I think an artist with cajones (and cash) should put a bunch of dehydrating babies into a giant greenhouse covering times square, and there should be a "Drive thru" sign on the entrance to symbolize 1) the cause, 2) the attitude of all of us as we seem to pass right through the reality of climate change.

In retrospect, we could probably do that without the babies. As long as the greenhouse is constructed properly (in the summer) so that it is noticably warmer inside the greenhouse than outside, the connection between the audience (the pedestrians) and the art will be enough to help people see the world in a new light.

As has been said often in the past few days, any human-induced problem can be acknowledged, addressed and overcome by the actions of people working together cooperatively.

Engineering the climate ought to be a mission of very last resort, after every effort at human behavior change has been tried and exhausted.

Engineering ourselves, if that has anything to do with eugenics or other forms of genetic engineering, needs to be avoided at all cost.

Engineering of financial and economic transactions, to the extent these activities are dishonest, dodgy, shady, secretive, needlessly complex and fraudulent schemes, needs to stop immediately.

Forget engineering. Please consider recognizing and then accepting human limits and Earth's limitations, and acting accordingly.

Has Jay Leno covered this yet? Humor, especially by a celebrity who is liked, can help disarm psychological defenses. Or Madonna doing a "green dance", sort of like Native Americans doing a rain dance? Or Shaquille O'Neal doing a TV commercial on how he is conserving energy?

As I continue to free associate about Andy's question, another strategy comes to mind. We will soon be entering a new decade, the decade of the teens (2010-1019). In a sense, we are in our adolescence as far as dealing with climate change, getting riled up but not yet accomplishing a whole lot.
Sometimes it is helpful to give decades a moniker. Why not something like Andy's Generation E that would pinpoint the environment, say:
The Teens for The Greens!
This is a slogan that could be adapted by all for the cause, beginning 1/1/10. Start preparing now!

i can't believe you remembered phil's great whoopee cushions!! that really was the phil clapp "cop of props." you had the whoopee cushions, buttons and who could forget the rubber ducks. oh the good old days

I still have two cushions and one roll of "credits." : )

One way to engineer climate:

The Dog Ate Global Warming
Interpreting climate data can be hard enough. What if some key data have been fiddled?

By Patrick J. Michaels

Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December.

Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.

Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren’t talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense.

In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia established the Climate Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world’s first comprehensive history of surface temperature. It’s known in the trade as the “Jones and Wigley” record for its authors, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as the primary reference standard for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a “discernible human influence on global climate.”

Putting together such a record isn’t at all easy. Weather stations weren’t really designed to monitor global climate. Long-standing ones were usually established at points of commerce, which tend to grow into cities that induce spurious warming trends in their records. Trees grow up around thermometers and lower the afternoon temperature. Further, as documented by the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Sr., many of the stations themselves are placed in locations, such as in parking lots or near heat vents, where artificially high temperatures are bound to be recorded.

So the weather data that go into the historical climate records that are required to verify models of global warming aren’t the original records at all. Jones and Wigley, however, weren’t specific about what was done to which station in order to produce their record, which, according to the IPCC, showed a warming of 0.6° +/– 0.2°C in the 20th century.

Now begins the fun. Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist, wondered where that “+/–” came from, so he politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones’s response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

Reread that statement, for it is breathtaking in its anti-scientific thrust. In fact, the entire purpose of replication is to “try and find something wrong.” The ultimate objective of science is to do things so well that, indeed, nothing is wrong.

Then the story changed. In June 2009, Georgia Tech’s Peter Webster told Canadian researcher Stephen McIntyre that he had requested raw data, and Jones freely gave it to him. So McIntyre promptly filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the same data. Despite having been invited by the National Academy of Sciences to present his analyses of millennial temperatures, McIntyre was told that he couldn’t have the data because he wasn’t an “academic.” So his colleague Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, asked for the data. He was turned down, too.

Faced with a growing number of such requests, Jones refused them all, saying that there were “confidentiality” agreements regarding the data between CRU and nations that supplied the data. McIntyre’s blog readers then requested those agreements, country by country, but only a handful turned out to exist, mainly from Third World countries and written in very vague language.

