In last
week's Radio Ecoshock Show, we talked with Professor Michael T. Klare, about
the looming possibility of social instability or riots, even here in
North America. Can't happen here? There was a riot in downtown Montreal,
Canada on March 15th. The march to
protest police brutality ended up with smashed store fronts, burned police
cars, and over 200 arrests.
Meanwhile
the European think tank called "LEAP/Europe 2020" says America is
likely to have outbreaks and riots due to a lack of a social safety net, in
these difficult times, plus the hundreds of millions of guns owned by citizens.
We could discount this as just another think-tank ploy, but LEAP also predicted the sub-prime real estate melt-down in the United States. This time, as Claire Gatinois reports on truthout.org, quote:
""If
your country or region is an area where firearms are in mass circulation"
(among big countries, only the United States is in that situation) LEAP
indicates, "then the best way to deal with the dislocation is to leave
your region, if that's possible."
In any
event, some Americans will "leave their region" simply because of
hurricanes, droughts and recurring floods caused by climate change. In fact, that's already happening in the
super-dry West, as well as Florida and the Louisiana coast. The first American climate refugees.
In this
program we'll catch the latest wave. We
interview one of the few independent environmental journalist still
standing, Stephen Leahy. You'll
hear what author and activist Bill McKibben told a business audience
in Indiana on March 11th. And a
scorching hot speech by Oakland activist Van Jones at the recent
Powershift09 conference in Washington D.C.
Right-wing radio nut Michael Savage calls Jones a thug. President Obama calls him his "Special
Advisor on Green Jobs".
I've got
lots of other audio goodies - and baddies - another roundup of Horrible
Climate News, a laugh and a song.
Radio Ecoshock.
But hey,
are you sick of hearing about climate change? Polls show millions of people can't stand to hear any more about
it, like this radio funster, Craig Mayhem.
Mr. Mayhem doesn't like anything, as we find out from his classic 1
minute rants.
[Craig
Mayhem Vs. Everything #6] [http://www.superfunpatrol.net/?p=973]
Actually,
Mr. Mayhem is just sick of all the talk about whether it's cooling or
warming. The planet is getting killed,
he says, and he's fed up with the blather.
Catch his other rants at http://www.superfunpatrol.net/. Superfunpatrol is a source for radio comedy,
aimed at the college crowd, so little kiddies need not apply.
British
writer slash activist George Monbiot says it's time to ditch the label
"climate change" anyway. After
realizing the Intergovernmental Panel, which governments have been using,
completely underestimated the rapid impacts, Monbiot says, quote:
we have
to stop calling it climate change. Using "climate change" to describe
events like this, with their devastating implications for global food security,
water supplies and human settlements, is like describing a foreign invasion as
an unexpected visit, or bombs as unwanted deliveries. It's a ridiculously
neutral term for the biggest potential catastrophe humankind has ever
encountered.
I think
we should call it "climate breakdown." Does anyone out there
have a better idea?"
Climate
breakdown, or climate shift. Whatever
we call it, we're in for it.
THE HORRIBLE CLIMATE NEWS (for this week)
About
2,000 scientists went to Copenhagen last week, to raise public and government
awareness of the climate crisis. We now
know, and can prove with scientific measurements, that the sea level rise
predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel report in 2007 was totally underestimated. Once we add melting of ice and glaciers, as
you've no doubt heard, sea level could go over four feet higher on average in
just one human lifetime - that is by the end of this century.
This news
comes as many cities are rediscovering their ocean fronts, switching from
unsightly industry and docks to upscale plazas and homes for millionaires. All that looks like another unsustainable
bubble as scientists announce sea level rises of four feet or more by the end
of this century.
I got
into this discussion with one of Australia's leading city planners, Dr.
Peter Newman. He was in Vancouver
with his new book "Resilient Cities, Responding to Peak Oil and Climate
Change." Dr. Newman showed
slides of imaginative ideas for redeveloping the shoreline of Sydney, but I
wondered if all that would be underwater in our children's lifetimes.
