The Toronto Star notices a footnote to the IPCC report that states that it did not take into account recent observations of the movement of fresh water in polar ice. Now a team led by James Hansen, NASA’s head of climate policy, says there is a strong indication that their could be a non-linear response to warming that could trigger precipitously high ocean levels in decades rather than centuries. This response, should it occur, would be beyond our ability to do anything about it. Similar events have taken place in very short periods many times over the past 400,000 years according to ice core samples.
The only way we have of possibly holding off this possibility is to hold total increases in temperature rise to 1 degree centigrade over the next 100 years- this will not happen in today’s political climate.

Tighten your seat belts- it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

“Inexpensive as it is, though, the Aura Hybrid is controversial. Toyota’s (TM) hybrid business is booming—the Prius’ sales have doubled in the first five months of 2007, to 76,747 units—and Detroit automakers want a piece of the action. But critics will say the Aura Hybrid is little more than another sign of how far behind Detroit is. That’s because the Aura Green Line is a “mild” hybrid that doesn’t have the fuel efficiency of a “full” hybrid such as the Toyota Prius and Camry.”

Business Week gives a rave review to the Saturn Aura Hybrid noting that it is the cheapest hybrid at around $23,000. Only one problem: The mileage is 28/city, 35/highway. My Honda Accord LX was $18,600 and it gets 24/34. The Toyota Prius, a true hybrid gets 51/60 at around $28,000. This is why it outsells all other hybrids. It’s also why Honda dropped its $30,000 Accord hybrid that got one mile more per gallon than my $18,600 Accord.
It’s the same story with the Ford SUV hybrids and most others- they are not true hybrid technology and there is virtually no benefit to paying extra for them.

To me this is cynical marketing at its worst. They make these vehicles so they can claim a green strategy. At least Honda pulled theirs and they still have the most fuel efficient automotive line. I’m guessing they are going back to the drawing board to compete with Toyota. Meanwhile the US carmakers fight any regulatory improvements to fuel efficiency while losing market share every day. The unions and management have to wake up and truly embrace this technology because it is in our national interest.

A note about emissions. These hybrids, with the exception of the Prius, have marginally lower emissions because they still use full size engines. My Honda, however, is what is known as a Partial Zero Emission Vehicle (PZEV) which seems to be a contradictory statement. This designation came about because of California’s strict vehicle emission standards which the Asian manufacturers apply to all their US vehicles. The US makers, for the most part, sell different cars in California to meet the standards- they’d rather pollute the states with lower standards to save a few bucks. Don’t buy American cars until they start acting responsibly. This goes for union members too- if you don’t take your heads out of the sand there aren’t going to be any union automaker jobs left at American car makers because they will be out of business.

“It is not real in any language. We are looking for accountable language and numbers. I might be be a rock star, but I can count.”
Bono

He is talking about the G8 announcement on aid for AIDS in Africa, a 25 page document that manages to have no committments whatsoever in it, but he might as well be talking about the Bush global warming ‘initiative’.
These announcements are nothing more than disinformation, stalls and denial campaigns, in other words, carefully crafted lies designed to keep us from actually doing anything. This has become a pattern among politicians of all stripes worldwide. The problem is that we face a worldwide, long term crisis that requires concrete collective action now. And the nationalistic political systems we have in place are simply not up to the task of working on a global scale.
As a capitalist, I think the best hope is that some of the major multi-national businesses realize it is in their interest to deal with this, not waiting for governments to act. This may be driven by profit or the need to protect their markets but it has to happen. Unfortunately the big oil companies are collectively short-sighted from a strategic perspective because they know that nothing can replace the short term cash cow they are riding. Until they come around and stop their lobbying and funding of massive disinformation campaigns, progress will be slow and deadly.
I realize that my statements regarding global corporations will horrify some but I have to ask: Who else is going to lead it? There is a reason why most speculative fiction (near term sci-fi) writers usually project a world run by global conglomerates- they cannot see any other obvious future.

I’ve been seeing the word mitigate being used more and more as we expand the dialogue regarding what we can actually do about climate change. For example today, in an article about a UN report on the melting of ice all over the world from the BBC there is this statement:

“Without taking measures to mitigate sea level rise, an estimated 145 million people, primarily in Asia, would be exposed to the risk of flooding.”

Just what exactly do they think this means? With one sentence there is the implication that there are solutions to these kinds of catastrophic changes. We can’t ‘mitigate’ the effects of glaciers melting in the Himalaya. Millions of people will lose their only sources of water. We can’t mitigate the effects of the Greenland icecap melting and raising sea levels several feet. We simply cannot ward off these types of changes. They are too global and too irreversible.
The problem here is political. Saying things like mitigate avoids discussion of the very real and hard choices we will face in the next 40-50 years.
And that’s a conservative estimate. Ask the Alaskan villagers whose towns have been destroyed by melting permafrost about ‘mitigation’. There isn’t any. The ground was solid and now it’s not. How do you mitigate that?