The  Bush Administration's final rush to loot and pillage as much of America's national heritage as it can before leaving office is proceeding full steam ahead. On the heals of its plans to lift the ban on offshore drilling and its refusal to abide by the Supreme Court ruling on EPA's responsibility to regulate greenhouse gases comes this.

From today's Washington Post:

The Bush administration is preparing to ease the way for the nation's largest private landowner to convert hundreds of thousands of acres of mountain forestland to residential subdivisions.

As books go, this one is very short. That, however, is one of it's strengths. By leaving out the details of climate change, which one can find in many other books and reports, and focusing instead on a synthesis of our current knowledge of climate science, Dr. Emanuel has written an extremely useful summary.

I have read many books on global warming, climate change, or, to use the term that I prefer, Climaticide. This volume is one of the most useful for the non-scientist because it presents all the major concepts in a concise, clearly written, yet comprehensive account.

Although there have been a couple of exceptions recently (see here and here), the Traditional Media continues to report on extreme weather events: flooding, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes and drought, etc. as if they were isolated occurrences, without any context. This, despite the facts that the IPCC (see Table 3.2 in the 2007 Summary Report) and most recently NOAA (see Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate), foresee an increase in precisely these kinds of extreme weather as a result of our continuing Climaticide.

Given that it is vitally important for the public to know both the context and the details of the relationship between Climaticide and extreme weather I have started a petition (sign here) demanding that the Traditional Media provide that context in its reporting.

UPDATE: I know that some of this has been covered before but I want to provide an overview of the entire boondoggle. I do need to apologize to mnemosyne9 however for the similarity to the title of his/her diary. I did not discover it until after having published this one.  Mea culpa.

Let's start with some background:

In April 2003, in a move consistent with the hostile approach that the Bush Administration has taken toward public health, the environment and environmental regulation, the US Environmental Protection Agency denied a petition from the International Center for Technology Assessment and a number of other organizations to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles.

As a result, 12 states, three cities and 13 environmental groups filed suit against the EPA to force it to comply with its obligations under the Clean Air Act.

Global warming must be a lie because, if it were not, it would take large scale government action to deal with it, and big government and the loss of our freedom is the greatest danger that we all face.

As I have argued elsewhere understanding that bit of nonsense is fundamental to understanding how Climaticide denialists think and why they care so little about science.

I have defined four principle categories of denialists.

1. Plutocrats

2. Shills

3. Literate conservative/libertarian ideologues

4. The right-wing booboisie

Today I propose to illustrate my earlier argument with a selection of denialist quotations from these four categories.  You can find these quotes all over the web. For the most part I present the quotations in no particular order. I trust you will have no trouble either identifying the common elements in each of the quotes nor in linking the quote to the appropriate category of denialist.

Still, for what it's worth, I will give you my take on how the categories relate to each other just below the fold.

Today I emailed Dr. Hansen, requesting his permission to post the full text here on Daily Kos and on my own blog Climaticide Chronicles of the written statement that he made yesterday to the National Press Club and the House Select Committee on Energy Independence & Global Warming.

He responded immediately, saying graciously:

[C]ertainly. My aim is to communicate.

So, here it is.

Kudos to James Hansen for once again having the courage to say what others are afraid to even think.

From today's UK Guardian:

James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

That's right, Hansen, the self-proclaimed "moderate conservative" is calling on Congress to put oil and gas companies CEO on trial for the crime of knowingly lying to the public about the danger that Climaticide poses for billions of the world's population and at least half her species of flora and fauna. In other words, for attempting to block action on a global holocaust.

Maybe the Mainstream Media is finally getting the message. As I reported on Thursday, NBC actually aired a piece on the their Nightly News about a new report from U.S. Climate Change Science Program linking Climaticide to extreme weather events.

Then, yesterday, syndicated columnist, Amy Goodman, had a piece in the Seattle Post Intelligencer called Flooding is global warming at work in which she took the Mainstream Media to task for their failure to connect the dots in their reporting on extreme weather events and Climaticide. Double score here.  Goodman reports on the link between Climaticide and extreme weather and criticizes the MSM for acting as if the connection does not exist.

[Yesterday I finally took the leap and started my own blog, Climaticide Chronicles.  Below, by way of an introduction, I have reprinted my welcoming post from Climaticide Chronicles in the hope that some of my fellow Kossacks might be interested enough to do me the honor of visiting.

As innumerable diaries and now a front page story have pointed out, Al Gore will endorse Barack Obama in about a half an hour. If you feel as I do that  stopping Climaticide is the number one issue of the 21st century, the context within which all other problems will have to be addressed, then I encourage you to make a contribution to the Barack Obama campaign within the hour.

Just like during an NPR fund drive, how many people contribute during a given event, is seen as a sign of how much public support there is for that event.  Let's show just how concerned Kossacks are about stopping global warming by making massive donations to the Obama campaign during the Gore endorsement.

Kos, it's pretty clear that an overwhelming majority of Kossacks find your post about John McCain's teeth offensive. At this moment the post has received nearly 900 comments (most of which condemn it) and there are two diaries on the recommended list which also find it offensive and think it should be taken down.

So far, we haven't heard a word from you in response (although you've written other things) and the diary is still up.  Now I understand very clearly that this is your site and that you can do whatever you want.  That's fine.  No problem. But I still think you owe it to us to talk to us. If you refuse to take the post down, tell us why, don't just ignore us.

