Politicians worry about the next election; business people worry about the next quarter. Who does that leave to worry about the longer term future? One top scientific expert believes the people who really do think ahead are parents, more specifically mothers. After all, they have to plan years, even decades ahead, when looking at schools and university – and also thinking about the kind of world their young children might inherit.
Dr Jim Hansen is director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, and is one of the world’s foremost authorities on climate. He is also a grandfather. Last December he wrote directly to Barack and Michelle Obama about the urgency of the planet’s climate crisis. Continue reading →
“Electric word life – It means forever and that’s a mighty long time”. Eighties music aficionados will probably recognise this line, from Prince’s Purple Rain.
It came to mind when reading a report from the US-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Put plainly, we have crossed the climate Rubicon. To a large extent, there’s probably no going back.
The new study, by NOAA scientist Susan Solomon, shows how changes in surface temperature, rainfall, and sea level are largely irreversible for upwards of 1,000 years, even if all CO2 emissions were somehow to completely stop. The findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Continue reading →
Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address today at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC took just over 20 minutes to deliver, and runs to 2,400 words.
As you would expect from one of the greatest political orators in a generation, he delivered a powerful, moving address, yet one which eschews self-induglence and rhetorical flourishes. Like the man himself, it is deep, reflective and improves with a second, even third reading.
You’ve probably seen it delivered on TV. It’s worth reading as well. For the record, it’s reproduced in full below: Continue reading →
And so, out with the old, in with the new. According to insurance giant, Munich Re, 2008 has been one of the worst ever for natural disasters. Overall global losses ran to around $200bn, with uninsured losses totalling $45bn, about 50% up on 2007. In a dry understatement, a spokesman commented: “Climate change has already started and is very probably contributing to increasingly frequent weather extremes and ensuing natural catastrophes”. Continue reading →
An image snapped on a wall earlier today in Dun Laoghaire… First posting shot on and uploaded direct from my iPhone! Well, television ain’t all bad. Take last night’s Prime Time Special on the murky world of Declan Ganley, lately of Libertas, but a man of many parts. Katie Hannon’s report was public service journalism of the highest order. Since Mr Ganley and his shadowy organisation have been so circumspect about putting information into the public domain as to their sources of funding, it’s about time someone set about filling in a lot of the missing details.
Ganley will doubtless feel it’s all a campaign by nameless Brussels types out to blacken him and his organisation, in fact given the level of influence Ganley has exerted on both Irish and EU politics, we have every good reason to want to have a forensic analysis of the man, his money and his mission.
Well done to all in Primetime (and yes, this makes up for having Phelim McAleer rabbiting on the other night).
Despite there being no shortage of hard news to cover right now, RTE’s Prime Time last night took a curious detour to air clips from a propaganda film, Not Evil, Just Wrong, made by two Irish filmmakers. It is, for want of a kinder way of putting this, bullshit par excellence, a bizarre neo-con mix of cliches about freedom, faux concern for ‘poor people’ and undying worship at the altar of bare-knuckle capitalism as the only way to organise world affairs. In short, a narrow, ugly little project.
Yet here we were, just after the main news bulletin, being served up such tripe as: “I don’t think it would be a bad thing for this earth to warm up”. This dense nugget of stupidity comes courtesy of one Patrick Moore, described in caption as ‘founding member of Greenpeace’. Assuming this is the case, I can only assume Moore has long since been drummed out of that organisation, a body which is only too well aware of the calamitous effects of a warming Earth.
The McAleer propaganda film fingers the campaign against DDT as ‘proof’ that these eco types are secretly plotting the deaths of millions of Africans from malaria. To listen to the hand-picked loons interviewed in this mockumentary, you would be left with the impression that DDT is the vapour squeezed from fresh rose petals. It is in fact a ‘persistent organic pollutant’. It has a half-life of 2-5 years. It accumulates in the food web, and concentrates in apex predators, such as eagles and other birds. DDT undoubtedly has its uses in tackling malaria but to suggest that it is benign and poses no health hazards is total bull.
