The problem with this research is that a large percentage of people who read articles like this won’t care because they don’t plan on being here in 2099, nor do they have enough compassion to want to shield their grandchildren from having to deal with the messes we are creating today.
What would be helpful is this: What are the coasts going to look like in 10 years? 20? Give us some data we can start measuring off our docks right now.
Fast-melting ice from Greenland and Antarctica will lead to a much sharper rise in sea levels than previously estimated, touching off flooding that will radically alter U.S. East Coast cities from Miami to Baltimore, according to a new study.
Climate change will cause a rise of at least 1 meter (39 inches) in sea levels by the end of this century, according to a review of scientific data by Clean Air-Cool Planet, an environmental group that calls itself nonpartisan.
The projection is in sharp contrast to a 2007 study by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said world sea levels could increase 18-59 centimeters (7-23 inches) by 2100.
“We are on our way to radically changing what the coasts look like,” said Jim White, a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, who worked on the study. “Norfolk could replace New Orleans as the poster child” for coastal flooding, he told reporters on Thursday.
There are some folks in our world who prefer to ignore science and cling to the droolings of drug-addled talk show hosts and Faux News. If you ask them, global warming is a myth and the planet is actually cooling. Not so says scientists. This decade — the one we are currently living in — will go down as the hottest in recorded history.
So, why do people choose to believe the far-right, pro-big business bologna? Good question. Besides the fact that so many people from that segment of society not only believe but repeat anything their propaganda machines say — to the point of being known as “ditto heads” — my best guess is they don’t want to accept the fact that they’re in some way responsible for ruining their children’s future. Not only that, they don’t want to take responsibility for cleaning up the mess humans have created.
For the rest of us, though, we’ll stick with real — not lobbyist funded — science and we’ll do what we can to reverse the damage our species has caused.
The Earth is still warming, not cooling as some global warming skeptics are claiming, according to an analysis of global temperatures by independent statistics experts.
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The statisticians, reviewing two sets of temperature data, found no trend of falling temperatures over time. And U.S. government figures show that the decade that ends in December will be the warmest in 130 years of record-keeping.
Global warming skeptics are basing their claims on an unusually hot year in 1998. They say that since then, temperatures have fallen — thus, a cooling trend. But it’s not that simple.
Since 1998, temperatures have dipped, soared, dropped again and are now rising once more. Records kept by the British meteorological office and satellite data used by climate skeptics still show 1998 as the hottest year. However, data from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA show 2005 has topped 1998.
Oh, and in related news: CPCC is getting some big money for an energy center. See, those in the know are are taking action working to create jobs. Meanwhile, the ditto heads … well, they’re still nodding.
Editing science = lying. We the People deserve to know what’s being pumped into our air, water, underneath the ground and into our bodies.
While the last Bush administration edited science to suit the needs of big business, the Obama administration takes their job a little more seriously. They seem to understand that no amount of corporate profit or shareholder praise is worth our health or the earth’s.
The apparent interference by Council on Environmental Quality during the Bush administration prompted a 16-month congressional investigation beginning in July 2006 that pored over 27,000 pages of White House documents. “The evidence before the committee leads to one inescapable conclusion: the Bush administration has engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming,” the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform wrote in its report on the matter in December 2007. “White House officials and political appointees in the agencies censored congressional testimony on the causes and impacts of global warming, controlled media access to government climate scientists, and edited federal scientific reports to inject unwarranted uncertainty into discussions of climate change.”
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The CEQ also helped shape the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) declaration that it did not have the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as well as its decision not to declare them a danger to public health under the Clean Air Act, despite an internal EPA analysis noting that greenhouse gas emissions endangered public welfare. “The decision to go with an advanced notice [of proposed rule making] or not was ultimately Steve Johnson’s” (the EPA administrator at the end of the Bush tenure), Connaughton says. “That comes out of a broader policy management discussion about how far [you] could go with the Clean Air Act versus how far you could go with legislation…I would have tried to get the climate legislative piece going earlier. If I could have gotten that going a year-and-half earlier, that would have heightened prospects of climate legislation by the end of our term.”
With the advent of the Obama administration, CEQ again reorganized, and some of its duties under the previous administration—such as taking the lead in climate change policymaking—were given to a newly created White House Office of Energy and Climate Policy directed by former Clinton-era EPA administrator, Carol Browner.
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Her new approach at CEQ “is to be guided by science and law,” Sutley says. “I’m not a scientist and I’m not going to comment on the science. My role here and CEQ’s role is to advise the president on environmental policy. The science is what the science is.”
Carbon dioxide will soon be declared a dangerous pollutant – a move that could help propel slow-moving climate-change legislation on Capitol Hill, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency said Monday.
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told reporters that a formal “endangerment finding,” which would trigger federal regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, probably would “happen in the next months.”
