[Rhodes22-list] More on global warming.

[Brad Haslett]

Rummy,

Expect to hear Bush 43 to acknowledge global warming in the coming State of
the Union address.  The rumor mill has it that the current carbon swap
program will be expanded and some type of enhanced carbon tax may be
forthcoming.  Remember that every news organization will repeat the same
mantra: Bush pulled us out of Kyoto.  Not true.  Here is the truth.


 On July 25, 1997, before the Kyoto Protocol was finalized (although it had
been fully negotiated, and a penultimate draft was finished), the U.S.
Senate unanimously passed by a 95–0 vote the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (S. Res.
98),[40] which stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States
should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding
targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or
"would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States". On
November 12, 1998, Vice President Al Gore symbolically signed the protocol.
Both Gore and Senator Joseph Lieberman indicated that the protocol would not
be acted upon in the Senate until there was participation by the developing
nations.[41] The Clinton Administration never submitted the protocol to the
Senate for ratification.

 Hmm. No Bush Administration rejection there. There is this bit, later on:

 The current President, George W. Bush, has indicated that he does not
intend to submit the treaty for ratification, not because he does not
support the Kyoto principles, but because of the exemption granted to China
(the world's second largest emitter of carbon dioxide[42]). . . . Despite
its refusal to submit the protocol to Congress for ratification, the Bush
Administration has taken some actions towards mitigation of climate change.

Regardless, the current administration is starting to embrace the issue. See
below.

Brad

_______________

  Bush to address global warming in annual speech

By Caren BohanTue Jan 16, 3:27 PM ET

President Bush will outline a policy on global warming next week in his
State of the Union speech but has not dropped his opposition to mandatory
limits on greenhouse-gas emissions, the White House said on Tuesday.

"It's not accurate. It's wrong," White House spokesman Tony Snow said
regarding media reports suggesting that Bush would agree to mandatory
emissions caps in an effort to combat global warming. Such caps could
require energy conservation and pollution curbs.

"If you're talking about enforceable carbon caps, in terms of industry-wide
and nation-wide, we knocked that down. That's not something we're talking
about," Snow said.

Britain's "The Observer" newspaper reported on Sunday that senior Downing
Street officials, who were not named, said Bush was preparing to issue a
changed climate policy during his annual State of the Union speech on
January 23.

U.S. allies such as Britain and Germany have pressed for a new global
agreement on climate change to replace the Kyoto Protocol which expires in
2012. Bush withdrew the United States from the protocol in 2001, saying its
targets for reducing carbon emissions would unfairly hurt the U.S. economy.

"We'll have a State of the Union address in a week and we'll lay out our
policy on global warming," Snow said when asked whether British Prime
Minister Tony Blair had persuaded Bush to agree to tougher action to combat
global warming.

Bush has pushed a series of initiatives aimed at encouraging the development
of alternative energy sources such as hydrogen and ethanol. That theme is
expected to be emphasized in his speech.

Germany is hosting the Group of Eight summit later this year and German
Chancellor Angela Merkel plans to make the fight against climate change a
top issue on the agenda.

Meeting with Merkel at the White House earlier this month, Bush said he was
committed to "promoting new technologies that will promote energy
efficiency, and at the same time do a better job of protecting the world's
environment."

The topic of climate change also came up on Tuesday when Bush met with new
U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon. Ban raised the subject, according to a U.N. source.

"This is a global problem that calls for global leadership," the source
quoted U.N. secretary general as telling Bush. According to the source, Bush
said that those who sign on to protocols like Kyoto need to live by them.

EVOLVING

Bush administration stances on global warming and other environmental issues
appear to have evolved over the last year, starting with the president's
2006 State of the Union address, when he called U.S. addiction to foreign
oil a serious problem that required more spending on new technologies.

After years of skepticism and calls for more research into the causes of
global warming, Bush acknowledged last summer that humans exacerbate the
problem.

His administration also is considering designating polar bears, whose icy
habitat has been melting in recent years, as an endangered species. That
could pressure the government to impose tougher measures to avoid global
warming.

Snow suggested the president was sticking to his emphasis on voluntary steps
to curb emissions.

"The president believes in doing everything in our power to use innovation
and the power of innovation to achieve people's goals of having cleaner
energy and abundant energy," he said.

