The Gloomanac

It’s even nigher than we thought

Piers Eccleston — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:40:01 +0000

This post is copied from an article in the Independant, by Steve Connor and Michael McCarthy. It was printed on Wednesday 18th November 2009. We’re all so inured to dire climate predictions, that this front page article didn’t seem to resonate with anyone I spoke to in London. Lots of X-Factor chat, obviously, but not a lot about the imminent end of human civilisation.

In brief, there’s a closing door of opportunity to arrest climate change. The best chance we have is to stop temperature rises at 2 degrees centigrade above the norm. Even at this rise, the planet will suffer terribly, but at least it won’t mean the end of us all. Experts call this aim “C”, knowing that it’s extremely optimistic to hope for anything like this.

However, it seems we’re heading for something far worse within a hundred years – a rise of 6 degrees centigrade. Such a rise will make the book of revelations look like a picnic. This is the first time such an announcement has been made. Even more important than the announcement is the ambivalence with which it has been received. It seems an impossible dream that the leaders at the forthcoming Copenhagen conference will manage to agree on the necessary steps to prevent our doom.

Beyond “C”, various natural carbon sinks will begin to stop working, creating ‘positive feedback’, a situation where the climate will warm exponentially to a point where life will become untenable for everything except fungus.

Here’s the article:

“The world is now firmly on course for the worst-case scenario in terms of climate change, with average global temperatures rising by up to 6C by the end of the century, leading scientists said yesterday. Such a rise – which would be much higher nearer the poles – would have cataclysmic and irreversible consequences for the Earth, making large parts of the planet uninhabitable and threatening the basis of human civilisation.

We are headed for it, the scientists said, because the carbon dioxide emissions from industry, transport and deforestation which are responsible for warming the atmosphere have increased dramatically since 2002, in a way which no one anticipated, and are now running at treble the annual rate of the 1990s.

This means that the most extreme scenario envisaged in the last report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2007, is now the one for which society is set, according to the 31 researchers from seven countries involved in the Global Carbon Project.

Although the 6C rise and its potential disastrous effects have been speculated upon before, this is the first time that scientists have said that society is now on a path to meet it.

Their chilling and remarkable prediction throws into sharp relief the importance of next month’s UN climate conference in Copenhagen, where the world community will come together to try to construct a new agreement to bring the warming under control.

For the past month there has been a lowering of expectations about the conference, not least because the US may not be ready to commit itself to cuts in its emissions. But yesterday President Barack Obama and President Hu Jintao of China issued a joint communiqué after a meeting in Beijing, which reignited hopes that a serious deal might be possible after all.

It cannot come too soon, to judge by the results of the Global Carbon Project study, led by Professor Corinne Le Quéré, of the University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey, which found that there has been a 29 per cent increase in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel between 2000 and 2008, the last year for which figures are available.

On average, the researchers found, there was an annual increase in emissions of just over 3 per cent during the period, compared with an annual increase of 1 per cent between 1990 and 2000. Almost all of the increase this decade occurred after 2000 and resulted from the boom in the Chinese economy. The researchers predict a small decrease this year due to the recession, but further increases from 2010.

In total, CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have increased by 41 per cent between 1990 and 2008, yet global emissions in 1990 are the reference level set by the Kyoto Protocol, which countries are trying to fall below in terms of their own emissions.

The 6C rise now being anticipated is in stark contrast to the C rise at which all international climate policy, including that of Britain and the EU, hopes to stabilise the warming – two degrees being seen as the threshold of climate change which is dangerous for society and the natural world.

The study by Professor Le Quéré and her team, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, envisages a far higher figure. “We’re at the top end of the IPCC scenario,” she said.

Professor Le Quéré said that Copenhagen was the last chance of coming to a global agreement that would curb carbon-dioxide emissions on a time-course that would hopefully stabilise temperature rises to within the danger threshold. “The Copenhagen conference next month is in my opinion the last chance to stabilise climate at C above pre-industrial levels in a smooth and organised way,” she said.

“If the agreement is too weak, or the commitments not respected, it is not 2.5C or 3C we will get: it’s 5C or 6C – that is the path we’re on. The timescales here are extremely tight for what is needed to stabilise the climate at C,” she said.

Meanwhile, the scientists have for the first time detected a failure of the Earth’s natural ability to absorb man-made carbon dioxide released into the air.

