Climate Change: Dangerous Sea Level Rise Imminent
December 12, 2008 by Suzie-Que
Dangerous Sea Level Rise Imminent Without Large Reductions of Black Carbon
News Blaze- Published: December 12,2008
The world is already close to passing the tipping points for abrupt climate change events, and if strong measures aren’t taken immediately the results will be catastrophic, concluded panelists during a side event at the UN climate conference in Poznan Tuesday night. Both scientific experts and government representatives alike at the event sponsored by the Federated States of Micronesia and Sweden, stressed the urgent need for fast-action mitigation measures that should be implemented and expanded immediately in order to avoid devastating consequences such as sea level rise.
Dr. Hermann Held of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research pointed out that land ice melt is being vastly underestimated, and that non-linear abrupt climate change is not being taken into account as it should be by the climate convention. The world is already committed to an astounding 2.4 degrees of warming, due in part to the warming effects of black carbon – a substance that is now considered the second-greatest contributor to climate change after CO2 – which are being “unmasked” by reductions of SO2, which produces a cooling effect.
MORE HERE
Environmental Progress Is a Cause for Right-Wing Paranoia
By Janet Smith, Intelligence Report. Posted December 12, 2008
Some conservatives have the wild notion that environmental policies are out to destroy American’s freedoms.
Addison, Texas — “Environment is not about saving nature,” the founder of Freedom Advocates, Michael Shaw, sternly warned an audience of antigovernment “Patriots” and far-right conspiracy theorists during a mid-July conference. “It’s about a revolutionary coup in America. [Environmentalism] is to establish global governance and abandon the principles of Natural Law.” Sustainable development policies, Shaw argued, will require “a police state” and ultimately “turn America into a globally governed homeland where humans are treated as biological resources.”
Shaw’s fearful call to arms against environmentalism was sucked in whole hog during the Ninth Annual Freedom 21 conference held in a Dallas-area Crowne Plaza hotel. Co-hosted by the Texas Eagle Forum, a hard-line Christian Right organization, and the anti-“New World Order” American Policy Center (APC), the three-day convergence included such right-wing heavyweights as the error-prone conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, gay- and feminist-hating Phyllis Schlafly, and the far-right Constitution Party’s presidential candidate, Chuck Baldwin.
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The University of Manitoba’s David Barber recently predicted that the Arctic Basin would be ice free by 2015. However, his prediction for the summer of 2008 was way off.
I have publicly challenged him to a $1000 charitable wager that his prediction for 2015 is also wrong.
Best regards,
ClimateSanity