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Titolo: (OT) Secondo la London Society il mondo e' morto.

Living on the Ice Shelf: Humanity's Meltdown 
By Mike Davis 
TomDispatch.com 
June 26, 2008
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174949
1. Farewell to the Holocene
Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for
the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no
newspaper in North America or Europe has yet
printed its scientific obituary.
This February, while cranes were hoisting cladding
to the 141st floor of the Burj Dubai tower (which
will soon be twice the height of the Empire State
Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the
Geological Society of London was adding the newest
and highest story to the geological column.
The London Society is the world's oldest
association of Earth scientists, founded in 1807,
and its Commission acts as a college of cardinals
in the adjudication of the geological time-scale.
Stratigraphers slice up Earth's history as
preserved in sedimentary strata into hierarchies of
eons, eras, periods, and epochs marked by the
"golden spikes" of mass extinctions, speciation
events, and abrupt changes in atmospheric
chemistry.
In geology, as in biology or history, periodization
is a complex, controversial art and the most bitter
feud in nineteenth-century British science -- still
known as the "Great Devonian Controversy" -- was
fought over competing interpretations of homely
Welsh Graywackes and English Old Red Sandstone.
More recently, geologists have feuded over how to
stratigraphically demarcate ice age oscillations
over the last 2.8 million years. Some have never
accepted that the most recent inter-glacial warm
interval -- the Holocene -- should be distinguished
as an "epoch" in its own right just because it
encompasses the history of civilization.
As a result, contemporary stratigraphers have set
extraordinarily rigorous standards for the
beatification of any new geological divisions.
Although the idea of the "Anthropocene" -- an Earth
epoch defined by the emergence of urban-industrial
society as a geological force -- has been long
debated, stratigraphers have refused to acknowledge
compelling evidence for its advent.
At least for the London Society, that position has
now been revised.
To the question "Are we now living in the
Anthropocene?" the 21 members of the Commission
unanimously answer "yes." They adduce robust
evidence that the Holocene epoch -- the
interglacial span of unusually stable climate that
has allowed the rapid evolution of agriculture and
urban civilization -- has ended and that the Earth
has entered "a stratigraphic interval without close
parallel in the last several million years." In
addition to the buildup of greenhouse gases, the
stratigraphers cite human landscape transformation
which "now exceeds [annual] natural sediment
production by an order of magnitude," the ominous
acidification of the oceans, and the relentless
destruction of biota.
This new age, they explain, is defined both by the
heating trend (whose closest analogue may be the
catastrophe known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal
Maximum, 56 million years ago) and by the radical
instability expected of future environments. In
somber prose, they warn that "the combination of
extinctions, global species migrations and the
widespread replacement of natural vegetation with
agricultural monocultures is producing a
distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal.
These effects are permanent, as future evolution
will take place from surviving (and frequently
anthropogenically relocated) stocks." Evolution
itself, in other words, has been forced into a new
trajectory.
2. Spontaneous Decarbonization?
The Commission's coronation of the Anthropocene
coincides with growing scientific controversy over
the 4th Assessment Report issued last year by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The IPCC is mandated to establish scientific
baselines for international efforts to mitigate
global warming, but some of the most prominent
researchers in the field are now challenging its
reference scenarios as overly optimistic, even pie-
in-the-sky thinking.
The current scenarios were adopted by the IPCC in
2000 to model future global emissions based on
different "storylines" about population growth as
well as technological and economic development.
Some of the Panel's major scenarios are well known
to policymakers and greenhouse activists, but few
outside the research community have actually read
or understood the fine print, particularly the
IPCC's confidence that greater energy efficiency
will be an "automatic" byproduct of future economic
development. Indeed all the scenarios, even the
"business as usual" variants, assume that at least
60% of future carbon reduction will occur
independently of greenhouse mitigation measures.
The Panel, in effect, has bet the ranch, or rather
the planet, on unplanned, market-driven progress
toward a post-carbon world economy, a transition
that implicitly requires wealth generated from
higher energy prices ultimately finding its way to
new technologies and renewable energy. (The
International Energy Agency recently estimated that
it would cost $45 trillion to halve greenhouse gas
emissions by 2050.) Kyoto-type accords and carbon
markets are designed -- almost as an analogue to
Keynesian "pump-priming" -- to bridge the shortfall
between spontaneous decarbonization and the
emissions targets required by each scenario.
Serendipitously, this reduces the costs of
mitigating global warming to levels that align with
