Global Warming Is A Tragedy, Not A Myth

The following is an article written by Nathan Mantua and found in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer entitled, "We need to get out of the clouds on issue of warming." This article is presented in its entirety. You can also click here to go directly to the article.


Life in the Northwest is shaped by the rhythms of climate. The evidence is all around us. The wet and mossy evergreen forests that tower west of the Cascade Range and the sage-steppe, orchards and rolling wheat fields of the dry and sunny area east of the mountains illustrate our region's amazing contrast in landscapes, flora and fauna.

Each year we see a hefty winter snowpack build in our mountains and witness the spring melt sending water surging into our largest rivers. The ongoing cycle brings the spring blooms of Skagit Valley tulips, the summer cherries of the Yakima Valley, the fall apple crops of Wenatchee and the fall and winter return of tens of thousands of coho and chum salmon to the streams of Puget Sound.

Just like the natural systems that make the region unique, human-built systems have evolved in ways that work with the climate of this place. We have built an extensive infrastructure to tap into our renewable resources. In particular, hydropower dams and storage reservoirs were designed to take advantage of the mountain snowpack and the resulting abundance of spring and summer runoff. These provide inexpensive and abundant electricity for people and industry and water for irrigators, industry and urban centers.

Those who built the dams, reservoirs and irrigation canals may not have realized it at the time, but they were basing some of their decisions on long-range climate forecasts. Did they consult The Old Farmer's Almanac?

Perhaps, but a more typical story is that those politicians, planners and engineers assumed the climate of the future for which they were building would look like the climate of the past. To their credit, most planners sifted the historical climate record to identify the most challenging conditions their systems might face, whether an extreme winter flood or a prolonged drought.

Plans were (and still are) written so that water and hydropower systems will work if the historic worst-case climate scenario happens again.

Recent climate extremes produced tangible reminders that many facets of Northwest life remain sensitive to the push and pull of climate change. In the winter of 1998-99, the region experienced one of the wettest periods in memory. Mount Baker, near Bellingham, set a record for the greatest annual snowfall ever recorded anywhere, with a remarkable total just shy of 100 feet. The spring and summer of 1999 saw a wide abundance of runoff and hydropower production in the region.

The winds and ocean currents of 1998-99 also brought significant cooling to the coastal ocean environment, with upper ocean temperatures dropping up to 8 degrees Fahrenheit from the exceptionally warm winter of 1997-98. That cooling marked the beginning of a four-year run of much more productive ocean conditions for many stocks of Northwest coho and chinook salmon that had been severely depleted in the mid-'90s.

But just two years later, our climate swung to the other extreme. The winter of 2000-01 brought the region one of the driest "wet" seasons in a century.

Late-season snowpack in the Cascades and the snowmelt runoff in the Columbia Basin were only about 60 percent of the long-term average. Irrigation flows for some farmers were severely restricted, and stream-flow targets aimed at protecting migrating salmon were frequently missed.

To make matters worse, the California energy markets were spinning wildly out of control, ultimately spiking the price of electricity all along the West Coast -- a convergence of climatic and socioeconomic events that will affect electrical ratepayers for years to come.

El Niño and La Niña get a lot of media attention around here, even though those labels apply to changes in winds, ocean temperatures and rainfall patterns in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Yet those two phenomena deserve our attention because they shift tropical rainfall patterns in ways that disturb wind and weather patterns over the northern Pacific and North America.

El Niño typically favors a relatively warm and dry Northwest winter and a yearlong warming of our coastal ocean. Those who ski or fish for salmon ought to be fans of La Niña, because that typically favors a cool and wet Northwest winter and a salmon-friendly, yearlong cooling of our coastal ocean. Natural tropical swings between El Niño and La Niña typically get started in our summer, then develop through the fall and winter months before fading away the next spring. An extensive network of buoys, ships and satellites provides us with an accurate picture of the status of El Niño or La Niña several months before our winter begins.

When we look back at our region's climate in the 20th century, we also find 20- to 30-year eras of climate conditions that strayed from the long-term average.

Mostly cool-and-wet years were the rule from 1946 through 1976, while warm-and-dry periods prevailed from 1925 through 1945 and again from 1977 through 1998. Part of this longer-term climate variability has been associated with a long-lived El Niñolike climate pattern called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

After 1976, that phenomenon brought an increase of a degree or two in the cold half of the year and about a 10 percent decline in average annual precipitation. Because of the warmer and drier conditions, spring snowpack at Paradise ranger station on Mount Rainer was typically 20 percent (about 44 inches) lower than it was during the cool periods of the '50s through early '70s.

