It… should not be surprising that the U.S. Pentagon states that global warming is a larger threat than even terrorism. “Picture Japan, suffering from flooding along its coastal cities and contamination of its fresh water supply, eyeing Russia’s Sakhalin Island oil and gas reserves as an energy source”, suggests a Pentagon memo on global warming. “Envision Pakistan, India and China — all armed with nuclear weapons — skirmishing at their borders over refugees, access to shared river and arable land.” The Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, has said that climate change needs to be taken as seriously as war and, further, that “changes in our environment and the resulting upheavals from droughts to inundated coastal areas to loss of arable land are likely to become a major driver of war and conflict”. Fighting global warming may be one way to prevent future wars, simultaneously increasing energy security and physical security….
[I]ncreased suffering and increasing numbers of environmental refugees, along with greater anxiety over access to food, water, land, and housing — the material essentials of life — often lead to unstable conditions that give rise to anger, ethnic violence, terrorism, fascism, and war. “It’s the poorest of the poor in the world, and this includes poor people even in prosperous societies, who are going to be the worst hit,” states IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri. Those who needlessly degrade and destroy the environment to satisfy their own selfish pleasures are like the pre-revolutionary Queen Marie-Antoinette, declaring “Let them eat carbon dioxide”!
This is part of a long, excellent article, Are You Taking Global Warming Personally?, by Dan Brook, Ph.D and Richard H. Schwartz, Ph.D. over on world.edu this week.
After an well-communicated, detailed intro on global warming and concerns related to it, like those above, the authors delve into the action side of things in detail as well. And as you can tell from the title, they don’t just talk about macro-scale action, but focus a lot on personal action.
As we did a bit in Going Green Tip #3, they focus their personal action suggestions around the topic of food. One of the best ways to address global weirding is to switch to a vegetarian or (even better) vegan diet. If we are serious about addressing global weirding, this should be on our list, and it should be near the top.
The authors and many others have compared addressing global warming to fighting a war. In order to mitigate the great risks we are facing from altering the Earth’s climate, we need to mobilize to a great degree. But while mobilizing to fight an “enemy” on the other side of the world may be easy for us, mobilizing to change our own habits seems to be much more difficult. Can you do it? Can you help your friends and family to do it?
As Buddha is credited with saying, “Though one man conquers a thousand men, a thousand times in battle, he who conquers himself is the greatest warrior.” An old Aztec saying is basically the same, “The strongest warrior is he who conquers himself.”
It is time for us to take up this hardest of battles a little more forcefully and effectively.
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Photo Credit: mysi anne via flickr (CC license)
Doc Vega
Global warming originally began as a ploy by Margaret Thatcher after an unfortunate election outcome that put a political party in power that would close down the coal mines in Great Britain in 1972. It has been proven that her government searched for a viable means to counter their political defeat. The solution: whip up a scheme about carbon dioxide driven global warming. This scheme would encourage an alternative push for nuclear energy which has a huge lobby even though the people were afraid of it at the time. The movement grew from there being embraced by modern day Druids who worship planet earth instead of God. This emotionally driven charade perpetuates itself among the disenfranchised who would allow their lives to be heavily regulated by the United nations and all other third world powers who have much to gain from alleged damages that they can sue the US, Great Britain, and other western nations who brought about the industrial age and fossil fuel energy emissions. This is just one in many ploys by globalists who want to limit or stop population growth all together with draconian government force. All the vegans, tree huggers, and Gaia worshipers will naturally gravitate to this policy of totalitarian control willingly are nothing more than the mindless followers of the green industry Pied Pipers like Al Gore. Gore, by the way, illustrates well just how much he personally exercises planet saving restraint after building numerous houses over the last few years along with his latest multi-million dollar stretch of California beach front realty. Okay, Al, we see how profit from green industry now don’t we? Gore is no different than many others who will push the Green industry agenda while telling all of us not to eat dairy products they’re bad for the planet, that we’ll have to pay more taxes to discourage energy use, and our transportation fuel will also rise until we are forced to ride bikes and limit our mobility while the fat cats clean up with the Druids and tree-huggers eating right out of their hands.
Not me! No sir, No way. No how. This is utter and complete heresy. Don’t fall for it people. Remember this, there is a big difference between pollution and climate change. We can fight pollution, but we can’t fight stupidity and greed on a conspiratory level and that’s what this ia all about!
