Myth busting on the road to armageddon and the inevitable  and imminent collapse of the biosphere.
For many years we have been sold the lie that a global warming target of 2C was both Safe and Achievable  It was never safe nor achievable under the yoke of Industrial civilisation and unfettered capitalism.
The IPCC has been used as the ‘Standard bearer’ for our green house gas emissions targets and there in lies the rub. Since it’s inception, the IPCC has compromised the science in the interests of political expediency and consensus. This has become a pathway to ecological collapse whilst being championed by the large NGO’s and even the large “Green”party’s world wide including the Green Party of Aotearoa who continue to parrot these myths. Instead of being honest about the severity of the crisis, they defer to political expediency, in the vain hope of electoral success at the expense of telling the truth which they either know and can’t face or are blissfully/willfully ignorant of. Time has run out for that strategy and the biosphere and most if not all complex life that depends on it.

From David Wasdell of the  Apollo-Gaia Project;
“It is with the utmost concern that we draw your attention to the fundamental methodological flaw in the determination of the value of Climate Sensitivity that is embedded in the Summary for Policymakers of the Scientific Workgroup of the 5th Assessment Report of the IPCC. The error was replicated in the Reports of Workgroups 2 and 3 and carried forward into the Synthesis Report. It has been used as the given basis for every subsequent publication. Our radical analysis of Climate Dynamics has generated a new and robust value of “Earth System Sensitivity” which has profound implications for:

• The relationship between temperature change and cumulative carbon emissions.
• The calculation of “available carbon budget”.
• The evaluation of the INDCs.
• The terms of reference of COP21 in Paris (30 November – 11 December 2015).
• The future global strategy for climate stabilisation.”

David Wasdell explains his concerns in this excellent interview on Radio Ecoshock . Wasdell refers to himself as not being a “Doom-munger”!!! Many of these otherwise brilliant scientists peer over the precipice we are now tumbling down and refuse to accept that we have crossed the multitude of “Tipping points” they have been warning us of for decades.This is where cognitive dissonance kicks in and the desire to continue to receive large salaries and research grants. For me Michael E Mann is the ‘champion’ of this cognitive dissonance. He and his colleagues identified the “Hockey Stick Theory” and now that it has manifest he can no longer see it!!! This is the privilege of the wealthy elites in the west, infinitely less for our cousins in Africa, the Pacific Islands and the Middle East where habitat is collapsing now, not long off in the future.
A large portion of the blame for the severity of the crisis we find ourselves in is the reliance on ‘Models’ as opposed to the much more expensive but reliable Field Research. Peter Wadhams drew attention to this dichotomy in a recent interview on Extinction Radio
For the first time in human existence we have now crossed  410ppm of carbon in the atmosphere, factoring in the 10 to 30 year lag between cause and effect the warming from most if not all of the carbon emitted this century is baked in but yet to manifest.
We have raced from 369.68ppm in 1999 to 410ppm at the time of writing (22/04/2017). The warming from 10% of all carbon dumped into the atmosphere has yet to manifest.

It is feasible that this Northern Hemisphere summer we could see the first Sea Ice Free summer in the Arctic which will trigger the albedo feedback loop which will lead to more warming and more melt in a vicious feedback that could well lead to the discharge of the 50 gigatonne methane burst or more as predicted by Shakova et al from the University of Fairbanks Alaska. Shakovas’ presentation filmed by Nick Breeze is embedded here;

I spent 25 years of my life as an ocean sailor, during which I completed 16 ocean passages on yachts varying in size from 37 ft to 65 ft. On well over half of those voyages I was the ‘Skipper’.
One ominous role of the Skipper is to always have a well thought out strategy in the event of catastrophic failure or loss of the vessel. My personal belief system is to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth to my crew and fellow passengers.
I detect a very stark comparison between the sinking of Titanic and the collapse of the biosphere. When the Titanic was sinking the affluent (effluent) continued to dance and drink champagne whilst the working class (The same ones who had built industrial civilisation and the wealth to afford the champagne) were locked down in the lower ‘steerage’ cabins drowning. Had I been the skipper on the Titanic, the moment I knew the ship was doomed to sink I would have released all of those hard working people, briefed them on the severity of the predicament and enlisted all of the able bodied to build rafts from the ample furniture and ropes and I would have launched the insufficient number of lifeboats with the young, infirm and elderly with the newly constructed liferafts available for the remainder.
Denial of the severity of the crisis means these liferafts which would at least provide psychological comfort would in some small way mitigate the Tsunami of Grief baring down on us. Alas denial and fascism rule at the end of the human epoch.
In 2014 and 2016 I was privileged to tour NZ with Professor Guy McPherson one of the very few scientists on the planet who is prepared to face the severity of the predicament in it’s totality. Most of the NZ presentations and interviews are embedded here;
Professor McPherson and his colleague Mike Sliwa have an excellent radio show on PRN.FM. The archive is embedded here

Recently I had Dahr Jamail, the man that I believe to be the worlds leading climate journalist staying at my home on Rakino Island Aotearoa New Zealand whilst we both did research for his forthcoming, latest book “The End of Ice”. Dahr writes climate dispatches for TruthOut.org links to his speaking truth to power are embedded here;

The situation is as always infinitely worse that we are being told. This post is an attempt to speak truth to power. “At the edge of extinction, only love remains” GMP.