what seems, at least theoretically, to be
politically possible, as expounded in the British
Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change of
2006 and other such reports.
Critics argue, however, that this represents a
heroic leap of faith that radically understates the
economic costs, technological hurdles, and social
changes required to tame the growth of greenhouse
gases. European carbon emissions, for example, are
still rising (dramatically in some sectors) despite
the European Union's much praised adoption of a
cap-and-trade system in 2005. Likewise there has
been little evidence in recent years of the
automatic progress in energy efficiency that is the
sine qua non of the IPCC scenarios. Although The
Economist characteristically begs to differ, most
energy researchers believe that, since 2000, energy
intensity has actually risen; that is, global
carbon dioxide emissions have kept pace with, or
even grown marginally faster than, energy use.
Coal production, especially, is undergoing a
dramatic renaissance, as the nineteenth century has
returned to haunt the twenty-first century.
Hundreds of thousands of miners are now working
under conditions that would have appalled Charles
Dickens, extracting the dirty mineral that allows
China to open two new coal-fueled power stations
every week. Meanwhile, the total consumption of
fossil fuels is predicted to increase at least 55%
over the next generation, with international oil
exports doubling in volume.
The United Nations Development Program, which has
made its own study of sustainable energy goals,
warns that it will require "a 50 percent cut in
greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by 2050 against
1990 levels" to keep humanity outside the red zone
of runaway warming (usually defined as a greater
than two degrees centigrade increase this century).
Yet the International Energy Agency predicts that,
in all likelihood, such emissions will actually
increase in this period by nearly 100% -- enough
greenhouse gas to propel us past several critical
tipping points.
Even while higher energy prices are pushing SUVs
towards extinction and attracting more venture
capital to renewable energy, they are also opening
the Pandora's box of the crudest of crude oil
production from Canadian tar sands and Venezuelan
heavy oil. As one British scientist has warned, the
very last thing we should wish for (under the false
slogan of "energy independence") is new frontiers
in hydrocarbon production that advance "humankind's
ability to accelerate global warming" and slow the
urgent transition to "non-carbon or closed-carbon
energy cycles."
3. Fin-du-Monde Boom
What confidence should we place in the capacity of
markets to reallocate investment from old to new
energy or, say, from arms expenditures to
sustainable agriculture? We are propagandized
incessantly (especially on public television) about
how giant companies like Chevron, Pfizer Inc., and
Archer Daniels Midland are hard at work saving the
planet by plowing profits back into the kinds of
research and exploration that will ensure low-
carbon fuels, new vaccines, and more drought-
resistant crops.
As the current ethanol-from-corn boom, which has
diverted 100 million tons of grain from human diets
mainly to American car engines, so appallingly
demonstrates, "biofuel" may be a euphemism for
subsidies to the rich and starvation for the poor.
Likewise "clean coal," despite a vigorous
endorsement from Senator Barack Obama (who also
champions ethanol), is, at present, simply a huge
deception: a $40 million advertising and lobbying
campaign for a hypothetical technology that
BusinessWeek has characterized as "being decades
away from commercial viability."
Moreover there are disturbing signs that energy
companies and utilities are reneging on their
public commitments to the development of carbon-
capture and alternative energy technologies. The
Bush administration's "marquee demonstration
project," FutureGen, was scrapped this year after
the coal industry refused to pay its share of the
public-private "partnership"; similarly, most U.S.
private-sector carbon-sequestration initiatives
have recently been cancelled. In the United
Kingdom, meanwhile, Shell has just pulled out of
the world's largest wind-energy project, the London
Array. Despite heroic levels of advertising, energy
corporations, like pharmaceutical companies, prefer
to overgraze the commons, while letting taxes, not
profits, pay for whatever urgent, long-overdue
research is actually undertaken.
On the other hand, the spoils from high energy
prices continue to gush into real estate,
skyscrapers, and financial assets. Whether or not
we are actually at the summit of Hubbert's Peak --
that peak oil moment -- whether or not the oil-
price bubble finally bursts, what we are probably
witnessing is the largest transfer of wealth in
modern history.
An eminent Wall Street oracle, McKinsey Global
Institute, predicts that if crude oil prices remain
above $100 per barrel -- they are, at the moment,
approaching $140 a barrel -- the six countries of
the Gulf Cooperation Council alone will "reap a
cumulative windfall of almost $9 trillion by 2020."
As in the 1970s, Saudi Arabia and its Gulf
neighbors, whose total gross domestic product has
almost doubled in just three years, are awash in
liquidity: $2.4 trillion in banks and investment
funds according to a recent estimate by The
Economist. Regardless of price trends, the
International Energy Agency predicts, "more and
more oil will come from fewer and fewer countries,
primarily the Middle East members of OPEC [The
Organization of the Petroleum Exporting
