Crucifying The Planet  

Time has a look at Mel Gibson's new movie "Apocalypto" which does paint a rather different picture of him than some of the pieces that focussed on his religious beliefs and connections to Opus Dei (who deny he is a member) after "The Passion of the Christ". Based on this article it sounds like he's getting as much inspiration from Jared Diamond's "Collapse" as he is from the bible. Mad Max even partakes of a little bashing of the fearmonger-in-chief.

Still, [Gibson] likes to confound expectations--he wears a cross containing relics of martyred saints, but he can swear like a Quentin Tarantino character--and those who peg him as a reactionary may be surprised to learn that his new film sounds warnings straight out of liberal Hollywood's bible. Apocalypto, which Gibson loosely translates from the Greek as "a new beginning," was inspired in large part by his work with the Mirador Basin Project, an effort to preserve a large swath of the Guatemalan rain forest and its Maya ruins. Gibson and his rookie cowriter on Apocalypto, Farhad Safinia, were captivated by the ancient Maya, one of the hemisphere's first great civilizations, which reached its zenith about A.D. 600 in southern Mexico and northern Guatemala. The two began poring over Maya myths of creation and destruction, including the Popol Vuh, and research suggesting that ecological abuse and war-mongering were major contributors to the Maya's sudden collapse, some 500 years before Europeans arrived in the Americas.

Those apocalyptic strains haunt Apocalypto, which takes place in an opulent but decaying Maya kingdom, whose leaders insist that if the gods are not appeased by more temples and human sacrifices, the crops will die. But the writers hope that the larger themes of decline will be a wake-up call. "The parallels between the environmental imbalance and corruption of values that doomed the Maya and what's happening to our own civilization are eerie," says Safinia. Gibson, who insists ideology matters less to him than stories of "penitential hardship" like his Oscar-winning Braveheart, puts it more bluntly: "The fearmongering we depict in this film reminds me a little of President Bush and his guys."

...

Mexican cast members like Mayra Sérbulo, 30, a Zapotec Indian who plays a villager, say they expect some criticism of the film from Mexican nationalists (who also tore into Salma Hayek's Frida), especially since it touches on the raw issue of human sacrifice, which scholars don't believe was a prevalent Maya practice until the post-classic period, after A.D. 900, when fiercer influences like the Toltecs and Aztecs arrived. It is in that period, not coincidentally, that Apocalypto is set. "But I'm frankly surprised and excited that someone is making a film about an indigenous Mexican culture that most Mexicans don't even know all that well," says Sérbulo. "I feel valued by this movie."

Gibson nonetheless is a lightning rod--pro-Mel and anti-Mel blogs abound on the Internet--and he knows that even non-Mexican detractors will ask why, if he's so morbidly fascinated with the bloody deeds of Jewish Pharisees and Maya priests, he doesn't hold a mirror to his own church and film the Spanish Inquisition. Gibson won't say that's a future plan, but he nods and agrees that "there are monsters in every culture."

The more immediate question is whether Apocalypto can repeat The Passion's success. ... Maya prophecy says the current world, which began 5,000 years ago, will end in 2012. So, even if Apocalypto flops, Gibson will at least have given the Maya one last chance to get the word out.

The trailer for Al Gore's global warming documentary is up at IFilm.

Ugandan paper "The Monitor" reports on yet another feedback effect between global warming and the energy crisis, quoting a PWC report saying that this sort of thing is "likely to cause global environmental catastrophe" (via Energy Bulletin).

The global energy industry must reform fundamentally to move fast to avert the full impact of an environmental catastrophe that is already unfolding, spawning deadly consequences for human survival, according to report by the PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

A result of a survey of 116 top executives at the world's leading energy companies, the report released yesterday says the most popular opinion passionately echoed in boardrooms across the world was of the "need to adopt a 10-year plan to halt environmental damage, developing new technologiesâ-oeand finding new fuel sources," The sort of change needed, PWC said, was nothing short of a revolution in the energy industry to give it enough capability to respond to the emerging challenges of supply disruption and growth rigidities, exploding demand and environmental crisis.

This report's observations strike a particularly familiar note in Uganda where an unsettling power crisis is inflicting immeasurable damage to the economy. That electricity shortage has been blamed in part on the lowering of Lake Victoria water levels, itself caused by the effect of global warming that has seen persistent droughts become more frequent and higher lake-surface evaporation rates.

