The following YouTube presentation is taken from the soon to be release book ‘Letters from 2030’
Leon Tolstoy once wrote – People were not inclined to take their situation with any degree of seriousness: on the contrary they became even more frivolous, as is always the case with people who see a great catastrophe approaching … they argue that it is too depressing to think of the danger since it is not in man’s power to foresee everything and avert the general march of events, and it is better therefore to shut one’s eyes to the disagreeable until it actually comes, and to think instead of what is pleasant.

The Reality is a future we must change for all who will inherit the future we have left them, my children, your children and theirs.

The Reality is that those with vested interests to protect (big oil and coal; amongst others) have the status quo to protect. They have successfully done this with misinformation about climate change, as others have done in the past. :– Smoking is not addictive or a heath hazard!

The Climate Reality Project is to raise awareness of a need for collective understanding that the single (multiple) ‘extreme weather events’ around the world over recent times are related to a change in climate, directly resulting from the pollution of our atmosphere by the burning of once safely stored carbon (fossil fuels ) along with the increase of other greenhouse gases resulting from positive feedbacks linked with these emissions. We have entered unknown and very dangerous territory with our giant chemical experiment with the atmosphere.

Join with us now on this global action day to ask those still sitting on the inactive fence of comfortable complacency, to demand action from our policy makers, to move to a future, safe, for those who will inherit what we are leaving behind; my children and yours.

Join us in the live discussion

Free desktop streaming application by Ustream

Read the following and join her and the Foundation to demand the Grand Canyon is not exploited for destructive Uranium mining. -

Save the Grand Canyon from Uranium Mining

To Whom It May Concern:

My name is Suzanne Sparling.  While I am a co-founder of SEN4Earth.org and the Greenhouse Neutral Foundation’s Executive Director of Operations, USA, I’m also a simple person, someone who cares and has a passion to make a difference.

After moving to Arizona almost 7 years ago, I immediately fell in love with the beauty of the area. Shortly afterward, I began searching for avenues to be able to make a difference with regard to environmental issues. While working with the Greenhouse Neutral Foundation, I became the U.S. Executive Director. My work with the Foundation led to a joint inspiration of SEN4Earth.org, co-Founded by Gregory Hilbert and myself.  We created it with the vision to help others to not only be further educated about issues but to also arm them with information, encouragement, and the ability to take action. Though I care deeply about many causes, my primarily concern is with environmental issues. My love of Arizona and passion for environmental activism sparked the Worldwide Campaign to Save the Grand Canyon.

Simply put, I want to make a difference in the world and help others see that they can make a difference too. Every change we make toward sustainability, conservation, and environmental awareness and implementation of changes to achieve those goals – no matter how large or small – matters.

I’m writing to you today to request your organization’s support and promotion of the Worldwide Campaign to Save the Grand Canyon. We are in a critical time crunch. The deadline for public comment is May 4, 2011. At that time, it will be decided whether a new 20 year ban will be enacted or if the mining companies will be permitted to move forward with the toxic contamination and destruction of one of the most incredible places in the world.

When Change.org contacted me directly about the petition I have on their site, I was overwhelmed with gratitude. With their assistance and emailing of their members, signatures skyrocketed from approximately 1100 as of April 4, to over 40,000 as of the writing of this message.

Change.org News Release:
http://news.change.org/stories/razing-arizona-citizens-fight-to-protect-the-grand-canyon-from-uranium-mining

SEN4Earth.org Blog Update:
http://sen4earth.org/articles/2011/04/06/will-the-grand-canyon-survive/

I implore you, please help us succeed with this campaign. I’ve been canvasing the petitions for signatures since August 2010. You may find the petitions here:

http://www.change.org/petitions/worldwide-campaign-to-save-the-grand-canyon
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/worldwide-campaign-to-save-the-grand-canyon-take-action/

If your organization is able to assist us with a news, blog or any other post, publication, or email campaign to your members, please don’t hesitate to send me a link and/or information so that I can show others your support and link back to your site.

Please help us save the Grand Canyon and all the millions of lives dependent upon it.

