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Apocalypse Now How Mankind Is Sleepwalking to the End of the Earth

by Maria Gilardin (tuc [at] tucradio.org)
Our World is on a precarious course, like gently turning up the heat on the water with a frog in it. The frog won't notice until after it is too late to get themselves Out of Harms Way. This is a wake up call to all of us Save our Earth and to restore an Ecological Balance.
Apocalypse Now
How Mankind Is Sleepwalking to the End of the Earth
by Maria Gilardin
http://www.dissidentvoice.org
September 21, 2005

This headline appeared in the London Independent in early February of 2005, following a conference at the Hadley Centre in Exeter, England, where 200 of the world’s leading scientists issued the most urgent warning to date: that dangerous climate change is taking place today, and not the day after tomorrow.

Floods, storms, and droughts. Melting polar ice, shrinking glaciers, oceans turning to acid. Scientists from the fields of glaciology, biology, meteorology, oceanography, and ecology reported seeing a dramatic rise over the last 50 years of all the indicators of climate change: increase in average world temperatures, extreme weather events, in the levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, and in the level of the oceans.

The award winning environmental writer Geoffrey Lean wrote: “Future historians, looking back from a much hotter and less hospitable world . . . will puzzle over how a whole generation could have sleepwalked into disaster -- destroying the climate that has allowed human civilization to flourish over the past 11,000 years.”

The overwhelming majority of scientists and international climate monitoring bodies now agree that climate change is taking place, that humans are responsible, and that time is running out. In fact, we could reach “the point of no return” in a decade, reported Lean.

Melting glaciers all across the world include: the Broggi in the Peruvian Andes, Glacier Ururashraju in the Cordillera Blanca of Peru, the Pasterze in Austria, Portage Glacier near Anchorage, Alaska, Mount Hood in Oregon, Mount Kilimanjaro in northeastern Tanzania, the Grinnell Glacier in Glacier National Park, and the Rhone Glacier in Switzerland.

The earth is getting warmer. While average warming is just under 1 degree Celsius worldwide, the Polar Regions show warming of 2 to 3 degrees Celsius, due to feedback effects. With the melt of white snow, that previously reflected some of the heat back into the atmosphere (albedo effect), newly exposed darker surfaces absorb heat, and accelerate melting of more ice and snow.

A world average warming of under 1 degree Celsius may seem small. However, historically, the difference between warm periods and an ice age has been only 5 to 6 degrees Celsius. The transformation from the last ice age to the present climate resulted from a slow rise in temperature, which took 5,000 years to fully complete, allowing life on Earth to adapt to the changes. We could bring about a 5- to 6- degree change in only 150 years if we don’t start constraining the use of fossil fuels.

It is not only the fundamental change in the composition of air, water, and soil that we need to consider. The speed at which these changes are forced upon the planet already leads to high extinction rates.

Scientists at the Exeter meeting agreed that warming over 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures would be dangerous -- and we are almost half way there. To burn up the world’s remaining coal reserves, they estimated, would raise the average temperature by 3 to 8 degrees C in less than 150 years.

Quite a few climate “skeptics”, fossil fuel executives, and members of the Bush administration are still denying that there is such a thing as human-caused global warming. Many of them claim that the sun has just grown hotter. However, a warmer sun would have heated the stratosphere as well. In contrast, the stratosphere is cooling -- suggesting a blanket of greenhouse gases that prevents the earth’s heat from radiating back into space.

We know how the greenhouse effect works. Venus, with a thick greenhouse cover is hot; Mars, with a thin greenhouse is cold. Earth’s blanket of greenhouse gases is made up of the byproducts of the industrial age and an outdated Victorian technology. Even though methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas, it is CO2 that makes up over 80% of the greenhouse gas mix. Ice core studies show that CO2 concentrations on this planet had been stable for the last millennium, never rising or falling more than 10 ppm, and fluctuating between 275 and 285 ppm. Now CO2 concentrations are beginning to exceed 370 ppm, and are rising from year to year. Other greenhouse gases show the same dramatic increase -- mainly in the past 40 to 50 years. We are already living under a dome of air that no one has breathed in a million years.

Ocean Warming and Acidification

The average temperature of the surface waters of the oceans, extending to a depth of several hundred meters, has risen by a 1/2 degree Celsius. This has occurred in just the past 40 years. The oceans have also become more acidic, due to the uptake of anthropogenic CO2. The Plymouth Marine Laboratory in England estimates that 48% of fossil-fuel CO2, or 400 billion tons, have been absorbed by the oceans, making them the largest reservoir of carbon, a load greater than that borne by the atmosphere or the earth. CO2, while more inert in the atmosphere, becomes highly reactive in oceans, leading to physical, biological, and geological changes.

Carol Turley, head of science at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, warns that no such ph changes in oceans have occurred in the past 20 million years, and that the capacity of oceans to take up CO2 is limited.

What might the consequences of such changes in the oceans be? An August 2005 article in the Globe and Mail, on starving sea birds washing up on Pacific coast beaches from California to British Columbia, reports that scientists believe that, at least for this year, the “bottom has fallen out of the coastal food chain.” Off the Oregon coast, the waters near the shore are 5 to 7 degrees warmer than normal. A layer of warm water along the whole Pacific coastline prevents the usual upwelling of cool water rich in phytoplankton, the base of the food web for all marine life.

Zooplankton, such as krill, depend on phytoplankton. The disappearance of zooplankton in turn affects seabirds and fish from sardines to whales. NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, found a 20 to 30 per cent drop in juvenile salmon off the coasts of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia; and monitoring in Central and Northern California shows the lowest number of juvenile rockfish in more than 20 years.

The world has not yet felt the real impact of global warming since the oceans have absorbed so much heat and CO2. The US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) put out two studies in March 2005. They suggest that due to the thermal inertia of the oceans global temperatures and sea levels will continue to rise for the next 100 years - even if greenhouse gas emissions come under control.

First Signs of a Gulf Stream Collapse
The opening presentations at the Exeter, UK conference gave the most comprehensive assessment of so-called “wild cards”, climate change events that risk feedback loops no longer responsive to human intervention. The run-away events, or ecological landslides include accelerated melting of the enormous ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, as well as the decline and possible reversal of the Gulf Stream that conveys heat from the tropics to Europe.

In the Hollywood movie “The Day After Tomorrow,” the Gulf Stream stops flowing in a matter of days, creating an instant ice age on the Atlantic coast and Western Europe. Scientists at Exeter said it would take at least ten years for such an event to unfold and a few hundred years to set up the conditions. But they warned that the Thermohaline Circulation, as they call the Gulf Stream, has stopped flowing before -- and that we have already a greater than 50% likelihood of a shutdown if we do not enact strict climate policies.

The amount of heat transported North by the Gulf Stream, which keeps Western Europe 5 to 10 degrees Celsius warmer than it would normally be at its latitude, equals one million billion watts -- sufficient to satisfy the energy needs of 100 Earths. Even a partial failure of the Gulf Stream would have huge consequences.

