Planetary Ruin

The Sydney Opera House’s gleaming white-shelled roof was darkened Saturday night along with much of the rest of Australia’s largest city, which switched off the lights to register concern about global warming.

The arch of Sydney’s other iconic structure, the harbor bridge, was also blacked out, along with dozens of skyscrapers and countless homes in the 4 million-strong city, in an hour-long gesture organizers said they hoped would be adopted as an annual event by cities around the world.

Mayor Clover Moore, whose officials shut down all nonessential lights on city-owned buildings, said Sydney was “asking people to think about what action they can take to fight global warming.”

Restaurants throughout the city held candlelit dinners, and families gathered in public places to take part in a countdown to lights out, sending up a cheer as lights started blinking off at 7:30 p.m.
 
Buildings went dark one by one. Some floors in city skyscrapers remained lit, and security and street lights, those at commercial port operations and at a sports stadium, stayed on.

“It’s an hour of active, thoughtful darkness, a celebration of our awakening to climate change action,” said Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett, who attended a harborside function to watch the event.

While downtown was significantly darker than normal, the overall effect, as seen in television footage from overhead helicopters, was that the city’s patchwork of millions of tiny lights had thinned, not disappeared.

“We were expecting a big difference straight away, but it was just a little bit,” said Sonja Schollen, who took sons Harry and James to a park to watch the skyline, joining dozens of other families. Children waved glo-sticks and sparklers while parents picnicked and sipped wine.

“It was quite sweet, actually, because the kids started chanting ‘turn them out, turn them out.’ You can see now the city’s a bit dimmer,” she said toward the end of the hour.
 
Organizers hope Saturday’s event – which about 2,000 businesses and more than 60,000 individuals signed up for online – will get people to think about regularly switching off nonessential lights, powering down computers and other simple measures they say could cut Sydney’s greenhouse gas emissions by 5 percent this year.

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His serious aviation habit means he is hardly the best person to lecture others on the environment. But John Travolta went ahead and did it anyway.

The 53-year-old actor, a passionate pilot, encouraged his fans to “do their bit” to tackle global warming.

But although he readily admitted: “I fly jets”, he failed to mention he actually owns five, along with his own private runway.

Clocking up at least 30,000 flying miles in the past 12 months means he has produced an estimated 800 tons of carbon emissions – nearly 100 times the average Briton’s tally.

Travolta made his comments this week at the British premiere of his movie, Wild Hogs.

He spoke of the importance of helping the environment by using “alternative methods of fuel” – after driving down the red carpet on a Harley Davidson.

Travolta, a Scientologist, claimed the solution to global warming could be found in outer space and blamed his hefty flying mileage on the nature of the movie business.

But his appointment as a “serving ambassador” for the Australian airline Qantas doesn’t seem to have much to do with the movies. Nor does a recent, two-month round-the-world flying trip.

“It [global warming] is a very valid issue,” Travolta declared. “I’m wondering if we need to think about other planets and dome cities.

“Everyone can do their bit. But I don’t know if it’s not too late already. We have to think about alternative methods of fuel.

“I’m probably not the best candidate to ask about global warming because I fly jets.

“I use them as a business tool though, as others do. I think it’s part of this industry – otherwise I couldn’t be here doing this and I wouldn’t be here now.”

Travolta’s five private planes – a customised £2million Boeing 707, three Gulfstream jets and a Lear jet – are kept at the bottom of his garden in the US next to a private runway.

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The place where most of the world’s people could first begin to feel the consequences of global warming may come as a surprise: in the stomach, via the supper plate.    That’s the view of a small but influential group of agricultural experts who are increasingly worried that global warming will trigger food shortages long before it causes better known but more distant threats, such as rising sea levels that flood coastal cities.

    The scale of agriculture’s vulnerability to global warming was highlighted late last year when the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), an umbrella organization representing 15 of the world’s top crop research centres, issued an astounding estimate of the impact of climate change on a single crop, wheat, in one of the world’s major breadbaskets.

    Researchers using computer models to simulate the weather patterns likely to exist around 2050 found that the best wheat-growing land in the wide arc of fertile farmland stretching from Pakistan through Northern India and Nepal to Bangladesh would be decimated. Much of the area would become too hot and dry for the crop, placing the food supply of 200 million people at risk.

[Complete Story] 

A deadly species of jellyfish, translucent and the size of a thumbnail, is spreading along Australia’s coastline as a result of global warming, scientists warned today.

