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Our Pan Geo Global Capital Appreciation Portfolio unlevered total rate of return is 63.5% from inception on November 15, 2000 to March 6, 2010 (average annual rate of return is 5.4%). Over this time, it has outperformed its global hybrid benchmark by 63.6%.

Our Pan Geo 100% American Strength Growth Portfolio unlevered total rate of return is 99.8% from inception on July 15, 2002 to March 6, 2010 (average annual rate of return is 9.5%). Over this time, it has outperformed its hybrid benchmark by 48.0%.

Welcome to our Investigations page. If you seek investment advice or further information about Pan Geo Investment Inc. and its services, please click on the links below to view other pages of this website or click on Welcome, OrderAdvice or InvestorDataBlock pages.

Check the marquee banners above and refer to the Performance  Page for information about the success of our investment advisory services to date and to view the first part of our 180 country Pan Geo Investment Global Table©. This table also contains direct links to stock market exchanges of these countries, so web surfing investors and interested parties can easily visit them by clicking on the links provided. The 100 countries not currently in our Pan Geo Global Index are shown in the Table portion on our Also Eligible  Page.

This Pan Geo Investment Investigation supports our independent portfolio investment advisory services. We have always been a future-oriented advisory. We consider clean, green investing to be a consequence of our forward thinking and advice in general. We come across all kinds of entities that are striving to contain and reduce environmental impacts. Ecological risks and impacts may be the limiting factor, ultimately determining what issuer "i" can and cannot do. Today, savvy businessmen are often tapping into advanced research and development for something new or more sustainable than heretofore what's been offered by many competing firms. So conducting ecological risk analysis on an ongoing basis helps us immeasurably in our green growth investing efforts here at Pan Geo Investment. Being able to cut the mustard in the green movement these days requires tremendous discipline, scientific knowledge, research and development plus technology application and transfer moxie like never before. Moreover, the ecological footprint of our operations is a tiny fraction that of the lion's share of competitors.

At this advisory, we do not accept that entities have any right to egregiously and unilaterally pollute like savages returning from our caveman past. To do so inevitably is to infringe on the rights, life-space, health and welfare of others, and very possibly to immiserate or sicken them irretrievably. Noone wants their place mussed up. So we try to uncover, expose and sweep away the secrecy, attitudes, complexes and rhetoric of egregious polluters. Historically, in many parts of the world, their actions enabled them to profit or extract other benefits in the course of taking ecological risks that some time thereafter results in many innocent people becoming the victims of that enterprise. Often such risks have remained opague to the public and have not been properly represented or disclosed in their filings of related documents with regulators.

Consequently, this investigation also directs us away from security issuers that still have operations with unacceptable environmental externalities, ecological risks and impacts. These entities may depend on government, lobbying, specialty public relations, revisionist advertising or other patronage or device intended to soften their questionable or unsavoury image, challenges and risks. Even if they survive in the marketplace, inefficient and outdated companies that are environmentally unfriendly may one day face significant fines, liabilities and lawsuits for their anti-social behaviors. Society does not have to pay to keep old stalwart polluters in the game.

The collective natural wealth of this Earth is what ensures survivability of living things and we are all equally responsible for stewardship of the Earth. Times are changing quickly now and ecological risks are becoming more clearly defined scientifically and legally with every passing day. The need for sustainable growth and ecological survivability is real and has become imperative for virtually every jurisdiction on Earth. There is wide recognition now that the hour is very late for preserving and enhancing the ecological vigour of many ecosystems. There is nothing relative or differentiated about the responsibility for running down an ecosystem. Neanderthalian projects that ravage the environment cannot be pursued any longer anywhere. Those responsible for continuance of some developing ecological burden or disaster-in-the-making tend to try to flummox the public and trot out distorted rationale, evidence and argument based on spin, procedure or technique that fails hopelessly and pathetically in the face of scientific scrutiny.

If we are going to solve our ultra-serious dilemma of climate change and ecological breakdown, we are going to have to recognize the ecologically-hideous nature of industrialization historically and excessive population as root causes of degradation and the extraordinary demands we have placed on our environment today. No entity should perpetuate some dracula-of-pollution project because there now exists eco-friendly, viable alternatives to such monsters. Stodgey, old-line politics, media, utilities, energy companies and financial institutions are too-often too-sneaky and slow to change when confronted with a better way forward. Why stand in the way of progress based on our blessed ability to learn, vast reservoir of knowledge and human experience?

Investors need to be especially wary about old industry archetypes that can no longer compete meritoriously but who have significant resources and well-established relationships and contacts. These entities may attempt to persist commercially using various tactics and strategies some of which are not that wholesome or forthright, and may in fact be misleading or deceptive. Here comes the twister - they are known to try to paint themselves as beacons of economic stability or as the heroic action figures whose viability as a going concern is being counted-on for national security reasons. We don't swallow that one whole. Rather, we believe the vast majority of scientists among many others think its precisely the opposite way around: Climate change and degradation of the natural environment including deforestation, desertification, acidification of the oceans, loss of ecosystems, species and biodiversity and ongoing, heavy-polluting activities are, by virtue of their existential and socioeconomic implications plus the great-unknowns associated with these phenomena, quickly becoming the paramount security issues of the new millennium for virtually every country. Dealing with volatility in marketplaces is difficult enough for many people, now we have the rising global overprint from ecological volatility and survivability to mix in.

We want to be clear that our doctrine of ecological survivability says nothing about growth per se. We hope every politician, lobbyist, industrial association spokesperson and whoever else visits us does not misconstrue what we are saying. Green growth with clean technology, renewable energy, green chemistry, new this and that is to replace the old, much more polluting products, services and processes. Old gray bank advisors will be replaced with new, green age advisors and blue helmeted actors. Change, progess, advancement of humankind and the simultaneous defeat of some of what came before in the marketplace that has not worked out too well for people generally but has of course enriched a relatively few who rode this or that old gray mare stock. The interests of our Earth and those who are suffering through some tragedy take precedence over everything else.

We see no reason why, for example, consumption cannot continue to increase on a mass scale. But it has to be sustainable consumption, that based on the new and the retirement of the old. In principle, consumption can escalate in every country on Earth, driving can be further and faster across every road on Earth. But only if the pollution impact has been curtailed, if everything is recycled, reused, reconstituted. This depends on the physical capacity of the Earth as a whole to replenish itself from concentrations of various pollutants without disturbing physical side effects accumulating such as temperature increase, changes in acidity of the ocean, altered weather patterns and climate change, glaciers melting, loss of species, invasive and fleeing species, spread of disease, contamination of air and water. Until and unless the Earth and its ecosystems can assimilate the consequences of our activities, we cannot allow polluting growth to materialize or we are all up the creek environmentally. So, to all the ole' status quo investors, commercial interests and hillbillies, we sing "...you keep same'ing when you ought to be a-changing, yeah, what's right is right and you ain't been right yet, these boots are made for walkin', and that's just what they'll do, and one of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you"© (pretend "these boots" are the stock market and opinion polls).

The same is true about population - if the pollution impact per capita on Earth is curtailed increasingly, then more people can be supported. But until then we are "over-driving our headlights". Which is why in our Eco-Table again and again we refer to all these issues because, as it stands now, there are innumerable instances where country "c" is speeding faster than is safely illuminated on the road in front of them. It absolutely does not mean you cannot "develop", rather it means that smoky gray development has to stop, to be replaced by sky blue, forest green alternatives. It's not necessarily a slow-down of development, it's a change-up of the mode and manner of development. If you do not have the required capability, you have to look for a better alternative or wait until you can gain that capability. Human progress, wisdom, self-awareness and ingenuity in action.

Our current expose of what we call Dusty, Sandy Brown Afflicted Countries™ is shown at the bottom of Investigations1  web page along with our Eco-Flags©™ and explanations of ecological risks and various pollution problems. We also show our Sky Blue, Forest Green Eco-Touring Countries™ there. Murky, Hazy Crimson Red Sunset Countries™ and Smoky Gray Day, Carbon Black Night Countries™ comprise the lower part of Pan Geo Investment Eco-Flags Table©™. They are shown on  Investigations2 and  Investigations3 web pages respectively. 

How does it look so far? Ever been to a ball game where you are losing 98 to 27? We don't like it either because we are in a must-win predicament. However, we still anticipate this once-dreadful situation will continue to improve steadily as time goes by. We know there is great urgency associated with solving and resolving climate change, pollution and population-pressure mega-problems. Happily, there is considerable manpower and resources planned and at-work making contributions to solutions to this very vexing state of affairs. There appears to be more and more action "in our bullpen" every waking day which is great news because we need plenty of support in relief. It's vital to maintain focus and a winning attitude because our side, the side for humanity and sustainability, cannot fathom losing this one.

In our opinion, as we outline in grimy detail on these very webpages, our fate will be determined by the physical survivability of people, habitat and nations collectively. Therefore, we believe the controlling variables, the situation that should concern us all the utmost, is captured by the 2029, 2039 and 2049 "headlights" shown to the left in our Eco-Flags Table. Our comprehensive concept we call ecological survivability forms the basis of our rank ordering. The current headlight values shown for a jurisdiction reflect, in our judgment, the overall health and wellness of ecosystems, including all lifeforms there, anticipated for the timeframe indicated. Pieces of paper are not going to help us or our children if we do not maintain the delicate balance of our natural world. The Ecology Bank of Earth cannot go down-and-down or organisms including homo sapiens will be going down with it. The time has come today to stop and seek to recast, replace or restrict all remaining scorched-earth, polluting activities before the consequences of that mayhem escalates any further than it already has.

Citizens of every country have the wisdom and awareness, the capacity to change. What concerns us the most is that even with that there is embedded a huge margin for error and miscalculation. To illustrate, consider that highly-educated people by the droves today continue to puff away on tobacco products despite prominent and often stark messages written on every pack and in advertisements concerning the crazy health and wellness risks people are taking with there own life by doing so. Yet they do it anyways. This kind of fatalist, lackadaisical mindset worries us a great deal because it provides inertia when, by contrast, tremendous collective effort and willpower is required worldwide to enhance the ecological survivability of Earth. Widespread cooperation on these matters is essential or we are probably doomed.

Eco-Flag©™ "tail-lights" are shown on the right-hand-side of our four Eco-Tables. Tail-lights include: "1900s" column lights that reflect the historical situation of the 19th and 20th centuries; "2010" column colored-boxes that encapsulate the current situation ecologically plus aspirations and intentions; and "2019" column values that may depend on the nature of the binding laws that govern legal actions in a country. Often, despite their importance to our very existence, environmental and energy laws are slow to be updated. Therefore, in the absence of particular information, intentions and data we look for, we sometimes insert the 2019 lights color by default based on current legal measures to deal with pollution, clean energy and global warming.

As a first approximation, the existing ecological state of a country or countries may be assumed to have arisen due to historical laws, rules and regulations so that is reflected in our Eco-Table. Unfortunately for all of us, there often exists a lag between when a rigorous legal framework is introduced and when ecological survivability is enhanced in that country. It's the latter that saves our bacon not the former, that's the point that should not be overlooked. It's also evident that there are very few commercial interests and not enough consumers that are willing to act decisively on their own accord to take vigorous environmentally-friendly actions unless and until their government revamps the laws, rules and regulations. Therefore, eco-conscious legislation or regulation is generally considered to be a precondition for improving our natural world en masse.

Relevant testing and data collection concerning our environment may be insufficient, untimely or kept confidential thus slowing a response or public pressure to act to rectify a particular situation. Enforcement, including compliance monitoring, reporting and verification, is often inadequate, questionable or unaccountable ultimately introducing yet-another cause for delay in reclamation, rejuvenation and restoration of our environment. Progress here is too-often painfully slow meaning we have to step-up our game here too by more than a notch or two. This is the play-offs now and our level of play has to rise accordingly. Or we run the risk of being eliminated.

There is a 24-color scheme in our Global and Eco-Flags Tables at this website. The particular color reflects the relative health, harmony and sustainability of ecosystems. The range of colors includes in order: dark blue, blue, dark green, green, light green, green-gold, yellow, cream, peanut butter brown, tan, brown, ox-blood brown, light orange, cadmium or flat red, light pink, pink, crimson, purple, mauve, gray, charcoal gray, lead black and black. So what quadrant is your country in now - green, brown, red or gray? Keep visiting us here for answers. On a best efforts basis, the color of status lights in these tables change with time as we become aware of relevant events, information and legal changes affecting a particular jurisdiction.

Our Investigation of Green Investing and Sustainable Growth

On this webpage and on Investigations1 , Investigations2  and Investigations3 pages, Pan Geo Investment Inc. presents the latest iteration of our investigation and Eco Table with Eco Flags and Memoranda. It was first published December 9, 2007. Our solution is offered for sale as outlined in our Comment section below dated November 30, 2008.

Comment November 30, 2008 -  Pan Geo Investment Inc. is offering our Green Earth Memoranda and Solution ("GEMS")™ in the form of an executive summary report. The Memoranda covers what is presented on this webpage, however, the Solution briefing is revealed only in the report. It is based on our methodology, justification and thinking further to the conduct of this investigation. We charge $850 US dollars per copy, seat or license. We believe we have something valuable to say about a formulation or solution, certainly at this juncture of the proceedings if not later on. Another exciting aspect about all this for us is the way we are going about marketing GEMS. Its being done through this website. In particular, connect to the OrderAdvice  Page or send your request for GEMS to the address in Vancouver, BC, Canada specified below. We are using "Green Agents" to reach virally many possible interested parties to purchase GEMS. We do not want to throw up lots of rules and restrictions about this. Any person who can legally approach an entity to sell our GEMS only needs to convince the latter to buy. For a Green Agent sale, have the buyer forward their name, organization and shipping address together with the full name, complete mailing address and hopefully a contact phone number and/or e-mail address of the Green Agent. The Green Agent must be at arms length from the buyer. If it is an agent sale, once the order is paid for and filled, we will forward our firm cheque for $200 of commission income to the Green Agent identified by the purchaser. This is our way of contributing to the green job movement. Hopefully, also, it may help some rather-disadvantaged people who happen to hear about this opportunity to participate and in so doing boost their own income and prospects. Thinking about hearing an outcome like that is doing our hearts a lot of good. So, if you're a go-getter sister, then we're gonna getcha some green bills for you and your family. Not only are we going to send $200 for every sale marketed successfully by a Green Agent, we're going to segregate $100 more of every $850 GEMS sold into our Yellow-Lit Mud Hut Fund™ (see the bottom of Also Eligible  Page about this Fund). Mailing Address:  Pan Geo Investment Inc., 688, Unit 4 - 350 S.E. Marine Drive, Vancouver, B.C. V5X 2S5  Canada

The rule of law is paramount among men and women. It has been hailed as the codification that, properly attended to, can solve any problem humanity can thrust on us. Most people believe it takes mere days, weeks or, at worst, years to reach agreement, a treaty or new laws concerning even the most horrible kinds of things like, for example, war. Whatever the situation is, given enough political brainpower, charisma and will, the most grievous crisis will be solved before too long by the powers that be. Hear, hear, the ayes have it.

Politicians used to strafing opposition positions, partisan pining and whining, posturing, bluster, obfuscating, contorting, maneuvering, mocking, stonewalling, head fakes, dipsey-doodling, pulled punches, spin-a-ramma moves, dust-ups, attack ads and what-not may be slow to assimilate that we are not talking politics here. Or anything artsy-fartsy. And no twittering, tweeting one of us is able to alter that characteristic of the situation we find ourselves in. This is not about pitting one person, group or jurisdiction against another. Rather, collectively we have ourselves pressed against the window. It's our Earth, our real world that we see out there the other side of that window. Metaphorically, Mother Nature has a bit of a fever right now and doesn't really like the incessant demands we are placing on her. She's asking us again to clean up her house for her because she doesn't feel all that great at this time. The outstanding question that remains from our point of view is: will we do it for her? Or not? Is the time for playing her requiem approaching or will we take heed?

