Global warming film lights fire under Congress

Global warming film lights fire under Congress
Saturday, September 23, 2006

Washington -- Congress, it appears, is channeling Al Gore. After years of
debating whether global warming was real or a hoax, the House and Senate
staged six hearings this week on how the government should respond to
climate change. And the Bush administration, which has downplayed the threat
of global warming during its six years in office, released a 244-page
strategic report this week laying out plans to address the rapid warming of
the planet.

Critics say the White House and the Republican-led Congress are not yet
ready to take the politically difficult steps needed to combat global
warming -- such as raising federal fuel efficiency standards or capping
greenhouse gas emissions by electric utilities and other industries, as
California did recently. But the mounting scientific evidence that human
activity is causing global temperatures to rise coupled with a growing
public alarm -- fueled by former Vice President Gore's climate change
documentary, "Inconvenient Truth," this summer -- has forced lawmakers to
take up the issue.

"Even on Capitol Hill, we have reached the tipping point," said Philip
Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, an environmental
group. "George Bush's 'just say no' policy on global warming is political
history," Clapp said. "Every senator and member of the House knows that at
midnight on the day George Bush leaves office, a new administration, whether
it's Republican or Democratic, will be returning to the international
negotiating table on global warming."
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/09/23/WARMING.TMP

More Snow Falls on Western Ski Resorts
Sep 22, 2006

While most of the leaves on the aspen trees are still turning from green to
gold, snow is once again falling on the ski and snowboard resorts of the
American West. In Colorado, Crested Butte Mountain Resort (CBMR) received
its first snowfall of the season yesterday. Wednesday night's snowfall was
only the beginning, with five to fifteen inches predicted. "Our summer
moisture trend is continuing. This type of trend could bring us another
stellar ski season," said Randy Barrett, vice president and general manager.

Next door in Utah, the snow was falling this morning for the second time
this month upon Utah's ski resorts. Up to a foot was predicted for the
higher elevations of the Wasatch Mountains as another blast of unseasonably
cold weather settled in.
http://www.firsttracksonline.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=45...

Evangelical Christians Called to Tackle Global Warming
September 26, 2006

The Rev. Richard Cizik, vice-president for governmental affairs of the
National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), is pushing to persuade
evangelical Christians to care about global warming. But while most U.S.
evangelical Christians tend to vote Republican, the environmental cause is
more associated with the Democratic Party, Cizik said in a Reuters
interview.

Cizik notes that since the 60 million or so American evangelicals tend to be
more concerned with such social issues as abortion and the war in Iraq,
getting them into tackling global climate change or other environmental
problems is not an easy task.
"There are people who disagree with what I'm doing ... within the
evangelical community of America," he said. "Simply for standing up and
saying, 'Climate change is real, the science is solid, we have to care about
this issue because of the impact on the poor' -why would that be
controversial? Well, I'm sorry to say, it is controversial and there are
people who want to take my head off."

Cizik is part of an overall ecological push by evangelical Christians known
as "creation care," the notion that the environment is a divine creation and
must be protected by humans. This movement included a highly successful
pitch to evangelicals to use more fuel-efficient vehicles, dubbed "What
Would Jesus Drive?" The title was inspired by the popular bromide, favoured
by Christians including President George W. Bush - "What Would Jesus Do?"
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/evangelical.christians.urged.to.ta...
.global.warming/7758.htm

Rain-Snow Mix Forecast Tonight For Denver Area
Up To 2 Feet Of Snow Forecast For Mountains
Sep 22, 2006

(CBS4/AP) DENVER Rain showers were expected to return to the Denver metro
area Friday afternoon with the precipitation turning to a rain-snow mix
later in the evening and overnight into Saturday, CBS4 meteorologist Dave
Aguilera said. The winter weather was rolling into Colorado as Summer turned
to Fall.

