Denial...was CC- What do we know, when did we know it?

[Fabio]

the cost of doing nothing about it:
http://content.healthaffairs.org/conten ... 7.abstract

[edatoakrun]

Apparently, he’s serious.

And about it being “less risky than geoengineering”, who knows, he could well be right.

“..In this paper, we consider a new kind of solution to climate change, what we call human engineering, which involves biomedical modifications of humans so that they can mitigate and/or adapt to climate change. We argue that human engineering is potentially less risky than geoengineering and that it could help behavioural and market solutions succeed in mitigating climate change...”

http://www.smatthewliao.com/2012/02/09/ ... te-change/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Reaction reported here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/b ... philosophy" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[edatoakrun]

So it goes.

While most of the world resolutely ignores global heating and its consequences, the world's legal community is fearlessly moving forward, to face the challenges to international law, posed by the emergence of a class of nations, extirpated by submergence...

...But increasingly, small island nations are being forced to consider another urgent legal matter: If rising seas do wash over their lands, what happens to their national sovereignty, who will own their resources and where will their people go?

...“In customary international law, there are four objective criteria for statehood,” says Stoutenburg. “A state must possess a defined territory, a permanent population, a government and a certain measure of independence.” There is some wiggle room—states with governments-in-exile have been recognized, as have states with governments temporarily dissolved by internal upheaval, such as Somalia—but not for the requirement that a state possess, or at least have, a legitimate claim to some inhabitable land. “It is the physical basis that allows people to live in organized communities,” she says.

It would be unprecedented for a nation to lose its statehood because its land actually disappeared, says Caleb W. Christopher, who is legal adviser to the U.N. mission of the Marshall Islands. “There’s never been a time when a government—even a small government—has vanished without somebody else coming over and taking over and succeeding it. Peru is always Peru even if another country takes it over, or if their government changes. It doesn’t just up and vanish off the face of the Earth.”

A key issue is how those nations can seek to preserve their statehood, claims to resources and national identity when they have no actual physical homeland...

http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/arti ... o_the_law/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[AndyH]

Another zinger from NOAA:

This marks the 35th consecutive year (since 1976) that the yearly global temperature was above the 20th century average.

In other words, says Greenman, if you're younger than 35, you've never experienced 'normal' temperatures.

enso-global-temp-anomalies_1024.png

Original here.


http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2011/13
http://climatecrocks.com/2012/03/20/if- ... /#comments

[AndyH]

Source video links on the youtube page.

[Fabio]

Chris Money, Author of 'The Republican War on Science' has an interesting blog entry on the HP

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-moo ... 79472.html

[...] smarter (or more educated) Republicans turn out to be worse science deniers on this topic.

This is a phenomenon that I like to call the "smart idiot" effect [...]

Let me tell you how I stumbled upon this effect -- which is really what set the book in motion. I think the key moment came in the year 2008 when I came upon Pew datahttp://www.people-press.org/2008/05/08/ ... l-warming/showing:

That if you're a Republican, then the higher your level of education, the less likely you are to accept scientific reality -- which is, that global warming is human caused.
If you're a Democrat or Independent, precisely the opposite is the case.
This is actually a consistent finding now across the social science literature on the resistance to climate change.

He goes on to explain the cause. Pretty interesting post.

[AndyH]

Interesting report from the Planet under Pressure conference that's just finishing in London.
http://www.planetunderpressure2012.net/

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/03/27-5

We may have already passed the tipping points on global warming, say scientists at the Planet Under Pressure conference. At the London conference, scientists are giving a bleak view of the future of the planet due to catastrophic damage and growth by humans, saying we are close to the irreversible point of global warming.

This effort appears at first look to be positive - in search of solutions - rather than continuing to beat the (almost) dead horse.

And the "Welcome to the Anthropocene" video (the last 250 years in 3 minutes) is stunning and very nicely done.

http://vimeo.com/39048998

This hurts a bit, though:

At the end of Monday's morning session, conference host Nisha Pillai asked the packed hall of delegates for a show of hands on this most basic question - will the changes that "we need" happen?

The noes outvoted the ayes.

Best wishes for a balmy Anthropocene.

Here's your dome.

[LeafinThePark]

Came across this well written article from one of our local meteorologists who also happens to be a republican.

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/03/2 ... ?mobile=nc" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Starting with....

I’m going to tell you something that my Republican friends are loath to admit out loud: climate change is real.

The whole article is very good making it hard to narrow down the most salient points...but here are a couple...

“Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.” 129,404 weather records in one year? You can’t point to any one weather extreme and say “that’s climate change”. But a warmer atmosphere loads the dice, increasing the potential for historic spikes in temperature and more frequent and bizarre weather extremes. You can’t prove that any one of Barry Bond’s 762 home runs was sparked by (alleged) steroid use. But it did increase his “base state,” raising the overall odds of hitting a home run. A warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor, more fuel for floods, while increased evaporation pushes other regions into drought.

Yet today there’s a very concerted, well-funded effort to spin climate science. Some companies, institutes and think tanks are cherry-picking data, planting dubious seeds of doubt, arming professional deniers, scientists-for-hire and skeptical bloggers with the ammunition necessary to keep climate confusion alive. It’s the “you can’t prove smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer!” argument, times 100, with many of the same players. Amazing.

[Stoaty]

Still warming after all these years (apologies to Paul Simon):

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/04/0 ... continues/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[DaveEV]

Global Warming: What We Knew in 82

Source video links on the youtube page.

Pretty amazing that we are still fighting for general consensus of global warming given how long the risks have been known...