And that’s about as good as this little film gets. The narrator intones: “Al Gore still supports (Rachel) Carson’s discredited claims about the compound…he is now also campaigning against fossil fuels with the same enthusiasm”. Good point, except that (i) Carson’s claims, in her book ‘Silent Spring‘ have never been discredited and (ii) global warming has nothing to do with DDT, no matter how many times these idiots try to smear-by-association.
McAleer appeared in studio to ‘debate’ his film with Dr Kieran Hickey of NUI Galway. Hickey played a blinder, patiently unravelling the web of lies and half-truths and laying its “fundamental flaws” bare. He opened with a damming three-point demolition of the film, pointing out how it had cherry-picked its facts (and contributors) while ignoring the strong consensus view of literally thousands of professional climate scientists, notably via the IPCC’s 20 years of analysis and its four major Assessments Reports.
McAleer again trotted out his bizarre line that the IPCC report had somehow been hijacked by the “many people in the IPCC” that he suggests don’t agree with its findings. Who these people are, what their objections are, we are left none the wiser. The report, by some mysterious osmosis, turns from hard science into what McAleer calls an “alarmist mantra” (I had my fun back in August in a live debate with McAleer on Today FM with Anton Savage).
He then quickly steers off into back to talking about DDT, and warnings that “it’s going to cause cancer, it’s going to kill us all, kill the birds…the result was 50 million women and children died in Africa from a spike in malaria”. No men, Phelim, just women and children. Is that an onion in your top pocket as your eyes begin to well up?
What’s the link with DDT and climate change exactly? “It’s a consensus, like the consensus about BSE, about killer bees…we’ve had these scares before”. Aaaaaah, yes, now I remember the Intergovernmental Panel on Killer Bees (IPKB?) and it’s alarmist report that we’re all doomed. Kieran Hickey interjected mid-rant to point out that the reason BSE was no longer a major threat to public health is precisely that it was taken seriously, the scientists told us feeding animal brains to other animals, and then eating those animals was just asking for trouble – so we stopped doing it.
In McAleer-land, if the fire brigade is called and manages to stop your house burning down, then there can’t have been a fire in the first place. The ‘debate’ descended into pure farce when Hickey challenged McAleer: “let’s talk about climate change”, to which the suddenly modest McAleer replied: “let’s NOT talk about climate change”. A bemused Miriam O’Callaghan intervened, reminding McAleer that this was in fact the reason he was in studio to begin with!
To cover his retreat, McAleer slung out a red herring about the difference between ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’, as if it mattered. Apparently McAleer’s geography teacher back in the 1970s told his class that we were entering a new Ice Age, as presumably reported by the Intergovernmetal Panel of Geography Teachers (IPGT). Ha! So there!
So what’s really behind all these mendacious scientists telling us a pack of lies about global warming? “I think there’s a lot of anti-capitalism, anti-development people behind this global warming hysteria”, said McAleer, a self-appointed spokesman for “the poor people in the world”, who he reckons desperately need global climate collapse brought on by out of control fossil fuel burning to lift them out of poverty – and into the abyss.
Nowhere does McAleer point out that over 90% of all fossil fuel burning to date has been done by us in the developed world, with the direct, tangible and highly damaging brunt of our actions already falling on the world’s poor.
When someone prefaces a statement to you by saying: “with the greatest respect…”, it’s a sure sign they think you’re talking rubbish, and so Miriam O’Callaghan brought McAleer back in to give him a kicking about his utter lack of qualifications for the task he purports to address in his mockumentary. His razor-sharp riposte is that “…but Al Gore’s not a scientist, in fact Al Gore interviews no scientist in An Inconvenient Truth and he wins a Nobel prize…our film has scientists from both sides of the argument”.
He wraps up by trying to smear environmentalists as being the new colonialists, trying to hold back people in developing countries from achieving prosperity. Miriam O’Callaghan’s growing frustration at McAleer’s tortured logic surfaced when she told him: “you’re almost making two different points”. Kieran Hickey scored the final punch when simply asking McAleer why he didn’t just make a film about DDT (given the gaping level of his ignorance on even the most basic science behind climate change).
