Will the Democrats fight to save us from Global Warming? [View All]

[Karmadillo]

I wouldn't claim anything close to expertise in this area, but it does seem we're quickly approaching and, perhaps, passing the point of no return. Assuming the Democrats were to gain the White House, the Senate, and the House in 2008 (a big, big assumption), would they take the steps necessary to give us a fighting chance for a semi-decent future?

http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/27034/

What Part of 'Global Warming' Don't We Get?
By Bill McKibben, Prairie Writers Circle

It's time for the denial to end, but Washington is governed by a bipartisan consensus that somehow the laws of physics and chemistry don’t apply to us.

Forget about the hurricanes. Put them out of your mind. We'll never know for sure that any particular hurricane is caused by global warming, so just don't think about them. Instead, concentrate on the other evidence for climate change that's appeared recently:

*In August, Russian researchers reported that an area of tundra larger than France and Germany combined was rapidly turning into bog as the permafrost melted.

*In early September, British researchers reported that warmer temperatures were causing the soil to heat up and dramatically increasing rates of decay. The temperate forests and fields of the United Kingdom are becoming, in essence, semitropical.

*In mid-September, researchers reported that arctic sea ice had shrunk by 20 percent. "The feeling is we are reaching a tipping point or threshold beyond which sea ice will not recover," one scientist told reporters.

*And in late September, European researchers reported on the biological effects of 2003's record heat wave, the one that killed 15,000 people in France alone. In Italy, they said, corn yields dropped by about 36 percent. Oak and pine also grew more slowly, the study found. In fact, overall there was 30 percent less plant growth that year.

What do numbers like these -- all from the best peer-reviewed journals -- show us? That global warming is not some distant problem waiting to appear, some hypothetical trouble we should start preparing for. They show us that the world is already changing with deadly speed. Every time we burn coal and gas and oil, we send carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and now that carbon dioxide is trapping enough heat to create a new planet.

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