It’s the cold, not global warming, that we should be worried about

Each year, an official estimate is made of the “excess winter mortality” – that is, the number of people dying of cold-related illnesses. Last winter was relatively mild, and still 24,000 perished. The indications are that this winter, which has dragged on so long and with such brutality, will claim 30,000 lives, making it one of the biggest killers in the country. And still, no one seems upset.

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http://www.telegraph.co.u...uld-be-worried-about.html

Is a Planetary Cooling Spell Straight Ahead? NASA: We May Be On the Verge of a “Mini-Maunder” Event.http://www.globalresearch.ca/

All climate scientists agree that the sun affects Earth’s climate to some extent. They only disagree about whether or not the effect form the sun is minor compared to man-made causes.

We noted in 2011:

This week, scientists from the US Solar Observatory and the US Air Force Research Laboratory have discovered – to their great surprise – that the sun’s activity is declining, and that we might experience the lowest solar output we’ve seen since 1645-1715. The Register describes it in dramatic tones:

What may be the science story of the century is breaking this evening.

Scientists who are convinced that global warming is a serious threat to our planet say that such a reduced solar output would simply buy us more time … delaying the warming trend, but not stopping or reversing it.

On the other hand, scientists who are skeptical about global warming say that the threat is a new mini ice age. (Remember that scientists have been convinced in the past that we would have a new ice age, and even considered pouring soot over the arctic in the 1970s to help melt the ice – in order to prevent another ice age. Obama’s top science advisor was one of those warning of a new ice age in the 1970s. And see this.)

NASA reports this week that we may be on the verge of another Maunder Minimum (a period with an unusually low number of sunspots, leading to colder temperatures):

Much has been made of the probable connection between the Maunder Minimum, a 70-year deficit of sunspots in the late 17th-early 18th century, and the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, during which Europe and North America were subjected to bitterly cold winters. The mechanism for that regional cooling could have been a drop in the sun’s EUV output; this is, however, speculative.



The yearly averaged sunspot number for a period of 400 years (1610-2010). SOURCE: Courtesy of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.

***

The sun could be on the threshold of a mini-Maunder event right now. Ongoing Solar Cycle 24 is the weakest in more than 50 years. Moreover, there is (controversial) evidence of a long-term weakening trend in the magnetic field strength of sunspots. Matt Penn and William Livingston of the National Solar Observatory predict that by the time Solar Cycle 25 arrives, magnetic fields on the sun will be so weak that few if any sunspots will be formed. Independent lines of research involving helioseismology and surface polar fields tend to support their conclusion.

NASA explains that interactions between the sun, sources of cosmic radiation and the Earth are very complicated, and it takes an interdisciplinary team of heliophysicists, chemists and others to quantify what is really going on. And the Earth’s climate is also affected by cosmic radiation.

So – even if NASA’s prediction of a period of an unusually low amount of sun spots is proven correct – it is hard to know whether that will lead to a large or small reduction in temperature trends.

For centuries most Americans have believed that “the shot heard ’round the world” in 1775 from Concord, Massachusetts, heralded the Enlightenment’s entry into history. Early observers of America such as G.W.F. Hegel, Edward Gibbon and Edmund Burke believed that, too. A new kind of republican citizen was rising, amid and against adherents of theocracy, divine-right monarchy, aristocracy and mercantilism. Republican citizens were quickening humanity’s stride toward horizons radiant with promises never before held and shared as widely as they were in America.

The creation of the United States really was a Novus ordo seclorum, a New Order of the Ages, a society’s first self-aware, if fumbling and compromised, effort to live by the liberal expectation that autonomous individuals could govern themselves together without having to impose religious doctrines or mystical narratives of tribal blood or soil. With barely a decorous nod to The Creator, the founders of the American republic conferred on one another the right to have rights, a distinguished group of them constituting the others as “We, the people.”

That revolutionary effort is not just in trouble now, or endangered, or under attack, or reinventing itself. It’s in prison, with no prospect of parole, and many Americans, including me, who wring our hands or wave our arms about this are actually among the jailers, or we’ve sleepwalked ourselves and others into the cage and have locked ourselves in. We haven’t yet understood the shots fired and heard ’round the world from 74 American schools, colleges and military bases since the Sandy Hook School massacre of December 2012.

