In a prophetic moment, Jack Webb speaks as the voice of Hillary Clinton supporters trying to explain to the rest of the Democratic Party why marijuana (Obama) is wrong for the party. Notice how he brings up Koolaid…

Now to find where he prophesies the coming of RuPaul.

Al Gore gave a talk at the recent TED Conference. It’s an updated and abbreviated version of his climate change slide show, with both alarming new data on the increasing speed of climate change and some heartening information on the growing public awareness that we need to act and soon.  Read more 

James Hansen in the Guardian, using real historical data, not computer models:

In a startling reappraisal of the threat, James Hansen, head of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, calls for a sharp reduction in C02 limits.

Hansen says the EU target of 550 parts per million of C02 - the most stringent in the world - should be slashed to 350ppm. He argues the cut is needed if “humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed”. A final version of the paper Hansen co-authored with eight other climate scientists, is posted today on the Archive website. Instead of using theoretical models to estimate the sensitivity of the climate, his team turned to evidence from the Earth’s history, which they say gives a much more accurate picture.

The team studied core samples taken from the bottom of the ocean, which allow C02 levels to be tracked millions of years ago. They show that when the world began to glaciate at the start of the Ice age about 35m years ago, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere stood at about 450ppm.

“If you leave us at 450ppm for long enough it will probably melt all the ice - that’s a sea rise of 75 metres. What we have found is that the target we have all been aiming for is a disaster - a guaranteed disaster,” Hansen told the Guardian.

The fundamental reason for his reassessment was what he calls “slow feedback” mechanisms which are only now becoming fully understood. They amplify the rise in temperature caused by increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases. Ice and snow reflect sunlight but when they melt, they leave exposed ground which absorbs more heat.

As ice sheets recede, the warming effect is compounded. Satellite technology available over the past three years has shown that the ice sheets are melting much faster than expected, with Greenland and west Antarctica both losing mass.

Hansen said that he now regards as “implausible” the view of many climate scientists that the shrinking of the ice sheets would take thousands of years. “If we follow business as usual I can’t see how west Antarctica could survive a century. We are talking about a sea-level rise of at least a couple of metres this century.”

But wait! There’s good news!  Read more 

I have already blogged extensively on the current food price crisis affecting mostly poor countries. Now, via Le Monde, we learn, unsurprisingly, that riots have exploded in parts of Africa in response to the cost of food.

L’Afrique piégée par la flambée des prix des aliments
LE MONDE | 04.04.08

©  Read more 

Via the Independent,

“A deal has been agreed that will place a financial value on rainforests – paying, for the first time, for their upkeep as “utilities” that provide vital services such as rainfall generation, carbon storage and climate regulation.  Read more 

The Lieberman-Warner “Environmental Sell-out to REEELLY BEEG Corporate Polluters”  Read more 

NASA time-lapse photography of the Arctic Circle:  Read more 

California’s still on fire, but the Air Force is now helping out. Check out the map:  Read more 

are
here.

Bush has gone back to DC. Schwarzenegger is headed back to Sacramento. Keep the folks on the ground — firefighters, residents, homeless (4 badly charred bodies found in a canyon) — and the animals — in positive thoughts again tonight, please.

If you can spare donations, there are people in need.
From a post in the 33rd Liveblog at Big Orange today:

“The National Latino Research Center announced Wednesday that it will begin collecting donations for displaced farm workers and their families in North County.  Read more 

Sixteen fires now. You can see it here:  Read more 

(Even paranoid DFHs have real enemies)  Read more 

Tropical Depression 4, projected to be a hurricane by Friday.  Read more 

Pope Benedict XVI bashes creationists…

“This clash is an absurdity because on one hand there is much scientific proof in favor of evolution, which appears as a reality that we must see and which enriches our understanding of life and being as such.”

And climate-change doubters…

“Our Earth is talking to us and we must listen to it and decipher its message if we want to survive,” he said.

Does this mean that John Kerry can have his communion wafers back?

I once had a fight with a radical friend over why it was important to stay active politically despite being in a tiny minority, and in the course of her explaination about why she wasn’t, she said, “a  Read more 

From, of all the unlikely places, Taegan Goddard’s offshoot called Political Insider. From anybody else I would just say this is nuts…but wasn’t Robert B. Reich, Secretary of Labor during the first Clinton administration, given a great deal of the credit for fixing the US budget after the last time the Republicans looted the place?

