posted 01-21-2004 06:12 PM               

N. America, Europe to cool as world warms?

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (Reuters) -- Parts of Europe and North America could get drastically colder if warming Atlantic ocean currents are halted by a surprise side-effect of global warming, scientists said on Wednesday.

The possible shut-down of the Gulf Stream is one of several catastrophic changes -- ranging from collapses of fish stocks to more frequent forest fires -- that could be triggered by human activities, they said in a book launched in Sweden.

"In the worst case it (the Gulf Stream) could shut down... it might even happen this century," said Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. "This would trigger a regional cooling, but not an Ice Age."

Climate models indicated a surge of fresh water into the North Atlantic from a melting of northern glaciers caused by global warming could stop the current that sweeps warm waters from the Gulf of Mexico toward Europe.

"The Eastern coast of Canada and the United States would also be affected. This is sometimes wrongly perceived as a European problem by American politicians," he told Reuters.

He said the Gulf Stream had collapsed about 20 times in the past 100,000 years, most recently at the tail of the last Ice Age about 8,000 years ago after an abrupt melting of icecaps.

If the Gulf Stream stopped, average temperatures might fall by 5-10 Celsius (10-20F) in Scandinavia or by 3-4C in Germany.

By contrast, global warming, widely blamed on emissions of gases like carbon dioxide from cars and factories, is expected to raise global average temperatures by 1.4-5.8C by 2100.

The U.N. Kyoto Protocol on limiting global warming hinges on Russia's yes or no. Moscow is undecided and President Vladimir Putin said his country might benefit from warmer world weather, though a halt of Gulf Stream would make northwest Russia colder.

Rahmstorf's study was included in a new book, "Global Change and the Earth System: a planet under pressure," which looks at the impact of the surge in the human population to six billion people, ranging from stripped forests to rising temperatures.

"A major finding is that change will not be progressive. There will be abrupt changes and tipping points," said Will Steffen, executive director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program which issued the book based on work by 5,000 scientists.

"Never before have we seen the range of change or the rate of change at the same time," he told Reuters.

"You can get to a point where forests are too hot and too dry and sudden fires rip through them," he said, referring to blazes last year in nations from Australia to France. "Global warming may make these events more frequent."

And another report indicated that fish stocks might not recover even if nations ban fishing. Depletion of cod stocks, for instance, lets smaller species flourish and these may prey on the young of any surviving cod and prevent stock recovery.

posted 01-21-2004 07:50 PM               

Earth 'entering uncharted waters'

By Alex Kirby

The Earth has entered a new era, one in which human beings may be the dominant force, say four environmental leaders.

In the International Herald Tribune, they say the uncertainty, magnitude and speed of change in many of the Earth's systems is without precedent.

The four, who include Margot Wallstrom, the European environment commissioner, say uncertainty cannot excuse inaction.

They believe humanity may cross some critical thresholds unawares, setting off changes which cannot be reversed.

Change at a gallop

The other authors are Professor Bert Bolin, founding chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; Professor Paul Crutzen, winner of the 1995 Nobel prize for chemistry; and Dr Will Steffen, director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP).

Their article, The Earth's Threatened Life-Support System: A Global Wake-Up Call, marks the publication of an IGBP book, Global Change And The Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure.

They write: "Our planet is changing fast. Change is a fact of life, but in recent decades many environmental indicators have moved outside the range of variation of the last half million years...

"It is the magnitude and rate of human-driven change that are most alarming.

"The human-driven increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is nearly 100 parts per million and still growing - already equal to the entire range experienced between an ice age and a warm period such as the present.

"And this human-driven increase has occurred at least 10 times faster than any natural increase in the last half million years."

They envisage the possibility, beyond 2050, of "rapid regional climate change, as would be caused by changes in ocean circulation in the North Atlantic, and irreversible changes, such as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the concomitant sea-level rise of six metres".

No compass

The authors write: "The Earth has entered the so-called Anthropocene - the geologic epoch in which humans are a significant and sometimes dominating environmental force.

"Records from the geological past indicate that never before has the Earth experienced the current suite of simultaneous changes: we are sailing into planetary terra incognita."

They argue for a precautionary approach, partly because natural systems can flip very rapidly from one stable state to another.

The writers say: "We are unsure of just how serious our interference with Earth system dynamics will prove to be, but... there are significant risks of rapid and irreversible changes to which it would be very difficult to adapt."

Dr Steffen told BBC News Online: "It would take about a millennium for the Greenland ice sheet to melt. But we could reach the trigger point that makes the process unstoppable within the next century.

"The book makes the point that this is global change - it looks at the range of effects, at how they're happening simultaneously, and at how they're reinforcing each other.

"It's a synthesis of the science, the best consensus - and it honestly acknowledges the unknowns."

Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/3411053.stm

posted 01-21-2004 08:18 PM               

Alaska's climate: Too hot to handle

Alaska is warming up more than anywhere else on Earth. Climate researchers are now turning to regional models to find out why - and how to deal with it. John Whitfield went north to investigate.

2 October 2003

JOHN WHITFIELD

The vast forests that cover southern Alaska should be evergreen. But not these days. Hop in a tiny plane - which Alaskans seem to do as often as a New Yorker hails a cab - and you'll see patches of brown stretching for miles into the wilderness. This is the work of the spruce bark beetle, which over the past 15 years has killed more trees in Alaska than any other insect in North America's recorded history. In the Kenai Peninsula on Alaska's southern coast, some 40 million spruce have perished across an area twice the size of Yellowstone National Park. The beetle's population rocketed thanks to changes in the weather, argues Ed Berg, an ecologist with the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. "We had a really long run of warm summers," he says.

The beetle boom is one of the more dramatic changes that locals and scientists alike attribute to global warming. But it's just one in a long list. Farther down the coast in Prince William Sound, boats pick their way through increased numbers of icebergs calving off the Columbia Glacier. The glacier has retreated 12 kilometres over the past 20 years, and some say it could collapse completely in another ten. Alaska's notorious mosquitoes, so big they're jokingly referred to as the state bird, have spread north to irritate the few residents who used to escape their attentions. Even the plants are changing. The spongy tundra, usually covered in grass and moss, is slowly being invaded by woody shrubs1.

This summer saw the biggest melt yet in Alaska's sea ice, and winter in the interior was unprecedentedly mild - for the Arctic. "I've lived here since 1968, and last winter was the first one that didn't drop below -40 ºC," says Gunter Weller, director of the Center for Global Change and Arctic System Research at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

Small change, big difference

Temperatures have changed more in Alaska over the past 30 years than they have anywhere else on Earth: winters have warmed by a startling 2-3 °C, compared with a global average of 1 °C. That's guaranteed to have dramatic effects in an Arctic landscape, where even small temperature changes can make the difference between freezing and melting. In Fairbanks, a city built on permafrost, the annual mean temperature is just -2 °C. If it pops above zero, residents can say goodbye to the frozen ground beneath their feet, along with the free iceboxes in their basements. The impacts on wildlife, and the people who depend on it for their livelihoods, will be huge.

Determining the effects of climate change on a local level has become one of the major priorities of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change2. And to do that, the panel needs regional models. Unlike the first generation of climate models, which covered the whole globe and divided it into chunks 50-200 kilometres a side, small-scale, regional models now look at sections just a few kilometres across. This helps to refine the picture of climate change and lets models take account of elements of topography such as mountain ranges, peninsulas and even cracks in sea ice.

Such models are particularly crucial for places such as Alaska, as global-scale simulations are notoriously inaccurate at the poles3. Arctic clouds, for example, are not like their counterparts at lower latitudes: their droplets may be mostly ice rather than liquid water, for example. The gaps in our knowledge about arctic clouds puts some rainfall predictions off by as much as 100%. And no one can agree on how to deal with the reflectance of the Sun's energy by ice and snow, known as albedo.

"Small differences in the value of ice albedo can produce large differences in model outputs," says climate researcher Filippo Giorgi of the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy.

Polar confusion

Inaccuracies in modelling other parts of the global climate can also accumulate up at the poles: an error in describing the winds that carry heat from the tropics to the poles, for example, could increase with every degree of latitude. "The Arctic could be a dumping ground for errors elsewhere," says atmospheric scientist Judy Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

It is also hard to tell how much of Alaska's climate change is due to global warming and how much to natural climate cycles. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation - an El Niño-like fluctuation of temperatures between the north and tropical Pacific that takes place over 20-30 years - flipped Alaska into a warming phase in the 1970s. The North Atlantic Oscillation has also contributed to warmer winters in Alaska since the late 1960s4. But at the same time it has been associated with a 2-3 °C cooling just across the continent in Greenland. There seems to be a 60-year see-saw in temperatures between the east and west of this part of the Arctic: when one side heats up, the other cools down. In a few years, this could flip again and reverse Alaska's recent warming trend. No one yet knows.

So it is perhaps not surprising that Alaska was one of the first places to attract the serious attention of regional modellers. Back in 1993, Amanda Lynch of the University of Colorado, Boulder, created the world's first detailed regional model to take into account such interactions as those between ice and air and water, and she did it for Alaska5. Since then, Lynch has refined her model and been joined by a host of teams aiming to pin down Alaska's climate.

In 2000, groups from the United States, Canada, Germany and Sweden, all with their own regional models, teamed up to run the Arctic Regional Climate Model Intercomparison Project (ARC-MIP). It isn't a beauty contest, says Curry, who serves as the project's coordinator. "The goal isn't to identify the best model, it's to improve all models," she says. The main difference between participants is how they deal with the interface where air meets sea or land: some have very complex treatments of how vegetation or sea ice influence the flow of gas and water into and out of the atmosphere. Others are less complex, treating sea ice as a simple barrier.

