Political Climate Articles
The top 10 bogus statements (BS) in the climate debate
If there is any doubt that Washington D.C. is where hyperbole, distortions and silly arguments come home to roost, that doubt disappears as we listen to congressional debate on climate and energy policy. Even some of the statements coming from the Obama team lately inspire a loud "Huh?"
Jon Stewart would win a Nobel Prize for Truth, if one were awarded for diligence in revealing how some members of Congress, not to mention the conservative chattering classes, regularly insult the American people's intelligence. Unfortunately, he's only on the air 30 minutes each day.
Also unfortunately - and here's an inconvenient truth - not all of the American people are informed enough about climate change to know their intelligence has been insulted. It's a complicated topic made even more complicated by bogus arguments.
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Should Thursday Be the New Friday? The Environmental and Economic Pluses of the 4-Day Workweek
As government agencies and corporations scramble to cut expenses, one idea gaining widespread attention involves cutting something most employees wouldn't mind losing: work on Fridays. Regular three-day weekends, without a decrease in the actual hours worked per week, could not only save money, but also ease pressures on the environment and public health, advocates say. In fact, several states, cities and companies across the country are considering, or have already implemented on a trial basis, the condensed schedule for their employees.
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Revealed: the secret evidence of global warming Bush tried to hide
Photos from US spy satellites declassified by the Obama White House provide the first graphic images of how the polar ice sheets are retreating in the summer. The effects on the world's weather, environments and wildlife could be devastating.
Graphic images that reveal the devastating impact of global warming in the Arctic have been released by the US military. The photographs, taken by spy satellites over the past decade, confirm that in recent years vast areas in high latitudes have lost their ice cover in summer months.
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U.S. Spent Nearly $25 Billion on Imported Oil in June - 13% increase - The Highest in 2009.
Energy expert T. Boone Pickens said that based on the latest figures from the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration (EIA), the U.S. imported 64 percent of its oil, or 354 million barrels in June 2009, sending approximately $24.7 billion overseas to foreign governments, a 13 percent increase from the $21.6 billion spent in May.
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Fertile Crescent "will disappear this century"
Is it the final curtain for the Fertile Crescent? This summer, as Turkish dams reduce the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to a trickle, farmers abandon their desiccated fields across Iraq and Syria, and efforts to revive the Mesopotamian marshes appear to be abandoned, climate modelers are warning that the current drought is likely to become permanent. The Mesopotamian cradle of civilisation seems to be returning to desert.
Last week, Iraqi ministers called for urgent talks with upstream neighbors Turkey and Syria, after the combination of a second year of drought and dams in those countries cut flow on the Euphrates as it enters Iraq to below 250 cubic metres a second. That is less than a quarter the flow needed to maintain Iraqi agriculture….
Drought has helped precipitate the crisis. The most detailed assessment of the Fertile Crescent's future under climate change suggests flow on the Euphrates could fall by 73 per cent. "The ancient Fertile Crescent will disappear in this century," forecasts Akio Kitoh of Japan's Meteorological Research Institute in Tsukuba, Japan. "The process has already begun."
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The End Of Fossil Fuel
Prepare for a radically different lifestyle as global crude oil production peaks and begins to decline.
You will never see cheap gasoline again. You will probably never see cheap energy again. Oil, natural gas and coal are set to peak and go into decline within the next decade, and no technology can change that.
Peaking is a simple concept. We generally exploit natural resources in a bell-shaped curve, with the rate of extraction increasing over time until we reach a peak and then gradually slowing down until we stop using them.
Peak oil is not about "running out of oil"; it's about reaching the peak rate of oil production. It's not the size of the tank that matters, but the size of the tap.
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New study backs UN panel on ocean rise
The UN's climate panel has been backed over a key question as to how far global warming will drive up sea levels this century, a study published on Sunday says.
The UN experts are right that the oceans are unlikely to rise by an order of metres (many feet) by 2100, as some scientists have feared, it says.
But, its authors caution, low-lying countries and delta areas could still face potentially catastrophic flooding if the upper range of the new estimate proves right.
The new paper, led by Mark Siddall of Britain's University of Bristol, used data from fossilised coral and from ice-core measurements to reconstruct sea-level fluctuations over the past 22,000 years, from the height of the last Ice Age to the balmy era of today.
This century, they calculate, the seas will rise by between seven and 82 cms, all sources included, on the basis of a 1.1-6.4 C (1.98-11.52 F) warming -- an estimated increase that is in the same ballpark as the IPCC's.
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