We are earning the scorn and condemnation of history”

Posted on October 21, 2011 by John Gibbons

He’s hardly a household name, but US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (a Democrat representing Rhode Island) delivered a quite extraordinary 23-minute speech last week on the floor of the Senate – the speech we hoped, back in the heady days of late 2008, to hear the incoming President one day deliver – and deliver on.

That, of course, hasn’t happened, and the world’s inexorable slide towards resource exhaustion and carbon-fuelled climate collapse has barely been dented by the change of incumbent in the White House from an outright climate change denier to a young president who has turned out to be simply a captive of a corporatised, utterly broken and bastardised political system. In hindsight, it was naive on my part, and on the part of millions around the world, to think that any one politician could or would dare to step beyond politics-as-usual and put his career on the line for the overwhelmingly greater good of preventing climate chaos. Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Sceptics, Sustainability | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

A little something for the weekend…

Posted on September 30, 2011 by John Gibbons

While smoking out climate change deniers can offer a little light relief, it’s important not to lose sight of what exactly is on the line here. For this, I am grateful to Joe Romm over at ThinkProgress for the following reminder:

mit-wheels.gif

The above ‘wheel’ graphic was developed by scientists at MIT to try to visualise complex options. The ‘No policy’ wheel’ is on the left, and that’s the wheel we are collectively now rolling. The wafer-thin blue segment at the very top represents the scale of likelihood of global warming not exceeding the catastrophic tipping point of +2C. Mid-range projections swing between 4-6C and there’s a one in four chance that the heating will be 7C, 8C or even more. Continue reading →

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Climate scientist fillets Pat Kenny

Posted on September 27, 2011 by John Gibbons

Prof Richard Somerville of the University of California is one of the world’s top climate experts. A lead author for the IPCC’s AR4, he is research professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He is also a big fan of John Tyndall, the 19th century scientific genius from Leighlinbridge, and (at least until Sean O’Brien hit the Ireland rugby squad) Carlow’s most famous son.

Somerville was in Dublin earlier tonight to deliver a lecture on the amazing legacy of scientific discoveries attributed to the dogged and ingenious research work carried out by Tyndall over a glittering career. With the international focus on climate science, the EPA was celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication in 1861 of Tyndall’s landmark paper, entitled ‘On the Absorption and Radiation  of  Heat  by  Gases  and Vapours‘. Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Media, Sceptics | Tagged , , | 27 Comments

The devil or the deep blue sea – our nuclear conundrum

Posted on September 16, 2011 by John Gibbons

Twenty five years ago, in the early hours of April 26, 1986 a botched safety test led to a massive explosion at one of the four nuclear reactors at Chernobyl in Belarus. This was the world’s most serious nuclear event since the US air force dropped nuclear weapons on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August 1945.

In the quarter century since the Chernobyl disaster, a powerful narrative has built up to the effect that nuclear power is simply too dangerous to be used. Among the environmental community in Ireland and elsewhere, opposition to nuclear power became conflated with opposition to nuclear weapons. And who in their right minds would want but to limit the development and distribution of nuclear weapons? Continue reading →

Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Nuclear, Sustainability | Tagged , , , , , | 9 Comments

When ‘functionally insane’ seems normal, time to worry

Posted on September 6, 2011 by John Gibbons

Every now and again I try to take a couple of hours out of life in La La Land (or was it Namaland?) to check in on the state of the real world. You know the one, it sustains all life, it’s the one upon whose well being all human hopes, dreams and plans depend. Yes, that one, the very one we’re collectively killing just as fast as we possibly can.

Of course, only crazy people see the crippling of the biosphere in the coming decades as a crisis. The grown ups, the politicians, the pundits who crowd around Marian Finucane on Saturdays and Sundays, the economists, columnists and assorted other soothsayers for what ails us have absolutely nothing whatever to say on the subject.

To be fair, for many of our humanities-educated commentariat this goes beyond just rank indifference and laziness; it is also generously leavened with quite spectacular levels of ignorance of even the most fundamental pass Leaving Cert science. Continue reading →

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More power to us if we choose nuclear option

Posted on August 25, 2011 by John Gibbons

Time to shake the ‘drill baby, drill’ debate on Ireland’s energy future up a little? here’s my piece in today’s Irish Times

OPINION: Instead of seeking partners to exploit hoped-for offshore fossil fuel resources, Ireland should consider building some medium-sized nuclear plants, writes JOHN GIBBONS

LAST MARCH, shortly after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Fintan O’Toole memorably described a nuclear power station as “a concrete testament to hubris”. The term, he reminded us, came from the ancient Greek, and is a “warning that there are boundaries we should not cross”.

