The subtext of this blog is sustainability and when we started two years ago it was still possible to maintain the illusion the planet could be saved and even fairly trivial actions like adaptive reuse could contribute to making things right. Of course we don’t believe that any more. There will be no fairy tale happy ending and we (ie us sentient beings of every species) have been doomed by humanity’s extraordinarily imaginative and energetic exercise of greed.
In case this sounds a bit extreme we would point to the response of the newly elected Australian Government (supposedly our climate change saviours) to this week’s preliminary report by its climate change advisor, right wing economist Ross Garnaut. He was meant to greenwash the coal industry and justify inaction but instead he announced that 90% emission cuts were necessary by 2050 (admittedly with lots of market religion provisos). Suddenly the Government was fleeing from him in terror, incapable of facing the endemic corporate corruption that blocks real climate change action.
And then we would point to this graph from gristmill where Joseph Romm talks about the nonsense of “consensus” on climate change.
As he pointedly observes, science deals in observable facts, not consensus. The graph illustrates the difference between the IPCC report’s consensus on melting arctic ice and the observable reality from satellites.
Romm says
I do believe in science. And I do believe in real-world observations. Perhaps the central question of our time is whether those who don’t will stop those who do from saving the planet.
And that is why Garnaut and the Australian Government and most other governments are wrong. By the time they all concede that we must do what must be done rather than what is comfortable or easily affordable it will all be too late. In fact it is becoming pretty obvious that it is too late already.