What's omitted in IPCC report

SUBHEAD: The scariest thing about the IPCC Report — it’s the watered down, consensus version.

By Jon Queally on 9 October 2018 for Common Dreams -
(https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/10/09/whats-not-latest-terrifying-ipcc-report-much-much-much-more-terrifying-new-research)

 
Image above: A burned truck and structures are seen at the Butte Fire on September 13, 2015 near San Andreas, California. California governor Jerry Brown has declared a state of emergency in Amador and Calaveras counties where the 100-square-mile wildfire has burned scores of structures so far and is threatening 6,400 in the historic Gold Country of the Sierra Nevada foothills.Photo by David McNew. From original article.

If the latest warnings contained in Monday's report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—which included pronouncements that the world has less than twelve years to drastically alter course to avoid the worst impacts of human-caused global warming and that nothing less than keeping all fossil fuels in the ground is the solution to avoid future calamities—have you at all frightened or despondent, experts responding to the report have a potentially unwelcome message for your already over-burdened heart and mind:

It's very likely even worse than you're being told.

After the report's publication there were headlines like: "We have 12 years to act on climate change before the world as we know it is lost. How much more urgent can it get?" and "Science pronounces its verdict: World to be doomed at 2°C, less dangerous at 1.5°C" and "A major new climate report slams the door on wishful thinking."

But as Jamie Henn, co-founder and the program director for the international climate group 350.org, stated in a tweet on Tuesday, the "scariest thing about the IPCC Report" is the fact that "it's the watered down, consensus version. The latest science is much, much, much more terrifying."

Henn was actually responding to Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann who was pushing back against those criticizing the IPCC report as too "alarmist" in its declarations and warnings.

"If anything," Professor Mann declared, "it is the opposite. Once again, with their latest report, they have been overly conservative (ie. erring on the side of understating/underestimating the problem.)"

This is very possibly true and there is much scientific data and argument backing this up.

As Henn and Mann both indicate, the IPCC report is based on the consensus view of the hundreds of scientists who make up the IPCC – and its been consistently true that some of the most recent (and increasingly worrying) scientific findings have not yet found enough support to make it into these major reports which rely on near-unanimous agreement.

According to Durwood Zaelke, founder of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, speaking to The Guardian in the wake of the latest IPCC report, it "fails to focus on the weakest link in the climate chain: the self-reinforcing feedbacks which, if allowed to continue, will accelerate warming and risk cascading climate tipping points and runaway warming."

In August, as Common Dreams reported, research published by Johan Rockström and his colleagues at the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden found that it is precisely these feedback loops and tipping points that should most frighten and concern humanity.

While nascent and not conclusive in its findings—two of the reasons you won't find it referenced in the IPCC report—the study warned that humanity may be just 1°C away from creating a series of dynamic feedback loops that could push the world into a climate scenario not seen since the dawn of the Helocene Period, nearly 12,000 years ago.

Quoted in Tuesday's Guardian article about the dangers of ignoring potential tipping points, Nobel prize laureate Mario Molina, who shared the award for chemistry in 1995 for his work on ozone depletion, said:

"The IPCC report demonstrates that it is still possible to keep the climate relatively safe, provided we muster an unprecedented level of cooperation, extraordinary speed and heroic scale of action. But even with its description of the increasing impacts that lie ahead, the IPCC understates a key risk: that self-reinforcing feedback loops could push the climate system into chaos before we have time to tame our energy system, and the other sources of climate pollution."

The purpose of recognizing the terrifying predictions is not to instill fear, however, climate campaigners and advocates for bold solutions say.

In a paper authored last year—titled Leading the Public into Emergency Mode: A New Strategy for the Climate Movement—Margaret Klein Salamon writes that while a World War II-style mobilization is necessary to achieve the kind emission cuts and energy transformation that science now mandates, understanding the stakes does not necessarily mean being debilitated by that knowledge.

In an op-ed for Common Dreams, she argued "that intense, but not paralyzing, fear combined with maximum hope can actually lead people and groups into a state of peak performance.

We can rise to the challenge of our time and dedicate ourselves to become heroic messengers and change-makers."

And as Rajiv Sicora, senior manager of research for The Leap, wrote to his group's supporters in an email on Tuesday:

"This is not the time to turn away, whether in fear or in active denial of the facts. This is a time to use our fear as fuel: because the report also makes clear that the worst effects of global warming can still be prevented, and the urgency of transformative change should excite and empower all of us who are fighting for justice anyway."

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When Collapse goes Kinetic

SUBHEAD: The mortally wounded the American middle class made Donald Trump president.

By James Kunstler on 9 July 2018 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/collapse-goes-kinetic/)


Image above: Elon Musk had to resort to building Tesla Model 3 cars by hand in a tent in Freemont, CA, when it was clear he could not build 5,000 cars in a week in an automated modern robotic plant. From (https://oppositelock.kinja.com/tesla-executives-approved-an-idea-from-the-company-s-e-1827266263).

I suppose many who think about the prospect of economic collapse imagine something like a Death Star implosion that simply obliterates the normal doings of daily life overnight, leaving everybody in a short, nasty, brutish, Hobbesian free-for-all that dumps the survivors in a replay of the Stone Age — without the consolation of golden ages yet to come that we had the first time around.

The collapse of our techno-industrial set-up has actually been going on for some time, insidiously and corrosively, without shattering the scaffolds of seeming normality, just stealthily undermining them.

I’d date the onset of it to about 2005 when the world unknowingly crossed an invisible border into the terra incognito of peak oil, by which, of course, I mean oil that societies could no longer afford to pull out of the ground. It’s one thing to have an abundance of really cheap energy, like oil was in 1955.

But when the supply starts to get sketchy, and what’s left can only be obtained at an economic loss, the system goes quietly insane.

In the event, popular beliefs and behavior have turned really strange. We do things that are patently self-destructive, rationalize them with doctrines and policies that don’t add up, and then garnish them with wishful fantasies that offer hypothetical happy endings to plot lines that do not really tend in a rosy direction.

The techno-narcissistic nonsense reverberating through the echo-chambers of business, media, and government aims to furnish that nostrum called “hope” to a nation that simply won’t admit darker outcomes to the terrible limits facing humanity.

Thus, we have the Tesla saga of electric motoring to save the day for our vaunted way of life (i.e. the landscape as demolition derby), the absurd proposals to colonize distant, arid, frigid, and airless Mars as a cure for ruining this watery blue planet ideally suited for our life-form, and the inane “singularity” narratives that propose to replace grubby material human life with a crypto-gnostic data cloud of never-ending cosmic orgasm.

The psychological desperation is obvious. Apparently, there are moments in history when flying up your own butt-hole is the most comforting available option.

I expect the collapse to pick up more momentum as we turn the corner around summer. The system that we have most willfully abused and perverted is finance.

This monster that so many observers call “capitalism” is just a set of methods for managing surplus wealth — the catch being that nothing nearly this complex has ever been seen before in history and is a pure product of the 200-year-long industrial orgy driven by fossil fuels.

That is, the world never before accumulated so much surplus wealth in such a short span of time.

We commonly refer to this dynamic as “growth.” When that growth, as expressed in modern GDP terms, slowed dramatically after 2005, we launched an array of clever mechanisms to keep faking it for a while. Racking up immense debt was our way of faking it.

If you can’t cover your costs in the present, just borrow from the future. Unfortunately, that works only as as long as there’s some reasonable expectation that debt can be paid back. We’re so far beyond that now, it’s not funny.

And that realization alone will destroy the bond markets and anything related to and dependent on their operations to function.

This is a broad outline to the coming end of the Trump miracle economy. It was the after effects of the previous debt blowup — the phony-baloney mortgage bond market in 2008 — that mortally wounded the American middle class and put Donald Trump in the White House.