The damage to the nuclear power plants resulting from a massive earthquake followed by a mega-tsunami apparently proved not the mistake of siting these facilities in a vulnerable coastal location, but rather, the folly of building any system that can ever fail catastrophically. Continue reading →

Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Nuclear, Sustainability | Tagged , , , , | 17 Comments

John Tyndall – Ireland’s Greatest Climate Scientist

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Paddy Morris

Science in 1861 was very different to now, and entire fields of study and concepts that are now taken for granted – quantum physics, the theory of relativity, continental drift, the big bang, DNA, the uncertainty principle, black holes, an expanding universe with multiple galaxies – simply didn’t exist.

Climate Science, contrary to what some people might like you to believe, did exist 150 years ago,and it was John Tyndall, an Irish scientist, who first correctly measured the relative infrared absorptive powers of the atmospheric gases – mainly nitrogen, oxygen, water vapour, carbon dioxide, ozone and methane.

With the publication in 1861 of ‘On the Absorption and Radiation  of  Heat  by  Gases  and Vapours,  and on the Physical Connexion of Radiation, Absorption, and Conduction‘, Tyndall was the first to prove experimentally the existence of the greenhouse effect, which had been postulated by Joseph Fourier in 1824. This helped form the basis of modern climate science, and it laid the groundwork for Svante Arrhenius who quantified the relationship between CO2 and temperature in 1896 with his greenhouse law which read as follows: ‘if the quantity of carbonic acid increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression‘. Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Survival of the fairest?

Posted on July 4, 2011 by John Gibbons

Greed, in the immortal words of Gordon Gekko from the movie Wall Street, is good. Or, as we were told over and over again in this country during the heady days of the Bubble, we just needed to free our “wealth creators” (usually code for neo-gombeen gamblers jetting in from their tax havens) to, well, create ‘wealth’.

We all now know only too well how that played out. While the bubble may be in tatters, the ideology that underpins it – that of striving for relentless economic growth while accepting without question the ever-widening income inequality between the elite and the rest – has remained surprisingly intact. Continue reading →

Posted in Biodiversity, Economics, Global Warming, Psychology, Sustainability | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

The decline and fall of the Human Empire

Posted on June 11, 2011 by John Gibbons

Below is my article, as it appears over four pages in the current edition of ‘Village’ magazine:

Doomsday cults are as old as human civilisation. The Bible is a rich sourcebook for ‘End Times’ enthusiasts, who pore over Iron Age manuscripts purporting to pinpoint a particular day that heralds the Apocalypse. Another such date passed on May 21st last, with the ‘Rapture’ now rescheduled to October.

But just because they’re crazy, doesn’t always guarantee they’re wrong. “An Armageddon is approaching at the beginning of the third millennium,” says celebrated naturalist Prof EO Wilson of Harvard. But, he adds, “it is not the cosmic war and fiery collapse of mankind foretold in sacred scripture. It is the wreckage of the planet by an exuberantly plentiful and ingenious humanity.” Continue reading →

Posted in Biodiversity, Economics, Energy, Global Warming, Irish Focus, Media, Sustainability | Tagged , , , | 13 Comments

In the world, at the limits to growth

Posted on June 7, 2011 by David Korowicz

By David Korowicz*

We imagine this country is in crisis, yet crisis is relative. Most people in the world would envy our material austerity and be thankful for our endlessly ‘collapsing’ health service. But, with our expectations thwarted and in the anxiety of uncertainty, we are focused inward. Yet we remain as deluded as ever.

Our arguments about austerity and default, and our prospective return to economic growth are framed within the context of a stable global economy. We imagine our troubles as if they are largely our own, shared maybe with a few other peripheral Euro-zone countries and some errant German banks. Our argument assumes that within our national life, a path can be found, however hard and long, that must eventually lead to renewed growth and a return to something like we had before property speculation consumed us. And even were Ireland’s economy to remain sunk in a mire, somewhere else out there, in Canada or China, the global economy will continue to roll on. Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, Energy, Global Warming, Sustainability | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Could climate change be linked to freak weather? Never!

