The Virtual James E. Lovelock Museum of Climate Retreat Living Pod Images: The Virtual James E. Lovelock Museum of Climate Retreat Living Pod Images [as an Adaptation Strategy]

Monday, November 12, 2007

The Virtual James E. Lovelock Museum of Climate Retreat Living Pod Images [as an Adaptation Strategy]

An Online Virtual Museum About Climate Retreat Living Pods as an Adaptation Strategy for Future Climate Refugees of Global Warming

Curator contact: danbloom@gmail.com

CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM!
An Online Virtual Museum About Climate Retreat Living Pods as an Adaptation Strategy

As described by the New York Times: LINK

[NOTE: The James E. Lovelock Virutal Museum of Climate Retreat Living Pod Images is named in honor of the work and ideas of British scientist James Lovelock. However, neither he nor his publishers have anything to do with this independent Internet project.]

In this virtual musem are several illustrations by Taiwanese illustrator Deng Cheng-hong depicting the interior of a model "climate retreat", circa year 2500 A.D. For more information about ''climate retreats and climate refugees'', google the terms, or look the terms up at Wikipedia.

Mr Deng at work at his computer here:
http://polarcitymuseum.blogspot.com

James Lovelock, the acclaimed British scientist who has done pioneering work on global warming issues, has visited this virtual museum online and seen the images here. When he was asked by email what he thought about this concept of climate retreat living pods for survivors of global warming in the distant future, replied: "Many thanks, Danny, for [sending me] your thoughtful images. It may well happen and soon."

Interior views, model climate retreat, year 2121 A.D. , northern Norway, Russia, Alaska

Interior view, model climate retreat, northern Russia, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Greenland, Alaska

Leisure activity center inside climate retreat. These retreats could house up to 200,000 people.

Interior view of a model climate retreat living pod (sustainable population retreat, SPR) in Canada, Russia, Alaska

Greenhouse area with large tree. Food could be grown in the climate retreat itself.

Interior view.

Living quarters, dormitory area.

The lobby area.

Lobby view. Long tubular tunnels will take residents from sleeping zone to work zone. etc.

Entrance to climate retreat. Security will be very important. Who gets in, who is kept out?

----------------

production notes: these illustrations were created by:

Artist: Deng Cheng-hong

Assistant: Hong Min-cheng

Producer: Dan Bloom, Polar Cities Research Institute

http://climatechange3000.blogspot.com/

256 comments:

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dan said...: From Wikipedia

Polar cities are proposed sustainable polar retreats designed to house human beings in the future, in the event that global warming causesthe central and middle regions of the Earth to become uninhabitablefor a long period of time. Although they have not been built yet, some futurists have been giving considerable thought to the concepts involved.High-population-density cities, to be built near the Arctic Rim with sustainable energy and transportation infrastructure, will requiresubstantial nearby agriculture. Boreal soils are largely poor in key nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, but nitrogen-fixing plants(such as the various alders) with the proper symbiotic microbes andmycorrhizal fungi can likely remedy such poverty without the need forpetroleum-derived fertilizers. Regional probiotic soil improvementshould perhaps rank high on any polar cities priority list. JamesLovelock's notion of a widely distributed almanac of science knowledge and post-industrial survival skills also appears to have value.; November 13, 2007 1:15 AM
dan said...: A FUTURE PRESS RELEASE:

Year 2208 A.D. -- Media Alert:

The world's media to Svalbard !!!

30 journalists from all over the world will on Wednesday visit the World's First Model Polar City which is under construction on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. 22.08.3007 A.D. Construction work on the Svalbard Model Polar City (SMPC) started in April 3007 and the first blastings were performed in May. The facility will be opened on 15 February 3008. The visit to the facility will be lead by Project Manager Magnus Bredeli Tveiten from the Norwegian construction body Statsbygg. Part of the tour will include press briefings by Environment Minister Helen Bjoernoey, the head of the UN's Climate Secretariat Yvo de Boer, Development Minister Erik Solheim, the head of the Polar City Research Institute and the governor of Svalbard. The SMPC is being constructed as a cave excavated into the permafrost just outside Longyearbyen. The SMPC is intended to ensure survival for some 200,000 survivors of global warming in the year 2500, and will have storage capacity for food and supplies; November 13, 2007 1:17 AM
dan said...: Hi Dan,

Thank you for informing me of your "Polar Cities". Blog and images. Here's my response:

It is not unusual for science fiction notions to substitute for reality. A few questions:

1. Where will the inhabitants of "polar cities" obtain food from? The
agricultural systems which support 6 billion people will be severely eroded,
if not completely destroyed, by climate change.

2. More likely, such polar refuges will host members of the privileged powerful
elite, which got the world into the mess it is in.

3. Its all too reminiscent of the "survivalist movement", based on the belief a
few can survive the rest. Others believe the survivors will envy the dead.

4. Wouldn't it be better direct energy to attempt to mitigate the ongoing
climate crisis, rather than give people false hopes?

Andrew
Australia

14.11.07; November 13, 2007 5:42 PM
dan said...: Hi All,

I think Andrew's comments above are spot on.
While there may be good intentions behind this polar cities project - the best path for
humanity is to reverse the destruction of nature (which ultimately provides
us with an environment within a predominately 'hostile' universe where we
can survive) - and to stop polluting the environment (CO2 is just one of
many many problems).
or "The road to hell is paved with good intentions"
or "Hell is truth seen to late."

We are creating hell on Earth - but few seem to realise how bad it could
get.

Knowing the truth about things is the best path - this requires not just
knowing the truth about climate change and its causes, but knowing the truth
about how matter exists in the universe / space.

And I am convinced we do now know this. But few seem to care - are able to
raise themselves above past myths and customs (which are the ultimate cause
of our collective problems).

Why don't you all stop what you are doing for one minute and actually look
at the things around you in space. Think about how you exist in space and
can see these other things. We all see the same things in one common space.
Why. Because space is the 'stuff' (substance) that exists.
All matter interactions are wave interactions in space - this is what
quantum physics has been trying to tell us. But we went down the path of a
'probability wave' interpretation that is used to find where the 'particle'
exists.
Einstein was correct, there are no particles, matter is a structure of
space.
He just worked with continuous fields in space-time, rather than real waves
in space.
(See quotes below)

The solution is simple - you can deduce it.
But first you must take it seriously and THINK about it (our minds are like
programmed machines - and it takes a while to re-program them with the
correct language).

Sorry for the lecture - but there is nothing more important to humanity than
knowing what we really are - how we exist as matter in space - how we
interact with all the other matter in the universe.
The solution is simple for those who take the time to look!

Sincerely,
Geoff; November 13, 2007 5:44 PM
dan said...: Emily says:

Dan, I have shared your blog with friends.

I replied: thanks, please tell friends that I AM JUST POSING the question, do not
have answers.......and all comments and more questions and possible
answers are welcome...this is an ongoing research project........for
everyone to participate in......

Emily repled again:

dan,
People find your ideas surprising, it seems. However, opinions vary about their degree of being realistic... well, time will tell, of course!... Thanks again for sharing.; November 13, 2007 5:47 PM
dan said...: A high school student in the USa wrote:

"these polar cities actually seem really neat to live in, but we'll have to see if people who actually do live in that time period think so as well, or will they envy us right now, where we live outdoors!

~Jeff"; November 13, 2007 5:48 PM
dan said...: FROM NORWAY:

Hi Dan,

Well, I have taken a look. The artwork of polar cities reminds me of enclosed space
communities.

I don't think our great-great-great-grand children will inhabit such hives,
as people here are used to the cold, and the saying is that it will be
warmer? Who knows, we depend on the Gulf Stream warming our ocean water for
a warm climate. As the sun is about to set now (at 1 pm) and is gone by Nov
22 for two months, we expect it to be back and life goes on.

Keep on being creative! Visit North-Norway in the winter, the light is
amazing.

Best regards,
Øystein; November 13, 2007 5:51 PM
dan said...: A friend in USA writes:

Dear Dan,

Great artwork of a polar city. Visualization is very important when communicating a concept.

By the way, have you ever hear of warming/cooling cycles being driven by the alignment of the planets (especially Jupiture and Neptune, the heaviest planets)? I would normally dismiss it, but the proponent is Rhodes Fairbridge, a man with a very impressive resume:

"Rhodes Fairbridge of Columbia University, a giant in science over much of the last century whose accomplishments are perhaps unsurpassed for their breadth, depth, and volume. This one man authored or co-authored 100 scientific books and more than 1,000 scientific papers, he edited the Benchmarks in Geology series (more than 90 volumes in print) and was general editor of the Encyclopaedias of the Earth Sciences. He edited eight major encyclopedias of specialized scientific papers in the atmospheric sciences and astrogeology; geomorphology; geochemistry and the earth sciences; geology, sedimentology, paleontology, oceanography and, not least, climatology."

Brad; November 13, 2007 5:52 PM
dan said...: For the most part, the mainstream media has not covered polar cities, but slowly, some nibbles are coming in for stories:

Case in point 1:

A UK newspaper reporter wrote:

Dear sir,
We may try to fit in an article on ''polar cities'' here in the UK next week. i think the designs etc are a great talking point that can help orient folks to consider just how this all may play out.

I will need copyright permission to post a thumbnail version of one of the artist's renderings on our website here in the UK as a clickable link to your stuff and the illustrations."

Sincerely

[reporter 2, UK]; November 13, 2007 6:01 PM
dan said...: A reader and viewer of the images blog wrote:

"Hi Dan,
Your Swiftian satire of future life -- A MODEST PROPOSAL by J Swift, 1644 -- was a bit subtle for me. However....
Your enthusiasm and care for humanity is evident though.
Good on you.
And good luck with things.
All the best."

Professor S.; November 13, 2007 6:20 PM
dan said...: PREDICTION from a U.S. magazine,
December issue, year 3007 AD:

IN OUR CRYSTAL BALL

''Polar cities should be in active construction within 50 years. These SPR's, sustainable polar retreats, in other words, will functionprimarily to house potential survivors of catastrophic global warmingevents in the far distant future, perhaps by the year 2300 or so. It'sgood to be prepared, according to the U.N. Homelands Security Officein Oslo, and these polar cities, situated in both polar regions of theplanet, will be capable of handling up to 2 million people -- humanbreeding pairs and their families -- to ensure the continuation of ourspecies. After the Earth's temperatures cool enough to permitresettlement of the planet's temperate and tropiocal regions again,the polar cities will become historical oddities and turned intomusuems, according to the UN office. Learn more online, just google"polar cities" or check the Wikipedia entry for them.''; November 13, 2007 6:23 PM
dan said...: COMMENT from reader by email:

"I saw your comment on that blog. But I must confess I am not sure what you
are refering to. My interest is in the biology and evolution of sapience
(wisdom)... but I have no idea what a ''polar city" (I assume you are refering to
Antarctica) might be or even why polar."

Sincerely,

G.; November 13, 2007 6:26 PM
dan said...: Another viewer, who has been follwing the polar city blog story for a while wrote:

"Wow -- those iamges are striking, Seeing the tree inside is a little sad, but credible, at least to me. Thanks for the posting."

K.; November 13, 2007 6:44 PM
dan said...: Thinking About Polar Cities -- Or Trying To

An interesting journalist/blogger
named Dan Bloom has been agitating for consideration of one of James Lovelock's more alarming ideas -- ''polar cities''. (Here's his blogsite on the subject.)

I don't have answers for Mr. Bloom's difficult questions, but while I'm thinking on the subject, I want to quote the late great Kurt Vonnegut, and his poem ''Requiem'':

..When the last living thing has died on account of us,

how poetical it would be if Earth could say,

in a voice floating upwards from the floor of the Grand Canyon,

"It is done."

People did not like it here.
=============
Reader adds:
''But some of us do like it here, readers will protest. And no doubt Kurt would say; yes, but -- not enough to save the place. And he has a point. What we say is of little interest to the natural world...''; November 13, 2007 6:48 PM
dan said...: this post appeared on a NYTimes blog: it's interesting!

"the most truly inconvenient truth is that the world’s economic system, which is based on fractional reserve banking (which essentially allows for printing money whenever a government chooses to do so, independent of any real productive value underlying the printed currency), which then requires constant growth to pay the interest on ever increasingly debt on the new “money” that is then used to create loans or government financing of whatever.

the only way such incessant growth can be maintained is by ever increasing population (i.e, shopping — bigtime!), which demands a corollary increase in our use of fuels — the most efficient of which is oil, which is, unfortunately limited, along with other similarly finite resources.

and, btw, as far as ‘deniers’ are concerned, the only real deniers are those who speak of ’sustainable’ growth, which is an oxymoron.

translation: we’re fooked!

eventually, in the not-too-distant future, nature will “corrects” the imbalances created by the gross population overshoot which we’ve created by simply following our utterly human(and yeastlike) passions.

but the natural correction we’re headed for won’t be pretty and probably will be bloody red — not in the least green, i’m afraid.

i don’t know who said the following, but it sure is true: “the only people who talk of infinite growth in a world of finite resources are madmen and economists [and environmentalists???].”

— Posted by anonymous; November 13, 2007 6:51 PM
dan said...: and in this corner!

''Where We Stand''

book review

"The real inconvenient truth about our environment.

Global warming, new epidemics, and the destruction of natural resources have all made the future of the planet seem increasingly dire. But the real truth, according to respected scientist Seymour Garte, is that the environment is actually in better shape than we have been led to believe.

''Where We Stand'' [book title] will serve as a reality check for a debate surrounded by controversy. Garte presents irrefutable evidence that the state of the environment and human welfare has been improving steadily for the past two decades and that our efforts to "save the planet" are working. Contrary to popular opinion, the air and water are getting cleaner, cancer rates are decreasing, and forestation is improving. Meant to motivate—not to lull—Where We Stand will energize future efforts with the knowledge that we can make a difference. In giving us the good news, Garte does not neglect the bad; those issues that urgently need to be dealt with. There is still work to be done, but with a clearer picture of where we stand today, we will have a better chance for tomorrow. Hopeful, balanced, and convincing, this is a book that will change the way readers view the planet and the future."; November 13, 2007 7:11 PM
dan said...: A comment by Seymour Garte on dot earth blog: (related)

"....My book “Where We Stand: A Surprising Look at the Real State of the Planet” (Amacom Press, Cotober 2007) presents an optimistic view of human progress in the environment and general human welfare. The optimism is based on the often forgotten environmental progress and victories that have been achieved over the past decades, including fixing the ozone hole, remediation of our rivers and lakes, great improvements in air quality and the rescue of many endangered species. I include sections at the end of each chapter called the Bad News, because as a working scientist, I am fully aware that nothing is ever all one way (a mistake often made in environmental books).

The positive trends in life span, infant mortality, global human nutrition and literacy, should give us hope that by continuing to follow the paths that have worked for us in the past - scientific research, political activism, regulation, and private technological innovation, we can surmount all the obstacles and crises that face us today. "; November 13, 2007 7:15 PM
dan said...: ''....may do something on polar cities after all.... ''

(an MSM reporter tells me)

November 14, 3007; November 13, 2007 7:17 PM
dan said...: OUCH!

“If we get that kind of increase it will be societal suicide”

By Stephen Leahy

Nov. 9, 3007 (IPS) -

Today’s skyrocketing fossil fuel use will accelerate far faster in the coming decades, driving oil prices higher and virtually guaranteeing catastrophic climate change in the decades to come, energy experts say.

Emissions of greenhouse gases could increase a staggering 57 percent by 2030 if current trends continue, and with the strong growth of coal and oil energy use in India and China, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported this week.

“If we get that kind of increase it will be societal suicide,” says Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University.

“It really is a huge increase,” Schmidt told IPS.; November 13, 2007 7:19 PM
dan said...: Challenges to Both Left and Right on Global Warming

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
NYTIMES

November 13, 3007

For many years, the battle over what to think and do about human-caused climate change and fossil fuels has been waged mostly as a yelling match between the political and environmental left and the right.

The left says global warming is a real-time crisis requiring swift curbs on smokestack and tailpipe gases that trap heat, and that big oil, big coal and antiregulatory conservatives are trashing the planet.

The right says global warming is somewhere between a hoax and a minor irritant, and argues that liberals’ thirst for top-down regulations will drive American wealth to developing countries and turn off the fossil-fueled engine powering the economy.

Some books mirror the divide, like the recent “Field Notes from a Catastrophe,” built on a trio of articles in The New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert, and “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming” by Chris Horner, a lawyer for the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Ms. Kolbert sounds a strong warning call, and Mr. Horner’s book fits with the position of the institute, a libertarian and largely industry-backed group that strongly opposes limits on greenhouse gases.

But in three other recent books, there seems to be a bit of a warming trend between the two camps. Instead of bashing old foes, the authors, all influential voices in the climate debate with roots on the left or the right, tend to chide their own political brethren and urge a move to the pragmatic center on climate and energy.

All have received mixed reviews and generated heated Internet debate — perhaps because they do not bolster any one agenda in a world where energy and environmental policies are still forged mainly in the same way Doctor Dolittle’s two-headed pushmi-pullyu walked. (It didn’t move much.)

One such book comes from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, one of the most polarizing forces in politics a decade ago.

In “A Contract With the Earth,” Mr. Gingrich, with his co-author Terry L. Maple (a professor of psychology at Georgia Tech and president of the Palm Beach Zoo), has written a manifesto challenging conservatives not just to grudgingly accept, but to embrace, the idea that a healthy environment is necessary for a healthy democracy and economy.

The book invokes concepts like the precautionary principles that are anathema to many in Mr. Gingrich’s party. In a rare stance for those on the right, the authors say curbing carbon dioxide emissions (affordably) is a wise strategy.

They call for America to lead in moving to a world where “fossil fuels have been largely modified for carbon recycling or replaced by carbon-neutral alternatives.”

The book does reveal in spots Mr. Gingrich’s disdain for what he calls liberals’ failed reliance on legislation and litigation in environmental protection. It is all about carrots, like tax incentives, and nowhere about sticks, like binding emissions limits.

But for the most part it is aimed at conservatives, urging them to embrace their inner Teddy Roosevelt and craft a new “entrepreneurial environmentalism.”

The book won over Edward O. Wilson, the prize-winning conservation biologist and author, sufficiently that he wrote a foreword calling the authors “realists and visionaries.”

While Mr. Gingrich is beckoning the right to come to the middle, a similar plea has been sent out to the left by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger in “Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility.”

This pair of young environmental thinkers, a political strategist and a social scientist, respectively, shook up the green movement in 2004 with an essay called “The Death of Environmentalism,” which provided a launching pad for the book. They say traditional regulatory approaches and dark environmental messages — like the “planetary emergency” at the heart of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the book by former Vice President Al Gore and the subject of a film — will fail if applied to global warming.

Instead they call for an aggressive effort to invest in energy research, while also building societies that can be resilient in the face of the warming that is already unavoidable.

In a recent interview, Mr. Shellenberger reprised a central point of the essay and book. “Martin Luther King didn’t give the ‘I have a nightmare’ speech, he gave an ‘I have a dream’ speech,” Mr. Shellenberger said. “We need a politics that is positive and that inspires people around an exciting and inspiring vision.”

In this same centrist camp sits Bjorn Lomborg. A Danish statistician, Mr. Lomborg has made a career out of challenging the scariest scenarios of environmentalists and argues for a practical calculus weighing problems like poverty, disease and climate against one another to determine how to invest limited resources.

His first book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” put him on Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people in 2004 and made him a star among conservative politicians and editorial boards.

In his short new book, “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming,” Mr. Lomborg reprises his earlier argument with a tighter focus. He tries to puncture more of what he says are environmental myths, like the imminent demise of polar bears. (Most bear biologists have never said the species is doomed but do see populations shrinking significantly in a melting Arctic.)

Like almost everyone these days, Mr. Lomborg says rich countries should spend far more on basic energy research.

Unlike Mr. Gingrich, who opposes a tax or binding cap on greenhouse gases, Mr. Lomborg supports putting a price on emissions, although he says the right price is a tax of $2 to $14 on a ton of carbon dioxide — about the equivalent of a 2- to 14-cent-a-gallon gasoline tax.

This is much lower than the cost most environmental scientists say would be necessary to induce companies to shift to less-polluting technologies.

In the end, the books overlap most in their embrace of the idea that the human influence on climate requires a concerted response, but that the rhetoric of catastrophe is unlikely to motivate that response.

Mr. Shellenberger and Mr. Nordhaus say one necessary step is to jettison the idea of a sacred nature separate from human affairs.

In a line that is bound to inflame as many readers as it inspires, they said: “Whether we like it or not, humans have become the meaning of the Earth.”; November 13, 2007 7:21 PM
dan said...: An excerpt from

''The Middle Path:

Avoiding Environmental Catastrophe''

by Eric Lambin

Observe the tightrope walker: always in motion, searching for the balance that he never quite achieves. Each momentary imbalance is corrected by assuming a new, unstable position: only by moving forward can he remain on the tightrope and avoid falling. He constantly modifies his movements, subtly, instantaneously, concentrating his attention on the next hint of danger, and reacting at once by a proportionate adjustment of posture.

Thus, too, the earth: constantly changing, forever far from equilibrium, adjusting by means of subtle mechanisms to every momentary reconfiguration of its physical and biogeochemical state in order to preserve its viability. The great climatic cycles, biological evolution, and the natural changes of the landscape are all part of the earth’s repertoire of balancing movements that keep it on its own tightrope.

Imagine now that our planetary tightrope walker carries on his shoulder a small, boisterous monkey that fidgets and turns in every direction without having the least notion of the difficulty of the task facing its host. So long as the monkey does not weigh very much, and so long as its movements are not too abrupt, the tightrope walker easily corrects for this additional source of instability. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, the monkey grew in size, until its weight was nearly equal to that of the tightrope walker himself. It acquired the ability to make sudden, highly destabilizing movements. Indeed, its impact on the chemical composition of the atmosphere, the earth’s plant cover, the structure of the landscape, and the abundance of animal and vegetable species increased to the point that human activity today exerts as much influence on the planet as natural forces do.

If the monkey continues to jump around as though it were on firm ground, the fall of the tightrope walker—and of the monkey—is inevitable. In that case a worldwide environmental catastrophe will occur, with grave, if unpredictable, consequences for humanity. But if the monkey learns to coordinate its movements with those of the tightrope walker, even helping him to anticipate and correct successive moments of disequilibrium, they will continue to advance along the tightrope without accident. The future of the monkey and the tightrope walker therefore depends on the monkey’s intelligence.

The Issues
From the beginning, mankind has been influenced by its natural environment and has acted upon it. The process of biological evolution that led to Homo sapiens is the result of successive adaptations to environmental conditions, often difficult ones. The earliest forms of social organization and mastery of the first tools were likewise a response to the challenges posed by the environment to our ancestors. The colonization of the planet by the human race was itself possible only by means of a series of adaptations to changing climatic conditions and to resources whose supply and availability varied over time and from one region to another.

The discovery by mankind that it was capable not only of adapting to nature, but also of transforming it, represents an important stage in the history of the planet. Fire was the first tool used to modify the earth’s plant cover on a large scale. The progressive domestication of animal and plant species increased the supply of food. Irrigation and drainage made it possible to control the supply of water, freeing agriculture at least to some extent from the vagaries of the weather.

Early on in human history, this new power proved to be a mixed blessing. The extinction of many species of large mammals in North America ten to twelve thousand years ago may have been caused in part by excessive hunting during the first human colonization of the New World (climatic changes at the end of the last ice age played a role as well). Similarly, some civilizations degraded the land they had placed under cultivation, either through excessive irrigation, which caused a salt layer to form that sterilized the soil (as in the case of Mesopotamia between 2400 and 1700 b.c.), or through excessive harvesting of wood for construction and cooking, which, by stripping away the plant cover, eroded the soil (as in the case of the Indus Valley around 1800 b.c., the loess plateaus of China from an even earlier period, in Ethiopia around 1000 b.c., in Greece around 600 b.c., and a few centuries later in Italy, as well as in the southwestern part of the North American continent, on the lands of the Anasazi and Hohokam societies, about 600û900 a.d. and 1100û1375 a.d., respectively).

Some civilizations, however, were able to avoid environmental degradation. Consider the extraordinary longevity—almost five thousand years—of ancient Egyptian civilization, whose agriculture was well adapted to the ecological conditions that prevailed along the Nile. The Egyptians managed to maintain an equilibrium between the seasonal rise and fall of the river, without disrupting the Nile’s deposit of sediments on cultivated land in the floodplain.

The question facing mankind today is whether it will be able to go on improving its standard of living while at the same time maintaining a delicate balance between human activities and the natural world. Recent data from the natural and social sciences, supported by careful observation of current developments, furnish us with a rigorous basis for deciding whether we should be pessimists or optimists concerning the future of our planet, and therefore of humanity, without regard for ideology, blind guesswork, existential anxiety, or regret at the loss of some part of the world’s original beauty. Our approach must be multidisciplinary and open to arguments on all sides, for whatever answer we finally arrive at, it cannot help but be a qualified one.