The snow level was expected to drop to 5,500 feet. The overnight low in
Denver was forecast to be just above freezing, meaning some places could
reach 32 degrees. The mountains were also seeing lighter snowfall Friday
morning, but that was expected to pick back up later on Friday afternoon and
into Saturday as more moisture moved into the state. Interstate 70 reopened
in the Colorado mountains Friday after blowing snow and icy roads forced an
overnight shutdown and stranded some travelers. Some icy spots remained on
Vail Pass, about 70 miles west of Denver, said Stacey Stegman, a spokeswoman
for the Colorado Department of Transportation.

A 50-mile stretch of eastbound I-70 was shut down Vail to Georgetown late
Thursday. Westbound traffic was allowed through Georgetown in stages,
transportation department spokesman Ryan Drake said. Fritz Homann of CDOT
reported blowing snow and sliding trucks at the Eisenhower Tunnel late
Thursday. U.S. 6 over Loveland Pass, an alternate to the tunnel, was closed
due to a jackknifed semitrailer. A winter storm warning was issued through 6
a.m. Saturday for areas including Rabbit Ears Pass, Breckenridge, Rocky
Mountain National Park and the Eisenhower Tunnel, a mile-long bore at 11,000
feet above sea level beneath the Continental Divide.

The wintry conditions sent many drivers hunting for rooms Thursday night.
"We're sold out," said Shawn Patel, general manager of the Super 8 Motel in
Georgetown. Up to 8 inches of snow fell in parts of Western Colorado
Wednesday and Thursday. The ski industry group Colorado Ski Country USA was
reporting that Silverton Mountain in southwest Colorado already had 14
inches of snow Thursday; Breckenridge had 12 and Vail 11.
http://cbs4denver.com/topstories/local_story_265065753.html

Enjoy Sunday's weather? Don't get used to it
Sep 26, 2006

BARABOO - The almanac predicts winter in the lower Great Lakes region ‹
including southern Wisconsin ‹ will be colder than normal, though
precipitation will be a bit less than usual. According to the almanac, the
coldest part of the year will be around Christmas though early February,
while the snowiest part of winter will come in mid-December, early and late
January and mid-February.

Almanacs notwithstanding, area naturalist and author Ken Lange said there
are several other popular local legends about how to use nature to judge the
harshness of the coming winter, such as the thickness of corn husks, number
of field mice and the quality of muskrat lodges. "They are often fairly
accurate," Lange said. "There are a number of people who certainly think
about the (predictions)."

Rusty Kapela of the National Weather Service's Milwaukee station said only
one in five El Nino winters produces below-average temperatures. "Some El
Ninos, the winters were actually colder than normal and snowy, though,"
Kapela said. "It's the law of averages."
http://www.wiscnews.com/bnr/news/index.php?ntid=100182&ntpid=1

Venezuelan firm will buy fuel oil for villagers
September 21, 2006
ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- A Venezuelan-owned oil company will warm 12,000 rural
Alaska homes this winter with an enormous gift of heating fuel that some
elated residents in the bush call a godsend - and ironic. The donation from
Houston-based Citgo will buy 100 gallons of fuel for every household in 151
villages. But the gift worth roughly $5 million comes courtesy of a country
whose leftist president is pals with America's enemies and supports Iran's
nuclear ambitions.

Hugo Chavez also calls our president mean things, such as "genocidal
murderer" and "madman." Margaret Williams, of the remote town Hughes, said
it doesn't matter who's providing the heating fuel, which costs about $6 a
gallon in the Koyukuk River village of 69. ³We sure could welcome it," she
said. "As long as we don't have to pay."

Daniel Ellanak, a Navy veteran who works for the tribal government on
Ouzinkie near Kodiak Island, is inadvertently responsible for the gift,
which could provide a couple of months of heating fuel for many homes. In
May, he gave a presentation at a tribal environmental conference near San
Diego that touched on village fuel woes, he said. A representative of Citgo,
an oil refiner owned by Venezuela's national oil company, was in the
audience and approached him. He told Ellanak about the company's effort to
provide fuel to poor people and offered to help Alaskans.

