Tag: climate change

Senator Jeff Merkley came to the podium during the luncheon session at America’s Future NOW! focused on energy.   He opened, reinforcing core points from his 2008 campaign:

If I’d been here a year ago, I would have talked to you about three things:  The need to transform energy economy, create jobs, and tackle global warming. … About the third, during the campaign, I spoke it about every single night. People asked me why, as it was 21st on people’s concerns.  I responded: it should be first on everyone’s agenda and the only way it will be is if we talk about it.

Senator Merkley speaks, today and elsewhere, knowledgeably and forcefully about Global Warming, providing a litany of items that should part of the agenda moving ahead. Amid these items and opportunity, Senator Merkley made some key points.  But, he provided a straightforward shorthand of what must happen.

If I am going to simplify the issue, we have to quit taking geologic carbon and turning it into atmospheric carbon.

Shut up already!!!

President Obama has said favorable words.

Al Gore says supports it.  Paul Krugman says support it. Two Nobel Prize Winners.

WTF are you to question the President and two Nobel Prize winners?

That is a question received, in more than one space, when it comes to the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security (ACES).

Well, with all due respect to our President and the infallibility of Nobel Prize Winners (Kissinger (’73), James Watson (’03), etc …), we should be clear that the bill, as drafted, falls far short of what is necessary and, well, quite likely falls short of what is possible.

Last night, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act out for consideration by the rest of the House.

This bill is filled with good … and bad elements. It has strong provisions for improving energy efficiency in the United States, a weak renewable energy standard, and massive (MASSIVE) direct and indirect subsidies and payoffs for the fossil fuel industries.

This is a challenging moment.

There are environmental organizations cheering from the rooftops. There are environmental organizations declaring their opposition. And, there are those vowing to fight even harder.

Crossposted from Antemedius

“Climate Change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.”

Last week on May 16, 2009 a collaboration between the British medical journal The Lancet and University College London released the first UCL Lancet Commission report, assessing the impact of global warming on global health, and on populations.

Titled Managing the health effects of climate change (.PDF), the year long study highlights the threat of climate change on patterns of disease, water and food insecurity, human settlements, extreme climatic events, and population migration. The report also highlights the action required by global society to mitigate the health impacts of climate change.

“Climate change,” the report concludes, “is the biggest global health threat of the 21 century.”

But the impact on and cost to human societies globally is hugely unequal, with the populations of developed countries that benefit most from fossil fuels projected to suffer the least, while poorer countries that because of the projected health cost to their peoples have the maximum incentive to prevent climate change have virtually no power to do anything to prevent the changes.

It’s the old story of the comparatively few rich benefiting in comfort at the expense of poverty stricken multitudes.

… while we’re lobbying politicians to punch the treaty full of loopholes”.

script(pdf) (script below the fold)

AVAAZ.org‘s “Stop Climate Spin” campaign.

AVAAZ has the hat out to raise the money to get the ad on heavy rotation at CNN. Also, if you can donate views, ratings, favorites and comments at Youtube, that’s another way to raise the profile.

(h/t A Siegel at Agent Orange)

Oh, the charm of the fossil fuels industry. In an effort to prevent public awareness of the growing climate crisis they do so much to create, they concocted an astroturf front with the Orwellian moniker Global Climate Coalition. The purpose of which was, of course, to deny its industry’s role in creating climate change. Thereby exacerbating the problem of climate change. Which does, actually, make it a coalition on global climate. A coalition determined to recklessly play a giant chemistry experiment with the climate, as long as its industry can make massive profits off it.

According to today’s New York Times:

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.

“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue

And it should come as no surprise, then, to learn that this astroturf front was so determined to deny its industry’s role in causing climate change that it actually engaged its own scientists. Who engaged in acts of science. And determined that, um, well, the fossil fuels industry does actually contribute to climate change. Oops.

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

Presented for your…well…just check it out:

STEPHANOPOULOS: So what is the responsible way? That’s my question. What is the Republican plan to deal with carbon emissions, which every major scientific organization has said is contributing to climate change?

BOEHNER: George, the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do, you’ve got more carbon dioxide. And so I think it’s clear…

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you don’t believe that greenhouse gases are a problem in creating climate change?

