The House has certainly been busy, while the Senate has been bogged down by procedural tricks the Republicans are pulling in order to stem a real debate about the Iraq War. The issue I have here isn’t so much with the procedural tricks, but instead with the fact that it’s obvious that Republicans are shying away from having to take a stand on the war, knowing their constituents fully support the resolution but themselves not wanting to march out of step of the party’s war-hawk message. It’s frightening how far they’re willing to take their consistent denial of reality.

Even so, senate Democrats should let the Republicans have their way, and press them into a full on filibuster of the resolution, forcing them to continually state their support for the war and the troop escalation out loud-the more they’re forced to, the likely less they will. We all know politicians prefer to speak less if possible, especially when they know they’re on the wrong side of the line. Let the Republicans be forced to defend their position, and you’ll hear the same old taglines and talking points, but eventually they’ll realize that all of those talking points will be used against them in their 2008 re-election campaigns.

Regardless, as much as some are dissapointed with the new Democratic congress for not doing enough about the Iraq war, I actually do believe that this is a first, even if it is symbolic, step towards truly shifting the debate on this war from pro/con to “let’s fix this mess and come home as soon as possible.”

[ House Passes Iraq Resolution With 17 Votes From G.O.P. ]
Source: The New York Times

Only a few miles down the road from here, the venerable Walter Reed Army Medical Center is the home for hundreds, if not thousands, of recovering soldiers returning from their service abroad, especially those wounded in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. One would think that those same men and women who served our country so bravely abroad in a war of aggression would be treated with the utmost respect and medical care when they returned home, but unfortunately that’s not entirely the case. To my own dismay, having been to Walter Reed several times, hearing the sad state of the facility is greatly troubling. It’s no excuse that the Pentagon is planning to close WRAMC in favor for a “next generation hospital” to be built at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center a little ways down the road. But as much as I say the conditions are bad, you have to hear it this way to really understand it:

Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan’s room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.

I’m absolutely sure that this is not the norm across all of the WRAMC facilities, but the truth is that it shouldn’t exist at all, and combined with the budget cuts for Veteran’s care and medical facilities that the Pentagon is faced with, this could be the norm for more and more soldiers returning from the wars abroad. The worst part is that this is no fault of Congress, or even the Administration, because the Pentagon generally gets the money it asks for; but of the Pentagon for not funding its support organizations like the medical center system. Combine this with the waning funds for the Veteran’s Administration and other civilian support organizations for military personnel (for which you should definitely write your legislator and tell them to reject the Bush Administration’s budget cuts) and you have a significant problem.

Not all of the quarters are as bleak as Duncan’s, but the despair of Building 18 symbolizes a larger problem in Walter Reed’s treatment of the wounded, according to dozens of soldiers, family members, veterans aid groups, and current and former Walter Reed staff members interviewed by two Washington Post reporters, who spent more than four months visiting the outpatient world without the knowledge or permission of Walter Reed officials. Many agreed to be quoted by name; others said they feared Army retribution if they complained publicly.

While the hospital is a place of scrubbed-down order and daily miracles, with medical advances saving more soldiers than ever, the outpatients in the Other Walter Reed encounter a messy bureaucratic battlefield nearly as chaotic as the real battlefields they faced overseas.

On the worst days, soldiers say they feel like they are living a chapter of “Catch-22.” The wounded manage other wounded. Soldiers dealing with psychological disorders of their own have been put in charge of others at risk of suicide.

Disengaged clerks, unqualified platoon sergeants and overworked case managers fumble with simple needs: feeding soldiers’ families who are close to poverty, replacing a uniform ripped off by medics in the desert sand or helping a brain-damaged soldier remember his next appointment.

The entire story is lengthy, but critical. The worst thing that could possibly happen, while the Republicans are crowing about how not sending more soliders to this kind of inevitable fate and how speaking out about things like this are “pulling the rug out from under the troops,” is that more and more of our brave men and women have to deal with these kinds of conditions. Unfortunately, it looks like more or them will have to before the Administration, the Pentagon, and congressional Republicans intent on sending more troops to the battlefield will listen to the rest of us.

[ Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration At Army's Top Medical Facility ]
Source: The Washington Post

Something of the “Manhattan Project” of climate research, British billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson, founder of the “Virgin” brand, with Al Gore at his side, announced that he was putting up $25 million dollars as a prize to scientists and researchers who can come up with a method to curb global climate change by removing significant amounts (at least a billion tons) of carbon dioxide from the Earth’s atmosphere. The prize, intended to spur on research and discussion among scientists on the best way to curb global climate change and turn the attention away from the so-called “debate” over the fact, is a good first step in getting people involved in correcting the problem instead of sitting back and lobbing the same tired arguments against it, like “it’s a hoax,” or “we can’t stop it,” and so on.

Branson believes, like I believe, that human ingenuity has the solution to our problem waiting in the wings for us to properly call it out to the center stage, and that solution will likely have to be a multi-faceted approach to changing our behaviors and changing the way we use energy and produce waste, as well as next-generation technology that will take advantage of cleaner energy sources, for starters.

“I believe in our resourcefulness and in our capacity to invent solutions to the problems we have ourselves created,” said Branson, who has pledged to invest $3 billion in profits from his transportation companies, including Virgin Atlantic Airlines and Virgin Trains, to fighting global warming.

“We are now facing a planetary emergency,” said Gore, whose documentary film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” has helped him become one of the world’s leading voices on climate change issues.

The former vice president will serve as a judge in the contest, known as the Virgin Earth Challenge. He said he hoped the contest would spur scientific innovation without distracting from more practical steps people can take to battle global warming, from using energy-efficient light bulbs to pressuring politicians to confront “the crisis of our time.”

“It’s a challenge to the moral imagination of humankind,” Gore said at a packed news conference, which several noted climate scientists and authors attended. Others provided videotaped endorsements or appeared by live video link.

If projects like the X-Prize are any indication, hopefully we can now do what the X-Prize did for commercial spaceflight; change the tone of the debate from “is it possible” or “is it real” to “what can we do” and “how will it work.” It’s a step in the right direction.

[ $25 Million Offered In Climate Challenge ]
Source: The Washington Post

For as much as the President’s budget is massive and sprawling, and contains incredible funds the Pentagon while squeezing domestic programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and well, every other domestically beneficial program in order to fund the war in Iraq, there are a few oversights so massive that they deserve to be laid out in the open to see how hypocritical and paradoxical this administration really is. One of those is the sharp and continuing trend the Bush Administration has had towards cutting veterans’ benefits and services while simultaneously sending more and more troops into battle, which all but assures that there will be more vets who need those cash-strapped services when they get out. Essentially the message from the Bush Administration and the Republicans who support these efforts is “go, fight for our cause in a war without end, and when you get back, out on the street with you, you’re not welcome here.”

As the funding for the war ramps up (and takes a conspicuous nose dive in 2009, which some in the press have signals means that the President doesn’t expect there to be war costs after 2009, I believe it simply means that he won’t be President anymore so he neither cares how much it’ll cost or is concerned with how a future President will have to mop up his leavings) and more troops head into harms way, one would think that some of that massive military funding would go to the support and medical organizations and agencies tasked with being the safety net for our brave men and women when they return home from serving so bravely while abroad. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be important in the eyes of the warhawks – more bombs, not doctors for the wounded; more ammo, no psychiatrists for the traumatized.

The Bush administration plans to cut funding for veterans’ health care two years from now – even as badly wounded troops returning from Iraq could overwhelm the system.

Bush is using the cuts, critics say, to help fulfill his pledge to balance the budget by 2012.

After an increase sought for next year, the Bush budget would turn current trends on their head. Even though the cost of providing medical care to veterans has been growing rapidly – by more than 10 percent in many years – White House budget documents assume consecutive cutbacks in 2009 and 2010 and a freeze thereafter.

