The Al Gore discussion, split from GOP/DEM

[Texsox]

But of course no one saids anything about the cult-like aquisations unlike when I suggested it earlier here, but that is pretty much what I expect here anymore.

 

Huh?

[EvilMonkey]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/21/us/polit...xprod=permalink

 

It's an article in the NY Times about the Goracle's visit to the Capitol. Note this one paragraph.

Almost everywhere he goes these days, Mr. Gore is met with the fuss of a statesman. His hair is slicked back in a way that accentuates the new fullness of his face. At the hotel, Mr. Gore’s perma-smile folded his narrow eyes into slits as he milled his way into a ballroom. Afterward, he accepted his customary standing ovation, slipped out a back door and into the back of a Lincoln Town Car, looking almost presidential.

 

I guess its too much to wonder why he didn't get into something with a 4-cylinder, or maybe a Prius or something, because its all about the message, right?

[Texsox]

[kapkomet]

I think it's "hypocritical", but honestly, necessary... the Goracle is a dignitary of this country, and you certainly can't armour plate a damn Prius.

[Texsox]

It is far easier to have everybody do a little to reduce their impact that try and have everybody riding bikes and driving 2 cylinder hybrids.

[BigSqwert]

'Surprisingly rapid changes' in Antarctic basin

Amundsen Sea ice shelves thinning, raising fears of sea level rise

 

MSNBC staff and news service reports

Updated: 2 hours, 45 minutes ago

 

HOUSTON - A Texas-sized area of Antarctica is thinning and could cause the world's oceans to rise significantly in the long-term, polar ice experts said in wrapping up a three-day conference.

 

"Surprisingly rapid changes" are occurring in Antarctica's Amundsen Sea Embayment, an ice drainage system that faces the southern Pacific Ocean, the experts said in a statement, adding that more study was needed to determine how fast it was melting and how much it could cause sea levels to rise.

 

The warning came Wednesday at the end of a conference of U.S. and European polar ice experts at the University of Texas in Austin.

 

The scientists blamed the melting ice on changing winds around Antarctica that are causing warmer waters to flow beneath the ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea. The shelves hold back ice that is grounded on the continent and known as the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Should the shelves collapse, grounded ice would start flowing into the sea much more rapidly, raising sea levels.

 

The wind change, they said, appeared to be the result of several factors, including global warming, ozone depletion in the atmosphere and natural variability.

 

The thinning in the two-mile-thick West Antarctic Ice Sheet is being observed mostly from satellites, but it is not known how much ice has been lost because data is difficult to obtain in the remote region, they said.

 

"The place where the biggest change is occurring is the Amundsen Sea Embayment," said Donald Blankenship of the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics.

 

"One, it's changing, and two, it can have a big impact," he said in a Webcast with a number of conference participants.

 

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet contains enough grounded ice to raise world sea levels close to 20 feet, the scientists said.

 

Other parts of the continent also were losing ice, Blankenship said, but generally not as quickly. The much larger East Antarctic Ice Sheet is considered much more stable.

 

The statement listed a number of consensus points reached at the workshop, among them:

 

* "Satellite observations show that both the grounded ice sheet and the floating ice shelves of the Amundsen Sea Embayment have thinned over the last decades.

* "Ongoing thinning in the grounded ice sheet is already contributing to sea-level rise.

* "The thinning of the ice has occurred because melting beneath the ice shelves has increased, reducing the friction holding back the grounded ice sheet and causing faster flow."

 

"All of the ice on Earth contains enough water to raise sea level over 200 feet, with about 20 feet from Greenland and almost all of the rest from Antarctica," the scientists said in their statement. "Although complete loss of the Antarctic Ice Sheet is not expected, even a small change would matter to coastal populations."

 

The experts stressed that further research should be made a priority, noting that the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its landmark report last February, "could not provide a best estimate or an upper limit on the rate of sea-level rise in coming centuries because of a lack of understanding of the flow of the large ice sheets."