It’s worth noting that McKitrick and I had published papers demonstrating that the quality of land-based records is so poor that the warming trend estimated since 1979 (the first year for which we could compare those records to independent data from satellites) may have been overestimated by 50 percent. Webster, who received the CRU data, published studies linking changes in hurricane patterns to warming (while others have found otherwise).

Enter the dog that ate global warming.

Roger Pielke Jr., an esteemed professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, then requested the raw data from Jones. Jones responded:

Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available.

http://article.nationalreview.com...

Best Wishes

Like the IPCC, one might simply apply values to things, such as carbon, as cap and trade does, but in such a manner as to create something from nothing:

http://c3headlines.typepad.com...

Only the IPCC, et al, sees carbon residency in the terms described.

If one tells a lie often enough, does it indeed become the truth? (taken loosely from Lenin)

Engineering ones self can take many forms, blah, blah, blah bang applies to the other side of the argument perhaps more fully that the AGW side, because as we have recently discussed, the problem is that climate follows nature but self engineering in this sense is based on ideology follows human emotion.

The problems for the next decades will be too little heat, sun and warmth in general not too much, despite perhaps 45 years of added carbon. This in no way pleases me, warm phases have generally helped humans to flourish, where cold has generally caused the opposite, even the ancient droughts often occurred during cold periods, cold and arid is very bad for crop yields. Add the odd volcano or several, we may be in for extreme cold, for years on end.

Which is better, engineering based upon science or that based upon fantastical projections whose inputs are as off-base as the above graphic demonstrates?

Best Wishes

Thanks for the insight. We (The Roosevelt Institute Campus Network) are actually trying to get a lot more college students involved in the debate and in the policy making itself, especially considering that the outcome of this debate is going to have far-reaching consequences for our generation.

Featured in our "10 Ideas Series," a few of our members have come up with ideas ranging from Revolving Loan Funds for Campus Sustainability Projects, to a Disposable Shopping Bag Tax to curb our dependency on oil and plastic

Check us out when you get a chance at http://www.rooseveltcampusnetwork.org/
We're hosting a Midwest Policy Workshop in Detroit from Nov. 13-14, so it will be a good way for students to learn how to get involved in policy making and shape the debate

Ethics (teaching tools) via ORGANIZED CRIME and The coordination of all University Environmental Studies programs?

Subliminal message data mining PENTAGON supercomputer augmented reality permaculture logistics semantic web context mapping

http://TradeSkilsLLC.blogspot.com

Social Multimedia Research aid Environmentalist Movie ALERT: The Age of Stupid Monday, Sept. 21st 7:30PM http://youtube.com/homeproject

I am attaching a document that is not about the movie directly but about a service I would like to provide for students of the environmental studies program at Wofford and any other local college programs for sociology students which are focusing on sociology for environment such as Corporate Social Responsibility or Fair Trade.

The idea here is to support the environmental studies students so that they are enabled to make the strongest transition to the global sustainability and fair trade.

This is the basic text you can skim before you open the document with color text and outline margins:

Student Social Media Research Assistant: Three cents per minute. {(donations taken + available for project investment + selection vote)} Ecology/Sociology students only. Globalcide@Gmail.com Soon = Globalcide.org
.
Professional Discipline trends on Twitter, Facebook, and Professional media sites or databases/journals/blogs. Call: M.att # Google Voice #

Developing list’s of people / org’s to follow + be followed by on Twitter and Facebook, etc.

Multiple accounts require different strategies. Example’s: Attacking the opposition, Spying on the opposition, Defending your field or corporate position, Finding opposition’s corporate espionage agents... ***Which could show or hide the timeline history of your well thought out sustainability activist communications and thereby provide background information in hiring choices. While more and more older or fundamentalist religious american’s put religious propaganda out against the sustainability efforts of the people (you) who are now trying to deal with the devastation via human created climate change.***

There is not enough time while studying; to sort through thousands of tweets which refer to further information... (and I can find context associations with your curriculum); also; which could require immediate scheduling updates for webcasts or events in the community.

Developing real time active following list for current research paper or group project outline or abstract for more recent dissertation’s on future projects line of sight.

This functions as the transitional increase in functionality that the web will begin to automate the function of real time knowledge base updates of social media cross referencing.