The proposed cuts are unrealistic in light of recent VA budget trends – its medical care budget has risen every year for two decades and 83 percent in the six years since Bush took office – sowing suspicion that the White House is simply making them up to make its long-term deficit figures look better.

“Either the administration is willingly proposing massive cuts in VA health care,” said Rep. Chet Edwards of Texas, chairman of the panel overseeing the VA’s budget. “Or its promise of a balanced budget by 2012 is based on completely unrealistic assumptions.”

Edwards said that a more realistic estimate of veterans costs is $16 billion higher than the Bush estimate for 2012.

In fact, even the White House doesn’t seem serious about the numbers. It says the long-term budget numbers don’t represent actual administration policies. Similar cuts assumed in earlier budgets have been reversed.

The veterans cuts, said White House budget office spokesman Sean Kevelighan, “don’t reflect any policy decisions. We’ll revisit them when we do the (future) budgets.”

Or in other words, let’s collectively shove our heads in the sand on this issue, like we have about so much else. It worked before, why not now?

[ Veterans Face Consecutive Budget Cuts ]
Source: The Associated Press (courtesy of TruthOut)

This could be a problem.

A significant number of doctors say they do not feel obligated to tell patients about medical options they oppose morally, such as abortion and teen birth control, and believe they have no duty to refer people elsewhere for such treatments, researchers say.

The survey of 1,144 doctors around the country is the first major look at how physicians’ religious or moral beliefs might affect patient care.

The study, conducted by University of Chicago researchers, found that 86 percent of those responding believe doctors are obligated to present all treatment options, and 71 percent believe they must refer patients to another doctor for treatments they oppose. Slightly more than half the rest said they had no such obligation; the others were undecided.

“That means that there are a lot of physicians out there who are not, in fact, doing the right thing,” said David Magnus, director of Stanford University’s Center for Biomedical Ethics.

If this is going to be the case, then patients need to step up to the plate and fill in where the commercial health care system, with its utter and pathetic lack of checks and balances on doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance companies alike, fail. I shudder at the notion of having to morally screen your doctor before you accept care from them, ensure they’re on the same political and personal playing field as you are, and agree with you to the point where they’ll provide you with the care that you need without filtering it through their own personal, economic, or back-door interests, but it’s possible that those of us in a privileged enough position to do so with our caregivers will have to do that. Sadly, that creates a health-care system that’s based on that privilege, as many people have no choice or say in which doctor they see (read: HMO subscribers) and what they believe, and choosing a different doctor is a nightmare of paperwork and phone calls to the HMOs for dubious results at best. Add into that the fact that you would have to pay a co-pay to see the doctor to screen them, and you toss money into the mix, which can be scarce for many.

It’s appalling that so many people feel it’s acceptable to literally not do their job because of their personal beliefs; don’t get me wrong, even the military offers soliders the right to refuse an illegal or immoral order, or the ability to be a conscientious objector, but by and large you’re still required to do your duty when the call comes. Most of us who have our own responsibilities and roles in the workforce may not always like what we’re asked to do, but we do it regardless because it’s our jobs – we don’t refuse to use the office printer or file papers because we have a moral opposition to clearcutting forests, and we don’t refuse to pay our taxes because we don’t support the war in Iraq. So why then, can doctors and pharmacists claim some imaginary moral “high road” and refuse to offer patients who come to them, paying for their expertise, knowledge, and treatment- all things they don’t have – the treatment they deserve. The very least a doctor should do is refer a patient to another doctor that will provide them such care.

Sadly, this appears to be another artifact of the commercial health care system, which claims to be so effective and inventive and the best in the world, but in the end suffers from similar pitfalls and problems that even the most modest socialized systems do in other countries. Curious how this impacts you? Ask yourself a few questions: If you doctor treats you poorly, or you suspect your doctor is not telling you the whole story, who can you complain to? Who can you write to or call to inform an authority of the doctor’s position or treatment? To whom does your doctor report?

