Do-It-Yourself God Power

Hey kids, let's go out to the garage and make some new life forms! Get ready, because it's already happening. We'll talk with Pat Mooney, founder of the ETCgroup about crazy new technology on the loose. Then well-known journalist Steven Kotler takes us on a tour of ecopsychology in ten easy steps. Is it a diversion for comfortable coffee shops or "the answer". Radio Ecoshock 160316

I'm Alex Smith. Welcome to Radio Ecoshock.

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ANOTHER YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY - PAT MOONEY OF ETC GROUP

You may be wearing clothes created with synthetic biology, and eating food laced with nanotubes. A weird future has arrived, without any warning labels. Our guest Pat Mooney will be your guide. Pat founded a group in 1977 looking into food, agriculture and commodities. In 2001 it was renamed the ETC Group, with offices in Canada, the U.S., Mexico, and the Philippines. If it's controversial, the ETC Group probably has a report on it.

Pat Mooney

If you really want to know what this interview is about, and get the details on scary tech you've never heard of, be sure and check out this ETC Group newsletter "ETC's Irreverent Review of 2015... ...and (possibly) Irrelevant Preview of 2016".

SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY

From the ETC Group newsletter:

"SynBio: During 2015, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity set to work monitoring and analysing biology and the panoply of new biotechniques. A multi-stakeholder working group met in Montreal at the end of the year and will report to the CBD’s scientific subcommittee this April. ETC’s Jim Thomas is a member of the committee. But, even as the UN inevitably concludes that CRISPR, synthetic biology, gene drives and everything else cry out for oversight, the EU Commission is expected to start 2016 giving a controversial legal opinion that at least some of the same techniques can enjoy a free pass – exempting so called ‘new breeding techniques’ from GMO legislation. (Incidentally, ETC together with Canada’s Bioeconomies media project and Germany’s Heinrich Böll Foundation published this year a video in several languages explaining SynBio).[xxxvii]

[xxxvii] ETC Group and Heinrich Böll Foundation, Video Animation on Synthetic Biology in 5 languages – French German, Spanish, Portuguese and Haitian Creole. "

Here's another good ETC Group source on synthetic biology.

EXTREME BIOTECH MEETS EXTREME ENERGY

ETC Group and Heinrich Böll Foundation, “Extreme Biotech meets Extreme Energy”, November 2015.

NANO TECH

I got an article from natural news saying "engineered nanomaterials or (ENMs)" are on the rise in food, including in allegedly "organic" food. Let me give you a paragraph from that article:

"A group called the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN) established an inventory of consumer products [that]contain ENMs in 2005. After this list was presented by Mother Jones with over 1,000 entries, PEN ran too low on funds to continue by 2009. That list depended on food manufacturers' reporting ENM content. Nowb the food industry folks no longer report their ENMs at all because labeling ENMs is not required. Thus ENM food content remains shrouded in mystery even more than GMOs."

That's a quote from an article at naturalnews.com.

Here is more from the ETC Group newsletter:

"Nano NO More: Whatever happened to nanotechnology? ETC was the first CSO to take up the issue 15 years ago but, since then, dozens of other strong partners around the world have taken up the cudgels and are making progress (albeit belatedly) especially in the EU. But, nanotech is by no means gone away. The global market for nanomaterials is about 11 million tonnes projected to contribute to end products valued at €2 trillion in 2015.[xxxii] Six million factory workers will be handling nanoparticles by 2020. As we prepared for the Paris climate change negotiations, we learned that, for the first time, children in the city were found to have carbon nanotubes in their lungs.[xxxiii]

[xxxiii] Sam Wong, “Carbon nanotubes found in children’s lungs for the first time”, New Scientist, electronic edition, October 21, 2015."

Are there nano particles placed in our food, would Americans be told if there were, and will they migrate throughout our body? Is anyone testing them for safety, or do we just run the experiment on all humans and nature?

BLOCKCHAIN - WHAT IS IT?

ETC Group staff will vehemently deny that Pat Mooney, when he retires at the end of 2017, will be replaced by a blockchain…

CONTROLLING TECHNOLOGY - IS IT AN OXYMORON?

The ETC Group is working with the UN to set up a group to oversee and possibly control technology. But when have we ever met a technology we didn't try, and eventually release into the real world? We can't stop North Korea from developing nuclear technology, what makes anyone think they can stop humans somewhere in the world from making anything, especially at things like 3D printing and computers make even the most complex ideas easy in somebody's basement or jungle? Pat Mooney gives us an update on efforts by the international community.

FORESTS DISCUSSION SOURCES:

Outside the sci-fi products now arriving, let's relax a little in the world's forests. Except that news is hardly relaxing. Apparently satellites have been misreading the amount of the Amazon rainforest lost to agriculture. We also found out from another paper published in 2015, that new growth in the Amazon is storing about half the carbon scientists have assumed in so many climate studies.

Selections from the ETC Group newsletter:

"Unfortunately, other satellites have been misreading the Amazon forest cover underestimating the incursion of cattle, cane and soya and exaggerating the trees and their biomass. Instead of a forest loss reduction rate of 25% last year, the loss accelerated by 62%.[ii]

[ii] Do-Hyung Kim, Joseph O. Sexton, John R. Towshend, “Accelerated deforestation in the humid tropics from the 1990s to the 2000s”, 7 May 2015, Geophysical Research Letters.

Worse still, the trees are growing faster but dying faster too – and storing barely half the CO2 scientists have assumed.[iii]

[iii] Gautam Naik, "Study: Amazon's forests sequester less carbon", Wall Street Journal, electronic edition, March, 21 2015.

Meanwhile, the boreal forests of North America may soon become net-emitters of carbon dioxide rather than capturing a third of the world’s atmospheric carbon. New estimates suggest that the Yukon Flats forest has been a source of GHG emissions for half a century.[iv] Where the Yukon goes, Alaska and Siberia are likely to follow.

[iv] Ryan Kelly, Melissa L. Chipman, Philip E. Higuera, Ivanka Stefanova, Linda B. Brubaker and Feng Sheng Hu, “Recent burning of boreal forests exceeds fire regime limits of the past 10,000 years”, June 19 2013, Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Climatologists – and the rest of us – also learned as we left Paris that perhaps as much as 40% of global deforestation comes through slave labor and that most of the world’s 35 million legally-defined slaves are either the victims of ecological destruction or are forced to contribute to one third of global annual GHG emissions through illegal mining, fishing, brick making and lumbering.[vii] We must all worry about what we don’t know we don’t know but a drastic reduction in GHG emissions is urgent – and not just for the climate.

[vii] Kevin Bales, Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World, Spiegel and Grau, 2016."

Pat Mooney has been looking into all this for decades. He's the Executive Director of the international Civil Society Organization ETC Group, based in Montreal, Canada, with branches in other countries, and co-conspirators all over the world. Keep up with latest developments at the web site, etcgroup.org.

Download or listen to this 26 minute Radio Ecoshock interview with Pat Mooney in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

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ECOPSYCHOLOGY IN TEN EASY STEPS? JOURNALIST STEVEN KOTLER

We know the big problems threatening humanity and the natural world. We even have some affordable solutions. So why do we keep driving so hard toward the cliff of extinction? Maybe it's all in the mind. In this program, we'll add to my short-list of interviews on ecopsychology.

Steven Kotler is one of those endangered species called a real journalist. He's been published in The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and much more. His best-selling 2012 book, co-authored with Peter Diamandis, is "Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think".

From his dog rescue ranch in New Mexico, we welcome Steven Kotler to Radio Ecoshock.

Steven Kotler

I think the future is much worse than Steve thinks. But maybe that's my damaged mind-set. So we talk about the really fine article he published in Orion Magazine, "Ecopsychology in Ten Easy Lessons".

