~ Personal Commentary
Highlighted excerpts from the transcript of former Vice President Al Gore's TED speech on climate change published in February of 2016 before (Asterisk 45) was installed in the Oval Office (with a high probability by the Russians) follow below...
I am of the mind we need to remember where we were pre (Asterisk 45) if we are to see where we are going post (Asterisk 45), if we are to be clear on the changes not to come as the vulture capitalists, with the blessing of the GOP climate change deniers GOP Kremlin cohorts, plunder the United States of America at the expense of the planet!
I am of the mind we need to remember where we were pre (Asterisk 45) if we are to see where we are going post (Asterisk 45), if we are to be clear on the changes not to come as the vulture capitalists, with the blessing of the GOP climate change deniers GOP Kremlin cohorts, plunder the United States of America at the expense of the planet!
After just re-watching "An Inconvenient Truth" and Gore's February 2016 speech I am feeling very sad for him, for all climate change activists and for all of us on the planet because what was -- several short months ago -- is no longer where we are!
😟😟😟😟😟😟
Focused Read in 2-3 minutes
Note: "The Nobel Peace Prize 2007 was awarded jointly to Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 'for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.'"
“Why is" (was?) "Al Gore
optimistic about climate change? In this spirited talk, Gore asks
three powerful questions about the man-made forces threatening to
destroy our planet -- and the solutions we're" (were?) "designing to combat
them. (Featuring Q&A with TED curator Chris Anderson)
...I'm going to propose three
questions and the answer to the first one necessarily involves a
little bad news. But -- hang on, because the answers to the second
and third questions really are very positive.
So the first question is,
"Do we really have to change?" And of course, the Apollo
Mission, among other things changed the environmental movement,
really launched the modern environmental movement...one of the things that we learned
confirmed what the scientists have long told us. One of the most
essential facts about the climate crisis has to do with the sky. As
this picture illustrates, the sky is not the vast and limitless
expanse that appears when we look up from the ground. It is a very
thin shell of atmosphere surrounding the planet. That right now is
the open sewer for our industrial civilization as it's currently
organized. We are spewing 110 million tons of heat-trapping global
warming pollution into it every 24 hours, free of charge...
And there are many sources
of the greenhouse gases, I'm certainly not going to go through them
all. I'm going to focus on the main one, but agriculture is involved,
diet is involved, population is involved. Management of forests,
transportation, the oceans, the melting of the permafrost. But I'm
going to focus on the heart of the problem, which is the fact that we
still rely on dirty, carbon-based fuels for 85 percent of all the
energy that our world burns every year. And you can see from this
image that after World War II, the emission rates started really
accelerating. And the accumulated amount of man-made, global warming
pollution that is up in the atmosphere now traps as much extra heat
energy as would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs
exploding every 24 hours, 365 days a year. Fact-checked over and over
again,conservative, it's the truth.
...So we're having
record-breaking temperatures. Fourteen of the 15 of the hottest years
ever measured with instruments have been in this young century.The
hottest of all was last year. Last month was the 371st month in a row
warmer than the 20th-century average. And for the first time, not
only the warmest January, but for the first time, it was more than
two degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the average. These higher
temperatures are having an effect on animals, plants, people,
ecosystems.
But on a global basis, 93
percent of all the extra heat energy is trapped in the oceans...This
has consequences.
The first order of
consequence: the ocean-based storms get stronger.
The second order of consequences are affecting all of us
right now. The warmer oceans are evaporating much more water vapor
into the skies. Average humidity worldwide has gone up four percent.
And it creates these atmospheric rivers. The Brazilian scientists
call them "flying rivers." And they funnel all of that
extra water vapor over the land where storm conditions trigger these
massive record-breaking downpours...These downpours are really unusual.
Last July in Houston,
Texas, it rained for two days, 162 billion gallons. That represents
more than two days of the full flow of Niagara Falls in the middle of
the city, which was, of course, paralyzed. These record downpours are
creating historic floods and mudslides.
...Every night on
the TV news now is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation.
..."All storms are
different now.There's so much extra energy in the atmosphere, there's
so much extra water vapor. Every storm is different now." So,
the same extra heat pulls the soil moisture out of the ground and
causes these deeper, longer, more pervasive droughts and many of them
are underway right now.
It dries out the
vegetation and causes more fires in the western part of North
America. There's certainly been evidence of that, a lot of them.
