James E. Hansen, NASA’s chief climate scientist, was the star of the lead story in last Sunday’s New York Times. Hansen says the Bush Administration has bound & gagged him — prevented him from telling the truth about global warming — ever since he testified, in a 6 December lecture in San Francisco, that without U.S. leadership, climate change will irrevocably change our planet. He’d complained before about the administration muzzling climate scientists, but this, he says, is the most egregious case yet.
This reminded us of our first global warming show — on the politics of climate change — with Rick Piltz, another government whistleblower.
So that was Sunday. Then on Monday morning the BBC led with this news: there’s now only a small chance that we’ll be able to keep greenhouse gas emissions below “dangerous” levels. Dangerous in that the resulting climate changes would be irreversible.
Tuesday was SOTU, in which George W. Bush said, “America is addicted to oil.” Which you could parse in a variety of ways, among them that Bush was alluding, however elliptically, to climate change.
Then we started hearing about Al Gore’s new book on global warming — and the accompanying documentary being screened at Sundance. (You can read about them here in the New York Observer; or here at Grist.)
All of this raises the question: is it possible that we’re approaching not just a tipping point scientifically, but also a tipping point in US public opinion? Is there any chance that global warming could be a real issue in the 2008 election? Any slight whisper of a possibility that Gore might run again…on a global warming platform?
Wouldn’t it be great if Al Gore ran again? As a Green Party candidate?!
One can only hope that US citizens finally get serious about global warming. Given the history, especially the recent history, of voting here, though, I don’t hold out much hope.
Is there any data from polls to even suggest that the mainstream voters might have global warming on their minds when the go to the ballots?
Al Gore mentioned the point once, I think, in his movie… and then missed it entirely!
Various aspects of climate change, “global warming,” environmental degradation, etc. have been referred to as “causes” of many of society’s problems when, in reality, they are results of a far more important phenomenon, the huge, unsustainable and growing current human population, the prime cause of the
other causes. The technical methods of alleviating the growing short-comings of our life-giving environments will be obsolete by the time they are implemented… outstripped by the size of the population.
You might find the views of Eric Pianka interesting and edifying:
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/Vanishing.Book.text.pdf
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/Everybody.html
http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/bio213/why.html
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/Controversy.html
The otherwise perhaps flawed domestic policies of China may not be to our liking, but their “one child” per parents should have our blessing and be adopted by the rest of the world as soon and completely as possible. It is nothing less than mandatory. It is the fastest (60 years), the cheapest (zero cost), the most easily participated (no one need do anything – merely do not have a second child) method with essentially no counter-acting side effects.This action obviates the need for all the programs now being touted and it will put the world back to the number of people, resulting from millions of years of linear growth, which existed about 250 years ago, when it was hardly under populated, but it was before the ruinous logarithmic growth that has occurred since. As Dennis Meadows said:â€Any environmental issue that doesn’t list overpopulation as the main problem is a lost cause.†Or, as this line on the stationery of The Committee of Concerned Scientists states:â€If we do not solve our overpopulation problem ourselves, sagely and humanely, the problem will be solved for us by Nature, efficiently and savagely.â€
Cheers