[Vision2020] Fantasy vs. Reality Third Installment

[News of Christ Cult]

Fantasy:

HIS VIEW: The gloomy global warming gang is no fun

 By Ed Iverson, Moscow-Pullman Daily News

Saturday, February 10, 2007 - Page Updated at 12:00:00 AM

The cult of global warming is in panic mode. They have thrown their "Hail
Mary" pass. They have played their trump card and here it is: "climate
specialists" in Europe are now darn sure that global climate change is "very
likely" due to human causes. "Very likely" translates to a solemn warning:
there is a 90 percent certainty that man and his machines have gummed up the
atmosphere so much that there is little chance of recovery.

Here we have the Greenhouse Gas Gang appealing to their "priesthood," (in
this case, socialist European scientists). What can the great unwashed
masses possibly do but fall back in wonder? Unbelievers must either submit
or have their papers confiscated. Surprisingly enough, much of the populace
remains stubbornly unconvinced. There is deep-rooted suspicion back east in
Hoboken. There is persistent skepticism out west in Elko. Thinking Americans
can't shake the notion that the pronouncements of "science" are largely
influenced by loyalty to a belief system. The GGG is afraid that "we ain't
buyin' it." They are running low on ammo and they are starting to panic. The
GGG will yammer on about "science"; but you will never hear them discuss
history. Even a quick review of history destroys their carefully crafted
house of cards. When have you ever read an article about global warming that
tells the truth about the MWP or the LIA? What? Do you mean your
sixth-grader came home from government school talking about Al Gore's movie
and never said anything about the 300 years from 900 to 1200 A.D. known as
the Medieval Warm Period? These kids are told that melting polar ice masses
will soon inundate coastal cities and that polar bears are dying on drifting
ice floes; but how many of them ever learn about the Little Ice Age that
began about 1400 and lasted well into the 19th century?

By 874 A.D., my Norwegian ancestors were colonizing Iceland where glaciers
were much smaller than they are today. A century later, they were pressing
on to Greenland, the voyage made much easier than it would be today because
the sea-ice between the two islands was almost nonexistent. Tree rings
dating from 1000 A.D. reveal high solar output and warmer temperatures.
Radiocarbon dating from the period confirms that there were trees that grew
in Canada far north of the modern timberline.

That is just the beginning of the interesting history that the GGG won't
ever mention. During the MWP, Estonia experienced rapid population growth
based on successful cultivation of cereal grains. According to "The History
of Estonia" by Tannberg, an astonishing 150,000 souls lived there by 1200
A.D.

Productive farms supported 70,000 Icelanders in 1100 A.D.; but by 1350,
fishing had replaced cereal crops as the main source of food. By 1400 A.D.,
the old sea routes to Greenland were frozen solid and Greenland was totally
abandoned. What had been a thriving vineyard industry in England during the
MWP was wiped out by the freezing winters and damp, cool summers. Glaciers
advanced all over the northern hemisphere, breaking through terminal
moraines, blocking the medieval gold mines of the Hohe Tauern (high passes
of the central Alps), and causing intermittent damming and flooding of
towns. The coast of western Greenland began to submerge — not from a rising
sea level; but because a much thicker ice sheet resulted in crustal
depression.

By 1600, the LIA was in full advance and would not retreat until sometime
during the 19th century. By 1850, Europe was again experiencing warm spring
and summer weather. High pressure once again prevailed and there were early
wine harvests all over the continent. At the beginning of the 20th century,
there was a marked decrease in sea ice around Iceland. Glaciers retreated
rapidly everywhere except on Antarctica.

The globe sighed with relief. Earthlings could once again look forward to
long growing seasons, mild winters, bountiful harvests, and comfortable
weather. But hold on. What's this you say? This warming period is the end of
civilization as we know it? Well shoot. I guess there's always something to
spoil the fun.

************************************************
HIS VIEW: Are we really dumber than a box of rocks?

 By Ed Iverson

Friday, February 23, 2007 - Page Updated at 10:20:54 PM, Moscow-Pullman
Daily News

 It's been a bad month for the cult of global warming. The nation's seats of
power and influence logged record-low temperatures and snow depths. We were
treated to an hourly report of how many people had succumbed to freezing
temperatures and swirling winds. Committee hearings that were scheduled to
explore new ways in which global warming could be exploited to extort new
taxes and extend the reach of government were cancelled due to blizzard
conditions. "Eeyore" Gore was probably even gloomier than his usual gloomy
self when he heard that several showings of his gloomy film "
'Unsubstantiated' Truth" were cancelled due to ice storms and impassable
roadways.

I am aware those of us who read these things and repeat them to one another
with a chuckle are considered to be dumber than a box of rocks by true
believers and other apologists for the cult of global warming. They
derisively condemn we global warming skeptics as "global warming deniers."
This terminology is designed to equate us with skinheads and neo-Nazis. It
is employed by people who pride themselves for their openness and tolerance.
These advocates of "diversity" threaten to expel any scientist from the
"fraternity" who openly challenges man-caused global warming. Professors at
small land-grant universities have no choice but to parrot the party line
required by these defenders of "academic freedom."

