If you are in doubt --- read on ............

"Tipping point"

As Barack Obama becomes the 44th president, one of his toughest challenges is also his greatest opportunity. The global environment is rapidly reaching a tipping point, much like our global economy. Once it passes that point, it will be all the more difficult to pull it back to stability. Our Earth is being altered to the point where it cannot sustain much of the life that has thrived for millennia; species extinctions today are occurring at an estimated 1,000 times the normal rate. When our landscapes, rivers and coral reefs can no longer sustain robust species populations, humans are also in trouble. People depend on healthy ecosystems for the very fundamentals of survival: clean air, fresh water, soil regeneration, crop pollination and other resources that we often take for granted until they are scarce or gone.

Just as the current financial crisis reveals how the world's economies are interconnected, we also must recognise the fundamental links between human well-being and Earth's ecosystems. When we abuse and degrade the natural world, it affects our health, our social stability and our wallets.

Natural capital


How great is the challenge? Well, today, 25% of wild marine fisheries are over-exploited, while another 50% are highly degraded.

1. West African fisheries have declined by 80% since the 1990s, resulting in thousands of fishermen searching for jobs in Europe.
2. When the Newfoundland cod fisheries collapsed in the early 1990s as a result of overfishing, it meant the loss of tens of thousands of jobs and cost $2bn (£1.4bn) in income support and retraining.
3. Tropical deforestation and land degradation contributes more global greenhouse gas emissions than all the world's cars, trucks, planes and trains combined.
4. What is lost in Indonesia or the Amazon affects the climate in New York, Paris and Sydney.
5. More than a billion people lack access to safe drinking water. In the poorest countries, one in five children dies from a preventable water-related disease.
6. This is a crisis that is worsening as ecosystems are damaged, increasing droughts and floods.
7. Mismanagement and corruption tied to natural resource exploitation have fuelled violent conflict in many countries including Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
8. Violence linked to natural resource loss and degradation has led to unimaginable human suffering in such places as Darfur.
9. Tensions in the Middle East are fed by conflict over water and oil, as well as religion and politics.

Under pressure

Now, climate change exacerbates the threats posed by over-consumption, pollution and habitat destruction. We are already witnessing rising oceans, spreading disease, reduced freshwater sources and myriad other serious threats. Recent studies show half of the world's population could face a climate-induced food crisis by the end of this century. Yet as overwhelming as the global environmental crisis has become, it offers some of today's greatest opportunities. First, we must make conservation of nature a core principle of development; they cannot be separated. Often an unintended consequence of development projects is the depletion or degradation of natural systems. We must recognise the value of nature and invest to protect it.



Ecosystem destruction costs our global economy at least $2 trillion (£1.4 trillion) every year. That is the value forests provide by storing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, cleansing fresh water supplies, and preventing soil erosion. It includes the value oceans and coral reefs provide in food security for millions who rely on fisheries as their primary source of protein. Overall, global ecosystems services have been assessed to be worth as much as $33 trillion (£22.6 trillion) a year. Every home owner understands that restoring and replacing a plumbing system, or a heating unit, is far more expensive than taking care of the system properly. Well, the same is true for nature's ecosystems. Restoring a forest costs 10 times as much as maintaining what we have. Building a reservoir and filtration system is far more expensive than preserving the intact forest systems that naturally filter and cleanse our drinking water.




Traditional measures of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) do not reflect changes in the quality and quantity of a nation's natural assets. Imagine measuring your personal financial condition without factoring in a dramatic and ongoing decline in your assets.



The world needs US leadership to begin honestly accounting for the state our natural assets. The Obama administration can bring these issues into the mainstream during this critical time of reorienting the US's national priorities. Initiatives to advance natural resource conservation in other countries have typically lacked strong political support and received only a small fraction of the total resources dedicated to international engagement. Mr Obama and his team should fully integrate and fund ecosystem conservation priorities within US national security considerations, as well as foreign policy and development assistance. By helping restore and protect developing nations' natural heritage throughout the world, the US will strengthen the bonds of friendship and trust through sustainable collaborations. The stakes are high, and the benefits of bringing ecosystem conservation to the forefront of our foreign policy will be enormous.



As 2009 begins, we face a new era of unprecedented global economic, health and security challenges. Confronting these challenges requires a bold new commitment to protect our most valuable joint asset - planet Earth.



