YOU NEED TO OBTAIN THIS BOOK CALLED "HOT" - IT IS A BLOCKBUSTER
AND WILL LAY BEFORE YOU THE TRUE FACTS OF WHAT IS HAPPENING TO
THE CLIMATE OF THIS WORLD, AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT TO LESSEN
THE DISASTERS TO COME. ONE SCIENTIST IS QUOTED IN THE BOOK SAYING
THAT WE SHOULD NOT CALL IT CLIMATE CHANGE OR GLOBAL WARMING, BUT
WE SHOULD CALL IT "CLIMATE CHAOS."
YOU NEED THIS BOOK FOR YOUR CHILDREN, FOR THEY WILL BE THE ONES
TO INHERIT THIS EARTH IN THE NEXT 40 YEARS (IF THIS AGE HAS NOT
COME TO AN END AND JESUS HAS NOT RETURNED). MARK HERSTGAARD IS
RIGHTLY CONCERNED FOR HIS DAUGHTER WHO IS IN 2011 FIVE YEARS OF
AGE. WHAT WORLD WILL SHE INHERIT?
YES, THIS IS A MUST BOOK FOR YOUR EDUCATION AND FOR THE EDUCATION
OF YOUR CHILDREN.
HERE IS JUST A SNIPPET FROM THE BOOK, TO WET YOUR APPETITE;
CHAPTER AFTER CHAPTER WILL BLOW YOU AWAY - Keith Hunt
......
HOT - Living through the next fifty years on earth
by Mark Hertsgaard
Prologue: Growing Up Under Global Warming
Working on climate change used to be about saving the world
for future generations. Not anymore. Now it's not only your
daughter who is at risk, it's probably you as well.
- MARTIN PARRY, co-chair of the "Fourth Assessment Report,"
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
I covered the environmental beat for fifteen years before I
became a father. Much of that time was spent overseas, where,
like many other journalists, I saw more than my share of
heartbreaking things happening to children. But they were always
other people's children.
My first time was in the old Soviet Union, where I exposed a
series of nuclear disasters that had been kept secret for decades
by both the KGB and the CIA. One day, I visited the leukemia ward
of the local children's hospital, where a dozen mothers and
children had gathered to speak with me. Many of the kids were
bald, thanks to the chemotherapy that was now being applied in a
last-gasp attempt to save their stricken bodies. The mother of
one heavyset girl could not stop sobbing. When her daughter
stroked her arm to comfort her, the mother unleashed a deep,
aching wail and fled the room. This woman, like the other
mothers, knew what the children did not: the doctors expected 75
percent of these children to be dead within five years.
Soon after, I spent four months in the northeastern Horn of
Africa, mainly covering drought and civil war. It was there, in a
refugee camp in southern Sudan in 1992, that I first came
face-to-face with starving children. In my mind's eye, I can
still see the young mother as she entered the Red Cross compound,
hoping to see a nurse. Unfolding the tattered cloth she had slung
from her neck, the mother revealed a nine-monthold baby girl, a
tiny creature with a grotesquely large skull and legs no thicker
than my fingers. Like one of every eleven African children, this
poor child would not live to see her first birthday.
Later still I visited China, where millions of children were
breathing and drinking some of the most carcinogenic air and
water on the planet. Crisscrossing the country in 1996 and 1997,
I became the first writer to describe China's emergence as a
climate change superpower, second only to the United States. To
fuel its explosive economic growth and lift its people out of
poverty, China was burning more coal than any other nation on
earth, making its skies toxic and dark even on sunny afternoons.
Some of the worst health effects were being measured in the
northern industrial city of Shenyang. One afternoon I visited a
heavymachinery factory that ranked among the city's deadliest
polluters. I arrived just in time to see the street fill with
hundreds of children. Chattering and laughing, they walked in
rows six abreast, returning home from school, inhaling poison
with every breath.
In my journalism, I tried to draw the outside world's
attention to the plight of all of these children, as well as to
its causes and potential remedies. Emotionally, though, I could
keep a distance. This was partly because, as I say, these were
other people's children. But it was also, I now see, because I
was not yet a parent myself. I did not really understand,
viscerally, how it feels to see one's own child be sick, in
danger, and perhaps facing death.
I found out soon enough.
