A little light relief from the doom and gloom

While we contemplate the potential end of our civilisation, we might as well have a laugh. This spoof is from “The Onion” a satirical publication.

 

Melting ice caps expose over 100 secret Arctic lairs

September 25, 2009

ZACKENBERG RESEARCH STATION, GREENLAND—Claiming it to be one of the most dramatic and visible signs of climate change to date, researchers said Monday that receding polar ice caps have revealed nearly 200 clandestine lairs once buried deep beneath hundreds of feet of Arctic ice.

An ice shelf off the coast of Greenland in 2006 (above) and last week (below)

“We always assumed there would be some secret lairs here and there, but the sheer number now being exposed is indeed troubling,” said noted climatologist Anders Lorenzen, who claimed that the Arctic ice caps have shrunk at the alarming rate of 41,000 square miles per year. “In August alone we discovered 44 mad scientist laboratories, three highly classified military compounds, and seven reanimated and very confused cavemen. That’s more than twice the number we had found in the previous three decades combined.”

“This is no longer conjecture,” Lorenzen added. “This is a full-blown crisis.”

According to oceanographers, the Arctic Circle has been devastated by the effects of global warming in recent years, threatening hundreds of men and women who use the frozen tundra as a place to conduct bizarre experiments in human-animal grafting, carry out massive government cover-ups, or simply as a hidden headquarters from which to battle the forces of evil and fight crime.

“Last week a giant ice sheet broke off and split my prized underground complex nearly in half,” said Dr. Raygun, a self-described psychotic mastermind best known for his diabolical thought-control experiments. “Now millions of dollars in state-of-the-art doomsday devices are gone—all because of the environmental carnage wrought by the human race.”

“You spend your whole career concocting a brilliant scheme to wipe out all of mankind, and what happens?” Dr. Raygun continued. “They bring about a major global catastrophe completely on their own, those fools!”

Evil Scientist Dr. Raygun has begun the expensive task of moving his entire mutant staff to their Titan moon base.

Scientists predict the problem will only get worse as rising temperatures release methane trapped in Arctic permafrost, perpetuating the warming cycle and threatening the habitats of those who depend on the ice caps for safety from the prying, meddling public.

Earlier this week a flying saucer surfaced and is reportedly still pulsating with increasingly intense, unearthly colors. And late last month, a mystical order of Nazi occultists emerged from an underground bunker where they had spent decades communing with the Hyperborean gods and attempting to breed a new Aryan super-species destined to destroy Homo sapiens and rule the earth for untold millennia.

The 12 elderly Germans were detained by local law enforcement in Wainwright, AK.

According to a Natural Resources Defense Council survey, 78 percent of sinister one-eyed industrialists based in the Arctic have been forced to relocate their powerful underworld shadow governments, with many now secretly orchestrating world affairs from dormant volcanoes on remote islands.

Many villains have also been forced to change their entire way of life.

Zawallah, the super-intelligent ape whose gold-teleporter crippled the global economy during the 1980s, recently ceased operation of his orbital heat cannon. Others, meanwhile, are genuinely concerned about the effect that increased temperatures may have on the future of humanity.

“Gwaahhhhrrr-huaawwwrr-gwaahhhrrrr,” cried test subject PR-433809-21, the ghastly result of a human cloning experiment gone horribly awry. “Pwwwuuuagharrgh!”

But not all inhabitants of the polar ice caps are upset by global warming. Last month saw the thawing out of a team of British explorers frozen in 1848. Expedition members told reporters they were confident that, if more ice melts, they can finally complete their original mission of discovering a Northwest Passage.

For the time being, most researchers have shifted their attention away from the ice caps and toward finding a way to contain the giant reptile monster Bizarricus, who was trapped in an ice floe by Japanese scientists in the 1950s and has now returned to teach the world a lesson about the folly of man.

From the geniuses at The Onion.

Moments of genesis of more denier garbage pinpointed on Climate Crock

The birth of much of the climate change denial myth and misrepresentation, the straw man arguments and general dangerous silliness, is not always clear but Pete Sinclair's latest "Climate Crock of the Week" (see below or click here for Youtube link) skewers a few of the exact moments when US media talking heads in the denial camp picked up on a perfectly rational and objective scientific explanation and severely misquoted, twisted, changed and added to and subtracted from it (AKA they lied through their teeth - either that or they are breathtakingly stupid and/or cannot comprehend English).

A significant climate scientist was explaining (only one month ago) that global average temperature cannot be expected to go up smoothly in a straight line because that’s just not the way that things work. This rather obvious fact was seized upon and perverted by the US pundits who claimed it  meant exactly what they wanted it to in the same way as Humpty Dumpty did in Through the Looking Glass – “when I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”.