There are answers to these questions, for all of us who have sought medical care at any point, but those answers simply aren’t obvious. If you don’t know, I advise you find out, for your own sake. Don’t settle for “getting a second opinion,” although I would suggest doing this to bolster your complaint, go farther and do more. Everyone reports to someone, and that someone will have to listen, even if they don’t like it.

[ Doctor's Moral Beliefs May Affect Care, Researchers Say ]
Source: The Boston Globe

Writing on both the hilariously silly matter of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force “bomb scare” in Boston last week which was actually a long planned and approved marketing campaign that was simultaneously running in 12 other cities (12 other cities that didn’t complain) and also getting to something of the root of the matter by examining how on earth people managed to get so incredibly jumpy, William Rivers Pitt, writing for TruthOut.org, has some excellent points that I think should be out and up front:

It took an astonishingly stupid bomb scare in my town last week to really make me feel old for the first time.

“Old” isn’t the proper word, I guess, since I am only midway through my 30s. I live in Boston, temporary home to nearly one million students from September to June every year, and so I am surrounded by kids all the time. I used to teach high school English to roomfuls of teenagers. Neither of these things made me feel old. The now-infamous Lite-Brite Bomb Fiasco of 2007 that unspooled here last week didn’t make me feel old either, so much as it made me feel out of touch, for the first time, with those who are ten or fifteen years younger than me.

…

So, was my fear an over-reaction? It is easy to say so in hindsight. How can anyone think one of those Lite-Brite things was a bomb? Easy. You spend a few hours watching the TV news people natter about “wiring” and “electronics” and things strapped to bridges and hospitals, but you’re not shown the actual items by those same news people. It was hours before I saw what they were talking about, and in that simple fact, we find one of the central afflictions of our wretched estate.

That whole thing last week was of the media, by the media and for the media. An advertising agency pimps a television show, and the resulting nonsense becomes fodder for the TV news shows. Like Tinkers to Evans to Chance, this was the perfect example of the media serving itself at the expense of the people. If they had shown us one of those LED boards, no one would have thought twice. It served the news media better, however, to bluster about suspicious items for hours. Better ratings, you see.

The event also exposed a dissonance in our collective thinking, especially among the aforementioned younger set. For them, and to use their favorite word, the 21st century absolutely sucks. A twenty-one year old today was seventeen years old when we invaded Iraq, fifteen years old when September 11th happened, and fourteen years old when the Supreme Court decided to take over the duties and responsibilities of electing our public officials. Since then, they have been subjected to bogus terror scare after bogus terror scare, to lies without count about threats beyond measure, to a war seemingly without end that serves only itself.

Agreed. I don’t discount the people of Boston for being careful, in fact I salute them for being exceptionally aware and concious, but I admonish them for being so afraid that litebrites could even remotely, in any possible case, be considered a bomb. But Pitt has a point – if you’re not shown the devices and the media and authorities don’t bother to speak to experts or any swath of people wide enough that might actually do anything other than fan the flames of fear, then of course you’re going to be scared, and of course you’re going to be defensive when the rest of the ocuntry calls you out on it. I can’t totally blame them, but I can’t totally let Boston off the hook either. It, like most things, are complicated and the truth lies between the two ends of the chain. If nothing else though, I appreciate Boston showing us that while terrorism can strike anywhere at any time, fear begins and rests here at home.

Still, I wonder what this generation is going to think as they get older. I can’t say I’m “old,” in fact I’m closer to the people he mentions than I am to Pitt himself in age, but if there’s anything I’m afraid of, it’s a future that continues down this perilous path of war, retribution, pre-emptive strike, and diplomacy through muscle-flexing and force. Not to say that diplomacy through rolling over and showing one’s belly gets you very far either, but again, somewhere between both ends of the chain is the answer, and moderation is the key. Sadly, with as divided as America is and the trend towards extremism on one respect or the other, I worry that no one will ever be able to meet in the middle, not so much politically middle, but the pragmatic and practical middle.

