April 18th, Gaia Conspiracy Continues

The Gaia Conspiracy Continues
By Evan Pritchard

Two different sets of facts are beginning to emerge in the media concerning Global Warming; one, that it is really happening, and two, that there really is a cover-up about it really happening. Of course the media plays this game where it cooperates with the cover-up until a certain point, and then it reports on those people covering it up, in a sense, reporting on its own reporting. The Washington Post, however has taken a courageous stance of late and has outed lots of closet greens.

Here is the Washington Post article on the cover-up of James Hansen. It is quite remarkable on how critical it is of the Bush administration, and with what placement. This tone has continued during this past week unabated.

Climate Researchers Feeling Heat From White House
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 6, 2006; Page A27
Scientists doing climate research for the federal government say the Bush administration has made it hard for them to speak forthrightly to the public about global warming. The result, the researchers say, is a danger that Americans are not getting the full story on how the climate is changing.
Employees and contractors working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with a U.S. Geological Survey scientist working at an NOAA lab, said in interviews that over the past year administration officials have chastised them for speaking on policy questions; removed references to global warming from their reports, news releases and conference Web sites; investigated news leaks; and sometimes urged them to stop speaking to the media altogether. Their accounts indicate that the ideological battle over climate-change research, which first came to light at NASA, is being fought in other federal science agencies as well.
These scientists -- working nationwide in research centers in such places as Princeton, N.J., and Boulder, Colo. -- say they are required to clear all media requests with administration officials, something they did not have to do until the summer of 2004. Before then, point climate researchers -- unlike staff members in the Justice or State departments, which have long-standing policies restricting access to reporters -- were relatively free to discuss their findings without strict agency oversight.
"There has been a change in how we're expected to interact with the press," said Pieter Tans, who measures greenhouse gases linked to global warming and has worked at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder for two decades. He added that although he often "ignores the rules" the administration has instituted, when it comes to his colleagues, "some people feel intimidated -- I see that."
Christopher Milly, a hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, said he had problems twice while drafting news releases on scientific papers describing how climate change would affect the nation's water supply.
Once in 2002, Milly said, Interior officials declined to issue a news release on grounds that it would cause "great problems with the department." In November 2005, they agreed to issue a release on a different climate-related paper, Milly said, but "purged key words from the releases, including 'global warming,' 'warming climate' and 'climate change.' "
Administration officials said they are following long-standing policies that were not enforced in the past. Kent Laborde, a NOAA public affairs officer who flew to Boulder last month to monitor an interview Tans did with a film crew from the BBC, said he was helping facilitate meetings between scientists and journalists.
"We've always had the policy, it just hasn't been enforced," Laborde said. "It's important that the leadership knows something is coming out in the media, because it has a huge impact. The leadership needs to know the tenor or the tone of what we expect to be printed or broadcast."
Several times, however, agency officials have tried to alter what these scientists tell the media. When Tans was helping to organize the Seventh International Carbon Dioxide Conference near Boulder last fall, his lab director told him participants could not use the term "climate change" in conference paper's titles and abstracts. Tans and others disregarded that advice.
None of the scientists said political appointees had influenced their research on climate change or disciplined them for questioning the administration. Indeed, several researchers have received bigger budgets in recent years because President Bush has focused on studying global warming rather than curbing greenhouse gases. NOAA's budget for climate research and services is now $250 million, up from $241 million in 2004.
The assertion that climate scientists are being censored first surfaced in January when James Hansen, who directs NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told the New York Times and The Washington Post that the administration sought to muzzle him after he gave a lecture in December calling for cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. (NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin issued new rules recently that make clear that its scientists are free to talk to members of the media about their scientific findings and to express personal interpretations of those findings.
Two weeks later, Hansen suggested to an audience at the New School University in New York that his counterparts at NOAA were experiencing even more severe censorship. "It seems more like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union than the United States," he told the crowd.

The Missing Piece


This is in addition to the Gaia coverup follies I reported on last week. There has been at least one major breaking story every day. I’m sure that its all planned that way for our entertainment. But through all this expose extravaganza, one big chunk is yet to be uncovered by the mainstream, and that is Lovelock’s new book, Revenge of Gaia. I discussed this book in my just released article in the April – May issue of NY Spirit, “Earth In Crisis” (with William Meyers) in some detail, based on reviews, and interviews, and it turns out, seems to be the only mention in print in the United States of this book.

Why do reports on ice sheets melting and glaciers vanishing and NASA administrators being tortured like Allied spies in Nazi Germany get coverage, but Revenge of Gaia does not? Why the special treatment? Because its good? In fact, that’s probably part of it….. It’s true, and the truer it is the worse it is and the greater the liability. Is just like the movie The Insider with Russell Crowe, who is probably on the phone to his agent right now saying, “I didn’t get an oscar statue for playing Jeffry Wygand (big tobacco’s leading whistle blower) . Let me do James Hansen!”

I traveled to Canada to obtain an imported copy of “Revenge of Gaia” from England, and it was expensive and was selling out. If you go on AmazonUK and pay by credit card in Sterling Pounds, it will probably come out to about $35, maybe more. It might be a good investment in the future. But by the time it arrives, the CE levels might have gone up five points.

