Those bastard Global Warming nay-sayers don’t gives a hairy rats ass about melting ice, starving animals, or any damn thing going on anywhere else in the world. They simply do not care!

Can we feed these assholes to the hungry bears now?

Polar bears resort to cannibalism as Arctic ice shrinks

(CNN) — Summer is over in the northern hemisphere, but it’s been another chilling season for researchers who study Arctic sea ice.

“It’s definitely a bad report. We did pick up little bit from last year, but this is over 30 percent below what used to be normal,” said Walt Meier, a research scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. [...]

“It is the second lowest on record. … If anything, it is reinforcing the long-term trend. We are still losing the ice cover at a rate of 10 percent per decade now, and that is quite an increase from five years ago,” Meier said. “We are still heading toward an ice cover that is going to melt completely in the summertime in the Arctic.” [...]

“The Arctic sea ice melt is a disaster for the polar bears,” according to Kassie Siegel, staff attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity. “They are dependent on the Arctic sea ice for all of their essential behaviors, and as the ice melts and global warming transforms the Arctic, polar bears are starving, drowning, even resorting to cannibalism because they don’t have access to their usual food sources.”

After eight years of inaction, carbon emissions policy may finally take a reality-based turn. Both Republican senator John McCain and Democratic senator Barack Obama have proposed “cap-and-trade” (CAT) plans. While McCain’s running mate, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, recently declared she doesn’t believe climate change is “man-made”, I’ll assume that McCain continues to support his plan.

There are two key differences between the candidates’ plans. First, by 2050, Obama would reduce emissions to 80% of 1990 levels. McCain stops at 60%. Second, Obama would use a market-based auction to allocate permits that power CAT policy, while McCain would simply give them to polluters, providing huge annual handouts to a favoured few at everyone else’s expense. Let’s see why.

More at the Guardian

“This animation in Google Earth shows satellite data of Arctic sea ice concentration from May 25 to August 21, 2008. Note how the decline rate speeds up during August, with strong losses north of Siberia.”

Per Juan Cole: The more drilling and use of oil and other fossil fuels in which we engage, the faster the arctic and antarctic ice will melt, leading to rising sea levels.

Barack Obama…..right. John McCain…..wrong.

THE heads of major fossil fuel companies who spread disinformation about global warming should be “tried for high crimes against humanity and nature,” according to a leading climate scientist.

Dr James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, sounded the alarm about global warming in testimony before a US Senate subcommittee exactly 20 years ago, Fox News reported.

He returned to the US capital yesterday to speak to US lawmakers about what he believes is a global warming “emergency” .

“Special interests have blocked the transition to our renewable energy future,” Dr Hansen wrote in an opinion piece posted on the WorldWatch Institute website to coincide with his visit to Washington.

“Instead of moving heavily into renewable energies, fossil fuel companies choose to spread doubt about global warming, just as tobacco companies discredited the link between smoking and cancer. Methods are sophisticated, including funding to help shape school textbook discussions of global warming.”

Read the rest here

Oh what a shock! From CNN:

NASA’s press office “marginalized, or mischaracterized” studies on global warming between 2004 and 2006, a government watchdog says.

In a report issued Monday, the NASA inspector general said the press office’s actions were a result of “inappropriate political interference.”

The inspector general’s report blamed “political appointees,” saying neither the agency’s top management nor career officials engaged in censorship of the studies.

Go sign up and tell your friends here

Western Antarctica ice sheets, considered relatively protected from global warming, now appear to be destabilizing.

SEND IN THE CLOWNS!

Republican presidential hopefuls Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, former Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., Sen. Sam Brownback R-Kan., and Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo. are seen at Ford Community and Performing Arts Center, in Dearborn, Mich., on Tues., Oct. 9.

So, the subject of global warming is finally gaining some traction from within the republican camp. Does anyone know precisely when rightwing journalists, newscasters, pundits and trolls are to change their tune on this also? Yeah, right!

Global warming starts to split GOP contenders

Candidates divided over policy solutions, but most recognize the threat

While many conservative commentators and editorialists have mocked concerns about climate change, a different reality is emerging among Republican presidential contenders. It is a near-unanimous recognition among the leaders of the threat posed by global warming.

Within that camp, however, sharp divisions are developing. Senator John McCain of Arizona is calling for capping gas emissions linked to warming and higher fuel economy standards. Others, including Rudolph W. Giuliani and Mitt Romney, are refraining from advocating such limits and are instead emphasizing a push toward clean coal and other alternative energy sources.

All agree that nuclear power should be greatly expanded.

Marc Santora, The New York Times

MSNBC.com

By Deborah Zabarenko,
Environment Correspondent
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More beetles and fewer spruce trees in Alaska, whiter coral and fewer scuba-divers in Florida and more wildfires in Arizona already show the impact of climate change on U.S. lands and waters, a congressional watchdog agency reported on Thursday.