He’s got an idea. Not a “carbon tax,” which would workd but would not get passed until about the time the sun expanded to the orbit of Venus…but a carbon auction:

The best idea I’ve heard so far to deal with global warming is not a carbon tax. I can’t imagine any politician calling for higher taxes affecting the middle class, or for that matter the middle class — already squeezed by high energy prices and stagnant wages — putting up with it.

The winning idea isn’t a cap-and-trade system, either. That system would allow companies to continue polluting, just require them to buy the right to pollute more from companies that keep their dirtying to a minimum. Today’s biggest polluters — those who’ve done least to reduce their emissions — would be the biggest winners because they’d get the highest caps.

The best idea I’ve heard is described as a carbon auction. Companies would have to bid for the right to pollute. And, most ingeniously, the money raised in the auction would be shared equally by all citizens in the form of yearly dividend checks — just like the residents of Alaska now get yearly dividends for their share of the state’s oil revenues.

I mean, it’s our atmosphere, right? Think of a national park or a national forest. No company is simply allowed to take what they want from it, free of charge. Why should the atmosphere be any different?  Read more 

They say laughter is the best medicine, and who better to turn frowns upside down than Dick Cheney?

The man who’s entrusted our energy policy to a cabal too nefarious to name publicly — a man who won’t be satisfied until we daisy-cut and nuke the Middle East back to the stone age — made a funny about Al Gore:  Read more 

This is how global warming will become common sense.  Read more 

Is this cool or what?

Think Progress Inhofe  Read more 

Forget all that crapola about principled conservatives versus the backsliding Republicans corrupted by Washington. The VRWC is a single network of corruption, fueled by corporate cash, and with no shreds of intellectual integrity left. The Guardian:

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Hey, I wonder what Condi thinks about this?  Read more 

Where do you see yourself in ten years? It’s a common question in college classrooms, on high school scholarship essays, in Human Resource workshops…but I guess we’re all going to have to get used to saying the same thing: “utterly fucked.” I suppose I should throw in some boilerplate about how this is “only one interpretation of the evidence,” and that “things could be not so bad” and that I’m confident that the governments of the world will drop everything and address this issue today. Except I don’t really feel that way.  Read more 

It’s been covered here before. It’s Big Science about to go awry in a very big way, fitting for Big Time himself. Since they don’t want to stop the profitable process causing global warming, they figure, why not quench the only source of warmth in the world?

This idea is so bad I don’t know where to begin:  Read more 

AP:

Chief executives of 10 major corporations urged Congress on Monday to require limits on greenhouse gases this year, contending voluntary efforts to combat climate change are inadequate.

Members of the group include chief executives of Alcoa Inc., BP America Inc., DuPont Co., Caterpillar Inc., General Electric Co., and Duke Energy Corp.

At a news conference, the executives said that mandatory reductions of heat-trapping emissions can be imposed without economic harm and would lead to economic opportunities if done across the economy and with provisions to mitigate costs.

Many of the companies already have voluntarily moved to curb greenhouse emissions, they said. But the executives also said they do not believe voluntary efforts will suffice.

“It must be mandatory, so there is no doubt about our actions,” said Jim Rogers, chairman of Duke Energy. “The science of global warming is clear. We know enough to act now. We must act now.”

And last I checked, Duke Energy wasn’t a candidate for sainthood.  Read more 

More fucked up Republican priorities:

NASA’s earth science budget has declined 30 percent since 2000. It stands to fall further as funding shifts to plans for a manned mission to the moon and Mars. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, meanwhile, has experienced enormous cost overruns and schedule delays with its premier weather and climate mission.

As a result, the panel said, the United States will not have the scientific information it needs in the years ahead to analyze severe storms and changes in Earth’s climate unless programs are restored and funding made available.

WTF? Why the focus on Mars? Do the Republicans want to evangelize the Martians, if any?  Read more 

In Federal Way, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, in a region of America that is perceived to be Liberal, the school board has a poorly worded policy that is preventing the showing of "An Inconvenient Truth" in classrooms! From the Seattle Post Intelligencer:

School Board members adopted a three-point policy that says teachers who want to show the movie must ensure that a "credible, legitimate opposing view will be presented," that they must get the OK of the principal and the superintendent, and that any teachers who have shown the film must now present an "opposing view."  Read more