BOEHNER: … we’ve had climate change over the last 100 years — listen, it’s clear we’ve had change in our climate. The question is how much does man have to do with it, and what is the proper way to deal with this? We can’t do it alone as one nation. If we got India, China and other industrialized countries not working with us, all we’re going to do is ship millions of American jobs overseas.

link: http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek…

Have We Hit the Limits of Human Population? – Alternet

The last 200 years of economic growth have been based on a monumental Ponzi scheme that has pushed us toward the ultimate tipping point.

Poor prognosis for our planet – Sydney Morning Herald

The world has about a decade left to sort out the climate-change mess. John Collee sees lessons from his medicine days as parallels for the future of our planet.

Every patient with an incurable illness will ask how long they have to live. The answer goes something like this: “No one can say how long you may live, because every individual is different, but focus on the changes you observe and be guided by those. When things start changing for the worse, expect these changes to accelerate. So the changes that have occurred over a year may advance by the same degree in a few months, then in weeks. And that is how you can judge when the end is coming.”

Breaking the silence about Spring – RealClimate

Did you know that in 1965 the U.S. Department of Agriculture planted a particular variety of lilac in more than seventy locations around the U.S. Northeast, to detect the onset of spring – in turn to be used to determine the appropriate timing of corn planting and the like? The records the USDA have kept show that those same lilacs are blooming as much as two weeks earlier than they did in 1965. April has, in a very real sense, become May. This is one of the interesting facts that you’ll read about in Amy Seidl’s book, Early Spring, a hot-off-the-press essay about the impacts of climate change on the world immediately around us – the forest, the birds, the butterflies in our backyards.

Ice loss sparks new climate change fears – Financial Times

Evidence of ice loss from both poles this week has sparked fresh fears that global warming is progressing faster than scientists had predicted. Arctic ice has thinned dramatically, as well as shrinking in area, according to US research. Thin seasonal ice, which melts and refreezes each year, now makes up about 70 per cent of the Arctic winter ice, up from about 40 to 50 per cent in the 1980s and 1990s, leaving far less of the older, thicker ice that is harder to melt.

In the Antarctic, an ice bridge connecting an island to the Wilkins ice shelf – a sheet of ice about the size of Northern Ireland – shattered as scientists monitored it through satellite observations.

Crossposted from Antemedius

For years as the planet warms the arctic icecap has been melting and retreating.

Many of us have long known that arctic wildlife like polar bears, gray whales, killer whales, narwhals, seals, and arctic fish and bird populations, as well as arctic coastal human settlements, are in danger of eventual extinction as their natural habitat has been retreating, but what most of us haven’t known is the extent and speed of the retreat.

Because of recent ice loss, Arctic surface air temperatures are warmer than normal, and much warmer than scientists expected to find.

As the ice has been melting the growing spans of open water absorb more sunlight than the ice previously did, so as more open water becomes uncovered, the remaining ice will melt more quickly. This will itself accelerate the rate of warming and lead to more ice loss. In addition, global climate change is likely to drive warmer ocean currents into the Arctic region.

You get the picture. What has developed is a positive feedback loop with dramatic implications for the entire Arctic, and for the rest of the planet, and for all life on Earth. It’s been nice knowing you.

The shrinkage of the Arctic ice cap is viewed with much alarm by climate researchers and scientists, as it appears to perturb important ocean currents elsewhere, notably the Gulf Stream, which gives western Europe its balmy climate.

Now a new report by scientists Muyin Wang of the Joint Institute for the Study of Atmosphere and Ocean and James E. Overland of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, is published in todays edition of the American Geophysical Union’s journal Geophysical Research Letters, forecasting nearly complete icecap loss by 2037:

Many in the Republican “base” found John McCain an outrage, his policy views and perspectives abhorrent, not least of which that he deigns to consider reality in stating that Global Warming is a serious issue meriting attention (even if his policy prescriptions aren’t enough).

Well, what does the Glorious Leader of the Republican Party have to say about this?

“Despite the hysterics of a few pseudo-scientists, there is no reason to believe in global warming.” Rush Limbaugh, 1993

Ah, words that could warm the cockles of even the cold heart of George “Will-ful Deceit” Will.