By all means, stop right here, and read Steve's article. It's entertaining, sure, Steven is a great writer. But it's deep, and well worth the time spent. I've been mulling it over ever since. And by the way, there's no question that climate change is wreaking havoc with people's mental health.

Steven tells us that's logical and real. For example, let's take James Lovelock's theory that all life is really one co-dependent organism, almost with a global mind. That is one interpretation of "Gaia". The late great Paul Shepard reasoned that when part of this great network is damaged, all feel it. Perhaps that's why we groan when another great swathe of the great coral reef die off, or an iconic animal is almost gone. Are we subconsciously attached to all of nature?

Steve puts it better than I can, writing:

"In 1982, the late ecologist Paul Shepard extended this theory into psychology, proposing that if there are innate links between the planet and the human species, then those links should extend to the human mind. Shepard feared that by wantonly destroying the former we are simultaneously ravaging the latter — quite literally driving ourselves mad one clearcut forest at a time."

For the record, paleontologist Peter Ward thinks the Gaia theory is dead wrong. The record shows life has barely stumbled along, surviving many of it's own suicidal tendencies. He calls it the "Medea Hypothesis". Even so, it's true we all feel nature's pain as though it was our own.

The idea that damage to nature is also damaging our mental health is gaining more and more ground. The U.S. National Wildlife Federation brought out an expert report on it in 2012. Maybe we are not as unfeeling about nature as we like to think, or at least, as corporate science has led us to believe? If human intelligence was developed over a very long time as hunters-gatherers, is it any wonder we have become so crazy living in concrete boxes where nature is more or less banned?

We also talk about Laura Sewell and her essay “The Skill of Ecological Perception.” We have to revive our senses, Laura tells us, in order to really conceive of nature at all.

Of course some readers in Orion Magazine questioned whether we really have to go to the ends of the Earth, as Kotler did in Patagonia, to find our ecological selves. Do you think it's become impossible for humans to recognize their true inner selves in a city?

Here's another paragraph from Steve's powerful writing that moved me (from his article "Ecopsychology in Ten Easy Lessons"):

"It all clicks into place — as I am watching the death throes of this iceberg. This is the real impact of industrial repression, the impact of our environmental arrogance. Once this meltdown is complete, it will not reverse. The freshly melted water will never become ice again, at least not in any time frame that is fathomable in human terms. What does it feel like to witness these end times? Awful. Like murder. Like I’m the one who is melting."

What about ecopsychology? There's no time to train a hundred million eco-counsellors. Is this marriage of psychology and ecology destined to remain a plaything of the inner circle? Will it be taught in schools? Will it ever reach the Republican Party. Where can it go?

Despite the title, there is nothing "easy" about ecopsychology.

Steven Kotler is also co-founder and Director of Research for the Flow Genome Project, which trains athletes and others to reach their personal best. But as he talks (including explaining where the expression "Three dog night" comes from) - we realize his heart is in his New Mexico dog rescue project. It's called "A Small Furry Prayer" and Steve has a book out all about that.

Keep up with all things Kotler at his web site www.stevenkotler.com. You may also be interested in his book "Tomorrowland: Our Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact".

Download or listen to this 28 minute Radio Ecoshock interview with Steven Kotler in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

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WRAPPING UP WITH MORE CLIMATE NEWS

Last week's program on strange, record-breaking developments in the Arctic is still waving out into the Twittosphere, still heavily downloaded. You can listen for free at soundcloud.com/radioeochshock, or download any of our past programs from ecoshock.org.

This week's climate horror story was pretty predictable. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have reached new levels above 404 parts per million. Just ten years ago, in 2006, it was big news when CO2 hit a record high of 381 parts per million. Greenhouse gases are still climbing, and they are increasing faster than ever before. Scientists used to talk about 2 parts per million added every year. Now it's over 3 parts per million, for the second year in a row. From February 2015 to February 2016 CO2 levels jumped 3.76 parts per million.

The rate of carbon emissions increases is not constant. There is an increase on the increase every year. Unless we go into a crash program to save ourselves, catastrophe is right around the corner.

Despite the Paris peace agreement, government bragging, corporate propaganda and our own pride when we walking or turn off a light switch, humanity and all the species are hurtling ever-faster toward rising seas, an ocean more acid, crop-crushing droughts and extreme weather. Some plants and animals will not be able to adapt fast enough. Some humans won't either.

But climate change is just one face of a revolution in human interference in natural systems. Let's look into synthetic life, a plague of new nano-materials and the joys of gene-drives. We must not forget the dark side of technology, in our race to try everything.

RADIO ECOSHOCK!

Radio Ecoshock reaches out to you every week from over 90 non-profit radio stations in 4 countries, and countless Net stations. It ripples out to more to listeners in more than 100 countries weekly, via Soundcloud, archive.org and many other sites. Still, not enough humans know how dangerous these problems are, or how short our time to deal with them.

If you agree this program content is important, you can help. Please go ahead and forward the show widely, Tweet about it, get it on Facebook. Thank you for helping me get the word out, by extending the voice of our expert guests.

And thank you for caring about your world.

NATURE REALLY IS THE BEST MEDICINE...

Our fake ad for Nature, as the new pharmaceutical wonder-drug, was created by the folks at nature-rx.org. Find the video version on You tube here.

NATALIE MERCHANT "IT'S A COMIN'"

We go out with a tune by Natalie Merchant called "It's a Comin'". I first saw this posted on Guy McPherson's blog, Nature Bats Last. Find all her latest works at nataliemerchant.com.

Here are Natalie's opening words:

Wild fires, dying lakes,

landslides, hurricanes,

apocalypse in store

like nothing ever seen before.

It’s a-coming.

Third-generation refugees,

street mob burning effigies,

revolution, civil war

like nothing ever seen before.

Mobilize to Save the Climate!

SUMMARY: Psychologist Margaret Klein Salamon on movement to mobilize to save the climate - a total shift in society. The transformative power of climate truth. Plus scientist Paul Beckwith on chemtrails and geoengineering.

She's an American clinical psychologist and host of theclimatepsychologist.com. Now Margaret Klein Salamon is calling the United States to an emergency mobilization - to stave off a disastrous shift in our climate. Why it might work. Why it has to.

Then we're back with climate scientist Paul Beckwith to talk over chemtrails or covert climate geoengineering. Maybe it hasn't started, but Beckwith thinks it should.

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MOBILIZE TO SAVE THE CLIMATE!

I realize not everyone listens to radio. That's why I'm taking the time this week to give you extensive notes on this critical idea of a rapid shift in society to prevent disastrous climate change. It's not a new idea, following the example of what happened in the United States (as well as Great Britain, Canada and many other countries) during World War II. What's new is a movement to really make that big change happen.

Our guest is Margaret Klein Salamon, the author of a widely read article "The Transformative Power of Climate Change".

While studying for, (and getting) her PHD in psychology last year, Margaret Klein Salamon became increasingly aware of climate change. She was also in New York City during Hurricane Sandy. Talking with friends, she decided to start a climate psychology blog, but her friends challenged her, saying writing is not enough. What can we do together to really solve this problem?

Clinical psychologist and climate activist Margaret Klein Salamon

Through her blog, she found more "collaborators" and allies, in particular Ezra Silk. They developed a "social movement start-up." (The Climate Mobilization, and The Pledge to Mobilize). Ezra Silk is the co-founder of the Climate Mobilization. The Pledge was developed with Philip Sutton, the co-author of "Climate Code Red" (2008).

Margaret is the fourth psychologist we've had on the show - but so far, no psychiatrists, even though what we are doing to the planet is pretty crazy. Why do you think there's a difference in response by the two fields of mental health?

She replies that psychatrists are trained like medical doctors, and these days tend toward pharmacology - writing prescriptions. While a psychologist might be able to offer therapy regarding climate change, there is no drug treatment for it. However, Lise Van Susteren is one American psychiatrist who is also a climate activist.

