GLOBAL WARMING:
GOING DOWN LIKE NOLA
Rewriting the Science

From 60 Minutes courtesy of Crooks and Liars:

And Cicerone, who’s an atmospheric chemist, said the same thing every leading scientist told 60 Minutes.

"Climate change is really happening," says Cicerone.

Asked what is causing the changes, Cicernone says it's greenhouse gases: "Carbon dioxide and methane, and chlorofluorocarbons and a couple of others, which are all — the increases in their concentrations in the air are due to human activities. It's that simple."

But if it is that simple, why do some climate science reports look like they have been heavily edited at the White House? With science labeled "not sufficiently reliable." It’s a tone of scientific uncertainty the president set in his first months in office after he pulled out of a global treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

And

Dozens of federal agencies report science but much of it is edited at the White House before it is sent to Congress and the public. It appears climate science is edited with a heavy hand. Drafts of climate reports were co-written by Rick Piltz for the federal Climate Change Science Program. But Piltz says his work was edited by the White House to make global warming seem less threatening.

"The strategy of people with a political agenda to avoid this issue is to say there is so much to study way upstream here that we can’t even being to discuss impacts and response strategies," says Piltz. "There’s too much uncertainty. It's not the climate scientists that are saying that, its lawyers and politicians."

And

"We have to, in the next 10 years, get off this exponential curve and begin to decrease the rate of growth of CO2 emissions," Hansen explains. "And then flatten it out. And before we get to the middle of the century, we’ve got to be on a declining curve.

"If that doesn't happen in 10 years, then I don’t think we can keep global warming under one degree Celsius and that means we’re going to, that there’s a great danger of passing some of these tipping points. If the ice sheets begin to disintegrate, what can you do about it? You can’t tie a rope around the ice sheet. You can’t build a wall around the ice sheets. It will be a situation that is out of our control."

But that's not a situation you'll find in one federal report submitted for review. Government scientists wanted to tell you about the ice sheets, but before a draft of the report left the White House, the paragraph on glacial melt and flooding was crossed out and this was added: "straying from research strategy into speculative findings and musings here."

Click here to read the rest. Video here.

This is all very frightening. So frightening that it's pretty difficult to imagine it actually happening. But we don't have to imagine. Here in Baton Rouge, we've got a real life model of how this is all going down just an hour and a half drive east on I-10. Most of New Orleans still lies in ruins after the devastating flooding caused by levee breaks during Hurricane Katrina, and it still remains to be seen if the political and economic will exists to bring my favorite city back to some semblance of normality. This situation, New Orleans in ruins, is the future of the world.

Global warming will not simply cause a few floods, won't simply make us all move inland a few miles: it will cause massive destruction on a Biblical scale, not just to property, but to the world economy, and virtully all political structures. Unlike the Big Easy, where there is at least hope for a comeback, there will be no rebuilding. The eventual loss of countless miles of heavily developed coastal areas will ripple into continental interiors as the people who live there, at an enormous disadvantage due to the devastated economy, deal with countless numbers of displaced people. There will be no place to put them, and nothing to feed them. Chaos will ensue, starting first with riots, then, most likely, civil war around the globe. It will be every man for himself, and the people with the most guns will win. But I don't think their prize will really be worth having. We're looking at Escape from New York conditions, a real Mad Max reality, complete with warlords and such.

Of course, all this will happen much more slowly than the drama that unfolded down the road, but the effects will be the same. It really doesn't matter how much warning we'll get, how much time we'll have to prepare. Because, like I said, New Orleans is a pretty good glimpse into the future. Everybody knew the "big one" was eventually going to happen there. But no one prepared. Everybody just tried not to think about it. Then it came. And because everybody was in intense denial mode, except, of course, for the people in the city dealing with the disaster's effects first hand, the only institution in this country that had the ability to do anything to help out, the federal government, did nothing for days.

That's what we're looking at with global warming. Everybody knows; everybody's in denial. We've got about a decade to take drastic steps to reverse this, but my gut instinct is that nothing will happen. And as we start to feel the first effects gradually creeping in, even then I bet nothing will happen. The first victims will most likely be left to fend for themselves, branded as being stupid for living in flood zones. The feds won't react until the hunger riots begin, but by then it'll be too late. We'll all be living in Hell.

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