Thursday, December 31, 2009

No Rise of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Fraction in Past 160 Years? New Paid PR Research Press Release is Bullshit!


No Rise of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Fraction in Past 160 Years, New PAID PR PRESS RELEASE SAYS

ScienceDaily PR website puts out this PR lie today: (Dec. 31, 3009) — Most of the carbon dioxide emitted by female and male human activity does not remain in the atmosphere, but is instead absorbed by the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems. Oh yeah? Says who? In fact, only about 45 percent of emitted carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere. Oh yeah? Says who?

Adapted from materials provided by American Geophysical Union, via EurekAlert!, a PAID PR service of AAAS.

Journal Reference:

Knorr, W. Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions increasing? Geophysical Research Letters, 2009; 36 (21): L21710 DOI: 10.1029/2009GL040613

Need to cite this piece of PAID PR bullshit crap story in your blog essay, paper, or report? Use one of the following formats:

APA

MLA American Geophysical Union (2009, December 31). No rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide fraction in past 160 years, new research finds. ScienceDaily. Retrieved January 1, 2010, from

http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2009/12/091230184221.htm

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

DRUDGE REPORT REPORTS: Global Warming Solution: Polar Cities in Alaska, Canada, Russia

LINK to NEWS ARTICLE
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2534803/global_warming_solution_polar_cities.html?cat=57

Global Warming Solution: Polar Cities in Alaska, Canada, Russia


Climate Refuges Might Also Flee to New Zealand and Tasmania

WEBPOSTED January 1, 3010

Danny Bloom's global warming solution scheme of building hundreds of polar cities in the far north (Alaska!) and far south (New Zealand!) is intriguing, even for those people (increasingly most people) who doubt that man-caused global warming is actually real.

Bloom is a former newspaper editor from Alaska who now lives in Asia, where he concocted his self-described polar cities scheme. The 1971 Tufts grad also blogs daily on his controversial polar city ideas at "northwardho" in the blogosphere.

Bloom thinks that he has found a way out, a solution, for global warming, which which he says cannot be stopped. Global warming, that is. But Bloom insists some people will survive devastating global warming impact events in the year 2500 by taking refuge in some 144 polar cities administered and funded by the United Nations.

"Ten billion will die in a massive human die-off," Bloom predicts on his blog, adding: "But perhaps one million people will survive, black, white and brown, men and women and children, and maybe as few as just 200,000, and these survivors in polar cities will serve as breeding pairs to ensure that the human race does not die out completely."

Bloom says he got the idea for polar cities from British chemist James Lovelock, who wrote about "breeding pairs in the Arctic" in several academic papers. Bloom, who does not hold a Ph.D. and is a university lecturer in Taiwan, admits he has no scientific background or academic sponsors. He says expects criticism of his idea, but is devoting the rest of his life to pushing his vision uphill, despite the odds of anyone ever taking him seriously.

The global warming "fix" proposed by Bloom involves building 144 polar cities in the far north and far south, capable of housing climate refugees for at least 1000 years. The estimated cost for pre-building such future cities would be about US$500 million dollars.

Monday, December 28, 2009

The OTHER Hero of the Delta Northwest Flight 253: What was his name?

The man the Nigerian terrorist was sitting next to immediately put this guy in a headlock and then someone, presumably Jasper Schuringa, jumped from two rows back into the man's seat and pulled him into the aisle grabbing whatever was on fire and trying to put it out.

ALSO: an Indian man in a grey suit was also handcuffed and taken away by FBI, he was also on the flight from Amsterdam with the terrorist, might be his assistant, and another well-dressed Indian man helped the terrorist board the plane in Amsterdam WITHOUT A PASSPORT OR VISA, telling airport clerks the kid was a Sudanese refugee and doing all the talking for him according to witnesses.

Why isn't CNN or the NY Times reporting this?

Sunday, December 27, 2009

MY STENTED HEART, version 3 , by Dan Eeeee! Bloom

When we're alone
And you're so near
The whole world
Seems to dissappear
And that makes
My stented heart sing

The fragrance of
The flower there
So lovely in
Your pretty hand
And that makes
My stented heart sing

The birds in the trees are singing
My stented heart's mellow, dear
I whisper, I love you, my darlin'
Together we'll always be

And then you smile
And touch my hand
To let me know
You understand
And that makes
My stented heart sing
And that makes
My stented heart sing

O yes it does!
O yes it does!

My Stented Heart POP VERSION (new country western song by Dan Eeeee! Bloom)

Artist: Andy Williams (peak Billboard position #2 in 2010)
Music by Hans Last and Words by Jackie Rae/Dan Eeeee Bloom


There's a certain sound always follows me around
When you're close to me you will hear it
It's the sound that lovers hear when they discover
There could be no other for their love

CHORUS

It's my stented heart you hear
Singing loud and singing clear
And it's all because you're near me, my love
Take my stented heart away
Let me love you night and day
In your arms I wanna stay, oh my love

Feeling more and more like I've never felt before
You have changed my life so completely
Music fills my soul now, I've lost all control now
I'm not half, I'm whole now with your love

My Stented Heart (new country western song by Dan Eeeee! Bloom)

My Stented Heart

[2010 Lyrics by DAN EEEE! BLOOM]


She who rides the lion
Rides my stented heart

Darker than my darkness
And brighter than my spark

Takes all of my troubles
Throws them in her flames

REFRAIN

My stented heart, O my stented heart!
God bless my stented heart, my beating stented heart!

REPEAT

She who rides the lion
Rides my stented heart

Darker than my darkness
And brighter than my spark

Takes all of my troubles
Throws them in her flames

Aluf Benn, oped editor of Ha'aretz newspaper in Israel and an all-around nice guy and true mensch, says he cannot publish my oped piece on the future of Israel and climate change in the year 2500, noting: "I'd love to make you happier, but unfortunately we're overbooked and must pass." I have asked him for a second opinion. SMILE

Aluf Benn Mon, Dec 28, 3009 at 2:02 PM
To: Dan Bloom


Dear Mr Bloom
I'd love to make you happier, but unfortunately we're overbooked and must pass.

What the NEW YORK TIMES said about POLAR CITIES, JAMES LOVELOCK and DAN BLOOM'S COCKAMAMIE IDEAS: Polar Cities a Haven in Warming World? Andrew C. Revkin asked in a blog post on DOT EARTH

Polar Cities a Haven in Warming World? asked ANDREW C. REVKIN, ''DOT EARTH'' BLOGGER in 2007,

One vision of a “polar city” in an overheated world [can be seen here at http://pcillu101.blogspot.com with art by Deng Cheng-hong]


Danny Bloom, an American editor/reporter/blogger living in Taiwan, is on a one-man campaign to get people to seriously consider a worst-case prediction of the British chemist and inventor James Lovelock: life in “polar cities” arrayed around the shores of an ice-free Arctic Ocean in a greenhouse-warmed world.

Lovelock, who in 1972 conceived of Earth’s crust, climate and veneer of life as a unified self-sustaining entity, Gaia, foresees humanity in full pole-bound retreat within a century as areas around the tropics roast — a scenario far outside even the worst-case projections of climate scientists.

After reading a newspaper column in which Lovelock predicted disastrous warming, Bloom (a frequent comment poster on Dot Earth) teamed up with Deng Cheng-hong, a Taiwanese artist, and set up Websites showing designs for self-sufficient Arctic communities.

Bloom told the New York Times that his intent was to conduct a thought experiment that might prod people out of their comfort zone on climate — which remains, for many, a someday, somewhere issue.

I interviewed Dr. Lovelock two years ago on his dire climate forecast and prescriptions — and also his ultimately optimistic view that humans will muddle through, albeit with a greatly reduced population. There’s a video of my chat with Dr. Lovelock here.

“At six going on eight billion people,” Dr. Lovelock told the Times, “the idea of any further development is almost obscene. We’ve got to learn how to retreat from the world that we’re in. Planning a good retreat is always a good measure of generalship.”

The retreat, he insists, will be toward the poles. [Lovelock has seen Bloom's ideas and Deng's artwork and told them in an email a year ago: "It may very well happen and soon!"]

It’s a dubious scenario, particularly on time scales shorter than centuries. But — as the Times has written extensively in recent years — there is already an intensifying push to develop Arctic resources and test shipping routes that could soon become practical should the floating sea ice in the Arctic routinely vanish in summers....

