Thanks for your kind words.

Perhaps expressions of intellectual honesty and moral courage in our time are radical things to do because they are so rarely in evidence.

Is it not yet time careful and capable people in large numbers begin to behave honestly and courageously rather than remain silent and comfortable by choosing to follow misguided leaders who are irresponsibly pursuing the patently unsustainable business-as-usual expansion of the global political economy, an unbridled, rampant expansion of big-business activities that is resulting in the massive extirpation of biodiversity, the relentless degradation of our environs, the reckless ravage of Earth’s body and perhaps the endangerment of humanity?

Hurry up, please. Now is the moment for humane, civil action, is it not? If not now, then when?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176

Steve @5: Well said. Indeed, this is why I prefer to refer to our current situation as the ‘Sustainability Emergency’, since it encompasses much more than just climate change – this is merely a severe symptom of a deeper malaise of living beyond the planet’s means. See the post on Hansen to Obama for a scientist who is fulfilling his duties.

Perhaps all of us can agree that science is indisputably the finest source for gaining an adequate understanding of the way the world we inhabit actually works and for accurately enough grasping the “placement” of the human species within the order of living things on Earth. But, as others have noted with such clarity and coherence, too many world-class scientists have treated the human overpopulation of Earth as a taboo topic and, even worse, perniciously participated in the politicization of the science of climate change. Barack Obama cannot know whatsoever could somehow be true, in large part, because so many scientists have failed to reasonably assume their responsibilities to science as well as to sensibly fulfill their duties as scientists.

Rather than do what I have been doing over the past 7 years by extolling the virtues of good science, today I am going to try something different.

What follows is a brief artistic expression that is intended to convey a symbolic meaning parallel to but distinct from, and more significant than, the literal meaning.

Please consider an allegory: that a titanic struggle between human beings and the natural world is in the offing. It seems this struggle is fulminating now precisely because too many leaders of the 6.7 billion {soon to be 9+ billion} members of the human family generally do not share the distinctly scientific, evidence-based perspective of many within this community. Many too many of our brothers and sisters, especially those with great wealth and power, pompously and erroneously believe that human organisms are separate from, and somehow superior to, life as we know it on Earth.

At least to me, it appears that an epochal contest is taking shape on the far horizon between the ‘team’ of “mother culture and father profit” on one side and ‘Team’ Mother Nature on the other.

This could be the greatest show on Earth in 10,000 years.

The team of “mother culture and father profit” appears adamant in its willful intentionality to stay the same old business-as-usual course of recklessly overconsuming limited natural resources; relentlessly expanding large-scale production and distribution capabilities without regard to physical limitations of the natural world; and overpopulating our planetary home, come what may for children and coming generations, biodiversity, the environment and the Earth’s body.

Team Mother Nature simply is.

Which team will likely be seen by reasonable and sensible observers as winning the contest for success in 2012, 2020 and 2050, if the human community continues its idolatry of distinctly human overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities by choosing forevermore unbridled overgrowth activities just as we are doing now?

If the leaders of the family of humanity do not choose change, do you have any ideas about which team will prevail and when will the outcome of the colossal contest no longer be in doubt?

Sincerely,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176

http://literature.lalisio.com/oai.html?o.0.au=Salmony%2C+Steven+Earl

Is there evidence for this statement? If I smooth (low pass filter) the instrumental temperature record and then examine the derivative, I see nothing unusual about the present rate of change, contrasted with earlier in the century.

“The forecasted global average rate…” The temperature record is diverging from the model forecasts. Every year this divergence continues, suggesting a lower than expected climate sensitivity to CO2. This results in more temperature variability attributable to other unknown factors. Perhaps, these factors also occurred in the past.

Then the alternate hypothesis is that the “…long-term, large-scale alteration of animal and plant populations” was a result of dramatically, but naturally occurring, temperature variations.

My question is, how do we know the temperatures at which these ‘population’ changes occurred? Also, how do we deconfound the environmental temperature with the adaptive, evolutionary change of the species between then and now – or is the time-scale too small for this effect?

many thanks for any response,
interested_scientist

I’m not sure how that looks on your screen
and /View/Character Encoding suggests way too many possibilities.

Could you spell that out in words, to make it clear?