But the federal agencies that manage over 600 million acres of federal land — nearly 30 percent of the land area of the United States — and more than 150,000 square miles of protected waters have little guidance on how to deal with the effects of global warming, the Government Accountability Office said.

“Undertaking activities that address the effects of climate change is currently not a priority” for the five U.S. agencies that manage this territory, the report by the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress said.

These agencies are the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Interior Department, which includes three of the five agencies, ordered them in 2001 to analyze potential climate change effects on U.S.-managed lands, but has not yet provided direction to managers on how to plan for climate change, the report said.

read more HERE

By Barry Brown
The Washington Times

TORONTO - A warm summer has produced a record melt of the polar ice cap, leaving the Northwest Passage clear enough for a sailboat to pass and prompting nations of the far north to assert claims over the Arctic Ocean seabed.

“The entire length of the Northwest Passage is navigable,” said Trudy Wohlleben, senior ice forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service, a government agency.

Ice usually blocks at least some parts of the passage, she said. “This melt is unprecedented, and it”s speeding up.”

The development threatens to accelerate long-frozen conflicts over security, sovereignty, environmental and economic conflicts among four powers with claims over the Arctic: the U.S., Canada, Denmark and Russia.

Russia said yesterday that 12 of its strategic bomber planes had begun a two-day exercise over the north of the country that was to include the firing of cruise missiles, the air force said.

All four Arctic powers have publicized their presence in the region this summer, the most dramatic being the planting of the Russian flag under the North Pole by a miniature submarine.

Beneath the Arctic Ocean floor are potentially vast resources, and Canada and the United States have a long’standing dispute over rights to the Northwest Passage, which joins the Atlantic and Pacific.

Mark Serreze, senior research scientist with the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, said all records for low levels of Arctic sea ice were shattered by mid-August.

“The Arctic is on a fast track of change, and the Arctic sea ice is on a death spiral. Both are moving faster than any of our previous models were telling us. We still don’t understand what’s happening up there,” he said.

Robert Huebert, associate director of the Canadian Center for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary, calls the trend troubling.

Canada’s claim of sovereign control over water passage rights through its Arctic archipelago has been disputed by U.S. officials who consider it “international waters.”

“Off the record, American officials understand from a security, alliance, partnership, historical perspective it would make imminent sense to work out some kind of understanding of Canadian control” over the Northwest Passage, he said.

But that would be seen as “backing down” to Canada and prompt other nations with coastlines that the U.S. considers strategic - such as Indonesia and Spain - to demand the same right.

In effect, the U.S. position allows any “North Korean or Chinese ship to sail through North American waters without asking anyone’s permission. From a national security perspective, that’s a mad policy,” Mr. Huebert said.

Yet because of U.S. pressure on this point, Canada doesn’t force ships entering Canadian waters to notify Canadian authorities.

“It’s like asking speeders on a highway to report themselves,” Mr. Huebert said.

Canada and the U.S. lag behind Russia in asserting northern control. This year, Russia commissioned the world’s only nuclear-powered icebreaker, and while Canadian and American icebreakers can reach the North Pole in summer, the Russian ship can get there “any time it wants,” Mr. Huebert said.

By Jonathan Spicer
Reuters

TORONTO (Reuters) - Warmer, drier weather coupled with alterations to the waterways of North America’s Great Lakes will likely drive Lake Superior down to record low water levels sometime this year, experts say.

Lake Superior, the world’s largest body of fresh water by surface area, has declined precipitously over the last decade but plunged down another 30 cm (1 foot) in the last year alone amid an “extreme drought,” putting pressure on both commercial shipping and fish habitats.

“That’s a dramatic fall,” Cynthia Sellinger, a hydrologist at the U.S. Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, told Reuters. “Lake Superior has been in and out of an extreme drought since 2003, and now the drought has got more extreme on the lake’s western basin.”

Lakes Huron and Michigan, into which Superior flows, are similarly low — down 1 meter (3.3 feet) in the last ten years — leaving dried out marshes and some inaccessible ports.

Meanwhile, some of the shallows and riverbeds used by fish species such as salmon and trout for spawning have dried up.

read more HERE

United Press International

Let’s get some research going on a way to harness this power, if possible. - JS

TALLAHASSEE , Fla., Aug. 11 (UPI) — Seawater rushing through an underwater mountain range in the Atlantic is generating record turbulence levels, U.S. and French researchers said.

The turbulence in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge packs an energy wallop equal to about 5 million watts, comparable to a small nuclear reactor, lead author Louis St. Laurent of Florida State University said in the journal Nature.

