i've pretty much resigned myself to nothing being done until we are well on our way to catastrophic climate change.

as usual, nothing will change until we see massive loss of life.  once the planet becomes almost completely inhospitable to the existence of human life, THEN you will see governments wake up.  at that point, the cost of keeping our climate livable will be tremendous, but hey, thats how humanity seems to work.

like agent smith said, humanity is a disease on planet earth.

Listening to some scientists, even 2 degrees is too much for the planets ecosystems. A 2 degree increase would cause us to lose all coral reefs and most of the Amazon. And it won't be just one "tipping point" but there will be a series of tipping points that will signal the point of no return.

I just hope that it won't take a huge critical event to wake us all up to finally work together to save what's left.

I tried to send a link to Reuters who have published information about ocean acidification but the link didn't work.  Maybe you could search for it?  It was about massive oyster die-offs.  Scary stuff. 

For Kaythecurler....

click link 

Massive Oyster Die-offs Show Ocean Acidification has Arrived
 

Thank you.  The article will be more likely to be read now it is easy to access.   

Stephen Hawking has already essentially written off planet Earth as the long-term home of humanity. He figures we'll have to go wreck/colonize somewhere else.

Wonder if we'll get an ark?

doubt it.

no self respecting life form from another planet would want us any where NEAR them.

The EU, which would normally be right in there at this conference, is totally distracted by the fact the Euro Zone is on the point of collapse and the politicians there all frantic.

It is unfortunate timing.  

It may well be "unfortunate timing" - but soon the whole planet will have to decide to concentrate on how mankind is stuffing up our environment - in preference to economic issues.

It may literally be a case of life or death.......

But when your house is on fire, you really do have to deal with ASAP.

The house is on fire in Europe.  They are paralyzed by the awkward construction of the EU, even the sub-set that makes up the Euro Zone.  They never expected this (the crisis being caused by bankruptcy in some of the Euro zone countries) and it is not in any of their treaties.  Agreement must be found between all the 17 countries in the Euro Zone, or at least the major ones.  

Canada and Oz have not felt the effects of the 2008 crisis nearly as badly as the US and Europe.  Both have natural resources.  Canada has the oil sands, while Oz sells iron ore and thermal coal to China.  

But it will reach us yet.   Well, I suppose the demand for oil and coal will continue.

Yet that is very problem with global warming!  The problem is this: there is no fast, easy solution to global warming.  We just cannot suddenly stop using these fossil fuels.  Trade would come to a halt if ships and trucks stopped running.  People would literally starve in places.  

And the second problem is:  at present, there is no substitute at all for oil.  There is ethanol, but at present, it only makes carbon sense if it comes from sugar cane.  It takes power to extract ethanol from a plant -- heat to distill it.  With corn, it takes more heat to distill it than you actually get from the ethanol.

And sugar cane can only be grown in hot climates.  And growing a lot of it takes a lot of land.  Brazil is well situated here.  But not the rest of the world.

As for biodiesel, it would require massive deforestation (it is already a problem in places like Indonesia).

There is simply no substitute at present.  And we cannot just stop using it suddenly.   

Quoted from CAN International  - bold emphasis mine

_____________________________________

"Canada is awarded the first place Fossil of the Day for proposing ‘eventual solutions’ for ‘urgent problems’

Canadian environment Minister, Peter Kent, said yesterday to media that: "There is an urgency to this. We don't need a binding convention, what we need is action and a mandate to work on an eventual binding convention."

What can we say. He nailed the first half of the sentence!

The second half needs some work: In order to address an urgent problem, we need a mandate to work on an eventual solution?

Like Canada’s plans to address its GHG emissions – this just doesn’t add up! (Canada has made many empty promises over recent years, and continues to have no plan that comes close to achieving our weak targets.)

Canada has agreed to keeping global warming below 2 degrees in Copenhagen, they have said they understand the need to close the gigatonne gap as soon as possible, and they claim to take the climate crises seriously. *** But action is for everyone else! ***

To quote a panelist at today’s CAN international press conference: “Canada is quickly becoming a bad joke at these negotiations.” So please Canada – we need you to urgently work on an urgent solution to solve an urgent problem."

