1. The Washington Post reports Limits on greenhouse gas emissions have wide support. “Three-quarters of Americans think the federal government should regulate the release into the atmosphere of greenhouse gases from power plants, cars and factories to reduce global warming, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, with substantial majority support from Democrats, Republicans and independents.”

   “But fewer Americans — 52 percent — support a cap-and-trade approach to limiting greenhouse gas emissions similar to the one the House may vote on as early as tomorrow.”

   Earlier this week, the Union of Concerned Scientists selected essays and photos from 67 Americans and published them in a new online book, Thoreau’s Legacy: American Stories about Global Warming. In her introduction, novelist Barbara Kingsolver writes:

   Even the architecture of our planet-climate, oceans, migratory paths, things we believed were independent of human affairs-is collapsing under the weight of our efficient productivity. Twenty years ago, climate scientists first told Congress that carbon emissions were building toward a disastrous instability. Congress said, We need to think about that. Ten years later, the world’s nations wrote the Kyoto Protocol, a set of legally binding controls on our carbon emissions. The United States said, We still need to think about it. Now we watch as glaciers disappear, the lights of biodiversity go out, the oceans reverse their ancient order.

   Back in Washington the House is scheduled to vote on cap-and-trade legislation said to be aimed at reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emission. McClatchy adds Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) is confident the Climate bill will pass the House on Friday. Markey believes the legislation will lead to a “green revolution”. “Republicans, with few exceptions, oppose the bill.”

   The Guardian reports Markey as having said, “this legislation is a game changer of historic proportion… The whole world is waiting to see if Barack Obama can arrive in Copenhagen as a leader of attempts to reduce green house gas emissions.”

   “The bill, now swollen to about 1,200 pages, would bind the US to reduce the carbon emissions from burning oil and coal by 17% from 2005 levels by 2020 and more than 80% by 2050.”

Four at Four continues with greenhouse gas emissions slowed by cut in oil use, an update from Iraq, and sharks are in a world of hurt.

1. The NY Times reports Documents link Saudi royal family to al Qaeda. “Documents gathered by lawyers for the families of Sept. 11 victims provide new evidence of extensive financial support for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family, but the material may never find its way into court because of legal and diplomatic obstacles.” The Obama administration is saiding with the Saudis seeking “kill further legal action.”

   “Internal Treasury Department documents obtained by the lawyers under the Freedom of Information Act, for instance, said that a prominent Saudi charity, the International Islamic Relief Organization, heavily supported by members of the Saudi royal family, showed “support for terrorist organizations” at least through 2006.”

2. BBC News reports ‘Dozens dead’ in Baghdad bombing. “At least 60 people have been killed by a bomb blast in the eastern Sadr City area of Baghdad, say officials. Iraqi police said the bomb went off in a market place in the predominantly Shia area of the Iraqi capital. More than 130 people were also reported to have been injured in the blast, one of the worst in Iraq this year.”

3. The NY Times reports a U.S. drone missile strike is said to have killed 60 people in Pakistan attending “a funeral for a Taliban fighter in South Waziristan”. Details are sketchy.

   If the reported death toll is correct, the drone “strike could be the deadliest since the United States began using the aircraft to fire remotely guided missiles”.

   According to DAWN Media, ‘There were two attacks.’ “The first strike by an unmanned drone killed six militants in Shubi Khel, a remote area under the control of Mehsud’s Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), about 65 kilometres north of the main district town of Wana. As mourners gathered for funeral prayers, another drone unloaded three more missiles into the crowd, officials and residents said.”

4. According to The Guardian, a UN report shows fall in opium and cocaine production. “People who take drugs need medical help, not criminal retribution,” said Antonio Maria Costa, director of UN Office on Drugs and Crime. Costa called “for universal access to drug treatment. Since people with serious drug problems provided the bulk of drug demand, treating this problem was one of the best ways of shrinking the market.”

