Political scandals and bad wars may come and go, but global warming is here to stay. We are doing little, if anything, to deal with this problem. The waiting game tells us that we can't even get started until January 20, 2009, when George W. Bush leaves office. The question is whether his successor will get the ball rolling. As global warming is hardly surfacing as an issue in the current presidential campaign, pushed aside for the usual debate on God, Gays and Guns, I doubt it. This is like smoking cigarettes while reading the warning label on the carton.

Scientists Make Dire Forecast for Alaska
By DAN JOLING,AP
Posted: 2007-09-07

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Sept. 7) - An analysis of 20 years' worth of real-life observations supports recent U.N. computer predictions that by 2050, summer sea ice off Alaska's north coast will probably shrink to nearly half the area it covered in the 1980s, federal scientists say.

Such a loss could have profound effects on mammals dependent on the sea ice, such as polar bears, now being considered for threatened species status because of changes in habitat due to global warming . It could also threaten the catch of fishermen.

In the 1980s, sea ice receded 30 to 50 miles each summer off the north coast, said James Overland, a Seattle-based oceanographer for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"Now we're talking about 300 to 500 miles north of Alaska," he said of projections for 2050.

That's far past the edge of the highly productive waters over the relatively shallow continental shelf, considered important habitat for polar bears and their main prey, ringed seals, as well as other ice-dependent mammals, such as walrus.

The NOAA researchers reviewed 20 computer scenarios of the effects of warming on sea ice, used by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its assessment report released this year.

The researchers compared those models with observations from 1979 through 1999, Overland said, and concluded that the summer ice in the Beaufort Sea likely will have diminished by 40 percent, compared with its 1980s area.

The same is likely for the East Siberian-Chukchi Sea region off northwest Alaska and Russia. In contrast, Canada's Baffin Bay and Labrador showed little predicted change.

There was less confidence for winter ice, but the models also predict a sea ice loss of more than 40 percent for the Bering Sea off Alaska's west coast, the Sea of Okhotsk east of Siberia and the Barents Sea north of Norway.

The research paper by Overland and Muyin Wang, a NOAA meteorologist, will be published Saturday in Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union.

The situation is dire for polar bears, said Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity, who wrote the petition seeking federal protection for the animals.

"They're going to drown, they're going to starve, they're going to resort to cannibalism, they're going to become extinct," she said.

As ice recedes, many bears will get stuck on land in summer, where they have virtually no sustainable food source, Siegel said. Some will try and fail to swim to sea ice, she said.

Bears that stay on sea ice will find water beyond the continental shelf to be less productive, she said, and females trying to den on land in the fall will face a long swim.

"It's absolutely horrifying from the polar bear perspective," she said.

Less sea ice also will mean a changing ecosystem for commercial fishermen and marine mammals in the Bering Sea, Overland said.

With sea ice present, many of the nutrients produced in the ocean feed simple plankton that bloom and sink to the ocean floor, providing rich habitat for crabs, clams and the mammals that feed on them, including gray whales and walrus.

"If you don't have the ice around, the productivity stays up closer to the surface of the ocean," Overland said. "You actually have a change in the whole ecosystem from one that depends on the animals that live on the bottom to one that depends on the animals that live in the water column. So you have winners and losers."

That could mean short-term gains for salmon and pollock, he said. But it also could mean that fishermen will have to travel farther north to fish in Alaska's productive waters, and warm-water predators might move north.

The contribution to warming by greenhouse gas emissions likely is set, he said. Emissions stay in the atmosphere for 40 to 50 years before the ocean absorbs them. The amount emitted in the past 20 years and the carbon dioxide put out in the next 20 will linger, Overland said.

"I'm afraid to say, a lot of the images we are going to see in the next 30 to 40 years are pretty much already established," he said.

A follow up to my other post today about the effects of global warming. Little did I know that the Associated Press was about to write another story about the irreversible consequences of rampant industrialization without regard for the consequences. Will our grand-children forgive us?

