Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, here it is, the main event you have all been waiting for,
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies yesterday published a new report aptly titled July 2010 -- What Global Warming Looks Like. And it looks like this:
Climate Progress offers the following play-by-play analysis:
- The fasting month of Ramadan began yesterday in sorrow for 14 million Pakistanis, as one fifth of the nation is underwater from the worst monsoon-related floods in living memory.
- Weeks of flooding and landslides in China have affected over 140 million people in 28 provinces as rivers like the Yangtze, the Yellow and the Songhua have swollen from the extreme rains.
- Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic face millions of dollars of damage after flooding rains last weekend carved a "swath of destruction," killing at least 11 people and damaging hundreds of homes and businesses.
- Russia's unprecedented heat wave, which has killed thousands and caused15 billion in damage to the country's economy, may be the "first disaster unequivocally attributable to anthropogenic climate change."
The World Meteorological Organization, in its report titled Unprecedented sequence of extreme weather events, explains that
"Climate extremes have always existed, but all the [current] events compare with, or exceed in intensity, duration or geographical extent, the previous largest historical events. ...studies of the past climate show no record of similar high temperatures since the tenth and eleventh centuries in Ancient Russia."
As far as I can tell, neither of these reports is on the front page of any American newspaper this morning.
Welcome to your future.
"The tax-payer funded National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has become mired in fresh global warming data scandal involving numbers for the Great Lakes region that substantially ramp up averages.
A beleaguered federal agency appears to be implicated in the most blatant and extreme case of climate data fraud yet seen. Official records have been confirmed as evidence that a handful of temperature records for the Great Lakes region have been hiked up by literally hundreds of degrees to substantially inflate the average temperature range for the northeastern United States.
The web pages at the center of this latest climate storm were created by NOAA in partnership with Michigan State University."
Global warming, made by NOAA and MSU!
If events prove life-threatening to all of humanity, survival could become an extremely powerful motivator.
The Arctic Global Warming Tipping Point has recently been found to be 400 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere.
We are currently at 390ppm and adding 2ppm each year.
Replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy systems as fast as possible may soon be recognized as necessary to insure human survival.
See A 5 Point Program at http://www.aesopinstitute.org for a summary and some supporting evidence. I've reprinted some of this post.
If the threat proves genuine, we need to provide whatever incentives are necessary to produce and deploy renewable energy systems on a 24/7 basis, worldwide. We may need to do that very fast!
The earth has experienced two Tipping Points in the distant past. Both destroyed most life on the planet. In one case down to single-celled organisms.
A Tipping Point is unstoppable once it begins. Preventing it still appears possible. If we fail, we may have to kiss our lives goodbye.
Check the facts. Ironically, what might prove necessary could open a door to a strong economic recovery.
If we confront the challenge, the economy could revive in a manner analogous to the way WWII ended the great depression. The huge number of jobs generated by that war resulted in a 2% rate of unemployment.
It is time for bold leadership and effective action to emerge from the entire government!