   Opium cultivation in Afghanistan, where 93% of the world’s opium is grown, declined 19% in 2008, according to the UN world drug report. In Colombia, which produces half of the world’s cocaine, cultivation of coca fell 18% while production declined 28% compared with 2007. Global coca production, at 845 tonnes, was said to be at a five-year low, despite some increases in cultivation in Peru and Bolivia.

1. The world’s greatest polluters met in Mexico, according to the UN, with the goal of “speeding up the stalling climate negotiation process… Poorer nations are proposing deep cuts from rich countries which, from a historical point of view, are most responsible for today’s climate problems.”

   AFP reports Mexico seeks help for developing nations on climate change. Mexico’s President Felipe Calderón asked for financial help for poorer nations to meet global climate goals. Developing countries need to be able to “count on sufficient (economic) stimulus and incentives to meet their commitments,” Calderon said.

   “We have to break certain patterns, certain old ways of thinking,” Calderon said. Mexico recently declared it would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by “50 million tonnes per year — the first developing country to make such a unilateral commitment.”

   “The finger-pointing has gone on for more than a decade without humanity taking a single step forward in the fight against climate change,” Calerdon added as reported by Reuters.

   “The world needs to cut emissions by 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 if the worst effects of climate change are to be avoided, according to the United Nations’ Climate Panel.”

   In related news, The Guardian reports the upcoming Copenhagen climate change treaty backed by ‘Hopenhagen’ campaign. As part of a global marketing push “launched under the umbrella strapline ‘Hopenhagen‘, the campaign aims to raise awareness of the importance of the UN meeting in Denmark in December.”

2. Back in the United States, Greenwire via the NY Times reports Lobbying frenzy begins as the House climate bill heads to the floor. “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s plan to bring a major climate and energy measure to the floor Friday has prompted a whirlwind of lobbying.”

   “20 U.S. companies and electric utilities published full-page ads in several Washington newspapers calling for the bill’s passage.” And no wonder, they are. According to the LA Times, the legislation provides “financial incentive to keep burning coal” and environmental groups “say the bill could set off a boom in the construction of new coal plants because of provisions that would restrict legal efforts to block such projects.”

   The legislation would create a cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases.

Four at Four continues with two op-eds on climate change: one advocates a wartime footing, the other advocates eliminating the war machine, an update from Iraq, China on trees versus food, and Obama on the public option for healthcare.

1. The LA Times reports Environmentalists are baffled by Obama’s strategy. President Obama is defending in courty harmful measures that he promised to eliminate.

   As a candidate for president, Barack Obama wooed environmentalists with a promise to “support and defend” pristine national forest land from road building and other development that had been pushed by the George W. Bush administration.

   But five months into Obama’s presidency, the new administration is actively opposing those protections on about 60 million acres of federal woodlands in a case being considered by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals…

   The strategy has puzzled some environmentalists because the administration has used the courts to backpedal from Bush policies in some areas, including spotted owl protection, energy efficiency standards and hazardous-waste burning.

   

   It’s not the only area where Obama is looking a lot like his predecessor. McClatchy reports In stark legal turnaround, Obama now resembles Bush. “President Barack Obama is morphing into George W. Bush, as administration attorneys repeatedly adopt the executive-authority and national-security rationales that their Republican predecessors preferred. In courtroom battles and freedom-of-information fights from Washington, D.C., to California, Obama’s legal arguments repeatedly mirror Bush’s: White House turf is to be protected, secrets must be retained and dire warnings are wielded as weapons.”

2. The NY Times reports on the health of Cuyahoga River, 40 years after the river caught fire. “Monday is the 40th anniversary of the Cuyahoga River fire of 1969, when oil-soaked debris floating on the river’s surface was ignited, most likely by sparks from a passing train.”

   The burning river in Cleveland helped lead to “the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and to the passage of the Clean Water Act.” Now, decades later, the Cuyahoga is slowly recovering. Fish have returned to the river along with beavers, blue herons, and bald eagles. “Long sections of the Cuyahoga are clean enough that they no longer require aggressive monitoring… Problems remain, however.”