...Right now we're seeing
microbial diseases from the tropics spread to the higher
latitudes; the transportation revolution has had a lot to do
with this. But the changing conditions change the latitudes and
the areas where these microbial diseases can become endemic and
change the range of the vectors, like mosquitoes and ticks that carry
them. The Zika epidemic now -- we're better positioned in
North America because it's still a little too cool and we have a
better public health system. But when women in some regions of South
and Central America are advised not to get pregnant for two
years -- that's something new, that ought to get our
attention. The Lancet, one of the two greatest medical journals
in the world, last summer labeled this a medical emergency
now. And there are many factors because of it.
This is also connected to
the extinction crisis. We're in danger of losing 50 percent of
all the living species on earth by the end of this century. And
already, land-based plants and animals are now moving towards
the poles at an average rate of 15 feet per day.
Speaking of the North
Pole, last December 29, the same storm that caused historic
flooding in the American Midwest,raised temperatures at the
North Pole 50 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal, causing
the thawing of the North Pole in the middle of the long, dark,
winter, polar night. And when the land-based ice of the Arctic
melts, it raises sea level.
...So the answer to the first
question, "Must we change?" is yes, we have to
change. Second question, "Can we change?" This is the
exciting news! The best projections in the world 16 years
ago were that by 2010, the world would be able to install 30
gigawatts of wind capacity. We beat that mark by 14 and a half
times over. We see an exponential curve for wind installations
now. We see the cost coming down dramatically. Some
countries -- take Germany, an industrial power house with a climate not
that different from Vancouver's, by the way -- one day last
December, got 81 percent of all its energy from renewable
resources, mainly solar and wind. A lot of countries are
getting more than half on an average basis.
More good news: energy
storage, from batteries particularly, is now beginning to take
off because the cost has been coming down very dramatically to
solve the intermittency problem. With solar, the news is even
more exciting! The best projections 14 years ago were that we
would install one gigawatt per year by 2010. When 2010 came
around, we beat that mark by 17 times over. Last year, we beat
it by 58 times over. This year, we're on track to beat it 68
times over.
We're going to win
this. We are going to prevail. The exponential curve on
solar is even steeper and more dramatic. When I came to this
stage 10 years ago, this is where it was. We have seen a
revolutionary breakthrough in the emergence of these exponential
curves.
And the cost has come down
10 percent per year for 30 years. And it's continuing to
come down.
...So now we're getting this: solar
panels on grass huts and new business models that make it
affordable. Muhammad Yunus financed this one in Bangladesh with
micro-credit. This is a village market. Bangladesh is now the
fastest-deploying country in the world: two systems per minute
on average, night and day. And we have all we need: enough
energy from the Sun comes to the earth every hour to supply the
full world's energy needs for an entire year. It's actually a
little bit less than an hour. So the answer to the second
question, "Can we change?" is clearly "Yes." And
it's an ever-firmer "yes."
Last question, "Will
we change?" Paris really was a breakthrough...The United States has already been
changing...Last year -- if you look at all of the investment in
new electricity generation in the United States, almost
three-quarters was from renewable energy, mostly wind and solar.
We are solving this
crisis. The only question is: how long will it take to get
there? So, it matters that a lot of people are organizing to
insist on this change. Almost 400,000 people marched in New York
City before the UN special session on this. Many thousands,
tens of thousands, marched in cities around the world. And
so, I am extremely optimistic. As I said before, we are going to
win this.
...We now have a moral
challenge that is in the tradition of others that we have
faced. One of the greatest poets of the last century in the
US, Wallace Stevens, wrote a line that has stayed with
me: "After the final 'no,' there comes a 'yes,' and on
that 'yes', the future world depends." When the
abolitionists started their movement, they met with no after no
after no. And then came a yes. The Women's Suffrage and Women's
Rights Movement met endless no's, until finally, there was a
yes. The Civil Rights Movement, the movement against
apartheid, and more recently, the movement for gay and lesbian
rights here in the United States and elsewhere. After the
final "no" comes a "yes."
When any great moral
challenge is ultimately resolved into a binary choice between
what is right and what is wrong, the outcome is fore-ordained
because of who we are as human beings. Ninety-nine percent of
us, that is where we are now and it is why we're going to win this. We
have everything we need. Some still doubt that we have the will
to act, but I say the will to act is itself a renewable
resource.
Thank you very much."
You can find the text of
the speech and the 25:20-minute video here
Focused Thought 45 seconds
( I picked up this meme for thought on the Twitter timeline @porpentina2017 !)
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