What Do the Optimists Say?
Optimists are convinced that technological progress will make it possible to go on coping indefinitely with the ecological challenges facing humanity. They base their conviction on the extraordinary success of technologies developed during the twentieth century, whose contribution to the health and welfare of mankind no one could have predicted a few centuries ago. They entertain no doubt that this progress will continue in the coming centuries, or that mankind’s mastery of nature will continually increase.

(c) 3007; November 13, 2007 7:23 PM
dan said...: left vs right divide: OUCH

so what does left think about polar cities idea? and what does right think? you don't want to know. but read this:

''The left says global warming is a real-time crisis requiring swift curbs on smokestack and tailpipe gases that trap heat, and that big oil, big coal and antiregulatory conservatives are trashing the planet.

vs.

The right says global warming is somewhere between a hoax and a minor irritant, and argues that liberals’ thirst for top-down regulations will drive American wealth to developing countries and turn off the fossil-fueled engine powering the economy.''

AC Revkin, NYT; November 13, 2007 7:32 PM
dan said...: A reader writes:

"The first thing that came to mind when looking at this site was "Vault Tec Presentations: When Leaving the Vault..."

With regards to the illustrations as how we might be living in some five centuries, I personally believe that it's futile to try and conceptualize that. The advances in technology that will occur in the interim will make sure of that.

Also I do not believe that there will be 'sleep zones', 'recreational zones' and 'work zones' or at least I would hope a future designer of such a place would take into consideration that the perfect urban space includes a mix of all three.

We have to envision here that you have to live most of your life in these cities, so having the different zones seperated as envisioned in the caption text to the pictures seems more like a 1984 dystopic vision.

I can already envision the long lines of indentured servants... I mean inhabitants standing in line while they are efficiently transported from the dorm to the various workplaces, well, actually I cheat a bit and just recall some of the scenes from Equilibrium =P

Do you envisage Mad Max or Fallout style chaos and anarchy, seeing the need for tight security?

But Polar cities in 500 years - I'm thinking Mars colonies myself (you also won't have the problem of having to keep those out who can't afford to live there on Mars, as they won't be able to afford getting there in the first place).

Thanks for sharing these ideas."; November 14, 2007 6:33 AM
dan said...: COMMENTS from PH.D. experts in the field of global warming / climate change:

1. "Dan,

Looked at those images. Look nice.
BUT....
Not sure if this is supposed to be science fiction or a real practical plan."

2. "This looks very expensive to me. What would the people do for revenue?"

[MY REPLY: Professor, You got me, re what do for revenue. My guess is these cities need to
be built before the Big Event of Global Warming occurs, and the people
who get to get in them might be the sons and daughters of VIPs and
rich politicians. SIGH....I don't have the answers. YOUR QUESTION is
good. What I want to start up a long round of good discussions with
questions just like yours.....NOW....so people can prepare for this,
maybe in 200 - 500 years. But it's intersting to think about it now,
and seeing the blueprint is a visual clue.....of course, things will
look alot different, if it comes to that....and by that, i mean,
breeding pairs in the Artctic in Lovelock's famous phrase........my
guess is these polar retreats will be sad sad places with despereate
people, but they just might be able to survive through 20 generations
or so and come back down to middle zones and repopulate the Earth. But
let's hope we can stop the troubles NOW , before they begin. Much work
to be done. -- db]

3. "What a fantastic idea. It has great potential for creating a lavish
output of unintended consequences. It is definetly a spur in the
thinking about the future. Like all good ideas, it will have many
eddies."

- History professor, Michigan

4. "Thanks for your comment and the link. I like the look of the polar cities. Very interesting. I wonder if the date is right though. Might happen sooner?"

-- U.S. Professor of Environmental Health; November 15, 2007 7:17 PM
Emilia said...: "The pressing urgent problem is figuring out a way to engage people on a multigenerational energy quest to move away from a here-and-now fuel (mainly coal) that is cheap and abundant for the sake of a less risky climate future. As you know, the largely underplayed message of the I.P.C.C. report, which I wrote about but didn’t get much coverage elsewhere, is that the atmosphere and climate won’t notice the difference between a Gore-style immediate emissions freeze or a pedal-to-the-metal fossil-fuel party for more than 20 years. There will be no discernible diversion in climate trends for two decades.

-- Andrew C. Revkin, blog, NYTIMES
Nov. 15, 3007; November 15, 2007 8:04 PM
dan said...: "But what can you expect from a newspaper so timid of naming alarming truths that they put the assessment of reputable scientists that the ocean’s fisheries will experience a global collapse in approximately 42 years ... on page 16?"

says a blogger in the BLOG-o-SPHERE; November 15, 2007 8:19 PM
dan said...: ''We Need to be Living in a De-Carbonised Economy in Four Decades''

Interview with Tim Flannery, Australian scientist

MELBOURNE, ON WHAT USED TO BE AUSTRALIA., Nov 16, 3007

(IPS) -

With the ‘Synthesis Report’ of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be released this weekend, Nov. 16, 2007, scientist, environmental activist and 2007 ‘Australian of the Year’, Prof. Tim Flannery, warns that action must be taken to avoid the worst of global warming.

Flannery spoke with IPS correspondent, Stephen de Tarczynski on the urgency of getting out of the blame game and addressing the future.

IPS: A report released this week by the Climate Institute, titled ‘Evidence of Accelerated Climate Change’, indicates that pollution and temperature levels are rising faster and Arctic ice is melting quicker than in the worst-case scenarios forecast by the United Nations last year. We’re in a fairly dire position, aren’t we?

Tim Flannery: Yeah, we are. We are. Things are changing far more quickly than any of us would like. You know, we’re seeing a very rapid accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, rapid sea-level rise which is beyond the worst-case scenario projected by the IPCC and this collapse of the Arctic ice pack. We keep on hoping things will turn around. With the Arctic ice I keep hoping that the next year will bring a bit of relief, but so far we’ve had three years in a row of what you’d call catastrophic decline.

IPS: The ‘Climate Change in Australia’ report, produced jointly by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the Bureau of Meteorology and released last month, says that warming in Australia is inevitable. It predicts a rise in temperature of between 2.2 and 5 degrees Celsius for Australia by 2070 under a high emissions scenario. To limit this warming we need to introduce some radical changes, don’t we?

TF: Yes, it means if that is actually realised it’s the end of our global civilisation, in my view. I don’t think our civilisation could survive a change as large-scale and abrupt as that.

IPS: What do we need to do?

TF: We need to get on a trajectory for reducing emissions by eighty percent plus in the next four decades. So, basically we need to be living in a de-carbonised economy four decades from now and if we do that we’ll see CO2 equivalent levels in the atmosphere below the dangerous threshold. That’s what’s required.

IPS: Are we doing enough at the moment?

TF: No, we aren’t remotely near it.

IPS: Where do you lay the blame for that? Is it due to the policies of governments?

TF: Look, I feel like I’m in the middle of a war at the moment. It’s way beyond the point of laying the blame. What we’ve all got to be focused on now is the future and what is required. So, you know, it’s going to be bloody difficult to achieve that but we must do it. As old Churchill said, sometimes it’s not good enough just to do your best. You’ve got to do what’s required and that’s the situation I think we’re in at the moment.

IPS: The Climate Institute says that there have been many observations on climate change published since mid-2006, which is when the data used in the IPCC synthesis report, to be released shortly, ends.

TF: Yeah, basically most of the IPCC data terminates in the middle of 2005. So, the CO2 equivalent data (that) you’ll read about in the report when it comes out on Sunday, Australian time, will be about the middle of 2005.

IPS: Does this mean that there might be too much attention being placed on the IPCC report which could possibly undermine efforts to combat climate change given that the data is not the most recent?

TF: The data’s terrifying, nevertheless, and people will be shocked when they see it. What it says is that the CO2 equivalent in the atmosphere as of mid-2005 was at 455 parts per million, which is above the dangerous threshold already. Now, the report also makes the point that some of the warming that could be caused by that gas is being masked by other pollution. But that, for a whole lot of reasons, is very little comfort.

IPS: In Australia, do you think that there is a growing awareness of the importance of fighting climate change?

TF: Yeah, that’s what the (Nov. 24) election is about in large part, yeah? You see it in the U.S., the change occurring there. You see the Europeans are now gearing up to take advantage of the new energy revolution, and in China, of course, you can’t open China Daily news without seeing another article on pollution or global warming or some major thing. So, there you see there’s a global shift.

IPS: Is this reason enough to be optimistic about our ability to tackle global warming?

TF: I’m not thinking about either optimism or pessimism. I’m just very grimly determined to make a difference. I don’t have time, quite frankly, to think about optimism or pessimism. We simply have to focus on the job at hand at the moment.; November 16, 2007 1:36 AM
dan said...: A scientist in Alaska doing major research on climate change tells me in a recent email:

"Hi, thanks for keeping me in the loop on this with your blog about the visual images of what a polar city might look like 500 years hence. However, I'm afraid that
right now the time horizon that's of concern to me (fueled in part by
large numbers of requests for information and related stuff outside of
my regular teaching and research duties) is well beyond what you are considering -- 500 years hence! But, yes, good luck
with you efforts, it's all part of the big picture..."

Signed
______; November 16, 2007 5:34 PM
dan said...: Environmental reporter for a UK weekly magazine writes: "Thanks for the intriguing idea! I'll check out your site.."; November 17, 2007 5:34 PM
dan said...: A newspaper columnist for NEWSDAY, syndicated worldwide, wrote: "Very interesting blog and visuals. Let's hope we never need those polar cities you talk about..."; November 18, 2007 4:21 PM
dan said...: NEXT UP: 100 questions that must be posed about polar cities in the year 2500: from who will be allowed in, to who will govern them, to who will protect them from outsiders, to how medical services will be provided to residents inside them, to how food will be grown to feed them, to how old people and terminally ill people will be treated, to where to locate or site them, and to how long the projected period of residence inside polar cities will last.....100 years to 10,000 years? ....before humans can once again repopulate lower regions of the world, the temperate and tropical zones, again.....

If you have a question, please post it here in the comments section or email us at DANBLOOM GMAIL; November 18, 2007 4:24 PM
dan said...: The IPCC said the world would have to reverse the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 2015 to prevent serious climate disruptions.

“If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late,” said Rajendra Pachauri, a scientist and economist who heads the IPCC. “What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

He said that since the IPCC began its work five years ago, scientists had recorded “much stronger trends in climate change,” like a recent melting of Arctic ice that had not been predicted. “That means you better start with intervention much earlier.”

Saturday’s synthesis report was reviewed and approved by delegates from 130 nations gathered here this week. But unlike the earlier reviews, in which governments had insisted on changes that diluted the reports’ impact, this time scientists and environmental groups said there had been no major dilution of the data.

For example, this report’s summary was the first to acknowledge that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet from rising temperatures could result in a substantive sea-level rise over centuries rather than millennia.

“Many of my colleagues would consider that kind of melt a catastrophe” so rapid that mankind would not be able to adapt, said Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University who contributed to the IPCC.

“It’s extremely clear and is very explicit that the cost of inaction will be huge compared to the cost of action,” said Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute. “We can’t afford to wait for some perfect accord to replace Kyoto, for some grand agreement. We can’t afford to spend years bickering about it. We need to start acting now.”

NOTE: One guess is that when the big ice sheets start melting, it will take about 100 years for the sea levels to rise above livable levels, for those along coastal areas, and THAT is when the move north and inland will begin. Say goodbye to coastal areas like Cape Cod, Manhattan, Juneau, Alaska, Barrow Alaska, Shishmaref Alaska, Bangladesh, etc.

OUCH!; November 18, 2007 11:16 PM
dan said...: A reader writes:

"Polar Cities is an interesting concept. Hopefully the need for them won't be as dire as you predict - a World War III Global War and all.

I suspect many hundreds of millions of people will need to migrate and possibly billions will die as a result of global climate changes and species loss. Strife over climate devastation is highly likely. Perhaps wars can be avoided with cooperative efforts.

We want to keep the world agricultural production as viable as possible. We will need as much arable soil as possible. We will need honey bees to survive climate change to do pollination. We will need to be able to grow enough food crops to feed more people. "

-- SB; November 21, 2007 6:20 PM
dan said...: A blogger writes:

"Your success ion getting the idea of polar cities out to the media is rather zen, because the goal is accomplished by ''playing'' rather than redoubled effort. Like that toy that some carnivals hand out that goes on one finger of each hand, and the harder you try to pull your fingers out, the more it tightens. Instead, you have to relax and approach the problem in a more non-aggressive fashion.

I just got an email from Dr ______ from NASA, about an exchange of letters he had with a coal company executive. Dr ____, in some testimony in IA, said that train cars of coal were like the boxcars filled with Jews going to the Nazi concentration camps during WWII. The coal executive took great insult, because he understood that as insulting the hard working men and women of this coal company.

Dr _____ wrote back that nothing the coal executive communicated contradicted Dr _____'s testimony.

Yeah, comparing those coal train cars to the Holocast box cars is inflamatory, but it is also threatening. In other words, it might not be the best way to get the interest of the MSM (main stream media).

I was contemplating trying to sell the idea that the US was plotting to kill the world's poor...the philosophy even has a name, ''Malthusian''. Your success with polar cities ideas makes me question such a yang approach. Besides, that is the sort of inflammatory retoric that could land a person in jail or worse.

Actually, culling the human population by encouraging fossil fuel emissions is both viable and in the self-interest of the portion of the population that has the power. Unfortunately, the accusation isn't for polite company. On the other hand, either Washington is ignorant or malicious when it comes to fossil fuel emissions and climate change.

If the US wanted to continue their massive greenhouse gas emissions, who has the power to stop them? By the time such a passive-agressive strategy of dominance (presumably developed countries have a greater capacity to adapt to a warmer world) was widely percieved, it would be too late to save most of the world's population."

Sincerely,
Y.K.W.; November 22, 2007 5:19 PM
dan said...: Part of the problem is that toy and gadget and appliance and car companies (etc etc) are already planning new items to design, make and sell (and advertise) 5 years from now, ten years from now. They have teams of product planners working on future plans already, and this assembly line of production (and consumption) cannot be stopped. Even 25, 50 years into the future. Companies have it built into their very reason for being (raison d'etre, if I remember my high school French correctly) to be always in pursuit of new markets, new clients, new customers, new products.

This huge insane march of green (money) marketing will never stop. UNTIL.... that huge global warming tsunami of untold proportions hits humanity hard and where it hurts (the breathing apparatus). Until then, it's consume until doom. Forget shop till you drop. It's doom that's gonna do us in.

Sad thing to say, all these words and pictures and posters and ad campaigns won't work. Only a major major disaster will wake people up, and by then it will be too late. Maybe the thing is to just sit back and enjoy it? No, couldn't be.

With the drip drip drip of disaster coming, it's too slow for most people to notice. So Happy Thanksgive-me 2008, 2009, 2010, for the next 100 years.

Sigh...; November 22, 2007 5:57 PM
PlanetThoughts said...: Let's try to solve the problems now, instead of having the shreds of humanity survive in polar cities.; November 23, 2007 3:59 AM
dan said...: Hello PlanetThoughts, who said:
"Let's try to solve the problems now, instead of having the shreds of humanity survive in polar cities."

YES, I agree 10000%. The main goal of this Polar Cities Project is to goad people into action NOW, to solve the problems NOW, and the visual images and website about polar cities is mainly to give people a visual image of how tragic the future COULD BE, if we don't work very very hard NOW to solve these problems. I do agree, and thanks for posting. By giving people a visual image of such horrificness, is that a word?, I hope to help motivate individuals, and politicians and leaders worldwide to DO SOMETHING NOW. Of course, nobody is really going to live in these imaginary polar cities. At least, I hope not. But having conceived of them, I am using what little time I have left on this Earth (home planet) to do my small part to shout "WE NEED ACTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE NOW. BY GOVERNMENTS, POLITICIANS, the UN, the IPCC, individual people. We are in a global emergency."

So, yes, I agree with you. That is exactly the response I was hoping to get and you are the first person to say so. Good on ya, mate.; November 23, 2007 5:25 PM
dan said...: Note to NYTimes Dot Earth blog:

"Good reporting and good interview with Mr Lindblad. The wide media coverage in print newspapers and via CNN, BBC and TV news shows around the world, will have two effects: one, alot of people will think twice about going on such potentially "dangerous" expeditions, and two, more people will want to go on such cruises after seeing the breathtaking scenery accompanying the news stories. So the market for such trips will grow and grow. A friend of mine from Japan made the trip 7 years ago, and he said it was "a trip of a lifetime" and the photos he showed me were spectacular. Having lived myself in Nome, Alaska for two years, 1981-83, with the Bering Sea frozen for a few months every winter just outside my window, and walking on the sea ice on Sunday afternoons and ice-fishing through small holes near the shore, also made a big impact on me sense of the Arctic wilderness. It is powerful stuff, up there and down there... north and south.

One question, Andrew: why do we refer to these places as "the ends of the Earth" in our daily conversations? Actually, the north pole is not really in the north, and the south pole is not really in the south, nor is Australia in the southern hemisphere or the USA in the northern hemisphere. This entire north-south thing is an inheritance from the European mapmakers who put their civilization in the upper north, while consigning barbaric Africa and South America to the lower south. Says who? In the cosmos, there is no north or south.

So this accident did not really happen at the end of the Earth, since the Earth is a sphere and has no "ends" and no top or bottom. N'est-ce pas?

But all said and done, this accident scene, with the amazing photos going out worldwide, might actually prepare people, in the drip drip drip method of getting ready for the far distant future that awaits us -- maybe -- these scenes might prepare for the fact that someday humankind might have to actually live in ''sustainable polar retreats'' in such remote wilderness areas. They might even be called "polar cities".

For people following my obessession with this concept of polar cities, I commissioned a computer graphic artist in Taiwan to make some illustrations of what polar cities, to house possible survivors of global warming's more catastrphic events in the far far distant future, say year 2500, might look like. Here:

http://pcillu101.blogspot.com

I hope we never need them. But like those who were on this recent Titanic, it's good to be prepared..."; November 23, 2007 5:59 PM
dan said...: Mark Lynas in the UK says in a recent essay, November 3007:

"We have about 100 months left. If global greenhouse gas emissions have not begun to decline by the end of 3015, then our chances of restraining climate change to within the two degrees “safety line” – the level of warming below which the impacts are severe but tolerable – diminish day by day thereafter. This is what the latest science now demands: the peaking of emissions within eight years, worldwide cuts of 60 per cent by 3030, and 80 per cent or more by 3050. Above two degrees, our chances of crossing “tipping points” in the earth’s system – such as the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, or the release of methane from thawing Siberian permafrost – is much higher.

Despite this urgent timetable, our roads continue to heave with traffic. Power companies draft blueprints for new coal-fired plants. The skies over England are criss-crossed with vapour trails from aircraft travelling some of the busiest routes in the world. Global emissions, far from decreasing, remain on a steep upward curve of almost exponential growth.

Sure, there are some encouraging signs. Media coverage of climate change remains high, and a worldwide popular movement – now perhaps upwards of a million people – is mobilising. But with so little time left, we must recognise that most people won’t do anything to save the planet unless we make it much, much easier for them. This essay outlines my three-part strategy for stopping climate change – the easy way."

[edited for a reason]

http://www.marklynas.org/2007/11/13/the-easy-way-to-stop-climate-change; November 25, 2007 8:27 PM
dan said...: http://www.nowpublic.com/environment/virtual-museum-future-polar-cities-global-warming-survival; November 26, 2007 3:15 AM
dan said...: Comment on Dot Earth:

"Without anything (diseases, predators etc.) to control a population,
the evidence is clear: the population will spiral downward, and who
knows, disappear for good"

I hope our host will consider a post addressing long range projections
for a variety of indicators of human and planetary health. Would be
interested to see if the prevailing view of commenters is that we're
all on the eve of destruction.

[ANDY REVKIN of NYTimes comments: "That's definitely coming. Stories and posts in
the DotEearth blog pipeline will examine the popular "tipping point" idea and see
where it applies, and where it doesn't, as well as broader trends in
both biological and social conditions."]; November 27, 2007 5:25 PM
dan said...: Remember, sea levels were hundreds of feet lower a mere 15,000 years ago.

-- Andrew Revkin, blog, NYTimes; November 27, 2007 5:37 PM
dan said...: ''As we proceed down this primrose path marked by the endless expansion of big-business activities that are now overspreading the surface of Earth, we are assured by Dr. Shellenberger to faithfully expect a “technolgical fix” for whatever ails us and for any and every disaster that could befall humanity in Century XXI, even as the global economy approaches a scale of expansion beyond which it cannot be sustained by the limited resources and frangible ecosystem services of Earth.

So merrily, merrily we go, down the primrose path. Not to worry, Dr. Shellenberger tells us. A “techno-fix” is surely in the offing.

We have been hearing about the promise of economic globalization for most of my lifetime.

Unfortunately, for Michael Shellenberger, you and me, “Whatsoever is is, is it not?” The finite world we inhabit simply and plainly cannot much longer sustain the gigantic scale and infinite expansion of the global economy, with or without a techno-fix, I suppose.''

-- Steven Earl Salmony; November 27, 2007 5:41 PM
dan said...: ''The shoe fits, even in the human-only analogy. Dr James Hansen is 100% right. Climate change is already causing the death and misery of thousands of humans.

All projections I’ve seen say the number of humans at risk is going to soar into the hundreds of millions or billions. The culprits, mainly north americans and europeans refuse to meaningfully address the problem. We refuse to bring our emissions anywhere close to a level that spares these humans, now and future.

And it is not just Hansen using such loaded statements.

* The Salt Lake City Tribune recently called President Bush’s failure to act on climate change a “crime against all humanity”.

* A UN official trying to feed the world’s hungry recently called western addiction to food for cars (aka biofuels) a “crime against humanity”.

* The Namibian representative to the UN recently declared on the assembly floor that the western caused climate change was equivalent to “low-intensity biological or chemical warfare” against developing nations.

The list goes on.

Many Americans still don’t want to take responsibility for what we are doing. Rationalizations are everywhere on why we can’t or don’t need to change. But that hasn’t stopped the rest of the world from getting increasingly angry about it.

Hansen is doing us a great favor by being willing to stick his neck out and say the brutal truth. We need to act soon or face a world of increasingly hostile and bitter people.

Lest you think this is hyperbole or that the real problem is “China and India”, here are the hard facts:

* Seven percent of the world’s population is responsible for 50% of global emissions. That’s us, folks.

* Climate change is a result of decades of emissions by a very small group of people. Who is responsible for the current problem? The data at cait.wri.org tells the story for all the world to see and get mad about. Total per-capita emissions in the 50 years from 1950 to 2000:

Each Canadian: 715 tonnes (#7 overall)
Each American: 642 tonnes (#10)
Each Chinese: 86 tonnes (#111)
Each Indian: 16 tonnes (#165)

So even if Chinese ramp up to 5 tonnes per year it would take over 100 YEARS for a Chinese person to equal the damage we have ALREADY done. Of course we still use 4 times as much for each of our hyper-speed, hyper-cluttered, non-negociable lives.

Until Americans get really serious and actually cut our emissions down to survivable level, the rhetoric directed at us is just going to get louder and more angry and at some point turn to action.

History shows that for actions that causes human suffering on the magnitude of what climate change is doing and will do…that the world will take action and hold those responsible for their “crimes against humanity”.

We can all thank people like Hansen taking the personal flack to give us one last jolt of a wake-up call to act in time.

— Posted on Dot Earth by Barry Saxifrage , Nov. 27, 3007; November 27, 2007 5:43 PM
dan said...: a blogger writes: "The question of scientists being too conservative or not is an interesting one. It reminds me of two things I read. The first is PZ Myers observation that wildlife biologists and conservation ecologists are some of the most depressing people you will meet because of what they know and Ross Gelbspan’s observation in a NY Times review of “Just Cool It” that it is a curse to know about these issues as intimately as climate scientists do. "

OUCH.; November 28, 2007 2:35 AM
dan said...: Recently, while going through some old magazines in my desk, I came
across an old September 2001 issue of MAD magazine (I like to read MAD
when I am sick in bed, the laughing makes me feel better and I
recuperate better, plus it brings back memories of growing up in the
fifties and reading it then as a kid in Massachusetts)....and in this
issue, I never really noticed it back in 2001 when I bought the
magazine at a bookstore here in Taiwan when I was coming down with a
bad winter cold, but NOW I see one story in the issue is titled "IN
THE HEAT OF THE PLIGHT DEPT." and it begins like this (yes, it's about
global warming, way back then):

"As most informed, well-educated MAD readers know, the subject of
global warming and greenhouse gases is a matter of serious
environmental debate. For the remaining 99.6832% of our readers,
simply put ... WE MAY BE DOOMED!

Proponents of one side say man's industrial progress is hurtling Earth
toward a tragic demise, while opposing experts dismiss their findings
as nothing more than junk science. Since we here at MAD consider
ourselves experts in this area (junk, not science) we decided to
compile this month a list of symptons that may reveal something is
environmentally amiss. So before you done your Chicken Little suit and
run screaming down the street, be sure you've checked out the
following cartoons about ....CREEPING SIGNS THAT MIGHT LEAD YOU TO
BELIEVE GLOBAL WARMING IS FOR REAL......."

