Among the participants was Beatboxer Shlomo, who “dedicates his beats to the cause“:

Insights Beatboxer gleaned from the arctic adventure include:

I couldn’t help but notice that it’s really quite cold.

… and …

Being with all these inspired people seems to have filled my head with a zillion ideas for musical endeavours that could easily save the world.

Possibly the most bold and transgressive artwork to be created during the expedition was this piece of performance art by Francesca Galeazzi:

This morning I walked across the fresh snow with a gas cylinder in my arms, containing 6kg of CO2. I took it across the unspoiled snow field of the Jakobshavn Fjord until I found what, to my eyes, was a wonderful place. …

I put the cylinder down, got on my knees and opened the valve. The CO2 came out violently, freezing the air around the nozzle and producing an unpleasant whistle. When I lowered the cylinder towards the ground, the snow blow off all around me under the pressure of the air jet, almost to signify the melting of the Arctic ice shelf because of the Carbon emissions generated somewhere else.

Reading this you might think I am an evil horrible woman.

David Thompson responds:

You’re not evil. That would at least be interesting. You’re merely a talentless poseur and a freeloading narcissist. Not evil, just a bint.

Tragically, no one encountered a hungry polar bear.

Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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The EPA has told two longtime agency veterans and outspoken critics of the administration’s cap-and-trade plan to remove any references to the agency in their critiques and to get approval for any future “outside writing projects.” That includes removing their critical video from You Tube.

Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, a married couple and EPA lawyers in San Francisco, have been railing against cap-and-trade proposals for a while. Most recently, they had a sharply-worded op-ed in the Washington Post that said current legislation would be ineffective and even counterproductive.

The couple stressed that the views they expressed were their own — not the agency’s. But they also stressed that their years of experience with the EPA, and specifically working on other cap-and-trade programs, informed their views.

Compliments of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the video our ecofascist rulers have tried to suppress can be seen here.

On a tip from Varla. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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Reducing Greenhouse Gases May Not Be Enough to Slow Climate Change

Georgia Tech City and Regional Planning Professor Brian Stone publishes a paper in the December edition of Environmental Science and Technology that suggests policymakers need to address the influence of global deforestation and urbanization on climate change, in addition to greenhouse gas emissions.

According to Stone’s paper, as the international community meets in Copenhagen in December to develop a new framework for responding to climate change, policymakers need to give serious consideration to broadening the range of management strategies beyond greenhouse gas reductions alone.

“Across the U.S. as a whole, approximately 50 percent of the warming that has occurred since 1950 is due to land use changes (usually in the form of clearing forest for crops or cities) rather than to the emission of greenhouse gases,” said Stone. “Most large U.S. cities, including Atlanta, are warming at more than twice the rate of the planet as a whole – a rate that is mostly attributable to land use change. As a result, emissions reduction programs – like the cap and trade program under consideration by the U.S. Congress – may not sufficiently slow climate change in large cities where most people live and where land use change is the dominant driver of warming.”

According to Stone’s research, slowing the rate of forest loss around the world, and regenerating forests where lost, could significantly slow the pace of global warming.

“Treaty negotiators should formally recognize land use change as a key driver of warming,” said Stone. “The role of land use in global warming is the most important climate-related story that has not been widely covered in the media.”

Stone recommends slowing what he terms the “green loss effect” through the planting of millions of trees in urbanized areas and through the protection and regeneration of global forests outside of urbanized regions. Forested areas provide the combined benefits of directly cooling the atmosphere and of absorbing greenhouse gases, leading to additional cooling. Green architecture in cities, including green roofs and more highly reflective construction materials, would further contribute to a slowing of warming rates. Stone envisions local and state governments taking the lead in addressing the land use drivers of climate change, while the federal government takes the lead in implementing carbon reduction initiatives, like cap and trade programs.

“As we look to address the climate change issue from a land use perspective, there is a huge opportunity for local and state governments,” said Stone. “Presently, local government capacity is largely unharnessed in climate management structures under consideration by the U.S. Congress. Yet local governments possess extensive powers to manage the land use activities in both the urban and rural areas.”

The Environmental Science and Technology article is available at http://pubs.acs.org/journal/esthag.