Ellanak is torn between the good fortune for struggling villagers and
Chavez's possible political gamesmanship. The other day, "I was watching the
ticker tape on the news and Hugo Chavez was partnering with Iran and I was
like 'Oh my god,' " he said.
http://www.sitnews.us/0906news/092106/092106_shns_freeoil.html

This hot Earth
Sep 24 2006

Standing on the shoreline in the heat of a mid afternoon sun, you couldn¹t
help but notice a strange ripple among the waves. This empty, muddy
shoreline of Nunavut has never seen animal life before. Neither has it seen
ice nor snow nor glaciers. This was 375 million years ago. Nunavut, lying
far from the Arctic Circle, still straddled the equator and flourished in a
tropical rain belt. The fishapod that waddled away from the sea to set the
stage for the evolution of land animals did so in a climate that allowed it
to thrive in the hothouse world of the Devonian Period when the average
global temperature was 22 C, compared to today¹s average of about 14.6C.

The evolution of animal life exploded. Plants were luxuriant and gigantic.
They dominated the Carboniferous period. Swamp land became so choked with
decaying plants that vegetation could not oxidize. It was compressed in
layers of peat beds, squeezed dry, and converted to coal where it lay for
millennia in thick, energy-rich black seams. Far into the future, they¹d be
noticed by someone with a pick. As earth rolled through geologic change,
life flourished or died with the ebb and flow of global warming and cooling
that characterized aeons of climate.

In the past 500 million years, there have been at least five extreme climate
events that have triggered worldwide extinctions. About 250 million years
ago catastrophic climate change resulted in the loss of 95% of marine life
and 70% of land animals. One theory is that supervolcanoes triggered global
warming. Another theory is a massive meteorite hit. Through NASA satellite
technology, a 480 km-wide suspect crater has been recently detected under
the East Antarctic ice sheet at a site called Wilkes Land.

Locked in ancient ice at the earth¹s poles are clues that tell a more recent
climate story. A multinational team of scientists from ten countries
representing The European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica spent most of
the last decade extracting a three-kilometre-long ice core from ŒDome C¹ on
east Antarctica¹s plateau. The core represented 740,000 years of climate
history and confirmed that during that time the planet has had eight ice
ages punctuated by brief warm spells. The current warm spell, or Holocene
Epoch, began about 12,000 years ago when global temperatures rose because of
earth¹s orbital cycles. Ocean waters warmed to allow CO2 to bubble into the
atmosphere once again trapping the sun¹s heat, raising global temperatures,
and changing climates as glaciers rapidly shrank.
http://www.theprogress.com/portals-code/list.cgi?paper=39&cat=23&id=7354...
ore=

Oil ends at 10-month low, posts weekly loss of 5%
Sep 22, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- futures closed lower Friday to register a
loss of more than 5% for the week with swelling inventories and an easing of
threats to global production sending the November contract to a 10-month
low. Natural-gas futures fell to a fresh two-and-a-half year closing low to
finish the week with a loss of just over 7%.
"The [oil] bears are selling the market to try to test OPEC resolve -- to
see if they will defend the $60-a-barrel area," said Phil Flynn, a senior
analyst at Alaron Trading.

Sentiment "holds that mild weather and economic contraction have led to a
reduction in overall energy demand in the face of swelling inventories,"
said John Kilduff, an analyst at Fimat USA, With overall supplies swelling,
traders began to wonder about the next move for the Organization of the
Petroleum Exporting Countries. The recent oil price plunge from a high of
around $78 in mid-July to a low of around $60 "is usually the type of drop
that would cause an immediate reaction from the OPEC cartel," said Flynn.
http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?dist=newsfinder&siteid=...
le&guid=%7BBF6E71CE-3F6E-4F89-AFA1-48798A89EEF4%7D&keyword=

Sun may be starting to 'cool off'
25 Sep 2006

Scientists hope expected cooling of sun might help global warming. Rival
study suggests Sun activity will increase global temperature. SCIENTISTS
studying sun spots believe the Sun could be entering a cooling period, which
could help in the battle against global warming.