[ The 21st Century Sucks ]
Source: TruthOut

Among the writers I truly enjoy reading is a blogger who goes by “uppityliberal,” a moniker after my own heart, who routinely posts the most insightful and intelligent commentary on the political atmosphere with such broad but accurate strokes that it’s hard to believe that anyone would simply be so clear, so precise, and so correct after writing so much. One of her recent pieces is directly related to the path that political discourse, whether it’s policy-based or simply commentary, has taken in America today, and I couldn’t paraphrase her if I tried, so with apologies for length and her granted permission, I’ll reblog:

Dr. Sagan, you are sorely missed.

“When the people in a democracy have lost the ability to set their own agendas, or even to knowledgeably question those who do set the agendas. When there is no practice in questioning those in authority. When clutching our crystals and religiously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in steep decline, unable to distinguish between what’s true and what feels good, we slide, almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness. That Worries Me. And I don’t think we have adequate protections against that and this is just a kind of fantasy. There are reasons to worry.”

(Quote found in this groovy article.)

Discourse in the US seems to have come down to two points of view: people who blindly obey authority without question, and people who blindly disobey authority on principle.

On the one hand, we have the devoutly religious and hardcore patriotic who bind their wills to god and flag without any concept of what those things actually are and what their history or current context is. And on the other hand we have the “don’t tell me what to do” squalling brats whose reaction to the ignorant behavior of those in authority is to disregard authority entirely.

Both of these things are evidentiary of a single failure: education. Oh, most kids graduate from high school with basic literacy and math skills, but they’re just not taught how to learn. They’re not taught how to seek out new information and use it to assess other data. Church has decided that secular education–the proper kind, that teaches one how to question and how to obtain answers to those questions–is dangerous to faith (it is) and therefore evil. By gum, if those younguns start digging deeper, they just might find out that the clergy are largely full of shit. We can’t have that! And pop culture has decided that education is purely establishment, designed mostly to teach people how to sit still, and therefore anti-freedom. We don’t need no education. (Actually, darlings, you do at least need a bit of a refresher course in grammar.)

The popular “Question Authority” slogan found pasted on numerous aging Hondas in college towns around the country is incomplete. Nice sentiment, but it doesn’t tell you what to do after you’ve questioned. What if, after questioning, you find that the authority does indeed know of what it speaks? Do you still ignore it or disobey it merely on principle? Why?

Say some expert in fire safety tells you that keeping combustibles next to a space heater is a fire hazard. Do you, in your rebellious nature, decide that there’s no such thing as an expert in fire safety, and by gum, if you want to keep that stack of old newspaper next to the heater, why, no one’s going to stop you? Good luck with that. I hear burns hurt a lot.

In some cases, the consequences of not paying attention to people who know better than you simply earns one a Darwin award. Yep, turns out that firing a deadly weapon while drunk can result in death or serious injury. Who knew? But the unfortunate part is that a lot of innocent people often get harmed by the reckless, rebellious behavior of some arrogant fuckwit who decided that warning labels were for wimps.

It’s fairly common knowledge now that Shrub doesn’t pay attention to the news, nor does he listen to anyone whose opinions differ from his own–even if the people in question are experts in their fields. He tends to fire people who challenge his worldviews, and has hired people to head up environmental and health agencies specifically to censor any data that may come from those agencies that would damage his ability to Rule Teh Wurld!

I suppose, given that this guy is STILL president, and got elected not just once but twice, it shouldn’t be surprising that so much of the rest of the country has leapt onto the bandwagon of so what if I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, I still have a right to do what I feel like doing.

And of course, the damned anal retentive right is making everything worse. The more they start going off about how there’s only one way to fuck or be an acceptable man or woman, the more they’re breeding their equal and opposite reaction, and a bunch of kids are going around barebacking and sportfucking and losing sight of what it means to be truly intimate with other people. And this, in turn, breeds more of the hardass right who argue that sex education is responsible for all this naughty behavior.