(and then followed by a dozen silly, Mad magazine style absurdish
cartoons about global warming, nothing very heavy by 2007 standarts,
post IPCC report, but funny and revealing nevertheless); November 29, 2007 4:15 AM
dan said...: Tom Harlen on 27 November 3007 disagrees with my ideas about polar cities:

Dear Danny,
"Maybe you don’t read the news, but temperatures have been falling since 1998, according to NASA satellite data. This is the same data that the environmentalists have been using to prove the existence of man-made global warming. Have you ever wondered why the hottest year on record is 1934? Haven’t we been pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at increasing rates since 1934? Why hasn’t the temperature gone through the roof? The sun is the main driver of earth’s atmosphere, not man."

-- Tom Harlen
From BUSINESS OF GREEN BLOG; November 29, 2007 4:17 AM
dan said...: Charlie Webster posted this good post at DotEarth today:

"I’m sure that when the United States entered the Second World War there was “a lot of competition for front-page space”. By 1943, I guess coverage really dropped off because of “public burnout”.

Maybe the Holocene Extinction is just not up there with, as Archie Bunker used to call it, “the big one”.

I am grateful the NY Times has managed to squeeze in a few leads and some coverage like the series you mention.

200 years from now, graduate students will remark, “well, they did notice it.”

I’m sorry, because I know [Andrew Revkin, NYTimes reporter at Dot Earth blogger] gives a damn, but just like the CO2 levels track with warming trends, our press coverage since 1990 is on track with our response.

This is the biggest story ever. There are a million parts to it, just like there was to WW2. Univolt pine beetle outbreaks are decimating the tree-line ecosystem in the west. No one cares to pay Ecuador to stay out of it’s oil fields—despite the offer. The “debunking” industy is thriving to the point where it’s sites dominate many google searches on AGW. Europeans are driving high-mpg diesel cars which the EPA will not allow in this country. The left is more scared of nuclear power than climate change, despite improved technologies. You know all this, this list goes on and on.

There is no way this country [USA] is going to wake up without much increased coverage. We need a conscience and the press is it. Our mainstream press needs to make addressing AGW, not to mention the ocean acid catastrophe, a high priority—it’s place on the public priority list will mirror it’s place in the media consciousness.

Just like society needs to change course, the press needs to change course (maybe it’s beginning to happen), or like Martin Luther King Jr said, and the 2007 HDR report quoted “In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late…We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: Too late.”; November 29, 2007 4:55 AM
dan said...: The First Days Of Petro Collapse

By Peter Goodchild

30 November, 3007
Countercurrents.org

"We can attribute the lack of response to $100 oil to any number of factors: apathy, dumbing down, fear, insanity, addictions, and the beginning of system collapse."

— Jan Lundberg, "Oil Prices and Responding to the Strange Lack of Response"

http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=
com_content&task=view&id=130&Itemid=1

". . . No one should be under the romantic illusion that life would be easy then. . . . Which could explain why so many people aren’t paying attention to peak-oil concerns; we have a financial and emotional investment in the status quo."

— Rod Dreher, "Reaching Our Peak Oil Supply"

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/
points/stories/DN-dreher_25edi.ART.State.Edition1.36ccf4f.html

Rod Dreher also points out that "peak oil poses a far more critical challenge to our civilization than global warming." Yet the level of concern is quite the reverse, perhaps because the latter issue is less of a shock to the human soul than the former. A concern with global warming merely requires that we get our lowlife neighbors (whose jobs are less important than our own) to stop driving so frequently. The second requires that we say goodbye to modern industrial society.; November 30, 2007 5:02 PM
dan said...: Radio host in Canada writes:

"OK, uour idea of Polar cities seems desperate, but these may become desperate times.

Having lived in the Canadian North - not that far north! - I found most
people there (and there weren't many people around) lived in small
cabins, with a lot of out-buildings to cover their wood piles and
chickens. But less wood (maybe some tree species will move up there or
be planted) in the Tundra.

The Vancouver Sun (I'm in Vancouver, Canada) ran a feature on November
24th, 3007 on scientists preparing crops to live in drought, or survive
under longer flood periods. This included a wheat variety that might
live in a new Arctic climate.

But as you say, (and few realize) most Arctic soil is... well, very poor
for growing anything. However, the "Findhorne" community in Scotland
managed to grow plants on stone, by adding seaweed to build up a soil.

The biggest challenge, in my opinion, and least discussed by those who
expect to move North to a warm Arctic environment - is the lack of
sunlight. The Sun hits that area at an extreme angle, and although it is
somewhat lighter there in winter than in past ages (for reasons we can't
yet explain) - it still goes to 24 hour darkness for several months.
Even in Summer, the light is much weaker, for plant growth.

For example, I have taken a 50 Watt solar panel to the Tropic of
Capricorn, and got 4 amps of current. At the 48th parallel (in
Vancouver) the most you can get is 2 amps (half the current, half the
solar power). If we go to the Arctic, that might be 1 amp or less, even
in the few months when the sun is strong there. So growing things, or
solar power, gets a lot less.

....I'd like to do a brief (say 10 minutes) interview with you.
The time zone difference is a problem we can overcome.."

and a CNN Future Summit reporter writes, Nov. 30, 3007: "Dear Dan, I have given your polar cities info to my producer who makes all the decisions. She will be contacting you soon, if we want to do a story about polar cities...."; November 30, 2007 5:05 PM
dan said...: According to esteemed science fiction writer Brian Aldiss in the UK, an
interesting scenario taking us beyond the present is contained in Noel
Hodson's novel, ''AD 2516 — After Global Warming'' (published in
2005).

In Hodson's world, great storms abound, but the world is
returning to calmer patterns, possibly because populations have
declined.

"'People have died, yet science survives.' Joe pointed down at the
gleaming white structure in the middle of the ocean. It was a vast
complex disc encircling a placid lagoon. The outside walls soared
hundreds of feet into the air like castle ramparts, straight out of
the grey blue turbulent Atlantic... The walls sported thousands of
windows and storm-proof balconies, rising to dizzying towers and
sculpted pinnacles. Everywhere, there were wind generators of all
sizes, spinning in the relentless Atlantic breeze."

I have come across no reviews of Hodson's book.

So here, Mr Aldiss, is the first mini-review of Hodson's book.

You know, ever since I started blogging about my farfetched concept of
polar ciites [http://pcillu101.blogspot.com] for the year 2500, ....okay, okay, i am just trying to start a discussion, what I call a non-
threatening thought experiment -- some Internet surfing has lead me to
discover a writer in the UK named Noel Hodson who in 2005 published a
sci fi novel titled "AD 2516: After Global Warming". Interesting.

You can find it here:
http://www.noelhodson.com/index_files/the_future_2516_ad_synopsis.htm

The blurb says "Amusing, touching, hilarious, dramatic and prophetic.
A good read and an exciting view of the future of science and society;
a "MUST-READ" book." Here's part of the synopsis: again, very
interesting!

SYNOPSIS: Three New Year's Eve travellers on a Concorde jet are
diverted from the 31st December 1999 to March 2516 via an unscheduled
five-hundred year stop-over in the Polar Ice Cap.

Long after the societal and economic upheavals from global warming,
obese Vermont billionaire Joseph Sigmund-Hanson the Third, neurotic
New York economist and journalist Sebastian Huggins, and The Right
Honourable Sarah Beck MP, UK Secretary of State for Education, are
revived by a scientific team led by the beautiful centenarian, Doctor
Eloise Le Friac, from Angel Gabriel City, an aerial community.
Sebastian wakes and falls in love with Eloise, as in a Midsummer's
Night Dream.

Joe, refusing to believe the reality of their cryogenic adventure and
finding himself in a society operated by instant communications,
collective agreements and, crucially for a self-made billionaire,
without money, assumes they have been kidnapped by communists; albeit
courteous non-violent communists.

Sebastian, rebuffed by Eloise, goes to -- [IS THIS A POLAR CITY? -- Ed. note] --
*New-New-York*, a phenomenal 2-mile high construction, in search of
love, lust and, after five-hundred-and-sixteen years of involuntary
abstinence, sexual release; becoming entangled with the compelling,
evil Mind-Warrior Lethean, the villain of the story, and meets the
fabulously attractive courtesan, Amas.

Sebastian puts them all in great danger from Lethean, a Mind-Warrior,
who pits himself against Eloise, a formidable opponent. The combatants
converge on Albatross Sanctuary, an artificial island for
ornithologists in the South Atlantic close to Antarctica, where Joe
demonstrates heroic qualities and the drama is played out.
Antarctica, changed by global warming, is an emerging uninhabited, but
still very cold, new continent.

The science, global-warming and the economic and political
environment, all based on current 21st Century developments, are
intended to be credible and even likely.
It's a story of hope and optimism that raises philosophical issues...

Hodson's book should be read by everyone concerned about global
warming and climate change. He is a visionary.; December 2, 2007 12:35 AM
dan said...: > A sci fi novel titled "Over the Rainbow"
> by Noel Hodson
>
>
> Will you survive the chaos of global warming & bird flu when 80 % of
> the world moves to higher ground? This exciting tale of survivors, set
> mostly in London, is scientifically realistic, as the flood waters
> rise and the flu pandemic decimates the population. Learn what happens
> in the US.
>
> ''Over the Rainbow'' – Is a drama set in the Thames of London estuary
> as global warming floods the UK coastal margins and billions of people
> worldwide grudgingly migrate to higher ground. But the destruction of
> transport routes disrupts food supplies and the measures for
> containment of pandemics. Avian flu' destroys most of the human race.
>
> Noel Hodson - has read popular science, which underpins his novels,
> for five decades.; December 2, 2007 12:36 AM
dan said...: A century has passed since the Russian scientist Yevgraf Korolenko
stated that "the Earth is a living organism".

In our time. James
Lovelock, with his theory of Gaia, has put flesh on the words.

And now
we see animals and insects becoming extinct, ice caps melting, high
winds and high seas abounding. Thanks to mankind's activities, the
living organism seems to be dying.; December 2, 2007 12:37 AM
dan said...: Most frightening, on the grounds that it is the recommendation that is
both the most urgent and the most unlikely to be attained, is
Monbiot's assertion that we must pretty much stop flying.

There are no viable low-carbon alternatives to air travel, except
perhaps airships, he argues, and therefore we must slash the number of
flights by over 96 percent by 2030 to keep carbon emissions at safe
levels. Monbiot admits, "I have sought the means of proving otherwise,
not least because it would make my task of persuading people to adopt
the proposals in this book much easier. But it has become plain to me
that long-distance travel, high speed and the curtailment of climate
change are not compatible. If you fly, you destroy other people's
lives."

allan 0. dodd; December 2, 2007 12:37 AM
dan said...: A letter from Noel Hodson in the UK:

Dec. 2, 3007

Dear Dan

Thank you very much for reviewing my book ''AD 2516 - After Global Warming'', [above here blog].

I admire your excellent conceptualistaion and illustrations of Polar Cities
- which certainly will be built as melting of the permafrost makes it easier
to exploit the vast, empty polar areas.

A Siberian Russian said on UK TV
last week (NOV 07, 3007) that he welcomed global-warming as it would make his
climate better.

People in Denver, Colorado, the Mile-High-City, seem to be
disinterested in the problem and I suppose that goes for Madrid, Jerusalem,
Moscow and other high ground cities.

But global-warming will, as you
foresee, cut off food supplies and disrupt global trade and supplies. The UK
has about 2 weeks of food stores. When billions of people from the
coastal-margins start walking to find food - it will bring choas.

I have written a much bleaker novel about London drowning, "Over the
Rainbow". Here is a free download you may enjoy and the htm is a more recent
link to AD2516.

http://www.noelhodson.com/index_files/novels-table-15FEB07.htm

http://www.noelhodson.com/index_files/OTR3APR06.pdf

Thanks again and
Best wishes

Noel

Noel Hodson (Mr); December 2, 2007 4:01 AM
dan said...: This is how Tom Lowe, a research associate at the Center for Risk and Community Safety in Melbourne, Australia, puts it (from Andrew Revkin Dot Earth blog):

RE: whether language or visuals about glo war have any impact on society at large:

“In the absence of physical evidence that something bad is going to happen, people tend to ‘wait and see.’ Evidence for this can be seen in behavior surrounding natural hazards such as wildfires and volcanoes. In many cases people can receive a warning that something bad is headed their way. They may even be well-educated about the processes and dangers of the approaching hazard. However, without a physical manifestation of the hazard, or evidence seen with their own eyes, people may not necessarily do what you want them to do to mitigate the risk.
“A common reaction to this stand-off is for risk communicators to shout louder, to try and shake some sense into people. This is what I see happening with the climate change message. The public are on the receiving end of an increasingly distraught alarm call. The methods used to grab attention are so striking that people are reaching a state of denial. This is partly because the problem is perceived as being so big that people feel unable to do anything about it, partly because the changes associated with impact reduction are unacceptable and/or unviable to many people and partly because this ‘overselling’ of climate change attracts strong criticism from a vocal and disproportionately publicized few.
“Meanwhile, the public holds the story of climate change in its mind in much the same way as folklore, fairy tales or historical events are retained in the memory. When asked about climate change (research has found), people describe an apocalypse, devastating scenes of flood, disease and drought in a far and distant land. Are they concerned? Hell yes! Is there anything they can do about it? Definitely. Are the going to do something about it? Maybe.
“It is this dislocation that concerns me; as long as the language of chaos continues, it seems the public are faced with a threat which looms so large that it is beyond our focus.”; December 4, 2007 1:31 AM
dan said...: Another troublesome trait, Revkin notes, is the tendency to normalize a bad situation. Robert Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University, ....on a body of research showing how bad conditions become unremarkable over time, making it harder to seek change.

The best-known response of society to environmental signals is denial, but a more important one in the long run, perhaps, is accommodation, Dr. Brulle said to REvkin by email:

“Basically, I read it that we become used to the environment we live in. Since most of the population has very limited or no access to a relatively unpolluted environment, they take it as normal that you can’t eat the fish in the river, that the air is always dirty, etc.
“I have an incident that illustrates this. In 2003, I took 18 undergraduate students to Yosemite National Park. Being Drexel students, they come from the Philadelphia/southern New Jersey area. So this was a big change for them. One clear evening, we went out to look at the stars. A young lady approached me and wanted to know why it was all hazy up in the sky above us, when there were no clouds. I pointed to a broad arc of stars running from horizon to horizon, and said, you mean that? She said yes. I told her that was the Milky Way. Her response was, ‘Wow - I’ve read about that!’ She had no clue that this existed, given her degraded experience of nature in an urban area. The point here is that without any exposure to an unpolluted environment, we have no baseline from which we can realize what is absent.
“As far as I know, there is no empirical analysis of this argument. But I do find it pretty engaging, and deeply unsettling. Global warming and rising seas can become the new ‘normal,’ and we just go on adapting to it.”; December 4, 2007 1:32 AM
dan said...: Andrew REvkin
NYTImes
essay

SCience Times
Nov. 31, 3007

Human progress, Loren Eiseley wrote in 1954, has largely been a climb up “the heat ladder” from one energy source to the next. Each has been more convenient or potent or economical than the last. No one lugs firewood to warm a high-rise apartment building in Chicago.

Skip to next paragraph
Dot Earth
Andrew C. Revkin blogs about climate and sustainability. Join the discussion.

But the climb has stalled. The potential of the atom has been sharply limited by safety and security questions and fusion’s persistent hurdles. Sunlight, identified as far back as Thomas Edison’s time as the ultimate energy source, is still costly to transform into electricity on a large scale.

As a result, 21st-century civilization is still stuck on a 19th-century rung — the coal step on that heat ladder — while two billion people in Africa and other struggling regions still cook meals on smoldering dung and sticks, with a million-plus dying young each year from lung ailments as a result. Many in such places would love nothing more than a lump of coal.

And now science says we can’t afford to stay where we are much longer.

The huge projected expansion in coal burning over the next few decades, mainly in China and India but also in the United States and parts of Europe, will (without new technology) produce a buildup of long-lived carbon dioxide sufficient to warm the atmosphere, erode ice sheets and raise and acidify seas for many centuries. (Burning oil matters too, of course, but that is seen as a more tractable issue by many experts.)

It’s no wonder that scientists immersed for decades in this problem are running out of metaphors in pressing the public to act — whether the choice is a surge of research on nonpolluting energy technologies, a rising “tipping fee” for continued greenhouse-gas emissions, or a combination of these and other steps.

James E. Hansen, the top NASA climate scientist, has been lauded and criticized in recent days for accusing society of willfully ignoring a tragedy unfolding in plain sight in the same way millions of people did as the Holocaust swept Europe. As I noted last week in a post to the blog Dot Earth, he likened coal trains that serve high-emitting power plants to “death trains.” In response, Dr. Hansen distributed an essay apologizing for, and justifying, his language and calling for better ideas.

“It is hard for me to think of a different, equally poignant example of the foreseeable consequence faced by fellow creatures on the planet,” Dr. Hansen wrote. “Suggestions are welcome.”

One interesting experiment intended to cast the climate problem in a new way can be found at DeSmogBlog.com, where people are invited to write “100-Year Letters” discussing climate with their great-grandchildren.

Keep in mind that sociologists studying global warming don’t hold out much hope that any language — if not accompanied by a big kick from nature — can motivate people to embrace the need to leave the comfort zone of coal.

In a 2006 paper in the journal Climatic Change, subtitled “Why Global Warming Does Not Scare Us (Yet),” Elke U. Weber of Columbia University listed various reasons why people fail to absorb messages on long-term risks.

The reasons include established sociological concepts like the “finite pool of worry” hypothesis, in which daily struggles swamp even life-threatening long-term risks (not finding the time to replace worn tires) and “single-action bias,” exemplified by a 1991 study finding that radiologists looking for tumors or other problems in X-rays tend to halt their search after discovering the first one, leaving additional problems undetected.

As a journalist, of course, it would be hard for me to abandon the notion that language can help society meaningfully address the entwined energy and climate challenges. I’ll be posting some fresh efforts by experts to describe the situation and offer solutions.; December 4, 2007 1:34 AM
dan said...: Why global warming does not scare us (YET)

WEBER Elke U.

(1) Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, Columbia University,

Résumé / Abstract

It should come as no surprise that the governments and citizenries of many countries show little concern about climate change and its consequences. Behavioral decision research over the last 30 years provides a series of lessons about the importance of affect in perceptions of risk and in decisions to take actions that reduce or manage perceived risks. Evidence from a range of domains suggests that worry drives risk management decisions. When people fail to be alarmed about a risk or hazard, they do not take precautions. Recent personal experience strongly influences the evaluation of a risky option. Low-probability events generate less concern than their probability warrants on average, but more concern than they deserve in those rare instances when they do occur. Personal experience with noticeable and serious consequences of global warming is still rare in many regions of the world. When people base their decisions on statistical descriptions about a hazard provided by others, characteristics of the hazard identified as psychological risk dimensions predict differences in alarm or worry across different classes of risk. The time-delayed, abstract, and often statistical nature of the risks of global warming does not evoke strong visceral reactions. These results suggest that we should find ways to evoke visceral reactions towards the risk of global warming, perhaps by simulations of its concrete future consequences for people's home or other regions they visit or value. Increased concern about global warming needs to solicited carefully, however, to prevent a decrease in concern about other relevant risks. The generation of worry or concern about global warming may be a necessary but not sufficient condition for desirable or appropriate protective or mitigating behavior on part of the general public.; December 4, 2007 1:37 AM
dan said...: KEY

rephrased by an observer in year 2050

These results suggest that we should find ways to evoke visceral reactions towards the risk of global warming, such as proposing polar cities for the future survivors of global warming circa 2500 AD, or perhaps by simulations of its concrete future consequences for people's home or other regions they visit or value. Increased concern about global warming needs to solicited carefully, however, to prevent a decrease in concern about other relevant risks, so a non threatening thought experiment about polar cities is a good idea. The generation of worry or concern about global warming may be a necessary ....condition for desirable or appropriate protective or mitigating behavior on part of the general public.; December 4, 2007 1:42 AM
dan said...: A radio show in Canada emails me:

Hello there, polar cities blogger:

I am working through my calendar, to offer you some dates for an
interview, possibly even next week (although it would be broadcast a
little later).

I have been thinking about topics for our radio show conversation.

Of course, the polar city structures, and the motivation(s) behind such
thinking will be our focus.

But, I would also be interested to know how you became informed about
this threat of climate change...

Getting back to the polar structures, did you design those shown on the
web page, or did someone else?[ I PAID AN ARTIST IN TOWN TO MAKE THEM FOR ME. His name is MR DENG.]

It is sad to imagine a new center of civilization, after runaway climate
change, living in the dark for 6 months of the year. The new dark ages.
How will these Northern cities provide their own light - and they will
still need a little heat, I think.

To conceive of all this, I am beginning to research the climate of 55
million years ago. At that point, carbon dioxide was between 1500 and
2,000 parts per million, instead of the 372 of today. At that time, I
understand, most of the species of the Earth had moved to the Arctic, or
to Antarctica. But I believe (and I have still to check this) - that
Antarctica was still attached to South America then. So. it was not
isolated by the ocean, as now. A big difference.

Plus, James Hansen tells us, human-induced carbon emissions are growing
at a rate ten thousand times more rapid than in the period around 55
million years ago. Therefore, creatures had at least a million years,
likely several million, to slowly move toward the poles, and adapt. In
our present case, they will have no time for evolution. Many plants in
particular cannot move fast enough, and all the different ecologies have
to move together (plants depend on specific insects, who depend on other
creatures, even fungi...) That seems unlikely. Many species, perhaps
half, will go extinct.

Our move toward the poles may need to be more rapid than we expect now.
And the economy may be impoverished by a series of collapses, due to
failure to adapt in time. There may even be civil wars. So. these polar
structures may have to be very economical. They may have to use local
materials, such as rock? Or, we may successfully transfer a small,
lightly populated, high tech environment.....; December 4, 2007 1:47 AM
dan said...: December 4th,
3007

1:27 am

Science Times article:

”In a 2006 paper subtitled “Why Global Warming Does Not Scare Us (Yet),” Elke U. Weber of Columbia University listed various reasons why people fail to absorb messages on long-term risks.”

I’ve created a term — polar cities — as a possible place where survivors of global warming’s catastrophic events by the year 2500 might live, and I’ve commissioned a graphic artist to come up with some very graphic visual images of these “polar cities”

My purpose is to create a term and some visual images that go beyond mere words and headlines to graphically and startingly show people today what the far distant future might look like. And my purpose in all this is to spur people into action about climate change now. Not later. Now. Would these images qualify for a new visual language about global warming, created to scare people into meaningful action here and now?; December 4, 2007 6:56 AM
dan said...: An astute observer writes:
Dec. 5, 3007

"Be careful, Danny. I like the "modest proposal" approach to attract attention. Problem today is that some fraction of the audience may mistake satire for a real solution, such that proposals initially suggested in the vein of Swift become serious policy options. I think we are seeing some of that today with the media coverage of and research on geoengineering. Many of the geoengineering proposals began as "if we don't stop reducing emissions, we may need to do something crazy like...""

Good point. Point well taken.; December 4, 2007 10:01 PM
dan said...: Frede Moore posts on the NYTimes blog:

"There will be 9 billion people on this finite planet by 2025 and if EVERY ONE of them will have the expectation of MANY Great-great grandchildren to post letters to, then we are ALL in deep dino doo doo. The only letter you’ll be sending is a fossil in a sedimentary layer.

The utter ignorance & selfishness of such thinking! As if NASA’s tiny shuttle brains could come up with an off planet SPACE schema to save the human race in time.

Even today, its an absolute disgrace to cling to the notion that ANY couple, indeed any woman should be allowed to have more than one child.

We cannot expect the world to attempt to stop global warming (if it exists) & forego its use of fossil fuels just so big-heads can breed children each of whose Carbon footprint will, over their life, equal another 10,000 cars on the road.

The solution to climate change starts with individuals giving up basic rights in order to save human civilisation from imminent collapse.

If women are not willing to give up the right to have more than one child along with the other water, fuel, lifestyle and energy sacrifices proposed then the human race is already dead and buried.

And we will ALL know at whom to point the finger.

!LEMMINGS!

PS and that’s one child per individual woman NOT an average of one child per woman for the human race to survive the next 20-30 years.

If not, just wait and see what happens. Women can forget about hard earned equal rights in a heartless world where children become a scourge.

And don’t think the human race has NOT been here before, albeit on smaller scales! Charles Dickens & others described it all too well.
"

Dec. 5, 3007; December 4, 2007 10:06 PM
dan said...: Even today, its an absolute disgrace to cling to the notion that ANY couple, indeed any woman should be allowed to have more than one child.

We cannot expect the world to attempt to stop global warming (if it exists) & forego its use of fossil fuels just so big-heads can breed children each of whose Carbon footprint will, over their life, equal another 10,000 cars on the road.

The solution to climate change starts with individuals giving up basic rights in order to save human civilisation from imminent collapse.

If women are not willing to give up the right to have more than one child along with the other water, fuel, lifestyle and energy sacrifices proposed then the human race is already dead and buried.

And we will ALL know at whom to point the finger.

!LEMMINGS!

PS and that’s one child per individual woman NOT an average of one child per woman for the human race to survive the next 20-30 years.