Countries]."
Dubai, which has little oil income of its own, has
become the regional financial hub for this vast
pool of wealth, with ambitions to eventually
compete with Wall Street and the City of London.
During the first oil shock in the 1970s, much of
OPEC's surplus was recycled through military
purchases in the United States and Europe, or
parked in foreign banks to become the "subprime"
loans that eventually devastated Latin America. In
the wake of the attacks of 9/11, the Gulf states
became far more cautious about entrusting their
wealth to countries, like the United States,
governed by religious fanatics. This time around,
they are using "sovereign wealth funds" to achieve
a more active ownership in foreign financial
institutions, while investing fabulous amounts of
oil revenue to transform Arabia's sands into
hyperbolic cities, shopping paradises, and private
islands for British rock stars and Russian
gangsters.
Two years ago, when oil prices were less than half
of the current level, The Financial Times estimated
that planned new construction in Saudi Arabia and
the emirates already exceeded $1 trillion dollars.
Today, it may be closer to $1.5 trillion,
considerably more than the total value of world
trade in agricultural products. Most of the Gulf
city-states are building hallucinatory skylines --
and, among them, Dubai is the unquestionable
superstar. In a little more than a decade, it has
erected 500 skyscrapers, and currently leases one-
quarter of all the high-rise cranes in the world.
This super-charged Gulf boom, which celebrity
architect Rem Koolhaas claims is "reconfiguring the
world," has led Dubai developers to proclaim the
advent of a "supreme lifestyle" represented by
seven-star hotels, private islands, and J-class
yachts. Not surprisingly, then, the United Arab
Emirates and its neighbors have the biggest per
capita ecological footprints on the planet.
Meanwhile, the rightful owners of Arab oil wealth,
the masses crammed into the angry tenements of
Baghdad, Cairo, Amman, and Khartoum, have little
more to show for it than a trickle-down of oil-
field jobs and Saudi-subsidized madrassas. While
guests enjoy the $5,000 per night rooms in Burj Al-
Arab, Dubai's celebrated sail-shaped hotel,
working-class Cairenes riot in the streets over the
unaffordable price of bread.
4. Can Markets Enfranchise the Poor?
Emissions optimists, of course, will smile at all
the gloom-and-doom and evoke the coming miracle of
carbon trading. What they discount is the real
possibility that a sprawling carbon-offset market
may emerge, just as predicted, yet produce only
minimal improvement in the global carbon balance
sheet, as long as there is no mechanism for
enforcing real net reductions in fossil fuel use.
In popular discussions of emissions-rights trading
systems, it is common to mistake the smokestacks
for the trees. For example, the wealthy oil enclave
of Abu Dhabi (like Dubai, a partner in the United
Arab Emirates) brags that it has planted more than
130 million trees -- each of which does its duty in
absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
However, this artificial forest in the desert also
consumes huge quantities of irrigation water
produced, or recycled, from expensive desalination
plants. The trees may allow Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed
to wear a halo at international meetings, but the
rude fact is that they are an energy-intensive
beauty strip, like most of so-called green
capitalism.
And, while we're at it, let's just ask: What if the
buying and selling of carbon credits and pollution
offsets fails to turn down the thermostat? What
exactly will motivate governments and global
industries then to join hands in a crusade to
reduce emissions through regulation and taxation?
Kyoto-type climate diplomacy assumes that all the
major actors, once they have accepted the science
in the IPCC reports, will recognize an overriding
common interest in gaining control over the runaway
greenhouse effect. But global warming is not War of
the Worlds, where invading Martians are dedicated
to annihilating all of humanity without
distinction. Climate change, instead, will
initially produce dramatically unequal impacts
across regions and social classes. It will
reinforce, not diminish, geopolitical inequality
and conflict.
As the United Nations Development Program
emphasized in its report last year, global warming
is above all a threat to the poor and the unborn,
the "two constituencies with little or no political
voice." Coordinated global action on their behalf
thus presupposes either their revolutionary
empowerment (a scenario not considered by the IPCC)
or the transmutation of the self-interest of rich
countries and classes into an enlightened
"solidarity" without precedent in history. From a
rational-actor perspective, the latter outcome only
seems realistic if it can be shown that privileged
groups possess no preferential "exit" option, that
internationalist public opinion drives policymaking
in key countries, and that greenhouse gas
mitigation could be achieved without major
sacrifices in upscale Northern Hemispheric
standards of living -- none of which seems highly
likely.
And what if growing environmental and social
turbulence, instead of galvanizing heroic
innovation and international cooperation, simply
drive elite publics into even more frenzied
attempts to wall themselves off from the rest of
humanity? Global mitigation, in this unexplored but
not improbable scenario, would be tacitly abandoned
(as, to some extent, it already has been) in favor
of accelerated investment in selective adaptation