Most polar bears could be gone by 2050 Associated Press September 7, 2007 Two-thirds of the world's current polar bear population could be gone by midcentury if predictions of melting sea ice hold true, the U.S. Geological Survey reported on Friday.

The fate of polar bears might be even more imperiled than that estimate, because sea ice in the Arctic might be vanishing faster than the available computer models predict, the geological survey said in a report aimed at determining whether the arctic bear should be classified as a threatened species.

"Projected changes in future sea ice conditions, if realized, will result in loss of approximately two-thirds of the world's current polar bear population by the mid 21st century," the report's executive summary said.

"Because the observed trajectory of Arctic sea ice decline appears to be underestimated by currently available models, this assessment of future polar bear status may be conservative."

In January, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, noting polar bears depended on sea ice as a platform to hunt seals. Projected sea ice loss due to global climate change was believed to jeopardize the bears' range.

The New York Times ran an article a few days ago about the curious reality of the computerized mail industry that sends junk and other mail to us whether we like it or not. The World Trade Center is still receiving mail, six years after the tragedy of 9/11. At last count, about 200 pieces of mail each day are arriving at the post office addressed to the businesses that formerly occupied the Twin Towers. According to the post office, that number continues to diminish as people update their mailing lists.

The inertia surrounding old mail is no surprise to us who continue to recieve mail intended for people who used to live in our current apartments and houses. We are slow to change, and so are computers.

It's understandable when computers still think it's September 10, 2001. But it's not so understandable when American citizens fail to update their mental hard drives accordingly. This morning's Times reports that a substantial portion of the American public still thinks that Iraq bombed us on 9/11: "Six in 10 Americans said in the poll that administration officials deliberately misled the public in making a case for the war; 33 percent of all Americans, including 40 percent of Republicans and 27 percent of Democrats, say Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001."

Notice that more Republicans than Democrats still blame Saddam for 9/11. When the Iraq war started, 70 percent of Americans thought that Saddam's fingerprints were on the terror attacks. That number is gradually falling, but like the mail that continues to arrive at the WTC, some still think that Iraq bombed us that day. As the President begs the American public for more time to finish off Iraq and kill more American soldiers, remember that this war continues, in part, because many among us still think that we are fighting back for the tragedy of 9/11. There is no doubt in my mind that this war was an easier sell because Americans thought that Iraq was responsible for 9/11. If our fellow countrymen and women learned how to read, maybe this horrible war never would have happened.

Of course, the primary catastrophic loss resulting from the terror attacks on 9/11 was the loss of life, including people who grew up in my neighborhood. The second catastrophic loss was the war in Iraq which was snake-bitten from the start thanks to lousy war planning and the false pretenses employed to start the war in the first place. The third catastrophic loss is the civil liberties which are being eroded each and every day and which may never return, so long as elected and other public officials use the terror threat to keep the population on edge for years to come. We continue to fall for these scare tactics.

The various counter-terror methods put in place by the dishonest hacks in the Bush administration have been well-chronicled. These warrantless searches are justified by the need to stop the next terror attack. That was the justification a few weeks ago when Bush rammed another surveillance law through Congress. According to Newsweek, that law, too, was premised on a house of cards.

In a new embarrassment for the Bush administration top spymaster, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, is withdrawing an assertion he made to Congress this week that a recently passed electronic-surveillance law helped U.S. authorities foil a major terror plot in Germany.

The temporary measure, signed into law by President Bush on Aug. 5, gave the U.S. intelligence community broad new powers to eavesdrop on telephone and e-mail communications overseas without seeking warrants from the surveillance court. The law expires in six months and is expected to be the subject of intense debate in the months ahead. On Monday, McConnell - questioned by Sen. Joe Lieberman - claimed the law, intended to remedy what the White House said was an intelligence gap, had helped to "facilitate" the arrest of three suspects believed to be planning massive car bombings against American targets in Germany.