Peter A Seligmann is chairman and chief executive of US NGO Conservation International

The week ending 24 Jan

Those of you who subscribe to Climate Change alerts will know that they come in think and fast.

In the past few days there have been warnings that most of the planet’s Glaciers will disappear by the middle of the century and quite apart from all the other implications of their disappearance, the key issue will be for all who rely on them as sources of drinking water.

The implications of the lack of water can only mean climate change refuges as people migrate [millions of people – maybe even billions] in search of water. South America and the countries [India and China] dependent on the Himalaya glaciers being most badly affected.

There are growing concerns about energy security which all add up to one central theme – energy independence and the need for our governments [Scottish and British] to set politics aside and act now.

Tony Blair is urging government leaders not to let the current economic crisis divert from Climate Change initiatives.

Hi tec detector vans are checking on the thermal efficiency of houses.

The world watches and waits as President Obama begins to paint America green. In early statements he has announced measures at curtailing America’s greenhouse gas emissions and reducing the US consumption of imported oil – pity about imported, should be oil, full stop!!!

The UK government believes that off shore wind power could meet the total UK electricity need by 2020.

Former London mayor, Ken Livinsgtone, has attacked the Labour Government record on Climate Change and in particular the third runway at Heathrow. Maybe it is time to do the unthinkable and vote Tory!!!

There are warnings that Climate Change may be irreversible, but maybe we can mitigate the effects???

There is concern that Emperor Penguins are heading towards extinction – just them???

And one for the sceptics from the Independent of 23 January 2009

The cable news network CNN has sacked its science team, and one of the consequences has been a number of embarrassing programmes about how the exceptionally cold weather in North America this winter contradicts global warming and supports the idea that we are actually due for or a period of global cooling, if not a full-blown ice age.

"And tonight, last year, one of the coldest years in American history. Is it evidence that global warming is being overstated? Or are we headed toward a new ice age? Or none of the above. We'll be joined by three of the world's leading authorities on climate change and physics," said CNN anchorman Lou Dobbs before being joined by some of the best-known climate sceptics in American history.

There is of course a heap of difference between weather and climate, and no scientist worth his or her research grant would dare to suggest that any one bout of extreme weather is the result of climate change, unless it was so extreme and prolonged that it bounces out of the statistical ballpark of natural variability – which is what happened with the hot summer of 2003 in France and Italy.

But a recurring theme among climate sceptics is that there is a genuine division of opinion among mainstream scientists over the reality or otherwise of climate change. Anyone listening to Radio 3's otherwise erudite Nightwaves last Tuesday night, for instance, would have heard a scholarly voice stating that scientists disagree over climate change, with some believing we are about to enter another ice age.

Well it depends what you mean by "about to". In another 10,000 years or so, another ice age may be upon us, as a result of longer-term cycles such as the way the Earth tilts, rather than atmospheric changes. But in the meantime we will have to cope with a predicted rise of between 2C and 6C by 2100 – the same sort of temperature difference between now and the last ice age. We are indeed heading for another ice age, but the question is whether we can survive an intervening period of possibly intense global warming.

Suggesting that there is a division of opinion among experts is a tried-and-trusted method of questioning the orthodoxy. It was done for the discredited idea that HIV doe not cause Aids, and has been practised by creationists to undermine Darwinist evolution.

For the record, there is little division among experts over global warming. Peter Doran of the University of Illinois in Chicago has published a study in Eos showing that 97 per cent of scientists engaged in climate research believe human activity has played a role in the increase in average global temperatures over the past 200 years. That's a pretty convincing consensus.

Two reports to read

A major part of the ethos of this site is to impart knowledge about climate change .... what you then do with that knowledge is between you, your conscience, your children and your grandchildren.

I encourage you to visit the following two sites ...

www.withouthotair.com



www.climatesafety.org


Malc

A bleak outlook

Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that action will have to be taken within Obama's first administration, he added.

Soaring carbon emissions are already causing ice-cap melting and threaten to trigger global flooding, widespread species loss and major disruptions of weather patterns in the near future. "We cannot afford to put off change any longer," said Hansen. "We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead."

Hansen said current carbon levels in the atmosphere were already too high to prevent runaway greenhouse warming. Yet the levels are still rising despite all the efforts of politicians and scientists.