Thank you,
Suzanne Sparling

In the 60’s activists of the day changed the World. Today more than ever we have at our fingertips the tools to get the job done! We now have Twitter where we can network and get our messages for change out to thousands; and activism websites such as Care2.com where we can start petitions and network with like minded people from across the World. People who have said “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” People just like you that have started as a single voice in the wildness and shouted so that others can hear and join you in the call for change.

I too have become an activist and feel the need to inspire others to join us. Your story can reach and inspire others.

On December 22^nd 2008 the following story appeared in OpEdNews ‘Interview with an Activist – Are you one?’ Read the feature and then allow me to hear your story of your journey to Activism. It will then feature on the Greenhouse Neutral Foundations website to inspire others.

Send me an email to BobWilliamson@greenhouseneutralfoundation.org and I’ll be in touch to hear your story of changing the World to a better place.

Follow me on Twitter @ZEROGreenhouse

Press On

Nothing in the world can take the place of perseverance.

Talent will not.

Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.

Genius will not.

Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.

Education will not.

The world is full of educated derelicts.

Perseverance and determination alone are omnipotent.

I look at that quotation almost every week at some point, when I take up a pen to put a note onto my desk pad to remind me to do something. So it’s a constant reminder to me why I keep pushing on the issues of climate change and a safe future, despite getting nowhere.

To be totally honest I didn’t think world leaders would agree on global emissions reduction targets for the world at Copenhagen in 2009 or Cancun in 2010. I didn’t think they would because the vast majority of the world’s population don’t want them to. To reduce emissions means that you and I, and everyone else in the developed and fast developing world, will need to agree to reduce our own consumption. Even if I agree to do that, will you?

Now you are reading this most likely, because you are a person with an interest in the environment and where we are inevitably headed. But if your politicians tell you must stop buying, you must stop driving, you must stop using energy, you must reduce the amount of water you use, you must pay more so that we can fast track renewable energy, you must stop flying, you must not take that overseas holiday and you must stop asking that the world gives you more, will you support them? ……..Well?

So you voted them in and you can just as easily vote them out; if they hurt YOUR hip pocket. So will they go to these climate change conferences? Yes; and as they have done at all the conferences so far and all those that will follow on, they will agree on one thing only….. to disagree.

However with all things that took a global movement, or even a national movement to make change, perseverance and determination alone were omnipotent.

I fear though that time is fast running out for the decisions to remain in our hands on decarbonising our lives and that unless we agree to agree very soon, the shit will hit the fan.

What of the environmental movement; are we wrong to keep striving, keep fighting, keep persevering to make change, when it seems, all is against us? This is a question I don’t know the answer to. The reason I’m not sure is, that even though there is a growing awareness of the urgency we face, there is a bigger barrier we are up against. Complacency of the majority, overrides the perseverance and determination of the few. The environment movement itself has many amongst it that talk the talk, but refuse to walk the walk. Maybe you are amongst them. I wrote in the introduction to the book ZERO Greenhouse Emissions, which more than likely you haven’t bought and read, so I’ll put the excerpt here;

This book is a cautionary tale for an urgent call to arms, but also a message of hope—that with collective action, we can change our future. There is however one essential lead actor who will determine the success or failure of this book and our planet’s future: you—and without you, there will be no success or happy ending.

I was once told that although the powers that be (policy and decision makers) saw the value and importance of the message we were presenting to them, they failed to see it as significant. I was told that unless this situation were to change and the message were to move from important to significant, not much more could be expected to happen. As public and political agendas shift from one focus to another, from powerful nations to the poor and impoverished, from issues of fossil fuel/oil security to issues of terrorism, from pollution, ecosystem damage, and species extinction to climate change and global warming, from disaster and displacement to water scarcity, from rising sea levels to extreme storms to drought, we are diverted from the main serious, important and significant issue—us. The leaders of nations and industry pass on their myopic view to us. We have been preconditioned to have a preoccupation with self, and we prefer to see the issues involving others as important rather than significant.

