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The following Parts are zip folders. Each folder has a PDF file and other info files concerning colors and text of the images. Adobe Reader 9 is best for reading the PDF files. The sequence of the Parts is about in the same order as that of the Table of Contents below.

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Part XVIII (1 page, 1.1 MB)
Part XIX (1 page, 2.0 MB)

The 29 Chapters of Global Parliament Constitution

[ Preamble ] [ Chapter  I ] [ Chapter  II ] [ Chapter  III ] [ Chapter  IV ] [ Chapter  V ] [ Chapter  VI ] [ Chapter  VII ] [ Chapter  VIII ] [ Chapter  IX ] [ Chapter  X ] [ Chapter  XI ] [ Chapter  XII ] [ Chapter  XIII ] [ Chapter  XIV ] [ Chapter  XV ] [ Chapter  XVI ] [ Chapter  XVII ] [ Chapter  XVIII ] [ Chapter  XIX ] [ Chapter  XX ] [ Chapter  XXI ] [ Chapter  XXII ] [ Chapter  XXIII ] [ Chapter  XXIV ] [ Chapter  XXV ] [ Chapter  XXVI ] [ Chapter  XXVII ] [ Chapter  XXVIII ] [ Chapter  XXIX ]

Table of Contents of Global Parliament Constitution Short Version

• Introduction
• Global Community 25 th Anniversary Celebration (1985 - 2010)
• Founders of the Global Community organization
• Definition of the Global Community
• Global Community Affiliated Centres for education and training
• Global Dialogue
• Global Information Media (GIM)
  

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  Global Information Media (GIM) Main Index
  



• Politics and Justice without borders: what we stand for
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• Definition of the Scale of Global Rights
• Global Sustainability

  Global Sustainability aspects and issues
  Agriculture and food production aspects and issues
  Earth Management aspects and issues
  Global development management aspects and issues
  Agriculture and food production management aspects and issues
  Building Global Communities for all life aspects and issues
  Sustainable cities aspects and issues
  
  

• Portal of the global civilization

  Portal of the Global Civilization aspects and issues ever since 1985.
  Portal of the Global Civilization for all life
  Our Vision is a benchmark for life
  Global vision aspects and issues ever since 1985.
  
  

• Global Movement to Help

  Global Movement to Help main listing
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  Global Community of North America (GCNA) Emergency, Rescue, and Relief Centre
  Federation of Global Governments Emergency, Rescue, and Relief Centre
  
  

• Federation Emergency, Rescue and Relief Centre (FERRC)
• Global rights year one
• Global Law
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  Global Rights
  The Judiciary
  Earth Court of Justice
  Standards & good practices
  Global Law & Regulations
  Formation of new nations
  Settling of disputes between nations through the process of the Earth Court of Justice
  Codes, Bills, Acts, and Statutes
  

• Global Parliament: what we stand for
  

  The House of Elected Representatives, the House of Advisers, and the Global Governments Federation together are the Global Parliament.
  The Federation of Global Governments vs the United Nations
  Federation of Global Governments
  Earth Government
  Cabinet Ministers
  History of the Global Community Organization and Interim Earth Government
  Annual meeting of the Federation of Global Governments
  

• Global Parliament schematic
• Global Community of North America (GCNA)
• Global Government of North America (GGNA)
• Federation of Global Governments: what we stand for

  Report Main Index
  Introduction
  The Federation of Global Governments vs the United Nations
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  Global Protection Agency (GPA)
  The Judiciary
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  Essential services
  
  

• Federation of Global Governments Emergency, Rescue, and Relief Centre
• Global voting on issues
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• Global Ministries are about local to global cooperation
• Global Peace Movement
  

  What Peace amongst nations means?
  The Global Community Peace Movement has declared a planetary state of emergency. Global Community Peace advocates have told their stories
  Global Peace Movement and Disarmament
  What Peace amongst nations means
  The Canadian experience is the pathway to Peace in the world
  Peace amongst nations means follow the pathway to Peace in the world
  

• The USA wars
• The Planarchists
• Obama world tepee (tea p.) and the Little Red Riding Hood
• Global Crisis
• NATO (the White House , war industry, big corporate rulers, Christian right) vs Global Rights and Global Justice
• Canada and the United States relationship
  

  Friendly understanding between President Bush and PM Harper of Canada
  Two wrongs do not make one right: Canada changing from peace keeping to war making
  Canada, the Mexico of the North and next victim of the IMF-World Bank rapacious appetite for nations with valuable resources
  

• USA 21st century global economic system
• Global Social Economic Model (GSEM)
• Global Social Economic Model (GSEM) vs the actual world economic system as proposed by G8/G20 nations
• The teaching of the Soul
  

  The teaching of the Soul
  The fundamental criteria of a global symbiotical relationship
  Guiding Souls and God want to help us manage Earth
  Guiding Souls to serve God is a part of a new unifying religion of a modern symbiosis global society
  The Divine Plan and the higher purpose of humanity
  The Global Community teaching
  Global Law
  

• Celebration of Life Day
• Planetary Biodiversity Zone

Planetary biodiversity zone ( Part III )
The Global Community has had work on biodiversity issues, rights and protection ever since 1985
The Global Community perspective on the control of the Northwest Passage, Canada sovereignty of Nunavut and 'blood resources'
Global Citizens Rights, Responsibility and Accountability Act


• The Global Exhibition
• Global Community days of celebration or remembering throughout the year
  

  Cultural Appreciation Day
  Along with all the global communities, the Global Community, all life on Earth, and the Soul of Humanity can rightfully claim ownership of the Earth as a birthright
  Founding of the Global Community organization, Earth Government and the Federation of Global Governments
  Global Citizenship Day
  Tribute to Virginie Dufour, the first Secretary General of the Global Community organization, who passed away April 28,2000
  The Global Exhibition
  Nationalization of natural resources
  Global Peace Movement Day
  Global Movement to Help
  Global Justice for all Life Day
  Global Justice Movement
  Global Disarmament Day
  Planetary State of Emergency Day
  Global Community 25 th Anniversary Celebration (1985 - 2010)
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  Planetary Biodiversity Zone
  

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  Global Parliament's Constitution Main Index
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  Twenty four years ago the Global Community organization was created. Happy 24 th year Anniversary everyone
  

  
  

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The latest issue of Nature contained a paper by Daniel G. Boyce, Marlon R. Lewis & Boris Worm called Global phytoplankton decline over the past century. This research describes a planetary catastrophe which, on a scale of 1 to 10, ranks about 8.5 on the disaster scale. This post should be viewed as a follow-up to How We Wrecked The Oceans (DOTE, May 17, 2010).

Here's the Nature abstract—

In the oceans, ubiquitous microscopic phototrophs (phytoplankton) account for approximately half the production of organic matter on Earth. Analyses of satellite-derived phytoplankton concentration (available since 1979) have suggested decadal-scale fluctuations linked to climate forcing, but the length of this record is insufficient to resolve longer-term trends. Here we combine available ocean transparency measurements and in situ chlorophyll observations to estimate the time dependence of phytoplankton biomass at local, regional and global scales since 1899. We observe declines in eight out of ten ocean regions, and estimate a global rate of decline of ~1% of the global median per year. Our analyses further reveal interannual to decadal phytoplankton fluctuations superimposed on long-term trends. These fluctuations are strongly correlated with basin-scale climate indices, whereas long-term declining trends are related to increasing sea surface temperatures. We conclude that global phytoplankton concentration has declined over the past century; this decline will need to be considered in future studies of marine ecosystems, geochemical cycling, ocean circulation and fisheries.

Phytoplankton are microscopic photosynthesizers, which means that they use light energy from the sun and take in carbon dioxide (CO2) to produce oxygen. These tiny plants, along with cyanobacteria, do a lot of the work that keeps the biosphere stable. From the press release—

The findings contribute to a growing body of scientific evidence indicating that global warming is altering the fundamentals of marine ecosystems. Says co-author Marlon Lewis, "Climate-driven phytoplankton declines are another important dimension of global change in the oceans, which are already stressed by the effects of fishing and pollution. Better observational tools and scientific understanding are needed to enable accurate forecasts of the future health of the ocean." Explains co-author Boris Worm, "Phytoplankton are a critical part of our planetary life support system. They produce half of the oxygen we breathe, draw down surface CO2, and ultimately support all of our fisheries. An ocean with less phytoplankton will function differently, and this has to be accounted for in our management efforts."

Doing the math, the researchers estimate that an astonishing 40% of ocean's phytoplankton population has disappeared since 1950! The fewer microscopic plants there are living in the ocean surface waters, the less CO2 is drawn down from the atmosphere. Thus, the Earth's carbon cycle is being fundamentally altered, with uncertain but surely deleterious effects.

