UPDATE: Once again I am asking for signatures on a petition to get the Traditional Media to tell the truth about the relationship between Global Warming, or as I prefer to call it, Climaticide, and extreme weather events. Given Al Gore's Challenge to Americans speech yesterday, it seems appropriate to once again call for signatures from the Daily Kos community. People can not make informed decisions if they aren't told the truth.

If you have already signed, thanks a ton. If you haven't please do.

You can sign here or read more below the fold.

The current edition of Econoticiario brings you stories from Spain (the end of the Catalan drought?), Mexico (a slideshow of a glacier crumbling in Patagonia), Costa Rica (results of a new study on the migratory habits of leatherback turtles), Colombia (Costa Rica announces carbon offset program for air travelers), and Chile (tightening of rules in Santiago on who can drive on "pre-emergency" days)

Your Spanish words of the week:

tar sands--arenas alquitranadas

energía mareomotriz--wave power/energy

energía solar--solar power/energy

energía eólica--wind power/energy

energía geotérmica--geothermal power/energy

In the introduction to The Ethics of Climate Change: Right and Wrong in a Warming World, James Garvey, Secretary of the Royal Institute of Philosophy (given that title you might expect him to be a white-haired old duffer, but in his photo he appears quite young, perhaps around 30] explains his motivation for writing it:

Science can give us a grip on the facts, but we need more than that if we want to act on the basis of those facts. The something more which is needed involves values. Climatologists can tell us what is happening to the planet and why it is happening, they can even say with some confidence what will happen in the years to come.  What we do about all of this, though, depends on what we think is right, what we value, what matters to us.  You can not find that sort of stuff in an ice core.  You have to think your way through it.

Australian protesters from the Camp for Climate Action-Australia shut down a coal-train line for about 6 hours yesterday as part of ongoing protests against the export of coal from Newcastle's Port Carrington Terminal.

According to the Daily Telegraph:

More than 1000 protesters shut down the Newcastle coal link yesterday before the police riot squad moved in to arrest 37 environmental activists who were fighting to stop climate change.

The protesters boarded a coal train, lay across railway tracks and chanted for the end of coal exports.

Camp for Climate Action is an international movement for direct action against global warming. This weeks protest in Newcastle are part of ongoing actions in Australia, where damage from Climaticide is already clearly visible. See the Garnaut report for more info.  [The first chapter is a summary of the very large report.]

The European Space Agency released stunning images today showing that the breakup of the ice bridge anchoring the Wilkins Ice Shelf to Charcot Island is imminent. (Observe how the ice bridge shrinks and cracks as the photos progress.) Between February 28 and March 8 of this year, the ice shelf lost 2717 km2. (See this diary for background information and a discussion of the earlier breakup). According to Dr Matthias Braun of the Center for Remote Sensing of Land Surfaces at Bonn University, in this most recent event another 1350 km2 have broken off.  Between 500 and 700 km2 will be added to that if the ice bridge collapses completely.

The total area of the ice shelf which would be exposed by the collapse of the ice bridge is 13,680 km2.

On April 9, 2008 Howard Frumkin of the Center for Disease Control submitted the uncensored testimony to Congress of CDC Director Dr. Jule Gerberding on the consequences for human health of continued global warming. Dr. Gerberding's original testimony was censored by the Bush Administration when she originally tried to give it in October 2007.

Yesterday, on his blog, Climate Progress, Joe Romm reprinted in full an excellent report by the Center for American Progress Action Fund detailing the relationship between the censorship of Dr. Gerberding and the White House's refusal to accept the EPA email on regulating greenhouse gases. The common element: Dick Cheney and opposition to the Clean Air Act. I highly recommend you check out his post.

For this diary let's focus on what the White House and other more objective sources have told us recently about the censorship of science, particularly science relating to Climaticide.

Apparently, some people in Australia don't agree with Georgia10.

From Climate Ark:

Environmentalists plan to block one of two rail lines into the world's biggest coal export port in Australia at the weekend, amid wrangling by rich nations over efforts to combat climate change, they said on Tuesday.

Any disruption to coal shipments from the Newcastle port could give another boost to benchmark coal prices that are already near record highs at nearly US$195 a tonne, having more than trebled in a year

In a curiously, contradictory bit of reasoning a couple of days ago, Georgia10 defended Millennials (sic) (By the way, isn't having a new label for young people every decade just another tactic to divide us?) against suggestions that they need to get up from behind their keyboards and take their activism out onto the streets by arguing that young people DO indeed engage in offline activism BUT don't really need to because this is the digital age and such tactics are out of date.

.

Tomorrow the G8 leaders will begin 3 days of meetings in Toyako Japan. Climaticide is one of the topics on the agenda, although analysts are holding out few prospects of any substantive agreements.

The indefatigable and ever optimistic James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies has written a letter to Japanese Prime MinisterYasuo Fukuda, who is under pressure at home to set limits on greenhouse gas emissions, stressing the urgent need to cut CO2 emissions and eventuallyroll them back to 350 ppm or less.  The key element in Hansen's analysis is that to do this we must quickly phase out coal emissions.

