It’s A Good Thing This Is All A Hoax
by digby
Gosh, if the five day non-stop deluge would stop just for a few minutes I could go outside and clear my head after reading this alarming story:
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) has projected that the United States will lead the world into catastrophic global warming over the next twenty five years…
This pathway would almost certainly commit the world to catastrophic climate change, including rapid sea level rise, extreme famine, desertification, and ecological collapse on land and sea. Right now, the United States, with less than five percent of global population, produces 20 percent of global warming pollution. Center for American Progress senior fellow Joe Romm published in Nature in 2008 that humanity “must aim at achieving average annual carbon dioxide emissions of less than 5 GtC [5 billion metric tons of carbon, or 18 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide] this century or risk the catastrophe of reaching atmospheric concentrations of 1,000 parts per million.” To do so, he said, humanity needs to adopt a “national and global strategy to stop building new traditional coal-fired plants while starting to deploy existing and near-term low-carbon technologies as fast as is humanly possible.”
Since 2008, the science has grown more dire. The impact of existing global warming on oceans, extreme weather, agriculture, polar ice, and ecosystems is at or exceeding the highest range of past projections. Dr. Romm’s suggestions were based on the assumption that stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at 450 parts per million (ppm) would likely limit warming to 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures. However, as climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows write in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, “the impacts associated with 2°C have been revised upwards, sufficiently so that 2°C now more appropriately represents the threshold between ‘dangerous’ and ‘extremely dangerous’ climate change”
Here’s a reminder of what the new head of the House Subcommittee on Environment and Economy in the 112th Congress thinks about all this:
“…the earth will end only when God declares it’s time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood…. I appreciate having panelists here who are men of faith, and we can get into the theological discourse of that position, but I do believe God’s word is infallible, unchanging, perfect.
Today we have about 388 parts per million in the atmosphere. I think in the age of dinosaurs, when we had the most flora and fauna, we were probably at 4,000 parts per million. There is a theological debate that this is a carbon-starved planet — not too much carbon. And the cost of a cap-and-trade on the poor is now being discovered.”
Well that settles that. Now lets get back to fixing those 75 year deficit projections while we have the chance. It’s just not fair to our great-grandkids to fail to balance the budget in 30 years by cutting those benefits today. Let’s think ahead for once, people.
Annual Holiday Fundraiser going on right now. If you can help support the blog, I appreciate it. Cheers!