Climate change could mean the extinction of our species

[Ben]

CEO and Chairman of ExxonMobil Rex Tillerson saying of global warming: "... clearly there is going to be an impact."
And Tillerson explicates: "... increasing CO2 emissions [in] the atmosphere is gonna have an impact, a warming impact."
Now, why would one of the most powerful men in the world admit to the science of climate change....
Mystery to me --

[Ben]

Global warming ‘manageable’, says Exxon chief

By Ed Crooks in New York
FINANCIAL TIMES

Global warming is a “manageable” problem, but will require policy changes to adapt to its effects, the chief executive of ExxonMobil, the largest US oil and gas producer, has said.
Rex Tillerson said at a meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York that climate change was a “great challenge”, but it could be solved by adapting to risks such as higher sea levels and changing conditions for agriculture.
“As a species that’s why we’re all still here: we have spent our entire existence adapting. So we will adapt to this,” he said. “It’s an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions.”
Exxon, the world’s largest oil company by market capitalisation, has long been attacked by environmental campaigners for its stance on climate change.
Lee Raymond, Mr Tillerson’s predecessor as chief executive, questioned whether the earth was really warming, and said the attempt to limit greenhouse gas emissions “defies common sense”.
Mr Tillerson, who took over at the start of 2006, has modified that position, but continued to be sceptical about the benefits of plans to cut emissions.
Speaking on Wednesday, Mr Tillerson said: “Clearly there’s going to be an impact. I’m not disputing that increasing CO2 emissions in the atmosphere ... will have a warming impact.”
However, he added: “How large it is what is very hard for anyone to predict. And to tell you how large it is then projects how dire the consequences are.”
He said Exxon had for many years been involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN-backed scientific body that reviews and assesses information about the climate, and funding research, but said climate modelling still contained large uncertainties.
“The competences of the models are not particularly good,” he said. “Our ability to predict with any accuracy what the future’s going to be is really pretty limited.”
He added: “In the IPCC reports ... when you predict things like sea-level rise, you get numbers all over the map. If you take what I would call a reasonable scientific approach to that, we believe those consequences are manageable. They do require us to begin to spend more policy effort on adaptation.”
He said there were other issues that were “much more pressing priorities”, including poverty, which could be relieved by access to electricity and fossil fuels for cooking, to replace traditional sources such as animal dung.
“There are more people being dramatically affected because they don’t have access to fossil fuels to burn. They’d love to burn fossil fuels, because their quality of life would rise immeasurably,” he said.
Under Mr Raymond, Exxon provided grants to several think-tanks and other groups that challenged the need to curb greenhouse gas emissions to avert the threat of global warming.
While Mr Tillerson has been CEO, most of that funding has been cut.
One remaining grant was the $50,000 that Exxon gave last year to the Heritage Foundation, which promotes a range of conservative and free-market policies, including the argument that “the costs of cutting greenhouse gas emissions, most notably carbon dioxide, far outweigh any benefits for individuals”.

[Ben]

“There’s No Economy on a Dead Planet”: Reflections on a Missing Election Issue:

http://www.zcommunications.org/there...by-paul-street

[Ben]

Candidates Flee East Coast as Frankenstorm Takes Revenge for their Ignoring Climate Change

by Juan Cole

Mitt Romney and Joe Biden have canceled campaign events planned for this weekend at Virginia Beach as a massive storm bears down on the east coast of the US. The candidates are fleeing from the East Coast, even though they won’t talk about the key environmental issue of our time.



The candidates in this year’s presidential election completely ignored climate change in their debates and their campaigning, even thought it is the most deadly issue facing this country and all humankind. Human beings are dumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning coal, natural gas and petroleum at feverish rates. They have already increased temperatures significantly since 1750, and are on track to put up the average surface temperature of the earth by 5 degrees C. or 9 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century, enough to turn everyplace on earth over time into a sweating tropics, melt all surface ice, and, over the long term, submerge a third of the current land mass. A global state of emergency would be necessary to keep the temperature increase to 2 degrees C. or less, but the window is rapidly closing for this curbing of disaster.
Big oil is pouring money into the Romney campaign or superpacs supporting him, so as to make sure they keep their tax breaks but those for wind power are abolished. The power of big Carbon money is preventing climate change from being discussed in the campaign, even though it affects every American voter. Romney’s energy policies will cause global disaster, but even Obama doesn’t seem to realize the severity and urgency of the problem (or else he does and feels his hands are tied).
A new study appearing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that uses accurate tide measurements since 1923 removes any doubt that hurricanes are more frequent and stronger in warm years (the number of warm years has steadily increased over the past century and especially in the past decade).
[pdf] For every increase of 1 degree Fahrenheit, US hurricanes will likely get 2% stronger (i.e. they are already 5% stronger than 2 centuries ago). In hurricanes, a 5% increase in ferocity matters quite a lot.
One mechanism for the increased severity is that higher temperatures produce more high-altitude clouds, called “deep convective clouds,” associated increased rainfall.
One recent study [pdf] found that torrential downpours in the United States are occurring a third more often than in 1948. New England has been the worst hit, with torrential downpours 85% more common now than in 1948. Note that these findings are based on actual historical records, and are not a matter of projection.
Across the board, storms are 10% more intense now than when Truman was president.
Hurricanes are a more contentious issue than storms but models show that the speed of hurricane winds could increase by as much as 13 percent over the next century as a result of our production of carbon dioxide, and rainfall rates will increase 10-31 percent in hurricanes. Because of the rising level of the seas, hurricanes will cause larger storm surges.
A Tel Aviv researcher has shown that every one degree increase Celsius produces a 10% increase in lightning, with the attendant dangers of increased forest and other fires.
Those who talk about solar energy being “more expensive” than coal or natural gas are not figuring in the expensiveness of climate change. In many markets, wind and solar are already competitive, and if the damage hydrocarbons are doing to our economy were taken into account, they’d be the only game in town.
One of the many indexes of the failure of American democracy is that our candidates can’t even publicly say the name of our worst nemesis.