They found significant evidence that more man-made CO2 is staying in the atmosphere to exacerbate the greenhouse effect because the natural “carbon sinks” that have absorbed it over previous decades on land and sea are beginning to fail, possibly as a result of rising global temperatures.

The amount of CO2 that has remained in the atmosphere as a result has increased from about 40 per cent in 1990 to 45 per cent in 2008. This suggests that the sinks are beginning to fail, they said.

Professor Le Quéré emphasised that there are still many uncertainties over carbon sinks, such as the ability of the oceans to absorb dissolved CO2, but all the evidence suggests that there is now a cycle of “positive feedbacks”, whereby rising carbon dioxide emissions are leading to rising temperatures and a corresponding rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“Our understanding at the moment in the computer models we have used – and they are state of the art – suggests that carbon-cycle climate feedback has already kicked in,” she said.

“These models, if you project them on into the century, show quite large feedbacks, with climate amplifying global warming by between 5 per cent and 30 per cent. There are still large uncertainties, but this is carbon-cycle climate feedback that has already started,” she said.

The study also found that, for the first time since the 1960s, the burning of coal has overtaken the burning of oil as the major source of carbon-dioxide emissions produced by fossil fuels.

Much of this coal was burned by China in producing goods sold to the West – the scientists estimate that 45 per cent of Chinese emissions resulted from making products traded overseas.

It is clear that China, having overtaken the US as the world’s biggest carbon emitter, must be central to any new climate deal, and so the communiqué from the Chinese and US leaders issued yesterday was widely seized on as a sign that progress may be possible in the Danish capital next month.

Presidents Hu and Obama specifically said an accord should include emission-reduction targets for rich nations, and a declaration of action plans to ease greenhouse-gas emissions in developing countries – key elements in any deal.

6C rise: The consequences

If two degrees is generally accepted as the threshold of dangerous climate change, it is clear that a rise of six degrees in global average temperatures must be very dangerous indeed, writes Michael McCarthy. Just how dangerous was signalled in 2007 by the science writer Mark Lynas, who combed all the available scientific research to construct a picture of a world with temperatures three times higher than the danger limit.

His verdict was that a rise in temperatures of this magnitude “would catapult the planet into an extreme greenhouse state not seen for nearly 100 million years, when dinosaurs grazed on polar rainforests and deserts reached into the heart of Europe”.

He said: “It would cause a mass extinction of almost all life and probably reduce humanity to a few struggling groups of embattled survivors clinging to life near the poles.”

Very few species could adapt in time to the abruptness of the transition, he suggested. “With the tropics too hot to grow crops, and the sub-tropics too dry, billions of people would find themselves in areas of the planet which are essentially uninhabitable. This would probably even include southern Europe, as the Sahara desert crosses the Mediterranean.

“As the ice-caps melt, hundreds of millions will also be forced to move inland due to rapidly-rising seas. As world food supplies crash, the higher mid-latitude and sub-polar regions would become fiercely-contested refuges.

“The British Isles, indeed, might become one of the most desirable pieces of real estate on the planet. But, with a couple of billion people knocking on our door, things might quickly turn rather ugly.”

Belief

Piers Eccleston — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:53:46 +0000

To believe in something is to be persuaded of a compelling argument by evidence. Belief is a binary thing; you either do believe something or you don’t. It’s impossible to CHOOSE to believe anything.

For instance, we believe in the sun because we see it. The evidence is convincing.

We believe in evolution because it’s a simple theory everyone can understand, a theory illustrated with countless examples. And the evidence keeps mounting up.

But when people say they believe in God, what is their ‘belief’ actually based on? There is no evidence for God, only the insistence of others. Those who pronounce this belief haven’t actually experienced any evidence to support their claim.

They have, in fact, DECIDED to believe in God. That isn’t believing. That’s just wishing for something to be true. If you have to decide to believe in something before you say you believe it, you aren’t yet convinced of an argument. It’s a misapplication of the word ‘belief’.

Before the Enlightenment, it would have been excusable to literally believe in God. But nowadays, it’s impossible for anyone with a Western education to genuinely believe in God – Not the Pope, the president, Bishop Desmond Tutu, or anyone else. The ‘faithful’ can exist in a state of denial and cling to words like ‘belief’, but not for very much longer. When people say they have ‘doubts’ about their ‘faith’, they’re simply experiencing cognitive dissonance – their own minds are telling them that the logic doesn’t add up. It’s not a ‘glorious mystery’, it’s just your brain warning you not to talk bollocks.

