global warming, WHAT global warming?

a wonderful posting from pensito review

Ten years ago, what American would have believed they’d someday be living in a country that denies global warming and evolution? In 2005, nature provided all the proof of herself we need.
The Sierra Club is calling it Year One. Bill McKibben:

So far we’ve raised the temperature of the planet by about one degree, and that’s been enough to set the poles to melting and the winds to roaring. Even if, right now, we started doing all that we could to overhaul our energy economy, we’d probably still be stuck with a couple more degrees of warming, and the world would change more profoundly than at any time in human history.
…a month before Katrina hit, [the] Massachusetts Institute of Technology…published a landmark paper in the British science magazine Nature showing that in the past half century tropical storms have been lasting 60 percent longer and spinning winds 50 percent more powerful. Two weeks after Katrina struck, Science published another paper, by a Georgia Institute of Technology team, demonstrating that Category 4 and 5 hurricanes have become twice as likely in recent decades… Katrina, a Category 1 storm when it crossed Florida, roared to monster size in the abnormally hot waters of the Gulf. Within a day, a million people were homeless. That’s far too many, we soon found out, for the federal government to cope with. And it’s just the beginning…
Katrina cast up ironies like so much flotsam and jetsam. The storm, for instance, wreaked particular vengeance on Mississippi, a state governed by Haley Barbour (R), who in an earlier incarnation as a GOP power broker and energy lobbyist helped persuade President George W. Bush to renege on his promise to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Thanks to Barbour and the other lobbyists-turned-administrators who throng the White House, the federal government has done exactly nothing to slow the progress of climate change. Today we’re emitting 20 percent more carbon than we were in 1990, when scientists were first issuing their prescient warnings...............