It seems support for the fossil divestment movement is becoming a blow-the-doors-off success, with Vermont's Sterling college announcing it will be the third US college to divest from the over 200 carbon energy companies on 350.org's black list. The movement has grown to 236 campuses through out the US. Hopefully this movement and more to come will in time prevent climate change becoming a burn-the-house-down disaster.
The physics are worrying and the longer the delay the more impossible and desperate the situation becomes as Bill McKibben explained is his article in Rolling Stone - Global Warming's Terrifying New Math.
However 18 months ago the Keystone XL pipe was a foregone conclusion now it has been pushed back twice after the largest publlic protests in decades and over 1200 people getting arrested for offences related to civil-disobediance. So the effort seems to be having some stalling effect. But much more needs to be done.
The climate denialism machine needs to exposed and shut down or rendered as impotent as a witch doctor shaking his fists at a volcano. According to Greenpeace and the David and Charles Koch brothers of Koch Industries have spent over $67m funding groups denying climate change since 1997. and keep in mind they are not the only funders of denial. All up over $400m(through the Donors Trust) has spent not so much to disproving climate science but smearing the scientists. The Donors Trust is an attempt to create a facade of independence, so that with a wink and a nod organizations like American for Prosperity or the Heartland Institute can say "We have no direct connection to Big Oil". If disproving science of climate change were possible the scientists would already have done it. And that is what the scientific process is about if have a hypothesis, you spend most of your effort trying to poke holes in it. If it still stands up, you could be onto a winner. A point which Cenk Uygur makes here...
The problem is for Koch et al is that leaving all the carbon in the ground seems like madness when it is worth approximately US$20 trillion. To anyone with a sense of self preservation or preservation for future generations or legacy realizes it is madness to pump more than $4 trillion of it into the air. Even if we only pump the $4trillion worth of carbon into the atmosphere our chances of being able to recover will have fallen to 80%.
We've already has over 336 consecutive months hotter that the 20th Century Average, the divergance of CO2 and temperature from Solar Irradiance, and the increasing more intense and frequent storms and other extreme weather trends.
What we are seeing in climate denial is the madness of Midas, the mythic character who's touch turned everything into gold including lunch and his wife leaving him hungry and lonely.
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