This story from the New York
Times is another alarming indicator of the Bush cabal's dtermination to exchange lucre for a habitable planet. Not five minutes after hearing Heather Mallick on CBC Radio discuss why some scientists think that there may be less than a century before most of the world becomes uninhabitable for human beings due to climate change, we get this nugget from the
Times...
The fresh efforts to quiet him, Dr. Hansen said, began in a series of calls after a lecture he gave on Dec. 6 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth "a different planet." The administration's policy is to use voluntary measures to slow, but not reverse, the growth of emissions.
After that speech and the release of data by Dr. Hansen on Dec. 15 showing that 2005 was probably the warmest year in at least a century, officials at the headquarters of the space agency repeatedly phoned public affairs officers, who relayed the warning to Dr. Hansen that there would be "dire consequences" if such statements continued, those officers and Dr. Hansen said in interviews.
It would be nice to see the same outrage and activism that goes into Abramoff, Alito, Iraq, and anything else you could name go into Bushco's determination to facilitate the destruction of the planet's support systems. With temperatures rising to unprecedented levels in the northern hemisphere, with Inuit warning that permafrost is rapidly melting, with one of the worst hurricane seasons in recorded history just behind us, with changes in ocean temperature decimating aquatic life, with deforestation in the tropics accelerating changes in the planets ability to convert carbon gas to oxygen, I think we need to be more concerned over the future of the planet's ability to sustain life.
Some facts: 256 billion tons of carbon have been released in the past two and half centuries - over half of that in just the past twenty-five years. Fossil fuel emissions have quadrupled since 1950. In the past two centuries, carbon dioxide concentration has increased to levels not exceeded in perhaps the past twenty million years. The planet's surface temperature is expected to increase this century by an average of six degrees Celsius. Sea levels are expected to rise by almost one metre. As a result of this global warming, snow cover has decreased by 10%, and Arctic ice thickness has been reduced by nearly one-half. The ozone hole in the Antarctic has grown to 30,000,000 square kilometres. There have been reductions in ozone cover of up to one-third in parts of Canada.
Kossacks need to act now to pressure their representatives to make the remediation of climate change a priority.