CLIMATE MOBILIZATION

"We recognize that the climate problem is a global emergency that threatens to cause the collapse of civilization within this century."

- Margaret Klein Salamon

That is the starting point. They look at history: the World War Two home-front mobilization in the United States, starting after Pearl Harbor (December 1941) and developing in 1942 and after. The global emergency was the imperial ambitions of the Axis Powers (Germany and Japan).

America rapidly transformed every sector of society and economy. Soldiers, businesses, and housewives went to work on the war needs. It was the first time women went to work in factories (other than during the early industrial revolution). During this time, 40% of produce was grown at home in Victory Gardens. Universities changed to war-related research (a trend which continues today). It's an example of how America, and other countries, could deal with an acute crisis, such as climate change.

This historic example has been used by many climate leaders and thinkers. Hilary Clinton has used that example, as have Executive Directors of many NGO's, including Lester Brown of Earth Policy Institute. He was one of the signatories of a 2008 letter to President Barack Obama, calling for an effort like the World War Two mobilization, but this time to fight climate change.

And yet, no one was directly advocating to go ahead and do this mobilization. That is the role of this new movement called Climate Mobilization. They want to push this forward through the tool "The Pledge to Mobilize". That is a one page document that any American, and just recently any international citizen, can sign. The Pledge contains a platform with five political demands. The signer recognizes climate change threatens civilization, and they endorse this 5 point plan to mobilize all social and economic resources to stop the worst of climate change from developing.

For example, the Pledge calls for the United States to reduce their emissions to "net zero" by 2025, through a complete transformation of the energy and agricultural sectors. It would entail, they say, full employment. It demands the top priority of American diplomacy is to reach global net zero emissions at top emergency speeds.

When signing, you endorse those 5 points, but also make three personal and political commitments. They include "I will vote for candidates who have signed the Pledge, over those who have not." That includes all levels of elections, whether local, state, or national. "I will support candidates who have signed the pledge with time or money or both." Plus the signer promises to spread the truth of climate change and the Pledge itself to others. Margaret says it becomes "like a missionary activity." The expectation is that you will talk to people about the reality of climate change, and what needs to be done, quickly. "It's a way to break climate silence."

Up until Pearl Harbor, many Americans were in denial about what was happening in Europe and Asia. They did not want to become involved in another European war (after World War One) and chose isolationism. Only when the people felt directly threatened at home, did the big swing take place. Where people wanted their personal lives, suddenly they developed a sense of duty before self. If each of us continues pursuing our own happiness only, then we will face collapse.

DO WE HAVE TO BE POLITICAL?

A huge number of people who distrust any government action. Does climate mobilization have to come from the federal government?

"Yes", says Klein, the scale of changes are so large that they must be coordinated nationally. A city-by-city, state-by-state approace won't do enough, fast enough. And yet City and State action are also needed.

She wants a declaration of emergency, or maybe even a declaration of war against climate change.

Localized agro-ecology is part of the required change, giving us near zero emissions supply lines, rather than long-distance trucking or air transport of food. Agriculture should also sequester carbon into the soil. This will also offer more protection against food shocks.

International relations would be built on countering the climate emergency. It might involve technology transfer, similar to the "lend-lease" that occured during World War Two. Except we might ship out solar panels or electrified mass transportation systems instead of guns and tanks. It will require "all hands on deck" which means anyone who wants to work would be employed in this climate emergency (full employment) as happened during World War Two.

The Republican majority in Congress is filled with leaders who deny climate change is real, or that humans are causing it. That's kind of a stumbling block, isn't it? Yes and no, says Klein. We should not waste out time arguing with deniers, but work with the majority of people who know climate change needs to be stopped.

We must ask our politicians: "do you have the ability to protect our country - and the world - from collapse, or not?"

Another part of World War Two, for people in many countries, was curtailing consumer spending and even rationing. Do we need that now, and won't that be a very difficult sell, to promise people less?

It seems just to fill up our car one more time, or pay that electric bill for coal-powered juice, we all need to be able to turn off our knowledge of climate change. Margaret, what tools can psychology offer to help us overcome the bits of denial we all need, in order to keep functioning in a fossil-powered world?

Klein says psychoanalytical work helps a patient accept conflict, within themselves. For example, you might both love someone and hate them. We will have similar mixed emotions, because in spite of our climate knowledge, the fossil powered world around us is almost inescapable on an individual level. Still, we feel guilty about our energy use.

Psychology suggests we should expect the mind to do anything and everything to protect us from full knowledge of what climate change means and will do. We've never been perfect as information processors. "We don't want to know, on the most basic level, because it hurts to know."

BEYOND DENIAL: DISSOCIATION

Denial is just one of our mechanisms. Most of the time we operate in "dissociation". The most extreme dissociation is an out-of-body experience, or creating multiple personalities. We all dissociate in lesser degrees, by putting unpleasant realities out of our minds. We may plan video games, watch TV or do many things to think about anything other than climate change. "Zoning out" works. Dissociation, Margaret says, is the lack of normal integration between thoughts, feelings, and action.

People understand the climate threat intellectually, and may talk about a billion people dying, but their feelings and actions don't reflect what they are talking about. Margaret references David Robert's recent piece about the awful truth about climate change - but his language reflected a kind of emotion numbing.

WILFUL IGNORANCE

Another psychological defense against really knowing about climate impacts is "wilful ignorance". It's when you "know enough to know you don't want to know any more." We may start reading an alarming article on climate change, then quickly move on to another news item, and "forget" about it. The person could learn more about it, or really throw their lives into it, but claim they are not experts, not scientists, so they bear no responsibility.

HANDLING CLIMATE EMOTIONS

If we really tune in to what humans are doing to this planet and other species, we may feel strong emotions, like grief or anger. Do you advise people to let those emotions happen, or to calm themselves in various ways?

Margaret says we must experience these emotions, but we may need to find ways to contain or structure, so they don't overwhelm our lives. "If you haven't cried about climate change, maybe you don't quite understand, or more likely, maybe you are dissociating." But we need to find the right time and place. It doesn't work to cry about climate change at an important meeting, "or to become furious about climate change in front of your young children." Holding feelings in can create psychological problems, she says.

Margaret started a Facebook group, now run by others, called "Climate Change. It's Personal". It's about how we as people live in these times. We don't have to experience the climate crisis alone.

SHOULD WE DOWNPLAY BAD CLIMATE NEWS TO AVOID PARALYZING PEOPLE?

We recently had the Norwegian eco-psychologist Per Espen Stoknes on the show. He says we have to stop frightening people with climate forecasts, which may only paralyze them into inaction. What are your thoughts?

She wants to read more about his position, but mainly disagrees. Climate change is frightening, if the facts are understood. However, Klein wants us to channel emotions like grief, fear, anger into mobilizing to do something about the situation. The Pledge to Mobilize solves the problem Stoknes is talking about. There is a huge solution on the table that everyone can be part of. "If we don't solve this, all is lost."

She believes in "climate truth" and recently published an essay titled "The Transformative Power of Climate Truth". It was published on Common Dreams, and has been a top story on the site Climate Code Red, while trending high on Reddit, and of course in her blog theclimatepsychologist.com.

Klein tells us: "If you're not talking about the fact that climate change will cause the collapse of civilization, if we don't take drastic action, I think basically you are bull-shitting people."

Her use of "bull-shit" comes from the piece "On Bullshit" by Philosopher Harry G Frankfurt. It shows how especially in America, and especially in politics, experts recommend avoiding the truth, to communicate instead just some message that works to bring people toward what you want. It's called manipulation, and it's the new method of operation for control by politicians, corporations, and anyone with a cause.

Even phrases like "green jobs" or "clean energy future" may hope to trick people away from the awful truth of climate change, and the much stronger path we need to take, says Salamon. Honesty offers us the enormous power of transformative truth. The fact we've gone this far, toward warming the planet, is a sign of wide-spread institutional failure.

