Re: SC34

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2007/01/the_warming.html#comments

Last summer, several water companies imposed hosepipe bans over much of London and several other parts of the UK, which, apart from Ireland and Norway is in theory about the wettest country in Europe. The bans are still operative so even now in the middle of "winter" - daffodils are springing up, frogs doing the business , trees have only just lost their leaves and are already in bud for spring, warmest December in London since records began back in 1658 etc etc - even now, folk can't wash their cars and water their lawns. Meantime the British government talks fine words about the threat to us all global warming and pushes for a massive expansion of airport capacity so that more jets can pump CO2 into the air, and promotes plans for a massive expansion of fuel burning suburban sprawl that will encrust much of the south and midlands of the country. Over in the French and Swiss Alps, the ski resorts were lamenting the absence of snow three weeks after it was supposed to have started layering the slopes. The snow has fallen now, so the jets are swooping in from all over Europe pumping out more carbon in the process and the trucks are thundering through the Alpine passes. Most of the south of Spain has a severe and permanent water shortage, and the wall to wall laying down of water thirsty golf courses, for a thousand kilometres from the Pyrenees to Gibraltar goes on. There are reports that in some areas of Italy there has been a return of malaria because of the effects to climate change. I remember visiting the south west USA a few years ago, and seeing Lakes Mead and Powell at half the level they should have been while the fountains pulsed water prodigiously high into the air outside the casinoes at Las Vegas. How many coal burning electricity generating power stations are opened in China every year? - I heard it works out at one a week. How much of the Brazilian rain forest is destroyed every year? From space you can see the long dark trail of filth from the factories of India staining the sky out across the Arabian Sea. Yet it seems nothing will be done by the governments of the nations - perhaps because in reality nothing can be done. The complexity of the whole world economic and social system is such that it is beyond the power of any govermnent or organisatioon to control and change - even if they were willing to do so. Perhaps the only hope is that peak oil may be within the next few years - then we'll have to start reducing our reliance on the stuff and be forced to pump out less carbon.

Perhaps..............