As the press release indicates, the researchers found that warmer surface waters caused by global warming are the main suspect in the decline—

The scientists report that most phytoplankton declines occurred in polar and tropical regions and in the open oceans where most phytoplankton production occurs. Rising sea surface temperatures were negatively correlated with phytoplankton growth over most of the globe, especially close to the equator. Phytoplankton need both sunlight and nutrients to grow; warm oceans are strongly stratified, which limits the amount of nutrients that are delivered from deeper waters to the surface ocean. Rising temperatures may contribute to making the tropical oceans even more stratified, leading to increasing nutrient limitation and phytoplankton declines. The scientists also found that large-scale climate fluctuations, such as the El-Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), affect phytoplankton on a year-to-year basis, by changing short-term oceanographic conditions.

In other words, warmer oceans are not well mixed at the surface, with warmer water sitting atop colder deeper water. Photosynthesizers must live in the surface waters where there is access to sunlight, but do not get the nutrients from upwelling colder water required by their metabolism. So they die off.

It is clear that we have a disastrous positive feedback loop at work here, in which warmer surface water supports fewer phytoplankton, which then take up less CO2 from the atmosphere, which causes the surface water to warm some more due to the greenhouse effect, etc. In fact, one of the crazier geo-engineering solutions to global warming is to seed the ocean surface waters with iron filings to stimulate phytoplankton growth!

Up to this point, I have written up this disaster without much emotion. That's probably because it's so depressing. If this trend continues, we Earthlings are surely fucked. And maybe on relatively short time scales (a few decades). In fact, if we have indeed lost 40% of the phytoplankton in the oceans since 1950, I do not understand why we have not felt the terrible effects already. Perhaps the Earth's biosphere (primary productivity) and nutrient recycling (as with carbon) are more resilient than they appear. None of this is well understood, but our uncertainty cuts both ways.

I think there's a certain point—perhaps we have just now passed it—where all you can do is throw your hands up in the air and shout out what the fuck do we do now? Frankly, I hope this phytoplankton decline result is wrong, but I fear it is right.

As warming intensifies, scientists warn, the oxygen content of oceans across the planet could be more and more diminished, with serious consequences for the future of fish and other sea life.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is overshadowing another catastrophe that’s also unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico this summer: The oxygen dissolved in the Gulf waters is disappearing. In some places, the oxygen is getting so scarce that fish and other animals cannot survive. They can either leave the oxygen-free waters or die. The Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium reported this week that this year’s so-called “dead zone” covers 7,722 square miles.

Unlike the Deepwater Horizon disaster, this summer’s dead zone is not a new phenomenon in the Gulf. It first appeared in the 1970s, and each summer it has returned, growing bigger as the years have passed. Its expansion reflects the rising level of fertilizers that farmers in the U.S. Midwest have spread across their fields. Rain carries much of that fertilizer into the Mississippi River, which then delivers it to the sea. Once the fertilizer reaches the Gulf, it spurs algae to grow, providing a feast for bacteria, which grow so fast they use up all the oxygen in their neighborhood. The same phenomenon is repeating itself along many coastlines around the world. This summer, a 377,000-square-kilometer (145,000-square-mile) dead zone appeared in the Baltic Sea. In 2008, scientists reported that new dead zones have been popping up at an alarming rate for the past 50 years. There are now more than 400 coastal dead zones around the world.

As serious as these dead zones are, however, they may be just a foreshadowing of a much more severe crisis to come. Agricultural runoff can only strip oxygen from the ocean around the mouths of fertilizer-rich rivers. But global warming has the potential to reduce the ocean’s oxygen content across the entire planet. Combined with acidification — another global impact of our carbon emissions — the loss of oxygen could have a major impact on marine life.

Scientists point to two reasons to expect a worldwide drop in ocean oxygen. One is the simple fact that as water gets warmer, it can hold less dissolved oxygen. The other reason is subtler. The entire ocean gets its oxygen from the surface — either from the atmosphere, or from photosynthesizing algae floating at the top of the sea. The oxygen then spreads to the deep ocean as the surface waters slowly sink.

Global warming is expected to reduce the mixing of the ocean by making surface seawater lighter. That’s because in a warmer world we can expect more rainfall and more melting of glaciers, icebergs, and ice sheets. Since freshwater is less dense than salt water, the water at the ocean’s surface will become lighter. The extra heat from the warming atmosphere will also make surface waters expand — and thus make them lighter still. The light surface water will be less likely to sink — and thus the deep ocean will get less oxygen. Instead, more of the oxygen will linger near the surface, where it will be used up by oxygen-breathing organisms.

The prospect that global warming could reduce the ocean’s oxygen has led some scientists to wonder if the predicted decline has already begun. It’s a maddeningly hard thing to determine, however. We can be very confident that humans have driven up the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because scientists have recorded a steady increase over the course of decades. The signal of human-produced carbon dioxide is stronger than the noise of nature’s ups and downs.

Fluctuations in oxygen levels, on the other hand, are a lot noisier. As ocean currents oscillate naturally, upwellings of deep-ocean water can deliver nutrients to coastal waters, triggering an explosion of growth and driving down oxygen levels. Volcanoes can alter oxygen levels, too, by creating a haze that blocks sunlight, thus temporarily cooling the ocean’s surface and allowing more oxygen to dissolve into the water.

In recent years some worrying signals have started to emerge from the noise. In 2006, for example, oxygen levels off the coast of Oregon dropped to record lows. Reefs that had been packed with rockfish and other animals suddenly became ecological ghost towns. Instead of agricultural run-off, studies on the Oregon dead zone suggest that global warming was partly responsible. Higher temperatures have reduced the oxygen in the ocean currents that deliver water to the Oregon coast.

It’s much harder for scientists to figure out what’s happening in the open ocean than along the coastlines, because the records are far spottier. But some recent studies have also offered cause for worry. In April, for example, Lothar Stramma of the University of Kiel and his colleagues published a study in Deep Sea Research in which they compared records of oxygen levels in the tropical ocean from two periods: from 1960 to 1974 and from 1990 to 2008. In some regions, the oxygen levels have gone up, the scientists found, but in most places they’ve gone down. In fact, the area of the global ocean without enough oxygen for animals to survive (less than 70 micromoles per kilogram to be exact) expanded by 4.5 million square kilometers (1.7 million square miles). That’s an area about half the size of the United States.

Because the records of oxygen levels in the past are so incomplete, many scientists are calling for a push for more research. An international collaboration started in 1995, the Climate Variability and Predictability Repeat Hydrography Program — CLIVAR for short — is beginning to gather better data. But in the latest issue of Annual Review of Marine Science , Ralph Keeling of Scripps Institution of Oceanography and his colleagues warn that the CLIVAR program may need 20 to 30 years to establish long-term trends of oxygen levels. To speed up the process, they call for a global network of floating sensors known as Argo to be brought into the effort. If scientists put oxygen sensors on a few hundred of the 3,000 Argo floats, Keeling and his colleagues predict that a clear pattern would emerge in as little as five years. Keeling and his colleagues believe that it’s urgent to speed up this research, because the deoxygenation of the oceans could have a major impact on marine life.

In order to project how global warming will alter oxygen in the oceans, climate scientists are developing a new generation of computer models. The models are still too crude to capture some important features of the real world, such as the way winds can change how deep water rises in upwellings. But the models are good enough to replicate some of the changes in oxygen levels that have already been recorded. And they all predict that the oxygen in the world’s oceans will drop; depending on the model, the next century will see a drop of between 1 and 7 percent.

That could be enough to have a profound effect on life in the ocean, according to Daniel Pauly, a fisheries biologist at the University of British Columbia. In his new book, Gasping Fish and Panting Squids: Oxygen, Temperature and the Growth of Water-Breathing Animals, Pauly argues that getting oxygen is the most important constraint on the growth of fishes and many other marine animals. That’s because it takes a lot of energy to extract oxygen from water, and the bigger animals get, the more energy they have to invest.

Pauly and his colleagues are working on computer models to project how global warming will affect the world’s fisheries. Many species of fishes will shift their ranges away from water that’s too warm for them. But this flight from heat may force them into regions of the ocean with low levels of oxygen, where their growth will be limited. Pauly and his colleagues predict that the drop in the ocean’s oxygen and pH levels will together reduce the world’s fish catch by 20 to 30 percent by 2050.

While fishes and other animals with high oxygen demands suffer, jellyfish may thrive. Jellyfish can tolerate lower oxygen levels than fish, in part because they can store reserves of the gas in their jelly. Free from competition and predators, jellyfish will be able to feast on the microscopic animals and protozoans that feed on algae. They may thus leave more food for bacteria, spurring a further drop in oxygen levels.