Irukandji jellyfish are among the world’s most toxic creatures – all but impossible to detect in the water but packing a potentially lethal punch belying their tiny size.

Until recently it was thought that they were confined to Australia’s northern tropical waters, but marine biologists have now found them off Queensland’s Fraser Island — a popular tourist spot about 400 miles south of their previously assumed range.

Their discovery has halted production of a Hollywood film, Fool’s Gold, starring Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey, who were originally due to be filmed swimming in the sea. Dr Jamie Seymour, from James Cook University, said she had found five of the animals off the island.

“You can’t now say the waters around Fraser Island are jellyfish safe. I mean, these animals have the potential to kill you,” he told ABC radio.

“The ones we were catching weren’t any bigger than your thumbnail. They’ve got tentacles that are probably a half to three quarters of a metre long, and pretty much transparent. So unless you really know what you’re looking for, you’re not going to see them in the water.”

If they migrate south in sufficient numbers, irukandji would threaten the safety of swimmers, surfers and snorkellers along southern Queensland’s Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast holiday destinations.

Little is known about their biology but their toxicity is legendary. One of the tiny jellyfish was blamed for killing a 58-year-old British tourist, Richard Jordan, in the Whitsunday Islands of Queensland in 2002. A few months later, a 44-year-old American tourist was stung and also died.

Increased sea temperatures caused by global warming would extend the species’ range south, Dr Seymour said. But the tourism industry said it would be alarmist and premature to warn tourists of the new threat to their safety.

“We don’t want a perception to spread that every Sunshine Coast beach is a killing field,” said Daniel Gschwind, the head of the Queensland Tourism Industry Council.

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Fresh from his face-to-face tussle with former Vice President Al Gore, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) is vowing to stall Gore’s hotly anticipated Capitol concert to draw attention to global warming.

Inhofe’s belief that climate change is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” is common knowledge in the capitol, and environmental groups cheered the new prospects for carbon-capping legislation when he ceded the Environment and Public Works Committee gavel this session. But Inhofe’s parliamentary powers can block indefinitely the resolution that would permit Gore to choose the capitol’s West Front for the U.S. leg of his seven-continent Live Earth concert tour — a collaboration between Gore and promoter Kevin Wall, who masterminded previous blockbuster charity concerts Live Aid and Live 8.

“There has never been a partisan political event at the Capitol, and this is a partisan political event,” Inhofe said yesterday.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) attempted late last week to pass the authorizing measure for Live Earth by unanimous consent. But Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) raised an objection on the floor, seeking more time for his side to look at the resolution.

Inhofe appeared to see little room for an accommodation that could allow the concert to go forward. “There’s no compromise. Either we change the rules or we don’t.”

Inhofe added that other members share his concerns, including unnamed Democrats as well as Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah), ranking member of the Rules Committee, which has jurisdiction over the concert resolution.

Democrats “may not be willing to stand up to Al Gore, but many of them found it just as objectionable as Republicans do,” he said.

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Senate GOP Says No to Al Gore-Global Warming Concert at Capitol
You probably didn’t notice it (since readers of The Crypt have actual lives), but late Friday afternoon, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) tried to get Senate Republicans to allow former Vice President Al Gore to stage a global warming concert on Capitol grounds. But Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) objected to Reid’s request, and the resolution authorizing the concert, for now, remains stuck in the Rules and Administration Committee.

Specifically, what Reid tried to do was get an unanimous consent agreement approving S. Con. Res. 24, which would permit Live Earth and the Alliance for Climate Protection, which Gore runs, to stage a July 7 concert on Capitol grounds. Live Earth is staging concerts that day on all seven continents, including Antarctica (yes, Antarctica too. If you don’t believe me, go look it up. And don’t place any nasty comments on here about me being an idiot). Reid and Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) have introduced the resolution allowing the concert to take place (see below), and it was referred to the Rules Committee. It’s still there, thanks to McConnell’s objection, and he apparently wants the panel to look into the matter before he signs off on it.

McConnell, though, said his objection only covered “the time being,” so I don’t know if that means he and other GOP leaders think it’s a good idea or not. I haven’t had time to ask him or his staff, but I will and get  back to you.

So, for all the wonks out there like me who get off on this stuff, here’s a copy of the resolution. Note that the concert won’t cost taxpayers anything, since Live Earth and the Alliance for Climate Protection will reimburse the Capitol Police for the cost of security during the concert.