These shots haven’t been fired by embattled farmers at invading armies. They haven’t been fired by terrorists who’ve penetrated our surveillance and security systems. With few exceptions, they haven’t been fired by aggrieved non-white Americans. They’ve been fired mostly by young, white American citizens at other white citizens, and by American soldiers at other American soldiers, inside the very institutions where republican virtues and beliefs are nurtured and defended.

They’ve been fired from within a body politic so drained of candor and trust that, beneath our continuing lip-service to republican premises and practices, we’ve let a court conflate the free speech of flesh-and-blood citizens with the disembodied wealth of anonymous shareholders. And we’ve let lawmakers, bought or intimidated by gun peddlers and zealots, render us helpless against torrents of marketed fear and vengeance that are dissolving a distinctively American democratic ethos the literary historian Daniel Aaron characterized as “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free.”

Many Americans are adapting to living with variants of force and fraud that erupt in road rage; lethal stampedes by shoppers on sale days; security precautions in their homes against the prospect of armed invasion; gladiatorialization and corruption in sports; nihilism in entertainment that fetishizes violence without context and sex without attachment ; the casino-like financing of utterly unproductive economic activities such as the entertainment I’ve just mentioned and the predatory lending that has tricked millions out of their homes; the commercial groping and goosing of private lives and public spaces, even in the marketing of ordinary consumer goods; and the huge, new prison industry that Americans have created to deter or punish broken, violent men, most of them non-white, only to find schools in even the whitest, “safest” neighborhoods imprisoned by fear of white gunmen who’ve often been students themselves.

Abroad, meanwhile, thousands more shots, fiendish and celebratory, are being fired into the corpses of American national-security and nation-building projects by terrorists and fanatics we were told had been decimated. These projects cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives, limbs, homes and hopes, including those of American soldiers, contractors and idealists. Their sacrifices can’t justify retroactively what shouldn’t have been undertaken in the first place.

Stressed by all this republican derangement, millions are spending billions on palliatives, medications, addictions and even surveillance designed to protect them from themselves. All those vials, syringes, security systems and shootings reflect the insinuation of what Gibbon called “a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire…” until Roman citizens “no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honour, the presence of danger, and the habit of command. They received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign, and trusted for their defence to a mercenary army.” Only a few late-Roman republicans, recalling their old freedoms, concluded, with Livy, that “We have become too ill to bear our sickness or their cures.”

What went wrong?

You might argue, and quite rightly, that “We, the people” have always subverted the truths we’d held to be self-evident, beginning with slavery and continuing with plutocracy. Yet somehow the republic kept experiencing what Lincoln called “a new birth of freedom,” thanks only partly to the fortuitous confluence of two oceans’ protection, a vast continent’s ever-alluring frontier and unending streams of aspiring immigrants:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land,
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates will stand
A mighty woman with a torch
Whose flame is the imprisoned lightning,
And her name: Mother of Exiles

True enough, the republic thus limned by Emma Lazarus in “The New Colossus,” her poem for the Statue of Liberty, needed those exiles for its labor market. And it still had a guiding aristocracy of sorts, but supposedly only “an aristocracy of talent and virtue,” as Jefferson put it, and not one of blood and ill-gotten wealth. True, too, certain lingering Puritan beliefs had nourished in the embattled farmers (and, even long before 1775, in some of the Puritans themselves) a conviction that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God. That injunction to defy worldly power sometimes in the name of a Higher Power legitimated individual conscience and autonomy right up through the nonviolent defiance of the best of the civil-rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s.

But the American emphasis on individual conscience and autonomy also gestated a liberal capitalist republic that has reduced individualism to market exchanges in ways that are now destroying both individuals and the society.

A liberal capitalist republic has to rely on its citizens to uphold voluntarily certain public virtues and beliefs that neither the liberal state nor markets can nourish or defend. The liberal state isn’t supposed to judge between one way of life and another, after all; and markets reward you as a self-interested consumer and investor, not as a citizen who might put such interests aside at times to advance a greater good that self-interest alone can’t achieve.

The moral silence and often bankruptcy of states and markets leaves citizen-leaders to be nourished and trained all the more intensively in institutions that stand somewhat apart from the state and markets. The Puritan founders of America’s oldest colleges understood this, but they expected that those colleges’ graduates would serve a theocratic state that would control markets and everything else. We’re right to dismiss the Puritans’ theocracy because it was repressive and hypocritical. But we’re wrong to have lost a side of its animating spirit that would have kept markets from controlling and devouring republican government and even our bodies and ourselves.

