Opine away on any climate/energy topic — or offer up your favorite quote.
Here’s one of mine, from Ian Fleming’s first James Bond book, Casino Royale (1953):
“Surround yourself with Human Beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles.”
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Previous in TP Climate Progress
Extremely mild temperatures and major flooding in many European countries due to heavy rain and melting snow. This at the time that should be the coldest of the year.
Seems like that denier predicted ice age isn’t so imminent after all. They can’t get anything right, it seems.
Joe, you mentioned, in the post below about the Science article, that no climate models take into account the slow feedbacks and thus underestimate the sensitivity of climate to them. Could you tell us why there aren’t any models yet that do this? Technical difficulties of some sort? Modeling _all_ feedbacks would seem to be one of the most important and urgent things scientists could do in our situation.
[JR: A few of the models attempt to broadly take into account some of the carbon cycle feedbacks. The tundra is tough because there is limited recent modeling, mostly by NCAR, of tundra loss under various scenarios. I will ping NCAR and ask them.]
Another warm-conveyor is affecting parts of Wales and NW England/W Scotland today. The Dyfi has burst its banks for the second time in 48 hours with consequent road-closures. The Met Office predict totals exceeding 150mm for the Lake District and 100mm for N Wales, so more flood-related news is likely in the next 24 hours.
Warm Conveyors are one synoptic set-up prone to the 4% moisture increase/extra degree F or 6% in the case of each extra degree C. Conditions such as today’s are not unfamiliar, of course, but I wouldn’t like to see what an added 4C could do to them! Today’s temps are 9-10C in the teeth of the gale and rain, but 11-13C in the lee of the hills due to the Fohn Effect.
Cheers – John
“It’s not your blue blood, your pedigree or your college degree. It’s what you do with your life that counts.” – Millard Fuller, founder of Habitat for Humanity.
“The concept of ‘not in my backyard’ is obsolete in a global world; when we become aware that, even on a massive global scale, everyone’s backyard is someone else’s front yard.” – John Friedman
“Civilization on Easter Island was not doomed when they cut down the last tree, it was doomed 20 years prior, when they neglected to plant the trees to replace the ones that they were cutting.’ – John Friedman
From Bill Moyers talk at Occidental College, February 7, 2007.
The only answer to organized money is organized people.
Some attribute this thought to Saul Alinsky, but I first heard it from Moyers.
But, for the common goals of the readers here, where do we have organized people… because those we label as professional deniers are so clearly the representatives of organized money. Is it McKibben and 350.org? While the goals are to motivate people, the organization is not producing policy or political action.
If not that, then do we go back to Alinsky and become ever more dedicated community organizers in our own communities? Do we have the time to build a movement that way?
Climate science is half about explaining existing data and half about making some sort of climate prediction.
What about gathering this weekend some prediction from the readers and then eventually have an open poll during the next week/weekend and see what people think about those, eventually ask a few of the more advanced contributors to comment/rate those predictions!
My own submission is rather simple – in the absence of a major volcanic eruption for the next at least 6 years we will have each year in turn becoming either the warmest year in instrumental record or the second warmest (second warmest is mostly to also cover 2010 and maybe 2011 which will still have some LA NINA until late spring).
“Junkies find veins in their toes.” – Al Gore on tar sands
In This last of meeting places
We Grope Together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this Beach of the tumid river……
This is the way the world ends
This is the Way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper
-T.S. Eliot
Opening quote from the Nevile Shute novel ‘On the Beach’
“Civilization is not and can never be sustainable, this is especially true of industrial civilization…this culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living” Derrick Jensen, Endgame
In re deniers and facts:
“You can lead a horse to water, but a pencil must be lead.”–Groucho Marx–
Revenge is a dish best served cold….Old Klingon Proverb
Today is a good day to die….Klingon
Victory is life….Jem’Hadar
“Anything is Possible”, but the real question is “Is it Probable” and if so “How often?”….?
The last is my personal favorite.
“Nature is indifferent to our love, but never unfaithful.” – Edward Abbey.
“Let us admit the case of the conservative; if we once start thinking no one can guarantee where we shall come out, except that many objects, ends and institutions are surely doomed. Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place. ”
– John Dewey, Experience and Nature
In honer of Marten Luther King:
“When dissent becomes impossible, revolution becomes inevitable.”
“UNLESS someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It’s not.”
The Lorax. (Indirectly)
And the to perfectly capture our problem:
“And, for your information, you Lorax, I’m figgering
on biggering
and Biggering
and BIGGERING
and BIGGERING”
“What you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”
With all the discussion on climate related blogs tow key issues receive next to now attention:
(1) the ability of virtually all Republicans and a minority of Democrats (mostly from coal or gas states) to propel the world at an ever faster rate into climate crisis. If the US continues to refuse to act it’s hard to imagine that there will be a sufficient global response, and Republicans and some Democrats are increasingly dedicated to blocking action. Their role in accelerating the climate crisis escapes virtually any attention in the main stream media or among he pundit classes.
(2)the disinclination of Climate Hawks to figure out what types of pressure our necessary to address the refusal to act. No, becoming a shining personal example will not achieve this necessary goal. You can reduce your own carbon footprint and the world will still fry. So what are the possible means? Carbon tarrifs (would require government action somewhere), carbon boycotts? What else?
Every person on this planet should take a look around them at their surroundings and try to imagine things that they thought could never happen there happening and prepare accordingly.
These major rains are going to hit in places that never saw such rains. We are now going to see weather events in our own neighborhoods we never thought possible. I’m very very glad I don’t own a house and can migrate if needed and not worry about losing everything. The human race i going to see how truly precarious some of its dwellings are and how stupid they were to build in landslide zones, flood plains, etc.
“Somewhere to the eastward a wold howled; lightly, questioningly.
I knew the voice, for I had heard it many times before. It was George,
sounding the wasteland for an echo from the missing members of his family.
But for me it was a voice which spoke of the lost world which was ours
before we chose the alien role; a world which I had glimpsed and almost
entered…only to be excluded, at the end, by my own self.”
Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf
“If we don’t change direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed.”
“the future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
—william gibson
“the people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now … the difficulty of translation from a language that doesn’t yet exist is considerable, but there’s no need to exaggerate it.”
—ursula leguin
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” – Einstein
“Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” -Malachy McCourt
Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. That’s all she is. You cannot sweet-talk her. You cannot spin her. You cannot tell her that the oil companies say climate change is a hoax. No, Mother Nature is going to do whatever chemistry, biology and physics dictate”
“Mother Nature always bats last, and she always bats 1,000″
-Rob Watson
Albert Einstein:
“I do not know the weapons of WW III but WW IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
I for one hope the “weapons” of WW III will be coordinated scientific, rational mitigation strategies against AGW and WW IV can be fought with sonnets.
“What we’ve got here is…failure to communicate.”
Call me a cockeyed optimist but it seems that nothing comes close to massive emissions reductions, at minimal costs, as broad deployment of net-zero human mobility with optional electric power assists; and simple mechanical collision avoidance, permanent magnet magnetic levitation, and linear induction motors in first generation systems.
And, just for fun:
Power from the People! & http://www.HumanPowerTheFilm.com
Wow! 82.4375 mph http://bit.ly/hQGEhG Advanced net-zero human mobility now!
“One can only hope that what is to be done is within the political repertoire of our species”
LEON FUERTH in CBC’s broadcast of Gwynne Dyer’s Climate Wars (part 3, 50’15”)
http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/features/2009/07/09/climate-wars-part-12-cd/
Of course there are many others but I wanted to bring this one up because probably not many people know it.
“Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.”
Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862); Walden Pond
“Do not fail to learn from the pure voice of an ever-flowing mountain stream splashing over the rocks. “ The Laws of Peace; O Sensei, Morihei Ueshiba (1883-1969)
“And what is there to life if a man cannot hear the lovely cry of the whippoorwill or the arguments of the frogs around the pond at night?”