The first trial set for ARC-MIP's models has been to reproduce the results from one of the best climate data sets for the poorly surveyed Arctic - measurements collected by an icebreaker that was frozen into Arctic sea ice from October 1997 to October 1998. Those first ARC-MIP results should be submitted to journals around the end of this year, says Curry. The project is far from over, but so far it looks as if the simpler models are performing more accurately: complexity may just create more opportunities for things to go wrong.

Those model results can't come soon enough for the people of Alaska. In the far north, the area covered by sea ice is shrinking at a rate of about 3% per decade6 - bad news for the seals and polar bears that depend on the ice environment, and for the subsistence hunters who depend on the animals. Winter is the prime hunting season, as snowmobiles can cover distances much more quickly than any vehicle on the tundra of summer. But the date when the snow melts has become less predictable, forcing communities to invest in expensive contingency plans such as helicopter rescue for stranded hunting parties.

Slip sliding away

The inhabitants of Barrow, the northernmost town in the United States, stand to lose more than their meals. The retreat of sea ice has exposed the land to the sea for more of the year, which has meant more erosion of the coast. Other symptoms of climate change exacerbate the erosion: more storms, melting permafrost - which makes the ground softer - and higher sea levels. Several other Alaskan communities are faced with having the ground washed out from under them, too. There are even plans to dismantle and move two villages on the northwest coast, Shishmaref and Kivalina, at a cost of more than $100 million - over $100,000 per resident.

Lynch and her colleagues have plotted the course of erosion in Barrow and the efficacy of attempts to stop it, such as building concrete walls or reinforcing beaches with sand. They have concluded that costly sea defences have done little to stem erosion. But they have also found that some areas of Barrow's coastline are actually gaining new land from the sea. When new buildings are required, says Lynch, the best response to the threat of erosion would be to focus construction in these places. Better prediction of future erosion will be the big challenge for her group over the next few years, she says.

posted 01-22-2004 08:10 PM               

NFB-CBC documentary series carries dramatic message about global warming

JOHN MCKAY

TORONTO (CP) - February might not be the best month of the year to air a documentary series on the Canadian Arctic, especially one with a message about global warming.

Viewers might prefer, say, July. But Montreal-based writer-producer Jean Lemire is delighted that his project, Arctic Mission, was taken up jointly by the National Film Board and the CBC and will begin airing next Wednesday night on David Suzuki's The Nature of Things.

The way Lemire tells it, there's little time to lose.

"Because the polar regions are the most affected by climate change, it's clear that it's started already there," Lemire says. "That's why it was important for us to go there and look and find some evidence."

Magnificently photographed in high-definition digital video, the $6-million series carries some sobering, downright scary messages about an environmental shift that has been much discussed as a future phenomenon, but which is already under way in the Far North and headed our way.

Lemire's camera crews document such events as melting permafrost and the arrival of robins, ants, grizzly bears and moose seen in the Arctic for the first time in history. Suzuki says Inuit kids have been terrified by dragonflies, an insect they've never seen before.

Meanwhile, nomadic Inuit hunters and fishermen - who traditionally know their frozen territory but who are now on the front lines of climate change - are falling through ice that is much thinner than it's ever been.

"All their culture is expressed on the ice, hunting, everything, because of course that's the richest part of the Arctic for them," explains Lemire. "It's really changing fast. They are risking their lives more and more."

Suzuki says most of us live in air-conditioned lifestyles where the world out there doesn't intrude that much, until 15,000 people die in France from summer heat.

"We've had these devastating forest fires in B.C. . .and we've had drought in Vancouver. Now Vancouver's the heart of rainforest, and still our provincial government is fully determined to go full tilt and develop offshore oil and do everything to encourage more use of fossil fuels. Just madness."

Lemire concedes that global warming may be a misnomer, or at least is misunderstood. As the polar ice caps warm, the flow of icy water southward will have a cooling effect at first on the more temperate climates.

"If we have more melting of ice in the Arctic, the Gulf Stream will start to slow down. If the Gulf Steam slows down, part of Europe will probably get colder. But the average for the entire planet will still be warmer."

Suzuki says the Swedes have already detected a slowing of the Gulf Stream.

"If that heat engine stops, Europe is going to be plunged into a catastrophic freezing period that will be like nothing we've seen."

Lemire says the biggest impact, though, will be in the form of wild weather.

"We won't have a big change in terms of quantity (of rain or snow) but in terms of big storms, big floods and all that."

While the series doesn't preach overtly, its message is clear. Lemire says that unlike acid rain, which was blamed directly on industrial pollution, greenhouse gases are a shared fault, part consumer, part transport and part big companies.

"Now we are part of the problem so we have to be part of the solution as well."

Lemire believes the CBC and the NFB should be collaborating on more such projects. He says it is very expensive to go to the Arctic and study it up close, and that while Japanese and American scientists are up there, most experts are working at home on computer models.

"I was really proud, actually, to have both the CBC and the NFB involved. For that kind of project, if you don't have big players like this it can be really hard to do it by yourself."

The episodes run an hour on TV but Lemire says a 90-minute version of the episode showing him and his crew navigating the risky Northwest Passage is still playing in Quebec theatres. It's also selling well on the international TV market - in April it will be telecast in high definition by the Discovery Channel in the U.S. - and a DVD package can be expected by fall.

Arctic Mission is a new five-part documentary series that looks at global climate change and its impact on the Canadian Arctic. A collaboration of the CBC, the National Film Board of Canada and documentary filmmaker Jean Lemire's Glacialis Productions, the five instalments, shot on high-definition video, will air on David Suzuki's The Nature of Things. Suzuki introduces each episode and narrates.

The Great Adventure: Lemire and a crew board the Sedna IV, a three-masted sailing vessel that departs Montreal for a five-month, 2,100-kilometre scientific mission to record signs of global warming in the Arctic. The journey includes a treacherous and dramatic voyage through the ice-encrusted Northwest Passage. (Jan. 28, Feb. 1)

Lords of the Arctic: Wildlife filmmaker Caroline Underwood offers dramatic footage of Arctic animals, including the polar bear, bowhead whales, muskox and caribou and how their relationship with nomadic Inuit hunters is changing. (Feb. 4)

People of the Ice: Director Carlos Ferrand looks at climate change through the eyes of the Inuit and how it is affecting their 4,000-year-old relationship with the Arctic environment. It asks the question, will these people be able to survive such wrenching changes to their habitat? (Feb. 11 and 15)

Washed Away: Filmmaker Patricio Henriquez shows northern communities struggling to prevent the physical disappearance of their land due to industrialization and its impact on the ecology. The case is made for reduced dependence on fossil fuels. (Feb. 18, 22)

Climate on the Edge: Director Alain Belhumeur talks to scientists who are predicting major upheavals in weather as a result of global warming. In the Arctic, viewers can see that the permafrost is already melting, a process that itself releases greenhouse gases, putting the ecosystem there at risk. (Feb. 25, 29)

posted 01-22-2004 08:15 PM               

Bush Silence on Environment, AIDS Deplored

Jim Lobe, OneWorld US

WASHINGTON, D.C., Jan 22 (OneWorld) -- A broad array of U.S. environmental and health advocates have deplored President George W. Bush (news - web sites)'s failure to even mention a series of critical global issues in his State of the Union address Tuesday night.

In a flurry of statements issued Wednesday, groups ranging from the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) to Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) expressed concern that Bush's omissions signaled the loss of interest in environmental degradation and the global AIDS (news - web sites) crisis.

Green groups suggested that Bush's failure to even mention the environment--despite new reports released by high-level U.S. scientific groups over the past year expressing increasing certainty that the burning of oil and other fossil fuels is responsible for global warming--was a deliberate attempt to take the issue off the political agenda in the November elections.

"The fact that President Bush avoided mentioning his administration's environmental policies could be seen as a tacit admission that his record is deplorable and the issue is a vulnerable one for him," according to a statement issued by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) here.

It noted that Bush had nothing to say about policies he had previously trumpeted as major advances for the environment, including his "Healthy Forests" initiative, which allows loggers to cut down large, fire-resistant trees in remote areas, or his "Clear Skies" initiative which, if approved by Congress would allow power plants to defer improvements designed to reduce air pollution for a longer period than under current law. Both initiatives have been strongly opposed by environmental groups.

"Polls show that the majority of Americans believe he is more interested in protecting his corporate campaign contributors than public health and the environment," NRDC said.

"It might be a tad embarrassing for the president to note that his Justice Department (news - web sites) went to the Supreme Court last week to support oil companies and diesel engine makers against numerous state and local government groups that seek the right to protect their citizens from the effects of air pollution," according to Frank O'Donnell, the executive director of the Clean Air Trust, writing for the tompaine.com website.

The League of Conservation Voters said it was not surprised by Bush's silence on his environmental record "since he prefers to let officials in his administration announce bad news about weakening environmental laws and regulations on Friday afternoon when most of the public is not paying attention."

"Tonight, as President Bush delivered his State of the Union address," said LCV President Deb Callahan, "the state of our environment is anything but strong. For the past three years, President Bush has taken nearly every opportunity to roll back safeguards to protect our air, water and public lands."

She noted that Bush did call in his speech for Congress to approve pending energy legislation that she called "one of the most anti-environmental pieces of legislation in history." She urged Congress instead to go back to the drawing board and "produce a real energy plan that invests in clean, sound long-term solutions, not just old, dirty polluting sources," a point echoed by NRDC.

Global health groups also expressed disappointment that Bush omitted all references to the issue--from AIDS and malaria, which kills more children annually in poor countries than any other single cause, to the recent discovery of mad cow disease in the State of Washington.

Bush used his State of the Union address last year to announce a five-year, US$15 billion "emergency" initiative to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, to be focused mainly Africa and the Caribbean where HIV (news - web sites) infection rates are highest.

Activists had assumed that Bush intended to spend the full $3 billion a year that Congress authorized in response to his proposal, but the administration in fact asked for less than $2 billion the first year, of which only $200 million it requested for the multilateral Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, TB, and Malaria, a special mechanism designed to expedite the delivery of funds and expertise to effective programs in the hard-hit countries, whose funding has failed to keep pace with demand.

