THE END OF THE WORLD IS CONFUSING

The following is an excerpt from a newsletter from Arianna Huffington...

If he’s smart enough to use it, the Democratic nominee may have just been handed the perfect cudgel with which to pummel President Bush — and cripple Karl Rove’s attempts to position his man as America’s go-to guy on national security. The weapon in question is a new report on the grave and gathering threat posed by global climate change — and the potentially cataclysmic consequences of the Bush administration’s obstinately ignorant approach to global warming. And the thing that makes the report so frightening — and the prospective bludgeon so crushing — is that it wasn’t authored by some crunchy granola think tank or a band of tree-hugging Earth Firsters, but by the U.S. Department of Defense. That’s right, the Pentagon — Rummy’s playpen. In fact, the report, which was slipped to the press earlier this month after being kept under wraps by the White House for four months, was commissioned by Andrew Marshall, a legendary DOD figure, nicknamed “Yoda” for his sagacity. As head of the Pentagon’s secretive Office of Net Assessment, Marshall has offered national security assessments to every president since Richard Nixon. And this latest assessment pegs climate change as a far greater danger than even the scourge of international terrorism. Dryly entitled “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security,” the report reads like the plot summary of the upcoming Dennis Quaid doomsday flick, The Day After Tomorrow in which global warming pushes the planet to the edge of anarchy and annihilation.

But this scenario is not science fiction. According to the Pentagon study, the question is not if abrupt climate change will happen, but when. It could be, according to the report’s authors, as soon as the next three years, with the most devastating fallout potentially occurring between 2010 and 2020. At that point, we could find ourselves in the midst of a new ice age in which mega-droughts devastate the world’s food supply, drinkable water becomes a luxury worth going nuclear over, 400 million people are forced to migrate from uninhabitable areas, and riots and wars for survival become commonplace. But the Bush White House remains unwilling to address — or even acknowledge — this looming peril. Instead, the oiligarchs in the administration continue to fiddle while the atmosphere starts to burn, routinely ignoring scientific evidence and international consensus, and casting a questioning eye on the very idea, let alone the fact, of global warming. It’s a stance that has warmed the hearts —globally, no doubt — of the Bush Pioneers and Rangers in the oil and energy industry, making them feel very generous indeed. As last week’s release of a scathing letter signed by 60 prominent scientists — including 20 Nobel laureates and former science advisers to both Republican and Democratic administrations — makes clear, the Bush administration has made an art out of ignoring science. Particularly whenit comes to the issue of global warming.

Unfortunately Arianna, a recent convert from right wing Republicanism, is not so well versed in the techniques of doom-saying as those of us who have been at for decades, like (say) kaymo, Doc40's own grim prophet of destruction. She gives no references, no chapter and verse, and even mistakes it as a party political issue and not another indication that this planet is just sooo fucked that we might as well stay loaded until The End. Fortunately, here at Doc40, we can at least manage to run a Google search, which revealed that the source of her alarming information is a month old issue of Fortune (apt, AH?), from which we lifted the following excerpt...

Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world's climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a decade—like a canoe that's gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. Scientists don't know how close the system is to a critical threshold. But abrupt climate change may well occur in the not-too-distant future. If it does, the need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societies—thereby upsetting the geopolitical balance of power. Though triggered by warming, such change would probably cause cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, leading to longer, harsher winters in much of the U.S. and Europe. Worse, it would cause massive droughts, turning farmland to dust bowls and forests to ashes. Picture last fall's California wildfires as a regular thing. Or imagine similar disasters destabilizing nuclear powers such as Pakistan or Russia—it's easy to see why the Pentagon has become interested in abrupt climate change. Climate researchers began getting seriously concerned about it a decade ago, after studying temperature indicators embedded in ancient layers of Arctic ice. The data show that a number of dramatic shifts in average temperature took place in the past with shocking speed—in some cases, just a few years.
For the full story – http://www.fortune.com/fortune/subs/print/0,15935,582584,00.html

BUT CHEER UP

Here, courtesy of Henry CB (who’s name I misspelled yesterday) is a new animation from the great Joel Veitch, that is quite as good as Viking Kittens or Gay Bar. – http://www.rathergood.com/moon_song/

MEANWHILE...

The FCC seems to be rolling hard in it’s clean up of the airwaves, and also providing Bush with another fatuous smokecreen. Bubba the Love Sponge is history and Clear Channel jerked Howard Stern from its stations just as Stern joined the League of Extraordinary Bushwhackers (LEB) by furiously turning on GWB and backing Kerry. But more of this later as the news comes in.

CRYPTIQUE – Jesus H. Christ, Mel...