Satire just shouldn't be this easy.

Now here is the truth: The GWS really do understand that unusually cold
weather this winter does nothing to disprove the claims of global warming
alarmists. However, we also understand that the best defense against
fanciful alarmism is a good laugh. It is so obvious that the purpose of the
global warming scare is to insert more government control into our lives and
justify an increasingly onerous tax burden. If we didn't laugh we would have
to cry. We cheerfully admit that despite annual deviations, the earth
experiences long periods of warming and cooling. Indeed, the "box of rocks
club" understands this better than does the cult of global warming. Just let
a few hurricanes rip through and the climate alarmists will begin weeping
and gnashing their teeth about how this is proof positive that man has so
devastated the ionosphere that Life on Earth as we know it will soon cease
to exist. The way Gore carried on last summer one would think that
Washington, D.C., had never before experienced a heat wave. I may be dumber
than a box of rocks, but I'm not the one seriously pointing to annual events
in order to defend my position.

True believers in global warming demand to know why we GWS refuse to bow to
the "evidence." By evidence, of course, they generally mean things like
pictures of polar bears adrift on an iceberg floating toward Iceland. Well,
to be fair, they occasionally cite a few more "proofs." For example, Sharon
Begley wrote a Wall Street Journal guest editorial, claiming "the reality of
climate change has been even worse than the alarming forecasts." She warns
that ocean levels are rising and icecaps are shrinking faster than
predicted. That is simply not true.

Begley says oceans are rising by 3.3 millimeters per year. A little
calculation reveals that this amounts to one foot per century. As Begley
herself observes, in 1995 the IPCC projected a sea-level rise of two feet
per century. Begley warns that ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are
"disintegrating faster than even the 2001 IPCC report anticipated." Again,
not true. Antarctica is actually gaining significant ice mass. The same is
true for Greenland. While ice is thinning at the edges, Greenland's interior
is gaining mass.

The real joke happens when a Gore groupie fondly compares himself to a
courageous Galileo standing for a heliocentric planetary system against
unreasoning superstition. That's getting it backward. Global warming is the
entrenched superstition of our day. It is the cult of global warming (not
the box of rocks club) who condemns all who have the temerity to raise
objections.

Ed Iverson is the head librarian at New Saint Andrews College in Moscow. He
earned a master's of library science at the University of Southern
Mississippi and studied theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British
Columbia. In 1990, he ran for the Idaho Senate as a Republican from Mullan.
He lives with his wife at Viola.

*************************************************

*************************************************


Reality:

IPCC:  The Physical Basis of Climate Change<http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf>


**************************************************************
Link to National Geographic Society
Story<http://mail.google.com/mail/?auth=DQAAAHsAAAB7WtympXeNQClN4ctHAmRWdvvL7zmC4ETEMuoZX6-nIADyNYB-vw1Pe4Xvq7zAZv7nNxwF-HvMkPmcdJ0NKksCkXwPMDmXjTe8bnSo5HqnWNgk1t6RblSw9wgcvHzwsQEZ9oh_WnxIGiXnXYuu2Nw-ZErRJCkoQUPog0BbKzJueQ>

Climate Change: Pictures of a Warming World
   [image: Global Warming Pictures: Glacier National Park, Montana, and
Melting Ice]
[image: Global Warming Pictures: Adelie Penguins and Bird Species]
<http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/12/photogalleries/global_warming/photo2.html>
[image: Global Warming Pictures: Inuits and Arctic Communities]
<http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/12/photogalleries/global_warming/photo3.html>
[image: Global Warming Pictures: Coral Reefs, Oceans, and Phytoplankton]
<http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/12/photogalleries/global_warming/photo4.html>
[image: Global Warming Pictures: Male, Maldives, and Rising Sea Levels]
<http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/12/photogalleries/global_warming/photo5.html>
[image: Global Warming Pictures: Barrow, Alaska, and Rising Polar
Temperatures]
<http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/12/photogalleries/global_warming/photo6.html>
[image: Global Warming Pictures: Polar Bears and Species Decline]
<http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/12/photogalleries/global_warming/photo7.html>
[image: Global Warming Pictures: Stronger and More Damaging Hurricanes and
Floods]
<http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/12/photogalleries/global_warming/photo8.html>
[image: Global Warming Pictures: Glaciers, Melting Ice, and Rising Sea
Levels]
<http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/12/photogalleries/global_warming/photo9.html>
More News Photos<http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/photo_in_the_news.html>
     [image: Global Warming Pictures: Glacier National Park, Montana, and
Melting Ice]   Email to a Friend
<http://news.nationalgeographic.com/cgi-bin/email2friend.pl>    1 of 9  *Next
>> *<http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/12/photogalleries/global_warming/photo2.html>

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 Dawn strikes the mountains rising above St. Mary's Lake in Montana's
Glacier National Park. When the park was created in 1910, it had 150
glaciers. Now it has 30 glaciers, significantly reduced in size.

