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The Canary In The Coal Mine: Climate Change in Time Lapse Photography

by: Edger

Sun Sep 13, 2009 at 17:18:02 PDT        
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(11 am. - promoted by ek hornbeck)

Time-lapse proof of extreme ice loss: James Balog on TED.com

"Ninety five percent of the glaciers in the world are retreating or shrinking... there is no scientific dispute about that"

Photographer James Balog shares new image sequences from the Extreme Ice Survey, a network of time-lapse cameras recording glaciers receding at an alarming rate, some of the most vivid evidence yet of climate change. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009 in Oxford, England. Duration: 19:22)
Edger :: The Canary In The Coal Mine: Climate Change in Time Lapse Photography
James Balog and the Extreme Ice Survey were featured in a one-hour documentary on NOVA/PBS on March 24, 2009. The film follow[ed] James as he photographs spectacular landscapes in Alaska, Greenland, and Iceland and, with his team, collects images from his time-lapse cameras.


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The Canary In The Coal Mine: Climate Change in Time Lapse Photography | 32 comments
Well... it's been nice knowing you... (4.00 / 19)

That polar bear... (4.00 / 5)
...breaks my heart.

The fierce urgency of now.  Martin
[ Parent ]
Breaks my heart -- what we have done! (4.00 / 3)
[ Parent ]
stunning photo (4.00 / 2)


"We are in the Age of Shiva, an age of death and rebirth. If we only focus on what is past we feel loss. If we focus on new beginnings we feel anticipation, like looking forward to a new day without knowing quite what the weather is going to be like."
[ Parent ]
thanks Edger (4.00 / 5)

I love TED Talks

and Photography too.

This ought to be good -- watching it now!

"The press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Seymour, 1807

WOW, simply stunning (4.00 / 5)

where is the emergency brake,
on this contraption?

Oh yeah, that's right --
Cap & Trade needs to go through the Baucus Finance Committee, doesn't it?

Bye Bye, Canaries of the North.



"The press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Seymour, 1807

[ Parent ]
From what little I know about cap and trade (4.00 / 7)
I have the feeling that it is a way to pretend to ourselves that we're doing something about the problem.

I think that we are are beyond the point of no return and that nothing can save us, unfortunately.

[ Parent ]
I'm a bit more hopeful about Cap and Trade (4.00 / 5)

a similar program actually worked to virtually stop Acid Rain!

Do you miss Acid Rain?


It's funny what can happen
when the "Hidden Costs" of Pollution

get "internalized", into those economic Profit Equations,
or face fines, by law.

Ingenuity will find a way,
to cut those not-so-hidden costs, then!


More afraid of Max-headroom Baucus' take on this Issue --
er, I mean, worried that he will be on the take on this Issue, too!

"The press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Seymour, 1807

[ Parent ]
From (4.00 / 7)
The End Of The Beginning?

Billmon in September of [2006] posted a story about:

British scientist James Lovelock and his warning that catastrophic global climate change is both imminent and unstoppable:

Within the next decade or two, Lovelock forecasts, Gaia will hike her thermostat by at least 10 degrees. Earth, he predicts, will be hotter than at any time since the Eocene Age 55 million years ago, when crocodiles swam in the Arctic Ocean.

"There's no realization of how quickly and irreversibly the planet is changing," Lovelock says. "Maybe 200 million people will migrate close to the Arctic and survive this. Even if we took extraordinary steps, it would take the world 1,000 years to recover."

It would be easy to view this as just another kooky end-of-the-world theory, if it weren't for the history of some of Lovelock's other kooky theories -- like the time in the late '70s when he hypothesized that chlorofluorocarbons wafted high into the stratosphere would eat great big holes in the ozone layer, exposing first the polar regions and then the rest of the earth's surface to increasingly harmful ultraviolet radiation. What a nut.

As far as I can tell, Lovelock's latest crackpot (or should I say "crockpot"?) idea is still the minority opinion among climatologists, most of whom seem to believe we have perhaps 70-100 years before the seriously disastrous greenhouse effects kick in -- although Jim Hansen, the NASA scientist, has suggested that unless major cuts in Co2 emissions are made within the next decade, the process will become every bit as irreversible as Lovelock claims it already is.



