Harper's contempt for Science and Canadian values

One of the fundamental differences between the previous Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney and the current Harper Conservatives (Reform-Alliance Party; i.e. CRAP) has been the complete abandonment of progressive environmental policies and investment in the basic sciences.

First, let us consider what Mulroney did in his two-terms that has lead some environmentalists to call him the "greenest Prime Minister" in Canadian history.

• In 1987, the Tories helped establish "The Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer".  The global treaty placed a ban on the destructive CFCs that were destroying the ozone layer and jeopardizing life on this planet.  
• Acid rain pollution was dramatically curtailed through cooperative legislation with the Americans.  
• A moratorium on fishing Cod, which twenty years later has yet to recover
• At the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the United Nations Environment Programme was championed by Canada, and Canadians served as their leaders.

Whereas, Mulroney could be considered the high-water mark in environmental protection, the Harper government without any doubt is about as low and dirty as a clogged drainage pipe.

Plenty of people have talked of the Conservative's fealty to market based approaches, which is vaguely strange given that the current Prime Minster has never held a real job or career outside politics; his Finance Minister Jim Flahery was a motor vehicle accident and personal injury litigation lawyer (aka Ambulance chaser); and key Minsters Peter MacKay, Tony Clement, John Baird, and Jason Kenney have spent much of their adult lives as professional politicians.  So having established that none of these men has any experience in actually running anything but their mouths off, on the tax payers dime, it is less than obvious why anyone would believe that they understand what they are doing when it comes to making decisions about science funding in the public's interest.

Stephen Harper's desire to constantly control the message and limit the information that reaches the public has become legendary.  Like the Republican Party under George W. Bush, Harper has fought to manipulate the press and machinations within the government to serve his exclusive political goals.  The influence and taint of lobbyists peddling preferred laws, as it is done in Washington DC, is now the norm in his majority government.  Legislation is proudly rammed through parliament without adequate review or discussion from opposition parties or committee members input.  Through this unsightly metamorphosis into a corporate state, impediments such as empirical data, scientific facts, and international treaties to protect the environment have been removed.

Harper has pursued a global embargo on the speech of research scientists affiliated with the Government of Canada for the past few years.  For example, prominent scientists have been barred from granting interviews, providing opinions to the public on their subject of expertise, or discussing  their publications at conferences.  Environment Canada prevented  Dr. David Tarasick from "published findings about one of the largest ozone holes ever discovered above the Arctic."  Similarly, Kristi Miller was prevented from discussing her research into  a virus that might be killing British Columbia's wild sockeye salmon, despite her research being published in the journal Science.  An article in the scientific journal Nature further illustrates the problem:

Carefully researched reports intended for the public — Climate Change and Health, from Health Canada, and Climate Change Impacts, from Natural Resources Canada — were released without publicity, late on Friday afternoons, and appeared on government websites only after long delays.

The government demands that any information provided to the public must be vetted and cleared with a local propaganda officer from the Conservative party.

Science that offends the sensibilities of religious fundamentalists, the same group that makes up Harper's western base, is also edited from public disclosure.

When Scott Dallimore, a geoscientist for Natural Resources Canada in Sidney, British Columbia, reported evidence of the colossal flood that occurred in northern Canada at the end of the last ice age (Nature 464, 740–743; 2010), he was put through the message-moulding machine. As a result, Canada's taxpayers, who funded the research, were left in the dark. While the news broke elsewhere, journalists in Canada who had previously had open access to Dallimore, a gifted communicator, were left spinning their wheels while deadlines passed. The flood happened 13,000 years ago, so how can this work be construed as politically sensitive?

Recently, the Harper government changed the laws so that not-for-profit groups that engage in political criticism are penalized to prevent them for so-called abusing their registered charitable status.

The nearly paranoid and conspiratorial nature of these acts, stems from the Conservative's desire to prevent any information that may run counter to their pro-corporate or religious minded policies from reaching the public and interfering with their program.

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It is not just the message that Conservatives loath; it is the scientists that accumulate all these facts that make Conservative-backers so angry with the fact-based world.  Over the past year, the Harper government has engaged in a systematic withdrawal of funding for Environment Canada projects and the scientists involved in those research projects.  A student researcher at the University of  Toronto discusses his perspective:

Over the past several months we have seen major cuts to Environment Canada that are leaving it without any real scientific or research power. We have seen many prominent scientific jobs cut, research funding slashed, and our ability to effectively do environmental assessment and management largely neutralized.

Given that public funding is the main source of revenue for environmental sciences at Canadian universities, which has now evaporated, researchers are packing up and leaving Canada en mass.

In 2011-12 Environment Canada had its budget cut by 20% to 854 million dollars.   Eleven percent of the department personnel was cut last year, with a total of 776 employees told that their jobs may be terminated.  Those affected include engineers, meteorologists, scientists, chemists, and biologists. Given the extent of previous cuts imposed by previous budgets, the department is said to be barely functioning.  Treasury Board Minister, Tony Clement (aka Mr. hundred thousand dollar Gazebo),  facetiously told reporters that “Environment Canada is open for business, they’re doing their job, and they want to do it more efficiently.”

Canada was a pioneer in ozone monitoring technologies, which "led to the discovery that the world's ozone layer was dangerously thinning in the 1970s, which in turn led to the successful Montreal Protocol on Ozone Depleting Substances."  The internationally renowned ozone monitoring network, has about one-third of the ozone monitoring stations in the Arctic region. The data produced by this network is heavily relied on by scientists around the world.  A single person was running the entire archives, until the conservatives closed down the The Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL) in Eureka, Nunavut.