Many of the world's freshwater
glaciers<http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/02/0201_020201_wiremountain.html>are
shrinking, as warming temperatures melt them away. Some have
disappeared
all together. The glaciers on both Mount
Everest<http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/06/0605_020604_everestclimate.html>and
Mount
Kilimanjaro<http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/09/0923_030923_kilimanjaroglaciers.html>are
among those glaciers noticeably decreasing as temperatures climb,
causing lower-lying
towns<http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/05/0501_020502_himalaya.html>considerable
worry.

Read fast facts<http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/12/1206_041206_global_warming.html>about
global warming.

See today's top news stories <http://news.nationalgeographic.com/>.

*Photo gallery by Chelsea Lane-Miller*
 *Photograph by Raymond Gehman, copyright National Geographic Society*

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-warming21feb21,0,6823000.story?track=tothtml

COLUMN ONE Climate change laps at Bangladesh's shores Rising oceans are
already a reality there, and thousands of people could be displaced.
By Henry Chu
Times Staff Writer

February 21, 2007

Bhamia, Bangladesh — GLOBAL warming has a taste in this village. It is the
taste of salt.

Only a few years ago, water from the local pond was fresh and sweet on Samit
Biswas' tongue. It quenched his family's thirst and cleansed their bodies.

But drinking a cupful now leaves a briny flavor in his mouth. Tiny white
crystals sprout on Biswas' skin after he bathes and in his clothes after his
wife washes them.

The change, international scientists say, is the result of intensified
flooding caused by shifting climate patterns. Warmer weather and rising
oceans are sending seawater surging up Bangladesh's rivers in greater volume
and frequency, experts say, overflowing and seeping into the soil and water
supply of thousands of people.

Their lives are being squeezed by distant lands they have seen only on
television — America, China and Russia at the top of the list — whose carbon
emissions are pushing temperatures and sea levels upward. This month, a
long-awaited report by the United Nations said global warming fueled by
human activity could lift temperatures by 8 degrees and the ocean's surface
by 23 inches by 2100.

* *Here in southwestern Bangladesh, the bleak future forecast by the report
is already becoming reality, bringing misery along with it.

The heavier than usual floods have wiped out homes and paddy fields. They
have increased the salinity of the water, which is contaminating wells,
killing trees and slowly poisoning the mangrove jungle that forms a barrier
against the Bay of Bengal.

If sea levels continue to rise at their present rate, by the time Biswas,
35, retires from his job as a teacher, the only home he has known will be
swamped, overrun by the ocean with the force of an unstoppable army. That,
in turn, will trigger another kind of flood: millions of displaced residents
desperate for a place to live.

"It will be a disaster," Biswas said.

Bangladesh, a densely crowded and painfully poor nation, contributes only a
minuscule amount to the greenhouse gases slowly smothering the planet. But a
combination of geography and demography puts it among the countries experts
predict will be hit hardest as Earth heats up.

Nearly 150 million people, the equivalent of about half the U.S. population,
live packed in an area the size of Iowa and about as flat. Home to where the
mighty Brahmaputra, Ganges and Meghna rivers meet, most of Bangladesh is a
vast delta of alluvial plains that are barely above sea level, making it
prone to flooding from waterways swollen by rain, snowmelt from the
Himalayas and increased infiltration of the ocean.

Global warming trends have already exacerbated that, and the situation will
probably get worse, scientists say.

"A little increase in temperature, a little climate change, has a magnified
impact here," said A. Atiq Rahman, director of the Bangladesh Center for
Advanced Studies — the country's leading environmental research group — in
Dhaka, the capital. "That's what makes the population here so vulnerable."

OTHER low-lying countries also are at risk, including the Netherlands and
tiny islands in the South Pacific that could eventually be swallowed by the
expanding oceans. But the population of these countries is only a fraction
of that of Bangladesh.

If the sea here rises by a foot, which some researchers say could happen by
2040, the resulting damage would set back Bangladesh's progress by 30 years,
Rahman said. As much as 12% of the population would be made homeless.

A 3-foot rise by century's end — a possible scenario if the polar ice caps
melt at a more rapid pace — would wreak havoc in Bangladesh on an
apocalyptic, Atlantis-like scale, according to scientific projections.

A quarter of the country would be submerged. Dhaka, now in the center of the
nation, would sit within 60 miles of the coast, where boats would float
above the underwater remnants of countless town squares, markets, houses and
schools. As many as 30 million people would become refugees in their own
land, many of them subsistence farmers with nothing left to subsist on.

"Tomorrow's poverty will be far worse than today's," Rahman said.

For years, the government either denied or downplayed the danger posed by
global warming. Bangladesh is hardly unique in that regard; many accuse the
U.S. of doing the same. Rahman recalls overhearing officials ridicule him as
a madman when he warned that Bangladesh risked being inundated.

But the weight of scientific opinion has grown, as has evidence that climate
patterns are shifting and producing harmful effects in this region.
Politicians who had previously dismissed global warming as a far-off problem
are starting to see it as a clear and present danger.

"Part of it is sheer reality hitting you on the head — there's stronger
floods, more frequent floods," Rahman said. "Now the game is much clearer.
The connection … has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt."

