Wonder how they will explain the Pentagon telling Shrub that Global Warming is real - and a threat.

Mark Townsend and Paul Harris of The Observer

The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.

The report was commissioned by influential Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall, who has held considerable sway on US military thinking over the past three decades. He was the man behind a sweeping recent review aimed at transforming the American military under Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Climate change 'should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern', say the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.

An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is 'plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately', they conclude. As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.

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Where Have All The ...

Damn! Where have they gone? All those scientists who were dissenters, that is...
The headline says "World Scientists Near Consensus on Warming", but what that really means is not that there is great disparity in thought, but that they want to all agree on the wording of their report!

Winter Patriot

Scientists from across the world gathered Monday to hammer out the final details of an authoritative report on climate change that is expected to project centuries of rising temperatures and sea levels unless there are curbs in emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that trap heat in the atmosphere.

That's what the report wants to say, but the wording is tricky because there's all manner of politics involved. And they're bickering over such things as whether the current rates of warming and melting will by typical in the future.

But scientists involved in the effort warned that squabbling among teams and government representatives from more than 100 countries — over how to portray the probable amount of sea-level rise during the 21st century — could distract from the basic finding that a warming world will be one in which shrinking coastlines are the new normal for centuries to come.

Ah yes, shrinking coastlines.

We might as well face it; No matter how much we try to curb the emissions of carbon gases, the atmosphere is already carrying a much higher concentration of carbon dioxide than it should, it's trapping heat at a greater rate than ever before, and the planet will continue to heat up, no matter what.

Regardless of what we do, the future will be hot, dry, and windy.

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Global Climate Change, even the scientists who disagreed now agree. It's coming!

Carl at Simply Left Behind

The smartest quote I've seen about global warming is in this article:

"Hell, we buy fire insurance based on a 1 per cent chance," [Professor Stephen Schneider, a climate consultant to the US government for more than 30 years] said. "If we're going to be risk averse … we cannot dismiss the possibility of potentially catastrophic outliers and that includes Greenland and West Antarctica [ice sheets breaking up], massive species extinctions, intensified hurricanes and all those things. "There's at least a 10 per cent chance of that. And that to me for a society is too high a risk … My value judgement when you're talking about planetary life support systems is that 10 per cent, my God, that's Russian roulette with a Luger."

More at My Left Wing

I'm done trying to explain to every subscriber of National Review exactly why it is that thickening of the center of the Antarctic ice sheet is actually evidence of global warming, rather than a refutation. I'm sick of laying out the evidence once again why this isn't just a "natural fluctuation."

So I'll tell you what I'm going to do next: make them defend themselves to me, using the 1% doctrine.

For those of you who don't know what the "1% doctrine" is, allow me to explain: it's supposedly the foreign policy doctrine conceived by Dick Cheney and can be explained as follows:

In his heralded new book, "The One Percent Doctrine," Ron Suskind writes that Vice President Dick Cheney forcefully stated that the war on terror empowered the Bush administration to act without the need for evidence or extensive analysis.

Suskind describes the Cheney doctrine as follows: "Even if there's just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty. It's not about 'our analysis,' as Cheney said. It's about 'our response.' ... Justified or not, fact-based or not, 'our response' is what matters. As to 'evidence,' the bar was set so low that the word itself almost didn't apply."

[...]I'm done being scientific and rational. I think it's time to operate on the "fear" principle instead. After all: if your average Republican can continue to justify spending $500 billion and the lives of over 3,000 American soldiers to supposedly justify averting the 1% risk of another September 11th, how much more, then, should we all be willing to spend--or perhaps even sacrifice our lives?--to avert the possibility of seeing Ground Zero under water?

[...]From now on, the next time I hear a conservative lament the effect that the Kyoto protocol, or raising CAFE standards, or any other such admission of responsibility, would do to our economy, I won't try to argue back. I'll just say:

I'd like to see how well the NYSE performs underwater.

It appears that only 'Big Oil' and Bush don't get it.

Andrew Gumbel in The Independent

An unprecedented coalition of blue-chip US companies and environmental lobby groups will urge President Bush next week to get serious about global warming, calling for caps on carbon dioxide emissions that would cut greenhouse gases by 10-30 per cent over 15 years.

The group, called the US Climate Action Partnership, will unveil the details of its plan on the eve of President Bush's State of the Union speech on Tuesday. The companies involved include some of the old-fashioned pollution-generating industries normally associated with anti-environmental policies and politicians - the chemical giant DuPont, the bulldozer company Caterpillar, the aluminium producer Alcoa and the US subsidiary of BP.

They, and environmental lobby groups such as Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Council, said yesterday they will call for "swift federal action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and speeding the adoption of climate-friendly technology".

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Earth monitoring satellites about to be kaput,

Thomas Leavitt at Seeing The Forrest

Apparently, Bush and the Republican Congress have allowed the nation's earth monitoring satellite infrastructure to degrade to an alarming degree, such that one critical tool used to forcast hurricanes and the El Nino phenomenon "could become inoperable at any time", and that without action, pretty much the entire system could vanish from the sky by the end of the next decade, according to a report issued by the National Research Council on Monday...

Why would the folks governing our society be so irresponsible? Perhaps because the data produced are politically inconvenient... you'll recall that earlier this year, NASA eliminated the promise "to understand and protect our home planet" from its mission statement. Prominent NASA scientist and global warming expert James Hansen stated to the New York Times that ""They're [the Bush Administration] making it clear that they ... prefer that NASA work on something that's not causing them a problem."

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