A drop in oxygen may also cause the ocean's bacteria to change. Bacteria that need oxygen will no longer be able to thrive in oxygen-free zones of the ocean. But these dead zones will foster the growth of many species of bacteria for whom oxygen is toxic. Some of these oxygen-hating microbes produce nitrogen compounds that are among the most potent greenhouse gases ever measured. In other words, a drop in oxygen levels could further intensify global warming.

Unless we find a way to rein in our carbon emissions very soon, a low-oxygen ocean may become an inescapable feature of our planet. A team of Danish researchers published a particularly sobering study last year. They wondered how long oxygen levels would drop if we could somehow reduce our carbon dioxide emissions to zero by 2100. They determined that over the next few thousand years oxygen levels would continue to fall, until they declined by 30 percent. The oxygen would slowly return to the oceans, but even 100,000 years from now they will not have fully recovered. If they’re right, fish will be gasping and squid will be panting for a long time to come.

PDF Version

2010 is shaping up as the warmest in the instrumental record, as recorded by the National Climate Data Centre (NCDC ? the worlds largest active archive of weather data), NASA Goddard Institute of Space Science (GISS), Hadley-Met/Climate Research Unit, Remote Sensing Satellite survey (RSS) and  Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU), and as shown by the plot (Figure 1) below http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_description.html , http://www.ssmi.com/msu/msu_browse.html

According to NOAA (July 15, 2010): ( http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100715_globalstats.html )
? June, April to June, and Year-to-Date Global Temperatures are Warmest on Record Last month's combined global land and ocean surface temperature made it the warmest June on record and the warmest on record averaged for any April-June and January-June periods ? Worldwide average land surface temperature was the warmest on record for June and the April-June period, and the second warmest on record for the year-to-date (January-June) period, behind 2007 ?. The monthly analysis from NOAA is based on records going back to 1880?.

But you will not read about it in much of the media.

A string of extreme weather events monitored by NASA portrayed on http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/ tells the story, including:

1.  Last month saw the hottest temperature on record for Asia, with 53C in Pakistan. The mega-floods in this part of the world are the result of the increased capacity of the warming atmosphere to hold moisture, precipitated when the humid air masses rise above the Himalaya.

2.  Moscow has also been recording temperatures of 37.4 degrees C, the monthly anomaly will be a record of around +7.5 degrees C, with a death toll reaching 2000 people. Extreme temperatures, reaching 40 degrees C in Moscow, have set large parts of Russian forests and wheat belts on fire http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-wildfires-2010-8#more-first-just-294-miles-south-of-moscow-7   *

3.  Beijing had it hottest day on record earlier in the month, 40.6C. 

4.  Japan scored a 39.4C on 22nd July.

5.  Hundreds of maximum and minimum temperature records have been broken across the U.S. and Canada in the last two months. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/records.php?ts=daily&elem=
maxt&month=7&day=26&year=2010&sts[]=US&submitted=Get+Records#recs ; http://blogs.sacbee.com/photos/2010/07/roasting-under-a-hot-summer-su.html

6.  Raging wildfires broke out July 29 just south of Los Angeles, CA, forcing mandatory evacuations and major firefighting response. http://www.businessinsider.com/big-breathtaking-photos-of-california-burning-2010-7#-5#ixzz0vseD4yf6

*  The Great Russian Heat Wave of 2010 chokes Moscow with smoke for a third day

Smoke from wildfires cause by the worst heat wave in Russia's history are choking Moscow for a third straight day today, bringing air pollution levels to three times the safe level and forcing cancellation of dozens of flights. However, air pollution is not quite as bad as it was yesterday, when carbon monoxide levels peaked at 6.5 times the safe level. Visibilities at Moscow's airport were higher today (500+ meters), but temperatures still hit 97°F (36°C). The past 26 days in a row have exceeded 30°C in Moscow, and there is no relief in sight--the latest forecast for Moscow calls for high temperatures near 100°F (37.8°C) for the majority of the coming week. As I reported in Friday's post , the number of deaths in Moscow in July 2010 was about 5,000 more than in July 2009, suggesting that the heat wave has been responsible for thousands of deaths in Moscow alone. I would expect that by the time the Great Russian Heat Wave of 2010 is over, the number of premature deaths caused by the heat wave will approach or exceed the 40,000 who died in the 2003 European Heat Wave. As seen in Figure 3, the Russian heat wave of 2010 is more intense and affects a wider region than the great 2003 European heat wave.




A comparison of August temperatures, the peak of the great European heat wave of 2003 (left) with July temperatures from the Great Russian Heat Wave of 2010 (right) reveals that this year's heat wave is more intense and covers a wider area of Europe. Image credit: NOAA/ESRL .

From: http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1570

Australia

It has been very warm across northern, north-western and some inland parts of Australia over recent weeks. We broke quite a few minimum temperature records- including Darwin, which broke its July minimum record by 1.5 degrees C.

Though most of what you would read about in the media is the manufactured CRU E-mail story, which tries to obfuscate climate science and cast doubt on the integrity of climate scientists. This is despite recent investigations showing climate scientists right, as stated:

?On the specific allegations made against the behaviour of CRU scientists, we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt.? ? ''We did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments.'' http://www.cce-review.org/pdf/FINAL%20REPORT.pdf
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/you-wouldnt-read-about-it-climate-scientists-right-20100725-10qev.html .

The newspapers that gave greatest play to the allegations tended to give less attention to these findings. The columnists who gave greatest vent to their indignation have not made any revisions or corrections, let alone apologised to the scientists whose integrity they so sweepingly impugned.

Those who would like to see themselves as ?sceptics?, but commonly present climate plots which inexplicably depart in essential detail from original datasets measured by the worlds premier climate research organizations, as well as ignore the basic physics and chemistry of the atmosphere, would suggest the current extreme weather events are ?natural? and not to do with human Carbon emissions.

By contrast, consistent with the Stefan-Boltzmann and Krichhoff laws of infrared radiation  ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirchhoff's_law_of_thermal_radiation ), these events manifest the increase in energy (temperature) levels of the atmosphere and oceans, consequent on the emissions of about 370 billion tons of carbon since 1750, currently at a rate of about 2 ppm per year, reaching 391 ppm, namely near 40 percent higher that during the last 10,000 years, when agricultural cultivation became possible thanks to stabilization of the Holocene climate.




Figure 1.  Global surface temperature anomalies
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/

Dr Andrew Glikson
Australian National University
Canberra, A.C.T. 0200

Affiliations:
Climate Change Institute /
School of Archaeology and Anthropology /
Planetary Research Institute /

E-mail:    (W)  Andrew.Glikson@anu.edu.au
               (H)  Geospec@iinet.net.au
mail:       P.O. Box 3698 Weston A.C.T. 2611

http://www.anu.edu.au/climatechange/content/author/Andrew%20Glikson
http://arts.anu.edu.au/AandA/people/visitors/glikson.asp
http://rses.anu.edu.au/highlights/view.php?article=10
http://rses.anu.edu.au/highlights/view.php?article=11
http://rses.anu.edu.au/highlights/view.php?article=12

Scientists warn that temperature rise of between 2C and 7C would cause ice to melt, resulting in 23ft rise in sea level

WASHINSTON - The entire ice mass of Greenland will disappear from the world map if temperatures rise by as little as 2C, with severe consequences for the rest of the world, a panel of scientists told Congress Tuesday.

An enormous chunk of ice, roughly 97 square miles in size, has broken off the Petermann Glacier along the northwest coast of Greenland. (Photograph: Aqua/Modis/Nasa)
Greenland shed its largest chunk of ice in nearly half a century last week, and faces an even grimmer future, according to Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University

"Sometime in the next decade we may pass that tipping point which would put us warmer than temperatures that Greenland can survive," Alley told a briefing in Congress, adding that a rise in the range of 2C to 7C would mean the obliteration of Greenland's ice sheet.

The fall-out would be felt thousands of miles away from the Arctic, unleashing a global sea level rise of 23ft (7 metres), Alley warned. Low-lying cities such as New Orleans would vanish.

"What is going on in the Arctic now is the biggest and fastest thing that nature has ever done," he said.

Speaking by phone, Alley was addressing a briefing held by the House of Representatives committee on energy independence and global warming.

Greenland is losing ice mass at an increasing rate, dumping more icebergs into the ocean because of warming temperatures, he said.

The stark warning was underlined by the momentous break-up of one of Greenland's largest glaciers last week, which set a 100 sq mile chunk of ice drifting into the North Strait between Greenland and Canada.

The briefing also noted that the last six months had set new temperature records.

Robert Bindschadler, a research scientist at the University of Maryland, told the briefing: "While we don't believe it is possible to lose an ice sheet within a decade, we do believe it is possible to reach a tipping point in a few decades in which we would lose the ice sheet in a century."