Not convinced at stopping the flow of information, eliminating the funding of  researchers, and closing down research stations, the conservatives have decided to destroy Arctic ice core bores that provide evidence of the atmospheric gaseous concentrations for thousands of years.  Mark Twickler, director of the U.S. National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, Colo said, “These ice cores are so valuable that the international community, including the U.S., will do whatever we have to to preserve these remarkable archives of past climate.”

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans is undergoing a similar budget slashing process. Budget cuts have lead to the closing of the Experimental Lakes Area. The program used a region of 58 freshwater lakes near Kenora, in western Ontario, where scientists conducted experiments on the effects of pollution.

The Environmental Lakes Area program was launched in 1968 and led to important discoveries about the effects of pollutants such as phosphates in household detergents and mercury on bodies of fresh water, prompting tighter regulation in Canada and the U.S.

Researchers from across the world are claiming disbelief at the action.  Harvard University aquatic sciences professor Elsie Sunderland said:

[she] was pretty shocked... This is one of the foremost research projects and places to do research in the world. To have it shut down is just appalling. It's just embarrassing. 

Cynthia Gilmour, a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland, said  she "was stunned".  Jim Elser an aquatic ecologist at Arizona State University said in an article in the journal Nature,  titled "Canada's renowned freshwater research site to close," that it was "completely shocking".  Elser said it was equivallent to the "U.S. government shutting down Los Alamos — its most important nuclear-physics site — or taking the world's best telescope and turning it off."

In a separate incident, 625 prominent scientists have written to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and warned him not to "gut fish-habitat protections they say would put species at risk and damage Canada’s international standing."  The legislation being implemented as part of the Fisheries Act in Bill C-38, the omnibus budget bill, would eliminate components of federal law that bans activity that results in "harmful" alteration, disruption or destruction of fish habitat.  The new law consists of a  prohibition against activity that results in "serious" harm to fish that are part of a commercial, recreational or aboriginal fishery, or any fish that supports one of those three fisheries.

David Schindler, ecology professor at the University of Alberta said the “pro-development” Conservative government was determined to abrogate long standing environmental protections.  Others are equally pessimistic of Harper's infringement on established environmental protections and resource management:

Nick Dulvy, a Simon Fraser University professor who worked formerly as a fisheries scientist in the British government, said the two moves add to his growing alarm about the Harper government's "misuse" of science.

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Hannah McKinnon of the Climate Action Network Canada (CAN Canada), an environmental NGO, made the comparison between funding essential scientific research that monitors the health of the nation versus providing 2-billion dollars to build ships for the Canadian Navy and Coast Guard and another 29 billion dollars allocated in a non-competitive and rigged bid for 65 F-35 fighter jets that don't even meet the Department of Defense's own minimal specifications.  The government can find billions of dollars to spend on pet projects, fighting Middle Eastern wars, and providing billions in subsidies to petrochemical companies -some of which are the most profitable in the world- yet it can't find the funds to monitor the environment or maintain reasonable scientific competency.

John Bennett, the executive director of Sierra Club Canada, puts it more bluntly, “It will give the polluters what they want, a toothless Environment Canada with no scientific or enforcement capability."

Chart of the day: increased incidence of natural disasters

(h/t The Big Picture)

The chart is provided by Re Munich and it indicates the growth of natural disasters over a period covering 1980-2011.  Insurance companies have an inherent self-interest in understanding the dynamics of disruptive natural events and how those events will have an impact on their business.  The data presented in the above graph is unequivocal in showing that climate change related events are rapidly increasing.  The scientifically illiterate right wing, uneducated masses, and corporate naysayers affiliated with the petrochemical industry can all continue to spout rubbish, but the facts speak for themselves. Consider that earthquakes and other geophysical events have stayed constant during the 30 year period, while storms, floods, and extreme temperature events have all increased geometrically over the same period.  This isn't God flushing the toilet on humanity; this is humanity self-destructing.

It appears from this graph, that we are looking at a doubling time of 15 years.  Under this time scale, things will become extremely difficult for most of this planet shortly.

We have passed the point of no return. What people should learn to accept is that we as a civilization and species have collectively failed to organize ourself to rectify a problem that  twenty years ago we all understood, but lacked the courage to tackle.  By kicking the problem down the road and listening to the greedy or stupid, we have condemned ourselves to a world that will nominally have substantial levels of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which will disrupt agricultural production; increase droughts, fires, mass population movements, cause mass extinctions of other species; encourage conflict and warfare over resource scarcity; and eliminate possibly billions of humans.

Texas sized Climate Change!

Reports from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, N.C. indicate that the heat waves encountered in the USA during the months of June, July, and August, represent the second warmest summer.