Moisture in our forests, which varies with temperature, precipitation and snowpack, is thought to be a key climate link to past changes in forest regeneration and the frequency and intensity of large Northwest forest fires.

Low snowpack in the '80s and '90s allowed subalpine fir trees to invade wildflower meadows on the east side on Mount Rainier. The history of large forest fires in the Northwest also parallels the changes in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, with large fire years concentrated in the warm-and-dry periods of the '30s, '80s and '90s, and relatively quiet fire eras in the late '40s through mid-'70s.

Climate effects on ecosystems can be seen in the ocean as well as on land. When the Pacific Decadal Oscillation shifted from cool to warm conditions in the late '70s, ocean temperatures warmed by 1 to 2 degrees, and there were major shifts in coastal ocean food webs. The abundance of cold-water forage fish and plankton dropped, but numbers of warm-water fish such as mackerel, hake and sardines increased. Ocean survival rates for many Northwest chinook and coho salmon populations reached historic lows in the warm-ocean years of the early to late '90s, and the persistently low return rates contributed to large population declines for already depleted stocks.

Century-long trends account for another important part of the long-term changes in 20th-century climate. The warming observed globally during the past century, which averaged about 1 degree, was mirrored by Northwest warming of about 1.5 degrees. Precipitation increased by 10 percent to 30 percent across much of the region. Since the 1950s, the warming climate has eroded our annual snowpack, especially at elevations below 6,000 feet.

Because of human-caused increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases caused by burning fossil fuels and converting forests to agricultural lands, an overwhelming majority of scientists expect 21st-century climate to be substantially warmer than that of the recent past. Climate models are providing some clues about what will happen because of the accumulation of greenhouse gases. State-of-the-art climate models suggest additional year-round increases in regional temperatures of 2.5 to 4 degrees for the 2020s, and 3 to 6 degrees for the 2040s. Most climate models also project modest increases in winter precipitation (typically around 10 percent).

Some of the consequences of a warmer and wetter Northwest climate are clear.

Rising snow lines, a declining snowpack, stream-flow increases in winter and declines in summer are always observed during an unusually warm Northwest winter and spring. Our present climatic course promises to transform the "unusual" of our experience to the "normal" of our future.

Warming-induced changes in the region's snowpack and stream flow will bring new challenges to our water and power systems, and even more problems to wild salmon that inhabit already degraded streams. Reduced snowpack likely will allow west-side forests to expand to higher altitudes, yet warmer temperatures may increase drought stress in low-elevation forests in ways that increase fire, disease and pest outbreaks.

Whether you farm or garden, work or play in the mountains, forests, streams, lakes, estuaries or ocean, your experience always will be shaped by climate. A climatic warming of a few degrees will change life as we know it in the Northwest; residents and regional planners can take that forecast to the bank.

US Senator Admits Iraq War Vote Was Wrong

The following is an AP article found on Yahoo News and entitled, "W. Va. Sen. on Iraq: 'My Vote Was Wrong' ." This article is presented in its entirety. You can also click here to go directly to the article (the link usually expires after a few days).


U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller regrets his vote to authorize a war against Iraq.

"If I had known then what I know now, I would have voted against it," Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Friday. "I have admitted that my vote was wrong."

The Democratic-led Senate approved the war resolution 77-23 on Oct. 11, 2002, one day after the U.S. House approved a similar resolution.

"The decision got made before there was a whole bunch of intelligence," said Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. "I think the intelligence was shaped. And I think the interpretation of the intelligence was shaped.

"We had this feeling we could be welcomed as liberators. Americans don't know history, geography, ethnicity. The administration had no idea of what they were getting into in Iraq. We are not internationalists. We border on being isolationists. We don't know anything about the Middle East."

Rockefeller also said he is disturbed at the failure to involve the United Nations in creating a new government and finding peace in Iraq.

Many of the senator's feelings were strengthened last week during a weeklong trip with four other Democratic senators to Iraq and four other Middle Eastern nations.

In Iraq, the senators visited a team of researchers investigating the presence of weapons of mass destruction.

"They have three million pieces of paper," Rockefeller said. "But it is a sham. There is nothing to point to any weapons of any kind."