His base is correct to feel swindled. That is exactly what happened to them, and the beat goes on now with securitized sub-prime auto loans.

Throw in the horrific burdens of unpayable and non-dischargable college loans that will ruin millions of lives and pricey health insurance with $5000 deductibles and you have a recipe for a complete loss of faith in the system.

The next debt blowup will be the end of Mr. Trump’s improbable credibility. It may also be the beginning of serious difficulty in being able to get many of the goods of daily life, because the producers of things will be very unsure of getting paid on delivery of just about anything.

A freeze up of short-term lending would quickly lead to empty WalMart shelves and “no gas” signs at the filling stations. That’s when collapse finally goes kinetic, and becomes something more than just bad feelings inane ideas.
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NTHE is a four letter word

SUBHEAD: Near Term Human Extinction may be coming after a few of us get through the eco-bottleneck.

By Albert Bates on 25 March 2018 for The Great Change -
(http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/2018/03/nthe-is-four-letter-word.html)


Image above: Illustration of a cityscape post near term human extinction. From (http://thefallingdarkness.com/near-term-human-extinction-a-conversation-with-guy-mcpherson/).

"Collective neurosis can be attributed to a concatenation of causes — diet, electrosmog, epigenetic triggering by microplastics in our toothpaste — take your choice."

We are not talking about climate deniers now, who have their own brand of insanity, but we keep hearing the same mantra chanted by otherwise respectable scientists and policymakers that, “climate change may be catastrophic but it won’t be the end of us.”

We hear that so often we almost never challenge it, not wishing to divert an otherwise productive conversation into what we know to be a blind alley. Nonetheless, we think the statement is at best deluded and at worst just a milder form of denialism. It is not science. It is faith. It is also human neurophysiology.

Brain imaging research has shown that a major neural region associated with cognitive flexibility is the prefrontal cortex — specifically two areas known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Additionally, the vmPFC was of interest to the researchers because past studies have revealed its connection to fundamentalist-type beliefs. For example, one study showed individuals with vmPFC lesions rated radical political statements as more moderate than people with normal brains, while another showed a direct connection between vmPFC damage and religious fundamentalism. For these reasons, in the present study, researchers looked at patients with lesions in both the vmPFC and the dlPFC, and searched for correlations between damage in these areas and responses to religious fundamentalism questionnaires.

— Bobby Azarian, Raw Story, March 14, 2018

In the quote above, Azarian is referring to a study published a year ago in Neuropsychologia that connected cognitive flexibility with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and proved that damage to that part of the brain hinders adaptive or flexible behavior, locking out world views that run contrary to some preconception. The study correlated brain-damaged veterans with religious fundamentalism.

The preconception most often grasped by NTHE (Near Term Human Extinction ) deniers is the notion that “humans survived far worse cataclysms to arrive at their present condition” —  the Toba event 70,000 years ago, for instance, when the human population was reduced to perhaps 10,000–30,000 individuals — “and we invariably rebound.”

The example most often cited is the 2005 Rutgers mDNA study showing all pre-1492 native populations of the Americas  —  well over 1 billion by some estimates  —  having descended from 70 or fewer individuals who crossed the land bridge between Asia and North America.

This is a variant of the techno-cornucopianism of Bill Gates or Elon Musk, but in their cases — building new desert cities in Arizona or seed colonies on Mars — that being externalized, absent a cold fusion Spindletop, is biophysical economics.

We have previously reviewed the hypothesis of Danny Brower and Ajit Varki that an evolutionary leap allowed homo to access higher consciousness by hard-wiring a neural pathway for denying reality.

Arguably that same pathway induces otherwise rational-seeming people to allow for the possibility of catastrophic climate change (already well underway) while denying the possibility of it leading to near-term human extinction (NTHE).

In our view, this colors the debate over what we should be doing by reducing the urgency.

Ironically there may have been human genotypes that suppressed their denial gene better than ours does. One of the effects of genetic bottlenecks is that selected genes (such as those offering a more balanced use of denial) fail to be passed along to succeeding populations.

Our personal view is that while we think NTHE can yet be avoided, the time for action grows short and as we as we walk out onto the razon’s edge and grow more desperate we will likely make many foolish mistakes, any one of which could trigger NTHE.

Appointing John Bolton the National Security Advisor, for instance. In 2016 USAnians fed up with the tweedledee-tweedledum two-party system opted to just hurl a hand grenade into the White House and stand back.

If one grenade was not enough, we still have President Bannon to look forward to in 2020 or 2024 if Cambridge Analytica can keep up with the AI revolution with respect to Big Data.

Collective neurosis can be attributed to a concatenation of causes — diet, electrosmog, epigenetic triggering by microplastics in our toothpaste — take your choice. Visionary forebears who saw these bottlenecks coming — Garrett Hardin, R. Buckminster Fuller, M. King Hubbert — all argued that the best antidote was better public education.

But at least in the US, public education was hijacked in the ‘90s by the vmPFC-lesioned hoards of Zombie Fundamentalists before being handed over to Betsy DeVoss for the final coup d’gras.

Whatever long wave or ergot diet issued humanity into the Dark Ages seems to be replaying now, and it could hardly arrive at a worse time from the standpoint of the organized climate solutioneering required to avert Anthropogenic NTHE.

We need to be in top form to survive this next bottleneck. We’d do better without the denial. Too bad climate scientists can’t afford to hire Cambridge Analytica themselves.

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Review of 'Dangerous Years'

SUBHEAD: David W. Orr he demolishes the lies of climate crisis denial, and a  minimalist response to this emergency.

By Gene Marshall on 28 July 2017 in Resilience -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-07-28/dangerous-years-a-conversation-with-david-orr/)


Image above: Apocalyptic vision of buildings sinking into landscape. From original article.

[Resilience Editor's note: This piece was originally published in the Realistic Living newsletter. More information about the work of Realistic Living can be found on their website.

I started to write a brief review of David W. Orr’s 2016 book Dangerous Years: Climate Change, the Long Emergency, and the Way Forward. I found, however, that a longer “essay” was what I felt called to write.

Orr’s book is the best thing I have read on the overall social-change challenges of this century. I am ranking this book, along with the Bible, as something to read over and over for the rest of my life. I recommend that you buy a hard copy, and wear it out over the next decade.

The social content of this book is broad, deep, and on target, and Orr’s prose reads like poetry. His choice of words is beautiful, gripping, and often funny. I am going to quote some examples for you to taste.

First of all, he demolishes the lies of climate crisis denial, as well as the lies of minimalist response to this emergency:

Nearly everything on Earth behaves or works differently at higher temperatures. Ecologies collapse, forests burn, metals expand, concrete runways buckle, rivers dry up, cooling towers fail, and people curse, kill, and terrorize more easily. Climate deniers . . . are doomed to roughly the same status as, say, members of the Flat Earth Society. page 25

The solutions Orr develops begin with a shift in the human will or heart, then move on to a shift in the human mind, and end with real-world, down-and-dirty, power-politics, as well as the year-in-and-year-out local tasks of reconstruction. Here is a quote about the educational care of our social minds:

We would be embarrassed to graduate students who could neither read nor count.  We should be mortified, then, to graduate students who are ecologically illiterate—clueless about the basics of ecology, energetics, systems dynamics—the bedrock conditions for civilization and human life.  page 110

Orr prepares our awakening “hearts,” “wills,” and “minds” for our real-world politics with sentences like these:

And there will be no Deus ex machina, or cavalry, or invisible hand, or miracle technological breakthrough that will rescue us in the nick of time.  It will be up to us to change the odds and the outcomes on our own.  page 144

The next passage I will be reading aloud in my speeches. It is a gem that notices the spirit depth of our call to action:

If humanity is to have a better future it will be a more “empathic civilization,” one better balanced between our most competitive, hard-driving selves and our most harmonious, altruistic traits; one that embraces the yin-yang poles of behavior.  It must be a change sufficiently global to bridge the chasms of ethnicity, gender, religion, nationality, and politics and deep enough to shift perceptions, behaviors, and values. The change must enable people to grow from a “having” orientation to a “being” orientation to the world.  It must deepen our appreciation, affiliation, and competence with the natural world, albeit a natural world undergoing accelerating changes.

