We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, August 24, 2013

Uncertainty Looms Over Terrestrial Ecosystems

Click here to access article by Jutta Wolf from Eurasia Review.

Recent research suggests that the ecosystem has already experienced a dreaded feedback effect which could mean that the tipping point has passed when climate destabilization becomes inevitable. (Burning of fossil fuels spews excessive carbon into the atmosphere which causes global warming which causes extreme weather which causes vegetation to absorb less carbon, thus more ends up in the atmosphere.)
The team then fed the various readings into complex computer models to calculate the global effect of extreme weather on the carbon balance. The models showed that the effect is indeed extreme: on average, vegetation absorbs 11 billion fewer tons of carbon dioxide than it would in a climate that does not experience extremes. “It is therefore by no means negligible,” says Reichstein.