[ Parent ]
does that mean we give up? (4.00 / 5)

I tend to give more credence to Hansen, and Gore,
and James Balog in your diary --

that the harm can be minimized,
and hopefully reversed, you know
that "window of opportunity" stuff.


a very funny Al Gore, at the TED Talks


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...


Bullet points from the Talk:


What can you DO about the Climate Crisis?

Target areas for reversing the Carbon Trend:

A) Efficieny in End-use Engery and Conservation

B) Efficieny in Energy Sources

C) Efficieny in Cars and Trucks

D) Efficieny in other Transportation

E) Carbon Capture and Sequestration (will be the "killer app")


What can you DO about the Climate Crisis?

1. Reduce carbon emissions from your home energy use.
(through better design, insulation, buy green energy)

2. Reduce carbon emissions from your auto and other transportation.
(buy a hybrid, use light rail, carpool, biking)

3. Be a green consumer.
Buy the most energy-efficient applicances and other products.

4. Live a "carbon neutral" life. It's easy than you think.
Reduce carbon emission; then buy offset the rest.

5. Use the Carbon Calculator.
Find out how to become "carbon neutral" (www.climatecrisis.net)

6. Make your Business "carbon neutral".
(It's not as hard as you think.)

7. Integrate climate solutions into all your innovations
(whether in Technology, Design, or Entertainment)

8. Invest substainably -- in companies and funds
that are part of the solution.

9. Become a catalyst for change in your community.
Teach others about the Climate Crisis

10. Raise awareness by promoting "An Inconvenient Truth"

11. Send someone to Nashville who can learn how to give
the Climate Crisis slideshow

12. Become politically active - Speak up!
Contact you elected Officials! Make Democracy work!

13. Urge the U.S. to join the rest of the world community
in "capping and trading" carbon emissions.
The market will work to solve this problem.

14. Help with the mass persuasion campaign when
it is launched this Spring. We have to change
the minds of the American People.

15. Re-brand Global Warming. Let's call it the " Climate Crisis".
It really is a "Planetary Emergency".


This is NOT a Political Issue. according to Al



"The press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Seymour, 1807

[ Parent ]
Jim Hansen is not a big supporter of can and trade either (4.00 / 3)
and he is instead proposing a "carbon tax" on fossil fuels that would be re-distributed equally among all citizens in the form of payments into their bank accounts.

Better world: Tax carbon and give the money to the people
Richard Webb, NewScientist.com, September 13, 2009

CONSIDER this injustice. Governments tax labour and profit, the engines of prosperity, while pollution and the depletion of resources - arguably the greatest threats to our economic well-being - remain largely untouched. So while we're thinking about how to rebuild our broken economies, here's a plea for a new cornerstone: a universal carbon tax.

The world needs to put a price on carbon, that much is agreed. The Kyoto protocol involves a very different mechanism, known as cap and trade. Permits to emit carbon are distributed among polluters up to a total, or "cap", equivalent to existing levels of carbon emissions. Those who don't use all their permits can sell them to those who exceed their allocation. Over time, the number of permits is reduced, raising their price and encouraging people to reduce emissions.

That's the theory, but the reality has not lived up to expectations. The world's largest cap-and-trade scheme, the European Union's Emissions Trading System, saw emissions rise 2 per cent in its first trading period from 2005 to 2007. Too many permits were distributed, and after tripling in value in the first six months of trading, their price rapidly collapsed to virtually nothing.

Tweaks introduced for the scheme's second phase might make it more effective, but there are some weaknesses to cap and trade that will never be eradicated. In particular, it is open to manipulation and political influence, and if not properly managed just shifts pollution around rather than reducing it. It also covers only a few carbon-intensive industries. The mooted introduction of a similar scheme of personal carbon credits for private consumption would have many of the same drawbacks - and will inevitably be a bureaucratic nightmare.

A universal carbon tax could be far simpler. NASA climatologist James Hansen is a vocal proponent, favouring a variant in which fossil fuels are taxed at source or at a country's port of entry. The most polluting fuels in terms of carbon emissions, such as coal or tar-sand-derived oil, could be taxed more heavily than others. Consumers would not pay the tax directly, but its effect would permeate through to everything from the price of gas to the price of food: the more carbon-intensive goods or services are, the more heavily they will be hit.