© 2012 Juan Cole

Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan

[danthepoetman]

Let’s not try too hard to find solutions for our survival, here; we could kill all hope for the rest of our planet’s species…
Who knows if a blue whale or one of the few thousands living chimpanzees are not reading these posts at this very moment.

[Prospero]

Let’s not try too hard to find solutions for our survival, here; we could kill all hope for the rest of our planet’s species…
Who knows if a blue whale or one of the few thousands living chimpanzees are not reading these posts at this very moment.

Reading "at this moment"... on their chimp pads?
or do you mean at some future point when we are extinct and a new civlisation has recovered the digital archive?
or was it just a tad too much of that good whisky?

[Stavros]

According to Stephen Hawking, humans have about 1,000 years left before 'they' trash the planet, thereby creating a need for the revival of Mars or some other habitable spot in space, though what humans do for water I will leave to the Lucasian Prof. Leaving aside his lack of judgement, making his predictions as comical as Malthus, I live in a country sleepwalking into an energy deficit which means domestic power will be in crisis in the next 25 years, which may not be a safe prediction, but I am assuming 25 years is easier to handle than a thousand. Well, unless you have a coalition government that cant make up its mind.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/s...a-century.html

[trish]

It's not the planet that calls out for salvation but the human soul. Solution: Tell the least corrupted man to build an ark, make it 300 cubits, by 50 cubits by 30 cubits. Then get him to go and and gather etc. etc.

[Stavros]

On a more serious note, I am surprised that someone like Hawking does not acknolwedge how ingenious humans have been in finding solutions for what at various times seem like critical issues that are about to spell the end of society as we know it. There are some real issues in energy, in this country for example because of complacency that has been built on what was once an abundance of North Sea oil and gas, the current row over wind farms does not address the longer term issue of where mass energy sources are going to come from, or become dependent on gas from Russia. I am not so worried about population growth because the informed opinion is that it will peak around 2050 and then decline so that forecasts of the world's population in 2100 are now much smaller than once they were. The regional/local issues will be more critical than the global -drought in the prairies of North America and across the fringes of the Sahel in Africa; floods in the foothills of the Himalayas and so on.

As for boats, I am already too corrupt to be given the task, and as I am no good with my hands I will not be in a boat -not with a pride of lions either. I mean, what are they going to eat?

[trish]

I am surprised that someone like Hawking does not acknolwedge how ingenious humans have been in finding solutions for what at various times seem like critical issues that are about to spell the end of society as we know it.

What exactly are the examples? When has science ever saved a civilization from collapse or extinction? Science is the study of nature, not the problems of civilization. It can only unveil the workings of nature one curtain at a time. The problems that are ripe for the picking are ones that we pluck. True, the discoveries that science makes, (because they are working models of the world rather than mere fictions and fantasies) are often quickly put to use (not always good use) by governments and entrepreneurs. The idea that human ingenuity, science and technology will find a way out of our predicaments all to often is used as an excuse to prolong the very practices that undermine our continued security. I think it just as likely (perhaps more likely) that human ingenuity will fail to rise to the occasion.

Energy and climate change go hand in hand. Through our accelerated consumption of fossil fuels we are thickening the blanket of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. We are simply burning up a resource for fuel (that has many other valuable uses) and cooking ourselves with it at the same time. Can we stop? China is opening up fifty new coal plants every month. That’s because at the current rate of consumption China has enough coal to last ten centuries. It’s not enough for technology to make it possible to substitute solar and wind or some other source for fossil fuel, it has to make it cheaper too.

There are nearly seven billion persons on the planet. We would like each one to have a quality standard of living. Does that mean consuming the energy of an average European? That would be a lot of energy. Unless the situation becomes so dire that we start cooperating, or the world is conquered by an empire that forces it to cooperate, I don’t see us significantly curbing our appetite for fossil fuels. Nor if by some miracle seven billion people suddenly switch to solar am I convinced that we won’t quickly discover a downside. We cover the planet. Whatever we do on mass we do on a planetary scale and our on mass actions will have planetary consequences.

We may find, as in the Life of Pi, that the lone survivor in a boat is one who has eaten every other survivor.