My daughter was born in 2005, in San Francisco, at the end
of a long and difficult labor. After many hours and much pushing
and tugging, she finally emerged from her mother's body. By that
time, the urgency of the situation had drawn a dozen nurses into
the room. As they attended to their various tasks - lifting the
baby onto her mother's chest, administering her first bath - one
nurse after another made the same observation. "Wow, look how
alert this baby is," the nurse in charge commented. "I know,"
marvelled a colleague. "Look at her eyes!"
Apparently, most newborns keep their eyes shut against the
light of the new world. Not ours. Her blazing blue eyes were wide
open.
From the moment she got here, this little girl was awake on
the planet.
When it came time to give her a name, her mother and I
remembered these first moments of her life and decided to call
her Chiara.
In the Italian language of her ancestors, Chiara (pronounced
with a hard C Key-AR-a) means "clear and bright."
Everything seemed fine until two days later. We had taken
Chiara home from the hospital. As scheduled, a nurse came to
conduct a followup exam. A few hours later, a doctor called and
told us to bring Chiara back to the hospital, to the intensive
care unit, right away. The exam had found dangerous levels of
bilirubin in her blood. Brain damage or worse could follow.
At the intensive care unit, Chiara was placed inside an
incubator, a white gauze headband stretched around her little
skull to protect her eyes. The nurses jokingly called it a
raccoon mask. Day and night I sat beside the incubator, watching
Chiara's yellowish body get drenched with vitamin D - laden
light.
Yet as worried as I was, I also felt fortunate. Unlike the
children I recalled in Russia, Africa, and China, Chiara had
access to excellent medical care. Within three days, she had
completely recovered, with no lasting damage, and was sent back
home.
Six months later, though, a different threat arose to my
daughter's life, and this time no quick fix was available. During
a reporting trip to London in October 2005, I learned that the
global warming problem had undergone a momentous transformation.
Humanity, it turned out, was in a very different fight than most
people realized. Now, no matter what we did, Chiara and her
generation were fated to inherit - indeed, spend most of their
lives coping with a climate that would be hotter than ever
before in our civilization's history.
Global Warming Triggers Climate Change
The most important interview I did in London was with Sir
David King, the chief science adviser to the British government.
King received me at his office high above Victoria Street, a few
blocks west of Parliament. When he stood up to shake hands, I
could glimpse the spires of Westminster Abbey over his shoulder.
Though not a tall man, King projected an unmistakable air of
command as he invited me to join him at a conference table. I was
on assignment from Vanity Fair magazine, a fact that seemed to
amuse King, who had chaired the chemistry department at Cambridge
University for seven years before entering government. "That's
one publication I never thought I'd appear in," he said,
chuckling. "I guess climate change has finally made the
mainstream in the United States."
Since becoming science adviser in 2000, David King had done
as much to raise awareness of climate change as anyone except
former U.S. vice president Al Gore. Among other accomplishments,
King had reportedly persuaded Prime Minister Tony Blair to make
the issue a priority, and Blair in turn made climate change the
lead topic at the 2005 summit of the Group of Eight, the world's
richest economies. King also had a gift for attracting media
coverage. In 2004, he called climate change "the most severe
problem we are facing today - more serious even than the threat
of terrorism." Coming barely two years after the September 11
terrorist attacks, the comment enraged right-wingers in
Washington. But King told me he "absolutely" stood by it. "I
think this is a massive test for our civilization," he said. "Our
civilization has developed over the past eight thousand years
during a period which has had remarkably constant weather
conditions and remarkably constant ocean levels.
(Ah did you catch that? 8 THOUSAND YEARS OF CONSTANT CLIMATE
CONDITIONS IN THE OVERALL OF THE WORLD - Keith Hunt)
What is happening now, through our use of fossil fuels,
through our growing population, is that that stable period is
under severe threat."
I had begun following the climate issue in 1989, the year I
first interviewed James Hansen. As the chief climate scientist at
the space agency NASA, Hansen had put climate change on the
international agenda the year before when, in testimony to the
U.S. Senate, he declared that man-made global warming had begun.
