Things have been quiet since Copenhagen and as is increasingly common there is a marked shortage of good news, forcing me to look carefully to avoid becoming terminally depressing.
The official NASA temperature results for 2009 are out, and we should at least hope to see the dissentients shut up about their “Its Cooling” rubbish. The Decade just completed is the hottest on record, while 2009 itself tied for the second hottest year ever with total warming since 1880 being about 0.8 degrees centigrade. The average temperature for the Southern Hemisphere in 2009 was the hottest ever as the graph below shows. All this during a solar minimum when the sun is delivering less radiation than normal. Given that the El Nino is continuing it seems likely that 2010 will be the hottest on record.
Its too early to say if the marked absence of any political activity is due to the normal festive season headaches, or to the Hopenfaden blues. However there is little movement in the USA which is trying to get some legislation through Congress in the next few months. Even worse the republican victory in the democrat heartland deprives the democrats of their theoretical filibuster proof senate majority, though they haven’t made great use of it so far. Inertia seems to be the order of the day.
Geoffrey Lean has an interesting take on China’s behaviour in Copenhagen where, amongst others, they allegedly refused to allow Europe to insert their own goals into the final accord. He suggests this is because they wish to hold back clean-tech development in the west while they become the dominant force in the area. Certainly China is making very significant moves internally while talking tough externally. A climate change arms race would finally be some good news, though the west isn’t trying at all hard yet.
A new report has confirmed what has become obvious; that carbon offsets are a rort and a gross waste of money. Unfortunately the proposed US climate legislation allows is heavily dependant on these and is even laxer than the European version. Basically you get to feel good and someone else gets to make money and the climate isn’t much affected.
Grist has a continuing series on the Washington DC schools program to replace prepacked meals with “fresh cooked” food. I found the first few articles (1, 2, 3, 4) quite horrifying, especially the first. If we are not careful the ubiquitous commercial interests will have perverted the entire language. The first meal described consists of pre-cooked “beef crumbles” (dull, greyish-brown items with ingredients shown as “beef, vegetable protein, caramel color” plus chemical flavourings and preservatives) with curly egg noodles heated up in a steamer. Then add canned tomato sauce (“tomato paste, dextrose/and or high fructose corn syrup, potato or corn starch”), spice it up with a little garlic powder, and some pre-shredded cheese. The scheme, as so much today, appears to be focussed on speed and ease of preparation by staff with minimal training, continuing our obsession with efficiency at the expense of quality. A quote from one of the customers: “I don’t like most of the food because it doesn’t taste good”.
Most of the rest of my news is just too depressing to report, including the book I have just finished. “What We Leave Behind” by Derrick Jensen and 
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Aric McBay. They argue that there is no conceivable way that our industrial society can be made really sustainable (again a word which is being commercialised beyond all recognition) and that the only ethical option is to try and bring it down. While reading this is was struck by an advert for a seven seater Kia which I think claimed to be designed to save the planet. Heavy shit man as they used to say.