The press release indicates the following:

• Excessive heat in six states -- Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana -- resulted in their warmest August on record. This year ranked in the top ten warmest August for five other states: Florida (3rd), Georgia (4th), Utah (5th), Wyoming (8th), and South Carolina (9th).The Southwest and South also had their warmest August on record.
• Only nine of the lower 48 states experienced August temperatures near average, and no state had August average temperatures below average.
• An analysis of Texas statewide tree-ring records dating back to 1550 indicates that the summer 2011 drought in Texas is matched by only one summer (1789), indicating that the summer 2011 drought appears to be unusual even in the context of the multi-century tree-ring record.
• Texas had its driest summer on record, with a statewide average of 2.44 inches of rain. This is 5.29 inches below the long-term average, and 1.04 inches less than the previous driest summer in 1956. New Mexico had its second driest summer and Oklahoma its third driest summer. New Jersey and California had their wettest summers on record with 22.50 inches and 1.93 inches, respectively.
• Based on NOAA's Residential Energy Demand Temperature Index, the contiguous U.S. temperature-related energy demand was 22.3 percent above average during summer. This is the largest such value during the index's period of record, which dates to 1895.

Dick Cheney unrepentant in having destroyed America

Richard Cheney, the 46th vice-president of the USA, is about to release his memoirs next week titled, "In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir. 

According to a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted when Dick Cheney left office in January 2009 his approval ratings (13%) were less than that of George W. Bush's (22%).  At their departure both men received historic disapproval ratings and continue to be considered by the majority of Americans as having failed to improve America.  The Bush presidency is highlighted by some of the following:

• advancing the unconstitutional notion of a unitary presidency
• repeated and consistent withdrawal from international treaties and agreements
• pushing through the civil rights destroying PATRIOT act
• massive and illegal wiretapping and spying on American citizens
• using torture upon seized enemy combatants and prisoners of war
• the failure to prevent the 9-11 attack on New York City and the Pentagon
• failing to adequately neutralize Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda's terrorist network
• pursuing the Iraq war under bogus pretenses and then failing to contain the regional civil war
• the abandonment of New Orleans and its citizens after Hurricane Katrina
• allowing the housing bubble to expand and eventually cause the financial collapse of 2008
• promoting corporate-written legislation that bolstered special interest profits
• promoting a laissez-faire regulatory framework that allowed corporate crime to exponentially grow throughout his two terms
• advancing the interests of oil and gas companies and rejecting sustainable and renewable forms of energy production
• denying climate change was occurring
• doubling the national public debt
• cut taxes for the richest Americans, while expanding the deficit
• cut national science and engineering budgets to pay for his wars and tax cuts
• limited scientific investigations on subjects deemed controversial for religious supporters, such as stem cell studies and environmental assessment studies
• preventing any international agreement that would prevent rises in global warming gases, which in the end may possibly be his greatest failure if even conservative predictions about climate change prove true

Cheney undoubtedly represented the very worst elements of the Bush administration.  Although Bush's approval didn't collapse until after Katrina, Cheney's approval amongst most Americans was in the gutter early into his first term.  His approval was constantly in the twenty-percent area and never improved.  He represented to his base an unapologetic statist who wanted to project American hegemony to its fullest level.  Cheney famously stated that "deficits don't matter!"  He was responsible for pursuing an energy policy that promoted America's addiction to foreign fossil fuels.  And as former Secretary of Defense, he was very familiar with the nature of the Pentagon machinery and sought to project America's military power domestically and across foreign shores.

To the rest of America, Cheney represented a Machiavellian operator.  With his over-the-top rhetoric, war making bravado, riddiculous claims that 3rd world nations with 2nd rate militaries were a threat to America, and his continuous scowl, the public turned on this crypto-fascist.

Reviews of Cheney's memoirs indicate a man who controlled both the president and policies of the Bush presidency in it early years. During the infamous 9-11 attack, Cheney states, despite clear lines of command set forth in the constitution, that it was him and neither Bush nor Rumsfeld who was in command of immediate operations.  At that moment in history, Cheney made it clear that the president of the United States had been unofficially deposed and that he had assumed all the controls of commander-in-chief.

The NY Times review of the book further highlights a man who is completely unrepentant of his actions.  The Times describes the book as being

often pugnacious in tone and in which he expresses little regret about many of the most controversial decisions of the Bush administration — casts him as something of an outlier among top advisers who increasingly took what he saw as a misguided course on national security issues.

So it is clear that as Cheney's policy failures mounted, George W. Bush and others in the Bush administration became progressively unwilling to accept Cheney's worldview and provocations.  In the end, the rift was so great that Bush himself was unwilling to even grant full pardon to Cheney's Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby for his acts of lying to prosecutors in order to protect Mr. Cheney.

What we know is Mr. Cheney is on his last legs and death is hunting him. This book is an attempt by a dying man to justify his evil by throwing sand in our collective faces. I'm sure Ozymandias would have done the same.

Quote of the Day: On the deluded masses

When people hold certain ideological beliefs strongly enough, no amount of facts will get in their way. If you believe that the current deficit is the result of excessive government spending (passed by Democrats, even though they only controlled Congress and the White House for four out of the past thirty years*), no pile of charts will be big enough to convince you otherwise — just like if you believe that tax cuts increase tax revenues, that the deficit has produced high interest rates, or that Barack Obama was born on Mars, no amount of evidence will convince you otherwise.

- James Kwak, "Who Created this Mess"

I've been struggling with this matter in the past few weeks.

Personal growth and development necessitates that each of us occasionally review and validate the overarching ideas that govern our worldview.  When dealing with religion, politics, and cultural issues, we are dependant on our limited educational and personal experiences and not hard empirical fact.  However, one would assume that most people when presented with facts that contradict prevailing opinions about the world, they would then tact and reassess their stances.  All too often though in this age of modern stupidity -as in the example on the right with regard to global warming and taxes or on the left with regard to the utility of the welfare state- people not only reject legitimate criticism and facts, but engage in buttressing their own faltering delusions.

