And a warm day in Perth, Tas- factor that in!

There has apparently been a bit of a slowdown in global warming in recent years, but not a reversal, as all that heat has gone into the polar ice.

Now with greenhouse gases being released from the permafrost and ocean floor methane hydrate deposits, the Earth’s temperature will go into overdrive and we can look forward to a rapid leap forward in global mean temperatures toward 4C and probably a lot more.

4C simply means we run the risk of a runaway greenhouse affect, which we will be totally helpless to stop.

In my recent article in the TT ~ ‘A Deeper Level of Denial’ ~
http://tasmaniantimes.com/index.php?/weblog/article/a-deeper-level-of-denial/

I explored the root causes of the carbon crisis, which is also how it could have been avoided.

The fact is, we have all totally failed to keep a safe Earth as a direct consequence of the shear size of our industrial impact and lifestyle demands.

Polite steps with the Earth now will not avoid the tsunami of catastrophe that rise before us and threaten any future we might hope for our children, let alone their kids.

The solution to this human caused crisis will need to be bold, large, radical and swift.

The way we could have avoided this catastrophe is also the way we can win back a safe Earth.

The key to this happening is in the hands of individuals.

Kim Peart

“... the overwhelming majority of scientists believe that the extreme weather of the last decade is at least partially caused by global warming. Some examples of climate calamities caused partly by global warming include:...”

It is easy to parrot such trite nonsense. The satellite records show however, that the planet hasn’t warmed globally for the past 23 years now   It is therefore difficult to ascribe any change in weather events to a global warming that hasn’t been happening..

Re: 3

There is a specific reason.

Arctic ice has been absorbing the heat.

Now the Arctic ice is melting beyond tipping points, the stage is set for a dramatic escalation of global warming.

Increasing acidification and growing dead zones in the oceans are also opening the way for very dangerous Earth changes.

Do we play with words while the planet burns?

See my comment above.

Kim Peart

#3, Jose, just love ideological denial, it’s so funny when you look at the reality compared to what they claim. Just like the belief in God/s, if you look at religious history, it is also a fervent denialist ideology. Nothing any ideology has claimed is, or has come true, yet everything they deny has. You’re in the right company, but the wrong place in time.

Climate change whether natural or man made is happening, the only way to stop it and live on a sanely run planet, is to remove all the ideological humans as soon as possible.

I’d like to thank you for contributing to that cause, by your denial and refusal to accept fact. I"m sure you’ll be very happy with the outcome in a few years, as you reap the rewards all ideologists receive in the end.

Old news really. Its what our elected representatives propose to do about it. Abbott’s proposals make it worse. Gillard opts for the satus quo and the Greens have a plan.

The trouble is that with a complex problem and dealing with a dynamic system its hard to convince those who don’ understand or care or who don’t want to understand that it is a problem that is not easily fixed and every dealy make a solution more difficult if not impossible.

Immediate action is to not vote Liberal, National or Labor until you have voted for a party offering a comprehensive. adequate and timely solution.

The Greens are the only such party.

Re: 6   Phill Parsons

In our planetary account the simple fact is. we have totally failed to keep a safe Earth and may even be seeing the dawn of a second Venus in the Solar System (p. 223, the Venus syndrome, ‘Storms of My Grandchildren’ by James Hansen, 2009).

Ocean acidification may be the first sign of this happening, now up 30% and set to explode, as the melting Arctic releases long-stored CO2 deposits.

Responsibility for total failure aught be roosted home to all who have led the charge into catastrophe, whether politician, industry or conservationist.

In my TT article, mentioned above, I describe how industry locked human activity down on Earth and as the carbon industry has been essentially paying all the wages, also locked-marched political institutions into their Earth-only focus.

The 1970s debate over solar power stations in space, which would have allowed a massive energy change and the keeping of a safe Earth, was in part lost when the environmental movement followed the gaze of the carbon energy industry and also totally focused on the Earth.

In this way, the environmental movement joined the lock-marched political compliance being set by big oil, coal and now, fracking gas.

Having personally experienced the rasp of Green politics when it comes to power over principle, which was quite successful in delivering political power, I see no hope there.