I do not think, however, that we can simply will ourselves to that empathic new world.  The transition will result from social movements, activism, education, and political changes.  But there is always an X-factor, an inexplicable process of metanoia, a word meaning “penitence; a reorientation of one’s way of life; spiritual conversion.”  It is a change of inner sight.  “I once was blind, but now I see” as the former slave trader John Newton wrote in the hymn “Amazing Grace.”  Metanoia is liberation from bondage—physical, mental, emotional—a total change of perspective. pages 147-8

I view the core of the revolution for a next Christianity to be the creation of metanoia circles, small groupings of people in which our deepest humanness can be nurtured on a regular basis and our compassion and persistence prepared for our wide-world responsibilities.

Orr pictures the role of politics as a “long revolution.” We now need more than small teams and edge movements: we need large structures of action that year-in-and-year-out for decades do all the little and big things that need to be done for this huge transition.

Orr works through our core challenges with thorough analysis and inspiring description of practical options. He also continues to indicate the spirit courage and persistence it is going to take. He deals with sustainable democracy, ecological design, hotter cities, systemic thinking, a new agriculture, and much more.

Orr concludes his book with a description of the Oberlin Project—a multi-committee, local project of community-renewal organized by Orr and others, in Orr’s Oberlin, Ohio home town. He pictures the kind of things that the co-pastors of future Christian Resurgence Circles might envision for their quality action in their local parishes of responsibility. Here is a quote taken from that final chapter:

We need people who make charity and civility the norm.  We need more parks, farmers’ markets, bike trails, baseball teams, book groups, poetry readings, good coffee, conviviality, practical competence, and communities where the word “neighbor” is a verb, not a noun.  We need people who know and love this place and see it whole and see it for what it can be. page 227

Orr is also clear that we need people who lead the global level responses to the climate crisis, economic equity, democratization, campaign financing, racism, sexism, and more.

• Gene Marshall has a long history of participation in Christian renewal and interreligious dialogue. In 1952 he made a decision to leave a mathematics career and attend seminary at Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, Texas. In 1962 he joined a religious order of families, the Order Ecumenical, and became a teacher and lecturer of Spirit topics.
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Not telling the truth

SUBHEAD: Lies, half-truths and cover-ups are all manifestations of fatal weakness in a society.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 21 July 2017 for Of Two Minds -
(http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly17/no-truth7-17.html)


Image above: Some lies are subtle - like this mashup photo of Donald Trump's small hands. Some lies are obvious - like everything Trump says. From (http://imgur.com/1AMQJNu).

When we can no longer tell the truth because the truth will bring the whole rotten, fragile status quo down in a heap of broken promises and lies, we've reached the perfection of dysfunction.

You know the one essential guideline to "leadership" in a doomed dysfunctional system: when it gets serious, you have to lie. In other words, the status quo's secular goddess is TINA--there is no alternative to lying, because the truth will bring the whole corrupt structure tumbling down.

This core dynamic of dysfunction is scale-invariant, meaning that hiding the truth is the core dynamic in dysfunctional relationships, households, communities, enterprises, cities, corporations, states, alliances, nations and empires: when the truth cannot be told because it threatens the power structure of the status quo, that status quo is doomed.

Lies, half-truths and cover-ups are all manifestations of fatal weakness. What lies, half-truths and cover-ups communicate is: we can no longer fix our real problems, and rather than let this truth out, we must mask it behind lies and phony reassurances.

Truth is power, lies are weakness. All we get now are lies, statistics designed to mislead and phony reassurances that the status quo is stable and permanent. The truth is powerful because it is the core dynamic of solving problems.

Lies, gamed statistics and false reassurances are fatal because they doom any sincere efforts to fix what's broken before the system reaches the point of no return.

We are already past the point of no return. The expediency of lies has already doomed us.

Honest accounts of hugely successful corporations that implode share one key trait: in every case, managers were pressured to hide the truth from top management, which then hid the truth from investors and clients.

This is the key dynamic in failed oligarchies as well: if telling the truth gets you sent to Siberia (or worse), then nobody with any instinct for self-perservation will tell the truth.

If obscuring the truth saves one's job, then that's what people do. That this dooms the organization is secondary to immediate self-preservation.

A distorted sense of loyalty to the family, community, company, institution, agency or nation furthers lying as the "solution" to unsavory problems. Daddy a drunk? Hide the bottle. Church a hotbed of adultery and thieving?

Maintain the facade of holiness at all costs. Company products are failing? Put some lipstick on the pig.

The statistical truth doesn't support the party's happy story? Distort the stats until they "do what's needed." The agency failed to fulfill its prime directive? Blame the managerial failure on a scapegoat.

Pathological liars and cheats rely on self-preservation and misplaced loyalty to mask their own failure and corruption.

A hint here, a comment there, and voila, a culture of lying is created and incentivized.
Obscuring the truth is the ultimate short-term expediency. Now that it's serious, we have to lie. We'll start telling the truth later, after everything's stabilized.

But lying insures nothing can ever be truly stabilized, so there will never be a point at which the system is strong enough and stable enough to survive the truth.

We are now an empire of lies. The status quo--politically, socially and economically- depends on lies, half-truths, scapegoats and cover-ups for its very survival. Any truth that escapes the prison of lies endangers the entire rotten edifice.

In an empire of lies, "leaders" say what people want to hear. This wins the support of the masses, who would rather hear false reassurances that require no sacrifices, no difficult trade-offs, no hard choices, no discipline.

The empire of lies is doomed. Lies are weakness, and they prohibit any real solutions. Truth is power, but we can no longer tolerate the truth because it frightens us. Our weakness is systemic and fatal.

"If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear"
~ George Orwell
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A Plan to Beat Climate Change

SUBHEAD: Even if Donald Trump won't help experts have a plan to avoid complete disaster if we act.

By Nick Visser on 30 June 2017 for Huffington Post -
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/climate-change-plan-2020_us_5955ef9ce4b0da2c73227dbe)


Image above: Chart of remaining "spendable" CO2 from the Global Carbon Project in original article and Nature. Click to enlarge.

The world has just a few years to scale back global carbon emissions to avoid the worst effects of climate change, a panel of leading experts and scientists warned this week. That goal may seem farfetched, but they say it is attainable.

The journal Nature published a statement Wednesday from a group of six climate experts urging the world to urgently reduce emissions in order to keep the planet from warming beyond safe limits that scientists established as part of the landmark Paris climate agreement. Dozens of prominent co-signers have also added their names to the statement.

The group, led by Christiana Figueres, the former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, has set a goal of 2020 to begin lowering emissions after a multiyear plateau. The experts said that despite growing antagonism from some parts of the world (like the U.S. under the Trump administration), the transition is still possible.

“When it comes to climate, timing is everything,” the authors write.

As several outlets note, the group points to basic math to rationalize the urgency of a target just three years away: The planet can probably only emit about 600 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere before temperatures rise beyond 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius.

Above that temperature, scientists say a slew of horrific effects would be seen around the planet, including heat waves, more intense weather events, rising seas and mass extinctions.

The authors estimate we only have about 15 years, maximum, before that allocation is exhausted, and it’d be near impossible to emit carbon for the next decade and a half and then immediately stop. Scientists warn the world is perilously close to missing targets if reductions aren’t locked in soon, and some say the Paris commitments aren’t even close to being strong enough.

