Cold weather is here, wrap up | The New Age Online

"In South Africa, many people are not adequately clothed and sheltered against the cold weather of winter..."

Ravaged by freeze, farmers may get federal aid for fruit | Star-Gazette | stargazette.com

"The worst year I've ever seen," said Martin Schutt, owner of Schutt's Apple Mill in Webster. "I just don't know what we're going to do. Cherries, peaches, and apples, we have a total loss on all of them."

Climate engineering report ranked among top government priorities

Bickel and Lane's report ranked first among the four papers solicited on climate change, and 12th overall on a priority list released this week by the Copenhagen Consensus.

High chance of Bangladesh sinking under rising sea levels

...a particular example for which Schneider presents some numbers should frighten all of us. For low-lying countries like Bangladesh, one of the critical questions of climate change is how high sea level rise will be. The answer to this actually depends on whether or not the Greenland ice cap melts; this event would release enough water to raise global sea levels about 25 metres (about 80 feet). This would be the end for Bangladesh, sinking perhaps 75% of the country. It would also be the end of most of the world’s coastal cities like New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC and London. Here are Schneider’s estimates of how likely this is:

“For Greenland to irreversibly melt, my own [estimate] would be roughly a 2 to 5% chance that it is already too late and it will happen over the long run. At 1 degree Celsius more warming, I’d raise the odds to 25% ...” (page 274).

So this is the problem of climate science in a nutshell; the likelihood of a major catastrophe like 25 meter sea level rise could be theoretically be as low as 2 to 5%. So in the US, Republican politicians like George W. Bush as well as numerous Democrats whose political campaigns rely on donations from oil and coal companies will always focus on the 2% probability and dismiss climate change as a waste of time. However, for those of us who have not been paid off and can think for ourselves, the rest of the sentence should be shocking: “... and at 2 degrees Celsius to 60%, at 3 degrees Celsius to 90%, and so on” (page 274 continued).