Worth A Look: System Vulnerability Approach to Climate Change

03 Environmental Degradation, Methods & Process, Worth A Look

Berto Jongman Recommends:

Impacts of Climate Change: A System Vulnerability Approach (2007)

By Nils Gilman, Peter Schwartz, Doug Randall

Over the past two decades, and especially in the last few years, climate change has become one of the most heavily researched subjects in science. Yet climate change impact studies remain at the low end of usefulness for policymakers and others; they are not predictive enough to be actionable because the exact nature of the events that will jar the planet in the near- and long-term future—the wheres, whens, and hows of climate change—remains both unknown and unknowable. This paper offers policymakers an alternative approach to thinking about climate change and its impacts. Instead of starting with climate change and working out toward impacts, we focus on systems that are already generally vulnerable first, and then consider what the geophysics of climate change may do to them. This approach has two benefits. First, it limits the number of logical steps necessary for thinking about the impacts of climate change, enabling more confident insights and conclusions. Second, it cuts across analytic stovepipes and gives regional specialists a framework for thinking about what climate change will mean for their particular areas, based on expertise they already have. Download PDF

Journal: Airplane Wings from Soy…Soon

03 Economy, 03 Environmental Degradation, 05 Energy, 12 Water, Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Technologies
Full Story
Full Story

Not New, But Improved

Allison Arieff

Meet Stella.

At first glance, this little yellow giraffe looks like a lot of other kids’ bath toys. But Stella is made from Renuva, a little-known material that could change for the better the way hundreds of things, from upholstery to airplane wings, are made.

The story of how Stella came to be made from this material, a soy-based alternative to polyurethane (which is typically petroleum-based), provides a model for how stuff can be better designed in the future.

Phi Beta Iota: While folks focus on the Al Gore show and the important but isolated challenge of reducing our carbon footprint, the avant guarde is way down the road with sustainable design, green chemistry, zero waste, and so on.  It's all connected, we need to get truth on the table, and we need to do the right things righter.  Stella is a poster child for a new paradigm of ecological economics, natural capitalism, and conscious evolution.  Learn more about Renuva from Dow below.

Learn More
Learn More

Journal: Chuck Spinney Sends–Katrina & Fear

03 Environmental Degradation, 08 Wild Cards, 12 Water, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Military
Chuck Spinney
Chuck Spinney

The Detritus of Katrina and the Paralysis of Fear:
A Metaphor for Contemporary Politics

The vast Mississippi Delta in Louisiana is sinking as sea water from the Gulf of Mexico seeps in to destroy its fresh water marshlands.  The Army's Corps of Engineers says it can not protect New Orleans from the inevitable storm surges caused by hurricanes (see the Guardian report attached below).

Some may dismiss this warning as alarmist hype, and the Army's Corps of Engineers certainly does not have an enviable track record in this regard.  That said, the Corps' warning does make evident the political-economic  detritus left over from Hurricane Katrina.  Inferentially, the warning also highlights the hollowness in the scare tactics used by global warming advocates to raise money for their far more costly ambitions, not to mention the paralyzing political-economic consequences posed by the politics of fear practiced by the Pentagon.

The reality of the Delta thus becomes a metaphor for the larger emptiness that now pervades American politics.

Below the Fold: Balance of Spinney Comment, Full Article with Highlight, Books
Continue reading “Journal: Chuck Spinney Sends–Katrina & Fear”

Journal: True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria

03 Environmental Degradation, True Cost

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‘Not Evil, Just Wrong’: What’s really at stake with global warming

Point of View By CHARLES COLSON
BreakPoint October 15, 2009

Global warming is a fact of life. Not a fact in a scientific sense. Far from it. But a fact in that it is an issue—an issue that will shape public policy, international relations, and the economies of the world for decades to come.

An eye-opening documentary called Not Evil, Just Wrong: The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria is being released this week by the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation—an outfit I endorse.

I dare say the film will be controversial because it tackles head on the sacred cows of the man-made global warming crowd.

