A.F.L.-C.I.O. Backs Keystone Oil Pipeline, if Indirectly - NYTimes.com

while some union leaders said the federation’s stance stopped short of an official endorsement, the nation’s building trades unions — eager for the thousands of jobs the pipeline would create — issued a statement saying the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s stance was a clear endorsement of the Keystone pipeline.

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Global Warming is a Virus by @darwinsfx on @slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/lazlomemes/global-warming-is-a-virus …

Tom Zeller Jr.: Tipping Points: Can Humanity Break The Planet?

In an email message, James E. Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and is an adjunct professor at Columbia University's Earth Institute, said that tipping points may unfold more smoothly than people generally understand, but that they represent points of no return nonetheless. He also suggested that dismissing the notion of global tipping points out of hand was a mistake. "Tipping points are real, albeit misunderstood by some people," he said.

...Michael E. Mann, the climatologist and director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, called the new paper "thoroughly unconvincing and implausible."

"We are not talking about random uncorrelated changes around the globe," Mann said, pointing by way of example to human-induced climate change. "We are talking about dramatic, coherent changes in climate around the world, in the form of unprecedented rates of warming, increased continental drought, extreme flooding and wildfires. Moreover, these are not simply additive, but interactive, with a whole array of other stresses on ecosystems around the world due to urbanization and habitat destruction, deforestation and environmental pollution."

The totality of these stressors, Mann argued, is greater than the sum of its parts.

"It's part of why scientists are predicting a collapse of coral reef ecosystems around the world in a matter of decades -- the combined result of ocean acidification, global warming, coastal pollution, and other factors," he said. "I suppose the authors would deny that this represents a global environmental tipping point."

Ecologists Start to Disengage from Climate Tipping Point Rhetoric | Tallbloke's Talkshop

Here’s an article from Science Daily which is important not so much for its subject area as for the line it draws in the soil. These ecologists are explicitly moving away from the rhetoric of global ‘climate tipping points’ so beloved of climate alarmists like Al Gore and James Hansen.