Gore & Suzuki on Climate Change

Articles on climate change (CC) tend to focus on drought & floods and extinctions eg. polar bears, but these things are already with us and seem not to be moving people to action. Let's try a new focus.

What could we lose if CC is ignored?

The Maldives government has already pleaded its case to the United Nations, saying, "stop climate change or we will drown."
The maldives are a swarm of small island atolls in 26 groups off the southern coast of India. Their average height above sea level is 6 feet. Every island is surrounded by beautiful white sand, just like the islands in the Caribbean, in the south Pacific. Just like low lying coastal areas everywhere. Focus on the fact that these are the places we all dream of being able to go on vacation. Miami Beach, Waikiki, Jamaica, Fiji, Seychelles, Tahiti.

1) It's a straight line from burning fossil fuels which emit carbon gas wastes, to climate change to global warming to icecaps melting to sea level rise to the end of white sand beaches everywhere.

In short, if you want to keep your gas guzzler the price is no more sandy beach vacations by the ocean.

re: PM Stephen Harper saying on entering office, "we will not meet Kyoto limits on GGs.
David Suzuki seeks to rebut Stephen Harper's claim that fighting climate change will kill Canada's economy by quoting Sweden's success in reducing greenhouse gases (GG) by 8% since 1990 while increasing their economy by 44% (Suzuki's figures) but Canada's economy is many times more resource based than Sweden's. Apples & oranges. Canada's energy corporations must be worried that just as they are becoming major players in the energy market, they are being asked to stop producing oil & gas & coal.

I wonder why is no one asking Al Gore how we are to stop population growth and to reduce world population? Ehrlich wrote the Population Bomb in 1968. Malthus warned of population growth a hundred years before that!
Is no one with a high profile speaking of it because they have too much money at stake? Are they afraid that as PM Harper claqims, if we cut GGs and don't fix the population growth problem we have to give up the luxurious lifestyle we enjoy here in the first world?
If we reduced per capita production of GGs by 2050 but the population grows by 50% by 2050 we will not have gained an inch on climate change, we will have lost ground.

Re-phrase the problem, want to save the white sand beaches? Stop having babies.

How do we get people to want to stop having babies?
1) Educate women. Give it to them free of charge. As in South Korea, educate women so that they have an option in life to support themselves without having half a dozen ofspring at the behest of a man seeking an heir.
2) Change the inheritance laws so that men will not prefer male children over females.
3) Legislate equality between the sexes. Mandate that leaders must alternate gender, whatever, do something to change the crazy desire for male children only.
Remove the incentives to have children, eg, baby bonus cheques, tax deductions for dependents..
Provide free conraception everywhere.
Buy vasectomies from male citizens.
Find surgical reversal technology for tubal ligations and pay women to have them.
Think tank ways to disincentivize having babies.
Stopping the catastrophe of CC is more important than the problem of too few young people / workers down the road.

Change the economical philosophy that growth must predominate. That precept can only work if population growth remains unchecked and that is devastating.
Educate everyone by means of a mandatory school syllabus of climate change and the long term effect of business practices.
Extend this list.

Canadian Politics on the Wet Coast

A snapshot:

We have a Federal minority government that depends for staying in office on playing the separatists, the liberals and the socialists against each other and are doing it very nicely indeed, except that all they have achieved by 5 o'clock when they all go home, is to have stayed on the high wire for another day.
Our PM is on a Trade Mission, read, staying out of trouble by staying out of country.

Provincially, we have an egomaniac with a huge majority who is content to ride the wave of popularity he attained by winning the right to impoverish the province by hosting the winter Olympics.

Can't get rid of the swine and everything is just going to cost more to pay for the parties he is enjoying until the games are over and the bills come in.

I've said for years, that we shouldn't think our politicians are less corrupt than those in the average banana republic, just because they speak English.

Arts Matters

CBC broadcast on the Arts in Kelowna Nov 6th 2009

My comments:
The speaker is mistaken in interpreting the quantity of brain activity as demonstrated by an MRI while listening to singing vs the speaking voice as a superior outcome because the qualitative value of the experiment is not measured.

More stimulus is not necessarily better stimulus. Nature is not a loud, noisy place. Humans did not evolve to thrive in a noisy, highly stimulating environment, but we can beciome addicted to high levels of stimulus with poor outcomes.

Few would agree that a constantly stimulating environment that we cannot shut off but cannot do without is a better environment.

The 350 Pledge

What is 350? 350 ppm (parts per million) is the number that leading scientists say is the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. We are already at close to 400 ppm so we need to reduce fast.