Chief Seattle
“We find ourselves ethically destitute just when, for the first time, we are faced with ultimacy, the irreversible closing down of the earth’s functioning in its major life systems. Our ethical traditions know how to deal with suicide, homicide and even genocide, but these traditions collapse entirely when confronted with biocide, the killing of the life systems of the earth, and geocide, the devastation of the earth itself.”
Father Thomas Berry Catholic priest of thePassionist order,
cultural historian and ecotheologian, although cosmologist and geologian — or “Earth scholar” were his preferred descriptors
“Human destiny is bound to remain a gamble, because at some unpredictable time and in some unforeseeable manner nature will strike back.” ~Rene Dubos, Mirage of Health, 1959
“We’re finally going to get the bill for the Industrial Age. If the projections are right,it’s going to be a big one: the ecological collapse of the planet. ~Jeremy Rifkin, World Press Review, 30 Dec ’89
“God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west… keeping the world in chains. If our nation took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.” ~Mahatma Gandhi
Re/Ad #2:
I’m also wondering about the carbon cycle feedbacks and would be happy about elaboration by JR:
Next to permamelt methane release I’m worried about plant productivity decline (as already sensored by NASA). We’ve already seen it in several places, above all Pakistan: First soil gets sterilized by drought and heat and/or forest fires. Then the nutrients get washed away by extreme rain. If this Hell & High Water treatment is repeated often enough, no soil or forest will regrow. Methinks this is an important feedback playing out on the time scale of few decades. Is this in any carbon cycle model?
—–
“We should be the heart and mind of the Earth not a malady.” — James Lovelock, 2007
“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” e e cummings
Burning Down the House
Would it be useful to chart/graph the 100, 500, 1000 year climate events occuring each year, over the past hundred years? Would such a chart reveal the same exponential rise in frequency/quantity of “rare” climate events that the global average temperature charts indicate?
Moscow record temps, flooding in Australia and Brazil? Would the human interest angle resonate with the average public better than the “2010 ties 2005 for warmest year” style of factual reporting?
@emichael, #15 – LOL!
“Stupidity and evil are the same thing. If you don’t believe it, look into the eye of a chicken”. Werner Herzog
10 million people were murdered over the last 10 years in the Congo so we can play with our cool touch pads.
We seeking and killing Canada geese because they get into the jet engines of our planes.
So the next time we check our email on a jet flying to sustainability conference, just remember the little rat that chooses cocaine to the exclusion of food. This crap going down cuz baby needs a new iPhone.
Joe, thanks for the response to my post(#2). Looking forward to the comments from NCAR.
“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe–are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.” ~ Carl Sagan
Burning Down the House
TERRY GROSS (PBS Fresh Air) hosted DAVID BIANCULLI (Author, “Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour”) Bianculli reported that George Harrison made an unscheduled appearance on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1968 and played this excerpt from 1968:
Mr. SMOTHERS: Do you have something important?
Mr. GEORGE HARRISON (Musician): Something very important to say on American television.
Mr. SMOTHERS: You know, we don’t, we – a lot of times, we don’t have opportunity of saying anything important because it’s American television, and every time you say something…
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. SMOTHERS: And try to say something important, they…
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. HARRISON: Well, whether you can say it or not, keep trying to say it.
My old mentor had a saying I carry to this day:
“At the point you are absolutely certain you are right, all learning stops”
There is a demand today for men who can make wrong appear right. (Terence [Publius Terentius Afer], c. 190-159 BC)
Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action. (Goethe)
A shocking crime was committed on the unscrupulous initiative of few individuals, with the blessing of more, and amid the passive acquiescence of all. (Tacitus)
My view is I am going to keep doing what we do better than anyone else in the world — finding, developing and delivering oil and gas to the world. (Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, July 2008)
The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them. (Einstein)
We have sunk so low it has become the obligation of every decent, thinking individual to re-state the obvious! (George Orwell)
The wise man does at once what the fool does finally. (Machiavelli; paraphrase)
In my humble opinion, non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good. (Gandhi)
… and it has to be concluded that the greatest source of harm to man is man. (Cicero, On Duties II)
It is obvious that the real wealth of life aboard our planet is a forwardly-operative, metabolic, and intellectual regenerating system. Quite clearly we have vast amounts of income wealth as Sun radiation and Moon gravity to implement our forward success. Wherefore living only on our energy savings by burning up the fossil fuels which took billions of years to impound from the Sun or living on our capital by burning up our Earth’s atoms is lethally ignorant and also utterly irresponsible to our coming generations and their forward days. Our children and their children and our future days. If we do not comprehend and realize our potential ability to support all life forever we are cosmicly bankrupt. (R. Buckminster Fuller: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth; 1969)
In the present circumstances, no one can afford to assume that someone else will solve their problems. Every individual has a responsibility to help guide our global family in the right direction. Good wishes are not sufficient; we must become actively engaged. (Tenzin Gyatso – The Dalai Lama)
Good quote session–I like #12 with reference to the partial nature of all thought, and the care that climate science requires.
So here’s my related original: “Simplify to understand; understand that NOTHING is ever simple.”
Thanks for the writing, Joe.
Wayne Burkhart
A couple favorites:
“It is the duty of every citizen according to his best capacities to give validity to his convictions in political affairs.”
- Einstein
“If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”
- Charles Darwin
Burning Down The House
Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken
Amory Lovins
Foriegn Afairs Magazine 1978
page 1 – “The commitment to a long-term coal economy many times the
scale of today’s makes the doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration early in the next century virtually unavoidable, with the prospect then or soon thereafter of substantial and perhaps irreversible changes in global climate. Only the exact date of such changes is in question.”
“Live so that when your children think of fairness and integrity, they think of you. ”
H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
A recent study indicates that there may be a gene associated with fear in political conservatives. Cal Thomas’ recent column appears to validate that
Are conservatives born “fearful”?
For those looking for a topic to write on here is a suggestion that I find particularly interesting: Power plant economics – how do you calculate the cost of electricity if you know all the other costs.
Also, it seems to me that there is something interesting going on with the concept of a power plant that never needs to be decommissioned. If it is of modular design and each module can be replaced in response to failure or impending failure, then it may never be necessary to replace the entire plant, but only to replace the modules periodically. If you have a power plant that can last indefinitely, how does that affect the cost of electricity? There are several configurations of solar thermal power plants that are potentially modular. In the long term analysis (far beyond repayment of the initial loans) it seems that such a strategy could lead to much cost reduction.
If you look at the reasons coal and nuclear power plants are decommissioned you will find that none of them apply to a modular solar power plant.
My favorite is a bumper sticker that I have on my cars: “Renewable Energy is Homeland Security”.
Dr Jill Bolte Taylor quote:
I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep, inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world and the more peaceful our planet will be. – Dr Jill Bolte Taylor
http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html
Thank you, Joe for creating this “quote” thread. I’ll copy/paste many of the offerings to use in the days ahead.
Also great thanks to Leif @ #22 for offering the Einstein quote. Nothing quite as sobering as that.
“It would indeed be the ultimate tragedy if the history of the human race proved to be nothing more noble than the story of an ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol dump.” – David Ormsby-Gore
“I concluded that I can’t change the world, so I decided to enjoy it as it is.”
Anonymous
Re: #2 — Years ago I had a discussion with folks from Scripps and NCAR about methane and clathrates and the need to model them … they said pretty much what Joe said — lack of data.
I suggested they take the known or estimated amount of methane released in previous extreme warming events (the PETM and the Premian die-off) as a starting point, or althernatively simply take the estimated amount now locked up and assume some percentages will get released, then model those assumptions as scenarios.
Not very exact, but we are in one of those situations where almost any number is more accurate than no number.
“The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by
the level of thinking that created them.”
–Albert Einstein
What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.
– Jane Goodall
There’s a diagram in the Heartland Institute’s 2010 prospectus which deserves to be mocked.
