Christopher Hitchens died

Oh I am going to miss his writing (and talk) so very much.

There are very few people who can get me laughing till my sides hurt, and flipped over into a red hot fury, all within a few sentences. He was such a person. I passionately agreed and disagreed with him on many issues. He had an amazing talent to use words as precision instruments and was the only person ever who had me yelling at the written word in a book or on a computer screen. Clever, acerbic, witty, sharp as a razor funny, infuriatingly intelligent man.

His was a life well lived, top to bottom. I'm thankful he shared some of that with the world.

You too will

end.

Money will not save you
Power will not save you

Your opinions will not safeguard you

Climate on a planetary scale will make no exceptions.

You who lied, misrepresented, twisted, leaned, pushed, forced, influenced, did everything you could to muddy the waters. You and your line won't be exempted. You too, will end.



So it goes.

Durban, a washout

Not that anything really constructive was ever expected to come from Durban, but I had hoped for more than this. Truth be said, the sense of let-down is not as large as Copenhagen, back then I was simply stunned. But realistically, the outcome in Durban is a kind of insanity. These are all informed people who understand the odds and dangers, they have no excuse.

Well, that's it, then. At least Kyoto gets stretched a bit further. And it seems, the best we can hope for, now, is an agreement with legally binding limits around 2015 to take effect no earlier than 2020. This ensures that we are locked into the high end of the climate change spectrum. We should be happy with this????

This is not something I want at all, but I'm now hoping for this list to happen as soon as possible. Really. Sooner rather than later. It's awful to be hoping for catastrophe but I really don't see anything else having an effect. Perhaps a number of whammys, one right after the other, will get people riled enough to demand action without shredding the fabric of our civil society too much. The best outcome would be one where there is so much pressure worldwide, that politicians simply must act, but not so much that it leads to anarchy, chaos and political rigor mortis.

Waiting till 2015/2020 (and that's assuming we don't build in another five to ten years procrastination and nitpicking the details) locks this planet into am ecology where we humans and most current species simply won't be able to survive. That's unacceptable.

I think the odds of this working out just fine, went down astronomically.
I'm 53, I won't see the worst of it. I sometimes watch the neighborhood kids as they run around and play outside, and my heart aches for them. I would not wish any of this on them. I'm sure their parents -were they to fully understand the danger- don't either.

Alarmists?

or very worried scientists?

Fragile

That thin, thin layer is all that keeps us alive.



Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

Wikileaks

It's no wonder Assange is fighting extradition so hard. Looking at the actions of the US government, they are putting in place a scaffolding that will be inescapable.

Here's my prediction: If/when he gets extradited, he'll be locked up while Sweden sorts out the charges and decide not to charge him after all as they extradite him to the USA straight from his holding cell.

Once in the USA, they'll pull a Bradley Manning on him: lock him up in more or less solitary confinement and throw away the key, classified as enemy combatant or suchlike. No trial, no fuss, no muss.

After a week or two of newspaper uproar the next celebrity will drunk-drive her way into the headlines and in my opinion, after that odds are that he'll end up the pet annual Amnesty postcard celebrity for the rest of his life.

Yes, in his shoes I'd fight the extradition with every ounce of energy I have.

The big blue, it's too big to be affected by humans?

Don't we wish!

This is how ocean acidification works.


It's the lag time that's the elephant in the room... and that's why the climate scientists are so adamant to get serious steps underway NOW while the effects are hardly noticeable yet, because once the effects really start showing, it's too late to use the brakes.
It's the lag time that's the true killer. As the people in the article are noticing now. And we are already locked in for another 50-some years of increasing emissions. We are already locked in to that, over and above what they are experiencing now.

I wish these kinds of articles ended up on the front pages of newspapers. It's that important.