The only thing worse than running out of oil

Posted: December 22, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Climate Change, Psychopaths in charge | Tags: , , , , | 17 Comments

Is not running out of oil.

This headline today is not good news: Does shale oil boom mean U.S. energy independence is near?Smog in New York. (Edwin Ewing, Wikimedia) Neither is this one that the US has a “200-year-supply” of coal. Nor these about all the fuel available in the Marcellus Shale, or the Canadian tar sands, or the Green River oil shale.

At this point it’s obvious to the meanest intelligence that burning fossil fuels adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, which causes climate change, which causes floods, fire, famine, pestilence, and war. It will kill billions of humans. I’ll repeat that. It will kill us. And I do mean “us.” Anybody who thinks they’ll be unaffected by the social consequences of global disasters is too dumb to last long in the hard new world. We are committing suicide.

We’re doing it right now. Not tomorrow. Not if things get worse. All we have to do is keep on doing what we’re doing.

Can I tell you a secret? Apparently, a lot of people don’t know this. Earth is the only planet we have.

Greenhouse gases are a gun pointed at our own heads. We have pulled the trigger.

But now comes the only good news: Planets work very slowly. The bullet has decades to travel. It’s already been traveling for about two centuries. Who knows how much more time we have? Probably minutes, but at least we’re not dead yet. If we did it very fast, we could move our heads out of the way.

Instead people write pleased headlines that more ways have been found to keep the bullet on track.

The whole species is headed for a Darwin Award. Except in this case it’ll be the planet whose survival is improved after we eliminate ourselves in an extraordinarily idiotic manner.

Crossposted from Acid Test

Late Night Climate Change Open Thread

Posted: December 9, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Climate Change, Environment | Tags: , , , , , | 4 Comments


From Mother Nature Network Blog:

Patagonia’s Jorge Montt glacier is melting faster than any other glacier in Chile, having shrunk by more than half a mile in just 12 months, researchers announced Wednesday. And they have 1,445 photos to prove it.

The glacier is located 1,000 miles south of Santiago in the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, which covers 4.1 million acres in the Andes between Chile and Argentina. According to the Center for Scientific Studies in Valdivia, which has made a time-lapse video of the retreating glacier, Jorge Montt’s snout shrunk by 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) from January 2010 to February 2011.

“Patagonia has experienced climate change at rates much more moderate than those observed in the rest of the world,” glaciologist Andres Rivera says in a press release about the findings. “However, almost all the glaciers of the region have lost area. And Jorge Montt is the one that has the record retreat.”

….

That retreat has already altered the surrounding landscape, including the emergence of the 12-mile-long, 1,300-foot-deep fjord, which wasn’t previously listed on local maps. It also highlights the plight of glaciers across Patagonia — according to a study published in April, Patagonia’s glacial melting has “increased markedly” in recent decades, contributing about 10 percent of global sea-level rise related to mountain glaciers in the past 50 years. And as glaciologist Michel Barer tells the Associated Press, the problem of retreating glaciers “is really hot in South America” overall.

Pun intended? Watch the video:

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