Symptoms and scapegoats hide the disease

Having miscarried republican self-discipline and conviction so badly, we find ourselves scrambling to monitor, measure and control the consequences, such as the proliferation of mental illness and the glorification and marketing of guns, as if these were causing our implosion.

They aren’t. They’re symptoms, not causes — reactions to widespread heartbreak at the breakdown of what Tocqueville called republican habits of the heart that we used to cultivate.

Equally symptomatic, not causal, are self-avowedly “deviant” and “transgressive” gyrations by people who imagine that the sunset of civic-republican order heralds a liberating, Dionysian dawn. Sloughing off our bad old repressions, we’ve been swept up by the swift market currents that turn countercultures into over-the-counter cultures and promote a free-for-all that’s a free-for-none as citizens become customers chasing “freedoms” for sale.

Even our war-makers’ and -mongers’ grand strategies and the growing militarization of our domestic police forces are more symptomatic than causal of the public derangement that’s rising all around us.

But turning the bearers of such frightening symptoms into our primary villains or scapegoats would only deepen our blindness to the disease, which is as old as the biblical worship of the Golden Calf and as new as Goldman Sachs. It runs deeper than anything that anyone but the Puritans and their Old Testament models tried to tackle.

I’m not suggesting we can or should return to Puritanism! Anyone expecting to recover that faith and way of life is stumbling up dry streambeds toward wellsprings that have themselves run dry. But we do need wellsprings that could fortify us to take risks even more daunting than those taken by the embattled farmers. We’d somehow have to reconfigure or abandon empty comforts, escapes and protections that both free-market conservatives and readers of Salon are accustomed to buying and selling, sometimes against our own best hopes and convictions.

Our cure would also require reweaving a fabric of public candor and comity strong enough to resist the rise of ressentiment, a public psychopathology, once associated with the rise of fascism, in which insecurities, envy and hatreds that many have been nursing in private converge in scary public eruptions that diminish their participants even in seeming to make them big. Ressentiment’s “little-big man” seeks easy targets for frustrations borne of exploitation by powers that he’s afraid to face and reckon with head-on. Blaming scapegoats warps his assessment of his hardships and options and drives him to wreak vengeance on them as soon as there are enough little-big men (and women, of course) to do so en masse under a Glenn Beck or a Sarah Palin.

Whether ressentiment erupts in racist violence, sectarian fanaticism, anti-Communist witch hunts, totalitarian show trials, politically correct cultural revolutions or sadistic escapism, its most telling symptoms are paranoia and routinized bursts of hysteria. Under the ministrations of gifted demagogues, its grievances and pain assume a fleeting brilliance that soon collapses, tragi-comically or catastrophically, on its own cowardice and lies.

Its targets often shift. The 9/11 attacks brought a reprieve of sorts to African-Americans, the republic’s most enduring scapegoats, when the burden of white censure pivoted toward Muslims. Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam lost credibility, but so did whites such as the neoconservative Daniel Pipes, who kept on insisting years after 9/11 that the first black president was a Muslim and a friend of terrorists.

The slipperiness of scapegoating became clear to me in 1993, as I wrote about a deranged black gunman, Colin Ferguson, who’d opened fire in a Long Island Rail Road car, killing six passengers. Even while holding him responsible, I saw him bearing symptoms far more widespread than his private demons. Noting Ferguson’s enthusiasm for a politics of rage, paranoia and death threats then prominent on a black radio station and in demagogic street politics, I warned that even deranged loners are sometimes better attuned to our subconscious hatreds and fears than we care to admit. That was true, too, of Jared Loughner, >the white paranoid-schizophrenic and anti-government fantasist who killed a U.S. District Court judge and six other people while trying to kill but severely wounding U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 13 others in 2011.

While apocalyptic religious and racist ranting can provoke emotionally disturbed people, so can journalism and entertainment that massage hatreds too diffuse to be called racist, religious or ideological. Some school shooters nursed the depictions of violence and lust that are pumped incessantly into young Americans’ horizons with the help of new technologies and investment strategies that ride reckless misreadings of the First Amendment. This hasn’t been done with malevolent intent as often as it’s been done in a kind of civic mindlessness by media corporations incentivized and indeed forced by market pressures to bypass our brains and hearts on the way to our lower viscera and wallets by exaggerating fears of armed home invasion, government takeover and vengeful victory by gunplay.

