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.

Environment in Peril

Library of Congress: Totem Bight Community House, Mud Bight Village, North Tongass Highway, Ketchikan vicinity, Ketchikan Gateway Borough, AK

This will be a light posting day as I am busy, busy: here are the things that jumped out at me on the web today:

Guardian (uk): Bush opens 3m acres of Alaskan forest to logging
· Environmentalists say region will be devastated
· Supporters claim plan will revive timber industry

The US government has announced plans to open more than 3m acres (about 5,000 square miles) of Alaskan wilderness to logging, mining and road building, angering environmental campaigners who say it will devastate the region. Supporters say the plan for the Tongass National Forest, a refuge for grizzly and black bears, wolves, eagles and wild salmon, will revive the state's timber industry.

The Bush administration plan for the forest, the largest in the US at nearly 17m acres, would open 3.4m acres to logging, road building and other development, including about 2.4m acres that are currently remote and without roads. About 663,000 acres are in areas considered most valuable for timber production.

The move, the latest in a long-running saga over the Tongass forest, effectively reverses the "Roadless Rule" protection given to the area by President Clinton.

ClimateProgress: Bush SOTU: Decreasing Energy Security and Fronting for Climate Change

Lets see. After 7 years:

* Record oil imports. Check.
* Record oil prices. Check.
* Record trade deficit in oil. Check.
* Endless war in the Persian Gulf. Check.
* Iraqi oil exports below pre-war levels. Check.

Now that’s what the White House calls “Increasing Energy Security.” I’d hate to imagine what it would take for the White House to say we were Decreasing Energy Security.

And don’t get me started on “Confronting Climate Change.” The thing to always bear in mind:

President George W. Bush doesn’t just fiddle while the planet burns, he actively fans the flames and thwarts the fire-fighters.

Thank goodness this is the last Bush SOTU we’ll have to endure.

AFP: 2005 a deadly year for Caribbean coral

PARIS (AFP) - The Caribbean's fragile coral reefs were devastated in 2005 by a doubly whammy of record-high temperatures and 13 full-on hurricanes, according to a UN-sponsored report released Monday.

During the last 50 years many Caribbean reefs have lost up to 80 percent of their coral cover, damaging or destroying the main source of livelihood for hundreds of thousands of people, said the report, prepared by a team of scientists and experts at the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network.

The study was jointly sponsored by UNESCO and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission.

Coral-based ecosystems are extremely sensitive to temperature increases, which have led over the last 50 years to massive bleaching -- affecting up to 95 percent of the reefs around some islands, including the Cayman Islands, Jamaica, Cuba, and the French West Indies.

2005 was the warmest year since records were first kept in 1880, and global warming is likely to increase in years to come, climate scientists have warned.

'An Underwater Holocaust' of Coral

According to this article, conservative estimates are that 1/3 of the coral in the Caribbean died in the last three to four months.

One third of the Caribbean's coral gone. In the last three to four months! There are areas in the Indian and Pacific Oceans where coral mortality has been 90%. Ninety percent gone! We must address global warming forcefully and immediately. Please, vote the global warming deniers out of office in November. The world is depending on us, who contribute 25% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions, to fix our problem.


In Puerto Rico, colonies of 800-year-old star lobed coral died from the bleaching.
This old chunk of brain coral is at least 90 percent dead from the disease called "white plague".
AP, via CNN: Caribbean coral suffers record die-off
World's coral reef loss 'an underwater holocaust'

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A one-two punch of bleaching from record hot water followed by disease has killed ancient and delicate coral in the biggest loss of reefs scientists have ever seen in Caribbean waters.

Researchers from around the globe are scrambling to figure out the extent of the loss. Early conservative estimates from Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands find that about one-third of the coral in official monitoring sites has recently died.

"It's an unprecedented die-off," said National Park Service fisheries biologist Jeff Miller, who last week checked 40 stations in the Virgin Islands.

"The mortality that we're seeing now is of the extremely slow-growing reef-building corals. These are corals that are the foundation of the reef ... We're talking colonies that were here when Columbus came by have died in the past three to four months."

Some of the devastated coral can never be replaced because it only grows the width of one dime a year, Miller said.

Coral reefs are the basis for a multibillion-dollar tourism and commercial fishing economy in the Caribbean. Key fish species use coral as habitat and feeding grounds. Reefs limit the damage from hurricanes and tsunamis. More recently they are being touted as possible sources for new medicines.

If coral reefs die "you lose the goose with golden eggs" that are key parts of small island economies, said Edwin Hernandez-Delgado, a University of Puerto Rico biology researcher.

On Sunday, Hernandez-Delgado found a colony of 800-year-old star coral -- more than 13 feet high -- that had just died in the waters off Puerto Rico.

"We did lose entire colonies," he said. "This is something we have never seen before."

On Wednesday, Tyler Smith, coordinator of the U.S. Virgin Islands Coral Reef Monitoring program, dived at a popular spot for tourists in St. Thomas and saw an old chunk of brain coral, about 3 feet in diameter, that was at least 90 percent dead from the disease called "white plague."

"We haven't seen an event of this magnitude in the Caribbean before," said Mark Eakin, coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Reef Watch.