Bush's efforts to hold back the funding, particularly to the Global Fund, and to apply a significant portion of the funding to programs promoting abstinence were strongly criticized not only by activists, such as the Global AIDS Alliance (GAA), but even by a large number of Republican lawmakers who finally pushed through a package that exceeded Bush's initial requests.

In recent days, unconfirmed reports have circulated that, despite public appeals from Evangelical leaders, AIDS experts, and others, Bush intends once again to request less than the $3 billion already authorized by Congress for fiscal year 2005, including only $200 million for the Global Fund, a sum, that, if matched proportionately by other donor nations, would provide only a small fraction of the $3.5 billion the Global Fund estimates is needed to begin to curb the spread of what is already the most lethal epidemic in recorded history.

"The result of Bush's promise last year has been a slowly executed and unilateralist program," said GAA president, Paul Zeitz. After a whole year, less than one percent of the two million people he promised in his 2003 address would receive AIDS treatment are actually receiving it."

"We had hoped to hear a challenge to Congress to fulfill the promise of the historic work they started last year," said Nils Daulaire, president of the Global Health Council. "This is far too important for the lives of tens of millions to leave uncompleted. Particularly in an election year, it is critical that those of us focused on the state of the union and the state of the world's health continue the fight to keep global AIDS in the forefront."

"Three million people have died since the last State of the Union address," said Holly Burkhalter, PHR's US Policy Director. "We can't afford to lose any more time on the extraordinary commitment that the President made last January. President Bush needs billions every year to bring life to the AIDS-stricken African continent, leaving no vulnerable person behind."

posted 01-23-2004 07:56 PM               

I am not advocating exterminating the population.

I would advocate some reasonable attempts at population growth control through birth control, sex education and other economic incentives.

I certainly don't think you should be thinking about ending your life...you have far too much to contribute to the rest of us... if fact, your insight is part of the solution to the mess we're in.

I don't advocate the intentional modification of the atmosphere as a short-term, stop gap mitigation to global climate change...

...nor am I convinced that this is anything more than a convenient cover for what we are witnessing.

As I have said before, I personally don't trust TPTB to act in any way other than one that supports their own, self indulgent, limited self-interest.

And they certainly won't tell us the Truth.

I do believe that it is important aware of the changes going on in the world we all share...political changes, environmental changes, spititual changes.

Education and sharing information is a good thing.

Do I have all the answers? ... of course not.

These are a few Truths that I believe...

"Think Globally, Act Locally"

"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem."

The current 6 billion plus humans are having an increasing impact on global ecosystems, and there is no way that the majority of those living in developing countries can aspire to the lifestyle enjoyed by the current American public...which is 4% of the world's population and is responsible for 20% of the world's pollution.

Natural resources are limited.

If corporations in power wanted to, we could develop cars that had far better gas mileage and produced far less pollution.

There are much cleaner, renewable sources of energy than the coal and oil we presently use.

If wise people were actually in control, we'd be moving as quickly as possible to these alternate forms of energy...and in the process creating new high tech industries and jobs here in America.

But instead, corporations like IBM are shipping jobs offshore to Bangalore just to make more money.

Increasing Climate Instability Is Real
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/040123/1/3hh7t.html

Dozens dead as heavy winds, bitter cold lash southeastern Europe

Freezing temperatures, heavy snow and high winds threw parts of southeastern Europe into chaos, claiming dozens of lives and overwhelming emergency services in the usually temperate region.

At least five people, including two schoolboys, froze to death in Turkey, while 15 sailors from a Greek-owned cargo ship were feared dead after the vessel sank in gale-force winds in the Mediterranean.

Turkish authorities were forced to shut down the key shipping route linking the Black Sea to the Mediterranean via the Bosphorus after strong winds and snow severely impaired visibility.

In the Middle East, the Suez Canal leading from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea was also closed because of bad weather and heavy rains.

Nearly 30 ships at the northern end were stuck at Port Said until visibility improved and winds slowed down, allowing the canal to be reopened on Friday afternoon.

Thirteen people died in two days in traffic accidents around Egypt brought on by rain and sandstorms, seven of them when a minibus filled with pilgrims crashed in poor visibility.

Bad weather hit Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Greece and Romania, with wind gusts up to 140 kilometres (90 miles) per hour cutting electricity to scores of towns in Bulgaria, and a state of emergency announced on the northern Greek island of Limnos.

Three children drowned in western Romania when the ice on the pond on which they were playing cracked, local authorities said.

And a gathering Saturday of 10,000 people including President Ion Iliescu to commemorate the 145th anniversary of the union of Romanian principalities was cancelled because of fierce snow storms, officials said.

In the Mediterranean, rescuers searched for 15 missing sailors -- 14 Egyptians and one Greek -- from a cargo ship which capsized in stormy international waters west of the Greek island of Crete.

A US-flagged cargo ship which rushed to provide assistance located the only two survivors found so far, both Egyptians.

But Turkey was worst hit by the weather. Rescuers there worked feverishly to free thousands of drivers trapped in their cars around the largest city, Istanbul, media reported. Many motorists ran out of fuel when they left their engines running overnight to stay warm.

Schools, universities and the stock exchange were closed after the equivalent of a month's precipitation fell on the region in just 24 hours, an official said.

In Istanbul, the authorities declared a state of alert. Rescue services official Ali Karahan said 9,000 police and municipal staff had been mobilized to cope with the severe conditions.

A 13-year-old boy in the eastern town of Cat and a eight-year-old boy from Istanbul both froze to death travelling between home and school. The snow also claimed three lives in the western provinces of Canakkale and Balikesir, Anatolia news agency reported.

Nine people, including six school pupils, were still missing more than 12 hours after they left their small village near the eastern Turkish town of Karayzi to attend an athletics competition, the town's governor told Anatolia.

The governor of Istanbul, Muammer Gular, described the situation on Thursday as "extraordinary", saying conditions were "similar to those of a disaster". Forecasters warned that snow would continue falling throughout the weekend.

Some 85 villages and towns in Bulgaria were without power on Friday, with dozens of secondary roads closed because of snow drifts. Temperatures were expected to range between minus two and minus 12 degrees Celsius (28 and 10 degrees Farenheit), about average for January, the weather service said.

The Czech Republic was also shivering in temperatures around minus 12 degrees Celsius in the capital Prague. The mercury was expected to drop to minus 20 (minus four degrees Farenheit) over the weekend.

Rome received a dusting of snow, which had not been seen in the Italian capital for four years. The last major snowfall there was in 1985.

Even in Lebanon winds reached 100 kilometres an hour, causing significant damage and preventing hundreds of fishermen from putting to sea in the southern ports of Tyre and Sidon.

Britain was expected to largely escape the worst of the bad weather this time but meteorologists warned that another fierce storm would hit the country next Monday night.

Cunard's new flagship ocean liner, the Queen Mary 2, was expected to leave its home port of Southampton as planned on Monday evening for an inaugural transatlantic voyage whatever the weather conditions, a company spokesman said.

*********************************************
Most important mark ... we're all facing this together, each in our own way.

I think most would be amazed at the true power of positive, collective activity.

Enjoy each breathe, each single track ride.

They are the true gift that can't be taken from you.

posted 01-24-2004 12:25 PM               

'No cosmic ray climate effects'

By Alex Kirby
BBC News Online environment correspondent

The principal cause of recent climate change is not cosmic rays but human activities, a group of scientists says.

They say an article last year linking cosmic rays and changes in temperature was "scientifically ill-founded".

They say the authors' methods were open to doubt and their conclusions wrong, surprising experts with their claims.

In Eos, the journal of the American Geophysical Union, the 11 Earth and space scientists insist that greenhouse gases remain the chief climate suspect.

In the climate mainstream

They say the most important physical processes are well understood, and model calculations and data analyses both conclude the human contribution to the global warming of the 20th Century through increased emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other gases was dominant.

The authors of the Eos article - Cosmic Rays, Carbon Dioxide And Climate - are from Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland and the US.

The research by Nir Shaviv, an astrophysicist, of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and Jan Veizer, a geologist, of the University of Ottawa and Ruhr University in Germany, was published in July 2003 in the Geological Society of America's journal GSA Today.

It said the Earth's climate was profoundly affected by cosmic rays, high-energy particles from outer space, which normally cool the Earth's surface by helping clouds to form.

But increased solar activity lessens the cosmic rays reaching the Earth, and Shaviv and Veizer suggested this blocking effect had been the dominant cause of global warming over the past century.

No ground given

They said cosmic ray changes accounted for at least 66% of the temperature variation during that period.

The Eos authors, led by Stefan Rahmstorf from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany, say the paper by Shaviv and Veizer was "incorrect and based on questionable methodology".
They say the data on cosmic rays and temperature so far in the past are extremely uncertain.

They argue that the authors' reconstruction of ancient cosmic rays is based on only 50 meteorites, and say most other experts interpret their significance in a very different way.

Arguing that Shaviv and Veizer had in places adjusted the data, "in one case by 40 million years", the Eos team says they did not show any correlation between cosmic rays and climate.

And even if their analysis had been methodologically correct, it says, their work applied to time scales of several million years, while the current climate warming has occurred during just a hundred years, for which completely different mechanisms are relevant.

Professor Veizer told BBC News Online: "It's a long story, and the whole issue is politically driven.

"We stand by what we said, that there is a correlation between the cosmic ray flux and the temperatures we calculated, though on the details we can disagree."

Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/3419975.stm

posted 01-24-2004 01:00 PM               

Global Warming: Early Warning Signs

Heat waves and periods of unusually warm weather

The map highlights places that have recently experienced record warmth in regions with a century-long warming trend (1901-1996). Frequent and severe heat waves lead to increases in heat-related illness and death, especially in urban areas and among the elderly, the young, the ill, and the poor.

