by William Thomas April 8th 2007
http://www.willthomas.net/Convergence/Weekly/Global-Warming.htmThanks to an American Senator, the world is being set straight on climate change. Working tirelessly to scuttle former elected President Al Gore's upcoming Capitol Hill celebration as part of a seven-continent “Live Earth” concert tour intended to rally the planet in cheerfully addressing runaway global warming, Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe speaks with the conviction of a Holocaust denier when he calls climate change "The greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people!" [The Hill Mar 28/07]
A least since the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, WMD in Iraq, the Iranian “threat”, the Bush Terror War On Terror, and the constitutional curtain-closing Patriot Acts 1, 2 and 3.
Apparently unafraid of facing future Nuremberg-style environmental trials, Climate Change Deniers as influential as the U.S. National Science Teachers Association have refused 50,000 free DVDs of Gore's Oscar-winning "An Inconvenient Truth" in fear of alienating heavy corporate funders like Exxon and the American Petroleum Institute, which gets scientists fired, publishes expensive ads in newspapers ridiculing melting glaciers, and helpfully provides “teaching aids” such as coal coloring books and classroom videos asserting, “You Can't Be Cool Without Fuel."
That means you, Mr. and Mrs. Penguin.
In sharp contrast, Tony Blair’s government is sending a copy of Gore's global warming documentary to every high school in England, where it will form part of a year-long environmental program in state schools. [Cybercast News Service Feb 9/07]
“I'm confident that the environmental path that I announce will benefit the entire world. It is based on… economic growth.” –GW Bush [NOAA Feb 14/02]
GLACIAL INDIFFERANCE
It’s not easy debating a destabilizing 10,000-foot thick glacier. Despite sea levels and melting polar ice-sheets already at the upper limits of the next 30 year projections… another 500,000 square miles of reflective Arctic sea ice melted into heat-retaining dark water and Alaska’s glaciers decanting more than 13 trillion gallons of meltwater into world ocean circulations each year… and Greenland’s fast-shrinking 2,000 kilometres of solid ice increasing its melting rate over the past five years from a metre a year to a metre a month… and polar bears drowning a hundred miles offshore while looking for ice floes retreating another 300 miles out… and thousands of Canadian harp seal pups experiencing 100% mortality from the same lack of ice… and the first month of 2007 3.4°F hotter than the any January ever recorded… and the snowpack serving drinking water to Seattle and the Pacific Northwest shrinking toward bare rock… and more than a quarter of the American West in either severe or exceptionally severe drought while Arizona cactus wither and die from lack of water—Inhofe and the White House insist, this planet can’t be heating up! [Reuters Mar 23/07; CBC Aug 3; Aug 20/04; BBC Radio 4 Aug 7/05; Independent Oct 2/05; Knight Ridder News Service July31/03; New York Times Mar 10/06; www.cejnewsviews.blogspot.com; [www.realclimate.org]
“A polar bear might be able to swim 100 miles. But not 400.” -Nupiak elder Charlie Johnson [CBC Aug 3/04]
“It’s happening much sooner than we thought.” -Ted Scambos, lead scientist U.S. National Snow and Data Center [Guardian Sept 29/05]
“Everyone’s quite shocked at the speed at which these things are changing.” -Bill Wareham, acting director marine conservation, David Suzuki Foundation [AP July 8/05]
"Things are happening a lot faster than anyone predicted. The last 12 months have been alarming." -Bill Chameides chief scientist, Environmental Defense & professor of atmospheric chemistry. [Time Mar 26/06]
On the other hand, an 18-inch rise in sea level will see salt water flowing into the Sacramento River Delta, destroying the drinking water for 23 million Californians. A 20-foot ocean level rise will put half of Florida under water— including Miami, Tampa Bay and Jacksonville—along with the new WTC memorial in Manhattan, and much of Washington DC, where Senator Inhofe is busily blocking climate change-inspired discourse, dancing and music. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer Mar 11/07; BBC July28/04]
In more than 180 countries, one out of every ten people on this planet could soon be chuckling over the climate change hoax while swimming inland. Fortunately for U.S. legislators like Inhofe, only one of these countries is the United States. The rest—China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, Egypt, Thailand and the Philippines have mostly expendable non-white populations who don’t buy much stuff from the United States, which today mostly exports self-deluding fictions, weapons and wars. [Inter Press Service Mar 28/07]
Meanwhile, the rapidly melting and slip-sliding Greenland ice sheet does not know it is a hoax and is set to raise world sea levels 20 to 30 feet, while far to the south, inland Western Antarctic glaciers uncorked by the calving Larson ice shelf are rushing to add another 20-feet or so to the rising sea level hoax. As for the melting Eastern Antarctic… think about relocating to a mountaintop with a dock in your front yard.
"[T]he world's scientists have spoken, clearly and in one voice," said U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, on the most recent report of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). After a rigorous multi-stage review process that includes 2,500 scientific expert reviewers, 800 contributing authors, and 450 lead authors representing 130 countries, the IPCC warns that "all countries" will be affected by climate change if carbon emissions continue to spiral.