One study by scientists in Texas has predicted the Sun will cool to its
lowest level for more than a century during the next few years. The
declining temperature of the Sun is part of a natural cycle, but some say
the expected cool period could give us a better chance to combat global
warming. Professor Joanna Haigh, of Imperial College London, said: "If there
was a period of low solar activity it could give us a little more time to
combat global warming and to introduce the curbs on the carbon emissions
that we need to limit climate change."

Scientists have known for many years that the Sun's output varies over an
11-year cycle, but have recently discovered that there are also longer
cycles of activity, characterised by drops in solar radiation and a fall in
the numbers of sunspots. The Texan research carried out by Leif Svalgaard
suggests sunspot activity will drop to an "extremely small" level during the
next decade and scientists predict a 0.2 per cent decline in global
temperatures.

Cambridge solar physicist Nigel Weiss said predictions of a global fall in
temperatures could well be accurate. "Periods of high solar activity do not
last long, perhaps 50 to 100 years, then you get a crash," he told New
Scientist. However, solar experts working in Boulder Colorado have predicted
an increase in the numbers of sunspots over the same period, suggesting that
global temperatures will rise still further.
http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=1414062006

Global warming nears Œdangerous¹ level
Researchers say average temperatures are close to a million-year high
Sept 25, 2006

This color-coded map shows how surface temperatures changed on average from
2001 to 2005. 2005 was the warmest ranked year on record. Dark red indicates
the greatest warming and purple indicates the greatest cooling. The numbers
refer to temperature anomalies as measured by degrees Celsius.Global
temperatures are dangerously close to the highest ever estimated to have
occurred in the past million years, scientists reported Monday. In a study
that analyzed temperatures around the globe, researchers found that Earth
has been warming rapidly, nearly 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit (0.2 degrees
Celsius) in the last 30 years.

If global temperatures go up another 1.8 degrees F (1 degree C), it would be
equal to the maximum temperature of the past million years. "This evidence
implies that we are getting close to dangerous levels of human-made
(anthropogenic) pollution," said study leader James Hansen of NASA's Goddard
Institute for Space Studies. Further global warming of 1.8 degrees F (1
degree C) defines a critical level, Hanson said.

James Hansen

The study also notes that global warming is greatest at higher latitudes
near the poles. This is because when Earth warms, snow and ice melt,
uncovering darker land and ocean surfaces. Instead of the once-white surface
that reflected solar rays back into space, the darker surfaces now absorb
more energy from the sun.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/15003895/

Photogenic cyclones
09/20/2006

Large-scale storm systems that develop and evolve during the more
drastically changing times of year- winter to spring and summer to autumn-
tend to become monsters. They can affect more than half of the lower 48
states with some type of changing weather. The cold front that came through
Pennsylvania on Tuesday from the stormcentered in Canada brought all kinds
of change in its trek across the country.

Near-record cold is following it over the Great Lakes and parts of the
Northeast. And the first frost is likely in those
same regions Thursday morning. So why "photogenic?" Midlatitude cyclones,
when in their
prime, take on a classic comma-shape.
http://www.thetimes-tribune.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=17221209&BRD=2185&P...
61&dept_id=416046&rfi=6

Ozone hole could reach record size: research
September 25, 2006

New research indicates the ozone hole over Antarctica is bigger than last
year and could reach record size! The CSIRO says new data shows the ozone
hole is now about 27 million square kilometres, 1 million square kilometres
smaller than the record set in 2000. Dr Paul Fraser from the CSIRO says the
lowest temperatures ever recorded in Antarctica's upper stratosphere this
winter - minus 85 degrees - are the cause.

"It's certainly the coldest we have ever seen and it requires very cold
temperatures to get very significant ozone depletion," Dr Fraser said. "So
on the basis of the very low temperatures that we have in and above
Antarctica at the present, that's one possibility indicating that this
year's ozone hole could be the biggest ever."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200609/s1748406.htm