Category: Life

From The Guardian UK Monday August 11 2008. Oliver Tickell
There’s no ‘adaptation’ to such steep warming. We must stop pandering to special interests, and try a new, post-Kyoto strategy

We need to get prepared for four degrees of global warming, Bob Watson told the Gurdian last week. At first sight this looks like wise counsel from the climate science adviser to Defra. But the idea that we could adapt to a 4C rise is absurd and dangerous. Global warming on this scale would be a catastrophe that would mean, in the immortal words that Chief Seattle probably never spoke, “the end of living and the beginning of survival” for humankind. Or perhaps the beginning of our extinction.

The collapse of the polar ice caps would become inevitable, bringing long-term sea level rises of 70-80 metres. All the world’s coastal plains would be lost, complete with ports, cities, transport and industrial infrastructure, and much of the world’s most productive farmland. The world’s geography would be transformed much as it was at the end of the last ice age, when sea levels rose by about 120 metres to create the Channel, the North Sea and Cardigan Bay out of dry land. Weather would become extreme and unpredictable, with more frequent and severe droughts, floods and hurricanes. The Earth’s carrying capacity would be hugely reduced. Billions would undoubtedly die.

Watson’s call was supported by the government’s former chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, who warned that “if we get to a four-degree rise it is quite possible that we would begin to see a runaway increase”. This is a remarkable understatement. The climate system is already experiencing significant feedbacks, notably the summer melting of the Arctic sea ice. The more the ice melts, the more sunshine is absorbed by the sea, and the more the Arctic warms. And as the Arctic warms, the release of billions of tonnes of methane – a greenhouse gas 70 times stronger than carbon dioxide over 20 years – captured under melting permafrost is already under way.

To see how far this process could go, look 55.5m years to the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when a global temperature increase of 6C coincided with the release of about 5,000 gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, both as CO2 and as methane from bogs and seabed sediments. Lush subtropical forests grew in polar regions, and sea levels rose to 100m higher than today. It appears that an initial warming pulse triggered other warming processes. Many scientists warn that this historical event may be analogous to the present: the warming caused by human emissions could propel us towards a similar hothouse Earth.

But what are we to do? All our policies to date to tackle global warming have been miserable failures. The Kyoto protocol has created a vast carbon market but done little to reduce emissions. The main effect of the EU’s emissions trading scheme has been to transfer about €30bn or more from consumers to Europe’s biggest polluters, the power companies. The EU and US foray into biofuels has, at huge cost, increased greenhouse gas emissions and created a world food crisis, causing starvation in many poor countries.

So are all our efforts doomed to failure? Yes, so long as our governments remain craven to special interests, whether carbon traders or fossil fuel companies. The carbon market is a valuable tool, but must be subordinate to climatic imperatives. The truth is that to prevent runaway greenhouse warming, we will have to leave most of the world’s fossil fuels in the ground, especially carbon-heavy coal, oil shales and tar sands. The fossil fuel and power companies must be faced down.

Global problems need global solutions, and we also need an effective replacement for the failed Kyoto protocol. The entire Kyoto system of national allocations is obsolete because of the huge volumes of energy embodied in products traded across national boundaries. It also presents a major obstacle to any new agreement – as demonstrated by the 2008 G8 meeting in Japan that degenerated into a squabble over national emission rights.

The answer? Scrap national allocations and place a single global cap on greenhouse gas emissions, applied “upstream” – for instance, at the oil refinery, coal-washing station and cement factory. Sell permits up to that cap in a global auction, and use the proceeds to finance solutions to climate change – accelerating the use of renewable energy, raising energy efficiency, protecting forests, promoting climate-friendly farming, and researching geoengineering technologies. And commit hundreds of billions of dollars per year to finance adaptation to climate change, especially in poor countries.

Such a package of measures would allow us to achieve zero net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and long-term stabilisation at 350 parts per million of CO2 equivalent. This avoids the economic pain that a cap-and-trade system alone would cause, and targets assistance at the poor, who are least to blame and most need help. The permit auction would raise about $1 trillion per year, enough to finance a spread of solutions. At a quarter of the world’s annual oil spending, it is a price well worth paying.