I think I have the answer: DDT isn’t a bandwagon. Masquerading as a ‘climate sceptic’ gets third rate filmmakers like this onto prime time television – literally, something that would never happen had he restricted his film making to an area in which he is competent (whatever that might be). The meeja loves a good argy bargy, and while I was horrified to see such a spoofer get this kind of publicity, he did remind me a little of P. Flynn on that famous Late Late Show many years ago, where the public saw clean through the gloss to the character beneath.
The so-called climate sceptic camp is getting critically depleted of spokespeople who can even pass for competent. Maybe this is indeed the best way of calling them out.
The last 24 hours has passed by in a blur, punctuated by less than 3 hours’ sleep. It was 6am today before we could drag ourselves away from TV screens and assorted laptops, to drift off, still smiling, into a brief, dreamless sleep.
The night of November 4/5, 2008 will I suspect be remembered and recalled vividly in twenty, thirty and more years’ time as one of the great ‘where were you when Obama hit 270’ moments. There were so many unforgettable moments that I’m straining for superlatives.
First, since everyong has long since jumped on the B.O. bandwagon, I’ll indulge myself with a small pat on the back for my Irish Times piece published when the Illinois senator was still duking it out with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. The headline read: ‘Obama is only credible candidate on climate change’. I argued in the piece that alone among the presidential wannabies had Obama, at potential political cost to himself, stood firm against a daft notion floated by John McCain and promptly backed by Hillary to introduce a cut in federal petrol tax for what they call the ‘summer travel season’.
It was doubly heartening therefore to hear, in his brilliant acceptance speech from Chicago early this morning, president-elect Obama immediately address global warming as a defining challenge of his presidency. After the unrelenting tragedy of eight ruinous lost years in this war we cannot risk losing, to hear the next US president identify a real mortal enemy instead of the straw men so beloved of George Bush is an immense relief.
The US may be coming to this fight late, perhaps even too late, but now at least there’s a sliver of hope where this time yesterday there was none. And who wouldn’t grasp a fighting chance if it’s offered? Having campaigned so effectively on a platform of ‘change’ and having delivered a bounty of new Senate seats to buttress his presidency, Obama now has the clearest possible mandate to actually deliver on this campaign mantra.
November 4th has breathed new life into the Kyoto process, and preparations and hard negotiations can now begin in earnest ahead of the crucial climate conference in Copenhagen in December 2009 which must take us far beyond the modest (yet largely unfulfilled) aims of the Kyoto accord which Dubya did so much to dismember.
It certainly has been the most extraordinary political campaign in a generation. The gruelling Democratic primaries would have wilted the will and dented the mettle of all but the toughest campaigners, yet Obama bounced through that with barely a dent, and then took everything the GOP could sling at him in the last few months for good measure. Now that’s what I call tough. He’ll need to be, since it’s about the toughest time in 50 years for any president. As the satirical magazine, The Onion inimitably put it: “Black man given nation’s worst job”.
As Oisin Coughlan of Friends of the Earth put it today: “Last week the British Parliament passed a climate change law to cut UK emissions by 80% by 2050. Yesterday, Americans elected a President who is committed to a law to cut US emissions by 80% by 2050.
Can we achieve a similar law in Ireland, Coughlan wonders. “The answer, of course, is yes we can. But, we need to generate a groundswell of public pressure on our elected representatives to turn their aspirational political promises into concrete legal commitments”. FOE is now calling on the Government to honour its promise to debate a Climate Change Bill introduced in Seanad last year by independent Senator, Ivana Bacik.
This would be another small but highly symbolic step towards getting Ireland into step with the more progressive EU states in demanding that there is no let-up in international efforts to head off climate catastrophe. These efforts will, from January 20 next, should have a powerful ally in Washington. Working in tandem, the EU and the US can move mountains – and not just for open cast coal mining either!