Three years ago, the government set up a climate-change unit in its
Environment Ministry, but it employs only a handful of staff and depends
largely on Britain for funding.

Lately officials have also begun appealing to wealthy, fossil-fuel-consuming
nations such as Japan and the countries of the European Union to help
Bangladesh prepare for a catastrophe it has few resources to combat.

"Lives in Bangladesh will be devastated through no fault of the people
concerned," Sabihuddin Ahmed, the ambassador to Britain and a former
Environment Ministry official, wrote in the Guardian newspaper in September.

For people in the West, Ahmed said, the onslaught of global warming may seem
decades away. In Bangladesh, "the future has arrived."

Here in the coastal southwest, in an area called Munshiganj close to the
Indian border and the famed Sundarbans mangrove forest, grizzled farmers
describe the relentless encroachment of the sea.

Thirty years ago, an embankment built to hem in the tidal rivers around them
was sufficient to protect villagers from major inundations. Now they
estimate that the high-tide mark has climbed 10 feet, and breaches such as
one that happened in September, which swamped hundreds of homes, have become
depressingly common.

"The water came up to here," said Iman Ali Gain, sweeping his hand up to his
chest as scores of men behind him hauled baskets of gloppy gray soil to
repair the dike. "We were afraid when we saw it."

LIKE many, perhaps most, Munshiganj residents, Gain, 65, does not understand
concepts such as carbon footprints, greenhouse gases, the ozone layer or
melting ice caps. The vast majority of the people in this area are
illiterate; only one in five has finished primary school.

But Gain knows how his life has changed over the last several years because
of new environmental conditions. He once grew rice to support himself and
his family, but his harvests started shrinking as the salinity of the water
increased. To cope, he followed the example of many of his neighbors and
switched to shrimp farming, a way to take advantage of the salty water
washing over the fields.

For the first time in Munshiganj, shrimp farming occupies more of the
cultivable land than do traditional crops.

Though the shift has enabled some villagers to survive, it has created other
headaches. Because it is less labor-intensive, shrimp farming has boosted
unemployment. Thousands of residents have migrated to other parts of
Bangladesh or India in search of work.

Worse yet, deliberately trapping so much briny water to raise shrimp has
increased the sodium concentration in the soil, which aggravates the
salinity creeping into drinking-water supplies.

"From ancient times, our people used [local] ponds for drinking water. Now
they need to go four to five kilometers to collect sweet water," said Mohon
Kumar Mondal, a local environmental activist who is trying to promote
awareness of and adaptation to climate change.*

*The small pond here in the village of Bhamia draws women with their jars
from surrounding villages that used to have their own, or closer, sources of
drinking water. But Bhamia's pond is becoming more saline, and the nearest
abundant source of untainted fresh water is nearly fives miles away.

Residents report an increase in health problems such as diarrhea, skin
diseases and dysentery. The salty water has also killed many of the palm and
date trees that once lent a fecund beauty to the sunbaked landscape.

THOSE here who are strongly religious, a mix of Muslims and Hindus, have
tended to ascribe the changes in climate and the natural disasters befalling
them to God, Mondal said.

Perhaps it is punishment for their impiety, the people murmur; perhaps, with
repentance and prayer, God will relent and spare them the heavier floods,
the stronger cyclones and the hotter summers they are experiencing. And
perhaps there will be more fresh water to slake their thirst.

A geographer with a master's degree, Mondal, 31, knows humans are
responsible for the problem that is making life more difficult here — and
threatens to make it impossible if the temperatures and the oceans keep
rising.

And so it is to humans, especially those in developed societies, that he
issues his plea.

"I request people, please understand the situation of the Earth. Please make
your decisions according to the situation," Mondal said. "And please think
of poor people like us, who have not created greenhouse gases. Please think
of our situation."


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http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-disease25feb25,0,7795423.story?track=ntothtml

Global warming: enough to make you sick Rising temperatures are
redistributing bacteria, insects and plants, exposing people to diseases
they'd never encountered before.
By Jia-Rui Chong
Times Staff Writer

February 25, 2007

CORDOVA, ALASKA — Oysterman Jim Aguiar had never had to deal with the
bacterium *Vibrio parahaemolyticus* in his 25 years working the frigid
waters of Prince William Sound.

The dangerous microbe infected seafood in warmer waters, like the Gulf of
Mexico. Alaska was way too cold.

But the sound was gradually warming. By summer 2004, the temperature had
risen just enough to poke above the crucial 59-degree mark. Cruise ship
passengers who had eaten local oysters were soon coming down with diarrhea,
cramping and vomiting — the first cases of *Vibrio* food poisoning in Alaska
that anyone could remember.

"We were slapped from left field," said Aguiar, who shut down his oyster
farm that year along with a few others.

As scientists later determined, the culprit was not just the bacterium, but
the warming that allowed it to proliferate.

"This was probably the best example to date of how global climate change is
changing the importation of infectious diseases," said Dr. Joe McLaughlin,
acting chief of epidemiology at the Alaska Division of Public Health, who
published a study on the outbreak.