“If the current rate of annual emissions stays at this level, we would have to drop them almost immediately to zero once we exhaust the budget,” the statement reads. “Such a ‘jump to distress’ is in no one’s interest.

A more gradual descent would allow the global economy time to adapt smoothly. The good news is that it is still possible to meet the Paris temperature goals if emissions begin to fall by 2020.”

Many of those negative climate impacts have already begun to take place ― even with the limited warming over the past century, the experts write:

After roughly 1°C of global warming driven by human activity, ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are already losing mass at an increasing rate. Summer sea ice is disappearing in the Arctic and coral reefs are dying from heat stress — entire ecosystems are starting to collapse. The social impacts of climate change from intensified heatwaves, droughts and sea-level rise are inexorable and affect the poorest and weakest first.

However, despite those fears, the group presents six goals they identify as “idealistic at best, unrealistic at worst” to achieve what they’re calling Mission 2020. The group has urged rapid investment in renewable energy to generate 30 percent of the world’s power by 2020, and said no new coal plants should be approved beyond that date. The experts called for 15 percent of all cars sold to be electric vehicles and for vast reforestation efforts to create a “carbon sink.” Other efforts would involve retooling investment in cities and business to favor environmental projects.

While those goals may seem unattainable, the authors note that optimism must be encouraged and efforts by the likes of President Donald Trump to withdraw America from the Paris Agreement will not stop a clean energy transition. Trump’s anti-climate agenda is likely to come to a fore during next week’s Group of 20 meeting, as a coalition led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel seeks to refocus attention on the issue, the nonprofit environmental news site Grist notes.

“Recent political events have thrown the future of our world into sharp focus. But as before Paris, we must remember that impossible is not a fact, it’s an attitude. It is crucial that success stories are shared. Demonstrating where countries and businesses have over-achieved on their targets will raise the bar for others. More-ambitious targets become easier to set,” the experts write in Journal.

“There will always be those who hide their heads in the sand and ignore the global risks of climate change. But there are many more of us committed to overcoming this inertia. Let us stay optimistic and act boldly together.”
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Do you, Mr Jones?

SUBHEAD: A sinister host of adversaries are coming after Trump and are going to get rid of him one way or another.

By James Kunstler on 22 May 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/do-you-mr-jones/)


Image above: Portrait of Bob Dylan on LP record album cover of "Highway 61 Revisited" on which "Ballad of a Thin Man" was released in 1965. From (https://genius.com/Bob-dylan-ballad-of-a-thin-man-lyrics). Click to enlarge.

In case you wonder how our politics fell into such a slough of despond, the answer is pretty simple. Neither main political party, or their trains of experts, specialists, and mouthpieces, can construct a coherent story about what is happening in this country — and the result is a roaring wave of recursive objurgation and wrath that loops purposelessly towards gathering darkness.

What’s happening is a slow-motion collapse of the economy. Neither Democrats or Republicans know why it is so remorselessly underway. A tiny number of well-positioned scavengers thrive on the debris cast off by the process of disintegration, but they don’t really understand the process either — the lobbyists, lawyers, bankers, contractors, feeders at the troughs of government could not be more cynical or clueless.

The nation suffers desperately from an absence of leadership and perhaps even more from the loss of faith that leadership is even possible after years without it.

Perhaps that’s why so much hostility is aimed at Mr. Putin of Russia, a person who appears to know where his country stands in history, and who enjoys ample support among his countrymen. How that must gall the empty vessels like Lindsey Graham, Rubio, Schumer, Feinstein, Ryan, et. al.

So along came the dazzling, zany Trump, who was able to communicate a vague sense-memory of what had been lost in our time of American life, whose sheer bluster resembled something like conviction as projected via the cartoonizing medium of television, and who entered a paralysis of intention the moment he stepped into the oval office, where he proved to be even less authentic than the Wizard of Oz.

Turned out he didn’t really understand the economic collapse underway either; he just remembered an America of 1962 and though somehow the national clock might be turned back.

The industrial triumph of America in the 19^th and 20^th century was really something to behold. But like all stories, it had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and we’re closer to the end of that story than the middle. It doesn’t mean the end of civilization but it means we have to start a new story that provides some outline of a life worth living on a planet worth caring about.

For the moment the fragmentary stories of redemption revolve around technological rescue remedies, chiefly the idea that electric cars will save the nation. This dumb narrative alone ought to inform you just how lost we are, because the story assumes that our prime objective is to remain car-dependent at all costs — when one of the main features in the story of our future is the absolute end of car dependency and all its furnishings and accessories. We can’t imagine going there. (How would you, without a car?)

The economy is collapsing because it was based on cheap oil, which is no longer cheap to pull out of the ground — despite what you might pay for it at the pump these days. The public is understandably confounded by this.

But their mystification does nothing to allay the disappearance of jobs, incomes, prospects, or purpose. They retreat from the pain of loss into a fog of manufactured melodrama featuring superheros and supervillains and supernatural doings.

Donald Trump could never be a Franklin Roosevelt or a Lincoln. These were figures who, if nothing else, could articulate the terms that reality had laid on America’s table in their particular moments of history. Mr. Trump can barely speak English and his notions about history amount to a kind of funny papers of the mind.

A sinister host of adversaries who ought to understand what is happening in this country, but don’t, or can’t, or won’t, are coming after him, and they are going to get rid of him one way or another. They have to. They must. And they will.

---

Ballad of a Thin Man
by Bob Dylan - 1965

You walk into the room with your pencil in your hand
You see somebody naked and you say, "Who is that man?"
You try so hard but you don't understand
Just what you will say when you get home
Because something is happening here but you don't know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

You raise up your head and you ask, "Is this where it is?"
And somebody points to you and says, "It's his"
And you say, "What's mine?" and somebody else says, "Well, what is?"
And you say, "Oh my God, am I here all alone?"
But something is happening and you don't know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

You hand in your ticket and you go watch the geek
Who immediately walks up to you when he hears you speak
And says, "How does it feel to be such a freak?"
And you say, "Impossible!" as he hands you a bone
And something is happening here but you don't know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

You have many contacts among the lumberjacks
To get you facts when someone attacks your imagination
But nobody has any respect, anyway they already expect you to all give a check
To tax-deductible charity organizations.

Ah, you've been with the professors and they've all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have discussed lepers and crooks
You've been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books
You're very well-read, it's well-known
But something is happening here and you don't know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to you and then he kneels
He crosses himself and then he clicks his high heels
And without further notice, he asks you how it feels
And he says, "Here is your throat back, thanks for the loan"
And you know something is happening but you don't know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

Now, you see this one-eyed midget shouting the word "Now"
And you say, "For what reason?" and he says, "How"
And you say, "What does this mean?" and he screams back, "You're a cow!
Give me some milk or else go home"
And you know something's happening but you don't know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

Well, you walk into the room like a camel, and then you frown
You put your eyes in your pocket and your nose on the ground
There ought to be a law against you comin' around
You should be made to wear earphones
'Cause something is happening and you don't know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

.

Find and Limit Ourselves

SUBHEAD: The only way into the future for humanity is a reduction in our numbers by an order of magnitude.

By Juan Wilson on 17 February 2017 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2017/02/find-and-limit-ourselves.html)


Image above: Painting "The Concert" by Gerard van Honthorst, 1623 From (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_van_Honthorst).

Yes ! I drone on - but I can't help it.

I'm afraid it is too late for the Earth, America, Hawaii and Kauai. At the international, national, state, and county level our organizational institutions have failed... or more precisely ...they have failed because we failed to put down the fossil-fuel crack-pipe and face the music of reality.