If you’re reading this and you think you believe in God, ask yourself “Why?” Do you actually believe in God, or do you just wish there was a God? It’s fine to wish for things, but it’s a crime against human development to claim a wish as a truth that you believe.

Why does any of this matter? Because if you say believe something by way of a decision, rather than by the force of fact, you’re lying to yourself. Worse, you’re shutting down your own critical, reasoning faculties. And as soon as you’ve forbidden yourself the right to question and think, you’re wide open to manipulation.

Big brother – more than just a TV show

Piers Eccleston — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:38:29 +0000

At the heart of our society are a few central tenets from which much of its philosophy derives – phrases like ‘Habeas Corpus’, and ‘Innocent until proven guilty’.

It’s amazing how folks today all seem to ‘know their rights’, yet at the same time many of us fail to discern the deeper concepts that prevent democracy from morphing into despotism.

Take identity cards (actually don’t). The unthinking majority seems to buy the line of “if you’ve nothing to hide, then you’ve nothing to lose”, without appreciating the inevitably far-reaching consequences of transferring powers of identity from the individual to the state.

Actually, we all do have something “to hide” – namely our private lives. Anonymity is something to be treasured. Ask any celebrity. Most of us know not to give our names to strangers trying to sell us things in the street because we know that personal details have value. Your identity has a power of its own and should be treasured.

Or take the 6 million DNA samples the police hold on UK subjects who have not been convicted of a crime. The police wish to keep these DNA samples in case they come in handy at a future date.

Or take the new phrase in operation in the Northumberland and Cleveland Police Forces of the Potential Dangerous Person, or PDP. This label is given to someone who is suspected of crimes but who has not been charged, let alone found guilty of an offence. Under this new designation they will be targeted as criminals, watched and inevitably harassed. The scheme links police, the probation service, with education, adult and children’s services in an information network which without any judicial process will decide on a person’s guilty intentions.

The assistant director of Country Durham Probation Service, is quoted as saying, “You have to balance the human rights of the offender with the human rights of the potential victim in the community.” Note the word “offender”. That’s an unconvicted “offender”, or more literally, a “potential offender”. As Henry Porter writes in The Guardian, “That the police can instigate this policy without the slightest murmur of dissent, without debate in parliament, without local MPs raising the mildest concern, is a very worrying sign indeed.”

It’s as though people fail to appreciate they’re free at all, as though a terrible misunderstanding is occurring between The People and The State, where the state presumes more power over individuals than it actually has, and, most alarmingly, The People cede their powers unwittingly.

What ends in the countless banal, but well loved freedoms in our society; Xfactor, glossy fashion magazines, an economy that can produce the ipod and crack the genome, begins in dusty latin legal phrases that make up the nuts and bolts of our individual independance.

Perhaps the link between the practical benefits of a free society, and the philsophical mores that enable all of this to flower has been lost in the public consciousness. It’s not so long since the second world war, where the issue of personal freedom was at stake. Surely in the 1940′s everyone had a clear idea of what they were fighting for. But now one wonders who understands what it was all about. In the same circumstances today, could a leader like Churchill rally the people of the UK to respond in the same way to a similar threat? Probably not.

One thing Hitler didn’t really bother with was stealth. That’s one thing that The Police and the current, unelected government have become experts in. They know the dry latin stuff is dull to the man in the street, so they can do what they like, using stealth tactics to sleepwalk a nation into tyranny.

Remember, the state and the police are in our service, not the other way around.

Nuclear stockpiles

Piers Eccleston — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:07:15 +0000

More than a decade and a half after the Cold War ended, the world’s combined stockpile of nuclear warheads remain at a very high level: more than 25,000. Of these, more than 10,000 warheads are considered operational, ready for use on short notice. The exact number of nuclear weapons in each country’s possession is a closely held national secret. Despite this limitation, publicly available information and occasional leaks make it possible to make best estimates about the size and composition of the national nuclear weapon stockpiles.

