Thermonuclear armageddon and climate change: a fair likeness?
A gathering of 20 Nobel Prize winners, calling itself the St James's Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium, has released a memorandum stating that 'Global climate change represents a threat of similar proportions' to that of thermonuclear armageddon at the height of the Cold War.
The memorandum, agreed by laureates in fields as diverse as physics, economics, peace and literature, identified three 'key requirements' for the world to avoid global warming of more than 2°C and associated 'unmanageable climate risks'.
The first of these is for the United Nations Climate Change Conference hosted in Copenhagen this December to agree an 'effective and just global agreement on climate change'. The second is for a 'low carbon energy infrastructure', which basically means switching energy production to much less emission-heavy systems. The third is for the protection of tropical forests.
So far, so unremarkable. These are the widely acknowledged political aims of climate-sensitive environmentalists the world over. That is until the bit about thermonuclear armageddon. It's fair to say that the facts relating to the outcome of tossing multi-megaton-yield nuclear warheads around the planet are a little more cut and dried than those relating to climate change.
The qualitative difference between the two threats is perhaps nowhere better expressed, however inadvertently, than by the convener of the symposium himself, Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber. Where once we had 'the Cold War notion of mutually-assured destruction,' he told the Times, 'Today we have mutually-assured increases in greenhouse gases.'
OK. But while debates around climate change are still qualified by the words 'might', 'could' and 'predicted', it's probably fair to say that the average person in the street may view the comparison of carbon emissions with things that can vapourise a major city in seconds as unhelpfully alarmist and perhaps just a little bit silly.
~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~34~RS~)
Comments
Man these Climate Cadets are pompous.
We're all used to psycho-babble - welcome to sustaino-babble.
They never use one short word when they can get away with 5 or 6 long and complex words.
How about this little gem:
"Clear policy frameworks aimed at fostering ..."
I thought they wanted some kind of urgent action ?
Later on we read:
"Building capacity as well as mechanisms for verification and national governance structures that can support and reward the maintenance ..."
These dudes need to get out more. Talking of which ... I'm going for a low-carbon walk with my low-carbon pet. Toodle pip.
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what these people seem to forget is can prove dropping nuclear bombs on each other is pretty serious, we have carried out enough real life experiments and collected enough empirical data. With climate change, where is the real life, empirical data to prove the hypothesis?
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There is plenty of proof, the is just no consensus. Its easy to know the outcome of dropping a nuke on a certain place, because we know the numbers in the equation: the amount of people in the locaton, the power of the blast. Climate change on the other hand has thousands of contributing factors, that no one body seems to accumulate. There are so many things that need to be take into account, so many actions that cause different reactions, which then change other parts of the equation. The problem is there are just so many possibilities its almost impossible to say exactly what will happen. This is what is holding up the process of preventing it.
All we can say for sure is that the climate is changing, it is caused by man, and what happens next is unpredictable and dangerous.
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We are all concerned about climate change and one of the big questions is whether the world's temperature really has increased as much as some claim - and whether it is now falling.
Blogger Anthony Watts has started a citizens' action campaign to check weather stations round the USA.
So far they have surveyed two thirds of the USA's weather station and found that 97% of them are compromised. That's right - only 3% are sited correctly.
The 97% of dud stations include stations next to roads, next to air-con units, next to transformers. Today's posting shows a temperature station next to a barbecue. One previous finding was a station at an airport, The runway has been extended and now jets turn and rev their engines towards the Stevenson screen.
And this is the foundation of the whole global warming bandwagon.
Yes, the thermometers are showing warmer conditions. Because rural stations have been absorbed into towns. New roads, new concrete areas, power lines, barbecues, jet engines all look like a trend.
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Is there any particular reason why The Blog of Bloom is never considered a worthwhile entry to appear anywhere in the BBC's own "Science & Environment" news web page?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/default.stm
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Hi Omnologos !
I think this blog is kept hidden because it's not fully on-message.
For example we've had postings that question the fatuous catlin expedition, the irony of watching 2 Climate Cadets being rescued by a Big Oil Tanker, and now Richard suggests here that the pompous Lorry-Ate-Symposium has exaggerated its claims.
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Interesting history lesson:
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/05/29/lawrence-solomon-enron-s-other-secret.aspx
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@Jack
I think this blog is kept hidden because it's not fully on-message
This blog appears to be so far off-message, I'm beginning to think the Top Gear Team are quietly taking over the BBC
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A presentation by an amazing man--Dr. Michael Crichton.
He speaks of how advocacy works with examples.
The Global Warming nonsense is a scam.
Click here for Dr. Crichton's presentation
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I can see what the main idea of this post has to do with promoting environmentalism.
It seems that all the doomsday scenarios are putting the general public off because we've so cynical of "the end is nigh" meesage so popular in todays media and political rhetoric.
Global Warming is real, it's just not as cleanly predictable as a nuclear bomb.
http://tinyurl.com/lzm6al
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