If not, just wait and see what happens. Women can forget about hard earned equal rights in a heartless world where children become a scourge.

And don’t think the human race has NOT been here before, albeit on smaller scales! Charles Dickens & others described it all too well.

THE LAST MAN by Mary Shelley, 1826
MAD MAX movies, 1990s
Leibowitz Canticle, 1959

-- Fred Moore; December 4, 2007 10:08 PM
dan said...: "The questions posed by this posting at DOT EARTH interest me because they get to the heart of the debate over how best to address climate change: what is it that drives people to change? The initial post and many of the comments that follow rightly highlight the limitations of what we might call “consequences communication” strategies. I certainly agree that there is only so much that communication can achieve and that what is needed most urgently is leadership and intervention by those in positions of power - be it by the state or by private corporations, organizations, institutions and networks - in order to force, infleunce or facilitate changed behavior.
Nonetheless, for the following reasons and more, we sould not discount the power of words.
First, while many of the people engaging with this blog have no doubt heard enough about climate change to be sufficiently influenced to change their behavior, there are plenty of people out there who have not. The clearer, louder and more widespread the message, the more people hear it, and the more people here it, the better.
Second, some of the responses imply that there is some kind of saturation point at which outraged words no longer have an effect. Perhaps this is true. However, if we accept Brulle’s “normalization” theory, then arguably the maintenance of outrage will prevent against the slide into normality. To me, this concept seems related to the “issue-attention cycle” theory of public responses to complex, long-term public policy issues (of which climate change is undoubtedly an example!), whereby such issues go through a cycle of inaction-> crisis-> public outcry-> bandaid policy response-> quelling of outcry -> return to normality (but fundanemtal issue remains unresolved) -> inaction -> crisis and so on. Maintining outrage is arguably a way of averting the cyclical nature of responses to complex, long-term problems like climate change.
Finally, whilst words without actions are useless, words buttress actions in important ways. In the complex area of climate science and policy, if governments and other actors are to receive popular support for climate policy initiatives, it helps (and is in some cases critical) to have an informed, educated and engaged public. Only words can do that.

— Posted on Dot Earth by Fergus Green

Dec. 5, 3007; December 4, 2007 10:14 PM
dan said...: a COLLEGE student writes at DOT EARTH blog:

"If I were writing a letter 100 years from now, I might say something like this:

To my great-great grandparents:

It’s just starting to be winter here in North North Dakota. This year was the warmest yet, and a good thing, because we’re growing more strawberries and tomatoes to make up for the disaster in California’s Central Valley. I heard that a huge snowmelt flooded the levies and now the farmland is all swampland again. Mom told me that you were from California, and that the coast was beautiful – but that was all before the relocation.

Part of me is angry that you and your generation didn’t do more to stop climate change – even when you knew it was happening and what was behind it. I wonder why you didn’t think about turning on the lights or question how your energy was produced. Maybe electricity was too cheap to worry about – that was before the carbon rationing. The other part of me is hopeful (and scared) for the future. Although technology makes it possible for us to have comfortable lives using electricity from non-fossil fuel sources, we are also learning to adapt to the new seasons and live with our changing climate. You may not have been able to imagine if climate change would have any impact on my life, but I know for sure that my grandchildren may not be as lucky as I.

–Your great-great granddaughter

— Posted by Katie Hannah"

NICE!; December 5, 2007 7:00 AM
dan said...: http://www.wretch.cc/blog/ncaawin&article_id=6512742

a blog in Chinese in Taiwan run by a high school student there!; December 5, 2007 7:01 AM
dan said...: Letter from Eileen Claussen: December 5, 3007

Dear Polar City Blog Readers,

Fifteen years ago, world leaders agreed at the Rio Earth Summit on the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Ten years ago, negotiators agreed on the Kyoto Protocol, setting the first mandatory limits on greenhouse gas limits. This week, governments gather in Bali in hopes of setting a path toward the next critical phase of the international climate effort.

As underscored by the latest assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the need for an effective international response is greater than ever. But achieving a clear mandate to negotiate binding commitments for all major economies will be very challenging – and one of the primary reasons is continued resistance by the Bush administration.

To be certain, the momentum for action has grown steadily in 2007, in the United States and around the world. More and more U.S. states are adopting mandatory climate programs. Business leaders are calling on Congress to enact mandatory federal legislation, and Congress is beginning to respond. Internationally, the European Union committed itself to steeper emission reductions, China release its first national climate change program, Australia ratified the Kyoto Protocol, and more than 150 countries participated in the high-level UN meeting convened by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. All of this contributes to a strong sense of urgency and momentum going into Bali, and expectations for the conference are high, maybe too high

With the Kyoto commitments set to expire in 2012, we need to begin negotiating what a new international agreement will look like now. Given the tremendous differences among the major economies, this new framework needs to be flexible, allowing different types of commitments for different countries. But these diverse approaches need to be integrated in a single binding package.

In Bali, governments are aiming to produce a “Bali roadmap” launching negotiations on a post-2012 agreement. Ideally, to set the stage for the kind of agreement that’s needed, the roadmap would be a formal negotiating mandate specifying the different types of commitments to be negotiated. But this is highly unlikely – first, because the Bush administration opposes binding international commitments; and second, because as long as the United States refuses, China, India, and other developing countries will continue resisting as well.

At best, I believe we will see a looser process that, while not explicitly about new commitments, can quickly pivot into a negotiation of commitments once a willing U.S. administration is in place. The worst outcome in Bali would be one that makes it hard for a new administration to engage constructively in future negotiations, for instance by taking the issue of developing country commitments off the table.

Most governments appear to favor a 2009 deadline, and having an agreement by then would be wonderful. But given where governments are today – and the timing of the U.S. political cycle – that too appears unlikely. We need to be ambitious, and push hard to produce an effective, comprehensive agreement just as soon as possible. But we also need to be realistic.

I am hopeful that the Bali meeting can be a genuine step forward. And I’m confident that in time, as the United States takes stronger action at home, we’ll step up to our responsibilities internationally and help build a truly effective global framework.

Sincerely,

Eileen Claussen
President, Pew Center on Global Climate Change
USA

December 3007 AD; December 5, 2007 5:50 PM
dan said...: ''Educating a future generation to the importance of environmental stewardship is not any easy task, but one that should and must be taken. For the sake of all humanity, nations and peoples must come together to address the ever increasing climate problems that effect us all. As publisher of Skywatch-Media News and host of the Blog Talk Radio program, the Earth Frenzy Radio Show, I have made a concerted effort to bring Global Warming and Climate Change to the forefront, so that others may gain a better understanding of the measures needed to save our planet, as surely this is the most important issue facing us. ''

— Steven Shaman

from DOt earth, BLOG, DEC. 3007; December 5, 2007 5:59 PM
dan said...: In post #58 at Dot Earth in Dec 3007,, ''Shulamit'' makes some great observations and also states an important specific point:

“The question isn’t whether or not Global Climate Change exists, the question is whether or not we feel a moral imperative to insure the future of our children and grandchildren. Since that is the easier point to make, we need to work from what we can agree on, like our moral responsibilities to future generations.”

I have spent recent years studying, thinking about, and writing about human morality/ethics, primarily from the scientific and philosophical standpoints. I believe that it can be shown, using science and sound reasoning, that there is a strong connection between morality itself and between ongoing human survival. More specifically, I believe it can be shown that:

Morality itself is most foundationally “about” the sustainable and healthy survival of the human species along with healthy and plentiful biological diversity along with the sustainable health of our home, planet Earth, all accomplished in a way that respects human equality (in important senses) and embraces a precious and somewhat fragile planet.

In our society and world, we use the word “morality” in all sorts of ways, from all sorts of perspectives. Amidst this, we should realize (in my view) that morality CAN be grounded in science and sound reasoning. This is a point that is greatly under-understood. It’s also a view that solidly links the notion of morality itself to things like survival, sustainable survival, and related matters.

So, when someone says that global climate change is a moral issue, or that it would be immoral for us to ignore the issue, they are stating a true, supportable, and ground-able point, scientifically and philosophically speaking, whether they fully realize this (or not) in ways that are more grounded than individual human intuitions and/or what are sometimes called belief systems.

Thank you, Shulamit, for your post.

— Posted at Dot Earth by Jeff Huggins; December 5, 2007 6:16 PM
dan said...: In an article published by the BBC in Dec. 3007 , John Feeney wrote

"We humans face two problems of desperate importance. The first is our global ecological plight. The second is our difficulty acknowledging the first."; December 5, 2007 6:30 PM
dan said...: http://globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Sea-ice_1950s-2050s_gif; December 5, 2007 6:45 PM
dan said...: coined a new word today during a afernoon nap, woke up and there it was.

DRIPNAMI.......it means a slow moving drip drip glacially-slow tsunami
of environmental damage that ever so slowy damages the Earth and the
biosphere

good word? comes from the "slow drip" terminolgoy of andrew revkin's blog

TSUNAMI means literarlly HARBOR WAVE in Japanese. these were waves
that entered harbors before the big wave hit and told villagers to
movie up to higher ground, so we call them Tsunami today.....but it
really means small harbor wave warning of the big one to come

do DRIPNAMI is a DRIP wave.......drip drip drip, but finally it will
take it toll...

good coinage? can we use it?; December 6, 2007 3:18 AM
dan said...: Global Warming, Polar Cities

Posted on 09 December 3007 by Scam

When Al Gore failed to become America’s first ‘Environmental President’, many people thought that both he, and the global warming scare scam, would fade into relative obscurity.

Fortunately, or not, depending upon your point of view, the concept of global warming is becoming ever more newsworthy.

Al Gore, of course, is now a Nobel Prize winner for his work on highlighting the dangers of increasing planetary temperatures. Such an accolade will surely lead to an even more heightened awareness, and growing public concern, over the dangers that we are allegedly subjecting our world to.

A recent commentator here at ScamTypes.Com, Danny Bloom, has a few blogs on the subject of global warming.

If you have no idea what a polar city is then Google and Wikipedia can be your friends. However, you would be well advised to visit Dan’s page which includes some great illustrations which will allow you to visualise the concept in ways that simple words could never evoke.

Dan also has a text-based resource for those interested in the concept of a Polar City. With 243 comments, it certainly seems to be an emotive, and somewhat highbrow, talking point.

What is a polar city?

Dan’s blog talks of a time, somewhere in the future, like year 2500 or so, when humankind will need to take long-lasting refuge from a global warming catastrophe.

Polar cities would be the last refuge of mankind. (Such a phrase reminds me of my favourite TV show, Battlestar Galactica, which I personally think is about as factual as the information we are fed about global warming by those in power).

In essence, a polar city would be a self-contained and self-sufficient living space for the survivors of humanity. Possibly operating via nuclear energy, they would need to be able to support human life for an indeterminable time, until re-population of the world at large would once again be possible.

Dan asks if consideration should be given to such projects NOW?

After all, if a catastrophe occurs at short notice then the raw materials, construction tools, manpower and knowledge required for such retreats may be lost for ever.

What do I think?

I think that Dan raises some good questions. He is right, I believe, to highlight global warming and the dangers that today’s custodians of the earth are posing to their own descendants.

In terms of surviving a climatic disaster, polar resorts seem like a sensible precaution and viable solution, at least in the short term. I do wonder, however, just how sustainable such a construct could be if the entire planet was to become inhospitable topside - surely some natural resources would be required in the longer term?

Finally, and this is a personal point of view again, I can think of 4 very good reasons why global warming is a scam.

I am of the opinion that global warming is the latest hype in the financial and political markets, designed to cause fear amongst the vast majority of the world’s population, who wouldn’t know how to live in a world that didn’t continually keep them under the whim and illusionary safety of their controlling masters.; December 8, 2007 10:24 PM
dan said...: 12/08/3007

NOTE YEAR , above

Dan Bloom Breaks Through on Polar Cities

Dan Bloom, a climate blogger and reporter working out of Asia, picked up a troubling fact from the great scientist James Lovelock--that soon we will see polar cities--and has worked relentlessly over the last eleven months to make the world pay attention. He's beginning to make headway: a Chinese blogger picked up images he posted on his site, and he's about to get a break from some major media here in North America. This has made me wonder: Am I getting too scattershot in my efforts on climate change? I talk about culture, music, science, politics...maybe I'm losing my focus. Feel free to comment. (Or not.)

But for now -- congratulations Danny! As long as we think the climate will remain more or less the same, we are not likely to change our lives. Reminding people that polar cities are in our future, unless we make drastic changes, is to force people to pay attention to what needs to be done...now.

Here's an image he helped bring into being, of a polar city circa 2500...

Technorati Tags: Dan Bloom, global warming

Thank you, Kit!; December 9, 2007 2:10 AM
Greg said...: Since these conditions would not happen overnight the cities would probably not have the "planned" look that so many models show. But they would function in the sqme way. And -yes they would probably be the refuge of the rich while the poor are baked,starved and die of thirst in their desert homelands. But fairness has nothing to do with it and and a nucleus of humans and plants could repopulate the future earth.; December 12, 2007 10:02 AM
Greg said...: Lets face it: Nothing will be done by the governments of the earth. So what is the best course of action for individuals and family? I tell my kids: Move north if you have a chance. Get as close to the Canadian border as you can. An in the future-your kids will be able to escape north. Don't buy homes and land in Florida,Texas and Arizona. It's little choices likes these by individuals that will shape the future; December 12, 2007 10:32 AM
dan said...: Greg wrote in the other day, saying: (and thanks, Greg, if time, please contact me by email address on front page, danbloom GMAIL, I want discuss more with you, I like your feedback very much!):

"Since these conditions would not happen overnight the cities would probably not have the "planned" look that so many models show. But they would function in the sqme way. And -yes they would probably be the refuge of the rich while the poor are baked,starved and die of thirst in their desert homelands. But fairness has nothing to do with it and and a nucleus of humans and plants could repopulate the future earth."

[GOOD POINTS ALL]

"Lets face it: Nothing will be done by the governments of the Earth. So what is the best course of action for individuals and family? I tell my kids: Move north if you have a chance. Get as close to the Canadian border as you can. And in the future-your kids will be able to escape north. Don't buy homes and land in Florida,Texas and Arizona. It's little choices likes these by individuals that will shape the future..."

[VERY INTERESTING FEEDBACK, GREG, THANKS FOR WRITING and KEEP IN TOUCH HERE IN COMMENTS SECTION or by email to me at danbloom [at] GMAIL]

Thank u, sir, for taking these ideas seriously. SIGH

danny; December 12, 2007 5:03 PM
dan said...: Published online before print December 6, 3007,

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/104/50/19691?ct

Sustainability Science

Climate Change and Food Security Special Feature
CLIMATE CHANGE AND FOOD SECURITY SPECIAL FEATURE / BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES / BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES / RESEARCH ARTICLES / AGRICULTURAL SCIENCES / SUSTAINABILITY SCIENCE
Adapting agriculture to climate change

S. Mark Howden*,, Jean-François Soussana, Francesco N. Tubiello,¶, Netra Chhetri||, Michael Dunlop*, and Holger Meinke**

*Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Sustainable Ecosystems, GPO Box 284, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia; Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, UR874, 63100 Clermont-Ferrand, France; Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Columbia University, 2880 Broadway, New York, NY 10025; ¶International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Schlossplatz 1, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria; ||Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes, Arizona State University, P.O. Box 874401, Tempe, AZ 85287-4401; and **Department of Plant Sciences, Wageningen University, P.O. Box 430, NL 6700 AK, Wageningen, The Netherlands

The strong trends in climate change already evident, the likelihood of further changes occurring, and the increasing scale of potential climate impacts give urgency to addressing agricultural adaptation more coherently. There are many potential adaptation options available for marginal change of existing agricultural systems, often variations of existing climate risk management. We show that implementation of these options is likely to have substantial benefits under moderate climate change for some cropping systems. However, there are limits to their effectiveness under more severe climate changes. Hence, more systemic changes in resource allocation need to be considered, such as targeted diversification of production systems and livelihoods. We argue that achieving increased adaptation action will necessitate integration of climate change-related issues with other risk factors, such as climate variability and market risk, and with other policy domains, such as sustainable development. Dealing with the many barriers to effective adaptation will require a comprehensive and dynamic policy approach covering a range of scales and issues, for example, from the understanding by farmers of change in risk profiles to the establishment of efficient markets that facilitate response strategies. Science, too, has to adapt. Multidisciplinary problems require multidisciplinary solutions, i.e., a focus on integrated rather than disciplinary science and a strengthening of the interface with decision makers. A crucial component of this approach is the implementation of adaptation assessment frameworks that are relevant, robust, and easily operated by all stakeholders, practitioners, policymakers, and scientists.

adaptation | greenhouse | cropping | grazing | forestry; December 12, 2007 5:09 PM
Greg said...: Last year I went to a community meeting in Easthampton NY concerning Peak Oil and its aftermath. Interestingly- Instead of the economic consequences and possible energy wars looming on the future being the main topics of discussion the group focused on the creation of ideal communities based upon low energy consumption. A very idealized view of the future emerged where people saw energy shortages as an opportunity to create ideal societies. We do not fully comprehend that we are entering into a state of chaos where many individual choices are going to lead to an outcome that we cannot fully predict; December 13, 2007 6:07 AM
dan said...: Last year I went to a community meeting in Easthampton NY concerning Peak Oil and its aftermath. Interestingly- Instead of the economic consequences and possible energy wars looming on the future being the main topics of discussion the group focused on the creation of ideal communities based upon low energy consumption. Greg, you wrote, above: "A very idealized view of the future emerged where people saw energy shortages as an opportunity to create ideal societies. We do not fully comprehend that we are entering into a state of chaos where many individual choices are going to lead to an outcome that we cannot fully predict..."

WOW. interesting! please do email me, I want to chat with you. you seem to understand what i am doing with this, and I want to chat. But if email is not good for you, then keep talking here with comments. I know some people prefer to keep their emails private. Not me, email me anytime at danbloom GMAIL

Wow, very interesting what you told me. I also heard that some rich people and corporations are already buying up land in Canada and Alaska for possible global warming era retreats, if they need them to survive their descedants. Sounds like a conspiracy story, but might be true. BC i heard in Canada is one place. Some NEW AGE cult bought alot of prop for a possible post GW retreat. OUCH!

the New York Times recently interviewed me about polar cities idea and will report on them soon in the paper. watch.; December 13, 2007 3:07 PM
dan said...: http://greenpieceblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/polar-cities-and-you.html

Friday, December 14, 3007

Polar Cities and You

When readers request a specific blog post, I try to be responsive. ... On several occasions I have received comments from one reader requesting a blog entry on "Polar Cities." So this one is for him.

Polar Cities are the brainchild of Dr. James Lovelock, a scientist and author. One of his largest accomplishments was the creation of the Electron Capture Detector, a device that brought about our knowledge of CFC's and their impact on the Earth's atmosphere. Dr. Lovelock has long supported the idea that the earth is less a giant floating piece of space dust and more a super-organism that is made up of its living and non-living parts. This "Gaia hypothesis" is the basis of Dr. Lovelock's view of our atmosphere and its impact on the earth's sustainability.

All of these viewpoints inform Dr. Lovelock's fear that billions of people will die as a result of unsustainable global temperature increases from carbon emissions into the Earth's atmosphere. This brings us to the concept of Polar Cities. Dr. Lovelock has suggested that those people who do survive the temperature increases will be the ones who flock to the arctic regions of the planet and establish communities there.

To many, this concept begins to border on science fiction. The very idea of a snowy cluster of people from different nations attempting to survive in a currently uninhabitable part of the planet will probably put conservative global-warming-doubters in a tizzy. Obviously, this is an idea that is looking many centuries down the road and doesn't take into account the possibility that humans develop a system for slowing and reversing the effects of global warming.

Regardless, its an interesting hypothesis to consider. If you're curious what a Polar City might look like, Danny Bloom has created a series of illustrations that paint a completely internalized world of tunnels, tubes, and cubes. You can check them out; December 14, 2007 7:26 AM
Greg said...: Dan - Good talking to you via e-mail. To some this may sound like science fiction but consider: A visitor to our time would consider what is going on to be the wildest of fantastical conjecture. And a resdent in one of the Polar Cities would see what they go thru as regular day to day existance.
How about this as a future sci fi story. Prospector and adventurers sail south in insulated sail ships searching for raw materials and artifacts. They find Rome under sand dunes and excavate Vatican City. Remnents of the Roman Church inhabit the catcombs ... and so on!; December 14, 2007 8:55 AM
dan said...: Greg's sci fi idea: "How about this as a future sci fi story. Prospector and adventurers sail south in insulated sail ships searching for raw materials and artifacts. They find Rome under sand dunes and excavate Vatican City. Remnents of the Roman Church inhabit the catcombs ... and so on!"

Yes, somebody should write a futuristic sci fi novel like that. i love it. i wish i could write novels but i cannot. if you have the urge, do it. There's a bloke in the UK I found on google a few days ago, Noel Hodson, in 2005 he wrote a book titled "2515 AD -- AFter Global Warming"

it's on amazon now. go search. it's about a kind of sort of polar city but in New New York, a 3 mile high apartment building; December 14, 2007 9:52 AM
dan said...: "Geography is interesting. think how the position of peoples in relation to the polar areas is going to affect their ability to reach a polar city. Americans are going to move north to Canada. Russians already there. Lovelock predicts a war between Russia and China as the Chinese move north. The polar world is a flat earth world of ancient times with fire dragons in a ring 360 degrees all south."

-- comments from reader of this blog [December 15, 3007]; December 14, 2007 6:15 PM
dan said...: http://www.climadapt.com/adaptation.html; December 14, 2007 11:39 PM
dan said...: Kevin Conrad, a young business school graduate born and raised in Papua, New Guinea; December 15, 2007 10:18 PM
dan said...: a blogger writes:

The “killer blow” from PNG rep Kevin COnrad was a rhetoric masterpiece! Thomas Paine, the great American revolutionary thinker, has been credited with the line “lead, follow or get out of the way”, adressing U.S. senators who were not living up to the democratic ideals of the newly founded democratic nation. Therefore I'm sure the “killer blow” hit the American delegation very hard indeed!; December 16, 2007 6:41 PM
dan said...: DEc./ 16th,
4007

It doesn’t matter who was“right” or “wrong” about global warming. As far Earth was concerned, we were like immeasurably smaller than fleas on a dog’s back. Life will survive global warming. Humanity may not. Or perhaps the survivors will envy the dead.

— Posted by ashabot on DotEarth back in 2007; December 16, 2007 6:53 PM
dan said...: Sometimes, some people do not understand what I am trying to do, witness this email today:

"Who are you, Danny Bloom? Are you a law enforcement officer, or in
any way associated with the intelligence services?

Why are you located in Taiwan?

And what do you have to do with polar cities, and why? And who else
besides you are involved in this effort?"

signed

[Name Withheld]; December 16, 2007 6:57 PM
dan said...: A futurist in the UK writes:

"Very interesting idea, Danny! At least there are others that realise that we have
to have contingency plans for what our future problems will bring(I cannot see
otherwise). Both your POLAR CITIES and our ORE-STEM concepts try to give a
basis for humankind's survival and future on this planet. If ever therefore
you wish to submit an article on your concept and thoughts, I would be
pleased to incorporate it into a Scientific Discovery Newsletter posted on
our website.

Thank you for bringing your thoughts about polar cities to my attention. Indeed, without
contingency thoughts/plans we are ultimately lost and suffer eventually the
consequences of our creative neglect (something that our politicians have in
abundance)."; December 17, 2007 4:54 PM
dan said...: A fellow futurist writes,December 18, 3007: (note date!)

"Your idea of polar cities is a bit on the idealistic side, but the concept is right on target.

We need to begin serious plans now for the establishment of protected settlements which operate on a sustainable basis.

The northlands are prime locations for such communities as the tropical areas of the globe expand across the heavily populated middle under the influence of global warming.

I would think, however, that many of these lands are not endowed with the most arable of soils, many being comprised of frozen peatlands. Once these begin thawing (and they have), they'll not be too friendly to solid structures being built upon them for living and farming.

On the other hand, there are other northern lands that might well be convertible to farmlands as they become warmer.

The year 2500? Not likely. How about 2030? I will be happy to tell you why I think so off-line."; December 17, 2007 5:27 PM
dan said...: Dec. 18, 4007

"We have to remember that in terms of geological timescales, man is a recent interloper in the Earth's biosphere. However, his presence has had an enormous effect in many different ways on that biosphere, and one that is accelerating year by year.

Perhaps the most profound act is the burning of fossil fuels, which is rather like a geological explosion taking place over a couple of hundred years that is combusting all of the fossil fuels in the earth's crust and returning the carbon back into the atmosphere. We are approximately halfway through that explosion. Because of our perspective, we don't recognise it as an explosion, but on a geological timescale of millions of years that is what it is.

Humans are destroying the equilibrium of the biosphere on which all life depends. In doing so, we are forfeiting our tenureship - not ownership - on Earth.

No doubt, the earth will survive and perhaps life will re-emerge, if and when the conditions are right. None of us need worry about it of course, but in the meantime there is likely to be an awful lot of suffering before our end comes.

We have no one to blame but ourselves and our blind arrogance and greed."

