Man’s Carbon Footprints on the Big Blue Marble: Are they fueling a climate catastrophe?
As representatives of the nations of the world meet in Copenhagen to attempt to restrict the use of energy produced from coal, gas and oil in the guise of fighting global warming, many scientists and scholars are expressing grave concerns about what they are trying to do, as shown in the video below.
John Coleman - Meteorologist/Founder, Weather Channel
Courtesy of the Science and Public Policy Institute
The American Geophysical Union is sending science back four hundred years - Four centuries ago, “heretics” who disagreed with religious orthodoxy risked being burned at the stake. Many were the dissenting views that could send offenders to a fiery end.
In 1633, the astronomer Galileo Galilei may have come within a singed whisker of the same fate, for insisting that the sun (and not the Earth) was at the center of the solar system. In the end, he agreed to recant his “heresy” (at least publicly) and submit to living under house arrest until the end of his days.
Growing evidence ultimately proved Galileo was right, and the controversy dissipated. Theology gave way to nature in determining the truth about nature.
The heated debate about global warming has suddenly cooled off. It's no longer between the fanatic adherents of global warming (AGW’ers: Anthropogenic – human caused - Global Warming adherents) and the more sober minded so-called "deniers." It's now between the warmiacs and Mother Nature, and she’s winning handily.
If you doubt that take a look a national temperature charts that show below-zero temperatures as far south as the nation's lower mid-section, a blizzard in Las Vegas and snow in New Orleans and fire-ravaged Malibu and all happening before winter really sets in.
This is only the beginning. If I'm correct about what I've been saying since 1997, (The Ice Man Cometh http://www.pvbr.com/Issue_1/global12) the onset of an ice age, little or big, is now upon us, and what's ahead is anything but pretty. This winter will tell the story.
The Environmental Consequences of Livestock
Ask most Americans about what causes global warming, and they'll point to a coal plant smokestack or a car’s tailpipe. But it’s two other images that should be granted similarly iconic status - the front and rear ends of a cow.
According to a little-known 2006 United Nations (UN) report called “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” livestock is a “major player” in climate change, accounting for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.
That’s more than our entire transportation system.
Water woes Down Under play major role in global food crisis.
If there were ever a case for a planned economy, it’s unfolding in Australia, the planet’s driest inhabited continent. Agriculture is in crisis in the Murray-Darling basin, one of the world’s largest river systems. A third of the country’s food is produced along the banks of the Murray River and its tributaries, chief among them the Darling.
The 20-plus rivers are the life flow of a vast arid plain in the country’s southeast, one seventh of Australia’s landmass. The Murray once emptied into the Southern (or Indian) Ocean. Now miles of its lower reaches lie below sea level, drying up and slowly stagnating into a toxic, acidic sludge that burns the skin.
Global warming has reduced rainfall, so that even where farming is possible, it is with shrinking supplies of stored water. Towns will be abandoned and thousands of jobs have already been lost. Australia has been the world’s second-largest exporter of wheat and a significant rice exporter. But this trade has nose-dived because of the water crisis.
Address from President Evo Morales to the member representatives of the United Nations on the issue of the environment. - September 24, 2007.
Sister and brother Presidents and Heads of States of the United Nations: The world is suffering from a fever due to climate change, and the disease is the capitalist development model. Whilst over 10,000 years the variation in carbon dioxide (CO2) levels on the planet was approximately 10%, during the last 200 years of industrial development, carbon emissions have increased by 30%. Since 1860, Europe and North America have contributed 70% of the emissions of CO2. 2005 was the hottest year in the last one thousand years on this planet.
Different investigations have demonstrated that out of the 40,170 living species that have been studied, 16,119 are in danger of extinction. One out of eight birds could disappear forever. One out of four mammals is under threat. One out of every three reptiles could cease to exist. Eight out of ten crustaceans and three out of four insects are at risk of extinction. We are living through the sixth crisis of the extinction of living species in the history of the planet and, on this occasion, the rate of extinction is 100 times more accelerated than in geological times.