Kinda grim - but this is reality .... and as a biologist (with a
technological bent) - I've been thinking in the same direction. Monbiot is
a biologist (with excellent credentials) - and a very well respected
commentator on environmental matters in the UK - look up his web site -

http://www.monbiot.com

So what are we going to do about it?? - trying to get institutions like
Universities to reduce their electric power useage seems damn near
impossible- but getting industry and households to shift will be a lot
harder - the only practical way that I can see, at least for Australia, is
to scrap the uniform tarriff for electricity - and charge about $1 per KWH.
Fat chance. No governm ent would have the guts to do that. But if they did
- the flow on to other areas would be enormous. And from there...

Hugh

The comment about methane gushers in the arctic is particularly scarey..

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071025174618.htm





http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/25/climate-change-carbon-emissi
ons

The planet is now so vandalised that only total energy renewal can save us

It may be too late. But without radical action, we will be the
generation that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse


George Bush is behaving like a furious defaulter whose home is about to
be repossessed. Smashing the porcelain, ripping the doors off their
hinges, he is determined that there will be nothing worth owning by the
time the bastards kick him out. His midnight regulations, opening
America's wilderness to logging and mining, trashing pollution controls,
tearing up conservation laws, will do almost as much damage in the last
60 days of his presidency as he achieved in the foregoing 3,000.

His backers - among them the nastiest pollutocrats in America - are
calling in their favours. But this last binge of vandalism is also the
Bush presidency reduced to its essentials. Destruction is not an
accidental product of its ideology. Destruction is the ideology.
Neoconservatism is power expressed by showing that you can reduce any
part of the world to rubble.

If it is too late to prevent runaway climate change, the Bush team must
carry much of the blame. His wilful trashing of the Middle Climate - the
interlude of benign temperatures which allowed human civilisation to
flourish - makes the mass murder he engineered in Iraq only the second
of his crimes against humanity. Bush has waged his war on science with
the same obtuse determination with which he has waged his war on terror.

Is it too late? To say so is to make it true. To suggest there is
nothing that can be done is to ensure that nothing is done. But even a
resolute optimist like me finds hope ever harder to summon. A new
summary of the science published since last year's Intergovernmental
Panel report suggests that - almost a century ahead of schedule - the
critical climate processes might have begun.

Just a year ago the Intergovernmental Panel warned that the Arctic's
"late-summer sea ice is projected to disappear almost completely towards
the end of the 21st century ... in some models." But, as the new report
by the Public Interest Research Centre (Pirc) shows, climate scientists
are now predicting the end of late-summer sea ice within three to seven
years. The trajectory of current melting plummets through the graphs
like a meteorite falling to earth.

Forget the sodding polar bears: this is about all of us. As the ice
disappears, the region becomes darker, which means that it absorbs more
heat. A recent paper published in Geophysical Research Letters shows
that the extra warming caused by disappearing sea ice penetrates 1,000
miles inland, covering almost the entire region of continuous
permafrost. Arctic permafrost contains twice as much carbon as the
entire global atmosphere. It remains safe for as long as the ground
stays frozen. But the melting has begun. Methane gushers are now gassing
out of some places with such force that they keep the water open in
Arctic lakes through the winter.

The effects of melting permafrost are not incorporated in any global
climate models. Runaway warming in the Arctic alone could flip the
entire planet into a new climatic state. The Middle Climate could
collapse faster and sooner than the grimmest forecasts proposed.

Barack Obama's speech to the US climate summit last week was an
astonishing development. It shows that, in this respect at least, there
really is a prospect of profound political change in America. But while
he described a workable plan for dealing with the problem perceived by
the Earth Summit of 1992, the measures he proposes are hopelessly out of
date. The science has moved on. The events the Earth Summit and the
Kyoto process were supposed to have prevented are already beginning.
Thanks to the wrecking tactics of Bush the elder, Clinton (and Gore) and
Bush the younger, steady, sensible programmes of the kind that Obama
proposes are now irrelevant. As the Pirc report suggests, the years of
sabotage and procrastination have left us with only one remaining shot:
a crash programme of total energy replacement.

A paper by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research shows that if
we are to give ourselves a roughly even chance of preventing more than
two degrees of warming, global emissions from energy must peak by 2015
and decline by between 6% and 8% per year from 2020 to 2040, leading to
a complete decarbonisation of the global economy soon after 2050. Even
this programme would work only if some optimistic assumptions about the
response of the biosphere hold true. Delivering a high chance of
preventing two degrees of warming would mean cutting global emissions by
more than 8% a year.

Is this possible? Is this acceptable? The Tyndall paper points out that
annual emission cuts greater than 1% have "been associated only with
economic recession or upheaval". When the Soviet Union collapsed,
emissions fell by some 5% a year. But you can answer these questions
only by considering the alternatives. The trajectory both Barack Obama
and Gordon Brown have proposed - an 80% cut by 2050 - means reducing
emissions by an average of 2% a year. This programme, the figures in the
Tyndall paper suggest, is likely to commit the world to at least four or
five degrees of warming, which means the likely collapse of human
civilisation across much of the planet. Is this acceptable?

The costs of a total energy replacement and conservation plan would be
astronomical, the speed improbable. But the governments of the rich
nations have already deployed a scheme like this for another purpose. A
survey by the broadcasting network CNBC suggests that the US federal
government has now spent $4.2 trillion in response to the financial
crisis, more than the total spending on the second world war when
adjusted for inflation. Do we want to be remembered as the generation
that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse?

This approach is challenged by the American thinker Sharon Astyk. In an
interesting new essay, she points out that replacing the world's energy
infrastructure involves "an enormous front-load of fossil fuels", which
are required to manufacture wind turbines, electric cars, new grid
connections, insulation and all the rest. This could push us past the
climate tipping point. Instead, she proposes, we must ask people "to
make short term, radical sacrifices", cutting our energy consumption by
50%, with little technological assistance, in five years.

There are two problems: the first is that all previous attempts show
that relying on voluntary abstinence does not work. The second is that a
10% annual cut in energy consumption while the infrastructure remains
mostly unchanged means a 10% annual cut in total consumption: a deeper
depression than the modern world has ever experienced. No political
system - even an absolute monarchy - could survive an economic collapse
on this scale.

She is right about the risks of a technological green new deal, but
these are risks we have to take. Astyk's proposals travel far into the
realm of wishful thinking. Even the technological new deal I favour
inhabits the distant margins of possibility.

Can we do it? Search me. Reviewing the new evidence, I have to admit
that we might have left it too late. But there is another question I can
answer more easily. Can we afford not to try? No, we can't.