Global Warming News n Views

Humans: will they ever get it? Voting Americans are concerned about climate change, yes, but they’re WAY more worried about energy prices. A broad range of opinion surveys conducted in the final months of the 2008 campaign “reaffirm that economic issues — particularly the high cost of energy — far outweigh the environment when it comes to influencing how Americans evaluate the candidates”, writes Kate Sheppard in Grist.

Confirmed: global warming has spread to Antarctica. That means, no continent is untouched by the effects of climate change. A new study, published today in Nature Geoscience, is the “first to find the fingerprints of manmade global warming on the Antarctic, where a shortage of data makes it hard to be sure”, says The Guardian.

Alexander A? has pointed out that a greenhouse gas emitted during the production of solar panels and HDTVs, nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) that is used for cleaning some parts of the gadgets, is about 17,000 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Google News, UC San Diego press release, Geophysics Research Letters (search for trifluoride)

Since 2001, I have devoted my life entirely to the peaceful promotion of windmills and solar panels to solve global warming. Apparently not everyone liked my work, however. Believe it or not, the Maryland State Police put my name in their criminal intelligence database as a “suspected terrorist” as part of their larger program of collecting information about political activists in 2005-2006. I was on this outrageous “watch” list apparently because of a single act of peaceful civil disobedience I participated in outside a coal-fired power plant in 2004.

CCAN’s former deputy director, Josh Tulkin, was also put in the database as was another former CCAN staffer who has chosen to remain anonymous. Neither of these people has ever been arrested for anything in their entire lives.

Government scientists recently completed an annual study of the Arctic and essentially found that global warming continues unabated.

Specifically, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic Report Card:

– There has been a near-record loss of Arctic sea ice;

– Loss of this ice allows more solar heating of the ocean. That in turn, endangers land and marine life;

– There was abnormal melting of surface ice in Greenland over the summer;

– Autumn temperatures in the arctic are a record 9 degrees above normal;

– 2007 was the warmest on record in the Arctic.

This 1958 episode of the Bell Telephone Hour, “The Unchained Goddess” clearly explains Global Warming and its dangers. But for 50 years the oil and gas and coal and car industries have bought the ads and politicians to pat us on the head and turn us into addicts.

WASHINGTON - Attempts to tackle global warming are being made more difficult by the spreading economic crisis even as Democratic congressional leaders say it’s still a top goal for next year.

At the very least, fear of a prolonged economic downturn is expected to delay attempts by the United States to cap greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

Democratic leaders in the House and the Senate as well as both presidential candidates say addressing climate change by imposing mandatory restrictions on heat-trapping pollution — especially carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels — remains a priority.

Only months ago, the prospect of climate legislation passing in the next Congress and becoming law looked promising. Both presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain support mandatory emission cuts and a Democratic majority vowed to act on the problem early in the new year.

The basic proposition behind the science of climate change is so firmly rooted in the laws of physics that no reasonable person can dispute it. All other things being equal, adding carbon dioxide (CO₂) to the atmosphere—by, for example, burning millions of tons of oil, coal and natural gas—will make it warm up. That, as the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Svante Arrhenius first explained in 1896, is because CO₂ is relatively transparent to visible light from the sun, which heats the planet during the day. But it is relatively opaque to infrared, which the earth tries to reradiate back into space at night. If the planet were a featureless, monochromatic billiard ball without mountains, oceans, vegetation and polar ice caps, a steadily rising concentration of CO₂ would mean a steadily warming earth. Period.