climate change by numbers

The current issue of Nature has two very significant research papers on the modelling of climate change and how much carbon dioxide we can still emit before crossing the threshold towards unmitigated disaster (pp 1158, 1163). It's all very depressing reading, but good to have some solid numbers to fall back on (and very easy to remember: 1 trillion tons of CO2 = very bad news). Plus there are also several editorial pieces to explain the background.

I just have to disagree with the headline of the editorial which says "Time to act". The time to act was 15 years ago. I remember learning about all this at the tail end of the previous environmental crisis (forests dying from SO2 and acid rain) and I remember how I first came across a mention of CO2 as a pollutant, and thinking what's wrong with CO2 now? That must have been about 1989 -- I was involved in local politics with Germany's Green Party at the time.

If there is one thing we haven't got now it's time. And very depressingly, as has become obvious from the recent not so very green budget of the UK government, certain politicians haven't understood that yet. Or maybe they just cynically rely on the fact that the catastrophe will only happen after they are out of office anyway ...

the natural philosophy of greed

More insights from Naomi Klein, as to why greed has become the only game in town:

Thanks a million, Ayn Rand, for setting the greedy free
The trickle-down theory beloved of Greenspan and his ilk is less a philosophy than a handy excuse for avarice

Now she should talk that greed thing through with her agent and publisher, because I would have bought her book if it wasn't so bloody expensive ... :) Oh well, I'll just wait for the paperback.


PS (July 2010) Seeing that this page seems to pop up frequently when people google for the terms "philosphy + greed", I'm thinking of adding some value to it. While I haven't studied the philosophy of greed as such, I have written a (tongue in cheek) piece about the thermodynamics of greed. Specifically, I find it puzzling that, while the third law of thermodynamics states that overall disorder must increase, so all "sorting" activities must be paid for by creating random mixtures elsewhere, the economy tends to be driven by forces that make rich people richer and poor people poorer, so reduces entropy. That piece was published in German in Nachrichten aus der Chemie in April 2007 and will feature in my next German book due to appear in 2011. Might do an English version for the blog, watch this space.

shock doctrine

I've read an interesting extract from Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine. Her thesis is that the current brand of neoliberal / globalized capitalism thrives not so much on freedom but on disasters which create a "clean slate" and often suspend democratic process and human rights, giving the swift commercial operator a unique chance to move in.

Click Shock Doctrine for extracts, an interview with the author, and more.

PS: In other news, while I was looking for the shock doctrine page, I found the Guardian headline: "Buying sex could become a crime"

I couldn't help thinking that this would make a large number of marriages illegal ...