Only the US now had the political muscle to lead the world and halt the rise, Hansen said. Having refused to recognise that global warming posed any risk at all over the past eight years, the US now had to take a lead as the world's greatest carbon emitter and the planet's largest economy. Cap-and-trade schemes, in which emission permits are bought and sold, have failed, he said, and must now be replaced by a carbon tax that will imposed on all producers of fossil fuels. At the same time, there must be a moratorium on new power plants that burn coal - the world's worst carbon emitter.

Hansen - head of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies and winner of the WWF's top conservation award - first warned Earth was in danger from climate change in 1988 and has been the victim of several unsuccessful attempts by the White House administration of George Bush to silence his views.

Hansen's institute monitors temperature fluctuations at thousands of sites round the world, data that has led him to conclude that most estimates of sea level rises triggered by rising atmospheric temperatures are too low and too conservative. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says a rise of between 20cm and 60cm can be expected by the end of the century.

However, Hansen said feedbacks in the climate system are already accelerating ice melt and are threatening to lead to the collapse of ice sheets. Sea-level rises will therefore be far greater - a claim backed last week by a group of British, Danish and Finnish scientists who said studies of past variations in climate indicate that a far more likely figure for sea-level rise will be about 1.4 metres, enough to cause devastating flooding of many of the world's major cities and of low-lying areas of Holland, Bangladesh and other nations.

As a result of his fears about sea-level rise, Hansen said he had pressed both Britain's Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences to carry out an urgent investigation of the state of the planet's ice-caps. However, nothing had come of his proposals. The first task of Obama's new climate office should therefore be to order such a probe "as a matter of urgency", Hansen added.

Of course maybe the real point about the above article from the Observer of 18 January is not that one man has 4 years but that the human race has four years to work together to address Climate Change .... so what are you going to do in the next four years that will make a difference???

WWF Earth Hour

It’s as simple as the flick of a switch.

On Saturday 28 March 2009 at 8.30pm, people, businesses and iconic buildings around the world will switch off their lights for an hour – WWF’s Earth Hour.

WWF want a billion people around the world to sign up and switch off their lights for one hour.

They invite you to Sign up to show that you care about people, wildlife and the planet, and that you want the world’s leaders to take action to tackle climate change.

Maybe even switch off the Computer for one hour ... certainly worth promoting

WWF and Climate Change

WWF works to create solutions to the most serious environmental problems facing our planet, so that people and nature can thrive.

Climate change is the biggest threat of all. The consequences of changing weather patterns, warming seas and melting ice are devastating people and nature.

We’re already seeing its impacts – from melting Arctic sea ice to flooding and droughts. So we must take urgent global action if we are to safeguard the natural world.

Staying below 2°C
The scientists agree. Average global temperatures must remain less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels, or we face irreversible and devastating changes in the planet’s natural systems. WWF seeks cuts in emissions at the UK, EU and global level that will prevent this.

Although significant impacts will occur with average global temperature increases of less than 2°C, once we go above this threshold there will be increasingly severe consequences for people and nature, with the most vulnerable communities and species being hit first and hardest.

We also face rapidly increasing risks of passing a number of ‘tipping points’ – events which lead to sudden and increasingly large changes.

It is possible
Leading research – including WWF’s 2007 Climate Solutions report – shows that it is still possible to avoid the worst impacts of climate change by measures such as rapid development of clean energy production (which would address some 65% of global emissions) and stopping tropical deforestation (addressing around 20% of emissions).

With climate programmes in many key countries – such as the EU, China, India, Japan, Canada, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Australia and the US – the WWF global network is well placed to work on this agenda.


Help us achieve a global deal
In December 2009, governments will be gathering at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen. At the summit, it is vital that we get an effective international agreement – a global deal – to tackle climate change.

WWF’s Earth Hour 2009 marks the launch of our global deal campaign. WWF will use all our influence, resources and leadership to make sure the global deal is as effective as possible.

Please join us and show world leaders that you care.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment

I had a look at today's Guardian web site's section on the environment.

The top story is all about the proposed third runway at Heathrow which I think might not open until 2020. The world is going to change an awful lot before then!!!