Of course, natural global warming had been taking place for a
very long time already. Building on the work of scientists going
back to Joseph Fourier in 1824, the Nobel Prizewinning chemist
Svante Arrhenius had published a theory of the greenhouse effect
in 1896. The theory held that carbon dioxide and other gases in
the atmosphere trap heat from the sun that otherwise would escape
back into space, thus raising temperatures on earth. Indeed,
without the greenhouse effect, Earth would be too cold to support
human life. In his Senate testimony, Hansen argued that human
activities--notably, the burning of oil, coal, and other
carbon-based fuels-had now added excessive amounts of carbon
dioxide to the atmosphere. This extra CO2 was raising global
temperatures, and they would rise significantly higher if
emissions were not reduced. The higher temperatures in turn could
trigger dangerous climate change, Hansen added.
(Did you catch that a guy back in 1896, yes 1896, published the
truth of carbon dioxide and other gas in the atmosphere trap
heat, the right MOUNT means life on earth - Keith Hunt)
A quick word here on definitions: although the terms global
warming and climate change are often used interchangeably, a
critical difference exists between them. In this book, global
warming refers to the man-made rise in temperatures caused by
excessive amounts of carbon dioxide, methane, and other
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Climate change, on the other
hand, refers to the effects these higher temperatures have on the
earth's natural systems and the impacts that can result: stronger
storms, deeper droughts, shifting seasons, sea level rise, and
much else. To oversimplify slightly, think of global warming as
the equivalent of a fever and climate change as the aches,
chills, and vomiting the fever can cause.
It was partly Hansen's 1988 Senate testimony that led me to
spend most of the 1990s travelling around the world, researching
humanity's environmental future. I was also motivated by
interviews I had done with Jimmy Carter, the former U.S.
president; Jacques Cousteau, the French underwater explorer;
Lester Brown, the founder of the Worldwatch Institute; and other
leading environmental thinkers. Brown in particular had argued
that problems such as global warming and population growth were
cumulative in nature and thus presented a new kind of
environmental challenge: if they were not reversed within the
next ten years, Brown said, they could acquire too much momentum
to reverse at all. I wasn't necessarily convinced Brown was
correct, but his assertion was a provocative hypothesis to
explore as I set off around the world. My mission was to
investigate whether our civilization's survival was indeed
threatened by global warming, population growth, and related
environmental hazards. And if the danger was real, I hoped to
gauge whether human societies would act quickly and
decisively enough to avoid environmental self-destruction.
Over the course of six years, I investigated conditions at
ground level in sixteen countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, and
North and South America to write the book "Earth Odyssey." As
part of my research, in 1992 I covered the UN "Earth Summit" in
Brazil, where I watched the heads of state or government for most
of the world's nations (including the United States, under the
first President Bush) affix their signatures to the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change. This treaty remains in force today;
the better-known Kyoto Protocol is an amendment to it. The
treaty's key sentence affirmed the world's governments' pledge to
keep atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases low enough to
"prevent dangerous anthropogenic [man-made] interference with the
climate system."
From the start, then, the goal of the international
community was to stop global warming before it triggered
dangerous climate change. As the 1990s wore on, more and more
scientists came to agree with Hansen that average global
temperatures were rising and that humanity's greenhouse gas
emissions were the main reason why. But - and this is the key
point - most scientists did not expect this global warming to
trigger significant climate change for a long time to come: the
year 2100 was the date usually referenced in scientists' studies
of sea level rise, famine, and other possible impacts. Although
2100 was chosen partly because it was distant enough to enable
more reliable computer modelling studies, the date had the
practical effect of implying - especially to politicians,
journalists, ordinary citizens, and non-scientists in general -
that serious impacts were a century away. In short, climate
change was regarded as a grave but remote future threat, and one
that could still be averted if humanity reduced emissions
in time.
(Ya....the attitude of "it's down the road, another generation
can tackle the problem." Especially would this attitude be among
the "oil geeks" and "keep the status quo so we can rake in our
billions of dollars" - Keith Hunt)
Meanwhile, a tiny but well-funded minority had begun arguing
that global warming was little more than a politically inspired
hoax.