SOURCE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)

Posted by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

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Few people have been as vocal about the urgency of global warming and the need to reinvent the way the world produces and consumes energy. And few have put as much money behind their advocacy as Mr. Gore and are as well positioned to profit from this green transformation, if and when it comes.

Critics, mostly on the political right and among global warming skeptics, say Mr. Gore is poised to become the world’s first “carbon billionaire,” profiteering from government policies he supports that would direct billions of dollars to the business ventures he has invested in.

Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, asserted at a hearing this year that Mr. Gore stood to benefit personally from the energy and climate policies he was urging Congress to adopt.

The Goracle responded with the ultimate in socialist chutzpah:

“Do you think there is something wrong with being active in business in this country?” Mr. Gore said. “I am proud of it. I am proud of it.”

But then, that’s how business is done, in a world run by the likes of Al Gore. You convince your government cronies to force people to pay for whatever you have to sell. The “green revolution” extolled by the Slimes will come about when all the green has been transferred from those who produce wealth to those who have friends in Big Government.

Bureaucrats just shoveled over $560 million of our money at Silver Spring Networks, in which Gore’s Kleiner Perkins outfit has invested heavily. He’s also working plenty of other angles:

He is a founder of Generation Investment Management, based in London and run by David Blood, a former head of Goldman Sachs Asset Management (the firm was quickly dubbed Blood and Gore). Mr. Gore earns a partner’s salary at Kleiner Perkins. He has substantial personal finances invested at both firms, officials of the companies said. …

Mr. Gore’s spokeswoman would not give a figure for his current net worth, but the scale of his wealth is evident in a single investment of $35 million in Capricorn Investment Group, a private equity fund started by his friend Jeffrey Skoll, the first president of eBay. …

He has a stake in the world’s pre-eminent carbon credit trading market and in an array of companies in bio-fuels, sustainable fish farming, electric vehicles and solar power.

Capricorn holds a major stake in Falcon Waterfree Technologies, the world’s leading maker of waterless urinals. Generation has holdings in Ausra, a solar energy company based in California, and Camco, a British firm that develops carbon dioxide emissions reduction projects. Kleiner Perkins has a green ventures fund with nearly $1 billion invested in renewable energy and efficiency concerns.

In short, if it’s economically useless but likely to be subsidized if not imposed by the watermelons running our government, Gore is getting a fat cut from it. He needs the money to pay his gargantuan power bills.

His next big project: a $300 million campaign to ban fossil fuels in electricity production within 10 years. Since windmills and pixie dust just don’t work, and nuclear power is frowned upon by moonbats, where the electricity will come from is something for people to worry about later — like how to pay for all the government subsidies to inefficient ecokook technology.

On a tip from Charles O. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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When Obama said that his stimulation package has created 1 million jobs, did he include Chinese jobs in the calculation?

China’s manufacturing sector expanded at its fastest rate in 18 months in October, the eighth straight month of expansion, and Obama just happens to have gotten back to trying to push cap-and-trade last week.

The actual amount of new jobs stimulation has created is… Well, 2.7 million have been lost.

We should remember that Obama thought the unemployment rate would only reach 9 percent if the stimulation package didn’t pass.

Again, it’s just a question of who is going to be stimulated.

With our two trillion deficit, other nations’ currencies are being stimulated, the Euro having hit $1.50 on the dollar last month.

If we ever want to buy energy in the future–not that we will if cap-and-trade passes–we will have to convert our worthless dollar now that it’s not being used for oil trading.

All the new energy jobs that cap-and-trade is going to create? Well, China is building one clean coal plant a month.

We could probably profit off clean energy, too, having 27% of the world’s coal reserves, but Obama would rather kill jobs and bankrupt the industry (his own words) than support the clean coal alternatives he lied about supporting during the campaign.

It strikes some as odd that even in a time of great job loss, when he’s bragging about how many jobs his accountants created, that Obama would knowingly push forward with this plan to raise energy rates instead of creating jobs. He’s been reaching out to the communists in Cuba, Venezuela, and Honduras, so maybe this is his latest diplomatic efforts to a communist nation, along with refusing to meet the Dalai Lama, or maybe it’s just his concessions to China in return for them holding up our increasing debt.

Or maybe it’s part of his reward to China for winning Al Gore’s support with their CO2 reduction programs.