Posted on June 1, 2011 by John Gibbons

By Bill McKibben*

Caution: It is vitally important not to make connections. When you see pictures of rubble like this week’s shots from Joplin, Mo., you should not wonder: Is this somehow related to the tornado outbreak three weeks ago in Tuscaloosa, Ala., or the enormous outbreak a couple of weeks before that (which, together, comprised the most active April for tornadoes in US history). No, that doesn’t mean a thing.

It is far better to think of these as isolated, unpredictable, discrete events. It is not advisable to try to connect them in your mind with, say, the fires burning across Texas – fires that have burned more of America at this point this year than any wildfires have in previous years. Texas, and adjoining parts of Oklahoma and New Mexico, are drier than they’ve ever been – the drought is worse than that of the Dust Bowl. But do not wonder if they’re somehow connected. Continue reading →

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Tipping the Scales towards Sustainability

Posted on May 19, 2011 by John Gibbons

The Stockholm Memorandum – 3rd Nobel Laureate Symposium* on Global Sustainability, Stockholm, Sweden, 16-19 May 2011

I. Mind-shift for a Great Transformation

The Earth system is complex. There are many aspects that we do not yet understand. However, we are the first generation with the insight of the new global risks facing humanity. We face the evidence that our progress as the dominant species has come at a very high price.

Unsustainable patterns of production, consumption, and population growth are challenging the resilience of the planet to support human activity. At the same time, inequalities between and within societies remain high, leaving behind billions with unmet basic human needs and disproportionate vulnerability to global environmental change. Continue reading →

Posted in Biodiversity, Global Warming, Sustainability | 5 Comments

2084: An Oral History of the Great Warming

Posted on May 12, 2011 by John Gibbons

“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”, the famous Danish physicist Niels Bohr once quipped, only half in jest.

Scientists, as we know, are a dry lot, preferring to leave the purple prose to the scribes while they pore over their beakers and field samples, tut tutting all the while at the misrepresentation and distortions in much of what passes for coverage of science generally (and the benighted and ideologue-infested sub-field of ‘climate economics’ in particular).

Dr James Powell is an exception. He has identified (correctly, in my view) that societies communicate more in storytelling and myths than in the recital of cold data, assessments and reports. Simply setting out the facts, as the IPCC and countless other worthy organisations have found to their cost, gets you nowhere, especially Continue reading →

Posted in Biodiversity, Global Warming, Sceptics, Sustainability | 21 Comments

Reflections on a Long Good Friday

Posted on April 22, 2011 by John Gibbons

“My God, my God, why hath thou forsaken me?” These are the words attributed to Christ on the cross, as recorded in two of the Gospels (Matthew and Mark). It is one of what are known as the ‘Seven Last Words’. An editorial in today’s Irish Times waxes lyrical about their apparent continued relevance: “Workers who have lost their jobs, families who have lost their homes, emigrants, migrants, the struggling people of Libya and the Middle East, all can echo the cry of anguish from a Christ who wonders whether he has been forsaken.”

Oddly enough, it always sounded to me a lot like a prophet who, in the course of being put to death for the beliefs he so earnestly held and professed, suddenly realised that this was it: he was about to die, just the same as every other flesh-and-blood human being. Frankly, this altogether human story is, to my ear, far more plausible and compelling than the more fanciful fables that have come to dominate our understanding of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Sceptics | 37 Comments

Fukushima a godsend for anti-nuclear bandwagon

Posted on March 22, 2011 by John Gibbons

I’ve been following the unfolding nuclear “crisis” in Japan with growing alarm. People who call themselves environmentalists have been jumping up and down with thinly disguised glee, pointing and waving and saying: “there, we warned you, nuclear is GONNA KILL US ALL”. Run for your lives, a plume of deadly radiation is spreading across the planet. We’re doomed, I tells ya, doomed.

And in a sense, they are right. Events at Fukushima have indeed taken the world a significant step closer to Carbon Armageddon. Continue reading →

Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Nuclear, Sustainability | Tagged , , , , , , , | 45 Comments