Thursday, January 24, 2013

North to Davos Country

Global Warming Divides U.S.eh?
In a 2009 Dredd Blog post about the inequalities afforded to Cavemen, I made a comment about the participants taking part in Davos 2009 in Switzerland.

I was not making any snide remarks, I was quoting a noted news service that was quoting those who were casting some stones:
“Nobody in Davos wants to get near a negative like redemption,” said Robert Dilenschneider, chief executive officer of the Dilenschneider Group, a public relations firm in New York. “But the truth is that everyone here is part of the problem, and the public will soon begin demanding a pound of flesh.”

“No banker or businessman wants to take responsibility,” said Dilenschneider, who counts 40 Davos delegates as clients, their identities shielded by confidentiality agreements. “It’s their view that everybody else did something wrong.”

Questions about responsibility, blame and contrition hang in the cold mountain air at the glitzy Alpine resort this week like so much exhaled breath. With $1 trillion of bank losses and $25 trillion of market value gone missing since the start of the financial crisis, there’s much to account for.
(Davos Delegates in ‘Denial’, Bloomberg, emphasis added). In a nutshell, denialism is the fundamental essence of the ideology of the exceptionalists.

This year's World Economic Forum conference at Davos, Switzerland entertains the mega-denialists once again, however, it seems to be that the denial business is getting a bit more difficult to pull off:
There is also increasing recognition of the worrying trend that multi-year emissions from greenhouse gasses have not lessened due to the ongoing economic crisis. Achim Steiner, head of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), will be in Davos to explain UNEP estimates that about 49bn tonnes of CO₂eq were emitted in 2011, roughly 20% more than the global emissions in 2000.

More disturbing still is UNEP's assessment that under current targets the world is on course for 4°C warming. The new head of the World Bank, president Jim Kim has said that a 4°C world would be "devastating", and so different from our current climate that it will come with high uncertainty and new risks that threaten our very ability to anticipate and plan.

On Saturday 26 January at 11.15 Europe time, an interview with president Jim Kim will be live streamed from the World Economic Forum, in which he will talk about the extreme economic risks of a 4°C world.

2012 was one of the 10th warmest years on record and the 36th consecutive year since 1976 that the yearly global temperature was above the 1960-1990 average, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); the US drought in 2012 was another record breaker, with about 45% of the continent in severe to extreme drought by November. The Midwest had the hottest, driest summer since 1936.
(Guardian, emphasis in original). Those are global figures, because 2012 was the warmest year in recorded history for the contiguous U.S., where one whole degree of temperature increase was experienced (the old world of the U.S. took ten years to increase a mere 0.13 degrees).

One tends to wonder what this has to do with the big bucks of the likes of Oil-Qaeda who are the sponsors of global warming induced climate change:
In discussion with US Senators earlier in 2012, leading insurers expressed their concerns about national economic vulnerability to these trends. They estimated that average weather-related insurance industry losses in the US were about $3bn (£1.9bn) a year in the 1980s compared to about $20bn (£13bn) annually by the end of the last decade.

Top executives from many insurance industry giants like Swiss Re, Zurich Financial, Marsh & McLennan and others will also be in Davos to discuss this worrying climate damage forecast.

They will share their concerns with energy chief executives [Oil-Qaeda], economic and finance officials, leading climate negotiators and senior officials and experts from key economies such as China, Europe and the United States.
(ibid, Guardian, emphasis in original). Isn't that special: "In discussion with US Senators earlier in 2012, leading insurers expressed their concerns", which means: "we will not support the crazy candidates who say global warming is a hoax, because it is costing us an arm and a leg."

Well, now you know why Oil-Qaeda is trying, through their right-wing lackeys in government, to plunder more money from your Social Security Insurance, Medicare Insurance, and Medicaid Insurance.

They call those three "good insurance" when they are trying to sell you on it and taking a percentage of every paycheck you earn, but then they call it "bad entitlements" when they want to take it back.

They want to take it back because their pollution of the Earth is killing the private insurance industry and government insurance efforts.

Killing those efforts with climate change catastrophes Oil-Qaeda themselves have caused through their fossil fuel pollution (which they adamantly deny and refuse to acknowledge):
Box also provided a large-scale perspective on how much sea level rise humanity has already probably set in motion from the burning of fossil fuels. The answer is staggering: 69 feet, including water from both Greenland and Antarctica, as well as other glaciers based on land from around the world.

Scientists like Box aren't sure precisely when, or how fast, all that water will flow into the seas. They only know that in past periods of Earth's history, levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases and sea levels have followed one another closely, allowing an inference about where sea level is headed as it, in effect, catches up with the greenhouse gases we've unleashed. To be sure, the process will play out over vast time periods — but it has already begun, and sea level is starting to show a curve upward that looks a lot like…well, the semi-notorious "hockey stick."
(Mother Jones, emphasis added). Thus, a song about death-by-civilization:

Lyrics to the following song can be view here.



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