Actually, Mother Earth will still be here chugging right along.

Her human riders? Eh, not so much.

Good Post Kirk! What’s a little soot if you make big bucks out of it?!

The big bummer is that Bush and his fellow bums wasted 8 years of the earth’s time. Cockroaches are worth more than George.

Thanks George. We’ll have to leave something behind so that our descendants will know exactly who to blame… when they’re scrounging acround in the dust, desperately looking for a few scraps of food.

Hell, Doc, we can’t even get them to admit that Global Warming is an Anthropogenic phenomenon. They truly don’t care at any rate, they’re just like Bush and History, “We’ll all be dead”. So what does it matter to them? These are people (questionably, I agree) that are truly so self centered that to think of future generations just isn’t within them.

Sounds like atheism. Sarah PAC launched now, and this will no doubt please God, who should be open to reversing climate change earlier than 1,000 years from now.

Kirk !

How ya doin’, buddy ?

The Hellstrom Chronicle, like Soylent Green, gives us a glimpse of the future. /s, or maybe not

Now see, the Returds will use your point as an argument not fund family planning. Why waste money on this if the we can’t live here anyway? They are a very logical bunch.

Thanks Kirk great post as always! Big coal is always throwing the soot over eyes in the name of making money, how fucking crass is that? They sure are short sighted and have no qualms about sentencing their heirs to a world of unstable environmental catastrophes!

Read that this morning. So sad, in a way, but I was saying the same thing here two years ago. Environmental crimes will be treated the same as war crimes, within 20 years. Should have begun doing that in 1965.

Just off the phone with the last of several ocean scientists and fisheries scientists.

question – how can we save the salmon of the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers?

consensus answer – we can’t.

Dugg

I thought it would be appropriate to post the rethug counterpoint, so that we can laugh at it and be afraid…:

“So the science, the science is totally changed. It was the IPCC, those intergovernmental panel on climate change with the United Nations. But keep in mind, the only report you get from them is their summary for policy docs. And those are not scientists. There’s only 52 scientists that signed on to those, to that, as opposed to what? Some 650 who now have rebuked that. And one last thing on my check list that has to be said is on Gore’s science fiction film, every assertion that he’s made has been refuted. I’m talking about hurricanes, sea level rises, ice caps, polar bears, you know. So, the science has turned around, but the economics has not turned around. And that’s what we need to remind people. THat if you are offended by the Clinton/Gore tax increase of 1993, this would be a tax increase ten times that tax increase.”

Senator James Inhofe (R-Dustbowl), January 22, 2009

The question is not if climate change is irreversible, it is can we still mitigate any of its effects. Hansen said a couple of years ago that we only had 10 years to curb the worse excesses of global warming. Since then we have done pretty much nothing. The main worry is that we are near a tipping point where no matter what we do climate changes will be severe.

hahahahahaha *shudder*

Inhofe is an idiot

When is the Goreacle going to the Hill ?

OT but a must read:More mayhem in our environment!

N.J. Town Shocked As Dead Birds Fall From Sky

FRANKLIN TOWNSHIP, N.J.

Residents in a New Jersey town were stunned when hundreds of birds started dropping out of the sky to their deaths, but after officials explained why, residents became fuming mad.

Dead birds were found all over Franklin Township in Somerset County, reports CBS station WCBS-TV in New York City. Found on front lawns, rooftops, and even in the middle of the street, neighbors are still picking them up while others are frightened to even get near them.

Methinks The Great Denier Inhofe (Moron-Dustbowl) switched the number of scientists who signed on to do the usual Rethug thing of twisting the facts to fit the ideology. Inofe, the second stupidest fucking man on the planet.

hey kirk, didn’t you get the message? economic depression is the strategy to delay global warmed via the effect of demand destruction.

When is the Goreacle going to the Hill ?

funny you should ask.

tomorrow.

JHFC that’s outrageous. Just fucking outrageous. I’m off to flame USDA.

Selise !

