Letting the climate change on purpose?

[Minstrel Boy]

Posted to my blog here.

Extreme enough for ya?

Just how weird must the weather get before some people acknowledge that even Kansas isn't in Kansas anymore?

I'm not talking earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes, although I could. I'm talking about the ordinary everyday stuff, which daily seems to be getting more extraordinary.

As extreme as North America's winter has been, it's nothing compared to Europe's. Unseasonal warmth in Central and Eastern Europe has caused bears to wake, grumpy, months early from their hibernation. Meanwhile, Scotland and Norway recover from hurricanes, for God's sake.

Fans of Michael Crichton will be quick to point out that last week's storms which battered Northern Europe were not true hurricanes, since they were not tropical. But that's a bit like saying George Bush can't be President, because President's can't be that stupid. The storms were severe and cyclonic, with torrential downpours and hurricane-force winds. So call it a "very bad storm" if you prefer, the results are the same. And it's going to get worse:

Storms "to get more destructive"

The storms which devastated parts of Scotland last week will become more frequent and more destructive in future, experts are predicting.

Residents of the west coast and islands said the storm, which brought hurricane-force winds reaching 124mph, was the worst in living memory. It caused the death of a family of five whose cars were swept into the sea as they tried to escape the fierce conditions on South Uist, and left a trail of destruction in its wake.

Power and telephone lines were brought down, roads and bridges were closed, schools and offices shut and buildings damaged or destroyed. But, according to researchers studying the seas off the west coast of Scotland, last week may be just a taste of things to come.

Scientists from Thurso and Southampton predict that a trend of more frequent storms may be set to intensify as a result of climate change, driving up winter wave heights off the west coast. The work has been done by Thurso’s Environmental Research Institute and Southampton Oceanography Centre.

The theory, popularized in The Day After Tomorrow (and perhaps so sensationalized it was raised for some to the level of an apparent absurdity), says the Atlantic Conveyor is vulnerable to an influx of fresh water from glacial melt. If it shuts down, or even slows down, severe weather will result, and Northern Europe's temperatures will plummet. The weather Europe is seeing now suggests we're getting close to the Conveyor's tipping point.

Into this strange new world of hurt strides the Bush administration, and today's headline:

US tries to remove climate change references in UN disaster talks

The United States, which opposes the Kyoto protocol on global warming, is trying to remove references to climate change in UN talks aimed at setting up a disaster early warning system, a US official said Wednesday.

The US has voiced objections to "multiple" references to climate change in drafting documents for the global conference in Kobe, Japan on disaster reduction, said Mark Lagon, deputy assistant secretary in the State Department bureau of international organization affairs.

He said the United States believed climate change was a "well-known" controversy and that there were "other venues" to discuss it.

Good on Mr Lagon to bite his tongue, and stop short of calling climate change a "conspiracy theory."

So what is going on with the stubborn refusal of the US to admit and act upon climate change? I think it's wrong to believe the policy-makers ignorant. We saw last year what the Pentagon's secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by the UK's Observer, made of it: climate change "should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern." Britain could be Siberian by 2020, and major European cities sunk beneath rising seas. According to the report, an imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is "plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately."

But with a challenge to US national security, also comes an opportunity.

Climate change impacts everyone, but short of a runaway greenhouse effect (and no worries - we have a good 50 years or so to squander before that eventuality), some will be impacted more than others. Europe, for instance, would be expected to fare worse than the United States if the Atlantic Conveyor shuts down. The continent depends upon the moderating current to keep it out of the deep freeze. If it fails, then so will Europe.

And which continent of former allies is it, which is now viewed with suspicion as a potential 21st Century rival to American hegemony?

Having read the CIA's laughable reverse-psychology "advice" to Europe, I think there are likely some people in places of influence who wouldn't object to putting the continent on ice. ("The current EU welfare state is unsustainable and the lack of any economic revitalisation could lead to the splintering or, at worst, disintegration of the EU." Oh yes; the CIA would just hate to see the EU fail.)

Perhaps the Bush administration isn't as ignorant as it seems regarding climate change. Perhaps it knows, even better than we know, what is coming. And perhaps, weighing everything in the balance, they are saying, in effect, "bring it on!"

In other words, perhaps what we're seeing in US environmental policy is another instance of Letting It Happen On Purpose.

[bobthedrummer]

1. North Sea hurricanes. I'm not surprised.

I've seen a lot about "owning the weather".
I read the original HR 2977 Space Preservation Act of 2001.
I've heard about the "exotic weapons".
http://www.raven1.net/govptron.htm

[Minstrel Boy]

2. Since Condoleeza Rice could call the tsunami a "wonderful opportunity"

(http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGB55TSV44E.html), I wonder what Donald Rumsfeld is calling climate change?

[PROGRESSIVE1]

3. ........

[anarchy1999]

4. Google T. Boone Pickens in Dallas and water privitazation.

http://www.citizen.org/cmep/Water/us/bulksales/texas/index.cfm

T. Boone Pickens in Texas

The notorious oilman has acquired land overlying the Ogallala aquifer and wants to pump and sell as much as 200,000 acre-feet of groundwater annually to one of Texas’ metropolitan centers.