The "Georgia Staight" has an article on "Canada, climate change and "The Weather Makers"" - good to see Tim Flannery getting more northern heisphere exposure - though the global warming news is as grim as ever.

If you’ve ever been troubled by the grim global-warming scenarios that have been bubbling at the margins of serious public attention all these years, there’s good news: you don’t have to wait any longer to see whether or not there’s really anything to it all.

The future is here now.

The Canadian winter that just ended was the warmest on record. Last year in Greenland, where the summers are now milder than they’ve been in 100,000 years, glaciers shed an amount of water into arctic seas more than twice the annual flow of the Nile River, tripling the yearly loss of Greenland’s glaciers from 10 years ago. There are robins on Baffin Island now, and the people of Pangnirtung are seeing thunder and rain for the first time and walruses, on melting ice floes, are starving to death.

...Like the silenced Hanson, the Australian paleontologist Tim Flannery is convinced that humanity is crossing a tipping point in climate change, and the consequences are likely to be horrific. Unlike Hanson, Flannery is not easily made to shut up.

While Canada is heating up along with the rest of the planet, the new Canadian government is casting a chilly shadow over climate science, slavishly following the American party line on global warming - and their practice of suppressing facts that conflict with their ideology in the grand tradition of Lysenkoism.

A scientist with Environment Canada was ordered not to launch his global warming-themed novel Thursday at the same time the Conservative government was quietly axing a number of Kyoto programs.

The bizarre sequence of events on the eve of the Easter long weekend provided an ironic end-note to the week in which Prime Minister Stephen Harper introduced his first piece of legislation -- aimed at improving accountability and transparency in government.

The day began with what was supposed to be the low-key launch of an aptly titled novel, Hotter than Hell.

Publisher Elizabeth Margaris said that Mark Tushingham, whose day job is as an Environment Canada scientist, was ordered not to appear at the National Press Club to give a speech discussing his science fiction story about global warming in the not-too-distant future.

The Independent reports on a warning from Britain's chief scientist David King that the world's temperature is on course to rise by more than three degrees despite efforts to combat global warming (and because of efforts to frustrate efforts to fight global warming, I'd say).

Sir David King issued a stark wake-up call that climate change could cause devastating consequences such as famine and drought for hundreds of millions of people unless the world's politicians take more urgent action.

Britain and the rest of the European Union have signed up to a goal of limiting the temperature rise to two degrees. In his strongest warning yet on the issue, Sir David suggested the EU limit will be exceeded.

According to computer-modelled predictions for the Government, a three-degree rise in temperatures could put 400 million more people at risk of hunger; leave between one and three billion more people at risk of water stress; cause cereal crop yields to fall by between 20 and 400 million tons; and destroy half the world's nature reserves.

Sir David made a thinly veiled attack on President Bush's approach after his chief climate adviser James Connaughton said recently he did not believe anyone could forecast a safe carbon dioxide level and that cutting greenhouse gas emissions could harm the world economy. Sir David said politicians who believed they could simply rely on new technologies to produce cleaner fuels should start listening to the scientists. "There is a difference between optimism and head in the sand," he said.

RealClimate has a couple of posts on yet another form of global warming denial conspiracy theory in the Wall Street Journal (who should be reporting on how business can adapt to a changing world rather than disseminating disinformation on behalf of sunset industries). Go to the posts for a number of relevant links.

We've received a large number of requests to respond to this piece by MIT's Richard Lindzen that appeared as an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal. We've had lots to say before about the Wall Street Journal (e.g. here and here), and we've had plenty to say about Lindzen as well. Specifically, we have previously pointed out that there is no evidence whatsoever that 'alarmism' improves anyone's chances of getting funded - if anything it is continued uncertainty that propels funding decisions, and secondly, the idea that there is a conspiracy against contrarian scientists is laughable. There is indeed a conspiracy against poor science, but there is no need to apologise for that! But rather than repeat ourselves once again, we thought we'd just sit back this time and allow our readers to comment...

RealClimate also has an interesting post on "Lessons from Venus".

A special report in The Observer on Sunday (April 9) titled 'Venus - The Hot Spot', provides a well-written account on a mission called the Venus Express. The Venus express is an European Space Agency (ESA) mission to probe the the atmosphere of Venus and address questions regarding the differences between the climates on Venus and Earth. According to the plans, the probe will enter the final orbit around Venus in May 2006, i.e. within about a month.