(Additional reporting by Deborah Zabarenko)


On 1/17/07, R22RumRunner at aol.com <R22RumRunner at aol.com> wrote:
>
>
> LIVERPOOL LAND, Greenland (Jan. 16) — Flying over  snow-capped peaks and
> into
> a thick fog, the helicopter set down on a barren  strip of rocks between
> two
> glaciers. A dozen bags of supplies, a rifle and a can  of cooking gas were
> tossed out onto the cold ground. Then, with engines whining,  the
> helicopter
> lifted off, snow and fog swirling in the rotor wash.
> Changing  Coastlines
> When it  had disappeared over the horizon, no sound remained but the
> howling
> of the  Arctic wind.
>
> "It feels a little like the days of the old explorers,  doesn't it?"
> Dennis
> Schmitt said.
>
> Mr. Schmitt, a 60-year-old explorer  from Berkeley, Calif., had just
> landed
> on a newly revealed island 400 miles  north of the Arctic Circle in
> eastern
> Greenland. It was a moment of triumph: he  had discovered the island on an
> ocean
> voyage in September 2005. Now, a year  later, he and a small expedition
> team
> had returned to spend a week climbing  peaks, crossing treacherous
> glaciers and
> documenting animal and plant life.
>
> Despite its remote location, the island would almost certainly have been
> discovered, named and mapped almost a century ago when explorers like
> Jean-Baptiste Charcot and Philippe, Duke of Orléans, charted these
> coastlines.  Would
> have been discovered had it not been bound to the coast by glacial ice.
>
> Maps of the region show a mountainous peninsula covered with
> glaciers.  The
> island's distinct shape — like a hand with three bony fingers pointing
> north  —
> looks like the end of the peninsula.
>
> Now, where the maps showed only  ice, a band of fast-flowing seawater ran
> between a newly exposed shoreline and  the aquamarine-blue walls of a
> retreating
> ice shelf. The water was littered with  dozens of icebergs, some as large
> as
> half an acre; every hour or so, several  more tons of ice fractured off
> the
> shelf with a thunderous crack and an  earth-shaking rumble.
>
> All over Greenland and the Arctic, rising  temperatures are not simply
> melting ice; they are changing the very geography of  coastlines. Nunataks
> — "
> lonely mountains" in Inuit — that were encased in the  margins of
> Greenland's ice
> sheet are being freed of their age-old bonds,  exposing a new chain of
> islands, and a new opportunity for Arctic explorers to  write their names
> on the
> landscape.
>
> "We are already in a new era of  geography," said the Arctic explorer Will
> Steger. "This phenomenon — of an  island all of a sudden appearing out of
> nowhere and the ice melting around it —  is a real common phenomenon now."
>
> In August, Mr. Steger discovered his  own new island off the coast of the
> Norwegian island of Svalbard, high in the  polar basin. Glaciers that had
> surrounded it when his ship passed through only  two years earlier were
> gone this
> year, leaving only a small island alone in the  open ocean.
> "We saw  it ourselves up there, just how fast the ice is going," he said.
>
> With  27,555 miles of coastline and thousands of fjords, inlets, bays and
> straits,  Greenland has always been hard to map. Now its geography is
> becoming
> obsolete  almost as soon as new maps are created.
>
> Hans Jepsen is a cartographer at  the Geological Survey of Denmark and
> Greenland, which produces topographical  maps for mining and oil
> companies.
> (Greenland is a largely self-governing region  of Denmark.) Last summer,
> he spotted
> several new islands in an area where a  massive ice shelf had broken up.
> Mr.
> Jepsen was unaware of Mr. Schmitt's  discovery, and an old aerial
> photograph in
> his files showed the peninsula  intact.
>
> "Clearly, the new island was detached from the mainland when
> the  connecting
> glacier-bridge retreated southward," Mr. Jepsen said, adding that  future
> maps
> would take note of the change.
>
> The sudden appearance of the  islands is a symptom of an ice sheet going
> into
> retreat, scientists say.  Greenland is covered by 630,000 cubic miles of
> ice,
> enough water to raise global  sea levels by 23 feet.
>
> Carl Egede Boggild, a professor of snow-and-ice  physics at the University
> Center of Svalbard, said Greenland could be losing  more than 80 cubic
> miles of
> ice per year.
>
> "That corresponds to three  times the volume of all the glaciers in the
> Alps,"
> Dr. Boggild said. "If you  lose that much volume you'd definitely see new