(And we STILL have a minority of those around, who for political
and/or physical raker-ins of dollars, want to deny the clear
facts - Keith Hunt)
Frederick Seitz, a former president of the U.S. National
Academy of Sciences, was the highest-ranking scientist making
this claim, but most of the argument was carried by spokespersons
for the Global Climate Coalition, a pressure group created and
funded by U.S. based energy and auto companies. Notwithstanding
its studiously neutral name, the coalition would spend millions
of dollars in the 1990s on a public disinformation campaign whose
strategy and tactics recalled the tobacco industry's earlier
efforts to persuade people that smoking cigarettes does not cause
cancer. Indeed, Seitz and organizations he directed were paid
more than $45 million for their work, first by tobacco and later
by energy companies, as I'll describe later in this book.
The goal of the disinformation campaign was to "reposition global
warming as theory rather than fact," according to an internal
strategy memo unearthed by journalist Ross Gelbspan, who exposed
the campaign in his 1997 book "The Heat Is On." Despite such
revelations, the deniers had considerable influence over the
public debate, at least in the United States. Fortified by
corporate contributions and bipartisan support in the U.S.
Congress, deniers turned global warming into a political rather
than a scientific dispute, blaming a supposed conspiracy by Gore
and other "liberals" to advance a radical environmental agenda.
James Inhofe, a Republican senator from the oil-rich state of
Oklahoma, led the charge, calling global warming "the greatest
hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." But Inhofe, Seitz,
and other deniers could never have fooled the public and stalled
political progress without the help of the mainstream media. In
the name of providing journalistic balance, U.S. news stories
routinely gave as much prominence to deniers of man-made global
warming as they did to affirmers of it, even though the deniers
amounted to a TINY fraction of the scientific community and
often, as in Seitz's case, were in the pay of fossil fuel
companies.
(OH READ THAT WHOLE PARAGRAPH AGAIN, LET IT SINK IN!! THE DENIERS
WERE LIKE THE DENIERS OF THE TOBACCO INDUSTRY, FOR POLITICAL AND
MONEY REASONS, IT WAS DENY, DENY, AND DENY, AND THEN DENY AGAIN
THE TRUTH AGAIN - Keith Hunt)
The upshot was that public discussion of global warming from
the 1990s onward was framed as an if - then formulation: if
global warming is real, and if greenhouse gas emissions are not
reduced, then humanity might face problems in the far-off future.
In our London interview, David King shattered this framing.
Climate change, the science adviser told me, was no longer a
distant hypothetical threat: it had already begun. What's more,
climate change was guaranteed to get worse, perhaps a lot worse,
before it got better.
No comparably prominent scientist in the United States was
saying
this sort of thing publicly in 2005. In particular, King's
assertions went beyond the findings of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international group of
scientists and experts the UN had created in 1988 to advise the
world's governments on global warming. The IPCC had issued three
major reports on climate change by the time I interviewed King.
Its First Assessment Report appeared in 1990, its Second
Assessment Report in 1995, and its Third Assessment Report in
2001. Only in its Fourth Assessment Report, released in 2007,
eighteen months after our interview, did the IPCC declare that
the scientific evidence for man-made global warming was
"unequivocal" and that long-term sea level rise and other impacts
of climate change had become inevitable. If King was ahead of the
curve, it was partly because, as the British Government's chief
science adviser, he kept a close eye on what his country's
scientists were doing.
Indeed, he told me, a group of British scientists had
recently detected the so-called climate signal; that is, the
scientists had demonstrated that global warming had already
exerted an impact on the earth's climate that stood out from the
statistical noise of the historical record.
(Ah ah, modern data showed something was going on with the
earth's climate that the noise some make of past history is a
false case - Keith Hunt)
The scientific rule of thumb had always been that no single
weather event could be linked to global warming. After all,
extreme weather events were a recurring fact of history; how
could one know whether a given event was caused by global
warming, not by something else? But Britain, King claimed, had
some of the best weather scientists in the world, a legacy of the
nation's past as a maritime empire. Now, three of those
scientists - Peter A. Stott, D. A. Stone, and M. R. Allen - had
produced a breakthrough of epochal significance.
Their research, published in the scientific journal
"Nature," focused on the summer of 2003, when Europe experienced
a brutal heat wave. Public health systems were overwhelmed. By
mid-August, corpses were piling up outside morgues in Paris. The
summer Of 2003 was not only "the hottest ... on record," King
told me, it was also "the deadliest disaster in modern European
history." It left 31,000 people dead, he added - a death toll
twenty times higher than that of Hurricane Katrina, which had
struck six weeks before our interview.
