California's interagency Climate Action Team on Wednesday issued the first of 40 reports on impacts and adaptation, outlining what the state's residents must do to deal with the floods, erosion and other effects expected from rising sea levels.Hundreds of thousands of people and billions of dollars of Golden State infrastructure and property would be at risk if ocean levels rose 55 inches by the end of the century, as computer models suggest, according to the report.
The group floated several radical proposals: limit coastal development in areas at risk from sea rise; consider phased abandonment of certain areas; halt federally subsidized insurance for property likely to be inundated; and require coastal structures to be built to adapt to climate change.
"Immediate action is needed," said Linda Adams, secretary for environmental protection. "It will cost significantly less to combat climate change than it will to maintain a business-as-usual approach."
From the same article, maps showing what will go underwater…
Because the Arctic ice cap is melting:
(CNN) — It could be the ultimate test of human endurance: Three British explorers are risking their lives in subzero temperatures to measure the melting Arctic ice cap.The team is on a three-month, 621-mile (1,000-kilometer) hike to their final destination at the North Pole. Along the way, taking precise measurements to determine exactly how fast the ice cap is disappearing.
[snip]
The unique expedition was prompted by this chilling prospect: The Arctic ice cap is melting at an unprecedented rate, which may lead to a dramatic shift in average global temperatures.
"In 2007, sea ice loss was the worst in recorded history," said oceanographer Kate Moran, professor of oceanography and ocean engineering at the University of Rhode Island.
The last time that scientists can say confidently that the Arctic was free of summertime ice was 125,000 years ago, according to the Web site of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.
All that could vanish within our lifetime, warn climate scientists, who predict that the Arctic sea ice in the summer season could be gone between 2013 and 2040.
Include Greenland and the Antarctic in that:
Scientists will warn this week that rising sea levels, triggered by global warming, pose a far greater danger to the planet than previously estimated. There is now a major risk that many coastal areas around the world will be inundated by the end of the century because Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are melting faster than previously estimated.Low-lying areas including Bangladesh, Florida, the Maldives and the Netherlands face catastrophic flooding, while in the UK, the Thames estuary is likely to disappear by 2100. Cities like London will need new flood defenses.
"It is now clear that there are going to be massive flooding disasters around the globe," said David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey. "Populations are shifting to the coast, which means that more and more people are going to be threatened by sea-level rises."
And um… bulges of water roaring about the globe?
Scientists say the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would have such profound effects it would shift the planet's rotation, sending a bulge of water into the Northern Hemisphere.The enormous ice sheet, which many experts believe could collapse as the climate warms, is so heavy that as it melts it "will actually cause the Earth's rotation axis to shift rather dramatically," reports a team led by geophysicist Jerry Mitrovica, at the University of Toronto. The scientists say the North and South poles would move about half a kilometre if the entire ice sheet collapses and shifts more water north.
Coastal regions from Washington to Vancouver could expect sea levels to rise at least six metres, Mitrovica and his colleagues report Friday in the journal Science. Much of Florida would be drowned as would low-lying areas in Maritime Canada, the Arctic and along the Pacific coast.
There is nowhere on the coast of Canada or the U.S. that the sea level won't rise to at least six metres, Mitrovica said in an interview.
He and his colleagues stress that the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, while a big concern, is not imminent and may not occur for centuries. "But these findings do suggest that if you are planning for sea level rise, you had better plan a little higher," says co-author Peter Clark at Oregon State University.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated that a collapse of the ice sheet would raise global sea levels by about five metres - a figure that has led to the "simplistic" idea that water will rise evenly around the planet, says Mitrovica.
I pointed this out last September, and it bears repeating now: Here is the last paragraph of a speech Greenspan gave in September 2005:
In summary, it is encouraging to find that, despite the rapid growth of mortgage debt, only a small fraction of households across the country have loan-to-value ratios greater than 90 percent. Thus, the vast majority of homeowners have a sizable equity cushion with which to absorb a potential decline in house prices. In addition, the LTVs for recent homebuyers appear to be lower in those states that have experienced the most explosive run-up in house prices and that, conceivably, could be at risk for the largest price reversal. That said, the situation clearly will require our ongoing scrutiny in the period ahead, lest more adverse trends emerge.What the f*ck was he looking at? And what "ongoing scrutiny" did he or the Fed ever provide? Sorry, Al, you're as guilty -- if not more so -- as the rest of the regulators, ratings agencies, corrupt mortgage lenders, speculative borrowers, etc., that all came together in bubbling cauldron of toxic greed. No revisionist history, Al. Sorry.
Orion Kent Mitchelle Stoltman, 19, of Tooele, Utah has some serious issues to work out. Stoltman has been arrested for burglarizing a family's animal pen, stealing two pet goats, taking them to a local elementary school and beheading them on Halloween.
Police believe that other teenagers were involved in the kidnapping of Daisy and Duke. Neighbor reported hearing crying in the schoolyard that night and called police. Various teens fled the scene after they arrived.
Stoltman now faces only 5 misdemeanor charges, including two counts of aggravated cruelty to an animal, theft, criminal mischief and criminal trespass. He has previously had run-ins with the law, including convictions for failing to stop at the command of a police officer, providing shelter to a runaway, and illegally discharging a firearm.
Story here.
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8:37 p.m. on a Friday evening....
James Fallows of the Atlantic declared that stewart "has become Edward R. Murrow," while Rick Aristotle Munarriz of the Investor website the motley fool concluded that "financial journalism's biggest celebrity looked defeated." Stewart even got a shout-out from white house press secretary Robert Gibbs, who praised him for asking "a lot of tough questions.""