The report said the turbulence — located about one mile below the surface, roughly halfway between New York and Portugal — is generating much of the mixing of warm and cold water in the Atlantic Ocean.

St. Laurent said the mixing produces the overall balance of water temperatures that helps control the strength of the Gulf Stream.

“We are aware that the climate is warming, but we don-t yet fully understand how the changes will affect society,” he said. “Our work will result in better models for predicting how the ocean will affect the climate in the future and a better understanding of sea-level rise, weather patterns such as El Nino, and the impact of these events on fisheries.”

By GILLIAN WONG
The Associated Press

SINGAPORE - Research aimed at disputing the scientific consensus on global warming is part of a huge public misinformation campaign funded by some of the world’s largest carbon polluters, former Vice President Al Gore said Tuesday.

“There has been an organized campaign, financed to the tune of about $10 million a year from some of the largest carbon polluters, to create the impression that there is disagreement in the scientific community,” Gore said at a forum in Singapore. “In actuality, there is very little disagreement.”

Gore likened the campaign to the millions of dollars spent by U.S. tobacco companies years ago on creating the appearance of scientific debate on smoking’s harmful effects.

“This is one of the strongest of scientific consensus views in the history of science,” Gore said. “We live in a world where what used to be called propaganda now has a major role to play in shaping public opinion.”

After the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made up of the world’s top climate scientists, released a report in February that warned that the cause of global warming is “very likely” man-made, “the deniers offered a bounty of $10,000 for each article disputing the consensus that people could crank out and get published somewhere,” Gore said.

“They’re trying to manipulate opinion and they are taking us for fools,” he said.

read more HERE

White Lies… confusion… obfuscation… Karl Rove taught them well. When are we going to join forces with the downtrodden of the republican party and wrestle our nation back from the wealthy? That’s what it’s going to take! Before party, we are all Americans. The rich have a vested interest in keeping us separated and polarized. We’re being played like violins, folks.

The Truth About Denial

Aug. 13, 2007 issue - Sen. Barbara Boxer had been chair of the Senate’s Environment Committee for less than a month when the verdict landed last February. “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” concluded a report by 600 scientists from governments, academia, green groups and businesses in 40 countries. [...] But Boxer figured that with “the overwhelming science out there, the deniers’ days were numbered.” As she left a meeting with the head of the international climate panel, however, a staffer had some news for her. A conservative think tank long funded by ExxonMobil, she told Boxer, had offered scientists $10,000 to write articles undercutting the new report and the computer-based climate models it is based on. (emphasis mine) “I realized,” says Boxer, “there was a movement behind this that just wasn’t giving up.”
[...]Global warming

Since the late 1980s, this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change. Through advertisements, op-eds, lobbying and media attention, greenhouse doubters (they hate being called deniers) argued first that the world is not warming; measurements indicating otherwise are flawed, they said. Then they claimed that any warming is natural, not caused by human activities. Now they contend that the looming warming will be minuscule and harmless. “They patterned what they did after the tobacco industry,” says former senator Tim Wirth, who spearheaded environmental issues as an under secretary of State in the Clinton administration. “Both figured, sow enough doubt, call the science uncertain and in dispute. That’s had a huge impact on both the public and Congress.”

As a result of the undermining of the science, all the recent talk about addressing climate change has produced little in the way of actual action. [...] Instead, every time the scientific case got stronger, “the American public yawned and bought bigger cars,” Rep. Rush Holt, a New Jersey congressman and physicist, recently wrote in the journal Science; politicians “shrugged, said there is too much doubt among scientists, and did nothing.”

Sharon Begley, Newsweek

Source: MSNBC.com

by Roddy Scheer
from E/The Environment Magazine

Robert Greenwald and his company Brave New Films are fast becoming members of my personal heroes list. - JS

A grassroots coalition of environmental, religious, and activist groups launched a campaign last week targeting the Fox News Network for spreading misinformation about global warming. The campaign is urging Home Depot, which has pledged concern for the environment, to stop advertising on Fox.

Led by the Sierra Club and documentarian Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films, the campaign kick-off includes a short video-”Fox Attacks: The Environment“-and an online petition to Home Depot, both posted on the new website FoxAttacks.com.

“Fox consistently spreads misinformation about global warming and denies the problem exists,” says Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope. “We have a very real, urgent problem that scientists tell us we need to respond to immediately. The fact that Fox is ignoring widely accepted science on global warming is irresponsible and dangerous. Fox is effectively accelerating global warming by delaying efforts to solve the problem.”

Besides the Sierra Club and Brave New Films, the coalition includes Progressive Christians Uniting, the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, American Family Voices, Campaign for America’s Future, Campus Progress, the California Council of Churches, the National Organization of Women, and MoveOn.org Civic Action.