A recent New Yorker cover carried a kitsch yet tragic image of a lone and all-puffed-out Father Christmas, sitting on a tiny disk of sea ice and leaning against a candy striped North Pole, like some absurdist and apocalyptic desert island scene at the very top of a hot and helter-skelter world.(*13&20 aug ’12)

George Monbiot’s scorchingly prescient piece on the record Arctic ice melt, in today’s Guardian, raises concerns that ‘a form of reactive denial’ drives lack of attention and a very muted response to this historic event. He describes 29th August, 2012 as…

‘The day the world went mad’:

As record sea ice melt scarcely makes the news while the third runway grabs headlines, is there aI wonder whether we could be seeing a form of reactive denial at work: people proving to themselves that there cannot be a problem if they can continue to discuss the issues in these terms…

(click above to Monbiot’s piece)

This interpretOr wonders whether cognitive dissonance drives the wretched and almost robotic ‘reactive denial’ bit, too…This event has the potential to impact upon all humanity – the phrase ‘earth shattering’ comes to mind…and all for that extra buckeroo for some oleaginous sociopath at mission control.

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Click above to view new and fabo vimeo short of Earth from space – (we’re working on the embed view).

The human race was dying out

No one left to scream and shout

People walking on the moon

Smog gonna get you pretty soon

Ship of fools, ship of fools. Ship of fools, ship of fools…

(Jim Morrison)

 A Journey From the Higgs Bosun to Extinction:

This week the media exultantly praised the brilliant scientific work that has resulted in the finding of  the elusive “God Particle” or the Higgs Bosun. The Australian media is also trumpeting their own success at undermining the equally brilliant scientific work of climate scientists in making us aware that by failing to deal with man made global warming we are on the path to our own extinction.

According to recent polls, Australians who once strongly supported government action on climate change now oppose a tax that has been put on carbon emissions into the atmosphere. This is despite the tax being imposed on only the largest emitters of carbon, and despite householders being compensated for cost rises caused by the tax.

It also disregards the strong probability that the early embracing of low carbon technology will put more money in the pockets of Australians than by continuing on our current high carbon pathway.

To achieve these negative polls the mainstream media has lent their support to the deceitful campaigns of shock jocks and avaricious coal barons aimed at denigrating the findings of climate scientists. These findings show that we are already locked into damaging and highly expensive levels of climate change.

While denying the science, they studiously ignore the economic analysis that shows that a carbon tax is the cheapest and most effective method of reducing carbon related climate change.

Disregarding the rapid increase in plant an animal extinctions which point to to our own demise, the media focus on short term impacts and the cost of the tax on consumers, and selected businesses that are high energy users. In doing so they only look at one side of the climate balance sheet.

To balance the ledger, here are just a few of the massive costs of not dealing with the human related causes of climate change:

In reducing carbon emissions we also reduce the health bill from the health impacts of toxic pollutants billowing out of industrial chimneys.

In Europe this cost is estimated to be at least 102-169 billion Euro’s per annum. Furthermore only 2% of the facilities cause 50% of this health cost and these are the same type opf facilities targeted by Australia’s carbon tax. In the USA, air pollutants are estimated to reduce agricultural output by 4% per annum.

According to CSIRO, the human health cost is estimated at between A$3 billion and A$5.3 billion every year, and annual damage to materials, property and buildings is between A$3 billion and A$5 billion – one per cent of gross domestic profit (GDP). 

The savings on avoiding adverse health impacts from pollution alone outweighs the cost of the carbon tax on the economy.

A rise in floods and other extreme weather events like those experienced across Australia has resulted in massive infrastructure damage that costs billions of dollars in crop losses and mineral production. Thousands of houses and their furnishings have been destroyed and as a result insurance premiums have risen massively.

Conversely extreme heat is causing more intense and more damaging bushfires than have occurred in the recorded past. As with the floods, many houses and lives were lost in bushfires, and again the cost was in the billions.

