Warming Is Real. Now What?

[groovedaddy]

Even as Democrats abandoned efforts late last month to advance a major climate change bill through the Senate, books about global warming continue to pour forth. Two of the more interesting ones do not waste time rearguing debates over the science (in 2007 a United Nations panel, synthesizing the work of hundreds of climatologists from around the world, called evidence for global warming “unequivocal”), but instead take as a starting point the clear and present dangers posed by the greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels.

“The Climate War,” by Eric Pooley — deputy editor of Bloomberg BusinessWeek and former managing editor of Fortune — looks at the hotly contested politics of global warming, especially as it’s been played out in Washington over the last three years. “The Weather of the Future,” by Heidi Cullen — a senior research scientist with Climate Central, a nonprofit research organization — offers a scorching vision of what life might be like in the warmer world that is already on its way.

Although “Weather of the Future” sounds like an exercise in speculation, Ms. Cullen grounds her harrowing predictions — extrapolations, really — in “the best available science” derived from an array of climate models, environmental data and interviews with scientists. And her forecasts actually turn out to be an armature for discussing the fallout of climate change (from rising sea levels to more extreme weather) in an accessible, tactile fashion and for examining existing liabilities in various regions and cities, like overstretched infrastructure and dwindling water supplies.

In what will come as little surprise to Americans suffering through this summer’s persistent heat waves, Ms. Cullen notes that the average annual temperature in the United States “has risen more than two degrees F during the past 50 years, and the temperature will continue to rise, depending on the amount of heat-trapping gases we emit globally.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/books/03book.html?th&emc=th

[yourout]

1. The Russians are coming around to the idea.....summer long record heat there.

<http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/08599200808100>