The  Bush Administration's final rush to loot and pillage as much of America's national heritage as it can before leaving office is proceeding full steam ahead. On the heals of its plans to lift the ban on offshore drilling and its refusal to abide by the Supreme Court ruling on EPA's responsibility to regulate greenhouse gases comes this.

From today's Washington Post:

The Bush administration is preparing to ease the way for the nation's largest private landowner to convert hundreds of thousands of acres of mountain forestland to residential subdivisions.

As books go, this one is very short. That, however, is one of it's strengths. By leaving out the details of climate change, which one can find in many other books and reports, and focusing instead on a synthesis of our current knowledge of climate science, Dr. Emanuel has written an extremely useful summary.

I have read many books on global warming, climate change, or, to use the term that I prefer, Climaticide. This volume is one of the most useful for the non-scientist because it presents all the major concepts in a concise, clearly written, yet comprehensive account.

Although there have been a couple of exceptions recently (see here and here), the Traditional Media continues to report on extreme weather events: flooding, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes and drought, etc. as if they were isolated occurrences, without any context. This, despite the facts that the IPCC (see Table 3.2 in the 2007 Summary Report) and most recently NOAA (see Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate), foresee an increase in precisely these kinds of extreme weather as a result of our continuing Climaticide.

Given that it is vitally important for the public to know both the context and the details of the relationship between Climaticide and extreme weather I have started a petition (sign here) demanding that the Traditional Media provide that context in its reporting.

UPDATE: I know that some of this has been covered before but I want to provide an overview of the entire boondoggle. I do need to apologize to mnemosyne9 however for the similarity to the title of his/her diary. I did not discover it until after having published this one.  Mea culpa.

Let's start with some background:

In April 2003, in a move consistent with the hostile approach that the Bush Administration has taken toward public health, the environment and environmental regulation, the US Environmental Protection Agency denied a petition from the International Center for Technology Assessment and a number of other organizations to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles.

As a result, 12 states, three cities and 13 environmental groups filed suit against the EPA to force it to comply with its obligations under the Clean Air Act.

Global warming must be a lie because, if it were not, it would take large scale government action to deal with it, and big government and the loss of our freedom is the greatest danger that we all face.

As I have argued elsewhere understanding that bit of nonsense is fundamental to understanding how Climaticide denialists think and why they care so little about science.

I have defined four principle categories of denialists.

1. Plutocrats

2. Shills

3. Literate conservative/libertarian ideologues

4. The right-wing booboisie

Today I propose to illustrate my earlier argument with a selection of denialist quotations from these four categories.  You can find these quotes all over the web. For the most part I present the quotations in no particular order. I trust you will have no trouble either identifying the common elements in each of the quotes nor in linking the quote to the appropriate category of denialist.

Still, for what it's worth, I will give you my take on how the categories relate to each other just below the fold.

Today I emailed Dr. Hansen, requesting his permission to post the full text here on Daily Kos and on my own blog Climaticide Chronicles of the written statement that he made yesterday to the National Press Club and the House Select Committee on Energy Independence & Global Warming.

He responded immediately, saying graciously:

[C]ertainly. My aim is to communicate.

So, here it is.

Kudos to James Hansen for once again having the courage to say what others are afraid to even think.

From today's UK Guardian:

James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

That's right, Hansen, the self-proclaimed "moderate conservative" is calling on Congress to put oil and gas companies CEO on trial for the crime of knowingly lying to the public about the danger that Climaticide poses for billions of the world's population and at least half her species of flora and fauna. In other words, for attempting to block action on a global holocaust.

Maybe the Mainstream Media is finally getting the message. As I reported on Thursday, NBC actually aired a piece on the their Nightly News about a new report from U.S. Climate Change Science Program linking Climaticide to extreme weather events.

Then, yesterday, syndicated columnist, Amy Goodman, had a piece in the Seattle Post Intelligencer called Flooding is global warming at work in which she took the Mainstream Media to task for their failure to connect the dots in their reporting on extreme weather events and Climaticide. Double score here.  Goodman reports on the link between Climaticide and extreme weather and criticizes the MSM for acting as if the connection does not exist.

[Yesterday I finally took the leap and started my own blog, Climaticide Chronicles.  Below, by way of an introduction, I have reprinted my welcoming post from Climaticide Chronicles in the hope that some of my fellow Kossacks might be interested enough to do me the honor of visiting.

As innumerable diaries and now a front page story have pointed out, Al Gore will endorse Barack Obama in about a half an hour. If you feel as I do that  stopping Climaticide is the number one issue of the 21st century, the context within which all other problems will have to be addressed, then I encourage you to make a contribution to the Barack Obama campaign within the hour.

Just like during an NPR fund drive, how many people contribute during a given event, is seen as a sign of how much public support there is for that event.  Let's show just how concerned Kossacks are about stopping global warming by making massive donations to the Obama campaign during the Gore endorsement.