> islands appear."
>
> He  discovered an island himself a year ago while flying over northwestern
> Greenland. "Suddenly I saw an island with glacial ice on it," he said. "I
> looked  at the map and it should have been a nunatak, but the present ice
> margin
> was  about 10 kilometers away. So I can say that within the last five
> years the
> ice  margin had retreated at least 10 kilometers."
>
> The abrupt acceleration of  melting in Greenland has taken climate
> scientists
> by surprise. Tidewater  glaciers, which discharge ice into the oceans as
> they
> break up in the process  called calving, have doubled and tripled in speed
> all over Greenland. Ice  shelves are breaking up, and summertime "glacial
> earthquakes" have been detected  within the ice sheet.
>
> "The general thinking until very recently was that  ice sheets don't react
> very quickly to climate," said Martin Truffer, a  glaciologist at the
> University of Alaska at Fairbanks. "But that thinking is  changing right
> now, because we
> 're seeing things that people have thought are  impossible."
>
> A study in The Journal of Climate last June observed that  Greenland had
> become the single largest contributor to global sea-level rise.
>
> Until recently, the consensus of climate scientists was that the
> impact  of
> melting polar ice sheets would be negligible over the next 100 years. Ice
> sheets were thought to be extremely slow in reacting to atmospheric
> warming. The
> 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, widely
> considered  to be an authoritative scientific statement on the potential
> impacts of
> _global warming_ (javascript:;)  , based its  conclusions about sea-level
> rise on
> a computer model that predicted a slow onset  of melting in Greenland.
>
> "When you look at the ice sheet, the models  didn't work, which puts us on
> shaky ground," said Richard Alley, a geosciences  professor at
> Pennsylvania
> State University.
>
> There is no consensus on how  much Greenland's ice will melt in the near
> future, Dr. Alley said, and no  computer model that can accurately predict
> the
> future of the ice sheet. Yet  given the acceleration of tidewater-glacier
> melting, a sea-level rise of a foot  or two in the coming decades is
> entirely
> possible, he said. That bodes ill for  island nations and those who live
> near the
> coast.
>
> "Even a foot rise is a  pretty horrible scenario," said Stephen P.
> Leatherman, director of the  Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida
> International
> University in Miami.
>
> On low-lying and gently sloping land like coastal river deltas,
> a  sea-level
> rise of just one foot would send water thousands of feet inland.  Hundreds
> of
> millions of people worldwide make their homes in such deltas;  virtually
> all
> of coastal Bangladesh lies in the delta of the Ganges River. Over  the
> long
> term, much larger sea-level rises would render the world's coastlines
> unrecognizable, creating a whole new series of islands.
>
> "Here in Miami,"  Dr. Leatherman said, "we're going to have an ocean on
> both sides of us."
>
> Such ominous implications are not lost on Mr. Schmitt, who says he hopes
> that the island he discovered in Greenland in September will become an
> international symbol of the effects of climate change. Mr. Schmitt, who
> speaks  Inuit,
> has provisionally named it Uunartoq Qeqertoq: the warming island.
>
> Global warming has profoundly altered the nature of polar
> exploration,  said
> Mr. Schmitt, who in 40 years has logged more than 100 Arctic expeditions.
> Routes once pioneered on a dogsled are routinely paddled in a kayak now;
> many
> features, like the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf in Greenland's northwest, have
> disappeared for good.
>
> "There is a dark side to this," he said about the  new island. "We felt
> the
> exhilaration of discovery. We were exploring something  new. But of
> course,
> there was also something scary about what we did there. We  were looking
> in the
> face of these changes, and all of us were thinking of the  dire
> consequences."
>
> Copyright (c)  2007 _The New York Times  Company_ (http://www.nytimes.com
> /ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html)
> 2007-01-16 09:43:21
>
> (
> http://news.aol.com/elections/president/story/_a/obama-takes-first-step-in-presidential/20070116102609990001
> )
> Read the
>
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