* If Greenland melts, seas will rise 23 feet. Greenland + Antarctica = 38 feet. Or more. “We are the first generation to feel the sting of climate change, and we are the last generation that can do something about it.” —Jay Inslee, Governor of Washington “The door is...
global warming
When Seawater Occupies Wall Street
* A security guard walks through a flooded street in the financial district of Manhattan early on Tuesday, Oct. 29. Photo by Adrees Latif/Reuters. * Knee-deep thought of the day: When seawater occupies Wall Street, perhaps Nature itself is telling Big Business and...
Hurricane Watch in New York City
Extreme Weather Coming Soon to an Eastern Seaboard Near You * “We have a tropical hurricane merging, or folding in, with a mid-latitude weather system, one of those low pressure systems that track across the country. The two systems’ dynamics are very different and...
IEA Sees “Irreversible Climate Change in Five Years”
“I don’t know who and where the climate leadership in the administration is. It doesn’t exist. There is no resolve in the Obama administration to do anything.” —Tim Wirth, U.N. Foundation president “What do you get for pretending the danger’s not real?” —Pink Floyd,...
Wrath of God? : Global Warming and Extreme Weather
In response to our recent post about Christian fundamentalists’ unconcern with the present danger of global warming, our good friend David in Berkeley, a former editor at Sierra Club Books, had this to say: I’ve been wanting to tell the rapturists et al.: Maybe the...
World Survives to Be Raptured by CO2 Poisoning and Believers’ Negligence
“Many Christian fundamentalists feel that concern for the future of our planet is irrelevant, because it has no future. They believe we are living in the End Time, when the son of God will return, the righteous will enter heaven, and sinners will be condemned to...
“Something Called ‘Volcano Monitoring’ ”
[cross-posted at Daily Kos] “[The Democrats’ stimulus] legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes . . . $140 million for something called ‘volcano monitoring.’ Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of...
Copenhagen Climate Accord Better Than Nothing
(Sound Familiar?)
First they put the planet in square brackets, now they have deleted it from the text. At the end it was no longer about saving the biosphere: it was just a matter of saving face. As the talks melted down, everything that might have made a new treaty worthwhile was...
Penguins Are Melting
How is the hurricane picture above related to the picture of Antarctica? Global warming has been found to increase the intensity of hurricanes (though a definite link to causing more hurricanes has not been established). As Katrina showed, fiercer intensity is bad enough.
Diagnosis of a Stressed-Out Planet
Climate change is a central concern here at Levees Not War—it keeps us up late at night. The reasons are obvious: As we’ve said before, even Category 5–strength flood protection is useless if global warming raises sea levels by 10 or 20 feet or more, as scientists have warned may happen in this century. (See ‘Swiftly Melting Planet 2007,’ several posts down.) The trend can be slowed, and eventually reversed, by massive coordinated—and sustained—effort.