But look, ...out on the horizon, what is that sickly-pink mass lighting up the silvery dun-brown haze? Enter nature's law. The advisors for nature are sorry to report that nature's law operates on nature's time scale. That's right, on the geologic time scale not according to a leader's calendar. Remember those secondary school science courses? Now we are not talking about some obstinate leader "x" in some area of the world "y" who will not cooperate with "z". We are talking about temperature, pressure, mass wasting of terrain, oxygen, humidity, rainfall, acidity, bacteria, viruses, biodiversity, invasive species, in short, about physical phenomena that affect everyone. There is nowhere to hide from nature, no way to fool nature and unlikely to be a second chance to deal with nature if we botch it up the first go-around. We may not be around by the time the Earth recuperates over geologic time.

By deciphering the information contained in polar ice cores, which can only "see back" about 800,000 years, we can interpret that greenhouse gas levels are higher in the air today that at any time during that interval. Over the prior two generations alone, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere has risen to about 45% from 40%. It is now known that the oxygen content of our atmosphere has dropped from about one-third in ancient environments to a mere one-sixth of the air now in many of our polluted cities, a reduction by half. What is this doing to us? As the average temperature of the world's air masses and water bodies rise, the dissolved oxygen content of ocean water diminishes. This increases the likelihood of formation in the water of more extensive anoxic zones, a situation that has proven fatal to many members of various marine species who became trapped in such conditions.

10,000 years ago, forests and other vegetation were twice as prevalent as they are today. That factor of two is looking pretty ugly in this juxtaposition. As time goes by and temperatures rise and oxygen levels decline, biomes suitable to support life are expected to progressively lessen in areal extent. Many forms of life are seen to be, and expected to try to, move to higher latitudes, higher altitudes or some combination of the two. Migrations of trees, fish, birds, people and more are, and will be, migrating away from oppressive heat, dryness and low oxygen environments associated with global warming, particularly affecting tropical and sub-tropical locations.

This means that added to the existing demographic pressure from population explosion will be an added influx of individuals to places having climates that are more hospitable to most species. Given this backdrop, going forward there can only be a marked intensification of competition to latch onto a decreasing share of the ever-dwindling amount of natural and other resources available per individual. If you still need a jolt of adrenalin, there are authoritative figures who claim it conceivable that only one in nine people projected to be on Earth by later in this century will actually be on a hotter Earth given the devastating ramifications traced to climate alteration that may come about. A very high degree of cooperation will be necessary to ensure this ominous scenario never occurs. We must realize and respect that the Earth is affectively the boss of all of us. No subset of people imaginable would be able to dictate to, dominate or otherwise "stand up" to the Earth in the name of what they want. Solar and geophysical forces are awesome and should not be toyed with in some foolish macho-driven show of brinkmanship.

We believe the 0.7 degree Celsius rise in global average temperature that has already taken place relative to pre-industrial times is too much. On average globally, 0.4 degree Celsius of that temperature change has taken place over just the past 30 years. Some claim this pace of temperature rise of about 0.1 degree Celsius per decade has been going on for a century. All ten of the warmest years recorded near the Earth's surface over the past 130 years have occurred since 1997.

We think contemplating up to a two degree Celsius rise is quite nutty. The last time the Earth was that much warmer than it is now, sea level worldwide was four to eight meters higher than today. During the Eemian interglacial period, 128,000 years ago, the Earth was only about one degree Celsius warmer than it is now and sea levels were four meters higher than today. Worse yet, existing, persisting atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases mostly originating from our pollution to date are said to pretty-well ensure us of another 0.7 degree Celsius increase in global average temperature over time. This is because there is an incomplete, lagged response of incremental temperature increase of the air and water expected from this buildup of gas. So including effects to come, this makes it a 1.4 degrees Celsius rise that we have already bagged. So we are about two-thirds the way to a two degree Celsius rise relative to per-industrial times based on what we have done already. This lagged effect is especially unsettling because the Earth is still in the long-term process of absorbing or utilizing those emissions.

Yet, as we document here, the absorptive capacity of our Earth including water, air and soil, has been clipped significantly by our collective actions. The ability of the Earth to continue to absorb various pollutants at the rate it has been is a faulty assumption. Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists integrating such dynamics into their global climate change model conceives in a probabilistic manner an average Earth temperature rise of a whopping 7.4 degrees Celsius before 2100 unless carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping pollution being generated by us is cut drastically and soon. A study tabled for the UK government cites the likelihood of a 6.4 degree Celsius rise in average ambient summer-time temperature by 2080 affecting the south of England. Such an increase embodies an average rate of nearly one degree Celsius up-and-up with every passing decade although the change in temperature is not expected to occur smoothly and uniformly.

Nowadays, virtually every forecast and projection applicable to the decades to come being made by climate scientists involves a rate of temperature increase somewhere in the range from one-half to two degrees Celsius per generation. Furthermore, a dizzying pace of temperature rise of one-half degree Celsius per decade has already been documented spanning at least one generation across many vast and diverse geographies around the world including tundra areas of northern Canada, the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau of China and the Sundarbans mega-delta setting of Bangladesh and India. Seawater temperature has likewise been rising at that rate in the Bay of Bengal, Arabian Gulf and Kuwait Bay to name a few examples.

As a corollary, it may now be considered quite unusual for Earthly-inhabitants to encounter any year cooler than the scorcher of 2005. This is hardly- surprising given our predicament with global average temperature ratcheting-up relentlessly. Sounds surreal to us. And we may have to adapt to the surreal: it is widely-believed by very knowledgeable people that it will take centuries for our Earth to be restored to "the way we were" even if we begin the rollback now. Carbon dioxide lingers naturally in the atmosphere over hundreds of years before its concentration lessens. The same is true of the insidious, heat-trapping hydrofluorocarbon gases which are still in broad use in many countries.

If our Eco-Tables were based not on ecological survivability but rather purely on the relatively-narrow conception of the concentration of all greenhouse gas emissions trapping heat in our atmosphere, our colored lights of hope would appear something like what's shown below:

This paints a bracing picture and one for which there is no point in our forseeable solution space that intersects with an ecological scenario achievable anytime soon where we can be assured of preventing runaway climate change. There are too many countries lagging too far behind to wrest us from the mean average global temperature rise we presume is coming. Many so-called "developing" countries and other nations, too are apparently still years away from their peak generation of emissions of heat-trapping gases. That means they are even further afield from becoming zero net carbon emitters or carbon neutral. Yet, according to the table of lights above, our interpretation is all countries have to arrive at the sky blue, forest green band level to ensure we do not cause temperature to rise by more than two degrees Celsius. This would have to happen very soon now. Some experts say there exists the distinct possibility this should occur before 2020 but almost-certainly before 2050. Or the chance for us all to hold the rise to only two degrees Celsius will have evaporated. Forever. Because our fix, our remediation efforts are just not happening. Fast enough. Which means we have to make it happen faster. Because it's not happening fast enough yet. So the ecological risk of running up temperatures as indicated above are no longer most-likely by century's end, rather the risk no longer exists in a probabilistic sense because it just happened. Let's not end up that way.

All countries are somewhere along a continuum of economic progress and ecological well-being. Even a cursory look at the contents of our Eco-Tables on Investigations1 , Investigations2  and Investigations3 pages demonstrates we are nowhere- near our top-tier result where all countries are Sky Blue, Forest Green Eco-Touring Countries. "Nowhere- near" in any of our timeframes - not in 2010, not by 2019, not by 2029 or 2039 nor 2049. There exists the prospect of more green and blue lights appearing for more locations as time goes by. But ecological survivability is not being enhanced fast enough in enough places on Earth.

The average increase in atmospheric temperature already this millennuim across the East Siberian Shelf region of Russia has been found to be four degrees Celsius. As scientists are now warning, we'll be blooming-lucky if we can limit climate change to a maximum four degree Celsius mean global temperature rise over the next generation or two or three. A four degree Celsius worldwide average temperature rise some time this century would mean northern climates such as that affecting much of Canada and Russia can expect a six to eight degree regional rise in average temperature some time this century. With that, the risk of runaway temperature change and associated widespread ecological catastrophe is very high due to follow-on, permafrost-melting-induced carbon-bomb type releases of greenhouse gases including methane and more carbon dioxide. We outline this "wild card" or tipping point phenomenon and other ones, too in more detail below on this webpage. Already, Arctic tundra mosses, lichens and plants are being supplanted across wide areas by boreal forest, shrubs and grasses. This "ups the ante" further as the latter, more-southerly vegetation is generally darker and more massive, thereby retaining even more sunlight and heat. Bog areas once frozen melt and/or the trend of depths where permafrost remains intact progressively rises closer to the surface. Species endemic to these vast expanses of tundra experience a disruptive loss of habitat that negatively affects their ability to survive.

We know this is not a pretty picture and it's one for which the blame game should be considered to be over and done with. It's too late to cast aspersions. There's no one left to blame and point a finger at save and except into the mirror of time. So we look in that mirror and remember our earlier self and how we appeared and what we did. We can think of our ancestors deeds, too. We can think through what could have been, what should have been but then what? Irrespective of whether we question the actions of our predecessors, we are met with the forward arrow of time that characterizes ecological survivability, entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. We realize the potentially-chaotic world of climate change and a maelstrom of pollution is here with us now. Today. Never mind yesterday. Our time has come today. It's the situation we are in and it has happened to a significant degree during the watch of our generation. That's this generation. And there is no escape clause to look for because this is not some legal construct that exists on a piece of paper or in the minds of men, women and children. Rather, it increasingly is manifesting itself in the guise of environmental diseases inflicted on people, as illness and maladies that need to be treated not ignored. Our environmental scourge has evidently become part and parcel of our current physical existence. Our progenies well-being and very existence now appears to depend upon our collective ability to address it and roll it back before it unravels any further than it already has. It's our duty collectively to mitigate further environmental chaos before it becomes environmental catastrophe for our descendants.

Because we are generating heat-altering emissions so much faster than the Earth can naturally absorb same and break it down, scientists at authoritative institutions such as United Nations, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research in Germany, the Met Office in Hadley Centre, University of Oxford and Cambridge University in United Kingdom, Stanford University in California, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Princeton University,  University of Alaska, Stockholm University, New York University, University of Colorado, US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, World Wildlife Federation, US Environmental Protection Agency, US Department of Energy, China Meteorological Administration, Beijing Climate Center, State Oceanic Administration in China, Max Planck Institute and Umweltbundesamt environment agency in Germany, the state climate monitoring agency at Murmansk, Russia and many more have collectively made it abundantly clear from their work that generation of greenhouse gas emissions is increasing, the planet is warming, ice is melting much faster than it is accumulating around the world, sea level is rising, oceans are acidifying, pollution is arcing up, biodiversity is lessening and forests, wetlands and other vital natural habitat are disappearing. Innumerable species are threatened with extinction. Soils are being depleted and eroded on a mass scale. Drought and desertification are increasing their grip over many countries. The intensity of heat waves and tropical cyclones has ratcheted-up relative to historical norms. And our climate is being affected in a myriad of ways that is raising eco-pressures and risks virtually on a daily basis. All of this means we must soon solve our environmental conundrum by highlighting and giving precedence and priority to the ecological survivability aspects of our existence. And reduce a selfish focus on the purely-economic aspects of our existence.

A temperature rise of four degrees Celsius is very possible before this century is over, some say even by 2060 or 2070. We have not had that amount of heat on Earth for 30 million years. That intensity of heat will mean havoc for one-quarter of humanity including severe fresh water stress, food insecurity, spread of disease, flooding, "camels are down" drought, loss of livelihood and terrain to live on. By then, about one-sixth of now-arable land in temperate climate zones and one-third in tropical and subtropical climates will be too parched for agricultural purposes.

There exists little realistic possibility of our limiting the average ambient global temperature rise to less than two degrees Celsius or to reduce greenhouse gases concentration-equivalent to somewhere in the 300 to 400 ppm range unless carbon emissions are zeroed sometime very-soon-now to avoid further accumulation in the atmosphere. Not long ago, we thought we had the fate of no more than half a chance, a flip-of-the-coin 50:50 chance, of a cumulative two degree Celsius rise if we cut back emissions by 80% from 1990 levels by 2050. An updated view is even starker: we need 100% reduction in those emissions by somewhere in the timeframe of 2020 to 2035 just to preserve this 1 to 1 even-chance crapshoot for no more than two degrees of global warming. This is what we are reduced to now in our natural world. This against a backdrop where global greenhouse gas emissions have risen by an astounding one-third and glacier melting has doubled since the onset of the new millennium, a mere blink of the eye ago in geologic time. And we have no global agreement yet for even a 50% cutback of emissions in our world versus 1990 levels before 2050.

Global emissions of greenhouse gases have been increasing at an average rate of 2% to 3% per year since the new millennium. Unfortunately, we need to decrease those emissions on average by about 2% to 3% a year until Earth reaches net zero carbon, then to keep it that way or better indefinitely. There is no grace period, no buffer of time left until we reach peak carbon emissions and start to decline. That window of time for negotiation, contemplation,  relaxation and transition does not exist. The time of peak heat-altering gases building-up in our atmosphere and peak concentrations of carbonic acid in our water should already be in our past. Speaking of peak emissions still to come is an artificial construct, a negotiating stance, a courtesy, ploy or device. There is no defensible physical basis for extending any more rope to any polluter regardless of location because there is no slack in it left to offer in the real world we now live in.

We are deluding ourselves to believe its somehow okay to continue gushing carbon for a while longer. Meanwhile, let's solve more poverty files, create a few more old fossil economy jobs and dump some more outrageous pollution into our Earth's lap. What about the many-more poverty-stricken cases that surely will be arising if we allow ecological survivability to deteriorate further from the troubling situation we have now? We need to create progressive, clean, green new economy jobs of the future to drive change for the better. Otherwise, we will be facing the unknown, the abyss concerning how big and bad a price we will pay in future for eco-errors we continue to knowingly commit every day. We cannot continue this masquerade. Many people are now aware of our unfolding eco-tragedy. But some of those parties nevertheless choose to gainsay or ignore the doctrine of ecological survivability. Invariably they offer up a purely economic justification for their decisions and actions that make no sense at all in the broader context of the real world we live in. We believe those people are a minority and should not prevail over the will of the majority or a super-majority in negatively affecting decisions. Critical decisions and actions about matters concerning the very inhabitability of our planet. Decisions and actions that are so imperative they are existential in nature. 

Due to the insidious rise in global temperature and associated changes in rainfall patterns, we are all but assured of more chaotic world events to come that will be unsettling to many life forms. The consequences of some of those events undoubtedly will result in further human displacements geographically, migration attempts and localized disruptions to peoples' health and livelihoods. It is also expected to result in further species being wiped out, threatened or endangered, so we have an ongoing loss of biodiversity. Unfortunately, even a modicum of average temperature increase of ocean water is believed to be sufficient to add an extra dollop of wallop to storm events. We are for accelerating the migration of millions of people from submerging island economies and very vulnerable, way-overpopulated countries such as Bangladesh and Haiti to other richer, higher elevation nations especially those still having relatively abundant ecological carrying capacity relative to the pollution and waste-stream load already being shouldered.

Unabated pollution and continuing deforestation, resulting in warming temperatures from rising greenhouse gas emissions, are already known to be have been primarily responsible for large-scale physical phenomena. This includes rearranging ocean currents; fracturing massive blocks of polar ice; affecting rainfall patterns leading to droughts and flooding; melting glaciers, perennial ice floes and ice sheets; triggering, with increased frequency, heat waves, thunderstorms, hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons and more. Its also quite clear now that the ongoing northward and southward expansion of the upper atmospheric jet streams is driven by some mass scale phenomena such as global increase in temperature and/or ozone depletion or holes at the poles of the Earth.

