Title of new report from the Institute of Food and Resource Economics of the University of Copenhagen: Earth on Fire
Hmmm. “E a r t h o n f i r e”. Should be easy to prove. Let’s have a look at the numbers.
Ignition temperature of paper: 451 °F or 233°C
(Source: Ray Bradbury. * see comments)
Average temperature of the earth: 61.43 °F or 16.37 °C
(Source: National Climatic Data Center July 2009 report – adding 20th century average plus July anomaly)
Yep, spontaneous surface ignition is possible at any moment in your area. Tune to CNN for official global fire emergency news. /sarc
Note the polar bear image on the front cover. Old habits die hard. – Anthony
from Eurekalert
New questions in the climate change debate — essential ethical and philosophical perspectives
Researchers from within the fields of science, the arts and theology add new perspectives to the climate change debate with the book ‘Earth on Fire — Climate Change from a Philosophical and Ethical Perspective,’ now available as an open-access book
 |
||||
 |
 |
|
 |
|
|
 |
  IMAGE: “Earth on Fire — Climate Change from a Philosophical and Ethical Perspective, ” edited by Mickey Gjerris, Christian Gamborg, Jørgen E. Olesen and Jakob Wolf.
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
||||
The book aims to show how climate change raises not only a number of questions which can be answered within the scientific domain, but also many issues of a more universal nature based on philosophical, political, ethical and religious views on the world is and how it should be. What is “good “?
The earth is on fire. So we need to both act fast and think carefully about what we are doing. The ethical questions that climate change raises may be new in their global character but behind them are still the well-known, basic universal questions such as what is “being good”, what should we do and who should we consider, how should we prioritise our efforts in a situation where there are more challenges than solutions, and how do we structure the debate of climate change issues so that everybody is heard and the best arguments gain acceptance.
Lifestyle changes are necessary
Associate Professor at Centre for Bioethics and Risk Assessment at LIFE – Faculty of Life Sciences at University of Copenhagen, Mickey Gjerris is one of the editors of the book. He says about our new situation:
“Countering climate change requires large changes to our lifestyle. Ethical thinking offers an opportunity to understand nature in a way which means that we should not only interpret these changes as a sacrifice we have to make but, rather, as an opportunity to establish a relationship to nature where protection of it is seen as a opportunity for man’s further development.”
Science as an integrated part of society
The authors of the book hope that it will contribute to researchers reflecting on the underlying values for discussion.
“It is important to understand that science is an integrated part of society and not an outside factor that can provide an independent description of what is happening while we are politically deciding what should be done”
“Today there is a tendency to lament the politicization of climate change research and to pretend that other researchers have an underlying agenda while you pride yourself on being firmly based on the objective foundation of science. But we all have an agenda, and the debating climate will gain by us recognising this”, says Mickey Gjerris.
Free English online version
The English online version of “Earth on Fire- Climate change from a philosophical and ethical perspective”, Edited by Mickey Gjerris, Christian Gamborg, Jørgen E. Olesen, Jakob Wolf, is free for all to use www.earthonfire.foi.dk. All the authors ask is that readers will share the existence of the book with their colleagues and fellow students so that as many as possible might benefit from it.
The book, which was published in a Danish printed version earlier this year, consists of seven chapters which show how the climate changes are rooted in our scientific, philosophical, political, ethical and religious understanding of the world, and concludes with three cases where the climate debate issues are discussed: CO2 trading, GM crops and biofuels. The cases are addressed by experts who have played a prominent role in the public debate of these topics.
“Earth on Fire – Climate change from a philosophical and ethical perspective” can be downloaded from this page: www.earthonfire.foi.dk where you can also read about the various chapters and authors of the book.
For more information, please contact Associate Professor Mickey Gjerris, LIFE -Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Copenhagen on tel.: +45 35 28 21 65, mobile: + 45 25 37 03 85 or by e-mail:mgj@life.ku.dk
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
hey, do they have the new king james version yet? or is that to be delivered by the goreacle? in gaia we trust!
Geoff Sherington (03:27:56) :
BTW, paper ignites at all sorts of temperatures because it is made of so many different components.
But more importantly, in the case of rolling papers, what’s inside it. ;~P
This morning I looked out of the window, being relatively sunny, to verify whether it was the case that London was on fire. It was not. However, from a philosphical perpective, it may well have been on fire, but my existential perception failed to register.. If so, then a Hegelian concept would have to be invoked to vouchsafe for the fact that the streets were indeed on fire, if not empirically so, then at least from a metaphysical perspective.
Nonethless I evaded these imaginary flames by wielding a certesian perspective, that the mind controls nature. This all left me feeling the grace of God.
Science, religion, and philosophy of climate in a nutshell.
