Climate // Current TV

Tornadoes and severe weather in South leave nearly 300 dead

The death toll approached 300 tonight from the tornadoes and thunderstorms that tore... more

JanforGore
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1 year ago
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145 comments

Climate activists storm the Department of the Interior

On April 18, climate activists under the name of Reclaim Power stormed the DC... more

CarlosBobthe3rd
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1 year ago
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6 comments

Sweet solution: Sugarcane helps cool climate

Sugarcane is not only a major source for producing a biofuel alternative to gasoline,... more

suzane
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1 year ago
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Tornadoes rip across Midwest with more storms to come

High winds were expected to cause localized damage Monday along a 1,000-mile line of... more

JanforGore
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1 year ago
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Imagination "reinventing the world through recycling"

This is a 30 sec video about Regina Parkinson a Texas native who uses recycled items... more

nsbryant
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1 year ago
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3 comments

Nitrogen pollution 'costs EU up to £280bn a year'

Nitrogen pollution from farms, vehicles, industry and waste treatment is costing the... more

suzane
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1 year ago
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GOP swallows blue pill of delusion, votes to strip EPA of greenhouse gas authority

It’s no surprise that the Republicans in the House of Representatives want to do... more

hoosierdaddy
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1 year ago
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GOP swallows blue pill of delusion, votes to strip EPA of greenhouse gas authority

In the Matrix, Morpheus offers Neo a choice between the blue pill of delusion and the... more

angliss
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1 year ago
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The right isn’t wrong, just stupid | Scholars and Rogues

What if the problem with conservatives isn’t that they are wrong, but rather... more

hoosierdaddy
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Republican Controlled Committee Legislates That Climate Change Does Not Exist!!!

written by Sean Pool, an Assistant Editor for Science Progress

House Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee demonstrated their commitment to science denial Wednesday by unanimously voting down three separate amendments offered by Democrats to reaffirm basic facts about climate science. They then unanimously voted to pass the Upton-Inhofe bill to repeal the Environmental Protection Agency's scientific endangerment finding on greenhouse pollution.

Let's be clear. Congress should not attempt to make scientific decisions. The role of Congress is to take the best science and use it to make the best possible policy. The three amendments rejected unanimously by committee Republicans each lays out a fairly basic statement about generally accepted climate science.

* Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado offered an amendment that simply reaffirmed what EPA scientists stated, that "'the scientific evidence is compelling' that elevated concentrations of greenhouse gases resulting from anthropogenic emissions 'are the root cause of recently observed climate change.'" That amendment was rejected in a party-line vote with all Republicans voting no.
* Rep. Jay Inslee of Washington state offered an amendment, again quoting the EPA, which stated "the public health of current generations is endangered and the threat to public health for both current and future generations will likely mount over time as greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere and result in ever greater rates of climate change." This, too, was rejected in a party-line vote with all Republicans voting no.
* The last amendment, offered by Rep. Henry Waxman of southern California, asserted even more unassailable scientific findings. His amendment stated simply that "Congress accepts the scientific finding of the Environmental Protection Agency that warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level." It was also unanimously rejected in a party-line vote with all Republicans voting no.

This is really getting ridiculous. In countries around the world, political parties on the left and right are debating how to deal with climate change. But by continuing to debate whether the world is even warming -- an objective, empirical, verifiable, scientific fact -- our great nation is demonstrating to the rest of the world that we are still in the Stone Age on this issue.

Let's keep in mind that virtually every credible climate scientist and science organization, including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, has declared climate change a "settled fact." Here is another quote from the academy which reaffirms all three of the rejected amendments:

Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities ... and in many cases is already affecting a broad range of human and natural systems.

The National Academy of Sciences might be thought of like the Supreme Court for science, so what they say matters a lot. But then again, even the U.S. Supreme Court itself has decided that the EPA should have the authority to regulate carbon pollution in the 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA decision.

Notwithstanding the advice of every U.S. science agency and the opinions of virtually every credibly international science organization, the committee voted 34-19 to pass the Upton-Inhofe dirty air bill, H.R. 910, which eliminates the ability of the federal government to regulate planet-warming carbon pollution. The Project on Climate Science summed it up nicely:

Through this antiscience legislation, the House Energy and Commerce Committee is substituting ideology for the intensive, comprehensive, peer-reviewed analysis of thousands of scientists, including the scientists at the EPA.

Comically, as Joe Romm noted yesterday, one of the committee members voting against the amendments John Shimkus (R-IL), cites the Bible as his reason for rejecting climate science. "God said the earth would not be destroyed in a flood." Another, Michael Burgess (R-TX), cited an online public opinion poll (in and of itself an unscientific way of sampling opinion data) as reason for rejecting the science of global warming. Making matters worse, it turns out the particular poll was targeted by well-known climate science denial website Watt's Up With That in a campaign to skew the results.written by Sean Pool, an Assistant Editor for Science Progress House Republicans on... more

figgdimension
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1 year ago
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Paradigm Shift: The great machine of capitalism starts to heave.

