Which Presidential Candidates Are Stepping It Up to Halt Climate Change?

[babylonsister]

http://alternet.org/columnists/story/65957/

Which Presidential Candidates Are Stepping It Up to Halt Climate Change?

By Bill McKibben, Grist Magazine. Posted October 23, 2007.

Three presidential candidates just got on board with the Step It Up campaign.


You can advance many great arguments against making Iowa and New Hampshire the bellwethers of our political life: they are pale, unrepresentative, rural, and obsessed with a few issues (the price of corn has doubled in the last year due to the ethanol boom, which in turn is due to the Iowa caucus).

But one argument that their backers always make rings true as well: in an America so oversized that politics takes on an entirely abstract feeling, in these two states the presidential candidates actually engage with citizens. The New Hampshire primary and the Iowa caucus offer the only punctures in the airless sphere that is high-level American political life -- the only chance for regular people to get inside for a moment.

What do I mean? Here's what I mean:

At noon last Saturday, a few of us were sitting around the Step It Up 2 offices along Elm St. in Manchester, N.H., eating a lunch we'd carried in from a nearby diner. We looked out the window, and there was Dennis Kucinich peering in at our signs and banners.

Lindsay Franklin grabbed the Flip camera and ran out on the sidewalk where she asked him if he'd come to one of the Step It Up events on Nov. 3 and give a talk. Sure, he said -- and with that we had our first commitment from a presidential candidate.

snip//

Before the day was out, we'd also heard from John Edwards, who promised to join our big New Orleans rally, complete with brass band, second-line march, and a front-row view of the big trouble that can be caused by global warming and bad government.

In other words, we've got real momentum starting to pick up.

more...

http://alternet.org/columnists/story/65957/

[arrested_president]

1. Since None Of Them Can Fly Into Space

i'm not sure what they can really do:


Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming, Scientist Says

Kate Ravilious
for National Geographic News
February 28, 2007

Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet's recent climate changes have a natural—and not a human-induced—cause, according to one scientist's controversial theory.

"Man-made greenhouse warming has made a small contribution to the warming seen on Earth in recent years, but it cannot compete with the increase in solar irradiance,"

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html

[laconicsax]

2. solar irradiance is a mostly discredited hypothesis.

From the same article:

"His views are completely at odds with the mainstream scientific opinion," said Colin Wilson, a planetary physicist at England's Oxford University.

"And they contradict the extensive evidence presented in the most recent IPCC report."

Amato Evan, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, added that "the idea just isn't supported by the theory or by the observations."

and

Perhaps the biggest stumbling block in Abdussamatov's theory is his dismissal of the greenhouse effect, in which atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide help keep heat trapped near the planet's surface.

He claims that carbon dioxide has only a small influence on Earth's climate and virtually no influence on Mars.

But "without the greenhouse effect there would be very little, if any, life on Earth, since our planet would pretty much be a big ball of ice," said Evan, of the University of Wisconsin.

don't forget:

"The solar irradiance began to drop in the 1990s, and a minimum will be reached by approximately 2040," Abdussamatov said. "It will cause a steep cooling of the climate on Earth in 15 to 20 years."

If the solar irradiance hypothesis reflected an accurate model, then we'd be seeing a cooling period starting about 10 years ago, rather than a warming period starting well before that.