Should a new movement of individuals arise who demand effective action on a safe Earth, human survival and future prosperity, then the geopolitical table could swivel toward a new way to address sustainability, equity and security matters.

As any defence of Earth must include protection from asteroids, where even a car-sized rock could flatten a city, as we got a taste of in Russia the other day, then the plan for Earth will need to include a robust industrial presence in space.

The key to that is the building of solar power stations in space, which would also give us the power to extract excess carbon from the biosphere to swiftly win back a safe Earth and get CO2 below 350 ppm (now passing 400 ppm and set to skyrocket).

To happen swiftly, there will need to be quite a few million honest individuals demanding action, which could include a tax on all who have failed to keep a safe Earth, providing a global fund to secure our survival and future prosperity in the cosmos, by finally launching the energy change from carbon to stellar, on Earth and in space.

Kim Peart

Kim Peart at #1 is right when he says “There has apparently been a bit of a slowdown in global warming in recent years, but not a reversal, as all that heat has gone into the polar ice” and again at #4 where he states “Arctic ice has been absorbing the heat.”

The explanation for this melting of a truly whopper ice block is here ..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_heat

.. where this appears:

“Latent heat is the heat released or absorbed by a body ... during a process that occurs without a change in temperature. A typical example is a change of state of matter ... such as the melting of ice ... “

What this means is that the Arctic ice cap is absorbing some of the planet’s excess heat by turning ice into water, a process wherein there may be no detectable change in its temperature thereby producing a deceptive image of what is really going on, namely not as much global warming as some of may have thought.

Kim is right again when he implies that when the Arctic ice has melted world temperature rise may be unconstrained - unless there’s more ice somewhere else to melt.

That would be the huge Antarctic ice cap where the same process has already begun.

As that white ice melts it flows into the nearest ocean and in doing so its albedo (reflectivity) is lost. The ocean does not reflect as much sunshine as the ice and so the new water receives the energy that the ice once reflected and consequently its temperature rises.

This in turn causes the remaining ice to melt at an accelerating rate in a process known as “positive feedback” and mechanical and electronic engineers know that this situation, if not limited by one or more factors, can produce catastrophic breakdown of equipment.

The “equipment” in this instance is planet Earth.

We’ve been warned.

The signs are clear, unmistakable -  and very ominous.

There is abundance evidence around Australia and the world that during the last 3 mill yrs of glacial/interglacial cycling that sea levels have been many metres above present levels, as a result of only a few degrees above present global max average. This has generally been down played by most Climate agents. But don’t believe me, search out your own marine transgressions.

Climate Change is a distraction from good ‘ol pollution.

Stop the pollution and confusing things.
Gotta laugh when Labor spends millions on a Climate Change Commission led by a palaeontologist and keeps exporting coal by the train load to China.

I’m still worried about the Ozone Hole.  What happened to that?  Unsexy?

Re: 10

Whether climate change or pollution, we can follow the trail of questions to get at the root cause of the problem.

When I did this, I found that expansion, primal in Nature, needed to be taken into account, or solutions to the strife that we are creating will not be found.

Ultimately the solution is very simple, that we must change energy from carbon to stellar, on Earth and in space, to launch industry beyond Earth to win back a safe Earth and be able to defend the planet from killer asteroids, or comets, as well as extracting excess carbon from the biosphere.

All else is geopolitical detail that distracts from our core survival needs and the health of the Earth.

That one little problem with the fridge gas, that united the World for a bit, could be set to return with a rather nasty vengeance, should growing dead zones and acidification in the oceans lead to vast algal blooms that release toxic hydrogen sulphide gas that can kill life on land and destroy the ozone layer.

The key driver of our world is greed, which has driven the carbon addiction and blocked the solar transition.

For greed to live, there must be fear and for the carbon energy industry that powers our world, there was fear of losing all that money that would have been lost if the people of Earth got wise and reached directly to the Sun for power.

If we got wise now, we would act in numbers and build that bridge to the Sun.

If greed and fear are in the way, then our bridge will need to be built over them.

This construction project will also create work.