"Now," said King, "if we treat that hot summer as a single
extreme event, the conclusion is that it's a 1-in-800-year
event - quite a highly unlikely event." But the science adviser
pointed out that over the past fifty years global warming had
created "a rising baseline" of higher temperatures, which was
heating up Europe's weather in both normal and abnormal years.
Thus Europe's average summer temperature in 2005 was the same as
it had been in the hottest summer of the twentieth century, in
1947. When an extreme event like the 2003 summer came along, the
rising baseline made it even hotter. The conclusion, said King,
was that "about half" of the excessive heat Europeans endured in
2003 was due to the rising baseline - that is, to global warming.
King then recalled the single harshest truth about climate
change: we can't turn it off, at least not anytime soon. Once
global warming has triggered it, climate change continues for a
very long time. The reason? The laws of physics and chemistry -
what King called "the inertia of the climate system."
Carbon dioxide, the most plentiful greenhouse gas, stays in
the atmosphere for as long as hundreds of years; oceans absorb
the heat created by global warming and release it back to the
atmosphere over the course of centuries. As a result, there is a
lag effect, a delay, between the time greenhouse gas emissions
may be reduced and the time global temperatures may begin to
fall. The lag effect meant that Europe was already locked in to
more frequent heat waves in the years ahead. Because of the
rising baseline of temperatures, the science adviser told me, by
2050 Europe was projected to experience heat waves like that of
2003 once every two years.
(Wow, are you reading this carefully, are you getting the message
loud and clear? We are in the end times where Jesus said there
would be famine, earthquakes and etc. that would come on the
earth as never before in history [Matthew 24] - Keith Hunt)
King summarized the dilemma by offering a hypothetical case:
even if our civilization stopped emitting all carbon dioxide
overnight, he said, "temperatures will keep rising and all the
impacts [storms, drought, sea level rise, and so on] will keep
changing for about twenty-five years."
I asked if that meant it was "too late to save humanity, if
that's not being too dramatic."
"No, no, it's not too late," King hurried to reply. "And
saving humanity, I think, is not being too dramatic." Because we
had waited so long to reduce emissions, we now had no choice but
"to adapt to the impacts that are in the pipeline," King said. At
the same time, the longer we wait to cut emissions, the greater
the impacts will be. "So let's never give up on this," he said.
I had a six-month-old daughter, I replied, so giving up was
not an option.
"Right," he said, flashing a quick smile. "My kids know who
I'm battling for."
"Chiara Has to Live Through This"
After leaving King's office, I needed time to absorb all I
had heard, so I headed down Victoria Street to walk along the
river Thames. The weather was sunny, pleasant, a stark contrast
to King's dire pronouncements. In effect, the science adviser had
told me that climate change had already arrived, a hundred years
ahead of schedule. If he was right, the debate over global
warming was forever altered.
If climate change had indeed already begun, the inertia of
the climate system ensured that the planet was locked in to at
least twenty-five more years of rising temperatures no matter
what - no matter how many solar panels people bought, no matter
how soon the United States and China might limit their emissions,
no matter what treaties the world's governments might one day
agree upon. And as temperatures continued rising, this additional
global warming would drive additional climate change: harsher
hurricanes, deadlier wildfires, more epidemics.
(Yes, the fact is we are living in the first verses of Matthew 24
as NEVER BEFORE - prophecy is marching on right before your eyes
- Keith Hunt)
By now I was passing Parliament, threading my way through
crowds of tourists and office workers dashing out to lunch. King
had said we were locked in to twenty-five more years of warming,
but fifty years seemed more plausible. The reason was partly
that, as I learned later in my reporting, other scientific
analyses indicated that the climate system's inertia would keep
temperatures rising after a global emissions halt for thirty to
forty more years, not the twenty-five years King had cited. A
second reason was that halting carbon dioxide emissions overnight
is impossible: it would mean turning off most of the world's
power stations, factories, vehicles, and other essential
infrastructure - a recipe for chaos and suffering. Like it or
not, fossil fuels were essential to our current social
organization; it would take time to shift to alternatives.
