Congress to consider Global Warming Wildlife Survival Bill

"Calling global warming the single greatest threat to the world’s natural environment, U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, today announced new legislation laying the groundwork for a national strategy to address the impacts of climate change on America’s wildlife.

The bill is the first of its kind and includes components for the most imperiled plants and animals in the United States. It would convene regional scientific discussions and a National Academy of Sciences panel to examine the impacts of climate change on endangered, threatened, and otherwise imperiled species and recommend action.

Senator Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat who chairs the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, will be an original cosponsor of the bill.

A member of the committee, Whitehouse said global warming has already begun to have a severe and lasting impact on wildlife populations and marine ecosystems in Rhode Island and around the world." |Read more|

Global Warming Starts to Divide G.O.P. Contenders

"While many conservative commentators and editorialists have mocked concerns about climate change, a different reality is emerging among Republican presidential contenders. It is a near-unanimous recognition among the leaders of the threat posed by global warming.


Within that camp, however, sharp divisions are developing. Senator John McCain of Arizona is calling for capping gas emissions linked to warming and higher fuel economy standards. Others, including Rudolph W. Giuliani and Mitt Romney, are refraining from advocating such limits and are instead emphasizing a push toward clean coal and other alternative energy sources.

All agree that nuclear power should be greatly expanded.

The debate has taken an intriguing twist. Two candidates appealing to religious conservatives, former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas and Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, call for strong actions to ease the effects of people on the climate, at times casting the effort in spiritual terms just as some evangelical groups have taken up the cause.

The emergence of climate change as an issue dividing Republicans shows just how far the discussion has shifted since 1997, when the Senate voted, 95 to 0, to oppose any international climate treaty that could hurt the American economy or excused China from responsibilities.

The debate among Republicans is largely not about whether people are warming the planet, but about how to deal with it." |Read more|

Global Warming makes Mount Blanc grow

"Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in France and western Europe, has grown more than two metres in two years - ironically as a result of global warming, experts have found.
# Pacific island could be submerged due to global warming

The Alps' tallest peak was measured at 4,810.90 metres (15,784 feet) last month, surveyors from France's Haute-Savoie region announced.

The volume of ice on Mont Blanc has doubled since 2005
Volume of ice on Mont Blanc has doubled since 2005

Generations of French schoolchildren were taught the famous peak was 4,807 metres tall, but it has been growing since 2003 and at a faster rate in recent months.

"The height as well as the volume of Mont Blanc has increased considerably, because the snow has massed on the summit over the last two years," said Philippe Borel, one of the survey team, at a meeting in the nearby resort of Chamonix." |Read more|

Gore's Nobel winnings go to Palto Alto Global Warming Alliance

A year-old Palo Alto nonprofit will receive the $750,000 former Vice President Al Gore received along with his Nobel Prize.

The Alliance for Climate Protection, which was once lauded by Gore as the planet's "PR agent," is a think tank focused on letting people know about the effects of global warming and helping them become activists against it.

The alliance also works alongside other environmental groups, such as the Sierra Club, for climate change education.

In concert with Gore's Current TV and actors that included George Clooney and Orlando Bloom, the alliance created a contest letting people submit videos on environmental action.

Gore also gave the alliance money from his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."

Linking Global Warming, Global Peace

"What does global warming have to do with global peace? The globe may find out sooner than we think, experts say.

"Climate change is and will be a significant threat to our national security and in a larger sense to life on Earth as we know it to be," retired Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, former U.S. Army chief of staff, told a congressional panel last month.

The Nobel Peace Prize Committee agrees. In awarding the prize Friday to climate campaigner Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N.-sponsored network of scientists, the Norwegian committee said the stresses of a changing global environment may heighten the "danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states."

Those like Sullivan who study the issues point particularly to the impact of drought and altered climate patterns on food and water supplies, leading to shortages that could spur huge, destabilizing migrations of people internationally.

In a report in May, scientists advising the German government noted specific scenarios that could upend the lives of millions, driving them across borders to overwhelm other lands.

"The dieback of the Amazon rain forest or the loss of the Asian monsoon could have incalculable consequences for the societies concerned," said the German Advisory Council on Global Change." |Read more|

Gore: Award Puts focus on Global Warming

"He spent decades trying to get the world to listen and believe as he did that global warming would destroy the planet unless people changed their behavior, and fast. But after former Vice President Al Gore and a host of climate scientists were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for their warnings, Gore took only the briefest of bows on a live world stage. He avoided the issue of a U.S. presidential run to "get back to business" on "a planetary emergency."