The ice loss from the Petermann Glacier was the largest such event in nearly 50 years, although there have been regular and smaller "calvings".

Petermann spawned two smaller breakaways: one of 34 sq miles in 2001 and another of 10 sq miles in 2008.

Andreas Muenchow, professor of ocean science at the University of Delaware, who has been studying the Petermann glacier for several years, said he had been expecting such a break, although he did not anticipate its size.

He also argued that much remains unknown about the interaction between Arctic sea ice, sea level, and temperature rise.

Muenchow told the briefing that over the last seven years he had only received funding to measure ocean temperatures near the Petermann Glacier for a total of three days.

He was also reduced, because of a lack of funding, to paying his own airfare and that of his students to they could join up with a Canadian icebreaker on a joint research project in the Arctic.

© 2010 Guardian News and Media Limited

I’ll be 62 this month. Even if I live another 30 years, I won’t have to suffer much from the effects of global warming.

Some more uncomfortably hot days, a few more storms, perhaps more expenses for air conditioning. I’ll be gone before it gets too hot.

My children are in their late 20s. By the time they are ready to retire, they’ll be facing a different world for their “golden” years. Dangerously hot summers will be common across the southern U.S. Coastal cities in Louisiana and Florida will be flooded. Thousands of animal and plant species will be extinct, with huge dead zones in the oceans. Unless we act now, these disasters will then accelerate during the lives of my grandchildren.

Science can deliver uncomfortable truths. When Rachel Carson announced in Silent Spring in 1962 that DDT was killing wildlife, agriculture had to abandon one of its basic tools. She was relentlessly attacked by politicians and the chemical industry. It took years to overcome resistance to her truths. When Dr. Herbert Needleman discovered in the late 1970s that lead was harming children’s brains, politicians and industrialists selling leaded paint and gasoline fought to discredit him.

This crisis is much worse. Until recently, nobody knew that the unprecedented wealth of American society carried extreme dangers for our own future. Our modern lifestyles of consumption are slowly killing the planet. The truth of global warming and its long-term effects is scarier than vampires, aliens and Bret Favre’s retirement put together.

According to the latest issue of National Wildlife, “70 percent of all known plant species, 37 percent of all known freshwater fish species, 30 percent of all amphibians, 28 percent of all reptiles, 22 percent of all mammals, and 12 percent of all birds now face threats to their survival.”

Once again politicians, big industry and the professional deniers in the media say “Do nothing.” They rely on tortured logic, personal attacks and outright lies to argue that the world’s scientists are wrong. The so-called Climategate scandal is an example of their tactics. Some stolen e-mails were massaged by climate change deniers to “prove” that scientists were lying. Further investigation shows that these e-mails were embarrassing about the researchers’ tactics, but say nothing against the scientific facts of global warming.

A July 28 editorial laid out that uncomfortable truth, but you don’t see the deniers on TV or in local columns taking back their trumped-up charges.

The deniers have no credibility. They represent the same forces who have tried to prevent every attempt to protect our environment, which means to protect our health. They are afraid of the truth.

Do we as a society really care about anything but our own lives? Are we capable of seeing further into the future than tomorrow?

Global warming is not a party issue. Democrats and Republicans may not agree on the right means to reverse our production of greenhouse gases. But they must agree that it needs to be begun right away.

Hunters and farmers, bird watchers and truckers, rural and urban Americans will all suffer unless we act. Giant corporations will do nothing to change their methods unless they are forced to. Only government can stop global warming. Not just our government, either, but the world’s governments acting together. No amount of ideological posturing or flag-waving will help.

I’m sick of politicians who think only about their reelection, their campaign contributors and their pictures on TV, who put ideology above country. I don’t expect them to come up with brilliant solutions. I just want them to take seriously the job we elected them to do — to think of the future, to gather the best information, to do what’s best for all Americans, those alive today and those not yet born.

I want them to stop fiddling, while we burn up in this heat.

Mr. Hochstadt is professor of history at Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois, and author of Sources of the Holocaust (Palgrave, 2004) and Shanghai-Geschichten: Die jüdische Flucht nach China (Berlin: Hentrich und Hentrich, 2007).

When "snowmageddon" buried the nation's capital in February, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Ok) cheered on his grandchildren in building an igloo on the Capitol grounds and couldn't have been prouder of them in mocking Al Gore. But even the grandchildren of Congress's "Climate Denier-in-Chief" are likely to change targets for their mockery and scorn as it becomes obvious how grandpa has risked their own future.

By every scientific measure greenhouse gases are heating the Earth rapidly and forcing us all to participate in a game of climate Russian roulette. In fact, Russia is one of this year's biggest losers. Temperatures 25 degrees hotter than normal, causing apocalyptic wildfires, have turned central and western Russia, including Moscow, into a ghoulish hell to rival J.R.R. Tolkien's Mordor. Death rates are double the norm from the heat and smoke, thousands have already died.

20 million Pakistanis are now homeless because of flooding from monsoon rains. Flooding in China has killed thousands. Desperation, starvation and diseases like cholera are inevitable. Crops in Russia, China and Pakistan and many other countries have been devastated, causing suspension of grain exports and price spikes. Millions who struggle to feed themselves in a normal climate will be unable to afford enough food to survive.

In many countries like the Sudan, Kenya and Bangladesh, millions of people have already become climate refugees, abandoning their homes and countries because sustaining life there is no longer possible. Climate disasters are mounting in on virtually every continent. Record breaking heat in our East and South, unprecedented flooding in Tennessee and Iowa, and a chronic, deepening drought in the Western US have given us just a taste of the misery other countries are now enduring.

This summer's events fit exactly the scientists' projections of more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming. Notwithstanding the Kool Aid being broadcast at Fox News, even "snowmageddon" fits into the models of a human caused climate crisis.

Last year the lead article in the Lancet, one of the world's most prestigious medical journals, written by 29 distinguished medical scientists called the climate consequences of the greenhouse gas phenomenon, "The biggest global health threat of the 21st century," and will "put the lives and well being of billions of people at increased risk." The report goes on to state that, "Even the most conservative estimates are profoundly disturbing and demand action. Less conservative climate scenarios are so catastrophic that adaptation might be unachievable." The authors said "what is needed now is a public health movement that frames the threat of the climate crisis for humankind as a health issue."

Note these words from the president of the World Medical Association. "Climate change represents an inevitable, massive threat to global health that will likely eclipse the major known pandemics as the leading cause of death and disease in the 21st century."

Many of the same politicians who supported preemptive war in Iraq either to protect ourselves or to save the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein don't believe in preemptive rescue of their fellow men from climate disaster. Then-Vice President Dick Cheney said if there was a one in a 100 chance Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, the invasion was worth it. So far, we've spent $2 trillion on that 1 in a 100 chance. Those same people seem to be unwilling to spend a fraction of that addressing what our best scientists say is a 98 in a 100 chance that CO2 is turning the climate into a global weapon of mass destruction.

A skeptical, but still qualified and honest investigation of climate science could lead one to challenge the scientific community's consensus on the odds of imminent disaster, but not defiantly dismiss it as an impossibility or a hoax. The "see no warming, hear no warming, speak no warming" posture can only come from ideological rigor mortis or ulterior motives.

With every passing day the deniers seem more and more absurdly detached from climate science, wallowing instead in climate witchcraft. Taunting them now might bring some satisfaction were it not for the fact that through their obstructionism they have grabbed the steering wheel of this country's energy policy which is rapidly becoming a ship not just of fools, but a ship of the selfish and cruel.

It's one thing to turn your back on the suffering of the masses half way across the world and rationalize that it is not your problem. But to listen to the scientists' warnings of the risk we are subjecting our own children and grandchildren to and proudly dismiss even the possibility, is criminal neglect of future generations.

Dr. Brian Moench is President of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment. He can be reached at: drmoench@yahoo.com

Try to fit these facts together:

* According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the planet has just come through the warmest decade, the warmest 12 months, the warmest six months, and the warmest April, May, and June on record.

* A "staggering" new study from Canadian researchers has shown that warmer seawater has reduced phytoplankton, the base of the marine food chain, by 40% since 1950.

* Nine nations have so far set their all-time temperature records in 2010, including Russia (111 degrees), Niger (118), Sudan (121), Saudi Arabia and Iraq (126 apiece), and Pakistan, which also set the new all-time Asia record in May: a hair under 130 degrees. I can turn my oven to 130 degrees.

* And then, in late July, the U.S. Senate decided to do exactly nothing about climate change. They didn't do less than they could have -- they did nothing, preserving a perfect two-decade bipartisan record of no action. Senate majority leader Harry Reid decided not even to schedule a vote on legislation that would have capped carbon emissions.