The information available for each country varies greatly, ranging from the most transparent nuclear weapons state (United States) to the most opaque (North Korea). Accordingly, while the stockpile for the United States is based on real numbers, the North Korean stockpile is highly uncertain. Indeed, although U.S. Intelligence claims that North Korea may have assembled a few nuclear weapons and North Korea claims to have some, no information is available in the public domain that proves that North Korea has assembled a nuclear weapons much less has an operational nuclear weapon.

To develop these arsenals, the nuclear powers have conducted over 2050 nuclear weapons tests since 1945. Historically, nuclear tests were primarily proof-tests to verify that a new weapon worked as designed. Some tests also served to check for potential defects in deployed weapon types. The United States and the Soviet Union agreed to move nuclear tests underground in 1963, and since then other nations have gradually followed. The last atmospheric test was conducted by China in 1980. India and Pakistan in 1998 both announced that they had conducted five tests, but only three and two, respectively, were detected. North Korea announced in 2008, that it had conducted another nuclear test after it’s last one in 2006. And then there’s Iran…

So long, and thanks for all the honey

Piers Eccleston — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:58:19 +0000

There’s a central theme in Douglas Adams’ Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books that we aren’t the smartest species on the planet. The book pictures a world where dolphins are actually vastly our intellectual superiors. What humans mistake as simple dolphin tricks (jumping through hoops and balancing balls on their noses), are actually a complex series of communications warning us of the planet’s impending doom. Ultimately, the dolphins give up trying to warn us and hightail it to the nearest planet that isn’t about to be blown up.

In the real world, perhaps we should see bees in a similar way, as sentinels giving a final desperate warning to us before they themselves disappear altogether. Colony collapse disorder is the name of a phenomenon that is wiping out global honeybee populations at an alarming rate.

The fact that this amazing creature is dying in vast numbers doesn’t seem to interest us much. And now that many bee species are facing a threat to their very survival, we hardly seem to care at all.

Bees are dying across the world at a terrifying rate. The epidemic started in the United States, where entire populations of honey bees have simply vanished in the phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder (CCD). Wild honeybees are now extinct in the US and all bee activity is carefully farmed and orchestrated by human agencies. But at least a quarter of America’s 2.5 million farmed honeybee colonies have been wiped out already, and CCD has spread to Brazil, Canada and parts of Europe.

Bee populations are also sharply reduced in Britain, with some keepers reporting the abandonment of more than half their hives. Three native species of bumble bee are already extinct and nine are threatened.

There are many theories about the cause of the population plunge — parasites, GM crops, pesticides, global warming — but no conclusions. The implications for humanity of the disappearing bee are enormous: honeybees pollinate about 80 per cent of flowering crops, which in turn furnish one third of the human diet.

The economic contribution that bees make to agriculture and horticulture in this country has been estimated at £1 billion, yet the looming threat to the bee population has been all but ignored. The Government spends just £180,000 on bee research.

Bees are not as cute as dolphins, yet as they perish in ever increasing numbers, they are trying to tell us something, and we had better listen.

Make no mistake, this is a real crisis. But being human, we’ll probably only sit up and take notice when a third of all our food disappears.

A pile of tits

Piers Eccleston — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:46:13 +0000

Don’t the newspapers get in a terrible huff about paedophilia.

And yet, not so long ago, it was a very different story. Sam Fox first appeared topless in The Sun at the age of 16, as did a bunch of other ‘top heavy lovelies’. More alarmingly, Lindsay Dawn Mackenzie appeared in The Daily Sport at the age of 15 a number of times as she approached her 16th birthday - topless, but covering her rudest parts with her hands. On the big day of her birthday, all was revealed.

You’re probablly reading this and presuming it all happened in the long, long ago. Not so. The Sport’s big scoop came out in 1994.

So, it could be argued that the same newspapers who revile kiddy fiddlers so vehemently today were part of the social architecture that made attitudes like this acceptable in the first place.

Funny old world.

Jargon and catastrophe

Piers Eccleston — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:04:37 +0000

It’s an old subject, but The Gloomanac aims to list everything wrong with the world, so we simply have to mention corporate jargon.

Of course the lexicon is irritating, but the real problem is the mindset of people that talk in this way – and the end result for everyone else.

Corporate jargon is something for people to hide behind when they don’t know what they’re doing. These are the people who stand just behind the fool in charge, whispering whatever encouraging piffle will keep them secure in their position. Jargon is the result of self interest of the least purposeful variety.

