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The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You to Know About — Because They Helped Cause Them |
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Julie Walsh
Huffington, editor-in-chief and co-founder of The HuffingtonPost Web site, said that listening to both sides for a story isn’t the way to report the news. According to Huffington, it should be the role of the media to be the arbiter of truth, even if there is a dissenting view.
The cuddly polar bear has become global warming's favorite mascot. It's also become a political flash point: on one side, conservation groups say global warming threatens the bear by permanently damaging its Arctic habitat. On the other, conservative groups say the so-called plight of the polar bear is a gambit to intensify climate change hysteria. The battle flared up again last Monday, when a California federal district court judge ordered the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), the Interior Department agency that evaluates endangered species, to decide on the polar bear by May 15 (a four-month extension of the original due date of Jan. 9). If FWS lists the bear as endangered, it would be the first mammal to face extinction due to global warming.
Four of the past 5 months are “all-time” records for Southern Hemisphere sea ice anomalies, “unprecedented” since the data set began in 1979 as shown below:
On a global basis, world sea ice in April 2008 reached levels that were “unprecedented” for the month of April in over 25 years. Levels are the third highest (for April) since the commencement of records in 1979, exceeded only by levels in 1979 and 1982. This continues a pattern established earlier in 2008, as global sea ice in March 2008 was also the third highest March on record, while January 2008 sea ice was the second highest January on record. It was also the second highest single month in the past 20 years (second only to Sept 1996).
The graph below shows the monthly anomaly (aggregating NH and SH), collating information from sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135.
Figure 2. Monthly anomaly sea ice area.
As suggested by a reader, here’s the same information with each monthly series plotted as a separate line (April-solid; January – dotted.) The surge in anomaly area in 2008 is not limited to a single month, but is consistent for all 4 months to date (and for the YTD average).
At Cryosphere Today, they provide the following scientific description of recent sea ice changes:
You’ve heard Al Gore comment that the “Earth has a fever”? It may also have major tooth decay.
They provide an animation showing declining sea ice to 2007 lows, but not the subsequent recovery in 2008:
Peruse an archive of map displays of the atmospheric and radiative climatic conditions leading up to the record setting Northern Hemisphere sea ice minimum of 2007: sea ice autopsy
Instead of perhaps celebrating the dramatic recent increase in sea ice, they complain that there has been a loss of “multiyear sea ice”.
I’ve uploaded my collation of the NOAA data to www.climateaudit.org/data/ice/seaice.dat .
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPe7lLkRbFo 285 234]
Democrat Barack Obama said Sunday the federal government might need to rethink its support for corn ethanol because of rising food prices, a stance similar to Republican John McCain's but at odds with farm states considered important to the November election. "What I've said is my top priority is making sure people are able to get enough to eat. If it turns out we need to make changes in our ethanol policy to help people get something to eat, that has got to be the step we take," said Obama, D-Ill., on NBC's "Meet the Press."
"When you look at the globe, California is a little spot on that globe," Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said recently at Yale University's Climate Change Conference. "But when it comes to our power of influence, it is the equivalent of a whole continent."
Perhaps. As an exercise of this influence, Mr. Schwarzenegger has attempted to push climate-change policy forward, signing the Global Warming Solutions Act. It commits the state to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels – roughly 25% below today's – and all but eliminating them by 2050.
U.K. voters resoundingly rejected the Labour Party in local elections last week. It was no capricious shift, but a citizen revolt against trendy carbon and nanny-state taxes that empower only bad government.
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