The global-warming skeptics at the launched a today targeting — who else? — former Vice President Al Gore.
The $30,000 buy is small as far as national-ad campaigns go, but itwill run on cable over the next two weeks in Boston, Phoenix, Orlando,Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C.
Fine. It's a waste of money. Clearly, this is a right-wing think-tank dedicated to protecting the oil industry. It proves that Al Gore represents a legitimate threat to polluters, therefore he has accomplished a lot already.
So we read progressive blogs and we support progressive candidates. If that's the case then we're obligated to live like we'd want our candidates to vote. During the holiday season, one way to do this is by purchasing rated products.
The EPA estimates that it saved about $12 billion in energy costs in 2005 alone. Energy Star has been a driving force behind the more widespread use of LED traffic lights, efficient fluorescent lighting, power management systems for office equipment, and low standby energy use.
On Dell.com, their cheapest Energy Star computers sell for about $20 more than the cheapest regular computer. Last week, at Best Buy, I bought a new wide screen LCD Television and paid $50 more for the Energy Star television.
Sounds like Energy Star products cost about 2-4% more up front, but the energy savings will be reflected in your electric bills for as long as you're plugged in. It's an investment worth taking and hopefully something that our government will eventually mandate. On Dell.com, they claim that:
Over 4 years, CO2 emissions can be reduced by approximately the same amount as 1/4 acre of trees reduces in one year OR the amount reduced by not driving your car for 8 weeks.
for his research and ability to draw attention to the issue of global climate change.
If you think Al Gore is above Washington politics; if you think he is the most qualified Democrat; if you think he has both the judgment and experience to lead; if you think he is best able to reform our energy policy; if you want to change the world -- . At least 167,630 people have done just that.
Early this morning, former vice president and current environmental activist :
Now the Nobel Committee has done its part, awarding Gore the PeacePrize for being "probably the single individual who has done most tocreate greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to beadopted" to combat climate change, according to his citation. (TheUnited Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was also ajoint winner of the prize.) And so, after the obligatory spasms ofcelebration and the equally obligatory gnashing of Rush Limbaugh'steeth, will Americans finally get to enjoy one of the great spectaclesin political history, as Gore's ultimate honor levitates him beyond hisleading rival, Hillary Clinton, and into the Oval Office?
According to the , Gore and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change were awarded the prize "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge aboutman-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measuresthat are needed to counteract such change."
So now to the big question: is Gore getting back into politics? Only time will tell. However, he is leaving his China trip earlier than expected so he can fly back to for Democratic Senate candidate Barbara Boxer (D-CA).
Climate change, extreme poverty, poor water treatment -- all signs of a growing :
Demand for water is doubling every 20 years, outpacing populationgrowth twice as fast. Currently 1.3 billion people don't have access toclean water and 2.5 billion lack proper sewage and sanitation. In lessthan 20 years, it is estimated that demand for fresh water will exceedthe world's supply by over 50 percent.
The biggest drain on ourwater sources is agriculture, which accounts for 70 percent of thewater used worldwide -- much of which is subsidized in the industrialworld, providing little incentive for agribusiness to use conservationmeasures or less water-intensive crops.
This number is alsolikely to increase as we struggle to feed a growing world. Populationis expected to rise from 6 billion to 8 billion by 2050.
Insufficient water treatment may have been the reason for the cholera outbreak in Iraq, according to Congressman Jim McDermott (D-WA).
Countries and businesses alike are making contingency plans for the next 30 years. Global warming is a serious problem -- whether it is natural, man-made or a little bit of both. With the sea level expected to rise significantly over the next generation, raised concerns this week at the United Nations:
"The international community has convened numerous conferences andsummits at which it has agreed on wide-ranging plans and programs ofaction," Foreign Minister of the Maldives Abdalla Shahid, told the U.N.General Assembly. "However ... all too often the reality ofimplementation has failed to match the ambitious rhetoric."
Hewas speaking just days after the world body convened its first-everclimate summit which sought to put new urgency into global talks toreduce global-warming emissions.
We can talk and talk and talk until we are all blue in the face. Though, the reality is that island countries and coastlines all across the world will not be prepared until we get prepared. That means coming estimates on food rationing, disease control and methods to keep track and affect the flow of refugees away from the coastline.
On a personal note, next year I will likely start my graduate school career in the field of International Relations. Until just a few months ago, I was dead-set on pinpointing my studies on the issue of conflict management in the Middle East. But in all likelihood, the most urgent conflict management over the next 50 years will be needed in places such as Africa and Southeast Asia. Global warming will affect habitat -- leading to crop shortages, and in the end, starvation. Food shortages can often lead to wars. Wars lead to refugees. Refugee camps lead to the increased risk of disease. I am for the most part convinced that the number one challenge this century will come from the continent of Africa. To be quite blunt, the threat of global warming does not help.
Polar bears are one of the many mammals that are being affected by global warming. According to the , the polar bear population will between now and 2050:
Two-thirds of the world's polar bears will be killed off by 2050 —and the entire population gone from Alaska — because of thinning seaice from global warming in the Arctic, government scientists forecastFriday.
Only in the northern Canadian Arctic islands and the westcoast of Greenland are any of the world's 16,000 polar bears expectedto survive through the end of the century, said the U.S. GeologicalSurvey, which is the scientific arm of the Interior Department.