A separate and slightly baffling annoyance about those who use jargon like this is that they tend to prosper. It actually works for them. These guys end up in important positions at companies like Proctor&Gamble, making the wrong decisions about, say, which powerful chemicals should be pumped with gay abandon down our lavatories to pollute our water table. I’ll bet the people who make Sillit Bang do nothing else but shout jargon at each other at the top of their voices.

Sure, the dictators and militarised thugs get all the headlines, but it’s the little men and their personal politics who make it all possible. And they’re bloody everywhere, in Washington, the UN, the Police, your council, and your office.

So maybe the end of the world all starts with the jargon. Words are powerful things, especially when they’re complete bollocks.

One small example of this is the hateful imp from Little Chef on a recent Channel 4 programme with Heston Blumenthal. It was clear he was from The Dark Side the second he opened his mouth and started talking about ‘blue sky thinking’. This is the face of The Man, an epitome of a mode of speech and behaviour that is destroying our civilisation.

So, here’s the deal. Little Chef are on their way down, and the best chef in the world comes in to try and save them with a seriously brilliant, practical and affordable menu. But the little man from Little Chef pulls the whole thing to pieces. He obfuscates. He says he’ll do one thing and then he does another. And oh crikey, does he trot out the jargon. Perhaps most damagingly, the guy form Little Chef takes Blumenthal’s menu on, but then uses cheaper ingredients, like oven chips instead of the items specified on the shopping list. The whole programme serves as a study of how something wonderful is slowly cheapened and perverted into something monstrous.

Perhaps that’s where jargon is useful; maybe it’s an early warning system for the rest of us. So, with this in mind, as soon as you hear someone talking in jargon, mark them as one to avoid. Perhaps that way, you’ll actually get somewhere with your day. Here’s a list to get you started:

(any additions to this list will gratefully received)

1. Blue sky thinking
2. Singing from the same hymn sheet
3. Thinking outside the box
4. Touching base
5. Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes
6. End to end solution
7. We must reach out
8. Evolution NOT revolution
9. All on the same page
10. Team work makes the dream work

The worst day of the week

Piers Eccleston — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:22:24 +0000

Suicide rates by day of the week

Day

Suicide rate (percent)

Sunday	11.8
Monday	14.3
Tuesday	12.7
Wednesday	24.6
Thursday	11.1
Friday	11.2
Saturday	14.4

Source: “Association of temporal factors and suicides in the United States, 2000-2004″ by Augstine J. Kposowa and Stephanie D’Auria

The scientists say Wednesday is the worst day of the week because that’s the day suicides spike. But suicides are just show offs and don’t know how to manage their gloom.

As any trued miserabilist knows, nothing beats Tuesdays for sheer eat-your-fists gloom. Tuesdays simply serve no purpose and should be banned at once. Check on Google – everyone seems to think the same.

Free newspaper… or just litter?

Piers Eccleston — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:36:22 +0000

Commuters, while commuting, simply stop being people at all. Getting into central London each morning is enough to make this writer lose all humanity. Looking around me, I see I’m not alone. Pushing and shoving, noisy headphones etc… It’s like a zombie movie – just without anyone likeable characters.

But there’s a new(ish) evil in this ninth circle of hell – free newspapers.

When a commuter zombie buys a newspaper, she’ll take it with her when she leaves the public transport system for the day to go and spoil the world in some other way. But when it’s a free paper, it just gets left, along with all the other free papers, on the floors and seats of tube trains. Why? I’ve heard people say it’s nice to leave a paper for others to read after them. But why don’t they leave the newspapers they have paid their money for for others to read too? Now that The Evening Standard is free, it’s getting the same treatment too. Is it the 20 pence they have paid for the paper that makes the difference? 20p? Really?

Give people half a chance and they’ll collectively lower their standards. A case of ‘If the bloke across the aisle does it, so can I’.

If you’re one of those people littering the capital in this way, please stop. Either you’re too stupid to see what you’re doing, or you’re too mean to care. Which is why, on a micro-cosmic level we’re all doomed.

A third of all species due for extinction

Piers Eccleston — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:18:32 +0000

Out of the 47,677 species in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 17,291 were deemed to be at serious risk.

That’s pretty bad news. But it comes below child obesity on the news agenda. Which is a shame, because when there’s nothing left to eat, all those fat children will be the tastiest treats around.

Check the link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8338880.stm