Argh.

Things would start recovering if we all remembered a few simple rules:

1. All opinions are not equal. Those based on extensive research will always have more merit than those pulled out of some random person’s ass. And if your opinion about something is causing you to behave in a way that harms others–directly or indirectly–expect to be called on it. Don’t expect to flail around about how you have a “right” to your opinion that smoking crack doesn’t harm your fetus without someone getting on your ass about that.

2. Faith and reason are inherently incompatible. Faith, by definition, is the absence of reason. There’s no point in trying to justify faith using the tools of reason.

3. Always be prepared to back up your opinions. Point to books, research, scholarly articles, experts, well-researched stories in reputable media, etc.

4. Follow the money. Don’t try to prove global warming is a hoax using data from Exxon-funded “scientists.”

5. The plural of “anecdote” is not “data.” Anecdotal evidence can be used to illustrate a larger finding or disprove an absolute, but in and of itself, it does not hold up as a statistical measure. If a preponderance of studies show that secondhand smoke causes illness, don’t point to your healthy mom/chainsmoker dad as “evidence” that that assertion is wrong. Exceptions only disprove rules. They don’t disprove generalities.

6. Read. Then go read some more. Learn how to sort quality information from bullshit, and quality purveyors of information from bullshitters, and stick to the quality stuff. Yes, that means turning off Fox News.

7. If someone proves you wrong with a nice stack of juicy data, politely concede. Arguing on principle when you’ve already been shown to be wrong makes you look like an idiot.

8. Degrees matter, especially if they’re from universities that specialize in a given subject. Experience matters, too, but absent the context and rapidly-refreshed information a full liberal arts education provides, it sometimes doesn’t give enough breadth on a topic.*

9. You don’t know everything. Neither does anyone else. But there are people who know more than you do. Respect them. By all means, verify that they do know what they’re talking about, but don’t just blow off someone with a bunch of letters after his name as an elitist because you’re too embarrassed to admit that you don’t actually know something.

10. There is no shame in ignorance. There is shame in willful stupidity. It’s when you can’t be arsed to go look something up that you look like a tool.

* It’s the anecdotal evidence problem again. Sometimes, people with a lot of experience in a given field get a bit of myopia, and forget to read new research, or base their opinions only on cases they’ve personally been involved in, instead of on controlled studies. The best combination–and therefore the best authority–is people with a degree and experience who also regularly refresh their datasets to include new information they may not get in the course of their day jobs.

She’s spot on, in literally every single respect. The sooner we can get over ourselves in these regards, the sooner we can have civil, intelligent discussions on matters of the public good, whether they have to deal with specifically contentious problems where everyone has an opinion, like global warming, or even the most simple issues that have become blurred thanks to the ideology of a few, like abortion. She knows how and when to bow out of an argument, and she knows how and when to stand against anecdotal ignorance. It’s a lesson I can only hope to learn and spread, and that the broader media could do well to take.

Read the article in its natural habitat below, and definitely make a point to read her other work.

[ Wise ]
Source: Stark Raving Liberal

I sincerely hope we can lay to rest the false claims and the attempts to obscure of blur the truth of the matter here. Global warming is real, and it is a direct result of human actions on Earth, including but not limited to the amount of greenhouse gases we pump into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels for energy, from coal to oil and more. Other human actions that contribute to global climate change have to do directly with mass factory-style agriculture and the clearcutting and decimation of old-growth forest and rainforest that would otherwise help to balance out the effects of human industry on the planet.

Scientists have placed the odds of all of this being correct at about 90%. In actuality? The IPCC report is actually a bit out of date. In compiling the report, they relied on studies published and reviewed up until 2005, which excludes valuable data from studies and surveys collected in 2006, which have substantially raised the confidence in the assertion that global climate change is happening and is a direct result of human actions. At the same time as the IPCC released its report, the Zurich-based World Glacier Monitoring Service reported that the rate of mountain glacier melt is accelerating. What does it all mean? The IPCC report paints a not-so-rosy picture of the future of the planet should global temperatures continue to rise. Rapid cooling in some places, rapid heating in others, and continuations of the trends of precipitation drawbacks in tropical regions, more mild seasons in temperate zones, and so on. We’ve seen some of the changes already, and those changes will likely accelerate.