For more than a generation now, the intensity of cyclones has increased in tandem with the rising temperature of tropical and sub-tropical ocean water. Furthermore, we now have findings and analysis linking increases in average ocean surface temperature in the tropics to increases in very high cloud cover, in particular, storm clouds such as cirrus and nimbostratus, ones associated with high winds, heavy rainfall and hail. The problem is, as the sheer number of particles in the atmosphere proliferates due to various pollution, the gross volume of moisture in the air has remained about the same over time. Water in the air coalesces around the escalating number of available aerosols until a threshold is reached and water drops away. This phenomenon acts to delay the time when agriculturally-friendly light rainfall would normally commence. Instead, it comes later but as heavy rain that may disrupt and wash away seeds, crops and more. In eastern China, for two generations the incidence of desirable light rain has been decreasing by about one-weeks-worth per decade. The culprit: people are pointing at air pollution and there is little in the way of credible alternative explanations.

Storms including hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons, etc. have been widely-reported as being of greater intensity when they occur now that global warming is upon us. Observers of weather patterns have been noticing the ever-increasing frequency with which ocean surface waters in various areas heat then cool then heat again. Episodes of greater evaporation of warmer water into the atmosphere are followed too-often by downpours and flash flooding in the direction the weather system moves. More heat is trapped in the air due to the increased water vapour content. Superimposing a relatively-steadily-rising average ambient temperature on this oscillation could one day transmogrify it leaving in our wake bodies of continuously-warmer water that trigger even more frequent and extreme flooding events. So the cycle escalates and repeats ever-faster. The specter of "continuous Copenhagen's" has apparently already arrived for many of us and is not far in the offing for many, many more.    

An extreme weather event and the associated calamity on average now occurs somewhere on Earth at least once a day, double the rate of just a few years ago. Oxfam estimates that by 2015 there will be 375 million people per year afflicted by extreme weather events, up from about 250 million per year currently. That's a rate of more than one million persons per day whose lives have spun out of control and been disrupted by insidious climate change phenomena beyond their control. 

In Africa alone over the past generation, the number of people afflicted by climate-change-induced natural disasters has doubled to nearly 20 million. 10 million of those have had their lives disrupted to the point that they have been displaced internally in their country. Food and water insecurity is widespread. The prospect that this phenomenon will continue and intensify in future is very real, even probable. In many localities, drought cycles have contracted from being many years apart to only several years or one year apart.

We risk triggering dangerous climate change and the attendant likely consequences of that warming, namely, widespread social unrest, calamity from spread of disease vectors and mass migration attempts by people from various hotspots. Yet another example of this may be the en masse migration of Mongolian nomadic herders into cities as a result of weather-induced disruption attributable to climate change. Nomadic pastoralists in Kenya have been giving up their traditional lives after recurring droughts felled too many of their animals and people. Similarly, reindeer and caribou herders near the Arctic have been devastated in recent times by the effects of warming that has already taken place in the north. This is happening to them currently even though they have been herding for their livelihood since about 1400 without any weather-related impacts to knock them out of herding permanently.

Another example could be intense water conflicts arising in Peru and Chile that have prompted miners to resort to pumping ocean water hundreds of kilometers into the Andes mountain ranges where their mineral and metal extraction and refining operations take place. All this work and infrastructure is required to avoid drawing any more water from watershed areas, a practice that had led to clashes with the local people who also depend on the groundwater, lakes and rivers.

Drought affected 120,000 people in Chile in 2008. Patagonian ice-fields of southern Chile have been shrinking alarmingly as temperatures have risen in the area by about one degree Celsius over the past century. Recent times has seen the worst drought in Chile in 50 years. If the dots are being connected here, it appears that huge coal-fired power plant slated for construction in Totoral, Chile is not such a good idea .

In recent years, we have had prolonged drought in southern and Western Australia, parts of Ukraine, Russia, Chile, Peru and Uruguay, southern Brazil and northern Argentina, Ethiopia, Somalia, northern Yemen, the Sahel belt region of Africa, southern Madagascar, northern Uganda, northern Kenya, Tajikistan, central and northern China, Nepal, Bangladesh, parts of India, Cyprus, southern Iraq, eastern Syria, Jordan, regions of Turkey and Spain, eastern Guatemala, a significant area of Mexico, southwestern USA and more. Scientists further worry that this increased dryness is a phenomenon that results in further releases of greenhouse gas, amplifying the impact and tacking on yet another incremental contribution to global warming. This is despite the fact that less water vapour in the stratosphere and the presence of more black carbon in the atmosphere both act to mask the actual extent of greenhouse gas forcing by 20% to 80% thereby limiting the temperature rise that has occurred. Various junk particles in the air block or reflect some sunlight back into space just as sulfate aerosols and other releases from a spewing volcano would act to cool the earth below the shroud of matter ejected from it.  

Any fires, intentionally or naturally-started add to the calamity as more smoke and soot further reduces rainfall and incrementally increases temperature. Thereafter, the risk of more fires rises with any increase in temperature and evaporation or reduction in rainfall. Australia added its quota of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere for the entire year of 2009 even before the first quarter ended thanks to contributions from rampaging wild bushfires. We've seen scientific studies attesting to the distinct possibility of centuries-long drought locked-in some areas of the world if humanity does not very-soon-now get a grip on the rising global temperature scalar field. Multi-year drought affecting the Horn of Africa region has had particularly gruesome consequences for people many of whom have become destitute and malnourished. Waterholes have not replenished, camels are down, croplands are dust and starvation is a very real worry for millions of people. Philippines has suffered a kind of revolving drought that has set in every three or four years since 1998-1999.

Rampant desertification crowds out people and arable land once used for grazing and farming. Internal migration begins as it has in many countries in Africa. Even with a static worldwide population, this phenomena of creeping desertification eventually leads to greater anthropogenic pressure to deforest other areas to in-effect replace or make-up for the shortfall arising from other regions whose usefulness was wiped-out by advancing sand dunes and parched lands.

The rate of change in global temperature may now be greater than at any time over the last 50 million years. Lake Baikal in Siberia contains nearly one-fifth of the world's fresh water. It has warmed by 1.2 degrees Celsius in just over 60 years. The Tibetan Plateau has warmed by 1.5 degrees Celsius in 50 years and Alaska by about the same amount in a similar time period according to independent records and research of the China Meteorological Administration and Alaska Climate Research Center, respectively. A significant portion of the Earth's surface in polar and high-altitude areas has already surpassed the two degree Celsius threshold of temperature increase since the 1800's. The Met Centre weather office in UK has reported loss of snow cover of 5% over a 20 year period, that's in less than a generation. If we don't get our act together soon, northern climates in Russia, Canada, United States, Scandinavia and more will rise by the end of this century by something like eight degrees Celsius relative to pre-Industrial times. The consequences of this in producing further releases of greenhouse gases are very likely, virtually-unavoidably, to become staggering as ice, snow, hydrates and permafrost soil and frozen layers with high organic content melt, absorbing more and more heat and releasing more and more methane and carbon dioxide.

Moreover, there is considerable evidence of reduced day-night temperature variations in many parts of the world which may be causing autumn leaves to lose their brilliant orange, red, yellow and burgundy colors. Soot coated with sulphuric acid, hydrochloric acid, nitogen dioxide and the like causes a brownish-colored haze in the atmosphere that reflects sunlight and reduces overnight cooling of air masses beneath it. Besides black carbon particulates there is the dark junk of carbon-rich oil droplets, jet and diesel fuel combustion particulates, tire, wood and dung combustion residues and metal particles, too. Coalesced around these various aerosols may be invisible greenhouse gases. All this pollution affects formation of clouds and hinders or lessens the chances of rainfall. When the rains finally do come, it occurs increasingly in the modality of a torrential downpour. Unsurprisingly, this phenomenon results in the swamping of storm sewer systems and greater incidence of severe flash flooding events. Flash floods are well-known to be associated with mayhem including spread of sewage and industrial waste, loss of potable water, destruction of crops, proliferation of bacteria and viruses, loss of property or lives and various other disruptions and tragic consequences.

We are now at about 394 parts per million (ppm) in our atmosphere of carbon dioxide at the far north Svalbard station of Norway although Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii reported 387 ppm in January, 2009 so there is some spatial variation in readings. This is an appalling number considering that until the Industrial Revolution started in the 1800's the concentration in the air of one greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, was generally below 284 ppm. This latter level is believed to have been the highest level of carbon dioxide for at least 650,000 years and our primordial Earth had levels that have already been found to be as low as 175 ppm.

Of course, there are many other greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. When we include ones like methane, nitrous oxide, tropospheric ozone and hydrofluorocarbons we are well over 400 ppm carbon dioxide- equivalent in the current concentration of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. Some reliable sources put the current concentration of all heat-trapping gases in the air at 420 ppm CO2 equivalent but it could well be even higher. We have seen 460 ppm equivalent cited, too. Concentrations of methane are now at about 1800 parts per billion in the atmosphere, a level more than double the amount present for at least 500,000 years. Over the past generation alone, methane concentration in the atmosphere has risen by 10%. A given molecule of methane may only last about half a generation in the air, unfortunately, spread over a generation its heat-trapping potential is 60 to 70 times greater than carbon dioxide. We further have reactive nitrogen compounds to contend with. Some scientists are warning their impact is similarly-devastating. Furthermore, the high concentrations of carbon dioxide or methane and certain nitrogen compounds are being implicated in formation of oceanic dead zones.

We oppose the ceiling for carbon dioxide of 455 ppm cited by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as being too lax. This is a level whereupon coastal cities around the global would be at severe risk of being inundated. Unfortunately, something like one-third of humanity currently live less than 10 meters above yesterday's mean sea level. Moreover, oceans would be too acidic for most coral reefs at 450 ppm CO2. Based on the opinion of Britain's former chief scientific advisor, a level of 450 ppm of carbon dioxide results in odds of about four to one that we will have a temperature rise of four degrees Celsius by 2050. We would add to that a 50% probability of a three degree Celsius rise over pre-industrial levels. Of course, we still have the other greenhouse gases to worry about too not to mention pollution generally. Other pollutants may well be shown to contribute to global warming or some other aberration of climate such as the frequency or duration of drought or heat waves, the intensity of storms or to affect cloud formation or ocean current circulation.

350 ppm of carbon dioxide is a much more realistic level to be at if we want to ensure our planet is inhabitable for succeeding generations. Coral reefs almost-certainly will be beyond hope of recovery, indeed will be in-line for continued degradation unless we get back to somewhere approaching the 350 ppm level. Furthermore, we do not know the level at which polar ice sheets may break down and collapse but we do have evidence that if we go beyond that tipping point level for too long it may be too late because belatedly cutting back to 350 ppm thereafter may not save very much of those precious frozen fresh water masses.

We are wondering how with less than seven billion people on the earth now generating waste-streams, what about the 35% to 40% increase in emissions by 2050 as a result solely of the population explosion, ceteris paribus, when the global population is said by demographers to likely approach nine to 9.5 billion people? This means for example that if you cut back pollution by 50% by 2050, the average polluting individual "point source" will have to cut back by much more than 50% to achieve the overall 50% reduction. According to our simple calculation, all else being equal, it would be effectively a 70% cutback on a per capita basis that is needed. If by 2050 say, this ole' Earth can only handle 20 billion tonnes or so per year more greenhouse gases to avoid high fever, we are looking at only two tonnes per year per person on a planet with 10 billion souls. Or is five billion people more realistic? This is why we think it's far easier to start now reducing population growth in many jurisdictions or we'll be having to face a severely-reduced quality of life for the huddled masses. Our Earth and ecosystems react to absolute quantities not to a relative measure calculated on a per capita basis. Worse, as deglaciation, deforestation and desertification increase, the absolute quantities of various pollutants the Earth can successfully grapple with and assimilate is apt to decrease. This means it's inevitable the ecological carrying capacity of our Earth will be such that a sharply-lower number of people can be supported than the four and a half billion or so that may now be able to live successfully in a state of quasi-sustainable equilibrium with the planet. We have seen estimates by authoritative people that this life support figure could ultimately dip as low as one billion people who can survive and prosper on Earth. It is not said to be most likely but it is conceivable.

Interpretations of recent NASA satellite data reveal that global sea levels are rising 50% faster than was the case only 15 years ago. Global warming increases the rate of organic decay and ice melt thereby increasing the albedo or darker surface area which is then expected to result in enhanced warming. To the extent that sea ice melts and thins and coniferous boreal forests spread north into tundra regions, the associated increase in dark matter and water much darker than snow and ice reduces the reflectivity of sunlight at the earth's surface relative to what it was previously thereby accelerating the warming process. Dust, soot and other particulates from pollution around the world may end up settling on ice and snowpack, darkening the surface area further. Water temperature anomalies of as much as seven degrees Celsius have been recorded in the Beaufort Sea near Alaska and air temperature anomalies of five degrees Celsius above the Eastern Siberian Shelf. Spring melting in the Beaufort Sea area of the western Arctic has been found to be occurring some two weeks earlier in recent times than it did merely a generation ago.And we are still not through facing up to the full magnitude of potential or likely temperature increases. Alarmingly, a five or six degree Celsius temperature increase has already occurred on average in midwinter in the Antarctic Peninsula. Rain is becoming more frequent here which further contributes to lubricating, refreezing, cracking, heaving, bursting and calving of ice and, of course, to enhanced melting. The average time per year the ocean has ice proximal to the peninsula has dropped by a full three months over a generation. Across the greater expanse of West Antarctica the average temperature has risen by more than half a degree Celsius in less than two generations. In less than a generation, at least six Antarctic ice shelves have collapsed and disappeared. Remember what you were doing in 2000? Seems like the blink of an eye ago and it most certainly is when talking about geologic time intervals. Nevertheless, in that brief time span, the outlook for "m" amount of melting to occur on Pine Island of West Antarctica is for that melting to occur not over more than half a millennium as was thought in 2000 but rather in less than a century. This revision involves not a factor of six, not two. 

What's more, as ice calving and ice tongue melting occurs at greater scale due to warming water and air above and below the ice mass, there may be less frictional resistance and inertia to follow-on cracking and conveyor of huge hunks of ice shelves seaward. Even the bluest ice, that which survived centuries intact, may now be seen crashing into the Arctic Ocean and melting away in the saltwater in less time than a fortnight. The impact from collapsing ice sheets can be so powerful it sometimes constitutes a newly-recognized type of earthquake epicenter. Less than a generation ago, most earth scientists would have balked at the thought of seeing glaciers move with the naked eye. Nowadays, its undeniable that it is happening in some places. The creepiest part may be what we cannot see, that which is taking place at the base of ice flows. Unfortunately in Antarctica, we already have news about this gleaned from satellite data analysis of glacial lakes beneath land-based ice sheets. The problem is that the extent of melting ice can be detected but exactly where the meltwater is going sometimes cannot be. This prompts the worry that perhaps it is accumulating as a lubricative layer of great areal extent at the base of ice masses. Such a phenomenon, if it is occurring, would increase the likelihood of huge volumes of ice creeping, in effect sliding slowly, into the ocean and eventually melting there resulting in a substantial further rise in global sea level.

If you like rolls of the dice, it's now said there is already a 50% chance, that is, half a certainty that the Greenland ice sheet will melt in its entirety, an event that over many decades would result in worldwide sea level rise of about seven meters. Warming of a cumulative 1.9 degrees Celsius could conceivably trigger meltdown of all Greenland's ice irretrievably. It has been thousands of years since the massive Ilulissat glacier of Greenland has been as small as it is now and there are already far-reaching changes taking place in Greenland as a result of global warming. It is known that melting in 2008 was three times greater than what occurred during 2007. Scientists also point out that the surface area in Greenland undergoing melting has increased by more than half in less than a decade. Beyond gainsay regarding the fate of Greenland, many scientists have cited a five meter rise of global sea level being entirely-possible sometime this century, although magnitudes up to perhaps-half that amount are still considered to be the mainstream of expert opinion and advice.