Kim Peart

Everyone speaks of the industrial age but lets not forget deforestation began way before the industrial age. The Romans, Greeks, Vikings, Saxons, Danes, Dutch and all large pre-industrial ocean going empires
cut down swathes of forest to build their fleets and make charcoal for steel foundry. When forest is regrown, the impact on the carbon cycle is minimal, but when land is cleared and converted to
agriculture and human settlement, the carbon entrained in the timber is lost to the atmosphere for good, along with the means to re-absorb it from the atmosphere.

Though I am beginning to come round to A.K. in some ways and his views on ideology, the system we currently have, is all we have and I agree with Phil that the Greens are the only ones who even recognise the problem and have a plan to tackle it, regardless of how flawed in some areas it may be. Short of a bloody revolution A.K. (which I don’t see happening with our dumbed-down, passive, hamstrung and paralysed population) we have to work with what we have.

Here’s a novel idea. Why don’t we give the poor soles a run. The Greens I mean. We vilify them for never doing anything or amounting to much while for forgetting we have never given them the power to have a red hot go. Lets get crazy. Lets all vote Green and give them 1-2 terms to show us their stuff. Could they really hash it up any worse than the Lib-Labs? Really, honestly?
If you say no, forgive me if I deem you more interested in your job and bank account than actually getting serious environmental, health and social issues sorted.
If we have no environment, public health or a functioning society, what good is your job, McMansion or RV? Time to get back to basics people.
Not cave dwelling, but a low consumption, low income, low cost functioning, evenly baanced, sustainable, educated society. That’s progress.

Kim I admire your passion and vision but may I ask if a calculation has been performed to factor in the fuel and energy needed to launch the materials, workers etc into space to complete the projects.
Is it really possible and do we end up with a net benefit? I understand the effect the atmosphere has on solar PV efficiencies but at least we have the technology now. As far as I am aware, the technology to ‘beam’ energy back to the planet surface has not yet been nutted out. With a smaller population, better efficiency and less use, increased solar PV efficiency, wind, geothermal, (dare I say it thorium reactors) and better battery technology, could we not achieve the same here on the surface without needing to go to the massive expense of working and building in orbit?
Far be it from me to poo-poo science fiction as it has always been the pre-cursor to scientific reality, but I feel without hard figures, you are pushing the proverbial to have your vision recognised as anything other than pie-in the sky.

Re: 12   Sue McNim

For an ardent Green advocate, one may wonder what the basis of Green thinking is.

As a Tasmanian alive and active at the time, I know that its root were in a passion for the Earth, to preserve Lake Pedder and to save the Franklin, which grew to a desire for a safe Earth.

How much Green thinking emerged from the 1968 image of the Earth from the Moon, which invigorated the global environmental movement?

Conservationists appeared to promptly forget where that image came from.

The core driver of Green thinking was not hard figures, but a love of Nature and wild rivers.

This thinking grew to reach into the heart of politics and question the expense direction.

In a similar way, if we love the Earth and Nature, we need a plan that will deliver a safe Earth.

Since Green politics hitched its wagon to Labor, in Tasmania and nationally, they became part of central power and with the next election, State and national, we will see what that translates into.

My personal grievance with the Greens is that they have put power before principle and I have personal experience that drove this home.

I now suspect that our future is in the hands of honest individuals who have the guts to stand up and be counted, who do not fear power, or those who seek it.

In simple honesty we can begin to face the brutal truth of our predicament, as the tsunami of catastrophe rises before us.

In my recent TT article, cited in comment 2, I pointed out how the Washing Empire was able to dump 7 million tons of bombs on Vietnam.

If the cost of that, along with all the fossil fuel required, had been used to invest in solar power stations in space, we could have kept a safe Earth.

Our fate is as simple as that.

Our future is just as simple.

Gerard K. O’Neill worked out the business plan and this can be read in his 1977 book ‘The High Frontier’.

That plan can be updated, when we have the will to act.

To survive is not “pie in the sky” ~ it is bottom line.

We need to be sure that we have the plan that will assure our survival, or we lose the bottom line and fall into oblivion.

Ask the dinosaurs about that?

To win back a safe Earth, the most direct path is to build solar power stations in space, to access the unlimited energy-well of our star to gain the power to extract excess carbon from the biosphere.

In the longer term, Earth’s energy needs may be entirely met by ground-based solar power generation, when heavy industry is mostly located in space.

