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Runaway Daily
Climate Change Strategy for Nonprofits
Posted on October 13, 2011 in Organizational strategy, What is RCC
Nonprofits need to consider their entire “environment” when planning for the future. This means the natural environment as well as the state of the economy, business and political trends, and funding prospects.
I think that climate change is going to become a much bigger issue in the next few years, and that it will affect the economy, business, politics, and society much more than it has to date. In doing so, it will affect the mission of most nonprofits – and funding prospects for all nonprofits.
Why Al Gore Was Wrong
A few years ago, Al Gore came out with An Inconvenient Truth – a presentation, book, and movie about climate change. He said that we have to cut CO2 emissions to keep climate change within a limit of 2C (3.2F) of warming. If we didn’t, the world would go into “runaway climate change” – fast, out-of-control warming, melting of the polar ice caps, sea level rise, and extreme weather.
Trying to Explain Hansen
Posted on July 23, 2011 in Paleoclimate
James Hansen is a hero of the fight to understand and stop climate change. He has co-authored a new paper about climate change in Earth’s past, which can be used to help anticipate climate change in the near future.
The paper is only available to people with access to scientific journal articles. Fortunately, Hansen has provided a publicly accessible brief online.
Sadly, though, the brief is very hard to understand. It’s probably only comprehensible to those who have a scientific background and a good working knowledge of recent work in climate science, including Hansen’s own work.
A typical working journalist would tend to either not understand Hansen’s brief at all, or misunderstand the points Hansen is trying to make. Climate science skeptics and deniers could easily use the brief to make claims of their own, undermining Hansen’s work.
Hansen says that there are three main ways to understand climate change trends of today:
Not Necessarily the News
Posted on May 2, 2011 in Miscellaneous
SPUR planner cites 5M sea level rise
Today I began researching news about runaway climate change on the Web – and the bad news is, there is no news.
A search on the term “runaway climate change” for the last 24 hours, using Google News, yielded no results. None. Zip. Nada.
This is sad. Runaway climate change means that human-generated warming has set off new processes in nature. These processes, if the “runaway” assertion is true, have their own momentum. Warming from these processes will continue, whether human-generated warming continues or not. The Earth will warm by at least several more degrees, with huge consequences for humanity, no matter what. (Slowing or stopping human-generated warming would still slow warming in the coming years, greatly easing sustainability crises, and perhaps limiting the ultimate extent of warming that occurs.)
MAD and Runaway Climate Change
Posted on May 1, 2011 in International competition
NCAR 2030-2039 drought projection
During the Cold War, one of the leading ideas and acronyms was MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction. The idea was for both sides (the US and the then-USSR) to have so many nukes that it would be, well, MAD for either side to start anything serious. A nuclear exchange would utterly destroy both sides.
Today, we have a MAD-type situation with carbon emissions. The major polluters – the US and China in the first rank – are each emitting enough CO2 to put us beyond the “safe” limit of +2C of total warming. (We’ve already had +0.8C, and are starting to suffer serious consequences, with at least +0.6C in the pipeline if emissions stopped tomorrow.) Europe and European Russia, together, make up a third major player that roughly equals the US and China in CO2 emissions.
What is “abrupt climate change”?
Posted on January 31, 2011 in What is RCC
To ordinary people living their lives, today’s global warming is imperceptible, and even the effects – changes in weather, in growing seasons, and so on – take hold gradually. The most dramatic recent predictions, from MIT and others, are for 10F – that’s 6C – of warming this century. While this would change life as we know it, it’s still “only” an average change of about 1F per decade; not a really earth-shaking deal in any specific ten-year period. The effects come from the accumulation of warming, one decade after the next.
There is a kind of climate change, though, that would be far more immediate in its impact. Abrupt climate change (Wikipedia entry here) is a sudden increase of anywhere from 2C to, perhaps, 10C of warming – that’s 3F to 16F – in about one to three years. Even at the low end, abrupt climate change would disrupt rainfall and change temperatures so much that getting the harvest in at today’s levels would be impossible, and widespread starvation would be almost impossible to avoid. Wars and more or less widespread breakdowns of order would probably ensue. At the higher end of the scale, the impact would be many times worse.