Arctic sea ice has disappeared by one-third in a generation or so. Moreover, the remaining ice has become noticeably thinner, weaker and greasier in its luster. Dark specks of various pollutants are evident. The Norwegian International Polar Year Secretariat has said that if Norway's average temperature in 2008 is merely as warm as the prior year, that conceivably could be enough to melt the Arctic ice cap in the summer of 2008 but it did not happen that year. British scientists said Arctic ice was melting even during the winter of 2008. Arctic Ocean temperatures were reported for October, 2008 to be as much as five Celsius degrees warmer than the norm. The cause of melting could well be an increase in temperature of water below the ice. Ice that did form during winter of 2008 was weak and thin thereby setting up the Arctic potentially for some very sorry follow-on summers of colossal melting. Reports are that three-quarters of Arctic ice is thin, seasonal ice whereas a generation ago less than half of it melted and refroze each year. Some researchers claim it to be about 75% probable the north pole will be sea-ice free some time before 2020. In other words, the cumulative probability of this sorry melting event happening is 0.75 by 2020 (a probability value of 1.00 would imply the occurrence of that event is certain). Apparently, most scientists studying the problem believe the time frame for melting of virtually all northern sea ice is most likely to be about a generation from now. When and if Arctic sea ice does melt, it will be the first time this occurred in at least 100,000 years. If it happens, the Arctic Ocean is expected to continue being free of ice every summer thereafter.

Worldwide, the rate of melting of alpine glaciers has more than doubled over the prior generation. Tropical glaciers on several continents including the Andes in South America and Ruwenzori in southern Africa may be gone completely in less than a generation, perhaps in as little as 15 years. Glacier melting ongoing in Central Asia and, in particular, across the Himalayas, will at some point result in disastrous debris falls, mudslides, flooding then follow-on drought and consequently, reduced crop yields. Snowpack of large areas of the Himalayas has been lost at an average rate of about 1% per year for a generation now. Himalayan glaciers are retreating at a pace of 10 to 20 meters per year from Kashmir to Tibet. Run-off from Himalayan glaciers feeds most of the water for nine major rivers in the region including the Ganges, Indus, Sianyan, Muntushun, Irrawaddy, Mekong, Brahmaputra, Yellow and Yangtze Rivers. Conceivably, this ice could all be melted before 2049, though it is more likely to occur sometime during the latter half of this century. In Bhutan, many glaciers now recede at a rate of 30 to 35 meters per year. Sounds to us like a recipe for epic chaos and misery given the staggering number of people in Indochina alone who could be victimized by such phenomena. Towering temperate climate mountain ranges including the Alps, Rockies and Pyrenees are said to be in-line to lose most awe-inspiring snow and ice caps before mid-century. Records and data regarding Glacier National Park in USA show that as many as seven of every eight glaciers that existed in pre-industrial times there are history today. Kaput, gone. The worst part of all this glacial melting is the stark realization that a retreat of glaciers and snowpack around this Earth generally constitutes unequivocal, physical evidence and independent proof that global warming is upon us. All that polar and terrestrial ice is our stored fresh water supply; all alpine glacier and snowpack melt-water that ends up in the ocean becomes part of our salt water supply (guess which one we like to drink).

Watch that ice cube in your water while casting an eye on your timepiece. Melting ice cubes and glaciers are not linear processes through time of volume, thickness nor linear extent. Rather, conversion of solid to liquid typically begins relatively-slowly during every seasonal glacier-melting episode. As time goes by, ice bonds and the lattice progressively weaken. Net phase changes of H2O increase in aging, pollution-gray glaciers with rise in average ambient global temperature, a phenomenon that is particularly acute in polar and high-altitude regions today. Old ice that melts in any given year is generally not being replaced by an equal or greater amount of new ice. Nor are weakened glaciers restrengthened back to the condition of one year prior. Ask any civil engineer about this. So every year old ice weakens further and more net melting occurs. Both phenomena are the consequence of global warming that is upon us. We believe pretty well any solid state physicist will concur with us that the extent of glacier ice melting and phase change of H2O generally are nonlinear functions of time today in our natural world. Pass along data from 2009 regarding melting, including a startling 1% to 2% or more net loss in the overall thickness of many glaciers, and ask the physicist how long the remaining mass is likely to last. The answer of "another three and a half centuries" sounds very much like a fairy tale to us.

These observations are decidedly not welcome news but we believe it is far better and more responsible to be aware and ready to face it than to be a cavalier, ecological risk-taker angling and arguing for others to share in the inevitable consequences of their risky behaviors. Capitalism and markets never intended there to be schemes to develop such as they have whereby profit-taking is privatized to shareholders whilst material risks associated with the project producing the profit are socialized. Also, various commercial interests fail to disclose the true nature of the risks their investors and financiers may unwittingly and regretfully find themselves party to. This appears to us to have occurred with many pollution-generating activities and has culminated in the proliferation of various ecological risks that society generally has to deal with now and buck-up for. In some cases, the private interest responsible no longer exists in a legal sense so it becomes a cost to society by default because there is no entity to pursue to perform the reclamation or at least attempt to recover the expenses involved.

Additional information has become public recently that wave height, at least in the Pacific Ocean, has been increasing progressively over the past generation. But we do not know why yet. Waves are now nearly one-half meter higher than they once were and coastal erosion and flooding has increased accordingly. Clearly, storm and tidal surge events will not be as romantic in future as they once were.

So we still have rising greenhouse gases overall on Earth. Couple that with the observation that historically we have relied on the land and water to absorb about half of those emissions naturally, the other half destined to remain in the atmosphere for great lengths of time. Many generations may pass and our current emissions may still be in the air we breathe. Trouble is, now we realize that not only have about half the world's rainforests been decimated over time but now apparently the capacity of marine water to absorb carbon dioxide has been reduced by about half as well. Feeling nauseous from factors of two not going in your favor? Here's another one: Following careful longitudinal study involving all kinds of trees spanning western North America, the rate of capitulation has been found to be double the norm. The phenomenon is being attributed to global warming and the extended, locked-down drought it appears to be causing. Still standing? Here's another: Global demand for energy is expected to double in a generation driven by booming population growth, increased urbanization and consumption.

Some scientists have cited a possible six centigrade degree rise globally by about 2050 if the capacity of oceans, flora and the atmosphere to absorb and utilize carbon dioxide diminishes over time because much more greenhouse gas could remain in the atmosphere or be expelled from the ocean back into the air. Extra heat in the water is likewise released back into the atmosphere. It is now known that as the temperature of marine water increases, its capacity to absorb carbon dioxide diminishes. For example, this may contribute to disruption of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation. There are already results from EU-sponsored research on the North Atlantic showing that in as little as 13 years, the earth's ability to utilize atmospheric carbon dioxide in that area has been reduced by one-eighth overall due to reduced capacity of this ocean water to uptake carbon dioxide by a factor of about one half. Likewise, recent results from Sea of Japan showed that uptake of carbon dioxide this millennium so far was only one-half that of a comparable time frame during the 1990's. The cause for that phenomenon was judged to be less vertical ventilation, mixing and overturning circulation in the sea. As the acidity of oceans increases shell-forming organisms have difficulty in the changing milieu and sequester less carbon from the water into their shells. Additionally, as nitrogen and nitrate concentrations increase in marine water, there is less ability of organisms and the physical environment to utilize it. This may lead to more algal blooms and marine dead zones. As global warming builds momentum, we can expect less interchange of layers of the ocean. Ocean currents deliver less oxygen and carbon dioxide to greater depths and the absorption capacity for ever-more carbon dioxide to come out of the atmosphere and into near surface water is thereby constrained. Gross concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by some 5% overall in the past 50 years or so. We interpret all this as a dire warning that we are functioning in an unsustainable mode. Any time, the carbon cycle could start to break down incrementally.  

Further, we have a selection of "wild cards", so-called because the effects associated with these phenomena are apt to be potentially very significant and can occur rather abruptly. However, there is currently large uncertainty associated with forecasts of the processes involved. For example, we have a peat lands wild card to contend with. This threat is illustrated well by recent findings from the Japan Agency for Marine Earth Science and Technology. They report that a four degree Celsius rise in average temperature proximal to peat lands would drive the release of anywhere from about 40% to 85% of the existing, vast carbon content of peat, the expected percentage amount being dependent on the depth of burial of the peat below the surface.  

Another wild card is large-scale deep melting of northern tundra, frozen soil permafrost areas, crystallized methane in soil, and/or methane clathrates, icy hydrate nodules beneath the ocean floor containing frozen methane gas. Plateau areas such as the Tibetan Plateau also may contain vast quantities of combustible ice, methane in an icy hydrate state. A global warming-induced melting event or regional temperature increase may result in possibly-gargantuan releases of methane and carbon dioxide greenhouse gas into the atmosphere where it would then be available to trap heat and contribute to further incremental global temperature rise. Recent thorough research across the Arctic has determined the permafrost soil there contains about twice as much organic remains, microbes and potential climate-warming gases as heretofore had been recognized. According to geophysical research from the University of Alaska, the upper three meters of permafrost store nearly two trillion tonnes of carbon, more than double the amount in our atmosphere today. As much as one-half of that is said to be within one to 1.5 degrees Celsius of wholesale thawing. Their estimate is that if only 1% of permafrost carbon were to be released each year that much alone could double the current worldwide amount of carbon emissions. After a decade of such releases, other research estimates that scenario would result in another 80 ppm worth of carbon dioxide-equivalent escaping into the atmosphere causing perhaps another 0.7 degree Celsius average warming of our planet. In addition, as temperature increases overall, more permafrost oscillates with increasing frequency between a frozen and partially-thawed or melted state. Unfortunately, due to the legacy of agricultural chemical residues present in a lot of ice, the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide is also released in the process. 

Methane levels more than 100 times greater than background levels of methane have been measured over hundreds of square kilometers in the Laptev and East Siberian Seas. Places have been found where ten times as much permafrost has melted in less than a generation than occurred there over the prior 1000 years. As ambient temperature has risen historically, the depth at which methane hydrate nodules and plumes become unstable and  melt thereby releasing methane into the ocean has been changing. The level at which such phase changes occur has been descending ever-deeper into the Earth at a rate of about one extra meter downwards per year for at least a generation. The implications here may be far-reaching because the volume of methane-laden hydrates that may potentially-dissolve further acidifying our oceans and adding more heat-trapping gas into the atmosphere is ratcheting ever-upwards as time goes by. Some scientists that study ice ages over geologic time claim that melting methane hydrates are the leading suspects for, or were the primary cause of, climate warming, retreat of glaciers and loss of fresh water stores that affected ancient environments.

Increases in methane may also be attributed to deep-sea viral activity. It appears that as we continue with our wanton polluting, we are upsetting the biochemical balance in the oceans and one major consequence is that bacteria are proliferating at the expense of oxygen-producing phytoplankton. As bacteria breaks down an organic compound called methylphosphonates, water is becoming supersaturated with methane such that methane concentration eventually becomes greater in the surface water than the air. This concentration gradient ensures that more methane will escape into the atmosphere than otherwise would be the case. We can ill-afford this happening as methane is already the number two greenhouse gas with an overall impact on global warming already about one-third that of carbon dioxide. Moreover, it persists longer in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

There have been reports of methane releases from the Arctic Ocean into the atmosphere possibly as a result of warming of the water. The methane may be originating from heretofore frozen hydrates at or near the ocean floor that are starting to melt and form methane gas chimneys piping up from below. But also, as once-frozen organic matter is increasingly set free and washed away by melt water, it tends to end up on the ocean floor. There, microbes feed on it in an anaerobic process that generates carbon dioxide and methane. The extent to which methanotroph or methane-metabolizing bacteria could slow submarine methane releases in polar regions is not well understood. Also largely-unknown is relying on ocean water density gradients to block or deflect the rise of large amounts of methane from near the ocean floor from possibly reaching the surface and bubbling out of solution into the atmosphere. 

Further, we also have a kind of background level of methane gas from decayed organic matter that comes into the air due to soil degradation generally. Release of more greenhouse gases on a lagged basis, perhaps up to a decade, occurs from many soil types in the vicinity of prior deforested areas. There are also now reports from scientists who connect the two prior phenomenon together. The reasoning is that the reduced albedo or reflectivity of sunlight in the northern polar region warms the ocean more than previously had been the case. Then, with the onset of seasonally cooler temperatures, due to the temperature gradient the extra heat rises out of the water. This unusually warm mass of air may end up far inland and conceivably it may enhance the amount of methane gas released from permafrost areas. So there is a kind of natural, positive feedback loop established resulting in ever-higher levels of heat-trapping emissions.

There are several other follow-on or higher order effects from global warming and increased pollution. Any phenomenon that may very well cause amplification of global warming are decidedly not good news. Some of those effects may be partly behavioral as people react to various weather-induced calamities. For example, where drought persists, more land may be cleared or burned in an attempt to compensate for the loss of productivity of other parched lands. Oilsands tailings ponds wastewater leaks into the surrounding area poisoning fish and stunting the growth of vegetation. This reduces the capacity of the boreal forest to act as a carbon sink further beyond that associated with extensive felling of trees to strip-mine for raw bitumen. Peat bog wetlands destroyed during strip-mining have never been restored and the outlook for being able to do so in future is all but nonexistent because we do not have tens of thousands of years to wait for proxy wetlands to form.

Any trend higher in global temperature has many ramifications including increased drying of forests, peat lands, croplands and grazing areas, increased tendency for desertification to advance and increased humidity in the air from evaporation arising from incremental warming. The incidence of wildfires will increase as average ambient temperature rises causing a further outgushing of emissions and possibly fire-retardant chemicals containing bromine or chlorine. This phenomenon is already clearly at work in boreal forest regions. Rampaging bushfires in Australia, California and elsewhere spook many people. The potential drying out of some Amazon Rainforest is characterized as a serious, potential wild card that we do not want to tip into. Some say the heat-trapping properties of water vapor in the stratosphere could effectively deliver a double-whammy of global heating relative to the effect on temperature from greenhouse gases assuming no additional moisture in the atmosphere. Increases in temperature increase evaporation from soil moisture and water bodies and evapo-transpiration from vegetation which then is available to trap more heat. This tendency is offset to some extent if it rains back down or if increased cloud cover reflects more incoming infrared radiation back toward the sun.

Another freaky wild-card scenario is if large quantities of soot and sulfates that have accumulated in the upper atmosphere at stratospheric heights, mostly from burning fossil fuels, were to be reduced, clear or be cleaned away somehow. If that transpired, scientists say, based on presently-observed concentrations of black carbon and sulfates there, thermometers could rise by about another 0.9 degrees Celsius. The effect on temperature of the long term recovery of the ozone hole above Antarctica is quite uncertain presently but very well could augment warming. All this tells us that on the climate change front we are in a deeper "hole" than we thought before recognition of these phenomenon. We believe we have to face up to it because getting rid of these mostly man-made aerosol pollutants to curtail acid rain and for other prudent reasons is advisable. We have to treat the underlying disease (too much pollution) not the symptoms (a secondary effect or aggravating factor arising from pollutants the presence of which happens to result in an incremental decrease in global temperature).

Unfortunately, especially troubling is the proliferation of dark-colored soot deposited over the ages on snowpack and ice causing more and more sunlight to be absorbed as opposed to being reflected. Black carbon and foreign pollutants of various kinds that have been deposited in ice over the years are invariably darker than the host ice meaning more heat is retained in that ice than otherwise would be the case so the ice is more likely to melt. Paradoxically, black carbon tends to augment or concentrate heat locally even if its coated with sulfate. So if that gunk were cleared from the lower troposphere around the world, that is, in the air nearest the surface of the Earth, that may, depending on the particle density of aerosols, proximity to the Earth's surface and other factors, actually reduce global warming in the short term. Needless to say, we are for getting rid of soot and atmospheric brown clouds in their entirety regardless of the climate consequences. It's better to confront this aspect of our vast pollution problems squarely and forthwith and grab the wholesale health benefits of ridding as much particulate matter as we can.