The above quote, highlights the issue in America surrounding some of the more pedestrian claptrap that manifests itself as serious discussion in the media.  It seems despite the ease with which people can look up facts on the internet and access knowledge, the less some people are interested in thinking.

Peak Oil: The Germans and British Understand the Outcome

A series of recent reports have been released by both the German and UK governments on the implications of Peak oil.  Jeff Rubin, former chief economist of Canada's CIBC World Markets, discusses both reports in his Globe and Mail blog.  In it he summarizes that the emerging global consensus amongst policy makers and long term government planners is that deficiencies in accessing and utilizing petroleum will lead to severe economic disruptions, social instability, and a collapse of the current global trade arrangements.

Rubin disputes the reassurances made by governments and industry supporters that peak-oil is not a concern.  As I've outlined in previous blog entries (here and here), many persons who have had a close examination of the situation believe that we reached peak-oil in 2005.  The German study states that there is "some probability that peak oil will occur around the year 2010 and that the impact on security is expected to be felt 15 to 30 years later."  Rubin concedes that while we may not have reached "geological peak-oil" from the economic perspective we certainly have.  As global oil prices maxed out at near $150/bbl it became abundantly clear that our current economy and way of life is completely incapable of sustaining these costs.  Furthermore, it is only at these very high levels of crude that many of the untested extraction technologies and difficult to obtain reserves can be made to be profitable.  Hence, in reality, accessible global oil reserves are not growing any further.

Der Spiegel International, outlines a series of potential situations that may arise:

1. Oil will determine power
2. Increasing importance of oil exporters
3. Politics in place of the market
4. Global market failures
5. Relapse into planned economy
6. Global chain reaction
7. Crisis of political legitimacy

Altogether, the implications of this fact are severe.  Rubin summarizes:

The German study paints a bleak picture of the post-peak world: political power quickly shifts from major oil-consuming economies to major oil-producing economies. Less and less oil is traded on the open market, while more and more is traded between nation states, with national oil companies entering into long-term supply agreements that are tied to broader political and military considerations. And military alliances coalesce around the security of energy supply, rather than between countries with shared political or economic principles.

In the UK, the Guardian newspaper also heralds the dangers associated with a post-peak oil world in an article titled "Peak oil alarm revealed by secret official talks."  Previous estimates by the International Energy Agency indicated that there would be "sufficient reserves to meet demand till 2030 as long as investment in new reserves is maintained."  However, major industry players, economic skeptics, and government analysts believe the situation could be considerably less solvent.

But an internal IEA source said: "Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible, but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further. And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources."

Coupled with climate change concerns, which includes the possibility of severe drought, famine, resource scarcity based conflict, and socio-economic collapse everywhere, we are not just talking about a realignment in global powers, but the possibility of wholesale disintegration of human civilization.

Climate Change may be Causative Agent in Bee Decline

Research conducted by scientists at the University of Toronto indicate that declines in bee population may be in part due to incongruencies that have emerged due to climate change.  Temporal mismatches arise between when the flowers are accessible and open to pollinators and when bees emerge from hibernation.  The seventeen year study indicates a "progressive decline in pollination over the years."

The research and article is summerized below from EurekAlert!

TORONTO, ON - Widespread reports of a decline in the population of bees and other flower-visiting animals have aroused fear and speculation that pollination is also likely on the decline. A recent University of Toronto study provides the first long-term evidence of a downward trend in pollination, while also pointing to climate change as a possible contributor.

"Bee numbers may have declined at our research site, but we suspect that a climate-driven mismatch between the times when flowers open and when bees emerge from hibernation is a more important factor," says James Thomson, a scientist with U of T's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Thomson's 17-year examination of the wild lily in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado is one of the longest-term studies of pollination ever done. It reveals a progressive decline in pollination over the years, with particularly noteworthy pollination deficits early in the season. The study will be published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences on September 6.

Three times each year, Thomson compared the fruiting rate of unmanipulated flowers to that of flowers that are supplementally pollinated by hand. "Early in the year, when bumble bee queens are still hibernating, the fruiting rates are especially low," he says. "This is sobering because it suggests that pollination is vulnerable even in a relatively pristine environment that is free of pesticides and human disturbance but still subject to climate change."

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Thomson began his long-term studies in the late 1980s after purchasing a remote plot of land and building a log cabin in the middle of a meadow full of glacier lilies. His work has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Matthew Simmons, Peak-Oil Proponent dead at 67

Matthew R. Simmons, long time oil industry analyst and author of the much discussed book Twilight in the Desert, which proposed of the idea that we have already passed peak-oil, was found dead at his home in Maine from an apparent heart attack.

Bloomberg elaborates on the theme of peak-oil, which Simmons is most associated with:

On a tour of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry in 2003, Simmons was inspired to estimate the world’s largest oil reserves, and from research that included poring through neglected engineering data, determined that the country was close to or nearing peak output, Peter Maass wrote in his book, “Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil.”

"He built his own energy firm and, having done that successfully, used his knowledge of the industry to challenge one of its biggest accepted truths -- that there are nearly unlimited quantities of oil in the world.”