90. Southern India - Heat wave, May 2002. In the state of Andhra Pradesh temperatures rose to 120°F (49°C), resulting in the highest one-week death toll on record (NCDC, 2002a). This heat wave came in the context of a long-term warming trend in Asia in general. India, including southern India, has experienced a warming trend at a rate of 1°F (0.6°C) per century (IPCC, 2001b; NCDC, 1999).

91. Nepal - High rate of temperature rise. Since the mid-1970s the average air temperature measured at 49 stations has risen by 1.8°F (1°C), with high elevation sites warming the most (Shrestha et al., 1999). This is twice as fast as the 1°F (0.6°C) average warming for the mid-latitudinal Northern Hemisphere (24 to 40°N) over the same time period, and illustrates the high sensitivity of mountain regions to climate change.

92. Chiclayo, Peru - Large increase in average minimum temperatures. Average minimum temperatures along Peru’s north coast increased 3.5°F (2°C) from the 1960s to 2000 (SENAMHI, 2001). The temperature in the high plateau region in extreme southeastern Peru has also risen 3.5°F (2°C), from an average of 48°F (9°C) in the 1960s to 52°F (11°C) in 2001 (Inter-Press Service, 2001). Northwestern South America has warmed by 0.8-1.4°F (0.5-0.8 °C) in the last decade of the 20th century (IPCC, 2001b).

93. Taiwan - Average temperature increase. The average temperature for the island has risen 1.8-2.5°F (1-1.4°C) in the last 100 years. The average temperature for 2000 was the warmest on record (Hsu and Chen, 2002).

94. Afghanistan - Warmest winter on record, 2001. Arid Central Asia, which includes Afghanistan, experienced a warming of 0.8-3.6°F (1-2°C) during the 20th century (IPCC, 1998)(WMO, 2002b).

95. Tibet - Warmest decade in 1,000 years. Ice core records from the Dasuopu Glacier indicate that the last decade and last 50 years have been the warmest in 1,000 years (Thompson et al., 2000). Meteorological records for the Tibetan Plateau show that annual temperatures increased 0.4°F (0.16°C) per decade and winter temperatures increased 0.6°F (0.32°C) per decade from 1955 to 1996 (Liu and Chen, 2000).

96. Mongolia - Warmest century of the past millennium. A 1,738-year tree-ring record from remote alpine forests in the Tarvagatay Mountains indicates that 20th century temperatures in this region are the warmest of the last millennium. Tree growth during 1980-1999 was the highest of any 20-year period on record, and 8 of the 10 highest growth years occurred since 1950. The 20th century warming has been observed in tree-ring reconstructions of temperature from widespread regions of Eurasia, including sites in the Polar Urals, Yakutia, and the Taymir Peninsula, Russia (D’Arrigo, 2001). The average annual temperature in Mongolia has increased by about 1.3°F (0.7°C) over the past 50 years (IPCC, 2001b).

97. Southeast Europe and Middle East - Widespread heat wave, July-August 2000. Temperatures reached as high as 111°F (43.8°C) in locations across Turkey, Greece, Romania, Italy, and Bulgaria. In Bulgaria, 100-year records for daily maximum temperature were broken at more than 75% of the observing stations on July 5th. For Armenia, 2000 was the hottest summer of the century. Jordan reported the longest stretch of summer heat in its 77-year record (NCDC, 2000; WMO, 2000; WMO, 2001). Continental Europe warmed 1.4°F (0.8°C) during the past century, with the last decade being the warmest on record (IPCC, 2001b).

98. Denmark and Germany - Warmest October on record, 2001. In Germany temperatures were as much as 7°F (4°C) above average (WMO, 2002a). The record-breaking temperatures occurred in the context of a warming trend of 1.4°F (0.8°C) over continental Europe during the past century (IPCC, 2001b).

99. Central England - Warmest October on record, 2001. Over the 20th century Central England temperature has warmed by about 1°F (0.5°C). Four of the five warmest years in the 343-year record occurred in the last decade (Hulme, 1999)(WMO, 2002a).

100. Australia - Warmest April on record, 2002. This occurred in the context of an average annual temperature increase of 0.9-1.8°F (0.5-1.0°C) per decade over the past century (Collins, 2002; Reuters 2002). There has also been an increase in warm days and a decrease in cold winter days (IPCC, 2001b).

101. Tropical Andes (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and northernmost Chile) - Increase in average annual temperature. Average annual temperature has increased by about 0.18°F (0.1°C) per decade since 1939. The rate of warming has doubled in the last 40 years, and more than tripled in the last 25 years, to about 0.6°F (0.33°C) per decade (Vuille and Bradley, 2000).

********************************************
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3411053.stm

Earth 'entering uncharted waters'

posted 01-25-2004 12:50 PM               

Global warming will plunge Britain into new ice age 'within decades'

By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor

Britain is likely to be plunged into an ice age within our lifetime by global warming, new research suggests.

A study, which is being taken seriously by top government scientists, has uncovered a change "of remarkable amplitude" in the circulation of the waters of the North Atlantic.

Similar events in pre-history are known to have caused sudden "flips" of the climate, bringing ice ages to northern Europe within a few decades. The development - described as "the largest and most dramatic oceanic change ever measured in the era of modern instruments", by the US Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, which led the research - threatens to turn off the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe's weather mild.

If that happens, Britain and northern Europe are expected to switch abruptly to the climate of Labrador - which is on the same latitude - bringing a nightmare scenario where farmland turns to tundra and winter temperatures drop below -20C. The much-heralded cold snap predicted for the coming week would seem balmy by comparison.

A report by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme in Sweden - launched by Nobel prize-winner Professor Paul Crutzen and other top scientists - warned last week that pollution threatened to "trigger changes with catastrophic consequences" like these.

Scientists have long expected that global warming could, paradoxically, cause a devastating cooling in Europe by disrupting the Gulf Stream, which brings as much heat to Britain in winter as the sun does: the US National Academy of Sciences has even described such abrupt, dramatic changes as "likely". But until now it has been thought that this would be at least a century away.

The new research, by scientists at the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Acquaculture Science at Lowestoft and Canada's Bedford Institute of Oceanography, as well as Woods Hole, indicates that this may already be beginning to happen.

Dr Ruth Curry, the study's lead scientist, says: "This has the potential to change the circulation of the ocean significantly in our lifetime. Northern Europe will likely experience a significant cooling."

Robert Gagosian, the director of Woods Hole, considered one of the world's leading oceanographic institutes, said: "We may be approaching a threshold that would shut down [the Gulf Stream] and cause abrupt climate changes.

"Even as the earth as a whole continues to warm gradually, large regions may experience a precipitous and disruptive shift into colder climates." The scientists, who studied the composition of the waters of the Atlantic from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, found that they have become "very much" saltier in the tropics and subtropics and "very much" fresher towards the poles over the past 50 years.

This is alarming because the Gulf Stream is driven by cold, very salty water sinking in the North Atlantic. This pulls warm surface waters northwards, forming the current.

The change is described as the "fingerprint" of global warming. As the world heats up, more water evaporates from the tropics and falls as rain in temperate and polar regions, making the warm waters saltier and the cold ones fresher. Melting polar ice adds more fresh water.

Ominously, the trend has accelerated since 1990, during which time the 10 hottest years on record have occurred. Many studies have shown that similar changes in the waters of the North Atlantic in geological time have often plunged Europe into an ice age, sometimes bringing the change in as little as a decade.

The National Academy of Sciences says that the jump occurs in the same way as "the slowly increasing pressure of a finger eventually flips a switch and turns on a light". Once the switch has occurred the new, hostile climate, lasts for decades at least, and possibly centuries.

When the Gulf Stream abruptly turned off about 12,700 years ago, it brought about a 1,300-year cold period, known as the Younger Dryas. This froze Britain in continuous permafrost, drove summer temperatures down to 10C and winter ones to -20C, and brought icebergs as far south as Portugal. Europe could not sustain anything like its present population. Droughts struck across the globe, including in Asia, Africa and the American west, as the disruption of the Gulf Stream affected currents worldwide.

posted 01-27-2004 08:16 PM               

History's Greatest Disaster Has Begun

Whitley Strieber

The greatest environmental catastrophe in recorded history is now unfolding. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute has announced that the North Atlantic Oscillation is failing, and, along with it, the Gulf Stream. The Institute has observed "the largest and most dramatic oceanic change ever measured in the era of modern instruments," in an analysis of Atlantic ocean currents from pole to pole. Woods Hole has found that salinity levels are changing in ways that they have changed in the past leading to periods of abrupt climate change. Polar waters are becoming far less saline, meaning that the "heat pump" effect that draws warm water north is failing.

Dr Ruth Curry, the study's lead scientist, says: "This has the potential to change the circulation of the ocean significantly in our lifetime. Northern Europe will likely experience a significant cooling."

The director of Woods Hole, Robert Gagosian, said: "We may be approaching a threshold that would shut down [the Gulf Stream] and cause abrupt climate changes."

Last summer, Unknowncountry.com reported an ominous sign that the North Atlantic Current was weakening, when cold northern water suddenly appeared along US coastlines as far south as Florida. This suggested that the Gulf Stream had moved farther offshore than normal, which would happen if it weakened and was not flowing north normally.

The extremes of heat and cold that the northern hemisphere has experienced over the past twelve months may be further signs of this effect. Extraordinary heat killed at least 20,000 people in Europe last summer, and extreme cold in north America this winter has been responsible for at least 35 deaths. World weather patterns have become extremely bizarre recently, exemplified by blocks of ice falling from the sky in regions as diverse as New Zealand, Spain and the American South and, within the past few months, tornadoes in Wales and, just yesterday, on Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands.

From now on, there is an immediate potential for abrupt climate change. The key factor in the sudden climate change scenario described in the Coming Global Superstorm and many other places is the collapse of the system of currents that equalizes heat and cold over the surface of the earth.

