Black Out for Dark Reasons

Yesterday along with many other websites, we were 'blacked out' in order to show our opposition to many of the changes contained within Bill 38.  The following illustrates just some of the reasons for those concerns.


In British Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees's book Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-first Century?  Rees discusses a range of risks confronting humanity, and estimates that the liklihood of human extinction before 2100  is around 50 per cent.  In David Suzuki's most recent lecture in Invermere last week, he stated, "We don't know enough to know it's too late but we know enough to know, all we really have is hope."  He stated that in the last twenty years we have been going backwards from the progress that was made in the eighties.


Economic growth Suzuki stated, has become the definition for progress and this assumption is fundamentally flawed.  Humans are the most numerous mammal on the planet. No other species of that number has existed on the planet and no other species has such an obsession with 'stuff'. Suzuki illustrated how economic growth cannot happen forever for the planet's resources will be expended.  He stated that we have failed to bring about the major paradigm shift necessary to sustain future generations.


In the same week this information was released:

From CBC News:
The Associated Press 

Posted: May 31, 2012 

The world's air has reached what scientists call a troubling new milestone for carbon dioxide, the main global warming pollutant.—

Monitoring stations across the Arctic this spring are measuring more than 400 parts per million of the heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere. The number isn't quite a surprise, because it's been rising at an accelerating pace. Years ago, it passed the 350 ppm mark that many scientists say is the highest safe level for carbon dioxide. It now stands globally at 395.

So far, only the Arctic has reached that 400 level, but the rest of the world will follow soon.

"The fact that it's 400 is significant," said Jim Butler, global monitoring director at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Lab in Boulder, Colo. "It's just a reminder to everybody that we haven't fixed this and we're still in trouble."

The article goes on to say:

It's been at least 800,000 years — probably more — since Earth saw carbon dioxide levels in the 400s, Butler and other climate scientists said.

Until now.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2012/05/31/greenhouse-gas-400-levels.html