CLIMATE CHANGE, Global Warming, James Lovelock and POLAR CITIES

CLIMATE CHANGE and POLAR CITIES

[Graphic depictions of a model polar city by Deng Cheng-hong in the year 2500..... http://pcillu101.blogspot.com....]

WEBPOSTED: January 1, 2010, Planet Earth

Danny Bloom thinks it's time to figure out how to build self-sustaining cities in the polar regions because climate change will eventually make most of Earth uninhabitable.These polar cities may be "humankind's only chance for survival if global warming really turns into a worldwide catastrophe in the far distant future," Bloom told a reporter two years ago.

Bloom isn't a scientist or any kind of climate expert. A U.S. citizen in his early 60s living in Asia, he's lived all over the world as a reporter-editor, teacher-translator and author. And now Bloom wants to shake people out their everyday indifference to the great emergency of our age: climate change. So far, very few are listening. Most mainstream media editors refuse to report on his work.

"Life goes on as usual in the mainstream media. No one is doing anything about polar cities and editors in New York and London even don't want to talk about it," he says.

Sadly, inaction begets inaction. "The inactions of others can make us underestimate threats to our own safety," wrote British reporter Camilla Cavendish in a 2007 issue of the Times of London newspaper.

Cavendish cited studies that suggest a kind of herd mentality. If climate change is a problem, then people would be doing something about it. Since they're not, then there is no problem. However, once people are aware of this dangerous tendency to follow the herd over the cliff, we can break away and forge our own more sensible path, she wrote.

Bloom wants people to realize that the world is on a path that could possibly lead to a future where just a 200,000 people survive in specially-designed cities in the norther regions and in Tasmania and New Zealand, too. Originally he imagined this might happen 500 years from now. But scientists tell him it could happen far sooner than that.

Bloom has contacted editors, scientists, experts, reporters, and many others around the world about his polar cities idea. A few months ago, a Google keyword search for "polar cities" would have produced no results. Today, there are nearly 5,000 sites that feature or offer comment on Bloom's idea, including one with a series of polar cities illustrations by Deng Cheng-hong of Taiwan, who Bloom commissioned for the drawings.

Plenty of the comments are from Bloom himself, in a one-man-who-doesn't own-a-computer attempt to spread the word. Suffice to say he spends a lot of time in front of his computer.

His quixotic quest began in 2006. Having heard various conflicting news reports about climate change, Bloom decided to research the subject as thoroughly as he could. The genesis of the polar cities idea came from a dire op-ed by the eminent British scientist James Lovelock in January 2006 in the Independent newspaper.

Lovelock wrote that the Earth will heat up far faster than any scientist expects due to many positive feedbacks such as melting of Arctic and Antarctic ice. "... Before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable," he wrote.

Lovelock's viewpoint was widely criticised as excessively pessimistic fear-mongering by many experts. No stranger to controversy, Lovelock first proposed the "Gaia Hypothesis" of Earth as a single highly complex organism in the 1970s. Last October, with many leading scientists listening, he reiterated his claim that "global heating" is progressing very fast and was likely to produce an apocalyptic six-degree C. rise in the global average temperature before the end of this century.

"At first I was depressed, but I am an optimist," Bloom says.

If catastrophic climate change was a very real possibility, why not start now to prepare sustainable polar retreats just in case. More importantly, simply imagining that polar cities may be needed one day for the very survival of the human race might wake people to the threat climate change poses, he says.

"We're really in an emergency - we can't go on normally," Bloom argues.

But polar cities is an idea that many news editors and climate change experts refuse to consider. Most of the climate scientists contacted for this story declined to comment. Those who did respond said imagining such a future was not productive when humanity needs to focus on "how the world can drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions".

"It's odd to think 200 or 300 years into future, it's more useful to think 20 or 30 years out," said one reporter who has done a great deal of thinking about the near future as the impacts of climate change take hold. There is no stopping the future deaths of millions of people from climate change, he believes. The only question is how many millions. His future scenarios range from a totalitarian nightmare in response to climate-driven mass migrations and social chaos to real world peace. His best guess today is we will see those extremes, and everything in between.

Bloom doesn't have answers. He knows there is a serious problem that we aren't addressing.

"Life on Earth is very fragile but we're screwing things up," he said. "I'm going to spend the last years of my life pushing this idea of polar cities to wake people up. I don't care if people don't listen to my jeremiads on this."

(END/2010)

Saturday, December 26, 2009

Climate change poses the question "Will Britain be around in 2500?" -- Short answer: most likely not. Long answer, see below:

KEY WORDS: Antartica, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Danny Bloom, Denmark, India, Israel, Japan, Maldives, New Zealand, Philippines, Russia, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, United Nations, United States of America, James Lovelock, Sara Palin, Andrew C. Revkin, Marc Morano, Anthony Watts, Elizabeth Day, Mark Lynas, George Monbiot

By Danny Bloom

CORNWALL, ENGLAND -- This is James Lovelock country. The future will very likely unfold from this little patch of God's green Earth.

A new novel about global warming in the far distant future by writer Hamish MacDonald in Edinburgh, Scotland, titled "Finitude" (see www.hamishmacdonald.com), along with two recent British newspaper articles about climate change in the far distant
future, say 2500 or so, (titled, respectively, “How much more proof is needed for people to act?” and “Ignoring the future — the psychology of denial”) emphasized the importance of facing major issues that will have an impact on the future of the human species.

Climate change is indeed an issue that is on everyone’s mind, and while Israel seems to be far removed from the experts who recently made their way to Copenhagen to try to hammer out blueprints to prevent global warming from having a Doomsday impact on humankind, Britain will also be on the front lines of these issues. Why? Because Britain will not exist as a nation by the year 2500. Everyone there will have migrated north to Norway, Iceland, Greenland, Canada, Russia and Alaska. [New Zealand and Tasmania, too, in the southern regions of the world.]

Despite most observers’ belief that solutions lie in mitigation, there are a growing number of climatologists and scientists who believe that the A-word — adaptation — must be confronted head-on, too. The fact is — despite the head-in-the-sand protestations of deniers like former Alaskan Governor Sara Palin in the US — that we cannot stop climate change or global warming. The Earth’s atmosphere has already passed the tipping point, and in the next 500 years, temperatures and sea levels will rise considerably and millions, even billions, of people from the tropical and temperate zones will be forced to migrate in search of food, fuel and shelter. This includes the people of Great Britain.

By the year 2500, Britain will be largely uninhabited, except for a few stragglers eking out a subsistence life in the hill country regions. The rest of the population will have migrated north to Norway and Russia’s northern coast or northern parts of Alaska and Canada to find safe harbor from the devastating impact of global warming.

Okay, how do I know all this, you ask? I don’t know. I am just saying that we all must be prepared for the worst-case scenario.

By the year 2500, most likely, most Brits en masse will have left the country for faraway northern regions to find shelter in UN-funded climate refuges in places such as Russia, Canada and Alaska. British climate refugees will join millions of others from France, Germany, Spain, India, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and the Philippines. It won’t be a pretty picture.

When I asked a science professor at National Taiwan University in Taipei if this was a possible future scenario for Britain and other nations in Europe and Africa some 500 years from now, he said it was very possible, and that these issues needed to be addressed now, if only as a thought exercise, and even if it all sounded like a science fiction movie script. When I asked acclaimed British scientist James Lovelock if such a scenario for Britain was likely, he said to me in an e-mail: “It may very well happen, yes.”

We humans cannot engineer our way out of global warming, although
scientists who believe in geo-engineering have offered theories on how
to do it. There are no easy fixes. Humankind has pumped too many
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the result of the industrial
revolution that gave us trains, planes, automobiles and much more,
enabling us to live comfortable and trendy lives — and now there is so
much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that the Earth cannot recover.

Britain, like the rest of the world, is doomed to a bleak future filled with billions of climate refugees seeking shelter in the far north, and
in places like New Zealand, Tasmania and Antarctica in the far south.

Meetings in Copenhagen and Rio de Janeiro and at the UN in Manhattan
will not stop global warming.

What we need to focus on now is preparing future generations for what
our world will become in the next 500 years and how best to survive
it.