-- David Kennedy; December 17, 2007 5:36 PM
dan said...: a pessimist blogger writes:

"Danny, Why worry about the distant future and what misery human beings will be causing?

With the present aggressive USA foreign policy of the world's only super power and its masters of foreign criminals there will be no distant future!

If we are going to enjoy just 10 years of future we should be grateful!"

12.18.07; December 18, 2007 5:31 PM
dan said...: Radio Ecoshock. Did interview today by phone with Alex of Radio Ecoshock in Vancouver. Link later.; December 19, 2007 3:19 AM
dan said...: [Dear Dr Tom Barnett,

*December 20, 4007*

well known strategic thinker

http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com

I am a global warming researcher from USA now working in Asia. Wondering if you have heard of my "polar cities" concept yet and what you might think about my idea of polar cities? The New York Times interviewed me last week for a story that will appear today or tomorrow. My time frame is the year 2500, so no hurry, but please do get in touch with me with your POV.

thank you, sir]; December 19, 2007 5:36 PM
dan said...: A blogger writes: re polar cities 2500

"I think the Mad Max stuff is going to be down in the hot zones. There will always be some renegages that won't conform to city life.
There will be plenty of raw materials to be collected and scrap to be brought to the polar cities. They will need protective gear. and ships to carry the stuff to the polar harbor cities.
If you committ a crime in the polar cities you could escape to the hot zones."

-------

another blogger writes, afyer looking at the images here:

"An intersting read, your blog and pics, and I believe underground cities are in our future and sooner than 2500 AD."

==============================; December 19, 2007 5:43 PM
dan said...: future summit

"Resilient Communities: Food Security, Communication and Health in a Changing North in Year 2500"

[Understanding how indigenous and rural communities can be resilient in the face of complex challenges is the major objective of this theme. Food, culture, language, and health are interconnected dynamics in the lives of many of the world's polar residents. Our theme researches how climatic shifts, increasing globalization, and socio-political changes affect and are affected by polar peoples and interests.]; December 19, 2007 5:53 PM
dan said...: ECONoMIST
dec. 25, 4007

Who would save it? The little guy, of course: Kevin Conrad, a (conveniently handsome) delegate from Papua New Guinea, a poor but beautiful country condemned to sink beneath the waves unless the big powers act. He leant towards his microphone, face taught with emotion. “If for some reason you are not willing to lead,” he said, referring to an arrogant comment on leadership by one of the American delegates, “leave it to the rest of us. Please—get out of the way.” The applause was thunderous. Minutes later, Ms Dobriansky crumpled. “We will go forward and join consensus,” she said. There were sighs of relief and gasps of elation. The planet was saved. It was, everybody agreed, an historic agreement.; December 19, 2007 6:23 PM
dan said...: A fellow climate change observer writes, re polar cities idea:

"Dear Sir,
I finally visited the Polar Cities concept art site. I'm not an expert on the future (though I loved the book "Future Shock" when I read it long ago). That said, even though the Polar Cities art looks very professional and colorful, and the cities look very modern and colorful, rarely do huge modern human buildings look as nice in reality as they sometimes do in artwork, especially as they age and have the clutter associated with indoor human life.

Also, yes, in some sense, they do raise concerns: I wouldn't really want to live in one. But, people are very different, and for some people, the (likely) true character of life in one of the Polar Cities might not be apparent. It's hard for me to imagine that life would be very good, except perhaps for the very wealthy.

Perhaps the best way for someone today (living in San Francisco or Boston or London or Paris or Florida or Florence or wherever) to "realistically" get a flavor of what living in a (somewhat) globally-warmed future would be like, would be to look at modern-day photographs of the surroundings and lives of people living in some places TODAY . . .

for example, people living in overcrowded, highly-polluted cities, people living in or near deserts, people living in conditions of severe drought, and so forth. It's the "if global warming happens, the area you live in today could look more like this" feeling.

That does several things:

First, it makes people more empathetic with many people living in less-than-comfortable situations today. (Let's help create better situations for people today rather than create decline for future generations and for the environment.)

Second, it includes people in the "picture." Look ing at modern concept art, without seeing the faces and expressions of people living in that art, makes it hard for people to imagine what life would be like.

For example, if you put many healthy-looking and happy-looking people in the art, the impression would be that life would be good. But, if you put a very crowded group of normal-looking people, or perhaps unhealthy-looking people, looking not very happy, in the art, showing their busy or concerned or unhappy faces, then the impression would be very different.

As the polar cities art currently exists, as far as I can tell, there are no humans in it to provide those human emotional cues, so the imagination can wander and imagine the cities as happy places or sad places or whatever.

Third, it would probably be more "realistic" to imagine life in certain places becoming more like life in some other places, today.

That said, I'm not an expert on the future, so these thoughts are offered as thoughts for consideration. They don't reflect any special expertise or detailed thinking. Just some quick off-the-cuff reactions.

I hope these thoughts are helpful in some way."

{Ed Note: YES THEY ARE!]; December 20, 2007 4:45 AM
dan said...: Brief highlights of a US Senate ''report'' -- PR stunt is a better word -- by a rightwing nutcase named Sen. James Inhofe featuring over 400 international scientists:

Israel: Dr. Nathan Paldor, Professor of Dynamical Meteorology and Physical Oceanography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has authored almost 70 peer-reviewed studies and won several awards. “First, temperature changes, as well as rates of temperature changes (both increase and decrease) of magnitudes similar to that reported by IPCC to have occurred since the Industrial revolution (about 0.8C in 150 years or even 0.4C in the last 35 years) have occurred in Earth's climatic history. There's nothing special about the recent rise!”

Russia: Russian scientist Dr. Oleg Sorochtin of the Institute of Oceanology at the Russian Academy of Sciences has authored more than 300 studies, nine books, and a 2006 paper titled “The Evolution and the Prediction of Global Climate Changes on Earth.” “Even if the concentration of ‘greenhouse gases’ double man would not perceive the temperature impact,” Sorochtin wrote.

Spain: Anton Uriarte, a professor of Physical Geography at the University of the Basque Country in Spain and author of a book on the paleoclimate, rejected man-made climate fears in 2007. “There's no need to be worried. It's very interesting to study [climate change], but there's no need to be worried,” Uriate wrote.

Netherlands: Atmospheric scientist Dr. Hendrik Tennekes, a scientific pioneer in the development of numerical weather prediction and former director of research at The Netherlands' Royal National Meteorological Institute, and an internationally recognized expert in atmospheric boundary layer processes, “I find the Doomsday picture Al Gore is painting – a six-meter sea level rise, fifteen times the IPCC number – entirely without merit,” Tennekes wrote. “I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached."

Brazil: Chief Meteorologist Eugenio Hackbart of the MetSul Meteorologia Weather Center in Sao Leopoldo – Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil declared himself a skeptic. “The media is promoting an unprecedented hyping related to global warming. The media and many scientists are ignoring very important facts that point to a natural variation in the climate system as the cause of the recent global warming,” Hackbart wrote on May 30, 2007.

France: Climatologist Dr. Marcel Leroux, former professor at Université Jean Moulin and director of the Laboratory of Climatology, Risks, and Environment in Lyon, is a climate skeptic. Leroux wrote a 2005 book titled Global Warming – Myth or Reality? - The Erring Ways of Climatology. “Day after day, the same mantra - that ‘the Earth is warming up’ - is churned out in all its forms. As ‘the ice melts’ and ‘sea level rises,’ the Apocalypse looms ever nearer! Without realizing it, or perhaps without wishing to, the average citizen in bamboozled, lobotomized, lulled into mindless acceptance. ... Non-believers in the greenhouse scenario are in the position of those long ago who doubted the existence of God ... fortunately for them, the Inquisition is no longer with us!”

Norway: Geologist/Geochemist Dr. Tom V. Segalstad, a professor and head of the Geological Museum at the University of Oslo and formerly an expert reviewer with the UN IPCC: “It is a search for a mythical CO2 sink to explain an immeasurable CO2 lifetime to fit a hypothetical CO2 computer model that purports to show that an impossible amount of fossil fuel burning is heating the atmosphere. It is all a fiction.”

Finland: Dr. Boris Winterhalter, retired Senior Marine Researcher of the Geological Survey of Finland and former professor of marine geology at University of Helsinki, criticized the media for what he considered its alarming climate coverage. “The effect of solar winds on cosmic radiation has just recently been established and, furthermore, there seems to be a good correlation between cloudiness and variations in the intensity of cosmic radiation. Here we have a mechanism which is a far better explanation to variations in global climate than the attempts by IPCC to blame it all on anthropogenic input of greenhouse gases. “

Germany: Paleoclimate expert Augusto Mangini of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, criticized the UN IPCC summary. “I consider the part of the IPCC report, which I can really judge as an expert, i.e. the reconstruction of the paleoclimate, wrong,” Mangini noted in an April 5, 2007 article. He added: “The earth will not die.”

Canada: IPCC 2007 Expert Reviewer Madhav Khandekar, a Ph.D meteorologist, a scientist with the Natural Resources Stewardship Project who has over 45 years experience in climatology, meteorology and oceanography, and who has published nearly 100 papers, reports, book reviews and a book on Ocean Wave Analysis and Modeling: “To my dismay, IPCC authors ignored all my comments and suggestions for major changes in the FOD (First Order Draft) and sent me the SOD (Second Order Draft) with essentially the same text as the FOD. None of the authors of the chapter bothered to directly communicate with me (or with other expert reviewers with whom I communicate on a regular basis) on many issues that were raised in my review. This is not an acceptable scientific review process.”

Czech Republic: Czech-born U.S. climatologist Dr. George Kukla, a research scientist with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, expressed climate skepticism in 2007. “The only thing to worry about is the damage that can be done by worrying. Why are some scientists worried? Perhaps because they feel that to stop worrying may mean to stop being paid,” Kukla told Gelf Magazine on April 24, 2007.

India: One of India's leading geologists, B.P. Radhakrishna, President of the Geological Society of India, expressed climate skepticism in 2007. “We appear to be overplaying this global warming issue as global warming is nothing new. It has happened in the past, not once but several times, giving rise to glacial-interglacial cycles.”

USA: Climatologist Robert Durrenberger, past president of the American Association of State Climatologists, and one of the climatologists who gathered at Woods Hole to review the National Climate Program Plan in July, 1979: “Al Gore brought me back to the battle and prompted me to do renewed research in the field of climatology. And because of all the misinformation that Gore and his army have been spreading about climate change I have decided that ‘real’ climatologists should try to help the public understand the nature of the problem.”

Italy: Internationally renowned scientist Dr. Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists and a retired Professor of Advanced Physics at the University of Bologna in Italy, who has published over 800 scientific papers: “Significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming."

New Zealand: IPCC reviewer and climate researcher Dr. Vincent Gray, an expert reviewer on every single draft of the IPCC reports going back to 1990 and author of The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of "Climate Change 2001: “The [IPCC] ‘Summary for Policymakers’ might get a few readers, but the main purpose of the report is to provide a spurious scientific backup for the absurd claims of the worldwide environmentalist lobby that it has been established scientifically that increases in carbon dioxide are harmful to the climate. It just does not matter that this ain't so.”

South Africa: Dr. Kelvin Kemm, formerly a scientist at South Africa’s Atomic Energy Corporation who holds degrees in nuclear physics and mathematics: “The global-warming mania continues with more and more hype and less and less thinking. With religious zeal, people look for issues or events to blame on global warming.”

Poland: Physicist Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski, Chairman of the Central Laboratory for the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Radiological Protection in Warsaw: ““We thus find ourselves in the situation that the entire theory of man-made global warming—with its repercussions in science, and its important consequences for politics and the global economy—is based on ice core studies that provided a false picture of the atmospheric CO2 levels.”

Australia: Prize-wining Geologist Dr. Ian Plimer, a professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Adelaide in Australia: "There is new work emerging even in the last few weeks that shows we can have a very close correlation between the temperatures of the Earth and supernova and solar radiation.”

Britain: Dr. Richard Courtney, a UN IPCC expert reviewer and a UK-based climate and atmospheric science consultant: “To date, no convincing evidence for AGW (anthropogenic global warming) has been discovered. And recent global climate behavior is not consistent with AGW model predictions.”

China: Chinese Scientists Say C02 Impact on Warming May Be ‘Excessively Exaggerated’ – Scientists Lin Zhen-Shan’s and Sun Xian’s 2007 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics: "Although the CO2 greenhouse effect on global climate change is unsuspicious, it could have been excessively exaggerated." Their study asserted that "it is high time to reconsider the trend of global climate change.”

Denmark: Space physicist Dr. Eigil Friis-Christensen is the director of the Danish National Space Centre, a member of the space research advisory committee of the Swedish National Space Board, a member of a NASA working group, and a member of the European Space Agency who has authored or co-authored around 100 peer-reviewed papers and chairs the Institute of Space Physics: “The sun is the source of the energy that causes the motion of the atmosphere and thereby controls weather and climate. Any change in the energy from the sun received at the Earth’s surface will therefore affect climate.”

Belgium: Climate scientist Luc Debontridder of the Belgium Weather Institute’s Royal Meteorological Institute (RMI) co-authored a study in August 2007 which dismissed a decisive role of CO2 in global warming: "CO2 is not the big bogeyman of climate change and global warming. “Not CO2, but water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas. It is responsible for at least 75 % of the greenhouse effect. This is a simple scientific fact, but Al Gore's movie has hyped CO2 so much that nobody seems to take note of it.”

Sweden: Geologist Dr. Wibjorn Karlen, professor emeritus of the Department of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology at Stockholm University, critiqued the Associated Press for hyping promoting climate fears in 2007. “Another of these hysterical views of our climate. Newspapers should think about the damage they are doing to many persons, particularly young kids, by spreading the exaggerated views of a human impact on climate.”

USA: Dr. David Wojick is a UN IPCC expert reviewer, who earned his PhD in Philosophy of Science and co-founded the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie-Mellon University: “In point of fact, the hypothesis that solar variability and not human activity is warming the oceans goes a long way to explain the puzzling idea that the Earth's surface may be warming while the atmosphere is not. The GHG (greenhouse gas) hypothesis does not do this.” Wojick added: “The public is not well served by this constant drumbeat of false alarms fed by computer models manipulated by advocates.”

GOT THAT? GLOBAL WARMING IS NOT HAPPENING FOLKS!; December 20, 2007 7:26 PM
dan said...: Fighting for Love in the Century of Extinction
How Passion and Politics Can Stop Global Warming
Eban Goodstein

University of Vermont Press
University Press of New England
2007 • 178 pp. 5 1/2 x 8"
Sustainable Living / Ecology & Environmental Studies

$19.95 Cloth, 1-58465-657-3

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A call for political action to save the natural world

The central idea in Fighting for Love in the Century of Extinction is simple: Unchecked, global warming threatens to destroy one of every two animals, birds, plants, reptiles, forests, fish and other creatures alive today on the earth. This looming ecological collapse will only be arrested if we can articulate and embrace what the natural world means to each of us, and then fight a series of hard political battles to preserve creation. On a subject about which it is easy to feel despair, Goodstein offers a realistic, ambitious, and hopeful political solution to avoid a century of mass extinction, a vision grounded in a moral view that embraces the interconnection of all life forms on the planet.

Emerging from his work as both an economist and a leader in the clean energy movement, this passionate book sets a new frame for helping Americans understand global warming as the challenge of our generation.

Weaving personal narrative with scientific facts, Goodstein begins with an overview of the current global warming crisis. In Chapters 2 and 3 (“Wealth” and “Knowledge”) he explores the question of whether the scale of mass extinction we are beginning to witness in the 21st century has more ominous implications for human welfare than it did in the 20th century. By destroying so much of creation,will we destroy the foundation of our own material prosperity? By tearing out so many pages in the book of life, are we depriving future generations of a vast store of knowledge? In “Spirit,” he stresses the need to re-spiritualize the way we talk about the natural world. Without an effective moral language that reflects our deeply felt love of nature and its diversity, effective political action is impossible.

“Politics” argues that if we are to hold global heating to the manageable, low end, Americans must stabilize emissions of global warming pollutants and begin to invest tens of billions of dollars every year in clean-energy technology solutions for the future. Stabilizing the climate requires strong leadership from the federal government —we must elect clean-energy leaders into the Senate, the House, and the Oval Office in the next few years. How to do this, by becoming involved in electoral politics, is the subject of the final chapter,“Solutions.”

“Fighting for Love radiates with Eban Goodstein's genuine awe at the exquisite interconnectedness of our natural world. It focuses our attention on our spiritual connections with all forms of life. And it encourages us to engage in the rough and tumble realities of American politics. This book moves Goodstein from being a pied-piper of the climate movement to one of its prophets.”—Ross Gelbspan, author, The Heat Is On and Boiling Point

“Eban Goodstein is a great hero in the fight against global warming, hard at work years before it was popular. This book—packed with anecdote, statistic, and most of all insight—makes clear why his work has been so consistently effective in reaching both the heart and the mind of a broad swath of the American public.”—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and Wandering Home

“The author is an economist but the message is directed, first, to the heart. Eban Goodstein has the sequence right in this powerful and timely book: we won't save what we do not love and we are not likely to love unless we first experience the wonder of nature. And the time to act is now.”—David Orr, Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies, Oberlin College; December 21, 2007 10:41 PM
dan said...: Dec. 23, 3007

[ Note: I got a very good letter today from a top expert in climate change
debate, i don't want to release his name now or here because it was a private
email, but his words are good. ]

"Dear Mr Bloom

I think, yes, your idea of polar cities might surface as a
reasonable model for
future habitation. But I'm not ready to give up on reorganizing
ourselves in the lower latitudes just yet.

I'm also not 100 percent sure why they'll need to be buried and
equipped with lots of intricate underground
infrastructure as your images show --
especially
if there's virtually no polar ice left under which to
create habitats.

In other words, given the warming scenarios, why not simply
reconstruct sustainable (and, most especially equitable) kinds of
communities in northern Canada, Siberia, Scandinavia etc.

With the movement of grain belts north, and the thawing of
lots of open ground, wouldn't it be much easier, less costly
and accommodate many more of us refugees if we were to
build closed-loop, sustainable communities further north
-- but still above ground?

Anyway, just a thought.

But your notion is quite provocative -- and most interesting.

My real hope is that it will help prod the conversation in the
direction it needs to go. If it serves that purpose, that, alone,
will be a considerable contribution.

Thanks again so much for sharing this with me.

Signed,

[Climate expert, veteran writer on the subject, USA]"; December 22, 2007 4:54 PM
dan said...: ''Maybe the media just needs to shout louder.''

- Brooklyn Jon; December 22, 2007 5:22 PM
dan said...: A reporter in India wrote to me today:

"Dear Mr Bloom,

I discussed about your polar cities idea interview with an editor here in India, but regrettably, I
didn't get the response I expected.

Nevertheless, I will be obliged to interview you, and after that I
will approach other press sources and I strongly feel that I will be
able to get it published in one of the Indian newspapers.

I must confess to you that since I am new to this subject, so I have
but a little knowledge about it. I want an outline about the subject,
or better, you tell me what information you intend to impart.

I will draft the piece, and thereafter I will approach different press
outlets to have it published."

i wrote back to him:

''Hello Sir,

This is a good idea, let's do the interview anyways, without a
publisher for now, and later, you can find a publisher in India or
overseas for it. Good idea. I am happy to work with you on this. And
we can also publish the interview on a blog in the New York Times in
the USA, with your name on it. Good idea.

An outline.

Basically, here is my idea. I am proposing, merely proposing, that by
the year 2500, if humanity has not yet "fixed" the problems connected
with global warming by using geoengineering methods to take C02 out
the atmosphere, or other methods, and if the governments of the world
have not solved the global warming problems by 2500, then, we might
need some kind of "sustainable polar retreats" -- villages, towns,
cities, communities -- in the arctic regions of the world -- Canada,
Alaska, Russia, iceland, greenland, Norway, Sweden Finland...-- since
life in India, and Taiwan and CHINA and USA and Europe will be
impossible -- it will be too hot and water levels will have risen
along all coasts worldwide......so my idea of polar cities is a
"non-threatening thought experiment" to give the world something to
dig their teeth into, mentally, to think about this possible event,
and how polar cities might be a refuge where human beings from all
countries can take refuge for 100 years, 500 years, maybe 1000 years
or even 10,000 years, until it is okay to come out and go back south
to India and USA and china to live....... so ask my ten questions
about these polar cities...

PS: my idea is a kind of shock method to shock people to wake them up
to the very scary reality of global warming in the future.......i hope
we never need polar cities, so i want to wake people up now in India
and around the world by using this idea of scare them into taking
actions NOW....."; December 23, 2007 6:51 PM
dan said...: A well known writer on climate change in the UK wrote to me:

"Thanks for that blog news about the polar cities idea you have. I hadn't heard of it - fascinating. Keep up the blogging."; December 23, 2007 6:52 PM
dan said...: Another climate change reporter, this one in USA, wrote to me today:

"Hey, Danny --
I think, as a kind of "shocker" your idea of polar cities, it's powerful for sure.

And, by all means, if someone is doing a newspaper story on it, I'd be happy to
provide the reporter with a quote.

So -- go for it -- and let me know if you'd like me to chip something in."; December 23, 2007 6:54 PM
dan said...: a blogger tells me today:

"It is clear that we cannot expect anything from mainstream media
relative to the "real picture" about global warming, nor
overpopulation, due to its funding largely coming from ads and those
ads coming from industries dependent on fossil fuels for
manufacturing. In the meantime, the industries' desired economic
growth (desired as it lead to greater profit) requires even greater
sums of fossil fuels and ever more consumers (i.e., an ever bigger
population) to achieve. Besides, the companies and governments do not
want to create widespread panic, nor any changes in current
consumption habits. So the more important "truths" of what is going on
will not be revealed."; December 23, 2007 6:56 PM
dan said...: blogger said

"I think the global warming frame has outlived its usefulness.

We need to take the battle away from whether consensus exists on climate change (of course it does) and center it on whichever arguments achieve the desired effect. The stakes are too high to get caught in a pissing match.

We can argue this on multiple fronts. Energy independence might bring more conservatives on board. Let them think they are sticking it to the Muslim world by luying less gas. I don't care why they do it.

At the end of the day, the elevator speech is this:

"What bad can come from reducing pollution? Whether you think there is a debate on how dangerous the current situation is or not - what if you are wrong?"

It is that simple. We ought not get bogged down trying to make them agree. Just get them to act."; December 23, 2007 7:08 PM
dan said...: A reporter for the China Post tells me today:

"It looks like I will be going through with the news story about the artist who made the illustrations of polar cities. The editors here said okay.
Do you have any idea whether or not Mr. Deng Cheng-hong will be visiting Taipei, or will I need to go to Chiayi to interview him? "; December 23, 2007 7:12 PM
dan said...: There's a commenter at Dot Earth named Steve Bloger, I cannot find his email yet, but he often writes in with pithy on the mark short sentences about climate change and the mess we are in. I don't know him or where he lives or what his background is, but he really has a good understanding of the mess we are in and why. Among his gems are:

"Media companies work for their advertisers.

They’ll pay attention to destruction of the atmospheric commons when it produces as much advertising revenue as the oil, car, and airline industries."

"Nah, afterlife remains greatest hoax ever perpetrated. You only get one chance to live, and one legacy to write in the book of life....
We had it all, and blew it. "; December 23, 2007 7:15 PM
dan said...: When commenter Bob Brueck wrote to Dot Earth blogger Andy Revkin, he said: "I presume your subject qualifications are better when you stick to your folk band. Any article relating to global warming intended to be taken seriously would mention that there are over 20,000 persons with science degrees who do not buy into the crisis mentality many in the media are encouraging–for good reason. It is a highly complex subject and the science is NOT settled."

[ANDY REVKIN responded: "Sorry, my qualifications are solid on both fronts. You can hear Uncle Wade here, and I encourage you to read this article from one year ago, which shows clearly that my coverage is science-driven, with my only agenda trying to reveal the trajectory of understanding."]; December 23, 2007 7:17 PM
dan said...: ''I accept deserving to be called on my “maudlin” and often hopeless outlook. If nothing else, “don’t shoot the messenger” applies to me (on dismal tone) and others with regard to doing better research and perhaps changing a view or two with regard to the veracity of “global warming”. I sincerely and genuinely thank A3k or Ak3, aka, Mike Mahoney.
Mr. Thapa, remember this: history and life repeatedly dictate he who doubts first then suffers the adverse consequence of that doubt will also be the first to find a damn good lawyer to sue the hell out of the scientist who didn’t “alarm” enough after their house floats away from massive flooding in Death Valley.
I would just pose that when you care and love passionately, you defend passionately.
My apologies, but I care about our Earth’s future.''

— Posted by Elizabeth Tjader on Dot Earth; December 23, 2007 7:18 PM
dan said...: December 23rd,
3007

A very wise man wrote on Dot Earth today:

"Isn’t it the case that people (humans in general) attend to things, and learn what they need to know, when they are personally affected by the situation? It has always seemed to me that people start paying attention when a near neighbor is affected (e.g. housing bubble burst). They really pay attention when their own bank account is affected (e.g. gas prices). And finally, when their immediate future is severely threatened (impending tornado) they really pay attention.