Gore has said, “Chinese leaders are mobilizing a national effort to introduce CO2 reduction initiatives, and have already begun the largest tree-planting program the world has ever seen.”

As has been noted, their CO2 reduction efforts involve building one coal plant a month.

As for their tree-planting efforts, only 15% have survived, and they have been counting shrubs as trees.

Counting trees like Democrats count stimulus jobs.

China’s “Great Green Wall” stimulus plan has been ongoing since 1978 and has 42 years left to go. That must be what Paul Krugman is talking about when he says the stimulus hasn’t been big enough.

All this talk about stimulus is on top of the healthcare bill the Democrats still haven’t passed. Maybe if they do it right, they can stimulate the Canadian healthcare industry, which has been losing jobs for some time to people seeking healthcare in America.

Everyone around the world loves Obama. I can see why.

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The worst thing that you or I can do for the planet is to have children. If they behave as the average person in the rich world does now, they will emit some 11 tonnes of CO2 every year of their lives. In their turn, they are likely to have more carbon-emitting children who will make an even bigger mess. If Britain is to meet the government’s target of an 80% reduction in our emissions by 2050, we need to start reversing our rising rate of population growth immediately.

All children are bad, but Western children are particularly bad, because according to the Gaiaist religion,

the poorer you are, the less carbon you emit. By today’s standards, a cull of Australians or Americans would be at least 60 times as productive as one of Bangladeshis. …one less British child would permit some 30 women in sub-Saharan Africa to have a baby and still leave the planet a cleaner place.

As usual, the role model for liberals is communist China, which is praised for reducing its population by hundreds of millions by dictating to parents that they can only have one child — a policy that often results in infanticide for baby girls.

If communism and Nazism could leave tens of millions dead, what will be the death toll if the evil freaks driving the environmentalism movement get the leverage to inflict their anti-Western and anti-human fantasies?

In the US, we already have a Science Czar who has advocated putting sterilants in the water supply. Why not use poison instead? After all, it may only be a matter of years before global warming inconveniences the polar bears unless the human race is reduced to a few barefoot peasants cowering before their socialist overlords.

Hat tip: The Blogprof. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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An international team of environmental scientists led by the University of Pennsylvania has shown that sea-level rise, at least in North Carolina, is accelerating. Researchers found 20th-century sea-level rise to be three times higher than the rate of sea-level rise during the last 500 years. In addition, this jump appears to occur between 1879 and 1915, a time of industrial change that may provide a direct link to human-induced climate change.

The results appear in the current issue of the journal Geology.

The rate of relative sea-level rise, or RSLR, during the 20th century was 3 to 3.3 millimeters per year, higher than the usual rate of one per year. Furthermore, the acceleration appears consistent with other studies from the Atlantic coast, though the magnitude of the acceleration in North Carolina is larger than at sites farther north along the U.S. and Canadian Atlantic coast and may be indicative of a latitudinal trend related to the melting of the Greenland ice sheet.

Understanding the timing and magnitude of this possible acceleration in the rate of RSLR is critical for testing models of global climate change and for providing a context for 21st-century predictions.

“Tide gauge records are largely inadequate for accurately recognizing the onset of any acceleration of relative sea-level rise occurring before the 18th century, mainly because too few records exist as a comparison,” Andrew Kemp, the paper’s lead author, said. “Accurate estimates of sea-level rise in the pre-satellite era are needed to provide an appropriate context for 21st-century projections and to validate geophysical and climate models.”

The research team studied two North Carolina salt marshes that form continuous accumulations of organic sediment, a natural archive that provides scientists with an accurate way to reconstruct relative sea levels using radiometric isotopes and stratigraphic age markers. The research provided a record of relative sea-level change since the year 1500 at the Sand Point and Tump Point salt marshes in the Albemarle-Pamlico estuarine system of North Carolina. The two marshes provided an ideal setting for producing high-resolution records because thick sequences of high marsh sediment are present and the estuarine system is microtidal, which reduces the vertical uncertainty of aleosea-level estimates. The study provides for the first time replicated sea-level reconstructions from two nearby sites.

In addition, comparison with 20th-century tide-gauge records validates the use of this approach and suggests that salt-marsh records with decadal and decimeter resolution can supplement tide-gauge records by extending record length and compensating for the strong spatial bias in the global distribution of longer instrumental records.