"For my part, I will be doing everything I can to try to understand how to best use the honor and the recognition from this award as a way of speeding up the change in awareness and the change in urgency," Gore said at the offices of the Alliance For Climate Protection, a nonprofit he founded last year to engage citizens in solving the problem.

Gore shared the prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations network of scientists. The scientific panel has explained the dry details of global warming in thousands of pages of footnoted reports every six years or so since 1990.

Gore, fresh from a near miss at winning the U.S. presidency in 2000, translated the numbers and jargon-laden reports into something people could understand. He made a slide show and went Hollywood. His documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" won two Academy Awards and has been credited with changing the debate in America about global warming.

"When he first started really working on the climate change issue, I remember he was ridiculed in the press and certainly by political opponents as some kind of kook out there in la-la land," said federal climate scientist Tom Peterson, an IPCC co-author. "It's delightful that he's sharing this and he deserves it well. And it's nice to have his work being vindicated."

If he felt any sense of triumph over the political and scientific critics who belittled or ignored his message, Gore did not betray it during his only public appearance Friday. He learned of his award at 2 a.m. while watching the live TV announcement — hearing his name amid the Norwegian — at his apartment in San Francisco.

Nine hours later, his tone was somber and his remarks brief. With his wife, Tipper, and four Stanford University climate scientists who were co-authors of the international climate report at his side, he referenced a recent report that concluded the ice caps at the North Pole are melting faster than previously thought and could be gone in 23 years without dramatic action.

Gore said he planned to donate his share of the $1.5 million prize to the nonprofit alliance he chairs." |Read more|

Gore's Nobel Peace Prize intensifies Global Warming debate

Al Gore shares this year’s Nobel Peace Prize with the United Nations for his efforts to make global warming a pressing global issue.

Within hours of the announcement, pundits across the country were debating whether Gore deserved the award and whether global warming is really the threat the former vice president says it is.

Gore is the first American to win the coveted international honor since Jimmy Carter in 2002.

Gore says the bottom line is, "We face a true planetary emergency."

He says it is not a political issue, but rather a "moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity."

Critics, however, question whether global warming is a threat to the planet, or just part of a continuing cycle of climate change.

They also question whether, as Gore says, man is the cause of the rise in global temperatures.

Gore says he'll donate his share of the $1.5 million award that goes with the prize to a non-profit alliance devoted to spreading the message about the urgency of the climate crisis.

Prince Urges Bold Global Warming Action

by: Associated Press

"Prince Charles told U.S. lawmakers in a letter Wednesday that the challenges of global warming require a "coordinated response, based on actions across every sector of society."

Charles, who has been praised by environmentalists for his call to action on climate change, said in a letter to Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., that the corporate sector was playing a key role in creating "a political space in which effective policies can be introduced and global progress can be achieved."

Members of the United Kingdom's Corporate Leaders Group were appearing before Markey's House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming on Wednesday.

Charles wrote that the corporate group was "crucial in demonstrating that tackling climate change is the way to ensure economic security for the longer term and that it can be done in a way that does not limit the aspirations for growth of rich or poor countries."

"To secure the future for generations to follow, I hope that the boldest possible targets can be set, together with policies needed to implement them — otherwise how can we expect developing countries, such as India and China, to take action?" Charles wrote.

Markey's panel was created by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to study and offer recommendations on how to deal with global warming."

Global Warming driving up humidity levels

"Man-made global warming is driving up humidity levels, with the risk that rainfall patterns will shift or strengthen, tropical storms intensify and human health may suffer from heat stress, a study released on Wednesday said.

From 1976 to 2004, when the world's average surface temperature rose 0.49 degrees Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit), global levels of atmospheric water vapour rose 2.2 percent, according to the paper by British scientists.

By 2100, humidity levels could increase by another 10 percent, lead researcher Nathan Gillett of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, eastern England, told AFP.

Previously, scientists had noted an increase in humidity over the past few decades as higher temperatures sucked more water from the land and ocean surface.

But it was unclear whether these changes were the result of a natural or a human impact on the climate, as the data was regional rather than global and different methods were used to make the calculations.

The new paper is based on a new set of observations of humidity levels. This data was then crunched through a powerful computer model of Earth's climate system in the late 20th century." |Read more|

Global Warming: Bad news for Gnus

"The annual wildebeest migration is one of nature's most spectacular photo-ops. More than a million wildebeest — also known as gnus — crossing from the Serengeti in Tanzania to Kenya's Masai Mara National Reserve and then back again in the search of fresh grass makes for some dramatic action shots, as massive herds travel across the plains before plunging into the Mara River to swim to greener pastures.