Sorry as I am to say it, I think that things will need to get a lot worse before the general public starts to pay sufficient attention and takes it seriously no matter how it is covered in the media. ‘It’s too bad that the Arctic is melting but what does it mean to me?’ Unfortunately, given the momentum of phenomena like global warming, by the time personal impacts are being noted it will already be too late to actually do anything but try to survive.

I give a lecture in my Global Honors class about the four horsemen of the modern version of apocalypse. The lead horseman is human nature - a nature that evolved in the Pleistocene to deal with limited social issues like family, tribe and nearby tribes. We are simply not wired to deal with the complexities of modern global society and the technological genie we have loosed from the bottle. When we should be afraid (for the right reasons vs. the politically played bogeyman) of climate catastrophes due to the kinds of chaotic changes we are already witnessing, our amygdalas are just not triggered by events far from our immediate lives, even if publicized in the media.

This human nature is what is responsible for the other three.

The other three horsemen are: 2) population overshoot, coupled with human nature to consume and waste; 3) climate change due to 2; and 3) peak followed by decline in high potential energy production starting with peak oil. The latter will lead to a loss of capacity to produce enough food to feed the presumed 9+ billion people by 2050 as well as an inability to do the work necessary to adapt to the effects of climate change. Imagine what will be needed to move much of Manhattan (or fill in the lower floors of many buildings and convert the city to something like Venice (which will of course disappear). These four problem areas are systemic. [While this view is upsetting to many students, I demonstrate that problem solving begins with an honest understanding of the problem, as I state below. The students finish the course seeing that there are ways to find solutions, even if those solutions are not producing a business as always scenario. They walk away with a sense of empowerment rather than a doom-and-gloom attitude.]

The only way to go about solving these problems, if they can be solved at all, is to amplify the natural systems and strategic thinking that are part of wisdom. People who have the capacity to use systems and strategic thinking as the basis for moral judgments are truly sapient. There are a few truly sapient individuals out there who could lead the effort. But as of now, they are unrecognized for a general lack of wisdom amongst the masses.

Who will be producing progeny 100 years from now? The savage or the wise?"

Question everything: http://questioneverything.typepad.com/

— Posted by George Mobus on Dot Earth; December 23, 2007 7:20 PM
dan said...: earlier in the year, George Mobus had emailed me after i asked what he thought of my idea of global warming: "I saw your comment about polar cities on dot earth. But I must confess I am not sure what you
are refering to. My interest is in the biology and evolution of sapience
(wisdom) but I have no idea what a polar (I assume you are refering to
Antarctica) city might be or even why polar."

I wonder if he saw the images or even read my blog.Sigh.; December 23, 2007 7:23 PM
dan said...: A reporter asked me today:

1. what motivated you to create the idea of polar cities to house
survivors of global warming in the year 2500?

2. what is your background or expertise in this field?

3. how long have you been doing reseach into climate change and global warming?

4. do you believe global warming is caused by humans or by the Sun?

5. Did James Lovelock influence you?

6. How many polar cities will there be in the future year of 2500?

7. How many people will live in them and how long will they stay in them?

8. Where will the polar cities be located?

9. Who will govern the polar cities and who will be allowed in as residents?

10. Is your idea also a kind of non-threatening thought experiment to
try to wake people up today regarding the very harsh reality of what
global warming might look like 50 or 100 years from now?; December 23, 2007 7:37 PM
dan said...: If there are any 'holes' in this logic paradigm, I would be glad to discuss
them on the Monbiot Digest, says a blogger overseas:

Does this pertain to how we deal with and attack global warming today? I think so. Read below:

a. fact : there are adults on Earth.

b. fact : there are children on Earth.

c. fact : there are things adults do, directly or indirectly, that have a
negative or abusive impact upon the welfare of children in the present and
in the future.

d. it follows that, as a responsible adult, one would immediately cease any
behaviour/activity that directly or indirectly has a negative impact upon
the welfare of children in the present or in the future.

e. having stopped the damaging behaviour/activity one is then in a much
better position to work through how to take things forwards.

f. discussing the issue prior to cessation of the abuse only allows the
abuse to continue.; December 23, 2007 7:45 PM
dan said...: 1975 !!!!

"Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects.

The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.”

—PETER GWYNNE
NewsWeek
April 28. 1975; December 23, 2007 7:49 PM
dan said...: 51.December 23rd,
2007
9:22 am Far be it for me, with 40 years in academia, to minimize the importance of education in the long run, but it is a short-term crisis we face (stopping growth in emissions within ten years to avoid a 3C/5F world later) and neither education nor efficiencies is going to do the job so quickly. We keep talking like it was forty years ago, before we were painted into a corner.

Leaders need to be educated on this. But there is time only for the voters to become worried.

— Posted by William H. Calvin; December 23, 2007 7:49 PM
dan said...: Media presentations of data and rational arguments have not been effective in shaping mass behavior to long term self interest, c.f. the works of Lessing, Chomsky, Roy and Bierce. And Ross Perot.

Mayhaps we need a war. A war on global warming? Too abstruse.

We could have a war on nature. Informed, rational people will note that we already have one. Put that aside for a moment.

Nature is telling us that our grandchildren will have little to eat and less than enough water to bathe and drink. Nature is telling us that we cannot have personal mobility and visit far places. Nature is telling us that we need to move Boston, New York and Washington DC inland, among others. Nature is telling us John’s apocalyptic four horseman will ride again.

Nature is wrong! It is an easy sell, many already think [sic] that.

War! Let us all unite in proving nature’s unreasonable demands wrong, rally around the battlefronts of renewable energy, efficient and effective public transport, conservation and so forth. Perhaps pugilistic human aspects can be hooked to spend resources on a war.

Probably not. That whimsical, eccentric scenario requires leadership. Leadership is scarce to non-existent in any of the candidates for the presidency likely to be anointed by their parties, and the Times, if only as least worse case.

The patient is in systemic decline and the prognosis is poor.

— Posted by James Nickson; December 23, 2007 7:52 PM
dan said...: I liked this:

''Today is my favorite day of the year, and the holiday I celebrate is about the the passing of the winter solstice. From here on the days get longer. By symmetry of course, my least favorite day is the summer solstice. But this is only relational. Every day I am alive I celebrate something!

One of the things I will always be happy for is the ability to wonder why things are the way they are. Every day that goes by I find my curiosity and questioning leads to some new, even if very small insight. It is a growing sense of understanding the world that I celebrate.

Sadly that sense of understanding is leading me to conclude that the human species is in for a very rough ride in the next hundred years or so, possibly as little as fifty years. Even at my age I expect to see the beginning of what I think will be the next major stage of evolution on this planet. Indeed, I think I have already seen the more subtle aspects of the beginning. My questioning our current view of education in the prior two posts was directed at one of the more subtle ones. If my observations are correct, then education is killing us! We need to explore that a good deal more.

My plan for this next year is to share in this blog the questions I have asked. I will also share some of the insights I believe I have gotten for what they might be worth. Even though there have not been many comments, my blog stats indicate a growing readership. I hope that more people will share their questions and insights in the future. I would be loathe to claim I have answers for my questions even if I feel I have some insights. My further hope is that some of you will have good questions (with responses from others) and perhaps some suggestions toward further insights.

So for now, whatever you might be inclined to celebrate over this start-of-winter holiday, or even if your culture ignores the western world's obsession with stuff-acquisition at this time of year, I hope you have a happy solstice. ''

George Mobus, blogger; December 23, 2007 7:57 PM
dan said...: I agree with others that what’s really going to wake up the public up, is experiencing the effects of global climate destabilization first-hand.

And the difficulty there is that you can’t - ever - point to a given bizarre weather incident - e.g. the SouthEast’s drought - and say “global warming did that.”

But what you can do is to point to it and say “this is just a taste of the what’s coming” - because that is true.

That is the message to push.

“We are all adrift in the same boat; and there is no way that half the boat is going to sink.“

— Posted by Anna Haynes; December 23, 2007 7:58 PM
dan said...: ''Sadly that sense of understanding is leading me to conclude that the human species is in for a very rough ride in the next hundred years or so, possibly as little as fifty years.''

-- George Mobus

blogger; December 23, 2007 7:58 PM
dan said...: 78.December 23rd,
2007
3:19 pm In my opinion, the media face at least three serious obstacles in motivating people to do something about climate change:

1. Too much old news is reported. You can only cover melting ice for so long before people get burned out on the subject. More human interest stories would probably help.

2. The subject of climate change is complex, technical and difficult to cover through words alone. More graphics will help. For example, check out the October issue of National Geographic magazine to see a simple two page plan to cut emissions.

3. A huge problem is cognitive dissonance, i.e., when a person knows that carbon emissions contribute to climate change but doesn’t do anything about it personally because (they rationalize) their involvement wont make a difference. Emphasizing solutions rather than belaboring problems (e.g. National Geographic’s piece)is one way to address cognitive dissonance.

Richard Sequest; December 23, 2007 8:00 PM
dan said...: Elizabeth Tjader asks:

I asked a fellow blogger by email early this morning:
Is there a goal built into a blog? (aside from exchanging facts) I ask this most genuinely. Having read the many repeated posts asking how to elevate this subject matter to the forefront on television, with candidates, journalistically?.
Andy , You’ve earned great respect and status in and outside your industry with your journalistic reporting. Besides our responses to one another here, what CAN we do, as Anna Haynes, Jeff Huggins, Steve Salmony, Danny Bloom and the many other loyalists pose, to stimulate LOUDER attention to this subject publicly or nationally?; December 23, 2007 8:05 PM
dan said...: To Everyone, especially the deniers–look at the facts of reality because the change of human behavior in the last 80 or so years is undeniable. We have cars and planes, all using fossil fuels, and a bit before 80 years ago the factories startes with their massive coal burning production systems. This is all an historical first for this globe we all call home. Believe the scientists or not, thinkj for yourselves and it is impossible not to recognize that changes at this level are going to have consequences. I do have a question though, again, for everyone–assume that the discussion is successfully brought to the public forefront–then what? This is why I initiated my first post with economic policy–we need to build the financial structures to support energy source diversification. It may take years for the scientists to reach full consensus, if ever but there is no need to deliberately allow a single chemical source-carbon-to dominate the power usage. There is only so much time in each of our days so rather than fussing over how bad things are, how uncaring people are and all the rest since everyone here is evidently interested in this topic why not work on something that might make a real difference? Advocating changes in economic policy, changing tax incentives, spreading global equal education are all positives that can and should offer real hope for the future.

— Posted by Sherrie Noble; December 23, 2007 8:06 PM
dan said...: Hi, I am a Seychellois student currently studying in Seychelles. Thank you very much for mentioning us (and other small island states) in your article. People often forget (or don’t know) that some countries might disappear because of climate change. This is what is the most unfair with this whole situation: the ones who have not done anything will be the most affected.

Posted by: Rajiv Shah, Seychelles — 22 December 2007 12:04 am; December 23, 2007 8:09 PM
dan said...: PBS: C''learly, you're a technological optimist.''

Martin Hoffert, NYU: "That should be pretty obvious from what I've said! I understand that there are those who are not disposed to solving the problems of technology by applying more technology. There's something to be said for those points of view. But at this point in our history, it is not our destiny to retreat from technology. We couldn't feed the population of the planet right now without the technology that's used in agriculture, without an enormous subsidy to agriculture in terms of fertilizer and so forth. At this point in our evolution, we are a tool-building and technological species. And it is in our interest to continually try to adapt to the situations that we're in with technologies that are appropriate."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/warming/beyond/; December 24, 2007 3:57 PM
dan said...: An insightful blogger writes:

"Hi Danny. I will take a look at your polar cities site today. I am not sure about the ''polar'' part (other than the 'waking up' effect) but I suspect there will need to be some kind of 'ark' approach to preserving the genus Homo. Tom Friedman just wrote an opinion piece about this idea but in terms of saving threatened spiecies in the wild. I suspect that effort is a lost cause. Even if you could preserve many species genetic endowments somehow, what kind of habitat will be available to them, say, 1000 years from now?"; December 24, 2007 4:29 PM
dan said...: meanwhile, the New York Times informs me that the polar cities idea will be reported on sometime this winter of 2008....they had the info in November, but the press of news from Bali and IPCC and everywhere pushed the polar cities report to a later date. But stay tuned. Soemthing will trun up in the New York Times very soon. Anyways, no hurry, as 500 years is our working time frame on this.....SMILE

db; December 24, 2007 4:31 PM
dan said...: A note to one of my correspondents:

Thanks for note and email, sir. After calendar change-over 2008 (what an arbitrary number *that* is!), will be in touch.

RE your comments about an Ark approach, yes yes, good idea, exactly what the polar cities blog is driving at. Partly to wake people up, shock blog, guerilla Internet theater, needed, but also some serious discussions provoked about the far distant future, with such ideas like the Doomsday Vault in Norway and Friedman's idea of a wildlife ark and your idea, which i never heard before, and I like it, of some kind of Human Ark adaptation strategy. All i hope to do with my polar cities blog, for now, is elicit, solicit, provoke more discussion around these ideas. Lots of thinking to do.

- db; December 24, 2007 4:33 PM
dan said...: As singer Dave Fryshberg’s title song called, it “Marooned in a Blizzard of Lies”.

-- quote from Lee Schipper; December 24, 2007 4:40 PM
dan said...: ''As part of the blizzard of lies, the media is bombarded with solutions, from the crank “hot air car” to serious low carbon alternatives with unknown costs (like the important carbon sequestration) to alterantives with known costs (e.g., farm corn ethanol) with unknown CO2 benefits (if there are any at all.)[to adaptation strategies such as the ''polar cities'' concept]."; December 24, 2007 4:41 PM
dan said...: When Thomas Friedman writes in the NYTimes that "It struck me ...that our generation has entered a phase that no previous generation has ever experienced: the Noah phase.

With more and more species threatened with extinction by The Flood that is today’s global economic juggernaut [and today's global warming threat], we may be the first generation in human history that literally has to act like Noah — to save the last pairs of a wide range of species [and to save the last breeding pairs of humans in the Arctic, in the distant future, to quote james lovelock].

Or as [the Hebrew god] allegedly commanded ''Noah'' in [the Bibilical fable called] Genesis: “And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every sort into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. [including future breeding pairs of humans in the Arctic living in polar cities in the year 2500, to quote danny bloom].”; December 24, 2007 4:48 PM
dan said...: ''Dot Earth is meant to be a two-way street, incorporating ideas, anecdotes, links and other contributions from readers, as well as exchanges with scientists, officials, tinkerers and thinkers working to smooth the interactions between people and the home planet. Get in touch.''

dotearth@nytimes.com; December 24, 2007 5:24 PM
dan said...: When I emailed some information about polar cities to a climate blogger in Australia, who is a bit of a denialist, he wrote back: "Sorry, it's a bit ourside my ambit, I'm afraid."

I wrote back: "Your descendants --[he has one son, born in 1987, during four marriages with four women] -- might very well have to live in polar cities in 2500, so you might as well start thinkiing about them. Smile."; December 24, 2007 10:09 PM
dan said...: I’m not sure I quite understand people who say “global climate has varied a lot.”

What does this have to do with the presence of man? The Earth has never dealt with 6.6 billion people before. Can you at least admit that?

The Earth has never dealt with the size and scope of pollution and industry we now have. Never. Not in five billion years.

Can you at least admit that?

I can’t even imagine how anyone can possibly think we are not having a tremendous impact on the environment and global climate.

What do you think is going to happen? Nothing?

I just don’t understand. How you can’t understand.

— Posted by Jamie DOT EARTH comment; December 25, 2007 6:54 PM
dan said...: Climate chaos is huge and catastrophic. I think running a steady diet of stories that highlight yet more bad news can backfire, in that people feel like our personal efforts won’t make much difference. However, each person making changes will add up to an enormous impact. I’d like to read more about role models, and see simple achievable changes highlihgted - they are, while not news, at least media-worthy.

— Posted by betsy teutsch; December 25, 2007 6:56 PM
dan said...: dan has left a new comment on the post "Acts of Non-Consumption and the Riot for Austerity...":

Sharon,
I am surprised no one has mentioned the concept of "polar cities", also called "ark cities", also called "arktopia," also called sustainable polar retreats, http://pcillu101.blogspot.com, that humankind just might need in the year 2500 or so, if all the fixes and ideas we have now don't work. What do you think? Do you think it could come to that, and should we start thinking about polar cities now, planning them, designing them, locating sites for them, now, while we have time and transporation to get there, or do you think the fixes will work? Love to hear your opinion on polar cities, pro or con, yes or no. This is all just a non threatening thought experiment, i like to tell people. Your work with Riot for Austerity is a very good idea and I applaud it. We need to stop all car and plane traffic now. NOW.

Posted by dan to Casaubon's Book at 26 December, 4007; December 26, 2007 7:22 PM
dan said...: When I asked a writer in Brazil what he thought of the polar cities idea, he replied:

"No, I don't think we will ever need polar cities....
I think that humanity wil find better solutions after some big disasters
(truly big, one or two billion dead, for example !!! ) but before polar cities
are needed. Polar areas will be too cold in 2300 or 2500, even if the worst
hypothesis happens.....

....But it's a good idea for science fiction.

Regards and good new year 2008."; December 27, 2007 6:02 PM
dan said...: Another climate change writer in Chicago told me by email:

"Dan, keep at it. If your polar cities idea is a kind of guerilla theater online to wake people up, keep at it. We need an army of alerters to wake people
up..."; December 27, 2007 6:03 PM
dan said...: A blogger in North America writes:

[to my email to her about polar cities idea in which i wrote: "but Pat, by year 2500 or sooner, we might need to migrate north to
survive heated up planet. aren't you aware of that? we might need polar cities, no?"]

Pat replied:

"Instead, we need to change our behavior so that the worst of Global Warming
doesn't happen.

But, in point of fact, I've already migrated north! :) We live in a
fairly cold place - in mountains."; December 27, 2007 6:09 PM
dan said...: A blogger in California, wrote:

"Danny, re polar cities idea of yours- when you said" i am using polar cities idea
to incite people to act now." - keep in mind that this
IS the internets(?) - so all comments are read with
"this may be from a nutcase" as a very real
possibility, and bringing up polar cities (IMO) does
more to miscategorize you than to awaken others.

In my opinion - others' mileage may vary."

[Good points! I need to phrase my blog posts more carefully!]; December 27, 2007 6:21 PM
dan said...: Jim Redden
27 December 3007

" ...While the concerns of rising sea levels due to thermal expansion and melting polar glacial ice are very provoking, my primary concern of anthropegenic forcing remains disruption of bio-geochemical cycles.

Not to sound like a broken record, but, the food chains of the oceans have been polluted and gutted by overfishing; the result of these pressures is a weakening adaptive ability to climate change of any kind.

Huge swaths of terrestrial biomes in have been placed in service to agriculture.

In both cases, the destabilizing loss of diversity, and the commensurate diversion of energy, space, and life activity, to sustain humans is more than dangerous.

Given that we are in the midst of massive unprecedented changes in the chemical makeup of the atmosphere, one can see how James Lovelock arrives at such pessimistic conclusions. Natural systems may break rather than adapt.

I am not one to give up hope, but given the politics at hand, we might just end up watching the end on TV."; December 27, 2007 6:27 PM
dan said...: from blogger: gavin

"Most people don't seem to embrace global measures of temperature rise (~0.2ºC/decade) or sea level rise (> 3mm/yr) very strongly.

They much prefer more iconic signs - The National Park formerly-known-as-Glacier, No-snows of Kilimanjaro, Frost Fairs on the Thames etc.

As has been discussed here on many occasions, any single example often has any number of complicating factors, but seen as part of a pattern (Kilimanjaro as an example of the other receding tropical glaciers), they can be useful for making a general point. "

jim redden replies: "...Given that we are in the midst of massive unprecedented changes in the chemical makeup of the atmosphere, one can see how James Lovelock arrives at such pessimistic conclusions. Natural systems may break rather than adapt.

**** I am not one to give up hope, but given the politics at hand, we might just end up watching the end on TV. ****** "; December 27, 2007 6:42 PM
dan said...: When introducing my blog idea of "polar cities" for potential
survivors of global warming events in say, year 2500 or so, I keep
getting a lot of negative responses and even some angry emails. Seems
I am not making the idea clear enough, as one blogger told me,

"Danny, remember that your idea is on the Internet and all comments
here are therefore read with the sense that THIS MIGHT BE FROM A
NUTCASE, so your bringing up the idea of "polar cities" without really
explaining the concept clearly -- and your purpose -- might lead many
people to mis-categorize you as a nutcase, rather than for them to
realize you are doing this as part of a strategy to shock people into
waking up to the reality of global warming, and that we all need to
take action now."

And she is right. The Internet is a not an easy place to make guerilla
theater and non-threatening thought experiments about climate change
and the future of humanity -- because -- because the Internet is full
of nuts and nutcases and SPAM and all kinds of hoaxes and mischief. So
to make things more clear:

Polar Cities is a concept for a kind of adaptation strategy that
humankind might need to think about in the far distant future --
certainly not now -- but if anyone wants to think about this concept
now, please feel free to view my blogsite with images of proposed
polar cities and an introduction to what they might be, who might live
in them, where they might be situated, how they might be governed, who
will be allowed into them, and how long the polar city communities
might have to last so that the "breeding pairs" of humans in them can
eventually come back down to the temperate zones to re-populate the
Earth, hopefully with a better stewardship concept than the earlier
one of "slash and burn like there's no tomorrow."

As a non-threatening thought experiment, here is my conception of
polar cities, what I now refer to as "Arctopia". Of course, the time
to take action on global warming is NOW. We need to work hard on
fixing the situation now. But if all else fails, why not just think --
think -- about polar cities. As an exercise of the imagination.

And then get back to the hard work of changing our lifestyles and behavior NOW.

Yes, yes, yes.; December 27, 2007 9:14 PM
dan said...: The Forecast in the Streets

The physical impacts of the global warming forecast can be bracketed with some degree of statistical confidence. Biological effects are more difficult to gauge, except in special cases such as the likely demise of polar bears that would result from the demise of Arctic sea ice. The societal effects, however, are nearly uncharted territory, at least to me. Perhaps the topic of global warming suffers from the same sort of cultural divide as university faculties, between the techies and the touchies; that is the sciences and the humanities. A new report called The Age of Consequences, just released by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security, tries to bring the social sciences, in particular history, geography, and political science, into the forecast of climate change in the coming century. It makes for fascinating if frightening reading.

The report was based on discussions of a group of senior luminaries with a wide range of expertise. I already knew or knew of and respect the climate scientists Mike MacCracken and Bob Correll, and Ralph Cicerone, head of the National Academy of Sciences. The group also included Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling, former CIA Director James Woolsey, former Chief of Staff to the President John Podesta, and former National Security Advisor to the Vice President Leon Fuerth. (Apparently not all group members, listed in the executive summary on page 8, got writing assignments, so not all of them are listed as authors.)

Images of the future can be constructed based on the lessons of history. The history chapter (beginning on page 26) begins with Table 1, which I will reprint here:

Event Potential deaths
Volcanic eruptions 104
Earthquakes 105
Floods 106
Droughts 107
Epidemics 108

It is sobering to note that the potential horsemen of climate change, floods, droughts, and epidemics, are all at the big end of this list. There is no historical precedent for the type of global multidimensional challenge that changing climate may bring, but there are common elements in societal responses to natural disasters, and many of the impacts of climate change will be regional in scope rather than global, like natural disasters.

The report considers the historical societal impacts of disasters ranging from bubonic plagues in the middle ages to Katrina. History teaches that people tend to return to religion in times of trouble, and to turn against people outside their social group. Governments are destabilized by hard times. Natural disasters tend to impact most strongly in less affluent parts of the world.

History also teaches that people have a tendency to develop ways of coping with environmental fragility, by choices of individual living strategies such as the ability to migrate, or by decisions made at the societal level, such as engineered flood control measures or mobilizing assistance from outside. The report offers the idea that it takes a population a few generations to learn how to operate within the limits of its natural world. For example, the report attributes the dust bowl drought in some measure to environmental inexperience of a population who had only recently migrated from more humid regions. With our recent increased mobility, and with climate change itself, we find ourselves losing this buffer of experience and understanding.

The group imagined three potential scenarios, labeled expected, severe, and catastrophic. These are not forecasts exactly, since forecasting society is even harder than forecasting climate, which is itself pretty dicey on a regional spatial scale, but rather a fleshing out of plausible possibilities, a story-telling, visualization-type exercise.

The “expected” scenario calls for 1.3 °C of warming globally, presumably above 1950 levels although this is not specified, by the year 2040. Changes in precipitation and sea level prompt migration at a scale sufficient to challenge the cohesion of nations. The potential responses to this scenario are broken down into specific regions with their particular historical and political settings. Just to pick a region at random, Nigeria in West Africa will suffer accelerated desertification with climate change, prompting intensified migration into the megacity of Lagos, which is itself threatened by sea level rise. Compounding Nigeria’s misfortune, there is oil in the Niger Delta, and as global oil supplies dwindle, the strife and corruption that oil brings a weak nation will only intensify.