We need not reinvent the wheel; we need to reinvent ourselves. I firmly believe man has the brilliance to solve each and every one of the many pressing, immediate, and significant challenges that are ahead. Unless we see these as self-imperatives and collectively take responsibility for our actions, they will be left up to a small band of others to solve. I doubt the solution will come from them alone. Feel no guilt for being part of the problem, but feel responsible and inspired to be part of a solution. A few great men and women may start out being the power of one, but no single great man, no single great woman, from the start of history or into the future, will make a change without collective will.

We need collective will, collective effort, and collective vision, for our collective future. You and yours. Me and mine. Them and theirs.

But it’s only your choice.

END Excerpt.

In closing this social commentary, here are some questions you may wish to answer.

Did equality for women start and finish with Emily Pankhurst?

Did segregation in South Africa finish when Mandela was imprisoned?

Did civil rights become achieved with the bill of rights?

Was slavery truly abolished with the vision of MLK?

Did the war on discrimination end with the JFK speech?

Will the fight for climate change end with Obama’s speeches?

Will the whaling stop in Antarctica when the Sea Sheppard sails?

Will the dolphin slaughter in the Cove end because we say it should?

Will the climate change because we stop protesting?

Will there be any change if we do?

Will there be any change if we don’t?

So …….Perseverance is why I am an activist

A year or so earlier I was talking on Skype to a dear friend Gregory Hilbert of the US based Green Education Network. He like myself, has been working for some years to alert those unconscious to the human effects on the future, of our complacent consumption of finite resources and the pollution of our shared atmosphere with climate changing greenhouse emissions. In that conversation I said to Greg “If one of my daughters came home and told me she was pregnant, I would weep.” The context of the comment was that we as environmental activists are doing all we can to change the mindset of the complacent global majority, but not getting very far with the enormity of the task, and the future for those to come looked very bleak at best. Sure; some are waking up to many of the indisputable facts, but no action is, or will be taken to avert the inevitable by those in power to take such action.

When Lisa told me 9 months ago that she and her partner had decided to have a baby, I indeed had very mixed emotions. I wanted to be happy for them (and was) while knowing that the future of their child, would not be the future I had seen and dreamed of for my own children. Morgan Bevan Slattery will be one of the last generation, to grow up on a planet that supports life as we know and live it today.

I read a book by Fred Pearce called the Last Generation which was released shortly after my book ‘ZERO Greenhouse Emissions – The Day the Lights Went Out – Our Future World’ came out in the US. In his book he asserts that humanity will go on; just not in the way we live today. My book agrees with his while laying out the reality if we do not act now and with global conviction.

I have been told many times that the fight cannot be won. Well I’m not about to relinquish the battle to those who would have me do so. Morgan Bevan Slattery will not say his Grandfather gave up on him….. Good luck young Morgan. I’m sorry that I was a contributing part of the problems you will face in the years to come. I’ll keep trying to be inspired to be a part of the solution…………………

UXBRIDGE, Sep 20 (IPS) – The carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels have melted the Arctic sea ice to its lowest volume since before the rise of human civilisation, dangerously upsetting the energy balance of the entire planet, climate scientists are reporting.

“The Arctic sea ice has reached its four lowest summer extents (area covered) in the last four years,” said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in the U.S. city of Boulder, Colorado.

The volume – extent and thickness – of ice left in the Arctic likely reached the lowest ever level this month, Serreze told IPS.

“I stand by my previous statements that the Arctic summer sea ice cover is in a death spiral. It’s not going to recover,” he said.

There can be no recovery because tremendous amounts of extra heat are added every summer to the region as more than 2.5 million square kilometres of the Arctic Ocean have been opened up to the heat of the 24-hour summer sun. A warmer Arctic Ocean not only takes much longer to re-freeze, it emits huge volumes of additional heat energy into the atmosphere, disrupting the weather patterns of the northern hemisphere, scientists have now confirmed.

“The exceptional cold and snowy winter of 2009-2010 in Europe, eastern Asia and eastern North America is connected to unique physical processes in the Arctic,” James Overland of the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in the United States told IPS in Oslo, Norway last June in an exclusive interview. Paradoxically, a warmer Arctic means “future cold and snowy winters will be the rule rather than the exception” in these regions, Overland told IPS.

