Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

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I don't believe that any European country will introduce the capital punishment again - most here think such to be a medieval anarchy.

Not so, Walter, Switzerland does have the death penalty on the books - for high treason at wartime. The law hasn't been tested in some time, however, last war being 7 centuries ago with no reports of traitors reaching us down the line.

Old Europe - am fairly certain on the facts surrounding the death of a Russian in Zurich years ago: he is the first person in forensics history to have committed suicide by holding his head underwater in his hotel's bathtub.

Old Europe - am fairly certain on the facts surrounding the death of a Russian in Zurich years ago: he is the first person in forensics history to have committed suicide by holding his head underwater in his hotel's bathtub.

The spirit of the original law certainly prevails - and mind you, the unfortunate Russian accident victim could hardly be accused of treason by the Swiss, since he was never a citizen or even resident.

The wording may have been changed somewhat in 1992 but "de jure" means nothing in this particular case

Article 10 Right to Life and Personal Freedom
(1) Every person has the right to life. The death penalty is prohibited.
(2) Every person has the right to personal liberty, namely to corporal and mental integrity and freedom of movement.
(3) Torture and any other form of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment are prohibited.

I don't believe that any European country will introduce the capital punishment again - most here think such to be a medieval anarchy.

the Middle Ages which were a relatively peaceful period, compared to what has followed..

Indeed a very good case can be made suggesting that it was only after the Enlightenment that the full scope of European war, revolution, murder and genocide was unleashed. The worst crimes of Europe all occurred in the modern era.

georgeob1 wrote:

the Middle Ages which were a relatively peaceful period, compared to what has followed..

Don't know. The collapse of the Roman Empire? The Muslim conquests? The destruction of the Carolingian Empire? The crusades? The Hundred Years' War? I'm not sure if I'd call that a "peaceful period."

georgeob1 wrote:

Indeed a very good case can be made suggesting that it was only after the Enlightenment that the full scope of European war, revolution, murder and genocide was unleashed. The worst crimes of Europe all occurred in the modern era.

Well, arguably, if you look at the number of victims as percentage of the total population, I'm not sure that the Second World War was more devastating than e.g. the Thirty Years' War. Which was clearly pre-Enlightenment, and could technically even be called a Religious War (Even though religion was often only a disguise for political ambitions. Not that too much has changed since then...).

Alaska's great glaciers are melting away. Some of the smaller ones have completely disappeared in the past few decades, and while many of the bigger ones will be around for a while yet, their yearly retreat is stunning nonetheless.

Alaska has warmed more quickly than any other place on the planet in the past 50 to 75 years, climate-change experts say. It holds a negligible lead over Yukon (canada) , which faces many of the same global-warming-induced challenges.

Statewide temperatures have increased about four degrees Celsius since 1950. There is a range of predictions for how warm it will get here in the coming years, but the most commonly used model sees temperatures rising by between three and six degrees by the end of the century and even more dramatically (up to eight degrees) along the coast, according to John Walsh, director of the Centre for Global Change at the University of Alaska.Not all the warming can be attributed to the rise in greenhouse-gas emissions. There has also been an El Nino-like shift in wind patterns, a phenomenon known as Pacific Decadal Oscillation. The patterns in the waters surrounding Alaska go through a transition every 20 to 30 years, and their effect on the region lasts much longer than El Nino's does elsewhere. The last major wind-pattern shift here was back in the late 1970s, which pumped up temperatures by a degree or two.

Add to that temperature increases due to manmade global warming, and in a place such as Alaska you suddenly have a unique set of challenges.

According to a recent University of Alaska study, climate change could add as much as $6-billion to what is now expected to be the $40-billion cost of building and maintaining public infrastructure in Alaska between now and 2030.

Alaska's roads, buildings, railroads and airports are all going to cost more to replace in part because the foundation upon which they are built is turning into sludge. That once permanently frozen subsoil - permafrost - is thawing.

"This is a huge issue for the state," said Peter Larsen, co-author of the report by the Institute of Social and Economic Research. "Canadians should be interested in this issue as well because a place like the Yukon faces the same challenges.

"What is going to happen to the permafrost when temperatures go above freezing? The airport in Nome is having a severe problem with thawing permafrost, and there are people from the state's Department of Transportation on the ground there trying to deal with the fact that the runway is facing a serious problem."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20122975/site/newsweek/

Newsweek article on the industry operations organizing and funding the GW denial campaigns.

As the writer notes, these fellows have taken a successful strategy used by the tobacco industry to delay/eviscerate government and citizen action which might jeopardize their operations by suggesting that "the science is unclear" (that smoking has negative health consequences). The most recent NY Review of Books has an excellent essay on this aspect of the tobacco industy's PR strategy but that article is behind a pay wall.

Come on blatham, apples and oranges. To suggest that man caused global warming is just as verified as lung cancer from smoking is a big stretch.

Even my grandfather called cigarettes coffin nails a hundred years ago.

Common sense would tell you there is no comparison. If anyone has a PR strategy, it is the environmentalist whackos in regard to this global warming crisis.

Soot blamed for ice melt

August 10, 2007

By Randolph E. Schmid
WASHINGTON/The Associated Press

Around the middle of the 19th century, the Arctic took a sooty turn for the worse, according to researchers studying how humans have affected the climate.
Soot can darken snow, causing it to absorb sunlight, warm up and melt. That, in turn, can add to local climate warming by exposing darker ground which absorbs energy from the sun that the white snow would have reflected.
Ice cores from before about 1850 show most soot came from forest fires. But since then, black soot in the snow has increased several times over and most now comes from industrial activities, according to a paper in yesterday's online edition of the journal
Science.

In a separate paper in that journal, a team of British researchers forecast that climate warming will slow for about a decade, then bounce back to record-setting temperatures.
That group added new detail to improve the accuracy of complex computer models that calculate changes in weather and climate to come up with their new outlook.
The soot study was done by a team led by Joseph McConnell of the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada.
The researchers analysed black carbon levels in ice from Greenland, covering the last 215 years.
They found that the older soot samples contained vanillic acid, an indicator of burning conifer trees.
In the more recent years, the soot was seven times more common and contained a larger concentration of non-ocean sulfur, an indicator of industrial emissions.
Soot concentrations peaked in 1906-10 and remained high for decades. Sulfur emissions declined following the Clean Air Act in 1970, they noted.
In the early 20th century, the Arctic warmed more than anywhere else on Earth, Richard Alley of the California Institute of Technology observes in a commentary on the report, noting a "broad correspondence between the soot peak and the observed warming."
Doug Smith and colleagues at the British Meteorological Office produced the improved climate model.
They added the effects of natural climate changes, such as the El Nino phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean, fluctuations in ocean circulation and anomalies in ocean heat content to their computer models.
In general, climate models have focused on the impact of outside factors such as solar radiation, atmospheric aerosols and greenhouse gases.
The new outlook calls for a slowdown in warming for the next few years, but then an increase again.
They forecast that at least half of the years after 2009 will be warmer than 1998, the warmest year to date according to the Met Office.
The U.S. National Climate Data Center ranked 2005 in a virtual tie with 1998.
The arctic soot research was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Desert Research Institute, Office of Naval Research and NASA.
The climate forecasters were supported by the United Kingdom Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the U.K. Government Meteorological Research Programme.