Global Warming

The nation's largest business lobby wants to put the science of global warming on trial. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, trying to ward off potentially sweeping federal emissions regulations, is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a rare public hearing on the scientific evidence for man-made climate change. Chamber officials say it would be "the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century" -- complete with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge who would rule, essentially, on whether humans are warming the planet to dangerous effect.

NO ONE seems to care about the upcoming attack on the World Trade Center site. Why? Because it won't involve villains with box cutters. Instead, it will involve melting ice sheets that swell the oceans and turn that particular block of lower Manhattan into an aquarium. The odds of this happening in the next few decades are better than the odds that a disgruntled Saudi will sneak onto an airplane and detonate a shoe bomb.

The Schwarzenegger administration pushed through new rules Thursday allowing California's biggest timber firms to cash in on the fight against global warming even as they clear-cut parts of their forests. Forest owners stand to reap tens of millions of dollars in the coming decades by selling the capacity of their woods to cleanse the air of carbon dioxide, offsetting greenhouse gases belched by industrial polluters. But the administration's successful effort to allow loggers to sell their carbon credits to industry while also clear-cutting their lands sparked intense opposition from several conservation groups.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin acknowledged Tuesday that global warming was harming her state but said stepped-up natural-gas production could mitigate its effects. Speaking at a hearing before Interior Secretary Ken Salazar -- the third of several he is holding across the country to consider renewed oil and gas leasing on the outer continental shelf -- Palin said that relatively clean-burning natural gas could supplant dirtier fuels and slow the discharge of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

In what could be an encouraging sign of change in the long-standing shortage of Americans preparing for "clean energy" careers, the subject is suddenly hot on college campuses across the nation -- a surge of interest largely stimulated by the specter of global warming.

Beneath a moonlit Arctic sky, Joe Swan Jr. and most of his 12-person crew were taking a cigarette break when a dump truck arrived and emptied another load of black sand at their feet. The backhoe driver, who happened to be his wife, gunned the engine, spewing a diesel haze into the air as she dug into the pile and filled another 2,500-pound sandbag for the sea wall shielding the island from the Chukchi Sea.

Mirror, mirror on the wall: Who is the greenest of them all? Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has a plan to slash his city's planet-warming greenhouse gases to 35% below the 1990 level by 2030, and make L.A. the "cleanest and greenest city in the country." San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has a blueprint to cut his city's greenhouse gases to 20% below the 1990 level by 2012, creating "the greenest large city in the United States of America."

Frank Eddy pulled off his dusty boots and slid into a chair, taking his place at the dining room table where most of the critical family issues are hashed out. Spreading hands as dry and cracked as the orchards he tends, the stout man his mates call Tank explained what damage a decade of drought has done . "Suicide is high. Depression is huge. Families are breaking up. It's devastation," he said, shaking his head. "I've got a neighbor in terrible trouble.

It's a silent but deadly source of greenhouse gases that contributes more to global warming than the entire world transportation sector, yet politicians almost never discuss it, and environmental lobbyists and other green activist groups seem unaware of its existence. That may be because it's tough to take cow flatulence seriously. But livestock emissions are no joke.

In proposing two big, expensive dam projects this week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made a novel argument to justify the old-fashioned public works projects. Advocating $4 billion in bonds to build reservoirs in Northern and Central California, the administration emphasized not population growth or the specter of future drought, but global warming.

Sen. Blanche Lincoln is one of the most endangered Democrats on the political landscape this year. The two-term Arkansas moderate is getting only 38% or 39% against any of her little-known Republican opponents, according to a recent Rasmussen poll. Politico is putting her "at the top of the list of vulnerable Democrats." And providing President Obama with his 60th vote for healthcare reform in the Senate isn't helping in a state where public opinion is running strongly against it. To stretch a metaphor, she's more endangered than that infamous snail darter that delayed Tennessee's Tellico Dam. Now, the League of Conservation Voters is going after Lincoln for her opposition to a climate change bill.