It is likely that climate change will take place over a single season, as the fossil record tells us. It will not be a protracted process, unfolding over hundreds or even tens of years. It will begin with an outburst of violent weather unlike anything recorded in the historical era, and then be followed by years of climactic turmoil. At some point, the climate will either return to the interglacial state it is in now, or we will slip into another ice age, but this is likely to be hundreds of years into the period of turmoil.

Mankind, for the foreseeable future, will experience the full effects of the turmoil and disaster caused by sudden climate change.

This process is going to devastate the northern hemisphere, dramatically altering growing seasons in the United States, Canada and Europe, shortening them, making them entirely unviable in northern areas, and crippling many regions such as the central-western US, with drought so intractable that it will likely result in large scale population movement out of these areas.

This unfortunate situation is in part the result of natural climactic cycling, but it has been sped up by human emissions of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, and the process could have been controlled by considered worldwide attention to controlling those emissions. Proper leadership in the developed countries could have prevented this catastrophe, and without significant disruption to business activities or the lives of individuals.

Instead, nothing useful has been done, and now we will go through a significant stage of climatic upheaval that will be accompanied by the death and impoverishment of millions of the best educated and most productive people on earth. This will result in a vast diminishment of mankind and the likely collapse of many of the structures of government, business and finance that we depend upon to insure our safety, prosperity and freedom.

Even if a tremendous reduction in greenhouse gas emissions were achieved within a year, the process would still continue. What we will be able to do, if human society remains organized at a high enough level to achieve this, is to make a slide into another ice age somewhat less likely, and hasten the return of a more acceptable climate.

Questions will be asked: why has this happened? Who is responsible? Among Americans, the answer is clear: political leaders and media personalities have, at the behest of corporate sponsors who feel threatened by environmental controls, lied to the public about the problem, promoting the fallacy that the situation was a matter for debate when, in fact, nature had already cast the die.

Worldwide, various governmental and private entities have misused the threat of environmental disaster as a means of imposing a level of planning on all human activities that many found unacceptable.

In fact, government, the corporate world and environmental groups should all have faced the real and imminent problems in a clear-headed and practical manner, instead of viewing them through the crazy lens of ideology, be it left or right. Instead, ideology has been placed above need in virtually every case, with the result that the worst possible situation has become true: human activities in the form of greenhouse gas emissions have been allowed to exacerbate a natural cycle, with results that promise to be devastating beyond imagination.

It is ironic indeed that the Day After Tomorrow, the film related to the Coming Global Superstorm, will be released in May of 2004, which is likely to be the first month in the past ten thousand years at least that the extreme weather conditions described in that book could actually occur.

At present, only a few paleoclimatologists will admit to the actual violence that the fossil record reveals, and there remain questions about the degree to which the debris from these extremely violent weather events of the distant past actually relates to sudden climate change.

For example, there have been questions surrounding the cause of the quick-freezing of mammoths, whose remains have been periodically found in Alaska and Siberia, often with still undigested food in their mouths and stomachs. It has been claimed that no weather-related mechanism could possibly cause this, and therefore that the mammoths must have fallen into sinkholes and frozen there.

Recently, however, the discovery of quick-frozen plants embedded in glaciers in Peru has revealed the fact that very extreme weather changes to take place on this earth, and result in long-term effects. For example, plants that froze in the Peruvian Andes in a matter of minute ten thousand years ago are only just now being disgorged by glaciers. In other words, plants that were living in a moderate climate were plunged, over what appears to have been the course of just a few hours or even minutes, into extreme cold that held them in its grip for ten thousand years.

All mankind is now threatened by such a danger. Where and when it will strike, or if it will unfold with such super-violence at all is unknown. But the greedy and the foolish among our leadership have released the bull from the paddock, and we are not likely to see it returned anytime soon.

Two questions remain: what can we do and what are the warning signs of sudden climate change?

The primary warning sign has always been the failure of ocean currents, and Woods Hole is telling us that this is happening now. On a more detailed, day-to-day basis, any excursion of warm tropical air into far northern latitudes, from now on, is apt to trigger ferocious storms, and the farther that air penetrates, and the warmer and more humid it is, the more violent the consequences will be.

We will be making certain changes to our Quickwatch on this website to reflect the changing situation. For example, we are going to expand the number of points from which we pick up air temperature measurements and drop the ocean current measures and observations, except for the Gulf Stream, as they have already been triggered and will not change anytime soon. We will be watching for the dissolution of the Gulf Stream. If this should happen between May and October, the immediate weather effects will stun the world. No matter when it takes place, and it is now certain that it will, it will lead in a single season to an entirely new climate of a kind that is far less viable for us than the one we have known.

Also on our Quickwatch page is an article that contains a series of simple steps that world leaders should have been aggressively asking individuals to take for the past ten years. Instead, they remained mired down in their various political and ideological issues, either claiming that there was no significant environmental problem or that there was a huge problem that could only be solved by massive government intervention, imposing draconian new levels of planning on society at every level, with special emphasis on corporate enterprise and economic development.

However, the fact remains that a great deal can be done:

To reduce individual emissions dramatically, only a few minor lifestyle changes are needed: Replace the 20-year-old fridge with an energy-saver model. CO2 savings = 3,000 pounds. Send out one fewer 30-gallon bags of garbage per week. CO2 savings = 300 pounds. Leave the car at home two days per week. CO2 savings = 1,590 pounds. Recycle cans, bottles, plastic, cardboard and newspapers. CO2 savings = 850 pounds. Switch from standard light bulbs to fluorescents. CO2 savings = 1,000 pounds. Replace the current shower head with a low-flow model. CO2 savings = 300 pounds. Turn the thermostat down two degrees for one year. CO2 savings = 500 pounds. Cut vehicle fuel use by 10 gallons in 2003. CO2 savings = 200 pounds. Switch from hot to warm or cold water for laundry. CO2 savings = 600 pounds.

posted 01-27-2004 10:36 PM            

quote:

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Whitley Strieber

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Oh, yes, he's definitely the one I turn to when I have a question of any consequence about scientific issues.

posted 01-27-2004 10:37 PM            

What are your thoughts on biodiesel? It is my understanding alot of Europe is switching over to newer and much cleaner diesel technology than was available even 20 years ago. Many of these cars like some Volkswagen Passats I saw on the net listed for sale in Britian claimed mileage of 55 mpg. and approx. 300,000 mile running engines. (that in itself would be a huge fuel savings) Supposedly the new technology puts out much much less C02 than American gas powered technology, but with somewhat more particulate matter given off, if I recall correctly. With that technology combined with much cleaner burning bio diesel (such as made of industrial hemp) I would have to think this could be a winning combination at least in a transitional stage to even something cleaner.

I know here in Mid Missouri the land and climate would be excellent for the production of industrial hemp, the farmers could benefit greatly (as well as the state), hemp oil could be blended as needed to reduce dependence on foreign oil while at the same time producing a reportedly much cleaner burning fuel. The fiber would also be a marketable material and the farms could benefit from reportedly much less costs of production. The only glaring problem. It looks like marijuana, and there for some assume it's guilt just based on plant classification, even though industrial hemp would be an awful waste of time for anyone to try and smoke it.

posted 01-27-2004 11:09 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Show-Me Truth:
Supposedly the new technology puts out much much less C02 than American gas powered technology, but with somewhat more particulate matter given off, if I recall correctly.

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Personally, I'd rather have CO2 in the air than more particulates. I don't consider CO2 a contaminant.

quote:

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I know here in Mid Missouri the land and climate would be excellent for the production of industrial hemp, the farmers could benefit greatly (as well as the state), hemp oil could be blended as needed to reduce dependence on foreign oil while at the same time producing a reportedly much cleaner burning fuel.

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posted 01-27-2004 11:40 PM               

Perhaps letxa2000 has credentials and/or data that allows him to refute their findings...though I seriously doubt that.

Given his statement, "I don't consider CO2 a contaminant", I'd assume he is living in Mexico City where he would find the air quality more to his liking.

posted 01-28-2004 12:52 AM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Sore Throat:
What the expatriate letxa2000

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Expatriate? Does the fact that I currently live outside the U.S. have any relevance whatsoever? If not, any particular reason you felt the need to mention it?

quote:

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chooses to ignore in his/her attack on Whitley Strieber is that he (Strieber) is only reporting on the scientific studies of others, in this case Robert Gagosian, Director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Dr. Ruth Curry from the Bedford Institute of Oceanography.

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I am aware of that. I just found it funny with so many more conventional scientists available that you would choose to post a story from Streiber.

quote:

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Given his statement, "I don't consider CO2 a contaminant" he is living in Mexico City where he would find the air quality more to his liking.

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posted 01-28-2004 10:17 AM               

CLIMATE COLLAPSE

The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare
The climate could change radically, and fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues.

By David Stipp

Global warming may be bad news for future generations, but let's face it, most of us spend as little time worrying about it as we did about al Qaeda before 9/11. Like the terrorists, though, the seemingly remote climate risk may hit home sooner and harder than we ever imagined. In fact, the prospect has become so real that the Pentagon's strategic planners are grappling with it.

The threat that has riveted their attention is this: Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world's climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a decade—like a canoe that's gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. Scientists don't know how close the system is to a critical threshold. But abrupt climate change may well occur in the not-too-distant future. If it does, the need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societies—thereby upsetting the geopolitical balance of power.

Though triggered by warming, such change would probably cause cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, leading to longer, harsher winters in much of the U.S. and Europe. Worse, it would cause massive droughts, turning farmland to dust bowls and forests to ashes. Picture last fall's California wildfires as a regular thing. Or imagine similar disasters destabilizing nuclear powers such as Pakistan or Russia—it's easy to see why the Pentagon has become interested in abrupt climate change.