So I have signed a pledge to do my part to help get us down to 350 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere. If you want to do so, go here:
http://www.sensociety.org/

I pledge to park my car 9 months of the year and commute the 25kms from Armstrong to my office in Vernon by bicycle, 50kms roundtrip, which I have been doing for 3 years now. Dec-Feb the roads get silly around here, but I carpool as much as possible.

Go Green!

What It Takes

We dragged ourselves out of the water and lay on our backs in the sun. Donnie and I had just swum across the lake and back.
Never swim without a buddy.
My shoulders were burning and my lungs had been turned inside out. I was ready to heave and I felt great.

Donnie flopped over onto his stomach on the warm, rough boards of the pier.
"I wanna go sub ten hours next summer. Can you help me, Clyde?"

I raised my head with my hands, feeling my abs about to cramp, opened one eye, keeping the other closed against the bright sun and said:
"I don't know so much about going sub-10 from personal experience, oh, the information is out there. You can find it easily - training schedules, periodization, nutrition.. but I know this:
you gotta love it.

You have to love it so much it lives in your gut, you gotta want it, want it so bad that it gnaws at you, that the goal becomes a need, a need that you would give anything for. You have to be willing to go out in appalling weather, to bike for four hours before dawn, to run on blistered feet with an aching back and pain in your lungs, to forego the beer with your non-tri friends because you have to be in bed by 8pm.

Going sub-10 is beyond most mortals. It means being willing to sacrifice pride, to mess yourself in front of God and everybody, to sweat and bleed and puke if necessary to get to that line before it hits 6 digits, 10:00:00. It means putting it all out there, everything you've got, being honest, being human - with all the weaknesses and frailties. You gotta want to wallow in the mud and the blood and the tears, to take your body where your will wants it to go.

If you want it that much, maybe you can go sub-10.
Then you can tell the rest of us how you did it."

Then I lay back down on the pier and thought about the race next month.
We hadn't done this year's sufferfest yet, and Donnie was already thinking about next year!
Ah, the ambitions of youth.

Use it or Lose it

The race to develop the resources of the Arctic region will devastate this pristine environment turning it into a

vast sterile, festering wasteland. Think Niger Delta with snow and ice.


Sovereignty claims in the arctic again begin to conflict with Canada's 142 year long ownership of Arctic territory.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently visited the high north, dined on local fare and proclaimed that merely having

the Inuit peoples living there isn't enough, we must "use it or lose it."
The Inuit were re-located to the high north in 1953, a land of a 3-month long totally dark Winter, and its

reciprocal 3-month long summer of 24hour daylight and have been largely neglected since then.
Nunavut was established as a separate federal territory in 1999, governed by the Inuit themselves but with funding

from Ottawa.
Recent explorations in the Arctic by Russia, Norway and the USA have stirred the Canadian federal government into

action, at least, into speaking up.
However, I believe that, lurking behind this rhetoric about sovereignty - a legitimate concern, since keeping

foreign interests out is likely to be easier than getting them out once they have established a foothold, is a

desire on the Federal Liberals to develop the Arctic's resources, to wit: Oil, gas, uranium, gold, diamonds,

minerals with graet cash value and a high return rate on investment.
ALL of the above mentioned resources are extracted from the environment at the expense of the environment. There is

no known method of sustainable, eco-friendly extraction of these resources. Therefore, in short, development of

Canada's north in order to establish "use" of the region is guaranteed to destroy the region for habitable purposes

and as a habitat for indigenous species, such as Caribou, bear, fox, birds, and every living creature. Even sealife

is endangered because the pristine Arctic waters will be polluted by runoff from mine tailings, oil production

residue and spills, radiation poisoning, increased cancer rates are already extant in the Inuit population.
The race to develop the Arctic is sure to turn this vast pure habitat into a wasteland devoid of healthy life.

Eve of my 57th birthday.

During the last 24 hours sefton and I have written a really interesting (I think) story on the Morning Electroshock forum over at Everyauthor.com site.

We seem to have similar mentalities albeit different styles when it comes to writing and we have put some very exciting prose together online. Never met the guy face to face but we once spoke on the phone for 20 minutes.

My birthday tomorrow. I'm fine right now but tomorrow I'll be old! 57. What of that? Dunno. It's just a number, factors of 1, 3, 19, 57, not even prime. I'm planning to dine out at a restaurant that offers a free entrée for the B'day Boy and later go to Rosters where they donate chicken wings equal to the number of years you have managed to remain upright and breathing.

I'll try to remain sober as well.