 

Background on the conference is online at: www.jsg.utexas.edu/walse/

[Rex Kickass]

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/60066...rce=slate_rss_1

 

Climatologists Secure Funding To Breed Glaciers In Captivity

 

FAIRBANKS, AK—Researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration received a $42 million federal grant for a captive-glacier breeding project that will attempt to spawn three to five of the massive, slow-moving bodies of land-carving ice by 2020.

 

"As the number of glaciers worldwide is less than half what it was 40 years ago, it is evident that we must do something to improve glacial fertility or they will face imminent extinction," said NOAA chief glacier behaviorist Ingrid Boorstein at a press conference at the future site of the National Indoor Glacier Preserve in central Alaska. "We've already sent teams of specially trained climbers to collect the Aletsch Glacier in Switzerland, Vatnajökull in Iceland, and the Siachen in the Himalayas to establish mating pairs."

 

The NOAA has received heavy criticism for its past failed attempts to reintroduce wild glaciers into their former Ice Age habitats in Central Europe and on the plains of the American Midwest.

[EvilMonkey]

It seems the defenders of the Goracle go for the intellectual insults rather that the lowbrow ones when confronting those that dare expose the Goracle to the light. NOT.

http://www.shns.com/shns/g_index2.cfm?acti...URDOCK-04-05-07

[Texsox]

It seems the defenders of the Goracle go for the intellectual insults rather that the lowbrow ones when confronting those that dare expose the Goracle to the light. NOT.

http://www.shns.com/shns/g_index2.cfm?acti...URDOCK-04-05-07

 

Ironic isn't it

[BigSqwert]

A cool quote from a Thomas Friedman article I was just reading:

 

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California summed up the new climate around climate when he said to me recently: "If 98 doctors say my son is ill and needs medication and two say 'No, he doesn't, he is fine,' I will go with the 98. It's common sense — the same with global warming. We go with the majority, the large majority.

[Balta1701]

Unless one of them is Bill Frist.

[Balta1701]

So, this probably isn't even the correct thread, but a while ago someone asked for an image of the variation in atmospheric greenhouse gases over time with the modern explosion in atmospheric CO2 also put on it, and i couldn't find a very good version. I've finally found one.

 

 

There you can see the dramatic increases in both CO2 and Methane concentrations in the atmosphere associated with the industrial revolution; a 30+% increase in CO2 for example, pushing the modern value well beyond anything that has been seen in any of the glacial/interglacial cycles for the last 600k years.

[southsider2k5]

I debated adding to this thread or starting a whole new one, but in the end I figured this would work here.

 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18659716/

 

Market for carbon offsets raises questions

Growing industry has few standards; buyers need to beware

Al Gore's 10,000-square-foot house in Nashville, Tenn., may not be energy efficient, but the vice president-turned-global warming guru still maintains a “carbon-neutral” lifestyle, according to his spokeswoman.

 

When Al Gore faced attacks earlier this year over how much energy is used to power his 10,000-square foot home, the vice president-turned-global warming guru offered an increasingly common defense.

 

Gore may indulge in some of life’s luxuries, but a spokeswoman told The Associated Press that Gore still maintains a “carbon-neutral” lifestyle. That’s thanks to a mixture of conservation and carbon offsets — a voluntary system in which people pay money toward renewable energy projects as a way to counterbalance their use of more traditional, and polluting, energy sources.

 

The desire to make amends for everything from a trip to the Oscars to a morning commute has spawned a plethora of for-profit and nonprofit carbon offset providers, whose offerings run the gamut in terms of how much they cost and what they say they will accomplish. But the growing retail market, which is largely unregulated, also is raising questions among environmentalists who say not all offsets are created equal.

 

“There’s a lack of standards in the voluntary market, and the offsets that people are purchasing might not be accomplishing what they hope they will,” said Deborah Carlson, climate change campaigner with the David Suzuki Foundation, a Canadian environmental advocacy group.

 

When the environmental group Clean Air-Cool Planet commissioned a study on carbon offsets, communications manager Bill Burtis was surprised to find how few groups offered transparent details of their projects or had set up any process of independently verifying their environmental benefits.

 

“It was pretty startling,” he said.