That doesn't mean that consumers need be out of pocket. As Hansen envisages the scheme, the proceeds of the tax should not be kept by the government, but instead distributed equally among all citizens in the form of payments into their bank accounts. Those who make greener choices - flying less, insulating their home, running a more energy-efficient car - will make a net profit from the tax.

The scheme is not without its difficulties. Poorer people spend a larger proportion of their income on basics such as heating and food, so they could be hit hardest. Such effects would have to be mitigated through targeted subsidies for poorer households, for instance, to insulate their homes.


[ Parent ]
Cool EPA video (4.00 / 1)

shows Cap and Trade in action

http://www.epa.gov/captrade/ma...

just click Play!

"The press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Seymour, 1807

[ Parent ]
Included in Cap and Trade 101: (4.00 / 2)
What is Cap and Trade?

In short, the "cap" is a legal limit on the quantity of greenhouse gases that a region can emit each year and "trade" means that companies may swap among themselves the permission - or permits - to emit greenhouse gases.

Cap and trade commits us to responsible limits on global warming emissions and gradually steps down those limits over time. Setting commonsense rules, cap and trade sparks the competitiveness and ingenuity of the marketplace to reduce emissions as smoothly, efficiently, and cost-effectively as possible.

Cap and trade at it's best, and that assumes that industry will not emasculate it the same way they did health care reform, is only a way of reducing the rate of increase of emissions pumped into the atmosphere.

The problem is that with what has already been pumped into the atmosphere we are far past the tipping point and global warming is already runaway and out of control.

Even if we shut down the entire global economy, all transportation, all industrial production and all heat generation (turn off your furnace in the winter?) and capped ALL emissions worldwide tonight, it is too late. I am convinced of this by now.

I think we are a dying civilization. A civilization in its old age, and like a person who grows old and dies, so too do civilizations. All things that live, eventually die.

It sounds depressing and defeatist, but it is not.

The point of life is not how many years there are in your life or how long you can avoid dying, but rather how much life there is in your years.


Is it possible that myself, my existence, so contains being and nothing that death is merely the "off" interval in an on/off pulsation which must be eternal - because every alternative of this pulsation (e.g., its absence) would in due course imply its presence? Is it conceivable, then, that I am basically an eternal existence momentarily and needlessly terrified by one half of itself because it has identified all of itself with the other half? If the choice must be either white or black, must I so commit myself to the white side that I cannot be a good sport and actually play the Game of Black-and-White, with the implicit knowledge that neither can win?

-- Watts, "The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are"


[ Parent ]
that is depressing (4.00 / 2)

global geo-engineering techniques
could come to the rescue,
to remove CO2,

block Sunlight, etc.

Feedback loops,
can be tweaked
to run the other way,
if you find the right trigger points.

Hell, a few Mt Pinatubo's could do it for us, lol


I, for one, refuse to just laid down, and die.

"The press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Seymour, 1807

[ Parent ]
It's not depressing at all. ;-) (4.00 / 3)
We forget too easily that the world we live in is a world of opposites that require each other for there existence, and that this is what gives us life.

We can't have up without down, or day without night, or light without dark, or on without off.

And neither can we have life without death, like a magnet cannot exist without both a north pole and a south pole.

Our unavoidable death is what gives us our life.

We are forever doing the wrong thing if we try only to extend our years and let ourselves be filled with anxiety about death at the expense of filling our years with life.


[ Parent ]
well then depressing for our kids (4.00 / 3)

and our grandkids then.



"The press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Seymour, 1807

[ Parent ]
No... (4.00 / 3)
They get the same deal. The same deal we got and every person ever born throughout history got.

The same deal as a magnet, or a day... or a butterfly.


[ Parent ]
Cap and trade is something, but not nearly enough (4.00 / 4)
China is sayingg that we need to act DRASTICALLY in the next 20 years, and that is comingg from China.

US? We're going to cut 5% over that 20yrs. By then, it's too late.

Change? Once again, what we are finding that the only difference is that the beatings have gotten less severe when Dems are in charge than when the GOoPers are. But hey! Something is almost better than almost nothing.

Almost

The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?' - 1984

[ Parent ]
Listened to Ed Schultz yesterday afternoon, while going to an appt. (4.00 / 2)
His guest was Leo Gerard, President of International Steelworkers Union.  What a pleasure that man is:  he spoke on cap and trade, as well as healthcare.