– frank
From the Australian Bureau of Meteorology website posted a couple of days ago (my emphasis in bold):
http://www.bom.gov.au/vic/flood/info.shtml
Oh, and three quotes that I recently came across:
“The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.” Fredrick Douglass.
“Civilization is the process in which one gradually increases the number of people included in the term ‘we’ or ‘us’ and at the same time decreases those labeled ‘you’ or ‘them’ until that category has no one left in it.” Howard Winters
“Imagination was given man to compensate for what he is not, and a sense of humor to console him for what he is.” Francis Bacon
“What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires – desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.”
- Bertrand Russell, Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndication
An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.
Mohandas Gandhi
Shantideva reflecting Lovelock’s insight (#28)
“Just as these arms and legs
Are seen as limbs of a body
Why are embodied creatures
Not seen as limbs of life?”
– Śāntideva (ca. 700CE), A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, transl. by S Batchelor
“Science is what we do to keep from lying to ourselves” (Richard Feynman?)
“We are often asked, “Is a particular event caused by global warming or
natural variability?” The answer is that it is always both.” (Kevin Trenberth, 2008)
“Warming of the Climate system is unequivocal” (IPCC AR4)
“There are no known natural factors that could explain the warming during this period.” (National Academy of Sciences)
The care of the river is not a question of rivers, but of the human heart.- Tanaka Shozo
Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets. To plant a pine, one need only own a shovel. ~ Aldo Leopold
You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
David Brower: We seek a renewed stirring of life for the earth
We plead that what we are capable of doing is not always what we ought to do. We urge that all people now determine that a wide untrammeled freedom shall remain to testify that this generation has love for the next. If we want to succeed in that, we might show, meanwhile, a little more love for this one, and for each other.
Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation, so let’s not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards from man-made sources. -Ronald Reagan, 40th US president, 1981-89
I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn’t study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people. – former US Vice President Dan Quayle, April 1989
The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun had been set afire merely to ripen men’s apples and head their cabbages. ~ Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac
The American reading his Sunday paper in a state of lazy collapse is perhaps the most perfect symbol of the triumph of quantity over quality…. Whole forests are being ground into pulp daily to minister to our triviality. ~ Irving Babbitt
Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature! – George Bernard Shaw
Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
Lord Monckton (channeling Rhett Butler) on climate change:
“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!”
Joe Romm (channeling Humphrey Bogart in The Petrified Forest) to Lord Monckton:
“There are a lot of chumps in the world, and you are the world’s chumpeen!”
As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life – so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls. ~ Matt Cartmill, anthropology professor
Whales and redwoods both make us feel small and I think that’s an important experience for humans to have at the hands of nature. We need to recognize that we are not the stars of the show.We’re just another pretty face, just one species among millions more. ~ Roger Payne
As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog across the poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on another planet to say about us: “With all their genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight and air and food and water and ideas,” or, “They went on playing politics until their world collapsed around them.” ~ U Thant
This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
We may differ about whether the universe was made by fiat, or by the laws of nature, but on this point we are in profound accord the Earth—with its gorgeous diversity of habitats and beings—belongs, if it belongs to any of us, to our children and their children and on into the distant future. It is not ours to squander. ~ Carl Sagan
davidgswanger (#2), florifulgurator (#28) and john atcheson (#49) about models that incorporate slow feedbacks, methane hydrates, permafrost, clouds, aerosols and the rest:
“Climate sensitivity will never be defined accurately by models. Fortunately, Earth’s history allows precise evaluation of climate sensitivity without using climate models…All physical mechanisms that exist in the real world are included–and furthermore, they are included correctly; the physics is exact.” — James Hansen
Hansen has spent 30 years creating climate models. He says they are invaluable tools for certain things, but paleoclimate is where we can look to get all the feedbacks and physics “modelled” correctly.
“If all the achievements of scientist were wiped out tomorrow, there would be no doctors but witchdoctors, no transport faster than a horse, no computers, no printed books, no agriculture beyond subsistence peasant farming. If all the achievements of theologians were wiped out tomorrow, would anyone notice the smallest difference?” –Richard Dawkins
“Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children.”
Ancient Native American Proverb
What is to give light must endure burning. ~ Viktor Frankl
Try? There is no try. There is only do or not do. – Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Cunning little Bunny Bumper discovered that new summer peas were so much to his liking that he sat in the garden and ate and ate until his cunning little tummy got bigger and bigger and just exploded, propelling peas through the air with the force of a shotgun blast and blowing a hole in the transmission of Farmer Frick’s Ford.
— Mary Anthony, entry in the Bulwer-Lytton Contest
The gods are too fond of a joke.
— Aristotle
If you surveyed a hundred typical middle-aged Americans, I bet you’d find that only two of them could tell you their blood type, but every last one of them would know the theme song from The Beverly Hillbillies.
— Dave Barry
Nothing is more intolerable than to have to admit to yourself your own errors.
— Ludwig van Beethoven
The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well and, having done it well, he loves to do it better.
— Jacob Bronowski
Hope for the best. Expect the worst. Life is a play. We’re unrehearsed.
— Mel Brooks
We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men’s crapper of the local bar.
— Charles Bukowski
I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty.
— George Burns
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire of every organism to live beyond its means.
— Samuel Butler
Two leaps per chasm is fatal.
— Chinese proverb
“It can’t happen here” is Number 1 on the list of famous last words.
— David Crosby
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
— Philip K. Dick
Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
— Will Durant
Tell me how, if you think you know,
How do people love when there’s no tomorrow?
Do people love when there’s no tomorrow?
And still not cry when it’s time to go
– Jefferson Airplane, 1968
Ben Lieberman (#17): “No, becoming a shining personal example will not achieve this necessary goal. You can reduce your own carbon footprint and the world will still fry. “
You do realize that this is exactly the same excuse for non-action that coal companies, tar sands developers, SUV makers, natural gas frackers, GOP, coal-state Democrats, jet-setters, USA Congress, China leadership and every one else says?
Read the reasons given by everyone, every industry, every region and every nation on why they don’t need to act. It all comes down to a version of “what i do is insufficient to solve the problem.”
And yet all are “required” and “necessary”.
This is a major reason why the climate crisis is a perfect psychological storm for humanity.
Until we climate hawks make it clear that it is absolutely necessary that everyone reduce their climate pollution rapidly down to zero — despite the fact that nobody and no nation will keep the world from frying by themselves — we will never get the needed motion on climate mitigation.
The answer to the climate crisis is finding a way to get people to cut their climate pollution in the face of the fact that nobody controls enough climate pollution to be “sufficient”.
We must stop this message that if an action is “insufficient” it doesn’t need to be done.
The message must become “if it is necessary it must be done.” That includes all of us too.
Which bring me to my favorite climate quote:
“Whatever you do may seem insignificant to you, but it is most important that you do it.” — Gandhi
CBC Radio 1’s Quirks and Quarks included a segment on a Nature Geoscience paper dealing with the long term and long lived effects of elevated atmospheric CO2 ( http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1047.html ) in today’s program that included an interview with Dr. Nathan Gillett of Environment Canada’s Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis.
You can listen to the segment, Climate 3000, here:
http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/episode/2011/01/15/january-15-2011/
We have met the Enemy….and he is us.
“Storms of our Grandchildren” – Hansen
“It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.” Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe
“do not confuse activity with action.”
And from Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run:
“the highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive.”
I have a text file full of quotes that I like to read periodically. These are but a sampling.
“We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.”
- Denis Diderot
“Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.”
- Albert Einstein
We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.
- R. Buckminster Fuller
“Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings.”
- Heinrich Heine
“Those who make peaceful evolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
- John F. Kennedy
“Fear not the path of truth for the lack of people walking on it.”
- Robert F. Kennedy
And, I think, best of all
“The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.”
- Andre Malraux
Burning Down the House
“This timeline cannot be allowed to continue……The war is going badly…Much worse than is generally known.”
Star Trek:The Next Generation, an episode called “Yesterday’s Enterprise” is one of the great moments in television history. I often compare the dire circumstances, heroic action, multiple complicated stories and perserverance to our present situtation.