Now back on planet earth, where science is a matter of proving the veracity of a hypothesis based on empirical FACTS, in the style of David Hume, I can walk the streets feeling relatively safe, save for the wind, rain, and other such phenomena that seem to occur from the heavens above. All i can say is that fire isn’t included amongst these meterorological phenomena. (Unless the Daleks have arrived)
I would have expected a rather different picture on the cover – maybe forest fires raging, a snip from the movie “The day the Earth caught fire” or possibly Dante’s inferno. However, the picture they’ve chosen suggest that the title of the book should have been “Earth awash with Polar bears”.
@Mr..artday (21:25:23) :
“I’m reading a short book on Prohibition and rum running. The attitudes and behaviors of the Prohibitionists are identical to those of the Groonies (Green Loonies).”
Groonies. I like that term! That’s going straight into my personal lexicon.
“Overstate the problems, oversell the solutions, and create a bigger mess than the original problem.”
Succinct and accurate, particularly the last clause.
Great post, sir.
To see where this agenda comes from, including the relevant quotes, just follow this link:
http://www.green-agenda.com/
JER0ME (03:22:50) :
“4. Greenhouse gases
The most important greenhouse gases are water vapour (H2O), carbon
dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), CFC (chlorofluorocarbons)
and tropospheric ozone (O3) (Table 1). It is not possible to rank
with any certainty the effect of the individual gases with respect to the total
greenhouse effect. This is, among other things, due to a number of feedback
mechanisms between the greenhouse gases (Box 3). Basically, the ratio
between the most important greenhouse gases – water vapour, clouds and
carbon dioxide – is estimated at 2‑1‑1.”
That 2-1-1 ratio kind of leapt off the page at me as I was giving this thing a quick scan. So clouds and CO2 are essentially equivalent in their effect on the climate. That seems to be somewhat at odds with the information I’ve encountered in exploring this topic, which as I recall indicates that 1 or 2 percent changes in cloud cover would have as much or more effect as a doubling of CO2. But then, I’m not a real climate scientist, so I probably don’t possess the proper level of intellectual sophistication to grasp the subtleties of the argument.
I’m hoping the lads at RC will provide this opus the samekind of line by line scrutineering and dissection as they have for so many other works related to the climate in the past, but since they probably are in full agreement with it and are ,in fact, responsible for a good deal of the deep thinking presented in it, I won’t be holding my breath.
Where I live a main industry is livestock production. We all know just how much methane these enslaved creatures are contaminaing the atmosphere with. A big greenhouse gas. However, with the high concentrations of methane comes the danger of spontaneous combustion–WHOOM!–methane (and global warming) gone, wow. There are many things that burn quickly, one of them being me. Me, when someone tries to put their hand in my pocket to lift my wallet. I burn, then I turn (on them). Anyone else burn when their money is stolen? That is what will happen with this Cap and Trade nonsense. The vast majority of folks in the US have no idea what is in store for them. For no real reason they want to take our money. Just where will this money go any way? Maybe Al Gore can afford to purchase an entire ocean to sail his overgrown boat on.
When I click on the link to ‘Earth on Fire’ at the top of the article, after a couple of minutes I receive a message saying the “file is damaged” – singed perhaps!
Would it be possible to refresh the link? Thanks
when talking about water and clouds we’re talking about 2 different things, although water vapour has much more power of absorbtion that c02 – it “absorbs” much more heat than c02. If it were cloudless on a typical summer night, then it would feel colder than if it were not. We assume that c02 levels are the same from day to day. It is the absence or presence of water vapour which has the major effect, so no: C02 is largely irrelevant as a climate feedback. Both vapour and c02 are feedbacks and not forcings however, and this is important to remember: Neither force the climate, and both are dependent on the ambient temperature of climatic factors. Also, because water vapour has a much wider band of absorbtion than co2 and overlaps the same bandwidths of c02, there is consequently much less heat left over for c02 to “absorb”
Oh: Back to the philosophy of climate change in the style of David Hume, who would have looked at the phenomenon both in terms of human reason and human nature. Human reason would have been the side of scepticism, whereas looking at it from the human nature would have gone something like this: “Tis folly and vanity which separates us from the animals”, so since we produce a tiny fraction of c02, obviously we’re extremely important, and so achieve the most monumental effect on the world around us, in proportion to our vanity.
for sake of simplification of the above, water vapour is some 100 times the ghg as c02 and thereby swamps, for want of a better word, any effect from c02. I’m sure that most climatologists know this already, bu ttry to get around the uncomfortable fact by staing that c02 causes more water vapour. What they don’t tell us is that Anthropogenic c02 is 3% of all C02 whereas the other 97% is from natural respiration, decay, oceans etc. All c02 is 385ppm of the atmosphere (less than 0.04%). so put the Anthopogenic level into perspective. In terms of temperature, it wouldn’t make any difference if there was any c02 in the atmosphere or not