The Gulf Stream picks up heat from the equatorial sun. Driven by warmth, the stream flows northeast towards Europe and the Greenland ice sheets, where the water cools and sinks. The cooler and saltier the water, the stronger the sinking motion. Dense cool and salty water from the Gulf Stream then flows back to the tropics at a deeper ocean level.

As the Polar Regions and the oceans are warming, melt-water from ice sheets and glaciers is changing the salinity of the ocean. A combination of the rising ocean surface temperature, and the decreasing salinity, already visibly changes the movement of sea currents that depend on differences in warmth and coolness, and the weight that higher salinity adds to the water as the driving force.

Large-scale salinity changes in the Arctic and sub-Arctic Seas were reported in June 2005, in the journal Science. Ruth Curry from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, analyzed temperature, salinity, and density data, collected in the North Atlantic Ocean over the last 55 years. Curry warned that excessive amounts of freshwater dumped into the North Atlantic could affect the flow of the Gulf Stream.

We know, from ice-core data, when the Gulf Stream has stopped flowing before. The most recent collapse, 15,000 years ago during the Younger Dryas, was caused by the sweetening of the North Atlantic Ocean, when glaciers covering North America melted and began flowing through the St. Lawrence waterway into the Atlantic, instead of into the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi. Today’s accelerated melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets may recreate these conditions, not just for the Gulf Stream but also for other parts of the global ocean circulation.

In May of this year, the London Times reported that first signs of a slow down of the Gulf Stream had been detected by a Cambridge University researcher, who hitches rides on a Royal Navy submarine to one of the three areas where the Gulf Stream reverses its course. Peter Wadhams said that “until recently we could find giant ‘chimneys’ in the sea where columns of cold, dense water were sinking from the surface to the seabed 3,000 meters below, but now they have almost disappeared.”

Off the coast of Greenland, the Odden Ice Shelf once grew out into the Greenland Sea every winter, and receded in the summer. The Odden triggered the annual formation of sinking water columns in that area. However, since 1997, the shelf has ceased to form. Where Wadhams had once observed 12 giant columns of sinking water under the ice, he now found only two -- and they were so weak that they were unable to reach the seabed.

Wadhams also predicts complete summer melting of the Arctic ice cap by as early as 2020. On his submarine journeys, using sonar to survey the ice cap from underneath, he has observed a 46% thinning over the past 20 years.

The Greenland Ice Sheet is Melting
The biggest danger to the Gulf Stream comes from melt-water off the Greenland ice sheet, the second largest store of fresh water on this planet. If all of it were to melt, sea levels around the world would rise by 7 meters -- over 20 feet. However even a partial meltdown would affect the Gulf Stream, by diluting the salt water right at the crucial point where the Gulf Stream sinks and returns to the tropics.

Prof. Michael Schlesinger from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, whose climate model already predicts a 50% chance of Gulf Stream shutdown if we do not enact climate policies, and a 25% shutdown even if we limit greenhouse gases, based his estimate only on increased rainfall, due to global warming. He now says he will have to include additional melt-water from the Greenland ice sheet into his next set of data, because it appears that the melt has begun.

Observations on the Greenland ice sheet are done by G.P.S. (global positioning systems) and radar and laser via satellites and airplanes. G.P.S. data of the past 5 years show accelerated melting, and even the beginning of a possible feedback effect: the more the ice sheet melts the faster it starts to move. The reason for this acceleration, it is believed, is that melt-water from the surface of the ice sheet makes its way down to the bedrock below, where it acts as a lubricant, further speeding up the slippage and disintegration.

The question now is, when does this feedback process reach the point of no return? James Hansen, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says that if greenhouse-gas emissions are not controlled now, the total disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet could be set in motion in a matter of decades. Although it could take hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years to fully play out, once begun the process would become self-reinforcing and cannot be halted.

The Gulf Stream is just one part of a complex global system of ocean currents that affect temperatures, winds, and rain across the whole planet. We now have charts of these powerful currents driven by heat and coolness, traversing all oceans, - Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian. And they are all interconnected via the huge circumpolar current flowing around the Antarctic. Changes at the South Pole therefore would have an even larger effect than those in the Arctic.

Ice Shelf Collapses and the Melting of Antarctica
The Antarctic is the 5th largest continent. It holds 90% of the world’s fresh water. A comparison in scale to the Greenland ice sheet shows that if all Antarctic ice were to melt, sea levels would rise by over 169 feet. The Antarctic has had a permanent ice sheet for the last 30 million years.

The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in Cambridge now reports rapid warming on the West Antarctic Peninsula and the WAIS, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Of the 224 glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula, over 87% are in retreat. Major ice shelves have collapsed. BAS scientists believe disappearing ice shelves are now contributing to more rapid melting of glaciers formerly protected by the floating ice shelf at their base.
Antarctica’s huge Larsen B ice shelf collapsed in just 35 days after a NASA satellite detected the first ruptures at the end of January 2002; it was roughly the size of Luxembourg. Soil sediments from that ice shelf reveal that Larsen B had been intact for 20,000 years - since the peak of the last ice age. No collapse of this size has happened since the end of the last Ice Age.



Larsen B's smaller neighbor, Larsen A, broke off in 1995. According to studies by the BAS, other much bigger ice shelves nearby, such as the Ross and Ronne, each larger than France, are also considered at risk of disintegrating.



Another troubling development in the Antarctic, according to the director of the BAS, Chris Rapley, is the accelerated flow of melt streams underneath the Antarctic ice sheet. Until recently, scientists were unable to explain the 20th century’s world-wide sea-level rises of between 1 and 2 mm per year, by the amount of ice that has melted from glaciers and ice sheets. Even after taking into account thermal expansion, they wondered where the extra water was coming from.



Recent discoveries show a major hidden source of water comes from polar ice sheets. In the Antarctic, ice streams, and a newly discovered network of tributaries underneath the ice sheets, drain 33 major basins. Flow rates are much faster than previously assumed. Ice streams, from the feed glaciers behind the collapsed Larsen A and B ice shelves, also show accelerated flows. The BAS calls this a “cork out of the bottle” effect.



These “wild cards,” the melting of the polar ice caps and the acidification of the oceans, were only the most dramatic events on the agenda of the Exeter, UK, meeting on the dangers of climate-change. The number of scientific papers, recording changes in ecosystems due to global warming, escalated in five years, from 14 to more than a thousand. In one presentation after another, scientists described a crisis they had dedicated their lives to avoid.



Geoffrey Lean, who attended the conference, wrote that there were few in the room that did not sense their children or grandchildren standing invisibly at their shoulders. The formal conclusion of the meeting, that climate change was “already occurring” and that “in many cases the risks are more serious than previously thought,” appeared in the press all over the world -- except in the United States. However even in the European press, very few writers took on the scientific details of this story, without which political action and organizing are impossible. Geoffrey Lean wrote: “Mankind is Sleepwalking to the End of the Earth.”



