David Suzuki 4 of 5 (2009)

Papantonio: Climate Change Leads to Massive Food Shortages

Climate change and Earthquakes?

George Carlin on Global Warming

I've posted this before, but it's worth posting again.
Keeping ourselves in perspective is sometimes hard to do.

The End of Suburbia

John Bruno: Climate Change's Effect on Our Oceans

Climate Change's Effect on Our Oceans from John Bruno on Vimeo.

Poor quality, but he makes some points we don't often hear.
For one, that we will have to live with the climate change we are already committed to for hundreds and even thousands of years.

Global Natural Symptoms of the Climate Change

Oil Smoke and Mirrors (Full High Quality)

Colin Campbell - peak oil

Amazing!

Over four years ago

Note that Reagan is credited with dealing with the ozone hole
Note that the issue has become even more partisan even as extreme weather is stressing our infrastucture.
Sad

Civilization Death Spiral

Dark

Combating Carbon in an Economic Crisis

Well worth the time.

Peak Oil & $225 Oil by 2012 Predicts CIBC Economist Jeff Rubin

I like listening to this guy.

Nic Marks: The Happy Planet Index

HT US Reality Check via twitter

World facing climate chaos: Suzuki

Five years

The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be "lost for ever", according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure.

Anything built from now on that produces carbon will do so for decades, and this "lock-in" effect will be the single factor most likely to produce irreversible climate change, the world's foremost authority on energy economics has found. If this is not rapidly changed within the next five years, the results are likely to be disastrous.
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Charlie Kronick of Greenpeace said: "The decisions being made by politicians today risk passing a monumental carbon debt to the next generation, one for which they will pay a very heavy price. What's seriously lacking is a global plan and the political leverage to enact it. Governments have a chance to begin to turn this around when they meet in Durban later this month for the next round of global climate talks."
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Christiana Figueres, the UN climate chief, said the findings underlined the urgency of the climate problem, but stressed the progress made in recent years. "This is not the scenario we wanted," she said. "But making an agreement is not easy. What we are looking at is not an international environment agreement — what we are looking at is nothing other than the biggest industrial and energy revolution that has ever been seen."

World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns

Carbon Capture is our only hope.

Carbon Capture & Sequestration | Sally Benson - Energy@Stanford from Cyperus Media.com on Vimeo.

Impartiality and Reporting Climate Change

John Ikerd: Dwindling Energy Resources Will Put The Economy at Risk

Peak Oil over again

The media loves to announce new seemingly large discoveries of oil as if they are the solution to what is really an unfolding liquid fuels crisis. They point to the Tupi field off Brazil which is purported to have 8 billion barrels of oil in it. And, they point to discoveries in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico thought to contain between 3 and 15 billion barrels. And, they point to the 4 billion barrels in the Bakken Shale in North Dakota. It all sounds like a lot. When I ask audiences how long a billion barrels of oil will last the world at current rates of consumption, I often get replies that range anywhere from three months to 5 years. The correct answer is 12 days. Just multiply these multi-billion-barrel discoveries by 12, and you'll realize right away that they are not going to overcome the constraints we are experiencing in oil supplies.

Read the whole article

Time to Worry: World Oil Production Finishes Six Years of No Growth

HT The Oil Drum via Facebook

Combustible

Climate Change Initiative "Combustible" from Realm on Vimeo.

And now for something truely depressing

Where will jobs for young people come from? Certainly not from pie-in-the-sky hopes for renewable energy and sustainables, says John de Bueger.
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It is a truly intractable problem. For those of us on record as having predicted nearly three years ago that the Global financial crisis was unlikely to ever end, one wishes somehow that one had been wrong - or if not wrong, then unduly pessimistic.
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The 7th billion human arrived last week, but it will be a miracle if even half this number exist at the end of this century.

Sounds like it won't be long before youth unemployment isn't the only thing we need worry about

Answer not blowing in the wind

HT The Oil Drum

Biggest jump ever seen in global warming gases

WASHINGTON (AP) — The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record, the U.S. Department of Energy calculated, a sign of how feeble the world's efforts are at slowing man-made global warming.

The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.

"The more we talk about the need to control emissions, the more they are growing," said John Reilly, co-director of MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.

The world pumped about 564 million more tons (512 million metric tons) of carbon into the air in 2010 than it did in 2009. That's an increase of 6 percent. That amount of extra pollution eclipses the individual emissions of all but three countries — China, the United States and India, the world's top producers of greenhouse gases.

It is a "monster" increase that is unheard of, said Gregg Marland, a professor of geology at Appalachian State University, who has helped calculate Department of Energy figures in the past.

Biggest jump ever seen in global warming gases

HT @sustainablearth via Twitter

The end of growth

The next 20 years are going to be completely unlike the last two decades. How the world works, how stocks grow, the very nature of investing and how our economy functions—all of these are due for fundamental, earth-shaking change. As investors, we have to adjust the way we look at the world.

We want growth. We need economic growth. It's all you hear about when the treasury secretary talks about how we are going to get the economy growing again or when the president talks about jobs. When our money system is growing, things are reasonably happy. When it is not growing, things are very unhappy. As long as everything is growing, our economy functions reasonably well. And when it stops growing, it throws giant fits and gets into trouble. That is why we are always chasing growth. And there is a reason for that: Money. But what is money?
I don't care what color it is or whose picture is on it or what counterfeiting measures you have in place. All money in the world today shares one characteristic: it is loaned into existence. It seems like a simple enough statement, but this has enormous implications. Because it is borrowed, we pay interest on it. That interest drives a peculiar feature in our money system (by "our" I'm referring to all fiat currencies in the world because all of them operate by this same loaning principle). When you loan money into existence, you have to pay both the principal and the interest back. That means there is always more debt than money in the system.
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We have a world where we will face exponentially rising costs if we continue to run our economy in the way it has been running. That is not a great strategy at this point. Our economy must grow by design because of how our money and debt systems operate, but it is connected to an energy system that can't grow. This is the definition of a predicament. No matter what policies we pursue or how clever our technologies get, there are certain things that we just can't undo. When you take oil out of the ground and you burn it, it is gone. And we are burning it up at a faster and faster pace.

Chris Martenson: Peak Oil Could Limit Economic Growth

Well duh

Many Do the Math posts have touched on the inevitable cessation of growth and on the challenge we will face in developing a replacement energy infrastructure once our fossil fuel inheritance is spent. The focus has been on long-term physical constraints, and not on the messy details of our response in the short-term. But our reaction to a diminishing flow of fossil fuel energy in the short-term will determine whether we transition to a sustainable but technological existence or allow ourselves to collapse. One stumbling block in particular has me worried. I call it The Energy Trap.

In brief, the idea is that once we enter a decline phase in fossil fuel availability—first in petroleum—our growth-based economic system will struggle to cope with a contraction of its very lifeblood. Fuel prices will skyrocket, some individuals and exporting nations will react by hoarding, and energy scarcity will quickly become the new norm. The invisible hand of the market will slap us silly demanding a new energy infrastructure based on non-fossil solutions. But here’s the rub. The construction of that shiny new infrastructure requires not just money, but…energy. And that’s the very commodity in short supply. Will we really be willing to sacrifice additional energy in the short term—effectively steepening the decline—for a long-term energy plan? It’s a trap!

The Energy Trap

The Great Climate Change Debate - An Ethical Perspective