Thanks, I thought as much … nice having this study out just in time to back the Repubs up against the wall.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

10 am – Senate Foreign Relations
Addressing Global Climate Change: The Road to Copenhagen

Witness:

The Honorable Albert A. Gore, Jr, Former Vice President of the United States, Nashville, TN

all the stupider when you consider that an estimated 1-2 degree centigrade rise in temps from current levels will likely cause sufficient prairie vegetration die off to bring about dune reactivation in Inhofe’s home state. In other words, Oklahoma becomes the center of a vast desert. Yep. The Dustbowl Senator. Have fun eating sand, rethugs.

Took me a while to find the spelling of the name but NPR just had a report from one of its reporters John Ydstie on what needs to be done with the banks. Apparently what we need to do is pay banks a good price for their crap assets (without looking at their books) and they will feel so good about this that when the goverment asks them they will start lending again.

It just tires me to hear these people blather on about how by doing more of the same with a few tweaks will make everything OK.

kirk – i’m i blind or is the pnas paper not on line yet?

well, i certainly can’t type. that should have been: am i blind or is the pnas paper not on line yet?

I agree with you Sd and the people weren’t even notified. They walk out their doors and find dead birds all over the freaking place and wonder WTF is going on?

A depression would slow economic activity and that would slow consumption of higher priced fuels or fuels for which foreign exchange would be necessary. In more marginal areas, it could send people back to burning wood, peat, dung, and coal. But I have no idea about the tradeoffs.

Here’s the email I sent to SecAg.

I am outraged after reading the following account of USDA poisoning European starlings in Franklin Township, NJ.

http://wcbstv.com/watercooler/…..18730.html

How can USDA guarantee that other birds did not consume the poisoned seed? USDA cannot and any attempt to say that USDA can prevent inadvertent poisoning is pure bs. Just what crops are endangered by the starlings in late January in New Jersey? USDA officials said that local officials were informed of the poisoning but that is denied by local officials. Yet again we are confronted with the heavy hand of the bureaucratic blind follower.

Here’s a newsflash for you barbarians. Killing is not acceptable behaviour. Period.

Here’s the Contact Us page for USDA

FWIW, I would call this another one of those “gotchas” that BushCo has left mining the playing field for the Obama Administration and would tend to assume that the new SecAg will be unaware of it as a policy until it has been brought to his attention after the fact.

not funny joke. was only thinking it’s twisted enough for some world leaders…

New post—>

Reality Org has a new “clean coal” ad. absolutly hilarious
http://www.scholarsandrogues.c…..#more-7218

thanks kirk, just read some of your links. some days i just don’t see how we are going to make it, but we’ve got to try.

My letter to the Secretary.
Dear Sir/Madam
I know you are new to your post and thus did not have any thing to do with this decision but the decision to the poisoning European starlings in Franklin Township, NJ.
I am am outraged that this could be allowed to happen! What protections were taken to prevent the same thing happening to the ingenious populations of birds? Also the birds were falling out of the sky all over the Township. What about the public health issues of thousands of rotting birds every where. You can’t clean all of them up and what about the poison used which USDA “says” is biodegradable? I have heard that before and find no evidence that is is true. The consequences of this a very far reaching. The story can be found here: http://wcbstv.com/watercooler/…..18730.html
Please look into this and put a stop to this outrageous acts by the USDA!

You are so much nicer than I.

Are you watching the House and the bloviating Republiclowns? They are disgusting! They repeat things that are lies, they know they are lies, they have been corrected on these mistruths, yet they persist. No bipartisanship, yet they have a third of this stimuli tied up in worthless tax cuts. Even I, an ex-Navy Chief, cannot find vile enough words to describe the worthless Mike Pence (asshat-IN). Now Smith is up, I must go hurl-excuse me…

If we can’t reverse the effects just by decreasing carbon emissions, some kind of geoengineering approach to the problem may be required. I would hesitate to recommend these approaches (e.g. inject stuff into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight) unless there is no alternative, because we’re likely to get harmful side effects (damage to the ozone layer, for example). But we can’t just wait for Antarctica to melt and put Manhattan (and Bangladesh) underwater.