   While today, Reuters reports the Supreme Court allows a world’s largest silver mining company to dump mine waste into our lake. “The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday for Coeur d’Alene Mines Corp by upholding a government permit that will allow the company’s Alaska gold mine to deposit rock waste into a lake on federal land.” The ruling overturned the appeals court decision.

   “The appeals court sided with environmentalists and ruled the permit violated the federal clean water law. It said the toxicity of the discharge might have lasting effects on the lake, killing all the fish and nearly all aquatic life.”

   So much for the Clean Water Act.

Four at Four continues with coal, Afghanistan, and guerrilla gardeners.

1. The Washington Post reports a Judge questions Justice Department effort to keep secret Cheney’s remarks on Valarie Plame.

   U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan “sharply questioned an assertion by the Obama administration that former Vice President Richard B. Cheney’s statements to a special prosecutor about the Valerie Plame case must be kept secret, partly so they do not become fodder for Cheney’s political enemies or late-night commentary on ‘The Daily Show’.”

   The DoJ claims “Cheney’s voluntary statements to U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald were exempt from disclosure”, because “disclosure would make presidents and vice presidents reluctant to cooperate voluntarily with future criminal investigations” cover-ups.

2. The CS Monitor reports The Pacific isn’t the only ocean collecting plastic trash. “A swirling ‘soup’ of tiny pieces of plastic has been found in the Atlantic Ocean, and something similar may be present in other ocean areas as well.”

   When Sylvia Earle began diving in 1952, the ocean was pristine. These days, things are different.
   “For the past 30 years I have never been on a dive anytime, anywhere, from the surface to 2-1/2 miles deep, without seeing a piece of trash,” says the renowned oceanographer and former chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “There’s life from the surface to the greatest depths – and there’s also trash from the surface to the greatest depths.”

   Dr. Earle’s experience illustrates the rising tide of plastic accumulating in the world’s oceans.
   And while the Pacific Ocean has garnered much attention for what some call the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” – a vast expanse of floating plastic deposited in the middle of the ocean by circulating currents – the problem doesn’t stop there.

   New research shows that plastic has collected in a region of the Atlantic as well, held hostage by converging currents, called gyres, to form a swirling “plastic soup.” And those fragments of plastic could also be present at the other three large gyres in the world’s oceans, says Kara Lavender Law, a member of the oceanography faculty at the Sea Education Association (SEA) in Woods Hole, Mass., which conducted the study.

Four at Four continues with an update from Afghanistan and Peru revokes Amazon development law.

1. The Guardian reports the Obama administration is criticized over failure to disclose coal dump locations. Democratic leaders and environmental groups are upset by the administration’s “refusal to publicly disclose the location of 44 coal ash dumps that have been officially designated as a ‘high hazard’ to local populations.” The ash dumps “contain a toxic soup of arsenic and heavy metals from coal-fired electricity plants”.

   The Obama administration’s excuse for keeping the public in the dark is “terrorism fears”.

   “Right now we have a blanket gag order,” Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who heads the Senate environment and public works committee told a press conference last week.

   “We are losing what we cherish in America: the citizens’ right to know.” …

   “There is a huge muzzle on me and my staff,” she said. “They’re putting ridiculous restrictions on me.”

2. Senator John Kerry, in an op-ed in the NY Times, writes “With Iran, Think Before You Speak“.

   The grass-roots protests that have engulfed Iran since its presidential election last week have grabbed America’s attention and captured headlines – unfortunately, so has the clamor from neoconservatives urging President Obama to denounce the voting as a sham and insert ourselves directly in Iran’s unrest…

   There’s just one problem. If we actually want to empower the Iranian people, we have to understand how our words can be manipulated and used against us to strengthen the clerical establishment, distract Iranians from a failing economy and rally a fiercely independent populace against outside interference. Iran’s hard-liners are already working hard to pin the election dispute, and the protests, as the result of American meddling…

   We can’t escape the reality that for reformers in Tehran to have any hope for success, Iran’s election must be about Iran – not America. And if the street protests of the last days have taught us anything, it is that this is an Iranian moment, not an American one.

Four at Four continues with light pollution endangering bats, the disappearing Milky Way, and native grasses may help clean up pollution.