Anyway, this is the Gore-concert resolution in its entirety:

S. Con. Res. 24

    Resolved by the Senate (the House of Representatives concurring),

   SECTION 1. AUTHORIZATION OF USE OF CAPITOL GROUNDS FOR LIVE EARTH CONCERT.

    (a) In General.–The Live Earth organization and the Alliance for Climate Protection (in this resolution referred to as the “sponsors”) may sponsor the Live Earth Concert (in this resolution referred to as the “event”) on the Capitol Grounds.

    (b) Date of Event.–The event shall be held on July 7, 2007, or on such other date as the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Committee on Rules and Administration of the Senate jointly designate.

   SEC. 2. TERMS AND CONDITIONS.

    (a) In General.–Under conditions to be prescribed by the Architect of the Capitol and the Capitol Police Board, the event shall be–

    (1) free of admission charge and open to the public; and

    (2) arranged not to interfere with the needs of Congress.

    (b) Expenses and Liabilities.–The sponsors shall assume full responsibility for all expenses and liabilities incident to all activities associated with the event.

   SEC. 3. EVENT PREPARATIONS.

    (a) Structures and Equipment.–Subject to the approval of the Architect of the Capitol, the sponsors may cause to be placed on the Capitol grounds such stage, seating, booths, sound amplification and video devices, and other related structures and equipment as may be required for the event, including equipment for the broadcast of the event over radio, television, and other media outlets.

    (b) Additional Arrangements.–The Architect of the Capitol and the Capitol Police Board may make any additional arrangements as may be required to carry out the event.

   SEC. 4. SECURITY AND ENFORCEMENT OF RESTRICTIONS.

    (a) In General.–Subject to subsection (b), the Capitol Police Board shall provide for–

    (1) all security related needs at the event, and

    (2) enforcement of the restrictions contained in section 5104(c) of title 40, United States Code, concerning sales, displays, advertisements, and solicitations on the Capitol Grounds, as well as other restrictions applicable to the Capitol Grounds in connection with the event.

    (b) Agreement for Reimbursement of Security Related Costs .–

    (1) IN GENERAL.–The sponsors shall enter into an agreement with the Architect of the Capitol and the Capitol Police Board under which the sponsors agree to–

    (A) reimburse the United States Capitol Police for all costs incurred (including additional personnel costs and overtime) in meeting the security related needs at the event, and

    (B) comply with the requirements of this section.

    (2) FAILURE TO ENTER INTO AGREEMENT.–If the sponsors fail, or are unable, to enter into the agreement under paragraph (1) before the date which is 14 days before the scheduled date of the event, the authority under section 1 to hold the event on the Capitol Grounds is revoked.

    (3) TREATMENT OF REIMBURSED AMOUNTS.–Any amounts received by the Capitol Police for reimbursement under paragraph (1) shall be credited to the accounts established for the expenses that are being reimbursed and shall be available to carry out the purposes of such accounts.

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Climate change could have an impact on animal evolution and ecology, scientists believe.

A 20-year study of Scottish sheep found weather patterns were driving changes in body shape and population size.

Harsh winters led to larger sheep, which brought about changes in population size, yet in milder winters this effect was not seen.

The team says the study, published in the journal Science, is the first to connect these different factors.

“Until now, it has proven really quite difficult to show how ecology and evolutionary change are linked, but we have developed a way to tie them together,” said Tim Coulson, an author of the paper and a scientist at Imperial College London.

Dr Coulson and colleagues did this by examining a population of Soay sheep on the island of Hirta in the Outer Hebrides.

“The reason we looked at these sheep is they have been studied in enormous detail. Where they live is like a natural laboratory – it is a really simple system – there is just sheep and grass on the island,” Dr Coulson explained.

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The latest point of emphasis in the global warming movement is that cattle farming endangers the planet by producing too much methane. So now, steaks and hamburgers are classified as instruments of destruction, along with large vehicles, lawn mowers, and charcoal grills. It can’t be much longer before cowboy movies, cigars and hockey are held to be enemies of the earth as well.

This has got to be the most blatant assault on guyhood since ABC moved Coach to the same night as Roseanne, and turned Hayden Fox into Phil Donahue. It’s a wonder that liberals don’t cut to the chase, by simply claiming that global warming is caused by testosterone. Then, they could make public school nurses siphon the offending fluid from the boys during health class.

