Ordc Forum/Blog

With the arctic sea ice area at a shocking new minimum, 10% below the previous minimum, it will be interesting to see if global warming is even mentioned during the debate this evening. The corporate media doesn't like to talk about global warming and I would expect that there will be zero questions on it.

For more detail see:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/08/arctic-sea-ice-minimum-2012/

26 September 2012 by Michael Marshall
Never mind what's going to happen in 2100: climate change is already shrinking the global economy.

According to the Climate Vulnerability Monitor – a report by Spanish non-profit organisation DARA – in 2010 climate change shaved 1.6 per cent off global gross domestic product. The figure was calculated by adding the harmful effects of climate change to the problems of the carbon-based economy, such as air pollution.

Previous studies, such as the 2006 Stern Review, concluded that climate change would not become a net cost for decades. But they had not considered climate's impact on productivity. As the temperature increases, people work less well. "It has been assumed that a hotter living and working environment is nothing to worry about," says Tord Kjellström of Umeå University in Sweden. "But the 5 billion people living in the hot parts of this planet are already constrained by heat."

=> Read more!

This is a 3 August op-ed in the Washington Post by James hansen.
James E. Hansen directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

When I testified before the Senate in the hot summer of 1988 , I warned of the kind of future that climate change would bring to us and our planet. I painted a grim picture of the consequences of steadily increasing temperatures, driven by mankind’s use of fossil fuels.

But I have a confession to make: I was too optimistic.

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Boys and girls, this is extremely bad news and may indicate that we have reached an irreversible tipping point. Some of these bubbles are 1km in diameter.
Russian research team astonished after finding 'fountains' of methane bubbling to surface
http://edpearl.blogspot.com/2011/12/shock-as-retreat-of-arctic-sea-ice.html

Steve Connor
Independent UK: 13 December, 2011

Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane – a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide – have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region.

The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years.

=> Read more!

Bill McKibben - Keystone Pipeline Victory
November 14, 2011
By Bill McKibben, AlterNet

Posted on November 10, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153037/keystone_pipeline_victory%3A_president_puts_disastrous_pipeline_on_hold_--_may_effectively_kill_the_project

Um, we won. You won.

Not completely. The president didn’t outright reject the pipeline permit. My particular fantasy--that he would invite the 1253 people arrested on his doorstep in August inside the gates for a victory picnic by the vegetable garden--didn’t materialize.

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