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Greenhouse gas sources, illustrated – ‘like a beating heart’ (Youtube and text)
James Bruggers, Courier-Journal (Kentucky) – journalist’s blog
Like a beating heart, the images in the video, below, produced by a team of researchers led by those at Purdue University, show the pulsating emissions of greenhouse gases — the pollution blamed for global warming.
Bright red blobs illustrating maximum CO2 output during the daytime shrink at night, showing how our industrial society literally breathes carbon dioxide.
“You could think of it as the industrial metabolism of the United States,” research project leader and Purdue assistant professor of earth and atmospheric science Kevin Gurney just told me.
[YouTube at original]
Turn up the volume on your computer because Gurney narration is needed to help people understand what they are seeing.
It’s stunning to view the United States this way, and yes, Louisville is a hot spot (click on the map to blow it up big, and you’ll see), no doubt because of our coal-fired power plants and heavy industry. But this new computer model also shows CO2 that comes from cars and trucks along our spiderweb-like network of roads and highways and in levels in some areas that might be a surprise.
(7 April 2008)
Will Capitalism Survive Climate Change?
Walden Bello’, TNI via Znet
Global warming is the privatisation of global commons by capital which now involves the expropriation of ecological spaces of the South. Progressive climate strategy must reduce growth and energy use while raising the quality of life of the broad masses of the people.
There is now a solid consensus in the scientific community that if the change in global mean temperature in the 21st century exceeds 2.4 degrees Celsius, changes in the planet’s climate will be large-scale, irreversible and disastrous.
Moreover, the window of opportunity for action that will make a difference is narrow – that is, the next 10 to 15 years.
Throughout the North, however, there is strong resistance to changing the systems of consumption and production that have created the problem in the first place and a preference for “techno-fixes,” such as “clean” coal, carbon sequestration and storage, industrial-scale biofuels, and nuclear energy.
Globally, transnational corporations and other private actors resist government-imposed measures such as mandatory caps, preferring to use market mechanisms like the buying and selling of “carbon credits,” which critics say simply amounts to a licence for corporate polluters to keep on polluting.
In the South, there is little willingness on the part of the southern elite to depart from the high-growth, high-consumption model inherited from the North, and a self-interested conviction that the North must first adjust and bear the brunt of adjustment before the South takes any serious step towards limiting its greenhouse gas emissions.
… One way of viewing global warning is to see it as a key manifestation of the latest stage of a wrenching historical process: the privatisation of the global commons by capital. The climate crisis must thus be seen as the expropriation by the advanced capitalist societies of the ecological space of less developed or marginalised societies.
This leads us to the dilemma of the South: before the full extent of the ecological destabilisation brought about by capitalism, it was expected that the South would simply follow the “stages of growth” of the North.
Now it is impossible to do so without bringing about ecological Armageddon.
Walden Bello, a fellow of the Transnational Institute, is president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition and senior analyst at Focus on the Global South.
(31 March 2008)
Also on the TNI site (originally in the Bangkok Post?)
Global Warming gets the Cold Freeze
F. William Engdahl, Global Researcher
Global warming hoax exposed by record global cold
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The media and governmental hype over a danger from global warming that already is allegedly causing the polar icecaps to melt and threaten a global climate catastrophe, looks more and more like the political hype it is. This year to date, snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.
… The recent Global Warming hysteria is in reality a geopolitical push by leading global elite circles to find a way to get the broader populations to willingly accept drastic cuts in their living standards, something that were it demanded without clear reason by politicians, would spark strikes and protest. The UN’s latest IPCC report on Global Warming calls for diverting a huge 12% of global GDP to “prevent the harmful effects of climate change.” The UN report, for example, estimated that its recommendations to reduce certain manmade emissions would cost about $2,750 per family per year in the price of energy.
Today there are two principal policy options of the Anglo-American power establishment to impose their further control over a world that is rapidly slipping out from under them. We might call them Plan A and Plan B for short.
The first, Plan A, was the option represented by Bush-Cheney and the big oil and military industrial complex behind them. Cheney and his close Houston friend, Matt Simmons, propagated the myth of Peak Oil to lull populations into accepting the inevitability of $100 a barrel or even higher oil prices. In the meantime, the relative strength of the Big Oil and the related US military establishment grew with higher oil prices.
… Today there are two major factions within the Western political power establishment internationally. They cooperate and share broad elitist goals, but differ fundamentally on how to reach these goals. Foremost is their goal of sharply controlling global economic growth and population growth. The first faction is best described as the Rockefeller Faction.
… The second faction might be called the Soft Power Faction. Their philosophy might be summed up that they think its “possible to kill more flies with honey than with vinegar.” Their preferred path to global population control and lowering of the growth rates in China and elsewhere is through promoting the fraud of global warming and imminent climate catastrophe. Al Gore is linked to this faction. So is British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. They see globalist institutions, especially the United Nations, as the best vehicle to advance their agenda of global austerity.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created by the United Nations Environment Programme. Its reports have been demonstrated to be fundamentally flawed in scientific methodology, yet they are aggressively being promoted as revealed truth by the powerful media behind this faction. Others in the circle include billionaire speculator George Soros, parts of the British Royal family and representatives of European “old money.”
F. William Engdahl is a Research Associate of the Center for Research on Globalization and author of the recently-released book, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (www.globalresearch.ca). He also author of ‘A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics,’ Pluto Press Ltd. He may be contacted at his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
(7 April 2008)
The posts by F. William Engdahl are getting stranger and stranger. Years ago he wrote several articles on peak oil. In 2007, he wrote again as an “ex” Peak Oil Believer, expressing disbelief that oil is a fossil fuel and instead that it is generated abiotically (See Engdahl and peak oil.) In the present post, he joins the dwindling ranks of climate change deniers. The talk about Rockefeller and other factions is equally weird. -BA