The Enteprise enters a temporal rift and finds itself transformed from a cruise ship into a battle wagon, engaged in a hopeless battle with superior Klingon forces. The Enterprise-C appears on the battlefield, badly damaged and requesting assistance. The Enterprise-D beams the wounded Commander Garret direct to sick bay where her life is saved…….. you can read the script here:
http://www.st-minutiae.com/academy/literature329/163.txt
Whoppi Goldberg’s character has the best lines….
GUINAN to Picard: “Picard, we have been together for twenty-two years. I have been your advisor, your confidant, your friend and in all those twenty-two years, I have never led you astray. This time line cannot be
allowed to continue. I’ve told you what you must do. You have only your faith in me to help you decide.”
Based on Guinan’s plea Picard decides to send the Enterprise-C back into the battle and delivers this message to Commander Garrett:
“The war is going badly for the Federation. Much worse than is generally known.” Forcing himself to say it. “Starfleet Command believes defeat is inevitable… that within six months we will have no choice but to surrender…”
“I would rather be mad with the truth than sane with lies.” Bertrand Russell
It isn’t easy being green.
— Kermit the Frog
It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life– and herein lies its secret– takes places in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.
— Milan Kundera
The fault lies not with our technologies but with our systems.
— Roger Levian
Throw strikes. Home plate don’t move.
— Satchel Paige
Most of the evils of life arise from man’s being unable to sit still in a room.
— Blaise Pascal
Americans will put up with anything provided it doesn’t block traffic.
— Dan Rather
It’s not the things we don’t know that get us into trouble; it’s the things we do know that ain’t so.
— Will Rogers
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty– a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.
— Bertrand Russell
You might as well aim high. Why shoot yourself in the foot when you can shoot yourself in the head?
— William Shatner
Without the voice of reason every faith is its own curse.
— Gordon Sumner
We’re all in this alone.
— Lily Tomlin
I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.
— Harry S. Truman
Men don’t change. The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.
— Harry S. Truman
The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
— Steven Weinberg
I use not only all the brains I have, but all I can borrow.
— Woodrow Wilson
Tell the truth and run.
— Yugoslavian proverb
“There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.”-Marshall McLuhan
Hey Joe, after wading through some of the comments in a finance article on GW action ( http://finance.yahoo.com/taxes/article/111827/why-fighting-climate-change-makes-sense ), I realized that the argument that unassisted markets will take care of everything has become much more pervasive recently. I don’t know if this is the next big line of argument for delayers, but maybe we need some refreshed perspective. We see story after story of of progress toward renewables, but are things really progressing fast enough that we needn’t worry about the continued pursuit of coal, tar sands, and Arctic oil? Yes, prices have risen, and investment in alternatives has increased, but it seems that higher prices are also driving a lot of cash into petro-liquid and natural gas production, and the dominance of the latter still depends on an uncertain picture for coal and NG.
So are activists and scientists still actively promoting cap & trade or some other improved system of incentive and/or disincentive? Or have things settle into a wait & see pattern?
“Problems can not be solved at the same level of consciousness they were created.” — Einstein
This one’s for all my fellow Climate Hawks…
“It is not up to you to finish the task, but neither are you free to desist”.
- Rabbi Tarfon
“Shine, Perishing Republic”
While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity,
heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and
sighs out, and the mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit,
the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances,
ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.
You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is
good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than
mountains: shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance
from the thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the
monster’s feet there are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a
clear servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught -
they say – God, when he walked on earth.
–Robinson Jeffers, 1925
My brother’s favoite quote: “Off with their heads!”
350 Now (65#) Yoda – in the not quite so good ‘Phantom Menace’:
“Do not fear. Fear breeds anger, anger breeds hate, hate breeds suffering”
Christopher (71#) Star Trek – Next Generation Season 6 Episode 25 ‘The Inner Light’. Picard encounters a deep-space time-capsule that downloads into his mind the life of a person on a long-dead planet. The account of an intelligent species facing its own extinction is extraordinary.
Sorry, should be SEASON 5!
[JR: How could you make such a blunder! For the record I thought that was a terrific episode, all but it strains credulity that Starfleet would allow someone to keep command of a starship after going through such a psychologically overwhelming experience.]
What comes around goes around.
No good deed goes unpunished.
Be very wary when the gods of irony smile upon you. (Original)
“He who troubles his own house will inherit the wind, And the fool will be servant to the wise of heart.” Proverbs 11:29—New King James Version.
Youth is wasted on the young.
The more honest you are; the less people believe you. The more you explain, the less they understand. (Original)
One of these days a scientist will discover the essence of the Universe. It will not be some exotic subatomic particle. Instead it will be irony. The Universe is pure irony. (Original)
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
Professor Albert Allen Bartlett
Beautiful stuff.
My own modest contribution, a variation on the old theme:
Think Globally (and Locally).
Act Locally (and Globally).
Joe – they let Picard command the Enterprise after he had been a Borg! (At the start of Deep Space Nine, Sisko was pretty unconfortable with Picard, who had been involved in the Battle of Wolf 359, where Sisko’s wife died)
[JR: Yeah, that didn't make sense either. Now admittedly he was a pretty mentally stable guy, but still!]
“We reap what we sow.”
A little off topic, but winter’s days are numbered and its seed catalog time. Gardening is a great activity for the individual, and for society. Grow some of your own food this year to save the climate. A great inspirational book to read is “A Secret Garden” by Frances Hodgson Burnett, its considered a kid’s book but it grows with you as you grow up too.
“Americans will put up with anything provided it doesn’t block traffic.
— Dan Rather”
PRECISELY!!!!!!! Now get that frickin’ Prius out of my way!!!!
3rd verse- This Lands is Your Land
“As I was walkin’ – I saw a sign there
And that sign said – no tress passin’
But on the other side …. it didn’t say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!”
-Woody Guthrie 1956
“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”~ Winston Churchill
“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.” ~ Edmund Burke
“The public interest requires doing today those things that men of intelligence and goodwill would wish, five or ten years hence, had been done.” ~ Edmund Burke
Given the condition of many deniers mindsets and consumers alike, I suggest the follow quote, or scene from A Few Good Men.
I WANT THE TRUTH! (Tom Cruise)
YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH… (Jack)
“Example is not the major thing in influencing people; it is the only thing.” Albert Schweitzer, Nobel Peace Laureate
Edward Abbey:
“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast….
a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it.
While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much;
I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators.
I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.” ~ Edward Abbey
“the debate is over
we see the threat
the time for action is now.”
- Arnold Schwarzenegger, June 1 2005
Can even be chanted at rallies (in Terminator accent).
The full version is:
“I say the debate is over. We know the science, we see the threat and we know the time for action is now.”
- Arnold Schwarzenegger, June 1 2005
http://www.fightglobalwarming.com/content.cfm?contentID=5127
I have two:
“Science is what we do to keep from lying to ourselves”
Richard Feynman
“The laws of Physics are real, everything else is politics”
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Wendell Berry:
Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine—which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes.– Wendell Berry
To arouse biophilia, science is not enough. Money, for all its power, is not enough.
Culture–literature, drama, music, painting, filmmaking, the humble activity of learning itself–may be the way to engage the heart. – Edward C. Wolf, in Arousing Biophilia; Orion Mag., Summer 1989
Not since former Interior Secretary James Watt tried to ban the Beach Boys from appearing on the National Mall has such a misguided effort at political censorship been undertaken by a Republican official. It’s dangerous enough to deny science; it’s sheer lunacy to deny song. ~ Rep. Edward J. Markey on Oklahoma Senator James Inhoffe’s voting to block former VP Al Gore’s LIVE EARTH concert on the Capitol steps on 7-7-07
Bill McKibben:
Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.” That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin’s wisdom not biblical; it’s counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans-most American Christians-are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.” – Bill McKibben
“Of course there were scientists who thought the evidence favoring DNA was inclusive and preferred to believe that genes were protein molecules. Francis, however, did not worry about these skeptics. Many were cantankerous fools who unfailingly backed the wrong horses. One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.”