Jackson announced her timeline even as top senators said they were delaying plans to introduce legislation that would set new limits on carbon dioxide emissions. Senators had been scheduled to unveil legislation next Tuesday, but the date has now been pushed back to later in September.
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The EPA can formalize the finding anytime, now that it has closed a 60-day public comment period that netted more than 300,000 responses.
A formal endangerment finding would obligate the agency to regulate greenhouse gas pollution under the Clean Air Act – even if Congress doesn’t pass a final climate-change bill.
President Obama and Jackson have said they would prefer that Congress – rather than the EPA – take the lead in implementing new greenhouse gas limits. Businesses and energy industry leaders also have largely favored congressional action over EPA-imposed limits, because they believe lawmakers are better positioned to combine economic safeguards with any new carbon cap.
“Legislation is so important, because it will combine the most efficient, most economy-wide, least costly (and) least disruptive way to deal with carbon dioxide pollution,” Jackson said. “We get further faster without top-down regulation.”
But Jackson insisted the EPA would continue on a path that began when the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that greenhouse gases qualified as pollutants and could be regulated if the government determined they threatened the public.
“Two years is a long time for this country to wait for us to respond to the Supreme Court’s ruling,” Jackson said.
No surprise here: Big business leaders are abusing the legislative process in their ongoing attempt to stifle progress and sell our future so they can continue to feed their addiction to money.
While Big Business and the EPA are busy measuring their johnsons, you might be interested to know that a recent study on global warming includes our fair city. Charlotte is not only listed as one of the 30 cities at risk, but it’s listed at the top of the at-risk list — right up there with Los Angeles, New York and Dallas.
The nation’s largest business lobby wants to put the science of global warming on trial.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, trying to ward off potentially sweeping federal emissions regulations, is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a rare public hearing on the scientific evidence for man-made climate change.
Chamber officials say it would be “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century” — complete with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge who would rule, essentially, on whether humans are warming the planet to dangerous effect.
“It would be evolution versus creationism,” said William Kovacs, the chamber’s senior vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs. “It would be the science of climate change on trial.”
The goal of the chamber, which represents 3 million large and small businesses, is to fend off potential emissions regulations by undercutting the scientific consensus over climate change. If the EPA denies the request, as expected, the chamber plans to take the fight to federal court.
The EPA is having none of it, calling a hearing a “waste of time” and saying that a threatened lawsuit by the chamber would be “frivolous.”
EPA spokesman Brendan Gilfillan said the agency based its proposed finding that global warming is a danger to public health “on the soundest peer-reviewed science available, which overwhelmingly indicates that climate change presents a threat to human health and welfare.”
Environmentalists say the chamber’s strategy is an attempt to sow political discord by challenging settled science — and note that in the famed 1925 Scopes trial, which pitted lawyers Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan in a courtroom battle over a Tennessee science teacher accused of teaching evolution illegally, the scientists won in the end.
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In the coming weeks, the EPA is set to formally declare that the heat-trapping gases scientists blame for climate change endanger human health, and are thus subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act. The so-called endangerment finding will be a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s plan to set strict new emissions standards on cars and trucks.
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Most climate scientists agree that greenhouse gas emissions, caused by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities, are warming the planet. Using computer models and historical temperature data, those scientists predict the warming will accelerate unless greenhouse gas emissions are dramatically reduced.
“The need for urgent action to address climate change is now indisputable,” said a recent letter to world leaders by the heads of the top science agencies in 13 of the world’s largest countries, including the head of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
China and India have closed ranks on climate change, blaming developed countries for the lack of progress towards a deal.
“They have talked much, but not done much,” said Xie Zhenhua, China’s minister in charge of climate change, adding that the conflict between developed and developing nations was driven by commercial and political interest.
His remarks came during two days of talks with Jairam Ramesh, India’s environment minister, which were aimed at -synchronising the two countries’ positions as negotiations at Copenhagen, Denmark, on climate change draw near.
Mr Ramesh also rejected the notion that the two Asian giants were obstructing a deal. “The way the narrative seems to have evolved is that countries like India and China are holding back an inter-national agreement,” he told foreign journalists before leaving for China. “Far from it.”
The two countries are responding to intensifying criticism from western -governments and climate change activists for refusing to agree to binding -targets for carbon emissions as part of efforts to forge an international deal to combat global warming. But the negotiators’ remarks also reflect their growing disillusionment with the talks.
“Developed countries just keep repeating the demand that China should commit to capping its emissions but they are not engaging in a sincere dialogue about the proposal China has put forward,” said Zou Ji, a leading climate change scholar at Renmin University who has advised Beijing on its climate change policy and is head of the World Resources Institute in China.
Groups from the oil industry, agriculture and manufacturing have lined up to oppose climate change legislation, saying it would add costs for producers, farmers and consumers without guaranteeing environmental gains.
Vilsack and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke met with groups from the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic states to press their message that a climate change law would be good for the environment and economy.
