Saturday, July 28, 2012

UPRAGE for the great reefs

Thanks to the excellent Canadian environmental journalist Stephen Leahey I was drawn to this headline  by scientists concerning the world's coral reefs.

Scientists Declare State of Emergency for World’s Coral Reefs

Scientists Declare State of Emergency for World’s Coral Reefs
  • The acidity of the ocean’s surface has increased due to increased atmospheric CO2.
On reading the statement it seems Stephen, like many of the media I am glad to say since the 2009 Copenhagen debacle, has put helpful words into the mouths of the scientists- in this case one word.

The word is 'emergency' for the worlds coral reefs .

There is no doubt the coral reefs are in a state of emergency.

No doubt this word was in the hearts of the scientists straining to be heard, but it didn't make it past the scientist head. You see the scientists still insist that words like emergency, dangerous, disastrous or catastrophic are banned from the communications of scientists because they are value judgement words that scientists can't make. I am so piffed oss by this!

So what the report says is a catalogue of numbers. Surely to Godness these experts could at least state what they know will happen if nothing is done to stop the CO2 emissions that are making the oceans acid.

The coral reefs will die. The fish that that make the reefs their homes and nurseries will die. The fish that depend those little fish for food will die. The oceans will eventually die. Disease Dying and Death  are scientific words - like they are objective findings. Dead rotting fish and rotten sea floors. That is what the science determines will happen if we don't stop heating and acidifying the oceans.

I just checked and guess what - the IPCC (lots of scientists) reported in the 2007 climate assessment that at a 1.5C warming 'all coral reefs' would be 'bleached' and that at 3C 'all coral reefs would be dead overgrown by algae'. That's more like it. Dead tells us some thing. The algae bit communicates to us- like really dead, dead for ever.

Now by the climate science, for a long time, we have definitely known we have been absolutely committed to a warming of 1.5C (double today's 0.8C). Today according to the published science we are committed to 2.4C. So the coral reefs are today committed to a mass dying and if no one who has expert knowledge declares coral reef planetary emergency they are as good as dead, doomed, done for, condemned, history, only to be seen on videos.

The public of course believes when there is an impending ocean or climate emergency the experts on the climate and oceans will gravely declare an emergency. Well unless they have a huge change of heart and head, they are never going to declare emergency. They will pronounce them dead when they are certain they are dead. When  they over grown with algae.

Why not declare reef emergency before they are definitely dead?  Just like a doctor does, which is interesting because doctors are scientists who were make objective observations and records and they declare emergencies on the basis of these - to prevent death.

Does this scientific report below communicate the reality of what is objectively happening to the oceans. The latest football results are far more interesting.

Changes already observed over the last century:
  • The surface of the world’s oceans has warmed by 0.7°C, resulting in unprecedented coral bleaching and mortality events.
  • The acidity of the ocean’s surface has increased due to increased atmospheric CO2.

  • By the end of this century:
    • CO2 emissions at the current rate will warm sea surface temperatures by at least 2-3°C, raise sea-level by as much as 1.7 meters, reduce ocean pH from 8.1 to less than 7.9, and increase storm frequency and/or intensity. This combined change in temperature and ocean chemistry has not occurred since the last reef crisis 55 million years ago.
    A concerted effort to preserve reefs for the future demands action at global levels,


    Too bad - there will no action in response to this kind of science reporting. Mortality event?  'MORTALITY EVENT'

    Where the hell did they get that language from - the US army- like civilian death is 'collateral damage'. 

     Those corals DIED damn it. They are now being overgrown with slimy algae. Get real experts. 

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Hitler Finds Out Climate Change Is Real (spoof)


Hitler Finds Out Climate is Real 

Yes this is very clever and very well done. 

What I find particularly clever and appropriate is that the corporate conspiracy of lying and deceiving the public about catastrophically dangerous climate change is given the equivalent status of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime.

We have greatly underestimated the influence of this deadly conspiracy that has been waging a psychological operations war on behalf of the fossil fuel industry for 20 years. 

I suspect the inexplicable general denial and complacency in the face of the coming climate catastrophe, is the result of the diabolical cleverness of this psychops campaign against the public intelligence.