Many environmentalists believe that the earth is a living organism, personified by the Greek goddess Gaia. Conveniently, it turns out that Gaia is a shrew, who demands that her men be reduced to henpecked, metrosexual noodles. Manliness makes Gaia angry, and we wouldn’t like her when she’s angry, because she’ll turn into a green monster and start smashing everything to bits. Hell hath no fury like an earth goddess exposed to excessive cattle-produced methane emissions.

Wouldn’t it be more plausible if a few items like styling gel, latte makers and tofu were said to destroy the planet as well? Perhaps, but that would not serve the purpose of expanding the base of the global warming movement. Since no liberal cause can produce much support on its own, any one of them must ally itself with all other liberal causes, so that they can pool their resources.

That’s why it’s almost impossible to distinguish the original purpose of a left-wing political rally. What starts out being an ‘anti-war’ demonstration will invariably become an convention of environmentalists, gun control advocates, pro-abortionists, animal rights activists, racial Balkanists, and outright Communists, because that’s the only way to prevent the size of the crowd from being laughably small. Therefore, environmental alarmists must incorporate other causes within their own, in order to keep their core of support relatively large and energized. Clearly, they’ve determined their alliance with the feminists to be vital to these ends.

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Some parents question how global warming is taught in schools

In Montpelier earlier this year, Bill Burrell’s sixth-grade students testified before legislative committees about global warming and what Vermont can do about it. The students also are immersed in conservation and alternative energy projects.

In South Burlington recently, a middle school math teacher used a portion of Al Gore’s documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” to illustrate linear equations. An English teacher used the movie to spark opinion writing. Another documentary, “Too Hot Not To Handle,” was shown in a science class during a climate and weather unit to help illustrate the effect that human beings have on the environment, according to Frederick Tuttle Middle School Principal Joe O’Brien.

In Jericho this week, Jericho Elementary School students put on a play about global warming.

As global warming has shifted from the subject of scientific trade journals and alternative media to the center of the public and political arenas, it also has become a hot topic in public schools. That has some parents questioning what their children are hearing. Parents who disagree with the global warming theory, or who chalk it up to environmental alarmists or political hyperbole, are finding that their points of view aren’t given the attention afforded the “other side.”

This has educators wondering if global warming is the next intelligent design versus evolution debate?

“That’s always a very delicate situation, that we provide a balance,” O’Brien said of the global warming discussion. O’Brien was contacted recently by parent Linus Leavens, who was upset that “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Too Hot Not To Handle” were shown to his children.

Although school officials say the movies were used as a tool to illustrate linear equations and to show how an argument can be presented, Leavens is still concerned that countering theories were not shown.

Leavens said he is not convinced that humans are causing climate change. He points to the views of S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist at George Mason University who is skeptical of global warming theories such as those discussed in Gore’s movie, and wants to ensure that the views of global warming dissenters are presented at school. Also, he complains, Gore is a politician.

“Al Gore is a political animal,” Leavens said. “That, I have an issue with. There are people out there who are not buying the left-wing environmental blitz hook, line and sinker. I want both sides to be presented.” ?

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Apocalyptic talk about global warming has stirred the sediment of old fears – the mushroom cloud has returned to haunt us. But, Thornton McCamish writes, the last great fright was a little different from the new one.

LAST year felt a bit like Armageddon all over again. It began on TV. Jericho was first: the sinister snickering of geiger-counters, the ICMBs flaming across the American evening sky. Then came Heroes, in which one of the characters, who can paint prophetic images, starts depicting New York under nuclear attack. On the latest 24, the terrorists upgraded to A-bombs.

It spread to literature. One of last year’s most celebrated novels, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, is an awesomely bleak epic set in the ashen aftermath of what seems to be a nuclear war.

The Bomb was back, like the ghost at a banquet of anxiety. And it wasn’t just explicit imagery that evoked nukes. It was all the stuff about the world ending. From Al Gore to the International Panel on Climate Change, everyone had grim news for the planet.

At the leading edge of climate pessimism, the prognoses were frankly apocalyptic. “Before this century is over, billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic,” predicted James Lovelock, a renowned environmental scientist.

In his book The Weather Makers, Tim Flannery puts aside his essential optimism for long enough to write: “If humans pursue a business-as-usual course for the first half of this century, I believe the collapse of civilisation due to climate change becomes inevitable.”

We shouldn’t be surprised that when planetary destruction is on the mind, we start seeing nukes again. Climate change has stirred the lees of old fears.