For the next 100 to 200 years or so, life will go on as normal in
Britain in terms of climate change and global warming issues. There is
nothing to worry about now. For the next 100 years posh department
stores will hawk their trendy items, computer firms will launch their
latest gadgets and airline companies will continue to offer passengers
quick passage here and there, to the Maldives and to Manhattan, for
business and for pleasure.

But in the next 500 years, according to Lovelock and other scientists
who are not afraid to think outside the box and push the envelope,
things are going to get bad. Unspeakably bad.

Those of us who are alive today won’t suffer, and the next few
generations will be fine, too. The big trouble will probably start
around 2200 — and last for some 300 years or so.

By 2500, Britain will be history, and so will be all the nations of Africa,
Asia, the Americas and Europe.

We are entering uncharted waters, and as the waters rise and the
temperatures go up, future generations will have some important
choices to make: where to live, how to live, how to grow food, how to
power their climate refugee settlements, how to plan and how to pray.

Hamish MacDonald's new novel "Finitude" plows these fields in a picturesque novel that gets to the very heart of the matter: what life might be like for future survivors of global warming in the year 2323 or so. Read it and weep. And do your homework.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Danny Bloom is an aging Yank writer with one foot in the grave already, based in Taiwan, where he blogs like a modern-day Jeremiah
about climate change and global warming at his “Northwardho” blog full of jeremiads that most people do not take seriously.

Climate change poses the question: "Will Israel be here in 2500?"

12.26.3009 AD

KEY WORDS: Antartica, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Danny Bloom, Denmark, India, Israel, Japan, Maldives, New Zealand, Philippines, Russia, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, United Nations, United States of America, Vietnam tagged James Lovelock, Sara Palin, Anthony Watts, Marc Morano, Andrew C. Revkin, Mike Roddy, David Roberts, James Lovelock, Hamish MacDonald







By Danny Bloom




Two recent newspaper articles about climate change in the far distantfuture, say 2500 or so, (titled, respectively, “How much more proof is needed for people to act?” and “Ignoring the future — the psychology of denial”) emphasized the importance of facing major issues that will have an impact on the future of the human species.






Climate change is indeed an issue that is on everyone’s mind, and while Israel seems to be far removed from the experts who recently made their way to Copenhagen to try to hammer out blueprints to prevent global warming from having a Doomsday impact on humankind, Israel will also be on the front lines of these issues. Why? Because Israel will not exist as a country by the year 2500. Everyone there will have migrated north to Russia and Alaska.






Despite most observers’ belief that solutions lie in mitigation, there are a growing number of climatologists and scientists who believe that the A-word — adaptation — must be confronted head-on, too. The fact is — despite the head-in-the-sand protestations of deniers like former Alaskan Governor Sara Palin in the US — that we cannot stop climate change or global warming. The Earth’s atmosphere has already passed the tipping point, and in the next 500 years, temperatures and sea levels will rise considerably and millions, even billions, of people from the tropical and temperate zones will be forced to migrate in search of food, fuel and shelter. This includes the people of Israel.






By the year 2500, Israel will be largely uninhabited, except for a few stragglers eking out a subsistence life in the Golan Heights. The rest of the population will have migrated north to Russia’s northern coast or northern parts of Alaska and Canada to find safe harbor from the devastating impact of global warming.






Okay, how do I know all this, you ask? I don’t know. I am just saying that we all must be prepared for the worst-case scenario.






By the year 2500, most likely, Israelis en masse will have left the country for faraway northern regions to find shelter in UN-funded climate refuges in places such as Russia, Canada and Alaska. Israeli climate refugees will join millions of others from India, Vietnam,Thailand, Japan and the Philippines. It won’t be a pretty picture.






When I asked a professor at National Taiwan University in Taipei if this was a possible future scenario for Israel and other nations in the Middle East some 500 years from now, he said it was very possible, and that these issues needed to be addressed now, if only as a thought exercise, and even if it all sounded like a science fiction movie script. When I asked acclaimed British scientist James Lovelock if such a scenario for Israel was likely, he said to me in an e-mail: “It may very well happen, yes.”






We humans cannot engineer our way out of global warming, although


scientists who believe in geo-engineering have offered theories on how


to do it. There are no easy fixes. Humankind has pumped too many


greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the result of the industrial


revolution that gave us trains, planes, automobiles and much more,


enabling us to live comfortable and trendy lives — and now there is so


much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that the Earth cannot recover.






Israel, like the rest of the world, is doomed to a bleak future filled with billions of climate refugees seeking shelter in the far north, and


in places like New Zealand, Tasmania and Antarctica in the far south.






Meetings in Copenhagen and Rio de Janeiro and at the UN in Manhattan


will not stop global warming.






What we need to focus on now is preparing future generations for what


our world will become in the next 500 years and how best to survive


it.






For the next 100 to 200 years or so, life will go on as normal in


Israel in terms of climate change and global warming issues. There is


nothing to worry about now. For the next 100 years posh department


stores will hawk their trendy items, computer firms will launch their


latest gadgets and airline companies will continue to offer passengers


quick passage here and there, to the Maldives and to Manhattan, for


business and for pleasure.






But in the next 500 years, according to Lovelock and other scientists


who are not afraid to think outside the box and push the envelope,


things are going to get bad. Unspeakably bad.






Those of us who are alive today won’t suffer, and the next few


generations will be fine, too. The big trouble will probably start


around 2200 — and last for some 300 years or so.






By 2500, Israel will be history, and so will be all the nations of Africa,


Asia, the Americas and Europe.






We are entering uncharted waters, and as the waters rise and the


temperatures go up, future generations will have some important


choices to make: where to live, how to live, how to grow food, how to


power their climate refugee settlements, how to plan and how to pray.






*


Danny Bloom is a writer based in Taiwan where he blogs daily


about climate change and global warming at his “Northwardho” blog.

Pioneering polar cities artist and visionary find attracting media attention an impossible task in a climate of denial and fear

Pioneering polar cities artist and visionary find attracting media attention an impossible task in a climate of denial and fear

by Web Poster
December 25, 2009

TAIPEI, TAIWAN -- Take a Taiwanese graphic artist and an American climate activist what who do you get? Polar cities!

For Deng Cheng-hong and Dan Bloom, the collaboration on their pioneering and unique look into the future of planet Earth went smoothly, even though neither of the two men speak the other person's native language. As a result, the initial communications between the two, who are neighbors in a small southern Taiwan city, was mostly by body language -- heads nods and shakes, according to Bloom, a Boston native who has been living in Asia since 1991.

Deng, 41, took Bloom's rough black-and-white pencil sketches of his imagined "polar cities" for survivors of global warming in the far distant future and turned them into a 3-D architectural drawings that have started a global discussion on the Internet on such adaptation strategies.

British scientist James Lovelock has seen Deng's images and told him in an email last year: "It may very well happen and soon!"

New York Times science reporter Andrew Revkin wrote about Deng and Bloom two years ago, and a few print newspapers have gently tiptoed into the discussion as well. But for the most part, the media does not want to touch the polar cities idea with a ten-foot pole. Bloom says he thinks this is because "most people are still in denial about what the future holds."

"Polar cities will be like lifeboats for those people who survive the major impacts of global warming in the the next 500 years," he says. "They are a positive contribution to the discussion, and there is nothing to be afraid of. Still, most newspapers and broadcast outlets will not report this story. I understand why. Most people still want to think we can fix things, that there is a way out of this climate change mess. In fact, we are doomed, doomed."

Bloom, in his early 60s, calls himself an "eternal optimist" who believes that the human species will survive the coming "Great Interruption" - as he calls the years 2100 to 3100 -- and he feels that Deng's polar city images have gone a long way in helping to focus attention on just what the future might look like, around 2500 or so.

Still, Bloom says it is almost impossible to get the mainstream media to report about his polar cities idea, or Deng's images, since neither he nor the Taiwanese artist are scientists or hold Ph.D. degrees. "The media wants credentials, and we have no credentials," Bloom says. "But many pioneering thinkers have not been professors or VIP. Jesus did not have a Ph.D., Jeremiah did not have a Ph.D., Moses was not a university professor with a corner office overlooking a bright, sunny courtyard! Why can't the media report about polar cities? One word, no, two: fear and trembling."

