From: "Macdonald Stainsby" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 23:30:46 -0700 To: "Rad Green" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [R-G] Fw: Global warming o Arctic sea ice is melting at a rapid pace-it is 40 percent thinner than it was forty years ago. (This will not raise the sea level by itself for the same reason that melting an ice cube in a drink doesn't raise the level of liquid in a glass. The projected rise in sea level of at least a foot would result mostly from the thermal expansion of hotter water.) o All major non-polar glacial systems are in rapid retreat-as a paper published last month made clear, the snows of Kilimanjaro may well disappear by 2015. o Throughout the Northern Hemisphere, ice forms on lakes about a week later in the winter than it did a century ago, and it melts about a week earlier. o The timing of egg-laying and flowering for animals and plants has shifted perceptibly as climates warm. o Precipitation has increased across our hemisphere-especially the rate of destructive deluges, which by some measures are 20 percent more common, precisely what one would expect from the greater amount of water vapor that warm air holds. o El Niņo events-the huge and sometimes disastrous effects caused by ocean warming in the tropical Pacific Ocean-have become more frequent, persistent, and intense since the mid-1970s. o A series of dramatic floods and storms have raised insurance payouts enormously. Instead of paying about $2 billion annually, which was the global average in the 1980s, between 1990 and 1995 the industry averaged $30 billion a year in reimbursements, which have continued to grow (and which have resulted in the insurance industry becoming the most outspoken part of the business community on these issues). In other words, the world as human beings have always known it is quickly changing, and we are the agents of that change. The scientific method has worked spectacularly. In ten years it has taken a physics and chemistry problem of enormous dimensions, used every tool of the modern scientist, especially the supercomputer, and reduced it to a set of maxims agreed upon by virtually everyone working in the field. The IPCC documents have been circulated to every government on earth-indeed, those governments have been involved in the process throughout. Their results have been reported in the world's press. If there were any lingering doubts about the IPCC's accuracy, they should have been dispelled in early June when the National Academy of Sciences, reviewing the IPCC report at the request of President Bush, confirmed its findings. In other words, as of the spring of 2001 we cannot say that we have not been warned. >From a review of studies on global warming by Bill McKibben in the New York Review of Books: http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/index.html Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org _________________________________________________ KOMINFORM P.O. Box 66 00841 Helsinki Phone +358-40-7177941 Fax +358-9-7591081 http://www.kominf.pp.fi General class struggle news: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe mails to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Geopolitical news: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________