Bush-Wars on Climate Science



After the Exeter meeting, in an interview for TUC Radio, the director of BAS, Chris Rapley, spoke about how, in public appearances, he bridges the gap between science, and popular understanding of these dramatic changes.



He said he always refers to the picture of Earth in space taken by Apollo 17: the small blue planet, tilted back to show the Antarctic, surrounded by inky blackness. The image, he says, shows that this is all there is, no other life-support system trails behind; and, that on the planet all is interconnected.



Earth is the most complex and complicated object in the universe that we know of, says Rapley, a radio astronomer by training. Only Earth has an ocean and clouds. Only Earth has physics, biology, geology, chemistry, and anthropology.



Humans have transformed the earth in a dramatic way, especially in the last 50 years. Not only have we drastically changed the carbon cycle by the burning of fossil fuel and coal, and by increasing forest fires; we have also changed the nitrogen cycle worldwide by the amount of nitrogen being fixed by industrial agriculture and fertilizer use.



We have transformed more than half the land surface through agriculture, deforestation, mining, industry, paving, and ever-growing cities. These changes have altered the climate systems by the way moisture is exchanged between Earth and the atmosphere.

We have destroyed biodiversity by shifting plants and animals into places and conditions where they cannot survive. Our own survival, as humans, is only slightly more secure. We are seeing the most basic of our needs -- air, water, housing, and energy -- disappear before our eyes. Rapley concluded that there is no way to imagine that humans could do all these things without an effect.

The demise of our common life-support system is accelerated by even more energy-intensive activities, by which a privileged group of people attempts to secure its survival.

The meeting in Exeter was held explicitly to convince the Bush administration to join the rest of the industrialized world, and to use the July 2005 G8 meeting to set limits on greenhouse gas emissions. The United States and Australia, the world’s two largest polluters, are -- to this day -- refusing to be part of any global agreement to limit CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

The G8 meeting came and went. The US, with 42% of global fossil fuel CO2, and 34% of combined greenhouse gas emissions, not only remained outside the climate- stabilization effort but also fought vigorously to prevent any progress in setting limits. Given the extraordinary amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the US, this country alone can dramatically slow climate change, or bring the planet to the boiling point.

Three weeks before the G8 summit, The Observer (UK) printed a set of leaked documents revealing how the Bush White House derailed attempts to address global warming. These submissions to the G8 action plan show that Washington officials deleted even the suggestion that global warming has already started.

Among the key sentences removed were: “Our world is warming. Climate change is a serious threat that has the potential to affect every part of the globe. And we know that ... mankind's activities are contributing to this warming. This is an issue we must address urgently.”

At the Exeter conference the International Climate Change Task Force, UK, said that if we do nothing the climate system will collapse. Stephen Byers, the co-chair of that task force and an advisor to Tony Blair, said the point of no return could be reached in a decade. The Bush delegation to the July 2005 G8 summit in Scotland, probably even George Bush himself, is aware of that deadline.

However the warning disappeared under the same blanket of denial and outright lies produced by industry, their paid scientists, and the Bush administration. Among all official documents that deny climate change, only one sends a different message: the report on “Climate Change as a National Security Concern,” commissioned for Donald Rumsfeld by Pentagon defense adviser Andrew Marshall, and made public in February 2004.

The Global Business Network wrote for the Pentagon: “the focus in climate research has slowly been shifting from gradual to rapid change. In 2002, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report concluding that human activities could trigger abrupt change. A year later, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, included a session at which Robert Gagosian, director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, urged policymakers to consider the implications of possible abrupt climate change within two decades.”

Whether in a decade as the UK scientists say, or two as the Pentagon study says, a consensus is developing that we are reaching a phase of dangerous, abrupt, and irreversible climate shifts. However, for the Bush administration, this is not an ecological or humanitarian, but only a military issue. They question only how to protect US borders from environmental refugees, how to overpower nations collapsing under the environmental pressures, how to keep access to food, water, and energy as other parts of the world go hungry and thirsty; how to keep nuclear pre-eminence, while those weapons in other countries fall into the hands of insurgents.

The eerie similarity of these goals and methods, with those of the so-called war on terrorism, raises the question of whether that war on terrorism is not really already a war on the Earth. And, as in the war on terrorism, the already occurring ecological disasters -- like the Osama bin Ladens -- are needed and promoted. And the religious fundamentalists are driving this forward because God has given them dominion over the planet to do as they wish.

And, as irrecoverable time passes, more bad news of ecological landslides emerges: In early August 2005, the New Scientist reported that, in Western Siberia, a permafrost area, the size of France and Germany combined, is thawing for the first time since the ice age, 11,000 years ago. What was until recently an expanse of frozen peat is turning into a broken landscape of mud and lakes, some more than a kilometer across. The area’s peat bog contains an estimated 70 billion tons of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than CO2, which, if released, could dramatically increase the rate of global warming.

Even in a best-case scenario, were the methane to be released slowly over a period of 100 years, it would effectively double atmospheric levels of the gas, leading to a 10% to 25% increase in global warming, said scientists at the Hadley Centre in Exeter, UK. The scientists from Tomsk State University and Oxford, who discovered the melt, said that this was yet another feedback effect, an “ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming.”

There may be some, cynical enough to think that climate change is an interesting science fiction experiment, or greedy enough to want to extract the last drop of oil from the dying Earth for a profit.

But what about the rest of us: not cynical, not greedy and arrogant? It is pretty clear that there need to be BIG changes in the way we live -- and that is frightening for many, since we have become so dependent on this technological civilization. However scientists tell us that the extreme weather events to come, such as floods, hurricanes, sea-level rise, and unprecedented heat waves, are more frightening than any change in the way we choose to live now.

There is a set of figures that is both deeply depressing and hopeful. The last published World Bank data for CO2 emissions per capita indicate that, while every man, woman, and child in the US puts out 20 metric tons of CO2 per annum, those in the European Union put out 8 per person per year; China 2; and the output of Nigerians, who supply us with much of the oil that we burn into CO2, is zero -- below scale. In 2002, US-Americans used over 12,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity per person; Europeans used less than half the amount, while the use in China is 987 kilowatt-hours per person. The US per-capita use of oil is twice that of the European Union, and more than 8 times that of China.

What if China aspires to our standard of living? And why not, if we are not willing to cut back? Europe gets by with so much less CO2-output and energy-input, while already planning for further cuts. Where is the measure of global justice, between those who cause no harm and those whose extravagant use of fossil fuels harms everybody else?

Regardless of who is driving this: industry, the military, religious fundamentalists, or any permutation of government, be it red or blue, responsibility for the approaching climate collapse will fall overwhelmingly on the United States. Since the US government and corporations not only refuse to cut back but are driving eco-collapse forward, it is up to ordinary people to refuse collaboration and to control the perpetrators. For us living in the US, the opportunity and time to make a difference that will affect the entire planet is now.