The spread of human disease has become one of the most worrisome subplots in
the story of global warming. Incremental temperature changes have begun to
redraw the distribution of bacteria, insects and plants, exposing new
populations to diseases that they have never seen before.

A report from the World Health Organization estimated that in 2000 about
154,000 deaths around the world could be attributed to disease outbreaks and
other conditions sparked by climate change.

The temperature change has been small, about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the
last 150 years, but it has been enough to alter disease patterns across the
globe.

In Sweden, fewer winter days below 10 degrees and more summer days above 50
degrees have encouraged the northward movement of ticks, which has coincided
with an increase in cases of tick-borne encephalitis since the 1980s.

Researchers have found that poison ivy has grown more potent and lush
because of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

In Africa, mosquitoes have been slowly inching up the slopes around Mt.
Kenya, bringing malaria to high villages that had never been exposed before.

"It's going to get very warm," said Andrew Githeko, a vector biologist who
heads the Climate and Human Health Research Unit at the Kenya Medical
Research Institute in Kisumu. "That's going to mean a huge difference to
malaria."

Githeko, 49, grew up in the central highlands in a tiny village near the
town of Karatina, about 5,700 feet above sea level.

His home was different from most of Africa. The air was damp and chilly. On
clear days, he could see the glaciers on Mt. Kenya, the second-highest peak
in Africa at 17,058 feet.

When he was a child, lowland diseases like malaria were unknown in Karatina.
But perhaps 10 years ago, a smattering of cases began to appear.

He had long ago left his home to study the great plagues of Africa — Rift
Valley fever, malaria, cholera and others. The appearance of malaria in the
highlands, however, was a mystery worth returning home for.

Githeko dispatched a colleague to collect mosquito larvae in puddles and
streams around Mt. Kenya, some as high as 6,300 feet. Tests later identified
some of the mosquitoes as *Anopheles arabiensis*, one of the species that
carry malaria.

Githeko's findings, published in 2006, marked the highest *A.
arabiensis*breeding site ever recorded in Kenya and was the first
published report of
malaria infections in the central highlands, he said.

He knew by watching Mt. Kenya's gradually disappearing glaciers that his
world was warming, and that lowland diseases would eventually work their way
higher. "But we did not expect this to happen so soon," he said.

Githeko's work has been echoed in a small number of studies around the
world.

In 1996, health authorities reported a human case of tick-borne encephalitis
in the Czech village of Borova Lada, elevation 3,000 feet. Until then,
the *Ixodes
rinicus *tick, which carries the disease, had never been seen above 2,600
feet.

The case caught the attention of Milan Daniel, a parasitologist the
Institute for Postgraduate Medical Education in Prague who has been studying
the movement of ticks in the Czech Republic for half a century.

He scoured the Sumava and Krkonose mountains and found that the ticks had
migrated as high as 4,100 feet largely because of milder autumns over the
last two decades, according to a series of studies published over the last
four years.

>From 1961 to 2005, the mean temperature in the Krkonose Mountains had
increased about 2 1/2 degrees.

"This shift of the ticks," Daniel said, "is clearly connected with climate
changes."

According to a landmark United Nations report released this month, global
warming has reached a point where even if greenhouse gas emissions could be
held stable, the trend would continue for centuries.

The report painted a grim picture of the future — rising sea levels, more
intense storms, widespread drought.

Predicting the future of disease, however, has proven difficult because of
myriad factors — many of which have little to do with global warming.
Diseases move with people, they follow trade routes, they thrive in places
with poor sanitation, they develop resistance to medicines, they can blossom
during war or economic breakdowns.

"No one's saying global warming is the whole picture here," said Dr. Paul R.
Epstein, associate director of the Center for Health and the Global
Environment at Harvard University. "But it is playing a role. As climate
changes, it's projected to play an even greater role."

In a Beltsville, Md., laboratory filled with bathroom-sized aluminum
chambers, U.S. Department of Agriculture weed physiologist Lewis Ziska is
peering into the future of one of the key components of global warming —
rising carbon dioxide levels.

CO2 levels have been on the rise since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution
more than 200 years ago. Today, they are at their highest point in more than
650,000 years.

In the tightly sealed chambers, Ziska re-created pre-industrial conditions
by turning down the concentration of carbon dioxide to 280 parts per
million. In another box, he simulated the present with 370 parts per
million. In a third box, he pumped up the carbon dioxide to 600 parts per
million, the estimate for 2050.

Much of Ziska's work has centered on ragweed, a noxious plant that sets off
allergy sufferers, such as Ziska himself. The weeds inside the tanks suck up
carbon dioxide. "It's like feeding a hungry teenager," he said.

Collecting yellow pollen in plastic bags fitted around the plants, Ziska
found that current conditions produced 131% more pollen than pre-industrial
conditions. Future conditions produced 320% more.

"For us weed biologists, this is the worst of times and the best of times,"
he said.

The impact of global warming has not been all bad. Researchers recently
found that rising temperatures have helped reduce some diseases related to
cold weather. One British study found that the number of children infected
with a cold-like virus known as respiratory syncytial virus has been
declining with warming temperatures.