County Level
I do not think that is possible anymore. As I watched our county planning department push through a ill conceived update to the Kauai General Plan it became obvious that the old plan's motto of "Keep Kauai Rural!" was to be replaced with "Make Kauai Suburban!"

This new General Plan proposal is based on doubling the population of Kauai over the next few decades and the requirement for transforming thousands of acres of agricultural land into suburban sprawl. It's exactly the wrong formula for the future.

State Level
Hawaii continues its dependence on tourism and the military for much of its economy. It has ignored the imperative of achieving food independence. It has put off reaching energy self sufficiency. It encourages the growth of American Consumerism.

The State of Hawaii has avoided any implementation of Hawaiian sovereignty, and delayed the promise of Hawaiian Homelands.

National Level
Since last year America dropped the Democratic and Republican parties that had governed the nation  through the 20th century. Some called it Pax Americana or The American Century. It was in actuality the century of America's military-industrial domination of the a world.

Well, that is over and done. We've replaced it with a flawed duopoly of the Deep State and Trump-Bannererism seeking a way towards war with Russia, China or both. 

International Level 
With the reduction of world natural resources andc heap energy modern industrialization the world has come to rely on  globalization and financialization to keep wheels of the economy spinning - all a giant Ponzi Scheme.

The Earth's nations are incapable of putting together and sticking to a plan for the future. The Conference of the Parties (COP) refers to the countries that signed up to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It is now twenty-five years old and has barley nudged the needle on the speedometer measuring our rush to extinction.

Natural Level
To the living Earth we appear to have become a malignant cancer. Something, if not cut our or reduced will destroy Gaia along with ourselves. I know, I know. That sounds harsh, but sadly it is an apt analogy.

As the planet's resources have dwindled humanity has become obsessed with virtual reality.  We are stuck with our self absorbed delusions on tiny handheld screens that have replaced nature and the reality of collapse. TIME TO WAKE UP! Turn off the fascination devices.

Solutions?
For nature to be whole again we must cease breaking it into small parts by roads, suburban squalor and flattened-out industrial agriculture. Nature's continuity is more important than ours. We can live in distinct separate self-contained communities, or even better yet - in Nature itself - as do some of our still indigenous cousins.

That means giving up oil for our muscle and the delusions it provides. In a practical sense it was the replacement of coal by oil as the means by which to plunder the Earth's resources and run industrial civilization that did the trick of defeating Nature. Our leverage over Nature increased by nearly order of magnitude as did our population.

We must return to a balance with nature that provides some continuity forward. Continuity cannot be achieved without achieving Sustainability. That means a smaller population using much less of the worlds resources. At this point that means something like the Renaissancein Europe - If we're lucky or the Middle Ages - if we are not.

That should not be not news to you - but it is still necessary. Have you stopped flying in jets for your own amusement yet?

Sustainability is not a means for the continuing the status quo.

Nature herself will provide the solution to her problems if we cannot. A short bitter worldwide nuclear exchange between nations would suffice. Even ignoring the current of human caused disasters, like meltdown Fukushima Daiichi, will do the trick in a generation for two.


.

Change can be a bitch!

SUBHEAD: 2017 will be the year where most people's favorite worldview flies off the rails.

By Raul Ilargi Meijer on 13 January 2107 for The Automatic Earth -
(https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2017/01/2017-change-can-be-a-bitch/)


Image above: From Revelers bundle up while gathered at Times Square during a New Year's Eve celebration Saturday, Dec. 31, 2016, in New York. Photo by Julio Cortez. (https://www.abqjournal.com/918871/ringing-in-change.html).

2016 brought a lot of changes, or rather, brought them to light. In reality, the world has been changing for many years, but many prominent actors benefitted from the changes remaining hidden. Simply because their wealth and power and worldviews are better served that way.

It’s entirely unclear whether we will ever get a chance to see to what extent the efforts to hide developments have been successful, or even been perpetrated at all, because we don’t know to what extent truth and reality will be accessible in the future.

What we can say at this point in time is that the changes 2016 delivered were urgently needed. There are many people out there who just want to turn back the clock, and change everything back to how it was, but they can’t, and that’s a good thing, because the way things were was hurting too many people.

2016 will go down in history as the year when a big divide between groups of people in the western world became visible, a divide that had until then been papered over by real or imaginary wealth, as well as by ignorance and denial.

When politics and media conspire to paint for the public a picture of their choosing, they can be very successful, especially if that picture is what people very much wish to see, true or not.

But as we’ve seen recently, our traditional media have become completely useless when it comes to reporting news; the vast majority have switched to reporting their own opinions and pretending that is news.

On the one hand, there is a segment of society that either has noticed no changes, or is so desperate to hold on to what they have left, that they resist seeing them. On the other hand, there are those who feel left behind by that first group, and by the idea that the world that is still functioning and even doing well.

The first group has been captivated by, and believed in, the incessantly promoted message of recovery from an economic, financial and gradually also political crisis. The second see in their lives and that of their friends and neighbors that this recovery is an illusion.

It’s like the old saying goes: you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. And that’s why you have Brexit and Trump and why you’re going to have much more of that, certainly across Europe. Things are not going well, and there is no recovery, for a large enough percentage of people that their votes and voices now swing the debates and elections.

It’s not even complicated. This week there was a report from Elevate’s Center for the New Middle Class that concluded that half of Americans, 160 million people, can’t afford to have a broken arm treated (at $1,400).

And sure, you can say that perhaps that number is a bit too high, but there have been many such reports, that for instance say the majority of Americans have less than $1000 in savings, and can’t even afford a car repair.

In Britain numbers are not much different. Over the past decade, the country has been very busy creating an entire new underclass. If your economy is not doing well, and your answer to that is budget cuts and austerity, it’s inevitable that this happens, that you create some kind of two-tier or three-tier society. And then come election time, you run the risk of losing.

Both Britain and the US boast low unemployment numbers, but as soon as you lift the veil, what you see is low participation rates, low wages and huge numbers of part-time jobs stripped of all the benefits a job used to guarantee. It allows those who still sit pretty to continue doing that, but it’ll come right back to haunt you if you don’t turn it around, and fast enough.

For many people, Obama, Merkel, Cameron and the EU cabal have been disasters. For too many, as we now know. That doesn’t mean that Trump will fix the economic problems, but that’s not the issue.

People have voted for anything but more of the same. Which in Britain they’re not even getting either, so expect more mayhem there.

In most places, some variety of right wing alternative is the only option available that is far enough removed from ‘more of the same’. Moreover, many if not most incumbent parties are in a deep identity crisis. Trump did away with the Republicans AND the Democrats, and they had better understand why that is, or they’ll be wholly irrelevant soon.

In Britain, the most important votes in many decades was lost by the Tories, who subsequently performed a musical chairs act and stayed in power. You lost! Losers are not supposed to stay in power! But the other guys are all too busy infighting to notice.

That identity crisis, by the way, is not a new thing. If you look across the western political spectrum, there are all these left wing and right wing parties happily working together, either in coalition governments or through other ‘productive’ forms of cooperation.

So who are people going to vote for when they’re unhappy with what they’ve got? Where is that ‘change’ that they want? Not on the traditional left or right.

So you get Podemos and M5S and Trump and UKIP and Le Pen. It’s not their fault, or the voters’ fault, it’s the political establishment that has tricked itself into believing in the same illusion it’s been promoting to voters.

And yes, they have now proven that it’s possible to stave off, for a number of years, a deeper crisis, depression, by borrowing and printing ‘money’. Especially if you can at the same time hit the poorest in your society with impunity.

But in the end no amount of fake or false news on the economic front will allow you to continue the facade for too long, because people know when they can’t afford things anymore. The evidence here is somewhat more direct than with regards to political fake news, though they may well both follow the same pattern of ‘discovery’.