'The Daily Show' has delivered a reminder of the need for independent-minded journalism - and in the process rendered CNBC a laughingstock to many casual viewers that might not have afforded the channel much thought previously," Brian Lowry wrote on Variety.com. - latte times
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Must read: Harper's: Infinite Debt: http://www.harpers.org/PR/highlights/Highlights-2009-04.pdf
Excerpt:
What is history, really, but a turf war between manufacturing, labor and the banks? In the United States, we shrank manufacturing. We got rid of labor. Now it's just the banks.
Which is why the middle class is shrinking. Basically, we're all waiters now; we're bowing and scraping and working for the banks. Look closely at any American, and it's even odds that he or she, directly or indirectly, is somehow employed by the "financial services sector," which covers insurance and real estate and financial instruments of any kind. As brokers, lawyers, loan collectors, loan consolidators, secretaries at big investment firms, chauffeurs of private limousines, or even the high-tech types who exist solely to service banks — all of us, millions of us, are part of it, living off it in some way, as three generations ago we lived off manufacturers.
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8 DINO's that are gonna screw over climate change laws:
Robert Byrd (WV), Blanche Lincoln (AR), Ben Nelson (NE), Evan Bayh (IN), Mark Pryor (AR), Bob Casey (PA), Carl Levin (MI), and Mary Landrieu (LA).
When President Obama submitted a budget that predicted passage of a revenue-raising climate change bill, hopes rose that Congress could successfully rein in carbon emissions this year.
But a cap-and-trade climate bill is almost certain to be filibustered by Republicans - and in a letter delivered to the Senate Budget Committee yesterday, eight Democratic senators joined 25 Republicans to defend the GOP's right to set a 60-vote margin for passing emissions limits.
"We oppose using the budget process to expedite passage of climate legislation," the senators, including eight centrist Democrats, wrote in their missive.
Using the procedure of budget reconciliation, which would allow a climate change measure to become law with 50 votes while preventing filibusters, "would circumvent normal Senate practice and would be inconsistent with the administration's goals of bipartisanship, cooperation, and openness," the 33 senators wrote.
Budget reconciliation was used by George W. Bush and congressional Republicans to prevent Democrats from stalling both the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. The opposition of nearly one-half of the Senate, however, means that President Obama's party will have little room to use the tactic as successfully as Bush's supporters did.
Filibuster-proofing the upcoming health care reform bill through reconciliation already has been ruled out strongly discouraged* by pivotal Democratic senators on the Finance Committee, Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV).
Democrats' reluctance to take advantage of their procedural arsenal to pass climate change and health care this year doesn't mean that both pieces of legislation would necessarily fall to filibusters. But it does mean that Republicans will have significantly more opportunities to insert pro-business provisions into these pivotal bills.
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Madoff sent to jail, seeks a Shawshank Redemption - By Don Davis
"I'm prepared to assist the warden with his own personal finances, manage the prison's books and records, collect all the money for the inmate's March Madness pool."
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Look in the mirror
Listen to me, those of you who invested your "life savings" with this asshole on the promise of 46% returns. You have no one but yourselves to blame. Forty-six percent???!!! If it weren't for your own greed, you wouldn't be scraping for every dime now. Nobody asked the hard questions of Madoff or they would (should) have taken their money and run for the hills (the mattress at the least).
http://alterx.blogspot.com/2009/03/look-in-mirror.html
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Distasteful
Insurance giant AIG will award hundreds of millions of dollars in employee bonuses and retention pay despite a confrontation Wednesday between the chief executive and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner.
[....]
"I do not like these arrangements and find it distasteful and difficult to recommend to you that we must proceed with them," (AIG's leader) Liddy wrote.
It's distasteful to stop paying the geniuses at AIG millions of dollars in bonuses the same way that it's distasteful to enforce our laws by investigating the Bush administration, the same way it's distasteful to ask George Will to stop lying about science, the same way it's distasteful to criticize Jim Cramer.
All this stuff is really a matter of taste.
If Geithner can't -- or won't -- get a handle on these extortionists, then he ought to step down so that the President can find someone who can. I don't mind paying taxes. I don't mind even paying higher taxes if they'll help us get out of this mess. But the thought of paying higher taxes so that Geithner can give more money to the same executives who brought AIG to the brink makes me want to go running to Washington with torches and pitchforks demanding an end to this no-strings-attached handout to greedy corporate bastards.
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'Stuff happens'
During an interview with Dick Shooter Cheney this morning, CNN host John King asked him why "we should listen to you" for economic advice. To make his case, King noted the following statistical changes that occurred under the Bush/Cheney administration:
Unemployment rate: Rose from 4.2 percent to 7.6 percent
Poverty: Jumped from 32.9 million individuals to 37.3 million
Uninsured: Escalated from 41.2 million individuals to 45.7 million
Budget deficit: Inherited budget surplus of $128 billion and left office with $1.3 trillion deficit
"So what would you say to someone out there watching this who's saying why should they listen to you?" King asked. Cheney responded that there's "all kinds of arguments that could be made," but he emphasized that there is "something more important than" the specific numbers King cited — namely, 9/11.
Cheney argued the Bush administration spent more because it had to go into "wartime mode." Cheney also referenced the need to spend money after the Katrina disaster:
All of these things required us to spend money that we had not originally planned to spend or weren't originally part of the budget. Stuff happens. And the administration has to be able to respond to that, and we did.
By Cheney's logic, the country could no longer care about poverty, the uninsured, or the unemployed after 9/11. Those issues were not deemed "important" enough to address.
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