I wrote the first book for a general audience on global warming back in 1989, and I've spent the subsequent 21 years working on the issue. I'm a mild-mannered guy, a Methodist Sunday School teacher. Not quick to anger. So what I want to say is: this is fucked up. The time has come to get mad, and then to get busy.

For many years, the lobbying fight for climate legislation on Capitol Hill has been led by a collection of the most corporate and moderate environmental groups, outfits like the Environmental Defense Fund. We owe them a great debt, and not just for their hard work. We owe them a debt because they did everything the way you're supposed to: they wore nice clothes, lobbied tirelessly, and compromised at every turn.

By the time they were done, they had a bill that only capped carbon emissions from electric utilities (not factories or cars) and was so laden with gifts for industry that if you listened closely you could actually hear the oinking. They bent over backwards like Soviet gymnasts.  Senator John Kerry, the legislator they worked most closely with, issued this rallying cry as the final negotiations began: "We believe we have compromised significantly, and we're prepared to compromise further."

And even that was not enough.  They were left out to dry by everyone -- not just Reid, not just the Republicans. Even President Obama wouldn't lend a hand, investing not a penny of his political capital in the fight.

The result: total defeat, no moral victories.

Now What?

So now we know what we didn't before: making nice doesn't work. It was worth a try, and I'm completely serious when I say I'm grateful they made the effort, but it didn't even come close to working. So we better try something else.

Step one involves actually talking about global warming.  For years now, the accepted wisdom in the best green circles was: talk about anything else -- energy independence, oil security, beating the Chinese to renewable technology. I was at a session convened by the White House early in the Obama administration where some polling guru solemnly explained that "green jobs" polled better than "cutting carbon."

No, really?  In the end, though, all these focus-group favorites are secondary.  The task at hand is keeping the planet from melting. We need everyone -- beginning with the president -- to start explaining that basic fact at every turn.

It is the heat, and also the humidity.  Since warm air holds more water than cold, the atmosphere is about 5% moister than it was 40 years ago, which explains the freak downpours that seem to happen someplace on this continent every few days.

It is the carbon -- that's why the seas are turning acid, a point Obama could have made with ease while standing on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. "It's bad that it's black out there," he might have said, "but even if that oil had made it safely ashore and been burned in our cars, it would still be wrecking the oceans." Energy independence is nice, but you need a planet to be energy independent on.

Mysteriously enough, this seems to be a particularly hard point for smart people to grasp. Even in the wake of the disastrous Senate non-vote, the Nature Conservancy's climate expert told New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, "We have to take climate change out of the atmosphere, bring it down to earth, and show how it matters in people's everyday lives." Translation: ordinary average people can't possibly recognize the real stakes here, so let's put it in language they can understand, which is about their most immediate interests. It's both untrue, as I'll show below, and incredibly patronizing. It is, however, exactly what we've been doing for a decade and clearly, It Does Not Work.

Step two, we have to ask for what we actually need, not what we calculate we might possibly be able to get. If we're going to slow global warming in the very short time available to us, then we don't actually need an incredibly complicated legislative scheme that gives door prizes to every interested industry and turns the whole operation over to Goldman Sachs to run.  We need a stiff price on carbon, set by the scientific understanding that we can't still be burning black rocks a couple of decades hence. That undoubtedly means upending the future business plans of Exxon and BP, Peabody Coal and Duke Energy, not to speak of everyone else who's made a fortune by treating the atmosphere as an open sewer for the byproducts of their main business.

Instead they should pay through the nose for that sewer, and here's the crucial thing: most of the money raised in the process should be returned directly to American pockets. The monthly check sent to Americans would help fortify us against the rise in energy costs, and we'd still be getting the price signal at the pump to stop driving that SUV and start insulating the house. We also need to make real federal investments in energy research and development, to help drive down the price of alternatives -- the Breakthrough Institute points out, quite rightly, that we're crazy to spend more of our tax dollars on research into new drone aircraft and Mars orbiters than we do on photovoltaics.

Yes, these things are politically hard, but they're not impossible. A politician who really cared could certainly use, say, the platform offered by the White House to sell a plan that taxed BP and actually gave the money to ordinary Americans. (So far they haven't even used the platform offered by the White House to reinstall the rooftop solar panels that Jimmy Carter put there in the 1970s and Ronald Reagan took down in his term.)

Asking for what you need doesn't mean you'll get all of it.  Compromise still happens. But as David Brower, the greatest environmentalist of the late twentieth century, explained amid the fight to save the Grand Canyon: "We are to hold fast to what we believe is right, fight for it, and find allies and adduce all possible arguments for our cause. If we cannot find enough vigor in us or them to win, then let someone else propose the compromise. We thereupon work hard to coax it our way. We become a nucleus around which the strongest force can build and function."

Which leads to the third step in this process. If we're going to get any of this done, we're going to need a movement, the one thing we haven't had. For 20 years environmentalists have operated on the notion that we'd get action if we simply had scientists explain to politicians and CEOs that our current ways were ending the Holocene, the current geological epoch. That turns out, quite conclusively, not to work. We need to be able to explain that their current ways will end something they actually care about, i.e. their careers. And since we'll never have the cash to compete with Exxon, we better work in the currencies we can muster: bodies, spirit, passion.

Movement Time

As Tom Friedman put it in a strong column the day after the Senate punt, the problem was that the public "never got mobilized." Is it possible to get people out in the streets demanding action about climate change? Last year, with almost no money, our scruffy little outfit, 350.org, managed to organize what Foreign Policy called  the "largest ever coordinated global rally of any kind" on any issue -- 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries, 2,000 of them in the U.S.A.

People were rallying not just about climate change, but around a remarkably wonky scientific data point, 350 parts per million carbon dioxide, which NASA's James Hansen and his colleagues have demonstrated is the most we can have in the atmosphere if we want a planet "similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted." Which, come to think of it, we do. And the "we," in this case, was not rich white folks. If you look at the 25,000 pictures in our Flickr account, you'll see that most of them were poor, black, brown, Asian, and young -- because that's what most of the world is. No need for vice-presidents of big conservation groups to patronize them: shrimpers in Louisiana and women in burqas and priests in Orthodox churches and slumdwellers in Mombasa turned out to be completely capable of understanding the threat to the future.

Those demonstrations were just a start (one we should have made long ago). We're following up in October -- on 10-10-10 -- with a Global Work Party. All around the country and the world people will be putting up solar panels and digging community gardens and laying out bike paths. Not because we can stop climate change one bike path at a time, but because we need to make a sharp political point to our leaders: we're getting to work, what about you?

We need to shame them, starting now. And we need everyone working together. This movement is starting to emerge on many fronts. In September, for instance, opponents of mountaintop removal are converging on DC to demand an end to the coal trade. That same month, Tim DeChristopher goes on trial in Salt Lake City for monkey-wrenching oil and gas auctions by submitting phony bids.  (Naomi Klein and Terry Tempest Williams have called for folks to gather at the courthouse.)

The big environmental groups are starting to wake up, too.  The Sierra Club has a dynamic new leader, Mike Brune, who's working hard with stalwarts like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. (Note to enviro groups: working together is fun and useful). Churches are getting involved, as well as mosques and synagogues. Kids are leading the fight, all over the world -- they have to live on this planet for another 70 years or so, and they have every right to be pissed off.

But no one will come out to fight for watered down and weak legislation.  That's not how it works. You don't get a movement unless you take the other two steps I've described.

And in any event it won't work overnight.  We're not going to get the Senate to act next week, or maybe even next year. It took a decade after the Montgomery bus boycott to get the Voting Rights Act. But if there hadn't been a movement, then the Voting Rights Act would have passed in... never. We may need to get arrested.  We definitely need art, and music, and disciplined, nonviolent, but very real anger.

Mostly, we need to tell the truth, resolutely and constantly. Fossil fuel is wrecking the one earth we've got. It's not going to go away because we ask politely. If we want a world that works, we're going to have to raise our voices.

Noam Chomsky is internationally recognized as one of America’s most critically engaged public intellectuals today. He spoke with Kathleen Wells, a political correspondent for Race-Talk, about Israel and its interplay with the United States.  

Kathleen Wells: I’m speaking with Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and renowned political activist and writer. He has written over 100 books on linguistics, human rights, economics, and politics. Thank you, Professor Chomsky, for taking the time to speak with me this afternoon.  

Noam Chomsky: Very pleased to be with you. 

KW: Speak to me about the relation between the United States and Israel. Specifically, address, as you have previously stated, how every crime, violation of international law, that Israel commits is done through the direct participation and authorization of the United States.