Climate researchers began getting seriously concerned about it a decade ago, after studying temperature indicators embedded in ancient layers of Arctic ice. The data show that a number of dramatic shifts in average temperature took place in the past with shocking speed—in some cases, just a few years.

The case for angst was buttressed by a theory regarded as the most likely explanation for the abrupt changes. The eastern U.S. and northern Europe, it seems, are warmed by a huge Atlantic Ocean current that flows north from the tropics—that's why Britain, at Labrador's latitude, is relatively temperate. Pumping out warm, moist air, this "great conveyor" current gets cooler and denser as it moves north. That causes the current to sink in the North Atlantic, where it heads south again in the ocean depths. The sinking process draws more water from the south, keeping the roughly circular current on the go.

But when the climate warms, according to the theory, fresh water from melting Arctic glaciers flows into the North Atlantic, lowering the current's salinity—and its density and tendency to sink. A warmer climate also increases rainfall and runoff into the current, further lowering its saltiness. As a result, the conveyor loses its main motive force and can rapidly collapse, turning off the huge heat pump and altering the climate over much of the Northern Hemisphere.

Scientists aren't sure what caused the warming that triggered such collapses in the remote past. (Clearly it wasn't humans and their factories.) But the data from Arctic ice and other sources suggest the atmospheric changes that preceded earlier collapses were dismayingly similar to today's global warming. As the Ice Age began drawing to a close about 13,000 years ago, for example, temperatures in Greenland rose to levels near those of recent decades. Then they abruptly plunged as the conveyor apparently shut down, ushering in the "Younger Dryas" period, a 1,300-year reversion to ice-age conditions. (A dryas is an Arctic flower that flourished in Europe at the time.)

Though Mother Nature caused past abrupt climate changes, the one that may be shaping up today probably has more to do with us. In 2001 an international panel of climate experts concluded that there is increasingly strong evidence that most of the global warming observed over the past 50 years is attributable to human activities—mainly the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal, which release heat-trapping carbon dioxide. Indicators of the warming include shrinking Arctic ice, melting alpine glaciers, and markedly earlier springs at northerly latitudes. A few years ago such changes seemed signs of possible trouble for our kids or grandkids. Today they seem portents of a cataclysm that may not conveniently wait until we're history.

Accordingly, the spotlight in climate research is shifting from gradual to rapid change. In 2002 the National Academy of Sciences issued a report concluding that human activities could trigger abrupt change. Last year the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, included a session at which Robert Gagosian, director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, urged policymakers to consider the implications of possible abrupt climate change within two decades.

Such jeremiads are beginning to reverberate more widely. Billionaire Gary Comer, founder of Lands' End, has adopted abrupt climate change as a philanthropic cause. Hollywood has also discovered the issue—next summer 20th Century Fox is expected to release The Day After Tomorrow, a big-budget disaster movie starring Dennis Quaid as a scientist trying to save the world from an ice age precipitated by global warming.

Fox's flick will doubtless be apocalyptically edifying. But what would abrupt climate change really be like?

Scientists generally refuse to say much about that, citing a data deficit. But recently, renowned Department of Defense planner Andrew Marshall sponsored a groundbreaking effort to come to grips with the question. A Pentagon legend, Marshall, 82, is known as the Defense Department's "Yoda"—a balding, bespectacled sage whose pronouncements on looming risks have long had an outsized influence on defense policy. Since 1973 he has headed a secretive think tank whose role is to envision future threats to national security. The Department of Defense's push on ballistic-missile defense is known as his brainchild. Three years ago Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld picked him to lead a sweeping review on military "transformation," the shift toward nimble forces and smart weapons.

When scientists' work on abrupt climate change popped onto his radar screen, Marshall tapped another eminent visionary, Peter Schwartz, to write a report on the national-security implications of the threat. Schwartz formerly headed planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group and has since consulted with organizations ranging from the CIA to DreamWorks—he helped create futuristic scenarios for Steven Spielberg's film Minority Report. Schwartz and co-author Doug Randall at the Monitor Group's Global Business Network, a scenario-planning think tank in Emeryville, Calif., contacted top climate experts and pushed them to talk about what-ifs that they usually shy away from—at least in public.

The result is an unclassified report, completed late last year, that the Pentagon has agreed to share with FORTUNE. It doesn't pretend to be a forecast. Rather, it sketches a dramatic but plausible scenario to help planners think about coping strategies. Here is an abridged version:

A total shutdown of the ocean conveyor might lead to a big chill like the Younger Dryas, when icebergs appeared as far south as the coast of Portugal. Or the conveyor might only temporarily slow down, potentially causing an era like the "Little Ice Age," a time of hard winters, violent storms, and droughts between 1300 and 1850. That period's weather extremes caused horrific famines, but it was mild compared with the Younger Dryas.

For planning purposes, it makes sense to focus on a midrange case of abrupt change. A century of cold, dry, windy weather across the Northern Hemisphere that suddenly came on 8,200 years ago fits the bill—its severity fell between that of the Younger Dryas and the Little Ice Age. The event is thought to have been triggered by a conveyor collapse after a time of rising temperatures not unlike today's global warming. Suppose it recurred, beginning in 2010. Here are some of the things that might happen by 2020:

At first the changes are easily mistaken for normal weather variation—allowing skeptics to dismiss them as a "blip" of little importance and leaving policymakers and the public paralyzed with uncertainty. But by 2020 there is little doubt that something drastic is happening. The average temperature has fallen by up to five degrees Fahrenheit in some regions of North America and Asia and up to six degrees in parts of Europe. (By comparison, the average temperature over the North Atlantic during the last ice age was ten to 15 degrees lower than it is today.) Massive droughts have begun in key agricultural regions. The average annual rainfall has dropped by nearly 30% in northern Europe, and its climate has become more like Siberia's.

Violent storms are increasingly common as the conveyor becomes wobbly on its way to collapse. A particularly severe storm causes the ocean to break through levees in the Netherlands, making coastal cities such as the Hague unlivable. In California the delta island levees in the Sacramento River area are breached, disrupting the aqueduct system transporting water from north to south.

Megadroughts afflict the U.S., especially in the southern states, along with winds that are 15% stronger on average than they are now, causing widespread dust storms and soil loss. The U.S. is better positioned to cope than most nations, however, thanks to its diverse growing climates, wealth, technology, and abundant resources. That has a downside, though: It magnifies the haves-vs.-have-nots gap and fosters bellicose finger-pointing at America.

Turning inward, the U.S. effectively seeks to build a fortress around itself to preserve resources. Borders are strengthened to hold back starving immigrants from Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean islands—waves of boat people pose especially grim problems. Tension between the U.S. and Mexico rises as the U.S. reneges on a 1944 treaty that guarantees water flow from the Colorado River into Mexico. America is forced to meet its rising energy demand with options that are costly both economically and politically, including nuclear power and onerous Middle Eastern contracts. Yet it survives without catastrophic losses.

Europe, hardest hit by its temperature drop, struggles to deal with immigrants from Scandinavia seeking warmer climes to the south. Southern Europe is beleaguered by refugees from hard-hit countries in Africa and elsewhere. But Western Europe's wealth helps buffer it from catastrophe.

Australia's size and resources help it cope, as does its location—the conveyor shutdown mainly affects the Northern Hemisphere. Japan has fewer resources but is able to draw on its social cohesion to cope—its government is able to induce population-wide behavior changes to conserve resources.

China's huge population and food demand make it particularly vulnerable. It is hit by increasingly unpredictable monsoon rains, which cause devastating floods in drought-denuded areas. Other parts of Asia and East Africa are similarly stressed. Much of Bangladesh becomes nearly uninhabitable because of a rising sea level, which contaminates inland water supplies. Countries whose diversity already produces conflict, such as India and Indonesia, are hard-pressed to maintain internal order while coping with the unfolding changes.

Scientists generally refuse to say much about that, citing a data deficit. But recently, renowned Department of Defense planner Andrew Marshall sponsored a groundbreaking effort to come to grips with the question. A Pentagon legend, Marshall, 82, is known as the Defense Department's "Yoda"—a balding, bespectacled sage whose pronouncements on looming risks have long had an outsized influence on defense policy. Since 1973 he has headed a secretive think tank whose role is to envision future threats to national security. The Department of Defense's push on ballistic-missile defense is known as his brainchild. Three years ago Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld picked him to lead a sweeping review on military "transformation," the shift toward nimble forces and smart weapons.

When scientists' work on abrupt climate change popped onto his radar screen, Marshall tapped another eminent visionary, Peter Schwartz, to write a report on the national-security implications of the threat. Schwartz formerly headed planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group and has since consulted with organizations ranging from the CIA to DreamWorks—he helped create futuristic scenarios for Steven Spielberg's film Minority Report. Schwartz and co-author Doug Randall at the Monitor Group's Global Business Network, a scenario-planning think tank in Emeryville, Calif., contacted top climate experts and pushed them to talk about what-ifs that they usually shy away from—at least in public.

The result is an unclassified report, completed late last year, that the Pentagon has agreed to share with FORTUNE. It doesn't pretend to be a forecast. Rather, it sketches a dramatic but plausible scenario to help planners think about coping strategies. Here is an abridged version:

A total shutdown of the ocean conveyor might lead to a big chill like the Younger Dryas, when icebergs appeared as far south as the coast of Portugal. Or the conveyor might only temporarily slow down, potentially causing an era like the "Little Ice Age," a time of hard winters, violent storms, and droughts between 1300 and 1850. That period's weather extremes caused horrific famines, but it was mild compared with the Younger Dryas.

