Is It Warm in Here? We Could Be Ignoring the Biggest Story in Our History

[kentuck]

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0118-33.htm

<snip>
ne of the puzzles if you're in the news business is figuring out what's "news." The fate of your local football team certainly fits the definition. So does a plane crash or a brutal murder. But how about changes in the migratory patterns of butterflies?

Scientists believe that new habitats for butterflies are early effects of global climate change -- but that isn't news, by most people's measure. Neither is declining rainfall in the Amazon, or thinner ice in the Arctic. We can't see these changes in our personal lives, and in that sense, they are abstractions. So they don't grab us the way a plane crash would -- even though they may be harbingers of a catastrophe that could, quite literally, alter the fundamentals of life on the planet. And because they're not "news," the environmental changes don't prompt action, at least not in the United States.

What got me thinking about the recondite life rhythms of the planet, and not the 24-hour news cycle, was a recent conversation with a scientist named Thomas E. Lovejoy, who heads the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment. When I first met Lovejoy nearly 20 years ago, he was trying to get journalists like me to pay attention to the changes in the climate and biological diversity of the Amazon. He is still trying, but he's beginning to wonder if it's too late.

Lovejoy fears that changes in the Amazon's ecosystem may be irreversible. Scientists reported last month that there is an Amazonian drought apparently caused by new patterns in Atlantic currents that, in turn, are similar to projected climate change. With less rainfall, the tropical forests are beginning to dry out. They burn more easily, and, in the continuous feedback loops of their ecosystem, these drier forests return less moisture to the atmosphere, which means even less rain. When the forest trees are deprived of rain, their mortality can increase by a factor of six, and similar devastation affects other species, too.

....more

[sasha031]

1. I know, what does the MSM yap about

Clinton and the plantation..

this is so terrifying, I have read Brazil has been having droughts, Brazil! France, Spain hasn't rained in 2yrs.
our beautiful planet, it is so scary

[kentuck]

2. and this...

<snip>
The best reporting of the non-news of climate change has come from Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker. Her three-part series last spring lucidly explained the harbingers of potential disaster: a shrinking of Arctic sea ice by 250 million acres since 1979; a thawing of the permafrost for what appears to be the first time in 120,000 years; a steady warming of Earth's surface temperature; changes in rainfall patterns that could presage severe droughts of the sort that destroyed ancient civilizations. This month she published a new piece, "Butterfly Lessons," that looked at how these delicate creatures are moving into new habitats as the planet warms. Her real point was that all life, from microorganisms to human beings, will have to adapt, and in ways that could be dangerous and destabilizing.

So many of the things that pass for news don't matter in any ultimate sense. But if people such as Lovejoy and Kolbert are right, we are all but ignoring the biggest story in the history of humankind. Kolbert concluded her series last year with this shattering thought: "It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing." She's right. The failure of the United States to get serious about climate change is unforgivable, a human folly beyond imagining.

[sasha031]

3. it's heartbreaking

polar bears are drowning, I get so depressed when I read these things. All you have to do is sit outside and look at nature, it will be gone.
we were warned time and again, but the corps silenced the scientist, and the country fell asleep.

[npincus]

16. you forgot presumed dead honeymooners and college girls in Aruba

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. Here in Minnesota, winters are far warmer than they were in my younger

days. So far, we haven't had any daytime highs below zero. In fact, temps have been hovering a few degrees on either side of 30, which is more like a Mid Atlantic winter than an Upper Midwest winter.

This is my third winter back here, and snowfall has seemed below normal all three winters. The Minnesota I remember had at least one three-foot blizzard every year. I heard a parent of a sixth grader say that her child had never experienced a "snow day" (a day when school is called off because of impassible roads).

[shraby]

5. In Manitowoc co. in Wisconsin

we don't have any snow and the daytime temps have been running between 30 and 40 degrees F.
Saves on the snowblower and that's a fact!

[kentuck]

7. Last week, we had the warmest day on record....

in Colorado Springs. In 103 years of record keeping.

[serryjw]

6. I grew up in LA from

1963 to 1983 and saw it get hotter and more humid every year. No wI am in Denver for 7 years and the same thing is happening. Hotter summers for longer periods and milder winters. We are obsolutely in a climate change and if this continues it could put all of mankind in jeopardy

[htuttle]

17. Here in Madison, WI, we have basically no snow on the ground again

We've only had a snow cover for maybe two weeks total this year, and that was mostly from one 'early' snowfall. I say 'early' in quotes, because late November didn't USED to be considered early for snow -- nowdays it is.

I've been riding my scooter to work almost every day, and it's mid January.

The climate is markedly warmer than when I grew up here -- far less precipitation too.

[mom cat]

8. I had a viola blooming last week in Boston...in January!

[welshTerrier2]

9. linking ecology to big oil and imperialism

check out this article that talks about selling off the Amazon rainforest to Big Oil ...

http://www.alternet.org/story/30657/

[Nomen Tuum]

10. This is what happens when people believe in fairy tales

Millions of Americans don't care about the environment because they really believe the Rapture is coming. Sadly, their stupidity is leading the whole world into the end times.

[wiley]

11. We need to follow Iceland's example

Now!

[Jeffersons Ghost]

12. check this out...

CBS/AP) The U.S. Senate rejected a plan Thursday to curb carbon dioxide emissions from industrial smokestacks as a source of global warming. It was the chamber's first vote in more than six years on the controversial issue of climate change.

The 55-43 vote against the measure co-sponsored by Sens. John McCain, a Republican, and Joe Lieberman, a Democrat, capped a two-day debate that the two senators described as the opening shot in what they acknowledged will be a lengthy effort to get Congress to address global warming.

Their bill would have required industrial plants — but not motor vehicles — to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to 2000 levels by 2010. The Bush administration said the bill would seriously harm the U.S. economy.


I'm glad Dur Fuhrer is finally worried about the ecconomy... What it should say is "The president is worried about the economy of large oil concerns, like his pals in the Mid-East and Houston."

By the way, lazy people, McCain is your next Fuhrer, I hope you like him.

[opihimoimoi]

13. But But...Rush LimpBalls sez it ain't so...GW is a Myth..its cyclic, etc

The Stone Calender in Mexico City...the old one....tells of our demise in 2012......I wonder.......

[hatrack]

14. Shouldn't that be "Duh Fuhrer"?

I'm just sayin . . .

[Javaman]

15. Long story short, it's too late. :( n/t

Even if we were to halt all pollutents now, it would do no good. All we can hope for now is just to slow it down, but again, that would require the nations of the world to pay attention and take the steps needed to make such a thing to happen.

so once again, long story short, it's too late

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

18. He is a proponent of the Gaia theory of the world

which I sort of subscribe to too. I think that warming will cause some kind of natural consequence - like diseases that we can't even dream about that will sweep through the world and do the neccessary pruning of the disruptive species - Man. Maybe some of us will survive in little trible enclaves all over the world. You only have to have a power disruption of a couple days to see how thin the veneer of civilization is. But, even a few hundred thousand years or so, and Earth will right itself, unless we have screwed it up in so major a fashion that the atmosphere disappears and the oceans dry up and we become a planet of dust like Mars.