I haven't made many friends by doing so (except mebbe you)...
Imho, the tipping point has passed, long since, mebbe 20 years ago.

The IPCC was deliberately conservative. It think it was unconscionable that they based their estimates solely on thermal expansion of the oceans, when the possibility that some substantial portion of the great land-based ice masses will melt and raise sea levels much higher in our children's lifetimes is so high as to be a near certainty. The mere fact that climate models do not permit a precise prediction of how fast those effects will happen should not have led to such an absurdly conservative estimate of sea level rise, an error which now gives the deniers just one more way to pound on AIT, Gore, etc.

i don't have any links, but a long time ago, the argument was made to me and i'll oversimplify it here. basically, what is going on in the climate is the result of what human endeavor put into it several decades ago. that is, the pollution and other climate-changing crap from the 50s and 60s created the situation we have today, when our Zone Map gets moved, by a lot. back then, there was less overall pollution- china wasn't the industrial powerhouse it is today, technologies were different, there were fewer people consuming resources, you get my drift. so what we have to look forward to is the 70s, 80s, and 90s, hell the 00s have been in the wrong direction even more greatly, but what impact they will have we will only know in the coming years.

there's also an acceleration curve involved. again, i'm being clumsy, but pollution and consumption lead to a snowball effect, where conditions deteriorate more rapidly over time.

so yes, i think we've passed the tipping point and there is no going back. which is why i'd like there to be more of a Radical Discussion about 'what we're going to have to do.' like sarah and i have sort of been trying to do in some recent posts.

Here's the problem: when things change fast on a geologic scale, they change within 100-1000 years.

The climate tends to buffer itself, but like any other window, the range of extreme weather shifts as the set point changes.

You're absolutely right. We are beyond the point of stopping it anytime soon. When things start to change seriously, the range of extremes will be even more marked than now.

But Hansen has this little problem. He's pretty much gagged by his employers, the Feds. Meanwhile, his professional competition is taking full advantage of the situation.

There is less Arctic sea ice this year than at any point in recorded history, but you won't hear it from the main$tream. All you see is hair-splitting among the second guessers even in the NOAA about whether things are really as bad as Hansen says.

No Hell below us
Above us, only sky

Global warming will make the tropics and sub-tropics increasingly uninhabitable, either because of declining agricultural productivity or because of submersion. One consequence will be migration and political instability energizing totalitarian and even genocidal forces. I hear officials at the World Bank, for example, talking about projects it is making more robust in the face of these threats, but who is thinking about and organizing for the social changes that will avoid the slaughter of millions?

Here's my point in this discussion about global warming. (And although Alexander Cockburn, in the Nation, called him a shill for the mining industry, I believe that of all the politicians out there, Al Gore gets the bigger picture.) The "debates" over the effects and extent of global warming is the "tree" that is blocking our view of the forest. The forest being that we humans have a record of shitting the bed over and over throughout the non-hunter/gatherer period of our existence on this good earth, let's just say the last 13 or 14 thousand years in time. I believe it is arguable that ever since humans started spreading out from Africa over the globe and domesticating grains and animals, forming and organizing civilizations, humans have been fouling the nests along the way and have been unable to exist in a sustainable way. We over-populate and pollute. We strip the soil of it's fertility and its trees and its animals. We go under the soil and strip whatever we think is valuable down there and when there appears to be not enough of whatever, we steal from and kill each other for it. There was at one time the myth of the noble savage and that the noble savage lived in peace, balance and harmony on the land. Hock-tooey on that. Now that there are too many of us and we are gobbling up the resources at an increased pace, the fate of collapse that once befell individual societies like the Maya or the Ottoman and Roman empires now threatens the entire human community. And it's not just about global warming. It's about us. By the way I don't know the answer but Kurt Vonnegut hit the nail of cynicism right on the head with his book "Galapagos". Humanity ended in 1986 with the exception of a boatload of survivors deserted on a Pacific island. They evolve over a million years into seal-like creatures with a brain that is one third the size of our current one. Humans become uninteresting and harmless creatures, now there's a solution! Gore-Kucinich.

Sorry, Dennis, I don't quite buy Vonnegut's answers, though I do think he had a really good idea of the problem.

There are billions of people walking the earth, and I'd like to see most of them survive this. I also think Civilization is a good idea, even if the idiot alpha-males who've tried to take over periodically screw it up repeated and use it as an excuse to bludgeon the rest of the human race. Intelligence is a good idea, otherwise we become like the locusts, or any other animal that mindlessly does exactly what the TheoCons want to do.