The concept of peak oil, (which I discussed in an earlier blog entry) is a function of the availability of crude reserves in relation to both time and cost.  As easily extractable sources of crude oil are consumed and more nations transition to first-world levels of industrialization and production, demand increases.  Shortly after peak oil, there will be insufficient supplies of petroleum causing global cost inflation, on nearly everything, and diminished availability.   M King Hubbard, first predicted that North American oil production would "peak" between 1965 and 1970; a physical event that did occur and is not disputed.  Simmons estimated that on a global level we reached peak oil in 2005.  While the actual date is of debate, there is little doubt based on quantitative analysis, that peak oil is real and we need to understand the immediate implications of that fact.   The first graph below, outlines global petroleum extraction levels versus time, consistent with Hubbard's (and Simmons') predictions. 

The second graph provides a timeline of America's actual proven petroleum reserves.

Given that virtually all transportation, manufacturing, and major military activities are related to the use of petroleum based products, volatility in its availability and price pose severe concerns to modern society.  The OPEC oil embargoes of the early 1970's, both Persian Gulf wars conducted by the Americans, pre-2008 agricultural commodity bubbles, and numerous revolutions in the 20th C. were a direct result of oil politics.

There are numerous opponents to Simmons' view of peak oil, who refer to his modelling as too simplistic and biased towards Malthusian conceits.   However, even if that was the fact, how long are we as a civilization going to continue to utilize oil as our primary energy source, when it has been proven that its use is causing climate change and destabilizing ecosystems across the globe.  These critics, which are primarily bankrolled by the oil and gas industries, constantly dismiss the scientific consensus on this matter and employ bogus libertarian arguments on the intrusion of "big-government" to persuade the masses that there is no climate change occurring or worries about peak oil.  Unfortunately, because these corporations and their handmaidens in politics have either ignored the facts at hand or dithered, we are well past the point of no return on both these matters. 

Available petroleum will continue to decline, the planet will continue to get hotter, and people will persist in deluding themselves that nothing needs to be done until it is too late.  As Rorschach, from the movie The Watchmen says:

[They will] shout "Save us!"... They had a choice, all of them. They could have followed in the footsteps of good men ...Instead they followed the droppings of lechers... and didn't realize that the trail led over a precipice until it was too late. Don't tell me they didn't have a choice. Now the whole world stands on the brink, staring down into bloody Hell.

The Coming Environmental Collapse

The United Nation's Biodiversity Chief, Dr. Ahmed Djoghlaf, issued a unequivocal do-or-die statement to the governments of the world, regarding the implementation of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.  According to the UN's website, the convention's purpose is to achieve the following:

The Convention on Biological Diversity was inspired by the world community's growing commitment to sustainable development. It represents a dramatic step forward in the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components, and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the use of genetic resources.

To date however, not a single signatory has met its target to protect nature.  Planetary biodiversity is not an esoteric subject or a triviality to be dispensed with lightly.  Rather, it is a vital ecological principle that defines biosphere stability and hence the survival of the human species.  The web of life is an extraordinary complex and dynamic set of systems, which cycles nutrients and minerals, stabilizes global climate levels, and controls an enormous number of biological systems necessary for sustaining life from the Antarctic to the rainforests to the grain fields of the Great Plains in North America.  As this blog has been discussing for the past year (here, here, here, & here), the destruction of the biological commons; liquidation of forests; consuming all the ocean's fish; and toxification of the air, land, and sea with human waste and pollution will result in a world which is more fragile and susceptible to ecological collapse; i.e. human extinction.

The Guardian UK newspaper outlines the argument.  In the article, Djoghlaf warns countries, "It would be very short-sighted to cut biodiversity spending. You may well save a few pounds now but you will lose billions later. Biodiversity is your natural asset. The more you lose it, the more you lose your cultural assets too."   His warnings, made to the entire world community, implies that unless substantial policy changes are made and improvements at conserving biodiversity and managing ecosystem stability are achieved, many nations and their citizens will cease to exist in the future.

UCLA scientist Jared Diamond likewise has outlined in his book Collapse how human civilizations over the millenia have failed due to human caused environmental degradation.  Overpopulation, resource scarcity, misuse and abuse of natural resources, water management failures...etc. are all areas that have resulted in the decline and eventual demise of many societies throughout history.  Today, all nations are confronted with some, if not all, of these issues.  Loss of biodiversity and ecosystem instability is therefore a direct result of societies and humankind not addressing the individual and unique issues that ultimately are within their own control and perpetuating what historian Arnold Toynbee described as the collective suicide on the part of societies, when they fail to adapt to challenges of their time.

Phytoplankton Levels in Oceans Crashed during the 20th Century

According to EurkeAlert!  a new study conducted by researchers at Dalhousie University in Canada, have found that phytoplankton, unicellular organisms that form the basis of the marine food chain, have been declining globally at dramatic rates over the 20th century.

Using an unprecedented collection of historical and recent oceanographic data, a team from Canada's Dalhousie University documented phytoplankton declines of about 1% of the global average per year. This trend is particularly well documented in the Northern Hemisphere and after 1950, and would translate into a decline of approximately 40% since 1950. The scientists found that long-term phytoplankton declines were negatively correlated with rising sea surface temperatures and changing oceanographic conditions.

Lead author of the study, Daniel Boyle, told CBC News, "We should be very concerned … it's extremely disturbing."

Phytoplankton represent a vast array of aquatic plants that live in close proximity to the ocean's surface.  Through photosynthetic activity, these organisms "produce about half the world's oxygen and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere."  In addition to forming the basis of marine food chains, phytoplankton are an important component of the carbon cycle and therefore are vital to the stability of the global climate.