Canada Earns 1st Place Again, United States Takes 2nd, a Safe Climate Comes in Last

_____________________________________

Let's be proud Canada!  We beat the Americans at being the global ass!

If that isn't something people want this country to be known around the world for, may I suggest you write to the "honourable" Mr. Kent, Harper and your own MP.

It is the Canadian people we get our mandate from...

     Stephen Harper, July 2011

EO - the economic woes are nothing compared to what is coming thanks to climate change.  If anyone with half a brain could think beyond next week, we would have some hope.  The EU COULD see this as an opportunity to fundamentally reshape.  Instead they ask the architects of the disaster for ideas how to solve it.

Germany has made bold goals on this.  See under "Global Defrost" thread about wind power in the Baltic Sea.   But you do not build a thing like that overnight.  Denmark (much smaller population) already has a big wind grid.  France uses a lot of nuclear power--yukky but not a greenhouse problem.

I am sure the EU will have representatives there--they take it very seriously.

The problem is, there are no ideas on how to replace oil.   Well, there are ideas, but nothing suitable for being rolled out next week.  Or next year.  Or next decade (see above).

Electric cars remain a non-starter until someone can either 1) make cars a whole lot lighter (build them out of carbon fibre?  I have that idea tossed around) or 2) batteries are made a hold lot bigger.

Neither is on the horizon at the moment.

It is all very well to talk about being short-sighted, but if we stop using oil tomorrow, we will soon have large numbers of people starving to death.

And your solution is?

They have invented a car that runs on compressed air, but I haven't heard anything more since.

You can pull it up on youtube.

I'm not talking about the energy infrastructure.  That is not the current false crisis that is distracting them.

Don't understand what you mean.

The financial crisis is currently distracting anyone from talking about environmental issues.  It is a false crisis, because it has been manufactured by a blind adherence to a monetary system that is based on fantasy and speculation, and it is a false crisis because it pales in comparison to the harm coming our way due to our continued climate inaction.

Confronted with this false, engineered crisis, the good people of Europe have turned to bankers and financiers for advice, completely ignoring that it was the same advice that got them into the mess in the first place.  So not only are they fixated on this false crisis (giving malicious people like our own government an excuse), but they are guaranteeing that the crisis will never be resolved.  You don't get out of a hole by digging further down.

Fake, engineered crisis?  I suspect our outlooks on the world are so different we cannot engage in meaningful conversation.

Cheers anyway!

It was indeed an engineered crisis - Governments and CEOs of companies claim that they can not "afford" to implement environmental controls yet at the same time they can "afford" to give themselves huge pay increases and bonuses.

Take for example, and this is just one of many, the following (bold emphasis mine)

******************************

Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion Undisclosed to Congress

The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.

[...]

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

[....]

Employees at the six biggest banks made twice the average for all U.S. workers in 2010, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics hourly compensation cost data. The banks spent $146.3 billion on compensation in 2010, or an average of $126,342 per worker, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That’s up almost 20 percent from five years earlier compared with less than 15 percent for the average worker. Average pay at the banks in 2010 was about the same as in 2007, before the bailouts.

[...]

Lobbying expenditures by the six banks that would have been affected by the legislation rose to $29.4 million in 2010 compared with $22.1 million in 2006, the last full year before credit markets seized up -- a gain of 33 percent, according to OpenSecrets.org, a research group that tracks money in U.S. politics. Lobbying by the American Bankers Association, a trade organization, increased at about the same rate, OpenSecrets.org reported.

*********************

$7.7 trillion, $1.2 trillion in one day!, $29.4 million - just imagine what that kind of investment into the environment would do.

Instead those funds are given and spent by corporations who through their own greed and mendacity caused their own collapse.

We live in a time when saving a bank is more valuable than protecting the air we breath and our children and grandchildren will bear the burden of our selfishness.

To Rome said Nero: "If to smoke you turn I shall not cease to fiddle while you burn." To Nero Rome replied: "Pray do your worst,
'Tis my excuse that you were fiddling first

     Ambrose Bierce

May there never be an end to puzzles :3

And here is some thoughtful words from David Marshall reminding us of what Canada once stood for and what we have allowed ourselves to become....

