More Dark Global Warming News on a Hot Friday
Two articles: “Ten Nations at ‘Extreme Risk’ Because of Water Shortages, Report Says” and “Heat Waves to Intensify Across U.S. in Next 30 Years, Study Says”
Gwynne Dyer Speaks About Climate Wars on Democracy Now
A new book by geopolitical analyst and columnist Gwynne Dyer imagines what the politics and demographics of the world might look like if temperatures continue to rise. Dyer writes ‘In this world our worries are not just hotter summers, bigger hurricanes, rising sea levels, and polar bears swimming for their lives. We’re trying to avoid megadeaths from mass starvation and quite possibly from nuclear wars and the odds aren’t good,” he writes.The June 1, 2010 edition of his book is called “Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats.”
Present Targets for CO2 Emission Cuts Will Not Prevent a 4C Global Temperature Rise
The world is heading for an average temperature rise of nearly 4C (7F), according to analysis of national pledges from around the globe. Such a rise would bring a high risk of major extinctions, threats to food supplies and the near-total collapse of the huge Greenland ice sheet.
Paper from PNAS: Expert credibility in climate change
97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field surveyed in this report support the tenets of ACC outlined by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.
“Cap and Trade” Would Make Getting to Zero Emissions of Carbon Dioxide Impossible
Jean Matlack, one of our trusted 350.org organizers in Maine, recently wrote a Letter to the Editor of the Bangor Daily News which was published on April 13. Her letter, titled “Cap and Dividend might work”, stresses the importance of passing effective climate legislation in the U.S. as soon as possible, and goes on to explain why the cap-and-dividend approach, proposed by Sen. Susan Collins, R-ME and Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-WA, could fit the bill (no pun intended). Please take a moment to read her letter, posted below, and consider writing a Letter to the Editor of your own local newspaper. We can’t afford to stay silent when it comes to solving the climate crisis, so now is the perfect time to get your ideas and opinions published.
Solar Minimum Induced Global Cooling? Don’t Bet On It
Will the media continue to ignore all the extreme weather that scientists have been predicting for years would become more common as we pour more heat trapping gases into the atmosphere? Given that we’ve only warmed about a degree Fahrenheit in the past half century and much of this country projected to warm 9°F or more on our current emissions path, it’s hard to imagine the kind of extreme weather we will ultimately be seen.
A CLIMATE LIFEBOAT AT SEA
While compromising your standards in dealing with misinformed, dishonest or incompetent politicians may make you look good to them, this won’t gain you much respect or credibility with your children and grandchildren, who will be forced to live with future climate change, exacerbated by the lack of meaningful action today. We should approach the great task before us with passion and concern – and not be afraid to show it.
Corporate Influence on Climate Change and Environmental NGO’s Exposed
By pretending the broken system can work–and will work, in just a moment, after just one more Democratic win, or another, or another–the big green groups are preventing the appropriate response from concerned citizens, which is fury at the system itself. They are offering placebos to calm us down when they should be conducting and amplifying our anger at this betrayal of our safety by our politicians. The US climate bills are long-term plans: they lock us into a woefully inadequate schedule of carbon cuts all the way to 2050. So when green groups cheer them on, they are giving their approval to a path to destruction–and calling it progress.
Bill McKibben: The Attack on Climate-Change Science
“In early 2009,” writes Bill McKibben in a soon-to-be-published new book, “just as Obama was getting set to unveil his energy plans, word came that 2,340 lobbyists had registered to work on climate change on Capitol Hill (that’s about six per congressman), 85 percent of them devoted to slowing down progress.” By early 2010, you can see the results of such efforts, multiplied many times over by the staggering levels of support available for anti-climate-change work from the richest industry on the planet: the energy business. All this was not helped, of course, by the much hyped “climate-gate” which proved that climate-change scientists were fallible human beings and not simply extraterrestrial super-brains. These “scandals” were, in turn, blown up to proportions that seemed to blot out the very image of the disappearing Arctic icepack.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, the latest poll on the American public’s attitude toward climate change shows startling drops in the belief in the very existence of climate change, in humanity’s role in causing it, and in its import for the planet: a 14-point drop since October 2008 in Americans who believe climate change is happening at all (to 57%), a 10-point drop in those who believe that human activity is at the root of the problem (to 47%), and a 13-point drop in those who claim to be “somewhat” or “very” worried about the problem (to 50%).
What’s strangest in all this is that the evidence for our changing planet seems to stare us in the face — from the previously mythical, now navigable Northwest Passage to melting glaciers just about everywhere to more intense storms (including, of course, more intense snowstorms because, despite the name “global warming,” no one has yet banished winter from the planet). What makes this sadder yet is that, if the U.S. refuses to deal with our planet’s health and well-being (and ours), everything becomes so much harder, so much less likely. If you want to put all of this into some reasonable perspective, when you’ve finished Bill McKibben’s latest piece, think about ordering his new book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (to be published this April). The title is unsettling — especially for an editor, with those two “a”s in Eaarth — and the book more so, but it’s not without hope and it could be the necessary guide to, and text for, the new planet with ever quirkier weather on which, after so many thousands of years, we humans suddenly find ourselves.