The invisible disease

Even though relatively few young Americans follow these siren songs into acts of destruction, the public fetishizing of sex and violence without context or caring dampens many others’ faith in society during their formative years. You don’t need to know a lot of developmental psychology or anthropology to know that children crave culturally coherent tests of prowess and loyalty in symbolic rites of passage that ratify their communal belonging. When such rites and symbols fail, some flail about, seeking order in private delusions, Dartmouth College fraternities and public orchestrations of ressentiment.

In 1775, most American communities still filtered such basic generational and human needs through traditions that encompassed kinship bonds and seasonal rhythms. In “Common Sense,” Thomas Paine could urge readers to take their recent experiences of monarchy “to the touchstones of nature” and decide whether they would abide the empire’s abuses. Today, those “touchstones of nature” — and with them, republican convictions about selfhood and society — have been torn up by runaway engines and developments in technology, communications and even intimate biology that would terrify Paine, Adam Smith and John Locke, not to mention those who fired the first shot at Concord. This time, we’re all in bed with the enemy. In “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” 40 years ago, Daniel Bell — no anti-capitalist, but prophetic enough about the worship of Golden Calves — argued that free markets no longer make free men because “economic liberalism has become… corporate oligopoly, and, in the pursuit of private wants, a hedonism that is destructive of social needs.”

He warned that consumer capitalism displaces the needs that the early republic filtered through nature’s rhythms and kinship traditions. It displaces those needs with ginned-up “wants” that “by their nature, are unlimited and insatiable….
- watsonnostaw[T]he rational calculation of efficiency and return” displace “the principle of the public household,” strip-mining and selling off fragments of cultural narratives.

Without civic wellsprings and narratives deep and compelling enough to strengthen a society’s adhesives and disciplines in the hearts of its young, neither free-market conservatives nor world-is-flat neoliberal cosmopolitans can reconcile their professed commitments to ordered, republican liberty with their knee-jerk obedience to riptides of destructive investment that are dissolving republican virtue and sovereignty before our eyes.

No wonder we’re losing our vision, in both senses of the word:

▪ Our foreign-policy savants across the ideological spectrum were too blind see that the Soviet Union was so much weaker than American Cold War propaganda and hysteria insisted that it imploded in 1989. The fabled “missile gap” that John F. Kennedy ran on in 1960 was as imaginary as Saddam Hussein’s WMD, but anyone who tried telling either of those truths was charged with a “failure of nerve” or worse by the blind war-mongers in our midst.

▪ Our business press was too blind to see that a tsunami of predatory lending would wreck the national economy and throw millions from their homes.

▪ Our market-addled Congressional committees and blue-ribbon commissions on national intelligence couldn’t discover, until Edward Snowden revealed it, that public surveillance had taken on an all-devouring life of its own.

▪ Neo-conservative and Vulcan conservative advocates of using American military force to spread democracy abroad couldn’t see that their strategy was doomed because democracy isn’t woven that way and because it was destroying democracy at home in ways that, if unchecked, will destroy the republic whose strengths they’ve so badly misconstrued and betrayed.

▪ Our consumer society, addicted to cheap comforts and quick fixes, can’t see its own Orwellian ensnarement by commercial censors, and it couldn’t take Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” about global warming seriously enough to offset the onrushing damage with the serious sacrifices we have yet to make.

▪ Our gilded political consultants, pollsters and campaign donors were too blind to see the boiling undercurrents that have swept away House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Nor can they see that Cantor’s political demise presages an inflammation of ressentiment so wild that the coming, specious, “Who Lost Iraq?” debate will be accompanied by the shot that some military veteran who feels betrayed will fire at a politician who’s been left holding the empty bag of our civic-republican hopes.

So we are flying almost totally blind, punched bloody by a Hand that we keep insisting is Invisible. We can see only the sickness of the gunmen and of the proliferation of their guns. Treatment of those symptoms is urgently needed, but it will be insufficient to curb the wrecking ball that global capitalism has become on our willfully blind watch, and triage won’t renew the civic fabric.

Exemplary defiance has its place

Whenever republican candor and courage have seemed about to succumb like this to tribal and theocratic delusions or to force and fraud in the past, some citizens have roused others to fend off threats to republican premises and practices:

▪ In 1776 a young schoolteacher named Nathan Hale was caught trying to track and expose the military and intelligence operations of the only established, legitimate government of his time. But just before his hanging he said, “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country” and became an incarnation of a nascent republic.