James D. Watson, The Double Helix, A Personal Account of the Discover of THE STRUCTURE OF DNA (page 14, paragraph 2)
My favorite quote from Joe Romm:
“Sure
Send me a short draft post, html if you can.”
http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2011/01/we-are-all-climate-hawks-now.html
One powerful influence in the environmental struggles is Hollywood. Recall the quotes below from AVATAR? I wonder if they were inspired by terrestrial orchids (lady slipper’s etc) from the temperate rainforests in southern Appalachia… Or about the mycelium so elegantly described in Paul Stamets’ talk at TED at
http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_can_save_the_world.html
- – - – - – -
“What we think we know is that there’s some kind of electrochemical communication between the roots of the trees. Like the synapses between neurons. Each tree has ten to the fourth connections to the trees around it, and there are ten to the twelfth trees on Pandora… That’s more connections than the human brain. You get it? It’s a network – a global network. And the Na’vi can access it – they can upload and download data – memories – at sites like the one you just destroyed. You need to wake up, Parker. The wealth of this world isn’t in the ground – it’s all around us. The Na’vi know that, and they’re fighting to defend it. If you want to share this world with them, “you* need to understand *them*.” – spoken by “Dr. Grace Augustine,” in the film AVATAR
It’s hard to put in words the deep connection the People have to the forest. They see a network of energy that flows through all living things. They know that all energy is only borrowed… And one day you have to give it back. One life ends; another begins. – from the film, Avatar
“She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damiens’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.”
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition, (page 1)
“Do right, and risk consequences.” – Sam Houston
When you are washing rice, just wash rice. Pay attention to every grain.
— Dôgen, Instructions for the Cook
http://hcbss.stanford.edu/research/projects/sztp/translations/eihei_shingi/translations/tenzo_kyokun/translation.html
http://www.intrex.net/chzg/mel11.htm
the most important book in Zen.
Oh Beautiful, for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain’s majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea. ~George Carlin
It wasn’t the Exxon Valdez captain’s driving that caused the Alaskan oil spill. It was yours.
~Greenpeace advertisement, New York Times, 25 February 1990
Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein. -H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
Lew Johns:
“We have met the Enemy….and he is us.”
Pogo (as written by Walt Kelley) for the record …
To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true. — Bertrand Russell
People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains,
at the huge waves of the sea,
at the long course of the rivers,
at the vast compass of the ocean,
at the circular motion of the stars;
and yet they pass by themselves without wondering.
St. Augustine (354 – 430)
Christian Science Monitor explains who’s to blame for floods in Brazil – government. Writer neglects to mention climate change, although sea surface temperatures off Brazilian are tied with 2007 for warmest ever.
With friends like the CSM covering climate change, who needs enemies?
Blame game begins in wake of deadly Brazil floods
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2011/0114/Blame-game-begins-in-wake-of-deadly-Brazil-floods
“We’re doomed.”
-Me
Earth speaks:
I shall continue, in the clean and emty air
And cell, reborn, shall reach for cell again
Saying ‘Once there was a storm here, which now is passed’
God, reflectively
Was it a storm, then? Could I have erred?
Not seeing the seed of every end is sown
In its beginning
(with an acknowledgement to Laplace, and an apology to Heisenberg)
“We deserve our doom,”
MOI.
Mother nature:
“I’m just getting warmed up.”
To all you wonderful people who responded, thank you! This has been a lesson, a deep lesson, in the history of human thought. I was going to post “Mother Nature always bats last” but someone beat me to it. Thanks to all and in particular, those who quoted William Gibson, my current favorite author of the dystopian present.
@Barry (#62): Of course, you (and Hansen) are right about the paleoclimate record; but, as you also quote Hansen as saying, models can sometimes be invaluable, and Hansen himself continues to work towards improved ones. I’ve heard about why clouds are difficult to model, but until Joe’s comment, it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder about slow feedbacks. I was just curious.
And as long as we’re doing quotes, here’s two:
“Against stupidity the very gods
Themselves contend in vain.”
–Schiller, The Maid of Orleans
“For how could it be that it is neglected practically by all, if salvation were close at hand and could be found without difficulty? But all excellent things are as difficult as they are rare.”
–Spinoza, Ethics
“He who mounts the wild elephant goes where the wild elephant goes” Randolph Bourne
From Malachi 3
“19 For, behold, the day cometh, it burneth as a furnace; and all the proud, and all that work wickedness, shall be stubble; and the day that cometh shall set them ablaze, saith the LORD of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.
20 But unto you that fear My name shall the sun of righteousness arise with healing in its wings; and ye shall go forth, and gambol as calves of the stall. 21 And ye shall tread down the wicked; for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet in the day that I do make, saith the LORD of hosts. ”
________________________________________________________________
The stubble refered to was used to fuel the ovens. The prophet is saying that the wicked will be the fuel of the heat that destroys them, this seems to be the role fossil fuel is playing in our time.
I take the “righteous sun” to be a reference to the use of solar energy, to end pollution, and prosper economically.
“Manage the unavoidable and avoid the unmanageable” from “Confronting Climate Change” United Nations Foundation, Feb 2007
“Live simply, that others might simply live” variously attributed (St. Elizabeth Seton, Mahatma Gandhi)
“The last word goes to the contrarian hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham, who in his July letter to investors, noted: “Conspiracy theorists claim to believe that global warming is a carefully constructed hoax driven by scientists desperate for … what? Being needled by nonscientific newspaper reports, by blogs and by right-wing politicians and think tanks? I have a much simpler but plausible ‘conspiracy theory’: the fossil energy companies, driven by the need to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of profits, encourage obfuscation of the inconvenient scientific results. I, for one, admire them for their P.R. skills, while wondering, as always: “Have they no grandchildren?” Tom Friedman in the NYT, 2010, quoting Jeremy Grantham.
And in honor of the inertia of denialist spirits in our material world, who even in grade school found vicarious learning a bore: “My universe is my eyes and my ears. Anything else is hearsay.” Douglas Adams
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
– Margaret Mead
“Science is the human enterprise that allows us to control our destiny. To corrupt science is to corrupt reason, and to corrupt reason is to demolish our edge over the apes. Take that edge away and we don’t have much, certainly not enough to justify the agonies of our existence.
Junk science is not just another price we pay for a free society, it’s an insidious rot that needs to be confronted wherever and whenever it arises. My belief is that if current patterns of twisting science continue, we face ultimate calamity. For if truth brings freedom, what can lies bring us but slavery?”
– Dan Agin, Junk Science pp. 291-2
“The widespread confusion about our climate crisis is no accident. For more than a decade, those who deny that climate change is an urgent problem have sought to delay action on global warming by running a brilliant rhetorical campaign and spreading multiple myths that misinform debate. As a result, many people still believe global warming is nothing more than a natural climate cycle that humans cannot influence, or that it might even have positive benefits for this nation. Neither is true. The science is crystal clear: We humans are the primary cause of global warming, and we face a bleak future if we fail to act quickly.”
– Joseph Romm, Hell and High Water, p. 2
Is there anybody listening?
Is there anyone who smiles without a mask?
What’s behind the words–images
they know will please us?
I’ll take what’s real. Bring up the lights.
Is there anybody listening?
Is there anyone that sees what’s going on?
Read between the lines,
criticize the words they’re selling.
Think for yourself and feel the walls…
become sand beneath your feet.
- Anybody Listening?
Chris DeGarmo and Geoff Tate (Queensryche)
It is great that ABC did a story on climate change and the flooding in Australia. We talk a lot about news coverage of cc, good and bad. But we new to talk more about getting cc infused in popular culture. Changes in people’s attitudes to gay rights, woman’s rights, and civil rights were all presaged by changes in how these topics were treated on TV shows and movies. So, how do we get cc on reality TV? What about hip hop and video games? Are there any good examples of cc in popular culture?
