As Jack Lemmon said in The Great Race: "When the water reaches my lower lip, I'm sure gonna mention it to somebody
The thawing of the world's largest peat bog
will release billions of tons of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and
scientists believe little can be done to stop it. The landscape is rapidly changing in a huge
expanse of western Siberia, roughly the size of Germany and France
combined, as the frozen tundra, enveloped in permafrost for millennia,
turns into a series of shallow lakes.
The worrying development, highlighted in New Scientist this week, has sparked a concerned outcry from environmentalists and renewed calls for urgent reduction in carbon emissions.
Since the onset of climate change temperatures
in the Siberian sub-Arctic have risen faster than almost anywhere else
in the world and the thaw has now started what Sergei Kirpotin, a
botanist from Tomsk State University, described as an 'ecological
landslide that is proabably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected
to climate warming'.
He told the New Scientist that the dramatic melt had been extremely rapid, happening over just three or four years.
Average temperatures in western Siberia have
risen by 3 degrees Celsius over the last 40 years, a rise most
scientists put down to a combination of man-made climate change,
natural cycles and the fact that as snow and ice melt to reveal land
and water the darker, uncovered areas absorb more heat.
The precise impact of the melt is not yet known, but the Siberian bogs
hold an estimated 70 billion tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas 20
times more potent than carbon dioxide.
Campaign group Friends of the Earth has seen the melt as evidence that
the Earth is reaching its "tipping point" - the point at which a slight
rise in temperature triggers major change and expressed fears the
methane could significantly accelerate the climate change process.
Siberia
feels the heat It's a frozen peat bog the size of France and Germany
combined, contains billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas and, for the
first time since the ice age, it is melting. Researchers
who have recently returned from the region found that an area of
permafrost spanning a million square kilometres - the size of France
and Germany combined - has started to melt for the first time since it
formed 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age.
In other global warming news, republicans and other corporatists who continue to claim that the
science doesn’t conclusively support the existence of global warming
(remember, it's not "climate change") have pointed to the work of
several scientists, whose research challenged the assumptions and
models used by peers who did claim that warming did exist and was only
going to get worse.
Until 2001, when the Bush Administration began
claiming that the science wasn’t conclusive, no one had revisited the
work of those several scientists to see if their claims and contrarian research were themselves solid. We now find out that the research disputing global warming is itself based on flawed calculations
and that the data used by the global warming skeptics did in fact
reflect that warming was taking place and would continue to get worse.
So the next time you hear Rush, or the rest of the “what me, worry?”
sycophants challenge global warming, remember that their claims that
the science doesn’t support that global warming is taking place are
garbage. The real reason for inaction is simply a desire for another
profit opportunity at the expense of all of us.
There's a common misconception that big and bad global warming
effects are far in the future. They may be. They also may not be. Ice
cores are showing that some past climate changes happened on the scale
of a few decades.
Prevention is the only possible way we can affect the process. Once
climate change starts, we don't begin to have the technology to change
it back. The evidence is accumulating that it has started.
What is the word about real estate in the Yukon? Who do I call?
Before puberty, children aren’t normally heterosexual or homosexual.
They’re definitely gender conscious. But young children are not sexual
beings yet — unless something sexual in nature has interrupted their
developmental phases.
Still, it’s not uncommon for children to experience gender
confusion during the elementary school years. Dr. Joseph Nicolosi
reports, “In one study of 60 effeminate boys ages 4 to 11, 98 percent
of them engaged in cross-dressing, and 83 percent said they wished they
had been born a girl.”
Great work and statistical sample, Doctor. I think this is called
labelling something based on certain characteristics and magically
finding out that the characteristics correlate with the label. In other
news, 100% of people diagnosed with Bush Derangement Syndrome don't
seem to like President Bush, and nearly 98% of people diagnosed with
depression meet one or more of the diagnostic indicators of depression.
Some of my favorite parts are:
Dobson: Evidences of gender
confusion or doubt in boys ages 5 to 11 may include: 1. A strong
feeling that they are “different” from other boys.
Norbizness: I know this sounds contrarian, but if the other boys want to jump off a bridge, you should encourage your child to do so as well.
Dobson: 2. A tendency to cry easily, be less athletic, and dislike the roughhousing that other boys enjoy.
Norbizness: Maybe
it was all of the communal box-wine you drank during pregnancy, but
it's too late for regrets. However, you and your husband can make up
for Timmy's lack of athleticism by screaming incoherently at him during
Little League sporting events.
Dobson: 5. A susceptibility to be bullied by other boys, who may tease them unmercifully and call them “queer,” “fag” and “gay.”
Norbizness: But,
for heaven's sake, don't be concerned about the violence-soaked
homophobia that attends your bullying child, if you have
one. Teasing people unmercifully got Pastor Dobson his
shamed, cowed flock, after all.
Dobson: 7. A repeatedly stated desire to be — or insistence that he is — a girl.
Norbizness: This
is the DEFCON-4 of an assault on your Godly parenting.
Immediately take your child to an all-nude strip club for a $20 game
of "compare and contrast."
Dobson: 8. A tendency to walk, talk, dress and even “think” effeminately.
Norbizness:Fortunately, there are ways to get around this. Dress your child in
stiff Wranglers and a leather vest, and paint a thick moustache on his
upper lip. Make him watch the Nathan Lane "tough talking" scene in The Birdcage over and over. And start developing telepathy to intrude on your child's thoughts.
I can hardly wait for the next series of articles, "Is Your Child
Becoming a Liberal?" It includes more tips on how to stamp out your
child's personality, as well as his or her hopes and dreams (because
God wants you to).
The thawing of the world's largest peat bog
will release billions of tons of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and
scientists believe little can be done to stop it. The landscape is rapidly changing in a huge
expanse of western Siberia, roughly the size of Germany and France
combined, as the frozen tundra, enveloped in permafrost for millennia,
turns into a series of shallow lakes.