Combining meteorological data and emergency room admission rates from 1981
to 2004, physiologist Gavin Donaldson at University College London found
each increase of 1.8 degrees clipped three weeks off the end the virus'
winter season.

"A small amount of warming can go a long way, as far as changing disease
transmission dynamics," said Dr. Jonathan Patz, director of Global
Environmental Health at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Given the gradual pace of warming, there are also some chances to adapt.

After Prince William Sound's *Vibrio *outbreak in 2004, the state required
more oyster testing in some areas. In the last two years, there have been
only four cases of *Vibrio *food poisoning.

Life in Aguiar's remote inlet has largely returned to the way it was before.
This winter has been cold. Aguiar, a bear of a man with a riotous beard,
huddled inside the houseboat for warmth recently as the temperature outside
hovered around 20 degrees. The pale Northern Lights pulsed over the
snow-laced Chugach Mountains, and skins of ice grew on the still water.

Come summer, Aguiar will start sending oyster samples to the state. When the
temperature hits about 55 degrees, he'll drop his oyster baskets 60 or 100
feet in the water for about 10 days to clear out the bacteria.

It's a solution he can live with in a warming world.

"It's not all evil," he said. "I just don't like to see rapid change."


****************************************************************************
HIS VIEW: Human effects on climate change are real

 By Ted Moffett

Friday, February 23, 2007 - Page Updated at 01:02:45 PM  Moscow-Pullman
Daily News

*Moffett*

In "The gloomy global warming gang is no fun," Ed Iverson attempts to
undermine the recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate
Change, ignoring hard science regarding historical, present and projected
CO2 levels, and implying the IPCC suppressed evidence regarding the Medieval
Warming Period and the Little Ice Age, mocking efforts to mitigate human
impacts on global warming.

A Science magazine article (Nov. 25, 2005: Vol: 310), giving results of
studying atmospheric samples trapped in Antarctic ice cores dating back
650,000 years, reveals that current CO2 levels of 380 parts per million are
27 percent higher than the high point of 300 ppm during this period,
according to Thomas Stocker of the University of Bern in Switzerland. This
650,000-year period covers numerous ice ages and interglacials.

Consider that pre-industrial CO2 levels were 270-280 ppm, and that the
current increase to 380 ppm is almost entirely due to human activity. If CO2
output continues to increase due to human fossil-fuel use, as it currently
is, atmospheric CO2 levels will rise to around 500 ppm by around 2100.

According to Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Daniel Schrag,
director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, who accepts
the 500 ppm figure for the projected human-caused CO2 increase in the next
century, the last time atmospheric CO2 levels were that high was 55 million
years ago during the Eocene, when ocean levels were hundreds of feet higher
due to the absence of polar ice caps.

I recently listened on C-SPAN as IPCC scientists addressed questions from a
member of the U.S. Congress in hearings held Feb. 8, about the Medieval
Warming Period and the Little Ice age answered frankly and expertly.
Iverson's claims that the evidence of these recent climate periods is
suppressed because this evidence contradicts human induced climate change
theory are unfounded.

On June 14, 2000, in U.S. Congressional briefings on global climate change,
under the auspices of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, Texas A&M
University's Dr. Thomas J. Crowley presented evidence that the Medieval
Warming Period and the Little Ice Age can be explained by variations in
solar output and volcanic activity, but that these variables do not explain
late-20th-century warming.

We hear variations of Iverson's skeptical theme that natural climate change
explains the current warming trend, not human impacts. But what if natural
climate change variables should be cooling our planet? Why is this
possibility not widely considered by the skeptics of human -induced global
warming?

The climate model theory put forward by William F. Ruddiman, Professor
Emeritus at the University of Virginia, in Scientific American, March 2005,
focusing on the precession of the equinoxes and solar output influencing
methane and CO2 releases, coordinated with ice ages and interglacials over
hundreds of thousands of years offers compelling evidence. But his findings
suggest we should be entering another cooling period. Human-induced
variables that warm the climate are overcoming natural climate change. In
effect, human activity is now stopping the next ice age, as we begin to
induce temperatures on Earth far above the moderate temperatures seen during
interglacial periods for tens of thousands of years.

Unless a mitigating variable like an asteroid impact or large-scale volcanic
activity intervenes, we have merely decades to lower CO2 output in absolute
amounts, sequester atmospheric CO2, or block solar energy by artificial
means, or radical climate change will occur if atmospheric CO2 levels reach
500 ppm or higher. The scientific evidence is compelling. Iverson's
anti-scientific skepticism, which is hampering efforts to stop human impacts
on global warming, is likely to be viewed by history as not very laughable.

Ted Moffett has a bachelor of science degree in philosophy from the
University of Idaho and lives near Troy.
********************************************************
Moscow-Pullman Daily News

*God Bless Ed Iverson*

Ed Iverson's latest "opinion" (Feb. 10-11) is a gem that should not go
unrewarded with blessings. The Daily News should entreat God for the first
blessing, for in Iverson we find an editor's dream: someone who writes
flamboyant, unsubstantiated claims — typically with a vituperative prose —
that must, as a consequence, sell an untold number of newspapers. And the
fact that it is only "His View," the paper is apparently not liable for his
misrepresentations of facts or routine prevarications.

