Work as hard as possible to make sure we don’t leave a world of wars to our children.

That means finally ending our addiction to oil, a source — if not the source — of two recent wars. And that also means avoiding centuries of strife and conflict from catastrophic climate change. As reported in September:

An intelligence forecast being prepared for the next president on future global risks envisions a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades, as the world is reshaped by globalization, battered by climate change, and destabilized by regional upheavals over shortages of food, water and energy.

The world beyond 450 ppm atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, the world that crosses carbon cycle tipping points that quickly take us to 1000 ppm, is a world not merely of endless regional resource wars around the globe. It is a world with dozens of Darfurs. It is a world of a hundred Katrinas, of countless environmental refugees — at least a hundred million by the second half of this century and more than a billion by the next century — all clamoring to occupy the parts of the developed world that aren’t flooded or desertified.

In such a world, everyone will ultimately become a veteran, and Veteran’s Day itself will fade into obscurity, as people forget about a time when wars were the exception, a time when soldiers were but a small minority of the population.

The time to act is January 20, 2009.

Related Posts:

• Warming Will Worsen Water Wars
• Must have PPT #1: The narrow temperature window that gave us modern human civilization
• More on Climate Change and National Security
• Report: Climate Change and Environmental Degradation Trigger Darfur Crisis

Nothing is more important to the deniers and delayers than finding a mistake. Oops, let me quickly correct that mistake before they do and start again.

Nothing is less important to the deniers and delayers than finding or even acknowledging the whopping mistakes by fellow deniers and delayers or frankly by anybody who publishes anything that might seem to support their anti-scientific views. See, as but a tiny sample,

• Should you believe anything John Christy and Roy Spencer say?
• Yet another denier talking point melts down
• Sorry deniers, hockey stick gets longer, stronger: Earth hotter now than in past 2,000 years
• Killing the myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus
• Nature article on ‘cooling’ confuses media, deniers: Next decade may see rapid warming
• A bunch of huge mistakes by Michael Crichton

Also, nothing is more important to the deniers and delayers than finding even the tiniest and most irrelevant mistakes in NASA datasets (see, for instance, “Must read from Hansen: Stop the madness about the tiny revision in NASA’s temperature data!“).

Well, they’re back! Two of the most popular denier websites are all excited by a temporary misreporting of some temperature stations by NASA (see wattsupwiththat.com and climateaudit.org — note, I can’t actually bring myself to hyperlink to them and thereby simplify their task of spreading disinformation). Anyway, you can read the entire story from NASA’s Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate.org in a post appropriately titled, “Mountains and Molehills“:

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Everybody is talking about a green recovery plan. But what are the details? Who exactly gets how much to do what? I’m glad you asked.

The Center for American progress has published the details of a plan for “Stimulating the Economy Today by Rebuilding for Future Prosperity.” This proposed $47.2 billion green recovery package includes near-term spending on the following programs:

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Our never-ending quest to identify all the amplifying climate feedbacks takes us back to Australia:

THE worst drought in a century, especially in Australia’s most populated and fastest growing regions, has forced state governments to make expensive, and in some quarters unpopular, decisions to secure water supply.

As rainfall dwindles, new dams are a less-than-promising prospect, so governments have looked to the boundless resource surrounding us — the sea — for an answer. Their solution: desalination….

The Bureau of Meteorology, in its annual climate statement for 2007, “warns of a drying trend in the decades ahead.” I noted last year that one Australian newspaper reported

… drought will become a redundant term as Australia plans for a permanently drier future, according to the nation’s urban water industries chief…. “The urban water industry has decided the inflows of the past will never return,” Water Services Association of Australia executive director Ross Young said.

People, however, need water. And even though many Australian kids now “use timers to take two minute showers, and collect the water in buckets so it can be re-used in the garden”(see “What climate change drives behavior change“), conservation is not enough for some:

Four states — Western Australia, Queensland, South Australia and NSW — either have working desalination plants or are planning to build them. Opponents say that producing the large amount of electricity required to run a desalination plant hastens climate change, which may be the culprit behind Australia’s drying trend. The scientific jury is still out.

Actually, I don’t think you’ll actually find very many climate scientists who believe the jury is out on whether human-caused climate change is a major contributor to Australia’s drying trend — since the expansion of the subtropical deserts is in fact a major prediction of climate change (see here, page 10-11).

THE FEEDBACK: Greenhouse gases cause climate change that increases drought and water shortages, which in turn drives countries to desalination, which in turn generates more greenhouse gases — a classic amplifying feedback. A classic amplifying feedback unless, of course, you do the desalination with renewable power:

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