Elaine Meinel Supkis
Before I go to bed, time to muse about events this week. Floods in Washington State did great damage and here, it is raining yet again, over and over, we are getting great storms out of the mid Pacific ocean and it was over 90 degrees Farenheit in Arizona in November, it is warm here, too. This isn't normal.
As global warming races onwards, humanity looks to the USA to stop messing up all the time.
mongabay.com
November 8, 2006A new paper argues that ethics, human rights, and justice should be key components to international negotiations on global warming. It says that some countries, notably the United States, are currently taking positions that are "ethically problematic" and may violate basic human rights of people living in other countries.
Released at the United Nations Climate Change Conference meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, The "White Paper on the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change" says that "nations that use scientific uncertainty, cost to their national economy alone, lack of action by other nations, or waiting for new, less costly technologies to be invented as justifications for not reducing their emissions to a level that represents its fair share of safe total global emissions, are acting unethically," according to a news release from the Collaborative Program on the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change.
We boast about how we are the leaders of the world and how rich we are and then whenever anyone asks us to stop polluting, we get all huffy and exclaim we need to make money so we need to pollute so drop dead, world! This Bush attitude has turned nearly everyone against us. We want Africa and China to not pollute! They should use new technology and systems while we screw around!
I will note, this is causing us to lose allies and friends in many places. Everyone today hopes the Democrats don't act so insane. We have to clean up our act or we all die. Just like WWIII, we, the USA, are the chief danger to humanity, no one else can nuke all other nations all at once. Ditto pollution: we still are the number one polluters despite China catching rapidly up with us!
By Daniel WallisNAIROBI, Nov 8 (Reuters) - The United Nations and Africa's Nobel laureate, environmentalist Wangari Maathai, launched a project on Wednesday to plant a billion trees worldwide to help fight climate change and poverty.
Kenya's Wangari Maathai, who in 2004 became the first African woman and first "green" activist to win the Nobel Peace Prize, urged people from the United States to Uganda to plant trees to combat global warming and to make a long-term commitment.
"Anybody can dig a hole, anybody can put a tree in that hole and water it. And everybody can make sure that the tree they plant survives," she said on the sidelines of a U.N. meeting on climate change in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.
I not only plant trees, I have my own forest. And it is dying, what? What is killing it?
Acid rain! From all the polluters in the South and Midwest! And so planting trees alone won't fix things at all. This is an ecosystem and the solution means working with all the components of this system, air, water, earth and fire.
By NINIEK KARMINI, Associated Press Writer 45 minutes ago
MANTANGAI, Indonesia - Dozens of endangered orangutans have been driven from their dwindling jungle habitat in Borneo by months of land-clearing fires that have shrouded parts of the region in a choking haze, conservationists said Monday.
Around 43 orangutans have been taken for medical treatment to centers in the Indonesian provinces of Central and West Kalimantan, said Anand Ramanathan, an emergency relief worker with the Washington-based International Fund for Animal Welfare, or IFAW.
Most were beaten by humans after fleeing from the burning jungle to nearby plantations in recent weeks, but several are being treated for respiratory problems and burns, he said.
Homo sapiens killed all other great apes except for the ones hidden deep in jungles far away from questing humans. But now, we bestride the planet and are everywhere and we are rapidly killing them all.
And killing 'the earth's lungs' which is the belt of junglelands that grow on the earth's equator's landmasses. Once we turn it all to dust, we will see all sorts of very unhappy side effects. In other times of severe global warming, the oxygen levels suddenly collapsed like during the Greatest Extinction of all: the Permian collapse. Dare we try this again?
Already, the oceans are being ravaged by fishermen and the sun. This week, the sun spat out some more X-rays, facing away, but then, this is the story: the sun is old and shines ever harder and the earth wobbles on its uncertain axis and the whole sheebang moves through space, inside one of the spiral arms of this galaxy.
As Australia dries up and dies, Howard is as clueless as Bush.
November 7, 2006 - 9:29AMThe drought has been declared the worst in a thousand years, but a crisis summit on the Murray-Darling Basin delivered little help for the parched river system.
Labor premiers have jumped on the latest grim drought assessment by a government agency as evidence of "uncharted territory" caused by climate change.
But Prime Minister John Howard - already sceptical about "extreme" predictions of the effects of global warming - publicly questioned a top water bureaucrat's statement that the big dry was a one in 1,000 year event.
This is why there is some hope with the Democratic win in the USA: we might see some faint sanity! There is so little time. All over the place all the indications look grim. The amphibian family, the creatures that dominated the ecosystem before the Permian collapse, are going rapidly extinct. The great whales are disappearing and scientists can't find them. Polar bears are drowning and so are walruses.
And the Permian oil and gas and coal which is causing all this is also disappearing, too! And time is awasting! I am happy we might see some progress but the time for slow changes is past. We passed that during the Clinton years when energy was super-chief so the USA decided to supersize ourselves.
To hell.
I can't wait for something to stop this! Pelosi, Reid, you hear me? We have little time.
Well, we have this really nice 'Global Warming.' Why spoil it by talking about this horrible 'Oxygen Collapse?'
Posted by: blues | November 10, 2006 at 08:19 PM