Other U.S. intelligence-community officials questioned the accuracy of McConnell's testimony and urged his office to correct it. Four intelligence-community officials, who asked for anonymity discussing sensitive material, said the new law, dubbed the "Protect America Act," played little if any role in the unraveling of the German plot. The U.S. military initially provided information that helped the Germans uncover the plot. But that exchange of information took place months before the new "Protect America" law was passed.

After questions about his testimony were raised, McConnell called Lieberman to clarify his statements to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, an official said. . . . Late Wednesday afternoon, McConnell issued a statement acknowleding that "information contributing to the recent arrests [in Germany] was not collected under authorities provided by the 'Protect America Act'."

It's bothersome to think that one of the reasons for widespread public unhappiness about the Iraq war is that we are not winning. In other words, if the U.S. won the war three months after it started, or if the U.S. were winning today, what percentage of the public would be against the war today? I think we know the answer.

Think back to 1991, when the U.S. last went to war against Iraq. The official reason for that war was to "liberate" the small country of Kuwait, which Saddam Hussein had invaded in August 1990. There were lots of reasons to oppose that war, waged by George W. Bush's father. One reason was that, like this time around, there was evidence that the U.S. was going to war as a first resort, not a last resort. Also, our own government has looked the other way and even actively supported precisely the kind of invasion that Saddam had commandered. There was also evidence in 1991 that our government had misled the public about the reasons for war in Iraq, just like the current war.

There was some opposition to the 1991 war, much of it principled, on the theory that we really declared war in Iraq because of its oil reserves and that we did not really care about the people of Iraq or Kuwait. This opposition stemmed from the undisputed fact that the U.S. government continued supporting Saddam when he gassed his own people, and the first President Bush did not follow through on his promise to help the Kurds rebel against Saddam after the first Gulf War ended, a broken promise that resulted in the deaths of thousands when Saddam retaliated.

No one cared about these nagging factual problems which American society did not debate or even know about, unless you were reading hard-to-find magazines in the pre-Internet era, when you really had to look for this stuff. When the soldiers came home after victory in Iraq, thousands of Americans cheered them on during the victory parades, unaware of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who died during that war and the many more who would die of malnutrition and starvation once our government imposed economic sanctions against Iraq which the U.S. finally lifted once Saddam was deposed in Gulf War II.

The indifference to foreign suffering has surfaced again. Thanks to Tom Tomorrow, a great cartoonist and blogger, I learn that the average American has greatly understated the true costs of the current war in Iraq.

One: when random Americans were polled a few months ago by the Associated Press, the median guess for the death toll was under ten thousand. So there’s a fair chance that however bad you may think Iraq is, you might want to multiply it by one hundred. We are talking about a possible literal megadeath. On our watch.

Two: predictably, the new estimate has already been dismissed out of hand by the Pentagon, as was last year’s Lancet study. But the Lancet study’s methodology is actually widely accepted; even John Zogby said it was “as good as it gets.” And the new poll, conducted by a respected firm whose clients include the Conservative Party, the Bank of Scotland, and Morgan Stanley — not exactly a bunch of raving lefties — is (as Jon notes) simply consistent with the Lancet study.

The death toll in Iraq far exceeds 10,000. It's in the high six figures, possibly even a million people. You can't blame the American people for this. They have no way of knowing how many Iraqis have died since the American invasion in 2003. The media doesn't care, and the public's opposition to the war has almost nothing to do with casualties on the other side,only our side. I wonder if American opposition to the Iraq war is principled, and if public opinion would turn around with a few well-publicized "successes" there?