You may or may not have research assistant staff in your new field and this will let you learn to administrate request’s for information on your projects and workflow... like having a secretary that sorts your email by priority for you at work (I think GIST.com has this or is developing this now).

Laundry or Errands service’s .

Laundry: 1 dollar per hour if I have wi-fi while doing the laundry (I can work on Social Multi-media data mining which is productivity) Errand’s will be 2 dollars per hour if I can accomplish errands for 3 or more people at the same store or route) (Motorcycle)

I want to develop the logistics of this for helping with home tasks for: Elderly, Disabled, Poverty Parents, Single Parents, and Students.

Coordinating Volunteer training and Security applications in the community’s survey’d needs.

Coordinating to fill the gaps of current community programs and budgets of manpower, expertise, and tool library’s or funds.

Local grown food and life coaching for gardeners based on GTD, The Art of War FlashCard Deck, Ethics semantic tools, and The 48 Laws of Power.

Life streaming of education automation during neighborhood watch + Yardening, which could integrate development of interpersonal assessment throughput via local and internationally available education programs for localized sustainability.

Teaching elderly and disabled to provide education support online after the national broadband plan is released.

The idea here is to support the environmental studies students so that they are enabled to make the strongest transition to the global sustainability and fair trade.

Great post Andy. Thanks.

I just had to pop the whole thing into my small-time blog.

May Dot Earth and your efforts amplify and multiply, world without end.

Lou Gold
http://lougold.blogspot.com

I'm for cvlimate engineering.

By stopping using coal and using biomethane instead.

Also by greening carefully selected portions of certain deserts:
Irrigated afforestation of the Sahara and Australian Outback to end global warming
http://www.springerlink.com...

Andy:
My suggestion is for people like you to be more explicit in discussing the Climate change problem and its consequences in the media. no one with training in the physical sciences doubts the emmision/adsorption properties of Carbon dioxide and no one monitoring the reports of atmospheric Carbon dioxide comming from hawaii monthly doubts the continueing carbon build-up. the Crux of the debate is the consequences of the build up. Alarmists like Jim Hansen at GIIS fear an eminent tipping point whereby the temperature of the planent will increase in a catastrophic manner due to the increased Carbon dioxide and a cooresponding increase of atmospheric water/increase in absolute humidity. However there is no data indicating an increase in atmospheric water nor is there any credible model which can be used as a proxy for data. Thats the crux of it!

R Christiansen
green Valley, Az.

Heat globally, cool locally. Geo engineering.

We can anticipate that Russia and American will compete in the area of Geo engineering, using it for political and economic gain. We will create opposing systems that constitute a 50 year period of MACC. Mutually Assured Climate Control. Before the equivalent of a START, let's call it STTRT, strategic thermostats reduction treaty, is initiated.

Steven at #3: "As has been said often in the past few days, any human-induced problem can be acknowledged, addressed and overcome by the actions of people working together cooperatively."

We don't know if this is a human-induced problem and even if it is, it is by no means clear that it can be overcome by "the actions of people working together cooperatively".

Wmar (#8) says, "If one tells a lie often enough, does it indeed become the truth?"

It is easy to put faith in the truth of frequent lies.

Being an adult and understanding that politics is a rough and tumble game, I found the George Bush whoopee cushions to be slightly funny (sophomoric humor is the best description) and no big deal. However, isn't it a bit hypocritical for a NY Times blogger to find insulting a president of the United States to be funny? I thought from the editorial page (and the news pages for that matter) of that newspaper that we were supposed to all be about adult, serious debate of issues without resorting to insults. I guess it matters which president is being insulted, right?

The original article on that 2005 meeting was describing events that occurred, not interpreting them as funny or anything else. The reference here is to unconventional ways groups seeking political change have made their points. I don't think any of this is making a judgment on what's right or wrong.

You know, I am recently asking myself a question on this that I don't want to: How much of the human contribution to global warming is actually engineered data?

Let's ignore, for a moment, the fact that NASA figures have been corrected by a skeptic, the number of stations I've gotten data from over the net that NASA and a few others like it don't include in their figures, or the fact one of the senior IPCC editors has outright spoken out against AGW. Those are all questionable, but explanable without issue to the cause.

