CSHTF
 

All -

"The coming climate panic?

23 DEC 2009 9:46 AM
BY AUDEN SCHENDLER, MARK TREXLER

One morning in the not too distant future, you might wake up and walk to your mailbox. The newspaper is in there and it�s covered with shocking headlines: Coal Plants Shut Down! Airline Travel Down 50 Percent! New Federal Carbon Restrictions in Place! Governor Kicked Out of Office for Climate Indolence!

Sometimes change is abrupt and unsettling. History shows that societies in crisis too often leap from calm reaction to outright panic.

The only thing your bath-robed, flip-flopped, weed-eating neighbor wants to talk about over the fence isn�t the Yankees, but, of all things ... climate change.

Shaking your head, you think: What just happened?

With a non-binding agreement coming out of Copenhagen at the same time that atmospheric CO2 creeps above 390 parts per million, it�s possible that a new feeling might soon gain prevalence in the hearts of people who understand climate science. That feeling is panic. Specifically, climate panic.

In the same way that paleoclimate records show evidence of abrupt climate changes, we think it�s increasingly possible that policy responses to climate change will themselves be abrupt. After years of policy inaction, a public climate backlash is already smoldering. When it blows, it could force radical policy in a short timeframe. It�s the same kind of cultural tipping point, often triggered by dramatic events, that has led to revolutions or wars in the past.

The backlash is brewing in the form of increasingly strident comments from respected and influential people. Economist and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman has called government indolence on the issue �treason.� NRDC attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has called it �a crime against nature.� Environmental journalist and author Elizabeth Kolbert has described �a technologically advanced society choosing to destroy itself,� while James Hansen and Rajendra Pachauri, perhaps the world�s leading climate scientists, have said inaction in the next several years will doom the planet.

Meanwhile, that very planet is visibly changing�epic droughts, fires and dust storms in Australia; floods in Asia, alarmingly fast melting of land ice in Greenland and Antarctica; the prospect of an ice-free summer on the Arctic Sea; raging, unprecedented fires throughout the world; and mosquito-borne illnesses like Dengue spreading to regions previously untouched. Measurements show that the oceans are rising and becoming more acidic, while the Earth�s average temperature was higher in the past decade than at any time in the past century.

At some point, even climate change becomes teenager obvious: �Well, Duh, Dad! Look around you!�

When the psychology of in-your-face warming gets combined with a shocking climate event�something like Hurricane Katrina on steroids�you end up with a witches brew that can result in what political scientist Aristide Zolberg has referred to as �moments of madness��unique historical moments when society challenges conventional wisdom and new norms are forcibly�oftentimes disruptively�created.

There are many historical precedents: the economic and political chaos in Weimar Germany that ultimately led to the rise of Hitler, the violence of the French Revolution, the sudden, peaceful collapse of the Soviet empire.

Stock market panics are another example: a rapid change in mindset that illustrates the dangerous unpredictability of human systems. On climate, such a response could mean sudden and painfully costly dislocations in the energy markets�and therefore the global economy�that wind up becoming the �worst case� scenario that few people had considered possible.

It is exactly these economic impacts that the Glenn Becks and the Rush Limbaughs fear we�ll impose on ourselves through restrictive government regulation of energy and carbon emissions. Ironically, a �no action� approach today actually makes a climate panic much more likely over time. What we�re describing would be popularly driven, not fueled by governments or policy wonks. It would be the direct result of free will, democracy, autonomy and the information superhighway. All these forces would accelerate, not mitigate, the greatest �Aha!� moment in the history of the human species. Imagine the sub-prime mortgage bubble pop multiplied a hundred fold.

Yet business and government planners continue to anticipate much less abrupt transitions to a carbon-constrained future. Even renewable energy policy and emissions reduction scenarios dismissed as crazily aggressive are based on relatively incremental change.

That�s a big problem. We believe that business leaders and politicians need to add a more radical scenario to their risk assessment: a climate panic that turns us from agents into victims, ushering in chaos. The only way to avoid this catastrophic scenario is a kind of backfire panic of our own: radical, rapid, and aggressive implementation of climate policy in the United States as a message to the world. In the end, as venture capitalist Eugene Kleiner has pointed out, �sometimes panic is an appropriate response.�"


New term here, folks.

CSHTF.

"Climate Shit Hitting The Fan"

Comment, 'ca?


scyth

Re: CSHTF
 

Something is flying around the fan alright, and it isn't the climate...

Re: CSHTF
 

The warm-mongerers never seem to wanna give up, facts be damned.

Re: CSHTF
 

Ok -

I'll play...... by the way I am focused on

Severe climate change, not global warming,

Just so you know.

So, sir, lay out all your facts that

The global climate is in reality

Not changing at all,

Or possibly changing for the better.

Whatever you choose..........

