This is not a criticism – it’s a plea.
We are at a time unlike any other in the 250,000-year history of our species. What we do now will determine the fate of our kind. We may soon know whether or not we deserve the name we have given ourselves, homo sapiens sapiens – wise or knowing human.
NASA warming scientist: ‘This is the last chance’
WASHINGTON – Exactly 20 years after warning America about global warming, a top NASA scientist said the situation has gotten so bad that the world’s only hope is drastic action.
James Hansen told Congress on Monday that the world has long passed the “dangerous level” for greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and needs to get back to 1988 levels. He said Earth’s atmosphere can only stay this loaded with man-made carbon dioxide for a couple more decades without changes such as mass extinction, ecosystem collapse and dramatic sea level rises.
“We’re toast if we don’t get on a very different path,” Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute of Space Sciences who is sometimes called the godfather of global warming science, told The Associated Press. “This is the last chance.”
(SNIP)
“We see a tipping point occurring right before our eyes,” Hansen told the AP before the luncheon. “The Arctic is the first tipping point and it’s occurring exactly the way we said it would.”
Hansen, echoing work by other scientists, said that in five to 10 years, the Arctic will be free of sea ice in the summer.
Longtime global warming skeptic Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., citing a recent poll, said in a statement, “Hansen, (former Vice President) Gore and the media have been trumpeting man-made climate doom since the 1980s. But Americans are not buying it.”
But Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., committee chairman, said, “Dr. Hansen was right. Twenty years later, we recognize him as a climate prophet.”
This diary is not about global warming or any of the other crises that threaten our existence, it’s about the leadership we must have for there to be any hope at all of diverting these disasters.
We are running out of time, and more of the same is a recipe for failure. We need change, and not just change we can believe in – we need change we can count on.
What we don’t need is just another politician. What we don’t need is vacillating, triangulating, pandering and yet one more boatload of political horseshit. What we don’t need is a long-awaited leader from the left moving to the right. What we don’t need is another poll-driven, flip-floppin’, flag-wavin’ hypocrite tragically entrusted with the levers of power.
We need leadership, integrity and vision. We need a person of unyielding principle – someone who will stand their ground – and all the political consultants in the world be damned.
We need a leader who will do the right thing in all circumstances and be unafraid of any criticism it may bring.
Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.
Albert Einstein
We need a leader unafraid to buck the conventional wisdom.
In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
Eric Hoffer
We need a leader with the courage of his or her convictions.
I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure: which is: Try to please everybody.
Herbert B. Swope
We need a leader who knows when to say no to bad advice.
A leader must have the courage to act against an expert’s advice.
James Callaghan
We need a leader who is not afraid to take risks.
Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.
Susan B. Anthony
We need a statesman, not just another politician.
The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.
Benjamin Disraeli
And while it is fine and good to love our leaders, we should be critical of them as well.
Pity the leader caught between unloving critics and uncritical lovers.
John Gardner
It is not just our right to criticize our leaders, it is our obligation.
It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.
Noam Chomsky
We must have a leader who will take us to a new place.
A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.
Rosalynn Carter
And above all, we must have a leader who possesses integrity.
Integrity is the essence of everything successful.
R. Buckminster Fuller
One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.
Chinua Achebe
Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn’t blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won’t cheat, then you know he never will.
John D. MacDonald
This is a time unlike any other. We have no time left for the old distractions. We must act swiftly and decisively to face up to the great challenge of our time – to preserve the biosphere for future generations.
Hell begins on the day when God grants us a clear vision of all that we might have achieved, of all the gifts which we have wasted, of all that we might have done which we did not do
Gian Carlo Menotti
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…of course, I really don’t agree that we need that.
Fundamentally, I deeply distrust these kind of calls for a philosopher-king. I don’t believe in Jesus, Neo, or Anakin Skywalker. This is one of humanity’s most constant myths, and one which has pretty much always been harnessed for great evil.
We don’t need a leader who embodies these things. We need lots of individuals who embody the qualities you describe. We need lots of Chinua Achebes (a former professor of mine); lots of learners and adapters. This reads to me as a call for a better shepherd; I suggest we stop thinking that we, and others, are sheep.
and stand up to the naysayers as one and allow that leader to actually get something done.