MTV has done something on cc:
http://trendsupdates.com/mtv-style-global-climate-change-campaign/
http://www.creativesideblog.com/2009/05/global-warming-campaign-for-mtv/
And see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_popular_culture
http://climateprogress.org/2009/04/19/shermans-lagoon-global-warming-comic-strip/
“The nervous system of a cockroach is more complex and more mysterious than any machine invented by man”. -forgotten biologist.
“Climate stresses are piling up, and they will make it harder to address the root causes of global warming. In the midst of drought, conflict, migratory tensions, international crises, and humanitarian disasters, what time will we have for the complicated challenge of cutting carbon? The greenhouse gases we release today shape the world of the future. We don’t have the luxury of waiting for devastating disasters to scare us into action.”
– Stephan Faris, Forecast, page 222
“But the golden thread of reason that used to be stretched taut to mark the boundary between the known and the unknown is now routinely disrespected. We are living in a political culture driven partially mad by the transformation of the ‘public forum’ that emerged in the wake of the printing press, which brought us newspapers, books, mass literacy, the ‘rule of reason,’ egalitarianism, and representative democracy.
“What philosophers of the early Enlightenment described as ‘the Republic of Letters’ has been subjugated by electronic images that carelessly blend news with entertainment, advocacy with advertisements, and the public interest with self-interest.
“The late German philosopher Theodor Adorno first described this transformation in a very different context 58 years ago: ‘The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power…has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.’”
– Al Gore, Our Choice, Pages 21 & 24
“We are at a critical juncture in human history. By mastering technology and by (so far) outperforming every other species on the planet, we humans have achieved global domination. We can remake landscapes, defeat diseases, extend lifespans, and expand the scope and scale of human wealth by almost every measure. We can also trash whole countries, pollute streams, rivers, lakes, and perhaps ultimately whole oceans to a disastrous extent. We can kill one another more quickly than ever in human history, and we can change the world’s climate in a way that scientists say is threatening our ability to survive on Earth.
“The question, as yet unanswered, is whether we can stop. Can we as a species rescue ourselves from a threat of our own making? To do so will take personal restraint, political courage, and a degree of global cooperation unprecedented in human history. Even more, it will take a clear understanding of the risks—an understanding that we will only achieve if we expose the climate cover-up.”
– Hoggan & Littlemore, Climate Cover-up, Pages 5-6
“If the natural laws of economics and the sovereign nation-state were sacredly ordained aspects of a cosmic scheme or plan, business as usual could be very good business indeed. But since these constructs exist only in the minds of those who believe in their existence, and since belief in their actual existence is effectively undermining efforts to revolve (sic) the crisis in the global environment, the time has clearly come to recognize that living in the service of false gods is not in the interests of human survival. If this does not happen and the international community refuses to abandon the business-as-usual approach to resolving the environmental crisis, we may soon find ourselves living in a world that resembles the one described in the Pentagon report. In this world abrupt, large-scale changes in the global climate system would have disastrous impacts on people living in every region or territory on the planet; the competition for scarce resources between nation-states would result in endless cross-border conflicts and armed invasions; and such conflicts could easily escalate to the point where one or more countries may elect to use nuclear bombs and other weapons of mass destruction.”
– Robert L. Nadeau, The Environmental Endgame, Pages 165-6
Mike @ 127
There is a 2009 video game called “Fuel” that featured an open world environment with dramatic effects of climate change including wildfires, tornadoes and sea level rise.
Here is info from Wikipedia:
“Fuel is an open world racing game set in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by extreme weather fueled by global warming, with players experiencing varying weather effects such as occasional tornadoes and sandstorms, as well as an accelerated day-night cycle”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_(game)
And here’s a video of the game showing the future world with climate change:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6R5hg4ILkkY
Pretty much the entire epistle of James, the brother of Jesus. James didn’t pull any punches when he wrote, and it’s a hard-hitting book. A few (hopefully) appropriate selections:
“If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.”
“…faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”
“Speak and act as those who are going to be judged by the law that gives freedom, because judgement without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgement.”
And finally:
“Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on Earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you.”
[A bit scary for me to read as a citizen of one of the wealthiest countries in the world. The implications for both climate change and sweatshop/slave labor are staggering.]
http://whitecollargreenspace.blogspot.com/
Here is a proposal that will save the Federal government close to $50 billion per year enough to pay for the public option with only an executive order. Most office space is very expensive yet white collar workers only use it 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. This amounts to only 30% efficiency which is completely unacceptable in today’s economic and ecological environmentWe can no longer afford to let all white-collar workers that still have jobs work banker’s hours when we can work two shifts per day in government and private industry and cut our overhead costs in half. This simple paradigm shifts solves three problems: It jumpstarts economy and fights poverty, cuts pollution, reduces budget deficits.
Didn’t have a favorite quote so went out to look some, found this one, don’t know if it’s going to be a favorite:
“It is far from easy to determine whether she [Nature] has proved to man a kind parent or a merciless stepmother.”, Pliny the Elder
A better one from the ancient naturalist:
“Such is the audacity of man, that he hath learned to counterfeit Nature, yea, and is so bold as to challenge her in her work.”
Pliny the Elder
i believe the climate has been come to my country i can see this from 1 year past that always raining its not normal.
Whenever I read some of the Tea Party utterances, I’m reminded of a quote most often attributed to Sinclair Lewis:
“When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
Resistance is futile….The Borg
One more from Carl Sagan if I may..
We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements- transportation, communication, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting- profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things, so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for awhile, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
…For much of our history, we were so fearful of the outside world, with it’s unpredictable dangers, that we gladly embraced anything that promised to soften or explain away the terror. Science is an attempt, largely successful to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get a hold of ourselves. To steer a safe course. Microbiology, and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death.
Avoidable human misery is more often caused by not so much by stupidity, but by ignorance, particularly ignorance about ourselves. I worry that…pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive.
…The candle flame [ of Science] gutters. It’s little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The Demons begin to stir.
Sagan in Demon Haunted World
Larry Chamblkn says:
January 15, 2011 at 1:40 pm
“The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by
the level of thinking that created them.”
–Albert Einstein
I believe that is the state of affairs when it comes to our economy and our chances of getting action to reverse climate change. I believe that those who wish to save our ecosystem must venture into the political discussions about jobs and economics and make climate change the main focus. We are being ignored.
Love people, not things; use things, not people.
Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.
Sometimes it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
Last night the wife said, oh boy when you’re dead don’t take nothing with you but your soul.
And some Shakespeare:
A fool thinks himself to be wise but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.
Better three hours too soon than a minute too late.
The fault dear Brutus lies not in our stars but in ourselves.
Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.
So we’re led by denial like lambs to the slaughter,
serving empires of style and carbonated sugar water
and the old farm road’s a four-lane that leads to the mall
and our dreams are all guillotines waiting to fall
Ani Difranco – 2001
“We are all doomed!!” Pte. James Frazer
From comedian Rick Overton: “We’ve got to ditch distinctions right now, because in a few years it’s going to be what Al Gore was talking about. It’s not going to be right wing, left wing. It’s not going to be liberals, conservatives. It’s going to be people inside the dome who can breathe, and people outside pounding on the dome trying to get in. All of your tinted windows and cell phones aren’t going to matter very much when you’re on all fours trying to wrestle a Mars Bar out of a rat’s mouth in an alley somewhere.”
It’s funnier when Rick tells it.
Extra! Extra! Local NE Georgia paper prints article saying climate here might be changing!
(Anyone ever here of Judah Cohen? Arctic Oscillation?)
http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/011611/new_770707340.shtml#comment102977
“Back off, man. I’m a scientist!”
– Dr. Peter Venkman (played by Bill Murray) in Ghostbusters 1984
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBRuLeJdU4o
Major General Mann (Les Tremayne): “The Martians are [doing some outrageously unlikely thing]. Is that possible?”
