C to 7C would mean the obliteration of Greenland’s ice sheet.

The fall-out would be felt thousands of miles away from the Arctic, unleashing a global sea level rise of 23ft (7 metres), Alley warned. Low-lying cities such as New Orleans would vanish.

“What is going on in the Arctic now is the biggest and fastest thing that nature has ever done,” he said.

Speaking by phone, Alley was addressing a briefing held by the House of Representatives committee on energy independence and global warming.

Greenland is losing ice mass at an increasing rate, dumping more icebergs into the ocean because of warming temperatures, he said.

The stark warning was underlined by the momentous break-up of one of Greenland’s largest glaciers last week, which set a 100 sq mile chunk of ice drifting into the North Strait between Greenland and Canada.

The briefing also noted that the last six months had set new temperature records.

Robert Bindschadler, a research scientist at the University of Maryland, told the briefing: “While we don’t believe it is possible to lose an ice sheet within a decade, we do believe it is possible to reach a tipping point in a few decades in which we would lose the ice sheet in a century.”

The ice loss from the Petermann Glacier was the largest such event in nearly 50 years, although there have been regular and smaller “calvings”.

Petermann spawned two smaller breakaways: one of 34 sq miles in 2001 and another of 10 sq miles in 2008.

Andreas Muenchow, professor of ocean science at the University of Delaware, who has been studying the Petermann glacier for several years, said he had been expecting such a break, although he did not anticipate its size.

He also argued that much remains unknown about the interaction between Arctic sea ice, sea level, and temperature rise.

Muenchow told the briefing that over the last seven years he had only received funding to measure ocean temperatures near the Petermann Glacier for a total of three days.

He was also reduced, because of a lack of funding, to paying his own airfare and that of his students to they could join up with a Canadian icebreaker on a joint research project in the Arctic. 

IN 1892 Edvard Munch witnessed a blood-red sunset over Oslo, Norway. Shaken by it, he wrote in his diary that he felt “a great, unending scream piercing through nature”. The incident inspired him to create his most famous painting, The Scream. 

The striking sunset was probably caused by the eruption of Krakatoa, which sent a massive plume of ash and gas into the upper atmosphere, turning sunsets red around the globe and cooling the Earth by more than a degree.Now a powerful group of scientists, venture capitalists and conservative think tanks is coalescing around the idea of reproducing this cooling effect by injecting sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere to counter climate change. Despite the enormity of what is being proposed – nothing less than seizing control of the climate – the public has been almost entirely excluded from the planning.Up to now, governments have been reluctant to talk about geoengineering. The reason is simple: apart from its unknown side effects, it would weaken resolve to reduce emissions.But it may soon prove an irresistible fix. This form of geoengineering is extremely attractive because its costs are estimated to be trivial compared to those of cutting carbon. It also gets powerful lobbies off governments’ backs, gives the green light to burning more coal, avoids the need to raise petrol taxes, permits yet more unrestrained growth and is no threat to consumer lifestyles.No government is yet willing to lend support to geoengineering, but the day when a major nation backs it cannot be far off. It is even possible that a single nation suffering the effects of climate disruption may decide to act alone.Indeed, Russia has already begun testing. Yuri Izrael, a scientist who is both a global-warming sceptic and a senior adviser to Prime Minister Putin, has tested the effects of aerosol spraying from a helicopter. He now plans a large-scale trial.Izrael is the latest in a long line of scientists who have advocated planetary engineering. Two of the earliest and most aggressive were Edward Teller and Lowell Wood. Teller, who died in 2003, is often described as the “father of the hydrogen bomb” and was the inspiration for Dr Strangelove, the eponymous mad scientist of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film. Wood was one of the Pentagon’s foremost weaponeers, which led his critics to dub him “Dr Evil”. He led Ronald Reagan’s ill-fated Star Wars project.Wood and Teller began promoting aerosol spraying in 1998. Reflecting the dominant opinion of the 1950s, they saw it as our duty to exert supremacy over nature. Both have long been associated with conservative think tanks that deny the existence of human-induced global warming.A number of right-wing think tanks actively denying climate change are also promoting geoengineering, an irony that seems to escape them.Of course, geoengineering protects their funders in the fossil fuel industries because it can be a substitute for carbon reductions and justify delay, but a deeper explanation lies in beliefs about the relationship of humans to the natural world.While emissions reductions are an admission that industrial society has harmed nature, engineering the climate would be confirmation of our mastery over it, final proof that human ingenuity will always triumph.Wood believes that climate engineering is inevitable. In a statement that could serve as Earth’s epitaph, he declared: “We’ve engineered every other environment we live in, why not the planet?”Advocates of geoengineering also court the super-rich. Wood is doubtful that governments can reach a consensus, but he sees no need for that, instead speculating about going ahead with support from a billionaire. “As far as I can determine, there is no law that prohibits doing something like this”. He is right.Perhaps the billionaire he has in mind is Bill Gates, who has been funding geoengineering research for three years. Gates is also an investor in a firm named Intellectual Ventures that is promoting a scheme called StratoShield, which would pump sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere through a hose held aloft by blimps.Richard Branson has also set up his own “war room” to do battle with global warming using “market-driven solutions”, including geoengineering.The Carbon War Room website promotes a paper co-authored by Lee Lane of the American Enterprise Institute, well known for its climate scepticism. It argues that the benefits of geoengineering vastly outweigh the costs. The authors worry that ethical objections from environmental groups may block deployment, before noting with relief that “in reality, important economies remain largely beyond the influence of environmental advocacy groups”.Geoengineering is not something we should enter into lightly or without proper public consultation. If we resort to it, then the concentration of carbon dioxide will continue to rise. It would then become impossible to call a halt to sulphur injections, even for a year or two, without an immediate jump in temperature.It’s estimated that if whoever controls the scheme decided to stop, the greenhouse gases that would have built up could cause warming to rebound at a rate 10 to 20 times that of the recent past – a phenomenon referred to, apparently without irony, as the “termination problem”. Once we start engineering the atmosphere we could be trapped, forever dependent on sulphur injections. More than a painting, The Scream would become a prophecy.Source New Scientist

Let the ideas percolate up from a thousand localities!

