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Former Vice President Al Gore is heading to Antarctica to highlight the extraordinary changes greenhouse pollution is causing even in our most remote continent. When Gore visited Antarctica in 1988, scientists were predicting it could warm more rapidly than the global average. “This prediction has proven true,” Gore writes. “Today, the West Antarctic Peninsula is warming about four times faster than the global average.” Although the vast ice sheets of the frozen continent are remote from almost all of human civilization, their warming has drastic implications for billions of people. With the melting of those almost inconceivable reserves of ice , the planet’s sea levels are rising. Scientists now expect 21st-century sea level rise — on the scale of three to six feet or more — will be dominated by the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps. Gore is leading an expedition of “civic and business leaders, activists and concerned citizens, as well as “many of the world’s leading climate scientists” to see how man’s negligence is transforming the forbidding continent: To better understand the changes taking place near the South Pole and the impacts those changes will have around the world, I will be returning to Antarctica this month with The Climate Reality Project. A large number of civic and business leaders, activists and concerned citizens from many countries on this voyage will be joined by many of the world’s leading climate scientists and Antarctica experts to see firsthand and in real time how the climate crisis is unfolding in Antarctica. The Climate Reality Project is asking everyone to host their own expeditions wherever they live. As the new plant hardiness zone maps from the USDA remind us, we don’t even need to leave our backyards to see the effects of the hundreds of billions of tons of carbon pollution we have pumped into the atmosphere with the profligate burning of fossil fuels. Nor do we have to leave our neighborhoods to see the signs of positive change — community gardens, electric cars, solar panels, wind turbine manufacturers, and more in the growing mass movement to build a sustainable, resilient civilization on our changing planet.

Tags: author, brad-johnson, global-boiling, green, health, january-2012, lgbt, thinkprogress

Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), chair of the House energy committee, told Politico that House Republicans intend to attach language pushing approval of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline into an expected February bill to extend the payroll tax holiday. “ We’re going to be using it, every opportunity to push Keystone .” Republicans are also considering attaching it to the upcoming transportation spending bill .

Tags: author, barack-obama, brad-johnson, economy, january-2012, joe-romm, rep-fred-upton-r-mi, security, tar-sands

John Coleman’s anti-science presentation Right-wing weathermen who publicly reject climate science have responded with anger and vitriol to a campaign that exposes their influence on the American public. More than half of TV weather reporters don’t believe in human-induced climate change, even as our poisoned weather grows more extreme. Forecast The Facts challenges the American Meteorological Society to take a clear stand against these anti-science ideologues. After ThinkProgress Green promoted the campaign, listing dozens of the prominent television weathermen who publicly heap scorn on scientific reality, the anti-science weatherguy community has lashed out: Rush Limbaugh ‘s “good guy” meteorologist Ryan Maue complained about the “left-wing sh*t website black-listing on-air meteorologists.” Accuweather Senior Vice President Mike Smith agreed that the ThinkProgress article “amounts to blacklisting .” San Diego’s KUSI-TV weatherman John Coleman said it was “ very disturbing ” that “the activists now feel the need to campaign to get us under control.” Cleveland’s WJW-TV weatherman Andre Bernier said: “The day the AMS strong arms anyone to tow the AGW is the day I disown them.” Retired TV weatherman John Ghiorse called the campaign “the ultimate in gestapo tactics.” Strangely, they didn’t complain when Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) compiled a list of science-denying weathermen in 2007. Take a look at their comments from Twitter, Facebook and the web:

Tags: author, barack-obama, brad-johnson, climate-change-deniers, congress, global-warming, green

Despite some wavering near the end of his distressed campaign, Jon Huntsman Jr. represented the most rational voice on climate science and policy in the GOP primaries. His exit leaves a field of climate-denying candidates that has openly questioned the harm of carbon pollution and threatens to reverse gains in clean air and public health by lifting industry regulations. “The minute that the Republican Party becomes the anti-science party , we have a huge problem,” Huntsman said in August appearance on ABC’s “This Week.” “We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election in 2012.” Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and Ron Paul all have accused scientists of cooking up the fact of man-made climate change from the burning of fossil fuels.

Tags: barack-obama, brad-johnson, donate, economy, election-2012, home page, january-2012, keystone-xl, security, thinkprogress, tweets, war

On her show last night, Rachel Maddow mocked the National Republican Campaign Committee’s attempt to use her to promote the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. In an online ad, the NRCC parodied a Maddow spot praising the public Hoover Dam with the argument that the private foreign pipeline was equivalent. “I am very flattered that I have been chosen for the rare and special honor of being the new face of the National Republican Campaign Committee,” Maddow said. “You guys nailed me. You got me exactly right!”

