Groundhog Days

In the autumn of 2006 I put together a spoof newspaper called "Socialist Lurker." It got handed out at the (in retrospect and at the time) disastrous meeting where the Climate Campers decided- with a little stalinist push from a couple of very hierarchical "non-hierarchicals", to keep doing big Climate Camps, bringing them to their current impasse and colonisation by NGOs.

The lead story in Socialist Lurker was "Scientists admit climate reports wrong: It's actually far far worse." I may get round to posting it here at PED, who knows. The point of my rambling is that the story pointed out that there was a discernible pattern of scientists recanting their previous predictions of the speed and scope of climate change's impacts of food production, glacier melt, ocean acidification, forest die-back etc etc. Science is too small-c conservative on this particular wicked post-normal science problem

The drumbeat of bad news gets louder and louder, with the latest example being, Dr Chris Field, a co-ordinating editor of the previous IPCC report (which got a roasting for its caution), telling a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that - you guessed it- the carbon dioxide emissions have been increasing a lot quicker than they'd thought. Ties in with the recent NOAA story that last year we went up 2.3ppm. Sink failure, positive feedbacks from forests and soil etc etc. What a doomed stupid species. And I remember that my mate Marc Roberts did a fantastic cartoon about this... (he's done fantastic cartoons about lots of things)