Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – Will Hutton writes about Thomas Piketty’s rebuttal to the false claim that inequality has to be encouraged in the name of development – and the reality that we have a public policy choice whether to privilege returns on capital or broad-based growth: It
Continue readingTag: IPCC
350 or bust: It’s Up To Us To Decide The Future
Global weirding has begun. We still have time to act, but not an indefinite amount of time: * Produced by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and Globaia and funded by the UN Foundation. The data visualization summarises and visualizes several of the most significant statements in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: The Window Of Opportunity Is Growing Increasingly Short
So says Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, if we are to take action to limit the global average temperature increase to two degrees Celsius: Six years ago we said that emissions would have to peak by 2015 if we wanted to hold them to 2C.
Continue readingThings Are Good: Obviously, The Climate Change Debate is Over
Anybody with the ability to reason realizes that anthropogenic climate change is happening – and it’s happening in an unpredictable but faster way than previously imagined. The fact that fools argue against this infuriates me as they are essentially arguing against reality. Recently, two acclaimed scientific bodies (The Royal Society
Continue readingThings Are Good: Cities Are The Key For Adjusting To Changing Climate
Readers of this site have seen lots of evidence that in the 21st century the best place one can live for a small carbon footprint is in urban areas. Things like increased infrastructure costs and higher costs of living associated with automobile use in rural & suburban places are obvious
Continue reading350 or bust: Signs of Change
* Now are we ready to stop using our atmosphere as a sewage dump? OECD Calls For a “Big Fat Price On Carbon” In the Fight Against Climate Change *
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: "Unequivocal"
Leaving no doubt; clear; unambiguous. The latest IPCC report concludes that mankind’s influence in driving climate change is beyond doubt, clear and unambiguous. Anthropogenic global warming is here, it’s here to stay and, unless we want a better future enough to change our ways, it’s going to get a hell
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Throwing Down the Gauntlet – "Rational" People Will Be Convinced By the Science – IPCC
There are encouraging signs that, this time, climate scientists are coming prepared for a fight against the forces of denialism. You can tell the Fossil Fuelers and the rest of their supporting cast in the denialist community have their knickers in a bunch over the pending release of the next
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: After All That, The Himalayan Glaciers are Indeed Shrinking
800px-Everest_North_Face_toward_Base_Camp_Tibet_Luca_Galuzzi_2006_edit_1.jpg Remember the Himalayan glaciers? They were at the root of the most deserved black-eye to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change during the intensely politicized period of 2009-2010. In so-called “GlacierGate,” it was revealed that the IPCC had published, in one of its reports, a truly bogus assertion that
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: The Really Inconvenient Truth For The GWPF – Debunking GWPF Briefing Paper No1
GWPF_0.jpeg This is the sixth post in a series examining the UK-registered educational charity and climate denial 'think-tank' Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). Previous posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) have identified very serious shortcomings and it is now make-or-break time for the GWPF's reputation. GWPF Briefing Paper No1 – 'The
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: What The IPCC Ignores, According To The GWPF
GWPF.jpeg This series of posts (1, 2, 3, 4) examines the UK-registered educational charity & climate-change denying think-tank the Global Warming Policy Foundation GWPF. This fifth post examines one of the assertions made within GWPF Briefing Paper No1. The paper boldly claims that the findings of the UN IPCC are too narrow
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: GWPF & The Hockey Stick Curve
gwpf_0.jpeg The previous post in this series examined the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) Briefing Paper No3 "The Truth About Greenhouse Gases". Despite its title, Briefing Paper No3 said very little about such gases. Yet one subject (not directly to do with greenhouse gases) was discussed at some length within
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: Evaluation shows "Faked" Heartland Climate Strategy Memo is Authentic
heartland logo.jpg A line-by-line evaluation of the Climate Strategy memo, which the Heartland Institute has repeatedly denounced as a "fake" shows no “obvious and gross misstatements of fact,” as Heartland has alleged. On the contrary, the Climate Strategy document is corroborated by Heartland’s own material and/or by its allies and employees.
Continue readingNEW MEDIA AND POLITICS CANADA: Today’s War On Everything News
I’m going to run out of titles for these daily wraps for my radio program in a hurry. I’m hoping the links and videos are of use and get sent around. Here’s a video of an Irishman getting it right about Wall Street, that the good people at Crooks and
Continue readingNEW MEDIA AND POLITICS CANADA: Today’s War On Everything News
I’m going to run out of titles for these daily wraps for my radio program in a hurry. I’m hoping the links and videos are of use and get sent around.
Here’s a video of an Irishman getting it right about Wall Street, that the good people at Crooks and Liars posted today. It’s dead on in so many ways and extremely funny, but the language is definitely NSFW.