OCD is the term that could be used to describe a new political creature, the Obsessive Compulsive Democrat. As we now enter the last day before what has perhaps been the world’s longest (and certainly most expensive) election campaign, OCD victims the world over have been obsessively checking the websites, from RealClearPolitics to Pollster, Electoral-Vote.com (whom I still haven’t forgiven for leading me to think a Kerry win was about to happen four years ago) and the multitude of media election sites for hourly updates on the latest poll from just about anywhere.
In my own case, my OCD symptoms were exacerbated when I installed a couple of election widgets on my 3G iPhone; last thing at night, first thing in the morning, and who knows how many times in between, I’ve found myself sneaking a peek at the ebbing and flowing charts, tables and graphics.
No doubt about it, this has been one hell of a ding dong battle. Both Obama and McCain were rank outsiders in the first place to even get their party nominations. Hillary Clinton was at least 20 points clear of the young Chicago pretender when he threw his hat in the ring. And Hillary had pretty much the entire machinery of the Democratic party behind her (not to mention to imprimatur of Blessed William Jefferson). And yet Obama, as much it seems a force of nature as just a mere politician, swept all that aside.
Next, they said Obama might have won among Democrats, but no way, no how would an African-American be able to get enough support outside the party, and especially among the white working class (which overwhelmingly backed Hillary in virtually every primary battle). Apart from his skin pigment, there is a definite whiff of ‘radical’ about Obama. Though he’s been at pains to pretend otherwise, he does appear to actually relate to and care about the tremendous inequality in US society, including the newly pauperised lower middle classes, not to mention that country’s vast legion of uninsured working poor.
Given the likely grip the Democrats will now wield on both the Senate and House of Representatives, this places an incoming Democratic President in a position of tremendous power. Power to begin the long task of rescuing the US from the cul de sac into which it has been dragged by the failed neo-con “project” to engineer an altogether different America with a hard-wired permanent Republican majority.
America can and must do better, much better. Global efforts to confront and reverse the slide into ecological collapse have been neutered by the bullying and thuggery of Bush and his ‘our way or the highway’ diplomacy. Almost a decade has been lost, a period which has seen the publication of the IPCC‘s Third (2001) and Fourth Assessment (2007) Reports, which have mapped out in forensic detail the profound changes our planet is undergoing, and given red flag warnings of the points beyond which humanity dares not tread.
As if to rub our noses in it, Al Gore, winner of the popular vote in 2000 yet cheated when the Republican-dominated US Supreme Court suspended the Florida recount, emerges as the one politician on the planet who truly, utterly and totally ‘gets’ climate change. His landmark film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ changed the trajectory of world debate on global warming, while all the while shaming Bush and his cabal of flat-earthers.
To the handful of people still out there who think politics doesn’t matter, I offer two words: Bush–Gore. Or, more germanely, McCain–Obama. Any initial enthusiasm environmentalists may have had for John McCain (a senator with a genuine record on trying to address climate change) was swept away when Thatcher of Alaska was added to the Republican ticket. Palin may have delivered the required red meat for the redneck ‘base’ of the party, but at a price.
Her arrival put paid to McCain’s trump card, i.e that he represented a clean break from the utter failures of the Bush presidency. And that delivered many so-called Blue Dog Democrats as well as a good portion of independents into the Obama column. Will it be enough? In about 30 hours time, midnight on Tues 4th, the eastern state polls will close. The final polls on the west coast won’t close until around 4am Irish time on Wednesday morning.
Given the unreliability of exit polls in previous elections, it’s likely that quite a few OCD sufferers (this one included) will remain by our TV and laptop screens until dawn’s first light on November 5th. RTE’s Morning Ireland coverage kicks off at 6am, so it remains to be seen if things are still in the melting pot at that stage. If ever there was a year to kick the Republicans resoundingly out of power (Bush’s personal approval rating is the lowest Gallup have recorded of any president in 50 years) this is it.
But as Obama keeps reminding us, there’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip, so only a fool would call this until the Fat Lady has not just sung, but has taken her curtain calls, had her supper, got a taxi home and is safely tucked up in bed. Only then could we say, and for once without the usual irony: ‘Mission Accomplished’.
