Geez Chris, if this load of tosh is the best the WWF's Conservation Programme Director can come up with, then the planet really is in strife.

You run the usual arguments about one season of hurricanes in one region being proof of extreme weather events being caused by global climate change and then suggest that world needs to do something about it. Exactly what it is remains unclear, except that it has to be something.

This is the problem with the WWF and other well-meaning green groups. They're good at beating up an issue, but kinda lacking on the details when it comes to feasible responses. Simplistic sloganeering maybe OK in undergraduate student politics, but it doesn't cut it in the real world.

In order to take beetr care of the environment that sustains us, misguided biologists need first to learn about Applied Mathematics and in particular, Statistical Thermodynamics.

Australian scientist, Tim Flannery said that the pessimism of Professor James Lovelock's evaluation, described by The Independent as the bleakest assessment yet of the effects of climate change by a leading scientist, was due to the British scientist's ''pessimism'' about the political inaction of the major polluting nations.
Dr Flannery said the world still had "one to two decades" to take action to reduce global warming, despite Professor Lovelock's warning that billions would die by the end of the century, and civilisation as we know it would be unlikely to survive.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/flannery-sets-deadline-to-save-world/2006/01/17/1137260034863.html

Comment:

Thermodynamics predicts that a quasi closed system like our biosphere will be pumped to higher and higher levels of ORDER and complexity the more that energy is put into the system.

The 100 year-out scenarios painted by these two frustrated scientists clearly approaches a thermodynamic equilibrium, where less energy is available and less effective work can be performed by living creatures or machines.
This is just contrary to the thermodynamics involved and clearly, as the so called global warming is already happening AND our civilisation is getting more complex and sophisticated every year, this simple science is largely proving itself.

Further, these two scientists continue to confuse global warming and climate change. That is a most annoying habit for two so called eminent scientists. Global warming is a thermodynamic state that has the biosphere approaching a thermal equilibrium where chaos rules and little useful work can be performed.
Climate change is a thermodynamic movement of ENTROPY in the world's oceans from low entropy formations in the tropics and off deserts towards huge coastal wastewater pollution plumes. Atmospheric pollution is less than 10% of the thermodynamic imbalance and thus only 10% of the problem. Curbing air emissions should be about stopping TOXIC gases and particulates from entering our bodies, not about saving the world from harmless natural gases like methane and CO2

If Flannery and Lovelock want to worry about something, If they want to take care of the environment, they should consider:

1. The explosive combination of Peak Oil and Greenspanian economic promotion of overpopulated cities. This is the only thing (apart from a meteor) that can destroy mankind --- essentially internecine fights over scarce oil reserves by Rwanda-fied first world populations.

2. The localised climate change effects from accelerating coastal development, mining, industry and agriculture and resultant growing pollution plumes and dead zones in adjacent seas. These changes, from now, will accrue way too fast for any GW theory to explain because of the greater heat capacity of oceans. And these climate changes will contract sharply within just a few years if coastal margins become protected from unabated wastewaters.

These two problems remain a double edged swinging blade above our corporal being as it is hog tied to the table of economic imperative.
It will not be the end of our race, but its consequences will be unimaginably abhorrent to all but a few corporate executives, the odd military man and enthusiastic politicians.

The solution for biologists and Greenpeace, is not to chase down whaling vessels but rather to:

1. Attack any politician in the world today who promotes population growth in large cities, for whatever reason.

2. Attack any source of untreated wastewater being emitted into coastal seas, especially where big dead zones are forming and where mining or agriculture operations are prominent

When I saw Flannery's response to the Lovelock's article, I laughed out loud. Of course we have another ten or twenty years to address the problem of global warming. Of course it isn't too late to reverse the damage we have inflicted on the planet. Of course we have to "keep up hope". Otherwise, who would pay all the scientists, environmentalists and their hangers-on for their vast range of forecasts, prognostications and survival theories? They would all be out of a job in an instant, wouldn't they?

For better or worse, we have created, and live in, a society that has been built on certain economic theories. And economists still cling to the belief that we act out of enlightened self-interest when faced with problems such as this, and spend their time on schemes such as carbon trading.

Reality is somewhat different. We are greedy, we are selfish, we are living far beyond our ecologically-responsible means. We actually know this, deep down, but can only see as far as our next overseas vacation, when we vaguely consider the effect on that ozone-layer thingy of the tonnes of damaging emissions we create as we jet off to Thailand.

All the research in the world won't convince us to change our ways, if we don't believe it will hurt us in our lifetime. We are fully accustomed to delegating the thinking and doing stuff to the government - isn't that democracy? Isn't that why we elected them, to decide what is best for us? So tell us what to do, Mr Prime Minister, that's what we pay you for.

One small problem. In order to get elected, a political party has to talk to us through our wallets. They sure as hell ain't going to tell us we have to change our ways, otherwise they will be out of a job too.

So that's where enlightened self-interest has led us. To a place where we just cover our ears and keep saying "I can't hear you I can't hear you la la la la I can't hear you."

Have a nice day.

I see KEAP has us all in dirty water again. Find a life.

From the time of our putative ancestor "Lucy" some three million years ago until the present, climate has been changing: There have been dramatic differences between the good and the bad intervals. So why should we be urged to get excited at the prospect of change now? Maybe the degree of excitement, or lack of it, depends upon an individual's faith, science, common sense, hope - or a mixture of them in relation to the folowing:
Of the last 50,000 years, only during the last 10,000 has climate been sufficiently benign, continuously, for the development of agriculture. And geological trends indicate it is almost time for that to come to an end.
Ten thosand years ago pressure on their environment would have been from less than two million people. We are now 6.5 billion: both we and our life styles consume raw materials and excrete waste products at a much higher rate and, having nowhere else to throw waste, we crap in our own kitchen. All added to by numbers increasing at 1.3 per cent.
We have fossil-fuel dependency. For two hundred years it has fed technological development, transport, and agriculture. Only it has enabled the world to increase human numbers over that period from 1 to 6.5 billion. And it is reaching its limits for present numbers.
But amazingly most environmental writers neglect to mention population pressure as the fundamental driver of environmental decline. Yes, we can improve our habits. And we need to do it quickly. But the rate of those improvements has to be greater than the rate of human increase. That is not happening. Furthermore, the right to social equity, in order to minimise conflict, has to spread world wide. But, to take the necessary steps to defer catastrophic climate change's arrival, this equity is not possible for anything like present numbers, let alone the expected extra.
Why, Chris Hails, do you belabor us with details while expunging the foundations of the problem from your article. Is this neglect because you are an ambulance chaser rather than a disaster preventer?