The entreating of blessings also should come from teachers that read his
column, for he saves them the tremendous amount of work it often takes to
find "real life" fundamental flaws in logic to be used as classroom
examples. Iverson's columns typically contain enough of these flaws to fill
a semester's notebook.

Take his recent "opinion" on global warming. He commits his first of several
genetic fallacies — the fallacy of attacking advocates of arguments, not the
arguments themselves — in the very first sentence where he lumps together as
a cult those who are convinced that warming is taking place.

The illogic is repeated with more vituperative prose: "Greenhouse Gas Gang"
and their "priesthood (in this case, socialist European scientists)." Added
to the genetic fallacy of ad hominem attack is an inability to understand
data.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's recent assessment, to which
Iverson obliquely refers, is the product of 2,500 scientists working across
the globe and was signed by more than 100 countries. It would be difficult
to imagine that all these scientists and countries are, as Iverson claims,
socialist.

Iverson's reluctance to look at empirical data also leads him to falsely
conclude that "much of the populace remains stubbornly unconvinced" when 85
percent of the public express belief in climate warming in scientific
opinion polls.

The fallacies march on. But suffice it to conclude with a final blessing for
Iverson.

*Gene Rosa,* Moscow

**************************************************************

Moscow-Pullman Daily News

*Point of column was elusive*

It was harder than usual to find a point in Ed Iverson's opinion piece of
Feb. 10 & 11, in which he seemed to argue that there is no global warming,
but if there were, it wouldn't have anything to do with human activity. Then
he concludes that there is, OK, global warming, but it is a good thing.

Never mind the witless and apparently clueless slams at the researchers who
prepared the International Panel on Climate Change's recent report
("socialist European scientists"). Never mind the sloppy writing.

There are just two questions I would like Iverson to answer. First, what is
the mechanism behind his supposed "natural cycle?" The global energy balance
is changing; what is the cause for it, natural or otherwise? Will Iverson's
suspicions about science extend to asserting there are effects for which
there are no causes?

Second, there is no climatological theory in which carbon dioxide increase
does not drive temperature. How, if the current temperature rise is wholly
natural, can the absence of effect from the increase in carbon dioxide be
explained? (Especially since the historical rises in temperature he cites
were roughly 10 times slower than the one we are currently witnessing.)

If a 35-percent increase in the second most important greenhouse gas is not
affecting the global temperature, why isn't it, Iverson?

*Keith Bromley,* Moscow

*********************************************

Moscow-Pullman Daily News

*Sound scientific perspective*

Ed Iverson raised some interesting questions on global climate change in his
weekend column (Opinion, Feb. 10 & 11). He discussed some historical changes
in climate (the "Medieval warming" of about 1,000 years ago and the "Little
Ice Age" of the 15th to 19th centuries) and wondered whether they are
pertinent to the climate changes being discussed today. He feels these two
periods have been neglected in today's discussions of global climate change.


Paleoclimatologists have not neglected these two periods. They have
concluded that this interesting "Medieval warming" was only a regional, not
a global, phenomenon. Further, the warming estimated for this period was
less than the warming already measured in the past few decades. This
accounts for the apparent neglect of this period in current climate
discussions.

The Little Ice Age of a few hundred years ago, while truly a cooler period,
was nowhere near as great a departure from the long-term estimated average
as the changes measured now. Current warming is much more than simply a
rebound from this cooler period.

No, let's not neglect history; but we should put it into a sound scientific
perspective. The changes seen in these two periods (successes and failures
of various crops, etc.) had large effects on people in those times. However,
the effects of climate change in the near future are likely to be more
severe. Already small changes in average temperatures have had noticeable
effects. For example, the lifecycle of a widespread insect pest (conifer
bark beetles) has changed, allowing it to inflict greater damage. In another
example, the severity of fire seasons has increased. Denial that climate
change has arrived will result in a lack of mitigating responses. This will
be a pathetic legacy to leave for our children.

*Steve Flint,* Moscow
*******************************************

Moscow-Pullman Daily News

*Can't deny global warming *

A big basketball weekend in Moscow/Pullman and the Daily News lets Eddie out
of the attic and he produces another of his ill-informed rants … this time
about global warming (Opinion, Feb. 10-11).

Way back in 1988 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was founded.
Its first (cautious) report was issued in 1990 after being vetted by
thousands of scientists, as well as 90-some participating governments
(including the United States). Its most recent report (issued last week
after going through the same process) put the likelihood that we humans are
the cause of global warming (which is a given from the evidence) at about 90
percent. At this point, as Ellen Goodman has noted, global warming deniers
are on a par with Holocaust deniers.

The problem with some of us seems to be that we refuse, individually and
collectively, to take responsibility and assume that our grandchildren will
be able to fix things (if they're lucky).