▪ Hale’s dignity in adversity, unfathomable to many of us these days, anticipated that of Martin Luther King, Jr., and black churchgoers who walked unarmed and trembling toward armed men and dogs with nothing but their faith and their long-shot strategy to delegitimate the seemingly impregnable segregationist establishment of their time by appealing to republican principles and an American civil religion whose theology was as vague as that of the founders.

▪ Hale’s dignity also anticipated that of three Yale seniors I came upon one wintry morning in 1968 as they gave university chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr., their military draft cards to announce their resistance to the U. S. Government on behalf of the American republic.

“The government says we’re criminals, but we say the government is criminal for waging this war,” said one of the seniors, struggling to find his voice. For all we knew, these guys were about to be arrested on the spot, and some of us felt arrested morally by their example because they were ready to pay the penalty of law in order to affirm their commitment to honest law itself.

Coffin, who held to a Calvinist theology that, like King’s, saw resistance to tyranny as obedience to God, was present to bless a courage that few national-security state conservatives understand, in the idiom of an American civil-religion few neoliberals and post-modern leftists understand. When he quoted Dylan Thomas’ “Do not go gentle into that good night; rage, rage, against the dying of the light,” that civil religion seemed to awaken briefly and to walk and talk again, re-moralizing the state and the law, and the silent, wild confusion I was feeling gave way to something like awe. (I described this experience in The Washington Monthly in 2000, during the protracted “election” of George W. Bush.)

▪ Hale’s courage also anticipated Edward Snowden’s. Both young men may have been impetuous and otherwise flawed in some respects, but they showed that resistance to corrupted power requires not only prowess, means, and will, but an elusive, republican sensibility that’s cultivated in civil society and confirmed in little daily interactions long before it emerges in demonstrations of civic courage that startle and move other citizens.

With a wonderment somewhat like Hegel’s, the German political philosopher Jurgen Habermas marveled at this “constitutional patriotism” in American citizens who possessed what Gibbon described as “that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger, and the habit of command.”

When I tell young millennials these stories, though, many of them listen pretty much as they would to tales about knights in shining armor, long ago and far away. Much closer to them are the school shootings and Internet mayhem that make brave citizenship seem archaic, implausible, and irrelevant to self-discovery and social change.

Yet republican expectations do have ways of resurfacing whenever “We, the people” begin to imagine what our lives would be like, singly and together, if we had to live without them. Not everyone can be seduced or intimidated away from them.

Still, so many Americans are generations removed from any easily recoverable religious or ethno-racial identity or other adhesive that we have to ask: Where are the touchstones or narratives strong enough renew public virtues and beliefs that neither markets nor the liberal state do much to nourish or defend?

Nourishing a new liberal order

The question should prompt a quest for a political culture that isn’t too commercial and vapid and that isn’t held together only by demagoguery and delusion. No reconfiguration of today’s capitalism will be possible without something better than that. Yet no think tank, legislature or foundation can carry that quest or that reconfiguration to a just conclusion. Nor can an Occupy Wall Street that isn’t grounded in something deeper than its own noble effort to be the change it wants us all to make.

Nor can our “illness” be cured by champions of a new foreign-policy “realism” such as Robert Kagan, who urge us to face the inevitable challenges of a world where only willpower and force can sustain the liberal order that many Americans take for granted. That’s right as far as it goes, but it begs the question of where willpower comes from and what, within the liberal order itself, is sapping that willpower.

Quoting Michael Ignatieff, Kagan speculates candidly that liberal civilization itself “runs deeply against the human grain and is achieved and sustained only by the most unremitting struggle against human nature.” Perhaps, Kagan adds, “this fragile democratic garden requires the protection of a liberal world order, with constant feeding, watering, weeding, and the fencing off of an ever-encroaching jungle.” But he can’t seem to face the challenge posed by the new shots heard ’round the world from America: The jungle and its encroachments begin not only abroad but within our own garden.

What seems our greatest weakness could be one of our greatest strengths, although it, too, won’t be enough: Even 150 years after the founding, the philosopher George Santayana wrote that Americans still heralded the Enlightenment’s entry into history precisely because they’d “all been uprooted from their several soils and ancestries and plunged together into one vortex, whirling irresistible in a space otherwise quite empty. To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education and a career….”