A new undertaking by Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens is even more disconcerting. Pickens has been acquiring acreage overlying the Ogallala aquifer with hopes that he could pump and sell the as much as 200,000 AFY of water to one of the state’s metropolitan centers – El Paso, Lubbock, San Antonio, or Dallas-Fort Worth. Ogallala is already severely depleted. The West Texas farmers rely on the aquifer for water. The aquifer’s minimal recharge rate of less then one AFY means that its users are mining fossil water that will not be replenished.

Pickens projects that his prices would be adjusted according to the distance the water has to be pumped: El Paso would pay $1,400 per acre-foot, Dallas would pay $800, San Antonio – more than $1000. Although building a pipeline will be expensive, an estimated $1-$2 billion, these prices are still very high.

The Panhandle Conservation District sanctions extraction up to one AFY per acre of land. Pickens and his partners currently own water rights for 150 acres and are seeking rights for 50 more. This could translate into pumping as much as 65 billion gallons of water a year. The conservation district attempted to reduce the planned extraction amount by half but was not able to because Pickens’ pumping level was equal to that of the Canadian River Authority, a public water supplier that has already been granted an approval to pump. Pickens argued that by law, both had to be treated equally. If Pickens lines up a buyer, financing would come and unprecedented amounts of groundwater would begin to be sold for colossal profits.

A more comprehensive groundwater regulatory regime is needed to prevent devastation of Texas groundwater resources. Further, Texas should abandon the Rule of Capture doctrine. Today, Texas is the only state to retain this antiquated rule.


Just one of the first that came up. Pay attention, everyone. "The notorious oilman" is going after water now. WWhatt?

[Minstrel Boy]

5. Blue Gold, Texas Tea

"Lead the sheeple to the order like lambs to the slaughter
The wars of this century will be over water"
- Clarity (Michael Kane)

From a Mother Jones interview with Canadian activist Maude Barlow, author of Blue Gold:

MJ.com: Historically, how were corporations able to change the perception of water from a basic right to a commodity?

MB: This started with the privatization of municipal water services. It was encouraged when water was declared a commodity or a good in the trade agreements. It started to be considered and talked about as a good and a need -- not a human right -- by the World Water Council when it was founded in 1997. The World Water Council is basically the World Bank, the other regional development banks and the development agencies of the northern governments. It set itself up as a global high command of water existing for its own benefit, to commercialize and commodify water. They have a big forum every three years, where they invite governments to come and observe, and the governments pick up this language of water as a commodity, such thatgovernments really didn’t think about this language 10 or 20 years ago, now they’re getting together and saying, “There’s this U.N. millennium plan and we have to be helping the developing countries bring on water, and how do we do that?” They’re all buying into this commodification notion, which is all very new and has happened very quickly -- and, I believe, has been driven by corporate interests. It’s important to remember that it’s a very small, incestuous circle -- these water companies, the World Water Council, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the IMF. There’s a lot of money to be made from the commodification of water, and these people know that whoever controls water is going to be both very rich and very powerful.

MJ.com: So why do governments cede control to this privatization system instead of, say, selling their water to the public themselves?

MB: Really, the same reasons that governments have bought into the whole concept of neoliberalism. Governments that used to protect their citizens and provide them with health care and water services and education no longer are allowed to do that if they’re poor and owe a debt to the developed world. Through structural adjustment programs, the IMF and the World Bank basically forced developing countries to abandon those relationships with their people, whether it’s health care or energy or state enterprises, because the funding was going to be cut if they didn’t. It’s been to the advantage of the powerful in northern countries, who are more and more controlled by their own big-business communities, to adopt this language. So it didn’t start with water, but water just kind of fell in there when they started talking about everything as a commodity. When you start commodifying things like social services, energy, forests, fish and even air -- because you’re now trading air-pollution credits and so on -- it’s not a big step to say “why is water different?” One of the first questions I often get asked in hostile interviews is why water is different than forests or fish. And one of my answers is well, actually, we should be protecting our forests and fish, too. However, we can restock fish, we can find alternatives to energy, and we can even replant trees. But there’s only so much water, and the more we destroy, the less access we have to potable water and the more desperate the situation becomes.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2005/01/maude_barlow.html

[seemslikeadream]

6. Jesus spoke to Peter, "Tend My sheep."

Each year, approximately 4,000,000 baby Karakul lambs are killed within a day or two of their birth to make Persian lamb fur coats and trim.
http://www.all-creatures.org/anex/sheep-plamb-01.html

[bobthedrummer]

7. Kick.

:dem::kick:

[Octafish]

8. Don't worry. God will bail us out of any jam.

People of Faith know that God gave man dominion over all the earth to do with as man pleases. So what if everything dies? It's man's property. Besides, Jesus will come soon and save the believers and throw the godless communists, oops, I mean, Liberals into the maw of Hell where they will burn in eternity along with them Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists and Jews and Catholics and Episcopaleans and Quakers and Methodists and Unitarians and uh and uh and uh... That's faith-based Christian Recontstructionism for ya.

And where does that lead? You got it, Minstrel Person.

The BFEE wants to kill all non-essential life on earth. The super powerful and super rich will go underground for however long it takes for the Untermenschen of Mankind to die off. Then, the Bushes and their toadies will repopulate with the Chosen People. "The women must be of a highly stimmmmulating nature,ja?"