Tags: barack-obama, brad-johnson, economy, feeds, green, lgbt, media, oil, rachel-maddow, the nation

Climate zombie Chris Coutu (R-CT) A climate denier running for Congress in Connecticut has attacked a non-partisan panel tasked to prepare Connecticut in the wake of record damage from extreme storms in 2011 for recognizing the growing threat of global warming. State Rep. Chris Coutu, who denies not only man-made global warming but even the fact of the warming itself, rejects the recommendations of the Two Storm Panel because it dared to mention the “ pseudo-science ” of climate change: Chris Coutu, who is running for Congress in the 2nd District, said the Two Storm Panel strayed “far from its non-political mission and into the political minefield of global warming .” “The “Two Storm Panel” had a simple, non-political task: determining how Connecticut can better prepare for and respond to major storms. Instead of simply focusing on solutions, the panel veered into politics with its recommendations for global warming ,” Coutu said in a press release issued a few hours after the panel released its report. “ I don’t believe global warming’s occurring ,” Coutu told the Hartford Courant. “There’s climate changes every year, there’s weather changes.” Of course, it’s radical anti-science ideologues like Coutu who have made the scientific fact of global warming into a political issue, putting the residents of his state, our nation, and the entire planet at deadly risk. This panel is taking long-delayed action to protect Americans from the impacts of global warming caused by political inability to stop the fossil fuel pollution driving it. “It’s global warming,” Sue Gress of New Canaan, Connecticut, told the New York Times in November. “No one wants to believe it, but things are changing. There’s much more violent weather, and we’re not prepared to deal with it.” The Two Storm Panel’s report states that rising sea levels brought on by a warming planet “raises serious concerns about the need to protect critical infrastructure along the coast and adjacent to rivers.” Experts told the group that sea levels are expected to rise about 1.5 feet by the middle of the century and from 3 to 5 feet by the century’s end. The panel recommended new engineering standards to “better protect the built environment from the effects of extreme weather.” “There is a reality that comes with the trend in climate change that we have to be better prepared for the future,” Gov. Dannel Malloy said. “We’re in a warming cycle,” James Skiff, the retired U.S. Air Force Major General who co-chairs the panel, told the Courant. “Sea levels are going to rise, that creates a higher storm surge.”

Tags: brad-johnson, climate-denier, environment, global-warming, green, security, threatens-storm, war

At a town hall in Atlantic, Iowa, Saturday afternoon, Gingrich gave an unusual reason for his present denial of man-made global warming. “ I’m an amateur paleontologist ,” Gingrich said. “I spend a lot of time looking at the Earth’s temperature for a very long time. I’m a lot harder to convince than just looking at a computer model.” Professional paleontologists, who have spent a lot more time than Gingrich looking at the Earth’s temperature, are convinced. “ Few credible scientists now doubt that humans have influenced the documented rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution,” the American Quaternary Society wrote in 2006.

Tags: brad-johnson, climate-change-deniers, donate, economy, global-boiling, global-warming, green, health, media, saturday-afternoon, science

The year 2011 brought the most billion-dollar climate disasters to the United States ever, piling history-making events on top of each other to catastrophic results. The litany of disaster included a scorching drought that rivaled the Dust Bowl summer of 1936, a tornado season twice as bad as the great 1974 tornado outbreak, and flooding worse than the the great 1927 flood on the Mississippi River. This year of disaster was the result of the unlimited burning of fossil fuels, which has trapped increasing amounts of heat in the atmosphere, disrupting our climate system. In an interview with PBS News Hour, Weather Underground’s Jeff Masters described the effect of the hundreds of billions of tons of global warming pollution as being like “ steroids for the atmosphere ,” intensifying extreme weather to unprecedented results: We look at heat waves, droughts, and flooding events. They all tend to get increased when you have this extra energy in the atmosphere. I call it being on steroids for the atmosphere . Normally, you have the everyday ups and downs of the weather, but if you pack a little bit of extra punch in there, it’s like a baseball hitter who’s on steroids. You expect to see a big home run total maybe from this slugger, but if you add a little bit of extra oomph to his swing by putting him on steroids, now we can have an unprecedented season, a 70 home run season. And that’s the way I look at this year. We had an unprecedented weather year that I don’t think would have happened unless we had had an extra bit of energy in the atmosphere due to climate change and global warming . Watch the program: Nationwide, more than 6,000 heat records were broken this year. On average, the U.S. has three or four events every year that are considered major natural disasters. But, this year, there were at least fourteen billion-dollar disasters . Damages are expected to exceed $53 billion .