They tried to make out that this major climate scientist was having second thoughts about global warming but nothing could be further from the truth. Unfortunately, just about everything that the deniers say generally couldn’t be further from the truth. It is a sad fact that over 40% of the US public have fallen victim to at least some of their propaganda. When Voltaire said he would defend to the death people’s right to say stuff he disagreed with, I don’t think in his wildest dreams that he was expecting poisonous stuff like this to crop up… perhaps, faced with it, he would have retracted his view.

This new lying piece of propaganda will now go out into the "denialosphere" of websites and blogs and will get endlessly brought up by their gullible followers, literally for years afterwards! They will in turn probably fine tune the wrongness to suit themselves as they pass it on in a giant Chinese whisper.

Carbon trading cartoon

 With cap and trade , the whole point of it is that, over time, the total "cap" limit on emissions is reduced to force the market to adopt ever more fossil greenhouse gas free answers for, and improving the efficiency of, transport, manufacturing and power generation. The man in the lift would have to eat ever fewer beans, beefburgers and Vindaloos and lose weight or be rendered eventually bankrupt as his “emissions” cost him ever increasing amounts whilst his “competition”, who went green, found their costs plummetting – not to mention having a clearer and sweeter atmosphere in the lift.

GM Rice petition

In just a few weeks, the European Union will decide whether or not GM rice can enter EU countries, appear on supermarket shelves and end up on our dinner plates. If the EU approves the import of Bayer GM rice, farmers in the US and elsewhere may soon start planting it.

The GM industry, and their supporters, often claim that we need GM food to feed the world but this is a very simple and highly misleading position to take (like most of the anti-environmental arguments, it appeals to the gullible and the self-interested who seem not to analyse any topic beyond the point at which they confirm their innate biases and their own wishful thinking). It is yet another example of an unsustainable solution with huge hidden drawbacks.

If you want to have your say, here is a link to a Greenpeace petition which states:

“We ask all governments around the world to protect consumers and farmers, their crops and fields by rejecting Bayer’s GM rice, and to stop GM rice field trials”.

Wile E. Coyote runs over the cliff edge, not immediately realising that gravity is going to do him in soon

September 25 was “Earth Overshoot” Day.

Earth Overshoot Day is a dangerous annual milestone: the metaphorical time in the year when humanity begins living beyond its ecological means. Beyond that day, we move into the ecological equivalent of deficit spending, utilising resources at a rate faster than the planet can regenerate in a calendar year. In other words, the planet can sustainably supply us with a certain amount in a year but unfortunately humanity as a whole is now using that amount up in under 10 months. The United Kingdom’s National Overshoot Day is about 22nd April. Jersey’s extreme consumer lifestyle obviously makes our own Island Overshoot Day a fair bit earlier than this. For shame.

Globally, we now require the equivalent of 1.4 planets to support our lifestyles. Put another way, in less than 10 months humanity has already used up the ecological services that it has taken 12 months for the Earth to regenerate.

Global Recession Barely Slows Ecological Demand

Because of the current global economic slowdown, we reached Earth Overshoot Day one day later than last year, according to Global Footprint Network projections. By comparison, in the past, Earth Overshoot Day has steadily moved four to six days closer to January 1st each year. “The fact is that in spite of a very painful world economic situation, we are still way over-budget in our use of nature,” said a spokeman for footprintnetwork.org.

Almost unbelievable!!!!!! – but in a good way…

Lawyers often get a bad press but this story, linked to here, shows that it looks as if it is possible for governments to sue power utilities for using too many fossil fuels even if the government itself has taken no action to reduce emissions themselves. Here’s an extract:

“The lawsuit against American Electric Power Co Inc, Southern Co, Xcel Energy Inc, Cinergy Corp and the Tennessee Valley Authority public power system, argued that greenhouse gas emissions from their plants were a public nuisance and would cause irreparable harm to property.

The utilities are five of the largest carbon dioxide emitters in the United States. Around 40 percent of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions come from fossil-fueled power plants.

Lawyers or representatives of the companies were either not immediately available to comment or could not immediately be reached for comment on the decision.

The top legal officers for Connecticut and New York welcomed the decision.

“Our goal is not money damages, but a change in company practices to stem the pollution and safeguard our environment and economy,” Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said in a statement.”

The importance of this ruling is that failure of Congress or the EPA to act on greenhouse gases will not immunise emitters from legal action to compel reductions in emissions. This could be huge!

Inspirational story from TED