Although there’s plenty to regret and respect in the traditions we’ve lost, there’s no turning back from the “moral condition” and “career” we face as citizens. We have no choice but to keep faith with the republic and one another. If Americans have a manifest destiny now, it’s to lead in weaving a new republican fabric that markets can serve but not subvert.

In 2008, Barack Obama seemed to incarnate so brilliantly the promise of weaving our diversity into a new republican discipline — he even invoked Puritan and biblical wellsprings in some of his speeches — that many people ’round the world considered him a prophet who would satisfy their hunger for new narratives. Probably no national political leader ever can do that.

The narratives the world needs now will have to come from other prophets and leaders yet unsung. I do think that Americans will be strong among them, if only because we’ve had so much experience generating that hunger by generating the civic-republican-capitalist effort that has failed.

Jim Sleeper is the author of Liberal Racism (1997) and The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (1990)
More Jim Sleeper.

edit: lol

a few spellign errors but otherwise flawless
- the_cause2000

- Doppleganger

what?

Series of decadal sunspot numbers, reconstructed between 1150 BC and 1950 AD. The ensemble mean (solid line) and inferred 95% CI (shading) are shown. Decadal group sunspot numbers directly observed since 1610 AD are shown in red. Horizontal dashed lines define the bounds of the three suggested modes: Grand minimum, Regular and Grand maximum modes, denoted "Min", "Regular" and "Max", respectively. Note that the maximum mode occurred in the second half of the 20th century. Courtesy: authors and Astronomy and Astrophysics.


Research published in an astronomy journal suggests that high solar output seen in the second half of the last century was a once in 3,000 year event.

This astronomical finding based on a careful analysis of sunspot activity has clear implications for climate science as the so called “grand maximum” in solar output identified by the researchers and observed between 1950 and 2009 co-incided with the rapid warming of global surface temperatures seen during the second half of the 20th century.

The international team of space scientists from Finland, France, Switzerland and Russia who authored the paper, “Evidence for distinct modes of solar activity” which appeared in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, do not explicitly link their results to climate science.

They state that the sun has several modes of activity and oscillates between periods of higher and lower output. “The distribution of solar activity is clearly bi-modal, implying the existence of distinct modes of activity. The main regular activity mode corresponds to moderate activity that varies in a relatively narrow band between sunspot numbers ≈ 20 and 67. The existence of a separate Grand minimum mode with reduced solar activity, which cannot be explained by random fluctuations of the regular mode, is confirmed at a high confidence level,” they state.

There is an indication that the Grand maximum seen between 1950 and 2009 also corresponds to a separate mode of activity, they state, “but the low statistics does not allow us to firmly conclude on this, yet”. The low statistics they refer to are because the solar output seen during this period was only observed once during the 3,000 or so years covered by the study.

The research was based on analysis of carbon-14 and magnetic evidence contained in sediments and rocks to reconstruct solar activity over a 3,000 year period.

The implications of this result are controversial as they appear to fly in the face of evidence presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and accepted by many climate scientists that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) have been the main factor driving up global temperatures in the industrial age and that the sun has played a minor role.

This finding that the period of most intense global warming has coincided with an unprecedented peak in recorded solar output will add pressure onto the IPCC to look again at the interconnection between the sun and the climate.

This is not the first paper this year to potentially finger the sun as an agent in recent global warming. Earlier this year reportingclimatescience.com reported on research from China published in a peer reviewed Chinese language journal that claimed that there is a strong correlation between solar output and the warming of the Earth. The paper implied that the climate models used by the IPCC may have "underestimated" the impact of natural factors on climate change.

The study claimed to demonstrate the existence of significant resonance cycles and high correlations between solar activity and the Earth's averaged surface temperature during centuries, according to an accompanying press release. The press release also claims that a peer reviewer of this paper stated "this work provides a possible explanation for the global warming".

The press release stated: "climate models of IPCC seem to underestimate the impact of natural factors on the climate change, while overstate that of human activities". It added that the study "implies that the "modern maximum" of solar activity agrees well with the recent global warming of the Earth. A significant correlation between them can be found".

This key finding of the Chinese research that there has been a recent peak in solar activity is consistent with the key finding of the Astronomy & Astrophysics paper.
Abstract

Aims. The Sun shows strong variability in its magnetic activity, from Grand minima to Grand maxima, but the nature of the variability is not fully understood, mostly because of the insufficient length of the directly observed solar activity records and of uncertainties related to long-term reconstructions. Here we present a new adjustment-free reconstruction of solar activity over three millennia and study its different modes.