We understand its only the troposhere, not the stratosphere that has so far been implicated in global warming. Obviously this leads credence to the view that variation in activity of the sun is not the primary cause of global warming as some stock portfolio-value change deniers, excuse us, climate-change deniers claim.

Now, setting aside the potential contributions arising from any of these wildcards, let's add up the global average temperature rise increments again. On a preliminary basis at least, we now want to take stock of the situation even if it is done grossly on the back of an envelope using basic probability concepts. Finished? Do you think that number is now enough of a warning to give us all pause? Prominent US researchers have recently reported greater than 90% likelihood by 2100 that low temperatures in tropical and subtropical areas then will be hotter than high temperatures of the past 15 years or so. This is decidedly not good news for agricultural productivity. Across Southeast Asia people are already smarting from the possibility that crop yields of rice paddies will diminish by 50% or so perhaps as soon as 2020 due primarily to climate change, in particular, to increase in ambient temperature.

We agree the dictates, time-lines, complexities and imperatives in achieving a low-carbon global economy will require an impartial, multilateral, "war room" institution of some kind. From Rio de Janeiro to Ho Chi Minh City and Ouagadougou; from Guadalajara then Thessaloniki to Philadelphia past Thiruvananthapuram, the world is, at once, spinning rapidly yet standing by, looking out for solutions. The influence of politics should be minimized to avoid deadlock and overly-partisan non-cooperation. We further do not believe the vast majority of citizens in many countries yet understand, or sense how it could be, that we are all in the "slow bake" of global warming. The gravity of the situation is not abundantly-clear to most of them yet. We believe many citizens remain only dimly-aware of the consequences and have not yet connected the dots. Perhaps their local government representative is not inclined to do that for them. As more and more people come to realize the severity of the situation and what it means for their own lives and future generations, we think they will become increasingly upset with politicians of all persuasions which is not good. That is another reason to depoliticize the entire issue and promote effective, independent, measured responses to the myriad significant ramifications of climate change that seem to be popping up on a daily basis.

We believe the discourse has to center on the physical and chemical impacts and the ways to curtail same. As soon as the debate emphasizes strategic, economic or business matters the potential for crafting sub-optimal and ineffective solutions increases. This is not a kind of competitive situation involving sectors, industries or countries. We, we being all of us, are up against the Earth here so to speak, and we think we have pushed the Earth too far. We all know the power of the Universe is vastly beyond us, so hopefully we can all agree not to try to oppose it. If we are carrying on in a way the Earth "doesn't like", then let's stop it now before things get ugly for us all. Pollution is a global multi-headed hydra that must be contained and slain by us all. We have breaking news for aggressive industrialists with little grasp of science who, at all costs, endeavour to persist in riding roughshod over Mother Nature: Noone can win a duel with a planet so give it up now before it's too late.

Given the gravity of the situation, no country should be sitting back waiting on others to do something, even if jurisdiction is uncertain or historical responsibility appears to be less. Our great-great grandpappy may well have been a snake-plus-coal oil salesman. But we do not really want to claim or bear responsibility for what some boorish ancestor did or did not do with respect to our natural environment. Education was lacking back then. When the nature of the difficulty becomes so crystal clear as it is today, the time for mitigation has arrived for everyone. There is no place remaining on Earth where someone can go and not be affected by, and see the effects from, global warming and pollution. So we all have responsibility to try our best to slow, halt and reverse-out of our collective ecological mess. It's going to take a very high degree of diligence and cooperation to pull-off all the remedial actions required.

On the high seas in the here and now, we have reprehensible burning of heavy marine bunker fuel oil by ships which by virtue of how "cheap" it is. Yet marine traffic now constitutes about 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Some worry emissions from the shipping industry are actually much higher. It's also responsible for about 10% of acid rain and a vast amount of ground level ozone. One report blamed the soot, fine particulate matter, sulfur oxide, sulphate, various nitrogen oxides and non-combusted fuel from ships as being directly linked to about 60,000 deaths annually from respiratory diseases, cancer and heart problems. Tugboats gush one gram of soot for every 1000 grams of fuel-sludge they burn. Hopefully, emissions control areas surrounding various countries will force ship operators to upgrade to cleaner fuels and more efficient engines.

Much mercury that was released into the air during combustion of various dirty fuels including, in particular, coal has been deposited over time into ice. As the ice melts, that mercury likely ends up in the melt water finding its way to the ocean. Ultimately, is ingested by marine life forms and later perhaps also by us as we enjoy our seafood. Of course, the mercury content in potentially-pervasive products such as compact fluorescent light bulbs has an additional dollop of mercury that is now emerging as another fly in the ointment in our quest for ecological utopia.

How exactly to reduce environmental entropy and chaos and all ways to pullback the forward arrow of time that exists as per the second law of thermodynamics should be growth industries in science and technology in our society. But there exists a kind of communication vacuum partly because scientists tend not to involve themselves in public policy debates or dialogue with an industry association or arguments with firm "f". We've noticed that too often environmental issues are painted by otherwise responsible and sensible people as acceptable costs for others to bear in the wake of their pursuit of some shop-worn commercial activity. Their pursuit of profit is downplayed publicly. The justification given for their actions by public relations people is invariably that they provide jobs in the "real" world. However, as a green investment advisory, we counter that our Earth and its ecosytems constitutes the lion's share of the corporeal world accessible to us. Whereas the economy is a construct of ourselves, an arts subject. The paradigms of economics are changing over time as we become more knowledgeable about what the discipline of economics should embody to promote more precisely the enduring wealth and welfare of us all. For example, more comprehensive measures of Gross National Product have been called for; the European Union is taking actions to make such changes evolve faster.

To illustrate the opportunity costs involved, consider the bad case scenario that this century a maximum of about 500 billion tonnes of carbon emissions can enter the atmosphere globally to keep the Earth's temperature from rising more than two to 2.5 degrees Celsius. Given such a limitation, the burning of any and all coal, coal-to-liquids, coal-to-gas, charcoal, coal tar, bitumen, heavy oil, shale oil, residual oil, petroleum coke, fossil diesel, asphaltene, kerogen, kerosene, oily-gasoline, rubber tires, plastic, dung, wood, wood tar, creosote, sludge and bunker fuel is setting us back because we are reaching the limit of all fossil fuel burning much faster by not eliminating the dirtiest, low-end energy sources forthwith. For example, liquefied coal discharges 40% more carbon than oil when combusted. Shut all the high-carbon fuels down. Even some coal-bed methane and shale gas may have to be forgone ultimately if the carbon content is too high or emissions associated with development and production are too blue. Or the environmental consequences from intensive use of water and noxious reservoir hydrofracturing chemicals perhaps including any of benzene, toluene, xylene, diesel-based fluids, kerosene, acids, sulfates, chlorides and solvents generally proves too much for this old earth to safely assimilate.

How is it going to be possible to reduce emissions by at least 2% every year from now until at least 2050 if we are not ratcheting-down, phasing-out and eliminating carbon-intensive projects? Surely, we cannot go on like this. The spooky thing is, despite the eco-cacophony that is already upon this Earth due to eco-risk gambling purveyors of high-carbon energy and products, most of those firms involved are yet-still angling forward with production growth plans together with lobbying pressure on governments and politicians to have the general public help them pay for reclamation and other environmental damage they are wreaking. Their shareholders extract the profits and those firms make valiant attempts to deal the environmental havoc to us. Such a corporate strategy reflects the attitudinal problems harbored by officers of those firms who continue to downplay and misrepresent the environmental risks associated with their operations to bureaucrats, politicians, potential investors, various media and the public.

They continue to play the job loss and/or energy security threat cards in order to attempt to perpetuate their operations, profits and values. However, we are not aware of studies outlining that fossil fuel energy companies are more labor intensive than renewable energy companies per megawatt of power delivered so what gives here? Old world fossil fuel jobs are going to be supplanted by renewable energy jobs and energy efficiency segment jobs. As the clean energy industry expands, eventually there will be a net gain in jobs and improvement in energy security as clean energy replaces dirty sources of energy.

The sun has billions of years of reserves from its nuclear fusion so the solar industry is presumably going to be a long-lived one. The Earth is expected to keep spinning on its axis of rotation for billions of years so our expectation is the wind industry has a bright future. Physicists tell us the gravitational constant is steady and gravitational forces will be strong for a long, long time, in particular, from our Moon so we can bank on tidal energy being with us. Subterranean geothermal energy sources and oceanic heat flow gradients have the potential to provide power for us all for untold millennia. Given all this, we are not sure we want to hear any more arguments and misinformation from tar sand and coal company executives with their grade school science background, lecturing the world that they have hundreds of years of reserves so only they can be counted on to provide energy security. What a charade! There are so many fallacies in those arguments how can it stand-up to rigorous scrutiny in our new millennium?

At this advisory, we learn literally on a daily basis of the spiraling number and pervasiveness of ecological risks we must grapple with going forward and somehow find a resolution to. The consequences of our collective indifference to eco-tragedy now unfolding and explained beyond any reasonable doubt in a growing number of locations on Earth affects virtually every economic actor out there today. Relevant, forthright explanations of those risks is not very clear in submissions by securities issuers to regulators around the world. Ecological survivability is a vital concept for investors to understand before they invest. The heat is coming on in various jurisdictions around the world for entities to pay for the full effects of their calamitous pollution, not to secretly or quietly offload those ramifications and costs on the general public while preserving the profits for themselves and their backers. 

We believe as more and more ecological disasters unfold, by and large it will be the Courts that will end up dealing with and terminating the mayhem being inflicted on our world by various careless, cavalier, caveman-like practices of carbon, water and energy intensive projects having grave environmental risks. If your carbon footprint is skywards, your use of land, water and energy is rapacious and people are becoming sick from the upstream and downstream implications from use of what you sell, what does that mean? It means it's a good time to push-off because your services are no longer of net benefit to society. Its the shut-'er-down card being played in economics now. As updated laws, rules and regulations come to the fore around the world, our bet is it will give judges the latitude to effectively enforce environmental protection. In China today, shutdown orders affecting the most seriously-polluting operators are happening all over the country as they strive to engineer a turnaround in ecological survivability. 

We say tax carbon merchants directly, hit the source of it. Force all the higher-carbon, lampblack junk out of the marketplace or phase it out by having producers, processors and consumers of dirty power pay heavy levies for the environmental calamity they are contributing to. One of many consequences of not doing so is to further constrain the use of comparatively clean energy sources in future such as natural gas. Natural gas is one-quarter to one-third cleaner than conventional oil and is only one-third to one-half as polluting as coal and heavy crude oil sources of energy. Studies have recently been published questioning the value of commissioning any new coal-fired power plant or of exploring for any more oil and gas. Why? The basic rationale was the Earth is already severely taxed by fossil fuel burning so we will not be able to utilize existing coal capacity or reserves of oil and gas before we have to stop using those energy sources altogether.

Apparently society also has to grapple with the outfall from extensive tar sands tailings and wastewater, sludge, coal ash landfills and holding ponds that at some point prior to ever being integrated safely into the dry landscape, leach and leak contaminants including arsenic, mercury, nickel, lead, selenium, sulphur and more into ground and surface waters. A new scare is coming from research conducted at New York University. Their findings support the notion that certain types of airborne particles are particularly deadly including nickel and vanadium. They found that surprisingly-low concentrations of these metals lodging in our airways may cause serious ailments and disease.

In general, to illustrate, we consider both importers and exporters of dirty fuel to be equally responsible for those pollutants that result from its combustion. Similarly, we think the country offering landing or docking rights for aircrafts and ships should jointly share in the allocation of emissions and discharges that arise from the flight or sailing with the country of origin for the trip. It takes two to tango and we believe social pressure to curtail and contain pollution will increase that much more if there exists this shared culpability. First it was California, then United States, then United States and Canada cracking down to eliminate the often-dreadful pollution emanating from ships. We hope similar changes spread around the world.

As worldwide population levels are expected to soar in the years to come, society will increasingly demand faster and faster replacement of faulty processes, products and services that degrade the environment. As human demands ratchet up on finite ecosystems, the margin for error in this regard will become progressively less as time goes by. We predict one phenomena now resisted by many governments, namely shelling out public monies to retrain and re-educate workers, will become imperative and routine for those laid off for the aforementioned reasons. We would see it as a welcome development socially. People should not have to listen to a chorus of self-centered whining, phony justification for continuance of perilous commercial activities, or complaining about job losses or lack of job increases that may occur in conjunction with ceasing some polluting, inferior business, segment or industry.

Spare us all from the disinformation, anxiety and angst that tends to come from lackey, slow-motion failing institutions; neurotic, unwieldy, weakly-competitive, retrenching corporations; grousing, displaced workers; concerned but parochial political figures who tend to lack scientific knowledge and grounding in the latest technologies; and/or troubled, overly-partisan industry associations who put themselves, their own ignorant, donkey-like self-interest and luxury, ahead of the world's vigilance regarding environmental externalities. 

Financiers or bankers "b" may help company "c" lobby government "g" for grants, tax breaks, subsidies, exemptions, research and development help, special treatment, etc. so the industrial player does not have to pay for the full pollution audit trail associated with their activities. Instead, inevitably, others "o" will. These corporations do not want to stop their pursuits because they do not want to get burned on their investments, retirement income or by hefty write-downs and write-offs of capital stock. There is no way out for them except to realize their losses which they refuse to accept doing so the entire ordeal is extended for a while longer. Until, of course, things get even worse environmentally than the current outlook.

The concept of an International Court with the requisite authority to preside over and prosecute matters affecting concerning global environmental and ecological impacts and issues is one whose time has come. The scope of how human-related activities are altering our world is unprecedented. The unwelcome news appears to be gathering in front of us hourly posing a litany of queries having as yet incomplete remedies and answers from ourselves collectively.

Send all those folks whose manpower is no longer needed a green slip to go back to school and the situation becomes win-win and win again for everyone affected. All the negative societal costs and implications from incremental environmental deterioration associated with the detrimental decisions and activities of atrophied, gray economic actors have been forgone. The entire Earth is incrementally less feverish as a result. Instead of claiming pink-slip type employment insurance benefits of some kind, all the parties involved here with the green slip have to deal with in this change of endeavor is to help with payment of tuition expenses and a stipend or other contribution towards a living allowance while the program of new, forward-looking studies takes place. We know there exists the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the United Nations. We call this the Green Education Mechanism (GEM). 

So far, we have come to the sorry conclusion that most resistance to change here arises from vested interests in energy-intensive undertakings. Heavy industry and other major polluters have historically relied on dirty energy sources. The only way momentum to cause these environmental externalities can persist for capital intensive, polluting industries is if there are a significant number of sizeable financial institutions profiting from backing them or government officials using a noble pretext such as the need to eradicate poverty and otherwise uplift the standard of living of the people. The error in those ways arises ominously and perhaps irretrievably soon as we conceive our greed-driven desire for more money or a higher standard of living is a particularly-human foible that may always be with us. By contrast, our empathetic desire to clean up, preserve and maintain our Earth and its living ecosystems is actually an imperative. If we collectively choose not to do it for whatever set of reasons, natural things and/or social upheaval could in places spin irretrievably beyond control. The distinction being, in the latter case, that desire cannot always be with us if we as a species or a society are no longer here to experience it. Rather, we have become one with meltwater and decomposing organic matter. 

We have many more current, troubling pollution, global warming, loss of biodiversity and deforestation related questions about stewardship of the Earth's environment and ecosystems including: First and foremost, the Earth, being multinational, probably is wondering if in our world of competing national interests, something is being missed by the custodians? Do we really want to realize at what point air begins leaking into outer space? Are we trying to test at what point the atmosphere, waterways, or flora and fauna including homo sapiens, cease up? Or, given that extinction of species are now occurring at least 100 times faster than has been natural or normal historically, are we underway with the 6th mass extinction of species, the 5th being when dinosaurs were wiped out? The last time our oceans were as acidic as they are projected to become very soon now, you guessed it, marked the end of the Cretaceous Period and the beginning of the next era of geologic time. At that juncture, 65 million years ago, only mammals resembling opossums existed. Proto-humans were not yet on the scene presumably due to the hostile nature of ancient environments prior to the advent of the current Cenozoic Era.

