Al Gore continues to be right, and George Bush continues to be wrong. Take a look at this picture comparing the Mt. Everest glacier in 1968 to the same glacier in 2007:
Notice anything different? Like, for example, where the hell did the glacier go in 2007? Well, here’s the answer, and what it means for future fresh water supplies for both India and China:
(cont.)
In a picture taken in 1968, the Middle Rongbuk glacier skirts through the mountain valley with the peaks above thickly covered with snow.
But almost exactly the same shot taken this year by a Greenpeace team reveals much barer peaks and a scarcely visible glacier. […]
“The degradation of the Everest environment and glacial retreat is, Greenpeace believes, a direct result of climate change,” a spokeswoman said. […]
The picture had to be taken approximately 1km away from the 1968 viewpoint instead because the glacier has retreated so much in the past 40 years.
Greenpeace estimate it has moved back by 2km, raising fears millions will soon be at risk because of the Rongbuk glaciers’ important role as a water source to China and India’s rivers.
Imagine, they couldn’t even get within 1 kilometer of the location of the 1968 photograph because so much ice and snow had melted. When even the rooftop of the world is feeling the effects of such dramatic changes in climate over a mere 4 decades, you’d think even the Bush administration would begin to take the climate crisis seriously. Well, actually you wouldn’t, and for good reason. Because they simply don’t give a crap about ameliorating the effects of global warming:
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called President George W. Bush’s new global warming plan a “profound disappointment” on Friday and said she wants Congress to pass legislation this year to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
Just returned from a European tour focused on climate change, Pelosi said Bush’s strategy, announced on Thursday, “rehashed stale ideas” and made her question whether the president understands the urgency of global warming.
“The science is clear, and yet the president continues to be in denial,” Pelosi said at a briefing. “Yes, he says now he believes that global warming is happening and he accepts the science that it is … But if that were so, if he truly understood that, he could not have come up with a proposal that is ‘aspirational’.”
By “aspirational” what Pelosi really means is that Bush’s plan is for a “voluntary” program in which we would all ask global polluters to kindly refrain from emitting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We might even ask them really nicely and say “pretty please, with sugar on top.” And the end result would be what you’d expect: a lot of hot air from the carbon emitters and no real results to speak of.
The Bush plan aims to gather representatives from 15 influential nations this year to discuss climate change and come up with long-term “aspirational goals” to reverse global warming by the end of 2008, in the last days of Bush’s final term in office.
The White House would not define what “aspirational” meant, nor say how long long-term would be or when any global warming goals might go into effect. Mid-term goals were seen as being in the next two decades. […]
Rep. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who heads a new House panel on global warming, said Bush should work with Europe rather than starting a new process.
“The president’s goals are not aspirational, they’re procrastinational,” Markey said at the briefing with Pelosi. “What the president wants to do is set up a whole new process that will end just as he is leaving office and pass this red-hot issue on to his successor.”
I think Markey has it about right. That’s our Bush, a man who knows when “not to decide” to do anything on global warming so as not to make his good friends in the oil and gas industry uncomfortable. As Al Gore says, the denial of the climate crisis is right up there with the Iraq war as being one of the biggest lies ever told by an American President, and one of the biggest mistakes by any American President–ever:
What the climate crisis has in common with the invasion of Iraq is that in both cases, more than enough evidence was available in advance of the decisions to convince any reasonable person that we should have done the opposite of what we did. Saddam Hussein was not responsible for attacking us on 9/11, even though the country came to be convinced that he was. ExxonMobil is not the correct source of the best scientific information on the climate crisis, even though their views are now dominant in shaping U.S. policy. Even this week, our country is blocking consensus in the G8 meeting on moving aggressively to solve this crisis, the most important challenge we’ve ever faced.
As I said, that’s our Bush. A deceitful, manipulative, cheating screw-up to the bitter end.