Tag: global warming

The man of science, the naturalist, too often loses sight of the essential oneness of all living beings in seeking to classify them in kingdoms, orders, families, genera, species, etc., taking note of the kind and arrangement of limbs, teeth, toes, scales, hair, feathers, etc., measured and set forth in meters, centimenters, and millimeters, while the eye of the Poet, the Seer, never closes on the kindship of all God’s creatures, and his heart ever beats in sympathy with great and small alike as “earth-born companions and fellow mortals” equally dependent on Heaven’s eternal love.–John Muir

The Guardian is reporting very discouraging news, in the lead up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference, in Copenhagen, in December.

Europe has clashed with the US Obama administration over climate change in a potentially damaging split that comes ahead of crucial political negotiations on a new global deal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

The impasse is said to threaten the goal of limiting global temperature increases to no more than 2 degrees celsius, by 2015. Another Guardian article quotes UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon:

“We are deeply concerned that the negotiation is not making much headway. It is absolutely and crucially important for the leaders to demonstrate their political will, leadership, and to give clear political guidelines to the negotiators. They should be responsible for the future of this entire humanity,” Ban told the Guardian.

Ban, newly returned from a trip to the Arctic, sees action on climate change as his personal legacy as UN chief. He said he hoped the unprecedented size of the climate meeting, the high level of representation and an unconventional format would transform the talks.

“Have you ever seen any such international conference at the level of so many leaders coming at one time and one place? In any summit meeting you have not seen such a highly political, highly motivated meeting. That is where we have to find some political strength.”

But as elucidated in the first Guardian article, the problem is this:

Real News CEO Paul Jay talks with Executive Director Jessy Tolkan of Energy Action Coalition, a coalition of 50 leading youth organizations throughout the U.S. and Canada,  at the Momentum ’09 Conference of the Tides Foundation in San Francisco.

The BBC has the summary:

Arctic temperatures are now higher than at any time in the last 2,000 years, research reveals.

Changes to the Earth’s orbit drove centuries of cooling, but temperatures rose fast in the last 100 years as human greenhouse gas emissions rose.

Scientists took evidence from ice cores, tree rings and lake sediments.

Writing in the journal Science, they say this confirms that the Arctic is very sensitive both to changes in solar heating and to greenhouse warming.

The full article is firewalled at Science, but it’s long enough to allow some significant quotes. The lead author is Darrell S. Kaufman of the School of Earth Sciences and Environmental Sustainability at Northern Arizona University.

 

We are killing the world’s coral reefs and their situation is virtually hopeless.

“The future is horrific,” says Charlie Veron, an Australian marine biologist who is widely regarded as the world’s foremost expert on coral reefs.

“There is no hope of reefs surviving to even mid-century in any form that we now recognise. If, and when, they go, they will take with them about one-third of the world’s marine biodiversity. Then there is a domino effect, as reefs fail so will other ecosystems. This is the path of a mass extinction event, when most life, especially tropical marine life, goes extinct.”

Or, as David Adam explains in his Guardian article about Why coral reefs face a catastrophic future:

Within just a few decades, experts are warning, the tropical reefs strung around the middle of our planet like a jewelled corset will reduce to rubble. Giant piles of slime-covered rubbish will litter the sea bed and spell in large distressing letters for the rest of foreseeable time: Humans Were Here.

They are not alone in their bleak outlook for the future of the world’s coral reefs.

Welcome to the 20th installment of “Considered Forthwith.”

This weekly series looks at the various committees in the House and the Senate. Committees are the workshops of our democracy. This is where bills are considered, revised, and occasionally advance for consideration by the House and Senate. Most committees also have the authority to exercise oversight of related executive branch agencies.

This week’s entry is a little different than usual. With Congress out of session until Sept. 8, there is not much going on in the standing committees. When they do get back, there will be a ton of work to get done, not the least of which will be a health care reform bill and a climate change bill. There are also 13 appropriations bills to handle. Everyone of these will certainly end up in a conference committee. This seems an opportune time to discuss that process.

If you heard this on the TV, would you sit and think, interesting Opinions?

“The facts are simple,” says Charles K. Johnson, president of the International Flat Earth Research Society. “The earth is flat.”

“Nobody knows anything about the true shape of the world,” he contends. “The known, inhabited world is flat.

[…]

the stars are about as far as San Francisco is from Boston.”

As shown in a map published by Johnson, the known world is as circular and as flat as a phonograph record. The North Pole is at the center.

 

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/…

Or if you heard this loudly stated Opinion, would you think, “Well, They have a Right to their Opinions”

Mr. Johnson, who called himself the last iconoclast, regarded scientists as witch doctors pulling off a gigantic hoax so as to replace religion with science. He based his own ideas on the Old Testament references to a flat earth

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03…