********************************

Canada a moral guide to no nation
 

There is a family of birds found mostly in Africa called honeyguides that will deliberately lead humans to bee colonies. After its human followers have found the hives and harvested the honey, the honeyguide will feed on the wax and grubs left behind.

A few years ago, a colleague with vast experience in international development said that historically Canada's role in international negotiations was to be the world's honeyguide. Any nations unsure of what position to take on an important multilateral issue could look to Canada to lead them—inevitably—to the moral equivalent of the honey pot.

Many Canadians will reference Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson and his concept of peacekeeping to illustrate the honeyguide metaphor. But we need not go back so far. Think of the ban on land mines and the 1997 treaty that bears the name of our capital city. Or the Montreal Protocol, an agreement that has led to the phasing out of ozone-depleting substances. Even on climate change, the Canadian government was one of the first in the world to ratify the climate change agreement that came out of Rio's 1992 Earth Summit.

No more. Canada has more often than not become the nation that will destroy the hive rather than lead others to its gifts.

This week, Canada's new role is playing itself out in Durban, South Africa, the site of the United Nations climate change negotiations. South Africa, of course, presents another historical example of Canada playing the honeyguide, when Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservative government joined other world leaders in imposing international sanctions against South Africa that eventually brought down its Apartheid regime. In a recent full-page ad Archbishop Desmond Tutu and other South African leaders from government, labour, and environmental groups have reminded Canadians of the leadership we once showed...and lamented how far we have fallen, especially with respect to environmental protection.

This is because of the shameful actions that the Canadian government is taking at the U.N. talks in Durban, pretending to negotiate while withholding secret plans to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol, the only agreement that binds Canada to take action on climate change. The Canadian government's approach shows it is more interested in protecting the interests of oil and gas companies in the tar sands than protecting the planet.

It gets worse. In media interviews this week, South Africa's High Commissioner to Canada accused the Canadian government of pressuring other countries behind closed doors to join Canada in rejecting Kyoto. High Commissioner Mohau Pheko suggested that Canadian officials have even threatened to withdraw aid money from poor countries if they didn't follow Canada's lead.

Meanwhile, Canada's environment minister, Peter Kent, has challenged the notion that Canada and other developed countries should be helping poor countries to address the climate change impacts that we helped to created and that they are facing. As the South African leaders pointed out, "For us in Africa, climate change is a life and death issue. [D]ramatically increasing Canada's global warming pollution... exposes million of Africans to more devastating drought and famine today and in the years to come.", Minister Kent rejected any assistance we might provide to developing countries as "guilt payments."

Canadian governments of the past, Liberal and Conservative, would have understood that this is not about guilt. It is about taking responsibility for the damage we have inflicted upon others. It is a strongly held principle in international law, including climate change agreements signed in Rio, Kyoto, and Copenhagen. And it is where Canada as honeyguide would have ended up not so long ago.

***********************

For those so inclined there is a link in the above article - click on the title above and it will take you there or I'll make it even easier just click here Canada should cooperate on climate change or go home - that allows you to send a letter to your MP.  It is quick, all you have to do is type in your postal code, the letter is already written.  Over 10,000 Canadians have done so already.

Because we should remember Stephen Harper's words

       It is the Canadian people we get our mandate from...

Harper and his cohorts are telling everyone that it is the Canadian People that are responsible for the government's actions.  We set the moral guide of this country and we will be held accountable for the direction.  The choice is ours.

While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of our actions.

      Stephen R. Covey

I hardly see how the Euro crisis was engineered.  If so, they were acting against their own interests, which seems kind of bizarre.

Inuit hunter takes climate change message to Durban conference
Geoffrey York
DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA— From Monday's Globe and Mail
Published Sunday, Dec. 04, 2011 5:54PM EST

It took 30 hours of flying, but Inuit hunter Jordan Konek has arrived in the land of surfers and palm trees with a message for the world’s politicians: Climate change is real, and it could devastate Canada’s Arctic people.

At his home in Arviat on the western shores of Hudson Bay, the snow is arriving later and melting sooner. Hunters are falling through the ice or becoming trapped in slush. Polar bears are so desperate for food that they are raiding the town’s garbage dumps.

“The Inuit see this and the world should know this,” Mr. Konek says. “It’s happening right before our eyes. If we’re going to be ignored, it’s like putting a shotgun in our mouth and pulling the trigger.”