The film points out that the British High Court ruled in a lawsuit that Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, “is scientifically flawed and has nine significant exaggerations and factual errors.” Among those exaggerations are the claims that sea levels could rise 20 feet by the end of the century, and that polar bears are disappearing because of global warming (in fact, they are not).

Not Evil, Just Wrong also presents a number of scientists and a founding member of the radical environmental organization Greenpeace, who are unafraid to challenge the chief scientific claims behind global warming.

Phi Beta Iota: In the absence of public intelligence, political intelligence is an oxymoron.  Cf.Review: The Resilient Earth–Science, Global Warming and the Future of Humanity.

Journal: Integrity 101 for Presidential Aides

03 Environmental Degradation, 10 Security, Ethics, Government

Full Op-Ed Online
Full Op-Ed Online

October 12, 2009

Climate Myths and National Security

By Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

The President of the United States recently told the United Nations that “global warming” poses a threat to national security and may engender conflicts as populations are displaced by rising sea levels, droughts, floods, storms etc. etc. etc. However, it is now clear that there is no basis for the notion that the barely-detectable human influence on the climate is likely to prove a threat to climate, still less to national security.

The first principle to which any national security advisor must adhere is that of objective truth. Though he must have an understanding of politics, he is not a politician: he is a truth-bearer. Therefore, he begins by narrowing down the issue to a single, central question whose answer determines whether the suggested threat is real. He then tries to find the truthful answer to that question, and draws his conclusion from that.  [Emphasis added.]

Continue reading “Journal: Integrity 101 for Presidential Aides”

Journal: MILNET Flags Africa wants $67 bln a year in global warming funds

03 Environmental Degradation, 08 Wild Cards, Communities of Practice, Earth Intelligence
Full Story Online
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* Africa seeks unity ahead of Copenhagen talks

* Climate change seen hitting poor nations hardest

By Tsegaye Tadesse

ADDIS ABABA, Aug 24 (Reuters) – African leaders will ask rich nations for $67 billion per year from 2020 to cushion the impact of global warming on the world's poorest continent, according to a draft resolution seen by Reuters on Monday.

. . . . . . .

A study commissioned by the Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum that was released in May said poor nations bear more than nine-tenths of the human and economic burden of climate change.

The 50 poorest countries, however, contribute less than 1 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions that scientists say are threatening the planet, the report said.

Phi Beta Iota: What Africa really lacks is a strategic analytic model such as developed by the Earth Intelligence Network.  All ten threats must be evaluated and their causes mapped.  At the same time, it has been established that the poor do as much or more damage to the environment than do corporations–giving Africa money in isolation from a larger analysis with targetted effects will be a waste–Africa merits both reparations for colonialism as well as strong support for the recapture of the hundreds of billions looted from Africa by its own leaders; AND a planned giving from both organizations and indiviudals, but it must have a strong continent-wide analytic foundation.  Not there.

2004 Daly (US) Globalization and National Defense–Implications of the Effective Erasure of National Boundaries in an Era of Ecological Economics

03 Environmental Degradation, Analysis, Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Historic Contributions
Herman Daly
Herman Daly

GOLDEN CANDLE AWARD:  Dr. Herman E. Daly

OSS '04: To Dr. Herman E. Daly for his early role as a founder of the field of Ecological Economics, including his leadership role in the creation of the journal for this area of ethical study, and his body of work including Steady-State Economics (1977) and the most recent Ecological Economics and the Ecology of Economics (1999).

We discovered Dr. Daly's work when we made the leap from environmental scare mongering to his term, ecological economics.  This great man, who spent most of his years in the University of Maryland system, has received every prize short of the Nobel Prize, and we were among those who urged the Nobel Comittee to recognize Daly and and others rather than the celeberity de jour.  Below is his presentation to OSS '06.  Please search for his books on this website, in the overcall scheme of strategic analytics, Herman Daly is “root.”

Herman Daly
Herman Daly