Discussions on the World
Discussions on the World
You may have seen that in her most recent quest for the limelight, Sarah Palin is teaming up with Discovery Communications for a new nature series calledC’s Alaska.
Discovery describes the show as a documentary series about the state’s natural wonders hosted by the former governor, vice presidential nominee, and Fox News contributor. She will receive more than $1 million per episode.
Click here to join our haiku competition to tell Discovery how ridiculous its choice is.
Discovery has long been a network renowned for its documentation of the natural world, with award-winning programs like Planet Earth and networks like Animal Planet and Treehugger.
For a corporation that has built its reputation on educating viewers about scientific realities, the decision to give Palin a platform is an alarming detour.
Among Palin’s anti-science positions is her outright denial that humans are contributing to climate change. She recently called global warming science “snake oil science,” ignoring the warnings of the nation’s most prestigious scientific academies, like NASA and the National Academy of Sciences.
We want to send a message to Discovery that it is alienating much of its potential audience by giving Palin a platform. And we’ve come up with an unconventional way to do so: a haiku competition.
Haiku is a form of Japanese poetry consisting of three lines: the first has five syllables, the second has seven, and the third has five. Traditional Japanese haiku has focused on nature, so what better way to lambast one of today’s most notorious anti-nature voices? Here’s an example:
Snake oil science?
But Alaska’s so pretty!
A glacier weeping
Can you come up with such a haiku? Once they are submitted, we’ll choose our top ten haiku and circle back to let you vote for the best.
Tell Discovery to stop fanning the flames of climate denial by submitting your own haiku.
Sphere: Related ContentOne of the leading experts on planet Earth, James Lovelock, believes that there is very little we can do to stave off global warming catastrophes. Lovelock is the man who created the Gaia theory – that the earth is essentially a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism.
“Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades.” This is the stark conclusion of James Lovelock, the globally respected environmental thinker and independent scientist who developed the Gaia theory in an interview this week with The Guardian.
Lovelock developed the Gaia hypothesis as an outgrowth of his work for NASA on methods of detecting life on Mars. The theory drew withering criticism from many in the scientific establishment.
Today, Lovelock believes that a rapid drop in carbon in the atmosphere could actually do more damage than good. He believes that the global warming that we are currently experiencing is offset by a cooling of 2-3ºC, caused by Global Dimming -essentially, the reduction of direct irradiance at the earth’s atmosphere as a result of industrial pollution, known to others as aerosol particles.
It’s a horrible catch 22 situation that leaves only a very small gap for any joy at all. If we continue to do nothing (note the use of the word continue), then we will doom ourselves. If we do do something, like a massive cut back in the emission of carbon in to our atmosphere, Lovelock believes that we would further damage Earth.
“Any economic downturn or planned cutback in fossil fuel use, which lessened aerosol density, would intensify the heating,” Lovelock will say, in a lecture to the Royal Society today. “If there were a 100 per cent cut in fossil fuel combustion it might get hotter not cooler. We live in a fool’s climate. We are damned if we continue to burn fuel and damned if we stop too suddenly.”
What’s worse is that Lovelock believes that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are underestimating the severity of climate change. He has labeled a report issued by the IPCC earlier this year as “properly cautious”. He believes the report leaves a tone of “we can fix this”, when there is none, adding that possibly six to eight billion people will suffer food and water shortages, intolerable climates, and the extinction of entire ecosystems.
“We are at war with the Earth and as in a blitzkrieg, events proceed faster than we can respond.” In his speech to the Royal Society, he will argue that when a model includes the whole Earth system it shows that “…when the carbon dioxide in the air exceeds 500 parts per million the global temperature suddenly rises 6ºC and becomes stable again despite further increases or decreases of atmospheric carbon dioxide. This contrasts with the IPCC models that predict that temperature rises and falls smoothly with increasing or decreasing carbon dioxide.”
Lovelock believes that we should attempt to lower greenhouse gases, and minimize the destruction of forests; but he believes that that will simply not be enough.
The bottom line, according to Lovelock, is that we will simply have to adapt.
adapted from materials at: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/
Sphere: Related ContentGeologists from the University of Leicester are among four scientists- including a Nobel prize-winner – who suggest that the Earth has entered a new age of geological time.
The Age of Aquarius? Not quite – It’s the Anthropocene Epoch, say the scientists writing in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. (web issue March 29; print issue April 1)
And they add that the dawning of this new epoch may include the sixth largest mass extinction in the Earth’s history.
Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams from the University of Leicester Department of Geology; Will Steffen, Director of the Australian National University’s Climate Change Institute and Paul Crutzen the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist of Mainz University provide evidence for the scale of global change in their commentary in the American Chemical Society’s’ bi-weekly journal Environmental Science & Technology.
The scientists propose that, in just two centuries, humans have wrought such vast and unprecedented changes to our world that we actually might be ushering in a new geological time interval, and alter the planet for millions of years.
Zalasiewicz, Williams, Steffen and Crutzen contend that recent human activity, including stunning population growth, sprawling megacities and increased use of fossil fuels, have changed the planet to such an extent that we are entering what they call the Anthropocene (New Man) Epoch.
First proposed by Crutzen more than a decade ago, the term Anthropocene has provoked controversy. However, as more potential consequences of human activity — such as global climate change and sharp increases in plant and animal extinctions — have emerged, Crutzen’s term has gained support. Currently, the worldwide geological community is formally considering whether the Anthropocene should join the Jurassic, Cambrian and other more familiar units on the Geological Time Scale.
The scientists note that getting that formal designation will likely be contentious. But they conclude, “However these debates will unfold, the Anthropocene represents a new phase in the history of both humankind and of the Earth, when natural forces and human forces became intertwined, so that the fate of one determines the fate of the other. Geologically, this is a remarkable episode in the history of this planet.”
"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth" - Albert Einstein
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"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein
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