The photos from this year's migration are just as dramatic, but for a different reason. This time, piles of wildebeest carcasses line the riverbanks, after 10,000 of the animals drowned trying to cross the Mara at the start of their journey back east to the Serengeti. The deaths are natural: each year, crocodiles and the strong current claim some victims. The numbers, though, are bizarre. The migration rarely leaves more than a few thousand dead; but this year, an estimated 10,000, or about 1% of the wildebeest population, were wiped out. Conservationists say the wildebeest simply chose the wrong point to cross the river, one where the bank on the other side was too steep to climb. As those in the front drowned, they trapped those behind them.

Nature can be cruel, but sometimes it gets some help. The Mara River was especially high this year, after the heavy rains that flooded parts of Africa, killing hundreds of people and uprooting thousands more. Climatologists are pointing to the downpours as proof that predictions that Africa will suffer the most from global warming and climate change are already coming true. The human toll is what makes all the headlines, but the consequences for Africa's wildlife is just as drastic." |Read more|

Obama vows to lead global warming fight

"Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama vowed Monday to tell Americans tough truths about global warming, and backed a "cap and trade" system to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The Illinois senator also argued the lagging US response to climate change was the product of gridlock in Washington -- in a swipe at his top rival Hillary Clinton, whom he portrays as a symptom of a US political malaise.

Obama's plan would see a 150 billion dollar investment in "climate friendly" energy, a bid to slash energy use in the economy and a target of cutting US reliance on foreign oil by at least 35 percent by 2030.

"Some of these policies are difficult politically, they aren't easy," Obama was to say in a speech in New Hampshire, according to excerpts released by his campaign.

"But being president of the United States isn't about doing what's easy. It's about doing what's hard, it's about doing what's right.

"Leadership isn't about telling people what they want to hear -- it's about telling them what they need to hear."

Obama's cap and trade program would cut greenhouse gas emissions to the level recommended by scientists, and he would lead a new drive for a global compact against global warming, his campaign said." |Read more|

3rd probe of Pumps on Canals requested

Is the Army Corps of Engineers putting New Orleans' residents safety at risk? Perhaps their incompetence resulted in the failure of the levees holding up during Hurricane Katrina. The entire Army Corps of Engineers need to be investigated.



Secretary Robert Gates has been asked to investigate a whistle-blower complaint that questions the reliability of 40 pumps the Army Corps of Engineers initially installed at three New Orleans canals after Hurricane Katrina.

It will be the third official review of the temporary pumping stations built under corps supervision at the 17th Street, London Avenue and Orleans Avenue canals after the storm's surge inundated the region 25 months ago, much of it rushing into the canals from Lake Pontchartrain and breaching substandard walls along 17th Street and London Avenue.

Corps commanders in New Orleans continue to say the once-troubled pumps have been overhauled and will work properly in a hurricane. The agency is providing information and running the pumps for a General Accounting Office team conducting a second investigation at the request of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-New Orleans.

All probes were triggered by a corps engineer with the Los Angeles district, Maria Garzino, who says corps officials haven't properly addressed the critical issues she first raised in the spring of 2006 in her role as leader of the corps' pumping systems installation team.

"My office has received serious allegations which cast doubt on the integrity of costly pumping equipment installed in three main structures by USACE and its ability to protect New Orleans from further flooding," according to a Sept. 21 letter to Gates from Scott Bloch, head of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.

In his letter Bloch determined that Garzino's claims warrant further investigation under the federal whistle-blower statute.

"I have concluded that there is a substantial likelihood that the information Ms. Garzino provided discloses a violation," he wrote. "Consequently, I am referring this information to you for an investigation of and appropriate action regarding Ms. Garzino's allegations and a report of your findings within 60 days of your receipt of this letter."

Neither Bloch's office nor the Defense Department could be reached for comment. But Col. Jeff Bedey, commander of the corps' Hurricane Protection Office in New Orleans, said Friday that he is familiar with Bloch's call for an investigation and the supporting documentation.

"I am confident that all the pumps currently in place on the three outfall canals will operate as they were designed to operate in the event a hurricane requires that we close gates," Bedey said.

Group releases documents

Jeff Ruch, executive director of the national whistle-blower advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, predicted Gates will assign investigators independent of the corps to conduct a more detailed technical probe than he says has been done to date.

In the end, Ruch said, Bloch could reject as unreasonable any or all of the findings of the Gates-directed inquiry, require more information, or accept all the findings outright.

Ruch released Bloch's letter to Gates and Garzino's official five-page "disclosure" in support of her allegations to The Times-Picayune.

Ruch's agency isn't representing Garzino, but because she consented to being publicly identified for the purposes of the investigation, Ruch said his group opted to release the documents to ensure the process is made public.