[clip
from Q and A following "Resilient Cities" speech at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, January 9th, 2009
- transcript:
Alex
Smith: "Many
of the slides that I've seen of urban concentrated development that you've
show, look to me pretty close to sea level.
But I'm thinking with sea level rise, we may be investing in something
we will have to retreat from."
Peter
Newman: "We
have quite strong planning laws that incorporate a one and a half to two meter
sea level rise in all development. And
we've had that in place for over a decade.
It's not that to build that in.
I don't
see that as being something that is impossible to overcome. Engineers love those kinds of problems,
because essentially, you know, you build sea walls. And do what the Dutch did, you know they're twenty meters under.
They say
Bangladesh is going to disappear, because of sea levels rising, and they are
very close to it. But they deal daily
with 13 meter tides, that's on average, 13 meters. So add another meter to that, how do you manage it? They manage it with huge mud banks which
they build and constantly are rebuilding.
Some of them break down in storms, but they're very clever at dealing
with the Sea. They've had hundreds of
years of dealing with that. And they
will go on doing that.
I think
we'll find ways of protecting our cities with sea walls, if it comes to that
but I would hope that the one and a half kind of meter rise is all that happens
because we get on and fix it. Fix the
atmosphere."
That was
Dr. Peter Newman, author of Resilient Cities, in a Q and A recorded by Alex
Smith of Radio Ecoshock in January 2009.
You can download Peter Newman's complete speech as a free mp3. Look for our 2009 program archive, and
select the show for January 16th.
I
don't share his optimism about our ability to adapt.
What if the economic crisis makes such super projects impossible to
finance? What if governments are too in
debt to build and maintain sea walls?
Keep in mind that fossil fuels required for building mega projects are
also running out as the century progresses.
It seem more likely we will simply abandon flooded parts of the
cities, as the sea levels rise more than expected, aided by stronger
storms.
That is the conclusion drawn by California's Climate Action Team, in a report released in early March 2009, and reported by the Los Angeles Times on March 12th. The Times writes "Report recommends phased abandonment of coastal areas and moving state infrastructure inland." end quote.
Billions
of dollars of infrastructure, from America's busiest port to freeways and
office buildings, may have to be abandoned if the sea rises just 55 inches by
the end of the century.
Another
report by the Pacific Institute in Oakland predicted 100,000 residents would be
directly affected, from well known neighborhoods like Marina del Ray and
Venice. The airports in San
Francisco and Oakland would go underwater.
The
Climate Action Team suggested about 1100 miles of sea walls and levees costing
$14 billion dollars. They also question
whether the state should support any further development along the coast, and
call for new construction to go further inland. Meanwhile, some of the poorest residents of the state, and some
of the wealthiest, can expect damaging floods and storms due to sea level rise.
The Copenhagen
scientists also warn that just two degrees of warming in the Arctic could start
melting the permafrost - the frozen soil and plant matter that could release a
storm of new carbon dioxide and methane into our atmosphere. It seems like that is inevitable. Science also projects that four degrees of
warming would wipe out the Amazon rainforests - adding yet another massive dose
of CO2 into the sky. George Monbiot
suggests it is time to feel "sheer animal panic."
You
may not be able to sweat about it though. Yale climate
expert Steven Sherwood said that summer in parts of India, China and even the
Eastern U.S. could get too hot for sweating.
Since that is how humans cool off, these regions would become
uninhabitable, Sherwood says. That
happens if the Earth warms 7 degrees over pre-industrial levels. Sherwood told Britain's Guardian newspaper
"There will be some places on Earth where it would simply be impossible to
lose heat." "This is quite imaginable if we continue burning fossil
fuels. I don't see any reason why we wouldn't end up there."
