John McCain Doesn't Know What Kind of Car He Drives!

I'd have a hard time forgetting if I drove one of these.

And the hits just keep on coming.

dailykos: Ok, Now McCain does not know what car he drives!

In our news interview, he was asked what kind of car he drove, he could simply not answer. As with Politico’s question about home ownership, he didn’t know and had to ask a nearby aide. "A Cadillac CTS," she told him.

What the hell is his carbon footprint, anyway? The guy has to be generating 100 times more carbon into the atmosphere than me, with all his (I mean hers) houses, and cars, and private planes.

Private Plane McCain, planet killer. Who doesn't know how many houses he owns, what car he drives, or the difference between Sunni and Shia.

I Read The News Today, Oh Boy: June 20, 2008

National Geographic: Kiribati Beach House
Photograph by George Steinmetz/CORBIS

A tiny group of Pacific coral islands, the Republic of Kirabati, with a population of less than a hundred thousand, will be submerged under the ocean in 50 to 100 years as a result of rising ocean waters. Bangladesh, the most crowded nation on earth, population 150,000,000 -- One Hundred and Fifty Million Human Beings -- will be completely underwater by the end of this century, according to NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen.

And those estimates may be accelerated, as data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) shows that Arctic sea ice is melting even faster than it did last year. An example of the chaos that this will bring is in Iceland, where two polar bears were shot in the past two weeks when they showed up hundreds of miles from their habitat.

And what are the Bush Administration and their rubber stamps in Congress doing to address global warming? Nothing. No, take that back, less than nothing. Republicans in the Senate blocked a bill to cut greenhouse emissions last week. The United States taxpayers are being forced to pay to build permanent bases in Iraq, which are surely to provide security for the oil companies (Exxon, Total, BP and Shell) which have just been awarded no-bid contracts to exploit the Iraqi oil fields. The Oilman-In-Chief sent thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to their deaths for the bottom line of Exxon.

Which of his crimes will Bush pay for? The torture he personally authorized? (though he is now trying to blame it on the soldiers, we know that it was the Bush Administration's official policy, memorialized in legal memos and West Wing meetings.) Maj. General Antonio Taguba writes this week that the Bush Administration committed war crimes, and recommends prosection. The Democratic Sheeple Party is unlikely to do so; we let everyone involved in Iran-Contra go, too.

By failing to prosecute the war criminals who perpetrated Iran-Contra, we populated the Project for a New American Century and all the other right wing "think tanks" with all those unindicted co-conspirators, who spent years conspiring on their next nefarious plan: to get us to attack Iraq. As Digby says: When you let Republicans get away with murder, they will do it again.

Some days reading the news is nihilistic. I'm going to take the weekend off from political blogging & regain my equilibrium.

It's Now or Never

A heavy haze could be seen in Beijing in August 2007. Two recent reports call for a heightened global effort to reduce carbon emissions. (By Greg Baker -- Associated Press)

WaPo: Carbon Output Must Near Zero To Avert Danger, New Studies Say

Using advanced computer models to factor in deep-sea warming and other aspects of the carbon cycle that naturally creates and removes carbon dioxide (CO2), the scientists, from countries including the United States, Canada and Germany, are delivering a simple message: The world must bring carbon emissions down to near zero to keep temperatures from rising further.

[]

Schmittner, lead author of a Feb. 14 article in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles, said his modeling indicates that if global emissions continue on a "business as usual" path for the rest of the century, the Earth will warm by 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. If emissions do not drop to zero until 2300, he calculated, the temperature rise at that point would be more than 15 degrees Fahrenheit.

'Carbon dioxide levels at 650,000-year high'

National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration
WSJ (republished in Denver Post): Carbon dioxide levels at 650,000-year high

For a half century, sensors atop Mauna Loa on the island of Hawaii have captured the world-wide signature of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, due largely to burning coal, oil and natural gas. The carbon dioxide traps heat. For 50 years, these CO2 readings, known as the Keeling Curve, have been climbing steadily, setting and then breaking a new record every 12 months or so.

Global concentrations of CO2 in 2006, not surprisingly then, reached the highest level since the record-keeping began in 1958, the World Meteorological Organization recently announced in its annual greenhouse-gas bulletin. Based on samples from 40 countries, the level of carbon dioxide in the air reached 381.2 parts per million, up fractionally from 2005 — concentrations not seen in 650,000 years, scientists said.

This week, while diplomats from 180 countries argued over the cost of staving off predicted climate changes, the Mauna Loa readings started to approach even higher levels.

These annual measurements are the world's longest continuous record of CO2 concentrations and, plotted as data points in a rising arc, form one of the most important graphs in science.

By 1960, the data had provided the first clear evidence that carbon was accumulating in the atmosphere and implicated human activity. By inference, it also records how little has been done each year since to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. "It is one of the iconic records of human influence on the planet," said atmospheric chemist Pieter Tans at the federal Earth Systems Research Laboratory in Boulder. "When you look at it, it is shocking how overwhelming the human influence has been on the atmosphere. It is the scientific basis for the whole anxiety we have about climate change caused by human beings." Climate scientists call the graph the Keeling Curve in tribute to a skeptical atmospheric chemist named Charles D. Keeling, who first began monitoring the pure air at two of Earth's most remote locations — Mauna Loa and the South Pole — in 1958. Oil then sold for $3 a barrel, a new fuel-efficient Ford Edsel promised 12 miles to the gallon, and no one thought the carbon released by burning fossil fuels, making cement or clearing land could have a measurable effect on Earth's climate.