Garzino, who could not be reached for comment, was dispatched to New Orleans last year to oversee quality control in the manufacture and installation of hydraulic pumps in temporary stations that the corps and its contractors were building at the mouths of all three canals.

The stations were built alongside massive floodgates, also constructed post-Katrina, to provide internal drainage for surrounding neighborhoods in the event the gates were ever closed against storm surges in future hurricanes. The pumps are designed to lift rising canal water up and around the closed gates.

The hydraulic pumps that Garzino questions are installed at all three canals. The corps also subsequently added new nonhydraulic, direct-drive pumps to increase capacity at the much larger 17th Street Canal, and the reliability of those pumps isn't in question.

But Garzino says shortcuts taken by the corps and the contractor, Moving Waters Industries of Deerfield, Fla., to meet a June 1, 2006, deadline set by Congress produced inherently flawed pumping systems that she says still have not been properly tested.

Corps vouches for pumps

Bedey said neither Garzino's allegations nor his response to them has changed.

"I absolutely believe that the (pump) team took the information from Ms. Garzino, who was correct to write her report, and all the other things we learned over time, and made the changes required in order to operate these pumps as intended," he said.

Bedey and other corps officials said publicly last summer that they were encountering problems with some of the pumps so severe that various components would be rebuilt after the 2006 season.

They also have said they didn't test the pumps as extensively in Moving Waters Industries' laboratory as ordinarily would be done because of the critical need to provide some additional flood protection for the 2006 storm season, the first since Katrina.

But Bedey said he still thinks the decision to install the troublesome pumps in New Orleans and continue to work on them during hurricane season was a more prudent decision than simply having no drainage pumps at all had a storm threatened the city.

"Just last week, when the GAO was out here, we turned on the pumps, and they ran as long as we had enough water to run them," Bedey said.

A major challenge to testing the hydraulic pumps on site -- rather than in the lab before delivery -- is that they must have a minimum amount of water in which to operate at full capacity, and that's been hard to come by during the mostly dry days since Katrina.

"We have done everything we can do. And some of those pumps have run five or six hours continuously," Bedey said. "But it is a fact that we've never had enough water at 17th Street to operate all the 43 pumps there at one time, nor do we believe we ever will unless there's a hurricane."

In its initial probe this spring, the GAO found no evidence of fraud or improper influence behind the corps' decision to award the multimillion-dollar contracts to Moving Waters Industries. But the GAO did criticize the corps for giving false assurances to the public during the 2006 hurricane season.

Once it became apparent that they wouldn't be able to correct serious vibration problems during the season, corps officials should have provided a more honest, less optimistic assessment of the ability of their troubled pumps to perform during a hurricane, the GAO said.

Just a few weeks later, a separate "technical review" was ordered by Brig. Gen Robert Crear, commander of the Mississippi Valley Division in Vicksburg, Miss., which oversees the corps in New Orleans. He summoned corps engineers from other districts to do the work, and in a June 4, 2007, memo, Crear and the engineers insisted the pumps have been tested and will work properly.

But the report also confirmed that another round of needed repairs that would provide even more reliability were only just getting under way.

As a result, Landrieu ordered a second GAO investigation.

Bedey said he hasn't yet been apprised of those findings and doesn't know whether that probe is complete.

Melting Ice Packs displaces Alaska Walrus

"Thousands of walrus have appeared on Alaska's northwest coast in what conservationists are calling a dramatic consequence of global warming melting the Arctic sea ice.

Alaska's walrus, especially breeding females, in summer and fall are usually found on the Arctic ice pack. But the lowest summer ice cap on record put sea ice far north of the outer continental shelf, the shallow, life-rich shelf of ocean bottom in the Bering and Chukchi seas.

Walrus feed on clams, snails and other bottom dwellers. Given the choice between an ice platform over water beyond their 630-foot diving range or gathering spots on shore, thousands of walrus picked Alaska's rocky beaches." |Read more|

Former Soviet Leader Tours the 9th Ward

Posted by:

John Pope, Staff writer
Times Picayune

Mikhail Gorbachev drew loud cheers in New Orleans Friday when he promised to lead a local revolution if the Army Corps of Engineers doesn't keep its promise to improve levees by 2011.

"We will be coming back," the Soviet Union's last leader said, through an interpreter, during a ceremony in the Lower Garden District. "If this pledge is not fulfilled, we will start a new revolution in New Orleans."

After the applause died down, Gorbachev said that action should be a last resort, even though, he added, most Americans apparently have forgotten that their country is the result of a revolution.

"We shouldn't want another revolution," he said. "We should do our best in every (other) way."

