"Nature Doesn't Do Bailouts." ". . . we are our own asteroid".

[bertman]

A demonstrator's sign and a poignant and painfully accurate statement by a demonstrator in London this week, as featured in this piece on Huffington Post.

-snip-

"The climate is currently going the same way as the banks. Last month, the world's climate scientists gathered in Copenhagen to explain we are facing "devastating consequences" - not in some distant future, but in my lifetime and yours. Unless we swerve fast, we are soon going to hit global temperatures that no human being has ever lived through. We don't have much time. By 2015, we will have belched so much carbon into the atmosphere that we will cross the Point of No Return: the climate will start to unravel as all its natural cooling processes breaking down one by one, guaranteeing we become hotter and hotter. Once we hit an increase of 4 degrees, much of the world will become uninhabitable, and there will be vast wars for what remains.

This isn't the warning of apocalyptic wackos: it's the judgment of the climate scientists who have consistently been proven right up to now. Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize winning scientist who has been appointed Energy Secretary by Barack Obama, says: "I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what will happen. We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California. I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going either." Goodbye Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego. And that, he stresses, is only the start.

The distinguished environmental scientist James Lovelock warns that climate changes tend not to happen gradually, inch-by-inch. They suddenly flip - in our case from a cool world to a very hot one. He believes the hotter new world we are bringing into being could support, at best, a billion people. That would require 84 percent of the world's population to die off.

That's why the protesters were talking about the climate. It should be the number one issue at every global meeting. And the way out of the climate crunch and the credit crunch is the same - a Green New Deal."

-snip-

We should all be jumping up and down, waving our arms and shouting, in addition to calling our reps and Senators and the White House about this burgeoning crisis. The climate situation, like the banking situation, is on the cusp of dire.

Here's the link to the HuffPo piece: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/listen-to-the-rioters-in_b_182553.html

[infidel dog]

1. Human greed trumps self-preservation. Too bad we have to take the planet with us.

[bertman]

2. Yes it is too bad, infidel dog. And what's worse is that the financial shenanigans are

taking the spotlight away from the global climate impending disaster, which is exactly why these protesters were making their presence felt in London.

We need this in the good ole' USA.

[Occam Bandage]

3. We couldn't hope to hurt the planet.

We could just make it far less habitable for humans in many places, leading to societal collapses as necessary resource production drops drastically. No more "hurting the planet" than destroying a termite colony would be hurting the planet.

[BeFree]

5. Yay!

We're off the hook, then. None of it matters! Gawd do I feel better already. We can't hurt the planet, just us and all the other 10,000 trillion or so other parts of the planet. The planet doesn't need any of that. If it was a moon, what dif would it make to the planet?

[Occam Bandage]

6. Nope. I actually think people would be far more concerned about environmentalism

if they saw it as "saving ourselves" rather than the vague, altruistic, and generally false "saving the planet."

[BeFree]

7. Yeah

People are all in to saving themselves. But, since we'll all be dead one day, saving ourselves just till tomorrow is all the saving we do. And we selfish bastards who are just "saving ourselves" say: "To hell" with everything else, eh?

Just imagine what a fine moon like planet this will become. Devoid of humans, and 10,000 trillion other, as far as we know, totally unique parts that live, breathe and recreate on this one little blue ball of life spinning in the vast void of space.

To hell with all that! It makes no difference!

Why is that? Because we say so?

[Occam Bandage]

8. I think you're overstating the damage humans would do to life.

If you're talking about climate change, well, the Earth has been much warmer and much colder than we could manage before our societies collapsed entirely, and the Earth was just as splendid as it is today. Biodiversity would probably welcome such a change, since human society represents a noteworthy extinction event, and its collapse would allow a reflourishing in its wake. Still, even a concerted human effort to destroy all life on Earth with nuclear weapons couldn't touch an overwhelming proportion of the Earth's biomass. It's quite possible that 90% of life on Earth is represented by deep subterranean bacteria, and we certainly couldn't hope to destroy them or to destroy deep-sea-vent ecosystems, even if we clouded the sun's warmth for centuries; from there, life would re-arise. Ten thousand years, after all, is but an eyeblink in geologic time. A nuclear war would be an extinction event, to be sure, but only about as deadly an extinction event as the Permian-Triassic.