One thing some people won’t like about the book is that it is strongly in favor of Nuclear power plants. He makes a good case, but he comes off sounding a bit biased. In fact, on Easter Sunday, Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore published an article in the Washington Post (who is breaking a lot of these stories these days) saying that he was wrong about nuclear power, and that it is the only way to replace coal based generators. I will include that article later. So that particular obstacle to the book’s acceptance is quickly dwindling, because in fact, he’s right. There have been no significant incidents involving nuclear power in the US; three mile island was a close call, but protective measures did their job. And yet no nuclear plants have been built in the US since the 1980s. This has meant trillions of dollars for the coal companies and for big oil. Coal generators also produce 36 percent of US emissions, 10% of global emissions as well. There are 600 coal fired electric plants in the US, which is 600 too many.

But that’s not why the Lovelock book is blacked out. It is a missing person because it mentions blue green algae and we aren’t supposed to know about that slimy little secret here in the US. The situation with blue green algae approaches a kind of sketchy certainty (within a huge ball park the size of the earth) one which demands specific actions which will mean less billions for oil companies and coal companies. Apparently cars are more important than people.

You see, little blue green algae don’t like cars, or at least what comes out of cars. Why do we care about a bunch of slimes? They outnumber us. And they run the planet, not us.

Carbon emissions were at about 89 ppm before the industrial revolution. They are now at about 390 ppm and rising steadily. Temperatures have risen about 2.7 degrees centigrade globally since then, (from about 56o F to about 60 o F) although people argue over this, but the temperatures are also rising steadily, some say in lock step with CE levels. This is in spite of blue green algae all over the world which has been busy trying to suck in CEs and keep the temperature down as well. According to a number of different computer models of climate dynamics, when the CEs reach 500 ppm, the temperature will reach 16o Centigrate, or about 62o F, and the blue green algae all over the world will die. This is a slight oversimplification, but that’s what the math tells us. Even with a margin of error of 10% we are still in trouble, especially if we end up on the short side of that 10%.

The algae will die mainly because the increased heat will create an ocean layer of warm water that algae can’t live in, too thick for the light to reach the algae. This will happen to varying degrees at various latitudes, in fact it is already happening. Just recently there are reports of blue green algae disappearing in the northern oceans. Just letting you know.

Running a climate without algae is like running an engine without coolant. According to the models, when the algae crashes, the temperature soars from 16C to 24C or from 62 o F to 78o F. I accidentally turned up the heating unit on the fish tank when I was a kid and left it on. When I came back a few hours later, all the fish were dead. The difference in temperature was not much different than that in Lovelocks’ computer model. I will never forget the sight of all those dead fish. I wish you could have seen them. It put me in a frame of mind to pay attention to details and to hear about warming oceans and other mayhem forty years later. That’s what will happen to the earth only worse. As the dead algae decays, it releases more methane and more carbon dioxide and that heats up the atmosphere a whole lot more. The great changes in temperature create huge wind storms around the earth, and deserts will form almost everywhere, with some rapidity. The 50% increase in hurricane activity of late has been linked to one degree rise in ocean temperatures. Imagine what 16 more degrees will do. Earth will begin to look more like the other planets in the solar system, the ones we can’t survive on either.

Another factor to consider, if you’re planning to wait out the storm, is that oceans expand considerably when heated. Some say that the ocean water has expanded 8 inches since the 1800s, so when experts say that the water volume has increased by an infinitesimal amount so far due to ice caps melting, that’s true, but misleading. If the algae goes away, we may see the water rise several feet rather quickly. And the heat will only continue to rise, as most of the things that keep planets cool get toasted in the new atmosphere, a scenario in fact just as bizarre as the different one posited in Day After Tomorrow, which took a reverse hypothesis, just so they could make a joke about Mexico.

Now Canada’s leader Harper is talking about cutting all programs to fund global warming management programs, but is leaving the bureaucrats in place with nothing to do but take home a salary. That’ll work.

This article appeared April 18th, 2006
Ottawa plan hacks green programs
MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT AND MICHAEL DEN TANDT
The new Conservative government has decided to slash spending on Environment Canada programs designed to fight global warming by 80 per cent, and wants cuts of 40 per cent in the budgets devoted to climate change at other ministries, according to cabinet documents obtained by The Globe and Mail.
The documents also say that the Conservatives' campaign promise of tax breaks for transit passes would cost up to $2-billion over five years, but would result in an insignificant cut in greenhouse-gas emissions because the incentives are expected to spur only a small increase in the number of people willing to trade using cars for buses and subways.
The section of the documents on the budget cuts, written by an unidentified government official after a cabinet meeting in late March that approved the reductions, also said the Tories want to try to claw back $260-million the Liberals had pledged to the United Nations to fund its international climate-change programs.
Federal funding for wind power, considered by environmentalists to be one of the cleanest new energy sources, "is also uncertain," the documents said.
Ryan Sparrow, a spokesman for Environment Minister Rona Ambrose, refused to confirm or deny the details in the leak, and said the government hasn't finalized its decisions on climate change.
"Once there is an announcement to be made, we'll make one," Mr. Sparrow said.
The documents were obtained by the opposition Liberals and bolster previous reports that large-scale cuts have been under way in climate-change programs, such as the highly visible One Tonne Challenge, which had much of its funding abruptly axed without public announcement in late March.
The Tories have indicated that they are ambivalent about the Kyoto Protocol to fight climate change, planning to neither pull out of the treaty nor meet its emission-reduction targets.
According to the documents, the Tories have yet to develop their unique Canadian-based set of actions.
"No process has been put in place to determine next steps on climate change or to develop the new 'made in Canada' climate plan," the documents said.
The documents said that while the Tories are trying to save money by cutting the programs designed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, they won't cut government staff positions, so most of the money earmarked for climate change will be going to salaries for bureaucrats.
"Only $375-million was approved for climate spending, with most of the dollars covering staff salaries until the new government determines next steps.
"What is clear is that staff will have little to do and that they will have no budgets to spend over the next year and that more cuts are coming."
According to the documents, the programs are being eliminated to help fund tax cuts, including the GST reduction the Tories pledged during the election, and to fund the transit-pass scheme.
The global-warming programs are being eliminated even though a Treasury Board review of government spending found that the vast majority of 166 such programs run by Ottawa were considered cost effective.
The review, which was begun by the Liberals and completed last fall, found only 22 programs were ineffective. The Treasury Board information was supposed to be used to reallocate funding from programs that weren't working to those that were achieving better results.
The Liberals did not deal with the review before the election, and many federal initiatives didn't have budget allocations after March 31, the end of the government's fiscal year.
Environmentalists reacted angrily to the cuts. John Bennett, a spokesman for the Sierra Club of Canada, accused the Tories of having a "slash and burn campaign."
The documents also show that senior officials in the Environment Ministry have told the government that its proposed tax credit for transit users will have virtually no impact on greenhouse-gas emissions and only a small effect on riders.
"A wide range of data suggests that people are not very responsive to changes in transit fares," said a memo prepared for Ms. Ambrose last week by officials in the office of her deputy minister. ". . . while the ridership impacts of the tax incentives are not known with precision, analysis suggests they will be low."
The six-page memo outlines five transit tax-incentive options, ranging from a 16-per-cent tax credit for all fares, at a projected cost of $2-billion over five years, to a credit for monthly pass holders only, at $1-billion, to the same credit for high-school students only, at a cost of $90-million.
The memo makes clear that the second option is the one the government prefers. But its benefits to transit users may be nullified, the memo states, because "it could be quite easy for the transit authorities to raise their fares to absorb the benefit of the tax credit."
The Canadian Urban Transit Association has estimated that the proposed tax break would increase transit use by up to 30 per cent by 2016. But in another Environment Minister memo drafted for Ms. Ambrose, ministry officials say that, based on a 1997 Canadian study, as well as a U.S. Department of Labour survey in 2004, use can be expected to increase between 2 per cent and 4 per cent. That means the effect on emissions will be negligible, the documents show.
Moving Right Along
One thing Canada has going for it is that it is building nuclear power plants. In the past, this has been controversial among the environmentally in the know, and some have foreseen possible civil war and even revolution over this issue as the blue green threshold of death approaches. But with the miraculous Easter morning resurrection of nuclear power, with GreenPeace founder Patrick Moore playing the part of John the Baptist, in that morning’s edition of the Washington Post, it is likely that such delays and battles will probably be averted. It will however take a lot of time to tear down 600 coal plants and build 600 nuclear ones in their place, remembering of course to clean up all the nuke waste and stuff it into swimming pools afterwards.

Here is that article in full. I suggest you read the whole thing. It agrees with Lovelock on the essential issue of nuclear power, but is more even handed concerning passive sources, which is admittedly a flaw in the “Revenge” book.

Going Nuclear
A Green Makes the Case
By Patrick Moore
Sunday, April 16, 2006; Page B01
In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That's the conviction that inspired Greenpeace's first voyage up the spectacular rocky northwest coast to protest the testing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.
Look at it this way: More than 600 coal-fired electric plants in the United States produce 36 percent of U.S. emissions -- or nearly 10 percent of global emissions -- of CO2, the primary greenhouse gas responsible for climate change. Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power. And these days it can do so safely.
I say that guardedly, of course, just days after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that his country had enriched uranium. "The nuclear technology is only for the purpose of peace and nothing else," he said. But there is widespread speculation that, even though the process is ostensibly dedicated to producing electricity, it is in fact a cover for building nuclear weapons.
And although I don't want to underestimate the very real dangers of nuclear technology in the hands of rogue states, we cannot simply ban every technology that is dangerous. That was the all-or-nothing mentality at the height of the Cold War, when anything nuclear seemed to spell doom for humanity and the environment. In 1979, Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon produced a frisson of fear with their starring roles in "The China Syndrome," a fictional evocation of nuclear disaster in which a reactor meltdown threatens a city's survival. Less than two weeks after the blockbuster film opened, a reactor core meltdown at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear power plant sent shivers of very real anguish throughout the country.
What nobody noticed at the time, though, was that Three Mile Island was in fact a success story: The concrete containment structure did just what it was designed to do -- prevent radiation from escaping into the environment. And although the reactor itself was crippled, there was no injury or death among nuclear workers or nearby residents. Three Mile Island was the only serious accident in the history of nuclear energy generation in the United States, but it was enough to scare us away from further developing the technology: There hasn't been a nuclear plant ordered up since then.
Today, there are 103 nuclear reactors quietly delivering just 20 percent of America's electricity. Eighty percent of the people living within 10 miles of these plants approve of them (that's not including the nuclear workers). Although I don't live near a nuclear plant, I am now squarely in their camp.
And I am not alone among seasoned environmental activists in changing my mind on this subject. British atmospheric scientist James Lovelock, father of the Gaia theory, believes that nuclear energy is the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change. Stewart Brand, founder of the "Whole Earth Catalog," says the environmental movement must embrace nuclear energy to wean ourselves from fossil fuels. On occasion, such opinions have been met with excommunication from the anti-nuclear priesthood: The late British Bishop Hugh Montefiore, founder and director of Friends of the Earth, was forced to resign from the group's board after he wrote a pro-nuclear article in a church newsletter.
There are signs of a new willingness to listen, though, even among the staunchest anti-nuclear campaigners. When I attended the Kyoto climate meeting in Montreal last December, I spoke to a packed house on the question of a sustainable energy future. I argued that the only way to reduce fossil fuel emissions from electrical production is through an aggressive program of renewable energy sources (hydroelectric, geothermal heat pumps, wind, etc.) plus nuclear. The Greenpeace spokesperson was first at the mike for the question period, and I expected a tongue-lashing. Instead, he began by saying he agreed with much of what I said -- not the nuclear bit, of course, but there was a clear feeling that all options must be explored.
Here's why: Wind and solar power have their place, but because they are intermittent and unpredictable they simply can't replace big baseload plants such as coal, nuclear and hydroelectric. Natural gas, a fossil fuel, is too expensive already, and its price is too volatile to risk building big baseload plants. Given that hydroelectric resources are built pretty much to capacity, nuclear is, by elimination, the only viable substitute for coal. It's that simple.
That's not to say that there aren't real problems -- as well as various myths -- associated with nuclear energy. Each concern deserves careful consideration:
• Nuclear energy is expensive. It is in fact one of the least expensive energy sources. In 2004, the average cost of producing nuclear energy in the United States was less than two cents per kilowatt-hour, comparable with coal and hydroelectric. Advances in technology will bring the cost down further in the future.
• Nuclear plants are not safe. Although Three Mile Island was a success story, the accident at Chernobyl, 20 years ago this month, was not. But Chernobyl was an accident waiting to happen. This early model of Soviet reactor had no containment vessel, was an inherently bad design and its operators literally blew it up. The multi-agency U.N. Chernobyl Forum reported last year that 56 deaths could be directly attributed to the accident, most of those from radiation or burns suffered while fighting the fire. Tragic as those deaths were, they pale in comparison to the more than 5,000 coal-mining deaths that occur worldwide every year. No one has died of a radiation-related accident in the history of the U.S. civilian nuclear reactor program. (And although hundreds of uranium mine workers did die from radiation exposure underground in the early years of that industry, that problem was long ago corrected.) • Nuclear waste will be dangerous for thousands of years. Within 40 years, used fuel has less than one-thousandth of the radioactivity it had when it was removed from the reactor. And it is incorrect to call it waste, because 95 percent of the potential energy is still contained in the used fuel after the first cycle. Now that the United States has removed the ban on recycling used fuel, it will be possible to use that energy and to greatly reduce the amount of waste that needs treatment and disposal. Last month, Japan joined France, Britain and Russia in the nuclear-fuel-recycling business. The United States will not be far behind.
• Nuclear reactors are vulnerable to terrorist attack. The six-feet-thick reinforced concrete containment vessel protects the contents from the outside as well as the inside. And even if a jumbo jet did crash into a reactor and breach the containment, the reactor would not explode. There are many types of facilities that are far more vulnerable, including liquid natural gas plants, chemical plants and numerous political targets.
• Nuclear fuel can be diverted to make nuclear weapons. This is the most serious issue associated with nuclear energy and the most difficult to address, as the example of Iran shows. But just because nuclear technology can be put to evil purposes is not an argument to ban its use.
Over the past 20 years, one of the simplest tools -- the machete -- has been used to kill more than a million people in Africa, far more than were killed in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings combined. What are car bombs made of? Diesel oil, fertilizer and cars. If we banned everything that can be used to kill people, we would never have harnessed fire.
The only practical approach to the issue of nuclear weapons proliferation is to put it higher on the international agenda and to use diplomacy and, where necessary, force to prevent countries or terrorists from using nuclear materials for destructive ends. And new technologies such as the reprocessing system recently introduced in Japan (in which the plutonium is never separated from the uranium) can make it much more difficult for terrorists or rogue states to use civilian materials to manufacture weapons.
The 600-plus coal-fired plants emit nearly 2 billion tons of CO2annually -- the equivalent of the exhaust from about 300 million automobiles. In addition, the Clean Air Council reports that coal plants are responsible for 64 percent of sulfur dioxide emissions, 26 percent of nitrous oxides and 33 percent of mercury emissions. These pollutants are eroding the health of our environment, producing acid rain, smog, respiratory illness and mercury contamination.
Meanwhile, the 103 nuclear plants operating in the United States effectively avoid the release of 700 million tons of CO2emissions annually -- the equivalent of the exhaust from more than 100 million automobiles. Imagine if the ratio of coal to nuclear were reversed so that only 20 percent of our electricity was generated from coal and 60 percent from nuclear. This would go a long way toward cleaning the air and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Every responsible environmentalist should support a move in that direction.
pmoore@greenspirit.com
I have yet to quote from the April 3rd issue of TIME magazine directly in these articles, but it is a must read. That was the issue in which a great number of burning stories about the new acceleration in global warming were first broken into the mainstream, presumably against some opposition from mysterious forces that had clobbered some rather hefty wanna-be green publishers. It was as impressive as the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence in that regard.

In a few days I will release the third edition of my Proposal for Addressing Climate Change. Thank you all for your continuing advice. We certainly need to do something, and there are many things we can do that will work. I am trying to find someone who will go on the record to say how many trees of what species are sufficient to create enough oxygen for one person during the leafing season. Please send me any tidbits on that. I also plan to publish some time soon a review of Revenge of Gaia.

Watch for Eliot Spitzer’s Earth Day Speech on Saturday, April 22nd, at 5 PM. He has the best record of any elected official in the US on environmental issues. He plans to talk about global warming. Let us respect his courage on this. It is still not politically safe ground to tread for a candidate, and a victory would open doors for other political leaders.

MEDIA WATCH: THE GAIA CONSPIRACY
Copyright c for Earthwatch By Evan Pritchard

Last week, TIME Magazine did what no one else seemed to be able to do, to publish an article about the new accelerated pace of global warming, right under the noses of the Bush administration. The date on the cover was April 3rd, however it was already sold out in stores across the country by April 3rd, and everyone was talking about it. “Be Worried, Be Very Worried!: were the ominous words on the cover. On Monday, April 3rd, I went to see a screening of an unfinished documentary by “Blue Vinyl” director/producer (Toxic Comedy Pictures danielbeegold@earthlink.net) Daniel Gold, called “Melting Planet.” It was somewhat in the Fahreheit 911 tradition, but looking to be a little more mainstream, more folksy, and also informative. There were priceless interviews with born- again Christians, revving up to meet the Lord, clueless folks who never heard of global warming, and hard-working people like you and me, saying “I can hardly make a living; what am I supposed to do about it?” Gold also interviewed author Ross Gelbspan, who candidly told us how terrible it was to be an expert on global warming, and demonstrated his frustration by making a box out of cardboard to put his own publications into storage.

I had brought the TIME magazine article, and Gold took it and held it up to the audience four different times, quoting from memory what it said, “The debate is over..” I did the same thing with both of my Marist classes the week leading up to April 3rd. That TIME article may turn out to be one of the most important documents printed in the US since the Bill of Rights, however that is only true if anyone reads it and does something about it. Otherwise it will just get burned and add CO2 to the atmosphere.

We watched snowmakers at a ski lodge in Utah watching moths in their headlights in January, waiting in vain for 26o or lower, so they could make snow. We saw the native peoples of Shishmarif, watching the permafrost melt and begin packing for the mainland. We watched Heidi the Weather Channel expert find a way to announce back in 2004 that Global Warming was “real.” We learned that the US is producing 4 billion tons of carbon emissions a year. We watched as a “Death of Environmentalism” movement caught hold.

TIME’s article was, to say the least, timely! But Gold said that one of the most important writings on global warming was a little-known memo, that has become known as “The Luntz Memo.” It was written in 2000 by a consulting company advising the Republican re-election campaign, and it said, basically, “As long as the public doesn’t believe there is a consensus, the debate will continue.” It advised the Republican party leaders to keep attacking the uncertainty of the science involved.

This is exactly what has happened during the last six years, and with great effect. And yet, according to Gold, our majority in Washington took things one step further and had government and corporate lawyers with no background in science, rewrite Exxon-funded (and other funded) studies, removing all language that sounded certain, and inserting the uncertainty that the situation, according to the Luntz Memo, required. Then the politicians would comment on the uncertainty with a dismissive air.

Global Warming
“The scientific debate remains open. Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and other experts in the field.”
The Luntz Memo.
(page 137)


According to Gold, James Hansen had appeared before Congress with this message way back in 1988, (That was before carbon emissions had even reached 1990 levels, which the signers of the Kyoto agreement now long for nostalgically) and read from his research stating that global warming was a fact. He was treated like a “doomsday nut” and dismissed. 1991 to 1995 were consecutive record heat years. Late in 2005, he began his tirades again, and was accused of being disloyal to the President. Now his reports must pass across the President’s desk in the feared Oval Office before he can read them.

I stated that Lovelock’s book was released on February 2nd, in the UK and yet seemed to have disappeared in the US. Gold agreed, and said he has been looking for it, and asking people in the book industry, but had not heard anything at all.

Lovelock said that his book “Revenge of Gaia” would be published on February 2nd, 2006, ie: Ground Hogs’ Day because in pagan tradition, that is the day on which prognostications are made, predictions of the future. That’s the day the groundhog sees his shadow. It was also announced that the US publication by Penguin Putnam would be on March 2nd. The book was released around February 2nd in the UK to rave reviews, however the US publication never happened. In fact it is not listed in the on-line books in print, nor have any booksellers in the US been notified of its existence. Rumor has it that Basic Books will pick it up in the fall. It is currently on sale in Ottawa, Canada and consumers have described it as a “small but expensive import,” about 140 pages and $30 Canadian currency. As of this writing, I have not met anyone in the US who has seen it.

Penguin USA has the rights to publish a book by a famous author, his most important book, and a sure best seller. However, they don’t publish it. One must consider the possibility that they got stepped on, however Penguin Putnam is a giant of the publishing industry and very independent at that. They try to live up to the legacy of Ian Ballantine.
When this scenario was mentioned to an employee of Penguin Putnam, they said no one could step on this company, that it would make the New York Times. Welll……..

Andrew Revkin, top science writer for the New York Times, wrote an important article in which he talked about the melting of the ice of Greenland, and said that the rise in ocean levels was now irreversible. He said it could possibly raise the ocean 20 feet above current levels, destroying much of Florida and many of the great coastal cities of the US. This article was posted on the internet at the NY Times site as part of the “Science Section” and dated March 24th, a Friday. It apparently only appeared in one local late edition of the Times. Many of the facts and findings were the same or similar to those mentioned in Lovelock’s book. Apparently the BBC broadcast the same or similar story to Revkin.

One of the few sources to bring this information to the internet is Common Dreams. They quote from British papers on this issue, as nothing else is available. Here are some excerpts from websites regarding James Lovelock and the Gaia Theory, plus Jack Todd Thomas Lovejoy, James Hansen and others.


Here are some quotes from Lovelock


The Independent Jan 16th

“We are in a fool’s climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over, billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.” James Lovelock

“She (Gaia) has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years.” Lovelock

“Had it been known then (in the time of Charles Darwin) that life and the environment are closely coupled, Darwin would have seen that evolution involved not just the organisms, but the whole planetary surface. We might then have looked upon the Earth as if it were alive…” Lovelock

“..So what should we do? ….realize how little time is left to act; and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilization for as long as they can.” Lovelock

“We should be the heart and mind of the Earth, not its malady. So let us be brave and cease thinking of human needs and rights alone, and see that we have harmed the living earth and need to make or peace with Gaia. We must do it while we are still strong enough to negotiate, and not a broken rabble led by brutal war lords…” Lovelock

“We will do our best to survive but, sadly, I can’t see the US or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time and they are the main source of emissions. The worst will happen and survivors will have to adapt to a hell of a climate.” Lovelock.


James Lovelock is an independent environmental scientist and Fellow of the Royal Society. The Revenge of Gaia, scheduled for release Feb. 2nrd 2006 is published by Penguin. He was part of a NASA team in 1965 to look for life on other planets.

Lovejoy heads the H. John Heinz III center for Science Economics and the Environment. He is the author of Global Warming and Biological Diversity.”
Article by David Ignatius Common Dreams

“Lovejoy fears that changes in the Amazon’ ecosystem may be irreversible.” David Ignatius, Common Dreams.

He describes a snowball of drying factors that is happening, and drought is spreading.

Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker ran a three part series last spring, mentioning the shrinking of the Arcitic sea ice by 250 million acres since 1979; the first thawing of the permafrost in 120,000 years. In a recent article “butterfly lessons” she showed how these creatures are moving to new habitats.


Dr. Charles David Keeling, a Scripps marine chemist was the first to confirm the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 1957. It has risen more than 14% since that time. Scripps Oceanographic Society

It has been discovered that the ice age ended abruptly 15,000 years ago, as temperatures rose 16 degrees in less than two decades. From Scripps Oceanographic Society


QUOTABLE QUOTES REGARDING GLOBAL WARMING

“It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.” Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker

“An Antarctic ice shelf that was 200 metres thick and had a surface area of 3,250 square kilometers has broken apart in less than a month.” BBC 3/19/02

“We knew what was left (of the Larsen B ice shelf) would collapse eventually, but the speed of it is staggering.” David Vaughan, a glaciologist at Cambridge.

“Scripps scientists have discovered an 1800 year cycle of oceanic tides that appears to drive changes in earth’s climate….strong tides bring cool conditions to the sea surface..weak tides lead to less cold water mixings and warming periods on Earth. Research at Scripps has shown that Earth is currently in a period in which a natural rise in global temperature..combined with warming from the greenhouse effect will push the planet through an era of rapid global warming.” Scripps Oceanographic Society:

“James Hutton (1726-1797) the father of geology, once described Earth as a kind of superorganism.” Oceansonline.com

“We are in a fool’s climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over, billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.” James Lovelock

“She (Gaia) has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years.” Lovelock

“Climate-change scientists have been warning about the rise in temperatures reaching a “tipping point” when carbon and methane locked up in the Amazon rainforest and Arctic ice would be released into the atmosphere as the climate becomes warmer and drier.” The Scotsman Jan 17 2006

“I would agree we are committed to a certain amount of climate change already. We cannot stop what’s happening, all we can do is slow it down.” Dr. Richard Betts, Climate modeler, Devon

“I don’t think anyone could put any sort of figure on how many people will survive.” Dr. Richard Betts.

“The collapse of the Gulf Stream appears to be unlikely to happen at least in the next 100 years, but it’s theoretically possible it could happen. It’s low probability, but would have a high impact.” Dr. Richard Betts

“Lovejoy fears that changes in the Amazon’ ecosystem may be irreversible.” David Ignatius, Common Dreams.

“People will be killed by climate change in this century. I’d be reasonably confident in that statement.” Dr Myles Allen, Oxford University.

“If the Arctic was to start releasing vast amounts of methane…it wouldn’t necessarily be a planet-destroying event.” Dr. Myles Allen

“Everything he (Lovelock) is writing has to be taken very seriously. Its not just some Doomsday Prediction.” John Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change Research.

“Many human lives are at stake if we don’t do anything about global warming.”
John Schellnhuber

“We could cut carbon emissions by 90 per cent by 2030..just within the realms of possibility..the tipping point is probably around 2025..just last year there was a new study saying British soil has become a source of carbon. Things can happen very quickly and far sooner than we are expecting…Last year there was a big conference in Exeter and what came out of that is we have only ten years in which we can take some meaningful action.”..If we do not do anything in that (timeframe) we might as well forget about it. Once we get to a certain point with global warming, its out of our hands.” George Monbiot British environmentalist The Scotsman Jan 17th 2006

Note: Jack Todd is also called John Todd and his group is called Oceans Ark, and has built amazing “green architecture” sites all over the world. Nancy Jack Todd is his wife who is an equal partner, and is writing a book. She is editor of Annals of Earth and Vice President of Ocean Arks International. She can be reached at (508)548-8161



The Famed Hansen-NASA Censorship Article

Here is a now-famous article about James Hansen by leading science writer Andrew Revkin.



By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: January 29, 2006
The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.


Dr. James Hansen on Global Warming
Dr. Hansen's Recent Lectures and Papers (columbia.edu)

Dr. Goklany's Papers on Climate Change
The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.
Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. "They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public," he said.
Dean Acosta, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at the space agency, said there was no effort to silence Dr. Hansen. "That's not the way we operate here at NASA," Mr. Acosta said. "We promote openness and we speak with the facts."
He said the restrictions on Dr. Hansen applied to all National Aeronautics and Space Administration personnel. He added that government scientists were free to discuss scientific findings, but that policy statements should be left to policy makers and appointed spokesmen.
Mr. Acosta said other reasons for requiring press officers to review interview requests were to have an orderly flow of information out of a sprawling agency and to avoid surprises. "This is not about any individual or any issue like global warming," he said. "It's about coordination."
Dr. Hansen strongly disagreed with this characterization, saying such procedures had already prevented the public from fully grasping recent findings about climate change that point to risks ahead.
"Communicating with the public seems to be essential," he said, "because public concern is probably the only thing capable of overcoming the special interests that have obfuscated the topic."
Dr. Hansen, 63, a physicist who joined the space agency in 1967, directs efforts to simulate the global climate on computers at the Goddard Institute in Morningside Heights in Manhattan.
Since 1988, he has been issuing public warnings about the long-term threat from heat-trapping emissions, dominated by carbon dioxide, that are an unavoidable byproduct of burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels. He has had run-ins with politicians or their appointees in various administrations, including budget watchers in the first Bush administration and Vice President Al Gore.
In 2001, Dr. Hansen was invited twice to brief Vice President Dick Cheney and other cabinet members on climate change. White House officials were interested in his findings showing that cleaning up soot, which also warms the atmosphere, was an effective and far easier first step than curbing carbon dioxide.
He fell out of favor with the White House in 2004 after giving a speech at the University of Iowa before the presidential election, in which he complained that government climate scientists were being muzzled and said he planned to vote for Senator John Kerry.
But Dr. Hansen said that nothing in 30 years equaled the push made since early December to keep him from publicly discussing what he says are clear-cut dangers from further delay in curbing carbon dioxide.
In several interviews with The New York Times in recent days, Dr. Hansen said it would be irresponsible not to speak out, particularly because NASA's mission statement includes the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet."
He said he was particularly incensed that the directives had come through telephone conversations and not through formal channels, leaving no significant trails of documents.
Dr. Hansen's supervisor, Franco Einaudi, said there had been no official "order or pressure to say shut Jim up." But Dr. Einaudi added, "That doesn't mean I like this kind of pressure being applied."
The fresh efforts to quiet him, Dr. Hansen said, began in a series of calls after a lecture he gave on Dec. 6 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth "a different planet."
The administration's policy is to use voluntary measures to slow, but not reverse, the growth of emissions.
After that speech and the release of data by Dr. Hansen on Dec. 15 showing that 2005 was probably the warmest year in at least a century, officials at the headquarters of the space agency repeatedly phoned public affairs officers, who relayed the warning to Dr. Hansen that there would be "dire consequences" if such statements continued, those officers and Dr. Hansen said in interviews.
Among the restrictions, according to Dr. Hansen and an internal draft memorandum he provided to The Times, was that his supervisors could stand in for him in any news media interviews.

Here is the text of a subsequent Andrew Revkin article, dateline March 24th, New York Times, which apparently only appeared in a late local edition of the New York Times.

The Lost NEW YORK TIMES Article
of Andrew Revkin

This important article by leading science writer Andrew Revkin, was published on the New York Times webpage on March 24th which is a Friday not a Tuesday, when most science articles appear and apparently only appeared in print in a local metro late edition of the Times. Here is the article in full.


By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: March 24, 2006
Within the next 100 years, the growing human influence on Earth's climate could lead to a long and irreversible rise in sea levels by eroding the planet's vast polar ice sheets, according to new observations and analysis by several teams of scientists.
One team, using computer models of climate and ice, found that by about 2100, average temperatures could be four degrees higher than today and that over the coming centuries, the oceans could rise 13 to 20 feet — conditions last seen 129,000 years ago, between the last two ice ages.
The findings, being reported today in the journal Science, are consistent with other recent studies of melting and erosion at the poles. Many experts say there are still uncertainties about timing, extent and causes.
But Jonathan T. Overpeck of the University of Arizona, a lead author of one of the studies, said the new findings made a strong case for the danger of failing to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that trap heat in a greenhouselike effect.
"If we don't like the idea of flooding out New Orleans, major portions of South Florida, and many other valued parts of the coastal U.S.," Dr. Overpeck said, "we will have to commit soon to a major effort to stop most emissions of carbon to the atmosphere."
According to the computer simulations, the global nature of the warming from greenhouse gases, which diffuse around the atmosphere, could amplify the melting around Antarctica beyond that of the last warm period, which was driven mainly by extra sunlight reaching the Northern Hemisphere.
The researchers also said that stains from dark soot drifting from power plants and vehicles could hasten melting in the Arctic by increasing the amount of solar energy absorbed by ice.
The rise in sea levels, driven by loss of ice from Greenland and West Antarctica, would occur over many centuries and be largely irreversible, but could be delayed by curbing emissions of the greenhouse gases, said Dr. Overpeck and his fellow lead author, Bette L. Otto-Bliesner of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.
In a second article in Science, researchers say they have detected a rising frequency of earthquakelike rumblings in the bedrock beneath Greenland's two-mile-thick ice cap in late summer since 1993. They say there is no obvious explanation other than abrupt movements of the overlying ice caused by surface melting.
The jostling of that giant ice-cloaked island is five times more frequent in summer than in winter, and has greatly intensified since 2002, the researchers found. The data mesh with recent satellite readings showing that the ice can lurch toward the sea during the melting season.
The analysis was led by Goran Ekstrom of Harvard and Meredith Nettles of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., part of Columbia University.
H. Jay Zwally, a NASA scientist studying the polar ice sheets with satellites, said the seismic signals from ice movement were consistent with his discovery in 2002 that summer melting on the surface of Greenland's ice sheets could almost immediately spur them to shift measurably. The meltwater apparently trickles through fissures and lubricates the interface between ice and underlying rock.
"Models are important, but measurements tell the real story," Dr. Zwally said. "During the last 10 years, we have seen only about 10 percent of the greenhouse warming expected during the next 100 years, but already the polar ice sheets are responding in ways we didn't even know about only a few years ago."
In both Antarctica and Greenland, it appears that warming waters are also at work, melting the protruding tongues of ice where glaciers flow into the sea or intruding beneath ice sheets, like those in western Antarctica, that lie mostly below sea level. Both processes can cause the ice to flow more readily, scientists say.
Many experts on climate and the poles, citing evidence from past natural warm periods, agreed with the general notion that a world much warmer than today's, regardless of the cause of warming, will have higher sea levels.
But significant disagreements remain over whether recent changes in sea level and ice conditions cited in the new studies could be attributed to rising concentrations of the greenhouse gases and temperatures linked by most experts to human activities.
Sea levels have been rising for thousands of years as an aftereffect of the warming and polar melting that followed the last ice age, which ended about 10,000 years ago. Discriminating between that residual effect and any new influence from human actions remains impossible for the moment, many experts say.
Satellites and tide gauges show that seas rose about eight inches over the last century and the pace has picked up markedly since the 1990's.
Dr. Overpeck, the co-author of the paper on rising sea levels, acknowledged the uncertainties about the causes. But he said that in a world in which humans, rich and poor, increasingly clustered on coasts, the risks were great enough to justify prompt action.
"People driving big old S.U.V.'s to their favorite beach or coastal golf course," he said, should "start to think twice about what they might be doing."
END

The following article appeared on March 20th in the Washington Post. It ties in with a number of articles that were apparently squelched elsewhere.

Early Spring Disturbing Life on Northern Rivers
By Cheryl Lyn Dybas
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, March 20, 2006; Page A05
THE GLEN, N.Y. -- The winter-old river ice is creaking and groaning, shifting position. Spring has come early to the frozen upper Hudson River, and ice-out is just around the corner.
Lilliputian wildflowers will soon line the Hudson's banks. In what are known as riverside ice meadows, an ancient cycle of ice formation and melting gives rise to swamp candles, ladies'-tresses, wood lilies and other rare, diminutive flowers. In New York's Adirondack Mountains, ice that forms on the river in winter is pushed onto its banks in spring; there it scours the sloping cobble shores, keeping them free of shrubs and small trees and leaving space for wildflowers to sprout in fragile, arctic-like ice meadows.
But the future for these floral pixies, which depend on late-melting river ice, is bleak. The number of days of ice on northeastern rivers has declined significantly in recent winters, said hydrologist Glenn Hodgkins of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Maine Water Science Center in Augusta.
The trend could spell disaster for the ice meadows. It also signals trouble ahead for endangered Atlantic salmon and other fish, for wetlands plants and animals, and for Northern economies, all of which are sustained by winters with icy rivers.
If the pattern continues, say scientists, only in Currier and Ives prints will ice skaters twirl across frozen New England rivers.
"Northeastern rivers have 20 fewer days of ice cover each winter now than they did in 1936," said Hodgkins, who said the total now averages 92 days. "A lot of that decrease has occurred since the 1960s."
Hodgkins has studied 16 rivers in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. In recent years, the data show, 12 of the 16 rivers had much earlier spring ice-out dates.
"On average, ice-out dates were 11 days earlier in 2000 than in 1936," Hodgkins said. "These changes are linked to warmer temperatures in late winter and early spring."
Winter, it appears, is melting around the edges.
Research by Hodgkins and USGS scientist Robert Dudley also shows changes in early-spring stream flow across eastern North America from Minnesota to Newfoundland. Rivers are gushing with snow- and ice-melt as much as 10 to 15 days sooner than they did 50 to 90 years ago, based on USGS records.
Hodgkins and Dudley's results are scheduled to be published Tuesday in the online edition of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

RIVER WARMING
Since 1936, gauges in northern New England rivers have recorded a steady decline in the annual number of days of river ice, a change that threatens Atlantic salmon, wetlands plants and Northern economies.
Number of days river flows were affected by ice
River 1936 2000 Drop
Allagash 138 129 9
St. John 134 124 10
Missisquoi 123 93 30
Piscataquis 119 105 14
Fish 118 93 25
Sandy 117 104 13
Swift 107 79 28
Saco 98 81 17
Oyster 51 31 20
CORRECTION: A chart with a March 20 Science article on river ice contained an incorrect scale, making it appear that some New England rivers had fewer days of river ice than they actually did. The decrease in average annual days of river ice from 1936 to 2000 for the selected rivers is reflected in this updated chart.
SOURCE: Glenn Hodgkins, U.S. Geological Survey
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So there you have it: While “Global ecological chaos” is a phenomenon that even conservative sources were admitting by the end of last year, now almost everyone is admitting to “Global Warming” as well. That is some measure of progress, very slow moving progress. I would say it was a “glacial pace,” however that term now seems to indicated great speed, not slowness.

The question is still being debated, “Has there been an organized conspiracy to squelch information about global warming here in the US?” From here, it looks like the answer is “yes,” but a fairly subtle and well-orchestrated one, based on the Luntz memo.