Mr. Konek, 23, and his cousin, 21-year-old Curtis Konek, are hoping their message will get through to the negotiators from 190 countries who are struggling to reach agreement on how to combat global warming. But the Durban climate conference has failed to make much progress in its first week, and analysts are warning of a potential breakdown in its final week.

Unlike previous climate summits, few prominent leaders will attend the final days of negotiations, knowing there will be little glory to share. Only 12 heads of state, mostly from Africa and small Pacific islands, are scheduled to arrive in Durban this week. Most of the politicians here will be lower-ranking ministers, including Canadian Environment Minister Peter Kent, who was due to arrive late Sunday night.

Mr. Kent will face an uphill battle as he tries to soften the negative image that Canada has quickly developed at Durban. Canada has been singled out for sharp criticism by foreign leaders and environmentalists, especially after reports that the Harper government is planning to announce Canada’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol and is lobbying other governments to ditch Kyoto as well.

[...]

“We shouldn’t expect a major outcome from Durban. Some countries have practically thrown their hands up in the air and stopped negotiating. There are many countries that are obstructing the process now.”

While the negotiations founder, scientists are reporting more bad news. Carbon emissions from fossil fuels and the cement industry have soared to a record high, rising by 5.9 per cent last year. The rise is the highest ever recorded in a single year, and the biggest increase came from rapidly industrializing countries in the developing world.

“The latest emissions figures should send shivers down the spines of negotiators in Durban,” said Tim Gore, policy adviser for Oxfam. “It is clear that the emissions-reduction pledges set by countries to date are nowhere near adequate to avoid devastating impacts for millions of poor people.”

Another report on Sunday warned that the world’s wildlife is suffering heavy damage from global warming. The report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization documented how the changing climate is causing death and disease in a vast range of animal species – including lions in the Serengeti, elephants in West Africa, tigers in India and caribou in northern Canada. Up to 30 per cent of plant and animal species are at higher risk of extinction because of global warming, it said.

“The world is undergoing an extinction crisis – the most rapid loss of biodiversity in the planet’s history – and this loss is likely to accelerate as the climate changes,” the report said. “Climate change is likely to exacerbate all of the traditional threats to wildlife, as well as introducing new ones.”

Jordan Konek sees the same dangers in Nunavut, where he has interviewed Inuit elders for films and blogs. “The Canadian government is ignoring how people are experiencing climate change,” he said. “It’s obvious that our climate is changing. The snow is coming a lot later now. We’ll be losing our hunting culture.”

*********************************

Our planet is dying.  And we keep getting distracted by man made follies that will mean nothing in the future. 

If there is a future, how will those survivors view our era; when we were more concerned about money than life.

A person writing at night may put out the lamp, but the words he has written will remain. It is the same with the destiny we create for ourselves in this world.

       Shakyamuni

i think that we need to be very careful how we phrase this, simply so that people truly understand exactly why people are so concerned...

the planet isn't dying.  barring some kind of cataclysmic cosmic event, earth will go on for a few million years yet.

what WILL die is humanity.  right now, our environment is able to sustain life, but there have been many periods through the ages when the environment was not habitable for life on the planet. 

if we don't change, we will simply once again make earth uninhabitable for human life.

THAT is how it needs to be phrased, imho. 

At one point in (very) distant past, the world was tropical the world over.  Lots of life then existed then (long before humans).  

The transition to a warmer world would, at present, involve huge costs and much suffering, is perhaps the main point.

And I encourage people who think the financial crisis is fake or engineered to respond in detail on the Financial Crisis thread under Politics.

My apologies Sighsnootles, the planet will continue to exist it simply will not breathe.

Quoted from   FAO:  Wildlife in a changing climate

*****************************

The world is undergoing an extinction crisis – the most rapid loss of biodiversity in the planet’s history – and this loss is likely to accelerate as the climate changes.

The impact of climate change on wildlife is already notable at local, regional and global levels. The direct impact on species that humans make use of or with which we compete, affects human communities in a very immediate way: the loss of biodiversity is our loss as well. Arguably, we also have an ethical responsibility to address the rapid increase in the rate of global species extinction that has been caused by our own actions.

