August 7th, 2008 | 
Author: The most interesting part of Gores speech for me was the strong point he made (oh he’s not the first or last) about dependence on foreign oil and renewables for the U.S. The economic, social and political, for this is surely big politics I argue not, points of his speech are the most interesting part of that speech. The American culture shines for me very strongly through as well as he as a person and a speaker but this also a very American thing, hmm perhaps…we do have these “strong leaders”, patriarchs, in other parts of the world as well.
Sustainability as is, that is the survival of the human race as a dominant species and in a society in which we can uphold this state for generations to come, is only partly about the ecological dimension of this planet. This is the part that is mostly talked about, details about how and what affects what in an ecological sense, which is all good and well as for we humans do need some sort of fairly stable environment to survive. But the other 2-3 aspects, (depending on who you talk to in the sustainability science field) social/cultural, economical and (institutional), are at least as important in the system of sustainability. It all links together.
Relating to climate change which is what I hope we are talking about here (whoever presents it and whatever “truths” are told or not).
“With the July 2007 release of the revised statement by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, no remaining scientific body of national or international standing is known to reject the basic findings of human influence on recent climate”
Now thats a cut from wikipedia Scientific opinion on climate change so I suppose I should dig something up from a nice journal like Nature or the like, but this was taken from Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union so I suppose it’ll have to do (for now).
Connected to the economic sphere; “The Stern Review on the economics of climate change” executive summaries can be found here, and the full review here. Now the yay and the nay has been loud on this one almost as loud as the yes and nos regarding climate change itself and understandably so we were built (Oh no I do NOT mean intelligent design…) to go for minimum energy…just something about this universe that wants it that way.
Now we live on a planet that has been around for about 4,5billion years. And a certainty is that our impact on this planet has during the last 200 years increased enormously (from about 1 billion to 6,5 billion! in population) somewhat related to fossil fuels and cheap energy? perhaps?
If not the population increase then at least the unbalancing effect we have on this balanced system called earth?
Thank you Thomas for inspiring me to clarify
Tags: politics, speech, al gore, climate change, earth, sustainability, aspects of sd
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Agreed, We do have an big impact, (maybe the biggest one not being C02),
And while a lot of guys are saying sound things about sustainability IMHO Al Gore has an awfully high signal-to-noise ratio.
Although while gas-prizes are going up and the american society is reacting heavily to this (and everyone from Disneyland to the whitehouse have the same lines about energy-dependency, so Al is not really a “leader” here), the real problem is not perhaps here, nor in CO2 impact and tropical storms but rather in the distribution of wealth and intelligence. The simple truth is that efficiency is bliss in everything… e.g. having single pane windows in a winter-area are is not sensible, nor is having the A/C on full while having all the windows open. Which is awfully common.
It kinda silly to promote eco-tourism when what we “really” need is eco-(i.e. efficient) living (of course eco-everything is good, but just sounding green seems to be enough for most people, Whereas using resources efficiently with a “good” reason is frowned upon.
Then just to quickly throw in a comment about the “consensus” about climate change you elude to, I have no big objections except, object to the “climate” where objection is frowned upon. There has not been many cases in history with equal conviction from people (both civvies and scientists) who simply shouldn’t be oblivious to the ifs.
I would like to have a count of people who actually have the brains to be convinced about this, I suspect the % would be smallish, but could be wrong
Impact: Natural unaffected ecosystems (forests, coral reefs, grassland…), clean water (drinking or otherwise), worked land, you could continue that the list for quite a bit. Objections: in most scientific areas objections are frowned upon…are they not? however if your objections are based on sound scientific data you will win someone over then some more and so on till you reach a consensus?
At the moment is this planet is getting hotter…co2 is at least partly the cause ..we put a lot of it up there? the solutions make for a cooler planet? who knows if we can affect it the other way, they say we might be able to stop the raise..some say it will even “go back” to “normal”.
Regarding the brains I dunno but I’m fairly sure some of them was/are sitting in the IPCC. http://www.ipcc.ch