Ice mass snaps free from Canada’s Arctic tells the tale of a huge ice shelf that broke free near the North Pole. Scientists haven’t seen anything like it in 30 years and attribute it to global warming, which is affecting the arctic faster than other regions.
US said to propose polar bear for endangered list “The Bush administration has decided to propose listing the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, putting the U S government on record as saying that global warming could drive one of the world’s most recognizable animals out of existence.”
There wasn’t a lot of press coverage for a Hidden Opportunity in Global Warming about The Stern Review on the economics of climate change:
It estimates that acting now to stabilize climate change could cost 1 percent of global GDP each year — which is relatively manageable — but not acting could create losses that dwarf that. Likely the losses from inaction, the Review estimates, would reach 5 percent to 20 percent of global GDP year after year, “now and forever.”
Climate change might, in the end, prove itself an optimal crisis. It could be among the catalytic forces — along with reaching peak oil production and other forms of ecological exhaustion — that are grave enough to break us out of our cultural trance, yet not so insurmountable as to crush our spirit. It might spur human society to the fundamental transformation that our culture so desperately needs, to move us from a culture of consumption and waste and isolation to one of sustainability and community and, yes I’ll say it, happiness.
Yeah, we can only hope. Let’s see?Give up that SUV or pictures of cuddly polar bears?