The Christian Science Monitor provides a more detailed explanation of the methodology, which entailed three years of combining satellite based data from 1979 and physical measurements as far back as 1899.

After carving up the marine map into 10 regions, the team found a lot of year-to-year variation in phytoplankton populations, as well as regional variations in abundance. But the century-long decline was evident in 8 of 10 ocean regions and was strong enough to offset gains in two others centered in the Indian Ocean.

The overall decline in phytoplankton populations is directly correlated to increases in ocean temperatures.  As temperatures increase, thermal stratification occurs, which prevents nutrients cycling to upper surface levels and diminishes phytoplankton growth.  The findings therefore, "contribute to a growing body of scientific evidence indicating that global warming is altering the fundamentals of marine ecosystems."   Anthony Richardson of the University of Queensland in Australia explains:

The ocean absorbs 40% of the CO₂ humans emit. Phytoplankton, in turn, convert that CO₂ into oxygen or die and bury it at the bottom of the ocean. If the phytoplankton are disappearing, Richardson says, "the ocean as a carbon sink is declining, and what that means is ultimately more CO₂ will stay in the atmosphere instead of being dissolved in the ocean." That will translate into a warmer world, which will wipe out even more phytoplankton.

Human based activities including over-fishing, pollution, biodiversity loss, climate change induced acidification of the oceans, and the creation of permanent dead zones in coastal areas across the planet point to the obvious and undeniable fact that the planet's oceans are in very poor health.   When aquatic ecosystems across the globe collapse, so will terrestrial life, which is inexorability connected to the oceans through the web of life.

American Idiots: Deep South Edition

One of the great paradoxes of America is that although more Americans have won Nobel prizes in the fields of science and medicine than any other nationality, and given the fact that the nation has the best universities and some of the greatest research and development centers in the world, Americans as a whole remain woefully ignorant, if not completely hostile, to basic scientific knowledge and rationality.

Over the past twenty years repeated surveys have found that as much as 95% of the American population is scientifically illiterate.  A recent study conducted by the California Academy of Sciences found that 47% of Americans did not know how long it takes Earth to revolve around the sun, and 41% believed that dinosaurs and early humans coexisted.  Another recent poll done by the Pew Research Foundation, found that only 52% of Americans understood the basis of stem cells in relation to normal differentiated cells and a mere 46% knew that atoms are larger than electrons.  As described in the Boston Globe, "On a highly contentious issue like global warming, meanwhile, the gap between scientists and the public was vast: 84 percent of scientists, but just 49 percent of Americans, think human emissions are causing global warming."

So it should come as no shock to discover that only a mere third of the population "believe" in the theory of biological evolution.  Worst, more than 50% of the population "believe" in literal creationism.  It is this latter group of simians that I wish to highlight.  In the state of Alabama, a state that is ranked as having the largest percentage of obese citizens and least educated persons in the country, the local Republicans managed to achieve a new intellectual low through a primary election campaign commercial.  According the online political news-blog TPM,

[An Alabama] state PAC recently went on the air with an ad attacking one of the Republican gubernatorial candidates for supporting the teaching of evolution in schools and for saying that parts of the Bible aren't true.

The candidate, Bradley Byrne, responded with a lengthy press release vehemently defending his belief in creationism and the infallible truth of the Bible.

The aggrieved Republican pol went on to further dismiss every piece of scientific analysis in the past 4,000 years -from the ancient Babylonians who studied astronomy to 19th C. scholars who developed theories of electromagnetism and nuclear chemistry to modern 21st C. molecular biologists- by making the ludicrous claim of "I believe the Bible is the Word of God and that every single word of it is true ..."

All these dunces and like-minded inbred yahoos south of the Mason-Dixon line are a burden to the rest of humanity.  They are idiots, who are morally debased, scientifically illiterate, and lacking in any common sense.  Just watch the following clip as evidence.

Palin versus Gore on Climate Change

I have made no attempt to deny over the past year my utter contempt for Sarah Palin, otherwise to be spoken of as Caribou Barbie, the Wasilla Whack-Job, or the grand priestess of American theo-fascist buffoonery. Until now, I had decided to ignore writing about her and the zombie masses that have flocked to her media-manufactured book tour out of sheer disdain. However, the Washington Post, in an attempt to completely repudiate itself as a newspaper, has decided to publish today (9 Dec. 2009) an op-ed written (or purportedly so) by Caribou Barbie, which lambastes scientists as opportunists and frauds, scientific debate as politicized drivel, and climate change mitigation as a massive exercise in liberal taxation and socialism.

I want to remind people, exactly what Sarah Palin believes in. First, she is a bigot who stated to her father, upon returning from a brief stint at Hawaii Pacific University, that she was "uncomfortable" around Asians and Pacific Islanders. “They were a minority type thing,” her father says, “and it wasn’t glamorous, so she came home.” She makes the claim in her pseudo-biography/ manifesto that she had a great deal of "affection" for her gay roommate from college (which no one can find), but opposes all rights for gay couples, opposes allowing gays to serve openly in the military, opposes gay-inclusive hate crimes legislation, and opposes the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.