NC: That’s a ... as a descriptive statement, that is pretty close to accurate. I mean "all" is a very strong word but it is certainly generally true. And, in fact, the United States has overwhelmingly vetoed Security Council resolutions condemning Israeli crimes and atrocities, prevented the Security Council from calling on Israel to terminate aggression, and so on and so forth. The descriptive comment is not really controversial. There are interesting questions about why it’s true. There were also interesting questions about the sources of support for this position in the United States, which helps us explain why it is true. 

The history is reasonably clear. This was not the case up until 1967. In fact, before 1967, the relationships were not very different from relationships among other powers. There was sympathy and support for Israel, which has many, many sources, including the Christian Zionism, which is a very powerful force that precedes and is numerically far stronger than Jewish Zionism. But for somebody like, say, Harry Truman, raised in a deeply Christian tradition, it was just taken for granted that the Bible instructs us that God gave the land of Palestine to the Jews. So it is kind of like in his bones. And that’s true for a very large part of the American population, much more so than -- far more than any other country.  So that is one factor, and there are other factors. 

But the major change in relationships took place in 1967. Just take a look at USA aid to Israel. You can tell that right off. And in many other respects, it’s true, too. Similarly, the attitude towards Israel on the part of the intellectual community -- you know, media, commentary, journals, and so on -- that changed very sharply in 1967, from either lack of interest or sometimes even disdain, to almost passionate support. So what happened in 1967? 

Well, in 1967, Israel destroyed the source of secular Arab nationalism -- Nasser's Egypt -- which was considered a major threat and enemy by the West. It is worth remembering that there was a serious conflict at that time between the forces of radical Islamic fundamentalism, centered in Saudi Arabia -- where all the oil is -- and secular Arab nationalism, centered in Nasser's Egypt; in fact, the two countries were at war. They were fighting a kind of a proxy war in Yemen at that time. The United States and Britain were supporting the radical Islamic fundamentalism; in fact, they’ve rather consistently done that – supporting Saudi Arabia.  And Nasserite secular nationalism was considered a serious threat, because it was recognized that it might seek to take control of the immense resources of the region and use them for regional interest, rather than allow them to be centrally controlled and exploited by the United States and its allies. So that was a major issue.

Well, Israel effectively destroyed Nasserite secular nationalism and the whole Arab nationalist movement that was centered in it. That was considered a major contribution to U.S. geopolitical strategy and also to its Saudi Arabian ally. And, in fact, that's when attitudes toward Israel changed sharply and the U.S. support for Israel -- material, diplomatic, and other -- also increased sharply.  In 1970, there was another turning point. In 1970, the Jordanian army (Jordan was a strong, close U.S. ally) – the Jordanian dictatorship was essentially massacring Palestinians during what's the month that's called Black September.

And the U.S. was in favor of that; it supported that. It looked as though Syria might intervene to support the Palestinians against the attack by the Hashemite dictatorship. The U.S. didn't want that to happen. It regarded it as a threat to its Jordanian ally and also a broader threat, ultimately, to Saudi Arabia, the jewel in the crown. 

While the U.S. was mired in Southeast Asia at the time -- it was right at the time, a little after the Cambodia invasion and everything was blowing up -- the U.S. couldn't do a thing about it. So, it asked Israel to mobilize its very substantial military forces and threaten Syria so that Syria would withdraw. Well, Israel did it. Syria withdrew. That was another gift to U.S. power and, in fact, U.S. aid to Israel shot up very sharply -- maybe quadrupled or something like that -- right at that time. Now at that time, that was the time when the so-called Nixon Doctrine was formulated.

A part of the Nixon Doctrine was that the U.S., of course, has to control Middle-East oil resources -- that goes much farther back -- but it will do so through local, regional allies, what were called “cops on the beat” by Melvin Laird, Secretary of Defense. So there will be local cops on the beat, which will protect the Arab dictatorships from their own populations or any external threat. And then, of course, “police headquarters” is in Washington. Well, the local cops on the beat at the time were Iran, then under the Shah, a U.S. ally; Turkey; to an extent, Pakistan; and Israel was added to that group. It was another cop on the beat. It was one of the local gendarmes that was sometimes called the periphery strategy: non-Arab states protecting the Arab dictatorships from any threat, primarily the threat of what was called radical nationalism -- independent nationalism -- meaning taking over the armed resources for their own purposes.

Well, that structure remained through the 1970s. In 1979, Iran was lost because of the overthrow of the Shah and pretty soon the Khomeini dictatorship -- clerical dictatorship -- and the U.S. once tried to overthrow that and supported Iraq's invasion of Iran, and so on. But, anyway, that “cop” [Iran] was lost and Israel's position became even stronger in the structure that remained. Furthermore, by that time, Israel was performing secondary services to the United States elsewhere in the world. It's worth recalling that especially through the '80s Congress, under public pressure, was imposing constraints on Reagan's support for vicious and brutal dictatorships. The governments around the world -- say Guatemala -- the U.S. could not provide direct aid to Guatemala, because -- which was massacring people in some areas in a genocidal fashion up in the highlands -- Congress blocked it.  Congress was also passing sanctions against aid to South-Africa, which the Reagan administration was strongly supporting South Africa and continued to do so right through the 1980s.

This was under the framework of the war on terror that Reagan had declared. The African National Congress -- Mandela’s ANC -- was designated as one of the more notorious terrorist groups in the world as late as 1988. [So] that it [could] support South-African apartheid and the Guatemalan murderous dictatorship and other murderous regimes, Reagan needed a kind of network of terrorist states to help out, to evade the congressional and other limitations, and he turned to, at that time, Taiwan, but, in particular, Israel. Britain helped out. And that was another major service. And so it continued.   

KW: I want to come up to today, because I only have 30 minutes.   

NC: So, it basically continues. I mean, if we go right up till this moment ... simply ask, where are the strongest sources of support for Israeli actions?  Well, pick the newspapers. By far the most rabid pro-Israel newspaper in the country is the Wall Street Journal. That's the journal of the business community, and it reflects the support of the business world for Israel, which is quite strong. There's a lot of high-tech investment in Israel. [Our] military industry is very close to Israeli military industry. There's a whole network of interactions. Intel, for example, is building its next facility for construct development of the next generation of chips in Israel. But, altogether, the relations are very tight, very intimate, quite natural. And it's not surprising that the main business journal in the country would be supporting Israeli expansion and power. Take a look at the two political parties. Most Jewish money goes to Democrats and most Jews vote Democratic. But the Republican Party is much more strongly supportive of Israeli power and atrocities than the Democrats are. Then again, I think that reflects their closer relations to the business world and to the military system.  There is, of course, also a Jewish lobby – an Israeli lobby -- AIPAC, which is a very influential lobby. And so there are many... and there's Christian Zionism, which is a huge element. Well, you know, all of these combined to provide a background for U.S. support for Israel, and they're facing virtually no opposition. Who's calling for support of the Palestinians?  

KW: Exactly, and so when you hear statements being made that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, and yet you see the occupation and the blockade on Gaza, the occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, what shall one think about this fact?

NC: First, let's ask about being the only democracy in the region. First of all, it’s not true. There were free elections in Palestine in January 2006. There were free elections in Palestine, carefully monitored, recognized to be free. The victor was Hamas, okay, centered in the Gaza Strip. Israel and the United States instantly, within days, undertook perfectly public policies to try to punish the Palestinians for voting the wrong way in a free election. I mean, it couldn’t have been... you couldn't see a more dramatic illustration of hatred and contempt for democracy unless it comes out the right way.    

A year later, July 2007, the U.S. and Israel, together with the Palestinian authority, tried to carry out a military coup to overthrow the elected government. Well, it failed. Hamas won and drove Fatah out of the Gaza Strip. Now, here, that's described as a demonstration of Hamas terror or something. What they did was preempt and block a U.S.-backed military coup to overthrow the democratically elected government.   

KW: What do you say to the fact that Hamas is listed on the United States State Department terrorist list? So they're characterized as terrorist?  

NC: Yeah, they are. Because they do things we don't like. The terrorist list has been a historic joke, in fact, a sick joke. So take a look at the history of the terrorist list. Up until 1982, Iraq -- Saddam Hussein's Iraq -- was on the terrorist list. 

In 1982, the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the terrorist list. Why? Because they were moving to support Iraq, and, in fact, the Reagan administration and, in fact, the first Bush administration strongly supported Iraq right through its worst – Saddam, right through his worst atrocities. In fact, they tried to ... they succeeded, in fact, in preventing even criticism of condemnation of the worst atrocities, like the Halabja massacre -- and others. So they removed Iraq from the terrorist list because they wanted to support one of the worst monsters and terrorists in the region, namely Saddam Hussein.