SOURCE

Posted by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

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Environmentalists across California have organized a series of colorful events Saturday to press for tough federal legislation and an international treaty to curb global warming. The participants are part of “an international day of action,” with about 4,000 events in 170 countries at places including the Taj Mahal and the Eiffel Tower, according to 350.org, a group started by environmentalist Bill McKibben.

Members of 30 Santa Barbara and Los Angeles-area environmental groups and their supporters will gather at 3 p.m. on the Manhattan Beach Pier for the “Amazing Waving Human Tide Line” to highlight the the sea rise expected from climate change. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted last month to endorse the International Day of Climate Action. (Click here to download a description of the South Bay 350 Climate Action Group.)

What fun! I hope they bring their coats, since it is actually scheduled to be a nippy 70 degrees in Manhattan Beach, three degrees below normal. And there will be many more demonstrations full of people who drove, but, surely didn’t shower, across California. Perhaps if they got a job……… Na. But, the LA Times wonders if photo ops can stop global warming. Well, photo ops are all these Climahysterics have. They won’t give up their large carbon footprint lives. Making changes is, like everything else in Liberal World, for someone else to do.

Oh, and look, they are doing the same in New England. Of course, there is a wee bit of a problem (besides the below average temperatures): people are buying this whole man made global warming mule fritters in smaller and smaller numbers. They care less and less about the issue. More and more scientists/climatologists are calling BS. And more and more cold records are being set, such as in Germany. But, hey, it is a beautiful day for a demonstration, isn’t it?

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World leaders have 50 days to save the Earth from irreversible global warming, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Monday.

Brown said climate catastrophe would occur if world leaders fail to agree on a climate protection deal at a major climate conference this December in Copenhagen, Denmark.

“If we do not reach a deal at this time, let us be in no doubt: Since once the damage from unchecked emissions growth is done, no retrospective global agreement, in some future period, can undo that choice. By then it will be irretrievably too late,” Brown told the Major Economies Forum, a conference bringing together representatives from the world’s 17 biggest polluters in London.

Since some of the biggest polluters have no interest in deliberately crippling their own economies — i.e., China, India, Brazil — the chances of bureauweenies substantially reducing harmless CO2 emissions are close to nil. The chances of them affecting the weather in any way are exactly nil. Make the most of your last 50 days!

On a tip from mega. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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For years, leading plaintiffs’ lawyers have promised a legal assault on industrial America for contributing to global warming.

So far, the trial bar has had limited success. The hurdles to such suits are pretty obvious: How do you apportion fault and link particular plaintiffs’ injuries to the pollution emitted by a particular group of defendants?

Today, though, plaintiffs’ lawyers may be a gloating a bit, after a favorable ruling Friday from the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, which is regarded as one of the more conservative circuit courts in the country.  Here’s a link to the ruling.

The suit was brought by landowners in Mississippi, who claim that oil and coal companies emitted greenhouse gasses that contributed to global warming that, in turn, caused a rise in sea levels, adding to Hurricane Katrina’s ferocity. (See photo of Bay St. Louis, Miss., after the storm.)

For a nice overview of the ruling, and its significance in the climate change battle, check out this blog post by J. Russell Jackson, a Skadden Arps partner who specializes in mass tort litigation. The post likens the Katrina plaintiffs’ claims, which set out a chain of causation, to the litigation equivalent of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.”

At first blush, this looks like just another meaningless and hysterical law suit, but, think about this for a moment. The plaintiffs are going to have to provide actual, factual, relevant, and meaningful evidence, and actually debate the merits of man made global warming in the public eye. The defense will be able to provide relevant, factual, and meaningful evidence, such as the “no warming in the last 10 years” information, all in the public eye. If the climahysteric plaintiffs lose, this could be a major slap in the face for the AGW movement.

Al Gore has been challenged to debate after debate after debate, yet, refuses to engage in one. The Washington Posts’ Andrew Freeman chickened out on a debate with Climate Depot’s Marc Morano. The US Chamber of Commerce called for a climate trial, and, rather than anyone taking them up on it, they were demonized. Lord Monckton has offered to debate any climate alarmist, and none will take him on. Perhaps this trial will shed some reality on the situation, and finally put to rest the notion of anthropogenic climate change. Until they bring it back up in a few years, of course.

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