Zachary Shahan
@Doc Vega: global warming started in 1972? http://planetsave.com/2010/11/29/climate-science-in-1956-video/ ; http://planetsave.com/2010/11/29/global-cooling-myth-dies-again/
global warming is a scientific issue, not a political issue, that threatens a lot more than you seem to grasp. how are you gonna find freedom in a world where people don’t have access to water or food or are being slammed with natural disasters?
i’m sorry, these are considerable, scientifically-concluded issues the world will be facing in years to come (even starting now)
Doc Vega
On the contrary, Pal. Global Warming is indeed a political. manifestation that has been materialized by the New World Order to socially engineer the entire global population under the aegis of Agenda 21 and Sustainable Development. There are protocols already in place for the UN to assemble a standing army to enforce the Agenda 21. Have any of you heard of HR3534 which will effectively confiscate ocean shores, Great lakes, land resources to be placed under UN jurisdiction? The Global Warming agenda has been unscientifically interjected into the global community without true debate among objective discussions. Those who did not agree or did not support the radical narrative were suppressed or ignored. Millions were funded by the UN for climate research that supported Global Warming while they rejected teams findings who found that the global warming theory was inconclusive and unsupportable without further evidence. The truth is people we are in a cooling period even the University of East Anglia personnel admitted it in emails that were leaked and were actually sharing ways of altering their data to come up with results that supported Global Warming. It’s a scam. Climatologists found that 500,000 years ago the earth had 20 times present carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere yet the mean temperature of the planet was 200 degrees below zero-conclusion carbon dioxide does not drive global warming.
Global warming is cyclical by natural processes. Without carbon dioxide in our atmosphere in the atmosphere there would be no photosynthesis no plant growth no crops to plants to consume carbon gasses to create oxygen we would perish without carbon dioxide it is a noble gas and is essential to our existence yet the Obama White House has declared it as a toxic substance. This insanity is emblematic of the BIG LIE which though out history has been used by liberals, Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and globalists to justify tyranny. The new globalist agenda is to control resources, reduce the human population, re-establish huge wilderness areas, restrict human travel and habitation in UN contracted dwellings that have no structural warranty or liability. People like Aaron Russo, Norman Dodd, G.Edward Griffin have warned us of these charlatans and control freaks who want to force others to accept their faulty theories. Wake up. This is not the ancient era of Druids!
Zachary Shahan
Doc, I’m sure your intentions are good, but you are far off the mark here.
The Understanding that we are causing considerable and concerning global warming and climate change is the result of about a century of research.
There is now a clear scientific consensus amongst climate science experts that this is the case: http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-scientific-consensus.htm
Even oil companies have acknowledged this now!
There is no huge global conspiracy behind all of this. This is a manufactured fear that is spread by some politicians and media. Thousands upon thousands of scientists have simply not colluded to take over the world.
Cooling? Heat records are 14 times more common than cold records these days: http://planetsave.com/2012/03/20/14-to-1-2012-heat-records-to-cold-records-in-u-s-1000s-of-heat-records-set-in-one-week/
2000-2009 was the hottest decade on record: http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-cooling.htm
“The globally-averaged temperature for May 2012 marked the second warmest May since record keeping began in 1880. May 2012 also marks the 36th consecutive May and 327th consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20th century average.”: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/
“Climate reacts to whatever forces it to change at the time; humans are now the dominant forcing.”: http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-change-little-ice-age-medieval-warm-period.htm
Numerous independent studies have show that the scientists at East Anglia did not alter data or do anything wrong scientifically: http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climategate-CRU-emails-hacked.htm
Yes, without CO2, we’d be dead. But with too much CO2 it’s the same. The key is keeping things in balance. And that’s what we’re not doing.
Regarding Obama: actually, it’s the Bush administration that declared CO2 a pollutant, and the Supreme Court that upheld that.
I imagine that from your huge supply of misconceptions and false facts, you probably won’t absorb much of the above, but try to look into it with an open mind and consider the facts for what they actually are.
Victor
The focus on reducing carbon emissions overlooks the all-important fact that methane is a far more potent global-warming gas than carbon dioxide. This explains another fact, namely that “livestock production” (raising animals for the consumption of meat and dairy products) is the number one cause of global warming. For more information, please watch the brief video titled “ANIMAL AGRICULTURE: THE FACTS” — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcjyn2GFJxk&feature=player_embedded and read the following article, titled “A New Global Warming Strategy: How Environmentalists are Overlooking Vegetarianism as the Most Effective Tool Against Climate Change in Our Lifetimes” — http://www.earthsave.org/globalwarming.htm By the way, these reports do not include information about the destruction of oceans and seas and the estimated consumption of fish or “seafood,” amounting to about 110 million tonnes annually.
Doc Vega
Now here’s a typical globalist’s control freak response to easing carbon emissions. Let’s just go ahead and kill the food industry, people aren’t important, they don’t have to eat. Remember, it’s the planet that’s important. Long live the planet, screw the little parasites called people, they don’t have a right to live unmolested by the control freak plans of world politicians, bankers, and corporations who stand to profit quite handsomely as scientists continually seek more praises and recognition for their flawed and agenda based research because the United Nations will just continue to keep funding those research grants for you guys, won’t they?
Communism and fascism come in many forms, under various headings, and veneers, but the common denominator is the same, control, control of the masses, control of masses money, control of the resources, control of the political stage. That is what the Global Warming Agenda is all about. Wake up people!
