Take Me Back Tuesday: GLOBAL WARMING CORRAL

[Hammer]

GOVERNORS FROM MD AND VA URGE FEDERAL ACTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE

WASHINGTON - As scientists and activists warned of the catastrophic effects that they said higher ocean temperatures and rising sea levels would have on the Chesapeake Bay, the governors of Maryland and Virginia called on lawmakers Wednesday to formulate a federal response to global warming.

Speaking before a Senate panel Wednesday, Gov. Martin O'Malley said the time had come for national programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, automobiles and other sources.

"We must transition from a carbon-based economy to a green, sustainable economy," O'Malley told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

"The coastal senators are already seeing and feeling this problem," said Mikulski, who asked committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer to schedule the hearing.

"Our sea levels are rising, our wetlands are disappearing and our islands are underwater. We're looking at the possibility that our agriculture will be wiped out and there won't be a Baltimore Harbor," Mikulski said.

Her comments echoed the findings of a report released in July by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation that said rising sea levels threaten hundreds of thousands of people living in low-lying coastal or river valley areas along the bay.

William C. Baker, president of the foundation, told the panel that warming oceans will likely increase storm intensity in the bay, and may expand the size and duration of oxygen-deprived "dead zones."

He asked lawmakers to support agricultural practices such as covering winter crops, rotational grazing and no-till farming, which a Yale study has estimated would sequester approximately 4.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually -- the equivalent of taking 786,000 Hummers of the road.

"Fossil fuels burning in Indianapolis or India, as well as a host of other greenhouse gas-producing activities, will negatively affect the people and creatures of the Chesapeake Bay just as toxics and other well-known pollutants do," he said.

"The policy choices you and your counterparts in other nations make will determine how severe those negative effects will be and how long they may last," Baker said.

Two committee members are developing legislation that would introduce a "cap and trade" approach to reducing emissions of the greenhouse gases that scientists say cause global warming.

Boxer and others expressed interest in the bill to be introduced by Republican Sen. John Warner of Virginia and Democratic Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, which would create a market for emissions permits that could be bought and sold.

O'Malley detailed efforts by the state to cut down on greenhouse gases, including participation in a multistate agreements to reduce emissions from power plants and plans to expand electricity from solar energy.

Maryland is among a dozen states waiting for the federal Environmental Protection Agency to sign off on new greenhouse gas emission standards on automobiles.

"Maryland will continue to be a leader," O'Malley said, but "we need our federal government to act. State-by-state reductions simply don't make sense for this global problem and the time is now for federal action."

Former State Department analyst Dennis T. Avery, author of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years, disputed the worth of government intervention.

Avery said climate change was more likely the effect of a long natural cycle of cooling and warming than any human activity.

"You are headed for enormous anguish, frustration and misspent capital in this effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions," Avery told the lawmakers. "It will not halt the temperature cycle."

His comments echoed those of Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the senior Republican on the panel and Congress's leading skeptic of manmade climate change.

Inhofe objected to Boxer's decision to allow Mikulski to join the panel for the hearing. Mikulski is not a member of the committee, but chairs the appropriations subcommittee that controls 85 percent of the funding for the nation's climate change science. Boxer overruled Inhofe.

Baker, of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, told the skeptics that even if global warming didn't exist, reducing reliance on fossil fuels and other strategies to counter climate change would "make great environmental sense."

Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin, who joined Boxer and Mikulski on a recent trip to Greenland to see the impact of warming ocean temperatures, called climate change "a threat to public safety, a threat to key bay species such as blue crabs and rockfish and a threat to the fragile lands that surround the Chesapeake."

"Global warming threatens all of us and it's time that we work together to develop effective solutions," he said.

matthew.brown@baltsun.com

[Hammer]

COWBOYS AT BILLS- BUFFALO, NEW YORK- OCTOBER 8- TEMPS IN THE 80s- AT NIGHT!!! CANT WAIT TO HEAR YOUR RATIONALIZATIONS FOR THAT ONE....