So to begin by following up on the Iran acquiring the technology to create a nuclear weapon and why the west should now go to war with Iran story, well, things remain unclear. The leaks that were making the rounds this week suggested that the IAEA was absolutely going to confirm that this was in fact the case and since they have considerably more credibility than the US and NATO on such issues, this was going to bolster the case for an attack on Iran. It turns out however, that this is not the case. The IAEA report in fact says that they are “unable to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, and therefore to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities,” according to the report by the UN watch-dog.
Iran has been accused of “…being slow to respond to IAEA requests for further information “concerning the construction of ten new uranium enrichment facilities,” the sites for five of which have been decided and only one of which has begun construction.” That’s far different from being ready to arm a long range missile with a nuclear warhead – in fact it’s not the same thing at all.
There is apparently only “…circumstantial evidence, provided by Western intelligence sources, that Iran has engaged in research and development activities which are “strong indicators of possible weapon development.” No direct evidence, however, is provided of an active weaponization program; the report’s concerns mostly arise from the absence of evidence disproving weaponization.
Did you get that? What evidence the IAEA claims to have comes from the same Western intelligence sources that have been beating the drums for war for some time now while baselessly claiming that the Iranians are a threat. And their concerns are about the absence of evidence disproving weaponization! That’s an insane reason to impose sanctions, let alone wage war. But it does this sound like the same kind of rhetoric that was heard before the illegal war on Iraq. It’s not out of the question that Iran could be pursuing such weapons, but it would likely be to ensure that they don’t find themselves the victims of attacks from the outside. They represent no threat to the west or to the world unless they also possess a desire to be incinerated.
There’s no war on poverty taking place in the US, but they are arguing about how to define it. The latest estimate says 16% of Americans lived in poverty in 2010. There’s only one word necessary to describe that, shameful.
There has been a war on the poor and it’s what the Occupy Wall Street Movement is about. It’s been going on for decades now …but if you hadn’t noticed, that’s not surprising. You wouldn’t often have found the casualty figures from this particular conflict in your local newspaper or on the nightly TV news. Over at Alternet you can find a Francis Fox Piven piece that a great job chronicling the numbers and the moral force behind tackling this ongoing assault on the poor.Some numbers to consider: Some 19 million people are living in what is called extreme poverty, which means that their household income falls in the bottom half of those considered to be below the poverty line. More than a third of those extremely poor people are children.
In the US, there’s also the war on the elderly and their pension plans. CNN’s reprehensible Candy Crowley …badgered the Director of the AARP, David Certner about whether seniors are going to be willing to “put skin in the game” when it comes to getting our budget deficits under control. That’s right – don’t tax millionaires and billionaires. Go after the pension plans that seniors paid into their entire working lives and deprive them of a decent retirement and dignity. Seems the wealthy won’t be happy until the elderly are living on cat food.
The war on the environment is being championed by those at Fox News, and this week they are pretending to have uncovered a “scandal,” …claims that IPCC reports “have often been written by graduate students with little or no experience in their field of study. Well, they left out some rather important and pertinent facts. Turns out that there were over 450 lead authors for the 2007 assessment report, plus 800 contributing authors and more than 2,500 reviewers. Fox identified only one graduate student who worked on the 2007 report. So they spoke about 1 out 1250 authors. I know, I know, it’s shocking that Fox News would engage in this kind of deceit.
Thanks to the changing climate, mountain pine beetles have been waging war on hundreds of thousands of whitebark pines and winning, making this rugged pine a likely victim of extinction in the very near future.
And by the by, the latest research on current climactic conditions finds clear evidence that the global warming we’re witnessing is unprecedented in the past 20,000 years. And remember, climate change come with all kinds of costs, some of the cash. So far in 2011 the costs of extreme weather in the US is upwards of $52 billion dollars! Go to the link and do the math – it’s extraordinary. Seems that prevention would be a money saving idea whose time has long since come.
Going to end this post on a happy note… actually, three of them: There were elections tonight in the US and voters in Mississippi went out and voted down the ghastly personhood amendment which would have defined a fertilized agg as a person. In Ohio voters defeated the anti-labor law Senate Bill 5 which would have stripped workers of their right to collectively bargain. And in Maine the voters defeated a voter suppression law keeping the state’s longstanding practice of same-day voter registration on election day.
NEW MEDIA AND POLITICS CANADA: Today’s War On Everything News
I’m going to run out of titles for these daily wraps for my radio program in a hurry. I’m hoping the links and videos are of use and get sent around. Here’s a video of an Irishman getting it right about Wall Street, that the good people at Crooks and
Continue reading