Home Turbines are under attack as hopelessly inefficient if in the wrong place. They can recoup energy production costs after 2 years if in the right place or up to 40 years if in the wrong position. In other words they need wind to work!!!

In Spain travellers are turning to the railway instead of flying.

The whole issue of the earth in balance has been illustrated by errant attempts at wildlife management on the sub Antarctic island of Macquarie. Way back cats were introduced to kill rats and mice who were destroying the native bird population. When the rats and mice went the cats turned to rabbits and when the rabbits went the cats turned to birds!!! The cats were killed [the last in 2000] and the rabbits came back in abundance and recently their burrowing caused a landslide that killed a large penguin breeding colony. There are now plans to kill all the rabbits and all the rats and mice that have returned post feline rule.

Finally there is a long tirade against Aga cookers that is generating much heat!!!

Congratulations

Congratulations to the Community of Arran Seabed Trust. COAST is a voluntary, not for profit community group which was set up in an attempt to redress the loss of marine life around the island of Arran. It is composed mainly of islanders but has members alll over the world.

In June of 2008, as part of the Observers Ethical Awards, singer Annie Lennox presented the award for Conservation Project of the Year to the group of retired islanders who had set up the Community of Arran Seabed Trust (COAST).

By September COAST had persuaded the Scottish government to create Scotland's first-ever No-Take Zone in Lamlash Bay on the Isle of Arran - decisive action that positively changes the outlook for future generations of fish and islanders.

What can we do in our local communities???

There is hope!!!

In the world's largest offshore wind farm the blades stretch as high as the London Eye, and even in a gentle wind turn at 200mph. Quite something, when you're right underneath, says Patrick Barkham in The Guardian on Thursday 8 January [Click to read]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/08/wind-power

It was a brilliant sunny day last summer when I first saw the world's largest offshore wind farm on the horizon. I was on the sand dunes at Holkham in north Norfolk when the sky cleared and suddenly, in the far distance, stood dozens of turbines.

This, it turned out, was a brand new wind farm, Lynn and Inner Dowsing, in the shallow waters of the Wash, just off the coast of Lincolnshire. Completed on time and on budget last year, its 54 turbines have a capacity of 194MW, enough to power 130,000 homes.

Britain is now the world's leading generator of offshore wind power, recently overtaking Denmark (other countries have greater onshore capacity). The power generated by offshore wind is still relatively modest but its potential is enormous. Turbines are quadrupling in size, vastly increasing their efficiency and the power they can harvest. And Britain is the windiest country in Europe, its west coast in particular buffeted by punchy, energy-giving winds.

Wind and tide power along with solar and ground heat exchange must be the way ahead ... Scotland should be leading the way in wind and tide research and application ... but are we???

The view from ... hell ... I mean Shell

In the latest of his groundbreaking encounters with the figures whose decisions shape our environment, George Monbiot challenges Jeroen van de Veer, chief executive of oil and gas giant Shell, on ethics, greenwash advertising, renewable energy investments and gas-flaring in Nigeria

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2009/jan/06/george-monbiot-


Click the link and watch -- I was not impressed were you???

95 months left!!!

This article is by Andrew Simms and was published in the Guardian on January 1. I let it sit without comment or question ......

From today, based on the best estimates available, we have eight years to head-off potentially uncontrollable climatic upheaval. What can happen in eight years? Quite a lot, actually. A world war can begin, and end. Two, in fact.

Last month there was a lacklustre meeting on climate change in Poznan, Poland. It was talks about more talks set to come later this year in Copenhagen. But that's all it was, talks. Now, on New Year's Day, hangovers and environmental ennui could prove a lethal combination. But squeeze those eyes open to 2009, and history tells us great things are possible. We are still in control. We just need to build, rapidly, new energy and transport systems and change our behaviour.

Only, we seem to have forgotten what we are capable of.

Victorian engineers would have been aghast at our timidity. Within our 8 year time frame, for example, between 1845 and 1852 there were 4,400 miles of railway track laid in Britain.

Today we desperately need to get people out of their cars and on to cleaner transport. But, after a decade of work and around £9bn spent just to upgrade the west coast mainline, it still didn't work properly when "opened" last month.

Skip back to a weekend in1892. By contemporary standards, engineers began a project of breathtaking ambition on the morning of Saturday May 21, and they finished it by 4am on the following Monday morning, May 23. In just those two days a small, perfectly coordinated army of 4,200 workers, laid a total of 177 miles of track along the Great Western route to the south west, converting the old broad gauge lines to the new standard, or narrow gauge.