Tags: air pollution, brad-johnson, clean air act, climate, global-warming, green, health, home page, security, tweets, weather

Anjali Appadurai uses the people’s mic at COP17. Anjali Appadurai spoke on behalf of the world’s youth at COP17, the UN climate summit in Durban, South Africa, using the people’s mic to say, “ Get it done! ” Appadurai, a student at the College of the Atlantic in Maine, gave the final address to the delegates before what was supposed to be the concluding session. Instead, negotiators have struggled through Friday and Saturday with the harsh conflict between urgent scientific necessity and political possibility. Appadurai challenged the delegates to remember that Africa is on the “ frontlines of climate change .” She accused the assembled nations of betraying her generation, saying we are living in “an era in which narrow self-interest prevailed over science, reason and common compassion”: The most stark betrayal of your generation’s responsibility to ours is that you call this “ambition.” Where is the courage in these rooms? Now is not the time for incremental action. In the long run, these will be seen as the defining moments of an era in which narrow self-interest prevailed over science, reason and common compassion . Watch it: “On a purely personal note, I wonder why we let not speak half of the world’s population first in this conference, but only last,” acting COP president Artur Runge-Metzger, chair of the European negotiating team, mused after Appadurai spoke. Transcript: APPADURAI: I speak for more than half the world’s population. We are the silent majority. You’ve given us a seat in this hall, but our interests are not on the table. What does it take to get a stake in this game? Lobbyists? Corporate influence? Money? You’ve been negotiating all my life. In that time, you’ve failed to meet pledges, you’ve missed targets, and you’ve broken promises. But you’ve heard this all before. We’re in Africa, home to communities on the front line of climate change. The world’s poorest countries need funding for adaptation now. The Horn of Africa and those nearby in KwaMashu needed it yesterday. But as 2012 dawns, our Green Climate Fund remains empty. The International Energy Agency tells us we have five years until the window to avoid irreversible climate change closes. The science tells us that we have five years maximum. You’re saying, “Give us ten.” The most stark betrayal of your generation’s responsibility to ours is that you call this “ambition.” Where is the courage in these rooms? Now is not the time for incremental action. In the long run, these will be seen as the defining moments of an era in which narrow self-interest prevailed over science, reason and common compassion. There is real ambition in this room, but it’s been dismissed as radical, deemed not politically possible. Stand with Africa. Long-term thinking is not radical. What’s radical is to completely alter the planet’s climate, to betray the future of my generation, and to condemn millions to death by climate change. What’s radical is to write off the fact that change is within our reach. 2011 was the year in which the silent majority found their voice, the year when the bottom shook the top. 2011 was the year when the radical became reality. Common, but differentiated, and historical responsibility are not up for debate. Respect the foundational principles of this convention. Respect the integral values of humanity. Respect the future of your descendants. Mandela said, “It always seems impossible, until it’s done.” So, distinguished delegates and governments around the world, governments of the developed world, deep cuts now. Get it done. Mic check! PEOPLE’S MIC: Mic check! ANJALI APPADURAI: Mic check! PEOPLE’S MIC: Mic check! ANJALI APPADURAI: Equity now! PEOPLE’S MIC: Equity now! ANJALI APPADURAI: Equity now! PEOPLE’S MIC: Equity now! ANJALI APPADURAI: You’ve run out of excuses! PEOPLE’S MIC: You’ve run out of excuses! ANJALI APPADURAI: We’re running out of time! PEOPLE’S MIC: We’re running out of time! ANJALI APPADURAI: Get it done! PEOPLE’S MIC: Get it done! ANJALI APPADURAI: Get it done! PEOPLE’S MIC: Get it done! ANJALI APPADURAI: Get it done! PEOPLE’S MIC: Get it done! CHAIRPERSON: Thank you, Miss Appadurai, who was speaking on behalf of half of the world’s population, I think she said at the beginning. And on a purely personal note, I wonder why we let not speak half of the world’s population first in this conference, but only last.

Tags: 99-percent-movement, brad-johnson, checks-climate, climate, donate, feeds, health, media, tweets, war

Speaking to the Des Moines Register, GOP presidential candidate and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney bet when he thinks the science of global warming will be settled, saying that scientists will only figure out man’s contribution “10, 20, 50 years from now.”

Tags: brad-johnson, climate-change-deniers, election-2012, feeds, global-warming, green, health, lgbt, mitt-romney, thinkprogress