Second, she has no background and zero credentials to discuss any subject on science. Her entire history is one that dismisses empirical fact and core scientific knowledge for superstition, innuendo, and demonstrably false lies whenever it serves her personal or political needs. Palin is an evangelical Christian that believes in creationism, thinks that the Earth is 6,000 years old, and proposes that fundamentalist dogma should be taught in every public school; she is an adherent of end-of-times theology, which involves the conversion of the believers of Judaism to Christianity and the rapture; she has made proclamations for the removal of the constitutional separation of church-and-state; and she is against cell stem research or any scientific research that she arbitrarily dislikes. With respect to climate change, she has repeatedly clung to the odious supposition, without providing any corroborating evidence, that there is no man-made (i.e. anthropogenic) element to current atmospheric or climate changes.

In the WaPo op-ed, she specifically calls the stolen emails from climate researchers at the University of East Anglia, proof that, "Leading climate 'experts' deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals." Unwilling to address the science itself or the overwhelming consensus generated by scientists and climate researchers across the planet for more than 20-years, she states that, "while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes."

This woman is an absolute ignoramus and demagogue, who will lie and distort any fact to empower herself and the theo-fascists in the Republican Party that have surrounded her.

In response to this exhibition of white-trash duncery and recycled claptrap, Al Gore has been asked on repeated occasions to address her complaints about the entire Climate change debate and the current United Nations Climate Change conference in Copenhagen (COP15). He states the obvious:

The global warming deniers persist in this air of unreality. After all, the entire north polar icecap, which has been there for most of the last 3 million years, is disappearing before our eyes. Forty percent is already gone. The rest is expected to go completely within the next decade. What do they think is causing this?
The mountain glaciers in every region of the world are melting, many of them at an accelerated rate, threatening drinking supplies -- drinking water supplies and agricultural water supplies. We have these record storms, drought, floods, fires, three deaths [sic] in the American West, climate refugees beginning now, expected to rise to the hundreds of millions unless we take action.

These effects are taking place all over the world exactly as predicted by the scientists, who have warned for years that, if we continue putting 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every day, the accumulation -- that's going to trap lots more heat, raise temperatures, and cause all of these consequences that are already beginning.

Reasonable people can argue and dispute matters of opinion, but facts as to whether humans have injected extraordinary levels of greenhouse-effect producing gases into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution is not subject to debate; it is a fact. There is no dispute that ocean levels are rising, whether the oceans are becoming acidified due to excess C02 in the atmosphere placed there by man, or even if this past decade and the decade of the 1990's have been the warmest in recorded human history. All these statements are facts that anyone can independently verify.

The twin forces of globalization and human tribalism have locked us all into a fearful downward spiral and there appears little hope that the majority of the human species is equipped to adjust to a low carbon economy, much less understand the dire situation we have created.

Propaganda Alert: The World is Not Cooling!

I'm sure you've heard the recent claims made by Climate Change skeptics that much of the data and arguments pointing towards global warming are little more than bulk conspiracy theories. The BBC ran an article a month ago by Paul Hudson, asking "What happened to global warming?" It makes the declaration that "the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998" in the past decade and further states that skeptics believe "there are so many other natural causes for warming and cooling, that even if man is warming the planet, it is a small part compared with nature."

While it is true that global temperatures reached a high point in 1998, it is not true that temperatures across the planet have been in decline since. Given the controversy, a re-analysis of the existing data led by the US NOAA's (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency) climate data center was conducted and no statistically significant cooling trend was found. An AP story quotes the agency as stating:

"The last 10 years are the warmest 10-year period of the modern record," said NOAA climate monitoring chief Deke Arndt. "Even if you analyze the trend during [the skeptics] 10 years, the trend is actually positive, which means warming."

Furthermore, in relation to ocean temperatures, NOAA asserts that of the 10 hottest years recorded, "eight have occurred since 2000, and after this year it will be nine because this year is on track to be the sixth-warmest on record."

What skeptics have done is what they always done: manipulate the truth. Depending on the starting year of their so-called ten year interval and the robustness of the data set, one can get one of three different outcomes: temperatures trending upwards, constant, or downwards. So which one is correct? According to David Peterson, a retired Duke University statistics professor, the methodology used by the skeptics to claim a downward cooling trend is "not scientifically legitimate." AP quotes Ben Santer, a climate scientist at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Lab, who calls their efforts, "a concerted strategy to obfuscate and generate confusion in the minds of the public and policymakers" prior to the international climate talks in Copenhagen this December.

People need to stop listening to these hucksters who are peddling refuted arguments prettied up with bogus statistical data for political gain. These are not trivial matters. For example:

• Heat waves in Europe in 2003 caused nearly 40,000 people to die.
• Global warming is more than a third to blame for a major drop in rainfall, that includes a decade-long drought in Australia and a lengthy dry spell in the United States, according to researcher Peter Baines of Melbourne University in Australia.
• Forest fires that have decimated parts of Australia, the Mediterranean, and Western North America in the past few years have been linked to a "positive feedback loop" caused by increased global temperatures.
• Glaciers across the world continue to melt at an unprecedented rate. Many of the world's most populous regions including India, China, and nations along the Andes are highly dependant on these bodies for water utlized in agriculture. Displacement of these massive bodies of ice has also been predicted by geologists to lead to an increasing number of earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions in unexpected places.

A world that is less stable and less able to sustain human habitation, is simply a world with less humans.

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I have additional blog entries about recent public opinions shifts in America on Climate Change (here) and a brief discussion on scientific research confirming CO2 concentrations and global temperature increases (here).