As Barack Obama waits in the wings to assume the presidency, he must be acutely conscious of the other great, if short-lived, American new dawn that began in 1961 when John F Kennedy became President.

In the first few months of Kennedy's term of office, he announced his nation's intention to put a man on the moon. As fantastic and, literally, other worldly as that must have seemed at the time, only eight years later, in July 1969, the US achieved its goal. By the time that the moon missions were over in 1973, an estimated $20bn dollars had been spent.

For a meaningful comparison of what that would represent today you need to look at it as a relative share of GDP. That brings the modern equivalent figure to a substantial $200bn. It's big. But considering the iconic nature of the project, the virtually standing start it had, and the speed of accomplishment, it looks rather affordable now, compared with the sums thrown at the banking crisis. And, of course, they could say, "Hey, we put a man on the Moon." With the trillions thrown at the financial crisis it can, at best, be said, "Hey, it could've been worse."

The Apollo programme was money spent for a handful of men to become the only people in history to set foot on another celestial body. Now, what price is it worth paying to preserve for the whole of humanity the conditions under which civilisation emerged? In America they are indeed invoking the Apollo programme as a precedent for the overdue climate-response.

There are inverted, negative examples, too, of our ability to mobilise resources. According to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz the Iraq war has cost the US around $3tn. The war has been going for just under six years, has made an enormous mess, and is far from over.

An increasing number of voices in the climate change debate are beginning to express despair. Among them are concerned, informed and well-motivated scientists and journalists. Fair enough. Comparing the emerging trends on greenhouse gas emissions with the past track record of achievements in energy conservation, increased efficiency, and the introduction of renewable energy options provides little encouragement.

But that is to look in the wrong place for hope. The beginnings of the great transition are already visible in the 1,000 flowers blooming as green energy projects at the local level. But, the clean energy shift has, until now, been nowhere a political priority on the scale of war or the Apollo programme. Neither has it had the wild ambition that the architects of empire brought to building their new infrastructure. The eight years we now have left is time enough if this kind of boldness and vision can be wrestled towards solving the climate predicament. If we build it, they will come, and the great transition will run on time. Happy New Year.

From rhetoric to action!

On 2 January one of the world's top climate scientists wrote a personal new year appeal to Barack and Michelle Obama warning of the "profound disconnect" between public policy on climate change and the magnitude of the problem.

Professor Jim Hansen, who heads Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, praised Obama's campaign rhetoric about a "planet in peril", but says that how the new president acts in office will be crucial.

Hansen lambastes the current international approach of setting targets through "cap and trade" schemes as not up to the task. "This approach is ineffectual and not commensurate with the climate threat. It could waste another decade, locking in disastrous consequences for our planet and humanity."

I suppose the key test will be whether or not the President will get the support of the public when he proposes measures that will restrict the "American way of life". I wonder what the US Churches will say ~ I wonder what the UK Churches will say when measures have similar effects here?

The view from January 2009

Providing a succinct overview of the progress of, and response to, Climate Change is very difficult. The great unwashed remain stoically ignorant or apathetic ... wait until the water runs out or pours and pours!

The trouble with Climate Change is that it is a creeping condition ... well maybe now crawling!

However if you think back even two years, there is now much greater lip service being paid to it by politicians and the media and in some cases [George Monbiot for example - go the Guardian Website and watch his interview with the head of Shell] real campaigning action. Indeed maybe even our own Scottish Government should be praised for their stewardship of the Climate Change Scotland Bill through the shining alley ways of the Scottish Parliament. Of course the test will be when fine rhetoric and great ideals actually have to hit the road and become policies that demand action.

And of course scientists who know are now united in their cries of concern.

Whatever, my view is that more and more and more is appearing in print, on TV and on Computers about Climate Change and hopefully with the uinuguration of President Elect Barack Obama in a few days time a very real sea change in global political attitudes.

Sea change ... wouldn't it be great to see some real change.

Hi folks, the blog kind of lost its way in the Autumn but an Achilles Tendon injury and an enforced 6 to 8 weeks rest mean only one thing ...

THE BLOG IS BACK

Malc

xx