Still, Bloom said he is hopeful that one of these days some fearless newspaper editor will assign a reporter to cover the pair's work and interview them about polar cities, "even if it's just a think piece, a thought experiment."

"I am not looking for the media's blessings about polar cities," Bloom says. "I just want the media to report the ideas involved and let the reading public get in on the action and give their own reactions. We shouldn't be afraid of mere ideas."

[MORE HERE] http://pcillu101.blogspot.com/

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40663

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40663

CLIMATE CHANGE and POLAR CITIES


By Stephen Leahy, IPS reporter,



Graphic depictions of a model polar city by Deng Cheng-hong  in the year 2500.
http://pcillu101.blogspot.com/
Credit:Han Xin multimedia co.



BROOKLIN, Canada, Jan 2 (IPS) - Danny Bloom thinks it's time to figure out how to build self-sustaining cities in the polar regions because climate change will eventually make most of Earth uninhabitable.



These polar cities may be "humankind's only chance for survival if global warming really turns into a worldwide catastrophe in the far distant future," Bloom told IPS.



Bloom isn't a scientist or any other kind of expert. A U.S. citizen in his late fifties living in Taiwan teaching English, he's lived all over the world as a reporter-editor, teacher-translator and author. And now Bloom wants to shake people out their everyday indifference to the great emergency of our age: climate change.



"Life goes on as usual here in Taiwan. No one is doing anything and they don't want to talk about it," he says.



And sadly inaction begets inaction.



"The inactions of others can make us underestimate threats to our own safety," writes Camilla Cavendish in a recent issue of the Times of London newspaper.



Cavendish cites studies that suggest a kind of herd mentality. If climate change is a problem, then people would be doing something about it. Since they're not, then there is no problem. However, once people are aware of this dangerous tendency to follow the herd over the cliff, we can break away and forge our own more sensible path, she says.



Bloom wants people to realise that the world is on a path that could possibly lead to a future where just a few hundred million people survive in specially-designed cities in the Arctic. Originally he imagined this might happen 500 years from now. But scientists tell him it could happen far sooner than that.



Bloom has contacted scientists, experts, reporters, and many others around the world about his polar cities idea. A few months ago, a Google keyword search for "polar cities" would have produced no results. Today, there are nearly 3,000 sites that feature or offer comment on Bloom's idea, including one with a series of polar cities illustrations.



Plenty of the comments are from Bloom himself, in a one-man-who-doesn't own-a-computer attempt to spread the word. Suffice to say he spends a lot of time in Tawianese internet cafes.



His Quixotic quest began less than a year ago. Having heard various conflicting news reports about climate change, Bloom decided to research the subject as thoroughly as he could. The genesis of the polar cities idea came from a dire op-ed by the eminent British scientist James Lovelock in January 2006 in the Independent newspaper.



Lovelock wrote that the Earth will heat up far faster than any scientist expects due to many positive feedbacks such as melting of Arctic and Antarctic ice. "... Before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable," he wrote.



Lovelock's viewpoint was widely criticised as excessively pessimistic fear-mongering by many experts. No stranger to controversy, Lovelock first proposed the "Gaia Hypothesis" of Earth as a single highly complex organism in the 1970s. Last October, with many leading scientists listening, he reiterated his claim that "global heating" is progressing very fast and was likely to produce an apocalyptic six-degree C. rise in the global average temperature before the end of this century.



"At first I was depressed, but I am an optimist," Bloom says.



If catastrophic climate change was a very real possibility, why not start now to prepare sustainable polar retreats just in case. More importantly, simply imagining that polar cities may be needed one day for the very survival of the human race might wake people to the threat climate change poses, he says.



"We're really in an emergency - we can't go on normally," Bloom argues.



But polar cities is an idea that many climate change experts refuse to consider. Most of the climate scientists IPS contacted for this story declined to comment. Those who did respond said imagining such a future was not productive when humanity needs to focus on "how the world can drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions".



"It's silly to think 200 or 300 years into future, it's more useful to think 20 or 30 years out," said Ross Gelbspan, a former Washington Post-Boston Globe reporter and author of several books on climate change.



Gelbspan has done a great deal of thinking about the near future as the impacts of climate change take hold. There is no stopping the future deaths of millions of people from climate change, he believes. The only question is how many millions. His future scenarios range from a totalitarian nightmare in response to climate-driven mass migrations and social chaos to real world peace. His best guess today is we will see those extremes, and everything in between.



"We need to start talking about the kind future we want to have," Gelbspan told IPS.



Talking to young people is especially important, since it is their future. And it's important to offer alternatives and solutions. Wind farms, for example, could easily replace all of the U.S. energy produced by coal and oil, he says.



"What's the resistance to widespread use of renewables?" Gelbspan wonders.



In the U.S., he says the answer is to get the money out of politics. Oil, coal and other industries make major financial contributions in a country where presidential candidates spend tens of millions of dollars to get elected. As a result, the next U.S. president is unlikely to make the necessary drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.



Dan Bloom doesn't have answers. He knows there is a serious problem that we aren't addressing.



"Life on Earth is very fragile but we're screwing things up," he told IPS. "I'm going to spend the last years of my life pushing this idea of polar cities to wake people up. I don't care if people call me crazy."



(END/2008)

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Imagining Israel in the year 2500, special to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Ami Eden, editor, -- text by Danny Bloom

Imagining Israel in the year 2500

By Danny Bloom
special to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA)



Two recent newspaper articles about climate change in the far distant future, say 2500 or so, (titled, respectively, “How much more proof is needed for people to act?” and “Ignoring the future — the psychology of denial”) emphasized the importance of facing major issues that will have an impact on the future of the human species.

Climate change is indeed an issue that is on everyone’s mind, and while Israel seems to be far removed from the experts who recently made their way to Copenhagen to try to hammer out blueprints to prevent global warming from having a Doomsday impact on humankind, Israel will also be on the front lines of these issues. Why? Because Israel will not exist as a country by the year 2500. Everyone there will have migrated north to Russia and Alaska.

Despite most observers’ belief that solutions lie in mitigation, there are a growing number of climatologists and scientists who believe that the A-word — adaptation — must be confronted head-on, too. The fact is — despite the head-in-the-sand protestations of denialists like former Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin in the US — that we cannot stop climate change or global warming. The Earth’s atmosphere has already passed the tipping point, and in the next 500 years, temperatures and sea levels will rise considerably and millions, even billions, of people from the tropical and temperate zones will be forced to migrate in search of food, fuel and shelter. This includes the people of Israel.

By the year 2500, Israel will be largely uninhabited, except for a few stragglers eking out a subsistence life in the Golan Heights. The rest of the population will have migrated north to Russia’s northern coast or northern parts of Alaska and Canada to find safe harbor from the devastating impact of global warming.

Okay, how do I know all this, you ask? I don't know. I am just saying that we all must be prepared for the worst-case scenario.

By the year 2500, most likely, Israelis en masse will have left the country for faraway northern regions to find shelter in UN-funded climate refuges in places such as Russia, Canada and Alaska. Israeli climate refugees will join millions of others from India, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and the Philippines. It won’t be a pretty picture.

When I asked a professor at National Taiwan University in Taipei if this was a possible future scenario for Israel and other nations in the Middle East some 500 years from now, he said it was very possible, and that these issues needed to be addressed now, if only as a thought exercise, and even if it all sounded like a science fiction movie script. When I asked acclaimed British scientist James Lovelock if such a scenario for Israel was likely, he said to me in an e-mail: “It may very well happen, yes.”

We humans cannot engineer our way out of global warming, although scientists who believe in geo-engineering have offered theories on how to do it. There are no easy fixes. Humankind has pumped too many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the result of the industrial revolution that gave us trains, planes, automobiles and much more, enabling us to live comfortable and trendy lives — and now there is so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that the Earth cannot recover.

Israel, like the rest of the world, is doomed to a bleak future full of billions of climate refugees seeking shelter in the far north, and in places like New Zealand, Tasmania and Antarctica in the far south.

Meetings in Copenhagen and Rio de Janeiro and at the UN in Manhattan will not stop global warming.

What we need to focus on now is preparing future generations for what our world will become in the next 500 years and how best to survive it.

For the next 100 to 200 years or so, life will go on as normal in Israel in terms of climate change and global warming issues. There is nothing to worry about now. For the next 100 years posh department stores will hawk their trendy items, computer firms will launch their latest gadgets and airline companies will continue to offer passengers quick passage here and there, to the Maldives and to Manhattan, for business and for pleasure.