Becoming More Stupid: Climate Change Disbelievers

Once again, the forces of human ignorance and absolute stupidity are on the march. According to:

The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Sept. 30-Oct. 4 among 1,500 adults reached on cell phones and landlines, finds that 57% think there is solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades. In April 2008, 71% said there was solid evidence of rising global temperatures. Over the same period, there has been a comparable decline in the proportion of Americans who say global temperatures are rising as a result of human activity, such as burning fossil fuels. Just 36% say that currently, down from 47% last year.

That is a startling drop of common sense. It means that 14% of the US population, despite thirty years of research, innumerable scientific studies, irrefutable empirical evidence, and the Nobel Prize for Peace being given to the IPCC (Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change), have in the period of a year changed their minds. The only possible answer to this disturbing regression is that the forces of corporate propaganda coupled with the mainstream media's indifference to articulating facts about the subject and the persistent aloofness of the general population to basic science have given ample opportunity to dissuade the ignorant masses that it is once again acceptable to pollute their way to prosperity.

I've exhausted all patience with these evolutionary dead-enders who shriek at the slightest increase in taxes and the cost of beer, yet are incapable of rationalizing the simplest of scientifically determinable facts. I expect nothing of substance to come out of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December and furthermore expect that those who prevented change, impeded consensus, and disseminated propaganda will once again be amongst the first to demand that government save them and their businesses when the full effects of climate change occur.

Quote of the Day: Short-term thinking

People just want to go on doing what they're doing. They want business as usual. They say, 'Oh yes, there's going to be a problem up ahead,' but they don't want to change anything.

- James Lovelock

Whether it involves the current economic disaster, which was worst than the combined dot-com bust of the nineties and the S&L crisis of the 80's/90's, or the current projections related to the effects of continued industrial pollution, toxification of the environment, and ultimately climate change, we all seem to realize that we have very serious problems, but of course few are actually willing to engage in the challenges of actually disrupting the status quo.

In the Bible it says, "And that food shall be for store to the land against the seven years of famine, which shall be in the land of Egypt; that the land perish not through the famine." Genesis 41:33-36. For a civilization to survive it requires long term thinking and everyday sacrifices by all. There used to be a time, a short while ago, when the thought of being in debt and accumulating unnecessary material wealth was a moral failing. Today it is the norm. Gangs of thieves inhabit the sky-scrappers of New York and London, silently looting from public coffers and awarding themselves for their brilliant immorality. Standing Imperial armies are sent to secure natural resources in the name of freedom, while quenching indigenous opposition. The servant classes fret about credit card payments, stagnant wages, and mounting debt, while plotting how to keep up with the Jones' next door.

The song remains the same.

Hey, global warming skeptics, take your heads out of the sand | csmonitor.com

Hey, global warming skeptics, take your heads out of the sand csmonitor.com

One of the more enduring alternative hypothesise that global warming skeptics have forwarded in attempting to rationalize why ambient global temperatures are on the increase, has been in correlating the natural periodicity of the planet to biosphere transformations. The basis of this argument is that Earth’s orbit varies in distance from the Sun over a 21,000 year cycle, leading to defined and determinable changes.

The above Christian Science Monitor article outlines research, conducted by Northern Arizona University (NAU) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., over a period of five-years, that has reconstructed 2,000 years of Arctic summer temperatures. The research team combined previous data from ice cores and tree rings with lake sediment data to build a record of events substantially beyond the existing 400 year record.

The study shows the Arctic is warming two to three times faster than anywhere else at a time when it should be cooling down. Natural changes in Earth’s orbit vary our distance from the Sun over a 21,000 year cycle. The closer we are, the warmer the Arctic and vice versa. Right now, we’re in the cool down part of that cycle. The study confirms a cooling trend over the past 2,000 years until it reversed about a century ago. The Arctic summer now is about 2.5 degrees warmer than it should be.

In an announcement of this result, team member Nicholas McKay explained that, “The 20th century is the first century for which how much energy we’re getting from the Sun is no longer the most important thing governing the temperature of the Arctic.” His co-author, Caspar Ammann at NCAR, said, “This study provides a clear example of how increased greenhouse gases are now changing our climate.”

As alternative explanations to global warming continue to fall to the wayside, the evidence continues to point to the fact that anthropogenic sources of CO2 emissions arising from the massive industrialization in the 19th and 20th centuries has precipitated this climate shift. Instead of engaging this subject with our best minds and efforts, we have allowed oil and gas companies, people with no understanding of science (much less evolution and ecology), anti-intellectuals who believe in a 6,000 year old earth, and bought off Western politicians to dictate the future of all life on this planet. Military organizations across the world have already started war-gaming the outcomes and have begun making internal preparations. Yet those in power would rather dither and obfuscate the reality to the public, while the dumbest of our population scold us that the American president just may be a resident alien who is a closet-communist seeking to euthanize the elderly and incarcerate card carrying rednecks in FEMA holding cells.

In some ways the issue is moot, for humanity has already waited too long to prevent the problem. We are now past the point of no-return, as the tell tale products of global climate change emerge: acidification of oceans, irregular precipitation patterns, drought, forest fires that are larger and more destructive (i.e. Australia, Greece, and Western North America), declining agricultural production, rising ocean levels, and mounting civil unrest brought on by environmental scarcity. Even if we were to completely stop all industrialization tomorrow, the existing gases in the atmosphere will reside there for decades and continue to likewise heat the planet.