Planetary Ruin

Since the documentary he starred in, “An Inconvenient Truth,” won an Academy Award, speculation has only increased about Al Gore’s potential entry into the presidential race. He is not taking any overt steps toward running, and that may be the cleverest strategy of all. A Democratic strategist sent Gore a memo sometime ago suggesting he announce, but forgo the traditional campaign trail and continue promoting the cause of global warming. He would be the nonpolitical candidate. Word came back: Gore isn’t running. But in fact he is. Whether it results in an official run depends on what the field looks like six months from now. Laurie David, who helped bankroll Gore’s film, and whose “personal fantasy” is that he run, says that when she presses him, he’s always coy and says his cell phone is breaking up. “I believe him when he says he doesn’t have any intention of running,” David told NEWSWEEK. “But I also believe the door is not completely shut.”

As part of his noncampaign, the former VP is returning this week to Capitol Hill for the first time since he left the White House to testify before the House and Senate about global warming. Gore will warn that the problem is accelerating so fast that any solution must be more than incremental. “The danger is they’ll do some small fix that allows them to claim credit without facing up to the problem,” says an adviser who did not want to be on the record seeming to disparage Congress.

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PHOENIX: For the fourth consecutive day, Phoenix roasted in record high temperatures.

It was 99 degrees Saturday, breaking the old record for the date of 92 degrees set in 1972.

It was also 99 degrees on Friday, which shattered the old record of 95 set in 1921. Friday’s temperature marked the hottest reading so early in a calendar year.

And, it marked the second hottest day ever recorded in March.

The all-time record high temperature for March is 100 degrees set on March 26, 1988.

On Thursday, the mercury soared to 92 degrees, breaking the old record of 91 degrees set back in 1934, according to Weather Watch 5 meteorologists.

On Wednesday, a record high temperature of 91 degrees was set at the official weather station at Sky Harbor International Airport. That broke the old record of 90 set in 1934.

Elsewhere on Saturday, it was 101 in Gila Bend and Yuma, both record events.

Still more record-breaking heat is on tap for the Valley through Sunday, with the mercury posting readings in the low 90s, according to Weather Watch 5 meteorologists.

An unusually strong high pressure system over the region is producing near-record or in some cases record-breaking heat.

A weak low pressure system has moved towards Arizona from the southwest, which is helping weaken the upper level high, leading to somewhat cooler readings on Sunday.

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As the world’s warmest winter on record drew to an end with a weekend snow storm, a group of religious leaders started walking across the state Friday to bring attention to global warming.

The nine-day haul from downtown Northampton to Copley Square in Boston was planned far before forecasts called for a weekend of snow and sleet just a few days before the start of spring.

“It was windy and cold. I was walking on the front of the line and I felt like I was bow of a ship with the wind just coming into my face,” said the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Johns of the Grace Episcopal Church in Amherst, where the group warmed up on bowls of lentil and minestrone soup after walking eight miles in deep snow from Northampton to Amherst.

Bullitt-Johns said the walkers kept their spirits strong by singing “Keep on walking forward, never turning back,” a hymn they had chanted in prayer services before the march to Boston.

The Rev. Andrea Ayvazian of the Haydenville Congregational Church said the snow was so deep, it felt like she was breaking trail.

In all 24 clergymen will walk the entire distance from Northampton to Boston, while some 800 people will join for smaller portions. The group hopes to have more than 1,000 gather in Boston for a final rally.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Thursday that in the past century, global temperatures have increased at about 0.11 degrees per decade. But that increase has been three times larger since 1976.

The report comes just over a month after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said global warming is very likely caused by human actions and is so severe it will continue for centuries.

“God has given us this Eden, and our behavior is making a mess of it,” said the Rev. Jim Antal, president of the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ, the state’s largest Protestant denomination.

The religious walkers are part of Religious Witness for the Earth, a 6-year-old national interfaith environmental organization. Supporters include clergy from the Catholic, Unitarian, Jewish, Episcopalian, and Muslim faiths.

The leaders are calling for individuals, businesses and government entities to reduce fossil fuel emissions by 80 percent by 2050.

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Former Vice President Al Gore has collected nearly 300,000 electronic signatures asking Congress to take action on global warming, Gore said in an entry on his Web site Friday.

Gore said the signatures demonstrate “that hundreds of thousands of people share my sense of urgency” on climate change. Gore is scheduled to testify before about the issue Wednesday.

“Political will is a renewable resource, and enough already exists to start solving this crisis,” Gore said. “We just have to communicate that forcefully to the political leaders of our country.”  

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Big U.S. airlines and their affiliates canceled more than 2,000 flights on Friday as a late-winter storm hit the Northeast’s biggest cities, airline and government officials said.