So now that we know for a fact that global climate change and global warming are real and are our fault, what are the detractors doing now? Well, the bulk of them are crying “well, we can’t do anything about it, it’s too late,” in perhaps the saddest cop-out attempt to avoid dealing with the problem or having to-heaven forbid-change their personal habits to work towards a more sustainable planet for our children. Others, however, including the energy juggernaut who posted the highest profit earnings of any American company in history, Exxon Mobil (profits made, without any shadow of a doubt, from their current anti-environment-at-all-costs policies), have taken a far more sinister tack, one that’s eerily reminiscent of the way the tobacco industry attacked its critics when it came to light that smoking was detrimental to your health; they’ve decided that if they can’t fight the scientific community with facts and experimental evidence, they’ll just buy some pseudo-science to support their conclusions.

As for the IPCC? This is what they had to say:

In a grim and powerful assessment of the future of the planet, the leading international network of climate scientists has concluded for the first time that global warming is “unequivocal” and that human activity is the main driver, “very likely” causing most of the rise in temperatures since 1950.

They said the world was in for centuries of climbing temperatures, rising seas and shifting weather patterns — unavoidable results of the buildup of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.

But their report, released here on Friday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said warming and its harmful consequences could be substantially blunted by prompt action.

While the report provided scant new evidence of a climate apocalypse now, and while it expressly avoided recommending courses of action, officials from the United Nations agencies that created the panel in 1988 said it spoke of the urgent need to limit looming and momentous risks.

“In our daily lives we all respond urgently to dangers that are much less likely than climate change to affect the future of our children,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, which administers the panel along with the World Meteorological Organization.

“Feb. 2 will be remembered as the date when uncertainty was removed as to whether humans had anything to do with climate change on this planet,” he went on. “The evidence is on the table.”

The evidence is indeed on the table. The IPCC stopped short of making recommendations as to specific actions that would help the problem, but in all reality, those recommendations are political in nature, not scientific. The scientists behind the myriad studies that came to these conclusions have done their part-they’ve collected the data, reviewed it, drawn the appropriate conclusions, allowed their peers and the rest of the community to review their work, and presented the information. Deciding on the appropriate courses of action are up to politicians, in conjunction with the scientists who can test the theories to see if those actions would actually help. Let’s see, though, if the world, not just the United States, (although I’m most worried about us here in America) steps up to the challenge to leave the world in better condition than we found it.

[ Science Panel Says Global Warming Is 'Unequivocal' ]
Source: The New York Times

The news is incredibly saddening, and Molly will be missed sorely.

She was an inspiration to so many people, and her words were always everything I always wanted to be: truthful, poignant, witty, smart, and brought that smirk to your face that only someone with wit, wisdom, and candor could bring. She wasn’t just a commentator or a writer, she was the voice of our conscience, smacking us upside our heads in disbelief at what we were doing, where we were going, and what we were saying, whether it was from on high in Washington or down low among the masses. Pick up her books, especially Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?, you’ll be pleased.

The Unsinkable Molly Ivins. I’ll miss you, you’ve inspired me so incredibly much. I’ll keep raising hell, alright, if not just for you. Rest well.

[ Molly Ivins: 1944-2007 ]
Source: The Texas Observer (courtesy of TruthOut)

[ Remembering Molly Ivins ]
Source: The Nation

[ A Sad Day for Journalism ]
Source: Textualdeviance@Livejournal

[ Treasuring the Wit and Wisdom of Molly Ivins ]
Source: National Public Radio

[ Quotes and Quips from Molly Ivins ]
Source: The Houston Chronicle