Saturday, September 16, 2006

Ten Years tops

NASA Scientist, and the world's preeminant climatologist James Hansen has sounded the same warning as Al Gore. We have a decade window, at best, to take steps to curb carbon mondioxide emissions.

If the world continues with a “business as usual” scenario, Hansen said temperatures will rise by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 7.2 degrees F) and “we will be producing a different planet.”

On that warmer planet, ice sheets would melt quickly, causing a rise in sea levels that would put most of Manhattan under water. The world would see more prolonged droughts and heat waves, powerful hurricanes in new areas and the likely extinction of 50 percent of species...

...Hansen spoke as NASA released two studies that found sharp reductions in winter Arctic sea ice.

One of those studies was from Hansen's institute. “It is not too late to save the Arctic, but it requires that we begin to slow carbon dioxide emissions this decade,” Hansen said in a statement.

Scientists and climate models have long predicted a drop in winter sea ice, but it has been slow to happen. Global warming skeptics have pointed to the lack of ice melt as a flaw in global warming theory.

The latest findings are “coming more in line with what we expected to find,” said Mark Serreze, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. “We’re starting to see a much more coherent and firm picture occurring.”

“I hate to say we told you so, but we told you so,” he added.

Serreze said only five years ago he was “a fence-sitter” on the issue of whether man-made global warming was happening and a threat, but he said recent evidence in the Arctic has him convinced.


Continuing to leave the conservatives in power is not only dangerous because they will make you poorer, less insured, and lose an unnecessary war for you; they have the power to watch the planet destroy itself and deny it to the end.

Let the last conservative global warming denier lose their aqualung rights.

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