So now Eddie complains about the "socialist European scientists" in the
global warming gang. I guess it's lucky for them that librarians from small
evangelical schools aren't in power, or all those bad scientists would have
to be burned at the stake.

The same thing cropped up when Galileo (gosh, another one of those pesky
European scientists) figured out that the Earth revolved around the sun (it
does Eddie) and was brought up on heresy charges by the ruling
ecclesiastics. He recanted and avoided the stake but to paraphrase Galileo
(who is said to have muttered something like this as he left the court),
"Yet … it is warming up."

*Ross Coates,* Moscow

**************************************************

Moscow-Pullman Daily News

*A serious threat*

Many people in our community are asking serious questions about global
warming. As a professional scientist, I'd like to respectfully offer a few
answers.

n Who wrote the report on global warming that has been so much in the news
recently? The report was published by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization.
It took five years of research by 600 scientists from all continents. A
brief 18-page summary (www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf) lists 303 writers and
editors from 40 countries (www.ipcc.ch/activity/wg1authors.pdf). Most of the
report's authors are Americans (62), followed by scientists from the United
Kingdom (25). Already 113 world governments — including the United States —
signed off on the report's conclusion.

n Why can't the scientists just tell me "yes or no" with absolute certainty,
instead of merely giving "90 percent probability" that global warming is
caused by humans? The answer is that science never deals with absolute
truths. Every scientific theory is in a way provisional, subject to future
refinement. For example, an apple falling from the tree will always fall
downward, and yet scientists still talk about Newton's "theory of
gravitation," instead of "fact of gravitation." Clearly, the word theory has
a different meaning in science, in comparison with everyday speech.

n How can there be global warming when it is so cold this week in upstate
New York? This has to do with the difference between weather and climate.
Weather can be observed from day to day, but the climate changes much more
slowly. In fact, scientists predict that an overall warming of the entire
planet will be accompanied by extreme weather in particular locations,
including cold snaps and torrential rains.

Global warming is a serious threat. We must learn about it as much as we
can, the sooner the better.

*Petr Kuzmic,* Pullman

*******************************************************************************


Moscow-Pullman Daily News

*Getting the facts straight*

Some of us need to write back to Ed Iverson regarding his misleading opinion
piece about global warming (Opinion, Feb. 10 & 11). Iverson has perpetrated
falsehoods.

* There is no cabal of socialist European scientists who preside over global
warming research and its interpretation. And there is no gang. Stop making
up things.

* According to surveys, the American people do not doubt the reality of
global warming to the extent you imply. Just political and religious
conservatives doubt it.

* The examples cited about warming and cooling episodes in the past 1,000
years are not often discussed because they don't mean much. On the scales
required for global warming and cooling, 300 years is a blip of nothing. Try
30,000 or 300,000 or 3,000,000 years.

* The greenhouse effect is as old as the Earth itself. What matters are not
periodic warming and cooling, but the rates of change. The rate is higher
now than it ever has been. Adaptation and co-evolution take more time than
the current rate of change allows for many species, probably including ours.
Other species matter because we cannot live alone.

* What are conservatives afraid of here? That accepting the reality of
anthropogenic global warming means one also has to accept the reality of
evolution? Logically, one does. And logically, it certainly means that the
Earth is more than 6,000 years old.

* We all have a right to our own beliefs, but we do not have a right to our
own science. You can take science or leave it but, unlike a cafeteria, you
cannot pick and choose. In this case, to doubt the reality of global warming
and the human contribution to it, is to doubt the reality of carbon
chemistry. That would be a preposterous conclusion for a carbon-based life
form.

*Lee Freese,* Pullman

***********************************************************
Moscow-Pullman Daily News


*Iverson's parallel universe *

If only it were possible to bodily transfer Ed Iverson into a parallel
universe (Oh, happy thought) in which no actions are taken to combat the
global warming that he pooh-poohed recently (Opinion, Feb. 10 & 11). There
he could bask in its effects while the rest of us mere mortals focus our
efforts on trying to save our precious world. Yes, Ed, in recorded history
there have been and will continue to be secular changes in the Earth's
climate on a scale of hundreds or thousands of years, but the present
changes within the past 50 to 100 years can be incontrovertibly linked to
human activity.

Hopefully, there is still time to do something about it - or is there?

Achim Steiner,director of the U.N. Environmental Program, one of the
sponsors of the International Panel on Climate Change, recently declared
"February 2nd will be remembered as the date when question marks were
removed on whether climate change has anything to do with human activity -
the moment when attention will shift to what on earth are we going to do
about it." (New Scientist, Feb. 10-16,2007,p. 3).

Data from Antarctic ice cores clearly show that atmospheric levels of CO2
and methane (CH4 ) have remained fairly constant for the past 10,000 years,
but have risen sharply within the past 100 years as a result of human
activity. I am happy to put my faith in the work of our atmospheric
scientists, whom Ed labels the "greenhouse gang."

Ed is welcome in his parallel universe to continue braying and praying to
his own GGG, aka greenhouse gas gods.

*Maurice Windsor, * Pullman

-- 


Juanita Flores
Advocate for the Truth from Jesus
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