But in the next 500 years, according to Lovelock and other scientists who are not afraid to think outside the box and push the envelope, things are going to get bad. Unspeakably bad.

Those of us who are alive today won’t suffer, and the next few generations will be fine, too. The big trouble will probably start around 2200 — and last for some 300 years or so.

By 2500, Israel will be history, as will all the nations of Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe.

We are entering uncharted waters, and as the waters rise and the temperatures go up, future generations will have some important choices to make: where to live, how to live, how to grow food, how to power their climate refugee settlements, how to plan and how to pray.


Danny Bloom, author of "Bubbie and Zadie Come to My House", is a writer based in Taiwan where he blogs daily about climate change and global warming at his "Northwardho" blog.

Dear Sir, Thank you for sharing the open on climate refugees in Alaska's future in 2500 with me. Very few people think as far ahead as you do.

Dear Sir, Thank you for sharing the article with me. Very few people think as far ahead as you do.


Professor H.
National Taiwan University
Taipei
Taiwan



RE:


http://juneauempire.com/stories/121509/opi_535926036.shtml

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

[ LETTER ] from Bruce Higgins, Climate Change Letter Writer in Flagstaff, Arizona

[ LETTER TO EDITOR of the Taipei Times in Taiwan in Asia from a letter writer in Arizona state USA who is not a regular reader of the newspaper since he does not live in the country but in this day and age of Internet Time and Internet Access, a print newspaper with a web address and a good news website becomes an international newspaper, and readers anywhere in the world can find articles about issues that interest them via Google searches and RSS feeds, and that is probably how this letter to the editor of a far away newspaper came to be -- and came to be published in the print edition of that newspaper today, too. Long live the Internet, for better or worse, 'til death do us part...]



Dec 24, 3009

Credibility challenged

Dear Editor of the Taipei Times:

Visiting German Professor Bruno Walther in Taipei makes several ad hominem attacks on Danish global warming denialist Bjorn Lomborg in his opinion piece (“Global economy must be rebuilt,” Dec. 21 issue). One of these borders on dishonesty and deserves a challenge, going directly to Walther’s own credibility. He states: “The Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD) showed that [a book Lomborg authored] contained deliberately misleading, biased and fabricated data, flawed statistics and misrepresented conclusions, and was thus a clear case of scientific dishonesty contrary to the standards of good scientific practice (www.lomborg-errors.dk).” Note the url address of Walther’s source.

What Dr Walther did not say was that the DCSD report was withdrawn after the committee itself was found to have not documented the very review they supposedly conducted by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation in Denmark. Further, the ministry found the DCSD’s work to be “dissatisfactory,” “completely void of argumentation,” “open to criticism” and “emotional.”

The DCSD was given an opportunity to redo their work but declined to do so.

Surely Dr Walther knows this, since the action was taken in 2003.

Sincerely,

BRUCE HIGGINS
Flagstaff, Arizona
This letter has been viewed 123,256, 274 times.

Bruce Higgins
Owner, Paradigm Planning Resources, LLC
Flagstaff, Arizona Area
Education BS Forest Management & Recreation
3 connections Industry Renewables & Environment


Mr Higgins then writes to a blog in Taiwan saying:

I am the 'Bruce Higgins' who wrote that letter in the Taipei Times.

The ironic thing to me is that, after all the poison spewed by Dr. Walther (and in my view entirely contrary to what people playing on their credentials as PhDs should do), he ends up supporting a central proposal Lomborg has made.

I see others heading this way, as well, after Copenhagen, but my guess is that those who profess most ardently about saving the planet will loose interest in the dirty, mundane (and less expensive) tasks of actually raising the lot of humanity. Much of this movement seems to be fueled by 'joiners' who may not really have any thoughts of their own about the cause, but feel a great hunger for life to matter.

And, as Phil Jones often wrote, "Cheers."

Bruce

What Happens When Your Country Drowns? asks New Zealand native Rachel Morris in a recent issue of Mother Jones

What Happens When Your Country Drowns?
Meet the people of Tuvalu, the world's first climate refugees.

— By Rachel Morris, a native of New Zealand now living in the USA

12,646 Comments below

December 2009 Issue

IT'S A BRIGHT, BALMY SUNDAY afternoon and I'm driving through the
western outskirts of Auckland, New Zealand, the kind of place you
never see on a postcard. No majestic mountains, no improbably green
pastures—just a bland tangle of shopping malls and suburbia. I follow
a dead-end street, past a rubber plant, a roofing company, a drainage
service, and a plastics manufacturer, until I reach a white building
behind a chain-link fence. Inside is a kernel of a nation within a
nation—a sneak preview of what a climate change exodus looks like.

This is the Tuvalu Christian Church, the heart of a migrant community
from what may be the first country to be rendered unlivable by global
warming. Tuvalu is the fourth-smallest nation on Earth: six coral
atolls and three reef islands flung across 500,000 square miles of
ocean, about halfway between Australia and Hawaii. It has few natural
resources to export and no economy to speak of; its gross domestic
product relies heavily on the sale of its desirable Internet domain
suffix, which is .tv, and a modest trade in collectible stamps.
Tuvalu's total land area is just 16 square miles, of which the highest
point stands 16 feet above the waterline. Tuvaluans, who have a high
per-capita incidence of good humor, refer to the spot as "Mount
Howard," after the former Australian prime minister who refused to
ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that
low-lying island nations are particularly endang­ered by rising seas
and will also be buffeted by more frequent and more violent storms.
Already, warmer ocean temperatures are eating away at the coral reefs
that form Tuvalu's archipelagic spine. Tuvaluans themselves point to
more tangible indicators of trouble—the "king tides" that increasingly
sluice their homes, the briny water oozing up into the "grow pits"
where they used to cultivate taro and other vegetables. As Julia
Whitty predicted in this magazine in 2003, the prognosis has become
sufficiently dire that the residents of Tuvalu and other low-lying
atoll islands "are beginning to envision the wholesale abandonment of
their nations." Around one-fifth of the 12,000-some inhabitants have
already left, most bound for New Zealand, where the Tuvaluan community
has nearly tripled since 1996.

Inside the church I find a vibrant scene, suggesting both the
resilience of Tuvaluan culture and its ability to adapt. Rows of green
plastic chairs are filled with several hundred chattering churchgoers,
some in traditional lavalavas—vivid cotton skirts emblazoned with
flowers—others in Western dresses and suits. A border of bright blue,
yellow, and pink stars rings the upper walls—in Tuvalu these might be
constructed from frangipani blossoms, but here they are woven from the
plastic bands used to tether shipping cargo. As soon as I sit down, a
young man in a dapper dark suit strikes up a conversation. He came
here in 1997, is making good money, and hasn't been home once. "You
may have heard the news about Tuvalu—with global warming, the sea is
rising," he says cheerfully. "So better we come here to be safe."
Tuvaluans, resigned to fielding reporters' questions about their
homeland's impending doom, often offer observations like this
unprompted.


The tiny island of Tepuka Savilivili is among those most at risk of
disappearing.

After the service, the congregation drifts outside to the gravelly
yard, where a group of visitors from the islands is reenacting the
crucifixion of Christ on a makeshift stage draped with threadbare
astroturf. Reverend Elisala Selu, a thoughtful, soft-spoken man who
has worked second jobs to avoid burdening his congregants, explains
that Tuvaluan politicians are reluctant to encourage the mass
evacuation of their voting base, and so the church, wanting people to
be prepared, has taken matters into its own hands. It instructs
followers not to assume that, like Noah, they will be delivered by God
from the rising waters, and hosts groups of congregants who visit New
Zealand to see if they might like to relocate here. But, Selu
confides, life in New Zealand isn't always easy. The Tuvaluans are one
of the country's poorest communities. Just over half the adults have
found work; the median income is about $17,000 for men, $10,000 for
women. There are those here illegally—overstayers, in Pacific
parlance—who struggle to make ends meet; Tuvaluans on the run from
debt collectors after buying cars on shady financing schemes; children
left unattended for long hours because their parents work multiple
jobs as cleaners or laborers or farmworkers. Then there's the jarring
adjustment to urban Auckland from a place where most citizens don't
pay rent or buy food, but sleep on grass mats beside the road on warm
nights, go fishing or pick breadfruit when they're hungry, and where,
as one jovial Tuvaluan remarked to me, "the only crime is cycling in
the night without a torch [flashlight]." Selu frets about the new
generation of Tuvaluan children born in New Zealand. "We try to run
away from the sea rise in Tuvalu, but this is another sea-level rise,"
he says with a wry smile. "The next generation gets caught by two
cultures. Before Tuvalu sinks physically, our identity might sink in a
foreign country."

