Climate Change

WASHINGTON -- The doors swung open and he made his entrance as cameras clicked. The man who was called a wooden politician, was denied the presidency and was derided as "Ozone Man" was coming home to the Capitol. But this time they called him a movie star and likened him to a prophet. Al Gore left Washington seven years ago after the disputed 2000 election. He returned yesterday as the subject of an Academy Award-winning film, a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, a 58-year-old who can share a stage with Leonardo DiCaprio and manage to be the center of attention.

Warning that the water is rising in the Chesapeake Bay, scientists and activists urged Tuesday that Congress act to reduce climate-warming pollution that threatens to flood bayfront communities and worsen the fish-suffocating "dead zones" that plague North America's largest estuary. With a House vote possible Friday on a bill that would seek to curtail greenhouse gas emissions nationwide, two natural resources subcommittees held a field hearing Tuesday at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater to learn more about what global warming might mean for coastal regions like the Chesapeake.

State still needs ultimate penalty Once again, our General Assembly will come together and some members will try to eliminate the death penalty ("O'Malley vows to work to end death penalty," Jan. 16). But I believe that the ultimate penalty of giving up one's life for the taking of another is needed in our society. It has been argued that the death penalty is not a deterrent to violence. But how can it be when it is not used in a timely manner and often is not used at all? And when someone is brutally and senselessly murdered, why shouldn't the person who committed this crime pay for it with his or her own life?

The vast majority of scientists who study climate change for a living have concluded that human activity is contributing to global warming. Heck, even the Bush administration admits it, having listed the polar bear as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act. And yet Ron Smith trots out maverick scientists and even Michael Crichton, the science fiction writer, as "experts" on the subject who suggest that climate change is solely the result of...

WASHINGTON -- Former Vice President Al Gore won a share of the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday for his work on global climate change, and he pledged to use the recognition to increase attention to what he called "the most dangerous challenge we have ever faced." With some supporters stepping up efforts to enlist Gore in the 2008 presidential contest, the former Democratic nominee avoided talk of a political comeback as he discussed the Nobel, saying he was "deeply honored" by the selection.

Act now to reverse the warming trend I hope that the new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will bring home to more Marylanders how imminent is the threat from global warming ("Turning up the heat," Feb. 2). Despite Hurricane Katrina and the daffodils that bloomed in Baltimore in January, climate change still seems somehow abstract and far in the future. The truth is, if we don't take urgent action now, we will soon reach a tipping point beyond which the continued warming of the planet will cause unimaginable devastation, including a rise in sea levels that will threaten all coastal areas, including our home state's.

It will happen after all. Politician-turned-concert organizer Al Gore announced yesterday that Live Earth -- a global series of shows to raise awareness about climate change -- will also have a presence in the nation's capital. Highlights of the show include brief performances by the country-music couple Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood and remarks by the former vice president. If you go The Mother Earth Concert segment of Live Earth: The Concerts for a Climate in Crisis begins at 10:30 a.m. outside the National Museum of the American Indian at Fourth Street and Independence Avenue Southwest, Washington.

Acknowledging Hurricane Katrina's second anniversary and a local drought taxing farmers and some municipal water users, the Carroll County commissioners endorsed yesterday a national climate-protection pledge already signed by the leaders of five Maryland counties and more than 600 mayors of cities and towns nationwide. County Commissioners Julia Walsh Gouge and Dean L. Minnich signed the pledge while Commissioner Michael D. Zimmer, who describes himself as a "global warming skeptic," refused to support the measure, called the Cool Counties Climate Stabilization Declaration.

To add to mortgage meltdown miseries, the credit panic, plunging home sales and rising foreclosures, here's a new worry: a proposed cutoff of mortgage-interest tax deductions for all houses with more than 3,000 square feet. One of Capitol Hill's most experienced and powerful legislators is drafting a "carbon tax" bill that would do precisely that. Rep. John D. Dingell, the Michigan Democrat who heads the Energy and Commerce Committee, expects to introduce comprehensive climate change reform legislation once the House returns next month.

If the world keeps getting hotter, people aren't likely to take it lying down. If water is scarce, if food is scarce, if land is scarce (because of a rising sea level), families and tribes and nations are sure to fight for what resources they can get. Or they'll try to move to other parts of the world where conditions are better - those parts in general being in North America and Europe. In short, climate change will brew conflict. This week, a group of retired American admirals and generals issued a report pointing out that global warming is going to be a military issue.