The first causalty of war is the loss of life. The second casualty is the truth. And the third is the loss of civil liberties. With the stroke of a pen last year, President Bush wiped out Habeas Corpus for certain detainees. Habeas Corpus is the legal procedure dating to the Magna Carta which allows prisoners to challenge the legal basis for their confinement, allowing a neutral judge to determine if the government has the right to lock them up. The problem with the new law is that the President decides if someone is an "enemy combatant" and no one can appeal that determination to the court, which means that an innocent man can sit in confinement for months or years without any fair process. Many observers think this restriction on Habeas Corpus can extend to United States citizens, not just foreign nationals. I wrote about this here and here. In a "war on terror," you can justify the restriction on civil liberties by telling everyone that without this restriction there will be another 9/11.

Unfortunately, the extension of civil liberties to certain classes of people generates more outrage than the loss of civil liberties to other classes of people. Case in point: when some courts in the last few years decided that same-sex couples have the equal right to marry each other under the Constitution, social conservatives were outraged and mobilized themselves to make that precise issue their top priority. But when the government wipes out the Habeas Corpus protection (which is specifically guaranteed under the Constitution) for military detainees, no one really gives a crap. Restricting civil rights gets you elected these days. Expanding civil rights gets you public scorn.

Many legal commentators continue to bemoan the loss of Habeas Corpus even as the rest of society has forged ahead with other pressing legal matters, like O.J. Simson's latest arrest. The forgotton story of Habeas Corpus lands that tragedy in first place in Project Censored's list of the 25 most censored stories of 2007. When you consider the importance of Habeas Corpus to the history of western civilization, this could be the most censored story of our young century.

As summarized by Project Censored, here is a brief description of the issue:

With the approval of Congress and no outcry from corporate media, the Military Commissions Act (MCA) signed by Bush on October 17, 2006, ushered in military commission law for US citizens and non-citizens alike. While media, including a lead editorial in the New York Times October 19, have given false comfort that we, as American citizens, will not be the victims of the draconian measures legalized by this Act—such as military roundups and life-long detention with no rights or constitutional protections—Robert Parry points to text in the MCA that allows for the institution of a military alternative to the constitutional justice system for “any person” regardless of American citizenship. The MCA effectively does away with habeas corpus rights for “any person” arbitrarily deemed to be an “enemy of the state.” The judgment on who is deemed an “enemy combatant” is solely at the discretion of President Bush. The oldest human right defined in the history of English-speaking civilization is the right to challenge governmental power of arrest and detention through the use of habeas corpus laws, considered to be the most critical parts of the Magna Carta which was signed by King John in 1215.

Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist #84 in August of 1788:

The establishment of the writ of habeas corpus are perhaps greater securities to liberty and republicanism than any it [the Constitution] contains. The practice of arbitrary imprisonments have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny. The observations of the judicious [British eighteenth-century legal scholar] Blackstone, in reference to the latter, are well worthy of recital:

“To bereave a man of life” says he, “or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation; but confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.”

While it is true that some parts of the MCA target non-citizens, other sections clearly apply to US citizens as well, putting citizens inside the same tribunal system with non-citizen residents and foreigners.

Some members of Congress have tried to restore Habeas Corpus. That effort failed this week. Again no one cares. But something tells me that if a military dictatorship wiped out Habeas Corpus, the United States would invade that country in the interest of preserving democracy. Who will invade us to restore Habeas Corpus?

Another presidential race is underway and, like always, there is almost no discussion about whom the candidates would appoint to the Supreme Court. This is like a couple deciding to have children without setting aside any room in the house for a crib. For those of us who care about civil liberties, there is nothing more important than the Supreme Court.

If you want to protect and advance the cause of civil liberties, don't look to our elected offcials or the President for this. No one will ever get elected to any position of authority on a civil liberties platform. That would mean advancing the rights of criminal defendants, prisoners, unpopular or minority religions, political dissenters and others who neither fit within the conformist politics of American society nor bottom feed with the lowest common denominator.