Airlines, hoping to avert the type of storm-related service meltdown that stung JetBlue Airways Corp. in New York a month ago, began canceling flights on Thursday. Cancellations piled up during the day and by late afternoon there was little activity at busy New York-area airports.

Major cancellations were also reported in Philadelphia and Boston where snow, sleet and heavy rain disrupted operations along the Atlantic coast.

“The airlines are making these decisions,” said Diane Spitaliere, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration, which runs the nation’s air traffic system. “It’s a business decision.”

Friday’s storm was the first measurable test for the industry since JetBlue reignited customer and political outrage over airline customer service when it stranded hundreds of passengers on planes during an ice storm last month in New York. The February 14 storm prompted more than 1,100 JetBlue flight cancellations over several days as it scrambled to reset its operations.

JetBlue promised to act more decisively ahead of bad weather to avoid stranding passengers in airports, a strategy also practiced by other airlines.

JetBlue canceled 400 of 550 scheduled flights on Friday and 28 on Saturday. “We canceled everything into an out of New York,” said spokesman Todd Burke.

Delta Air Lines canceled 600 flights, most in the New York area and US Airways Group Inc. said it canceled more than 1,000 flights, much of it feeder service from New England.

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Climate change is being blamed for a changing of the guard among Sydney’s cockroach population.

Researchers say the most common sub-species in city households was the german cockroach, until it disappeared about seven years ago.

Martyn Robinson from the Australian Museum says the Australian house cockroach, methana marginalus, which likes warmer climates, has begun moving in.

“It’s most likely to be the…warmer climate,” he said.

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Global warming is the hottest story of our time, and it will get even bigger as the full implications of melting ice caps and rising sea levels percolate through the media pipeline and into general public awareness, a panel of journalists said last weekend during the American Bar Association’s environmental law conference.

The discussion was focused on how the media has covered the story and whether or not public perception of global warming has changed in recent months and years. Among the questions the panelists tried to answer is why it has taken so long for the story to reach critical mass.

Most of the panelists credited Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, with helping to generate attention. The Democratic takeover in Congress has also advanced public debate, the panelists said. And even though the basic global warming science – heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere – is “third-grade” stuff, according the Wall Street Journal’s John Fialka, the issues have been clouded by a massive, industry funded propaganda and disinformation campaign aimed at creating uncertainty.

But now the issue is taking center stage, and journalists must help explain the evolving story in terms that readers can understand, by showing them how the impacts will affect their lives, the panelists agreed.

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Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which won an Academy Award for best documentary. So do many environmentalists, who praise him as a visionary, and many scientists, who laud him for raising public awareness of climate change.

Don J. Easterbrook, a geology professor, has cited “inaccuracies” in “An Inconvenient Truth.”
But part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.

“I don’t want to pick on Al Gore,” Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. “But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data.”

Mr. Gore, in an e-mail exchange about the critics, said his work made “the most important and salient points” about climate change, if not “some nuances and distinctions” scientists might want. “The degree of scientific consensus on global warming has never been stronger,” he said, adding, “I am trying to communicate the essence of it in the lay language that I understand.”

Although Mr. Gore is not a scientist, he does rely heavily on the authority of science in “An Inconvenient Truth,” which is why scientists are sensitive to its details and claims.

Criticisms of Mr. Gore have come not only from conservative groups and prominent skeptics of catastrophic warming, but also from rank-and-file scientists like Dr. Easterbook, who told his peers that he had no political ax to grind. A few see natural variation as more central to global warming than heat-trapping gases. Many appear to occupy a middle ground in the climate debate, seeing human activity as a serious threat but challenging what they call the extremism of both skeptics and zealots.

Kevin Vranes, a climatologist at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, said he sensed a growing backlash against exaggeration. While praising Mr. Gore for “getting the message out,” Dr. Vranes questioned whether his presentations were “overselling our certainty about knowing the future.”

Typically, the concern is not over the existence of climate change, or the idea that the human production of heat-trapping gases is partly or largely to blame for the globe’s recent warming. The question is whether Mr. Gore has gone beyond the scientific evidence.

“He’s a very polarizing figure in the science community,” said Roger A. Pielke Jr., an environmental scientist who is a colleague of Dr. Vranes at the University of Colorado center. “Very quickly, these discussions turn from the issue to the person, and become a referendum on Mr. Gore.”

“An Inconvenient Truth,” directed by Davis Guggenheim, was released last May and took in more than $46 million, making it one of the top-grossing documentaries ever. The companion book by Mr. Gore quickly became a best seller, reaching No. 1 on the New York Times list.