Dr. Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry): “If they’re doing it, it is.”
–From the 1953 movie version of “The War of the Worlds”
“Coal is a dead man walkin’”
Kevin Parker, global head of asset management and a member of the executive committee at Deutsche Bank. “Banks won’t finance them. Insurance companies won’t insure them. The EPA is coming after them. . . . And the economics to make it clean don’t work.
And our “failed” President just shut down mountain top removal.
“These are my beloved children in whom I would be well pleased if I could just stop laughing hysterically.” — God, contemplating humans
Re, #68 Barry: Humanity does not have the political structure to act coherently on a global scale. The only way to get a global shift from fossil fuels to renewable non-fossil energy is to make the latter cheaper, more profitable than the former. If it is not politically feasible to do this by imposing carbon-taxes/renewable-subsidies/cap-and-trade, then it will have to be done by sheer technological innovation and development; we’ll have to invent or refine renewable-energy tech until it becomes cheaper than coal even without such governmental aid.
I recall a quote from Gandhi: “Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”
And a song I heard from the Mitchell Trio around 1960, probably originating decades earlier:
One man’s hands can’t tear a prison down
Two men’s hands can’t tear a prison down
but if two and two and fifty make a million, we’ll see the day come ’round
We’ll see that day come ’round.
More verses; “set a people free”, “see the day ahead”, more I don’t recall.
Let us not talk falsely now
The hour is getting late
-Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower
“Too many people believe in the Rapture to do anything about global warming.”
–sung by the Chicago Complaints Choir when Bush was president. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvWVxHEaWDU in the 6th minute
What have they done to the earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her
Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn
And tied her with fences and dragged her down
I hear a very gentle sound
With your ear down to the ground
We want the world and we want it…
We want the world and we want it…
Now!
- The Doors
“By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity,
another man’s I mean.”
— Mark Twain
Below is a link to an excellent article and video posted on the climate change blog at AccuWeather.com :
“Deep Past Climate a Clue to our Future Climate” with a video interview with National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) scientist Jeffrey Kiehl.
http://www.accuweather.com/blogs/climatechange/story/44399/deep-past-climate-a-clue-to-ou.asp
The entire essay, “Stick to your guns, climate scientists” by Evelyn Fox Keller published in the Jan 11, 2011 issue of New Scientist magazine.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20927944.200-stick-to-your-guns-climate-scientists.html
My favourite piece of graffiti:
“The paranoids are after me.”
When thinking of the psychology of the denier/sceptic movement, it is helpful to consider the Dunning-Kruger effect — “…when people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, …they are left with the mistaken impression that they are doing just fine.”
An excellent example of this from the denier community and even from organized religion such as the Catholic Church is that environmentalism is a false religion. The pope warned of this a year or so ago in one of his homilies.
Some deniers embellish this thinking further by claiming that Al Gore is our false god. On a fundamental level they believe that the Christian God will save us because we were put here to multiply and fill the earth and that a loving God would NEVER allow any harm come to his beloved Mankind or planet Earth. Their motto is “Don’t Worry, Be Happy (and multiply”).
Well it seems to me that the denier/skeptic community is the ultimate faith-based false religion providing further proof of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.
Warmers ….. Avoiders ….. Deniers
I don’t have any good quotes, but a thought. There is another group that rarely gets noticed in this debate, possibly by their own design and not being noticed certainly serves their purpose. This group is the AVOIDERS. The Warmers are on one side, the Deniers on the other and the Avoiders are somewhere in the middle. The Avoiders that I am concerned with know that Global Warming is a problem, possibly a really big problem but do their best to avoid engaging in the subject, in action or even in conversation because they don’t like how even acknowledgement would complicate their lives. This is a particularly insidious group, because deep down they know, but do nothing. They should be ashamed. We should figure out how to shame them. They should know better. They are the ones who are acting unethically, the most unethically of everyone. There system of ethics requires a response but they just don’t want to respond. They desire invisibility. Some of you reading this may fit into this category; in privacy, at your computer when no-one else is around.
I don’t know how many people are in this group, but I think it’s a large group. We spend a lot of energy relative to deniers who we probably can’t influence, but maybe silence. Some of that effort would be well spent in trying to reach and activate the Avoiders.
Calvin : You can’t just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood.
Hobbes : What mood is that?
Calvin : Last-minute panic!
……. I guess our creativity will get turned on real soon….
“What state do you live in?”
“Denial.”
- Miss Wormwood & Calvin
….. and it is a comforting state until calamity kicks in the door….
One of my favorite authors.
Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
Creationists make it sound as though a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.
Isaac Asimov
You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.
The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.
W Churchill.
“Don’t ask what your country can do for you: take the money and run!” (John F. Allen;)
Hi. This is Dennis Hlinka.
All that Brookline Tom described (Weekend Open Thread Jan 8 @9:28PM) on what happened to me on the Accuweather blog is true, except for the fact I did not request that my account be removed. I never received a formal explanation or notice of my termination other than the fact I can no longer even read posted comments on that forum.
In my offline communication with Brett, he said this to me after I sent him the particular posting I had placed on the blog site where I received the warning of incivility from the moderator (jdrenken):
“Wow. Our moderators should have been around a couple years ago and witnessed some of those comments! I had to read it three times to see if I was missing something. I don’t know Dennis. I personally do not see anything wrong with the statement. Statements like these actually engage discussion, which is what we want. I guess their rules are quite strict.If you have any other problems, you know how to reach me. Regards, Brett.”
I have the greatest respect for Brett, but like Brookline Tom said, Brett appears to be sand bagged by the higher-ups.
Even though I cannot prove this, I received this warning right after I posted a number of very critical comments about Joe Bastardi and I think those higher-ups (including Bastardi) were just itching to find a way to get me off that forum with anything they could find no matter how bogus. They did, but with a very bogus warning and as I tried to get some clarification on and my simple questioning of their reasoning, they banned me.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
WB Yeats, 1920
And db #21, “always coming home” is one of my favorite books! But hard to convey in a single quote. Thanks for finding one.
My favourite quote is: “Opinions are like assholes: everyone’s got one”
- Harry Callahan
I think ‘ol Harry was on to something. In the modern context of Global Warming, so much effort has been expended on confounding the public and confabulating the facts that the ‘person on main street’ is flummoxed.
A confused and ignorant population is a great population to have for those who want to commit political skulduggery.
“My brother used to ask the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like the ocean, all things flow and touch each other; a disturbance in one place is felt at the other end of the world.”
Fyodor Dostoyevski, “The Brothers Karamazov
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“The louder he spoke of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”
A motivation I place prominently-
Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem:
Within Our green and pleasant land
William Blake. From the end of ‘Jersusalem’
w/ minor change to last line – replace ‘england’ w/ ‘our’
Poem later set to well-known music by Hubert Parry
Idea from Miss Wormwood and Calvin:
Thanks for posting the quote, Anders @ #163. It’s given me an idea…
For our happy little congress persons, satisfied with publicly denying human-caused global warming that results in catastrophic climate chaos… let’s give their state a bit more recognition.
Sen. Jim Inhoffe, R-OK/Denial
Sen. Tom Coburn R-OK/Denial
Sen. Pat Toomey, R-PA/Denial
Sen. Jim DeMint, R-SC/Denial
Sen. John Thune, R-SD/Denial
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-WI/Denial
…and so on…
Let’s identify them by the state they claim to represent, as well as where the state where their allegiance lies: The state of Denial.
– Captain John Sheridan, Babylon 5 (from the IMDB quote collection)
“We are insulting nature faster than we can understand it.”-
Rob Watson
BP, Rosneft Deal Draws U.S. Criticism
Implications rise for national security http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704511404576085932247348132.html
– Eugene Linden, Winds of Change, page 2
– Eugene Linden, Winds of Change, page 260
Adam (#153) the ‘two riders’in ‘All along the watchtower’ are apparently bringing the news of the fall of Babylon.