Life is more resilient than people give it credit for. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the Earth was entirely populated by anaerobic life: by microscopic photosynthesizing 'plants', and by microscopic anaerobic predators. Unfortunately, all that photosynthesis was slowly filling the Earth's atmosphere with a deeply toxic gas: oxygen. Oxygen is not only corrosive, at high concentrations it interferes with photosynthesis as surely as carbon monoxide interferes with our breathing. The Earth was choking itself to death; this was possibly the greatest environmental crisis in history. But life adapts, as always. Life learned to harness the corrosive, destructive gas oxygen to more efficiently strip the energy from food, allowing larger predators to exist. Not only was a balance restored, but life was richer for the experience.

[BeFree]

9. Yay!

We're off the hook, then. None of it matters! Gawd do I feel better already. We can't hurt the planet, just us and all the other 10,000 trillion or so other parts of the planet.

Keep on preaching brother! It doesn't matter what we do! Nothing really matters according to that branch of science.

Were off the hook! We can go ahead and destroy life as we know it. Alright!

[Occam Bandage]

10. I don't understand why you seem to think

"We cannot hope to hurt the Earth" means "it is perfectly fine to harm individual species." That is a bit like saying "a man with a gun cannot hope to personally murder all of humanity, so therefore it is perfectly fine for him to shoot all the people he wants."

[IDemo]

4. The sudden flip may occur sooner than later

http://www.terranature.org/methaneSiberia.htm

Melting permafrost methane emissions: The other threat to climate change
15 September 2006

A frozen peat bog covering the entire sub-Arctic area of Western Siberia, the size of France and Germany, contains billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas that is melting for the first time since it was sequestered more than 11,000 years ago before the end of the last ice age.

Researchers Sergei Kirpotin of Tomsk State University in Siberia, and Judith Marquand of Oxford University first reported in 2005 that one million square kilometres of permafrost had started to melt.

Such an unprecedented thaw could dramatically increase the rate of global warming.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/exclusive-the-methane-time-bomb-938932.html

Exclusive: The methane time bomb

Arctic scientists discover new global warming threat as melting permafrost releases millions of tons of a gas 20 times more damaging than carbon dioxide

By Steve Connor, Science Editor

The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.

The Independent has been passed details of preliminary findings suggesting that massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats.

Underground stores of methane are important because scientists believe their sudden release has in the past been responsible for rapid increases in global temperatures, dramatic changes to the climate, and even the mass extinction of species. Scientists aboard a research ship that has sailed the entire length of Russia's northern coast have discovered intense concentrations of methane – sometimes at up to 100 times background levels – over several areas covering thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf.

* Hundreds of methane 'plumes' discovered

In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through "methane chimneys" rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a "lid" to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.

[yurbud]

11. punishing Wall Street: Pierce the Corporate Veil to get bad actors

I was looking for something else and stumbled across this and really like it, particularly since for all the talk of corporations being faceless financial cyborgs, we all know that at the highest levels, the same handful of execs, directors, and major shareholders serve the other two functions and scratch their buddies backs leaving customers, small investors, pension funds and the like holding the bag.

This is one of the keys to stopping the corporate crime--simply call bullshit on sociopaths hiding behind the fiction of corporations. Faceless financial entities don't kill economies, people kill economies.

Find them, punish them, keep them in jail until they make restitution.

Then kill their cyborg for good measure.

The corporate law concept of piercing (lifting) the corporate veil describes a legal decision where a shareholder or director of a corporation is held liable for the debts or liabilities of the corporation despite the general principle that shareholders are immune from suits in contract or tort that otherwise would hold only the corporation liable. This doctrine is also known as "disregarding the corporate entity". The phrase relies on a metaphor of a "veil" that represents the veneer of formalities and dignities that protect a corporation, which can be disregarded at will when the situation warrants looking beyond the "legal fiction" of a corporate person to the reality of other persons or entities who would otherwise be protected by the corporate fiction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_veil