Zachary Shahan
@Doc Vega: very simply, i think you are way off in many respects. they are encourage people to eat vegetarian or vegan because it would, among other things, help others in the world to a great degree. as a lifetime vegetarian, and one who is very happy with this way of life and who has met tons of people also very happy with it, i don’t see encouragement of this diet as a problem at all. numerous studies have shown that vegetarians and vegans are healthier and even HAPPIER (http://eatdrinkbetter.com/2010/07/01/new-study-vegetarians-are-happier/).
as far as addressing global warming, this is not just about protecting other creatures on the planet, it is also about protecting current and future generations from horrible catastrophes, suffering , and death
Doc Vega
The only reason anyone could possibly embrace global warming is because they are completely uninformed, emotionally identify with the cause, or are so gullible they will support and issue that appeals to the disaffected and disenfranchised who are prone to rebel against conventional wisdom. There were 2002 meteorological records set within one week in December 2010 all indicating a global cooling. Record snowfalls, record rainfalls, record low temperatures, in other words there is no weather condition that supports the global warming theory. Scientists who were wrong will not admit their error. They also will not admit how they conspired to alter climate data and suppress the testimony of others who do not concur with their erroneous data. The United Nations is corrupt and will support any money making scheme and will continue the funding of research that supports the false global warming agenda.The United States is currently under attack by the left who will fabricate any scheme that will undermine truth, the US Constitution, and human rights. Advocates of global warming also advocate big government intervention in our lives, they advocate submitting to the oppression of individual rights, and they will fall for anything because they are followers who need control in their lives.
I strongly suggest determining which political leaders support global warming directives and vote them out of office. This is reality people accept it!
Zachary Shahan
Wow, Doc Vega, looks like you’ve got one or two conspiracy theories running through your mind, & a ton of misinformation. when 97% of heart doctors give you advice on what to do to avoid a horrible heart attack in the near future and you ignore them, you can tell us all again that global warming is a fraud. no, not 5 or 6 such doctors, but hundreds and hundreds of them. i’m sorry you have a problem with liberals in the U.S., but use a little common sense and don’t take it out on your children and grandchildren
Doc Vega
Zachary, what science? What science would proclaim that there is global warming is valid in the face of a 15 year cooling cycle, numerous record cold temperatures set in the month of December, organizations of meteorologists who have monitored temperatures in the US and the world for decades that say there is no evidence and if anything there would be a general cooling period that has persisted for at least more than a decade, just to name a few. Even Global Warming pundits say there has been less than a 1 degree rise in a century. Your statement is false with no supporting science what so ever but subjective opinions that are politically and ideologically motivated. Why don’t you go to the Northeastern seaboard and see the record blizzards going and tell me that this is a symptom of global warming. Why don’t you examine the orbital stretch theory(talking about science) and educate yourself?
Zachary Shahan
Doc Vega: I cover these issues almost everyday. 2010 was the hottest meteorological year on record (http://planetsave.com/2010/12/28/top-10-global-weirding-environment-stories-of-2010/2/), according to NASA. and it was clear throughout the year it would be or would be close to the top, given that several months beat all-time time records (links to some of those stories in the link above). yes, there were cold record set in 2010, but there were far more heat records set, as has been the trend for the past couple decades (see the charts here: http://planetsave.com/2010/12/15/nasa-november-2010-hottest-november-on-record-2010-likely-hottest-year-on-record/). For a little explanation on how the NE U.S. & Europe happened to get such a cold winter in the midst of clear global warming, check out this piece: http://planetsave.com/2010/12/29/one-more-time-does-the-cold-in-the-northeast-europe-disprove-global-warming-heck-no/
We even hit a new hottest world temperature this year: http://planetsave.com/2010/06/05/hundreds-killed-in-india-from-heat-waves-new-hottest-temperature-record-in-asia/
Truthfully, where it your proof of this supposed cooling? I’m truly sorry that you think you’re getting correct information from somewhere on this matter, but it is clear you are not.
tfagan
I think a few simple facts might be helpful to understand how important reducing CO2 in the atmosphere is to our survival.
The lowest safe level of CO2 is 150 ppm any level lower is dangerous to the survival of all plants and animals. Levels under 150 ppm in green houses result in dying vegetation and a resulting reduction in oxygen in the atmosphere.
The high safe level is 50,000 ppm and we are not anywhere near the high safe level. In fact we would be better off if the actual 390 ppm was raised to safer middle level of between 5,000 ppm to 40,000 ppm.
The idea that we should make people pay a tax to force a reduction the level of CO2 output is laughable. The best thing we could for a more healthy world with vigorous vegetation growth would be to build many more coal fired power plants. Providing better particulate filters on those power plants would safely reduce energy costs, invigorate plant growth, increase oxygen levels with a resulting reduction in world hunger.
Do you think the government is pushing the cap and trade CO2 reduction tax to help you? Don’t bet your life on it.
Zachary Shahan
@tfagan: Wow, i don’t know where you are getting your info, but it is way off the mark. there are so many studies out there refuting so many of your statements i don’t know how you could actually believe what you have written, unless you don’t look at the science very much at all