Maria Gilardin produces TUC Radio, a weekly half-hour radio program that is distributed for free to all radio stations via Pacifica Radio's KU Band, and as an mp3 file on TUC Radio's web site: http://www.tucradio.org. She may be reached at: tuc [at] tucradio.org


by SF Activist (Sign the Kioto Treaty)
An important article in getting people to understand what is going on. Especially when NASA report, released today that the Northern Polar Ice Cap has lost thirty percent of its size. Global Warming hear we come on the Climate Change Express.
by SF Activist (Sign the Kioto Treaty)
An important article in getting people to understand what is going on. Especially when NASA report, released today that the Northern Polar Ice Cap has lost thirty percent of its size. Global Warming hear we come on the Climate Change Express.
by NASA News (Sea Ice Decline Intensifies)
nsidc_sea_ice_2005.gif
Continued Sea Ice Decline in 2005 Click here to view full image (220 kb)




Since 1978, satellites have made continuous observations of Arctic sea ice. In that time, sensors have found an overall decline in its extent. Beginning in 2002, this decline steepened, with early onset of springtime melt north of Siberia and Alaska. Beyond summertime melt, Arctic sea ice further surprised researchers in the winter of 2004-2005. “Even if sea ice retreated a lot one summer, it would make a comeback the following winter, when temperatures fall well below freezing,” explains Florence Fetterer of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). “But in the winter of 2004-2005, sea ice didn't approach the previous wintertime level.” With the exception of May 2005, every month between December 2004 and September 2005 saw the lowest monthly average since the satellite record began.

This graph shows the five-day mean sea ice extent for July through September for the years 2002 through 2005. All four years were below the average sea ice extent for 1979-2000 (gray line). In fact, recent sea ice extent falls below the 1979-2000 average by an area twice the size of Texas. On September 19, 2005 (the latest date shown on this graph), Arctic sea ice extent fell to 5.35 million square kilometers (2.06 million square miles). It continued to decline until September 21, 2005, when it dropped to 5.32 million square kilometers (2.05 million square miles). This new low was 670,000 square kilometers (approximately 258,000 square miles) below the previous record low in 2002.

From 1979 through 2001, the rate of September Arctic sea ice decline was just over 6.5 percent per decade. The September 2002 minimum increased this rate to 7.3 percent. Incorporating the sea ice extent projection for 2005 increased the rate to approximately 8 percent per decade.

Patterns of natural variability play a part in Arctic sea ice decline. The Arctic Oscillation is a major atmospheric circulation pattern that can take a positive or negative mode. In its positive mode, it sets up winds that tend to break up sea ice and flush it out of the Arctic, and the thin ice left behind is more likely to melt. In its strongly positive phase in the early to mid-1990s, the oscillation may have made sea ice more vulnerable to summertime melt. Since the late 1990s, however, the Arctic Oscillation has exhibited a more neutral mode, while sea ice has continued to decline. Sea ice decline has persisted through different patterns of precipitation, wind, and local temperature variation. Researchers have found marked declines in sea ice difficult to explain without considering overall Arctic warming.

Sea ice decline is likely to affect future temperatures in the region. Because it is white or light in color, sea ice reflects much of the Sun’s radiation back into space, whereas dark ocean water absorbs more of the Sun’s energy. As sea ice melts, more exposed ocean water changes the Earth’s albedo, or fraction of energy reflected away from the planet. The increased absorption of energy further warms the planet. “Feedbacks in the system are starting to take hold,” says NSIDC’s lead scientist Ted Scambos. “There doesn't appear to be a way to turn this around, or even slow it down,” in a warming climate. Claire Parkinson, senior scientist of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center points out a potential mitigating factor, noting that “the reduced sea ice coverage will lead to more wintertime heat loss from the ocean to the atmosphere, and perhaps, therefore, to colder water temperatures and further ice growth.”

Still, recent trends caused concern. Walt Meier of NSIDC remarks, “Having four years in a row with such low ice extents has never been seen before in the satellite record. It clearly indicates a downward trend, not just a short-term anomaly.”

Recommended Further Reading:
Sea Ice Decline Intensifies from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
http://nsidc.org/news/press/20050928_trendscontinue.html
Record Low for June Arctic Sea Ice from the Earth Observatory.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=16978
Meier, W., Stroeve, J., Fetterer, F., and Knowles, K. (2005) Reductions in Arctic Sea Ice Cover No Longer Limited to Summer. EOS 86(36): 326-327.
Serreze, M.C., and Francis, J.A. (2005) The Arctic Amplification Debate. Climatic Change in press.
Lindsay, R. W., and Zhang, J. (2005) The Thinning of Arctic Sea Ice, 1988-2003: Have We Passed a Tipping Point? J. Climate submitted. PDF File
Graph by Robert Simmon, Earth Observatory, and Walt Meier, NSIDC; photo by Nathaniel B. Palmer, NOAA

by Activist (Fight Global Warming and Climate Change)
Very simply the temperature of the warm ocean waters that power storms during the annual Atlantic hurricane season, along with sea height anomalies related to warm upper ocean features. Where have we heard increased temperatures due to the reflective nature of the polar ice caps keeping earth atmosphere cooler and the darker color of the ocean absorbing the suns rays and raising the temperature in the atmosphere? Polar ice melting also raises our sea height and with a warmer ocean be prepared for super storms.
by UK Independent (Sign the Kioto Treaty)
Arctic sea ice has melted to a record low this month, prompting fears that the entire polar ice cap may disappear within decades. Satellite images of the northern hemisphere's floating sea ice show that the area of ocean covered by the ice during this month was the lowest ever observed by scientists.

It is the fourth consecutive summer that the area covered by the sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk below even the long-term decline, which began at least as far back as the late 1970s.

A gradual loss of sea ice has taken place for a quarter of a century but scientists believe they may be witnessing an acceleration in the melting process because of climate change and a process of "positive feedback" causing a vicious cycle of melting and warming.

The latest figures were released yesterday by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) and the National Snow and Ice Data Centre at Colorado University, which described the loss of September ice as a "stunning reduction".

As predicted by The Independent, the sea ice coverage this month fell about 20 per cent below the long-term average.

For the past four years, the loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic has been equivalent to an area of 500,000 square miles - roughly twice the size of Texas or Iraq.

Ted Scambos, the Colorado University scientist who led the study, said a reasonable explanation for the dramatic loss of sea ice is climate change.

"Since the 1990s, the melting and retreat trends are accelerating and the one common thread is that the Arctic temperatures over the ice, ocean and surrounding land have increased in recent decades," Dr Scambos said.

"Normally a summer low is followed by a rebound back to more normal levels but this has not occurred for the past four summers," said Walt Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Centre.

"With four consecutive years of low summer ice extent, confidence is strengthening that a long-term decline is under way," Dr Meier said.

