Environment and Climate Change

Here it is guys, the APS has thrown a wrench into the "GW Mess".

Just received. May be of interest to others:

Dear Arctic,

Something important is happening tomorrow.

In a speech in Washington, DC, Nobel Laureate and Former Vice President Al Gore will issue a major challenge, essentially pressing the "reset" button on how we think about energy and climate, and how we can create prosperity in America.

Known for its long-standing opposition to whaling, logging, strip mining, genetically modified food, nuclear power, the chemical industry, wars, corporations, politics, and weapons, the activist group Greenpeace today announced that as of 12:01 this morning, it will just oppose everything.

"It's all bad, it all needs to stop," said a Greenpeace spokesperson, who added the group will no longer send out action alerts calling for opposition to specific issues, but will instead issue daily alerts to all members that read, "No" in 37 different languages.

I don't even know what to say about this. How can someone be SO STUPID?

The Bush administration, dismissing the recommendations of its top experts, rejected regulating the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming Friday, saying it would cripple the U.S. economy.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080712/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_global_warming

Wildlife extinction rates 'seriously underestimated'

Endangered species may become extinct 100 times faster than previously thought, scientists warned today, in a bleak re-assessment of the threat to global biodiversity.

Writing in the journal Nature, leading ecologists claim that methods used to predict when species will die out are seriously flawed, and dramatically underestimate the speed at which some plants and animals will be wiped out.

Just like how the tobacco denial movement was a conspiracy by tobacco companies (this was proved in court) ... there are some proposing that the global warming denial movement is a similar oil company conspiracy.

On Democracy Now this morning (http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2008/7/3) they covered this idea pretty deeply. You can easily listen/watch the show online.

Groundbreaking Lawsuit Accuses Big Oil of Conspiracy to Deceive Public About Climate Change

Attorney Stephen Susman helped file a groundbreaking lawsuit earlier this year on behalf of 400 Inupiat villagers in the Alaskan town of Kivalina who are being forced to relocate because of flooding caused by global warming. The suit accuses twenty oil, gas and electric companies, including ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, ConocoPhillips and Peabody, of being responsible for emitting millions of tons of greenhouse gases causing the Arctic ice to melt.

And

"Global Disruption" More Accurately Describes Climate Change, Not "Global Warming" - Leading Scientist John Holdren

Leading scientist John Holdren says ‘global warming’ is not the correct term to use, he prefers ‘global disruption.’ “Global warming] is misleading, it implies something that is mainly about temperature, that’s gradual, and that’s uniform across the planet,” says Holdren. “In fact, temperature is only one of the things that’s changing it’s sort of an index of the state of the climate. The whole climate is changing: the winds, the ocean currents, the storm patterns, snowpack, snowmelt, flooding, droughts—temperature is just a bit of it.”

So the worlds largest solar generation station is supposed to be built in the Imperial Valley, just over the mountains from San Diego in the desert. 300 megawatts to began with and possible expansion to 900 megawatts. This is going to be great, that is if they get the power link to San Diego completed. Right now there is one HV line out to that area, apparently not big enough for the increase in power that this new GE plant will provide. Problem is the environmentalist are fighting the power link every inch of the way.

http://spaceweather.com/nlcs/gallery2008_page1.htm

They hover on the edge of space. Thin, wispy clouds, glowing electric blue. Some scientists think they're seeded by space dust. Others suspect they're a telltale sign of global warming.

All this talk about getting away from oil has me wondering why we went to oil in the first place. I mean even when it was "first" discovered it was messy, polluting, had to be found, extracted from the ground, transported, refined and after all that they had to figure out what to do with it.

I watched PBS tonight it was showing a NOVA program about Mega-volcanoes. Turns out the biggest one at Yellowstone erupts every 600,000 years, it's been 640,000 years sense it last erupted, I do not know about you guys but I'm moving to Australia, I'm packing my bags as I type this.

Deron.