The result in the more frequent swings between El Niño and La Niña oceanic oscillations has been accompanied by an emerging pattern of major floods followed by years of extreme drought. This has caused havoc with horticulture and agriculture and with native vegetation and fauna. Even marine species are at threat with the warming of the ocean, the changes in ocean currents and the acidification of the marine environment.

In fact our whole ecosystem is teetering on the brink of a major collapse. To add to this massive problem for humanity their is a twenty to thirty year lag time in the conversion of CO2 in the atmosphere to a change in the climate.

The current impacts of global warming was caused by the CO2 levels of twenty years ago. With our current CO2 output, global warming will be significantly worse in twenty years time even if we reduced our emissions right now. But if we do not make a  massive change there is a very bleak future for our grandchildren.

As Chief Seattle is reported to have said:

“Only after the last tree has been cut down. Only after the last river has been poisoned.  Only after the last fish has been caught. Only then will you find that money can not be eaten.”

While the enlightened continue to seek out the God particle, the ship of fools is sailing on a high wind. Blinded to the truth by the high priests of greed and selfishness they speed on to oblivion. Will you join them?

source: UN, Al Jazeera (2012)

(source UN & Al Jazeera 2012)

The first Earth Summit was held 20 years ago – greenhouse gas concentrations continue to spiral upwards – this week will see 50,000+ people converge on Rio de Janeiro for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, aka RIO+20 Earth Summit.

Here at the interpretOr, we’ll be sharing Al Jazeera infographics on a daily basis in the run up to RIO+20:

(source U.N. & Al Jazeera 2012)

According to Hannah Krakauer in New Scientist, North Carolina legislators have found a novel way to ameliorate climate change.

They plan to stop climate change in North Carolina by legislation. By creating legislation that bans the current method of calculating sea level rise and replacing it with a linear method of calculation that gives inaccurate but  much lower level outcomes, they hope to save millions of dollars in reparation.

Hannah Krakauer reported that :

The 8-inch model, based solely on historical records from the last 100 years, flies in the face of modern climate science. Sea level rise is due to a combination of climate-driven factors: warmer temperatures cause ocean water to expand, and rising temperatures are melting the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps. The combined feedback makes for exponential – not linear – growth. Yet the North Carolina bill states: “Rates of sea-level rise may be extrapolated linearly to estimate future rates of rise but shall not include scenarios of accelerated rates of sea-level rise.”

“This is unprecedented,” says Orrin Pilkey, professor emeritus of geology at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. “It’s the first time a law has dictated the shape of a curve.”

NC-20, the group behind the bill, has argued that incorporating the 39-inch predictions would be an enormous economic burden on coastal communities. “The legislature has declined to face the problem of what we’re going to do about it, and instead has attacked the science,” contends Pilkey.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21934-north-carolina-tries-to-outlaw-climate-models.html

To celebrate this miraculous occasion I have created a new but nostalgic anthem for North Carolina.

Carolina Climate Anthem

Wishing is good time wasted,

Still it’s a habit they say;

Wishing that swimming I had mastered

That’s what I do all day.

But speaking of wishing I’ll say:

Maybe there’s nothing but fishing but

Chorus

Nothing could be finer than to float round Carolina in the morning

No one could be wetter than my paddling red setter when I feed her in the dawning.

Where in the morning dories

Sail around my door

I love to hear the stories

Of when we lived onshore

Throwing out my burley but the water is too swirly in the morning

Butterflies still flutter up to kiss the salty buttercups but there all drowning

If I had Aladdin’s lamp for only a day,

I’d make a wish and here’s what I’d say:

Nothing could be finer than to float around Carolina in the morning

Though everything could be better and we’d be less wetter if we listened to the warning

Dreaming was meant for night-time

I live in dreams all the day;

I know it’s not the right time,

But still I dream away.

What could be sweeter than dreaming,

Just dreaming and drifting away.

(Repeat Chorus)

Apologies to Gus Khan and Walter Donaldson

*theinterpretOr is looking at an alternative melody based on Frank Zappa’s “Carolina Hardcore Ecstasy”

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21934-north-carolina-tries-to-outlaw-climate-models.html