Our societies are still run as if there is no real crisis, as if it’s all just a temporary glitch, as if the incumbent models function just fine, and as if recovery is just around the corner. And we can make it look as if that is true, but only for an ever smaller amount of time, and for an ever smaller amount of people.

The basic issue here is not a political one. It’s economic. Our economic systems have failed, and they can’t be repaired. We should always have realized that no growth is forever, but at least we now know. Or could know, it’ll take a while to sink in.

Next up is a redo and revamp of those economic systems, but that is not going to be easy, and may not get done at all. The resistance may be too strong, warfare -economic or physical- may seem like a way out, there are many unknowns.

We could, ironically, get quite far in that redo if we simply cut all the waste for our economic processes, but then again, that would have us find out that much of the system runs entirely on wasting stuff, and wasting less kills the system.

However that may be, and however it may turn out, this is where we find ourselves. Protesting Trump and Brexit is inevitable, but it doesn’t address any core issues. From a purely economic point of view, Obama failed spectacularly, as did David Cameron, as does Angela Merkel. And as do, we will find out in 2017, many other incumbent ‘leaders’.

Their successors, whatever political colors they may come from, will all come to power promising, and subsequently attempting, to restart growth. Which is no longer feasible across an entire country, or even if it were, it would mean squeezing other countries. With corresponding risks.

Trump and Brexit are necessary, perhaps even long overdue, in order to break the illusion that things could go on as they were. But they are not solutions. America needs a big wake-up. Trump looks likely to deliver one. That is needed for the rest of the country to wake from its slumber.

Ask yourself: are you going to get weaker from dealing with a Trump presidency? Maybe not the best question, or at least not before having asked: do you know how weak you are right now?

For Britain to leave the EU is a great first step. As I’ve said many times, centralization is not an option without growth. And Brussels has shown us quite a few of the worst consequences of centralization. Nobody should want to be a part of that.

Summarized: for most people, 2017 will be the year of the inability to understand where their favorite worldview flew off the rails. Change can be a bitch. But change is needed to keep life alive.

.

Exxon must reveal CO2 research

SUBHEAD: A Massachusetts judge has refused to block the climate fraud investigation of Exxon.

By By David Hasemyer on 12 January 2017 for Inside Climate News -
(https://insideclimatenews.org/news/12012017/mass-judge-ruling-climate-investigation-exxon-tillerson)


Image above: An ice sculpture fashioned by protesters slowly melts outside the Exxon Mobil shareholders meeting in Dallas. From (https://thinkprogress.org/50-years-ago-big-oil-bragged-about-being-able-to-melt-glaciers-while-they-knew-about-climate-change-728efe887daa#.6d54cpe8f).

Exxon had fought state Attorney General Maura Healey's demand for documents about potential climate fraud, but a Massachusetts judge backs Healey's right to the probe.  

A Massachusetts Superior Court judge has refused to block the climate fraud investigation of ExxonMobil opened last year by state Attorney General Maura Healey.

The ruling Wednesday means Exxon must comply with Healey's civil investigative demand for company records. Healey requested the documents as part of an investigation to determine if Exxon misled consumers about the risks climate change posed to its business.

Exxon had argued Healey lacked the jurisdiction to pursue the investigation and maintained Texas was the proper venue for any legal action because the company is headquartered in Dallas.

But Judge Heidi Brieger disagreed.

"This matter involves the Massachusetts consumer protection statute and Massachusetts case law arising under it about which the Massachusetts Superior Court is certainly more familiar than would be a federal court in Texas," according to Brieger's ruling.

The parallel legal battle Exxon is waging in a federal court in Texas to derail Healey's investigation remains under way.

The Massachusetts court ruling affirms the authority of the attorney general to investigate fraud, said Chloe Gotsis, a spokeswoman for Healey.

"Exxon must now end its obstructive tactics and come clean about whether it misled Massachusetts consumers and investors about what it knew about climate change, its causes and effects," Gotsis said.

A spokesman for Exxon did not respond to a request for comment.

Healey opened the investigation in April under the state's consumer protection laws seeking documents back to 1976 related to Exxon's understanding of climate change and the effects it could have on its business.

The civil investigative demand—similar to a subpoena—included a request for documents detailing the company's decades of climate research, how it was preparing for sea-level rise and materials prepared for potential investors.

The demand also sought statements by Exxon officials, including by the company's then-chief executive, Rex Tillerson, who was questioned Wednesday about climate change during his Senate confirmation hearing to become secretary of state.

The company argued that Healey's investigation amounted to an "arbitrary and capricious" abuse of power and was politically motivated.

But the judge said that under state law Healey was empowered to open the investigation based on her belief that a person or company was engaged in unfair or deceptive business practices in the state and that she should have "broad access" to Exxon records to determine if there were any violations of law.

Brieger also rejected Exxon's contention that the company was targeted by Healey because of its views on global warming.

"The court finds that the Attorney General has assayed sufficient grounds her concerns about Exxon's possible misrepresentations to Massachusetts consumers—upon which to issue the CID," said the 14-page ruling.

"In light of these concerns, the court concludes that Exxon has not met its burden showing that the Attorney General is acting arbitrarily or capriciously toward it."

See also:

Ea O Ka Aina: Exxon - The Road not Taken 12/25/16

.

Exxon - The Road Not Taken

SUBHEAD: Their own research confirmed fossil fuels' role in global warming decades ago.

By N. Banerjee, L. Song , D. Hayesmyer on 16 September 2015 for Inside Climate News-
(https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15092015/Exxons-own-research-confirmed-fossil-fuels-role-in-global-warming)


Image above: Photo of the "Esso Atlantic" oil tanker aboard which Esso gathered CO2 climate data. Built in 1977 it was one of the ten biggest boats ever constructed. It was scrapped for its steel in 2001. From (http://informasiduniasekitar.blogspot.co.id/2014/11/10-largest-ships-ever-built-in-world.html).

Top executives were warned of possible catastrophe from greenhouse effect, then led efforts to block solutions.

At a meeting in Exxon Corporation's headquarters, a senior company scientist named James F. Black addressed an audience of powerful oilmen. Speaking without a text as he flipped through detailed slides, Black delivered a sobering message: carbon dioxide from the world's use of fossil fuels would warm the planet and could eventually endanger humanity.

"In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels," Black told Exxon's Management Committee, according to a written version he recorded later.
It was July 1977 when Exxon's leaders received this blunt assessment, well before most of the world had heard of the looming climate crisis.

A year later, Black, a top technical expert in Exxon's Research & Engineering division, took an updated version of his presentation to a broader audience.

He warned Exxon scientists and managers that independent researchers estimated a doubling of the carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentration in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit), and as much as 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) at the poles.  Rainfall might get heavier in some regions, and other places might turn to desert.

"Some countries would benefit but others would have their agricultural output reduced or destroyed," Black said, in the written summary of his 1978 talk.

His presentations reflected uncertainty running through scientific circles about the details of climate change, such as the role the oceans played in absorbing emissions. Still, Black estimated quick action was needed. "Present thinking," he wrote in the 1978 summary, "holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical."

Exxon responded swiftly. Within months the company launched its own extraordinary research into carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and its impact on the earth. Exxon's ambitious program included both empirical CO₂ sampling and rigorous climate modeling. It assembled a brain trust that would spend more than a decade deepening the company's understanding of an environmental problem that posed an existential threat to the oil business.

Then, toward the end of the 1980s, Exxon curtailed its carbon dioxide research. In the decades that followed, Exxon worked instead at the forefront of climate denial. It put its muscle behind efforts to manufacture doubt about the reality of global warming its own scientists had once confirmed. It lobbied to block federal and international action to control greenhouse gas emissions. It helped to erect a vast edifice of misinformation that stands to this day.