He said that China is all set to grab the windmill market -- so, if we don't hurry up, we will lose that market, too.  

In a rush right now, but here's Ed's site:  Ed Schultz

Say "YES" to Generation We  Go there, read the Petition and sign, if you agree!   Say "YES" to GENERAL STRIKE

[ Parent ]
I looked all over for a recording of yesterday's show, but couldn't find it, (0.00 / 0)
(I think you have to pay for it).  But Schultz had Leo Gerard on his MSNBC Show that night and there is a transcript of that airing, but it is not as complete as was the radio airing, but here's a snipet:

The union's got a big victory from the Obama White House over the weekend, when the president agreed to impose temporary tariffs on tires imported from China.  Union leaders say cheap Chinese tires have cost American jobs and shut down plants, and putting an import tax on them will level the playing field for American workers.  

Joining me now is Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers International.  Mr. Gerard, good to have you with us tonight.  How bold a move was this by President Obama to go ahead and uphold the U.S.  International Trade Commission's ruling on this?  This is something the Bush administration did not do.  How bold is this in your opinion?  

LEO GERARD, UNITED STEELWORKERS INTERNATIONAL PRESIDENT:  I think it was a very important step, very important move.  In fact, this is the first time a president has brought meaning for sanctions against a foreign-a foreign country since Ronald Reagan.  Ronald Reagan did it twice.  So I'm pleased that President Obama stepped in.

We believe that this is a rule-base country.  We went to the International Trade Commission and said, China's breaking the rules.  They agreed.  Now President Obama's agreed.  I'm very pleased.  

SCHULTZ:  John Harwood of CNBC had an exclusive interview with President Obama today and asked him about this ruling and trade agreements.  Here's his response.  

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA:  I just want to make sure if we actually have rules written down, they mean something.  The next time I go to the American people or to Congress, saying this trade agreement is good for America, people have to have confidence that these words are going to mean something.  

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCHULTZ:  Mr. Gerard, what does this signal to the Chinese?  Is this a new day dawning on how we're going to deal with China, after we owe them a boat load of money?  If it wasn't for their help, I don't know if our economy would be floating right now.  What do you make of this?  

SCHULTZ:  I want to take a little license, I guess, with what you said.  We owe them a boat load of money because we've been sending them our jobs.  And they've been sending us their products.  We've been exporting jobs and importing products.  That's the wrong approach.  I think what President Obama has said is that he's now going to look at making sure that the rules of international trade are going to be followed.  

I'm very confident that what we ought to be doing now is using this opportunity to work with leadership in the Congress to talk about a new kind of trade pattern that we would take.  We owe China trillions of dollars, but that's because we've been running 300 and 400 billion dollar a year trade deficits for the last six, seven years.

If the president says we're going to have a rules-based system, I think then we have a look at how do we change the rules so that the rules favor American workers, so that we can export products and not jobs.  

SCHULTZ:  Do you think we can create jobs and the manufacturing sector in America with the trade agreements we have right now?  

GERARD:  I think the trade agreements we have now, Ed, are really knocking the manufacturing industry flat on its butt.  Recently, China said it was going to have a stimulus program, and that every product that was going to get bought in the stimulus program had to be made in China.  Just a couple of weeks ago, they said that they want to be the export platform for renewable energy.  

Just this week, they said they want to be the export platform for photovoltaic cells and wind turbines.  If we're going to try to have renewable energy so that we're not going to be prisoners of foreign oil, but we have to import wind turbines and photovoltaic cells from China, then that's not going to be much different.  

I believe, given a level playing field, that American workers can compete with anybody and everybody.  

SCHULTZ:  Now, China is not taking this well.  Beijing has responded.  They don't like the move that the president, what he's done with the tariffs.  Did you get the tariffs you wanted on tires?  Or was it a lower number?  

GERARD:  The tariff that the president sanctioned is a much lower number than we asked for.  It's a much lower number than the International Trade Commission approved.  But they used a different set of facts because they were able to look three and four and five months into the year, where we weren't.  They think these tariffs will be relatively equivalent to what the ITC said.  We accept them at their word.  We're going to monitor that.  

Let me say a word about China.  China is blustering and trying to bully.  They ought to stop that.  They sent an army of folks over here to try and intimidate us, to try and push us around.  The fact of the matter is these are the rules China agreed to when they entered the World Trading Organization.  When they entered the World Trading Organization, they said these are the rules we're willing to play by.  We went to the International Trade Commission, which in my view is the Supreme Court of trade in this country; we demonstrated unequivocally that they broke the rules.  