On the Fourth of July, we celebrated Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Madison and all the other great men who created our democracy, right?

Not exactly. The Founders did create the framework for a democratic republic, but they didn’t create much democracy. Indeed, in America’s first presidential election, only 4 percent of the people were even eligible to vote.

The Founders created the possibility for democracy, but it took the struggle (often bloody and always hard) of ordinary people over the years to create the substance. In some decades, we’ve made advances; in others, we’ve fallen back – including in the past three decades, when the power of America’s workaday majority has steadily been usurped by corporate elites. So now, We the People must put America back on its historic path toward economic and political democracy.

“Fine,” you might say, “but how? I’m just one person. What can I do?”

1) Start by considering what’s reasonable for you. Few of us can be full-time activists, and the list of issues and problems is intimidating, long and complex. So just take one bite, choosing an issue that interests you most, then start contributing what you can (time, skills, contacts, money, enthusiasm, etc.) to making progress. No contribution is too small. If you can only devote half a day a week, or an hour a day or even minutes a day – it all adds up. As a young Oregon woman said of her half-day-a-week volunteer door-knocking in a legislative race: “I was only drop in the bucket, but I was one drop. And without all of us, the bucket would not have filled up.”

2) Inform yourself. A little effort can quickly connect you to accessible, usable information and insights on any given topic, allowing you to gain a “citizen’s level” of expertise so you can talk to others about it. Read progressive periodicals, tune in to progressive broadcasts, get information from public-interest groups, and plug into good websites and blogs.

Don’t know how to go online? Nearly all public libraries not only have computers, but also librarians and volunteers who’ll assist you in finding the info you want and teach you how to use the machines.

Or find a youngster (maybe your grandchildren or someone at church) who’ll help you. Yes, you can do this!

3) Democracy belongs to those who show up. Join with others. Everyone feels better when they’re part of a group, a movement, a community (whether real or virtual). In your own town or neighborhood, many others are either already working together or willing to help form a group – seek them out, maybe at bookstores, book clubs, coffee shops, events, churches, blogs, Websites and other meeting places.

4) A community is more than a collection of issues and endless meetings. Combine the serious with the social, and remember the Yugoslavian proverb, “You can fight the gods and still have fun!” So discuss your issues and strategies at potluck suppers (bring the kids, have some music, pour a little wine), throw an annual festival of politics, create weekly sessions of beer-mug democracy at local taverns, set aside one day a week for Big Talk (rather than small talk) at the coffeeshop, etc.

5) Become the media. Create a local newsletter, blog, bulletin board (on the wall or online), Internet radio broadcast, etc. Just as importantly, enlist high-school or community college speech and journalism teachers to help you learn how to do radio and TV interviews and how to get local media to cover your issues. Also, get them to train you and others in pubic speaking, so you can have your own speakers’ bureau to address clubs, churches, schools, etc.

6) Hold your own “what to do” sessions in your community. Don’t wait for national progressive groups, which haven’t figured out a cohesive strategy for focusing on people’s anger about the meekness of Washington’s Democratic leaders. Instead, have your own discussions about what should be done nationally – if anything – and start zapping those ideas to other communities, heads of national groups, progressive media outlets and so forth. Let the ideas percolate up from a thousand localities!

That’s what democracy is. Some assembly required.

Source Alternet

You can be the solution as a single voice that joins many others. Personally I have and am committed to being engaged to create change in our troubled world. When I wrote my book ZERO Greenhouse Emissions I acknowledged my role as an unwitting contributor with the following passage in the introduction chapter.

Excerpt:

We teach our children simply “This is a book—say book! This is a cat. This is a dog.” They see it and understand. We teach them right from wrong. We teach them how to share, but to some extent, through our actions we teach them how not to. Inadvertently we have shown them the wrong way to value their worth instead of the right way. We have told them that the true measure of a person’s worth is what they contribute during their time on Earth, but we have taught them with our toil how important it is to amass as many material possessions as we can in the shortest possible time. We have shown them how to consume. We have told them not to be greedy and shown them how to be. We, you and I, learn through life the true value of life, but by the time some of us fully understand love, compassion, and caring for our fellow man, we have already imbedded in our children the same values we once held as our principal purpose, the accumulation of personal wealth. End Excerpt.

In chapter 10 Designed for Demise is written:

We tell our children to share but we show them how not to. Finite resources means going, going, gone. But every industrialized process, every commercial practice, every economic activity, every consumption pattern, revolves around the depletion of finite resources until they are going, going, gone.

And I finish the chapter with:

Future generations will not have the resources on which we have built the industrial and economic model of the developed and developing nations. They will need to survive without them and adapt their lives to survive. They will need to develop infinite and sustainable systems. They will have no other choice. If they do not adapt they will perish. I have confidence that they, with survival of the species of man at stake, will find new ways of living within the boundaries of the natural system, taking no more than can be provided with infinite sustainability. It will be the world we have left them and the only one available.

It cannot be a system designed for demise.

Now watch; and decide if you wish to join me and others and the ‘Coalition of the Willing’

Coalition Of The Willing from coalitionfilm on Vimeo.

President Obama recorded a message for Organizing For America supporters to update us on the crisis in the Gulf and ask us to stand with him to build a new foundation for energy in the US.