Gorbachev, who is in New Orleans as the board chairman of a worldwide organization that promotes environmentally friendly construction, spoke at the International School of Louisiana after a quick tour of the Katrina-ravaged Lower 9th Ward.

"A few brief hours are not enough to see everything," he said, "but it is enough to appreciate the scale of the disaster that the city had to go through."

As a result of that trip, "my impression was that New Orleans is beginning to come back," Gorbachev said, "but, still, there is a lot that remains to be done. ...

"We saw many traces of the devastation, but we also saw the signs of the city coming back."

In a meeting with City Council President Arnie Fielkow earlier Friday, Gorbachev said he had been told of the work that businesses and citizens' groups have done to help restore the city.

Such action is commendable, reflecting the citizens' courage, he said. But, he added in an interview, it is not enough.

"The government of the state and the federal government should express to the world .¤.¤. the intent to rebuild this city, because I think that this great country will be a loser if it is not able to assure this.

"If such a great country cannot rebuild this city, then what about all the other small countries?"

Gorbachev, who won the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize, indirectly criticized President Bush and the Iraq war, in which the United States has been involved longer than it was in World War II.

"Unfortunately, money is easily found for war," he said. "It takes just a few days. I have to say that that's not the first time that money is easily found for wars but not for this kind of trauma, not for this kind of tragedy."

When asked whether he would deliver this message to Bush, Gorbachev replied, "If there is an occasion, I certainly will volunteer my opinion."

Different kind of chairman

Gorbachev, 76, is the board chairman of Green Cross International, which is made up of about 30 organizations, including the U.S. affiliate, Global Green USA. That is the organization working with actor Brad Pitt to build environmentally friendly, energy-conserving homes in the Holy Cross neighborhood and, perhaps, the rest of the Lower 9th Ward.

Green Cross' board chose New Orleans for its first meeting in the United States to express solidarity with New Orleanians and their struggle to rebuild, Gorbachev said.

The board meeting, which is not open to the public, will be held today at the Hotel InterContinental. Gorbachev will speak tonight at a dinner at the Foundry. Tickets for the fundraiser, which benefits Green Cross, range from $250 to $25,000.

Gorbachev, who wore a suit but no tie, and his retinue were at the International School because Global Green USA has chosen the school to be made more energy-efficient and improve indoor air quality, Global Green spokesman Ruben Aronin said.

The changes will include daylight sensors that will turn off lights when use is low, solar panels and solar-powered water heaters, said Matt Petersen, Global Green's president and chief executive officer.

The school on Coliseum Square, which goes from kindergarten through the seventh grade, is the second in New Orleans to be designated a Green Seeds School. The first was A.P. Tureaud Elementary School; five more will be named, Aronin said.

The changes to these schools, which are underwritten by a $2 million grant from the Bush-Clinton Katrina Foundation, cost between $75,000 and $100,000 per school, Aronin said.

Warm welcome

For the Friday visitors, the students strung welcoming signs, in Russian, on brightly colored sheets of construction paper -- one Cyrillic letter per sheet -- across a hall. Pupils serenaded them with "This Earth Is Your Earth," a retooled version of the Woody Guthrie folk song "This Land Is Your Land," that ended with this line: "Keep this Earth green for you and me."

The welcome extended to the former head of what used to be the biggest Communist country was just one example of the changes that have occurred since the Soviet Union fell apart 16 years ago.

Other changes were evident Friday. In a sharp contrast to the overheated rhetoric from the Cold War, Gorbachev called for international dialogue, and the former leader of a country that was officially atheist credited God for the fact that more people were not killed by Katrina and the ensuing flooding.

"I think that the world is changing so rapidly that I feel that even I am not keeping pace," he said in the interview.

"In this situation," Gorbachev continued, "it is very important .¤.¤. to lay the foundation for the building of our future so that we don't have to say one day, 'We're so sorry that we didn't take the opportunity at the beginning of the 21st century to promote whatever is positive and eliminate whatever is negative.'¤"

A capitalist idea

Gorbachev has changed, too. The man who grew up under communism has worked in advertising campaigns for Pizza Hut and Louis Vuitton, the upscale luggage manufacturer.

In one ad, Gorbachev is sitting in a car with a $900 Louis Vuitton duffel bag, driving past a remnant of the Berlin Wall.

He said his reason for joining the ad campaigns was simple: He needed the money for his family and for the Gorbachev Foundation, which promotes diplomatic values and moral principles, according to its Web site.

"The money was very timely for a good cause when we were in great difficulty," Gorbachev said.

His compensation didn't include a set of Louis Vuitton luggage. "More like a briefcase," he said.