Do we really want to find out the hard way how the formation and dispersion of different types of clouds are affected by global warming? Especially if this brings us more frequent cumulonimbus storm and heat-trapping ones? Is cloud cover lessening as time goes on due to global warming? If yes, is it causing a positive feedback of further temperature increases due to enhanced penetration of incoming sunlight reaching the Earth's surface? Is the stage set for us to find out to what extent rainfall is curtailed as a result of having many more tiny pollution aerosol particles in the atmosphere for moisture to coalesce around? Do we really want to find out to what extent increases in atmospheric concentration of soot or methane gas alter monsoon cycles such as facilitating only torrential downpours, not more moderate ones? Worse, some fear as a consequence severe disruption and even cessation of critical monsoon cycles affecting Asia. These possible outcomes do not go down well with the tightening-yoke of widespread Himalayan glacier melting. 

Or do we really want to see how protein levels in staple food crops decrease as atmospheric carbon dioxide increases? Or to see how many countries dependent on rain for farming will have crop yields cut in half within a decade? According to the United Nations in 2009, there were already about one billion food-insecure, hungry people suffering from some degree of malnutrition.

How many methane out-gassing livestock can we coexist with? Do we realize rising temperatures make it less likely trees and other vegetation can withstand drought, pests and parasites? Do we really want to witness gray Acacia trees that have withered in yet-another African drought? Not to mention fire hazard risk that is escalating with every ratcheting-up of average ambient temperature. Some say the incidence of wildfires could increase by 50% within a generation. With that comes unprecedented levels of smoke including soot and toxic organic carbon aerosols that can impair respiratory systems forever. Plus there may exist a reaction to dump ecologically-damaging fire retardant chemicals in huge volumes to contain the blazes.

Or do we want to experiment with the rate of mountain glacier melting to determine the capacity of alpine lakes before they burst? Or to gauge at what point major ice fracturing and melting of an ice shelf could occur in polar regions? Or do we want to tempt more partial ice shelf collapses in polar regions to see if it will go all the way? Do we really want to toy with the Earth's axis of rotation as one of the gravitation-induced consequences of massive, collapsing ice sheets such as the West Antarctica Ice Sheet? Or do we want to experiment with how little sea ice can remain and still be able to call it home for walruses, polar bears, narwhals and seals? Or do we want to know at what temperature vast stores of methane could be released from frozen soil permafrost regions of northern countries? Or do we want to test the hypothesis that North Atlantic deep water now circulates into the Arctic Ocean or at what point deep ocean circulation slows or stops in places? Warming surface water and air masses above increase the thermal gradient, making vertical mixing involving cold, dense lower layers of the ocean less likely. Or do we want to find out what the implications of our ongoing carbon build-up and consequential deep-ocean warming are for global air temperature something we may be in line for even if further carbon emissions are stopped completely now?

The aforementioned is some of what we realize and are seeing today. Imagine how are children feel about what phenomenon might become real next. For example, we hope the recently-documented proliferation of the four primitive-brained, 24 eye, lethally-poisonous box jellyfish is not another sorry impact of global warming. And we have no knowledge yet that there is a link but the fact they are reproducing markedly in number has us on the lookout for answers here too. Already we know Namibian authorities are concerned about jellyfish multiplying offshore near them and exacting a toll on their marine fishery. Warmer water can absorb less oxygen. Could it be that global warming induced hypoxic (low oxygen) events in marine waters near Namibia are triggering either directly or indirectly the helter-skelter survival instinct reproduction of jellyfish as those fish or the sea life they eat are threatened by oxygen deficiency and increasing acidity of the water? We have similar concerns about the ravenous jumbo squid. We already know the giant Pacific Oyster invasion that threatens species such as mussels and Eider ducks is caused by global warming of marine waters. Are we relegating ourselves to a future where oceans support invasive algae, bacteria, viruses, protista, virus and bacteria-ridden ocean slime, seaweed, sea urchins, squid, crown-of-thorns starfish, copepods, water snakes and jellyfish swarms but not many other life-forms? Do we really have to start feeling cozy across vast terrestial expanses where knotweeds, mile-a-minute weeds, chytrid fungus, armyworms and many more invasive species thrive on our ecological mayhem?

Up to 50% of all known reptile species and one-third of amphibians are currently considered to be threatened with extinction, the most sudden wave of extinction ever known to mankind. You may also add tropical insects to that list as these cold-blooded creatures are as likely to roast due to global warming than quickly adapt to it. Or how about noble, heavy-coated musk oxen, survivors of at least one ice age but now sweltering to death and obsolescence in the warming oil of our Earthly fry pan? In fact, one-third or more of the absolute number of animals of all phyla have vanished since about 1970. Is it really true that one-eighth of the world's birds and one-quarter of mammal species are threatened? A great many more species are susceptible to negative effects from climate change impacts of one sort or another but their numbers have not been noticed to have dropped precipitously, at least not yet. The World Conservation Union claims one third of coniferous tree species and as many as two-thirds of plant species have succumbed forever-more to our modern world or are now threatened with extinction. Nearly half of primate species are endangered including the mercurial blue-eyed, black lemur and the pig-tailed, snub-nosed langur. Is it really true that, on average, three or more species are gone forever every hour of every day? And with that goes our biodiversity, forever reduced. Capitulation is primarily blamed on how polluted our planet has come to be, on the changing climate and on how little pristine habitat remains compared to the way it used to be.

Not only are a myriad of species that depend on an in-tact ecosystem to survive and prosper under attack, entire ecosystems are under assault. Tropical and subtropical freshwater lake and river ecosystems are in drastic decline in many locations. Many wetlands have been transmogrified beyond recognition by developers or other commercial interests. Salt marshes, mangroves, subsea grasses and kelp beds store volumnious amounts of carbon, protect shoelines from erosion, storms and flooding and provide critical habitat for a wide range of species. Already, one-fifth of the world's coral reefs are dead or have been destroyed due to the changing biochemistry and heat properties of marine water. Some predict all could vanish before 2040 if we keep going as we have been for very much longer. Which is very soon now. A 2009 Nature Conservancy report estimates 85% of oyster reefs have disappeared already. Knowledgeable people are already warning that oceanic dead zones could spread and become permanent. Based on that, try to verify if fish stocks can replenish despite lack of oxygen, warming, altered currents and circulation, increased acidity, various pollutants, microplastic and styrofoam debris in the water and movement of alien species to new locations.

Many scientists are more alarmed by the escalating acidity of our water than any other facet of environmental degradation. Marine waters are becoming acidic at a faster rate than has been the case for more than 50 million years. Our oceans are already about one-third more acidic than two centuries ago, a mere flick of geologic time. The National Center for Scientific Research in France has concluded that before 2019, 10% of the Arctic Ocean will have become too acidic to support shellfish life forms. By mid-century half of it may be inhospitable to calcium-carbonate-shell secreting creatures due to excessive concentration of carbonic acid that arose from high levels of carbon dioxide in the air above the water. Further, if plankton, algae or coral are less able to form shells, less carbon is sequestered naturally by them. Nothing like this level of acidity has believed to have happened for some 20 million years. That's one million generations ago if for fun we can call the "new generation" 20 years long not 25 or 30 years. Regrettably, in this ancient environment 20 million years past global sea levels are estimated to have been around 30 meters higher than now. Gulp! That's a lot of gulps of extra water if you live on the coast.

Should zooplankton levels at or near the ocean surface really be dropping by 70% in little more than a generation?It's said that every second breath we take is courtesy oxygen produced through photosynthesis by phytoplankton.  Would we really like to know how much carbonic acid marine waters can contain before dinoflagellates take over from diatoms? Or pteropods pack it in altogether? Or are we testing how warm acid in a tidal pool will affect snails and sea urchins or their larvae? The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has revealed that two-thirds of Blue King crab larvae died when exposed to acidity levels in water similar to what already exist along parts of the west coast of United States. At what concentration of hydrogen ions in seawater do coral shells begin dissolving rather than building? Are we there yet? Do we really want to push our enviro-brinkmanship to the threshold to witness if shell-crushing predators like sharks, jellyfish and crabs enter warming polar waters to create havoc there for existing benthic marine life? Or to see how expansive the ocean's biological deserts can be? Or to test to what extent we have dead zones in shallower marine waters especially near the mouths of rivers?

Subsea grasslands in near-shore areas have apparently been wiped-out globally at the phenomenal rate of about 7% per year from 1990 to 2008. Do we want this to continue any longer? Are we to witness ourselves reaching the ocean deepwater environment threshold with pollutants including ones that persist for great lengths of time? Are we to verify the increasing acidity of oceans causes a cacophony for marine mammals as sound is transmitted further and louder underwater? Or to discover that fertility of oysters deteriorates due to increases in carbonic acid concentration in water? Or that gender-bender chemicals have already caused feminization of males in species across all classes of vertebrates? Or for us to find out the hard way that non-decomposing micro-plastic debris cannot be a staple in the diet of endless species in our food chain? How about plastics that eventually decompose in saltwater and release bisphenol A, polystyrene-based oligomers or styrene monomer? Do we want pollution to become so pervasive it changes the methylation of our genes or reduces the size of gene groups? Should everyday cosmetics contain parabens, phthalates, vinyl acetate, propylene glycol or butylene glycol? Should various lotions and potions have methylparaben, propylparaben or triclosan in them? What if certain chemicals and pollutants are altering our genes or switching them on and off creating chaos with the biological systems of organisms including us? Should we continue to try to douse forest fires or coat various upholstery and electronic apparatus with polybrominated biphenyl ethers? Are we too slow developing and applying green alternatives to petrochemical-based plastics, perfluorinated chemicals, cement, fire retardants, asbestos, vulcanized rubber, dyes, pigments, adhesives, abrasives, cleaning compounds, corrosive fertilizers, toxic pesticides and herbicides? 

How can we look forward to finding we are on-course to augment the number of endangered or extinct species including many frogs, salamanders and other natural enemies of mosquitoes carrying the aforementioned diseases, beyond the 100 or so amphibians that have already disappeared over the past quarter century? Do we really want to be without hearing the warble of a loon or the raspy cry of an Arctic tern? Or do we want to find out how much ozone and other air pollution is required before pollinators such as bees cannot sense the aroma of flowers beyond "q" meters away when it used to be "r" meters ? Already now r = 5q approximately in many car-culture metropolises whereas r = q historically. Or to find out how short hibernation can be for chipmunks, squirrels, marmots and hedgehogs without driving them to fatigue, mixed up behavior, an early demise or possible extinction? The pika, hyper-sensitive to temperature increases, is now in a fight for survival that knowledgeable observers believe its going to lose. Their solution to find a cooler climate is a tragic error that countless species are in the midst of committing - to move upslope rather than to migrate further to higher latitude, perhaps lower elevation areas. Soon they will en masse be idling dazed and confused on hilltops and mountainsides very possibly with no escape route.

Do we really want to ring the spring alarm clock earlier and earlier for plants, insects, birds and other creatures? Do we want to test how many wheatears, swallows and chiff-chaffs can be fooled into staying on in the UK for the winter? Or perhaps, how many majestic Bewicke's swans now forgo their southward migration to Europe during now-milder Siberian winters? What is the fate of the purple-crowned woodnymph after all, and who really appears to have the attention-span of a hummingbird? Or do we want to find out how widespread, concentrated and lethal pesticide can be before the number of songbirds that remain can no longer be heard? Already, the chirping and singing of some birds is reported to be off-kilter due to their ingesting too many chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB's). Ad infinitum. Are we entertaining disaster by introducing so many "sleeper" alien species into new ecosystems having extra heat and altered thermal tolerances? Do we want to welcome that brown tree snake into our environs, too? Is global warming behind the arousal and spread of some alien species such as cryptococcus gatii fungus in the Pacific Northwest region of North America? Is the fabled quiver tree of drought-stricken Africa really on the way out? Do we really want to swap krill, a staple of countless Arctic species, for the tiny copepods that jellyfish consume en masse?

Do we really want to monkey with nitrogen trifluoride, an ultra-potent climate-altering chemical being used increasingly in various manufacturing activities? How sure are we that the 82,000 plus chemicals in our world already are safe? Or how much mercury in the air and methyl mercury in the water coal-burners can contribute without impacting our food chain, water supply and health? Or at what point a few new chemical reactions will start that we may know little about? Or how much sub-micrometer sized particles of carbon, nitrates, metals, etc from vehicle exhaust and industrial pollutants we can tolerate without developing heart, lung or liver disease? Or to determine what level of persistent organic pollutants can be accumulated in our blood before diabetes or cancer is triggered? Do people really want to move to the big city if they face months or even years off their (average) lifetime as a consequence of breathing the air there? Are we experimenting how salty the near shore environment can become before pregnant women develop childbearing issues? Or at what point species "x" mutates into species "(x+p)" in the field? Or at what point birth defect "y" begins to ramp up? Or at what point virus "z" gains a foothold or flavivirus "f" expands its territory? Or to test how the incidence and geographic spread of malaria, schistosomiasis, bilharzia, dengue fever, chikungunya, encephalitis, yellow fever, haemorrhagic fever, meningococcal meningitis, tuberculosis, typhoid, hepatitis A and E, diptheria, acute gastroenteritis, shigella, ebola filovirus, plague, avian flu, swine flu, West Nile virus, Nipah virus, tick-borne Powassen virus and Lyme disease, babesia, Chandipura virus, Rift Valley fever, Ross River virus, silicosis or pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, eye disease and skin cancer varies as a function of rising temperature, humidity, salinity and various airborne and waterborne pollutants? Increasing concentrations of dust, smoke and other particulates act more and more frequently as transport mechanisms far and wide for bacteria and viruses.

Or to see how well a Maldivian, Kiribatian or Bangladeshi can swim? Or to check how far polar bears can swim underwater or verify if they really enjoy mating with grizzly bears or eating one another as they are pressured to go further south to survive? Only a minority of the number of polar bears existing now are expected to exist come mid-century. Polar bears today are only about two-thirds the weight of those roaming the North just one generation ago. Do we want to field-test if penguins can still find their way and survive despite the rise in temperature? Have harbor seals left the harbor forever? Is the level of mercury in ringed seals really rising in tandem with the amount of polar ice that is melting with the attendant release and mobilization of its accumulated load of various pollution detritus?

In fact, there are many species, including white possums, sandeels and eelpouts, whose numbers are considered indicative of negative impacts from global warming; those populations have been plummeting. Many seabirds will disappear if one of their dietary staples, the sandeels, are in decline due to rising surface temperature of ocean water. The lemuroid possum, highly sensitive to rising temperature, has been heading for higher elevations to live. But how long can this adaptive behavior go on until the top of the hill is reached? Then what? What kind of world is evolving if the Leatherback turtle, a creature that has survived for over 100 million years, is now quite suddenly an endangered species? Every known species of sturgeon fish is said to be living at the edge of extermination due to the inhospitable environment they find themselves in. Very likely, somewhere between 10 and 100 species of living organisms are becoming extinct every waking day on our planet. What values do we hold dear as people? What destiny do we look towards? What gives us inspiration? It's clearly time for a gut-check.

We don't get it. But the leadership of Kiribati, Tuvalu and Maldives apparently do: they've been engaged in efforts to provide assurance to their people that they can vacate the country for somewhere else and have the wherewithal to do so. They consider their situation to be hopeless in the long term. They foresee no responsible and credible alternative other than to plan for mass exodus of their homelands. They are acutely aware now what others may have the luxury of realizing at a later date, namely, that the rap sheet for climate-altering pollution is indeed a long one and the consequences, especially of continued widespread use of carbon-intensive energy sources, are grim. Nobody living near the coast wants to face that brutal 50-year wave maybe every three years as sea levels edge up ever-higher. They do not want decisive action delayed as they could be swallowed up by the ramifications of everyone's inaction or uncooperativeness. They and we all surely do not want to enter the realm of what is known in the mathematics as an over-constrained problem. An over-constrained problem is one for which there exists no solution because there are many constraints, the nature of which are such that, taken together, a solution is not possible. Of course, no one wants to have that happen when the problem to which we are referring is that of global-warming, other serious environmental degradation, further endangerment and extinction of species or individual lives lost in the midst of some catastrophic event such as from extreme weather, spread of disease, ecosystem collapse, water stress or roiling heat.