SCHULTZ:  That they cheat.  

GERARD:  That they cheated, that they broke the rules.  They surged in violation of what they said they would do.  Now for them to bluster and to bring about threats, that also is a violation of the World Trade Organization.  So I don't take them too seriously.  We're a rules-based society and we follow the rules.  

SCHULTZ:  President of the United International Steelworkers, Mr. Leo Gerard, thanks for your time tonight on this subject.  We'll visit again. . . . .

Unfortunately, this session didn't include his strong remarks on the healthcare issue (as in the radio show).  But I remember him saying that healthcare insurance is not healthcare, etc.

 

Say "YES" to Generation We  Go there, read the Petition and sign, if you agree!   Say "YES" to GENERAL STRIKE

[ Parent ]
it's quite possible (4.00 / 4)
that the most important reason to keep trying to fix things, is to sustain community. Because I don't think we're all going to die.

However, whomever is left will surely benefit from those of us who tried to keep it together, no?

"We are in the Age of Shiva, an age of death and rebirth. If we only focus on what is past we feel loss. If we focus on new beginnings we feel anticipation, like looking forward to a new day without knowing quite what the weather is going to be like."

[ Parent ]
Well, if Cap & Trade, "Green" Technology, and international climiate... (4.00 / 2)
treaties don't work, guess we'd better fast-track the Manned Mars Mission Plans and expand them to include evacuating the whole planet permanently.
[ Parent ]
Do we have to take cheney? (4.00 / 2)
Or any of his friends?
[ Parent ]
Nope, but don't tell him he's going to be left behind... (4.00 / 2)
till after the last ship leaves, or he'll get the CIA to shut down NASA...
[ Parent ]
hum..... (4.00 / 3)
first the heat......
then the fires.......
then the water.......
then the ice......
If we all whip out our AK47s (4.00 / 5)
and blow each other away there will be far less people to demand 27 different brands of nasal spray, instant twitters or Unicorn flu shots.
Obama did spawn the current American ammunition shortage didn't he.

Whatever you do to others you also do to yourself!
Gave you a pony for making me laugh (4.00 / 5)
but i kinda wanna cry too.

Is that wrong?

The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?' - 1984

[ Parent ]
Cap n trade (4.00 / 2)
Can All Trade!
Crash that Clunker(US government)
Hey is that bear humping that berg?  (See Subliminal sex in US media)

So should I
Suck on the exhaust pipe of my ten cylinder Dodge Dualie
Or just get the Unicorn flu shot

We all live in a yellow subterrene
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Whatever you do to others you also do to yourself!

it's also possible (4.00 / 3)
still, that we'll get the new ice age scenario, where the Atlantic convection currents grind to a halt (to oversimplify things). I don't it's currently rated high on the possibility list, but we are such small stupid beings, even the smartest of us, about this big ol' planet.

So, though climate change is pretty much a given, how it will play out, is not. Since we don't seem to be ready to stop burning up every iota of fossil fuel on the planet yet, one might even hope for the new ice age scenario.

Isn't science fun?

"We are in the Age of Shiva, an age of death and rebirth. If we only focus on what is past we feel loss. If we focus on new beginnings we feel anticipation, like looking forward to a new day without knowing quite what the weather is going to be like."

I see (4.00 / 4)
an undamped harmonic oscillator in this planet's future. It may right itself in a few ten-thousand years. Hard to believe a species can emit a couple million years worth of stored hydrocarbons in a couple hundred years and not expect consequences. In a million years Gaia won't even remember us.
[ Parent ]
aw, c'mon (4.00 / 4)
I'm sure we'll make for some really cool fossils.

"We are in the Age of Shiva, an age of death and rebirth. If we only focus on what is past we feel loss. If we focus on new beginnings we feel anticipation, like looking forward to a new day without knowing quite what the weather is going to be like."
[ Parent ]
Or something (4.00 / 4)


[ Parent ]
The Canary In The Coal Mine: Climate Change in Time Lapse Photography | 32 comments
Reform Immigration -
March for America
Sunday, March 21
 

March on Washington
Saturday, March 20
 

 

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