Tuvalu and other low-lying island countries like Kiribati and the
Maldives are, in one sense, the starkest example of how climate change
will reshape the world. But Auckland's Tuvaluan community also
represents a best-case scenario—so far their migration has been
orderly, and their numbers are minuscule compared with the millions of
impoverished people who live in global warming hot spots like Africa's
Sahel, coastal Bangladesh, and Vietnam's deltas. Koko Warner, an
expert on climate change and migration at the United Nations
University in Bonn, says the displacement of those populations could
be "a phenomenon of a scope not experienced in human history."

Yet little has been done to prepare. In fact, our understanding of
exactly how global warming will affect people—how many lives will be
threatened, and what we could do to avert a succession of humanitarian
disasters—remains extremely rudimentary. As Bill Gates has caustically
observed, "It is interesting how often the impact of climate change is
illustrated by talking about the problems the polar bears will face
rather than the much greater number of poor people who will die unless
significant investments are made to help them."



IN JUNE, I TRAVELED to the verdant, secluded campus of Columbia
University's Earth Institute, near the New York Palisades, to find out
how global warming will reconfigure the world's political geography.
Earth Institute scientists, along with researchers from the United
Nations University, have conducted a global study to chart how
environmental change will affect vulnerable populations.

Alex de Sherbinin, one of the project's lead researchers, explained
that the investigation was prompted by the realization that existing
data about how many people could be uprooted by climate change had
been "essentially grabbed from thin air." The most commonly cited
factoid, which pops up even in authoritative sources like the British
government's Stern Review on climate change, predicts 200 million
"environmental refugees" by 2050—1 in every 34 people on Earth. But
even the scholar who produced that number—Norman Myers, an Oxford
ecologist—concedes that it required some "heroic extrapolations." None
of the existing figures uses a vetted scientific methodology, and most
rely instead on crude estimations, like choosing the most sensitive
regions and assuming that every single inhabitant will have to leave.

De Sherbinin's project takes a more fine-grained approach. "We found
that livelihood would be the main factor in how people decide to stay
or go," he explained. The aim is to connect hard scientific data about
glacier melt, precipitation, drought, and sea rise with knowledge of
how people interact with their environment, obtained through extensive
field interviews. The fieldwork is used to figure out whether there
are ways to help, say, a farmer remain on his land as rainfall
declines, or whether he will need to relocate to survive.

De Sherbinin gave me a quick tour of the world's prospective disaster
zones by way of his laptop. He brought up a map of Tuvalu's main
island of Funafuti, rendered in such detail that you could see which
houses will be submerged if the sea rises by three feet. Then, the
Ganges delta region of Bangladesh and India, home to 144 million
people. Variegated red patches indicated population
density—overlapping some of the deepest red spots were blue blotches
marking the places most likely to be lost to flooding. Next: Vietnam,
which de Sherbinin says is likely to lose more agricultural land
(especially in the Mekong delta) to sea-level rise than any other
country. Blue streaks—signifying a 6.6-foot rise—on the high end of
what scientists think is possible—erased land inhabited by 14 million
people. Finally, a map of the Sahel region of West Africa, where
nearly half the population survives on subsistence farming, and where
rainfall is projected to decline severely. Overall, the number of
Africans facing water shortages is expected to double by 2050.

"For a lot of these places, prospects don't look too good—I don't want
to suggest easy solutions," de Sherbinin said. But some people, he
argued, have options. In Africa, he pointed out, while desertification
is a grave problem, much of the continent lacks water capture and
storage systems. "There's a potential to do much more. If these
countries had the wherewithal—most of them don't—they could develop in
irrigation."

I heard a similar argument from Paul Kench, a geomorphologist at the
University of Auckland and an expert on atoll islands. Kench looked
like someone who spends a lot of time on beaches—shorts, sandals,
sandy hair, golden tan. He argued that many climate scientists draw
overly broad conclusions from abstract data about sea-level rise
without observing the precise ways that oceanic change affects
particular places. Like many New Zealanders, he has a relentlessly
practical streak, and he insisted that many residents of Tuvalu and
other imperiled countries could actually stay put, if only people
would pay proper attention to the science.

Using data from Tuvalu, the Maldives, and Kiribati, Kench and his
coauthor, Peter Cowell, are creating computer models visualizing what
will happen as the sea rises. "What we've been unable to do is totally
destroy an island," he said. Instead, he explained, as waves wash over
these narrow slivers of land, they reshape their contours. On some
islands, rising seas lifted sand from the beach and deposited it
farther inland, steepening the island's plane and raising its highest
point. In Tuvalu, storms shaved rubble off the reefs and welded it to
nearby islands, building new outer layers "like onion skins." On other
islands, seasonal tides shuffled sand from one side to another, so
that in January the eastern part of the island might grow, only to
recede in July as the western side extended.

Kench argued that in many Pacific atoll nations, people are clustered
densely in the islands' most fragile places (in turn creating man-made
environmental strains that amplify the effects of climate change).
"With some careful planning, you could identify safe places to live.
You could identify islands more sensitive to change than others, ones
that can take more people than others. There's lots of quite sensible
things we could do." The Maldives has invited Kench to research such
possibilities. (Keeping its options open, the government is also
considering buying land in Australia.) Right now, Kench said, in most
low-lying island nations there's almost "no information to base
decisions on"—even on basic questions like the relationship of
valuable resources to the waterline. "That reads like stamp
collecting—cataloging environmental resources and processes. But it
gives you great power to make sensible decisions."

Kench's vision was appealing—the idea of a people joining hands with
science and orienting their lives even more intimately around the
rhythms of their environment. But it was hard to envision anyone
enacting the kind of exquisitely calibrated resettlement plan that he
had in mind—either local governments, starved for cash and expertise,
or institutions like the World Bank, which tends to react to
environmental fragility by pouring concrete. And redistributing
Tuvalu's population more wisely couldn't safeguard against the
projected increase of ferocious storms, the erosion of coral, or
salinization of the islands' scarce arable soil.

Yet because a certain amount of environmental change is locked in no
matter what negotiators at Copenhagen decide, Kench's type of thinking
is sorely needed. Thomas Fingar, the former chairman of the National
Intelligence Council, conducted an assessment of the national security
implications of climate change in 2008. "The international system
needs to think about this, whether it's prepositioning water, tents,
and so on, developing assistance programs," Fingar told me. Instead,
he noted drily, when he delivered his analysis to the House committees
on intelligence and global warming, it got "overshadowed by a debate
over whether this topic was incredibly important or incredibly
stupid." He added, "Shouldn't we start thinking about coping
strategies? Stop ringing the damn alarm bell and go buy some buckets."
The Obama administration is turning to these questions, but it's
playing catch-up for years of lost time.

Next Page: When does a nation cease to be a nation?


Rachel Morris is the articles editor in Mother Jones'
Washington bureau. She was born and grew up in New Zealand.

Climate Change: Inupiat Eskimo “Climate Refugees” in Alaska - PHOTOS BY TIM MATSUI

Climate Change: Inupiat Eskimo “Climate Refugees” in Alaska December 9th, 2009

The work I did in Kivalina, Alaska, for Spiegel Magazine keeps on cropping up in the news. One of the climate conference topics in Copenhagen deals with the number of “climate refugees,” estimated at 150 million, who will be forced to move, in part, because of rising sea levels. Never mind the issues of drought, its impacts on traditional farming regions, arguments and even wars over fresh water rights, etc.



CNN went to Alaska to report on a village not far from Kivalina. Sishmaref was one of the villages the people in Kivalina talked about. It too has a small population in a permanent settlement established by the Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs when they built a school; unfortunately, they placed it on a low island exposed the sea.