I knew what was going to happen in Kentucky but I'm still pissed off about it. Why?  Why does it upset me so much? I've decided that there are 3 main reasons: 1) the large-scale racism 2) the general silence in the MSM and on most blogs, including this one, that it is racism and 3) the Clinton campaign's willingness to exploit, not the racism directly, but the ignorance on which it is based and which is key to it's survival.

I am deeply offended by the racism demonstrated in the primaries in West Virginia and Kentucky. (I know there are racists in every state in the Union, particularly in the Deep South, but the power of the racists in Deep South states was offset by the large African-American turnout and hence less visible. Of course there is a racial element in the decision of some African-Americans to support Barack Obama, but that racial element is the righteous outrage of the oppressed as they (finally) assert their power, not the pathetic attempts of the white underclass to cling to the one sop is has historically been offered as compensation for its own misery--superiority over non-whites).

Let me tell you a story in the present tense.

We're on a commuter train and a six-year old boy starts screaming that his mom is having a seizure and that if we don't do something about the vial of poison that's rolling around on the floor and leaking into the air we're all going to have seizures and maybe die. Everyone freezes at first because the scenario is so outside of their experience they can't believe it could possibly be true.

The child keeps screaming. One of the passengers springs into action and goes to the woman but has no way to deal with the toxic spill. She sees the danger but can do little herself. She calls for help. Call 911!  Tell the engineer to stop the train!

A recent post by Joe Romm over at Climate Progress, The denialists are winning, especially with the GOP, in which he cited a Pew Poll showing that 13% fewer Republicans believe in global warming now than did a year ago, drew a huge number of denialist responses. After reading them all (groan) it struck me that it might be useful to analyze who climate denialists are and why they behave as they do.

Anyone who has tried to discuss Climaticide with a climate change denialist knows just how frustrating it can be. No matter how well informed you are, no matter how many peer-reviewed studies you cite, or how many times you point out the overwhelming agreement based on the evidence that exists among climate scientists that global warming is real and is principally caused by human fossil fuel use, you will get no where. Your adversary will deny the facts, cherry pick the scientific evidence for bits of data that, taken out of context, support his/her denialist view, or drag out long-debunked counter-arguments in the hope that they are unfamiliar to you and that you will not be able to refute them. If you succeed in countering all of his arguments he will most likely reword them and start all over again.

Now that even the MSM seems to have finally got it through it's collective skull that Hillary is not going to win the Democratic nomination, I think that it's a good time to turn our thoughts to what we would like to see happen in an Obama presidency.

Of course, there is still the small matter of beating John McCain, but I'm not too worried about that because we will have John McCain's help in achieving that goal every step of the way. What respect I have for McCain is based on the courage, loyalty to his fellow prisoners, and steadfastness that he displayed while a prisoner in North Vietnam. Unfortunately, surviving imprisonment, no matter how bravely, does not necessarily qualify you to be president, particularly if the net sum of your life-changing experience is that you advocate policies that are only minimally different from Bush/Cheney and Co.

EcoNoticiario # 5 covers a broad range of topics: health of forests and wetlands in Spain and Cuba, a whole range of environmental news from Colombia, the effects of drought, rising energy costs and volcanic eruptions in Chile, and the ongoing farmers' strike in Argentina.

[I have been writing about the Spanish water crisis in a separate series of diaries. For the latest news see my recent diary: Ten Things America Can Learn From Spain's Water Wars.]

Your environmental word of the week:

sequía-drought

[As always: All translations are mine.]

A combination of political compromise and a bit of rainfall and snowmelt, which raised the average levels of the Catalan reservoirs from 20.1% of capacity to over 25%, seems to have provided a temporary breathing space in the water crisis in northeastern Spain.

The Catalan drought, which threatens to leave five million people in Barcelona without drinking water, is only one example of a worldwide increase in Climaticide induced drought (Australia, Ethiopia, Yemen, Chile, etc.).

In Spain, where political battles over water have a long tradition, the infighting has been bitter and the crisis is still far from over.  Even as the bulldozers and backhoes begin work on the pipeline that will carry water from the Ebro river to Barcelona, irrigators block highways in protest, other regions complain they are not receiving equal treatment, and debate rages over whether the country should build another pipeline from the Rhône river in France to provide a long-term solution to the area's water problem.

Can the United States, like Spain, a developed country with a growing water problem, draw useful lessons from the Spanish experiences? It would seem prudent to at least have a look.

[Note: Links below sections are to the source material for that section. All translations are mine]

It is a commonplace of environmental economics that a problem of our current free-market economic system is that it has no mechanism for determining external costs. Without appropriate government policy, business has no way to calculate external costs so as to include them in the pricing of goods and services. For example, cancer costs from toxins in industrial and consumer products, the clean-up of water pollution from chemical fertilizer use in industrial agriculture, or the costs inflicted on humanity generally by human-induced global warming are all left to be born by society at large.

Moreover since these costs are only paid after the consequences have been felt, there is a tendency to focus on cures, in the case of cancer, or cleanups, in the case of pollution, rather than on prevention. In other words by not including external costs in original pricing we end up paying more than we would have for prevention, and that, only after the misery and suffering of disease and pollution have been inflicted upon society at large. This is an inevitable failure of the Republican free market model, which rejects regulation and prevention in favor of actually inflicting harm, litigation, and compensation (minus attorney's fees of course).