feminist blogs

It's a new year, but we're hearing the same old tune. Oh, the irony of Chicken Littlest approvingly pointing to John Tierney's meditation on "alarmism."

Many of the conservatives braying about Gore's Nobel Prize have had a convenient brain fart regarding a February 2004 report issued by the DOD:

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'

The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.

The report was commissioned by influential Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall, who has held considerable sway on US military thinking over the past three decades. He was the man behind a sweeping recent review aimed at transforming the American military under Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Climate change 'should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern', say the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.

...do you think the nutroots would stop plugging their ears and shouting "nah nah nah nah nah nah nah"?

Oh, probably not. It's that godless science that's the problem, right?

Al Gore now can add a Nobel Peace Prize to his Oscar kudos, but does it make up for the election the Supreme Court took from him?

What about the rest of us, who are living in a world so broken by that other guy? What do we put on the mantle?

Are you ready for 1,000 years of rising oceans?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will publish its report, the most complete overview of climate change science, in Paris on February 2 after a final review. It will guide policy makers combating global warming.

The draft projects more droughts, rains, shrinking Arctic ice and glaciers and rising sea levels to 2100 and cautions that the effects of a build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will last far longer.

"Twenty-first century anthropogenic (human) carbon dioxide emissions will contribute to warming and sea level rise for more than a millennium, due to the timescales required for removal of this gas," the sources quoted the report as saying.

The good news? This century we should see oceans rise only a couple of feet. American coastal cities can get by like the Netherlands, with dikes and levees. Of course, neglectful Bushian attitudes about their maintenance, as evidenced in New Orleans, would have to go.

The draft projects temperatures will rise by 2 to 4.5 Celsius (3.6 to 8.1 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels with a "best estimate" of a 3C (5.4 F) rise, assuming carbon dioxide levels are stabilized at about 45 percent above current levels.

This could make el Niño seem like a little boy indeed.

Apparently the Bible is now the litmus test against which all science must be measured. Never mind what we can observe in the world, religious dogma is the only truth to be taught in schools in Federal Way, near Seattle.

This week in Federal Way schools, it got a lot more inconvenient to show one of the top-grossing documentaries in U.S. history, the global-warming alert "An Inconvenient Truth."

After a parent who supports the teaching of creationism and opposes sex education complained about the film, the Federal Way School Board on Tuesday placed what it labeled a moratorium on showing the film.

That's right. Global warming is too un-"God"-ly of a concept for children.

"Condoms don't belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He's not a schoolteacher," said Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old. "The information that's being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is. ... The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn't in the DVD."

In other words, one can assume, Hardison believes global warming is a good thing. There's nothing like having people looking forward to Armageddon calling the shots in schools to scare the crap out of you.

School Board members adopted a three-point policy that says teachers who want to show the movie must ensure that a "credible, legitimate opposing view will be presented," that they must get the OK of the principal and the superintendent, and that any teachers who have shown the film must now present an "opposing view."

But not an opposing scientific view, but rather a view opposing science itself.

Let's look at some other examples where, following Federal Way's example, we should oppose science:

• The earth is round vs. the earth is flat
• The earth revolves around the sun vs. the heavens move on invisible spheres through ether
• The flu virus evolves vs. God makes the flu to punish humankind for homosexuality

Maybe it's time to buy stock in fundamentalist Christianist textbook companies.

Ah, there goes that Hugo again.

The 30-second spot featured above, which is running on frequent rotation here in the Mid-Atlantic (and I suspect further North), cracks me up every time I catch it. Or would, if almost half the country wasn't going to see an increase in their home heating bills this year.

If the Feds weren't suppressing, obfuscating or exhibiting difficulty creating policies based on facts and evidence, then this wouldn't be 21st Century America. Today's example? Nature:

A government agency blocked release of a report that suggests global warming is contributing to the frequency and strength of hurricanes, the journal Nature reported yesterday.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration disputed the Nature article, saying there was not a report but a two-page fact sheet about the topic. The information was to be included in a press kit to be distributed in May as the annual hurricane season approached, but wasn't ready.

[...]

...Nature said weather specialists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration -- part of the Commerce Department -- in February set up a seven-member panel to prepare a consensus report.

According to Nature, a draft of the statement said that warming may be having an effect. In May, when the report was expected to be released, panel chairman Ants Leetmaa received an e-mail from a Commerce official saying the report needed to be made less technical and was not to be released, Nature reported.