Open Thread for Night Owls & Early Birds

David Gow at The Guardian writes:

Prince of Wales likens climate change battle to war

In a speech to a selected audience at the European parliament, he said: "If military policy has long been based on the dictum that we should be prepared for the worst case, should it be so different when the security is that of the planet and our long term future?"

Prince Charles highlighted the rapid melting of the north polar ice cap as a wake-up call "as we sleepwalk our way towards the edge of catastrophe" and called for a "courageous and revolutionary" approach to tackling global warming.

He warned that if such an approach was not embarked upon, "the result will be catastrophe for all of us but with the poorest in our world hit hardest of all. In this sense it is surely comparable to war."

The prince, by now a seasoned climate campaigner, called for a new initiative to tackle tropical deforestation under which governments would effectively pay the authorities in countries such as Brazil and Indonesia to preserve rainforests.

Meanwhile, ScienceDaily reports:

Ocean Dead-Zones May Be Linked To Global Warming

A review of all available ocean data records concludes that the low-oxygen events which have plagued the Pacific Northwest coast since 2002 are unprecedented in the five decades prior to that, and may well be linked to the stronger, persistent winds that are expected to occur with global warming.

In a new study to be published Feb 15 in the journal Science, researchers from Oregon State University outline a "potential for rapid reorganization" in basic marine ecosystems and the climatic forces that drive them, and suggest that these low-oxygen, or "hypoxic" events are now more likely to be the rule rather than the exception.

"In this part of the marine environment, we may have crossed a tipping point," said Jane Lubchenco, the Wayne and Gladys Valley Professor of Marine Biology at OSU, and the lead scientist for PISCO, the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans. ...

"People keep asking us, 'Is this situation really all that different or not?'" Lubchenco said. "Now we have the answer to that question, and it's an unequivocal 'yes.' The low oxygen levels we've measured in the last six years are abnormally low for our system. We haven't seen conditions like this in many, many decades, and now with varying intensity we've seen them in each of the last six summers."

Days since Mission Accomplished: 1751.

Cost per minute of the Iraq war/occupation: $222,000