For planning purposes, it makes sense to focus on a midrange case of abrupt change. A century of cold, dry, windy weather across the Northern Hemisphere that suddenly came on 8,200 years ago fits the bill—its severity fell between that of the Younger Dryas and the Little Ice Age. The event is thought to have been triggered by a conveyor collapse after a time of rising temperatures not unlike today's global warming. Suppose it recurred, beginning in 2010. Here are some of the things that might happen by 2020:

At first the changes are easily mistaken for normal weather variation—allowing skeptics to dismiss them as a "blip" of little importance and leaving policymakers and the public paralyzed with uncertainty. But by 2020 there is little doubt that something drastic is happening. The average temperature has fallen by up to five degrees Fahrenheit in some regions of North America and Asia and up to six degrees in parts of Europe. (By comparison, the average temperature over the North Atlantic during the last ice age was ten to 15 degrees lower than it is today.) Massive droughts have begun in key agricultural regions. The average annual rainfall has dropped by nearly 30% in northern Europe, and its climate has become more like Siberia's.

Violent storms are increasingly common as the conveyor becomes wobbly on its way to collapse. A particularly severe storm causes the ocean to break through levees in the Netherlands, making coastal cities such as the Hague unlivable. In California the delta island levees in the Sacramento River area are breached, disrupting the aqueduct system transporting water from north to south.

Megadroughts afflict the U.S., especially in the southern states, along with winds that are 15% stronger on average than they are now, causing widespread dust storms and soil loss. The U.S. is better positioned to cope than most nations, however, thanks to its diverse growing climates, wealth, technology, and abundant resources. That has a downside, though: It magnifies the haves-vs.-have-nots gap and fosters bellicose finger-pointing at America.

Turning inward, the U.S. effectively seeks to build a fortress around itself to preserve resources. Borders are strengthened to hold back starving immigrants from Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean islands—waves of boat people pose especially grim problems. Tension between the U.S. and Mexico rises as the U.S. reneges on a 1944 treaty that guarantees water flow from the Colorado River into Mexico. America is forced to meet its rising energy demand with options that are costly both economically and politically, including nuclear power and onerous Middle Eastern contracts. Yet it survives without catastrophic losses.

Europe, hardest hit by its temperature drop, struggles to deal with immigrants from Scandinavia seeking warmer climes to the south. Southern Europe is beleaguered by refugees from hard-hit countries in Africa and elsewhere. But Western Europe's wealth helps buffer it from catastrophe.

Australia's size and resources help it cope, as does its location—the conveyor shutdown mainly affects the Northern Hemisphere. Japan has fewer resources but is able to draw on its social cohesion to cope—its government is able to induce population-wide behavior changes to conserve resources.

posted 01-28-2004 01:45 PM               

Drought threatens millions in southern Africa

Foreign assistance dries up as villagers grapple with hunger

MAFETENG, Lesotho - From miles around they come, pushing wheelbarrows in the relentless heat to collect sacks of maize meal, beans and cooking oil from the U.N. food agency.

The worst drought in more than a decade is sweeping through southern Africa, destroying crops, driving up food prices and leaving millions hungry — even as foreign assistance dries up, governments and humanitarian agencies say.

Last week saw the first significant downpours since April — but the rain came too late to save the summer harvest, and forecasters predict more dry weather ahead. Aid workers expect near total crop failure in the tiny mountain kingdom of Lesotho, along with massive losses in Swaziland, southern Mozambique and parts of Zimbabwe.

“The current drought could be disastrous for southern Africa,” Richard Lee, regional spokesman for the World Food Program, said Tuesday. “Parts of the region, which have now experienced two years of crisis, will have another year of massive shortages, if this continues.”

The southern town of Mafeteng, once surrounded by some of Lesotho’s most productive agricultural land, is now on the front line of the region’s drought. Dams are empty, rivers have been reduced to a muddy trickle, and wells are drying up.

With the soil too dry to plant, vast areas have been left idle. The few maize crops that were put in have been stunted by the sun. Despairing of rain, some farmers are already allowing their skinny herds into their fields to eat the scorched crops.

“Normally we have maize all over,” district secretary Eliase Thekiso said as he surveyed a parched and rocky landscape. “But the soil is going and leaving us with stones.”

Aid contributions fall short
Between 600,000 and 700,000 people — a third of Lesotho’s population — are expected to need food aid this year.

But while the international community reacted swiftly to last year’s food crisis in six southern African countries, response this year has been much slower, U.N. officials say.

Despite recent contributions by the European Union and United States, WFP is still short $127 million — 29 percent of its emergency appeal to feed 6.5 million people in Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe for the year finishing in June 2004.

Millions of people in Zimbabwe have already had their rations reduced due to lack of funds.

In Lesotho, there is only enough aid for the most vulnerable, including the sick, the elderly, children under 5 and pregnant women. General distributions were suspended this month.

“What are we going to do?” despaired Mateko Mafereka, who has been trying to support a family of six on the $3.50 a week she makes selling apples and candy in the nearby Ha Lepolesa region. Her entire village was unable to plant this year, and there is no other work to be found in the area.

“There is no future without water,” she said.

This is the third consecutive year of drought in many parts of southern Africa, and subsistence farmers like Mafereka’s family have nothing left to fall back on. There are no seeds to plant, no livestock or other assets left to sell.

If the drought persists, U.N. officials fear many families will be pushed into destructive coping mechanisms such as pulling their children out of schools, migrating to urban areas and prostitution.

The AIDS pandemic is also having a devastating effect, cutting a swathe through the region’s most productive age groups.

Making matters worse in Lesotho, tens of thousands of migrant laborers have been retrenched from neighboring South Africa’s mines and farms over the past decade, depriving families of their only alternative source of income.

Lesotho is also suffering the effects of years of over grazing and over dependence on maize, which has depleted the soil of its nutrients. Erosion has left the southern lowlands crisscrossed with deep gullies, in stark contrast to the level fields on the South African side of the border.

Reform cripples regional breadbasket

In Zimbabwe, once a regional breadbasket, food production has been crippled by erratic rains, soaring costs and shortages of seed, fuel and fertilizer. Government supporters have seized 5,000 white-owned farms for redistribution to blacks in an often-violent reform program that has crippled the country’s agriculture-based economy.

Basic food prices are increasing even faster than the country’s record inflation rate, currently around 600 percent, putting many items out of the reach of many Zimbabweans.

In Swaziland, government officials say the current drought has the potential to be the “worst in recorded history.” Just under a quarter of the tiny kingdom’s 1 million people are receiving food aid, while low water levels in the rivers and dams are putting livestock at risk.

Mozambique, devastated by floods in 2000 and 2001, is now experiencing its lowest rainfall in 50 years in some areas. Worst hit is the southern province of Gaza, where more than 11 percent of children under 5 are suffering from malnutrition.

In Malawi, the government recently appealed for help feeding 3.5 million people, particularly in the south.

posted 01-29-2004 12:47 PM               

ExxonMobil Plays Key Role in Global Warming, Says New Report

Jim Lobe, OneWorld US

WASHINGTON, D.C., Jan 29 (OneWorld) -- As a U.S. federal judge in Alaska Wednesday ordered ExxonMobil to pay nearly US$7 billion in damages and interest as compensation for the disastrous 1989 oil spill of the Exxon Valdez, the world's largest grassroots environmental group said the U.S. oil giant should be held liable for many more billions of dollars for its contributions to global warming.

In a new report released shortly after the Alaska ruling, Friends of the Earth (news - web sites) International (FoIE) charged that ExxonMobil's combined operations and production have caused between 4.7 and 5.3 percent of all human-made carbon dioxide emissions, which have been affecting the Earth's climate since the Standard Oil Trust, the company's oldest ancestor, was founded in 1882.

The report, "Exxon's Climate Footprint", found that seven of the top ten years of Exxon-Mobil's emissions and production took place since 1996, the year when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)--an international committee of experts that reviews the scientific research on global warming--found "a discernible human influence on global climate."

This finding echoed earlier studies on the relationship between the emission of carbon dioxide and climate change.

That finding should have promoted a more cautious approach to the production of fossil fuels, such as oil and gas, the report argues, but ExxonMobil's response was both to pour money into lobby groups that have questioned the link between fossil-fuel combustion and global warming and ''to increase its production of fossil fuels to record levels."

"[ExxonMobil] must be held responsible for its behavior, both morally and legally," according to the report, which cited a number of recent studies projecting losses the hundreds of billions of dollars in storm damage, agricultural losses, and other natural disasters associated with the climatic effects of warming.

"We hope this assessment will bring forward the day when the victims of climate change can take legal action against ExxonMobil for the damage its activities have caused and will cause in the future," said Tony Juniper, FoEI's vice president.

ExxonMobil is one of the world's largest energy companies whose subsidiaries and affiliates also include Esso, Mobil, Imperial Oil, Tonen General and Exxon. Producing 4.5 million barrels of oil a day in 2002 alone, the company made more than $11 billion in profits that year. Total 2002 production--2,831 barrels--was equivalent to 209 million tons of carbon released into the atmosphere, nearly twice of Britain's total annual emissions.

The report is based on two studies carried out by independent experts in the United States and New Zealand, commissioned by FoEI. The first estimated the carbon dioxide and methane emissions from ExxonMobil operations and the burning of its products since 1882; the second, based on a widely used computer program, estimated the contribution these emissions have made and will make to the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and their contribution to average surface temperatures and sea level rise.

According to the IPPC and other independent scientific panels that have become increasingly persuaded since the 1996 study that fossil fuel combustion contributes directly to global warming, the burning of coal, oil products, natural gas, and gasoline accounts for about 75 percent of all human-made carbon dioxide emissions. The remaining 25 percent is produced by deforestation, cattle raising and the cultivation of rice and other related crops. The United States alone produces about 25 percent of all greenhouse emissions.

ExxonMobil was chosen by FoEI as the first company for a comprehensive assessment because, virtually alone among the world's biggest oil giants, it has tried to undermine the growing scientific consensus about the emissions-warming link and delay effective international action to curb emissions.