Rockefeller said the influence of terrorist groups, such as al-Qaida, is growing in Iraq. He estimated that only about 5 percent of insurgents in Iraq are recent arrivals, with the rest "homegrown."

Bushmen: Karl Rove and the people who are seeking to give us four more years of the shrub (aka President Bush)

The following is an AP article found on Yahoo News and entitled, "Rove, Small Circle Lead Bush Campaign." This article is presented in its entirety. You can also click here to go directly to the article (the link usually expires after a few days).

President Bush entrusts adviser Karl Rove to oversee his bare-knuckle bid for a second term. Yet Rove is but one of a small group of counselors helping to guide the most expensive, and possibly the most corporate-like, presidential campaign in history.

Aides emphasize Bush's hands-on role in the $170 million campaign. For instance, it was his decision to mount an early attack on his presumptive Democratic rival, John Kerry, and to air television commercials naming Kerry. The president also keeps close tabs on fund raising.

Bush and Rove talk daily about the campaign and stay in close touch with those running the Bush-Cheney effort from a nondescript office building across the Potomac River in Arlington, Va. There, Bush seeks political advice from campaign chairman Marc Racicot, a former Montana governor who served as Republican National Committee chairman, and campaign manager Ken Mehlman, Bush's former White House political director.

Mehlman is a Rove protege, and the two came to the White House with Bush from Texas. It was Rove who masterminded Bush's 1996 gubernatorial race in Texas and his 2000 presidential campaign, and Rove's stamp is clearly on the daily operations of both the White House and the campaign.

Among other members of Bush's brain trust are Vice President Dick Cheney; a brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush; longtime adviser Karen Hughes; and Ohio Rep. Rob Portman, a longtime Bush family friend.

Hughes left her job as White House counselor in 2002 to spend more time with her family in Austin, Texas, but remains one of Bush's most trusted advisers. She has become more active on the campaign trail in recent weeks, giving speeches and making campaign appearances.

Portman, the only alumnus of the first Bush administration serving in Congress, is actively involved in Bush's strategy in industrial battleground states like his own.

"We've never had such a comprehensive grass-roots operation," Portman said in an interview. "It's all about getting the vote out."

Bush's inner circle includes some of his biggest fund-raisers.

Topping the list is Mercer Reynolds, an Ohio financier who was a partner with Bush in the Texas Rangers baseball team. Reynolds gave up a prized job as ambassador to Switzerland last year to become national finance chairman of the Bush-Cheney campaign. He has been involved in every Republican presidential campaign since Ronald Reagan (news - web sites)'s in 1980.

Bush also is close to Bradford Freeman, a Los Angeles banker who is his California finance chairman and a longtime friend.

Still, it is Rove who will likely be toasted if Republicans win in November — and blamed if they don't. Little escapes his attention on either the president's domestic or international agenda.

Rove won plaudits after Bush led his party to victory in the midterm congressional elections in 2002. But his political skills came under question among some restive Republicans as Democratic candidates pounded Bush for three months while the president tried to remain above the fray.

Now, with Bush aggressively striking back at Kerry, Republicans are resting easier — and back on the same page of the Rove playbook.

Rove has boasted to conservative activists of the campaign's rapid response once it learned that Kerry was to give a speech in West Virginia, a battleground state. The Bush team rolled out a broadcast ad within 24 hours, dispatched volunteers to hand out pro-Bush material in the state, and made GOP officials available to local media outlets.

Other key players in Bush's re-election effort are:

Mark Wallace, deputy campaign manager. A former legal adviser in the Department of Homeland Security, he worked on Bush's 2000 campaign and on Jeb Bush's three gubernatorial campaigns.

Terry Nelson, political director. He's a former RNC official, former political director of the National Republican Congressional Committee and former campaign manager for Rep. Jim Nussle, R-Iowa.

Matthew Dowd, chief political strategist. He was Bush's pollster in the 2000 campaign. He worked for two Democrats — Lloyd Bentsen and the late Texas Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock — before joining Bush's team.

Jack Oliver, deputy national finance chairman. He's was deputy chairman of the RNC and was finance director of Bush's 2000 campaign.

Mark McKinnon, Bush's ad maker. The one-time, singer-songwriter and former Democrat is based in Austin, Texas, and did the ads for Bush's 2000 campaign.

Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, and Nicolle Devenish, his counterpart at the campaign.

Other advisers deeply involved in certain aspects of the campaign include Mary Matalin, a former top aide to Cheney, and Cheney family members, Devenish said.

