The Time has Come

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Fourth Assessment Report, Working Group III, draft of May 4, 2007, final draft to be released in November 2007. The IPCC is a joint project of the World Meteorolgical Organization and the United Nations Environment Program.

²See BBC News, May 4, 2007, online at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6620909.stm. Other typical responses were: “Mitigating the effects of climate change is not only cost-effective over the next 25 years, but it is actually affordable.” Geotimes web extra, “IPCC says Climate Change Mitigation is Affordable,” May 4, 2007, online at: http://www.agiweb.org/geotimes/may07/article.html?id=WebExtra050407.html; “World Has What It Takes to Fight Climate Change,” Climate Ark, Climate Change blog, May 3, 2007, http://www.climateark.org/blog/2007/05/consensus_reached_on_climate_m.asp.

³There is one exception, which is fragmentary and went unnoticed by the journalists I read: Category A1 (on page 22 of the report) calls for holding CO₂ under 400 by the year 2050, leading to a 2.0° to 2.4° increase. The mitigation in CO₂ requires a reduction of from 50 percent up to 90 percent in emissions from present levels. No GDP reductions are given, presumably because they offer no solace to hopes for economic growth. As noted, the report as a whole is unfinished. It is also fiendishly difficult to follow. If you enjoy scratching your head, then I can recommend an hour spent in trying to make sense of the IPCC findings.

⁴IPCC report, op. cit., p. 26.

⁵Both in terms of direct damage, for example, the nuclear epoch or chemical pollution; or in the commission of gross error, for example, the notions of witchcraft, phrenology, or of the races of humankind as biological subspeciation, all produced by what was considered to be “science” of the day.

⁶I recall reading some years ago that approximately one-third of the economy depended upon electronics, whose foundation is quantum mechanics, a form of discourse entirely closed to common sense and way beyond crude manipulation by dominant ideology.

⁷For the debate see http://www.zmag.org/debatesglobalwarming.html. Cockburn's rejection of the greenhouse gas/global warming hypothesis is longstanding. When I was running for the U.S. Senate in 1998 on the Green Party line and foregrounding the need to radically contend with global warming, Alex was supportive except in this respect, in which he identified me as deluded by the global warming hypothesis.

⁸The most authoritative such network (which even considered l'affaire Cockburn) is to be found at http://www.realclimate.org.