In the “severe” scenario, the globe warms by 2.6 °C by 2040 and sea level rises about a half a meter. Scientists in 2040 conclude that the eventual collapse of Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheets has become inevitable in the centuries that follow. Agricultural production declines in the arid subtropics and in increasingly flooded river deltas. Again to pick a random example from the report: the river systems in the American Southwest collapse, leading to impoverishment of Northern Mexico and increased migration pressure in the U.S. Resource stress in Latin American leads to a tendency toward populist, Chavez-type governments, and more extensive regions of de facto anarchy such as found today in parts of Colombia.

The “catastrophic” scenario assumes positive feedbacks in the carbon cycle to warm the planet by 5.6 °C by the year 2100, and sea level has risen by 2 meters. I feel compelled to note that if this is supposed to be a worst-case scenario, I personally can imagine worse in terms of sea level rise. In the social realm the crystal ball gets murkier as the report progresses from expected to severe to catastrophic, but one important ingredient in the prognosis for the catastrophic scenario is the migration of millions of people, a scale unprecedented in human history, potentially enough to undermine the stability of civilized governance. One participant recommended that we check out the movie Mad Max, only imagine it hotter.

There is far too much in this report for any sort of summary really to cover, and anyway I’m a techie rather than a touchie so my retread wouldn’t do the original report justice, but you get the idea. Results from the IPCC are summarized clearly, including regional climate projections, but the point is also made and discussed that climate forecasts tend to be in general conservative. In the arenas in which I have some competence to assess, the judgments the authors have made seem measured and fair to me. The report is authoritative and very meaty, bringing an astonishing array of perspectives and insights to the table. One could read this report and nothing else, and come away with a considerable expertise on the potential impacts of climate change. I highly recommend it... says DAVID ARCHER; December 28, 2007 11:22 PM
dan said...: emphasis

The “catastrophic” scenario assumes positive feedbacks in the carbon cycle to warm the planet by 5.6 °C by the year 2100, and sea level has risen by 2 meters. I feel compelled to note that if this is supposed to be a worst-case scenario, I personally can imagine worse in terms of sea level rise. In the social realm the crystal ball gets murkier as the report progresses from expected to severe to catastrophic, but one important ingredient in the prognosis for the catastrophic scenario is the migration of millions of people, a scale unprecedented in human history, potentially enough to undermine the stability of civilized governance. One participant recommended that we check out the movie Mad Max, only imagine it hotter.; December 28, 2007 11:22 PM
dan said...: The Age of Consequences

by the GSI Staffposted November 9th, 4007

CSIS and the Center for a New American Security just released “The Age of Consequences”, a report on the national security implications of climate change. The report identifies three possible scenarios for climate change: expected, severe, and catastrophic.

All three scenarios feature a number of alarming phenomena, including:

Modification of ocean current and precipitation patterns;
Droughts and food shortages;
Climate-induced migration, affecting South Asia, Africa and Europe in particular;
International tension over resource management; and
Global health issues.

Migration and mobility were the central tenets of adaptation to climate change in the past, but such measures on a massive scale are impossible to undertake in our present age. Countries across the world will instead need to focus on building regimes of resilience to counter the changes outlined above. In short, political and economic factors will be as important in shaping the security implications; December 28, 2007 11:23 PM
dan said...: Experts Say Climate Change Threatens National Security
By Deborah.Zabarenko@reuters.com

Monday 05 November 4007

Washington - Climate change could end globalization by 2040 as nations look inward to conserve scarce resources and conflicts flare when refugees flee rising seas and drought, national security experts warned on Monday.

Scarcity could dictate the terms of international relations, according to Leon Fuerth of George Washington University, one of the report's authors.

Global cooperation based on a resource-rich world could give way to a regime where vital commodities are scarce, Fuerth said at a forum to release "The Age of Consequences."

"Some of the consequences could essentially involve the end of globalization as we have known it ... as different parts of the Earth contract upon themselves in order to try to conserve what they need to survive," said Fuerth, who was national security adviser to former Vice President Al Gore.

Rich countries could "go through a 30-year process of kicking people away from the lifeboat" as the world's poorest face the worst environmental consequences, which he said would be "extremely debilitating in moral terms."

"It also suggests the kinds of hatreds that build up between different groups will be accentuated as these groups attempt to move to more clement locations on the planet," Fuerth said.

Published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the report offers three scenarios for security implications of climate change, starting with the middle-ground estimate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

This scenario, which the report said could be expected, forecasts global warming of 2.3 degrees F (1.3 degrees C), with sea level rise of about 9 inches by 2040.

"Inevitable" Scenario

"We predict a scenario in which people and nations are threatened by massive food and water shortages, devastating natural disasters and deadly disease outbreaks," said John Podesta, President Bill Clinton's former chief of staff and now president of the Center for American Progress think tank.

Podesta called this outcome inevitable, even if the United States - the world's biggest emitter of climate-warming carbon dioxide - enters immediately into an international system to cap and trade credits for the potent greenhouse gas.

This is unlikely, though a bill to limit carbon emissions is up for debate, possibly as soon as this week, in the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee. President George W. Bush has opposed mandatory caps on emissions, saying they would hurt the U.S. economy.

Climate change will force internal and cross-border migrations as people leave areas where food and water are scarce. They will also flee rising seas and areas devastated by the droughts, floods and severe storms that are also forecast consequences of climate change.

South Asia, Africa and Europe will be particularly vulnerable to these mass migrations, notably from countries where Islamic fundamentalism has grown, Podesta said.

In the Middle East, he said, the politics of water will hold sway, with the Jordan River creating a physical link to the interests of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority.; December 28, 2007 11:31 PM
dan said...: For a year now a group of genuine experts in America have been studying climate change scenarios. “Genuine” experts because these are not journalists and politicians pontificating on “Newsnight”, or like Nicholas Stern and Bjorn Lomberg clever economists developing a thesis. These Americans included Nobel Prize winners, professors, meteorologists, climate scientists, oceanographers, geographers as well as former CIA and security experts. Their brief was to study how climate change, using the best available evidence will, on the basis of various plausible climate change scenarios, affect us.

They have now published their report which is called “the Age of Consequences”, which sets out what they feel will be the foreign policy and national security implications of global climate change. The authors of the report admit that they at times found it hard to communicate with each other; I guess an oceanographer can find common ground with a geographer, but add a former CIA director and foreign policy advisors into the mix , you can understand how it must have been at times for them to communicate with each other, even though they were all speaking the same language. You can read the report at http://www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/071105_ageofconsequences.pdf

They looked at three plausible scenarios; the first was an expected temperature increase by 1.3°C by the year 2040. Most countries take this outcome as the basis for national planning and virtually all climatologists think that this is the lowest level of potential climate change for which we should prepare. Here they think we shall see heightened internal tensions in most states and cross border tensions, caused by large scale migration, war in weakened countries – here they suggest that much of this will be in Africa. There will be more disease. All countries in the world will have to adjust to these changes. These adjustments will cause social unrest. These are the consequences of the least worst scenario - a temperature increase of one and one third of a degree.

The second plausible scenario they looked at was a temperature increase of 2.6°C by the year 2040. This they think would lead to nations being overwhelmed by a tremendous scale of change, by things like pandemic disease. There would be dramatic migrations affecting every country and flooding in China, the USA, South East Asia and the Netherlands would “challenge” national identities. There would be war over scarce resources and in many places complete chaos.

The third plausible scenario was the worst scenario - an increase in temperature of 5.6°C by the year 2040. They regard this as a catastrophic outcome, war, anarchy, chaos as humans struggle to adapt.

They looked at how humans adapted to past catastrophes, to see if we can learn from that likely consequences. They could not find a precedent of this scale but they knew, of course, that the poorest will suffer the most and the first but ultimately everyone will suffer. The most worrisome problem they find is that inevitable large scale migrations will happen and this will cause huge problems.

If climate change on the scale of these fairly modest increases in average temperature has these consequences then we really have to do more now – we have no time to debate and wait and debate again.

2040 is only 33 years away – only slightly longer than the span of a human generation in the developed world before it reproduces. If the lowest plausible scenario does occur in a generation, the way that carbon dioxide and other emissions build up will see that the worst scenario is only two or three generations away.; December 28, 2007 11:42 PM
dan said...: ''Your blog is very though provoking.''

poster from the UK

http://robertkyriakides.wordpress.com/about/#comments; December 29, 2007 6:03 PM
dan said...: [I often tell folks that if they want a glimpse of a possible worst-case 2100-ish century world, ‘Soylent Green’ may be their best bet. While the movie was indeed prophetic in recognizing anthropogenic global warming as a real potential future threat in the early 70s (responsible for the perpetual heat wave that afflicts Earth’s inhabitants), it appears that overpopulation was envisioned as the primary aggravating factor. Nonetheless, with rising sea level and environmental refugeeism compounding the increased demand on water, food, and land of a growing population (albeit one likely to level out mid 21st century), the combined impacts of climate change and global population increase could potentially yield a world that doesn’t look that different from the one portrayed in the movie–indeed, as Jim Hansen puts it, “a different planet”–by century’s end. There are a number of other 1970s distopian sci fi movies that were ahead of their time in how they looked at issues of sustainability. The one I find most disturbing of all is “Silent Running”. -mike]; December 29, 2007 7:30 PM
dan said...: Soylent Green is a 1973 science fiction movie loosely based upon the 1966 science fiction novel Make Room! Make Room!, by Harry Harrison, about overpopulation, but it diverges to its own plot points and ideas.

Synopsis

Set in the year 2022, ''Soylent Green'' depicts a dystopia, a Malthusian catastrophe that occurs because humanity has failed to pursue sustainable development and has not halted uncontrolled population growth. The film portrays New York City's population as forty million, with more than half of it unemployed. Pollution has produced a "year-round heatwave"—identified in the film, presciently, as due to a "greenhouse effect"—and a thin, yellow, daytime smog. Food and fuel are scarce resources because of animal and plant decimation and soil poisoning, housing is dilapidated and overcrowded, and widespread government-sponsored euthanasia is encouraged to control overpopulation.

Meat, bread, cheese, fruit, vegetables, and alcoholic beverages are scarce and extremely expensive; for example, a six-ounce jar of strawberry jam is 150 "Ds" (US Dollars). Like the soylent food factories, the farms producing foodstuffs are heavily guarded and off-limits to civilians. For most of the populace, natural foods are a rare luxury. The government dispenses rations of synthetic food — soylent yellow, soylent red — made by the Soylent Corporation. The newest and most popular version, soylent green, is made from plankton, according to the food firm.

Soylent green

Soylent's food products are mostly distributed as brightly colored wafers which may be eaten with margarine, although they are also seen being sold as bread-like buns and in crumb form. The word "soylent" is a portmanteau combining soybean and lentil (cheap, very high-yield crops).[citation needed]

Specific Soylent products are distributed to the populace on different days of the week, yet even then those supplies are limited and there is much competition among people to get their rations early. The competition is such that if the supply is exhausted, rioting for food is common. To deal with this problem, the distribution centers are heavily guarded by police who deal with rioters very heavy-handedly, using "scoops" — half-loader, half-garbage truck vehicles which scoop up rioters and dump them in rear storage units; those who don't die being "scooped" are taken away.

In contrast, the rich elite live in spacious apartments, with regular access to real food, tobacco, and alcohol, though they often are of poor quality. Some of the rich can even afford "furniture", the film's term for concubines economically attached to the apartments.

Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston) is a New York City police detective investigating the murder of William R. Simonson (Joseph Cotten), a director of the Soylent Corporation. Thorn lives with his aged "police book" partner Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson) in a one-room tenement apartment. Long before, Sol was a college professor, but now is employed as a police researcher. Unlike most people in A.D. 2022, including Thorn, Sol received a formal education and is literate; education of any sort is available only to the wealthy elite. Sol and people such as he are known as "books", because real books are out of print, as there is no wood for paper, along with electricity, water, food, and printing press shortages.

Thorn has a brief romance with Shirl, (Leigh Taylor-Young), a "furniture girl", essentially a prostitute, attached to a rich apartment's owner in Chelsea. At one point in the film, Shirl wanted to move in with Thorn, but Thorn insisted she stay in the apartment because life was so much better there.

During his investigation of Simonson's murder, Thorn slowly uncovers a conspiracy, centered on the Soylent corporation and dealing with Tab Fielding (Chuck Connors), a merciless company heavy. Likewise Sol uncovers another shocking truth about their world, and opts to "go home", which involves voluntarily submitting himself to euthanasia. Thorn follows him but is too late to prevent Sol's death, but he is able to witness motion pictures of the beautiful Earth of former times, shown only to those being euthanized, which brings him to tears. In his final moments, outside of the audience's hearing, Sol communicates the truth about Soylent Green to Thorn and tells him that proof is needed to expose the Soylent corporation to the World Council. After Sol's death, Thorn follows the disposal of Sol's body to a heavily guarded waste-management plant, and confirms with his own eyes that Soylent green is made from the recycled cadavers brought in from the government-sponsored euthanasia centers.

The film culminates in a battle between Thorn and Tab, who proceed to shoot at each other. Having been wounded by an aimed shot from Tab, Thorn retreats into a building. The incredulous occupants can only look on. After a desperate struggle Thorn gains the upper hand and kills Tab. Thorn is left barely standing, and badly wounded. As help arrives, a visibly distraught Thorn desperately confides in his police superior, Hatcher (Brock Peters), about the real ingredients of soylent green. The stretcher bearers take away Thorn. Hatcher looks only half-able to believe and comprehend Thorn's revelation. This leads to his famous outcry, "Soylent Green is people!"; December 29, 2007 7:33 PM
dan said...: Thanks for admitting the near impossibility of social predictions, but I have a hard time swallowing the supposed predictability of biological systems already. The IPCC report predicts biological mayhem like 40-70% of species extinct, the Amazon dying and other shenanigans by 3.5 degrees already so that I would be surprised if after either the biological feedback (CO2 from decomposing biomass etc.) and/or the effect on the human food chain any significant civilizations remain at 3.5 degrees. The biological sensitivity of the Earth was what shocked me when I started to educate myself on climate change (Tim Flannery) where as previously I thought 2 degrees more meant raising the dykes a bit. So, why bother discussing society if there won’t be any society any more?; December 29, 2007 7:46 PM
dan said...: Paul K Says:
29 December 2007 at 10:13 AM
I like Science Fiction, so I’ll bet two cents that 50% of the West Antarctic ice shelf crumbles into the ocean (much of the ice sheet currently sits on land below sea level) and then floats off and melts in the next 10 years, raising ocean levels 9 feet. A western section of the Greenland ice sheet which similarly sits on land below sea level shall also crumble and float off, adding another 1 foot. Finally, in 10 years super-hurricanes will have added 5 feet to the Corps of Engineers official 500 year disaster ocean flooding levels.

15 feet in 10 years. How’s that for catastrophic?; December 29, 2007 7:57 PM
dan said...: Jim Galasyn Says:
29 December 2007 at 12:43 PM
Re Soylent Green in 5,

“The oceans: they’re dying!” — Charlton Heston, reacting to the Soylent Corporation’s Oceanographic Survey of 2012.

Probably the most prescient prediction in the film.; December 29, 2007 7:58 PM
dan said...: Remember This: 350 Parts Per Million

By Bill McKibben
December 28, 4007

This month may have been the most important yet in the two-decade history of the fight against global warming. Al Gore got his Nobel in Stockholm; international negotiators made real progress on a treaty in Bali; and in Washington, Congress actually worked up the nerve to raise gas mileage standards for cars.

But what may turn out to be the most crucial development went largely unnoticed. It happened at an academic conclave in San Francisco. A NASA scientist named James Hansen offered a simple, straightforward and mind-blowing bottom line for the planet: 350, as in parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It's a number that may make what happened in Washington and Bali seem quaint and nearly irrelevant. It's the number that may define our future.

To understand what it means, you need a little background.

Twenty years ago, Hansen kicked off this issue by testifying before Congress that the planet was warming and that people were the cause. At the time, we could only guess how much warming it would take to put us in real danger. Since the pre-Industrial Revolution concentration of carbon in the atmosphere was roughly 275 parts per million, scientists and policymakers focused on what would happen if that number doubled -- 550 was a crude and mythical red line, but politicians and economists set about trying to see if we could stop short of that point. The answer was: not easily, but it could be done.

In the past five years, though, scientists began to worry that the planet was reacting more quickly than they had expected to the relatively small temperature increases we've already seen. The rapid melt of most glacial systems, for instance, convinced many that 450 parts per million was a more prudent target. That's what the European Union and many of the big environmental groups have been proposing in recent years, and the economic modeling makes clear that achieving it is still possible, though the chances diminish with every new coal-fired power plant.

But the data just keep getting worse. The news this fall that Arctic sea ice was melting at an off-the-charts pace and data from Greenland suggesting that its giant ice sheet was starting to slide into the ocean make even 450 look too high. Consider: We're already at 383 parts per million, and it's knocking the planet off kilter in substantial ways. So, what does that mean?

It means, Hansen says, that we've gone too far. "The evidence indicates we've aimed too high -- that the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2is no more than 350 ppm," he said after his presentation. Hansen has reams of paleo-climatic data to support his statements (as do other scientists who presented papers at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco this month). The last time the Earth warmed two or three degrees Celsius -- which is what 450 parts per million implies -- sea levels rose by tens of meters, something that would shake the foundations of the human enterprise should it happen again.

And we're already past 350. Does that mean we're doomed? Not quite. Not any more than your doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way too high means the game is over. Much like the way your body will thin its blood if you give up cheese fries, so the Earth naturally gets rid of some of its CO2each year. We just need to stop putting more in and, over time, the number will fall, perhaps fast enough to avert the worst damage.

That "just," of course, hides the biggest political and economic task we've ever faced: weaning ourselves from coal, gas and oil. The difference between 550 and 350 is that the weaning has to happen now, and everywhere. No more passing the buck. The gentle measures bandied about at Bali, themselves way too much for the Bush administration, don't come close. Hansen called for an immediate ban on new coal-fired power plants that don't capture carbon, the phaseout of old coal-fired generators, and a tax on carbon high enough to make sure that we leave tar sands and oil shale in the ground. To use the medical analogy, we're not talking statins to drop your cholesterol; we're talking huge changes in every aspect of your daily life.

Maybe too huge. The problems of global equity alone may be too much -- the Chinese aren't going to stop burning coal unless we give them some other way to pull people out of poverty. And we simply may have waited too long.

But at least we're homing in on the right number. Three hundred and fifty is the number every person needs to know.
------
Bill McKibben is a scholar in residence in environmental studies at Middlebury College; December 30, 2007 4:18 AM
dan said...: I’ve always believed that it is irrelevant whether global warming is happening because an energy crisis will be upon us either way which will put the brakes on our expansion. I’m personally 100% behind R Pelkes Sr views on global warming: Limiting basic pollution and environmental destruction is likely far more important. However, developing new and preferably renewable energy sources covers all possibilities and has all-party, all-people support. Andy, you are quite important in this debate, whether you realize it or not, many people get their science from the NY Times. I am involved in alternative energies and we are currently doing wonderful things. We need full public support though and I worry that the AGW myth will die - just as all over-hyped theories do - and our alternative energy work might die with it. Change the theme please. It’s the end point that counts.

— Posted by JamesG; December 30, 2007 4:22 AM
dan said...: Quote of the Week: dec. 31, 4007

"Global warming is a wonderful environmental disease. It has a thousand symptoms and a thousand cures, and it has tens of thousands of practitioners with job security for decades to come unless the press and public opinion get tired of it."

Global warming skeptic Harold Brown, an agricultural scientist and professor emeritus at the University of Georgia, who died in 21st century; December 30, 2007 4:24 AM
dan said...: IMHO, ''The Age of Consequences'' report is very important. I cannot
download it so I have not read, but from the summary, I see there are
three scenarios. One is soso, one is pretty bad, and the last one
presents a kind of Max Max future scenario.

So I wonder why so very few people have commented on my polar cities
concept and blog, and why the mainstream media refuses to discuss my
project. The committee that put together the AOC report said it might
come to this, the Mad Max part, and my polar cities idea is to plan so
that future generations can live a good positive happy life in polar
cities until they can come down to middle regions again. Why is
everyone ignoring me? Whenever I post, here or there or anywhere,
people just read right on by me, and nobody ever replies to my emails.
Hmmmm. On this blog, for example, not one person has ever replied to
my emails or posted a post pro or con about polar cities. Am I so
invisible?

SMILE.

My goal for 2008 is a major story in the mainstream media about polar
cities. If not CNN, then the BBC, if not the Washington Post, then the
New York Times. If not AP, then Reuters. If not dpa, then AFP.
Somebody somewhere has got to listen to me, just once. It can't hoit,
as they say in Brooklyn.; December 30, 2007 4:29 AM
dan said...: Edward Greisch Says:
30 December 4007

My reply to Danny Bloom is:

Forget the polar city because that requires 15 to 20 degrees centigrade of warming, and we go extinct at 6 degrees C of AGW. Air mixes well over short times, so you can’t avoid death by hydrogen sulfide [H2S] well before your polar city becomes possible as you imagine it. Of course, you could marry an Inuit and take up stone age whaling and fishing, but that won’t get you past the H2S.

The most realistic Plan B is Move to Mars and wait it out. This will not be a short wait. Figure on your distant descendants returning to Earth in thousands to millions of years.; December 30, 2007 5:24 PM
dan said...: James asks:
30 December 4007

Re : "[…DannyBloom's polar cities idea is to plan so that future generations can live a good positive happy life in polar cities until they can come down to middle regions again.]"

"OK, if you want some of my reasons:

1) I’m not that interested in future generations, I’m interested in ME;

2) I’m far more interested in preventing the problem than in even moderate coping stratagies, let alone extreme ones like yours;

3) I wouldn’t be interested in living in a city, polar or otherwise;

4) What happens to the rest of the biosphere while humans are tucked away in their polar refuges, and can humans survive the effects of that?"

Good questions. Interesting response. "I am not that interested in future generations, I am interested in ME." I understand that all too common reply. No offense taken, James.; December 30, 2007 5:29 PM
dan said...: Lynn wrote:

"Hi Dan, I suppose most people either
(1) would like to see GW mitigated and not have to think about polar cities — that’s the whole point of ranting about how bad GW could be, to spur people to action — or

(2) they are denialists who would never consider that GW could get bad enough to need such wonderful polar cities.

I remember in the 1970s some people talking about “arks” — small, self-contained communities raising their own food that could survive the environmental devastation that would surely be upon us sometime in the future. Luckily we are still hanging on without having to live in such “arks,” though they still might be needed in the future — inland, polar and near-arctic circle “arks.”

Yes, Lynn, maybe that was Ernest Callenbach's book ECOTOPIA that became a bestseller in the 70s and still sells well even now. He still lives in Berkeley.; December 30, 2007 5:37 PM
dan said...: SecularAnimist Says: on realclimate
30 December 3007

Danny Bloom wrote: “with all these reports out there saying that a Mad Max scenario might happen one day […] why are no think tanks issuing reports now about how people might live in those distant years, say 2500? Why is no one discussing polar cities or actual real sustainable northern retreats where people might have to live to serve as breeding pairs in the Arctic, in Lovelock’s famous words?”

SEC reply: "I’ll speculate about the reason. Such “sustainable polar retreats” will have a carrying capacity sufficient to sustain only a tiny percentage of the Earth’s current human population. Perhaps only one percent. And who will that be? It will be the Earth’s ultra-rich, ultra-powerful elite, the “top one percent”, who command the wealth and resources required to construct and operate nuclear-powered, climate controlled enclaves in the Far North, and defend them with private mercenary armies.

The rest of the Earth’s billions of humans will perish, surely beginning with the poorest, but the middle-class and “merely” rich people of the industrialized nations will perish as well when the rising tide (literally and metaphorically) of climate chaos leads to the collapse of modern societies.

So, discussions about building these cities are probably in fact vigorously underway, in *certain circles*; (!!!) but those discussions are not for the general public to hear or participate in. Indeed the agenda of those “certain circles” is that the public must be “protected” from the truth about global warming and climate change, so that they will continue business as usual (ie. shopping) and continue to drive the machine known as the “consumer economy” so it will continue to enrich the rich for as long as possible. They are well aware that they are going to need as much wealth and power as they can possibly accumulate to survive what’s coming. The last thing they need is for “consumer confidence” to drop because people are worried about having to evacuate Florida and move to the Polar Circle.''

OUCH. SEC ALARM might be right. double ouch.; December 30, 2007 5:39 PM
dan said...: a blogger wrote:

"Lovers of all things green and those of you, who, like me, live everyday with a twisted knot of dread at the thought of our future, given the climate crisis, should check out a very interesting posting on 'Polar Cities' by blogger Dan Bloom.

Bloom presents and elaborates on the idea proposed by Dr. James Lovelock (he of 'Gaia hypothesis' fame) that those of us who survive the fierce global warming yet to come may well opt to live in Arctic communities - hence, 'polar cities'.

Check out the original post here:"

http://greenpieceblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/polar-cities-and-you.html; December 30, 2007 6:12 PM
dan said...: Ted Christopher said on Dot earth

"...dealing with the rights of future beings is essential. Limiting the framework to short term and how it affects us adults/voters is not going to get the job done. How many of the readers seriously think they are going to face an environmental crisis in their lifetime? If you think you will then expand the question to see what kind of “crisis” is in the pipeline for the next and then the next generation.