Atlantic coastal communities have been slow to prepare themselves for rising sea level from climate change, though Maryland has been in the forefront of states in grappling with the issue, a new report says. The report, published Tuesday as Senate leaders push climate legislation, summarizes the results of a $2 million federal effort to map the likelihood of shoreline protections if climate change raises sea level as predicted. The findings of the federal study were suppressed by the Bush administration, but the authors were allowed to air the outcome in "Environmental Research Letters," a scholarly journal.

It doesn't take a world-class bargain-hunter to recognize that the price of anything, from groceries to electronics, is impossible to assess without considering hidden costs. Like that big-screen TV? Better ask about the added cost of cables and digital sound. A home listed below market price can seem great - until repairs to the cracked foundation, faulty wiring and leaky plumbing are factored in. Yet for decades, the U.S. has embraced an energy policy blithely ignorant of the true price tag of driving our highways and providing electricity to our homes.

Efforts to pass climate change legislation through Congress in time for the international summit in Copenhagen received an unexpected boost from Republican sources this week. The first, and perhaps most important, was South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham's decision to join Massachusetts Democratic Sen. John Kerry in a bipartisan climate bill that includes - gasp! - the cap-and-trade provision so often derided by conservatives. But for those frustrated by the pseudo-science and quackery of climate change opponents who continue to bury their heads in the warming sand, the second was just as satisfying: Turns out the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under President George W. Bush was just as alarmed by climate change as the rest of the mainstream scientific community.

The Assateague Island National Seashore in Maryland was listed Wednesday by a pair of environmental groups as one of the 25 U.S. National Park Service properties most threatened by the effects of climate change driven by human activity. Stronger coastal storms and predicted sea-level increases of several feet by the end of this century are "virtually certain" to produce breaches and fragmentation of the island, along with losses of habitat for its animal and plant species, according to the report by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization.

If international confabs held last week in New York and Pittsburgh produced anything worth noting in the area of climate change, it is this: Don't expect the world to reach a new agreement over controlling greenhouse gases in time for the United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen in December. Consensus is not around the corner, and the U.S. is not the only nation struggling with this important but difficult issue. Still, while the prospect of a blown deadline isn't ordinarily an especially good reason to cheer, there are too many positive signs of movement here and abroad to embrace a gloom and doom outlook.

The debate over climate change legislation is beginning to heat up. The American Clean Energy and Security Act was passed by the House and is now before the Senate. The debate on this issue typically takes the form of environmental concerns about global warming pitted against economic fears about the cost of reducing greenhouse gases. It is often framed in left-right terms. But as Americans think about whether to support this legislation, they should ponder the national security implications of climate change.

Warning that the water is rising in the Chesapeake Bay, scientists and activists urged Tuesday that Congress act to reduce climate-warming pollution that threatens to flood bayfront communities and worsen the fish-suffocating "dead zones" that plague North America's largest estuary. With a House vote possible Friday on a bill that would seek to curtail greenhouse gas emissions nationwide, two natural resources subcommittees held a field hearing Tuesday at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater to learn more about what global warming might mean for coastal regions like the Chesapeake.

Let us begin today with full disclosure: For those who don't know my position on global warming alarmism and its insidious uses, it is that this phenomenon is the greatest hoax in modern times and is being used to achieve things - bad things - quite apart from its ostensible goal of "saving the planet." Al Gore wanders the spheroid he is determined to save, spouting increasingly inane observations as his bank account grows and his "carbon footprint" becomes ever more Godzilla-like, considering all the jet fuel burned as he hurtles from appearance to appearance.

The failure to agree on swift, concrete steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the summit meeting of the world's most advanced economies points to a continuing logjam and hard bargaining ahead on global warming - especially on the politically sensitive issue of who goes first. President Barack Obama and his counterparts in the Group of Eight, who are holding two days of meetings in the central Italian mountain town L'Aquila, announced broad agreements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and combat rising global temperatures over the next four decades.

As expected, Friday's debate on the floor of the House of Representatives produced the usual misinformation and hysteria that have typified the nation's climate change deniers. But in the end, some measure of reason prevailed, and House passage of the landmark American Clean Energy Act is rightly seen as an important step toward reducing America's production of greenhouse gases. This is not a bill without flaws. Its targets are not aggressive enough given the threat posed by climate change.