They have used Hitler's propaganda tool of demonizing the opposition, the big lie and simple endless repetition of falsified facts to take control of the public perception of the climate change threat.

This is why it takes these comic creative productions to attract people to even consider the risk of climate catastrophe.

And even if they do watch this kind of climate change production and promotion of the climate truth, will people really get the message that, as James Hansen has written, now is our last chance to save humanity from the coming climate catastrophe, or will they move onto the next entertaining Youtube. 

Instead of acting like intelligent human beings demanding that our governments intervene with a planetary emergency (James Hansen 2008) response the conventional wisdom is just to do more research to be even more certain that we are destroying ourselves, and to look for all kinds of psychological reasons to explain why we are doing nothing to stop it- except to promote adaptation to the coming climate catastrophe.

Planning to adapt to global climate change is like planning to leave a non-stop express train at a suitable time and place. 

This is heaping insanity onto insanity onto insanity.

The Second World War and the Nazi Holocaust is conveniently explained and blamed on the insanity of one man, Adolf Hitler. Everyone is rightly outraged at Hitler's atrocious crimes against humanity. 

Though he was the instigator of dirty political tricks, Hitler was elected democratically. The record of this still recent history shows that European civilization in all the nations that Germany took over was only too ready to compromise and turn a blind eye as the crimes of the Nazis escalated. Very many helped the Nazis in their 
bloody business. Hitler's concentration camps were built and run for economic reasons.

No amount of psychological rationalization can absolve our generation from being blind the coming global warming holocaust that we are recording in great detail but not actively opposing. Unlike the people of Germany we have no excuse for our compromising and delaying - quite the opposite for we are the 'affluent age' of the 'consumer culture'.

The very few people in the world telling the terrible climate change truth like Al Gore, James Hansen - surely there must be others- have reminded us of Winston Churchill in the lead up to the Second World War and the Nazi Holocaust.

The first volume of Churchill’s great literary historical epic The Second World War is The Gathering Storm. 

We are watching and ignoring the gathering global climate change storm that without drastic emergency intervention will annihilate humanity and most of life. 

Winston Churchill starts The Gathering Storm describing how he had recognized the great evil of Hitler and his 'Nazi Huns'. However he describes how he fully understood the reasons for the rise of Nazism in Germany which he seems to have had some sympathy for,  but this did not shake him from his bulldog determination to overcome the what he called the 'monstrous tyranny' of the 'Nazi evil'. 

We are in a similar position now only it is on a global scale. Suddenly the world is polarized between good and evil by the rise of a monstrous evil tyranny such as the world has never seen. Know it or not, today we live in a time of unprecedented evil, as time will tell it is far worse than the worst of Hitler's. 

That is because already the unprecedented concentration of today's greenhouse gases in the atmosphere , emitted at an accelerating rate in modern times, commits the future to a global warming several times greater than today's, and who is demanding that we stop emitting greenhouse gases. 

It is 20 years since the unprecedented rate of species extinction was recognized and since the global warming effect of atmospheric greenhouse gas pollution was recognized. 

For the past 20 years there have been almost 1 billion people in the world needlessly condemned to hunger and malnutrition with the terrible needless loss of life that this imposes on the most economically deprived populations in the world. This is the result of what UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called 'the twin evils of extreme wealth and extreme poverty'.

Global climate change over the past few years has just started to pile more victims onto these horrendous evils. An estimated 300,000 people a year are being killed by global climate change. The fastest ever species extinction is increasing even further. 30% of life has been wiped out in the past 40 years as our fossil fuel civilization demolishes the last great forests of our magnificent planet (2012 Living Planet Report).

The conventional convenient wisdom on global climate change is not to communicate the full catastrophic truth of our situation because it is doom and gloom which it might scare people. Heaven forbid that people should be made afraid of global warming and climate change.  Instead we are advised to change our light bulbs, drive less, and recycle- and most important of all to be hopeful. 

Yes we do need to recycle, but we need to see that none of these have any effect on the fossil economy monster that keeps on growing. 

Of course it's gloom and doom if we do not revolt against the monstrous tyranny of the fossil fuelled globalized corporate economy. It is doom and glooms for our children- all our children in all the world.

The famous and important quote “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” comes from another British statesman of the early 19th century, Edmund Burke. It speaks to us today. 