Alternatively, you can get your heads out of your arses, admit you are wrong and repeat after me:

I apologize to Hammer for being wrong about GW and wasting 40 pages of bandwith on the obvious. I agree with the National Academy of Sciences, GW is real and is caused by human emissions of CO2 and other GHG. I will take this issue seriously by making changes in my lifestyle and will not use my influence to mislead others into believing that GW is not real and that it is not caused by human emissions of GHG.

I believe you will feel better about yourself the second you utter these words.

[rjohnson]

They still can't prove the CO2 amounts in the air are extremely higher than they were 100, 500, 2k, 5k, 15k, or 50k years ago. They don't have enough history to prove that the CO2 levels are actually what is causing the ever so slight rise in temperature. You can keep posting all this information from politicians, CEO's, and scientists looking for grants but we are not going to believe it. We don't trust politicians or CEO's any more, period. And we definitely don't trust someone's opinion who is catering to what the requirements are for the grant they want so they can keep playing mad scientist in a lab somewhere.

[Hammer]

What part about scientific studies of tree rings, glacier ice, mountaintops, sea beds, etc dont you understand? Every credible scientific organisation in the world that has reviewed the data has concluded that (A) CO2 concentrations are double what they were at the end of the last Ice Age and (B) that human emissions of CO2 have caused this. Read the above thread for references to the websites for this information.

Ever so slight increases? Glaciers are melting the world over, Arctic sea ice is not refreezing in the winter, Antartica and the North Pole are shrinking dramatically. Ducks dont migrate anything like they used to but you- a duck hunter of all people- refuse to admit the truth.

You are like a smoker who keeps puffing on his cigs, denying the reality that they cause cancer. So you keep emitting your CO2, denying the reality that you are causing the Age of Extinction of vast numbers of species of plant and animal life. And fighting me over the obvious scientific reality with some outlandish Conspiracy Theory.

Fortunately, there are growing numbers of Americans everyday who see the light. It took 40+ years on cigarettes. Millions of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars in health care expenses later, smoking rates started to decline. If we wait that long on GW, we will be in deep do-do.

[mudsucker]

COWBOYS AT BILLS- BUFFALO, NEW YORK- OCTOBER 8- TEMPS IN THE 80s- AT NIGHT!!! CANT WAIT TO HEAR YOUR RATIONALIZATIONS FOR THAT ONE....

Ever hear of Indian Summer? :roll:

Hammer is wrong about GW and wasted 40 pages of bandwith on the obvious..............

This we already knew!

[MSDawg870]

I'll see your Oct. 8th 80deg temps and raise you an Easter frost.

I don't think you're changin anyone's opinion, but I appreciate the effort.

[JaMak84]

COWBOYS AT BILLS- BUFFALO, NEW YORK- OCTOBER 8- TEMPS IN THE 80s- AT NIGHT!!! CANT WAIT TO HEAR YOUR RATIONALIZATIONS FOR THAT ONE....

I dont put stock in day in and day out temps...

If you don't put much stock in day in and day out temps, then why was this a big deal?

[GILREATH]

Seems to me he's irrational.

[Warren]

bet he likes hillary health care too

[JJ McGuire]

What part about scientific studies of tree rings, glacier ice, mountaintops, sea beds, etc dont you understand? Every credible scientific organisation in the world that has reviewed the data has concluded that (A) CO2 concentrations are double what they were at the end of the last Ice Age and (B) that human emissions of CO2 have caused this. Read the above thread for references to the websites for this information. .

crackpot pseudo science that is looking for govenment funding. funding that should be used on real, verifiable and verified issues.


For years, many climatologists have been predicting that world temperatures will rise because of atmospheric buildup of greenhouse gases released by human activities. One important exception appears to be in Antarctica, where recently, Peter Doran of the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a team of scientists, report finding a marked decrease in temperature—as much as 0.7 °C per decade since 1966.