So what do we do? We think it's counterproductive and wrong-headed to attempt to rationalize and justify the situation of ongoing, unabated environmental degradation by arguing we need to free people from poverty or we need to promote economic growth and the only way to achieve it is to continue to line the pockets of status quo businessmen and officials benefitting from violating the environment. In a new age market economy, if that entity could not pay for the full cost of running that operation including the externalities, that organization should be shut down and resources should automatically be reallocated to other competitors. Very likely other competitors includes new competitors who have worked hard and risked a lot to develop higher-quality, more advanced alternatives. Alternatives that very possibly are being offered for sale at apparently-higher prices than the artificially-low price of the inferior good being supplanted. So our general advice is for regulators and government officials to get out of the way of progress; don't try to team up with an old line competitor to push an inferior good or service on the consumer a while longer. We further disagree with providing non-public guidance to carbon or pollution-intensive entities such as coal miners or coal-fired utilities related to the viability of their investments. Those negatively affected may seek to lobby for help or clarification about the new rules of the game for carbon markets or whatever. If they invested in coal or tarsand, that's their risk capital and their problem from lack of understanding or due diligence not anyone else's. We have some words for colliers and bitumen extractors who claim they built country "x" and are the heroic answer to the energy security needs there - get real, get over it, move on, your time is up. Citizens generally do not believe you anymore because you don't have sustainable solutions.

We believe that operating a carbon cap and trading system, however well-intentioned, at this juncture is risky and subject to complex fraud. There is also the need for comprehensive and perhaps overly-complicated regulation and administration of carbon or other pollutant contracts and agreements. Already the scramble from various industrial polluters is on to try to devise some scheme to minimize commercially the environmental remediation "hit" they can anticipate having to absorb. Regulators are being pressured by them for carbon trading exemptions, free emissions permits and/or certification of some cheap offsetting scheme for their pollution habit with an alleged green project conducted in a developing country. All this invites attempts to spend public money inefficiently. We have already seen how it results in prolonged  participation in the market from those parties who do not want to reduce their pollution absolutely. It further risks compensating those who should not be compensated, and may improperly incentivize. It may cause society to settle for token payments from carbon price declines. It could prolong what should be forestalled. It could cause the conditions for circumvention of the central need to ratchet back on pollution mayhem when the vital response should be to face up to that ecology-driven requirement squarely and resolutely. Markets can encourage participants to manipulate, wrangle, placate, appease, discombobulate or obfuscate about objectives and/or shirk responsibility; result in the sly shifting of assets, production and, of course, emissions geographically; precipitate delays, posturing and diddling around rather than solving the many, serious pollution problems we are faced with. To us, its too much like a hunter with a lance around a campfire in Krakatoa, East of Java, who decides to joust with a spewing volcano.

At this point, we have to have 100% certainty-equivalent that whatever world leaders come up with to stop polluters and climate change, that it works and can be seen to be working. Why don't we be more direct and forthright? So far, it appears to be a bit of a royal battle just to hold global emissions constant year over year. The most recent data shows greenhouse gas emissions worldwide rose by 1% year over year. How are we going to get a grip on the situation such that high single digit reductions in emission levels occur globally every year? It's going to require stronger medicine that will taste increasingly-awful the longer we put off listening to the doctor. Most emphatically, let's ensure the prescription does not give the appearance that something is being done when it is ineffective in halting climate change and other environmental afflictions. No whistling in the dark coal smoke.

Banning the minor but potentially very significant class of greenhouse gases known as hydrofluorocarbons would be a noble start to an arduous process. Even attaining that is not a lay up. It's going to require a huge cooperative effort spanning many countries and would result in only an ephemeral victory compared to what we ultimately have to achieve to stabilize the health and restore the vitality of our planet. After advanced and thorough study, the bill from global warming, pollution and loss of biodiversity has been recently estimated to be as gargantuan as two to five trillion dollars a year. That cost reflects the rate of depletion of "nature's capital" as the environmental services of ecosystems to all organisms are degraded and decimated.

The artificial process of apparently-cutting pollution by offsetting to another country in general will not cut the mustard with us though such transference potentially has a role. Some say little or no absolute reductions in greenhouse gases will result from these projects which is devastating if true.

For example, if Japan "reduces" its emissions by availing itself of carbon credits arising from plain-vanilla economic collapse of various businesses in Czech Republic following dismantling of the Berlin Wall, then we wonder about that. Of course, we want to encourage and speed-up termination of prehistoric lignite coal power-driven operations but those entities should be competed-away into oblivion through the normal course of market mechanisms. This is especially true now if we attach a carbon price to the activity. We are never against capabilities and mechanisms being set up in case we need them. However, any diversion of purpose from holding polluters' collective feet to the hot coals to have them reduce their pollution very soon now or drop out of the energy business, to us, is distracting, counterproductive and circumventing green-wash.

Similarly, logging companies clearly have responsibility to replant their licensed areas, otherwise they should not get to log the area in the first place. Forest industry practices have to be sustainable in the normal course. Reforesting commercially-logged areas is expected to be done without fanfare or monetary reward by those who harvested the resources. So surely the logging company doesn't rack-up carbon credits and do same just so they can cash-in on a deal with someone in a faraway land who wants to continue some polluting process unabated in his or her own backyard. You may fool some people with a scheme such as this but do you really believe you're going to get this "solution" past Mother Earth? We need absolute reductions and big ones from the most egregious polluters and we need it soon.

To achieve efficient and effective allocation of resources, you have to ensure the mechanism is applied to the root cause of the problem and is cheat-proof and transparent in its application. Therefore, we think there should be a Global Externality Tax (GET). It would be something like a Value-Added Tax, however, the levy would be against the guilty producer or perpetrator. If they choose to continue to operate in an activity that has negative externalities associated with it, in particular, pollution, then they pay the incremental tax associated with that incremental production and environmental externality or cease activity. If the source country does not cooperate in assessing and collecting the tax, then the destination country would do it for them. If some countries assess the "cost of carbon" relatively lower for whatever reason, then other countries would apply the difference thus negating the possibility of using a low carbon tax as a drawing card for investment.

A carbon tax or tariff could be a subset of GET. GET extends the power to any country or union shipping or receiving goods and services to precisely target and in effect potentially drive dysfunctional economic actors out of business wherever they are located. The producer of incremental pollution effectively pays the consequences of that incremental externality regardless via the global GET mechanism that catches everybody. Otherwise, this world does not benefit from having the proper and efficient allocation of resources as technology advances and comparative advantages of countries change. This isn't protectionism as in protecting some narrow self-interested party from a foreign competitor. Rather, its market economics with full cost accounting that's designed to protect us all from those with narrow self interest, those that want to take more money for themselves whilst leaving their environmental bill for others to pay and the environmental consequences, perhaps life-threatening ones, for others to grapple with.

So its a level playing field for every competitor regardless of where their economic acts are carried out. And nowhere for a scheming businessman to hide out with his polluting operation because its now in the cards to map any of a great number of pollutants geographically in real time with more resources and greater precision than ever before. There should then be fewer threats directed at politicians and governments of some local company transplanting operations to a laxer jurisdiction. So the common assumption of many polluters heretofore that the money will all be in the bank or distributed to shareholders before anyone knows exactly what their environmental risks, liabilities and impacts are will prove in future to be painfully false.

We are concerned that carbon trading mechanisms alone will prove to be inadequate in addressing the problem soon enough. The UK government for one has already recognized that carbon markets are not going to ensure the transition to a low carbon world nor that the diversity in the mix of energy segments that emerges is sustainable. We need serious, wholesale citizen buy-in to the green movement not only a business-driven cash-out play. With carbon taxes such as GET you know there will be no free ride or discount fare for those who pollute because the costs of the tax are assessed directly against the offender irrespective of whether its a consumer, producer or some other entity. They can sink or try to swim a little further with the added weight of extra costs it if they want to. If the world sees that pollution / emissions are still out of control, governments can ratchet up the percentage rate of the GET applied such that polluting by amount "p" becomes uneconomic. Heretofore, polluting corporation "c" had been extracting an amount $x to tack on to its bottom line whilst leaving everyone else to buck up for at least $x to take care of its environmental externality expenses. On an individual firm basis, as the magnitude of the pollution tax it faces increases, projects "c" in the past assessed as being viable will be eliminated at the margin along with the attendant incremental pollution. Like a laser-guided missile, its a direct hit and there is no doubt about the outcome or the consequences. User pays, the abuser pays. There are no delays and no opportunity for intervention, circumvention or gamesmanship. Other more advanced, efficient and conscientious firms "a" will fill any void in supply from the contraction of business of "c". At this juncture, why should it be otherwise? Why prop up losers or give them a "break" when there are now, or soon will be, winners chomping at the bit to replace the old-style polluters? By extension, the same can be argued about the financiers, advisors and investors of those firms. Why not favor the ones who know how to push replacements for those polluters who have utterly failed to properly assess the real-life risks, liabilities, impacts and publicity fall-out associated with their operations.

In negotiating climate change pacts country to country, there is no more perverse incentive than to try to outwait the other side in making concessions. The only issue to coordinate beyond the global GET mechanism itself is who, for example, takes particular action, verifying and levying as necessary GET against corporation "c" who has exported good "g" to country "y" from country "z". If country "y" invokes an adjustment its border or port of entry, does it reimburse country of origin "z" for that GET amount given that "z" has been lax or negligent in assessing against "c" and perhaps many other polluters in its own jurisdiction? In one sense, its like a global value-added tax operating in reverse since polluting is a value-subtracting characteristic associated with a particular good or service. So the magnitude of the tax is assessed based on the value loss not yet explicitly recognized in the accounting that arises due to incremental pollution associated with the "value added" economic activity that occurred in country "z".

We like GET a great deal. Properly designed, it will curtail or help stop perpetrators of pollution-intensive and inefficient businesses and consumption. By penalizing those entities appropriately and thereby sending them into decline sooner rather than later, the marketplace progressively and automatically opens up more demand and supply-space for alternative firms and other more environmentally-friendly economic actions and behaviors. As this process runs its course, demand soon reallocates towards, newer, cleaner, greener, more advanced competitors goods and services. Legacy organizations scale back, break apart, close down or are liquidated.

Meanwhile, regulators dispassionately administer the global GET in a back-office setting. There are no questions arising due to volatile markets and no difficulty policing a tax collection versus the alternative of attempting to regulate markets for a rather abstract, inherently-negative phenomenon. The outcome is certain not uncertain or subject in any way to manipulation, opacity or misrepresentation. Corporations can plan their projects accordingly. We are very much market-oriented people here, however, in the drastic case of global warming that looms ominously over all of us, we want the most transparent, efficient, cost effective and efficacious method to reign supreme and that would be the global GET not cap-and-trade markets. The latter markets can still be developed and applied so the mechanisms are there. But to us, all that should remain a sideshow in the very serious global effort required to monitor, halt and roll-back worldwide temperature increases and pollution generally.

With border-tax-adjustments in-place to execute the new reality of GET levies on greenhouse gas emissions and other vectors of pollution, we predict only the odd miscreant would continue to complain bitterly about such a fair-minded, certain, smoothly functioning system such as this. After all, this global GET mechanism is applied boldly, transparently, cross-border and continuously to every Earthly event in the name of preserving the habitability of our planet. With GET, a complete set of bilateral relationships is quickly, almost automatically, established. No riverboat gambling delays to 2015, 2020, 2025, or whenever need be countenanced in this scenario to buffer anybody anywhere, so precious time is saved. It's not there to upset people or organizations, it's there to ensure all organisms can live sustainably in our biosphere. Just the impacts we go over on this webpage, which is by no means an exhaustive list, should make anyone pause and wonder how pollution, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, extinctions and climate change has gone as far as it has already. Its time for action because the consequences of all this are potentially so incredibly- serious for so many lives.

Perversely, in many countries around the world today we still have some form of fossil fuel subsidies in place to shield consumers and commercial interests from paying even the market price. These subsidies are in effect negative carbon taxes, ones that encourages greater demand for, and more pollution arising from, carbon-rich combustion. Seen in isolation, such subsidies also discourage the pursuit and slows adoption of alternative energy, delivering another glancing blow to the belly of our Earth and life as we have known it.

Zooming past Stra and Siwa and Miri to check on Bhola and Sh'huur, oh no, climate change time has come today. From Nis to Sur to Oyo to Ibb, we want to help you keep an eye on changeable things, there's a lot of it about. At Selbo and Labgar, too we wish you all the luck in drawing that green line in the sand. And to Lecce with love for your white houses. Marburg and Ota, we want to see your rooftop solar installations. In Julich, Germany we hope you succeed with high-efficiency solar thermal energy featuring hot-air driven turbines. Or, for that matter, any dry-cool design that uses 90% less water than heretofore has been the case. We are happy to see India's first solar-fired power plant by Awan. And to residents of Roscoe and Dali, too, we are endeared by your wind turbines. To Flexial, Brazil, we really do hope you can succeed over the long haul harvesting nuts sustainably in the Amazon.

From Daru to Jos to Tio and Nuuk, we really do know you're there. Aboard the sad caravan from Kobo to Sodo, we feel for your food and water insecurity. Past Oulu and Remu to Sanaa and Suai, from Bor to Bar to Gra, by Qutuf and Hinche, too your thirst for hope for this Earth is our quest, too. Do mountains really come down near Blair? Are forests levelled en masse near Cacoal? Will the sea really rise over Male? Or infiltrate Moura, Bangladesh a sea-facing village observers extend little hope of surviving intact beyond about five years. Will cyclones demolish Gabura? Well, heavy rain brings deadly mudslides to Cunha. Will heat waves and drought cause the people of Korem to set out in a desperate search for food once more? Or prompt nomadic herders to settle in Dela thereby terminating a mobile lifestyle experienced by these people and their ancestors for millennia? From Leh, India to Khapi, Bolivia we are sorry about diminishing glacier-fed streams you depend so much upon. We know that snow conditions in Rogla are generally not that good anymore. From Lech to Vail to Banff to Voss, is your ski season really shortening by about one day per year for a generation? To Sochi, Russia we hope you get lots of snow and ice in the build-up to winter, 2014 and beyond. From Waw to Tete to Gao, Osh and Xia-Xia, we think of you, too. Including those from Jolo and Heihe, all this is not a cruel joke or our idea of fun. In Banana, Man and Ho, Ghana, too, we know you try hard to believe you are not alone.