And since there was an empty position on the terrorist list, they had to fill it, so they added Cuba. Cuba's probably the target of more terrorism than any country in the world, back from the Kennedy years. Right? In fact, just at that time, there had been a rash of major terrorist acts against Cuba. So Cuba was added to the terrorist list to replace Saddam Hussein, who was removed because the U.S. wanted to support him.  Now, you take a look through the terrorist list, yeah, that's the way it is. So, for example, Hezbollah is on the terrorist list. Well, you know, probably it's carried out terrorist acts, but by the standards of the U.S. and Israel, they're barely visible. The main reason why Hezbollah is on the terrorist list is because it resisted Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon and, in fact, drove Israel out of Southern Lebanon after 22 years of occupation -- that's called terrorism. In fact, Lebanon has a national holiday, May 25th, which is called Liberation Day. That's the national holiday in Lebanon commemorating, celebrating the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in year 2000, and largely under Hezbollah attack.  

KW: How would you characterize Hezbollah and Hamas?

NC: Hezbollah happens to be the major political grouping in Lebanon. It's the Hezbollah-based coalition, handily won the last election in the year 2009. Now you know it's not a perfect election, but it's one of the ... by the standards of U.S.-backed dictatorships it was an amazing election, and they won it. They didn't happen to win the largest number of representatives because of the way the confessional system works, but they won the popular vote by about the same amount that Obama had won.   So they're the main political grouping in the country. They largely -- almost completely -- control southern Lebanon. They're a national Lebanese organization. They've ... they're charged with some terrorist acts outside of Lebanon, maybe correctly. But again, if the charges ... we take all the charges and weigh them against U.S./Israeli violence, aggression, and terror, they don't even count. But that's basically what they are.  As far as Israel's concerned, Hezbollah‘s position is they don't recognize Israel. 

They don't ... they... but they say their position is, well, they'll accept any agreement with Israel that the Palestinians accept; we're a Lebanese organization. What about Hamas? Hamas is a ... its background is it's an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization, which would be a major competitor in Egypt's elections, if Egypt permitted democratic elections, which it won't.  The Egyptian dictatorship -- which the U.S. strongly backs, Obama personally strongly backs -- doesn't permit anything remotely like elections and is very brutal and harsh. But they don't ... they hate the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas is an offshoot. In its early days, Israel supported Hamas as a weapon against the secular PLO. Later, when Hamas really crystallized, became a significant organization, Israel turned against them, and it became bitterly opposed to them in January 2006, as the U.S. did, when they won a free election.

That was intolerable and they had to be overthrown. Hamas's position is that as a political party it does not recognize Israel, but that doesn't mean much: the Democratic Party doesn't recognize countries either. It says that their position is that they’re willing to accept a two-state settlement in accordance with the international consensus, which the U.S. and Israel have blocked for 35 years. So they say, "Yes, we'll accept that, but we don't want to recognize Israel." Well, okay, that's their position. Are they a nice organization? No. I wouldn't ... I certainly wouldn't want to live under their clerical rule.

But compared with organizations and states that the United States strongly supports, they don't stand out as particularly harsh, say Egypt, for example.   

KW: So respond to those who defend Israel's policy and state that Israel is surrounded by enemies. Their Arab neighbors -- Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, Ahmadinejad in Iran -- they pose a threat to Israel. They want to see Israel's destruction, and they feel like these Arab countries are an imminent threat to Israel. Give me your thoughts on those who defend Israel's policies.   

NC: Well, the truth of the matter is that Israel and the United States, which act in tandem, are a tremendous threat mainly to the Palestinians. In fact, while we're discussing the potential threat to Israel that might exist, the United States and Israel are crushing and destroying the Palestinians. That's the live reality.  Now what about the threat? Well, yeah, there's a potential threat, and Israel and the United States are substantially responsible for it. I mean, if the U.S. and Israel would accept the overwhelming international consensus on a political settlement, that would very sharply reduce the threat.  But Israel and the U.S. prefer Israeli expansion to diplomatic settlement and, therefore, are blocking that settlement -- they're alone. I mean, Europe, the non-aligned countries -- the Arab League, the Organization of Islamic States, which includes Iran -- have all accepted the international consensus on the two-state settlement. I mean, there are details to be worked out, but the basic structure is clear. For 35 years, the U.S. and Israel have been blocking it. There are a few rare and temporary exceptions, but that's basically the story. I don't have time to run through all the details here.   

KW: But what's the rationale?  

NC: The rationale‘s very simple.   

KW: Exactly. 

NC: They prefer expansion to security. That's been explicitly true since 1971. I think the most fateful decision that Israel and the U.S. made in this regard was in February 1971 when President Sadat of Egypt offered Israel a full peace settlement -- full peace settlement; no conditions -- nothing for the Palestinians, in return for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, and, in fact, he cared only about Sinai.  Jordan made the same proposal a year later with regard to the West Bank.  Israel had to decide, at that point, whether to accept security -- which would certainly have followed from the withdrawal from the conflict of the major Arab military forces, primarily Egypt, secondly Jordan -- whether to accept security or to insist on expansion.  Now expansion at that time was mostly into the Sinai. Israel was developing plans for substantial expansion into the Egyptian Sinai, including a major city, Yamit, supposedly a million people, a lot of settlements, and so on. And that was a very clear choice: do we choose expansion or security? They chose expansion.  The crucial question is what would the United States do? Well, there was an internal bureaucratic battle in the U.S., and Henry Kissinger won out. He was in favor of what he called “stalemate.” A stalemate meant no negotiations, just force.

So the U.S. and Israel proceeded with expansion. Sadat, for the next... he made gesture after... move after move for the next year or two to try to convince the U.S. to accept the political settlement. It was disregarded. He kept threatening war if Israel continued to develop the northeast Sinai.  It was dismissed. Then came the October 1973 war, which was a very close thing for Israel, the worst moment in its history. Well, at that point, Kissinger and the Israeli leaders recognized they can't simply dismiss Egypt, and they moved slowly toward the Camp David Settlement in 1978, which pretty much accepted what Sadat had offered in 1971 -- a diplomatic catastrophe. Meanwhile, Israel has continued its expansion, by then mostly into the West Bank, and the U.S. was supporting it all the way, and so it continues.  So, sure, if Israel continues to settle in the occupied territories -- illegally, incidentally, as Israel recognized in 1967 (it's all illegal; they recognized it) -- it's undermining the possibilities for the viable existence of any small Palestinian entity. And as long as the United States and Israel continue with that, yes, there will be insecurity.   

Read the rest of the interview on Race Talk.

Seems like everyone is singing the praises of Natural Gas, our newest greenest most homegrown and secure source of American Energy. NOT!  "Clean Natural" Gas is neither. Gas extraction, made possible by hydraulic fracturing (or fracking for short) has to sit right beside Deep Sea Drilling, Mountain Top Removal, and Dirty Tar Sands Oil in the pantheon of insane ways to get our carbon fix.

Did you know that Halliburton (yes that Halliburton) pantented fracking: a process that mixes millions of gallons of precious fresh water with a proprietary cocktail of toxics, injects it through our drinking water table, and into the ground at a pressure that will fracture rock? Did you know that when Dick Cheney (yes that Dick) was the VP he fracked the EPA to make sure that this insanity would be exempted from the Safe Drinking Water Act?

Stand Up, New York!

Fracking has brought the gas rush to New York. Some of the biggest and dirtiest names in Big Oil are coming to frack you. And they will not be gentle with New York's world class water features.

You can expect the same dirty drilling that has poisoned the water in Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, and Ohio. Who will be at risk? Everyone downstream. Including the drinking water of tens of million in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

On the morning of May 5, 2010, nobody could say for sure how much fluid had leaked from the 650,000-gallon disposal pit near a natural gas drill pad in Shippen Township, Penn. -- not the employees on site; not the farmers who own the property; not the DEP rep who came to investigate.

But there were signs of trouble: Vegetation had died in a 30’ by 40’ patch of pasture nearby. A “wet area” of indeterminate toxicity had crept out about 200 feet, its puddles shimmering with an oily iridescence. And the cattle: 16 cows, four heifers and eight calves were all found near water containing the heavy metal strontium. Strontium is preferentially deposited in cows’ bones at varying levels depending on things like age and growth rates. Since slaughtering 28 cattle on mere suspicion can devastate a farmer financially, nobody knows what, if anything, the cows ingested. They're now sitting in quarantine.

The Shippen Township incident isn’t the first time hydraulic fracturing, a controversial gas extraction technique that involves shooting water, sand and a mix of chemicals into the ground to release gas, has been blamed for livestock damage. But for farmers in the northeast whose land sits atop the gas-rich Marcellus Shale formation, it is a wake-up call – an event that raises questions about fracking’s compatibility with food production.

