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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Extra Pale who wrote (3155)	2/27/2004 4:28:20 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 36917

Re: I just finished reading the Pentagon's report on Global Climate Change Is it available on the Web? Do you happen to have a URL handy? TIA :)

To: Extra Pale who wrote (3155)	2/27/2004 5:17:40 PM
From: k.ramesh	Respond to of 36917

SuperMillionaire Question- When did life originate on earth? A 10 B years B 4 Billion years C 500 m years D 6 million years Even the 3 whizzes got it wrong and so did I. but atleast I was in good company. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Me and the 3 smart guys said C. > Answer B) 4 Billion years. I had a copy of Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life handy so I checked. Earth -- 4.5 B years old single celled life 3.7 B years Multi Celled Life 570 Million years Man 32000 years ago. couple of nice quotes from the book. Into this world why not knowing Nor Whence, like Wate willy-nilly flowing And out of it,as the Wind along the Water I know not Whither,willy-nilly blowing. Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyyat Then this - Alexander Pope Essay on Man All Nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance,direction, which you canst not see. All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good.

To: Extra Pale who wrote (3155)	2/28/2004 9:22:07 AM
From: Crocodile	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36917

On a positive note, at least someone in the US government is paying attention to potentailly catastrophic situation. Offsetting the positive is my impression that the report has had little coverage and provoked almost no discussion in the media or via the presidential race. I would like to see europe, canada, asia, etc. seriously pressure the US to wake-up and review its resource consumption policies. Yes, actually, that was the one positive note which struck me when I read about the Pentagon report. That at least someone down there is actually taking global warming seriously, despite the snow-job that the present administration has been trying to pull off. And yes, other countries probably should be trying to do more to get a dialogue going on resource consumption policies. If the U.S. can't wake up when its own alarm clock is ringing, I suppose it's up to other countries to speak up. I guess part of the problem is that most other countries are accustomed to minding their own business and not telling the people of other countries how to do things. If the shoe were on the other foot, I expect things would be quite different. Just for the record, as one who is pretty tied into a scientific community of biologists and field naturalists, I have absolutely no doubt that global warming is "for real". We're seeing migrant birds that don't bother to migrate anymore (many Robins are staying here now and they're now being seen up in Arctic regions in summer -- which was absolutely unheard of in the past). Seasonal fluctuation in watershed levels is getting fairly dramatic. We're getting hotter, drier summers and many of our rivers up here have had extremely low levels for several years. Last autumn, we had a lot of rain and a decent snowfall this winter, so it will be interesting to see if that helps to top things up a bit.. but my guess is no. The levels don't look nearly as high as they used to be a decade ago, even after all of the rain and snow. I'll be watching this closely this spring. We're also seeing certain invasive species growing rampant up here -- species that favour higher ambient air temperatures and lower water levels in lakes and rivers (a study of Phragmites in the Great Lakes region over a period of years seems to have confirmed this). All in all, I would say that the evidence points to increasing heat and lower moisture in our part of North America. Should be very interesting to see how this all shapes up around the world over the next decade.