Mr. Gore depicted a future in which temperatures soar, ice sheets melt, seas rise, hurricanes batter the coasts and people die en masse. “Unless we act boldly,” he wrote, “our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes.”

He clearly has supporters among leading scientists, who commend his popularizations and call his science basically sound. In December, he spoke in San Francisco to the American Geophysical Union and got a reception fit for a rock star from thousands of attendees.

“He has credibility in this community,” said Tim Killeen, the group’s president and director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a top group studying climate change. “There’s no question he’s read a lot and is able to respond in a very effective way.”

Some backers concede minor inaccuracies but see them as reasonable for a politician. James E. Hansen, an environmental scientist, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a top adviser to Mr. Gore, said, “Al does an exceptionally good job of seeing the forest for the trees,” adding that Mr. Gore often did so “better than scientists.”

Still, Dr. Hansen said, the former vice president’s work may hold “imperfections” and “technical flaws.” He pointed to hurricanes, an icon for Mr. Gore, who highlights the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and cites research suggesting that global warming will cause both storm frequency and deadliness to rise. Yet this past Atlantic season produced fewer hurricanes than forecasters predicted (five versus nine), and none that hit the United States.

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Al Gore is comin’ home — and he wants a big gig on the Hill.

Yes, the former vice president wants to stage a global-warming concert at the Capitol. I can’t believe it’ll come off, but if it does, I want a ticket. Look at some of the bands they have lined up for this thing (at liveearth.org), including the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Snoop Dogg and Bon Jovi. Even I know these guys are pretty cool. Get it? Pretty cool.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) have introduced a resolution to use the Capitol grounds as a site for the huge, multi-venue global-warming concert on July 7.

The Live Earth concert will take place on seven continents and reach more than 2 billion people, according to its promoters. One of the groups involved is the Alliance for Climate Protection, founded by, among others, … wait for it … Al Gore.

Anyway, I hope this comes off. The resolution was referred to the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, which means Republicans can block it, even though Snowe is a co-sponsor.

FYI: The Alliance for Climate Protection includes not only Gore but also former EPA Administrator Carol Browner, Brent Scowcroft, who was Bush 41′s national security adviser, and a bunch of other very important people. And I can personally vouch to the Senate that they’ll leave the Capitol grounds just the way they found them. I swear they will.

Still more Gore: He’s testifying before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on March 21, and Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.) is trying to get the House to approve a resolution praising Gore for his work on global warming. Engel circulated a “Dear Colleague” letter last week seeking co-sponsors for the measure, which also salutes the 2000 Democratic presidential nominee on the Oscar for his global warming documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

So far, Engel has 55 co-sponsors for his resolution, and he’s talking to Democratic leaders to mark it up before Gore testifies.

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A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite. The explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, on Saturday called off what was intended to be a 530-mile trek across the Arctic Ocean after Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold temperatures drained the batteries in some of their electronic equipment.

“Ann said losing toes and going forward at all costs was never part of the journey,” said Ann Atwood, who helped organize the expedition.

On Monday, the pair was at Canada’s Ward Hunt Island, awaiting a plane to take them to Resolute, Canada, where they were to return to Minneapolis later this week.

Bancroft, 51, became the first woman to cross the North Pole on a 1986 expedition. She and Arnesen, 53, of Oslo, Norway, were the first women to ski across Antarctica in 2001.

But the latest trek got off to a bad start. The day they set off from Ward Hunt Island, a plane landing near the women hit their gear, punching a hole in Bancroft’s sled and damaging one of Arnesen’s snowshoes.

They repaired the snowshoe with binding from a ski, but Atwood said the patch job created pressure on Arnesen’s left foot, which led to blisters that then turned into frostbite.

Then there was the cold — quite a bit colder, Atwood said, then Bancroft and Arnesen had expected. One night they measured the temperature inside their tent at 58 degrees below zero, and outside temperatures were exceeding 100 below zero at times, Atwood said.

“My first reaction when they called to say there were calling it off was that they just sounded really, really cold,” Atwood said.

She said Bancroft and Arnesen were applying hot water bottles to Arnesen’s foot every night, but had to wake up periodically because the bottles froze.

The explorers had planned to call in regular updates to school groups by satellite phone, and had planned online posts with photographic evidence of global warming. In contrast to Bancroft’s 1986 trek across the Arctic with fellow Minnesota explorer Will Steger, this time she and Arnesen were prepared to don body suits and swim through areas where polar ice has melted.

Atwood said there was some irony that a trip to call attention to global warming was scuttled in part by extreme cold temperatures.

“They were experiencing temperatures that weren’t expected with global warming,” Atwood said. “But one of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability.”

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