What does ‘dangerous’ climate change really mean?

The conversation around climate change can sometimes seem riddled with magic numbers and dark thresholds. Researchers talk about the dangers of surpassing 2 degrees of warming. Headlines blare about the importance of reducing emissions by 2030. Even your friendly neighborhood climate reporter (hi!) gets tripped up by the complex calculations involved.

The conversation around climate change can sometimes
 seem riddled with magic numbers and dark thresholds.

But all this math didn’t get pulled out of a hat; it’s the product of years of careful research by scientists and painstaking negotiations among diplomats. So it’s worth understanding how the world comes up with these targets — and what might happen if we fail to meet them.

Read the story from The Washington Post by Sarah Kaplan - “What does ‘dangerous’ climate change really mean?”

Economics defeats science in climate change conversation

Immediately the climate change conversation became a matter of economics it was lost.

The economically loaded dice.

The climate change doubters, denialists, and their contemporaries celebrated once they were able to shift the discussion from the realities of science to the quirkiness and whimsicality of economics.

The financialization of the world is complete and world leaders driven by a populous unable to see beyond or through this shroud of secrecy that favours just a few, a frighteningly small percentage of the world’s population, make decisions rooted in economics, rather than good sense.

What’s best for people is a concept that under the sleight of hand control by the demagogues of the world has collapsed to slide to near the bottom of the hierarchy of importance, while what’s best economically now sits unchallenged at the top.

Climate change can only be resolved if the public is again allowed, or given, its pre-eminent importance and the people of the world set free of the economic chains that presently restrict their behaviour.

Individualism, globalism, the desire to have more, and the urgency to accumulate riches whatever the cost, exemplified by a distorted capitalism, has bequeathed the world climate change and although we live in a world with many cultures, races, territories, passions, views and ideas that can divide us, we are, whatever people think or believe, one people with just one planet and the resolution of climate change, or at least learning to live what we have done, rests with us acting at one.

The dilemma that has produced climate change, the financialization of a scientific conversation, is being repeated on Britain contemplates it future in the European Union.

What’s best for the people of Britain is now being judged almost entirely in raw economic terms, rather than what is best for them; what will enable them to build the resilience to be a socially richer country; a country able to address and deal with the challenges evolving from our disrupted climate system.

Dealing with climate change is not economic, it is a social issue as is the matter of whether or not Britain leaves or stay in the European Union.

Posts on blog pass 3000 mark - much, but little has changed

-       Robert McLean

Posts on our Beneath the Wisteria blog have just passed 3000, with the first being posted early in 2012.

Much, but little has changed since then.

In that relatively short time, the climate change conversation has gone from being contested, in many cases vigorously, to now being broadly and widely accepted.

There have been significant advances in terms of what should be done – international agreement arising from last year’s Paris climate talks is an indication of that – but the way of life in the developed world which is at the root of the trouble appears to continue unabated.

Many scientists and academics have spelt out where it is we are going wrong, why and what we need to do in response, but the world’s leaders appear to lack the courage to make the necessary changes needed to preserve humanity.

However, I suspect the trouble, the reluctance, rests not with just our leaders, but the wider population for any serious effort to counter climate change will demand that we (and that is all of us in the developed world) willingly opt for significantly different standard of living.

Ideally, contentment will not be guillotined, but many of the comforts we now take for granted look to be threatened.

And so although we can recline in comfort arguing that until our governments act, we will do little, but sadly that is a falsity that leads only to sweeping difficulties.

Our governments, of whatever persuasion, will not act until you and I step forward and tell them we want them to act and plan to counter climate change.

Below is the first post on our Beneath the Wisteria blog:

Tom Blees has a Prescription for the Planet.

He recognises the fact that the earth is ill and in a privately published book has put together his prescription.

Writing in praise of the book, the Director at Plasma Research in the US, Louis J. Circeo Jr., Ph.D. said: “Tom Blees has embarked on an important journey to launch a Global Energy Revolution. This book brings together the most important technologies of the day to counter the effects of global warming and looming energy crisis”.

Blees book is accompanied by the website that helps readers understand what he says is a painless remedy for energy and environmental crisis.

On the book’s back cover it says: “Global crisis, like climate change, pollution, and resource wars simply cannot be managed by the same systems that created them. The unprecedented severity of these problems demands a new world paradigm that actually offers solutions and promises a better life for all.

“Prescriptions for the Planet offers real remedies for all those dilemmas-and more. Impeccably researched and lucidly written, this is a must read for anyone concerned about the health and well-being of Planet Earth and its inhabitants.”