If self-immolation were somehow our collective goal, there is no surer way of expediting this outcome than to allow the rampant clearing of the world’s remaining forests. A critical place to start is in cracking down on imports of illegally logged timber to try to save rare forest species and tackle climate change.
EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas has called for an end to global deforestation by 2030. Commissioner Dimas produced a set of plans to try to curb the wholesale destruction of the world’s forests by half by 2020 – but his action was slammed as ineffective by environmental groups.
EU officials are already negotiating voluntary agreements with Indonesia, Malaysia and Ghana to stop wood logged in protected areas from reaching the European Union. Dimas said EU nations would have to change their national laws so the importers of wood from unsustainable sources can be fined or jailed. The EU does not have the power to draft criminal laws.
The EU plan will also offer extra money for producer countries to preserve old forests and place the burden on importers to prove the wood is from sustainable sources. “When forests disappear so does a vast array of plants and species with disastrous and irreversible consequences,” Dimas said. His demand for an end to global deforestation by 2030 may well be realistic, since by then, there may be little or no original forest standing anywhere on Earth left to protect. Well, it’s one way of meeting a target.
“These precious resources also play a vital role in regulating climate change”, said Dimas. He may have been reading the WWF’s report, 2010 and Beyond: Rising to the Biodiversity Challenge. This revealed that biodiversity has declined by more than a quarter in the last 35 years and highlighted the inequitable burden placed by developed countries on the world’s biodiversity through unsustainable production and consumption.
“Biodiversity is not just a green issue – it is the life support system of our planet providing food, fuel, fibre, medicines and services such as pollination, soil fertility and clean water,” said director of international policy at WWF International, Gordon Shepherd. He said that the report recognises the economic value of biodiversity both to our global economy and for the millions of people directly dependent on natural resources for their livelihoods.
“We have to integrate biodiversity in all policies. The loss of biodiversity is now affecting the economy of our countries through the depletion of fish stocks in our oceans through overfishing and illegal fishing to agricultural activities polluting river basins,” added Shepherd.
While many governments and agencies are rightly exercised by the carbon-driven climate crisis, even if somehow a switch could be thrown that miraculously fixed this problem worldwide, the ongoing human-driven environmental holocaust would continue unabated. As the lessons of Easter Island and the collapse of the Mayan civilisation illustrate, civilisation can no more exist without an intact environment than a salmon can exist on the riverbank.
We’re the ones with the Greens in Government, yet it’s Britain that has gone and set up a new department of Energy and Climate, headed by Ed Miliband. The UK is also to adopt a more severe target to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, increasing this to 80% from its previous 60%. These are seriously ambitious targets that, to be delivered, will require no less than the re-engineering of British society.
Toughening up the targets was done in the teeth of intense industry lobbying to dilute the EU’s ambitious climate change plans, including tough carbon caps. Predictably, lobby groups for businesses argue that cutting carbon emissions will jack up fuel bills, but Miliband has stuck firmly to the line expounded in the Stern Review from 2006, and that is that the costs of inaction on climate change were far greater. Miliband’s next job is to set out exactly how this can be done.
“In tough economic times, some people will ask whether we should retreat from our climate change objectives. In our view, it would be quite wrong to row back”, said Miliband. His comments are a shot in the arm for EU leaders who have been battling to keep a December deadline to agree EU-wide energy and climate proposals on the table, and keep to a target to cut emissions by a fifth by 2020.
The spectre of a deep looming recession is making many in Europe, especially new members such as Poland (they of the large coal deposits) very jumpy. The emissions targets would apply to all six greenhouse gases defined under the Kyoto Protocol, not just CO2, as had been the case.
Concessions have already been agreed for some heavy industry and coal-dependent former communist countries. What’s most important about what Britain is now doing is that its government is making its new targets binding by amending its Climate Change Bill. Even the environmentalists, to date sceptical of much of the New Labour spin, are singing the praises of this new approach.
