RAW: THE UNCOOKED FACTS OF THE BUSH ASSAULT ON THE ENVIRONMENT
ISSUE #27, February 23, 2004 What Would Pogo Do?
The Bush administration is going to have a tough time "fuzzying" the science on this one. Over the last three years, the administration has made every effort, through both words and deeds, to ignore and undermine the science behind global warming. It has ridiculed study after study and testimonial after testimonial as insufficient, incomplete, inconclusive, biased, or worse. Now, however, the administration's in a bit of a pickle. How do you discredit the source when the source is YOU?
http://jahtruth.net/envird.htm
The Pentagon now finds itself in this most awkward of circumstances. Sunday's Observer (of England) reported that according to a new study administered by the United States Department of Defense, "Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters." The Observer article
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1153530,00.html), which calls its source a "secret report, suppressed by defense chiefs and obtained by the Observer," quotes the study as recommending that climate change "should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern." Now, this is where it gets even spookier: The lead authors of this report, according to the Observer, are "Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network;" not your typical environmentalists. http://jahtruth.net/environ.htm
This all seems like an episode of "The Twilight Zone," so we at RAW were rather skeptical ourselves. Then we found corroborating sources, such as this Fortune magazine article from January 26th, entitled "The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare," which makes similar claims. See http://www.fortune.com/fortune/print/0,15935,582584,00.html Here is how, according to Fortune magazine, a scenario considered quite plausible by 2020 would affect national security: "Mega-droughts afflict the U. S., especially in the southern states, along with winds that are 15% stronger on average than they are now, causing widespread dust storms and soil loss. The U. S. is better positioned to cope than most nations, however, thanks to its diverse growing climates, wealth, technology, and abundant resources. That has a downside, though: It magnifies the haves-vs.-have-nots gap and fosters bellicose finger-pointing at America."
The urgency conveyed by the Pentagon rivals even the most outspoken environmental organizations. According to both Fortune and The Observer, this study was ordered by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and overseen by senior Pentagon advisor Andrew Marshall, known as "Yoda" within the Defense Department due to his decades of experience and respected wisdom. http://jahtruth.net/yodas.htm
We at RAW don't know what to say. Apparently, though, neither does the Bush administration, which has made no official comment since this report was completed in late 2003. Whenever the administration does decide to go public with these findings, however, we'd be happy to help them with talking points.
http://jahtruth.net/greeneco.htm
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1032984,00.html
Not just warmer: it's the hottest for 2,000 years Widest study yet backs fears over carbon dioxide Ian Sample, science correspondent September 1, 2003 The Guardian
The earth is warmer now than it has been at any time in the past 2,000 years, the most comprehensive study of climatic history has revealed.
Confirming the worst fears of environmental scientists, the newly published findings are a blow to skeptics who maintain that global warming is part of the natural climatic cycle rather than a consequence of human industrial activity.
Prof Philip Jones, a director of the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit and one of the authors of the research, said: "You can't explain this rapid warming of the late 20th century in any other way. It's a response to a build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere."
The study reinforces recent conclusions published by the UN's intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC). Scientists on the panel looked at temperature data from up to 1,000 years ago and found that the late 20th century was the warmest period on record.
But the IPCC's report was dismissed by some quarters in the scientific community who claimed that while the planet is undoubtedly warming, it was warmer still more than a thousand years ago. So warm, in fact, that it had spurred the Vikings to set up base in Greenland and led to northern Britain being filled with productive vineyards.
To discover whether there was any truth in the claims, Prof Jones teamed up with Prof Michael Mann, a climate expert at the University of Virginia, and set about reconstructing the world's climate over the past 2,000 years.
Direct measurements of the earth's temperature do not exist from such a long time ago, so the scientists had to rely on other indicators of how warm - or not - the planet was throughout the past two millennia.
To find the answer, the scientists looked at tree trunks, which keep a record of the local climate: the rings spreading out from the centre grow to different thicknesses according to the climate a tree grows in. The scientists looked at sections taken from trees that had lived for hundreds and even thousands of years from different regions and used them to piece together a picture of the planet's climatic history.
The scientists also studied cores of ice drilled from the icy stretches of Greenland and Antarctica. As the ice forms, sometimes over hundreds of thousands of years, it traps air, which holds vital clues to the local climate at the time.
"Drill down far enough and you could use the ice to look at the climate hundreds of thousands of years ago, but we just used the first thousand metres," said Prof Jones.
The scientists found that while there was not enough good data to work out what the climate had been like in the southern hemisphere over that period, they could get a good idea of how warm the northern hemisphere had been.
"What we found was that at no point during those two millennia had it been any warmer than it is now. From 1980 onwards is clearly the warmest period of the last 2,000 years," said Prof Jones.
Some regions may well have been fairly warm, especially during the medieval period, but on average, the planet was a cooler place, the study found.
Looking back over a succession of earlier centuries, the temperature fluctuated slightly, becoming slightly warmer or cooler by 0.2C in each century. The temperature has increased by at least that amount in the past
20 or so years, the scientists report in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
"It just shows how dramatic the warming has been in recent years," said Prof Jones.
Special report: Climate change http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/0,12374,782494,00.html
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