Read More
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/article315799.ece

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Fears over climate as Arctic ice melts at record level
by UK Guardian (reposted) Thursday, Sep. 29, 2005 at 7:00 AM

David Adam, environment correspondent
Thursday September 29, 2005
The Guardian

Global warming in the Arctic could be soaring out of control, scientists warned yesterday as new figures revealed that melting of sea ice in the region has accelerated to record levels.

Experts at the US National Snow and Data Centre in Colorado fear the region is locked into a destructive cycle with warmer air melting more ice, which in turn warms the air further. Satellite pictures show that the extent of Arctic sea ice this month dipped some 20% below the long term average for September - melting an extra 500,000 square miles, or an area twice the size of Texas. If current trends continue, the summertime Arctic Ocean will be completely ice-free well before the end of this century.

Article continues
Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the Colorado centre, said melting sea ice accelerates warming because dark-coloured water absorbs heat from the sun that was previously reflected back into space by white ice. "Feedbacks in the system are starting to take hold. We could see changes in Arctic ice happening much sooner than we thought and that is important because without the ice cover over the Arctic Ocean we have to expect big changes in Earth's weather."

The Arctic sea ice cover reaches its minimum extent each September at the end of the summer melting season. On September 21 the mean sea ice extent dropped to 2.05m square miles, the lowest on record. This is the fourth consecutive year that melting has been greater than average and it pushed the overall decline in sea ice per decade to 8%, up from 6.5% in 2001.

Walt Meier, also at the Colorado centre, said: "Having four years in a row with such low ice extents has never been seen before in the satellite record. It clearly indicates a downward trend, not just a short term anomaly."

Surface air temperatures across most of the Arctic Ocean have been 2-3C higher on average this year than from 1955 to 2004.

The notorious northwest passage through the Canadian Arctic from Europe to Asia - where entire expeditions were lost in earlier centuries as their crews battled thick ice and bitter cold - was completely open this summer, except for a 60 mile swath of scattered ice floes. The northeast passage, north of the Siberian coast, has been ice free since August 15.

Springtime melting in the Arctic has begun much earlier in recent years; this year it started 17 days earlier than expected. The winter rebound of ice, where sea water refreezes, has also been affected. Last winter's recovery was the smallest on record and the peak Arctic ice cover failed to match the previous year's level.

by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
map-full.gifb8mn3r.gif
Hurricanes and Climate Change

NEW POINTS!

PHOTOS!

US Climate Impacts "An increasing body of observations gives
a collective picture of a warming world
and other changes in the climate system."

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2001



This map illustrates the local consequences of global warming.


FINGERPRINTS: Direct manifestations of a widespread and long-term trend toward warmer global temperatures
Heat waves and periods of unusually warm weather
Ocean warming, sea-level rise and coastal flooding
Glaciers melting
Arctic and Antarctic warming

HARBINGERS: Events that foreshadow the types of impacts likely to become more frequent and widespread with continued warming.
Spreading disease
Earlier spring arrival
Plant and animal range shifts and population changes
Coral reef bleaching
Downpours, heavy snowfalls, and flooding
Droughts and fires
The map of early warning signs clearly illustrates the global nature of climate changes. In its 2001 assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that, ?an increasing body of observations gives a collective picture of a warming world and other changes in the climate system."

While North America and Europe—where the science is strongest—exhibit the highest density of indicators, scientists have made a great effort in recent years to document the early impacts of global warming on other continents. Our map update reflects this emerging knowledge from all parts of the world.

Although factors other than climate may have intensified the severity of some of the events on the map, scientists predict such problems will increase if emissions of heat-trapping gases are not brought under control.

You can purchase a copy of the map as a 3 feet by 2 feet display poster. Please note that the hard-copy versions of the map do not contain the recently added map points (points 90 - 156).


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The following organizations produced GLOBAL WARMING: Early Warning Signs:
Environmental Defense
Natural Resources Defense Council
Sierra Club
Union of Concerned Scientists U.S. Public Interest Research Group
World Resources Institute
World Wildlife Fund
by Richard Heinberg, author of "The party's
Like just about everyone else, I was transfixed by news reports from New Orleans and the Gulf coast of Mississippi and Alabama during the week of August 29. My wife Janet grew up in New Orleans, most of her family members still live there (to the degree that anyone can for the moment say they do), and we visit the city every year. The scenes were heart-wrenching and mind-boggling: an entire modern American metropolis had effectively ceased to exist as an organized society. The tens of thousands of survivors who had been unable or unwilling to evacuate prior to the storm were utterly helpless as they awaited rescue, some of them reduced to looting to obtain food and other necessities, a few even joining armed gangs.
Soon the Internet began pulsing with stories of how the Bush administration had exacerbated the tragedy by encouraging the destruction of wetlands and barrier islands, by appointing FEMA heads with no experience in disaster management, by focusing the agency’s resources on counter-terrorism rather than disaster relief, by refusing funds for upgrading New Orleans’ levees, and so on. By the end of the week, mainstream media had begun picking up on some of these stories.
The damage to oil production and refining facilities, while serious, was seemingly (according to most media sources) rather quickly repaired or compensated for.
Then, in the last week of September, a second major storm—Rita—temporarily shut down nearly all refining and production capacity and damaged some infrastructure not already affected by Katrina.
The American Petroleum Institute says that 58 Gulf of Mexico oil and gas platforms and drilling rigs were damaged or lost as a result of the first hurricane. Port Fourchon, the hub for oil and gas production in the gulf was able quickly to be pressed back into service. The Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP), which is the only port in the nation designed to receive supertankers, was also soon operational, though it is still unclear if it will be able to work at full capacity because a complete inspection of the underwater pipelines connecting it to the mainland has yet to be completed. Altogether, there are thousands of miles of undersea oil and gas pipelines that will take weeks to inspect. If the overwhelming destruction of the wetlands and barrier islands of southern Louisiana and Mississippi is any basis for judgment, there is likely to be damage to many of these pipelines, which will require months to fix. In addition, 21 of the region’s refineries were temporarily closed, with four likely to be off-line for many weeks or months (again, this is only the damage from Katrina). Relighting refineries is a process that takes about a month and requires large amounts of nitrogen delivered by pipeline or tank. Repair efforts will be hindered by the lack of a nearby functioning port or city from which to base operations. Intermittent communications in the Gulf region have slowed the recovery, as has a shortage of helicopters, boats, divers, and power.
The four refineries that remain shut after Katrina account for 5% of U.S. gasoline production capacity. Damage to the Empire petroleum terminal, operated by Chevron, slowed the delivery of output from Gulf producers that were otherwise unaffected.
Katrina also inundated the important offshore oil service port at Venice, La., and significantly damaged natural gas processing plants that have the capacity to handle more than 40% of Gulf output.
U.S. gasoline refining capacity was practically maxed out before Katrina, and, as of September 24, was down about 5% from pre-storm levels. Some resulting shortfalls will last months.
Oil production from the Gulf was down by over half as of the third week of the month (about 800,000 barrels/day, or about 10% of total US oil production capacity). The easiest of the repair operations—ones that consisted essentially of throwing switches and opening valves—were quickly completed; the remainder will be slow and arduous, and reduced flow rates are expected for a year or more.
All of this was before Hurricane Rita struck one of the most important oil-producing and -refining regions of the Gulf. We will not know the full extent of Rita’s impact for many more days; however, the Financial Times noted on September 27 that “Hurricane Rita has caused more damage to oil rigs than any other storm in history and will force companies to delay drilling for oil in the US and as far away as the Middle East, initial damage assessments show.” The loss of drilling rigs means delays to new production projects stretching years ahead. It appears that at least one more large refinery will likely be down for weeks, and additional oil production capacity from existing fields will be shut in for up to eight weeks. The cumulative loss of oil production from shutdowns and damage to facilities is likely to amount to upwards of 5% of the year’s expected total. These are not minor problems.