More info on Dubya's inner circle can be found at:

Bush's Inner Circle

American Demand for Wood Destroys Already Decimated Virgin Rainforests

Next time you hear all the glee that erupts in the economic world because of "new housing starts" you will probably cringe when you learn that much of the wood used to provide Americans this piece of the "American dream" comes from "Indonesia’s virgin rainforests and is turning Borneo into a barren wasteland," according to a press release from the Rainforest Action Network.

American companies, like Weyerhaeuser, are directly involved in this destruction. Rainforest Action Network states that 80% of old-growth forests worldwide are already gone forever and less than 5% remain in the United States. The press release notes an October 27, 2003 BusinessWeek editorial titled “Indonesia’s Chainsaw Massacre,” which states that: "the country’s rainforests are disappearing at a rate equivalent to the area of 300 soccer fields every hour to offer Western consumers cheap lumber.”

Rainforest Action Network’s 2003 report, “Importing Destruction,” documents the connections of U.S. companies to the international market for Indonesia tropical plywood.


This is the full press release:

Rainforest Action Network
PRESS RELEASE

US Wood Importers Pillage Virgin Indonesian Rainforests
For Immediate Release: March 19, 2004
RAN Calls For US Moratorium To Help End Indonesian Massacre
Yale Research Confirms Environmental Impact of Crime and Corruption

San Francisco – Rainforest Action Network sent letters to 163 U.S. tropical wood importers and members of the International Wood Products Association calling for an immediate corporate embargo on forest-based products from Indonesia’s ravaged rainforests. The letter follows Science magazine’s publication of new research from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies confirming ‘expansive and accelerating deforestation’ of the country’s ‘protected areas’ and calling for ‘immediate transnational management’ to end the massacre.

In the March 18, 2004 letter, Rainforest Action Network executive director Michael Brune reiterated Indonesian President Megawati Soekarnoputri’s plea for an international moratorium to help stop illegal logging. It affirmed widespread acknowledgement that reduced-impact logging and stump-to-store bar coding schemes have failed, quoting the Indonesian Minister of Forests’ admission that “it has become clear that Indonesia will not overcome illegal logging without stemming the foreign demand for Indonesian logs and forestry products.” Mr. Brune challenges U.S. companies to join Centex Homes, International Paper and Lanoga Corporation and suspend purchasing from the region until legal supplies are verifiable. A copy of the letter is available at www.ran.org/indonesiamoratorium.

The February 13, 2004 issue of Science magazine exposes the environmental destruction caused by decades of corruption and crime. Satellite and field-based analyses conclusively show that since 1985 over 50 percent of protected lowland forests have been destroyed. Despite a declining resource base caused by decimated forests, Indonesian loggers and mills have maintained excessive production capacities. Over the past two decades, the volume of timber exports from Borneo has exceeded all wood exports from tropical Africa and South America combined. Most legal Indonesian concessions have been depleted of their harvestable timber and abandoned by loggers who have illegally expanded their uncontrolled clearcuts into protected areas. Except for the remote Betung Kerihun National Park–also currently being logged–large, intact protected lowlands no longer exist in Kalimantan. The team of international scientists concluded that “stemming the flow of illegal wood from Borneo requires international efforts” and that a failure to institute solutions will lead to “irreversible ecological degradation.”

“Indonesia is ground zero for illegal logging,” said Michael Brune, executive director of Rainforest Action Network. “Corrupt logging companies are pillaging Indonesia’s virgin rainforests and turning Borneo into a barren wasteland. American corporations that are trading in illegal Indonesian timber are as guilty as the criminals who supply them.”

According to an October 27, 2003 BusinessWeek editorial titled “Indonesia’s Chainsaw Massacre,” the country’s rainforests are “disappearing at a rate equivalent to the area of 300 soccer fields every hour” to offer “Western consumers cheap lumber.” Rainforest Action Network’s 2003 report, “Importing Destruction,” documents the connections of U.S. companies to the international market for Indonesia tropical plywood.

Rainforest Action Network works to protect the Earth’s rainforests and support the rights of their inhabitants through education, grassroots organizing, and non-violent direct action. Additional information may be found at: www.ran.org.

US Wood Importers Pillage Virgin Indonesian Rainforests

Blix: Iraq war was illegal

Although I am glad you are speaking out against Bush and Blair's decision to go to war now Mr. Blix, this is information that would have been very useful to the public before the unjustified babrabaric invasion of Iraq.