Even I, an ex-Navy Chief, cannot find vile enough words to describe the worthless Mike Pence (asshat-IN).

haven’t been, but i will now. thanks for the laugh. excellent timing too.

Paulsen R-Minnesota up complaining about the budget deficit.

That’s what the Conservatives are hanging their hat on. As you say, we must be extremely leery of screwing about with Mother Nature. The Law of Unintended Consequences is most definitely in play here. But it most certainly will be catastrophic to do nothing!

We, as a species, will increasingly rely upon the oceans as source of food, especially with the “Breadbaskets” turning into dust bowls. Already we are experiencing extreme drought conditions in all of the World’s primary grain farming areas. Should the oceans become incapable of supporting commercial fish farming, the human race will be living on algae, as will likely be the case anyway!

But the incoming Secretary had nothing to do with it! I was a Bush gift! Besides being nice may get their attention… maybe..

sorry, nonplussed i can’t watch anymore congress today. just too fucking depressing. tomorrow i’ll try again.

It’s rare for any communication to get further up the line than staffers. I want them to know there’s at least one angry citizen out here. I’m tired of being nice to a government that shits on us.

Global warming protest.

Right on, Bro! Screw em, we should know by now that they’re snakes. It’s only a matter of how venomous…

All I’ve got to say to this is – Duh.

CO2 levels began creeping up at the very beginning of the industrial revolution when global fossil fuel use was less than 1% of what it is today.

That said, if you want atmospheric level of CO to level off, much less decrease, emissions must go to a level lower than at the beginning of the industrial revolution – that’s right, damn near zero.

back before we knew how to make fire, it took 100s of thousands of years for the planet (then loaded with plant life) to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels by anything like the last century’s increase, there’s no damn reason what-so-ever to think it will happen any faster the next time.

Anyone with half a brain doesn’t need a team of scientist to tell them some fairy tell about how things might be well and good in a thousand years. It won’t.

The question is now just how screwed are things going to be in a thousand years, and we’re still headed the wrong way on a fast train.

Carbon emissions must go to ZERO in the next few decades. That’s the truth no one wants to tell you.

The question is IF and HOW we as a species might survive. Or not. ;-)

Eli is upstairs!
The Return Of Science… And Democracy

If we’re going to have battery cars and use wall plug-ins to charge them and neither coal nor nuclear is satisfactory, then we had better ramp up other energy sources and the modern electric grid in a hurry!

How long will that transition take?

In the mean time does it hurt anything to clean up coal?

No, coal is not a long-term solution, but it’ll be here a while, so why not clean it up some?

There’s no cleaning up coal. When fossil fuels are burned CO2 is created. It’s the primary gassious product of combustion. It can’t be reduced in any meaningful way as combustion processes are already pretty darn efficient, being less efficient means wasting fuel dollars and the economics of idustries took care of that long ago.

This idea of carbon sequester is science fiction, it always will be. The volumes are astronomical, and the idea that they’re going to compress it and drive it into salt domes is quiet honestly, just plain silly. It’s just junk science to give people a false sense that something can and is being done.

Nuclear is the only bridge we have to a future of clean renewable power. The technology is here to do it safely. As unpalitable as it is to many it’s all we have.

Remember folks, carbon emission from fossil fuels have to go to ZERO. That’s the only answer. There’s no getting around it.

There’s no such thing as clean coal – never will be.

I was interested to find firedoglake and read the comments. 20 years ago I had a book published on different economic concepts to point the way to a sustainable world economy. Someone who liked the book contacted me this year to suggest that I update and re-publish it as a blog. She set up the blog, and the book is now complete on the blog in a series of postings. There are now also additional pieces on global warming and other subjects. Here is the link:

http://www.economicsforaroundearth.com

With all good wishes,
Charles Pierce