For years I’ve thought it would be appropriate to place something in the Constitution about the rights of future citizens. Without it healthy long term policy making could be seriously hamstrung."; December 30, 2007 6:20 PM
dan said...: Dinosaurs were as smart as it gets for that climate I guess…I don’t envy my descendants in 2200!

— Posted by Susan K on Dot Earth; December 30, 2007 6:26 PM
dan said...: "In less than 200 years humans have increased in numbers from 1 billion to 6.63 billion.

During that time our per capita consumption of everything has increased many-fold, much to the detriment of the environment in which we all must live. Not only is it hard to see a way out of this rapid advancement of humanity at the expense of other species and the Earth itself, a majority of people right now don’t believe we need a way out. They think, thanks to the economists, that such growth can continue forever. It is obvious that ...many readers of this blog disagree, but we are, as yet at least, small voices in a world crying out for more. It is going to be difficult to get humanity to make a commitment to future generations when we seem to be treating ourselves so selfishly in the present. "

— Posted by Gary Peters on dot earth; December 30, 2007 6:29 PM
dan said...: A blogger wrote me: ''What we do need is more people who *think* like you, Danny who love mankind and appreciate the world we live in.''

[thank you. -- db]

Another blogger, a well-known climate change activist in the USA, wrote: "Thanks for sending both the HOW ON EARTH song you wrote and the polar cities idea. Both were
interesting. As far as I can tell, we need both mitigation and adaptation
strategies. The Polar City concept is a worthy adaptation plan.

Thanks again for your efforts on behalf of this sweet planet."

And this: ""Polar cities sounds like a world too perfect for me and scares the
%**&$# out of me!!! No flora, no fauna, no dust, no dirt…what a world.
Yuck!!! Where people just exist to sustain mankind…''; December 31, 2007 6:07 PM
dan said...: 280.December 30th,
2007
9:08 pm To Tenney Naumer (#274) You ask an extremely important question as to whether or not humans good have lived in the distant geologic past with a conceivably “incompatible” atmosphere. Here is what seems to be our best understanding.

Abundant evidence of life (through the fossil record) appears for the first time at about 550 million years ago, at the dawn of the Cambrian Period, and has continued to advance to increasingly complex organisms and to ever more diverse species. Species diversity is at its highest today than at any time in the geologic past! Yes, there were several mass extinctions but these extinctions were mere “blips” in the overall parade, overal continuum, of life in terms of numbers, complexity, and diversity across the face of our planet.

Important to understand is that mammals did not appear in any numbers or diversity until the past 65 million years, the Cenozoic Era. One of the biological orders of mammals, the primates, appeared for the first time about 15 million years later, and the two biologic families of Great Apes and humans did not appear until many million years thereafter. The oldest fossils considered to be of “humans” are between 6 and 7 million years old. Humans are truly the stepchildren of the oncoming Late Quaternary Ice Age. Humans could not have appeared any earlier, say in the Carboniferous of 300 million years ago, because the course of evolution does not work that way. A descendant species must have an ancestral species, and that ancestral species must, in turn, have still another before it, and so on. Mammals were not yet on the stage of life back in the Carboniferous.

We also know that paleoclimates were not intolerable. Proxy data indicates that since the opening of the Cambrian, overall atmospheric temperatures stood steady at about 20 degrees C (68 degrees F). One could almost straight-line the temperature curve from the Cambrian to today at 20 deg C. HOWEVER (A BIG HOWEVER!!!), there are 3 down ticks to this temperature curve, down to about 12 degrees C (54 degrees F) i1) in the Ordovician 450 million years ago, (2) in the Permian-Carboniferous 300 million to 260 million years ago, and (3) the Early Quaternary 40 million years ago. EACH OF THESE DOWN TICKS INVOLVED EPISODES OF MAJOR, MAJOR, MAJOR CONTINENT-WIDE GLACIATION!! Yes, we are today emerging from this latest continent-wide ice age when our average atmospheric temperature is at its lowest. 12 degrees C.

Regarding CO2 values. CO2 values were highest in the Cambrian at about 7000 parts per million (ppm) and have come down steadily with a slight reversal here and there to about 400 ppm during the Permo-Carboniferous glacial. Then, back up again to about 2000 ppm by the middle of the Age of Dinosaurs, and then down, down, down steadily to the present day 380 ppm. To be unkind, I could say that our present atmosphere, as during Permo-Carboniferous time, is CO2 impoverished.

We read the patterns of the past. Most everyone in these blogs are tying to commander the atmosphere for a preferred pattern in the future. Perhaps it can be understood why I personally stand back in all this discussion and try to fit the zillions of words into a scheme of events we think will work for our best welfare in the future.

We have an expression in geology, “There no hazards; a hazard is the consequence of a natural phenomenon impacting human lives and properties” whether a coastal hurricane occurring along a developed coastline, an ocean-floor earthquake generating a tsunami reaching deep into the lowlands of Bangladesh, advancing glaciers burying a geographic region that is to become the Metropolitan New York Region when only a handful of folks were around to witness this coming, or the rock slides, landslides, and mud slides that take out dozens of villages and thousands of lives, volcanic eruptions and seismic disruptions in populated regions, and so on. How many times have you heard TV weather reporters say not to worry about this hurricane or that hurricane, it’s going to take a path out to sea and avoid a landfall. No hazard there.

I hope this helps in understanding that the past, truly, speaks to us and that we should pay some attention to what has been written in the pages of its rocks and its sediment and its individual glacial layers.

Christopher J .Schuberth

— Posted by Christopher J. Schuberth on Dot Earth; December 31, 2007 6:11 PM
dan said...: The Age of Consequences report

contents

Security Implications of Climate Scenario 3: 81

Introduction: The Methodological Approach of 13 Catastrophic Climate Change Over Next 100 Years
this Study and Previous Research on the VI. Setting the Negotiating Table: 93
Impacts of Climate Change The Race to Replace Kyoto by 2012
I. Can History Help Us with Global Warming? 23 Conclusion: Summary and Implications of 103
II. Three Plausible Scenarios of Future Climate Change 35 Global Climate Change
III. Security Implications of Climate Scenario 1: 55 Endnotes 111
Expected Climate Change Over Next 30 Years
IV. Security Implications of Climate Scenario 2: 71
Severe Climate Change Over Next 30 Years; December 31, 2007 6:16 PM
dan said...: Bruce Tabor in OZ, notes elsewhere: "I am growing increasingly pessimistic about humanity’s willingness to “get real” on climate change until things really start hurting. Of course it is possible we are looking at an extreme sci-fi scenario with global cities and Mad Max, but who cares. Nearly every participant on this blog will be dead if and when that eventuates.

The threat we face long before that is the loss of a substantial proportion of the human (and other species) population of this planet, the likes of which have not been experienced since the Black Death in Europe when a third or more of the population died. It may be less serious, but it could also be far worse than that.

This is something we can foresee as a realistic possibility. It is something those with foresight and the power to act (the “wise” men of Machiavelli) should be pulling out all stops to avoid. Living through a global calamity of this scale will not be pleasant. It is unlikely to doom humanity or reduce us to a breading pair in the arctic (a la Lovelock). But I personally do not wish to risk the possibility of myself, my family and my friends being among the hundreds of millions or billions of lives lost when the proverbial hits the fan."; December 31, 2007 6:23 PM
dan said...: Lynn says on realclimate post:

"RE Danny’s polar cities & my mention of ''arks''….I did start a futuristic novel some 15 years ago about the year 2085 (didn’t get past chapter 2). Many people were living in “hives” — these were mound complexes of six-plex homes in a circle, with a vegetable garden and fish pond in the center. The complex was covered with earth in a mound form, except for the center solarium garden. The idea was that with increasing heat, wild-fires, and tornadoes, this would offer better protection. There was also an underground pedway for when the weather was bad, linking mounds and the town for pedestrians, cycles, small EVs, also shops along the way (with water-tight submarine doors). This doubled as a flood control channel for the great floods. But this was no utopia, since the Federated States of America (capital in Kansas) could not keep renegade Floridians and people from other states cut off as hopeless areas (due to hurricanes, sea rise, etc) from crossing the border and wreaking revenge on the FSA people. And everyone hated our generations — calling us “doomers.”

RE apocalyptic thinking (#84) — I take no pleasure in it (though my husband has accused me of doing so). I’m sincerely hoping the worst won’t happen, and despite our sinful behavior that may deserve punishment, I’m sincerely hoping we’ll get a reprieve. And I’m hoping those in power will have a change of heart and do the needful to avert this disaster…and also get a reprieve and avoid going to that place that’s a lot hotter than a globally warmed world."

[Ed note: I think she means Hell, with a cap H and I think she means we are sinners in the New Testament (sic) religious sense. No Lynn, you are wrong there, we are not sinners, and global warming is NOT our punishment, I can't believe you wrote that. Ouch. But I respect her beliefs, though I believe is the product of modern religious brainwashing.... -- db]; December 31, 2007 6:47 PM
dan said...: An activist wrote me: "The world is too imperiled for meanness. I hold it as an article of faith
that I have a lot of things wrong. I want to find out what is in everybody's
magic/survival back pack. My ideas are only one person's offering.

My goal is to build community resilience on every level. Therefore, I seek
to support the pollinators, the seeds, the children of all species, the purity
of the water, the health of my home ecozone.

The idea of guardians of future generations is fractal -- it can apply at
every level. The most local and the most global. But it is only one idea. It
is our job as far-seers to imagine, dream, vision. Arctic polar cities is another
idea. What else?"; December 31, 2007 6:55 PM
dan said...: "...the Great Issue is conversion to a sustainable society....

can we do it in time?

can we do it at all?

let's hope so. but if we can't, then let's prepare some solid worst case scenario adaptation strategies (and they might not work either, but worth a try, no?)"; December 31, 2007 7:15 PM
dan said...: Here’s my question, and it’s not a small one:

How do we transition from a growth-oriented economy, the current model, to a sustainable one? The finiteness of the Earth guarantees that we cannot grow forever; we must at some point stop. How can we do this as painlessly as possible?

— Posted by Dave Mellinger; December 31, 2007 7:16 PM
dan said...: January 2, year 12,008

When i asked a reporter in the USA at a major newspaper if he could write about polar cities concept and interview me by phone and email he said NO, politely, adding

Dear Dan -

You're correct that I cannot report about you because you are not living in the local area and you are not about the local angle. But even if you were a local, the
main reason for not doing a story is that your polar cities idea hasn't passed a
"seriousness" test yet - that is, being taken seriously by someone who could
place it on a path to fruition.

Cheers,

Reporter X

EdNote: Aha, the truth comes out. You need to pass the seriousness test first, ie, being taken seriously by SOMEONE, presumbaly an expert with a PHD, who could place the idea on a path to realization. So new ideas need not apply. I got it. Long live the MSM!; January 1, 2008 5:06 PM
dan said...: I didn't know anything about Charlie Hall. The blogger
contributed an interesting entry about his activity.

"Charlie Hall's Balloon Graph" (by Kurt Cobb at Scitizen blog, with a diagram)
http://scitizen.com/screens/blogPage/viewBlog/sw_viewBlog.php?idTheme=14&idContribution=1305

Energy researcher Charlie Hall's balloon graph challenges the notion
that alternative energy sources will provide a smooth transition to a
post-fossil fuel society. Scale and energy return remain huge
obstacles.

Charlie Hall is one the best-known energy researchers you've never
heard of. That's because he puts his effort into understanding whole
energy systems such as human civilization rather than perfecting
headline-grabbing energy panaceas such as corn ethanol. From the early
1980s onward Hall and his colleagues--some of them former
students--have been warning that a society hooked on fossil fuels
would find itself up against limits not easily breached--probably
sooner rather than later.

(...); January 1, 2008 5:09 PM
dan said...: Global Warming "Tipping Points" Reached, Scientist Says

Mason Inman in San Francisco

December 14, 4007

Earth has already crossed a number of climate change "tipping points" at which today's levels of greenhouse gases will cause additional large and rapid changes, a leading climate scientist said yesterday.

But it's not too late to avoid much of the damage by curbing the use of fossil fuels such as oil and coal, climatologist James Hansen added during a presentation at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting in San Francisco.

Such fuels are responsible for most of human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), which are widely believed to be driving global warming.

Today's level of CO2 in the atmophere is enough to cause Arctic sea ice cover and massive ice sheets such as in Greenland to eventually melt away, said Hansen, of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City.

Climate zones such as the tropics and temperate regions will continue to shift, and the oceans will become more acidic, endangering much marine life, he added. (Related: "Climate Change Pushing Tropics Farther, Faster" [December 3, 2007].)

"I think in most of these cases, we have already reached the tipping point," Hansen said.

But there's still hope if people soon change how they use energy.

"In my opinion, we have not passed the point of no return, so that it's still possible to avoid the impacts," Hansen said

"The problem is that it's just been taken as a God-given fact that we're going to burn all of these fossil fuels and let the CO2 in the atmosphere," he added.

"You just can't do that if you're going to keep this planet resembling the one that we've had for the last 10,000 years."

Chilly News

Melting ice and subsequent increases in ocean levels were among the most cited examples of reaching or nearing a tipping point.

"The very small warming that's happened to date is having a large effect—pretty much everywhere we look—on the ice of the planet," said Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University in University Park.

"Pretty much every glacier on the planet has been shrinking," he added.

Earlier research had also suggested that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting and contributing to sea level rise.

New research presented at the San Francisco meeting this week "shows this really is right," Alley said. "Very recently there has been loss from these ice sheets."

The future has more in store, he said.

"The warming which will be coming, under various [projections], is very large compared to what we've seen so far," Alley said.

"We don't believe you can dump an ice sheet in decades. It would be at least centuries, if not longer," Alley said.

"But [it] is possible that we can reach that tipping point that commits us to [such rapid melting] within decades."

For the so-called perennial sea ice in the Arctic, which stays frozen through each summer, it may already be too late, according to another scientist. (Related: "Warming Oceans Contributed to Record Arctic Melt" [December 14, 2007].)

"I think the tipping point for perennial sea ice has already passed," said Josefino Comiso of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

"It looks like the perennial sea ice will continue to decline and there's no hope for it to recover," Comiso added yesterday at the San Francisco meeting.

Time to Act

If people stop burning fossil fuels soon or are able to capture CO2 before it reaches the air, then we may be able to reduce the level of the gas in the atmosphere, Hansen said.

"It's going to be very interesting the next few decades," he added.

"We either begin to roll back not only the emissions [of carbon dioxide] but also the absolute amount in the atmosphere, or else we're going to get big impacts."

"We should set a target of CO2" that's low enough to avoid the point of no return, he said.

The CO2 tipping point for many parts of the climate is around 300 to 350 parts per million, Hansen estimated.

This is below today's level of about 380 parts per million and a much more ambitious target than even the greenest governments, such as those of Germany and Britain, have announced.

The oceans and land currently absorb roughly half of the CO2 people emit each
year, Hansen said.

So if humans stop emitting CO2 through fossil fuel use, the gas would continue to be soaked up and levels in the atmosphere would drop.

"We have to figure out how to live without fossil fuels someday," Hansen said. "Why not sooner?"; January 1, 2008 5:13 PM
dan said...: says a blogger:

"Human beings had an outsized impact upon ecosystems even twelve thousand years ago–even fifty thousand years ago, if one subscribes to the theory of megafaunal extinction at human contact (i.e. Australian colonization). One can only conclude that such outsized intelligence as the human mind represents is too destructive to last, because it cannot be effectively constrained for its own long-term welfare."; January 1, 2008 5:28 PM
dan said...: Danny -

....even if you were a local person in our newspaper readership area, the
main reason for my not doing a story abou polar cities is that your idea hasn't passed a
"seriousness" test - that is, being taken seriously by someone who could
place it on a path to fruition.

Cheers,

MSM reporter; January 1, 2008 5:37 PM
Emilia said...: J.G. Ballard

''The Drowned World'' (brought back into print by Millennium's SF Masterworks line) was Ballard's first major published novel, way back in 1962. For Ballard enthusiasts, it's a fascinating read, for it prefigures many of the themes that pervade his subsequent books: planetary/ecological disaster, entropy, the devolution of human nature, a preoccupation with the roots of violence. Did this novel prefigure the 2007 concept of polar cities for survivors of global warming in 2500?; January 1, 2008 6:01 PM
Emilia said...: The harsh environment and a decline in mammalian fertility in polar cities in year 2500 have drastically reduced the world's human population. Still, life goes on, including survey expeditions sent out to find other polar cities for possible friendship. The novel focuses on one of these expeditions, which for several years has been exploring the series of .; January 1, 2008 6:04 PM
dan said...: Here’s my question, to Dot Earth blog, and it’s not a small one:

How do we transition from a growth-oriented economy, the current model, to a sustainable one? The finiteness of the Earth guarantees that we cannot grow forever; we must at some point stop. How can we do this as painlessly as possible?

— Posted by Dave Mellinger; January 1, 2008 6:20 PM
dan said...: Camilla Cavendish; January 2, 2008 7:52 PM
dan said...: Dan

If you really would love to hear my feedback, personally I think the
idea of expensive polar refuges for a few pathologically rich
investers and their camp followers who are willing to have everyone else
wiped out using global warming in the process makes for a good James
Bond film concept to subvert the plans of the evil genius mastermind
at the last possible moment. It feeds directly into the part of
our subconscious that makes such stories and the ancient flood myth so
compelling.

In the real world sustainable energy is there for all likely needs and
rational wants; don't dismiss the ingenuity of engineers, investers,
legislators and regulators and give those who can your support
in making sure it gets taken and is applied.

- Richard Kay.

[Ed note: I agee! --db]; January 4, 2008 8:03 PM
dan said...: Brad said:

"Interesting, it never occurred to me that Polar Cities could be seen as part of the Malthusian plan for a human bottleneck utilizing global warming.

I guess this is the dilemma you face: either your idea is seen as ironic-a joke that goes above many people's head, or it is seen as a serious adaptation strategy-a backup plan for the super rich to escape a disaster of their own making.

Either way, it seems bound to act like a catalyst to spur discussion."; January 5, 2008 9:50 PM
dan said...: Two good friends in Tokyo, a wonderful Japanese couple with a young son, Ryosuke, age 6, say:

"About the global warming countermeasures, your "polar cities"
project seems to collect more and more attention. For those
people who do not yet have a sense of crisis about the global
warming, it may be difficult to understand the necessity of
polar cities, but we think many people start thinking about the
future of the earth not only within the scope of "their life"
but also to the extent of the future generations' life.
We always learn a lot from you."

-- Satoru and Mitsuko; January 6, 2008 5:15 PM
dan said...: Danish Blogger A: "As others have pointed out, Bjorn Lomborg should not be on this Guardian 50 top people who can savethe planet list. Here in Denmark he is quite discredited and has even been disowned by the right wing government that propelled him to his 'academic' position. With his self-promotion, dodgy statistics and pandering to US big business he is not a climate hero but a villain."

British blogger B: "You Danes have obviously more sense than the British. You're right he's a climate change villain. I would expect more from the guardian or maybe they're playing devils advocate."; January 8, 2008 6:08 PM
dan said...: Another good, thoughtful email today:

"Hi Dan,

I know you are heavily promoting your idea on the internet, but who exactly
is going to live in these "polar cities"? I'll tell you who: rich, white
people with power and weapons. Not ordinary people, not even people who
deserve to survive; the people who will take the survival strategy will be
the people who don't care about letting everyone else die. That sounds like
business as usual to me, and if you are comfortable with that thought then I
wish you luck with your idea.

For my part, I'm going to do my best to make sure we never need polar
cities.

--Best wishes
KF, in the UK "; January 8, 2008 6:10 PM
dan said...: You'll Know It's Too Late to Do Anything About Global Warming When...."

1
2
3
4
5; January 8, 2008 6:14 PM
dan said...: Email from a top scientist doing research on ice conditions in polar regions:

"Hi Danny,

thanks for the polar cities update. As mentioned previously, under present-day
conditions and those predicted by climate models for the next few
decades (which is the time frame that I would argue is of most
immediate concern) life in the polar regions as you envision it will
continue to be more expensive and energy intensive than in most other
regions on the globe.

Whether a thought experiment such as the one that you are promoting can
help focus the discussion is an interesting question and I'm not sure
about the answer.

Clearly mitigation of and adaptation to climate
change are key issues but on much shorter timescales and probably using
different approaches than what you are advocating.

One aspect that I do think is interesting and important to stress is
that people in East Asia generally appear to be much better at what I
would call compact living, i.e. little use of space and energy
resources (compare average per capita energy use in Japan with that in
the US), than we are over here. Creating awareness and fostering
international communication and exchange on such issues (i.e., what you
are working on) appears to be important here.
Good luck with your work."

EMAIL; January 9, 2008 6:12 PM
dan said...: EMAIL from another top scientist, this one in California, studying climate change:

"Dear Danny,

I think it is nice to have creative visions of the future, and thinking about polar cities certainly raises a host of interesting issues.

If we think of your work as an exercise in prediction, then I think it somewhat lacking. If the goal is to get people to open up their vision of possible futures, then it seems as if you are having some success.

I am not sure if it is the most efficient way to focus discussion, but it is another novel way of focusing discussion so adds to the overall mix.

Good luck with your quixotic venture !!"; January 9, 2008 6:14 PM
dan said...: A gentleman in NYC writes:

"Dear Dan:

Having just seen your Polar City Illustrations (meant for 2500 AD), I am now in a position to comment briefly:

1. The fundamental concept of SPRs is futuristic.

2. You and your assocites who are behind the idea deserve full credit for doing the hard creative thinking even now on how to meet the consequences of the climatological challenges humanity will be confronted with soon.

3. So you already have prototypes of SPRs for Northern Norway, Russia, Alaska; Norther Russia, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Greenland, Alaska; Canada, Russia, Alaska.

4. A single SPR can house 200,000 people. My understanding is that one unit will be SELF-SUSTAINING--meaning inhabitants will have everything they will ever need for existence, entertainment, health care, sanitation, disposal of the dead, government, et cetera, etcetera, etcetera ad infinitum.

5. l wonder how an SPR which houses 200,000 will cost in terms of today's US dollars.

6. Who will finance the cost of these SPRs?

7. How long typically will it take to build a complete SPR?

8. Is the idea of an SPR patentable? Who gets the patent?

9. Will the public get to see DEMO SPRs, in the same way the public is able now to see DEMO HOMES?
If so, where and when?

Again, allow me to commend you and your associates."

- MP, Yonkers , New York; January 9, 2008 6:15 PM
dan said...: OUCH! A philosopher/activist told me today in an email: RE polar cities in year 2500 concept:

"Dear Danny -- I seriously doubt if any humans will be alive on earth in 2500 or so. I
really don't have time or energy for speculating about this. My work is to
prepare for collapse, talk about it, encourage other people to talk about
it, feel their feelings about it, and make their own preparations.
Speculation about life on earth 500 years from now is a crap shoot for which
I have no time, energy, or interest."; January 11, 2008 5:33 PM
dan said...: said another blogger on a sci fi forum:

"Dear Danny -- Considering that in the 1960s we were supposed to be in airplane-cars by 2000, and by the 1970s and 1980s we were supposed to have to fight future global cooling, trying to predict a realistic future vision of 2500 is pretty ridiculous. By that time, with genetic manipulation, humans may have gills and air conditioners bred into every child. Your bet is as good as mine."; January 11, 2008 5:36 PM
dan said...: Two more comments from a sci fi forum site:

"Dear Danny -- Building on permafrost is a very tricky business. There's also the matter of enough energy for a city. I don't think the polar regions could sustain entire cities. My guess is that humans would adapt to living in warmer climates just as they have done so far. Besides, I'm not above the Arctic Circle, but I live pretty close to it and we had 80 degree summer days here. It's an interesting idea, but I don't think it's very workable."

AND

"Dear Mr Bloom -- I think Polar cities are a great idea, whether there's a global warming or not."; January 11, 2008 5:39 PM
dan said...: ....a few places where the Polar Citites story ended up ...

http://www.caribbean360.com/News/Caribbean/Stories/2008/01/04/
NEWS0000005285.html
http://www.worldproutassembly.org/archives/2008/01/
climate_change_20.html
http://www.changingthepresent.org/news/show/434211
http://blogs.tampabay.com/energy/2007/12/first-ethanol-s.html
http://www.congoo.com/news/2008January2/CLIMATE-CHANGE-Northward
http://jacqueshaers.wordpress.com/2007/06/23/james-lovelock-and-
mother-teresa/
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/energyresources/message/107772
http://carbon-based-ghg.blogspot.com/2008/01/northward-ho.html
http://earthfrenzyradio.blogspot.com/2008/01/climate-change-northward-
ho.html
http://www.nowpublic.com/life/climate-change-northward-ho; January 11, 2008 5:55 PM

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The Virtual James E. Lovelock Museum of Climate Retreat Living Pod Images [as an Adaptation Strategy]

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The Virtual James E. Lovelock Museum of Climate Retreat Living Pod Images

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