To suggest a culling of the human population is a death toll of billions of people and where will that stop?

As nations panic, we may see the nuclear demon unleashed.

The only safe way to sustainability and equity that I have found, is to rebel against the carbon energy dogma of focusing on Earth alone for all we need and reach to the Sun for energy, as the first step of the expansion of life from Earth into the cosmos.

The greater expense will be our failure to act on survival, as the loss of all will be the greater expense.

Kim Peart

Re: 12   Sue McNim

Energy transmission is old technology now.

We read of Isaac Asimov proposing microwave transmission in a 1941 SF story and Dr Peter Glaser formally proposing this approach in 1968, for which he was awarded the patent.

More recently, laser beams have been mooted as a means of energy transmission.

To follow the key questions, Google the for the key words and see what the stories found have to say.

We may wake up one day to learn that India and China are investing in solar power stations in space, because they are now talking about it.

We can wait for that day to arrive, or take the lead and reap the benefits.

This may be our choice, if we can get our heads out of the old convict and governor paralysis.

If we can rediscover the spirit of Eureka, then we may find our cosmic feet as a nation, along with the real meaning of the stars of the Southern Cross.

Kim Peart

When #7 submits that “we have totally failed to keep a safe earth…” is ‘totally’ to be taken for its plain meaning- or is #7 a bit worked up.
And is it really that easy to convert Earth to a Venus?

Re: 15

Reading James Lovelock’s 2009 book ~ ‘The Vanishing Face of Gaia - a final warning’ ~ I became aware that our star is now 25% hotter than at the dawn of life 3.5 billion years ago (p.108).

From the early days of developing his Gaia theory, this is one of the details that pestered Lovelock, which Carl Sagan had alerted him to, that though the Sun is getting hotter, the mean temperature of Earth has not risen.

Something has been holding the temperature down and Lovelock suggests that it is our planet’s life-support system, especially by sequestering carbon in the belly of the Earth.

Lovelock goes on to warn that by destabilising the balance, we run the risk of initiating a change of the Earth’s temperature to a permanently hotter environment, one that will be hostile to life as we know it.

The human death toll from such a change could be rather horrendous and could also leave us permanently trapped on Earth, if we lose the cutting edge of space technology, or see our global civilization collapse.

I read from Lovelock and others that change in Nature can happen swiftly, once conditions reach a critical point.

A casual reading of astronomy reveals that our Sun is on the way to become a red giant star over the next 5 billion years, expanding to the orbit of the Earth and at some point before then, this planet will become a second Venus.

It is James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who began his career with the study of Venus, who warns that with CO2 above 350 ppm (now passing 400 ppm and set to skyrocket), we run the risk of bringing on a hotter world and an early beginning of a Venus-like state (p.223, the Venus syndrome, ‘Storms of My Grandchildren’, 2008).

Do we ignore warnings from leading scientists, because they interfere with our current business plan?

Or do we face reality and plan a way through the carbon crisis, avoiding mass-death and winning back a safe Earth?

We also need some effective asteroid protection.

Wally Broecker, who participated in a 1965 study from the White House warning the World about global warming and climate change from CO2 emissions, tells us in ‘Fixing Climate’, 2008, “we can no longer expect Mother Nature to take care of us - the planet is ours to run, and we can’t retreat from our responsibility to run it wisely.” (p.269).

Lovelock, who lived through Britain’s darkest hour under Churchill’s leadership, tells us, “It is our duty to survive.” (p.56).

With all the facts that any clear thinking individual can dig out and examine, I am left wondering if it is carbon energy propaganda that has lulled human society into a false sense of security, that we can work out our fate on Earth alone.

It is this total focus on the Earth that could be the death of us.

While we still can, I hope we wake up and act.

I am keen to hear from anyone who hankers for the action to win back a safe Earth and secure our cosmic survival.

We can now mobilise in the virtual worlds, planning local action and driving celestial options.

Kim Peart
http://www.islandearth.com.au/

Tasmania’s future seems obvious if recent trends are a clue. Long dry periods, heat, wild winds, timber everywhere, a spark ...

I don’t share Kim Peart’s optimism about solutions.