USGSprojects that polar bears during the next half-century will disappearalong the north coasts of Alaska and Russia and lose 42 percent of theArctic range they need to live in during summer in the Polar Basin whenthey hunt and breed. A polar bear's life usually lasts about 30 years.
is the report itself.
Last year, the proposed to the polar bear to the list of endangered species. On Friday, they released a statement reiterating their report about "."
This is extremely good news to hear from these government agencies, and somewhat surprising. In Bush's first term, he more than 100 one-time industry insiders as regulators.
Then again, these days global warming is getting fairly difficult to deny -- especially when the US that more arctic oil will become available once the ice melts in a few decades.
The at risk. in New York City. A looming invasion in the United Kingdom. The earth is than any other time in the last 100 years, and with it comes changes in weather patterns. That means advocates of the nation's biggest polluters, such as the , will have to work even harder to blur the about climate change.
This morning, there is yet another out on the climate. Scientists found that temperature increases, impacted by greenhouse gases, will be offset over the next few years by a cooling trend in the eastern and southern portions of the Pacific Ocean. But once the weather pattern subsides, the next decade will break temperature records:
The climate projection, published Thursday in thejournal Science, suggests that a cooling trend in eastern and southernPacific ocean waters has kept a lid on warming in recent years.
And it will continue to do so, scientists say, but not for long.
Theprojection spans 2007 to 2017. "At least half of the years after 2009are predicted to be warmer than 1998, the warmest year currently onrecord," the researchers say in their report.
Globally,that means a typical year will be about half a degree warmer than inthe previous 10 years, a projection in line with findings this year bythe Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The panel's report alsopredicts steadily rising temperatures.
And about :
Over the 10-year period as a whole, climate continues to warm and 2014 is likely to be 0.3 deg C warmer than 2004.
The effect that just a slight average temperature increase has on is extremely significant because of what it does to crops, particularly in third world countries.
Late this week during a forum in Singapore, former vice president exposed the active campaign by polluters to cloud these climate facts:
"There has been an organized campaign,financed to the tune of about $10 million (euro 7.2 million) a yearfrom some of the largest carbon polluters, to create the impressionthat there is disagreement in the scientific community," Gore said atforum in Singapore.
This comes even though the disagreement among scientists is almost non-existent. So where does some of this money go? Earlier this year, the American Enterprise Institute announced that it would to publicly deny that humans have had anything to do with the rise in CO2 and temperature. That is how desperate the other side is getting.
Meanwhile, the facts continue to speak for themselves.
A scientific journal released a study that shows a significant climb in the severity of in recent years, which the researchers link to changes in the climate:
Forest fires in the Western United States have occurred morefrequently, burned longer, and covered more acres since 1987—and globalwarming is a big part of the underlying cause—according to a researchpaper published in July 2006 by the journal Science.
Researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and theUniversity of Arizona found four times as many large wildfires occurredin Western forests between 1987 and 2003 compared to the previous 16years. The more recent fires burned 6.5 more land, the average durationof the fires increased from 7.8 to 37 days, and the overall fire seasonduring those years grew by an average of 78 days.
It will be fun to see what creative excuses the anti-science, pro-oil lobbyists will give to explain this new report. These are significant numbers here. The change in duration, as highlighted above, is more than a 350 percent increase. How can that happen? A British group released a similar on forest fires late last week, which came to the same conclusion. Forest fires are especially bad because they release even more CO2 into the atmosphere. have never been this high in 650,000 years, according to another report.
The July heat wave in the Southwest really didn't help things. This week, South Carolina is dealing with similarly . Parts of Aiken County reached 110.
just completed an excellent piece for the August 13th edition of Newsweek that exposes the tactics that oil companies and DC lobbyists have used to prevent legislative action to combat global warming. It is a very long article, but well worth the read.
In this one excerpt, Begley explains how special interests rely on Republican lawmakers to kill legislation aimed at energy independence. Lawmakers and lobbyists write talking points that use words such as "uncertainty" or "lack of understanding" to put doubt in the minds of Americans about there being sufficient evidence to support the on global warming:
Killing bills in Congress was only one prong of the denial machine'scampaign. It also had to keep public opinion from demanding action ongreenhouse emissions, and that meant careful management of what federalscientists and officials wrote and said. "If they presented the sciencehonestly, it would have brought public pressure for action," says RickPiltz, who joined the federal Climate Science Program in 1995. Byappointing former coal and oil lobbyists to key jobs overseeing climatepolicy, he found, the administration made sure that didn't happen.Following the playbook laid out at the 1998 meeting at the AmericanPetroleum Institute, officials made sure that every report and speechcast climate science as dodgy, uncertain, controversial—and thereforeno basis for making policy. Ex-oil lobbyist Philip Cooney, working forthe White House Council on Environmental Quality, edited a 2002 reporton climate science by sprinkling it with phrases such as "lack ofunderstanding" and "considerable uncertainty." A short section onclimate in another report was cut entirely. The White House "directedus to remove all mentions of it," says Piltz, who resigned in protest.An oil lobbyist faxed Cooney, "You are doing a great job."
As a culture, we trust experts: auto repair, medicine, cooking -- you name it. So when an issue as large as our very existence is at stake, why are the experts being discounted?
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