Comment July 26, 2009 - Here is a concrete, hypothetical example of how our Global Externality Tax (GET) could work at least in the initial stages:  Politician "p" fields another Friday afternoon phone call from a big-wig domestic coal company executive, "bw". bw angrily threatens (again) to relocate their operations and jobs to another country, "oc" if "p" dares to impose a carbon tax or tariff plan as is being contemplated by the home country government, "hc". bw argues bitterly that oc does not have any carbon penalty on coal production and shipment to market and bw is competing with coal companies in oc. What a dunce you are p, why don't you get with it at least one day a week, eh?! p is sick of this sort of antics and pressure-play. p resolves to help lead the introduction of GET in hc which p succeeds in doing. An outraged bw does move company operations to oc then tries to sell its coal production to consumers and businesses back in hc. However, at the border of hc, an agent slaps the exporter with GET. If GET is not paid, the ship will be denied the privilege to offload at the port. Wonders never cease and the GET is paid forthwith. Because this particular GET was designed assuming joint responsibility between the exporting and importing countries, in this case oc and hc, 50% of the GET assessed and collected is forwarded to the treasury of hc government and 50% is sent back to oc government. bw gets nothing back, exactly zero. Both oc and hc opt to re-invest the incremental revenue collected in clean projects and green technology in their own country. bw is smarting now because the financial impact on bw's company seems to be about the same wherever bw tries to have it spew pollution freely. bw reasons that the Earth is the biggest sewer there can possibly be anyways, right? However, at this point bw and other employees of the company are really getting worried. They stop going to bars and restaurants. Workers start spending weekends learning how to re-engineer the old company to reduce waste-streams. They soon conclude it will not be feasible. The younger people at the firm start searching colleges for information. Older workers phone mystified gray bank advisors with instructions to dump their company's stock from their portfolios. They also ask for assistance in planning an early retirement. Catching wind about what many of his staff are doing, bw places an urgent phone call to World Trade Organization, lambasting them for apparently allowing the "high-seas illegality" of this GET. bw is claiming the GET monstrosity is ruining his company singlehandedly. A low level service representative at WTO coolly informs bw that it is perfectly legal to impose such a border tax or tariff adjustment. There already exists a similar tax levied against coal companies still operating in hc. Despite being implored to do so by an incensed bw, the agent refuses to transfer the call to her boss. Goodbye bw. Rumors begin circulating among the banks that bw's coal company might be headed down. The market price of it drops. A fledgling solar power firm "sp" sniffs out an opportunity to fill the slight gap in supply. sp provides a higher quality, clean energy alternative albeit at a much higher price than the price offer cited in bw company literature. Funny thing though, sp projects in the short term future that they will be able to sell their renewable energy profitably at the current border tax adjusted GET price for coal per joule of energy equivalent. But not at bw's phoney, low-ball price, at least not for some time yet. So much for bw's cost accounting and price-setting; it seems something was missing there all along.  

Given all the above, we think its reprehensible that heavy industry anywhere would be actively engaged opposing imposition of environmental levies based on the amount and carbon content of fossil fuels being burned. Far too much coal is used. To us, the polluter-pays principle represents the path of least resistance to solving environmental problems because it is so hard to argue with. As we have found out already, there is no shortage of anxious industrial executives in many countries trying to pretend they do not grasp this elementary concept which is or should be part of the curriculum of entry-level economics courses. Without incorporation of external costs and risk factors, there is no way to allocate resources optimally among alternative projects that utilize various technologies, skill sets and forms of energy. So many bad decisions have been made which results in more pollution, less-advanced technology being developed and deployed, and reduced energy efficiency.

Time is tight. A way to progress even faster would be to plan and push for a worldwide ban on coal including lignite and bituminous coal and coal-based synthetic fuels. The lone exception for more time for replacement may be for anthracite, hard coking coal to support the steel industry and other metallurgy. Otherwise, coal's time has come and gone. Speaking purely in economic not scientific terms, banning it means that, considering the cost of externalities, coal is already much more expensive than other forms of energy not cheaper, GET it?

We believe most of those involved do GET it. Interestingly, many jurisdictions not faring well in our Eco-Table at this juncture are the same ones who speak out against invoking such a mechanism. We believe there is causation in this correlation. Its because these jurisdictions realize GET will work so there would be significant consequences for them to have to re-engineer their economies away from their current overdose of gray entities contributing heavily to pollution on Earth. Unfortunately, pollution takes its toll across borders, too and there are no customs agents to turn it back at the border. We believe the situation globally is sufficiently grim that criminal sanctions are necessary to bring to justice egregious polluters.

In our view, potential solutions to stop the ominous and complicated problems of climate change should not be entangled with too many other problems, for example poverty. Those issues have to be solved separately, over and above mechanisms put in place globally by governments to halt greenhouse gas emissions buildup, water pollution, rise in temperature, threats to the survival of particular species, etc. If objectives are melded, it may make a timely solution overwhelming, beyond reach. There cannot be any further delays to a negotiating process that's already bogged down and too slow. There are many environmental ogres that have come to be and we need to overcome them before they overcome us all. The roadmap to resolve the environmental colossus is to break it down into bite-sized pieces. Metaphorically and really, are we going to wait for the nincompoop driver of a Studebaker to be able to afford a Prius or are we going to force him and his atrocious slagheap off the road and him onto a bicycle or horse instead?

Clearly, the magnitude of economic growth as reflected in Pan Geo Investment Global Table© (see Performance Page) does correlate to some extent with countries that end up in Pan Geo Investment Eco Table© below but correlation does not imply causation. We think there is strong evidence that new methods, energy sources, technologies, people and organizations associated with clean and green growth can and will systematically go about solving the world's pollution problems. The key is to accelerate this changeover to be as quick as possible. This implies the need to clear reactionary forces out of the way with fervor or to bring them onside. That the pollution quagmire exists to the extent it does is largely attitudinal. Changing flagrant attitudes, conspicuous consumption, egregious habits and wanton lifestyles will not be a cakewalk for anyone who attempts it. Those who have experienced a luxurious standard of living and leisure, and who have become accustomed to it, taking it for granted, often fight like alley cats before giving up even a smidgeon of their Earthly excesses and transgressions.

We cannot count on any consumer-oriented society to bail us out of our environmental troubles, at least not in a timely fashion. We trust that brainpower, smart regulation, research and development, engineering, technology, manufacturing expertise, venture capital and financial wherewithal will play an instrumental role in getting us all out of the environmental mess we are all in now. As time goes by and the gravity and intractability of climate change and ecological breakdown becomes more and more apparent to one and all, the masses will progressively chime in with wiser marketplace choices and with more frugal and healthy behaviors and lifestyles.

Answers from anywhere and everywhere on Earth are welcome. This includes everybody from Dneprodzerzhinsk to Kota Kinabalu,  from Cox's Bazar to Nizhny Novgorod. Whiz by Tanjungkarang-Telukbetung to Nakon Ratchasima, past Petropavlovsk-Karnchatskiy and Puerto Santo Tomas de Castilla, too. We include Yamoussoukro, Tegucigalpa and Shijiazhuang also. From Szekesfehervar to Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, from Kampong Chhnang to Port Muhammed Bin Qasim, we need your answers also. From Bandar Seri Begawan to Alexandroupolis to Sungaipakning, you're in it along with us. From Comodoro Rivadavia to Antananarivo, from Narayanganj to Kahramanmaras, it's not too late for us all yet. By Ban Laem Chabang and Afyonkarahisar past Vishakhapatnam, Rachaya al-Foukhar and Konstantinovka, it's not us and them, it's only us.

Ordering our complete solution is referenced in our November 30, 2008 Comment below our Forest Green Eco-touring Countries Table near the top of this webpage. We are not talking about GET mechanisms now. Rather, we are outlining what should be explicitly considered by every country in the framework to solve climate change before things get to the point where many more ecosystems are routed and many more lives are ruined. We want to promote eco-consciousness because we do not want to see the advent of eco-warriors, eco-catastrophe, eco-refugees and more if we fail to address serious eco-problems that are already simmering in many settings around the world. This solution is what we believe forms the basis for a fair and equitable agreement. How do we justify saying who is responsible for cutting back and by how much? Here is a way every country can work together to tamp down pollution. It's important to note that our solution can also be used as a negotiating tool. While we can offer an opinion as to how we would formulate the solution for agreement, it would be the work of many others who could perhaps use it as the foundation for a firm agreement. We believe it's unique. It's designed to solve eco-problems, in particular, the scaling back of greenhouse gas emissions. Don't get caught without your copy of it at Copenhagen in December.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of Bali and Copenhagen, we feel we have no choice but to hand off to the authorities soot black, smoky gray and murky crimson boxes containing metallic gray memoranda cards illustrated in the table below. Black and dark gray boxes symbolize sickly, chemical-altered sunlight piercing through dark carbon soot and gray smoke in the atmosphere. We have the smoky-dun grays. We have the bitumen tar-black and sooty, coal blacks too. Thick brownish-gray clouds cast a pall over a broad region including parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal and Afghanistan. The constituents include black carbon, sulphate, nitrate, ozone, various metallic particles and more.

We have used a kind of parched, sun-baked yellow-brown to indicate the threat, reality and affliction of desertification, erosion and water shortages that many countries face. Many of those countries are in Africa. We understand full-well how they are victimized by any increase in average global temperature, never mind an "x" degree rise. Further, yellow haze or sandy dust are now a regular feature of the atmosphere of many countries listed in our Eco-Flags Table including China, Mauritania and Afghanistan. In other bands of this Table, we also mix in a saturated, murky ox-blood red, cadmium or dull red, pink or crimson for visual effect. The use of gaudy pinks, crimson and purple lights are intended to give viewers pause that something is going wrong with the chemistry and pollution enveloping us. Something is amiss. Do we really grasp the speed and extent we are altering our natural environment or are things teetering beyond the scope of our understanding? There is never any harm to come by slowing things down for a period of time to ensure we have a grip on the situation. We're not sure we grasp the dog-eat-dog, old growth style development rush. If creating job "j" implies ecological mayhem at the margin, we do not need that job. Send the bloke back to school with a stack of books until society figures out what else he or she can do that is in harmony with our Earth. The main thing in life is not money, rather its being in tune with the natural world, the real world. Unfortunately, current economic paradigms and models are silent about that so there is an artificiality to the discipline that is not working out too well presently. Frankly, we shudder to hear conventional, old world economists talk and analyze while still apparently oblivious to environmental and health and wellness factors, issues and imperatives. This is 2010. Our survivability depends on us en masse closing the window on the past and arriving at the door to the future.

In the real world, we would like to see lots of white or light pastel colors to enhance reflectivity of light and heat and cool things down. White roofs, white houses, light-colored or pastel-colored houses, buildings, vehicles, pavement and clothes. Think twice before selecting saturated-color paints, tiles, dyes, pigments, garments and fabrics. We sincerely hope asphalt, asphalt-based and tar plus bitumen shingles are not among citizen,"c" 's  options for roofing material. Better to wait for next generation gel-based ones that change color to white and thereby increase reflectivity of sunlight as temperature rises. We believe climate-warming could develop into a game of inches where we're all involved in a kind of goal-line stand to stop the planet from heating up beyond some crazy tipping point that would be lethal to many lives. So let's learn to do without the asphalt driveway with coal tar sealant, please and thank you.

See Investigations1 , Investigations2 and Investigations3 pages to see our Eco-Table with Eco-Flags. In short, it represents our rendition of our historic and unprecedented descent into the murky, risky and uncertain depths of the unknown ramifications arising from polluting our planet. The astounding biodiversity we have all been blessed with came about over long periods of time as a function of global temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, etc regimes and, of course, many other variables, too. We have decided only quite recently, on a de facto basis, to start monkeying with those weather conditions and biochemical imperatives that may prove to be essential for biodiversity and quality of life. Just what will the outcome be for our children, our children's children and so on through the chain of life, for other species, for developing potential medicines and therapeutics, for preventing the spread of disease and poverty and for ensuring the safety of our drinking water and the food web? Does anybody really have a trajectory on the vast implications of what we are doing when we recklessly strip from, unduly contaminate, dry out, heat up, or eco-pressure the life from, the Earth's delicately balanced and magnificently intertwined ecosystems.

Comments

September 7, 2008 - Greenland's Jakobshavn glacier has about doubled its "speed" over the past six years. Not in sixty years, that's six years. According to recent research, the Earth may now be at its warmest time for at least 2000 years. Certainly, we know that is true for the last 150 years since the advent of reliable temperature gauges. Sometimes, a good and quick little moral compass is to say to yourself "what if everybody engaged in behavior such and such, then what"? As we know, pollution and the imperative of environmental stewardship is fast becoming a formidable moral issue for the 21st century and beyond. As such, its reasonable to ask "what if every glacier melted at the rate Jakobshavn now is"? Then what? Many scientists currently agree that even if all glaciers did approach Jakobshavn "speed", this century we are still very likely in for a maximum rise of global sea level of 2 meters. There is, however, a boatload of assumptions incorporated in the furnishing of that estimate. Two meters is a flimsy factor of 2 away from 4 meters. Ask any physicist how much time in their career they have spent chasing around a factor of 2. Empirically, as we survey the lay of the land, we now know that Arctic ice melted some 24% faster during August, 2008 than it did the prior August. That's according to the latest satellite measurements and analysis done at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center. Five huge ice shelves in Canada's north were reduced in size this summer by, in the aggregate, 23%. We still have great uncertainty in forecasting glacier melting due to our limited ability to predict rate of change in average ambient temperature. And many results to date have shown that the rate of temperature increase affecting polar regions is more marked than elsewhere. How confident are we that this will not affect, even marginally, the incremental melting of now-frozen, methane-laden hydrates near the sea floor? Is the possibility of any such leakages of these potent greenhouse gases included in modeling? What if some portion of sulphur aerosols now in the atmosphere were to clear for whatever reason? What if coal use continues to be ramped up, or is not soon curtailed, in Indochina or by other big users? Is that in the model? We didn't think so. To us, the threat of climate change is not only a moral issue and scientific debate. There are now pervasive impacts from pollution and global warming that continue to descend upon, and envelope, many prior files concerning matters pertaining to global security and the well being of countless species, including us. We here continue to believe that contemplating a global temperature rise anywhere near an amount like 4 degrees Celsius is, at once, freakish and "el nutso". People who have been familiar with happenings on the Antarctic Peninsula over the past 50 years or so probably realized this long before we did.

August 24, 2008 - Pollution is an entropy dragon that arises entirely in nature - its partly understood through biology, chemistry and physics. It can only be solved by addressing and resolving the physical phenomena involved. Politics, history, the law, the arts, economics, etc. have no part in that. We hear over and over and over again from politicians of various countries who continue to tie poverty reduction or the need for further economic development and growth to the solution for curtailing pollution and stopping global warming. Which is why we wrote in December 2007 on this webpage that combining those two objectives or missions might be a colossal mistake. To us, its like we're tempting our fate by dancing around in our Last Act. Look around the Earth physically right now - too many places appear spent. Various local areas are ecologically gone now. Kaput! As time goes by, more and more and more people are not going to be able to sustain a good consumer life from an Earth that's aging physically at such an alarming rate. It seems, in the absence of the environmental answers and remedies we need so far, we may have to slow things down economically for a while to be sure we know what we are doing going forward with clean growth. It beats facing the known and unknown risks of perishing altogether in a slagheap of dirty growth, doesn't it? Just ask the World Bank. They apparently will tell you "why, of course..................not". Rather, look what the World Bank is up to now: helping fund disgusting mega-coal power projects in India and who knows where else, all ostensibly in the name of reducing poverty. We are very disappointed in this unexpected turn of events. Poverty is a social challenge that needs to be worked at constantly, systematically and incrementally. Poverty, however sad and demoralizing it is, is localized in nature and, with the possible exception of vectoring some horrid new disease, has relatively low risk of doing in humanity collectively if we do not solve it according to some timeline. The same absolutely cannot be said about pollution. Pollution could have the potential to gas us all in a way we may not even faintly comprehend yet. Unlike the situation with poverty, no amount of money, physical prowess, social status or security arrangements are likely to matter one whit. And we may not receive any notification in the mail or process serving either concerning its deadline. Therefore, our advice to each and every country continues to be, first and foremost, with a studied urgency, to go about hunting down and slaying the entropy dragon of pollution in its midst before it breathes its hellfire on us and children of the world not yet born. 

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Acknowledgements and Gratitude:  We are grateful to and acknowledge the Government of United States of America as an important source for key input data utilized in production of Pan Geo Investment Eco Table©. The World Resources Institute report on the environment from 2005 was an important reference on cumulative, historic emissions for many countries. Nevertheless, any opinions expressed, interpretations or rendering of information presented on this web page are entirely that of Pan Geo Investment Inc. performing its role as an independent investment advisor and analyst. Accordingly, Pan Geo Investment Inc. is solely responsible for same.