“In a decade in power Labor has never adopted a target so ambitious, far-reaching and internationally significant as this,” said Dr Doug Parr of Greenpeace. An amendment to Britain’s energy law being discussed would introduce ‘feed in’ tariffs for small-scale renewable energy generation.
These feed-in tariffs pay people a premium to generate “green” electricity and feed this back into the national grid, earning them a profit which helps to pay for installing solar panels, wind turbines, groundwater heating systems and other sources. Noises have been made in this direction in Ireland, but nothing so clearcut as this.
A couple of months ago, Gordon Brown was a political Dead Man Walking, now cometh the (economic) crisis, cometh the man. Clearly, for a leader well known to find environmental issue worthy-but-dull, he has had a Pauline conversion along the way. What hope our own Mr Cowen might follow suit? Two chances woul
They say the first casualty in war is the truth. The same surely applies to elections, and none more so than the crucial US election on November 4th next. Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin has shown a startling contempt for science, as I previously reported in the Irish Times. Now we find that she and her officials in the Alaskan government drew on the work of a number of scientists known to be sceptical about the dangers and causes of global warming, to back efforts to stop polar bears being protected as an endangered species. Some of these same scientists were funded by the oil industry, surprise surprise.
In submissions to the US government’s consultation on the status of the polar bear, Palin referred to at least six scientists who have questioned either the existence of warming as a largely man-made phenomenon or its severity. One paper was partly paid for by oil company ExxonMobil. Continue reading →
Today FM’s The Last Word yesterday evening featured two items with a climate twist, I was involved in one (a discusssion as to why, according to a UK survey, people who profess green credentials still engage in lots of long-haul flying) while Conor Faughnan of AA Roadwatch was in a separate discussion, this one around a planned crackdown on cars in Dublin city as a climate change measure.
Cars, Conor told us, are always being made the scapegoat. Carbon dioxide emissions? Pah, says Conor, every time you exhale, you emit carbon, so therefore you and I are pretty much the same as a car, ergo leave cars alone! He actually went so far as to suggest that a person exhales around the same amount of CO2 as someone who drives not that much.
Cars, for the record, on average emit FOUR TIMES their weight in carbon per annum, so a typical one ton car whacks up 4 tons into space for the next 50-250 years (OK, some of it ends up in the oceans, if we’re lucky). Cars are such a teensy part of the problem, says Conor, as coy as Michael O’Leary on a bad day, you couldn’t possibly pick on them. Go pick on houses, yea, they’re bigger again, and emit even more CO2. Anyone but my special interest group.
For the record, transport emissions, most notably from private cars, are far and away the fastest growing source of Irish CO2 emissions, having risen over 160 per cent since 1990, and continuing, according to the recent EPA report, to climb all the way to 2020. The AA really can do better than this if they want to be taken seriously as a lobby group.
In July I wrote what I thought was a fairly measured article about the environmental impacts of our culture of low-cost flying. The main focus of the piece was on comments made by Aer Lingus boss, Dermot Mannion decrying EU efforts at making aviation pay a contribution towards the emissions it generates.
Reaction was swift and furious, but from Ryanair boss, Michael O’Leary, who seemed to have blown an entire gasket in fury at the above article. Two days later his now-famous response was published in the Irish Times letters page – littered with no fewer than 11 insults along the line of ‘eco-clown’, ‘eco-loony’, ‘eco-killjoys’, etc etc. Continue reading →
This is highly significant since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has already warned that a rise in global temperature in the range of 1 to 3°C will lead to catastrophic consequences, including “widespread loss of biodiversity, widespread deglaciation of the Greenland Ice Sheet, and a major reduction of area and volume of Hindu-Kush-Himalaya-Tibetan glaciers. These systems provide the head-waters for most major river systems of Asia.” Continue reading →
What has meat go to do with climate change? At first glance, not a lot. But dig a little deeper and you’ll soon find that the sharp increases in meat consumption in the last decade or two is a major contributor to the problem of climate change and global warming.
The solution is that people should eat less meat to help combat the effects of climate change, that’s according to Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He argues that people should aim for one meat-free day a week, before scaling down their consumption even further. Continue reading →