"Our institutions are not working. It has to come from us, from the people living in this fateful hour." She's seen this inaction. For example, some have change jobs, so they have more time for climate activism. They become the kind of fuel for the massive social transformation that we need.

Of course I agree with Margaret: this is the hour. People are either going to answer this threat in reality, or not.

INSPIRATION FROM SOCIAL CHANGE IN WORLD WAR TWO

Margaret says she derived some hope from the book "No Ordinary Time" by Doris Kearns. The full title is "No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II" and it won a Pulitzer Prize for history after it was published in 1995.

During the isolationist phase in the United States after World War One, military production was largely decommissioned. Germany built a war machine never seen before, with the Blitzkreig and tanks, while the U.S. was still using horses - the Cavalry - in the military. After the attack on Pearl Habor, there was a transformation on every leve in America, with massive public participation. It gave her hope we could make a massive change to save what's left of the climate.

IS A MILITARY IMAGE THE BEST WE CAN DO?

I worry a return to military imagery has it's draw-backs. Militarism is part and parcel of climate change and the bad things that might happen when droughts, famines or repeated extreme weather strike. Is this really the best example we have?

Klein admits it's not the best example, but it may be the best we have in living memory. Plus, the climate mobilization will be much better, because it leads to more life and living things, rather than death and destruction.

However, in some ways it's easier to sell war. It's been part of our evolution as a species. If the North Koreans (or pick you enemy) was destroying our climate, we might rally against them sooner. But really, we ourselves are the enemy wrecking the climate. That's difficult.

There are bad actors, like fossil fuel companies and denial think-tanks. But they don't actually cause the problem as much as our willing dependency on burning fossil fuels. Without a visible "enemy", the climate mobilization will require a higher level of human consciousness and functioning.

CAN "CLIMATE MOBILIZATION" GO INTERNATIONAL?

How do you see this call for climate change going international - to countries like India, who never experienced the big shift in World War Two, or Scandinavia, where they didn't mobilize against Hitler? I guess I'm asking, is this really an American movement, when we need a global response?

Klein replies that very recently they introduced an international version of The Pledge to Mobilize. They had to take out the World War Two metaphor, as it doesn't apply everywhere. Plus they changed the target of getting to Net Zero to 2030, to give developing nations a little bit more time. Instead of relying on the U.S. Constitution, it calls on the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights. People from all over the world are now taking the Pledge to Mobilize. It can apply in any country that has elections, because it calls on pledgers to choose climate-active politicians. I presume it cannot yet reach into dictatorships or kingdoms, like Saudi Arabia.

We must choose leaders who will "protect civilization" - the "pro-civilization party".

CURRENT MOBILIZATION NEWS

Ralph Nader, the famous consumer advocate and Presidential candidate, has signed the Pledge.

The first Climate Mobilization Day of action will be on June 14th, 2015. That's anchored by their San Diego team. They had a march/rally where they posted the Pledge on the Federal Building in San Diego. They will follow that up with former Congressman Jim Bates who has signed the Pledge. Bates will recreate Paul Revere's ride in the streets of San Diego - warning that the climate crisis is coming and we must mobilize, ad Revere warned of the coming British troops in the Revolutionary War.

Now the movement will build on that to call on Mobilizers all over the country on June 14th. Their longer goal is about the 2016 elections in America. The huge media coverage of this long drawn-out election cycle is a good opportunity to get the Mobilization message out.

Climate change is so evident now, everyone can see it in their community. What initially seemed like a wild idea now seems almost self-evident - that we need a massive change to save ourselves. Who could have imagined the Roman Catholic Pope Francis would spear- head the climate message?

People wanting to take the Pledge and become climate truth activists should go to climatemobilization.org.

Download or listen to this 44 minute interview with Margaret Klein Salamon in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

SCIENTIST PAUL BECKWITH ON GEOENGINEERING AND "CHEMTRAILS"

A lot of interest in geoengineering from former chemtrails people, who think geoengineering is already happening, being sprayed from planes.

On our Radio Ecoshock show for March 18, 2015, Harvard scientist David Keith said we would know if geoengineering was being done on a scale that matters was happening. That show was picked up by Dane Wigington, host of geoengineeringwatch.org. Suddenly that show was downloaded a month later another 500 times from Soundcloud.

Dane is one of the more charismatic and savy people to emerge out of the "chemtrails" movement. They don't refer to "chemtrails" any more, but position themselves as an anti-geoengineering group. Some environmentalists also oppose geoengineering, like the ETC Group. But Wigington, and apparently a large number of people connected via the Internet, think covert spraying of the sky, to cool the planet, is already happening.

The former chemtrails movement has splintered somewhat. Some still believe the spraying is done to enable the secret Alaskan radio frequency site HAARP to control our minds. That may be the origin of the "tin foil hat" expression, as believers suggested metal foil could repel these waves from our brains. I got an email from another chemtrails enthusiast who thought the spraying was CAUSING global warming, not cooling the planet. Other's don't believe in climate change at all, so it's all over the map.

Wigington has no doubts that the world is set to warm in a dangerous way. He says governments, or the Powers That Be, are panicked, and are spraying aerosols to try to control what would otherwise be runaway warming. They may also be playing with controlling the weather, a project the U.S. military has tried in the past.

I haven't been able to find any peer-reviewed, published scientific work establishing the existence of a massive covert project to stave off climate change with aerosols launched from aircraft, commercial or otherwise. Being a science-based program, that doesn't leave me much to cover, other than asking other scientists what they think about it.

University of Ottawa climate scientist Paul Beckwith

Two weeks ago, we had Paul Beckwith on Radio Ecoshock, for a tag-team effort to cover major climate change stories around the world. After our talk, I asked Paul what he thought about covert geoengineering, and about new scientific calls to do research into ways we could cool the planet on an emergency basis. Paul agreed to have this conversation broadcast, and that's what you'll find in this week's show.

I'm just making notes on a major climate research talk given at Harvard University. The speaker, Dr. James Anderson, says there is support for geoengineering research coming from both the Left and the Right. The Left hopes to show the big risks of doing it, the Right wants to find a way to keep on burning fossil fuels. Meanwhile, the U.S. National Research Council has called for funding research into geoengineering. However, I haven't heard of that resulting in new funding announcements yet.

As a member of the Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG), Paul Beckwith joins a few other scientists, including Dr. Peter Wadhams of Cambridge (also a guest on Radio Ecoshock) in calling for geoengineering to cool the Arctic. They want to save what is left of the sea ice, saying when that goes, runaway feedbacks will develop that will speed glacial melting, increase methane emissions to very dangerous levels, and further destabilize the weather in the Northern Hemisphere, by disrupting the Jet Stream.

In another Radio Ecoshock interview, Beckwith suggested that just a few airplanes could spray sulfur or other materials to create a localized volcano-like cloud in the Arctic to deflect some solar energy back into space. He's now looking at other ways to create clouds in the Arctic, and is open to many varieties of geoengineering, such as biochar, and of course technology to remove carbon from the air.

Does he think there is a global conspiracy of geoengineering right now? He hopes not, "because it certainly isn't working." Like David Keith, he thinks any spraying effort large enough to make any difference would be detectable in various ways, and it hasn't shown up.

It's a simulating talk, which no doubt will add to both or our resumes on the Chemtrails "Disinformation Directory".

I've been told in a half dozen emails that eventually I will be tried and convicted of some sort of crime for not admitting that there is a conspiracy to poison the sky. It's rather amazing that we picked up that number of listeners who came to hate. That's new for Radio Ecoshock.

Listen to Paul Beckwith on geoengineering and conspiracy here in CD Quality or Lo-Fi.

My thanks to those whose ongoing monthly support keeps this show on the air. You know who you are. And a special thanks to Pat for her generous donation this past week. Find out how to support the show here.