[...]

One thing is clear: biodiversity loss cannot be halted if we fail to stabilize the climate, and if we are to stabilize the climate as well as to move into the era of low-carbon living, we must protect the biosphere – the very life-support system of our planet.

***************************

I am very well aware that the severe impact of climate change will not be felt in my life time.  Nor will it probably impact my only son except to make his old age more uncomfortable but he will be at the end of his time not the beginning.  So why do I care?  Because I am also equally aware that the actions of my government, or more precisely the inaction of my government in the case of the environment, will impact on my honorary grandson's life. 

He will be 41 years old when 20–30 percent of plant and animal species will be at higher risk of extinction due to global warming and that a significant proportion of endemic species may become extinct (ibid).  He'll still be a young man with memories of his "honorary" grandmother. Fond memories I hope, so I don't want him to think, as the planet becomes increasingly barren, that I was so distracted by my own present that I forgot about his future.

In his 41st year, I want him to know that I thought protecting his future was more important than bailing out some bank or auto manufacturer.  I want him to remember that he deserved a world as diverse and rich as the one we currently enjoy.  I want him to believe, and every other 2 year old child on this planet, that this generation believed they were important and worth investing in.

As with everything in life, I won't get all that I want but I sure as hell hope that our children in the future will get what they need because we tried.

We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyones arguing over where they're going to sit.

      David Suzuki

I acknowledge the enormity of the global-warming problem, but I am worried that we cannot change fast enough.   Forget Canada for the moment:  Excerpt from the Financial Times (based in London, England):

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/18b4659a-19b4-11e1-ba5d-00144feabdc0.html...

...As thousands of delegates meet in Durban, South Africa, for the latest round of UN climate talks, they do so against an increasingly tough funding background to address climate change.

Experts are warning that spending is likely to plunge by $22.5 billion in the next few years, as government austerity cuts bite, and by as much as $45 billion if the Eurozone crisis escalates.

The report by Ernst & Young predicts that European countries will suffer the brunt of the spending cuts, but that large reductions could also be made in the US and Japan.

Among the 10 economies studied, the worst hit in the short term is forecast to be Spain.  Here, rigorous austerity measures suggest that the government will spend $5 billion less between 2011 and 2015 on climate-change prevention that it would have done under "business as usual" conditions.

"The conditions under which the Durban meeting will take place could not be more challenging," warns Juan Costa Climent, global climate change and sustainability services leader at E&Y....

Looks better in China, though (FT):

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/0a1108d0-15c8-11e1-8db8-00144feabdc0.html...

.....

Meanwhile, in China, the opposite trend prevails. Government support for clean energy has increased, with the recent announcement of the promotion of electric vehicles in 25 cities – the latest in a series of policy ambitious initiatives. Many clean energy projects have received funding through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), through which companies in industrialised countries can receive carbon credits for investments made globally that result in emissions reductions. 

However, despite prospects of the CDM ending along with the first Kyoto commitment period, which is due to end in 2012, few see the rapid growth of China’s clean energy commitments coming to a halt.  “For China and renewable energy, it won’t have a lot of impact,” says Arne Eik, CDM expert at Thomson Reuters Point Carbon.  He adds: “China has high renewables targets, projects are big and have a lot of money, so are not dependent on additional revenue schemes.” 

Meanwhile, China’s voracious appetite for energy, as much as its environmental concerns, is driving investment in a wide range of energy technologies. Ian Muir, manager of carbon strategy at PFC Energy, a consultancy, says: “They have such an issue with regard to meeting demand for energy that they’re going for an ‘all of the above’ approach.” 

.....

there is no doubt in my mind that something will be done when the climate issue becomes catastrophic... when that happens, it will cost BILLIONS UPON BILLIONS to fix it.... so much so that people will stand back and think 'you know what??  who cares about money?!?!'

imho, it will be like that scene in 'titanic'... some rich guy is running around with gobs of cash, trying to buy his way onto one of the last lifeboats.   one of the ships porters looks at him and says 'do you really think your money is worth anything at this point?' 

when you are on a ship that is sinking, money is useless.

Be sure to check the "Global Defrost" thread, people are adding things there too.   It is like the "perfect storm" as the economy and environment both collapse....