Today, Amy Goodman interviewed Richard Muller:
The following excerpt is from Democracy Now:
After years of denying global warming, physicist Richard Muller now says "global warming is real and humans are almost entirely the cause." The admission by Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley and founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, has gained additional attention because some of his research has been funded by Charles Koch of the Koch Brothers, the right-wing billionaire known for funding climate skeptic groups like the Heartland Institute. "We can make the scientific case more solidly than had been made in the past," Muller claims. "I think this does say we do need to take action, we do need to do something about it."
At Rolling Stone, Bill McKibben puts the hot summer into perspective:
If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.
So far we’ve raised the temperature of the earth about one degree Celsius, and two decades ago it was hard to believe this would be enough to cause huge damage. But it was. We’ve clearly come out of the Holocene and into something else. Forty percent of the summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone; the ocean is 30 percent more acidic. There’s nothing theoretical about any of this any more. Since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere is about 4 percent wetter than it used to be, which has loaded the dice for drought and flood. In my home country, 2011 smashed the record for multibillion-dollar weather disasters—and we were hit nowhere near as badly as some. Thailand’s record flooding late in the year did damage equivalent to 18 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). That’s almost unbelievable. But it’s not just scientists who have been warning us. Insurance companies—the people in our economy who we ask to analyze risk—have been bellowing in their quiet, actuarial way for years. Here’s Munich Re, the world’s largest insurer, in their 2010 annual report: “The reinsurer has built up the world’s most comprehensive natural catastrophe database, which shows a marked increase in the number of weather-related events. For instance, globally, loss-related floods have more than tripled since 1980, and windstorm natural catastrophes more than doubled, with particularly heavy losses from Atlantic hurricanes. This rise cannot be explained without global warming.”
I'm getting really tired of hearing people talk the talk, without walking the walk. All of us do it, me included (what else can you say when I take a long airplane trip to vacation in San Francisco, despite the fact that I often ride a bicycle to work?). In the meantime, we are living in the only industrialized country that is still debating whether burning fossil fuels is heating up the planet. I'm tired of people driving to Earth Day in big SUVs. I'm tired of the fact that most of us who whine about sustainability (including me) live comparable lifestyles to those who downplay the importance of such issues.
And how is THIS for a sobering talk?
The speaker is Dr. Peter Raven who, in a gentle voice, is reading the riot act to the audience (his speech "Saving Ourselves" runs from 5:55 to 29:00). Raven is a courageous speaker who is not afraid to tie the exhaustion of natural resources to the exploding number of human beings on planet Earth. His facts and figures are not in dispute by any thinking person.
[At the 29:00 mark, Raven describes an attempt to reclaim a precious preserve of extremely bio-diverse land in Costa Rica--this video was created at a fundraiser for that effort, titled the "Children's Eternal Rainforest."]
As Bill McKibben says, it's time to severely devalue mere talk and to start making things really happen. The path is going to require some conscious change at the highest levels, because we cannot depend on ourselves to keep making the right decisions--we don't have that kind of willpower. We don't yet know exactly where we are headed, but we do know that we need to steer sharply away from fossil fuels. We also have some reason to believe that this future devoid of fossil fuels could be an opportunity as much as it is a crisis--see this talk by Amory Lovins, who argues that it is time to "Reinvent Fire."
About 80 people accompanied Reverend Billy and Savitri D - founders of the New York City based Church of Stop Shopping - to a political ritual, "Naked Grief" in the lobby of the Deutschebank in Barcelona's Placa Catalunya at noon today. The action was organized with activists and artists of The Influencers Festival. After entering the bank lobby, the crowd began dramatically weeping. Savitri D disrobed, and as the Barcelonans around her cried, Reverend Billy implored the "God of Deutsche Bank" to stop investing in CO2 emitting coal-fired power plants. Eventually coal was poured over the head and shoulders of the "Naked Mother" as the crying crowd shouted "Earthalujah!"
The Chamber of Commerce spent more money on the 2010 elections than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined, and 94% of those dollars went to climate-change deniers. That helps explain why the House voted last year to say that global warming isn’t real.
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