In this political climate it will take an extrodinairy leader. One with total integrity. One who can inspire the leaders of other countries to get with the program. Or in our case, one who is willing to listen to leaders of other countries who are already WITH the program and help them lead the world and be, as Rosalynn Carter stated:
We don’t need that in Washington. We don’t need that anywhere. And we certainly don’t need people doing it on blogs, as too many do while they could be standing their ground and standing up to their reps, senators, and presidential candidates.
The truely well intentioned people fighting tooth and nail over this issue. Big Al’s carbon trading scam is just that a scam. A tax on the poor to keep control over people and elite bankers laughing. It’s warped focus is preventing real solutions to a very real problem. Yes, we do damage our enviornment but rewarding elite scumbags with piles of cash seems an illogical answer.
Now should said elite douchebag scum of the earth assholian Nazi fucks show up an my door with a free solar energy system then and only then will I shut up about said issue.
Also I am skilled in the art of electrical stuff so when the power grid gets flaky I could suggest some conversion tactics to 12 volt backup systems.
Once again you’ve touched me deeply…..
Found this over on McClatchy in an article about how nervous those guys are about the Olympics going off well:
My emphases. Just thinking here, every single thing that Bush has touched has turned to absolute shit. He’s like the King Midas of Shit. And these fools actually want him to attend the opening ceremony.
Maybe I should have posted this at NL’s Interesting Times essay. This could easily be the most interesting August since 1968.
if Obama can’t do it, no one can, because Obama isn’t just Obama, Obama is Obama plus a big popular movement. it’s like having political body armor. if he can hold this coalition together for four years, I like our chances on combating global warming. I’m shocked to see myself write that, but I do.
my reasoning is one of the key components of the Obama campaign is the youth contingent. right now, it’s busy trying to get him elected, but not just because we’ve been charmed… it’s because it’s become so clear how bad things have gotten and how much worse they’re likely to become if we don’t act with more urgency than before. what I feel in my peers is a generation very nervous about the future and desperate to do something to improve it. but also a generation so wet down with cynicism that it’s hard to spark things on our own, especially the kind of effort it’ll take to make significant progress re: global warming. a lack of confidence, basically, … and justified by the fact that W has been at the top to block anybody’s initiative for the last 8 years. but if you have someone at the top who looks competent, sounds sincere and makes a good case, we might get the kind of groundswell of individual actions (er… “sacrifices”) that it’ll take to seriously improve our lot, plus maybe get some hard legislation and international agreements, too. this is the only way I see us solving the global warming issue before it completely skirts that threshold from “dangerous threat, already causing deaths” to “insane, irreversible global tragedy”.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/sto…
This just in from Oz: NF3, 17000 times worse than CO2 and not under the Kyoto protocol. Article also says LCDs bigger energy hogs than CRTs. Anyone have any data on this?
There is no way that civilisation, as it exists today, can continue. The drive to live in the materially excessive world that America has represented for the last hundred years or so is a world wide phenomenom, but the planet can not sustain that level of Earth Resouce use. Or rather that level of Earth Resource misuse.
We, as a species, and as a nation, have misused the planets’s natural resources to the point where it is inevitable that global warming, ocean acidification, resource depletion, and overpopulation have produced a perfect storm – a perfect storm that will eradicate a huge amount of the life on this planet. How much? Nobody really knows, perhaps 90% as happened 250 million yearsd ago.
James Lovelace has predicted the human population in a hundred years to be somewhere around 250 million people, (roughly 3% of the current 8 billion), all living on the northern extremes of the continents, fighting to survive.
I think that is optimistic.
The amount of world wide co-operation necessary to forestall this outcome is 100%. How can any sane person ever imagine that kind of co-operation? When we in this country won’t even car pool!
Does any one really think that the massive amounts of nuclear weaponry available will not be used in the resource wars to come? Hell cheney/bush have plans, or at least options, to use nukes in Iran.
I mean WTF?
Arguing about leadership or populations determining their outcomes is almost irrelevant. The entire paradigm, all the rules governing existence have to be changed, and will be. The whole water to wine, walking on water thing is the natural domain of the human species. Physical reality is determined by the mental activity of the individual(s) involved, and the belief systems that give the individual(s) strength. This is supported by quantum physics.
The only thing that is going to “save” Gaea is an “Om Moment”. Undertanding the nature of consciousness, and the application of a whole new set of operating procedures with the strength of conviction is and will be the only road out of the quagmire.
Peace, and be well.
OPOL.