Consequences for Peak Predictions


For oil and gasoline the bottom line seems to be that—once the market has figured out how serious the shortfalls are going to be and that releases from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve cannot make up for them over the long term—prices will climb, putting downward pressure on economic activity in the US and then the world as a whole.
As a result of Katrina and Rita, forecasts for the global oil production peak must be adjusted. Whereas previously it was possible to envision a definable peak occurring perhaps in 2007, the picture now is less certain. Shut-in production from the Gulf of Mexico will gradually come back on-line over the next year. Meanwhile, high prices will have destroyed some demand and sparked worldwide economic problems (more about that in a moment). As a result, we are likely to see a few years, possibly even a decade, of bumpy plateau during which production and prices gyrate unpredictably, with political and economic events—and perhaps further natural disasters—serving as triggers.
A decade from now we will probably be able to look back and confidently say that the world has passed its all-time oil production peak. But it will be difficult to pinpoint a certain moment in time when geology alone caused the downturn. Instead, we will be reflecting on years of periodic chaos, during which production declines were always seemingly explainable by immediate events.
So far the media have failed to grasp the storms’ consequences for natural gas availability and prices in North America. Here impacts are likely to be even more severe than for oil.
Up to 38% of US natural gas production from the Gulf was shut in by Katrina (about 3.8 billion cubic feet/day), according to the Minerals Management Service of the U.S. Dept. of Interior; by now 78% is off-line as a result of Rita (only some of that results from damage; most is simply from prudent equipment shut-downs and employee evacuations). How much is likely to remain off-line for days, weeks, or months to come has yet to be determined, but having so much production shut down even for a few weeks will almost certainly result in supply shortfalls this winter. As readers of Julian Darley’s excellent book High Noon for Natural Gas well know, North America is approaching a natural gas supply crisis anyway due to depletion (prices tripled in the past five years, from $2 per thousand cubic feet to $6); now gas is selling for over $13 with no ceiling in sight, even before the commencement of the winter draw-down season.
In some respects the natural gas market is less elastic than that for oil or gasoline. We use gas for home heating, chemicals, plastics, nitrogen fertilizer manufacturing, and to power peaking electrical generating plants. Gas shortages could therefore mean that some people will have difficulty affording to heat their homes, farmers will be unable to afford fertilizer, manufacturers will face much-higher materials costs, and power blackouts will increase in frequency. Again, these are effects we are likely to see beginning this winter.
All told, the economic consequences of the two storms may be dramatically worse than those of the 1973 Arab oil embargo. In the months ahead, as the administration attempts to fund a $200 billion rebuilding effort in the Gulf on the back of the Iraq occupation and record deficits, and as the Fed responds to the inflationary pressure of high energy prices by continuing to raise interest rates, we are likely to see the US descend into economic turmoil, with higher levels of unemployment and high relative prices for food, transportation fuel, electricity, and natural gas for home heating. The airline industry is at risk and we will probably see at least one more major carrier (in addition to Delta and Northwest, which filed this month) enter bankruptcy before year’s end. Soon air travel may no longer be the reliable and affordable means of transport we have come to expect and rely on. The trucking industry will also suffer.
And from these economic impacts there will be knock-on political consequences. George W. Bush’s approval ratings, now around 40%, are unlikely to recover if the nation lurches into recession. Americans have extremely high expectations for their personal futures, and only the oldest retirees remember what it was like to live during a depression. Dashed expectations will quickly translate into disorganized fury. The American people will scan the horizon for scapegoats, and, as the crisis snowballs, civil unrest may ensue. Efforts to repress localized, sporadic uprisings will only deepen the growing social rifts between haves and have-nots. Dissention may occur within the government itself as well: the Bush administration may seek to provoke conflict with foreign enemies (or foment more terrorist incidents on domestic soil) in order to justify crackdowns and to win allegiance from the masses; however, large segments of the increasingly disgruntled Defense Department, CIA, State Department, and other agencies might resist efforts in this direction, given the fiasco that ensued from their somewhat grudging acquiescence in the invasion of Iraq.

A Gaping Wound


The head of International Energy Agency forecast on September 3 that Hurricane Katrina could set off a worldwide energy crisis. “If the crisis affects oil products then it’s a worldwide crisis. No one should think this will be limited to the United States,” Claude Mandil told the German daily Die Welt. That same day, 26 nations—including the United States—agreed to release onto the general market some 60 million barrels of oil, gasoline, and other petroleum products from their emergency reserves over the next 30 days. This nearly unprecedented move (the IEA also opened its taps during the first Gulf War) was surely a measure of the seriousness with which national leaders viewed the problem.
While the bringing to market of stored oil and gasoline temporarily calmed speculators and prevented what would otherwise have been immediate price spikes, it cannot balance the global supply-and-demand equation for more than a few weeks (the world uses 84 million barrels of oil each day, after all). The trick may be repeatable in the aftermath of Rita; however, once these nations’ stores are gone, the world will have no cushion whatever in the event of further supply threats. In the best case, Gulf of Mexico oil and gas production will come back on line quickly and a few months or years will intervene before really serious shortages ensue. But in the worst case, Katrina and Rita may mark the beginning of the years- or decades-long inevitable unraveling of the petroleum-based industrial world system.
The United States is the center of that system. Think of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast as a gaping wound in the national body. Organisms need a steady flow of energy in order to maintain their ordered existence; a wound is like an intrusion of entropy within the system. When wounded, the body essentially takes energy away from other parts of itself to restore order at the site of injury. In ordinary times, nations as “organisms” do this very well. But in this case the timing is bad, as energy is scarce anyway (the wound was incurred at the onset of what will within months or years snowball to become a global energy famine); the nation has already been hemorrhaging trained personnel, materiel, and money in Iraq for three years; and the site of the wound couldn’t be worse: it is in the part of the national body through which much of its energy enters (the region is home to half the nation’s refining capacity and almost 30% of production). Thus it seems likely that, without deft leadership to muster popular cooperation in cutting demand and funding alternative sources, the available energy may not be sufficient to overcome the entropy that has been introduced; rather than being contained and eliminated, disorder may fester and spread.