I'd also like to thank Jack Wolfe for helping to manage the Radio Ecoshock Facebook page. Jack's doing a tremendous job, helping to announce each new show on a wide variety of internet forums. With that help, we reached over 19,000 people on Facebook in one week. You can help us spread the word, by "liking" Radio Ecoshock on Facebook here. That helps us get wider exposure.

The folks who retweet my humble weekly show announcement are also helping a lot. It's a kind of radio/Net activism.

All our past programs are available as free .mp3 files on our web site at ecoshock.org.

I'm Alex Smith, saying thank you for listening, and caring about our world.

How to Avoid Thinking About Climate Change

In this week's show:

* Norwegian eco-psychologist Per Espen Stoknes tells us why public concern about climate may be falling, even as the science becomes more certain. How to avoid thinking about climate change.

* Alternative energy expert Robert A. Stayton says "yes we can power the world with solar" and tells us how.

* Dr. Alan Rozich tells us "Other Inconvenient Truths Beyond Global Warming."

Due to circumstances beyond my control, the full blog for this program, with many more links, will not be posted until tomorrow, Thursday. Please check back tomorrow. In the meantime, this will get the new show out to our thousands of podcast subscribers.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen on Soundcloud right now!



You can also download individual interviews. Per Espen Stoknes in CD quality or Lo-Fi

Robert Stayton in CD quality or Lo-Fi

Alan Rozich in CD quality only.

I'm Alex. Thank you for listening, and caring about our world.

THE CRUNCH - Are You Ready?

From US Dept of Energy lab, Dr. Steven J. Smith says we will get hotter faster. Paul Goddard on why sea level went up over 2 inches in New England in 1 year. Carolyn Baker: preparing our minds and hearts for the coming troubles.

The Radio Ecoshock train is all booked up, ready to leave the station. We have two science reports: how we know the world will get hotter faster, and why sea levels along Eastern North America went up a couple of inches in single year. But first, I worry how we will cope with the coming bottleneck, when the economy crashes, along with climate disruption. Are you ready inside?

Then let's turn to the scientists. First, why temperatures will go up almost 2 degrees in North America and Europe in the next 40 years. After that, we'll investigate a case extraordinary sea level rise.

Download or Listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen right now on Soundcloud!



CAROLYN BAKER: Love In the Age of Ecological Apocalypse

Our next guest, Carolyn Baker returns to Radio Ecoshock. Carolyn is the author of many books, including "Collapsing Consciously", "Sacred Demise" and now a brand new book: "Love In the Age of Ecological Apocalypse: the Relationships We Need to Thrive". She has been a former psychotherapist, and currently offers life coaching.

Carolyn and I share news stories, although I get more than I give, being a subscriber to her amazing daily news service. We're kind of online friends, but we don't agree about everything. For example, I want my listeners to know that I don't agree that humans will go extinct this century.

But here's the thing. I think humans are in for some terrible shocks in the future. We are badly prepared, mentally and emotionally, to handle what is coming. Carolyn has some really useful inside tech to help us deal. We're going to need it.

We both agree that humans are approaching an awful bottleneck due to multiple causes. I would include the impacts of climate change, the economy, possibly a new plague, energy and food supply problems.

On Carolyn's web site, looking through the videos page, I was surprised, and not surprised, to find her interview with preparedness guru Chris Martenson. Chris probably has a lot of male listeners, some of them preppers with extra gold, food, and guns in the basement. Maybe they need Carolyn most, to realize relationships and community may be the survival tools we need most.

It's my theory that millions of Western people have become disengaged from fundamental human feelings. They experience emotions through characters on TV or movies. That's when they laugh or cry on cue, along with the sound-track. Soon, it's time to get real, and experience our own emotions.

Let's say we have the real economic crash we deserve. Money becomes almost worthless, and jobs disappear. Even if it's just a major depression, millions of people may find their emotions are left back in a child-like state. They didn't get or take the opportunity to feel real grief from real life.

REACTIONS TO SOCIAL SHOCK EVENTS

I'm going somewhere with this. It seems obvious that an event or period where millions of people die is coming, possibly this decade, almost certainly during the next. I don't know if it will be famine, but there are just too many reasons why our population is unsustainable. What happens to the survivors, especially if they witness it all on TV?

Just think of the lasting emotional scar left by about 5 million human-caused deaths in the Holocaust during World War Two. Now let's picture millions of people dying, due to our wasteful lifestyles burning carbon, over-using pesticides and antibiotics, or filling the ocean with plastic. How would we handle it?

I think that post-traumatic stress disorder could become a result, but on a mass scale, almost viral. If we take those PTSD symptoms and draw them out on a big social scale, what does that look like?

The other possible reaction is seen in the medical diagnosis of "shock". The person becomes numb, may even fall asleep as the bombs fall, as happened in World War I. That is one of several reasons I called this program "Ecoshock". I think millions of people will go into a state of shock as the environment unravels from the stresses we have created. Can you picture that?

A third possibility arises, and that is the direction you take. We could learn to grieve and survive. How can grief help us get through things? The key question is: how do we stop grieving, and what follows next? Carolyn addresses all that in her book, and in our interview.

Carolyn has been counselling people, especially those newly aware of the coming challenges for years. A lot of that gets into this new book. A challenge we've talked about before, but which keeps coming up, is the situation where one person in a relationship sees the fragility of our system and wants "out" or at least want to prepare a fall-back position. The spouse, and it could be a man or a woman, doesn't see it, and wants to keep playing the role of debt and consumption. We talk briefly about handling that, but the in-depth material is in the book.

Is it harder to find friends and lover now, as the media and the economy encourages us to sit in our silos of the office and then the couch and TV?

Carolyn lost a friend, and in the process learned more about the hospice experience. She thinks with species disappearing daily, and beloved landscapes and natural experiences lost, we may all be in hospice. Does that mean we just sit around crying? Not at all says Carolyn. Some people in hospice find a new release, and learn to value every minute of every day. We can all learn from that. And yes, joy has an important place even in difficult times.

I'm always interested in how aware people use the media to get their message out. Carolyn writes books, pumps out a daily news service of headlines we all need to hear about, and she took over "The Lifeboat Hour" radio show after the passing of Michael C. Ruppert. The Lifeboat Hour had it's own share of collapsing, after the New York studio of the Progressive Radio Network (PRN) was flooded and badly damaged. PRN had to go to pre-recorded programs only, instead of popular call-in programs like The Lifeboat Hour.

Carolyn tried Global Collapse Radio out of the UK, but that folded when the founding partners split up recently. Now PRN is back with renovated studios, and The Lifeboat Hour is back with Carolyn Baker at a new time, Fridays at 2 pm. You can listen live at PRN, or download past shows here at podbean.com.

By the way, you can listen to Radio Ecoshock online on PRN every Saturday morning at 10:30 am Eastern Time. Listen to/download this Radio Ecoshock interview with Carolyn Baker in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

Check out all things Carolyn Baker at her web site Speaking Truth to Power.

STEVE J. SMITH - EARTH GETTING HOTTER, FASTER

Scientists have predicted how hot Earth can become, depending on our greenhouse gas emissions. But they seldom say how quickly that happens, or how it will develop in the region where you live. As biologists can tell you, when it comes to survival of the species, the rate of warming may be as important as the final temperature.

What's true for the animals and plants is just as true for humans and our ability to adapt our civilization. Speed matters. Biologists have been saying for decades the rate of change is key. Plants, animals and insects can only adapt so far, and in the living network, they have to move together, or species and systems begin to fail.

That's why I welcome a new paper titled "Near-term acceleration in the rate of temperature change." The lead author is Dr. Steven J. Smith, a past lead author with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and currently a scientist with the Joint Global Change Research Institute, of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in Maryland. That's part of the U.S. Department of Energy. Dr. Steven Smith joins us on Radio Ecoshock to discuss this new research.

