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Global warming worries hunters, anglers
Wes Smalling, The New Mexican
A recent nationwide survey shows that it’s no longer just radical environmentalists who think global warming is real.
About half of America’s hunters and anglers — including many who said they voted for President Bush in 2004 — told pollsters they are witnessing firsthand, in the outdoors, the effects of some form of climate change, according to the results of a nationwide survey of sportsmen released Tuesday by the National Wildlife Federation, an environmental group based in Washington, D.C.
The sportsmen are seeing climate change in the form of lakes that no longer freeze over for ice fishing in the winter, fall-hunting seasons without enough snow to track deer and other drastic environmental changes they consider a threat to wildlife, the group says.
Of those who say they have seen such changes, the majority attribute those changes to global warming, and many go a step further to blame the burning of fossil fuels as the cause of the warming.
(24 May 2006)
Related: Arkansas Times
Field and Stream
IPCC scientists see new signs of dangerous warming
Peter Calamai, Toronto Star
OTTAWA—Even stronger scientific evidence of dangerous climate change has emerged just when the federal government is opposing tougher measures to curb global greenhouse gas emissions at a post-Kyoto meeting in Germany.
A draft report from the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, obtained by the Toronto Star, warns that the global average temperature will likely climb by around three degrees Celsius by 2100 if atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gas continue rising.
Many scientists fear that anything higher than a two-degree temperature increase will trigger some combination of dangerous heat waves, extreme flooding, sea level rise, extensive droughts or more intense tropical storms.
The IPCC is made up of hundreds of scientists and other climate experts brought together by the United Nations. Earlier studies by the group provided the main scientific impetus for the Kyoto Protocol, which is aimed at reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from wealthy developed countries by 5 per cent from 2008 through 2012.
The panel’s report surfaced during a flurry of activity on the climate change front dominated by mounting criticism of the Conservative government’s opposition to deeper emission reductions in any Kyoto follow-up.
(24 May 2006)
Gore Warms Up
David Corn, The Nation
… In the [An Inconvenient Truth, the new film about global warming, Al Gore] notes that the good news is that because global warming is a human-induced crisis, it can be addressed by humans. But the humans who would have to do that are politicians. If Gore–with all his commitment to the issue–was not willing to campaign as a global warming warrior, how can he expect other politicians to take on this hard task?
Gore declined to rehash his 2000 decisions or to explain why it took losing an election (with an asterisk) to unleash the crusader in him. He only obliquely addressed the matter: “Here’s the underlying reality…. America is still in what someone described as a Category 5 denial on the seriousness of the global warming crisis. Until the American people change their minds about this reality, then the politicians in both parties are going to find rough sledding when they propose the serious solutions that are needed.” That is, an America in denial is a tough audience for a politician obsessed–healthily–with global warming. After the disappointing finale of the 2000 race, Gore said, he decided he “was going to do everything I could to change that underlying reality and to take this message to as many people as I could.” His mission, in a way, is to make the world safe for the politician that Gore might have wanted to be but was not. Hence, the traveling slide show–which he had first developed years earlier and which he says he’s presented about 1,000 times.
…He’s doing what he can now. But when he looks at the Democratic Party leaders these days, he doesn’t find many compatriots. Congressional Democrats have proposed an energy-independence plan, but they’re hardly making planetary rescue a front-burner issue. (And Gore notes in the film that the window of opportunity for preventing climate catastrophe may close in a matter of years.) In fact, with an electoral strategy based partly on a backlash caused by rising gas prices, the Democrats are reinforcing the popular notion that Americans have a sacred right to cheap gas. Is Hillary Clinton, I asked, as committed as she should be? Gore didn’t take the bait, but he did say that the Democrats were not doing enough: “It gets back to that underlying reality. The country as a whole is not yet in a place where politicians feel comfortable.”
…For all his doom and gloom in the film–it’s enough to give the most ardent enviro stomach pains–Gore told me he believes public opinion is near a tipping point. “Six months from now,” he said, “if we have this conversation, you and I will agree that the period between the spring and the beginning of winter was a period when the country changed dramatically on global warming.” What’s the reason for this green bullishness? His film? Gore ticked off the positive signs: Evangelical ministers have pronounced global warming a moral issue; corporate execs at General Electric, Du Pont and other companies have championed emissions-cutting measures as good for business; cities and towns have taken their own steps and called on the federal government to move; Mother Nature has kicked up more extreme weather (a true warning sign); and insurance companies around the world are beginning to worry. “Now, I have felt in times past that we were close to a tipping point, and I’ve been wrong,” Gore added. “I don’t think I am wrong this time.”
(25 May 2006
