"Global Warming: Will you listen now, America?"

[GreenPartyVoter]

On a high-profile and bi-partisan fact-finding tour in Alaska and Canada's Yukon territory, Senators John McCain, a Republican, and Hillary Clinton, the Democratic senator for New York, were confronted by melting permafrost and shrinking glaciers and heard from native Inuit that rising sea levels were altering their lives.

"The question is how much damage will be done before we start taking concrete action," Mr McCain said at a press conference in Anchorage. "Go up to places like we just came from. It's a little scary." Mrs Clinton added: "I don't think there's any doubt left for anybody who actually looks at the science. There are still some holdouts, but they're fighting a losing battle. The science is overwhelming."

Their findings directly challenge President George Bush's reluctance to legislate to reduce America's carbon emissions. Although both senators havetalked before of the need to tackle global warming, this week's clarion call was perhaps the clearest and most urgent. It also raises the prospect that climate change and other environmental issues could be a factor in the presidential contest in 2008 if Mrs Clinton and Mr McCain enter it. Mrs Clinton and Mr McCain, who represents Arizona, are among the leading, and the most popular, likely contenders.

That they chose Alaska as the stage from which to force global warming on to the American political agenda was not a matter of chance. In many ways, this separated US state is the frontline in the global warming debate. Environmentalists say the signs of climate change are more obvious there than perhaps anywhere else in the US.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0819-03.htm

[SHRED]

1. No way can we recover in time

I am sorry but with the corporates controlling information distribution and very little of it being solutions...well...we are doomed to a world that is going to change fast and ferociously.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1546824,00.html

[Gabi Hayes]

2. absolutely correct....time to start preparing for how we're going

to deal with the disaster ahead

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=global+warming+too+late&btnG=Google+Search


only 2 million plus links

[CityZen-X]

4. Start Stockpiling Sun Block

it will be a hot commodity, and you can bet the manufactures and distributors will jack the prices. After all that is the Amerikan way!

[Gabi Hayes]

5. just the very tip of the iceberg, as it were

"President Bush and his Administration have risen to the global warming challenge with responses ranging from obfuscation to pretense to outright denial...I'd like to issue each and every one of them a challenge. Come with me--see what I have seen--and try to understand what global warming really means for us and for our children. Leave Washington and travel to the places I have visited..."--From the Preface

A glacier disappears high in the Peruvian Andes. Floodwaters surge across the English countryside. Ten thousand Pacific Islanders begin to evacuate their homeland. A dust storm turns day into night across the Inner Mongolian plains. These events may seem unrelated, but they are not. Even as scientists and other experts debate the specifics, climate crisis is already affecting the lives of millions.

In this ground-breaking book, Mark Lynas reveals the first evidence--collected during an epic three-year journey across five continents--about how global warming is hitting people's lives all around the world. From American hurricane chasers to Mongolian herders, from Alaskan Eskimos to South Sea islanders, Lynas's encounters and discoveries give us a stark warning about the even worse dangers that lie ahead if nothing is done.

High Tide's message is urgent and its revelations are at once shocking and inspiring--shocking as so few of us yet realize the magnitude of what's happening, and inspiring as there is still time to avert much greater catastrophe. No one who reads this book will be able to look their children in the eyes and say "I didn't know."
As global temperatures soar to record levels, Lynas bears witness to:

- CRIPPLING DROUGHT: China's Yellow River nolonger reaches the sea for half the year, and villages across the north of the country are disappearing under advancing sand dunes
- BAKED ALASKA: Permafrost is melting, leaving houses, roads and whole forests sucked into the thawing ground. Winter is in retreat, leaving animals confused and Native Alaskan people without a livelihood
- DISAPPEARING GLACIERS: Every glaciated mountain range on Earth is experiencing massive ice losses. Montana's Glacier National Park has lost 100 glaciers in the last century; only 50 remain. Water supplies to hundreds of millions of people--from Peru to Pakistan--are threatened
- HIGH TIDES: Islanders on the tiny South Pacific nation of Tuvalu are already leaving their homeland as rising sea levels engulf their atolls. Today 70 percent of the world's sandy shorelines are retreating; up to 90 percent of the beaches on the Eastern U.S. seaboard are eroding fast
- CATASTROPHIC FLOODS: English villagers now talk about a "wet season" rather than a winter. Heavier rainfall is now falling across the global mid-latitudes, from the continental U.S. to Russia, sparking devastating floods on an ever more frequent basis.

High Tide, by Mark Lynas

and it's gotten WORSE since he wrote the book. hear about the Siberian permafrost, for one?

wish I could buy the "inspiring" part

[GreenPartyVoter]

6. I live in a coastal area. I am wondering if I need to move

inland.. say to Nebraska?

[wli]

8. yep, it's runaway global warming now

We could stop emitting GHG's cold tomorrow and it wouldn't help anymore.

[jayfish]

3. Oh Yes The Science May Be Overwhelming...

but it doesn't matter. It's what Jesus wants. I like to call it IW for intelligent warming.

Jay

[blurp]

7. There's just no point in trying to stop it.

It's a tragedy of the commons situation. If one country reduces it's output of CO2, they hurt themselves economically and other countries fill that gap. China, in particular. And there's no way China is going to pull back now.

I hate to say it, but I think global warming is inevitable. There is just too much short-term economic benefit for people to let go of fossil fuels.

Not just in this country, but most of the world.

I think instead we should be talking about how to prepare for the changes to come. Wishing for sudden global "enlightenment" will not help us.

[wli]

9. it's an existential threat, not just worse weather

6C increases in global mean surface temperature can cause mass extinction events comparable to the Permian-Triassic extinction.

10C increases in global mean surface temperatures are sufficient to disrupt the gas reclamation cycles in a manner sufficient to exterminate all multicellular life on the planet.

[CityZen-X]

10. How About This Existential Threat

Chimp Bu$h*t delivers nuclear weaponry to Iran. What do you think that will do for the "multicellular life"?

[wli]

11. nukes are actually rather small compared to natural phenomena

For instance, a single low-intensity hurricane carry more kinetic energy than the combined nuclear arsenals of all the countries in the world.

Similarly, there aren't enough nukes in the world to carpetbomb the biosphere. Global warming can literally and provably wipe out the biosphere.