The key message of the concluding communication, from the Copenhagen Climate Science Congress, held March 11th and 12th:
[(http://climatecongress.ku.dk/newsroom/congress_key_messages/):]
“Recent
observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the
worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realized. For
many key parameters, the climate system is already moving beyond the patterns
of natural variability within which our society and economy have developed and
thrived. These parameters include global mean surface temperature, sea-level
rise, ocean and ice sheet dynamics, ocean acidification, and extreme climatic
events. There is a significant risk that many of the trends will accelerate,
leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts.”
You
can understand why weak minds flip into utter denial.
Who wants to believe this striking change is upon us - unless we give up
fossil fuels. It's the same mechanism
where nicotine addicts light up a smoke, as soon as they are out of the
hospital after a lung transplant. We
continue a lot of things that we know are killing us.
Plus,
every day we stall, there's all that good motoring, and all that good oil money
to be made...
If you
were a 12 year old heading into the Net for information on global warming, of
course you expect to find good information, moving info, on our climate
challenge and what to do about it.
Not. The Net, and especially
You tube, is crammed with a chorus of denial. There are think-tanks, and hidden paid agents, who make sure new
denial rants are posted every single day.
And there are denial cranks who seem to post a link to their denial heroes
every minute or two. Soon you end up
with Texas talk show host Alex Jones, explaining global warming is a vicious
plot by the world bankers to take over your freedom. The new collapse of these same banks doesn't seem to slow down
the paranoid. Neither does mere
science, or publicly available facts, like the melting Arctic Sea.
With your
permission, I'm going to spend a few short minutes, to dive deep into the
twisted reasoning of climate deniers. I
won't bother with this guy, the official CNN denier that went over to Fox. [Glenn Beck sniveling]
We'll
start with a clip from John Coleman, an aging meteorologist, long-time
TV weatherman, and - claim to fame - a founder of the Weather Network. The Weather Network has long since parted
with Coleman, and carries features on climate change. But Coleman is ready to battle the whole world about this
horrible scam. Let's visit the brain of
John Coleman.
[Coleman
clip sorry no transcript – check out the radio show]
Isn't
that what everyone wants to hear? It's
all fine! Smoking is good for ya too!
Coleman
says he'll have the last laugh 20 years - he'll be 95 if he last that long
without being hung by some angry crowds in the heat.
As John
Coleman, TV weatherman for KUSI San Diego explains, all those climate
scientists are actually trying to overthrow the power of the United States, on
behalf of the poor countries who covet our SUV's. And this guy gets tons of national TV time to spout what
amounts to climate terrorism.
Look, if
I go on national TV and say that buildings are always blowing up for one reason
or another, so it's OK if you do it - I'd have the terrorist police breaking
down my door. But John Coleman can tell
you that greenhouse gases - your own automobile exhaust, has nothing to do with
climate change. If he succeeds in
slowing American action, yet again, he leaves a ruined planet for all coming
generations. Isn't that climate
terrorism? Isn't he an enabler for
all the carbon addicts?
British
academics just met in Bristol March 7th and 8th to analyze the psychology of
climate deniers. To look at the
mental mechanisms that make people deny the obvious. In my experience 99% of climate deniers men. The majority are old men, who can't accept
their past has led to dangerous failure.
They'll be dead soon anyway.
Some of them have been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the
fossil lobby. Others feel they have
been gypped of some important position, or wronged by so-called
"liberals." The rest are much
younger, acting out their rebellious phase, denying authority, and claiming
attention for themselves. They may hope
to become a new media figure, and post constantly, everywhere.
It gets
much worse. Near the end of this
program, I'll let talk show hate-leader Michael Savage explain the green
plot in more detail, as he introduces our featured speaker, Van Jones.
First,
let's chat with an endangered species.
He's a reporter for the Independent Press, publishing stories in media
all over the world. Stephen Leahy does
the legwork, goes to meetings, interviews scientists, reads their reports,
watching over the environment. He joins
us from Canada.
Now I
want to report on a new speech by author and activist Bill McKibben. On You tube, you can find
part of his presentation to the Annual Business Conference of the Kelley School
of Business on March 11, 2009. That's
in Indiana.