Burke gained attention for his radical ideas that led him to strongly oppose the 'slave trade' against the general rationalized acceptance of the 'trade' as an economic benefit. 

Like so many others of my generation somehow I assumed that the evil shadow of European civilisation dies with Hitler and Hitler in Hitler's Berlin bunker. I thought I was being sophisticated by philosophising that there was really no such thing as evil in the world. Everything was shades of grey and relative. As I look upon what we are condemning the future of all humanity and life to with abject complacency and without remorse  I realise how wrong I have been.











Friday, July 20, 2012

The Greatest Hoax is the Greatest Crime

As the terrible truth of global warming's reality starts to sink in to the American mind, the terrible crime of those in power who have lied and deceived the American people is finally coming to light.


The self proclaimed Fuhrer of the great US climate change corporate fossil fuel conspiracy is Senator James Inhofe. 


I wonder how many books of his 2012 The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future will sell from now. 


Inhofe is in fact the greatest threat to the future, and he must relish it in some perversely evil way. 


He calls himself the top watchdog of the US government's global warming agenda.  That means he lies and deceives the American people from the safety of the US Congress to make sure America burns more and more fossil fuels where all the big quick dirty dollars are to be made - especially with the world past peak oil. 


This Senator is one mad viscous dog who hounds all those in government who know we must stop burning fossil fuels if our children are to survive a life of global warming the disrupted climate. 


He is top of the league in crimes against humanity. 


In a 2006 interview with the Tulsa World newspaper, Inhofe was reported saying of the environmental movement and global warming , "It kind of reminds... I could use the Third Reich, the Big Lie ... You say something over and over and over and over again, and people will believe it, and that's their strategy... A hot summer has nothing to do with global warming". 


Now that's a revealing comment, because obviously no one has used the Hitler Big Lie strategy in a more extreme destructive way than Inhofe over global warming. The big lie got Hitler elected and the rest is the most evil period in our history when millions were murdered for economic convenience- most evil period up to now that is.   


The more fossil fuels we burn the more food for the future burns and the more millions will starve- all over the world. Of course the Senator knows that, like he must know that unmitigated global warming is going to kill tens of millions -at least. 


An estimated 300, 000 are already being killed by global climate change. Now some Americans have been killed by the extreme heat caused by global warming. 


In America oil is now being squeezed out of shale, from ultra deep sea drilling and soon out of the Arctic- making lots more of the most dirty money ever and committing (condemning) all future generations to a heating many times today's that is already baking the world's best farm land. If not stopped, that is a heat most of humanity will not survive.


Inhofe has brought human depravity to a new low by abusing his personal  political power to sacrifice the future of all life in order to make the most fast fossil fuel money today. 


The greatest region of food production in the world is being ruined and its because of  malicious morons like Inhofe. Don't be deceived America- this smarmy smiling Senator is the most dangerous man ever. 




Thursday, July 19, 2012

Little Red Riding Hood and B B Wolf 2


I am continuing to explore my Euro-American cultural origins with the children's bedtime story of  Little Red Riding Hood and Wolf. 


The beautiful image shows human and wolf contentedly looking at one another in the forest environment. It's an image of mutual respect living in the forest. 


The good news is that these nasty children's stories collected by the aptly named Brothers Grimm are no longer the standard fare for moulding young minds.

The bad news is that violence is even more general and prominent in our culture we call civilization, which it is now literally destroying us along with most other life.

Other bad news of modern times is that the age old style of mixing up humans and other animals in stories has been largely outed by misplaced scientific and literary correctness. Jane Goodall is honoured for partly breaking down that barrier.

In my childhood no child could escape hearing about the big bad wolf but I was read stories at bedtime by my mother from Beatrix Potter. Who could forget a name like Jemima Puddle Duck? Potter's animal characters were part of the old rural England in a time when farmers managed to provide food without making total war on the wild.

The first book that turned me on for reading was The Wind in the Willows, that I loved. These were wild rural England creatures made into human characters. The kindly old Toad of Toad Hall was endearing to many a kid.

I was lucky that a kind and wise aunt gave me Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book after I took to reading, which he wrote in 1894. 