Two things I cannot explain: 1) The Arctic being ice free in the past, when current theories put AGW as impossible or require the warming to have been contributed to by humans for long enough that it's practically impossible to reverse now without nuclear war. 2) The fact they found the cause for the Greenland ice sheets melting, and it's not human actions but nature in play (enjoy: http://www.redorbit.com... )

Okay. We've elimated humans as the direct cause for the Greenland ice melt. Anyone want to take bets that something similar is involved with the Antarctic? Also, I will note the researchers, in this case, are obviously quite wrong on one aspect... The idea that the waters have not resulted in a constant rise in Earth's temperature. A quick bit of not ignoring the existance of geology and factoring this in proves otherwise.

Now, before you question this, let me point something out: The entire problem is based upon the existance of mechanisms we know are already in place, but are being activated in the wrong sequence by human actions. That means we just discovered a new mechanism involved in the planet's temperature and weather patterns. A mechanism which we were previously completelt unaware of as possibly being able to act in this manner, despite the fact that it logically should be able to.

One of the things we're forgetting in all of this is that CO2 does not actually control the planet's temperature. If anything, the earlier posits of it being nothing more than a minor greenhouse gas seem to be even more likely when one factors in just how much of an effect water has in both the liquid and solid states in addition to water as a gas. But, I shall not go into that again.

What I will say is this: Whether or not we can control this is pretty iffy. We do not know all of the mechanisms involved, as this so succinctly proves, and do not even know the full roles of all mechanisms. If we are to do this, we need time to gather data, understand what is happening, and find a way to fix it permanently. Doing half-baked solutions now with a sense of urgency are only going to make the problem worse later with all of the resources and time they divert away from serious solutions.

And, let's get real on this... Windmills? Solar panels? Clean coal? "Energy-saving" lightbulbs? Electrical cars? Modern nuclear power? These are not serious solutions. Most of these are half-backed schemes that often involve as much overall energy cost and end up just as reliant upon fossil fuels in the end as what we're using now. And some of these (solar panels, windmills, the lightbulbs, and nuclear power) carry their own associated environmental damage and health problems.

To be honest, we're in a state where we are trying to solve a math problem written in word form, and yet have been handed strips of paper with random sentences of it and not even all of them yet. We could try to solve it now, and possibly get it right or (more likely) end up completely off-base. Or we could wait until we have the entire problem and then look at the actual total of it.

Want to know how best to get the message out? Wait until you know what the full message is. Engineer yourself to have enough patience to wait for us to actually have a real solution and know the full particulars of the problem or if, as the skeptics claim, it doesn't exist at all. Human history is full of problems caused by human impatience... like bacteria immune to all known antibiotics or the massive usage of the internal-combustion engine. Are you in such a hurry to engineer tomorrow's disaster today?

Gene:

Actually, it does matter which president is being insulted. George Bush was a train wreck in every respect, bought and sold by the fossil fuel industry, so complaining about whoopee cushions in his name tells me where you're at. And I thought Emissions Accomplished was witty as hell, and I'm not a big fan of potty humor.

I think the opportunities to change through humor are limited, though we need them once in a while. I would rather see a Mencken or Twain, or even a Vidal, who can give the monstrous thugs who continue to peddle fossil fuels the tongue lashing they deserve. For some reason, MSM is scared of them. Or, more chillngly, maybe we know the reason.

Oops, one more potty humor piece (true story): I was in Texas in 2006, and found myself inside a truck stop stall. The graffiti said: "Nice going, Texas. You (expletive deleted)'d up the whole world."

"“Emissions Accomplished.”
The Leftist media were so proud on how they span the "Mission Accomplished" banner on the carrier and turned it against Bush.
If Obama had done what Bush did that day, they would have turned him in to a hero for meeting the sailors out there, as they were returning home after they had accomplished their mission to support the invasion of Iraq. Quite well in fact; the crews of the carrier worked very long hours, risked life and limp on 'round the clock operations, the pilots flew in dangerous conditions never ending sorties and for what? At the end they were ridiculed by the Press along with their commander in chief.
If it was Obama, none of the lefty reporters and the rest of the spinmeisters of the Leftist media would have considered the sign inappropriate or to mean that the job was not done, all the fighting was not finished, or the planet was not in peace, or that the Iraqis had not created the perfect democracy yet.
If there is a hell for journalists, they will never be lonely there.
I do not include Andy.