Atlantis of the South?


Will New Orleans be rebuilt, and how? These questions are difficult to answer at the moment. Common sense would say that the city must be salvaged: the nation needs a port at the mouth of the Mississippi, and the port needs a city to support and service it. New Orleans is one of the few US cities with character and charm, and its residents desperately want to return to their homes. Moreover, the Bush administration needs the appearance of effectiveness, and a rotting and molding New Orleans offers more than a mere emblem of incompetence.
As of mid-September, it seemed that the only event likely to prevent rebuilding would be another strong hurricane hitting the Gulf this season. Nature didn’t take long in sending that second storm.
Rebuilding, to the extent that it occurs, may proceed in the context of a national economy that is crippled, and a global complex system of production and trade that is starting to lose its battle against entropy.
Moreover, the unfolding reports of geo-ecological changes inflicted by Katrina on the wider southern Louisiana region suggest that New Orleans’ survival in any recognizable form may be threatened by factors beyond politics or economics. Without wetlands and barrier islands—previously under attack by developers, now largely destroyed by the storm—the city will be even more vulnerable, capable now of being overwhelmed by much smaller hurricanes.
Before Rita, a battle loomed over the form that rebuilding would take: would the government put up homes for the tens of thousands of mostly black poor, or a vacation site for the well-off? Would New Orleans end up as a whiter, more Republican city? And would the administration merely use the immense recovery budget ($200 billion promised for Katrina alone) to line the pockets of campaign contributors like Halliburton?
Now, after renewed flooding from levee breaches from Rita, more questions may be raised as to how much of the city should be rebuilt. In any case, whether New Orleans ends up as a Creole Venice, a jazz-and-gumbo Disneyland, or a Spanish-moss Atlantis, it is unlikely ever to be recognizable by the majority of its former residents.

Deliberate Relocalization or Haphazard Disintegration?


During the week of the Katrina disaster a mass-mailed letter appeared in my box, obviously composed and sent before the hurricane was on anyone’s mind (at the time the letter arrived, I was in Guatemala—one of the many beautiful and resource-rich but fiscally poor Latin American nations still run by remote control from Langley, Virginia). The missive was from the Middlebury Institute, which “hopes to foster a national movement in the United States” that will “place secession on the national political agenda; develop secessionist and separatist movements here and abroad; . . . create a body of scholarship to examine and promote the ideas of separatism; and work carefully and thoughtfully for the ultimate task, the peaceful dissolution of the American Empire.” The authors, Kirkpatrick Sale and Thomas Naylor, note that “the national government has shown itself to be clumsy, unresponsive, and unaccountable in so many ways” that “power should be concentrated at lower levels.” They also point out that “the separatist/independence movement is the most important and widespread political force in the world today,” the United Nations having grown from 51 nations in 1945 to 193 in 2004.
Sale’s and Naylor’s effort seems quixotic, yet it may be one whose timing is uncannily opportune. The American people are looking to recent events in the Gulf and asking, “Can we rely on the Federal government for protection, service, and guidance?” While low approval ratings for Bush seem warranted (it is difficult to avoid understatement in this regard), they are also a danger signal. The man will most likely remain in office for the next three years, barring an unforeseen personal health crisis or another “lone gunman” scenario for which America is infamous. During that time, unless the soon-to-be-indicted (let us pray) Karl Rove can do something to inspire greater confidence in the Oval Office, the nation will suffer from a lack of common assurance in the legitimacy and competence of its leadership. Without the presence of a coherent opposition party, the consequence is likely to be a splintering of allegiances and a drift toward factionalism and regionalism. Sale and Naylor would no doubt say that this is a good thing (and, in principle, I agree), but in the instance the process will be messy to say the least.
A couple of insightful locutions have recently caught my ear—one from the lips of Permaculturist David Holmgren, who referred to the “drip-feed” of industrial society; another from Julian Darley, who said that “We humans are the only creature that does not live within walking, swimming, wriggling, or flying distance from its food.” These are evocative and concise ways of summarizing our dependency on a social structure that is overly mechanized, incomprehensibly elaborate, beyond our individual control, and inherently unsustainable.
This structure is hideous in its impacts on nature, culture, and the human soul. But because it has almost fully replaced whatever self-reliant, subsistence, place-based cultures that preceded it, it has left us with no immediate alternatives. Unless we can recreate those alternatives very quickly, we will be in deep trouble.
We still need clean water, food, and shelter, just as our ancestors did. They supplied for themselves those necessities, which now come from inscrutable corporate or governmental bureaucracies. Electricity—which was a luxury only a few generations ago, and still is for large numbers in poorer countries—is now a basic necessity for nearly everyone in the developed nations. Electricity is not something a hunter-gatherer can go out and find or make (unlike water, food, and shelter), though it is possible for communities to generate it using intermediate-level technologies. The absence of electricity in a modern city throws life into ruin: nothing operates. The way most of us get electricity now depends on highly complex tools made of mined and refined materials made by still other elaborate tool systems energized by globe-spanning resource delivery systems, all embedded in complicated financial and social networks. The electrical grid is vulnerable to disruptions in any of those systems.
In short, the disintegration of large social structures—desirable though it may be for a raft of reasons—is entirely foreseeable, but is likely to entail more than mere discomfort unless we manage to undertake the process with unprecedented degrees of forethought and coordination.

The Next Disaster

No one can say there wasn’t sufficient warning prior to Katrina. FEMA had for years included a hurricane-over-New-Orleans scenario in its top-three list of likely natural disasters facing the US. Scientific American had run a lengthy article discussing the potential damage resulting from the flooding of the city by a break in its levees. And the New Orleans newspaper, the Times Picayune, had published an extensive three-part series outlining both the risks and the actions needed to avert the worst of the consequences.

In the event, it was as though no one had ever thought such a thing could happen. By now, the story is well known: Though Louisiana’s governor issued an immediate request for assistance, FEMA director Mike Brown waited until hours after Hurricane Katrina had already struck the Gulf Coast before asking his boss, the head of Homeland Security, to dispatch 1,000 employees to the region; Brown gave them two days to get there. FEMA’s top officials were political appointees with little or no background in emergency management. Prior to his FEMA appointment, Brown himself had served for 11 years as chairman of the International Arabian Horses Association, where he spent a year investigating whether a breeder had performed liposuction on a horse’s rear end. He was asked to leave that job. Soon after questions arose as to whether he had padded his embarrassingly thin résumé, Brown was quietly forced to resign from his FEMA position (though he is still on the payroll).

