Bill Maher on Fear

Bill Maher sets Americans straight on what they really need to fear. Brilliant as always...

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White House: Global Warming is good for your health

Given their constant assertions that "the verdict is still out" on global warming, it seems they're pretty sure about this. Here's episode #77584 of "how stupid are these people?" featuring the creepily hot Dana Perino.
From Think Progress:


I have to say that her remarks at the end about "not being an expert" and "letting Julie Gerberding answer that question" are particularly laughable given that the question was about censoring Dr. Gerberding;s testmony before congress. Does she really not understand the fundamental contradiction between the idea of allowing someone to give there expert opinion and censoring it for political purposes?
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Population growth and Climate change means more war.

By Ben Cohen

A new report by the U.N has warned that climate change and human population growth will put severe pressure on food resources. As we require more and more food to sustain ourselves, the threat of war also increases as supplies decline. The Malthusian future of starvation and war will of course effect the poor rather than the rich, but its knock on effect will have stark consequences for developed nations as well. Read here for more information-it doesn't make for pleasant reading. Full text. Read more!

Hurricanes linked to Global Warming, says new report

By Ben Cohen

There is a new report that confirms the theory that climate change is increasing the frequency and ferocity of Hurricanes. It seems the more we study the effects of our rapidly heating planet, the more we find is going wrong. Climate change deniers were quick to trash environmentalists who pointed to global warming when Hurricane Katrina struck two years ago, but have now been proved wrong again.

Here is the report from the BBC:

"A new analysis of Atlantic hurricanes says their numbers have doubled over the last century.

The study says that warmer sea surface temperatures and changes in wind patterns caused by climate change are fuelling much of the increase.

Some researchers say hurricanes are cyclical and the increase is just a reflection of a natural pattern.

But the authors of this study say it is not just nature - they say the frequency has risen across the century.

Two-decade rise

Hurricanes are a spinning vortex of winds that swirl around an eye of low pressure.

Thunder clouds surround the edges of these storms and they can wreak devastation on people and property when they hit land - most famously in the case of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005.

Scientific analyses in recent years suggest hurricane numbers have increased since the mid-1980s.

This new study, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in London, looks at the frequency of these storms from 1900 to the present and it says about twice as many form each year now compared to 100 years ago.

The authors say that man-made climate change, which has increased the temperature of the sea surface, is the major factor behind the increase in numbers.

"Over the period we've had natural variability in the frequency of storms, which has contributed less than 50% of the actual increase in our view," said Dr Greg Holland from the United States National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, who authored the report.

"Approximately 60%, and possibly even 70% of what we are seeing in the last decade can be attributed directly to greenhouse warming," he said.

Experts say that 2007 will be a very active season with nine hurricanes forecast, of which five are expected to be intense."


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The Future with Global Warming: War

By Ben Cohen

High minded politicians will tell you that nations go to war for noble purposes. Wars on terror, fights for freedom, defense, and security, are some of the usual catch phrases used to manipulate and rally the masses.

The harsh truth though, is that nations go to war rarely for the above. Prestige and natural resources are the real reason countries spend billions of dollars and thousands of lives on war, with the recent invasion of Iraq being a perfect example. In this case, the rhetoric fell severely short of the facts:

There were no weapons of mass destruction, there were no links to Al Qaeda, we did not go in to protect the Kurds (our allies in Turkey were busy killing their Kurdish population while we were denouncing Saddam for it), and we clearly didn't go in to bring democracy (in fact, we tried to prevent it almost every step of the way when voting didn't go the way we wanted).

The U.S and Britain clearly went in to secure and control the second largest crude oil reserve on the planet, and have quietly stolen billions of dollars worth of it. Just imagine if Iraq's main export was potatoes. It's highly unlikely anyone in the U.S or Britain would even know where it is. With oil prices rising and the war costing 2 billion dollars a day, the benefits have not exactly made themselves clear. Had we invested the $442,312,900,000 spent on the war so far in renewable energy, perhaps the looming oil crisis could have been avoided aswell.

Alarmingly, with global warming rapidly ensuing, this may only be the start of things. A new report from the journal 'Human Ecology' has found a link to rises in temperature and war, citing 899 wars fought in China over the past 1000 years that correlated closely to temperature change. Rising temperatures lead to water shortages that can severely affect crop growth, resulting in wars for dwindling food. As the science weighs in, it looks like war might be an even more integral part of our future.

As the arguments for the war and occupation in Iraq disintegrate further, this new report about wars over real issues makes it even clearer how absolutely unnecessary it was in the first place. Read more!