Sorry – more Star Trek – Next Gen. Season 7 Episode 9 tells of the discovery that warp drive damages the space time continuum. An allegory of climate change, I’m sure.
Speaking of the ‘Watchtower’, where are today’s protest songs and singers? If only John Lennon were still here.
– Krupp & Horn, Earth: The Sequel, page 252
Here is the quote
Rep. Edward Markey, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, called for the deal to be analyzed by the Committee on Foreign Investment, a branch of the Treasury Department.
“BP once stood for British Petroleum,” he said. “With this deal, it now stands for Bolshoi Petroleum.”
Republican Congressman Michael Burgess, who sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, also said the deal “deserves some analysis and scrutiny.” http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704511404576085932247348132.html
The WSJ Article is now censored it seems …?
350Now, post #173
good idea, pretty funny as well….
Let’s hope the next batch live in the states of Hope, Hard Work and Can Do. Not in the states of Despair, God We are All Going to Die etc.
I know there is a site for assessing if politicians are lying, is there one for assessing if they are any good?
“I’d put my money on the sun & solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”
Thomas Edison, 1931
“A conervative is someone who thinks nothing should ever happen for the first time.”
(author unknown, perhaps someone here knows who said it)
“He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.”
Albert Einstein
“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.”
Albert Einstein
“We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.”
Albert Einstein
“Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet”
Albert Einstein
GoingGreen: Next Generation Nuclear Power
Houston, we have a problem.
Same problem, just larger scale now.
Re Houston, a comment about a recent forbes article
14#, Bill Walker says: 6 Jan 2011 at 8:08 PM
The tag line on the article makes it pretty clear what we’re dealing with here:
“Weekly columnist Larry Bell is a professor at the University of Houston and author of ‘Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax’, which will be released on Jan. 1, 2011.”
He is a professor of Space Architecture. No doubt this makes him eminently qualified to analyze climate science. Being in Houston, I would have guessed he had something to do with oil. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/01/forbes-rich-list-of-nonsense/
Think globally, act locally.
Rene Dubos
More than 250 Earth Fail Warnings and More Earth Fail Warnings, songs and videos warning of our climate and ecological predicament. This is an ongoing projects, so suggestions are appreciated.
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=327E5F312C238644
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=F021912A3436BA08
“I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest”, more by Tony Hayward http://news.google.com/news/quote?pz=1&cf=q&ned=us&hl=en&qsid=TPhIMD13Ly0WEM
BP CEO Tony Hayward explained the oil spill this way: “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”
Jan 1, 2011 Korea Times (152 occurrences)
“We were making it up day to day,” Hayward said of BP’s rescue plan.
Jan 11, 2011 EP Magazine
Bob, why are you playing Russian roulette?
The speed and secrecy with which BP decided to climb back into bed with Moscow and hand it a strategic stake in Britain’s largest industrial enterprise suggests a supremely confident company. But nothing could be further from the truth.
The decision by new American-born chief executive Bob Dudley to deal directly with Prime Minister Putin’s Moscow – where BP and other Western oil companies have had a such a torrid time recently – looks to be born of weakness. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1347773/Bob-playing-Russian-roulette.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
BP targets one of the world’s last unspoilt wildernesses after deal
Environmentalists are angry at the energy giant’s plans to drill for oil in a remote region of the Arctic http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/bp-targets-one-of-the-worlds-last-unspoilt-wildernesses-after-deal-2185821.html
Put them on trial for crimes against humanity!
For more quotes, unmixed with “open thread” topics, see the ClimateSight quote collection (link) that Kate started.
Australians wanting to calculate how much energy they can produce from PVs may find the following BOM solar exposure information valuable. Please remember the tables do not list how much energy will be collected per given area. Inefficiencies in PV equipment, mounting angles, shadowing and other factors must be taken in to consideration. ;)
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data/index.shtml?bookmark=203
The average IQ is 100
Since there are a few sci-fi quotes posted, I liked the following quote from G’Kar, Babylon 5, as the last line especially is relevant to our situation.
It is said that the future is always born in pain. The history of war is the history of pain. If we are wise what is born of that pain matures into the promise of a better world. Because we learn that we can no longer afford the mistakes of the past.
“[I]t is undeniably no light sin to tell lies knowingly as they do and moreover to deceive poor folk curious to learn things new.” — Rabelais, 1533
The reference is to certain astrologers.
If you haven’t heard of Rabelais, look him up; he’s a riot.
@sailrick #180,
I was skeptical of your Edison quote. So, I looked around and found this source.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison
The full quote is even better: “We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Natures inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. … I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.” — In conversation with Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone (1931); as quoted in Uncommon Friends : Life with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, Alexis Carrel & Charles Lindbergh (1987) by James Newton, p. 31
The next quote given is, “There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.” As one who teaches for a living I can attest this one!
Another climate hawk logo – this one with a Creative Commons license – is at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/95117730@N00/
(I also made a plate of climate hawk cookies, if someone wants to print out a bunch at a time; they’re currently misfiled at tinyurl.com/climateposters )
@190 Matt, another useful site lists real time and historical solar PV production from PV on homes around Australia – updated live and daily by PV-producing households. Lots of different views of the data:
http://www.pvoutput.org/list.jsp?p=1
Research published in J Climate showing Australia is getting more hot and wet extremes from human-induced global warming:
http://www.theage.com.au/environment/weather/more-of-australia-getting-hot-and-wet-extremes-20110115-19rj7.html
And the paper can be found here:
Gallant, Ailie J. E., David J. Karoly, 2010: A Combined Climate Extremes Index for the Australian Region. J. Climate, 23, 6153–6165.
doi: 10.1175/2010JCLI3791.1
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2010JCLI3791.1
Nice link Sou. Now if only I owned my own home and could install solar. ;(
A fresnel lens could be used to power
a biochar container. The container
could have up draft and a pipe outlet
at the topside to flame off the gases.
Just a thought.
The Thomas Edison quote is the best.
This quote, attributed to Arthur Schopenhauer, seems to me to sum up the attitude toward climate change as currently exercised:
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
“The problem is climate change. One of the issues is the degree to which our behavior contributes to it. Why? Because our contributions would be the easiest to change. What if it were 0%? Should we remain fatalistically idle? “Oh, well. The solar wind is going to make the planet uninhabitable. Pass me the heroin.” No, we’d figure out what to do about it. After all, we wear clothes, we build houses, we grow food, etc. We already change our environment to suit our needs. ”
-Jeffrey Davis, blog commentary #4 on RealClimate’s “Statistical Analysis of Consensus” post… reply posted on 16 Dec 2004
I have no idea who Jeffrey Davis is, but when I saw this quote, i had to copy it down!
Richard Feynman….
“I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!”
“You must not fool yourself– and you are the easiest person to fool.”
“We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.”
Has anyone noticed that virtually all of our rules, laws, and etc. seem to originate from bad experiences we’ve had historically? In other words, we learn from our mistakes.
So, with apologies to George Santayana, here’s my offering for this collection of quotes:
“Those who cannot learn from the past are condemned to suffer while making history.”
Cheers,
Roger
In possibly the understatement of 200,000 years of human history…
“I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest.”
–Statement by BP Executive Tony Hayward, concerning an event that reportedly may have tripped ocean current shutdown, leading to hell and high water.
Perhaps the best quote by far, as mentioned first (#76) by Lou Grinzo:
“Americans will put up with anything provided it doesn’t block traffic.”
— Dan Rather
Is this a clue as to how ‘climate hawks’ might awaken the unaware flock?
If blocking traffic is now too extreme, how about going the speed limit?
Proper messaging will of course be critical. Can anyone help with this?
This civilization is the work of man, who high-handedly and ignorant of the true workings of Nature, has created a world without meaning or foundation, which now threatens to destroy him, for through his behavior and his activities, he, who should be her master, has disturbed Nature’s inherent unity. – Viktor Schauberger
My favorite quote is from Horace Mann: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for Humanity.”