Historically, such shifts - from wood to coal in the nineteenth
century, from coal to oil in the twentieth - had taken about
fifty years. Even if we managed the task in half the time, we
still faced at least fifty more years of intensifying summer
heat, dwindling water supplies, and persistent droughts like the
one then fueling civil war in Darfur. Lester Brown's warning back
in 1990--that if we didn't reverse global warming within the next
ten years, it could become irreversible - began to look
disturbingly prescient.
(Matthew 24 is coming to pass as you breath. It will all head up
in the final desperation of a resurrected Holy Roman Empire of
Europe to rule the Western world under the false pretense that it
is doing the will of God to preserve the world, and so who it
rules over better get in line with its religion and political
will - Keith Hunt)
Soon I had crossed the Westminster Bridge and begun heading
down the far bank of the Thames. A large Ferris wheel, known as
the London Eye, stood just ahead. I heard children laughing and
shouting as they waited for the Eye's mechanical arms to lift and
wheel them high above the bustling city. I was still a new father
at that point, and it took these children's cries to remind me
that I had a child of my own now. The words burst from my mouth
before I knew it: "Chiara has to live through this:"
It was a staggering realization. My infant daughter did not
know how to walk or talk yet, but some fundamental facts about
her future seemed already determined. Twenty years from now, when
I hoped Chiara would be finishing college and preparing to make
her way in the world, average global temperatures would still be
rising, unleashing yet more powerful impacts. And temperatures
and impacts were bound to keep increasing until at least 2050,
when Chiara would be almost as old as I was now.
True, higher temperatures will have positive as well as
negative effects. For example, as climate contrarians such as
Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg like to emphasize, fewer people
figure to die from winter cold. But such positive effects will be
dwarfed by negative ones, according to the vast majority of
scientific analyses, including the IPCC's reports. It is also
true that there is considerable uncertainty about the scope and
timing of climate change impacts. Scientists find it especially
difficult to determine the probability of the most extreme
scenarios, such as the total melting of the massive Greenland and
West Antarctic ice sheets or the shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean's
thermohaline circulation--popularly known as the Gulf Stream -
whose warm currents give Europe its temperate climate. But
the practical consequences of such extreme events - an estimated
forty feet of sea level rise if those ice sheets melt, a
near-polar chill descending on Europe if the Gulf Stream shuts
down - are so grave that they command concern. "The odds of some
of the extreme scenarios may be only 10 to 20 percent, we're not
sure," said Stephen Schneider, a professor of biology at Stanford
University who was one of the first scientists to raise concerns
about global warming in the 1970s. "But it's crazy to run those
kinds of risks. The odds of your house catching fire are a lot
less than 10 percent, but you wouldn't think of going without
fire insurance."
The fundamental point is that my infant daughter would be
growing up under global warming for the rest of her childhood and
coping with climate change for the rest of her life. Under the
circumstances, it wasn't just Chiara's physical safety I worried
about; her emotional wellbeing was also at risk. As she got
older, how would she cope with knowing that the climate around
her would become less and less hospitable over time? How would
that make her feel about her future, about perhaps having kids
herself someday?
Staring down at the Thames, I felt stunned, heartbroken, but
also deeply angry. Of course Chiara was not the only one at risk;
every child on earth faced a version of the same fate. My fear
mingled with a sense of personal failure, for my daughter and her
generation were locked in to the very future that I and many
other people had spent years trying to prevent. Now, it seemed,
time had run out on all of us who had tried to halt global
warming before it did serious damage.
(It was written that Jesus said these days would come, it is NOW
- only in the last decade or so that we have really entered the
first verses of Matthew 24 - those verses are NOW going to be
amplified greater and greater in the next decade or two - Keith
Hunt)
But there was more to it than that. True, the premature
arrival of climate change was partly a matter of bad luck. Even
scientists as outspoken as Hansen were surprised by its speed.
"The impacts we're seeing today weren't expected until late in
this century," he later told me. Nevertheless, humans had played
a decisive role.
Our collective failure to take action against global warming
had been a conscious decision, a result of countless official
debates where the case for reducing greenhouse gas emissions was
exhaustively considered and deliberately rejected. Voices of
caution had repeatedly been overpowered within the halls of
government, in the media, and in the business world. Bankrolled
by the carbon club lobby, to borrow author Jeremy Leggett's
term - the energy and auto companies that profited from carbon
emissions - opponents of taking action had confused the public,
politicians, and the media with false or misleading information
while also pressuring governments not to act.