A U.S. Agriculture Department study shows farmers could boost their net income by $10 billion to $20 billion in the long term earning money from offsets — contracts to plant trees or change the way they till land to lock more carbon in soils, Vilsack said.
“The report highlights the current vulnerabilities from heat waves growing,” says climate scientist Amanda Staudt of the National Wildlife Federation, a report sponsor. Average temperatures are expected to grow 4 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit nationwide over the next century, according to the federal climate research group.
The severity will vary with industrial emissions of greenhouse gases, but “heat waves will continue to get worse in the coming decades,” the report warns. It lists the 30 major cities most at risk.
In June, the climate research program published a report that found average temperatures in the USA have increased more than 2 degrees in the past five decades, largely as the result of emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, which are produced by burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil. Greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, which drives up temperatures in the air and oceans.
No surprise here. As with most things in the corporate world, they’ll do what it takes to protect their money.
Insurers in the U.S., Germany and Switzerland say a pledge announced yesterday at a meeting of the world’s biggest polluters to limit global temperatures is essential to controlling the cost of protecting property.
Munich Re, the biggest reinsurer, and Zurich Financial Services AG back the target set by the European Union, the U.S. and 15 more nations to hold the planet to within 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) of pre-industrial times.
The 17-member group, acting on scientific forecasts that excessive warming may spark more severe weather, set the goal as the centerpiece of their declaration in L’Aquila, Italy, after meetings led by U.S. President Barack Obama. The 2-degree cap, supported by the EU since 1996, has gained acceptance from insurers, one of the first corporate converts.
In case you haven’t heard the latest craze among right-wing talkers, it’s about Al Carlin, an Environmental Protection Agency analyst who stated his skepticism about global warming. Conservatives are saying that Carlin’s views on climate change were suppressed by EPA honchos because they didn’t agree with Obama administration opinions.
Now, it’s true that conservatives are well-versed in the issue of presidents stifling scientists who oppose their views — Bush did it for a solid eight years, after all. But here’s the big difference: Carlin is not a climate scientist — he’s an economist who wrote some reports on his own, without prompting by the EPA, after taking on the issue of global warming as a “hobby” on his own time. Nothing was “suppressed,” since Carlin’s reports weren’t EPA reports at all. Meanwhile, of course, Sen. James “The global warming debate is predicated on fear, rather than science” Inhofe of Oklahoma is calling for a criminal investigation into the Carlin matter – in order, we imagine, to scare the daylights out of the scientists at the EPA.
What principles are you willing to to go to jail for?
It may seem odd timing that many of us are heading to the nation’s capital early next month for a major act of civil disobedience at a coal-fired power plant, the first big protest of its kind against global warming in this country.
After all, Barack Obama’s in power. He’s appointed scientific advisers who actually believe in… science, and he’s done more in a few weeks to deal with climate change than all the presidents of the last 20 years combined. Stalwarts like John Kerry, Henry Waxman, and Ed Markey are chairing the relevant congressional committees. The auto companies, humbled, are promising to build rational vehicles if only we give them some cash. What’s to protest? Why not just give the good guys a break?
If you think about it a little longer, though, you realize this is just the moment to up the ante.
Read the rest of this Yale Environment 360 Op-Ed piece here.
Global-warming talk and going green initiative is everywhere. The race season has recently commenced and I am submerged right in the middle of it. So, I couldn’t help but notice a bumper sticker that read, “NASCAR is killing our planet.†At first, it seemed arbitrary, but it as it intended, it got me thinking. I thought about the hundreds of thousands of race fans that haul out to the track every weekend in towns across America, the 18-wheelers and airplanes that shuttle the teams back-and-forth from North Carolina, and the typical three-day event of circling trucks and cars to the tune of 200 miles plus. I thought about the land that was plowed to construct a track worthy of NASCAR sanction, the acres of parking space and I realized, the bumper sticker had a point.
I missed the John Locke Foundation’s “Why Al Gore is Wrong” talk Monday about global warming. Yeah, yeah, yeah … I’d actually hoped to go. Here’s a related event (albeit of a ideologically different stripe) that also looks interesting — and entertaining. Local activists, including Brian Staton (who sent this to me) are working with the Neighborhood Theatre (which has hosted An Inconvenient Truth screenings) to stage a Live Earth concert here.
From Brian’s e-mail:
Live Earth is a monumental music event that will bring together more than 2 billion people on 7/7/07 to raise awareness about global warming. With 24 hours of music across 7 continents, and performances by more than 150 of the world’s top musicians, Live Earth will engage, connect, and inspire. Charlotte Friends of Live Earth will combine education with a free live concert experience!
The Neighborhood Theatre 511 E. 36th Street – NoDa – Charlotte, NC will create a FREE Live Concert experience for the Live Earth monumental music event that will bring together more than 2 billion people on 7/7/07 to raise awareness about global warming !!!