In the Jungle Book the wild is portrayed as the good normal way of life and the wild animals as other people. Akela was the head of the pack and a great hero to the jungle boy 'man cub' Mowgli. The Jungle Book may be anthropomorphic but its perspective is jungle centred, not anthropocentric which is the cultural blindness we are afflicted with. 

Ye may kill for yourselves, and your mates, and your cubs as they need, and ye can;
But kill not for pleasure of killing, 
and seven times- never kill Man!
If ye plunder his Kill from a weaker, devour not all in thy pride;
Pack-Right is the right of the meanest; 
so leave him the head and the hide.

Kipling who was born in India no doubt learned the back ground for the jungle book from Indian tribal peoples, who have great respect for wild animals. Mowgli the 'man cub' must have been modeled on actual cases of Indian feral children being adopted by wolves and living wild in the jungle. In the end Mowgli returns to the 'man village'. Feral children never survived being rescued by civilization. 

The North American native culture has profound respect for Wolf as having a great intelligence and culture within the wolf pack. Native people have told me they based their culture and governance largely on what they learned from their wolf kindred species. All living beings they know are people as 'all our relations'.

Our aggressive anthropocentrism does not allow us to see that science has proved the native people right. We are all closely related within the diverse culture of animal species, all with unique intelligences which does not make humans a superior species. In fact we depend  more than any other on all other species to survive.

On the once Great Plains the Sioux and Wolf hunted the once great buffalo herds together.

Wild predators only hunt when they have to for food out of hunger and there is no waste in Nature when a predator brings down its prey. The native people learned these lessons well.

Our modern science indicates that Wolf  (the ancestor of our domesticated dogs)  had a key role in the success of our species. The Sapiens of Homo Sapiens is owed in large measure to Wolf.  When human and wolf teamed up together for our mutual advantage our relatively weak maladapted species was able to prevail against the wild tiger that was our big predator and succeed  over other hominids. The combined intelligence of Human and wolf was our great success story.  If we had not befriended Wolf we probably would not exist and our Neanderthal relative might still be living as a wild hominid species.

Today Homo Sapiens is madly ravaging our common Earth home. Atmospheric greenhouse gas pollution is now adding to the sixth mass of extinction of life caused by our destruction of the last great forests and jungles. The deforestation adds to the carbon pollution.

We have no right to call ourselves Homo Sapiens Sapiens. We are now Homo Demens Demens, adding insanity onto insanity. 

The moral of this story  is we all need to learn to love the wolf and the wilderness with a profound respect if we are both to survive much longer. 



Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Little Red Riding Hood and B B Wolf

Like it or not we live in a culture of violence. Go to any video store and see how our popular idea of entertainment is violence.

For hundreds and hundreds of years in European history there never has been a generation free of the most terrible violence that is war.

Before movies and television the culture of violence was propagated generation after generation by children's stories told by their parents and instilled into their subconscious at bedtime.

Today we desperately need different stories for our children, and we can transform these horrid children's tales

One of the best known of these children's bedtime stories is Little Red Riding Hood.

Little Red Riding Hood is a sweet innocent child walking through the woods to see her Grandmother. She is stopped on the way by the Big Bad Wolf, and the rest of the story shows how clever  the Big Bad Wolf is at getting human flesh to eat. What big eyes - big teeth- you have wolf - All the better to see- to eat - you with. 


The hero at the end of the story is the woods man who kills the wolf and cutting the wolf open rescues Little Red Riding Hood, still alive in its belly.

The story is one designed  to instil fear into the minds of children.

Wolf represents the world of wild animals -the 'beasts'. Wolf  represents the hostile dark world of Nature the 'wilderness' that for centuries European civilization has been waging constant war on to conquer and tame.

Who speaks for a narrative of the wolf that reflects the truth?

The animal rights groups mainly, who governments have listed as terrorists.

This allows the wolf hunting industry to carry on killing wolves for a large profit. Corporate executive holiday hunters pay thousands of dollars for the thrill of killing a wolf. The picture is of  two Arctic wolves shot by little red capped thumbs up man with the rifle.  

Most people will have heard that wolves do not in fact kill people.

It is vital we gain insight into our acculturation of violence and hostility to the natural world, and indeed the social attitude to wolf has been recently rapidly changing.