This paper finds the rate of heating, and therefore the actual impacts of climate change, is speeding up. The world is heating at a faster rate than at any time in at least the past 1,000 years, probably more.

Smith tells us: "What these climate models project is that we are on the cusp right now of a new state of climate where the models are projecting that the rate of change will soon start to speed up, and be outside of the range that we saw historically."

There has been too little research into this rate of change. Previous work looked at a rate on a century scale. This paper tries to quantify what is happening in shorter, more meaningful time scales, like 40 years, something "comparable to the life-time of much of human infrastructure.

Another factor to consider: new science has emerged predicting that heat sinks like oceans and forest may not function as well in the coming decades. If those land and ocean heat sinks are declining in their uptake of CO2, could that speed up the rate of temperature increase even more?

I am referring to the 2014 study, “The declining uptake rate of atmospheric CO2 by land and ocean sinks,” M.R. Raupach et al. Biogeosciences, 11, 3453–3475, 2014 Paper here.

REGIONS MATTER

In the paper "Near-term acceleration in the rate of temperature change" we find this, quote:

"Although global temperature trends are on of the most commonly used metrics of climate change, climate impacts will be driven by regional trends."

Why do regional results matter as much or more than global forecasts? Farmers, and all of us care more about what will happen in our area.

Let's talk about a few regions of the Northern Hemisphere. What did these scientists find about the rate of temperature increases in North America? "In North America, the models showed a change from about .7 to about 1.8 degrees Centigrade over a 40 year period.... that's about 1 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit over that period."

What about Europe? The scientists found predictions of increasing warming there are similar to North America.

The Arctic is already fantastically warmer the past few years. Will it get even warmer, even faster? Yes, according to this study. Temperatures in the Arctic will go up 1.1 to 3 degrees degree C.by the year 2050.

What are the predictions about warming rates in Australia or New Zealand?

"Australasia has lower rates of change in both data sets". Due to the large amount of ocean in the southern Hemisphere, warming will come slower in places like Australia.

THE ANTHROPOCENE MANIFESTS

A key point I found in this paper is the concept that as this century progresses, the human fingerprint on climate change becomes easier to see. Right now we have a hard time saying that a certain violent storm or heat wave is due to human emissions, rather than natural cycles or variations. All that should become clearer by 2040 or 2050, although the whole question is still an active topic in science.

Steven Smith says it will likely be easier to attribute heat waves to increased warming, than rainfall. Extreme rainfall events may have several complicated causes, so they will be harder to directly attribute to human caused global warming, he says.

But the scientists cannot predict how humans will react to this heating. As Smith points out, there are no laws of physics governing human behavior. So the paper cannot take into account things like a severe economic crash which slashes carbon emissions. However, their paper concentrated on the 90% most likely range, so extreme events might be found in the 10% tails on the prediction curve, which they don't cover. Let's call that a Black Swan event, which may or may not ever happen.

Download or listen to this key science interview with Steven J. Smith in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

A STRANGE CASE OF RAPID SEA LEVEL RISE IN NEW ENGLAND

Sea level rise has been called the single greatest impact of climate change. But we are learning sea level can go up regionally for other reasons. Surprising new research shows the ocean rose along the coast of New England by almost 4 inches for a couple of years.

Here to explain why is Paul B. Goddard. He's working on his PHD in climatology and climate modeling at the University of Arizona. Most recently, Paul was the lead author of a paper in the journal Nature Communications titled: "An extreme event of sea-level rise along the Northeast coast of North America in 2009–2010."

I've been told by experts, including scientists on Radio Ecoshock, that the major cause of sea level rise in places like New York city was subsidence - that the land was still sinking along the coast after the glaciers departed. But this new research found the sudden higher sea levels was not due to land sinking, which is a very, very slow process.

That shows just how complicated assigning the causes of sea level rise can be. If it wasn't subsidence, what did cause New England seas to go up 128 millimeters, or about 5 inches, in some places? It all has to do with ocean currents in the North Atlantic. In particular, the Gulf Stream changed.

Regular listeners must be bored with my repetitive amazement that the sea is not level. It isn't. Anyway, in this case, the outer, Eastward side of the Gulf Stream was lower than it's Western edge, which helped pile up water on the New England coast.

I'm assuming this new work is closely related to another paper. That's the one in Ocean Science led by H.L. Bryden. The title is "Impact of a 30 % reduction in Atlantic meridional overturning during 2009–2010". Scientists call it AMOC for short. Our guest Paul Goddard gives us the clearest explanation of these ocean currents that's I've heard.

I was astounded to find in that Bryden paper that this North Atlantic ocean current system is, quote:

"accounting for 25 % of the maximum combined atmosphere–ocean heat transport necessary to balance the Earth’s radiation budget."

Twenty five percent is a huge number! What happens if this system slows down - as some scientists fear it might. That could happen if a whole lot of fresh water floods into the far north Atlantic, due to melting in Greenland and elsewhere in the Arctic. The big ocean conveyor belt depends on heavy salty water sinking, and more freshwater could throw that out. That's the theme in the overblown Hollywood movie "The Day After Tomorrow". Scientists do worry about this, but on a much slower scale, perhaps over a century or two. One side effect would be much colder weather for the UK and Europe.

Another key reason I thought this paper was important is: what if ocean circulation brings another big hike in sea levels - at the same time as a big storm-surge event like Hurricane Sandy. Wouldn't Sandy flooding have been much worse if it happened in 2009 or 2010? Yes it would, Goddard tells us.

This is one reason why I think the impacts of sea level rise are routinely underestimated. Ten or twenty millimeters of sea level rise in the near-term doesn't sound like much. But we have to couple that with things like a high Spring tide, storm surge, and now periods of change in ocean circulation.

The whole subject of how the ocean works is coming into a kind of renaissance. We are coming to appreciate two things: 1. how much we really don't know about the ocean and 2. the ocean is probably the biggest single factor driving climate in the coming centuries.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock interview with Paul Goddard in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

Here is a good article in Science Daily to follow up on this strange case of rapid sea level rise.

THANKS FOR STICKING WITH RADIO ECOSHOCK

Thanks for sticking with it. We all need to feed our brains until we know what to do, without a doubt to stop us.

Next week we're starting a bit of change, as Spring arrives in the Northern Hemisphere. We'll talk with energy guru Richard Heinberg about his new book "Afterburn". And then Marjory WildCraft tells us about a big online summit on growing your own groceries. I hope this plants a seed in your mind.

A big thanks to those who donated to Radio Ecoshock last week. You keep me going, and keep the shows coming. Get more details here.

Check out our web page at ecoshock.org, the show blog with all the links at ecoshock.info and our busy page on Soundcloud, where we went past 20,000 listeners in just our first year in the cloud.

Thanks for listening, and caring about your world.

Abrupt Climate Change - Again!

Summary: Dr. James White, Arctic specialist at U of Colorado, says abrupt climate shifts happened in the past, happen now, and will come again. Huge changes possible. Then UK psychotherapist Ro Randall on how to talk to a denier. Clip of Robert Kennedy Jr. on coal.

Dr. James White is the Director of INSTARR, the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado. Last December he delivered the important "Nye Lecture" at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union on abrupt climate change.

I ask Dr. White for examples, and they could curl your hair. The climate of Miami could arrive in Montreal Canada within this lifetime. Seas will rise not centimeters, but tens of meters, more than 20 feet. All this has happened in the past, and some of it is happening now.

UK psychotherapist Rosemary (Ro) Randall founded the circles of people who meet to talk about how they feel about climate change. It's called "Carbon Conversations" and they have a new workbook available to the public called "In Time for Tomorrow".

We also talk about how NOT to approach a family member or work-mate who denies climate change is happening, or is caused by humans.

Then I go on a slight rant about a right-wing business front group that tells us coal is good for the economy and the environment. It isn't good for either one.