US Navy sinking skeptics?
Posted on August 17, 2010 in Attended
Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus spoke at the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco this evening. He seemed to be avoiding controversial statements, but described how the Navy is planning to patrol an Arctic Ocean that is projected to be ice-free in about 25 years and is moving to cut fossil fuel use in half by 2020.
It occurs to me that it’s hard to see how an American, at least, can maintain a skeptic’s position in the face of these plans. Mablus, a former governor, stated these plans as unexceptional. They’re reviewed, and must be approved, by congressmen and senators of both parties. If any of them believe that climate change is not real, they are seriously derelict in approving Navy budgets of many tens of billions of dollar that are based on such considerations – and in not making these actions by the Navy a campaign issue.
Stewart Brand and Climate Wars
Posted on June 27, 2010 in Attended
Stewart Brand hosts Climate Wars Q&A at The Green Arcade
A plug: The Green Arcade is the first San Francisco bookshop to sell my new book, Runaway! Buy it from them, to encourage the others.
The shirt says "Rad", not "Bad"
Climate Wars is an exciting new book by Gwynne Dyer, journalist and author. Climate Wars describes potential military conflicts as climate change “heats up” issues of water sharing, food security, and border control for countries worldwide. The book also, though, offers a snapshot of the current understanding of climate change and our future in top military, government, and scientific circles worldwide. It’s not a pretty picture.
Stewart Brand, famous for the Whole Earth Catalog in the 1960s and 70s, is head of Global Business Network (GBN) and the Long Now Foundation. Dyer provides analysis and consulting for GBN. So Brand hosted Dyer’s Q&A and book signing at The Green Arcade, the famous green and sustainability bookshop on the central part of Market Street, southwest of the Civic Center.
MIT in Journal of Climate: 10°F Warming by 2100
Posted on June 21, 2010 in What is RCC
An MIT report says the world is on track to get much warmer, much faster. An increase of +9F this century is predicted – nearly 1F per decade. This is on top of the 1F increase seen between pre-industrial times to 2000, for total global warming of 10F by 2011.
MITers and "roulette wheel" of temperature increases
Total warming of 10F means a very different world, one in which the natural world is decimated and feeding current and projected populations is impossible.
The report, which was the subject of stories earlier this year, has just been published in the prestigious Journal of Climate. If the report is correct, the survival of most people on Earth is at risk. A 10F warmer planet will support many billions fewer people, and with a transition period quite possibly marked by massive war and conflict. Any steps that save many lives are likely to be so draconian as to feel like wartime, even if implemented as benignly as possible.
Commented on “The Atlantic”
Posted on March 22, 2010 in Miscellaneous
Let’s see – this is the only large representative, rather than parliamentary, democracy; and, it’s the greatest country in the world. Coincidence?
The Dems were brave today. Whether they were also smart remains to be seen. But if you note the vociferous defence of every last dime of Medicare and Medicaid spending by Republicans (!) just lately, you have to guess they were smart indeed.
Originally posted as a comment
by floydsm8
on The Atlantic using DISQUS.
Ecology Emerges
Posted on March 19, 2010 in Attended
Tonight was #1 in the Ecology Emerges series
held in Oakland, led by Chris Carlsson and his SF history project, Shaping San Francisco. This is a great series; see upcoming dates here.
The theme was the Evolution of Eco-Activism, “Following the compelling shift from conservation to environmentalism to environmental/social justice over the last half-century”, with Jerry Mander (International Forum on Globalization), Karen Pickett (Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters), and Carla Pérez (Movement Generation).
Chris showed an evocative new 10-minute film, then there was a valuable panel talk. Jerry Mander said that things have gone so far that we need systemic changes and worldview changes, but that localization and sufficiency will be crucial. Karen Pickett talked about the Headwaters campaign and the importance of direct action.