What relevance does a mission to Venus have for a blog like RealClimate? Primarily, Venus offers scientists the chance to see how the same basic physics used to study Earth's climate operates under a very different set of circumstances. In one sense, Venus is rather similar to Earth: it has nearly the same mass as Earth, and while its orbit is somewhat closer to the Sun, that effect is more than made up for by the sunlight reflected from Venus' thick cloud cover. Because of the cloud cover, the surface temperature of Venus would be a chilly -42C if were not for the greenhouse effect of its atmosphere. In reality, the surface of Venus, at 740K (467C) is even hotter than the surface of Mercury, which is a (relatively!) pleasant 440K.

The BBC has a report on the concept of "ecological debt" and the unsustainability of current UK consumption patterns. While all this is fairly obvious, it would be nice if someone pointed out that the trainwreck can be avoided if we work towards making our economies (and particularly the systems of production) more sustainable, rather than just pointing out what a useless bunch of over-consumers we are...

The UK is about to run out of its own natural resources and become dependent on supplies from abroad, a report says. A study by the New Economics Foundation (Nef) and the Open University says 16 April is the day when the nation goes into "ecological debt" this year. It warns if annual global consumption levels matched the UK's, it would take 3.1 Earths to meet the demand.

The report uses a number of examples that it says illustrate how resources are being wasted, including:

* In 2004, the UK exported 1,500 tonnes of fresh potatoes to Germany, and imported 1,500 tonnes of the same product from the same country
* Imported 465 tonnes of gingerbread, but exported 460 tonnes of the same produce
* Sent 10,200 tonnes of milk and cream to France, yet imported 9,900 tonnes of the dairy goods from France

The authors say this shows how current trade systems are inefficient at a time when there is concern over energy supplies and greenhouse gas emissions.

"If you do not have the right signals within the economy to tell you when you are doing something very environmentally wasteful, then you cannot expect it to stop," says Mr Simms, the report's lead author. "Lifestyles in Britain are becoming increasingly unsustainable and are placing an ever larger burden on the global environmental system."

The UK's food self-sufficiency has been falling steadily for more than a decade, and indigenous food production is now said to be at its lowest level for half a century. In 2004, the UK lost its energy independent status when it became a net importer of gas following lower returns from the North Sea fields.

At a global level, the world is also living beyond ecosystems' ability to supply the resources and absorb the demands being placed upon them.

This year's ecological debt day for the world is 23 October. In the future, it is expected to be even earlier as emerging economies, such as China and India, demand more resources to meet changing lifestyles.

Energy Bulletin has an interesting piece from Project Gutenberg about Thomas Alva Edison (always a fascinating topic, especially if you've read Tim Powers' books) and renewable energy.

The place is a maze of retorts, kettles, tubes, siphons and tiny brass machinery. In the midst of the mess stood two old-fashioned armchairs—both sacred to Edison. One he sits in, and the other is for his feet, his books, pads and paper.

Here he sits and thinks, reads or muses or tells stories or shuffles about with his hands in his pockets.

... said Edison as we sat at lunch... "Some day some fellow will invent a way of concentrating and storing up sunshine to use instead of this old, absurd Prometheus scheme of fire. I'll do the trick myself if some one else doesn't get at it. Why, that is all there is about my work in electricity--you know, I never claimed to have invented electricity--that is a campaign lie--nail it!"

"Sunshine is spread out thin and so is electricity. Perhaps they are the same, but we will take that up later. Now the trick was, you see, to concentrate the juice and liberate it as you needed it. The old-fashioned way inaugurated by Jove, of letting it off in a clap of thunder, is dangerous, disconcerting and wasteful. It doesn't fetch up anywhere. My task was to subdivide the current and use it in a great number of little lights, and to do this I had to store it. And we haven't really found out how to store it yet and let it off real easy-like and cheap. Why, we have just begun to commence to get ready to find out about electricity. This scheme of combustion to get power makes me sick to think of--it is so wasteful. It is just the old, foolish Prometheus idea, and the father of Prometheus was a baboon."

"When we learn how to store electricity, we will cease being apes ourselves; until then we are tailless orangutans. You see, we should utilize natural forces and thus get all of our power. Sunshine is a form of energy, and the winds and the tides are manifestations of energy."