 

Some offset retailers did not even return the study’s questionnaire, and one provider, which Burtis wouldn’t identify, actually lobbied against the release of the report.

 

Clean Air–Cool Planet hired an independent firm to do the study because it has ties to a carbon offset provider called NativeEnergy.

 

The study ultimately awarded only a few companies its highest rankings, including the U.S. firms Climate Trust, Sustainable Travel International and NativeEnergy. Burtis said other providers have made changes since the report came out.

 

There also have been attempts to come up with formalized criteria for ranking carbon offsets, but no clear standard has emerged. That process, too, could incite controversy — Burtis notes that whoever ultimately creates a solid standard could potentially make a lot of money off validating other groups’ carbon offset projects.

 

Environmentalists are quick to note that carbon offsets do have the potential to do good. Carlson said one major benefit of carbon offsets is that they often force people to evaluate how much carbon they actually are responsible for, hopefully spurning people to first make reductions and then buy offsets. It’s also seen as a practical way to fund renewable energy projects ranging from wind power to solar energy.

 

But others worry that an easy payment solution has the potential to give people a way to essentially assuage guilt over buying big cars, big houses and even Big Macs, while doing little to actually reduce their “high-carbon” lifestyles. Carbon offsets may counterbalance your use of polluting energy sources, but they do not actually erase the initial output that contributes to global warming.

 

“It’s sending this message that somehow it’s this get-out-of-jail free card,” said Charlie Kronick, head of the climate and energy campaign for Greenpeace U.K.

 

That’s especially troubling if the offset itself doesn’t actually prove effective, something even the experts concede can be hard to judge.

 

If you do choose to use carbon offsets, here are a few things to look for:

 

 

Transparency. Many say offset providers should clearly spell out what projects they are contributing to and offer tangible proof those projects are making a positive impact. Be wary of groups that provide only vague information on how your money will be used or that sell offsets in bundles or “pooled carbon offsets” that don’t clearly state all the projects involved.

 

Additionality. By far the most contentious issue about carbon offsets involves whether the contributions are actually prompting an organization to do something that they wouldn’t have otherwise done.

For example, if a farmer was looking for a way to dispose of methane gas produced by his business but couldn’t afford to build a system for using the gas as a renewable energy source, then contributing carbon offsets to that project would be considered additional. But if the farmer had been planning to build a system for using methane to produce energy anyway and had the funds for it, then accepting carbon offsets wouldn’t appear to add anything additional (except perhaps a bit of padding to everyone’s bottom line).

 

Verification. Experts recommend that you look for carbon offsets that have been independently verified by a reputable third party. While there is no clear standard for validating carbon offset projects, many place faith in the Gold Standard, which was developed based on certain Kyoto Protocol criteria.

Project type. In general, environmentalists favor offsets that work toward developing more widespread renewable energy, such as wind turbines or solar energy, with the goal of eventually replacing more pollution-heavy energy producers.

 

Approach. The Clean Air–Cool Planet study faulted many offset providers for not providing enough education about global warming. Also, not all offset providers offer tips for how people can reduce their energy use before buying carbon offsets.

 

Many groups also are skeptical about a popular form of carbon offsets: reforestation. People may like the idea of having a tree planted in their honor, but it can take years for plantings to grow large enough to pay off with real environmental rewards. In the meantime, the trees are vulnerable to disease, fire and other forces that could eradicate them.

 

Reforestation also does little toward creating more sustainable, renewable energy sources —which many experts believe will be key to any solution.

 

Bill Stanley, director of the global climate change initiative at the Nature Conservancy, notes that small changes, such as adding insulation to your home, using public transportation or buying locally grown products, can reduce carbon emissions and potentially save money.

 

Still, Stanley said carbon offsets can be an effective tool. He said the Nature Conservancy plans to add an offset option to the portion of its Web site that lets people calculate how much carbon they are responsible for, although the group is still working to design one that meets its integrity standards.

 

Stanley also said he wouldn’t necessarily criticize someone for just buying carbon offsets, since a high-quality purchase could ultimately help spur more renewable energy projects.

 

“It’s a step in the right direction," Stanley said.