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May we do the right thing….MWiz

In my hand sat a document sealed from a person I only knew as a mystery. I didn’t know what to do. Should I open it? And against my better judgment I knew that only way to find the answers I had been looking for over the past three years would come from what I held. But that didn’t help the sensations that flowed within me saying, “You are doing something wrong.”
Now it is clear that my mom had been hiding me from this man for my entire life. She moved from her hometown in Oklahoma, to changing my name, all so that he wouldn’t be able to find me. She was protecting me, but from what?
There are times I wonder to myself if she would have just answered my questions when I was eleven if things would have been different. Then I have to look at the other side of the connection, which included the ET’s, and truthfully I don’t know. But what I did know was that sitting in my hand was a note; a letter from him that could answer a lot of my questions and give me some answers of who I am. And if he is so wrong why would he have faced jail to contact me?
Shaking and scared I carefully removed the seal. Inside were several pieces of paper all were hand written by him. I couldn’t believe it…I was holding something that was done in his hand. When we were on the highway that day in 1974, headed to the attorney, writing a foreign name to me I never would have realized that I one day I would be holding in my hands a note from him. From all I knew he was dead and that is all they wanted me to know.
And what did the note say; to this day I don’t remember everything that the document said, but if I really wanted to know, I could go back to him and see if he still has copy of it. One thing about my dad he is really good at keeping documentation. He has made a career out of it just look at his garage or storage.
What I do remember is that the letter basically addressed who he is, where he has been, his family now, and whether or not I would be willing to meet him or call him. From what I read about him, he sure in the hell didn’t sound like this evil man that I was told he was. But out of guilt I gave the letter over to my mom, which opened up a can of worms that I could not control or thought I could not control. It was just a continuation of something that had occurred back in the spring of 1978, which coincided with the two UFO events and my dad moving to within 32 miles of where I lived. But that would only be the beginning of many coincidences, which has taken me thirty plus years to realize how complex everything is and can be, but that will have to be another day.
Mary.

…In December 1977 I would see for the first time my first remembered UFO. This is not to say that there were no other events prior to this date, but this would be the beginning of a long journey toward the truth of my life and who I am.
In March 1978 I would have another event that would equal in comparison to the first. The only difference was seeing an object and not a light. The characteristics were uncanny and truthfully at the time I thought they were all connected to going out to eat at this one restaurant located on Highway 14 near Cedar Crest, NM.
This is where the first twist would come in, but I wouldn’t know about it until several years later. So before we review the twist let me continue with the events that led up to it.
By the summer of 1978 my family and I had seen another light that would do spectacular things amazing feats for us all. I realize there was an element of fear, especially with my mom and grandmother throughout the event, but for some reason I was connected to what was happening and I had excitement flowing throughout my being. I couldn’t explain it, but it felt right.
Now let us go back to 1974. This is the year I was to turn 12. It was also the year that I had to legally apply for my social security card. I was going by the name Betty Sheffield though my legal name was Mary Sheffield. Wrong! It was on a drive to Farmington, NM that I would learn that my brother and I were not true brother and sister. I found out that I was in fact a child of another man and had a different last name. We were headed to the attorney to change my legal name to the one I had used all my life.
Amazed by all of this I began to ask questions about my dad, but they were never answered. I was told not to worry about him or think about him. He was a bad man and that is all I had to know. Later that year I questioned my grandmother and even she wouldn’t tell me about him either. He became a mystery to my heart. Who was he and why did I have such a desire to meet him? But for that answer we need to go forward to the spring of 1980.
By this time I was 17 ½ years of age. I had not quit yet made it to my 18th birthday when an event would throw me back and the beginning of a whole new direction of my life would occur. I received a letter from a classmate at school. This letter would lead to the most complicated chain of events in my life. Events that would begin back with my first remembered UFO event in December 1978. This would be the time of my awakening of which I was; though at the time I didn’t realize it. It was actually the beginning of a long journey, that would span decades of events and it all started with that fateful night of my conception.

More next week…

Mary