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Gore’s sources

I forget who sent me this, but there's a nifty post over on unbossed.com about the sources used for Al Gore's famous slideshow.

Samuelson’s counsel of despair

A column by Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post has conservatives all a-twitter -- appropriate, I guess, since it gathers all the state-of-the-art conservative talking points on global warming in one place.

Browse around at reactions and the impression you will get above all is that conservatives just don't take the subject very seriously. They're looking for some clever arguments so they can move onto other stuff that gets their viscera churning (terrorism, evil liberals, etc.). This headline is typical: "WaPo: Global Warming a Bunch of Bull."

Of course, that's not what the column says at all. What the column says is that we can't really do anything about global warming, and any politician who says otherwise is a hypocrite. It advocates despair and surrender.

There are two primary points in the column, and one conclusion that follows from the two points. Let's take them in order.

Goldberg grapples with the big question

Both Matt and Ezra have commented on this question, quoted approvingly by Jonah Goldberg from a reader email:

If Al Gore were to be convinced that global warming WAS a natural phenomena, would he be so worked up about it?  I don't think so, yet the consequences would be the same.

Let's address this in three ways.

1. Would it make a practical difference if global warming were natural? Would it change our response? Of course. I don't know how to put it any more simply than I did in this post:

Acid Vicious

Coral and other sea critters suffer as CO2 makes oceans more acidic By the end of the century, oceans may no longer be livable habitat for coral, a coalition of U.S. scientists warned yesterday in a new report. The world’s oceans absorb about a third of the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide, which these days is a […]

Good news! Green views renew you! EBN reviews the how-tos.

Environmental Building News has an article up on integrating biophilia into green building practices.

Biophilia is a notion popularized by biologist E. O. Wilson. It describes humans' innate affiliation for the natural world. Biophilia attempts to define "the connections that human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life."

The thrust of the article is that biophilia is an underdeveloped element of green building practices, but one that has significant potential benefits.

Words fail me. Well, not really.

So Andrew Sullivan says global warming is like the WMD "debate" before the Iraq War:

It occurs to me that the global warming debate is not unlike the WMD-terrorist debate, except the sides are reversed ....

In both cases, however, the evidence is complicated and hard to pin down with absolute certainty. We know we are at much greater risk now from Islamist terror than we were a decade ago - but measuring how much, and where from specifically, is very hard. Equally, we know that global warming is real, but whether it has reached or will soon reach a dangerous tipping point is not a given.

Riiight. I can think of a number of ways that Iraq and climate change are similar, but that isn't one of them. Let's count the ways:

Coral reefs face growing threats

Coral reefs just can't catch a break. It's not enough that deep sea corals are ripped from the ocean floor by destructive trawling -- now shallow water corals are contending with global warming.

High sea temperatures stress coral, making them susceptible to disease and premature death. Last year, up to 40 percent of coral died in abnormally warm seas around the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the stage is set for the same to happen this year. Yesterday, ENN reported that Caribbean Sea temperatures have reached their annual high two months ahead of schedule.

Tax-funded press release ‘highly partisan and political’

There's not much new info in Jim Motavalli's review of the infamous AP article and Inhofe's infamous response thereto. But I thought one bit was fairly remarkable. Recall that the Inhofe press release came directly from the Senate Environment and Public Works committee -- your tax money at work, as they say. Witness:

Marc Morano, a spokesperson for the Senate majority on the Environment and Public Works committee ... denied, however, that the press release was "an official government action," implying subpoenas or hearings. "This was not from a senator, but from the Republican majority," Morano said. "It's up to others to decide if it was unusual or not. I'd be surprised if there was no precedent, because many congressional committees are highly partisan and political."

(Morano, you'll recall, is a long-time Republican media thug.)

Notice that Morano implicitly concedes two things. The first is that he and his boss view global warming purely as a "highly partisan and political" issue. The second is that it's now scarcely noteworthy that Senate committees are used for the personal partisan vendettas of their chairs.

The moral and political bankruptcy of the gang in charge in D.C. is now accepted fact, one they don't even bother to deny.

Database of sustainability communication projects

The United Nations Environment Program must have been listening to all the Grist chatter (here and here) about how to communicate environmental issues, because they have just launched the Creative Gallery on Sustainability Communications, described as the ...

With This Ping, I Thee Dead

Judge temporarily restricts Navy’s sonar use to protect whales The U.S. Navy is temporarily forbidden to use high-intensity sonar in war-game exercises off the coast of Hawaii, a federal judge declared on Monday. She ruled that environmental groups had provided “considerable convincing scientific evidence that the Navy’s use of … sonar can kill, injure, and […]