February 15, 2009 by mike.

I tried a Word Press theme that enabled widgets, but frankly widgets didn’t seem that impressive to me, so I am back to the original format with a few changes.  Need to keep moving things around and continue to learn more about what I can do with this software.  Minor changes - did a little updating and organizing on the blogroll.   I think I like the categories for links.

Thanks for stopping by.

Posted in Blog Rules for Small Blue Planet | Print | 1 Comment »

February 15, 2009 by mike.

With a tip of the hat to Climate Progress:

clipped from climateprogress.org Sen. Barbara Boxer, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, announced earlier this month that she hopes to have a cap-and-trade bill blessed by her committee by the end of the year. Her announcement left room for criticism. These will be a hard sell. A climate bill truly guided by science, for example, would cause U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to peack and begin a rapid decline by 2015. That would require a radical turnaround by our economy. All the vested interests that will be affected by carbon pricing, including big emitters and fossil energy producers, will define a “transparent and accountable” trading system as one that includes more protections for them than for the atmosphere. The tendency will be to fill the bill with off-ramps, price caps and giveaways that make the trading system neither transparent nor accountable.

Posted in Small Foot Print | Print | No Comments »

February 15, 2009 by mike.

I have tried to spread the word now for years that there are feedback loops that will greatly accelerate global warming that have not been addressed effectively in the scientific literature. If these feedback loops and the possibility of runaway global warming was addressed effectively we would have done much more to reduce the build up of greenhouse gases than we have.

There are many reasons why the scientific literature and its presentation in popular media has not conveyed the speed at which change can occur. One of the main reasons is the political backlash and suppression that has been brought to bear on this existential issue.

The deniers have created a record of their misdeeds. It’s hard to figure out what can or should be done about people who have taken money to slow down effective action on this problem. It is even harder to figure out what to say to human beings who have fallen for the denier stories and who have been used as pawns in a geopolitical game to allow the accumulation of wealth and power for a short term, extravagant lifestyle at the expense of the future of the planet and its diverse and threatened inhabitants.

Shame on you doesn’t seem to cover it.

All that said, there is nothing to do but to continue to make the changes in our lives and work for the geopolitical changes that will keep this small blue planet inhabitable.

The key may be getting back to 350 ppm and everything that we have to do to make that a reality.

That is our work now.

clipped from news.bbc.co.uk Global warming ‘underestimated’ The severity of global warming over the next century will be much worse than previously believed, a leading climate scientist has warned. Professor Chris Field, an author of a 2007 landmark report on climate change, said future temperatures “will be beyond anything” predicted. Prof Field said the 2007 report, which predicted temperature rises between 1.1C and 6.4C over the next century, seriously underestimated the scale of the problem. The rising temperatures could also speed up the melting of the permafrost, vastly increasing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, Prof Field warns. “Without effective action, climate change is going to be larger and more difficult to deal with than we thought,” he said. Prof Field said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report had underestimated the rate of change. “We are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we’ve considered seriously in climate policy,” he said.

Posted in Connect the Dots, Small Foot Print, Global Warming | Print | No Comments »