Greenhouse gas emissions shock scientists

[wtmusic]

"WASHINGTON -- The world pumped up emissions of the chief human-produced global warming gas last year, setting a course that could push beyond leading scientists' projected worst-case scenario, international researchers said Thursday.

The new numbers, which some scientists called "scary," were a surprise because experts thought an economic downturn would slow energy use. Instead, carbon dioxide output rose 3% from 2006 to 2007.

That amount exceeds the most dire outlook for emissions from burning coal and oil and related activities as projected by a Nobel Prize-winning group of international scientists in 2007."

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-na-warming26-2008sep26,0,6690604.story

Has Sarah Palin weighed in on this yet??

[Lorien]

1. Has ANYONE?? Once again, the environment isn't even an issue

during the campaigns. The Left needs to learn from the Right; MAKE THE ISSUES. Don't just REACT to the issues they put on the table (like gay marriage). Take a REAL issue and put a spotlight on it! Is losing the planet's ability to sustain life AT ALL important? Er, yeah it is!


BTW- this should be in LBN or GD, otherwise it'll just be forgotten.

[kristopher]

4. There are 4 components to the problem

Environmental threat

Energy security

Energy prices

Employment


They are arguing 3 of the 4 pillars. The right has been extremely effective at negating the environmental pillar by packaging it in with their ideological template, and there is no sense trying to alter that as part of the election strategy. If anything, focusing on the environmental issues would motivate opposition by activating the defense response built into the conservative world view.

You might find this paper interesting: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/glep.2006.6.1.76
Jacques, Peter.
The Rearguard of Modernity: Environmental Skepticism as a Struggle of Citizenship
Global Environmental Politics - Volume 6, Number 1, February 2006, pp. 76-101

The MIT Press

Peter Jacques - The Rearguard of Modernity: Environmental Skepticism as a Struggle of Citizenship- Global Environmental Politics 6:1 Global Environmental Politics 6.1 (2006) 76-101 The Rearguard of Modernity: Environmental Skepticism as a Struggle of Citizenship

Peter Jacques* Environmental skepticism doubts the importance and reality of environmental problems, but it is not about science. It is about politics -- global politics to be specific.

Environmental skepticism denies the reality and importance of mainstream global environmental problems. However, its most important challenges are in its civic claims which receive much less attention. These civic claims defend the basis of ethical authority of the dominant social paradigm. The article explains how political values determine what skeptics count as a problem. One such value described is “deep anthropocentrism,” or the attempt to split human society from non-human nature and reject ecology as a legitimate field of ethical concern. This bias frames what skeptics consider legitimate knowledge. The paper then argues that the contemporary conservative countermovement has marshaled environmental skepticism to function as a rearguard for a maladaptive set of core values that resist public efforts to address global environmental sustainability. As such, the paper normatively argues that environmental skepticism is a significant threat to efforts to achieve sustainability faced by human societies in a globalizing world.

[GliderGuider]

6. I agree with Jacques completely

These are essentially the same arguments I made in "Political Will, Political Won't", except there's no indication from the abstract that Jacques examines the origins of the "dominant social paradigm" whose authority the skeptics are defending.

[kristopher]

7. You could examine his list of writings.

You could examine his list of writings if the article isn't available (I thought it was open access). He is well versed in social movements.


I don't see much similarity in what he has written and what you linked to. Jacques develops the theme that conservative perceptions of environmentalism have been shaped to allow environmentalism to replace communism as their whipping-boy. It is well grounded in reality and confirmed by another paper doing an empirical study of the origins of environmental skeptic literature.

[navarth]

2. recommend

they've been sort of teasing the edges of this problem, talking about green jobs...but nothing really substantial.

[XemaSab]

3. .

[stuntcat]

5. .

[tom_paine]

8. Everything is happening faster than expected, and we have absolutely no control over ourselves...

Ever wonder what the first Easter Islanders to really begin to see how fucked up their environment was becoming, or the first Aztecs?

Actually, it is almost certain they thought what we are thinking right now, except locally instead of globally. We are they and they are us.

As hardy as human beings are, I will quite frankly be amazed if there are any h. sapiens around in 20,000 years and likely it will be much sooner.

It also depends on how long and agonizing the death of the human species is. It might be a multi-millenial journey from a global human population of 100,000 to 1,000, to 0, and it certainly won't be a pleasant one. Any more that it must have been pleasant for the billions of animal communities that suffered the same environmental degradation and population collapse (albeit in a much faster time-frame) who suffered basically what we will soon be suffering as humanity exploded numerically and technologically into all areas.

What goes around comes around, I suppose.

I am very glad it is a statistical impossibility that I should live to see the year 2100, and highly unlikely to see 2050. Pity those who do.