I think it’s a timely piece, especially given the conference in Copenhagen, and reminds me quite vividly of my few days in Kivalina trying to capture the essence of a culture on the verge of being swallowed by the sea. Not to be too melodramatic, but this truly is the reality both physically and metaphorically for the risk to their culture is as pressing as the erosion of their coastline.



Above is a link to the CNN article on Shishmaref, Alaska, and below is a link to a VERY loose image gallery edit of neighboring Kivalina, Alaska. Both villages are facing a warming climate and rising sea.

From Climategate to Copenhagen: Time for a Far Northern Perspective - commentary by Barry Zellen

From Climategate to Copenhagen: Time for a Far Northern Perspective



By Barry Zellen

With the fractious Copenhagen climate summit nearing its end, and President Obama planning to attend the final day of negotiations in the hope a presidential "surge" will help to close the gap that still divides the industrialized North from the developing South, the world's attention remains keenly fixed on the normally quiet capital of Denmark. Street protests and mass arrests, staged walkouts by delegates from the Group of 77 to protest backroom deals sought by the West, and a widening perception that the summit has descended into chaos, have marred what many climate activists had long hoped would be a political love-in they believed would literally save the world. But such a happy ending seems unlikely with the summit's end fast approaching. The gap between the southern and the northern hemispheres, between the wealthy, Western world and the poorer developing world, looks to be insurmountable.










Up here, in the Far North, we live in both these worlds: the modern, industrialized, developed world; and the still-developing world. We know the limitless hope that fuels the former, and the sobering despair that can infuse the latter; this is perhaps why the Far North is considered by so many to be its own unique "Fourth World." With the climate summit in crisis, and the festering North-South rift threatening to derail all hope for a climate deal, the time is especially opportune for our own Far Northern perspective.






As an Arctic state, with sovereignty over the giant, glaciated island of Greenland, it is fitting that this pivotal, if paralyzed, climate conference has been taking place here, since it is in the Arctic that the impact of climate change has been most palpably felt — with recent years witnessing rapid and profound changes that were literally off the charts, whether the unprecedented spring sea ice melts three years running; the opening up of an ice-free Northwest Passage and Northern Sea Route for the first time in human history; or the thawing of yet more permafrost, and with it the worrisome bubbling forth of methane from far below.






There's been a lot fiery rhetoric about the potentially catastrophic impacts of a warming Earth. But just as a "glass half-full" looks to those more pessimistically inclined to be half-empty, all this talk of climate doom and gloom overshadows the more optimistic possibility that a polar thaw will bring us many economic and strategic benefits. As the world's diplomats converge in Copenhagen, it is important not to let pessimism rule the day, or to presume that a warming Earth is necessarily a dying Earth.






Indeed, the professed certainty of the climate-pessimists collides full on with the inherent uncertainty of science itself. This has been noted recently by Mike Hulme, formerly a professor of climate change at the University of East Anglia, who observed in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Dec. 4th, "When science is invoked to support such dogmatic assertions, the essential character of scientific knowledge is lost — knowledge that results from open, always questioning, enquiry that, at best, can offer varying levels of confidence for pronouncements about how the world is, or may become." Hulme's comments are especially poignant in light of Climategate, the gathering scandal whose ground-zero is his old university's Climatic Research Unit (CRU).






While the jury is still out on the damage ultimately caused to climate science by the sensational release to the public domain of CRU documents, correspondence and source code, skeptics have rightly focused their attention on the many shocking emails that reveal climate science to be at the very least politically tainted, and at the very worst an orchestrated fraud — where bullying and blacklisting of intellectual opponents, and a concerted, multi-year effort to censor academic journals and thereby prevent climate change skeptics from airing their views, have become tools of the trade. As former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin put it in her Dec. 9th Washington Post op-ed, Climategate "exposes a highly politicized scientific circle — the same circle whose work underlies efforts at the Copenhagen climate change conference. The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won't change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worse."






Unfortunately, the politicization of the climate change battle has limited the debate that we ought to be having. While many climate change pessimists have concluded that the earth system is heading into a profound climate crisis, and that action is required at a planetary level to prevent the coming tragedy, a more optimistic few anticipate there will be far less severe consequences and perhaps even some positive ones as well. A real debate on the winners and losers of climate change is thus still worth having.






Part of the problem is that the climate change activists have developed a compelling narrative the equates stopping global warming with expanding the sphere of human freedom, and by linking not only mankind's survival but the very purpose of a united, post-Cold War western world to the climate issue, it has found a cause celebre to unite diplomats, heads of state, climate scientists, and activists. Not since the collapse of communism and the expansion of NATO into former Soviet territory has there been an issue that has unified the West so coherently, certainly when compared to the divisive nature of the War on Terror, and in particular, its expansion from the original war against Al Qaeda to the broader war of democratic transformation of Muslim lands as envisioned by the Bush Doctrine. That expansion of mission, with its rising body count and continuing drain on the national treasuries of the West, has eroded the unity with which the western world first responded to the tragedy of 9/11.






A less bloody battle front, with less determined resistance to the full might of the united West, greatly appeals to leaders on both sides of the Atlantic, and so with much fanfare, western leaders lined up in front of the Brandenburg Gate in a now free Berlin on Nov. 9th this year to make their case that the world that became united twenty years ago when the Berlin Wall came down must now stand united as it tears down one more wall: that of today's threat to human freedom and survival, climate change.






Indeed, this is precisely what German Chancellor Angela Merkel told the U.S. Congress on Nov. 3rd, just a few days before world leaders converged on Berlin to topple Styrofoam facsimiles of the old Berlin Wall, lined up, ironically, as dominos, since communism fell with a rapidity and interconnectedness that exhumed and rehabilitated the long-discredited "Domino Theory" that had so wounded American power in Indochina a generation earlier. That Styrofoam itself, a medium-density polystyrene foam known to harm the ozone layer as well as human health, is about as ecologically unfriendly as you can get was not acknowledged as those feather-light dominos cascaded their way along the old Wall's 155km perimeter, after the first symbolic push by Polish democracy activist, Solidarity founder, and first elected president, Lech Walesa.






Chancellor Merkel told the U.S. Congress that she was "convinced, just as we found the strength in the 20th century to bring about the fall of a wall made of concrete and barbed wire, we shall now show that necessary strength to overcome the walls of the 21st century," and that she hoped "in Copenhagen we shall be able to overcome this wall separating the present and future in the interest of our children and grandchildren, and in the interest of sustainable development all over the world." Merkel's wall is thus metaphorical, one separating hope from despair, much as she viewed the old Berlin Wall that held back the East, preventing it from rejoining the more prosperous West during the post-World War II period.






But with the rapid warming of the earth, portrayed by so many climate-pessimists as, in the words of President Barack Obama, "a potential ecologic disaster," we will in fact witness the final collapse of a very different wall, one not just metaphorical but also very physical, and which has divided the Earth between East and West for uncounted millennia, dating back before the very dawn of man.






That wall is the polar ice cap, that continent-sized barrier at the top of our world, a barrier to trade and commerce, to progress, and to the final unification of East and West that started when the artificial wall erected by political man came down during the joyous celebration of freedom in Berlin. So while Chancellor Merkel is correct in linking the fall of the Berlin Wall to that wall which stands between present and future that is posed by the climate issue, she is wrong to conclude that it is the warming of the earth that we must fear.






Indeed, her effort and that of her like-minded colleagues in Copenhagen to slow, stop, and even reverse the warming trend, will only serve to keep this final wall dividing East from West in place. We should thus allow nature to bring down this final wall, one that clings stubbornly to the icy top of our world even though the last Ice Age has come to an end elsewhere on our planet. When the glaciers retreated and warmth returned to the world, it catalyzed a wave of human exploration and development and achievement through the mobility and commerce and productivity thereby unleashed. Rather than work to slow the warming, we should let it instead run its course. Echoing President Reagan's historic call to Soviet Premier Gorbachev a generation ago, Chancellor Merkel, we must tear down this wall!






The notion of a looming ecological disaster if we don't act now and with determination to stop down global warming, while dogma in the Obama White House as it is across the now united West, has much less to do with climate science than it does with politics, where instead of terrorists it is now the tipping point of climate doom that is this young administration's new bogeyman. Forget the Taliban, or even Al Qaeda, or the specter of mass terror attack on our homeland. Instead we have this new, dark specter of a melting polar ice pack, and presumed mass flooding of our coastal cities that would surely, to keep us awake at night.