And by the way, I'm assuming you are of the belief

That after the last glacial episode,

The Earth went on steady-state forever.

scyth

Re: CSHTF
 

You want to ban or reduce CO2, you prove your crap. Your the one wanting to change the world for your hoax.:thumpdown

Re: CSHTF
 

Denial is the first refuge of the addict.

Other than burning billions of tons of oil and coal over

The last century and a half,

Please give me an equivalent natural phenomenon.

Perhaps the thousandfold increases in herring populations?

Or the thousandfold increase in volcanic eruptions?

Or maybe the massive and uncontrolled increase in salmon and steelhead populations.

Or, speaking of massive and uncontrolled population increase,

Why doug fir, sitka spruce, western red cedar and ponderosa pine

Are overwhelming both the cities and the suburbs.

Pray tell.


cheers

scyth

Re: CSHTF
 

Scyth, the earth's climate is always in a state of change. Around 15 thousand years ago there was a 2 mile thick ice sheet over my head where I am typing this message. Guess what? It all melted over the course of a few thousand years when there was no man-made CO2.
Since then the earth has gone through minor warming and cooling periods. For the past ten years the earth has been cooling, not warming.
Have you heard of the term "Climategate" Do a fast google search and see what comes up. While you are at it, check out some youtube vids of Lord Monckton. The Warmistas run away in terror from him.

Re: CSHTF
 

Ahh -

Got it.

The Earth is going into a severe cooling mode.

That is why both poles are melting.

Now mind you I referred to climate change, not warming.

And all the PCB's, heavy metals, nitrates, pesticides, nuclear waste

And complex hydrocarbons that are melting out of the polar

Icecaps and polluting us all from millions of years ago.

Gosh, I wish I'd known that sooner.............

Then I wouldn't worry.

It was all the dinosaurs' fault.

Can you list me some peer reviewed reference works for this

Brilliant research?


scyth

Re: CSHTF
 

So, how did we get out of the ice ages?

SUV's?

Why is this in Prepping anyway? Put this in Conspiracies where it belongs.

Re: CSHTF
 

........and it stinks and once it flies straight into the fan, then it will not look pretty on us at all.

Re: CSHTF
 

No, like I said in my above post, there is no steady-state, only change and flux toward which all life on earth has either adapted to or perished.
The climate may indeed change for the detriment of humankind but it is presumptuous, I dare say even megalomaniacle, to suggest that humans are the cause, rather than the gargantuan forces of solar radiation fluxuations and earth orbital gyrations.
It is a part of the folly of our modern times, where man thinks he is the sum of all things and the master of creation and the universe. Rather, we are like ants compared to the power of the cosmos.
Man-made climate change is a delusion at best, a money-making scam at worst.

Re: CSHTF
 

And........

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others"

From George Orwell's "Animal Farm."

Which is to say, if I treat my 5 acres with a solid dose of Dioxin

Based herbicide, and it all dies, and the neighbor's kids

Come up with severe disabilities

I can blame it on the Universe and solar radiation fluxuations.

Cool. A rather dissolute friend of mind converted to Catholicism,

Years ago. I couldn't figure it out, so asked him why.

He said "I can confess once a week, and do it all over again."

My credo: do the best to take care of what you have, and

Are blessed with, in your life and times.

The galaxy is going to do its own trip.


scyth

Re: CSHTF
 

Scyth, I'm totally with you on the matter of pollution. We are poisoning the planet and it must stop. But made made pollution and man made climate change are not the same thing. It wouldn't surprise me if many of the Warmistas confuse Carbon Dioxide with Carbon Monoxide.

Re: CSHTF
 

Well -

I'm not a Warmista.

However, there is a pretty obvious grey zone

Between just how much and many vicious ways you can destroy

The original and natural environment,

And the ongoing environmental change in response to the destruction.

OK. Simple example. I live in the NW.

The forests are shot, cut out.

Salmon, steelhead, rockfish are gone.

The waters of the Puget Sound are loaded with heavy metals,

PCB's, petroleum residues, etc. etc..

So, if you wish to compare it to 100 years ago, we've

Trashed the place.

No question in my mind that the environment is different.

Multiply that globally. Look at those nice satellite pictures

Of Mainland China stack exhaust covering the Pacific and the Northwest.

How can anyone deny that we are not really negatively messing

With the environment.

Now, the nice Government Jesuits, with their Jesuitical arguments,

Like carbon offsets, for chrissakes,

Are pouring "oil and corn" to use the old Roman term,

To keep the populations in line.

Look at it globally, and we are definitely messing with

Our global health, whether it be timber, fish, agriculture,

Or weather.


Just my .02


scyth

Re: CSHTF
 

We humans have been very poor caretakers of Mother Earth. All of Creation moans in collective agony at the harm we have inflicted. If we cut down more trees than they can be replaced, we will end up like the Easter Islanders.
But make no mistake: Those pushing for a climate treaty and a carbon trading exchange are no friends of the planet. They are Satan's spawn, intoxicated by their greed for material wealth and hiding beneath an apron of environmentalism to further their nefarious schemes.