That ends with a classic quote from Robert Kennedy Jr. on the mirage of "clean coal". He lists the dead lakes, dead people, and dead world coming out of the coal business.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen on Soundcloud right now.



ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE - DR. JAMES WHITE

As I said, Dr. James White is the Director of INSTARR, the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado. He also lectures there as a Professor of Geological Sciences.

Last December White delivered the important "Nye Lecture" at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union on abrupt climate change. The title is "Abrupt Climate Change: The View from the Past, Present and Future." That lecture was available to the public for a short time, during which I made an audio recording, and took lots of notes. Then it disappeared behind an AGU members-only paywall. But it showed up on You tube. See that Nye lecture with all the slides here.

Dr. James White, University of Colorado

White's specialty is the Arctic, and especially evaluating Greenland ice cores. That's a window into the past 100,000 years or so. Scientists can study different molecules of air caught in the ice, to evaluate the carbon dioxide levels, but also the temperature based on different oxygen isotopes. Advanced science now empowers scientists to see layers of ice right down to a single year. They can also tell how much precipitation fell in that area in a particular year.

I asked James White a question I've been pondering for years - and got a good answer! It's this:

OK, we find temperatures in Northern Greenland went up 1 or 2 degrees in just one or two years. But what does that tell us about the whole planet? The Arctic is warming rapidly right now, but the global mean temperature is only going up slowly. Do abrupt changes in the Arctic really apply to the rest of us?

Here is the best current scientific estimate: the amplitude of polar changes is about 3 times what happens in rest of world. For example a 10 degrees C change in pole may be 3 degrees C change in hemispheric temp, especially the Northern Hemisphere. Change in the Southern Hemisphere might be delayed, possibly for a long period of time, until the ocean heat exchange system catches up to change in the atmosphere. Unlike the North, the Southern Hemisphere is mostly ocean.

Let's get to it. What does this experienced scientist say about abrupt climate change?

In his Nye Lecture, White says this is the biggest moment in human history. It's a watershed moment, but he doesn't like the word "crisis". We are in the midst of the climate change. That is increasingly critical to many issues adaptation, economy, society. How we cope, and all other species cope, depends on how fast climate changes.

His Nye Lecture follows this report came out last year "Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change, Anticipating Surprises". That in turn builds on a 2002 report by Richard Alley.

A key point that comes out in both the lecture and our Radio Ecoshock interview: in addition to abrupt climate changes, we may also experience "abrupt climate impacts".

One example: storms and hurricanes hit the U.S. East Coast, but then with Hurricane Sandy a combination of slowly rising seas, a powerful storm surge, and long-term subsidence flood the New York City subways. All of our human systems have their own "tipping points" - a kind of built in fragility or intolerance that leaves us open to "sudden" impacts.

I could add a lot of examples. Here's just one: if rice is near it's highest temperature tolerance in a particular area, just a small increase in heat could mean rice could no longer be grown there.

HIDDEN TIPPING POINTS

In fact, we don't really know where these sudden impact points are in our civilization. Some tipping points are unseen until they are already passed. White gives the example of an early European explorer going down the Niagara River. A prudent person would stick near shore, but if our explorer was in a hurry, they could make good time down the fast moving river. When they get close enough to hear the roar of the up-coming giant Niagara Falls, it is too late to get to the shore.

The tipping point is not when the explorer goes over Niagara Falls. It is the point several miles back when there was still time to get back to shore. That point would not be seen or known until it was already too late. That is what we have to worry about in so many aspects of abrupt climate change.

"There are many more human systems that have abrupt thresh-holds than there are natural systems".

ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE PAST

The Greenland Ice cores show many instances of dizzying changes. The temperature can go up or down 10 to 15 degrees Centigrade in a few years, or in 40 years. There have been periods where Greenland heated 1 degree per year for 5 years - which is 100 times faster than our current warming. It might plateau there for 30 years or so, and then go into another 5 year period of 1 degree warming per year.

The Earth's climate is NOT STABLE. There have been 24 warming events found in the ice cores in the last 115,000 years. Studying the warming, about 14,000 years ago, as discussed by scientist Geoffrey C. Bohling, they found 10-15 degrees C happening in 1 to 2 years.

Think about what that means for us, who are so concerned about a 1 degree rise in 100 years. Even if we "only" experienced 1 or 2 degrees C rise in 5 years, the impacts could be near catastrophic for humans, plants, and animals. Some systems would break down, and there would be so little time to adapt. Certainly some crops would fail, forest fires would go out of control, and water cycles (rain, snow, drought) would be upset.

White told our Radio Ecoshock listeners: "There are even changes where you get 10 degrees [C] in a year, which is a thousand times faster."

Rate of snowfall can double in 1-3 years, methane goes up 50% in a lifetime, nitrous oxide goes up 10% in a lifetime.

THREE SIGNS ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE IS HAPPENING NOW

One of the biggest signs of abrupt climate change is the melt-back of the Arctic Sea Ice, especially starting in 2007. It's not just the stunning change in the extent of the ice, but the thinning of ice, and younger ice, that is more open to wide-scale melting in a hot year.

Here is a video showing the old ice disappearing, replaced only with new ice.





A second great sign of change is that we are in the midst of one of the great species extinctions.

A third indication that an abrupt climate change is happening now is ground water loss in many places of the world. New gravity measuring satellites can detect how ground water is declining (think California for example, or under the Indo-Gangetic Plain in Asia.) A change in the hydrological cycle is one of the great signs of a climate shift.

Here is a graphic from the National Science Foundation which shows Earth morphing from a planet largely covered by deserts, into one clothed in green vegetation, in just 200 years (that happened fairly recently, around 14,500 years ago).

I ask Dr. White how good this ice core science really is. It has progressed a long way, with computer and other technical aids. Plus, they cross-check the information with other markets, such as known periods of volcanic dust, or the records found in sea bed samples. It all fits together into a coherent snap-shot of the planet in different ages.

SEA LEVEL IS A REALLY BIG DEAL

In the Nye Lecture, Dr. White shows a plot from Foster and Rowling from PNAS showing sea level for last 400,000 years. Sea level is very tied to temperature on the planet.

When you heat air, and oceans, that eats away at the land ice. In the public almost no one appreciates the surprising size of sea level rise. It goes from zero to 130 meters sea level change. 20,000 years ago Florida was twice as large as today, and it will go underwater when land ice melts.

People think a foot or six inches is a big deal. Average person can't imagine 20 feet higher really happening.

"We're expecting sea level rise of about one meter by 2100" [32 min] But in the geological record, rates three times faster than that (3 meters in a century) are common."

THE THREE HOW'S OF SEA LEVEL RISE



1. how fast is the change occurring

2. how far

3. how inevitable

Here are more of my notes from the AGU Nye Lecture:

Sea level rise is "a long slow losing battle". [36:20] West Antarctic has started to shed ice and will do so for centuries. It's slow, with abrupt changes within the system.

Federal Flood Insurance may become larger than Medicaid and other government programs - with huge tax implications.

Infrastructure will be hit, and salt water intrudes on fresh water wells.

[38:40] Work by David Archer at the University of Chicago showed the last time Earth had 400 ppm CO2, was about 2.5-3 million years ago. Sea level was 20 meters higher - 65 feet higher!! Earth was less than 2 degrees C warmer than now.

[39:30] Scientists Foster and Rohling looked at relative sea level. There was a fairly stable plateau of about 14 meters higher than today; 45 feet higher, which lasted from about 300 ppm to about 600 ppm; over 600-700 ppm you start to melt all of Antarctica, and sea level eventually goes up 70-80 meters.

We are at 400 ppm, and Jim White bets we will hit 600 ppm at the end of the century.

We say we love our kids, but do we show it? "We live on a water planet, and on a water planet the impacts show up 50 years later, because it just takes a long time to warm up water."

"When one generation is not to set aside short-term profits to deal with the benefit of their children, you're never going to solve this problem because we live on a water planet."