There is Science, and it does provide solutions. Alternative energy works, and can be made to work on a scale to power global economies. Carbon dioxide can be fixed into the biosphere as quickly as we release it into the atmosphere. Ten billion educated motivated human beings could take our species to the stars. But there's the rub: the last thing the oligarchs in the world want is an educated, active populace fully employed with the environment.

Science provides solutions: but we have to put the control of science into the hands of the people, for the good of the people, and not solely into the control of the oligarchs who would rule us all.

No Hell below us
Above us, only sky

I think it was titled "Report on the Barnhouse Effect."

By the way I don’t know the answer but Kurt Vonnegut hit the nail of cynicism right on the head with his book “Galapagos”. Humanity ended in 1986 with the exception of a boatload of survivors deserted on a Pacific island. They evolve over a million years into seal-like creatures with a brain that is one third the size of our current one. Humans become uninteresting and harmless creatures, now there’s a solution!
All his books were/are brilliant.

It was (according to wiki) initially published in 1950 in Collier's Weekly. I believe it was the first story he sold. It is a subversive tale: it brings a kind of magic and hope to a world in love with war and the bang-bang toys that military men and arms dealers drool over. The protaganist, Mr. Barnhouse, is alas mortal, and his discovery that a special talent of his (that renders arms useless) is in jeopardy because he can't live or hide forever. At the end of the story the first-person narrator leaves the possibility that the instruments of war may be at the mercy of Barnhouse's legacy after all.

A curveball version of this can be seen in an early Simpson's Halloween episode, when all the earthlings no longer care for war or weapons (Lisa can be seen rearranging the letters of the DANGER that marks a missile silo into GARDEN), and are easily overtaken by a few cyclopean aliens. In the end the humans take back the earth, with one alien running while screaming "Ack--he's got a board with a nail in it!"

Report on the Barnhouse Effect is wistful and simplistic and awfully enchanting--it would, in the hands of creative and talented people make a terrific film, perhaps creating a 3rd dimension to Shystee's Pincer post. ++++

Science is a tool, and a reality based discipline of thought. Nothing more.

Saying "greed trumps science" is like saying "greed trumps fire" or "greed trumps meditation". Well, yeah. Tactically and in the short term. But the greedy chop down all the trees on Easter Island and starve. The greedy insist on being ranchers in a climate that kills the cattle, and starve and freeze next to the richest fishing grounds on earth at the time.

It's typical.

Science is the discipline of asking questions about everything, and questioning even the answers you get. Science is solar. Science is also thermonuclear, but science realizes the pointlessness of trying to use naked plutonium to warm up those cold winter nights.

Non-solutions are not solutions, and not scientific.

You might say the Warriors continue to try to use the powers of the wizards and witches for their wars. In fact, many witches and wizards have abandoned the knowledge of their arts and taken the path to war, or sold their arcane skills to the mercers that drive the war. That doesn't invalidate the Great Art. It just serves to identify the shamen who lack reality based skills.

No Hell below us
Above us, only sky

i'll say this: the cranky grasshopper doesn't get food in the winter any more than the lazy one. come over here with the ants.

i'll be brutally honest to prove a point: i've thought about suicide before, i mean, who hasn't? and i don't have the guts for it, not yet at least. so the reality is that i'm going to live thru this crap like it or not. here are my choices:

1. do nothing and suffer greatly.
2. do something and suffer perhaps a great deal less.
3. expect my government to fix everything and suffer greatly, and with bitterness.

perhaps you've got a 4. i don't. so the purpose of these conversations, at least for me, is to exchange information with like minded people that can help me. now and in the future. and help them while i'm at it.

it's funny, because i happen to agree with you. humanity is fatally flawed, and we are likely to see catastropic change in things like where people live and what we eat and how we "power" the things that need it. so i'm trying to prepare for that. i thought the books and movies rather dull, but one part i liked about LOTR is when the blonde says, "but we can still die on them (swords)." i can still die in them, even if i had no hand whatsoever in the making of the social and political crises that bring about destruction. i'd like to avoid that.

and i'll say this: science may not save us anymore than jeebus, but the people who survive will sure as fuck be using at least some of it, to overcome those with whom they compete for limited resources. so that makes it a good thing to posses and apply, no?

Perfectly normal for someone thoughtful and sensitive to look back at some point and ask WTF was that all for? And to look at the future with trepidation, the sense that it can’t be as good as we thought it might be, may be just one of the ways the mind readies us for our own death.