for Earth's first-class passengers. We're talking
here of the prospect of creating green and gated
oases of permanent affluence on an otherwise
stricken planet.
Of course, there will still be treaties, carbon
credits, famine relief, humanitarian acrobatics,
and perhaps the full-scale conversion of some
European cities and small countries to alternative
energy. But the shift to low, or zero, emission
lifestyles would be almost unimaginably expensive.
(In Britain, it currently costs $200,000 more to
build a zero-carbon, "level 6" eco-home than a
standard unit of the same area.) And this will
certainly become even more unimaginable after
perhaps 2030, when the convergent impacts of
climate change, peak oil, peak water, and an
additional 1.5 billion people on the planet may
begin to seriously throttle growth.
5. The North's Ecological Debt
The real question is this: Will rich counties ever
mobilize the political will and economic resources
to actually achieve IPCC targets or, for that
matter, to help poorer countries adapt to the
inevitable, already "committed" quotient of warming
now working its way toward us through the slow
circulation of the world ocean?
To be more vivid: Will the electorates of the
wealthy nations shed their current bigotry and
walled borders to admit refugees from predicted
epicenters of drought and desertification like the
Maghreb, Mexico, Ethiopia, and Pakistan? Will
Americans, the most miserly people when measured by
per capita foreign aid, be willing to tax
themselves to help relocate the millions likely to
be flooded out of densely settled, mega-delta
regions like Bangladesh?
Market-oriented optimists, once again, will point
to carbon offset programs like the Clean
Development Mechanism which, they claim, will allow
green capital to flow to the Third World. Most of
the Third World, however, probably prefers for the
First World to acknowledge the environmental mess
it has created and take responsibility for cleaning
it up. They rightly rail against the notion that
the greatest burden of adjustment to the
Anthropocene epoch should fall on those who have
contributed least to carbon emissions and drawn the
slightest benefits from 200 years of
industrialization.
In a sobering study recently published in the
Proceedings of the [U.S.] National Academy of
Science, a research team has attempted to calculate
the environmental costs of economic globalization
since 1961 as expressed in deforestation, climate
change, over-fishing, ozone depletion, mangrove
conversion, and agricultural expansion. After
making adjustments for relative cost burdens, they
found that the richest countries, by their
activities, had generated 42% of environmental
degradation across the world, while shouldering
only 3% of the resulting costs.
The radicals of the South will rightly point to
another debt as well. For 30 years, cities in the
developing world have grown at breakneck speed
without any equivalent public investment in
infrastructure services, housing, or public health.
In large part this has been the result of foreign
debts contracted by dictators, payments enforced by
the International Monetary Fund, and public sectors
wrecked by the World Bank's "structural adjustment"
agreements.
This planetary deficit of opportunity and social
justice is captured in the fact that more than one
billion people, according to UN-Habitat, currently
live in slums and that their number is expected to
double by 2030. An equal number, or more, forage in
the so-called informal sector (a first-world
euphemism for mass unemployment). Sheer demographic
momentum, meanwhile, will increase the world's
urban population by 3 billion people over the next
40 years (90% of them in poor cities), and no one
-- absolutely no one -- has a clue how a planet of
slums, with growing food and energy crises, will
accommodate their biological survival, much less
their inevitable aspirations to basic happiness and
dignity.
If this seems unduly apocalyptic, consider that
most climate models project impacts that will
uncannily reinforce the present geography of
inequality. One of the pioneer analysts of the
economics of global warming, Petersen Institute
fellow William R. Cline, recently published a
country-by-country study of the likely effects of
climate change on agriculture by the later decades
of this century. Even in the most optimistic
simulations, the agricultural systems of Pakistan
(a 20% decrease from current farm output predicted)
and Northwestern India (a 30% decrease) are likely
to be devastated, along with much of the Middle
East, the Maghreb, the Sahel belt, Southern Africa,
the Caribbean, and Mexico. Twenty-nine developing
countries will lose 20% or more of their current
farm output to global warming, while agriculture in
the already rich north is likely to receive, on
average, an 8% boost.
In light of such studies, the current ruthless
competition between energy and food markets,
amplified by international speculation in
commodities and agricultural land, is only a modest
portent of the chaos that could soon grow
exponentially from the convergence of resource
depletion, intractable inequality, and climate
change. The real danger is that human solidarity
itself, like a West Antarctic ice shelf, will
suddenly fracture and shatter into a thousand
shards.
[Mike Davis is the author of In Praise of
Barbarians: Essays against Empire (Haymarket Books,
2008) and Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car
Bomb (Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a
book about cities, poverty, and global change.]
-- 
www.iaciners.org


Potresti cortesemente tradurre il tutto?
Potrei farlo io senz'altro, ma potrei fare degli errori con il rischio
di attribuire un significato diverso al senso delle frasi.
Grazie in anticipo.

 quotaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!
Oh! E va bé!!! Non t'incazzare!
Buon Bagno

 quotaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!
Lassa perdere... E' una troll, che si traveste molto bene (è un po' la 
sua missione).
Consiglio a te e a tutti i nuovi di non risponderle. Fa dei discorsi 
inizialmente seri per farti abboccare poi vira sul trollaggio.
Poi fate voi.
Ciao,
Stefano

 June 26, 2008
Invece Franco Battaglia, il destronzo negazionista, qualche giorno fa 
scrive un articolo su Il Giornale che suona più o meno così:
"Il polo nord forse quest'estate sarà senza ghiaccio.
Sai che roba. Sticazzi."

 Poi fate voi.
Ancora? I discorsi seri li so fare di tanto in tanto...poi viro sullo
scherzo e non sul trollaggio come asserisci tu...insomma ti sto
proprio antipatica! Non leggermi e lasciami perdere, no?
Passo e chiudo...con te, definitivamente. Mi hai proprio seccato.

 quotaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!
cosa vuoi dire?
-- 
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Allen 1966) - L'uomo di Alkatraz - L'incredibile Hulk - La dialectique
peut-elle casser des briques? - Sangue Pazzo - Street Kings - The
Happening - JCVD - Maradona, la mano di Dio - Waltz with Bashir -
Drillbit Taylor - Frankenstein (1931) - Liverpool - Entre les murs - The
Blues Brothers 1980 - Futurama The Beast With A Billion Backs
www.iaciners.org



Mi piace leggere il giornale, porta notizie fresche, da un mondo che non
c'e' ma che ci piacerebbe che esistesse.
Ieri
SI all'immunita' per le alte cariche.
Venerdi'
I giudici sottomessi al parlamento
Giovedi
Ecco come ridurre le rate del mutuo 
ecc.


 Ecco come ridurre le rate del mutuo 
"Grazie al vostro fantastico governo potrete pagare 200 euro per 10 anni 
(24.000 euro) anziché 300 per 5 (18.000)! Non è fantastico?"

 Ecco come ridurre le rate del mutuo 
"Grazie al vostro fantastico governo potrete pagare 200 euro per 10 anni 


 Sai che roba. Sticazzi."
Franco Battaglia il parrucchiere? Pardon, l'hair stylist?
--
Joe

 Franco Battaglia il parrucchiere? Pardon, l'hair stylist?
Sì, quello è il suo vero mestiere.
Però sui biglietti da visita scrive scienzatrotfl.

 cosa vuoi dire?
Ah!
Credevo fossi tu!

 c'e' ma che ci piacerebbe che esistesse.
Maroni vuole schedare i bimbi rom, la UE è d'accordo.
Sì, niente male in effetti.
-- 
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