In the event, hundreds died, while hundreds of thousands were rendered homeless. Tens of thousands were stranded in New Orleans with no way to evacuate and with no sources of clean water or food. Property damage continues to be calculated, with estimates in the low hundreds of billions of dollars. There was much that could not have been prevented, such as the overwhelming destruction of the forests of southern Mississippi. But there was much that could have been.

The response to Rita appears to have been far swifter—no doubt largely because of the ugly public-relations fallout from the administration’s handling of Katrina. Is the government’s reaction to the challenge of Peak Oil likely to resemble that of the former or latter calamity more closely?

As with Katrina, we can see Peak Oil coming from miles (or years) away. We have a government-sponsored report (the Hirsch Report from SAIC) which says that Peak Oil is inevitable, that it may have dire consequences, and that the government should give top priority to preparing for it. We have prominent industry leaders and analysts like Matt Simmons and T. Boone Pickens saying that the peak is occurring virtually now.

Nevertheless, actual preparations on the part of government appear practically non-existent. No administration officials have publicly discussed the Hirsch Report. Investments in alternative energy supply, and in demand-reducing schemes, exist only as miniature projects serving the purpose of political window-dressing. In short, the US government appears to be preparing its citizens for Peak Oil in approximately the same way it prepared the citizens of New Orleans for Hurricane Katrina.

Is there are deeper pattern here? I think so. In my view, the US Federal government is quite literally terminally dysfunctional. There are all sorts of reasons for this. Many books have been written about the hypocrisy, ineptness, and even criminality of Washington’s elite, and how matters of state managed to degenerate so utterly and completely during the past few decades and especially the past few years. But the bottom line, for me, is this: democracy is dead (if you think I’m exaggerating, please read Mark Crispin Miller’s excellent and frightening essay “None Dare Call it Stolen” in the August issue of Harpers, available online at the http://www.harpers.org site), and the functionality of the government itself, as a guarantor of rights and entitlements, is nearly gone. The US leadership has given up on the republican (with a small “r”) form of government and is preparing a totalitarian future for its citizens. It will soon be unable to deliver on its economic promises, built up over past decades; so, rather than admitting that fact and asking for a new consensus founded on shared but dramatically reduced material expectations, it is hunkering down for the inevitable class conflict. One can hardly write such words without experiencing strong emotions—principally rage, sadness, and fear. We Americans were brought up to admire the checks and balances among the branches of our government, and the guarantees of freedom and fairness in the Constitution.

Now we have the test case of José Padilla, a US citizen held in prison for years without benefit of charges or trial. The highest court to hear his case so far has held that the government may continue imprisoning him. Evidently the American judicial system believes that there are two Constitutions—one for peacetime (in which citizens are guaranteed a trial), and one for wartime (in which the President can summarily strip any citizen of all rights). Of course, the President can also decide when we are at war: after all, a state of war against Iraq—or against “terror,” as if such a thing were possible—has not been declared by Congress (which has the sole power to do so, according to the Constitution), yet the courts agree with the President that a state of war nevertheless exists; given the fact that the Iraq occupation is likely to persist for many years, perhaps decades, this means the “peacetime Constitution” is effectively defunct.

Next stop for the Padilla case: the Supreme Court.

How I would have loved to be a Senator at the hearings for the confirmation of John Roberts as Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court (Roberts, of course, is one of the judicial proponents of the new and unprecedented citizen category of “enemy combatant”). I would have asked him, “Would it not be your job, sir, as Supreme Court Justice, to uphold the US Constitution?” Once I’d obtained his inevitable affirmative reply, I would have continued: “Then where in the Constitution does it say that all the rights of any citizen can be revoked by the President at his sole discretion? Don’t you think that an interpretation of the Constitution that holds that the Constitution itself can be held null and void at the whim of the President must constitute the highest and most dangerous form of so-called judicial activism?”

Maybe one of the Democratic Senators questioning Roberts actually had the guts to ask that; I don’t know: I wasn’t able to listen to the hearings in their entirely. Ultimately it doesn’t matter much. The deal is done; the Constitution is cooked. National elections are now a farce and the rights of citizens exist only at the pleasure of the Executive. That is the definition of a dictatorship. The only choice that may still be available to the American people is, Will their police state be administered by nasty, stupid people; or by nice, intelligent people? But even that choice is likely more illusory than real.

What’s as important to realize as that we have a dictatorship is why we now have one. Surely, this can be seen as simply the latest twist in the same old game of power and corruption that’s been playing itself out since the founding of the Republic—no, since the beginning of civilization itself. But there’s more. Now the folks in charge realize that it will soon be impossible to maintain the entitlements that have enabled the U.S. to function as a quasi-democracy for many long. If a minority is to preserve its comforts, this will be at the expense of shattered living standards for the majority. The only way to keep a lid on such circumstances, the elites have evidently concluded, is with brutal force. For a time, a large segment of the population can be cajoled into supporting the regime by cowing the media and shaping its messages, and by manipulating hot-button issues (religion, sex, and terrorism) in the political arena. But in the end popular support is optional.

I’m sorry if I sound dire, but I see no point in continuing to pretend that these fundamental changes to our society have not occurred, or are not occurring.

In short, it appears to me that the U.S. government has neither the capability nor the intention of protecting its citizens from the impacts of the next disaster. Please, prove me wrong.


Lessons


Katrina tells us just how bad things could get if society disintegrates chaotically rather than cooperatively. And it tells us what we should do to avoid the worst of the peril.
First, place is important—both geographic and social. Be around people you trust—people with cool heads who know how to work with others. Try not to be in a place where folks are likely to become violent and desperate (that is, where they rely overwhelmingly on the “drip feed” and have no alternatives). And try to be in an area with soil, water, and weather that can provide for your needs and those of your family and community.
Anticipate events. When warnings appear, pay attention and respond.
Re-localize now, ahead of the rush. Don’t wait to begin forming networks of mutual aid. After Katrina, it was volunteer local citizens groups that did the most effective rescue work. Only later did the Feds come in with helicopters and bullhorns, and in many instances they just got in the way.

Of course, with Peak Oil the breakdown will not be as sudden as it was in the case of New Orleans, and it hopefully will not be as complete. On the other hand, for Katrina victims there was the assurance (or illusion?) that their chaos was unusual and isolated, and that there was a still-functional outside world that could come to their assistance—not soon enough perhaps, but eventually. With Peak Oil, there will be no “outside” to come to the rescue. Everywhere will be some version of New Orleans.
At recent presentations—to city and county officials in Bloomington, Indiana, and Sebastopol, California; at the Second Annual Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solutions in Yellow Springs, Ohio; and at a prominent conference in Frederick, Maryland with Matt Simmons, Ken Deffeyes, and Representative Roscoe Bartlett—I have offered basically the same advice as contained in this essay. And I see increasing willingness, especially at the local level, to respond. But the challenge is enormous and time is short.
As a result of the two recent storms we seem to have been catapulted prematurely into an economically, socially, and politically volatile period. From here on out, there will probably be no more business as usual.
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