A couple of good articles.  The one on Sierra Club is disturbing but not surprising.

Published on Saturday, March 24, 2012 by Common Dreams

First decade of 21st Century warmest on record; US locations break 7,000 temperature records in March

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/03/24-2

No right way is easy. . . .We must risk our lives to save them.
—John Muir, Sierra Club’s founder

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/26-7

ScienceDaily (Mar. 27, 2012) — A new study examining nearly 40 years of satellite imagery has revealed that the floating ice shelves of a critical portion of West Antarctica are steadily losing their grip on adjacent bay walls, potentially amplifying an already accelerating loss of ice to the sea.

The most extensive record yet of the evolution of the floating ice shelves in the eastern Amundsen Sea Embayment in West Antarctica shows that their margins, where they grip onto rocky bay walls or slower ice masses, are fracturing and retreating inland. As that grip continues to loosen, these already-thinning ice shelves will be even less able to hold back grounded ice upstream, according to glaciologists at The University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics (UTIG).

Reporting in the Journal of Glaciology, the UTIG team found that the extent of ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea Embayment changed substantially between the beginning of the Landsat satellite record in 1972 and late 2011. These changes were especially rapid during the past decade. The affected ice shelves include the floating extensions of the rapidly thinning Thwaites and Pine Island Glaciers.

"Typically, the leading edge of an ice shelf moves forward steadily over time, retreating episodically when an iceberg calves off, but that is not what happened along the shear margins," says Joseph MacGregor, research scientist associate and lead author of the study.

i tink nature (which includes us) will get through this; of course, some won't, as most of the species on Earth that have ever existed have already died out...

(there are no guarantees)

it seems our sun is a variable star -- the last time it was this active was some 11,000 years ago [source: NOAA]

i wonder what more surprises and challenges lie in store?

(i'm voting for chocolate becoming a food group)

(also, a book i'll be looking forward to is this one , which is timely, every news outlet seems to be yakkin aboot the coming Carrington Event...here's a taste and here is another one...more stuff to terrify you all)

It seems there is little that I can really do to stem this heating trend.  I limited my family size, have avoided using vast quantities of energy and water, have never driven a real gas-guzzler vehicle, I don't fly off to resorts and various far away places for holidays,  I eat the food that enters my home and compost the few bits of waste that I have (apple cores etc). 

I have tried to interest my kids in frugal living to no avail.  My grandchildren seem to believe that they will live in luxury through there own adult years. 

I have serious doubts.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/26/us-climate-thresholds-idUSBRE82POUJ20120326

bump to the 'original'

bless universe for giving herself (and all her semi-autonomous units) endless opportunities, play, and endless tricks to try to experience and discern and, maybe for a bit, go "i wonder what this does?"

Were did all these posts come from?

Sorry, double post

Thanks for drawing the connection between population and climate change, Kay. I think it's a no-brainer. More people - more resources needed. I believe it's the biggest cause of global destruction followed closely by willful ignorance. It's like no one gives a thought at all about how they are sentencing their grandkids and great grandkids to a horrible life as long as they have what they want right now. We need seventh generation thinking. 

From New Scientist:

Claims that environmental regulations will worsen unemployment are false. When the economy is struggling, the opposite is true

IN DECEMBER, the Obama administration approved long-overdue environmental regulations requiring US power plants to reduce emissions of mercury, arsenic and other toxic metals. The Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, or air toxics rule, is expected to prevent up to 11,000 premature deaths a year and have many other health benefits. And yet conservative members of Congress oppose it.

Why? Because they say it will "kill jobs". This is a familiar tactic for politicians opposed to any sort of regulation. Conservatives have been scarily disciplined in appending the job-killing label to all regulations, both old and new.

The rationale for attaching the job-killing label to nearly all mentions of regulation is pretty clear: even 32 months after the official end of the recession, the US continues to have a joblessness crisis. While the overall unemployment rate has fallen from its 10 per cent peak in October 2009 to 8.3 per cent last month, the large majority of this decline was explained not by increased job creation, but by a drop in people classifying themselves as actively looking for work.

Conservatives are, in short, hoping to convert the public's justifiable concern about joblessness into support for their decades-long battle against robust environmental, labour and financial regulations.

Voters who might normally be sceptical of efforts to halt regulations that would protect them from mercury and arsenic spewed into the atmosphere could be more receptive to arguments that they should be postponed so as not to threaten an already fragile economic recovery.

Just a suggestion:

Summertime "powerless" days. One day a week in summer, don't cook — eat salads and cold cuts; switch off the computer and tele… get by "off the grid" (but let the freezer and refrigerator tick over). It's actually is less work and very enjoyable, and you get to bed at a sensible hour..

Powerless days are totally geat.  Lots of people go camping and use no electricity at all - but it takes gas to get there.

I long ago suggested a cure for unemployment - training and hiring people to look after others and the world we all live on.  More teachers, doctors, nurses, home care staff, playground supervisors, youth camp staff, support workers for special needs citizens,  literacy activities etc etc.  We need to get away from mindless, endless consumption and move towards are more just society.   

for those who are really serious aboot overpopulation being a problem, might i suggest suicide

or join the VHEMT organization?

i really like i heard some neighbours in the USA have done is they have put solar panels on their roof and are in talks with the local power company to figure out the particulars of selling their electricity back to the power company :3

another fine example of the OCCUPY WALL STREET 'movement' in action

Published on Tuesday, March 27, 2012 by Common Dreams

Scientists issue dire call for action on climate change at conference; we must stop warming or "cross the threshold"

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/03/27-5

The increase in consumption by Westerners is a far greater factor, I believe, than population growth.  It seems to be easier to tell poor people to have fewer children than it is to tell ourselves and descendants to quit increasing their demands for material goods and energy-consuming pleasure/entertainment.

indeed, it seems easier to tell other people what they should do.

there seems to be a correlation between birth rate & a country's development, so it would make good sense to make sure that every country go toward getting developed.  which puts us in a bind, because then more resources will be consumed...

Oh, and looking at your standard Mercator projection of the continents doesn't show me just how HOOGE places like Africa is...until I see it like this

no bloody wonder it has 'problems'.

plus it seems that these economic recessions & depressions are a natural ocurrance, boom and bust being part of nature itself...

i recall how a SF race, the Moties, solved the overpopulation crisis; they built archives or doomsday vaults with all the knowledge of their race on their planets so when the eventual collapse of civilization happened, they wouldn't be completely destroyed...interesting book called "The Mote in God's Eye".

so many different problems to deal with; the several existential threats, like asteroids, supervolcanoes, our variable sun...how to manage our Earth...how to learn how to be able to live with one another...can we do the necessary long-term planning while still allowing people their present level of freedoms?

life is never boring on planet Dirt

Btw, you genties & ladlemen should read the new IPCC SREX report :3

The link is here

an exercpt: "...“There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change...”

and..."The statement about the absence of trends in impacts attributable to natural or anthropogenic climate change holds for tropical and extratropical storms and tornados...absence of an attributable climate change signal in losses also holds for flood losses”.

thank goodness the science continues despite religious agendas

This morning on CBC radio one, The Current interview with Katherine Boo, author of `Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai undercity"

When the interview becomes available for listening to at the website, I recommend it.