1. The CS Monitor reports Federal judge rules Bush ‘torture memo’ lawyers could stand trial. In a 42-page decision, US District Judge Jeffrey White ruled John Yoo “can be held personally responsible for the indefinite military detention and alleged torture of an American citizen who was suspected of involvement with Al Qaeda.”

   “Like any other government official, government lawyers are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their conduct,” White wrote.

   Meanwhile the CIA fights against full release of detainee torture report, reports the Washington Post. The CIA wants to suppress passages in a May 2004 report that describe “in graphic detail how the agency handled its detainees” claiming its disclosure could “damage ongoing counterterrorism operations”.

   The report was written by “Then-Inspector General John L. Helgerson and his team of investigators traveled to secret CIA prisons and witnessed interrogations firsthand, making them the only observers allowed into the detention sites who were not participants in the program”. The report indicated war crimes were committed.

   “The argument was that combining the techniques amounted to torture,” said a former agency official who read the report. “In essence, [Helgerson] was arguing in 2004 that there were clear violations of international laws and domestic laws.”

Four at Four continues with fighting in Pakistan, refugees number reach all-time high, cement, and climate change impact in your state.

U.S. already impacted by human-caused climate change

1. The United States Global Change Research Program, a joint scientific product of the White House and more than 30 scientists across 13 federal agencies, released today “the most comprehensive and authoritative report of its kind” documenting “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States“.

   

   The ten key findings of the report are:

   1. Global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced.
   2. Climate changes are underway in the United States and are projected to grow.
   3. Widespread climate-related impacts are occurring now and are expected to increase.
   4. Climate change will stress water resources.
   5. Crop and livestock production will be increasingly challenged.
   6. Coastal areas are at increasing risk from sea-level rise and storm surge.
   7. Threats to human health will increase.
   8. Climate change will interact with many social and environmental stresses.
   9. Thresholds will be crossed, leading to large changes in climate and ecosystems.
   10. Future climate change and its impacts depend on choices made today.

   In its coverage of the report’s release, the Washington Post observes “Even if the nation takes significant steps to slow emissions of heat-trapping gases, the impact of global warming is expected to become more severe in coming years, the report says, affecting farms and forests, coastlines and floodplains, water and energy supplies, transportation and human health… But the speed and severity of these effects in the future are expressed with less certainty in the report and will depend to some extent on how quickly the United States and other nations move to reduce emissions.”

   “What we would want to have people take away is that climate change is happening now, and it’s actually beginning to affect our lives,” said Thomas R. Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a principal author of the report. “It’s not just happening in the Arctic regions, but it’s beginning to show up in our own backyards.”

   Dr. Karl said that unless the country acted soon to reduce emissions and to adapt to inevitable effects of a changing climate, the costs would be severe.

   “Our destiny is really in our hands,” he said. “The size of those impacts is significantly smaller with appropriate controls.”

   The Guardian adds the report “provides the most detailed picture to date of the worst case scenarios of rising sea levels and extreme weather events: floods in lower Manhattan; a quadrupling of heat waves deaths in Chicago; withering on the vineyards of California; the disappearance of wildflowers from the slopes of the Rockies; and the extinction of Alaska’s wild polar bears in the next 75 years.”

   If today’s generation acts on climate change, the average US temperature will rise 2.2C-3.6C (4-6.5F) by the end of this century, said the draft, which was finalised in April.

   If it does not, average temperatures could rise by about 3.9C-6.1C (7-11F) with catastrophic consequences for human health and the economy.

Four at Four continues with climate changes impact the world’s rivers and water resources, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed said he lied when tortured, Abu Zubaida was tortured but CIA mistakenly identified him as al-Qaeda, and idle factories in the U.S. at a record high.

1. The LA Times reports on A ‘time bomb’ for world wheat crop.

   Crop scientists fear the Ug99 fungus could wipe out more than 80% of worldwide wheat crops as it spreads from eastern Africa. It has already jumped the Red Sea and traveled as far as Iran. Experts say it is poised to enter the breadbasket of northern India and Pakistan, and the wind will inevitably carry it to Russia, China and even North America — if it doesn’t hitch a ride with people first.

