This Space for Rent

Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue

The world's scientists yesterday gave their starkest warning yet that a failure to cut greenhouse gas emissions will bring devastating climate change within a few decades.

Average temperatures could increase by as much as 6.4C by the end of the century if emissions continue to rise, with a rise of 4C most likely, according to the final report of an expert panel set up by the UN to study the problem. The forecast is higher than previous estimates, because scientists have discovered that Earth's land and oceans are becoming less able to absorb carbon dioxide.

(--The Guardian reports on the latest IPCC report)

The climate change denialists are, of course, saying their usual bullshit about "there's no global warming! It's magic sky fairies!" and every conservative government in the world is warming up their "oh, this is serious. We'll do some research and get back to you in 2040" (Apres moi le deluge; it's not just a handy phrase, it's how these fuckheads live their lives) so you can take as a pretty safe bet that the "up to 6.4C" temperature change will, if anything, be the low limit. Perhaps global warming will put the tropical sea temperature up to the boiling point of water, and then we can play the same sort of exciting runaway global warming which has made Venus into such a charming vacation spot.

Aaaaarrrgg. I'm not one to talk, since I'm sitting in a large poorly insulated house typing in front of an always-on computer that eats half a megawatt a year (it's always on because we've got ssh connections to the outside world, and when the computer powers down all those connections go "poof" because the fault tolerance of ssh is somehere between none and less than none.) We might have a Prius, so our carbon footprint isn't that big for an American, but we're still shovelling more CO2 into the atmosphere than 20 people anywhere else but Canada.

What a lovely planet to leave for my grandchildren. "Here's a flash disk with all of the family photos on them. Try to get to the arctic and keep some technology going for seventy generations so your descendants will remember their dumber than a stack of bricks ancestors and hopefully not do the idiotic things we did."