In order to solve some climate problems, White says we have to control population. That means women's education and women's rights. Empower women economically and politically to help prevent catastrophic climate change. Oh, and that makes a better, fairer world as well.

Listen to or download this important Radio Ecoshock interview with James White in CD Quality or Lo-Fi.

Some James White You tube videos are "Dr James White on Methane and Abrupt Climate Change", James White at the Weather and Climate Summit 2012 on the connections between weather and climate change.

RO RANDALL - MORE CARBON CONVERSATIONS

Despite the winter cold covering North American listeners - the year of 2014 was probably the hottest ever recorded. It's another milestone in the road to extreme climate change.

Maybe you've noticed the resistance. Friends, family, or workmates don't want to talk about it. You know the science and truth about warming - and you're stuck with it. Are we alone with this awful knowledge?

Back in 2013, we heard from Rosemary or Ro Randall. She's the UK psychotherapist that co-founded Carbon Conversations - the circles of people who meet to talk about climate change. It's time to connect again.

Ro Randall. Find her blog here.

Their new handbook is now available to the public, rather than just for people who took part in Carbon Conversations. It's called "In Time for Tomorrow". Find it here.

Admittedly this book is geared toward a reader in the United Kingdom. However, it could be used to base a similar "carbon conversation" in other parts of the world. So far, this handy way to express your feelings and worries about climate change has not year reached North America, except for one group leader in Alberta. Are Americans and Canadians finally ready to talk about climate change?

It really isn't easy. Bring up climate change, and friendly conversations can drop with a dull thud, leaving us feeling exposed. How do we handle that?

I found Ro's advice for tackling relatives and work-mates who deny climate change is happening, or that we humans are responsible for it.

First of all, "think strategically". Choose the best place and time to bring it up. That may not be when your in-law proudly announced their new pickup truck. Try later.

Second, don't become the archetype of the scolding parent or teacher we've all rebelled against. It's better to talk about the worries you have personally, and what you are doing - not what the other person "should" do or not do. Let them see you open up without pointing fingers, says Randall.

And third: really listen to the other person. This isn't your chance to overwhelm the person with your vast collection of climate facts, like a prosecutors' summation of the case. It's a chance to let the other person open up about their concerns, reasons and doubts. Let them have all that, and then return to your own wrestling with climate problems.

Don't expect an instant conversion. Just keep planting seeds, and be there as support. As before, you don't know when a tipping point has been crossed, and your friend or loved one will come around.

We have to keep in mind that some people grab the climate issue as part of their explanation of their deeper selves. They may choose to rebel against science for personal reasons that are not easy to explain or change. It can take time, or a sudden trigger, for people to let those fundamental drives go, and wake up to the facts. Until that happens, likely there is no weight of evidence that could convince them.

I find Ro Randall is one of the more thoughtful voices out there on the psychology of climate change. Don't miss this interview.

Listen to Ro Randall on Radio Ecoshock (22 minutes) in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

TALKING DIRTY - ABOUT COAL

Would you like me to talk dirty? Of course, I'm talking about coal, the fossil fuel that can wreck Earth's climate for 50 generations. Unless of course we go extinct along with most other mammals and species long before that.

But hey don't worry about that. American jobs are at stake. That's the message coming from the National Center for Policy Analysis, or the NCPA. It's a tax-exempt organization that's been pumping out the big business message for over 30 years.

These days the NCPA gets big bucks from the Koch brothers, just part of a network of front groups we call the fossil fuel octupus.

The NCPA puts out an alleged "report" which turns out to be a couple of pages written by staffer Jacopo Zenti. Here's the first paragraph of their press release:

"Increasing U.S. coal exports could be good for the U.S. economy, workers, and the environment, according to a new report by National Center for Policy Analysis Research Associate Jacopo Zenti." Really? Coal is good for the environment?

Zenti just used an online coal fact browser put out by the U.S. government Energy Information Administration, the EIA. Since America brags it has the world's biggest coal reserves, capable of sinking us all, I went to the EIA, to see who's buying the black poison.

The buyer's club is suprising. We like to think Europe is getting greener - and many countries there are adding renewable energy at a break-neck speed. In the meantime though, some European countries are buying record amounts of coal from the U.S.

Take Germany. Despite shutting down nuclear reactors after the Fukushima melt-downs, Germany is still on track to achieve 40% of their energy from renewables by 2025. Renewables are now larger than the dirty brown lignite coal German mines produce, and gaining on gas and hard black coal. While the German economy has grown 40% since 1990, electricity demand is actually going down. Even better, German emissions of carbon dioxide in 2014 hit their second lowest level since 1990.

The bad news, as the NCPA tells us, quote:

"Germany imports of American coal doubled from 2010 to 2011, and could continue to rise as Germany shifts from nuclear energy production to coal by 2022.

[And] The United Kingdom and the Netherlands were the two largest importers of American coal in 2012, and American coal exports to Britain were 73 percent higher in the first three quarters of 2012 than in 2011."

European coal and climate activists should take note, and start closing that door to American coal shipments.

Of course the NCPA is bullish on exporting American coal. As they admit, coal burning in America has fallen from 50% of all electricity produced in the 1990's to about 40% now. New power plants in the U.S. are powered by gas, not coal. So they need to sell it overseas.

Efforts to build new coal shipping ports, in places like Washington State and Oregon, have hit several snags, with some projects abandoned, due to the environmental impacts. No worries, the big Wyoming coal mines have struck a deal to ship their climate-killing product through the Port of Vancouver, in Canada. It's like the Keystone Pipeline in reverse.

The biggest black dream is to sell more coal to China, which still runs about 70% of it's expanding economy on coal. And there's always India, still very coal dependent.

Let me quote further from the NCPA press release:

"Yet Zenti says concerns over environmental detriment are misplaced.

'For example, restricting coal exports to China will not reduce its emissions from burning coal,' says Zenti. 'Without American imports, China would simply look elsewhere or consume more of its own coal, which often comes from unsafe, less regulated and environmentally damaging mines.'

The United States should take advantage of the global movement on coal, says Zenti. 'Restricting coal export will not dissuade other countries from burning coal, and will instead hurt the American economy and U.S. workers.'"

This is the classic drug-dealer's argument. We know high school kids will try heroin. We may as well sell it to them, because if we don't somebody else will! You see, worrying about wrecking the world's climate is foolish. Let's make some money here boys! Although it's strange, I can't find any mention of climate change in this coal-lover's press release...

The lobbyists bribing Congress people to boost American coal exports, by slashing environmental regulations, are actually building the next trap door for an economic collapse. Take a look at Canada right now. The Canadian government built their holier-than-thou economic hopes on expensive oil from the Tar Sands. Now that is collapsing with cheap oil prices. Without those oil royalties, Alberta's Provincial budget is in the toilet, along with the Canadian Federal Government. The Canadian dollar has collapsed, losing more than 20% of it's value, in just a few months. All that infrastructure, and all the public spending, is in doubt.

Fast forward just a few short years, as people all over the world demand action to save what is left of the climate. Coal will be the first shoved overboard from the sinking ship. The railways, ports, city budgets, and state budgets built on coal will crash. (Are you listening, Australia?) So will pension plans that invest in coal.

While Germany, and even China, are building toward a renewable future, America seems hell-bent to stay in the horse-and-buggy age of un-burnable fossil fuels. That won't end well. So more coal exports are not good for the economy or the environment. Some people don't mind a big lie, as long as it keeps today's profits coming in.

Nobody tells you about coal like this guy: Robert Kennedy Jr. The world may try to forget what he told Real News back in 2008, but my hard drive never forgets, and You tube remembers... Here is Robert Kennedy Jr. speaking to Matt Palevsky of Real News on the 26th of August, 2008. And don't forget therealnews.com.

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Reporting for you, on Radio Ecoshock