“I’ve already heard from a couple of customers that they’re concerned about the location of a drill site near my farm – in terms of the quality and safety of my food,” said Greg Swartz, a farmer in Pennsylvania’s Upper Delaware River Valley. Swartz, who sells all his products locally, fears that leaked fracking fluid could seep into his soil, bioaccumulate in his plants and cost him his organic certification. “There very well may be a point where I am not comfortable selling vegetables from the farm anymore because I’m concerned about water and air contamination issues,” he said.

Air contamination – specifically the production of ozone – is what worries Ken Jaffe, another farmer in Meredith, NY. When excess methane gas, coupled with volatile compounds like benzene, toluene and xylene, are released into the air in a process the gas industry calls “venting,” it can inhibit lung function and wreak havoc on plant life. In Sublette County, WY, fracking has been blamed for ozone levels that are comparable to those in Los Angeles.

Without healthy pasture, Jaffe said, his cows won’t grow. Which means his beef won’t sell. “The economics of my operation are in part based on how many animals I can graze per acre and get them to grow fat,” he told me. “And if I have less grass and less protein and less clover, then I have a problem.”

Over the past two years, horizontal hydraulic fracturing has garnered a lot of attention. Advocates of the practice believe the staggeringly high amounts of gas it makes accessible could serve as a “cleaner-burning” bridge between fossil fuels and renewable energy sources. But critics blame fracking for a whole range of problems -- house explosions, flammable drinking water, chronic sickness, crop failure and air contamination, to name a few. In 2005, the Bush administration introduced the Energy Policy Act, which exempted hydraulic fracturing from several key environmental regulations, including parts of the Clean Water Act and CERCLA (Superfund). Since then, drilling operations (along with corresponding environmental problems) have begun to extend like spiderwebs across states like Colorado, Wyoming, Texas, and Pennsylvania.

For all their concerns, farmers like Swartz and Jaffe comprise only one side of a larger debate over drilling. Leasing one’s land, after all, carries the promise of a comfortable retirement -- sometimes even millions of dollars. And with milk prices making small-scale dairy operations harder and harder to maintain, many farmers are looking for the light at the end of the pipeline.

Some have found it. According to one Penn State study, Pennsylvania made a $2.95 billion profit from drilling in 2008 alone; the state also gained 53,000 new jobs. And in the Windsor/Deposit area of New York, 300 property owners have signed a lease with XTO Energy that covers 37,000 acres and is worth $90 million (notably, the lease contains a provision that indemnifies drillers against damage to livestock). Though New York is still waiting on its Department of Environmental Conservation for the go-ahead to start horizontal drilling, much of the state’s topography has already been carved, cordoned and auctioned off to eager gas companies.

“The way things are now financially, it would be hard to turn [leasing] down,” said Richard Dirie, a dairy farmer near Youngsville, NY. “Farming is definitely a physical occupation. You definitely reach an age where -- I don’t care if you want to do it or not -- you just can’t do it anymore.”

Dirie has not yet leased his land. But at 59, he’s not sure he would reject an offer if it came his way. “I keep saying, ‘I hope they don’t come and talk to me.’ That way I don’t have to make a decision, you know?”

Gas drilling raises a lot of questions for farmers short on options. Is it worth the risk to retire comfortably? What are the implications for future use of the land? Perhaps most importantly: How does fracking affect crops, livestock and, by extension, the people who consume them? Answers are scarce.

“There’s a lot going on out there and we don’t know most of it,” Swartz said.

The Knowledge Vacuum

It’s with good reason that Jaffe describes fracking’s relationship to food as “a knowledge vacuum.” Pennsylvania’s Department of Agriculture can’t say for sure whether or not any cows in the state came into contact with fracking fluid before the Shippen Township incident in May. Nor can it guarantee similar things won’t happen in the future. “We hope that this is the exception rather than the rule,” said spokesman Justin Fleming. “We hope that this is an extraordinarily rare occurrence.”

A representative for the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service -- the organization in charge of testing milk and meat for chemicals – neglected to comment on whether or not heavy metals like the strontium found in Shippen Township were considered “adulterated” under the Federal Meat Inspection Act. He also did not immediately comment on whether naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORMS) -- known to surface after a well has been fractured – fall under the act’s clause banning meat from being “intentionally subjected to radiation.”

Scientists, too, are grappling for information. Though there exists an increasingly comprehensive catalog of knowledge about water problems related to fracking, little work has been done to determine how the practice affects animals and crops.

“I see very little research being done on cows,” said Theo Colborn, founder of the non-profit Endocrine Disruption Exchange. Because animal testing with many chemicals known to be involved in fracking has historically failed to deal with instances of a) limited exposure and b) prolonged exposure, no one really knows what the potential health effects are – for cows or humans.

“It’s very difficult to deal with this problem,” Colborn said. “Who has the money? Who can perform the tests?”

Certainly not the federal EPA. Earlier this year, it announced plans to launch a two-year study of hydraulic fracturing’s effects on water. According to an EPA spokesperson, no part of that study will deal with plants or animals.

And yet, there is significant anecdotal evidence that suggests fracking can seriously compromise food. In April 2009, 19 head of cattle dropped dead after ingesting an unknown substance near a gas drilling rig in northern Louisiana. Seven months before that, a tomato farmer in Avella, Penn. reported a series of problems with the water and soil on his property after drilling started: he found arsenic levels 2,600 times what is recommended, as well as dangerously high levels of benzene and naphthalene – all known fracking components. And in May 2009, one farmer in Clearview, Penn. told Reuters he thought that gas drilling operations had killed four of his cows.

Occurrences like these aren’t just limited to the eastern U.S. In Colorado, a veterinarian named Elizabeth Chandler has documented numerous fertility problems in livestock near active drill sites, including false pregnancy, smaller litters and stillbirths in goats; reduced birth rates in hogs; and delayed heat cycles in dogs.

In another case, Rick Roles, a resident of Rifle, Colorado, reported that his horses became sterile after three disposal pits were installed near his home. Like those in Chandler’s study, Roles’ goats began yielding fewer offspring and producing more stillbirths. Roles himself suffered from swelling of the hands, numbness and body pain – symptoms, he said, that subsided when he stopped eating vegetables from his garden and drinking his goats’ milk.

Actual scientific studies are few and far between, but what’s out there paints a pretty damning picture. One, titled “Livestock Poisoning from Oil Field Drilling Fluids, Muds and Additives,” appeared in the journal Veterinary & Human Toxicology in 1991. It examined seven instances where oil and gas wells had poisoned and/or killed livestock. In one such case, green liquid was found leaking from a tank near a gas well site. The study’s authors found 13 dead cows, whose “postmortem blood was chocolate-brown in color.” Poisoning cases involving carbon disulfide, turpentine, toluene, xylene, ethylene, and complex solvent mixtures “are frequently encountered,” the study concluded.

Another study, this one conducted in Alberta, Canada in 2001, investigated the effects of gas flaring on the reproductive systems of cattle near active gas and oil fields. Its conclusions: “One of the most consistent associations in the analysis was between exposure to sour gas flaring facilities [as opposed to “sweet” ones, which contain more aromatic hydrocarbons, aliphatic hydrocarbons and carbon particles] and an increased risk of stillbirth. In 3 of the 4 years studied, cumulative exposure to sour flares was associated with an increased risk of stillbirth.”

'Rare Cases'

When questioned about fracking and food, America’s Natural Gas Alliance, an organization composed of the nation’s leading gas production and exploration companies, neglected to get into any specifics. Instead, it offered this response:

“In rare cases where incidents have occurred, companies have worked with the appropriate regulatory authority to identify, contain and correct the issue, and to implement measures to ensure they don’t recur. ANGA member companies understand and respect people’s concerns about the safety of their water and air, and we are committed to engaging in dialogue with community members, policymakers and stakeholders to talk about the safety of natural gas production and the opportunities natural gas offers communities across our country.”

Environmental groups have a markedly different perspective on the issue. “There’s a lot of violations that happen out there that are never documented,” said Wes Gillingham, program director of Catskill Mountainkeeper.

When we talked, Gillingham took out an enormous aerial photo of a drill rig. One disposal pit was surrounded by gray blotches of moisture: leaked fracking fluid. “The stuff that’s coming up – this stuff is getting into the environment,” he said, pointing at the blotches. “You’ve got heavy metals and normally occurring radioactive materials, all of which bioaccumulate in a grazer. That stuff is coming up in the grass where the grass is growing.”

So what sorts of concerns should people have about eating animals that have themselves ingested xylene, benzene, heavy metals, radioactive material? Gillingham, like so many farmers, federal officials and industry reps, can’t say for sure.

“It’s a serious issue in terms of potential contamination getting to market and nobody knowing about it,” he said. “It’s an important piece of research that needs to be done.”