The fallout from Mt. Rainier's shrinking glaciers is beginning to roll downhill, and nowhere is the impact more striking than on the volcano's west side. "This is it in spades," U.S. Park Service geologist Paul Kennard said recently, scrambling up a 10-foot-high mass of dirt and boulders bulldozed back just enough to clear the road. As receding glaciers expose crumbly slopes, vast amounts of gravel and sediment are being sluiced into the rivers that flow from the region's tallest peak.

The Obama administration pledged Thursday that the United States would cut its greenhouse gas emissions about 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 -- a step that would bolster the global warming deal brokered at climate talks last month. In a letter to United Nations climate officials, the administration formally "associated" itself with the Copenhagen Accord by making the pledge, which it said would be outlined in more detail once Congress passes a bill limiting emissions. Most of the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gases, which scientists blame for global warming, are expected to follow suit.

Climate change just isn't what it used to be. Case in point: The number of otherwise intelligent people who are saying that all the cold weather (in the East) and rain (here at home) are causing them to lose faith in the gospel of global warming. To their way of thinking, it's fine and good to be bellyaching about rising sea levels when it's 100 degrees outside. It's easy to remember to carry around your reusable tote bag when drought begets parched hillsides, which beget wildfires, which beget air that smells like rotisserie chicken minus the chicken.

Before finally sitting down to write about the inanity of end-of-year top 10 lists, I spent a long time trying to think of ways to make the column itself a top 10 list. Like every writer who works on deadline, I didn't want to expend too much effort this week. I wanted a column I could type with two fingers on one hand while writing holiday cards (yes, I'm still doing that) with the other. I wanted a topic that required the use of 3% of my brain as opposed to the usual 7% -- my estimate, based on that adage that humans only ever use 10% (scientists say we use more, but I say, not necessarily newspaper columnists)

The White House is poised to order all federal agencies to evaluate any major actions they take, such as building highways or logging national forests, to determine how they would contribute to and be affected by climate change, a step long sought by environmentalists. Environmentalists say the move would provide new incentives for the government to minimize the heat-trapping gas emissions scientists blame for global warming. Republicans have opposed it as potentially inhibiting economic growth.

'Vampirism' just doesn't add up It was pretty jarring, to say the least, to be hit in the face by Michael Tolkin's angry anti-right, anti-God rant ["This Vampirism Is Made in America," Dec. 20]. What a pitiful attempt at political allegory. Who needs to hear such a hateful existentialist tirade, especially at this time of the year? I do not appreciate Tolkin's half-baked brand of allegorical logic either, and I was not at all surprised to learn that he coauthored the screenplay for the film "Nine."

Storms of My Grandchildren The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity James Hansen Bloomsbury: 304 pp., $25 Most scientists rarely experience the luxury of certainty. But we expect them to speak with authority. We expect them to make impossible predictions and judge them on their accuracy. Even more, we expect them to stay above or at least outside public debates. In "Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity," James Hansen gives us the opportunity to watch a scientist who is sick of silence and compromise; a scientist at the breaking point -- the point at which he is willing to sacrifice his credibility to make a stand to avert disaster, to offer up the fruits of four-plus decades of inquiry and ingenuity just in case he might change the course of history.

First, Chicken Little warned children that the sky was falling. And now Build-a-Bear Workshop has warned children that the North Pole could disappear before Christmas. The Missouri-based company has found itself in hot water, defending an animated series on its website featuring polar bears, penguins and Mrs. Claus, as Santa is warned that global warming is "a serious situation." Conservative bloggers reposted the videos online and called for a boycott of the toy company, saying Build-a-Bear should not be presenting a political stance to children.

When two weeks of climate negotiations finally wound to an overtime finish in Copenhagen, the goal of a new binding treaty to combat global warming still looked elusively far away. And, even for climate activists, the question was: "Is that so bad?" The summit officially ended Saturday with a gentlemen's agreement among the world's largest economies to take steps to curb greenhouse gas emissions, but no formal consensus on the part of the 193 nations present -- and no prescription for what comes next in the global negotiating process that is nearly 20 years old. It was a muddled mandate from a conference originally intended to produce a successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.