How ever we carry on destroying the natural world faster than ever.

David Suzuki decades ago proclaimed our interdependency with Nature, which was giant step forward.

The scientific truth is we humans are the one species most obviously totally dependent on Nature. The fact is Nature has zero dependency on us. One thing that makes us different is that we are dependent on all other species for our survival. The indigenous cultures have always known it and now our science confirms it, but we still fail to see it.

We must learn this lesson fast, because we have made our human species a most critically endangered one by our rabid destruction of every form of  life naturally wild.

With escalating atmospheric greenhouse gas pollution now impacting on top of the sixth mass extinction event we are destroying all advanced forms of life.

It is total insanity, and the hall mark of insanity is having no insight into destructive behaviours.

The picture at the top of this blog is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen and I wish I knew who the artist is. It's a Red Riding Hood Mona Lisa.

The image is one of the human helping to nurture the wild. Look at it closely. Here's what I see.

The eyes of the adult wolf are looking at the same time, at the wolf cubs and ahead to the forest where they will live and depend on for their health and survival. The wolf looks confident.

 Little Riding Hood and the cubs are looking ahead to rest of the forest. The cubs look content. Little red hood, having the cubs in her basket, shows a sense of nurturing ownership that she shares with the adult wolf. They are the same size in the picture as they would be in real life.

Little Red Hiding Hood's face has a sense of apprehension. She is helping to  look after the wolf cubs and that means she must care about the forest. The forests of Europe in  her time had already been largely cleared for the advance of Europe's aggressively violent civilization.  She knows what wolf cannot know.

Little Riding Hood's fear for the future of the cubs, today should be our fear for the future of our children. We are killing them with what we see as economic development and progress. It is us who is the big bad evil animal.



Monday, July 2, 2012

Raise a Little Hell



From a great blog by Lisa Curtis (edited here for brevity)

There are two ways to respond when you watch the world’s leaders attempt to solve the planet’s most pressing problems and fail:

You can despair or you can raise hell.

Here is a cool music video (image opposite) to illustrate the point.

After watching the 2009 climate talks in Copenhagen collapse, many bright-eyed young people despaired, suffering through months of what can only be described as a “Hopenhagen” hangover. More recently, when the diplomats at the Rio+20 Earth Summit produced a policy document with all the weight of a fluffy pink cloud, we watched the cloud pass and decided to get down to business.

I attended Rio+20 as the communications coordinator for SustainUS, an entirely youth-run and volunteer-led nonprofit that helps U.S. youth sort through the alphabet soup of the United Nations and push for meaningful change at conferences like Rio+20. It was truly inspiring to be entrusted with the stories of young people across the globe.

On the second-to-last day of Rio+20, young people organized a “people’s plenary” to make our voices heard and then walked out of the conference center after symbolically ripping up the summit’s final “outcome document.”

Unlike many of the gray-haired negotiators, we can’t afford to let our system continue to fail.
We’re coming of age in a time of rising inequality, staggering rates of global unemployment severe declines in natural resources, and this fun little thing called climate change that even scientists funded by Big Oil can’t seem to deny.

 Many of my peers and I have come to see this doom and gloom as an incredible opportunity to change the way the world works.

In fact, while the final Earth Summit agreement contains some rainbows and sunshine about “recognizing the need for broader measures of progress,” the push for a new way of thinking about progress dominated discussions at many of the side events run by environmental and social justice groups.

Now, people young and old are beginning to push for a new framework for defining progress. The famous economist Jeffery Sachs gathered crowds at Rio when he gave speeches warning that by failing to account for the things that make us well-off and satisfied, our current metrics of progress will lead us over a cliff.

Though the negotiations might have failed to set ambitious targets for sustainable development, Rio+20 has given us a sense of our common cause and inspired all of us to work harder to put the correct systems into place to create the future we truly want. This time we’re not turning away in despair. We’re walking away determined to lead where our leaders could not.

A frequent blogger and social entrepreneur, Lisa Curtis is the community builder at Solar Mosaic and co-founder of Kuli Kuli, a nutrition-focused social enterprise. Previously, Lisa wrote political briefings for President Obama, served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger, and managed communications for an impact investment firm in India. Follow her on Twitter @LisaCurtis.