   “It’s a time bomb,” said Jim Peterson, a professor of wheat breeding and genetics at Oregon State University in Corvallis. “It moves in the air, it can move in clothing on an airplane. We know it’s going to be here. It’s a matter of how long it’s going to take.”

   Though most Americans have never heard of it, Ug99 — a type of fungus called stem rust because it produces reddish-brown flakes on plant stalks — is the No. 1 threat to the world’s most widely grown crop.

   The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico estimates that 19% of the world’s wheat, which provides food for 1 billion people in Asia and Africa, is in imminent danger.

2. The NY Times reports Climate change may drive mass migration. CARE, the U.N., and Columbia University have released a new report, “In Search of Shelter, which maps the effects of climate change on human migration and displacement. The study “combined climatological and demographic data with field interviews of migrants already on the move” with the goal of providing “an overview, with rich maps and an oft-lacking dose of empiricism, of where the changing environment is driving decision-making on the ground and which areas are likely to be hit hardest if things get worse.”

   Meanwhile, the United States has been resisting describing people moving because of a changing climate as “climate change refugees” because it “invokes all manner of political, legal and financial imperatives – not least those arising from a 1951 U.N. convention on refugees.”

   Meanwhile, the CS Monitor reports Adapting to climate change depends on site-specific knowledge. “It’s too late to avoid some unpleasant effects of global warming, such as a rising sea level and water shortages. But there’s still time to avert the worst foreseeable consequences, such as an even larger sea level rise and even more extreme temperatures.” However, “One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to coping with the effects of climate change.”

Four at Four continues with years before jobs return, American children are being deprived of an arts and music education, the connection between psychopaths and politicians.

 

Bradley Graham has a lengthy article, nearly 8,000 words, on the “Decline and Fall” of Donald Rumsfeld in Friday’s Washington Post. The article is adapted from his forthcoming book, By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld.

A few anecdotes leap out that I found telling. Such as, Rumsfeld was afraid of Condoleezza Rice and sent people in his stead to inform her of decisions he made that he knew she would not like rather than in person to avoid her ire.  

1. The Guardian reports the U.S. says it will not demand binding carbon cuts from China. Instead of binding cuts, “Jonathan Pershing, head of the US delegation in Bonn, said developing nations – seeking to grow their economies and alleviate poverty – would instead be asked to commit to other actions”, including “sting energy efficiency standards and improving the take-up of renewable energy”.

   “Only developed nations, including the US, would be expected to guarantee cuts… China and the US are the two biggest polluters in the world, making their positions on the deal critical.” China has called on “the US to cut emissions by 2020 by 40% on 1990 levels.”

   While the Obama administration may be able to negotiate a climate treaty, without requiring binding cuts by China and other ‘developing’ nations, I am not optimistic of seeing such a treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate.

2. The NY Times reports As wind power grows, so does the push to tear down dams in the Pacific NorthWest. The Bonneville Power Administration transmission system has quadrupled the amount of wind power “in the last three years and is expected to double again in another two. The turbines are making an electricity system with low carbon emissions even greener – already, in Seattle, more than 90 percent of the power comes from renewable sources.”

   Environmental groups contend that the Bonneville Power Administration’s shift to wind turbines buttresses their case for tearing down dams in the agency’s territory, particularly four along the lower Snake River in Washington State that helped decimate one of North America’s great runs of wild salmon.

   Bonneville wants to keep all the dams, arguing that they not only provide cheap power but they also make an ideal complement to large-scale installation of wind power. When the wind slows and power production drops, the agency argues, it can compensate quickly by telling the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, which operate the dams, to release more water from reservoirs to turn the huge generators. When the wind picks up, dam operations can be slowed.

   The dams help alleviate a need for natural-gas-fired power plants, which are used in other regions as a backup power source when the wind stops blowing, but which release carbon dioxide that contributes to global warming.

Four at Four continues with Amazon destruction and gray hair.