The Caribbean is actually better off than areas of the Indian and Pacific ocean where mortality rates -- mostly from warming waters -- have been in the 90 percent range in past years, said Tom Goreau of the Global Coral Reef Alliance. Goreau called what's happening worldwide "an underwater holocaust."

And with global warming, scientists are pessimistic about the future of coral reefs.

"The prognosis is not good," said biochemistry professor M. James Crabbe of the University of Luton near London. In early April, he will investigate coral reef mortality in Jamaica. "If you want to see a coral reef, go now, because they just won't survive in their current state."

For the Caribbean, it all started with hot sea temperatures, first in Panama in the spring and early summer, and it got worse from there.

New NOAA sea surface temperature figures show the sustained heating in the Caribbean last summer and fall was by far the worst in 21 years of satellite monitoring, Eakin said.

"The 2005 event is bigger than all the previous 20 years combined," he said.

What happened in the Caribbean would be the equivalent of every city in the United States recording a record high temperature at the same time, Eakin said. And it remained hot for weeks, even months, stressing the coral.

The heat causes the symbiotic algae that provides food for the coral to die and turn white. That puts the coral in critical condition. If coral remains bleached for more than a week, the chance of death soars, according to NOAA scientists.

In the past, only some coral species would bleach during hot water spells and the problem would occur only at certain depths. But in 2005, bleaching struck far more of the region at all depths and in most species.

A February NOAA report calculates 96 percent of lettuce coral, 93 percent of the star coral and nearly 61 percent of the iconic brain coral in St. Croix had bleached. Much of the coral had started to recover from the bleaching last fall, but then the weakened colonies were struck by disease, finishing them off.

Eakin, who oversees the temperature study of the warmer water, said it's hard to point to global warming for just one season's high temperatures, but other scientists are convinced.

"This is probably a harbinger of things to come," said John Rollino, the chief scientist for the Bahamian Reef Survey. "The coral bleaching is probably more a symptom of disease -- the widespread global environmental degradation -- that's going on."

Crabbe said evidence of global warming is overwhelming.

"The big problem for coral is the question of whether they can adapt sufficiently quickly to cope with climate change," Crabbe said. "I think the evidence we have at the moment is: No, they can't.

"It'll not be the same ecosystem," he said. "The fish will go away. The smaller predators will go away. The invertebrates will go away."

See No Global Warming, Hear No Global Warming, Speak No Global Warming

From today's WaPo:

DISPATCH FROM NEW ENGLAND
Sports on Ice Are Feeling Under the Weather

The problem, as Washingtonians also know, is that this January did not act like January on the East Coast. In Boston, the average temperature last month was a little over 36 degrees -- more than seven degrees above normal. Farther north in Burlington, Vt., January was even more abnormal, 10.2 degrees too warm.

Forecasters say the fault lay with the jet stream. Instead of blowing frigidly in from the north, the dominant flow was more directly west to east, bringing along wetter, warmer, Pacific weather.

"Normal climate variability," a government forecaster called it.

This article does not even mention global warming. No mention that 9 of the 10 warmest years in human history are 9 of the 10 last years. No mention that 2005 was the warmest in recorded history. The corporate media goes blithely on, presenting all news as "infotainment", stripped of context. It's like covering 9/11 by saying, "Look, a plane flew into the World Trade Center! Two! Hmmm. That's unusual."

Today's global warming news:

Global warming threatens Tibet rail link

Feb 5, 2006 — BEIJING (Reuters) - Global warming could threaten the new Qinghai-Tibet Railway, the world's highest, within a decade, a Chinese researcher said in remarks published on Sunday.

Wu Ziwang, a frozen soil specialist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told the official Xinhua news agency his research over three decades revealed large areas of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau showed signs of shrinking, as they were frozen less of the time.

This could threaten the new railway, which is to start operations this year, Wu said.

"Fast thawing of frozen soil in the plateau might greatly increase the instability of the ground, causing more grave geological problems in the frozen soil areas where major projects such as highways or railways run through," Wu added.

Global warming boosting Greenland glacier flow

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Two major glaciers in Greenland have recently begun to flow and break up more quickly under the onslaught of global warming, a new study said on Friday, raising the specter of millions drowning from rising sea levels.

The report from the University of Swansea's School of the Environment and Society said the Kangerdlugssuaq and Helheim glaciers had doubled their rate of flow to the ocean over the past two years after steady movement during the 1990s.

This spurt meant that current environmental models of the rate of retreat of Greenland's giant ice sheet -- which could add seven meters to the height of the world's oceans if it disappears -- had underestimated the problem.

Global Warming Posing Significant Threat To Great Barrier Reef

Sydney, Australia (AHN) - Australia's hot summer has had a devastating effect on the ecologically sensitive Great Barrier Reef.

Water temperatures during the past four months had been well above normal and the reef is following a similar temperature profile of 2001-2002, which led to the worst incidence of coral bleaching to the spectacular natural formation.

The University of Queensland scientists say the underwater scene shocked them and are fearful the entire reef may be at risk of destruction from global warming.

Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg reports most of the reefs the team saw are now completely bleached.

He continues, "Going down to 10 meters, every pieces of coral was a glowing white color - all that brown color had disappeared and that was surprising for us.”