I’m a scientist and so a little biased but I do believe with all my heart and mind that science will provide tools that will be nothing short of miraculous from our current viewpoint, enough knowledge to solve the world’s problems and then some. My parents grew up in houses without running water besides the pump at the sink, with outhouses and wood stoves and the whole hardscrabble bit. Lots of their relatives and playmates died from whooping cough and pneumonia and other diseases and accidents that today are trivial thanks to science. In comparison I and my children live wonderfully well. The worst hamlet in the third world today is better for human habitation than was The Great City of London in 1857. In another 150 years people will look back and wonder how we could have survived in what to them will seem a horrible and primitive existence.

Science only provides tools, as kelly b. said; what we do with them is the big challenge and what I think Dennis is bemoaning. Could be as a species we’ve already sown the seeds of our own destruction but we are unlike any other organism that has ever been and our ability to anticipate the future may yet allow us to escape the fate of other dominant predators. Fifty years ago we were doing schoolroom duck and cover drills in case the Soviets turned us into vapor and yet here we are still alive and arguably less threatened than we were then. If we’re halfway smart about it that same nuclear energy can all but eliminate the need for fossil fuels and hydroelectric dams. Our children will sort out how to do that, either out of sensible anticipation or emergent necessity but they will sort it out.

As for the battle against Evil, it never ends. The best we can do is what has been done, beat it down and then when it arises again, beat it down once more. There will never be a day when all humankind can dance around the Maypole singing Hey Nonie Nonie and never have to worry about bad people trying to take it all away; if you predicate success on that goal you’ll never feel good. It is an endless struggle and having the wherewithal to continue the fight is as much success as there ever will be. Our children will be fine and their children will live in a world more wondrous than we can possibly imagine, global warming and wannabe dictators and all. The future will be glorious; don’t despair.

None of this is to dispute the call to action in the original post from the deliciously youthful, immensely talented and yet still sadly pessimistic Chicago Dyke. Big trouble coming, big changes, big decisions to be made, for sure. This idiot bunch running things the past couple of decades is clueless or imagines they can make money no matter what so why worry, but they’re on the way out of power now and being stupid about global warming is one of the reasons they’re no longer respected like they were. As to no one talking about the future and change and consequences, while it may seem like it that’s not entirely true, lots of people are talking and some are acting and very shortly now we’ll see much more action. Is it in time to keep climate change from occurring, no, but it will be in time to soften the worst of the effects and build from those changes into a far better world than we have today.

It is past time to get started, no argument there. Being a “bitchy radical environmentalist” and turning “the volume, and the polemic, way up as we discuss global climate change and what it will bring” is the right thing to do. So IMHO is focusing a bit more on the probability of beneficial solutions rather than quite so much on the doom and gloom. If you want people to follow you it may be better to hold out the glories of the Promised Land and not dwell too much on the desert in between.

dennis, the story of the lazy grasshopper and the industrious ants- you don't know it? i'll save that for a later silly/fun post.

but yeah, what bringiton said. and dammit, i'm not trying to be 'pessimistic.' ahem. ok, sometimes i am, but that's my own lil hangup.

i am also trying to be realistic, logic based and science informed. which means that i have to accept how much people suck right now and how big a mess many are making for all of us to enjoy in the future. you all are a tremendous help in that, even you dennis. and your example is inspirational, please come back and tell us more. and forgive me if i seem bitchy. ;-)

I agree with bringiton when he says:

The best we can do is what has been done, beat it down and then when it arises again, beat it down once more. There will never be a day when all humankind can dance around the Maypole singing Hey Nonie Nonie and never have to worry about bad people trying to take it all away; if you predicate success on that goal you’ll never feel good. It is an endless struggle and having the wherewithal to continue the fight is as much success as there ever will be.

I think there is a strain in progressive thought that believes humans are naturally good. The founders knew better, perhaps precisely because they knew what it meant to own slaves.

I believe that humans are both good and evil, and that both arose in nature (along with our ability to recognize them) because both confer evolutionary advantage. (And how else would they have come to be, pray tell?)

That's why "let ambition counteract ambition" (Federalist 51) is the only way to go. We can't rely on "good leaders" without putting into place a system that allows good people to be good. Right now, we're in the midst of a gigantic Stanford Experiment imposed on us by the Conservative movement and its operatives in the GOP, so all these issues are hard to see.

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan