By Staff
Too bad we don't have 50 years. Greenland is melting at a rate which breaks previous records every couple of years.
Climate change can be seen most vividly in the Arctic, where temperatures have been rising twice as fast as the rest of the world – the rare natural disaster which can be witnessed in slow motion.
If ice keeps melting at its current pace, worldwide sea levels could rise three feet by 2100.
Nobody's sure what this surge of cold, fresh water into the Gulf Stream will do to, say, Europe's climate, but there would be no more coastal cities such as New York, Miami and New Orleans, our fastest-growing city, though it remains about half its size pre-Hurricane Katrina in August 2005.
If we've learned anything, it's that as change intensifies, it gets harder to predict.
By 2007, 78 mineral-exploration licenses had been granted to 30 companies anxious to learn what lies beneath the 81 percent of Greenland ice covered.
The world's largest island, roughly the size of all 26 states east of the Mississippi, it doesn't have many more inhabitants than Cass County.
The Independent, a London newspaper, reported that the entire flying capacity of Air Greenland was booked by prospectors of this modern Klondike much of last summer to look for oil, gold, diamonds, zinc, lead, silver and other untapped natural resources.
World leaders July 8 in Toyako, Japan, articulated a non-binding goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in half by 2050 to thwart global warming.
The Group of Eight industrialized nations, or G-8, include the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, Russia, Italy, France and Canada.
The G-8 also decides to impose targeted sanctions against Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe's government in response to last month's rigged elections.
Dick Cheney, of course, fights climate change his own way: A former senior EPA official, Jason K. Burnett, claims July 8 that the vice president's office lobbied to delete from congressional testimony references to the consequences of climate change on public health.
Burnett stated in a July 6 letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., the White House was concerned that the proposed testimony last October by Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, might make it harder to avoid regulating greenhouse gases.
Boxer, at a news conference, said Press Secretary Dana Perino lied about why the White House pushed for the deletions (to reflect concerns by the White House Office of Science and Technology over the accuracy of the science), prompting Perino to demand an apology.
Burnett wrote that Cheney's office succeeded in removing almost half of the CDC's original draft testimony.
Six pages were excised.
Boxer further claimed heavy editing was the first stage of a "master plan" aimed at "covering up the real dangers of global warming and hiding the facts from the public."
Whoever said everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it, never met Cheney.
So much for the rhetorical 'Axis of Evil': U.S. exports to Iran, from bras and bull semen to perhaps even weapons, have grown more than tenfold during the Bush administration. America sent more cigarettes to Iran – at least $158 million worth – than any other product, according to an Associated Press analysis of seven years of U.S. government trade data showing Michigan fifth in the top 10 after California, Florida, Georgia and Louisiana with $12 million; top export, chemicals. Indiana ranks 16 with $1.8 million; top export, medical diagnostic equipment. U.S. government figures show $148,000 worth of unspecified weapons and military gear.
"Our sanctions are targeted against the regime, not the people," said a spokesman for the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which enforces sanctions.
Patriotism vs. nationalism: We love our country, right or wrong, but mistakes must be acknowledged as well as accomplishments to make it better.
Patriotic pressure blinded the media from sufficiently questioning the Iraq invasion. Congress members feared being targeted as unpatriotic if they voted against the stampede to war. We need to be more worried about living up to our American ideals than making shallow patriotic displays.