There has been much hand-wringing among liberal Supreme Court watchers about the direction the Court is taking. There is no longer any balance. Only two Democrats have been appointed to the Supreme Court in 40 years. The last and best place to preserve and protect the civil liberties outlned in the U.S. Constitution lies with the Supreme Court. But the Court over the last few years has veered further to the right than anyone predicted, as the subliterate clown in the White House has already made two lifetime appointments to the Court.

There is very little talk about this, but I'm telling you right now. It will be a political bloodbath when the oldest Justice on the Court, John Paul Stevens decides to retire or dies. This will happen relatively quickly. Stevens is 87 years old and has sat on the Court for 32 years. He is regarded as a liberal these days, but that is only because this conservative is nowhere nearly as conservative as the others on the Court. I do not care for everything Stevens has done on the Court, but I would take him over everyone else. This week's New York Times Magazine offers a comprehensive personality profile of Stevens, who for some reason spoke openly with a reporter, something the reclusive Supreme Court justices rarely do.

The article tells us how far we have moved away from viewing the Supreme Court as the true guardian of American civil libertes. Stevens issued a foreful dissening opinion this Spring as the Supreme Court struck down a measure used by many school districts to ensure integrated schools, i.e., making sure that racial diversity exists in the schools to help prepare students for the real world. Years ago, in the famous Brown v. Board of Education case, the Supreme Court made it illegal for school districts to keep the black kids away from the white kids, ruling that "separate but equal is not equal" under American law. This ruling, of course, applied the principle that the government cannot discriminate against students on the basis of race.

In the current educational environment, where school districts were bringing together black and white students, the districts were not doing anything inherently discriminatory and these policies did not stem from any racist views of inferiority. But in June 2007, the Supreme Court assumed that any educational decisions based on race are illegal, even if the policy creates no victims and does not have the effect of shutting students out of good schools. The current Supreme Court's simplistic views on racial policies and classifications outraged Justice Stevens, a grandfatherly type who is not prone to hyperbole. But he issued a statement in his dissenting opinion that will stand as a epitaph for the current civil rights environment: "It is my firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision."

A voice like this will not be on the Supreme Court forever. God help us if a Bush-clone appoints the replacement when Stevens leaves the Court. Why is this not an issue on the campaign trail?

War is fun, if you're not the one who's dying. Or if you're the guy playing with the little plastic soldiers and tanks on your desk and shouting "boom!" before knocking over the soldiers with the tank and taking prisoners by flicking the soldiers off the desk and onto the floor.

The guy at the desk is George W. Bush. The plastic soldiers represents the lives of our sons and daughters. When George W. walks around the Oval Office in bare feet and accidently steps on a plastic soldier, I'm sure it hurts like hell. But it's nothing like the loss of a leg or an eye.

That distinction was lost on President Ding-Dong in early 2003. We know from the so-called Downing Street Memos that a secret meeting between British and American diplomats revealed that the case for war was being manipulated to show that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. When news of the Downing Street Memos broke a few years ago, the media looked the other way and the American public yawned, if they knew about it to begin with.

Some more smoking gun memos surfaced a few weeks ago, this time from Spain. Same story. According to ThinkProgress.org,

the Spanish newspaper El Pais published a transcript of a discussion between President Bush and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar in February 2003 in which Bush told Aznar that the U.S. would go to war with Iraq to disarm Saddam Hussein with or without a UN resolution:

“We must take him right now. We have shown an incredible degree of patience until now. There are two weeks left. In two weeks we will be militarily ready.”

Though Aznar asked Bush to “have a little patience” and urged, “It is very important to have a [UN] resolution,” Bush pushed for war throughout the meeting, telling the Spanish Prime Minister, “We will be in Baghdad by the end of March.”

Just a few days later, Bush insisted to the American public that war with Iraq was not a certainty.

This memo shows Bush just itchin' for war, describing the tedious process of diplomacy as "Chinese Water Torture." His swagger in boasting about the coming war drips off the page. Like a child who can't wait for the toy soldiers to arrive in the mail. More analysis here, including a transcript of the memo.