Twenty
years ago, Bill McKibben wrote the first book for non-scientists about climate
change, titled "The End of Nature."
The sound quality on the video is too crappy for radio, but I want you
to hear his important conclusions.
I've transcribed that talk - you can find it in my blog entry for
March 19th - and I want to read it you now.
That's what I do - passing on the latest news and views about what is
happening.
Quoting
Bill McKibben's latest speech:
"The
real news, that you may not quite be aware of, is that in the last two or three
years that diagnosis has darkened and darkened considerably. The scientists that I have been speaking to
for a quarter century - people who have been sober and concerned and worried,
are all of a sudden panicked when one talks to them on the phone, and the
reason is it becomes very clear that both the scale and the pace of global
warming [is] happening much more quickly than we had anticipated.
This
is a grand huge experiment. What happens when you pump a
lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
And so it is not surprising that there are surprises. It's too bad that all the surprises so far
are on the bad side."
"Those
feedback loops, and there are dozens of them, now are assuming a life of
their own, and pushing us very close to the point where no matter what we try
to do about climate, we won't be able to do very much because it will no longer
be in our control. The best science
tells us we still have a brief window where closing down our output of fossil
fuels may allow us to get this problem back under control. But it is a very narrow window, closing much
more rapidly than we thought.
And if we
don't manage to hop through that window, the scale of impacts on the other side
is enormous in ways that we're only now beginning to fully appreciate."
He
describes a "cap and dividend" program which sounds very much like a
transparent flow-through carbon tax - put in words acceptable to
Americans. There would be a limit on
the amount of carbon that can be releases - the cap. He prescribes a price for carbon - to be paid by energy producers
like Exxon Mobil, who would pass that along to consumers, so the price of gas
might go back to four dollars a gallon or whatever. The money raised would not go to the oil companies, or to
Congress, but would be sent back as a "dividend" to every American.
"It's
time limited. We have to reach a
solution now, or it's no use reaching a solution. If we wait five or ten or fifteen years, and put that much more
carbon into the system, okay, then it will acquire a momentum of it's own so
great that nothing we can do in the outyears will have any measurable effect on
what happens in the Earth physical systems."
McKibben
points out that all other politics are negotiations between human beings. But the physics and chemistry of climate
change not negotiable. The
processes are what they are. If you add
gasoline to a fire, there will be a bigger fire. We cannot compromise with the atmosphere or the oceans. Talk or negotiations are not possible. If we add greenhouse gases, the Earth will
warm, and many systems that civilization depends upon will destabilize, and
change beyond historic recognition.
It is not
a debate between Conservatives or Liberals, McKibben says, or even between the
U.S. and China. This is between humans,
who emit carbon, and the atmosphere, which reacts to greenhouse gases in ways
predetermined by the physics and chemistry of the Universe.
"It
would be a great shame, [missing a word] - were we to leave it entirely to
eighteen and nineteen and twenty year olds to try and make this happen. This is a problem that all of us caused, by
a lifetime of living the ways that we've lived, and in any sensible Universe,
it's up to us to try and make deep, powerful, brave changes in the very short
time that we have."
That is
how Bill McKibben ends the speech, delivered March 11th. Find this transcript in the Radio Ecoshock
blog, or watch the speech
on You tube.
Adding to
the chorus, just this past week U.S. Senator John Kerry told Agence
France Press that deferring action on climate change, just because of the
economic crisis, would amount to, quote, "a mutual suicide pact." AFP quotes Kerry saying:
"Climate change is not governed by a recession, it's governed by scientific facts about what's happening to Earth. And you either accept the realities of the science or you don't."
Well, here is someone who doesn't. Michael Savage is a popular radio talk show host, syndicated across America. My listeners in Canada, Europe, Australia or Asia will be shocked at the amount of hatred spewed out on right-wing radio in the States. Here Mr. Savage, whose real name is Weiner, explains how President Obama is implementing Nazi-style fascism through green energy, and controls on greenhouse gases.