This untold chapter in Exxon's history, when one of the world's largest energy companies worked to understand the damage caused by fossil fuels, stems from an eight-month investigation by InsideClimate News.

ICN's reporters interviewed former Exxon employees, scientists, and federal officials, and consulted hundreds of pages of internal Exxon documents, many of them written between 1977 and 1986, during the heyday of Exxon's innovative climate research program. ICN combed through thousands of documents from archives including those held at the University of Texas-Austin, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The documents record budget requests, research priorities, and debates over findings, and reveal the arc of Exxon's internal attitudes and work on climate and how much attention the results received.

Of particular significance was a project launched in August 1979, when the company outfitted a supertanker with custom-made instruments. The project's mission was to sample carbon dioxide in the air and ocean along a route from the Gulf of Mexico to the Persian Gulf.

In 1980, Exxon assembled a team of climate modelers who investigated fundamental questions about the climate's sensitivity to the buildup  of carbon dioxide in the air. Working with university scientists and the U.S. Department of Energy, Exxon strove to be on the cutting edge of inquiry into what was then called the greenhouse effect.

Exxon's early determination to understand rising carbon dioxide levels grew out of a corporate culture of farsightedness, former employees said. They described a company that continuously examined risks to its bottom line, including environmental factors. In the 1970s, Exxon modeled its research division after Bell Labs, staffing it with highly accomplished scientists and engineers.

In written responses to questions about the history of its research, ExxonMobil spokesman Richard D. Keil said that "from the time that climate change first emerged as a topic for scientific study and analysis in the late 1970s, ExxonMobil has committed itself to scientific, fact-based analysis of this important issue."

"At all times," he said, "the opinions and conclusions of our scientists and researchers on this topic have been solidly within the mainstream of the consensus scientific opinion of the day and our work has been guided by an overarching principle to follow where the science leads. The risk of climate change is real and warrants action."

At the outset of its climate investigations almost four decades ago, many Exxon executives, middle managers and scientists armed themselves with a sense of urgency and mission.

One manager at Exxon Research, Harold N. Weinberg, shared his "grandiose thoughts" about Exxon's potential role in climate research in a March 1978 internal company memorandum that read: "This may be the kind of opportunity that we are looking for to have Exxon technology, management and leadership resources put into the context of a project aimed at benefitting mankind."

His sentiment was echoed by Henry Shaw, the scientist leading the company's nascent carbon dioxide research effort.

"Exxon must develop a credible scientific team that can critically evaluate the information generated on the subject and be able to carry bad news, if any, to the corporation," Shaw wrote to his boss Edward E. David, the president of Exxon Research and Engineering in 1978. "This team must be recognized for its excellence in the scientific community, the government, and internally by Exxon management."

Irreversible and Catastrophic
Exxon budgeted more than $1 million over three years for the tanker project to measure how quickly the oceans were taking in CO₂. It was a small fraction of Exxon Research's annual $300 million budget, but the question the scientists tackled was one of the biggest uncertainties in climate science: how quickly could the deep oceans absorb atmospheric CO₂? If Exxon could pinpoint the answer, it would know how long it had before CO₂ accumulation in the atmosphere could force a transition away from fossil fuels.

Exxon also hired scientists and mathematicians to develop better climate models and publish research results in peer-reviewed journals. By 1982, the company's own scientists, collaborating with outside researchers, created rigorous climate models – computer programs that simulate the workings of the climate to assess the impact of emissions on global temperatures. They confirmed an emerging scientific consensus that warming could be even worse than Black had warned five years earlier.

Between 1979 and 1982, Exxon researchers sampled carbon dioxide levels aboard the company's Esso Atlantic tanker (shown here).

Exxon's research laid the groundwork for a 1982 corporate primer on carbon dioxide and climate change prepared by its environmental affairs office. Marked "not to be distributed externally," it contained information that "has been given wide circulation to Exxon management." In it, the company recognized, despite the many lingering unknowns, that heading off global warming "would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion."

Unless that happened, "there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered," the primer said, citing independent experts. "Once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible."

The Certainty of Uncertainty
Like others in the scientific community, Exxon researchers acknowledged the uncertainties surrounding many aspects of climate science, especially in the area of forecasting models. But they saw those uncertainties as questions they wanted to address, not an excuse to dismiss what was increasingly understood.

"Models are controversial," Roger Cohen, head of theoretical sciences at Exxon Corporate Research Laboratories, and his colleague, Richard Werthamer, senior technology advisor at Exxon Corporation, wrote in a May 1980 status report on Exxon's climate modeling program. "Therefore, there are research opportunities for us."

When Exxon's researchers confirmed information the company might find troubling, they did not sweep it under the rug.

"Over the past several years a clear scientific consensus has emerged," Cohen wrote in September 1982, reporting on Exxon's own analysis of climate models. It was that a doubling of the carbon dioxide blanket in the atmosphere would produce average global warming of 3 degrees Celsius, plus or minus 1.5 degrees C (equal to 5 degrees Fahrenheit plus or minus 1.7 degrees F).

"There is unanimous agreement in the scientific community that a temperature increase of this magnitude would bring about significant changes in the earth's climate," he wrote, "including rainfall distribution and alterations in the biosphere."

He warned that publication of the company's conclusions might attract media attention because of the "connection between Exxon's major business and the role of fossil fuel combustion in contributing to the increase of atmospheric CO₂."

Nevertheless, he recommended publication.

Our "ethical responsibility is to permit the publication of our research in the scientific literature," Cohen wrote. "Indeed, to do otherwise would be a breach of Exxon's public position and ethical credo on honesty and integrity."

Exxon followed his advice. Between 1983 and 1984, its researchers published their results in at least three peer-reviewed papers in Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences and an American Geophysical Union monograph.

David, the head of Exxon Research, told a global warming conference financed by Exxon in October 1982 that "few people doubt that the world has entered an energy transition away from dependence upon fossil fuels and toward some mix of renewable resources that will not pose problems of CO₂ accumulation." The only question, he said, was how fast this would happen.

But the challenge did not daunt him. "I'm generally upbeat about the chances of coming through this most adventurous of all human experiments with the ecosystem," David said.

Exxon considered itself unique among corporations for its carbon dioxide and climate research.  The company boasted in a January 1981 report, "Scoping Study on CO₂," that no other company appeared to be conducting similar in-house research into carbon dioxide, and it swiftly gained a reputation among outsiders for genuine expertise.

"We are very pleased with Exxon's research intentions related to the CO₂ question. This represents very responsible action, which we hope will serve as a model for research contributions from the corporate sector," said David Slade, manager of the federal government's carbon dioxide research program at the Energy Department, in a May 1979 letter to Shaw. "This is truly a national and international service."

Business Imperatives
In the early 1980s Exxon researchers often repeated that unbiased science would give it legitimacy in helping shape climate-related laws that would affect its profitability.

Still, corporate executives remained cautious about what they told Exxon's shareholders about global warming and the role petroleum played in causing it, a review of federal filings shows. The company did not elaborate on the carbon problem in annual reports filed with securities regulators during the height of its CO₂ research.

Nor did it mention in those filings that concern over CO₂ was beginning to influence business decisions it was facing.

Throughout the 1980s, the company was worried about developing an enormous gas field off the coast of Indonesia because of the vast amount of CO₂ the unusual reservoir would release.
Exxon was also concerned about reports that synthetic oil made from coal, tar sands and oil shales could significantly boost CO₂ emissions.

 The company was banking on synfuels to meet growing demand for energy in the future, in a world it believed was running out of conventional oil.

In the mid-1980s, after an unexpected oil glut caused prices to collapse, Exxon cut its staff deeply to save money, including many working on climate. But the climate change problem remained, and it was becoming a more prominent part of the political landscape.

"Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate," declared the headline of a June 1988 New York Times article describing the Congressional testimony of NASA's James Hansen, a leading climate expert. Hansen's statements compelled Sen. Tim Wirth (D-Colo.) to declare during the hearing that "Congress must begin to consider how we are going to slow or halt that warming trend."

With alarm bells suddenly ringing, Exxon started financing efforts to amplify doubt about the state of climate science.
Exxon helped to found and lead the Global Climate Coalition, an alliance of some of the world's largest companies seeking to halt government efforts to curb fossil fuel emissions. Exxon used the American Petroleum Institute, right-wing think tanks, campaign contributions and its own lobbying to push a narrative that climate science was too uncertain to necessitate cuts in fossil fuel emissions.
As the international community moved in 1997 to take a first step in curbing emissions with the Kyoto Protocol, Exxon's chairman and CEO Lee Raymond argued to stop it.

"Let's agree there's a lot we really don't know about how climate will change in the 21st century and beyond," Raymond said in his speech before the World Petroleum Congress in Beijing in October 1997.

"We need to understand the issue better, and fortunately, we have time," he said. "It is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now."

Over the years, several Exxon scientists who had confirmed the climate consensus during its early research, including Cohen and David, took Raymond's side, publishing views that ran contrary to the scientific mainstream.

Paying the Price
Exxon's about-face on climate change earned the scorn of the scientific establishment it had once courted.

In 2006, the Royal Society, the United Kingdom's science academy, sent a harsh letter to Exxon accusing it of being "inaccurate and misleading" on the question of climate uncertainty. Bob Ward, the Academy's senior manager for policy communication, demanded that Exxon stop giving money to dozens of organizations he said were actively distorting the science.

In 2008, under mounting pressure from activist shareholders, the company announced it would end support for some prominent groups such as those Ward had identified.

Still, the millions of dollars Exxon had spent since the 1990s on climate change deniers had long surpassed what it had once invested in its path-breaking climate science aboard the Esso Atlantic.

"They spent so much money and they were the only company that did this kind of research as far as I know," Edward Garvey, who was a key researcher on Exxon's oil tanker project, said in a recent interview with InsideClimate News and Frontline. "That was an opportunity not just to get a place at the table, but to lead, in many respects, some of the discussion. And the fact that they chose not to do that into the future is a sad point."

Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, who has been a frequent target of climate deniers, said that inaction, just like actions, have consequences. When he recently spoke to InsideClimate News, he was unaware of this chapter in Exxon's history.

 "All it would've taken is for one prominent fossil fuel CEO to know this was about more than just shareholder profits, and a question about our legacy," he said. "But now because of the cost of inaction—what I call the 'procrastination penalty'—we face a far more uphill battle."

Click here for Part II, an accounting of Exxon's early climate research; Part III, a review of Exxon's climate modeling efforts; Part IV, a dive into Exxon's Natuna gas field project; Part V, a look at Exxon's push for synfuels; Part VI, an accounting of Exxon's emphasis on climate science uncertainty.

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Tokyo damaged by nuclear pellet rain

SUBHEAD: Intensely radioactive glass pellets rained down on Tokyo from Fukushima explosions with impact on human health.

By Admin on 28 June 2016 for ENE News -
(http://enenews.com/intensely-radioactive-glass-rained-downtown-tokyo-fukushima-nuclear-fuel-particles-500-trillion-becquerelskg-significant-consequences-human-health-scientists-understanding-disaster-extreme-im) 


Image above: Still fame of simulation of radioactive particles clinging to living cell structures. From video below.

[IB Publisher's Note: I know this article is old (June 2016), but it is still informative. We've known for a while about the radioactive elements including cesium embedded in tiny glass particles or carbon buckyballs. That does not mean the issue has gone away and does not need attention. These particles will persist and be a threat for a very long time.]

Public Release from Goldschmidt Conference, Jun 26, 2016: New research shows that most of the radioactive fallout which landed on downtown Tokyo a few days after the Fukushima accident was concentrated and deposited in non-soluble glass microparticles, as a type of ‘glassy soot’. This meant that most of the radioactive material was not dissolved in rain and running water…

The particles also concentrated the radioactive caesium (Cs), meaning that in some cases dose effects of the fallout are still unclear… Japanese geochemists… analysed samples collected from within an area up to 230 km from the FDNPP…

It had been anticipated that most of the radioactive fallout would have been flushed from the environment by rainwater. However… most of the radioactive caesium in fact fell to the ground enclosed in glassy microparticles…

These particles… formed during the molten core-concrete interaction inside the primary containment vessel in the Fukushima reactor units 1 and/or 3. Because of the high Cs content in the microparticles, the radioactivity per unit mass was as high as ~4.4×10^11 Bq/g [440,000,000,000,000 Bq/kg]…

Analysis from several air filters collected in Tokyo on 15 March 2011 showed that 89% of the total radioactivity was present as a result of these caesium-rich microparticles, rather than the soluble Cs, as had originally been supposed.

Discovery (Seeker), Jun 27, 2016: Fukushima Accident Rained Glass Particles on Tokyo… Most of the radioactive fallout that descended upon downtown Tokyo in the days after the March 2011 accident [was] glass microparticles — essentially, glass-filled soot. As a result, the fallout, which contained concentrated radioactive cesium, wasn’t dissolved by rainfall, and probably lingered in the environment…

Japanese scientists thought that most of it would be washed away by rainwater. Instead, analysis… revealed that most of the radioactive cesium in fact fell to the ground enclosed in glassy microparticles.

ANI, Jun 28, 2016: Research indicates Fukushima radioactive fallout may be worse than expected… Most of the radioactive fallout, which landed on downtown Tokyo a few days after the Fukushima accident, was concentrated and deposited in non-soluble glass microparticles, as a type of ‘glassy soot’…

Inverse, Jun 26, 2016: Radioactive “Glassy Soot” Fell Over Tokyo After the Fukushima Meltdown… The findings… show that the radioactive fallout… has been poorly understood. Previously, it was assumed that most of the radiation that fell dissolved in rain. This would mean that it would wash out of the soil and through the environment…

These tiny glass particles entered the air and fell as soot on the surrounding region. Because the radioactive molecules are contained in an insoluble medium, they will not wash out of the soil with rainwater to the same extent…

Beyond the consequences for the environment, there are significant consequences for human health. Breathing caesium encased in glass particles may have a very different impact from exposure to it as radioactive rain…


Image above: Video on the creation and contamination created by radioactice nano-particles from Fukushima affecting health. From (https://youtu.be/YDZMhywXwHY).

Scientists from Fukushima Univ., Japan Atomic Energy Agency, Stanford Univ., etc, June 2016: Cesium-rich micro-particles unveil the explosive events in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant — Cesium-rich micro-particles (CsMPs) retain novel information on the molten core-concrete interaction… CsMPs specimens were discovered… in atmospheric particulates collected at Suginami, Tokyo… [Note: "The author has requested that this abstract is not discussed on social media."]

Dr Satoshi Utsunomiya, Kyushu Univ.: “This work changes some of our assumptions about the Fukushima fallout… This may mean that our ideas of the health implications should be modified“.

Prof. Bernd Grambow, Director of SUBATECH laboratory, France: “[The observations] presented here are extremely important. They may change our understanding of the mechanism of long range atmospheric mass transfer of radioactive caesium from the reactor accident at Fukushima to Tokyo, but they may also change the way we assess inhalation doses from the caesium microparticles inhaled by humans. Indeed, biological half- lives of insoluble caesium particles might be much larger than that of soluble caesium“.

See also:
Nuclear fuel found 15 miles from Tokyo — Fukushima uranium in ‘glassy’ spheres flew over 170 km
Fukushima Nano Bucky Ball Hot Particles Filled With Uranium, Plutonium, And Cesiu

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