3 posts tagged “global warming”
The planet earth scored another major political victory today when Henry Waxman (D-CA) won the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. He wrested control from John Dingell (D-General Motors), who has been blocking any meaningful climate change legislation in the House because he thought it would be bad for the Big Three. Of course, we know how well that has worked out for them...
This is great. We know that Obama has said repeatedly that one of his top agenda items is going to be carbon emissions reduction. With Waxman at the head of the key committee in the House, Obama's job just got a heck of a lot easier.
There is no question, Obama is putting all the pieces in place for some major legislative accomplishments. All of the key people he is appointing to his staff are folks with deep understanding of how the legislative process works in Washington. With large majorities in the House and Senate, and some powerful allies on the relevant committees, the chess pieces are set. I feel fairly certain that he's going to get major health care reform and major global warming legislation passed within the first six months of his presidency. And that, my friends, is change we can believe in!
WASHINGTON - The planet's temperature has climbed to levels not seen in thousands of years, warming that has begun to affect plants and animals, researchers report in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Earth has been warming at a rate of 0.36 degree Fahrenheit per decade for the last 30 years, according to the research team led by James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
That brings the overall temperature to the warmest in the current interglacial period, which began about 12,000 years ago.
The researchers noted that a report in the journal Nature found that 1,700 plant, animal and insect species moved poleward at an average rate of about 4 miles per decade in the last half of the 20th century.
The warming has been stronger in the far north, where melting ice and snow expose darker land and rocks beneath allowing more warmth from the sun to be absorbed, and more over land than water.
Water changes temperature more slowly than land because of its great capacity to hold heat, but the researchers noted that the warming has been marked in the Indian and western Pacific Oceans. Those oceans have a major effect on climate and warming that could lead to more El Nino episodes affecting the weather.
"This evidence implies that we are getting close to dangerous levels of human-made pollution," Hansen said in a statement.
Few scientists doubt that the planet has warmed, though some question the causes of the change.
Hansen, who first warned of the danger of climate change decades ago, said that human-made greenhouse gases have become the dominant climate change factor.
The study said the recent warming has brought global temperature to a level within about one degree Celsius — 1.8 degree Fahrenheit — of the maximum temperature of the past million years.
"If further global warming reaches 2 or 3 degrees Celsius, we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know. The last time it was that warm was in the middle Pliocene, about 3 million years ago, when sea level was estimated to have been about 25 meters (80 feet) higher than today," Hansen said.
From Think Progress
It’s getting difficult to distinguish actual opposition to global warming science and parody. FYI, the following is not a joke.
National Review editor James S. Robbins shares his thoughts today:
Personally, I don’t know what all the shouting is about. Global warming is great. Granted, maybe it isn’t really happening, and if it is there are strong reasons to doubt that humans have anything to do with it. But if the world is warming, I say “bravo.”
What are the benefits? According to Robbins, “vast regions” of Canada would become “comfortably habitable,” “more land will be available for cultivation,” and there will be a “land boom up the coastlines as people rushed on up for beachfront property.”
Robbins brushes off all negative consequences. He acknowledges that rising sea levels could create “some dislocations” but says that a worldwide sea level rise of as much as 20 feet could be taken care of with “some form of sea wall.” The image above illustrates the impact a 20 foot sea level rise on Florida. Apparently, Robbins plans on building a sea wall around the entire state.
Robbins doesn’t even mention increased hurricane intensity, drought, wildfires and the other severe impacts of global warming — much less explain, as he claims, how these natural phenomena can “be overcome.”
Robbins concludes, when “you are enjoying the surfing at your beach house in upper Newfoundland, you won’t care what caused global warming, you’ll just thank goodness it happened.” In so doing, he illustrates an important point. Intentional or not, his arguments are a joke.