There is growing evidence of widespread impacts from a warmer Arctic, agreed Serreze. “Trapping all that additional heat has to have impacts and those will grow in the future,” he said.

One local impact underway is a rapid warming of the coastal regions of the Arctic, where average temperatures are now three to five degrees C warmer than they were 30 years ago. If the global average temperature increases from the present 0.8 C to two degrees C, as seems likely, the entire Arctic region will warm at least four to six degrees and possibly eight degrees due to a series of processes and feedbacks called Arctic amplification.

A similar feverish rise in our body temperatures would put us in hospital if it didn’t kill us outright.

“I hate to say it but I think we are committed to a four- to six-degree warmer Arctic,” Serreze said.

If the Arctic becomes six degrees warmer, then half of the world’s permafrost will likely thaw, probably to a depth of a few metres, releasing most of the carbon and methane accumulated there over thousands of years, said Vladimir Romanovsky of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks and a world expert on permafrost.

Methane is a global warming gas approximately 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide (CO2).

That would be catastrophic for human civilisation, experts agree. The permafrost region spans 13 million square kilometres of the land in Alaska, Canada, Siberia and parts of Europe and contains at least twice as much carbon as is currently present in the atmosphere – 1,672 gigatonnes of carbon, according a paper published in Nature in 2009. That’s three times more carbon than all of the worlds’ forests contain.

“Permafrost thawing has been observed consistently across the entire region since the 1980s,” Romanovsky said in an interview.

A Canadian study in 2009 documented that the southernmost permafrost limit had retreated 130 kilometres over the past 50 years in Quebec’s James Bay region. At the northern edge, for the first time in a decade, the heat from the Arctic Ocean pushed far inland this summer, Romanovsky said.

There are no good estimates of how much CO2 and methane is being released by the thawing permafrost or by the undersea permafrost that acts as a cap over unknown quantities of methane hydrates (a type of frozen methane) along the Arctic Ocean shelf, he said.

“Methane is always there anywhere you drill through the permafrost,” Romanovsky noted.

Last spring, Romanovsky’s colleagues reported that an estimated eight million tonnes of methane emissions are bubbling to the surface from the shallow East Siberian Arctic shelf every year in what were the first-ever measurements taken there. If just one percent of the Arctic undersea methane reaches the atmosphere, it could quadruple the amount of methane currently in the atmosphere.

Abrupt releases of large amounts of CO2 and methane are certainly possible on a scale of decades, he said. The present relatively slow thaw of the permafrost could rapidly accelerate in a few decades, releasing huge amounts of global warming gases.

Another permafrost expert, Ted Schuur of the University of Florida, has come to the same conclusion. “In a matter of decades we could lose much of the permafrost,” Shuur told IPS.

Those losses are more likely to come rapidly and upfront, he says. In other words, much of the permafrost thaw would happen at the beginning of a massive 50-year meltdown because of rapid feedbacks.

Emissions of CO2 and methane from thawing permafrost are not yet factored into the global climate models and it will be several years before this can be done reasonably well, Shuur said.

“Current mitigation targets are only based on anthropogenic (human) emissions,” he explained.

Present pledges by governments to reduce emissions will still result in a global average temperature increase of 3.5 to 3.9 C by 2100, according to the latest analysis. That would result in an Arctic that’s 10 to 16 degrees C warmer, releasing most of the permafrost carbon and methane and unknown quantities of methane hydrates.

This is why some climate scientists are calling for a rapid phaseout of fossil fuels, recommending that fossil fuel emissions peak by 2015 and then decline three per cent per year. But even then there’s still a 50-percent probability of exceeding two degrees C current studies show. If the emissions peak is delayed until 2025, then global temperatures will rise three degrees C, the Arctic will be eight to 10 degrees warmer and the world will lose most its permafrost.

Meanwhile, a new generation of low-cost, thin-film solar roof and outside wall coverings being made today has the potential to eliminate burning coal and oil to generate electricity, energy experts believe – if governments have the political will to fully embrace green technologies. 

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.