It makes sense that the mushroom cloud, the great spectre of the 20th century, would return to spook the 21st. Bill McKibben, author of a foundation text of the climate change era, The End of Nature (1990), explicitly links the last great fright to the new one. Climate change is “the single biggest challenge facing the planet, the equal in every way to the nuclear threat that transfixed us during the past half-century”, he wrote last year.

Some don’t buy any of this “climate porn”, as a UK think tank recently described such talk. Al Gore’s movie is “bullshit from beginning to end”, according to Ray Evans, a former Western Mining executive and author of the Lavoisier Group’s Nine Facts About Climate Change (2006). For Evans and many others, man-made climate change panic is a bugaboo, perhaps even a hoax.

Either way, the debate over climate change is now about fear. How afraid should we be? It’s a valid question, because a sensible reaction to any threat begins with fear. Fear can help propel us towards solutions, as it did in the case of ozone-depleting CFCs. But we don’t want to respond to a threat with asymmetric alarm.

Unfortunately, allowing the old threat of nuclear war to haunt our anxiety about climate change is not going to help, for the simple reason that the nuclear holocaust never happened. This happy fact tends to foster a blithe optimism about the past: look — nuclear doomsday was a beat-up! This is false logic, of course. The fact that we survived the nuclear threat doesn’t mean it was always inevitable that we would. But people believe it, nonetheless, and you can see why they’d want to.

This is the age of dire prophecy, after all. If it’s not melting icecaps, it’s a terrorist mega-strike, an avian flu pandemic or collision with a titanic near-Earth object. Yet you look up from your paper and there are the family photos, still on the shelf; outside the sun’s still coming up, the fridge still hums. We haven’t had any of these catastrophes yet, so there’s not much point getting worked up about the next one. For those in the ostrich position, the pairing of nuclear apocalypse and climate change risks by a climate Cassandra like McKibben is therefore more reassuring than anything. In 1999 I saw an article on the Y2K bug by an American columnist, Charles Krauthammer, in which the author scoffed at the “efflorescence of millennial panic” triggered by the escalation of the nuclear arms race in the 1980s.

Pondering the relative calm on the eve of the millennium, he suggested that every generation has only one millennial panic in it, and with nuclear hysteria we’d “already shot our wad”.

Apart from sounding weirdly like nuclear porn, this is just too breezy. It’s an error of tone, as much as anything; it denies the sheer horror of atomic weapons. So do most of the TV shows currently featuring nukes.

Jericho is entertainment, of course, not science. Even so, the producers only make a token stab at capturing the fantastic destructiveness of nuclear war. In this end-of-the-world soap opera, the bombs just provide the (radioactive) atmosphere for the standard small-town dramas.

TO COMPARE the threat of climate change with the threat of nuclear war is to make a category error. The nuclear threat was unique. We never formed a proportionate fear response to nuclear weapons, because no level of fear was equal to the sickening intensity of the threat. This is the second reason why our reaction to the Bomb shouldn’t guide us on our climate change anxiety: fear didn’t get us anywhere.

Which isn’t to say that it wasn’t everywhere. Most people over 30 can probably remember the moment when they first intuited the full meaning of atomic war. “I know exactly what happened to me,” Martin Amis wrote in his memoir, Experience. “When I was a child, my form-master regularly told me to get down on the floor and hope that my desk lid would protect me from the end of the world; I sensed violence and absurdity that lay beyond contemplation, and I expelled it from my conscious mind.”

My nuclear awakening also came at school. In year 8 English, my teacher was Mr Grey, an intriguingly out-of-place Englishman who had the richest speaking voice I’ve ever heard. One day in 1984, he lined us up at the window and urged us to focus on the tip of the post office tower in Shepparton, eight kilometres away across the flat paddocks, and to imagine an atomic bomb detonating directly over it, the mushroom, the supernova heat. We might, he said, with leering relish, “have just enough time to see our skin falling off our bodies before our eyes melted and ran down our cheeks”.

This was mild as far as Cold War trauma goes. Compare the experience of the six-year-old New Yorker, described in Joanna Bourke’s book, Fear: A Cultural History, who in 1951 told a classroom visitor that she had to wear an ID tag “so that people will know who I am if my face is burned away”.

I think Mr Grey just wanted to shake up our adolescent complacency. He certainly had our attention. If anything, I was grateful for the heads-up.

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