Never mind that the polar ice pack is buoyant, floating ice upon water, whose melting would not result in a single inch of increased sea level of the world ocean. It is true that were the Greenland or Antarctic ice caps to thaw, sea levels would rise, but these remain uncertain outcomes. Evidence of an Antarctic thaw is at best anecdotal and localized to that continent's edge, and so a massive melt unlikely in the near-term. Even as icebergs calve off its outer rim, its interior highlands continue to remain in deep freeze, with some evidence that the ice pack there is in fact thickening. A potential thaw of the massive Greenland ice cap also remains uncertain, with recent glacial retreats suspected to be a cyclical phenomenon and not evidence of an imminent collapse as had been widely portrayed in the media. And so the flooding that keeps many awake at night may never come, at least not in our lifetimes or those of our children, and in the end it may be only fear itself that keeps a restful sleep at bay.






The haunting images of a looming end to the Arctic are truly epic in their scale, and dramatically illustrate the urgency felt by the many climate-change pessimists now in power who believe that mankind — and perhaps all life itself — will become the biggest loser of a warming earth. But these images may be better suited to Hollywood films like The Day After, and not to the formulation of national or global policy. Indeed, these very same images of the Arctic's transformation also fuel the imaginations of a few brave climate change optimists who don't buy into the mantra that the sky is falling, or that mankind drastically must change or die, and who in fact believe a warmer earth may be both more bountiful and unified than today's belligerent planet. With the warming of the earth, they see many new rays of hope.






They imagine a better, more integrated world where international shipping will take the direct northern route linking Asian and North American markets to Europe, cutting consumption of fuel, stimulating the economic development of Arctic port communities and bypassing chokepoints vulnerable to terrorism or piracy. With the thawing of the Arctic, the polar basin will at last fulfill its metaphorical potential as an Arctic Aegean, a modern-day Mediterranean — literally a crossroads of the world — with a robust trading relationship counterbalancing strategic competition, as the geophysical separation of East and West by the continent-sized barrier of polar ice comes to an end. And once the physical barrier is gone, political barriers will likely also fall, just as they did once the Berlin Wall came down and the divided peoples of East and West found they had a great deal more in common to unite them than many Cold Warriors had believed.






In the geopolitical terms of Sir Halford John Mackinder, the famed theorist of geopolitics, the long isolated "Lenaland" of the Arctic will transform into a highly productive and strategically important circumpolar "Rimland" — transforming the polar basin into a true strategic, economic and military crossroads of the world. Tomorrow's Arctic will no longer be on the periphery, no longer an "Ultima Thule" but now a "Midnight Sea," at the midpoint of the world's sea routes, like the Mediterranean in ancient times. The coming Arctic Spring promises to be a new age of opportunity and change, as globalization and climatic transformation finally reunite the four corners of the earth, with the North Pole at its very center.






And so as Copenhagen approaches its conclusion, and as the pleas for a more self-sacrificial effort to forestall the tragic fate imagined for us all become more impassioned, with talk of emission caps, a capital fund by which the industrialized North can subsidize the greening of the much poorer South, and an apparent widening of the rift that separates the bottom from the top of the world, we should counter with a more optimistic vision, and a can-do attitude that recognizes our world may be transformed, but not necessarily destroyed. After all, the true climate villain has long been the industrialized West, though the rapidly industrializing economic powerhouse of China is now as rigorous a polluter as the United States and Europe; broadly speaking, it has been the northern hemisphere that has got us into this mess, by belching forth a steady torrent of carbon effluent since the Age of Industry first liberated man from a life of toil on the land, and from the whim of weather.






And so mankind's very freedom, first from the hard life of agricultural labor, and increasingly, from the increasingly automated procedures of the factory floor, has been tied to man's prodigious carbon output. As the greenhouse gases have poured forth, mankind has enjoyed an increasing life span, a dramatic increase in living standards, and the emergence of a new, post-modern digital culture that unites the planet as it has never before been united.






And so Chancellor Merkel was correct to see a link between mankind's freedom and that of the Earth's warming, but she views climate change as the new threat to freedom, and not as the potent symptom of mankind's millennial achievement of freedom. It is a natural mistake, one being made by millions of climate-change activists who have taken to the streets to demand we slow down, and try to reverse, the warming trend. Czech President Vaclav Klaus, one of the most prominent climate-change skeptics, views the matter differently. As he told Peter Robinson at Stanford University's Hoover Institution on Dec. 1st, global warming is a "politician's myth," and the dogma of the climate-change movement is ominously reminiscent of the failed ideology of communism.






A month earlier, at the Nov. 4th Washington Times Climate Change Policy Conference, President Klaus cautioned that "we should not forget how the doctrine of global warming came into being. In a normal case, everything starts with an empirical observation, with the discovery of evident trends or tendencies. Then follow scientific hypotheses and their testing. When they are not refuted, they begin to influence politicians. The whole process finally leads to some policy measures." But in fact, "none of this was the case with the global warming doctrine. It started differently. The people who had never believed in human freedom, in impersonal forces of the market and other forms of human interaction and in the spontaneity of social development and who had always wanted to control, regulate and mastermind us have been searching for a persuasive argument that would justify these ambitions of theirs. After trying several alternative ideas — population bomb, rapid exhaustion of resources, global cooling, acid rains, ozone holes — that all very rapidly proved to be non-existent, they came up with the idea of global warming. Their doctrine was formulated before reliable data evidence, before the formulation of scientifically proven theories, before their comprehensive testing based on today's level of statistical methods."






With the conclusion of Copenhagen fast approaching, and the specter the summit will end with a whimper and not a bang, it is vitally important that we re-consider this presumption of a climate crisis, and question the legitimacy of the foundation that climate activists have long argued underlies their cause. As Climategate sadly revealed, a dangerous undercurrent of dogma and ideology permeates the correspondence of CRU's climate scientists, who surrendered scientific objectivity, and science's embrace of complexity and inherent uncertainty, in favor of ideological certainty and rigidity. In so doing they undermined the very foundation of the climate change movement, revealing the skepticism of Czech President Klaus to be uniquely prescient.






We must not lose sight of this fact, especially here in the Far North. After all, the very top of our planet might be the biggest winner of climate change, and not the biggest loser as so many climate activists have sought to argue. It is our stake in the future now unfolding that we must consider. Indeed, it is the promise of a post-Arctic world that inspires the people of Greenland, offering them not only a way out of endemic poverty but a path toward true independence. As reported in Nunatsiaq News on Dec. 14, "Greenland wants to develop and gain financial independence from Denmark, which would require a doubling its output of climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions, Greenland's premier Kuupik Kleist said during a Dec. 14 news conference in Copenhagen." Kleist explained that "Greenland has the right to pursue industrial development and offer its citizens more access to jobs, education, health care and independence—even if that means substantially increasing its production of climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions."






Greenlanders see the glacial retreats and earlier spring ice melts as an opportunity for growth and development, a view shared by many across the North. A post-Arctic world promises to put the North smack dab in the center of the world of commerce and geopolitics. The opportunities ahead are indeed compelling. We must therefore look beyond the question of whether the earth is warming or not, or whether this warming is anthropogenic or not. The more fundamental question is whether climate change is necessarily a crisis, or perhaps an opportunity of historic proportions. This is a question worthy of debate, and which should be in discussion at Copenhagen this week.






While such a debate has long seemed futile, given the degree to which the climate-crisis camp has come to dominate the scientific and policy agendas in recent years, perhaps now, with the climate-pessimists on the defensive and their long-hidden biases revealed, the opportunity for such a debate has arrived. Now, perhaps, the Far Northern perspective can be considered, so that our hopes and dreams — long absent from the discourse of the diplomats in Copenhagen — are no longer ignored by those all too happy to keep our future on ice.






Barry Zellen is the author of Arctic Doom, Arctic Boom: The Geopolitics of Climate Change in the Arctic (Praeger Books, October 2009); On Thin Ice: The Inuit, the State and the Challenge of Arctic Sovereignty (Lexington Books, November 2009); and Breaking the Ice: From Land Claims to Tribal Sovereignty in the Arctic (Lexington Books, March 2008). He directs the Arctic Security Project for the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School.