(YOU BET THEY DID - THE CORRUPT GREEDY FOR MONEY LOBBY GUYS FOR
THE GREEDY PHYSICAL PROFIT PEOPLE OF THE OIL WORLD AND THE CAR
WORLD, WHO FOR SELFISH REASONS WANT NO CHANGE - Keith Hunt)
Covering the climate story during the 1990s, I had often
wondered about the deniers' motivations. Did they sincerely doubt
the scientific case for man-made global warming? Or were their
attacks rooted in an allegiance to continued burning of fossil
fuels? Years later, an answer emerged after a lawsuit pried loose
internal documents of the Global Climate Coalition. It turned out
that the coalition's own scientific advisers had informed its
leadership in 1995 - two years before the carbon lobby led the
fight against the Kyoto Protocol - that the science behind
man-made global warming was "well established and cannot be
denied." The coalition's board of directors responded by ordering
their scientists' judgment removed from the coalition's public
statements.
In short, the carbon lobby knew perfectly well that global
warming posed real dangers, but it chose to deny those dangers
and disparage anyone who sought to bring them to public
attention. The lobby put its immediate economic interests ahead
of humanity's future wellbeing. By devoting enormous financial
resources and political muscle to blocking limits on greenhouse
gas emissions, the carbon lobby in effect insisted that humanity
bet its survival on the possibility that David King, James
Hansen, and hundreds of other scientists were either lying or
wrong about the dangers of climate change.
(READ THAT AGAIN! HAVE YOU GOT IT? IS IT SINKING IN YOUR MIND?
DO YOU SEE WHAT THE OIL INDUSTRY HAD DONE AND WAS STILL WANTING
TO DO - DENY, DENY, AND MORE DENY - Keith Hunt)
Now, in October 2005, it was becoming clear that scientists
had actually underestimated the danger. Humanity had lost the
bet. Climate change had arrived a century sooner than expected,
and future generations were no longer the only victims. My
daughter and her peers around the world were now at grave risk as
well.
As a father, I rebelled at what all this implied for my
little Chiara's future. So there beneath the London Eye, I made a
silent vow: to find a way, if one existed, for Chiara and her
generation to survive the challenges ahead. Using my journalistic
skills, I would investigate how bad things were likely to get,
how soon. What would Chiara's community in northern California
look like after ten, twenty, fifty more years of climate change?
What were our civilization's chances and options for reversing
global warming? Could we do so soon enough to avert what the IPCC
had delicately called "the worst scenarios" of climate change,
including an eventual sea level rise of eighty feet - enough to
put most of civilization underwater? I also hoped to discover
ways to cope with the heat waves, droughts, sea level rise, and
other impacts that were now locked in over the coming decades.
Could sufficient protections against these impacts be put into
place? Above all, what steps were needed to turn these twin
imperatives - to reverse but also to survive climate change -
into practical realities? In short, what had to happen for my
daughter and her generation to live through the storm of climate
change?
..........
THAT IS JUST THE OPENING CHAPTER OF MARK HERSTGAARD'S BOOK.
THE OTHER CHAPTERS WILL BLOW YOU AWAY.
YOU AND YOUR CHILDREN NEED TO HAVE THIS BOOK!!!!
THE PROPHECIES OF MATTHEW 24 ARE COMING TO PASS AS NEVER BEFORE.
HOW LONG THE FATHER WILL ALLOW THE FIRST VERSES OF MATTHEW 24 TO
LAST IS UP TO HIM. BUT IF THE FATHER ALLOWS ANOTHER 20 OR MORE
YEARS BEFORE JESUS IS SENT BACK TO RULE THE EARTH, THEN AS THEY
SAY "YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHING YET" IN CLIMATE CHAOS.
MANY RELIGIOUS PEOPLE THOUGHT WE WERE INTO THE FIRST VERSES OF
MATTHEW 24 IN THE 1960S AND 1970S BUT WE WERE NOT! THOSE VERSES
ARE ONLY NOW IN THIS 21ST CENTURY COMING TO PASS.
YOU ARE LIVING IN EXCITING TIMES BUT ALSO PERILOUS TIMES.
Keith Hunt
February 2011