[Michael Savage Clip][Savage calls Van Jones a “thug” and then muses about Jones being given thousands of armed followers called the “Green Shirts” which he compares to Hitler’s “Brown Shirts”.]
Mr.
"Savage" is actually a portly PHD, a doctor who doesn't
practice. He has told listeners that he
sleeps in different places, always with a big gun ready, in case of
assassination. Actually a businessman
in the health field, Mr. Weiner sold his brand of power drink to the Pepsi
people. Big corporations sponsor
Weiner's show, because his rants, which remind me of the Nazi propaganda
minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels, draw an audience of a million or more. This green-hating, along with his hostility
to homosexuals and Arabs, takes Michael Savage to the number three spot on talk
radio in America.
That is
what the scientists in Copenhagen, all the scientists around the world,
including at the American National Academy of Science, is up against. If the denialists win, and the people turn
to hatred, the world will be in flames in more ways than one.
Fortunately,
we have other voices, and lately, these saner voices have won at the
polls. Let us here from Michael's
Savage's "thug" Van Jones.
Van is an African American Activist from Oakland, California. He was early to say that the green movement
needed to include people of color. That
any big change in America would not work if it leaves the poor and the
dispossessed behind. Hell, I'll let him
tell you. Here is the conclusion of his
speech to the Powershift 09 conference just held in Washington DC February 27th
to March 2nd, 2009.
[Van
Jones at Powershift 09]
Van Jones
has been appointed as a "Special Advisor to the President on Green
Jobs". The media wanted to call
him the Green Jobs Czar - but Jones was quick to point out he would be more of
a handyman. His mission is to
facilitate the greening of many departments in the U.S. government. So that all of them get moving not only on
the carbonless economy, but on green jobs for those who need them most.
That is a
huge social program, and a long-time dream of social justice. Of course it isn't possible. In the same way that an African American man
could never be elected President of the United States.
Maybe we
can. There is no way to toss up a
few solar panels and hybrids, and declare the consumer society green. It's going to take changes from everyone,
just to survive the economic crash, the energy slide, and climate
breakdown.
We'll
have to stop arresting young people, and minorities for victimless crimes like
pot. Yes, Van Jones, the millions of
imprisoned Americans will need to be brought into the solution, along with
the aboriginal people. Everybody. Otherwise, the billionaires make their
last stand behind the remains of the military, and it's blood in the streets
until the heat waves solve the human problem by ending it. Massive change or massive death, and we may
experience both.
Should
we change our slogan to "Yes We
Must"?
Here is a
word of hope from Peter Sinclair. Peter
has a raft of good videos on You tube answering the phony claims of climate
deniers. The famous hockey stick
debate, the Medieval warming period, the urban heat island effect - all the
myths those skeptics repeat over and over -demolished by Peter Sinclair's You
tube videos, called "Denial
Crock of the Week". Seek them
and ye shall find. Peter says....
You can
find lots of answers in our
past Radio Ecoshock Shows. Our
latest programs are downloaded a thousand a week from the free web site
ecoshock dot org. Even Ecoshock Shows
from two years ago, with experts on smog, global dimming, and surviving after
the lights go out - get downloaded on average 200 a month. Find out for yourself what top authors and
scientists are saying. Load up your
computer or IPOD, at ecoshock dot org.
I'm your
host Alex Smith, as we travel through the whirl-wind.
Don't
forget, Saturday March 28th at 8:30 pm - it's Earth Hour. Turn off the electricity. About 100 U.S. cities, including Baltimore,
Boston, Pittsburgh, Tucson and many more have signed up for Earth Hour this
year. Another 1500 cities are going
dark, with Berlin just signing on to turn out.
Major U.S. companies, grocery stores and sports teams have signed
up. Even the huge Coca-Cola sign in
London's Piccadilly Circus will be shut off for only the third time since World
War II. Find out more at http://www.earthhour.org/ - and get your city or
company to sign up.
Let the
world see we do care about the planet.