The researchers’ findings are based on measurements obtained from in-place meteorological stations at various Antarctic locations. The collected data contradict the predictions of climate models, which indicate that as a result of greenhouse gas buildup, there should be a warming trend in the southern polar region. The observed cooling, the scientists say, challenges models of climate and ecosystem change.

Creating yet another challenge for global climate change modelers to consider, scientists report that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is not thinning as previously believed, but is instead growing thicker. This finding, suggest Ian Joughin of the California Institute of Technology and Slawek Tulaczyk of the University of California—Santa Cruz, may indicate an end to the Holocene retreat of the region’s Ross Ice Streams.

Although previously reported analyses of ice thickness indicate a long-term, ice-thinning trend, those results, the two scientists explain, were based on limited, in situ measurements of ice flow velocity. In contrast, Joughin and Tulaczyk’s analysis takes advantage of the much-expanded database available from ice-flow velocity measurements obtained using Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar.

The new data, which provide the best assessment yet of the mass balance of the Ross Ice Streams, indicate the ice sheet is growing by 26.8 gigatons annually, in contrast to older estimates that there has been an ice mass shrinkage of 20.9 gigatons annually. The researchers say that stagnation of some of the region’s ice stream flows is the primary contributor to the ice buildup.

[LawDawg]

ya'll can't be done! what am I supposed to do with my day? global warming is a whore.....continue...

[mudsucker]

http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/ ... 38792.html

Very interesting!Or not!

[mudsucker]

http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/gore-gets-a-cold-shoulder/2007/10/13/1191696238792.html

Very interesting!Or not!

Or not!

[Hammer]

I obviously been in the woods trying to own more bone (coming up short on taht but owning more backstrap and sweet meat is a nice compromise- 3 down, many more to go) and taking a few gray wings when I need a break from the deer woods so I didnt have a chance to note that Al Gore won the frigging Nobel Prize over this, the worst ever firestorms around Malibu, the "Indian Summer" continued into Denver last night where they wore shorts and t shirts to watch the Broncs and Packers, buddies are reporting that 60s and 70s in Illinois have shut the rut down, elk season was so bad that outfitters were calling clients and telling hunters not to come, etc....

Meanwhile...back here in the Delta...I cant wait to hear all of your so called "Reasons" for why duck season will largely, for most of us, suck again, when the overwhelming reason will be, as it has been for quite a while now, Global Warming....Without sustained cold weather, ducks dont migrate...Whatever that temperature tipping point is for migrating ducks relative to all the other factors, we have reached it and the ducks dont migrate like they used to. Simple as that.

This is not to give you kill at all cost SOBs a pass, since the ducks and those of us that hunt them, would enjoy better duck hunting if the limit were 50/5/3 mallards/1 hen across the US and the outrage that is the duck slaughter in Canada and Mexico were ended but those are other topics for other days and frankly, I cant say anything on that subject that has not been covered in http://www.madduck.org...When I do introduce that topic to this board, I'm sure you GW naysayers will ahve plenty of rationalizations for why 60/6/4/2 and the Canada/Mexico end games are defensible.

In general and across the board, I remind you all that you reap what you sow and that Mother Nature is a very cruel mistress indeed. Me- I'm just as happy in a deer stand as in a duck blind, so I am doing my part by cutting back on my duck days- and I am proud to be part of a true, successful conservation story- whitetail deer- rather than the shame that is "waterfowl management". Remember when we didnt have any deer so we didnt have a deer season. Ditto for turkeys. As we got them back, we were very conservative in opening the seasons up to more days and bigger bag limits. Where is that approach with waterfowl? Where is erring on the side of the resource in waterfowl?

Oops- look like I did introduce the subject now didn't I? So bring your typical BS and when I get oout of the woods again, I'll rip it apart too.

HAMMER

[Po Monkey Lounger]

Meanwhile, PML last night was enjoying a good hot bowl of deer chili, on my patio,next to a roaring fire in fire pit, smoking a good cigar, drinking Beam and coke, and otherwise enjoying a nice, normal cool fall evening on Sharby Creek.