The company lobbied hard against the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (news - web sites) to reduce emissions by developed countries, and funded such groups as the Global Climate Coalition, the Cooler Heads Coalition, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which question the scientific basis for the link. ExxonMobil has also strongly opposed shareholder actions efforts to urge management to take the issue more seriously and invest more in renewable energy sources.

The two current studies found that ExxonMobil's emissions, both from its own operations and the fossil fuels that it has produced and sold, totaled an estimated 20.3 billion tons of carbon between 1882 and 2002, or roughly five percent of all emissions released globally over that 120-year period.

This amount is equivalent to about three times the amount of carbon dioxide that the entire world emitted from fossil fuel combustion in 2002. If methane is added, total emissions come to about 21.53 billion tons of carbon equivalent.

About two-thirds of the company's total emissions in those years took place after the 1971 "Study of Man's Impact on Climate" international conference in which leading scientists reported a danger of rapid and far-reaching global climate change, according to the report.

Based on the most recent models, the second study found that ExxonMobil's emissions also contributed between 3.4 percent and 3.7 percent of total attributable temperature change (about 0.6 degrees Centigrade) since 1882, and about two percent of the total sea level rise.

Tuvalu, a tiny, low-lying South Pacific nation whose survival is particularly threatened by a significant rise in sea level, has been considering a lawsuit against countries responsible for the greatest greenhouse emissions, but FoEI suggested in the report that individual companies should also be held responsible for the impacts of warming, at least from the time that the scientific community began reaching consensus on the link between fossil fuel emissions and climate change.

"ExxonMobil is sticking its heard in the sand just like tobacco companies that knew the harmful impacts of their product and are now paying the price," said Jon Sohn, a senior policy analyst with the U.S. section of Friends of the Earth. "ExxonMobil's greenhouse gas contribution is staggering, and shareholders can vote for resolutions that force the corporation to act now."

The report called on ExxonMobil to publicly affirm the IPCC's judgment about the link between global warming and greenhouse emissions, halt all funding of organizations that are trying to undermine that consensus; support the Kyoto Protocol and its implementation; and makes its own assessment of its emissions and the its potential liability.

posted 01-29-2004 12:55 PM               

Snow hinders European transport

Snowfall across large parts of western and northern Europe has caused chaos on the roads and at airports.

The wintry weather forced the cancellation of hundreds of flights in Germany, Denmark and Britain.

Belgium and Luxembourg faced road and rail delays, though the snow also led to the opening of several downhill ski runs in Belgium's southern hills.

The Franco-Belgian border was closed to lorries overnight due to the bad weather but re-opened later.

Flight cancellations

In Germany, the heavy snows caused the cancellation of 76 flights at Frankfurt international airport, the country's largest.

Authorities said two thirds of the remaining planes from Frankfurt were delayed.

In Munich 40 flights were cancelled due to snow in the region or to weather-related delays in other parts of Germany or Europe.

In Denmark, Scandinavian Airlines cancelled 53 flights out of Copenhagen's Kastrup airport on Thursday morning due to snow and a strike by a company that supplies the airport with kerosene.

A rare snowfall in Britain's capital led to cancellation of around 90 flights at London's Heathrow airport and others faced serious delays.

Hundreds of waiting passengers crowded terminals at London's Heathrow and Gatwick airports.

'Lots of accidents'

Freezing temperatures also caused chaos on Germany's roads, as stuck farm vehicles in three western states blocked autobahn routes for hours and delayed morning commuters.

"There are lots of accidents," a police spokesman in Dusseldorf told AFP.

Dozens of people were injured in crashes throughout the country.

Freezing conditions also caused problems in France, Brussels and the Netherlands.

In northern France, around 10 centimetres of snow fell overnight.

Huge traffic jams built up around Brussels and other cities, while 20 accidents were reported in the south-eastern region around Liege.

Rough seas

Further east, bad weather closed Russia's main Black Sea oil port of Novorossiisk on Thursday, and strong winds and currents led to the closure of the Bosphorus strait to tankers.

Some 58 daylight-restricted vessels were left waiting at both ends.

The waterway was re-opened to smaller ships carrying non-hazardous cargoes at 1400 GMT.

posted 01-29-2004 01:09 PM               

Damn Hippie Liberal Trees

BushCo wants you to know: Caring about the environment is for pinko terrorist idiots

As if 600-year-old redwoods give a damn for your politics.

As if struggling salmon care a whit for the Catholic Church's sneering homophobic stance on gay marriage. Like Alaskan elk think your viewpoints on war are far too lopsided to hold sway in the national dialogue.

There are typical GOP evils and there are warmongering BushCo flying monkeys and there is Dick Cheney's pallid sneer as he slaughters a small mountain of birds for blood sport, and then there is perhaps the most vile and destructive notion the GOP has succeeded in foisting upon the numbed nation to date: that caring about Mother Nature makes you, yet again, a "goddamn hippie liberal."

This is what has happened: The GOP has succeeded, woefully, viciously, in demonizing nature. Right now, to love our unlogged forests or to wish air quality to be protected or to hope our leaders don't allow monster crony oil companies to jam their snarling proboscises into our country's nature preserves for a handful of crude is now to be thought of as a dreadlocked Greenpeace-Earth First!-tofu lover.

It's true. You cannot think solar power is cool without being labeled a hippie. You cannot want the U.S. Navy to knock it off with the goddamn high-powered sonar that damages whales without being cast as some sort of New Age freak. You cannot drive a Prius without being deemed some sort of nutball geek who probably feeds your kids only hemp seeds and homemade sproutburgers with a side of fresh mulch.

This is the other thing: Bush is the worst environmental president in the nation's history. Period. The proofs are irrefutable, and the list of his administration's sinister assaults on the pale blue dot we all call home is painful and tragic and punishable in the afterlife by seven billion years of listening to Lynne Cheney being scraped across a chalkboard.

No natural resource has been left unmolested: From forest management to air quality to water pollution to emissions standards to land management to industrial farming to reduced controls on heavy polluters to global warming to nuclear waste to our energy policy, BushCo has made atrociously efficient progress in decimating, in just three short years, 30 years of staunch environmental protections.

Dubya, by way of his industry cronies, has initiating more than 200 major rollbacks of America's most significant environmental laws. Hey, it's nothing new: As governor of Texas, Bush made his state No. 1 in thick smudgy black air and water pollution that makes babies gag and eyes water and cancer cells flourish. He had the ugliest enviro record of any governor in the state's history.

He has openly sodomized the Clean Air Act. He has given the green light to clear cutting the nation's largest old-growth forest, Alaska's stunning Tongass National Forest. He is allowing huge industrial polluters extensive new freedoms to pump toxins into rivers and lakes. He has scoffed at the Kyoto Treaty, even as the world's top scientists wave proof after proof of the reality of global warming in his face.

Here's a telling fact: During Dubya's State of the Union speech, the environment received not a single mention. According to Environment2004, not since Bush Sr.'s 1992 State of the Union address has a president failed to acknowledge that a healthy environment is essential to the survival of our species. Dubya did, however, scowl at steroid use by athletes. Now, there's a pressing issue.

The list of BushCo enviro assaults is enormous, appalling, increasing and far too extensive and outright depressing to detail in this column, but much gruesome proof can be had by perusing Robert F. Kennedy's superlative, damning essay in Rolling Stone, "Crimes Against Nature," or by simply browsing through the National Resource Defense Council's many pages on BushCo's enviro-hating policies. For a start.

Here's how successful the GOP's antienvironment brainwashing has been: With the exception of Dennis Kucinich, not one of the major Demo presidential candidates has truly focused on environmental issues in the debates or in their campaign speeches, for fear of being labeled "too liberal." Thanks to the GOP, to talk too much about the health of the planet now is to be thought of as anticapitalist and antiprogress and an outright traitor to the American causes of money-uber-alles and the-world-is-our-sandbox.

So duped is the nation that to even hint that you care deeply about safe drinking water for kids or the direct connection between toxic big agribiz and the increased rates of heart disease and cancer in this nation is tantamount to spitting on the flag.

BushCo even shames its own party members. Abundant, I imagine, are the staunch Republicans who still care deeply about the health of the planet and want to see pollution decreased and their children able to drink the water or go fishing at the local lake without worrying about mercury poisoning from the local coal factory -- the one Bush just excused from complying with the Clean Air Act.

But they don't dare speak up. They don't dare mention that they care, lest the "liberal" label get slapped on their asses and they are instantly considered treasonous terrorist sympathizers who would happily give refuge and a nice organic chai tea to Osama bin Laden.

This is the GOP credo: You're either with us 100 percent, or you're a commie hippie homo who should move to France. And there are few things a conservative fears more than being ostracized by the party.

The truth is, no matter which party you align yourself with, nowadays it takes more guts, more outright nerve, to care about this planet, to work to strip your life of the plastic and the poisonous and minimize your waste and your impact, eat more consciously and support local farming and cherish the flora and fauna, than it ever could be to load up the Escalade with Malaysian-made crap you bought at Wal-Mart that's now 89 cents cheaper because it's made in a sweatshop and not at the local factory that was forced to shut down.

This, then, is the ultimate BushCo credo: No sanctity. No reverence for that which is larger and more ancient and more divine. No concern for that which provides beauty and nourishment and sustenance. Mother Nature is not a source of life and inspiration and vital health -- she's just a lowly wench who needs to be put in her place.

And this, then, is the only possible response: If there was any better time in American history to proudly announce yourself as an environmentalist, this is it. It really doesn't matter where you stand on other issues. Because when that beautiful bitch Mother Nature really begins to strike back, nothing else will matter.

posted 01-29-2004 11:46 PM            

SmT- I bet you are quite concerned then with all of these geoengineering proposals and experiments that release more and more particulates into the atmosphere.

L2K-"How will it (industrial hemp vs crude oil) compare cost wise?

SmT- Well, if one includes wars for oil and all of the lives wasted and cost in human suffering as well as monetary loss that they produce then it tips the scale substantially. How much is life worth?