Here's an interesting article from adbusters.org

Note: For those right-wingers that don't know how to read -and don't know anybody that does, there is link at adbusters.org where you can download the audio version.

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/94/paradigm-shift.html

There’s a tectonic mindshift going on in the science of economics right now, but you wouldn’t know it by tuning in to the likes of Martin Wolf, Paul Krugman, Andrew Sorkin, Lawrence Summers, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, Dominique Strauss-Kahn or most of the professors teaching Economics 101 around the world. These old-school practitioners of neoclassicism are stuck in past, versed in only one language: the language of pure, unadulterated money.

As oil reserves dwindle and climate tipping points loom, they babble on endlessly about liquidity, stimulus, derivatives, bond markets, sovereign debt, AAA ratings and investment banker bonuses. They never say a word about melting glaciers, eroding coral reefs, rising sea levels, fizzing oceans or the methane that’s bubbling out of the arctic tundra. Like medieval theologians who argued endlessly about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, today’s economists argue incessantly about how economic growth can be sustained forever on a finite planet. Ten years from now, as the blowback from the externalities of their way of doing business repeatedly hammers us and global warming kicks in with a vengeance, we’ll look back in shock and awe – and wonder what it was about these logic freaks and their money narratives that so mesmerized us.

Five hundred years ago astronomers following Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the universe were tearing their hair out trying to make sense of all their calculations of the sun, moon and stars moving around above us in the night sky. It was only when Copernicus pointed out that we are not the center of the universe – the sun does not revolve around the Earth but rather the other way around – that all their convoluted calculations fell magically into place.

Today something eerily similar is happening in the science of economics: Economists and lay people alike are realizing that our human money economy is a subset of the Earth’s larger bioeconomy rather than the other way around. Over the next few years, as this monumental shift of perspective kicks in, all the economic, ecological and financial craziness of the industrial era will evaporate, and a new sustainable way of running our planetary household will fall magically into place.

Economics students, especially PhD students, in departments around the world have a crucial role to play in ushering in this new paradigm. Go to kickitover.org and join the movement.

—Kalle LasnHere's an interesting article from adbusters.org Note: For those... more

Roldan
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1 year ago
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Nick Griffin MEP: Man-made climate change is the deadliest scam in history

Whew it is getting hot in here! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1zuTM1B1io

TheAmericanPatriot
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1 year ago
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9 comments

Mississippi counties take multiple hits from tornadoes over the last year

No one can question the fact that tornadoes can strike an area more than once after... more

stormchaser4850
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1 year ago
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Colorado River scarcity prompts basin states to examine their lifeline

The worst drought in the 105-year historical record of the Colorado River has opened a new era of water scarcity that is prompting state and federal water managers to evaluate never before considered options for increasing water supply and reducing demand.

The new ideas for managing the seven-state river basin, which supplies water to 30 million residents and thousands of farms, have attracted increasing attention from agricultural users and other big water interests, particularly in the upper basin states that counted on receiving more water under the region’s near-century-old water use agreement.

In Las Vegas last month, at the annual meeting of the Colorado River Water Users Association—the only organization bringing together stakeholders from each of the seven basin states—opponents and supporters made their views known during a speech by Doug Kenney, the director of the Western Water Policy Program at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Kenney was invited to Caesar’s Palace to share the first-year findings from his study on water governance in the Colorado River Basin. His message: in a new era of water scarcity along the river—where supply and demand lines have already crossed—traditional water management practices will need to be fundamentally changed.

New options for managing the Colorado include establishing provisions for year-to-year agreements with states and farmers to avoid shortages. They also include improvements in the efficiency of river operations, or by river augmentation, which means adding new supplies from a slew of sources—some viable, some expensive, and some fanciful: desalination, river diversions, and weather modification, respectively.

“I thought it was time for someone to stand up at that meeting and start talking about the reality.”

Kenney’s governance study is just one of several such assessments—carried out by academics and federal agencies, as well as state and regional water management authorities—suggesting the need for new ways to manage water flows. The studies are providing a new legal and scientific foundation for defining existing water rights within states, clarifying laws and regulations about how shortages on the river would be handled, and evaluating options for increasing the basin’s water supply and reducing demand.

Kenney argued that the states of the upper basin—Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming—are the most vulnerable if future flows are as low as predicted because the river’s legal structure gives priority to Mexico and the lower basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada.

“I thought it was time for someone to stand up at that meeting and start talking about the reality,” Kenney told Circle of Blue. “That there’s just not any water left on that river.”

While there were no catcalls or rotten fruit, Kenney admits that some representatives from the upper basin states were not pleased to hear that water promised to them nearly a century ago under the Colorado River Compact would probably not be available in the coming decades.

cont.The worst drought in the 105-year historical record of the Colorado River has opened a... more