August 24, 2010 - Global Warming has been out of the news recently. In its place we have had stories about the BP oil disaster, Tea Party insurgents, Cape Cod sharks and Snookie. The earth doesn't care. It's doing what it does. And this summer the earth got warmer. Global warming happens slowly and not always smoothly. But maybe, just maybe, we are beginning to see things change because of a hotter earth: 

Here on Cape Cod we've had a great summer. The weather has been sunny and warm, one of the best summers in recent memory. The only negative thing to say is that warmer water has brought more seals to our shores and with them, a convention of great white sharks. Maybe the toothy grin of a great white is the current face of global warming on Cape Cod.

In Russia summer hasn't been so great.  Wild fires have raged across its countryside aided by a severe drought and the hottest summer since temperature recordings began 130 years ago. The fires have destroyed residential houses, military facilities, and claimed the lives of more than 50 people while a heat wave has claimed an estimated 5000 lives. In Moscow, which has been affected by thick smog from the fires surrounding the city, the mortality rate has doubled. The fires even threatened to stir up atomic fallout by burning forests and brush tainted with residue from the Chernobyl disaster. Maybe a Russian heat wave accompanied by months of wild fires is the current face of global warming in Russia.

Pakistan has had a rough summer too. Millions of people have been forced to leave their homes and more than 1,500 people have been killed by flooding triggered by the annual monsoon rains that have covered nearly 1/5 of the country's land mass in knee deep water. The flood waters have washed away millions of hectares of crops, submerged villages and destroyed roads and bridges. Disease is spreading among Pakistani flood victims. Pakistan is prone to flooding and is routinely drenched by the monsoon rains. But this year is much worse than normal.  Maybe more disastrous monsoon flooding is the current face of global warming in Pakistan.

Earlier this month in Greenland a massive island of ice four times the size of Manhattan broke off and slid into the sea. Scientists say this ice island is the biggest in the Northern Hemisphere since 1962. Maybe more and bigger ice islands calving from glaciers is the face of global warming in Greenland.

At the American Renewable Energy Day summit in Aspen film maker James Cameron lost his cool, calling Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh "swine", because of their attacks on environmentalists and on the science of global warming. It is a fact, not a maybe, that the human faces of the global warming discussion are getting hot.

Absolute proof of global warming will not exist until after the fact and the causes may be debated forever. But regardless of why, maybe, just maybe, we're beginning to see what happens as the world begins to warm up. What happens if things get really hot?

July 26, 2010 - There will be no federal climate change legislation this year. Last week Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid said that the votes were not there. Republicans are unanimously opposed and some Democrats, those who find the interests of their constituents aligned with carbon extraction and usage industries (auto, coal, oil), are opposed as well. This has taken place in the midst of a heat wave and compelling evidence, incontrovertible in the minds of most scientists, that global warming is a reality. 

Do all conservatrves think global warming is a hoax?  Not at all.  Then why do all of them now oppose taking action on it?  In today's NY Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat provides an explanation. Douthat does not deny global warming. He thinks it's as real as Al Gore does. He differs on what to do about it. Conservatives remember the 1970's he explains. Back then the big worry was population growth:

The Seventies were a great decade for apocalyptic enthusiasms, and none was more potent than the fear that human population growth had outstripped the earth’s carrying capacity. According to a chorus of credentialed alarmists, the world was entering an age of sweeping famines, crippling energy shortages, and looming civilizational collapse.

It was not lost on conservatives that this analysis led inexorably to left-wing policy prescriptions — a government-run energy sector at home, and population control for the teeming masses overseas.

Those fears were not realized and many conservatives believe that today's global warming fears will prove to be similarly wrong. Douthat thinks otherwise:

History, however, rarely repeats itself exactly — and conservatives who treat global warming as just another scare story are almost certainly mistaken.

May 18, 2010 - The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported yesterday that the combined global land and ocean surface temperature in April 2010 and during the period from January to April were the warmest on record. Additionally, last month’s average ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for any April, and the global land surface temperature was the third warmest on record. The monthly analysis from NOAA is based on records going back to 1880. Here's more.

May 1, 2010 - Last week US Interior Secretary Ken Salazar approved the installation of 130 wind turbines in Nantucket Sound. It now seems that nothing will stop the Cape Wind project from becoming a reality. Cape Codders have been divided on the project.  Some see benefits in local jobs, reduced electricity rates, cleaner air and water. Others see ruined views, disrespect to native heritage and negative impacts on tourism.  From a national perspective the significance of Cape Wind is that it paves the way for other offshore wind projects. 

Kit Kennedy of the National Resources Defence Council explains: "When this process began in 2001 there was no roadmap to follow for permitting offshore wind. We had to create one." Initially the Army Corps of Engineers was given the task of creating a permitting process and implementing it with Cape Wind. The Corps had spent years on the project, including time spent drafting a complex Environmental Impact Statement.  Then Congress decided that the Minerals Management Service, within the Department of the Interior, was better equipped to handle the job. That meant starting over with a new Environmental Impact Statement and redesigning the process for rulemaking. But that part is now complete. "We have a roadmap, now," says Kennedy. "Although it's not perfect, it's something to build on. And we simply didn't have that before."