From Wang Suya

We need these practice and action, 20-plus meeting, still no consensus. It is big ironic, how can we hope Copenhagen? I hope many organazitions, individuals show something around Copenhagen meeting hall to stimulate delegates make right decision. I used to plan to hungerstrik in front of meeting hall, but I have to take visa to Damark and rest my job. Many things resitrict me to hungerstirk in Copenhagen. I also think the delegates will not care whether I hunger die or life so that I cancle my plan.

http://www.psr.org...

Andy, this is important. I am interviewing the gentleman who compiled this list now and will post published interview on my blog tomorrow. He is a member of the Dot Earth community. Great work, Sir!

From the Physicians for Social Responsibility website:

Health Implications of Global Warming:
Be Mindful of Mental Health

Global warming is acknowledged by scientists around the world to be a reality and to be caused
primarily by human activity, especially the burning of fossil fuels. As the earth warms, the delicate
balance of climate, weather events and life is disrupted. Consequences emerge that threaten human health and, ultimately, survival.

This is one of several fact sheets produced by Physicians for Social Responsibility that examine recent
scientific evidence of global warming’s impact on health.

All of the specific health risks of global warming have associated mental health risks.

• Heat waves contribute to more alcohol and substance abuse.ii
• Just an increase of 1 degree F (0.5 C) seems to increase the risk of violent behavior, especially in warm climates and the inner city.iii
• Food and water shortages threaten our basic sense of security and therefore are associated with increases in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and other mental health problems.iv
• The chronic drought in the outback of Australia is causing a new and dangerous variation of grief, solastalgia, which is a kind of distress about environmental losses in one’s homeland.v
• Perceptions of poor air quality results in increased anxiety, especially in children, along with increased family violence.vi
• Individual panic and group hysteria are risks of vector-borne or waterborne diseases. Recent harbingers of this possibility were seen in the SARS epidemic.vii
• People with schizophrenia are of particular risk health-wise as they tend to ignore health risks and tend not to take necessary precautions. One study links increased air pollution, specifically from motor vehicles, with an increased risk for schizophrenia. If duplicated, this would be an important finding with implications in regard to climate change.viii
• When viewed in the totality of its impacts, global warming creates the potential for large-scale human conflict, as a result of displacement from climate-scarred lands and/or disputes over increasingly scarce resources.
The direct mental health risks of global warming have some unusual variations.
• The mental health implications will vary with the type, suddenness, and scale of climate change damage, as well as the social, historical, and cultural context. All of this will be filtered through the resilience of each individual.ix
• In certain isolated locales, the climate change of global warming can be desirous and beneficial to human life, at least temporarily. In these environments, mental wellbeing can improve.
• Under-recognized background anxiety exists in communities prone to undesired climate change and the associated natural disasters.x
• Children who feel they are growing up in a threatened future tend to be more troubled than their parents or grandparents. A survey of Australian children indicated that a quarter of the children fear the world will come to an end before they grow up.xi
• If the perception is that people are causing climate change, rather than it being mainly a natural phenomena, the risk of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder will increase following climate-related disasters. Whenever there is a perception that more could have been done to avert, mitigate or respond to disasters, the mental health toll will be higher. Such was the case with Hurricane Katrina.xii
• People who have to move from climate-ravaged environments, such as flooded Bangladesh, have come to be known as “climate refugees.” Stress Disorders are common in such situations and complicated by “cultural bereavement.”xiii
Resources for providing mental healthcare related to global warming are inadequately developed
• More people are likely to be vulnerable to the mental health implications of climate change than physical health impairments. Yet for general mental healthcare in most countries, insurance and resources are inadequate compared with general healthcare.
• Disaster Response Teams are prepared for responding to acute disasters, but not to the more chronic and slowly developing mental health problems related to global warming.
• Even with adequate resources, people with mental illness often receive inadequate care.

Dear Suya (#22),

You are a wonder to me.

Thanks for all you are doing to save biodiversity from extinction, the enviroment from degradation, the Earth from wanton dissipation and the children from reckless endangerment.

Sincerely yours,

Steve