Methods. We present a new adjustment-free, physical reconstruction of solar activity over the past three millennia, using the latest verified carbon cycle, 14C production, and archeomagnetic field models. This great improvement allowed us to study different modes of solar activity at an unprecedented level of details.

Results. The distribution of solar activity is clearly bi-modal, implying the existence of distinct modes of activity. The main regular activity mode corresponds to moderate activity that varies in a relatively narrow band between sunspot numbers 20 and 67. The existence of a separate Grand minimum mode with reduced solar activity, which cannot be explained by random fluctuations of the regular mode, is confirmed at a high confidence level. The possible existence of a separate Grand maximum mode is also suggested, but the statistics is too low to reach a confident conclusion.

Conclusions. The Sun is shown to operate in distinct modes – a main general mode, a Grand minimum mode corresponding to an inactive Sun, and a possible Grand maximum mode corresponding to an unusually active Sun. These results provide important constraints for both dynamo models of Sun-like stars and investigations of possible solar influence on Earth’s climate.
Citation

Evidence for distinct modes of solar activity by I. G. Usoskin, G. Hulot, Y. Gallet, R. Roth, A. Licht, F. Joos, G. A. Kovaltsov, E. Thébaultand A. Khokhlov published inAstronomy and Astrophysics A&A Volume 562, February 2014 http://www.aanda.org/arti...a23391-14/aa23391-14.html

Read the abstract and get the paper here.
See also

Our story on recent Chinese research that suggested the Sun played a significant role in global warming http://www.aanda.org/arti...a23391-14/aa23391-14.html

[quote=watsonnostaw]For centuries most Americans have believed that “the shot heard ’round the world” in 1775 from Concord, Massachusetts, heralded the Enlightenment’s entry into history. Early observers of America such as G.W.F. Hegel, Edward Gibbon and Edmund Burke believed that, too. A new kind of republican citizen was rising, amid and against adherents of theocracy, divine-right monarchy, aristocracy and mercantilism. Republican citizens were quickening humanity’s stride toward horizons radiant with promises never before held and shared as widely as they were in America.

The creation of the United States really was a Novus ordo seclorum, a New Order of the Ages, a society’s first self-aware, if fumbling and compromised, effort to live by the liberal expectation that autonomous individuals could govern themselves together without having to impose religious doctrines or mystical narratives of tribal blood or soil. With barely a decorous nod to The Creator, the founders of the American republic conferred on one another the right to have rights, a distinguished group of them constituting the others as “We, the people.”

That revolutionary effort is not just in trouble now, or endangered, or under attack, or reinventing itself. It’s in prison, with no prospect of parole, and many Americans, including me, who wring our hands or wave our arms about this are actually among the jailers, or we’ve sleepwalked ourselves and others into the cage and have locked ourselves in. We haven’t yet understood the shots fired and heard ’round the world from 74 American schools, colleges and military bases since the Sandy Hook School massacre of December 2012.

These shots haven’t been fired by embattled farmers at invading armies. They haven’t been fired by terrorists who’ve penetrated our surveillance and security systems. With few exceptions, they haven’t been fired by aggrieved non-white Americans. They’ve been fired mostly by young, white American citizens at other white citizens, and by American

Series of decadal sunspot numbers, reconstructed between 1150 BC and 1950 AD. The ensemble mean (solid line) and inferred 95% CI (shading) are shown. Decadal group sunspot numbers directly observed since 1610 AD are shown in red. Horizontal dashed lines define the bounds of the three suggested modes: Grand minimum, Regular and Grand maximum modes, denoted "Min", "Regular" and "Max", respectively. Note that the maximum mode occurred in the second half of the 20th century. Courtesy: authors and Astronomy and Astrophysics.


Research published in an astronomy journal suggests that high solar output seen in the second half of the last century was a once in 3,000 year event.

This astronomical finding based on a careful analysis of sunspot activity has clear implications for climate science as the so called “grand maximum” in solar output identified by the researchers and observed between 1950 and 2009 co-incided with the rapid warming of global surface temperatures seen during the second half of the 20th century.

The international team of space scientists from Finland, France, Switzerland and Russia who authored the paper, “Evidence for distinct modes of solar activity” which appeared in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, do not explicitly link their results to climate science.

They state that the sun has several modes of activity and oscillates between periods of higher and lower output. “The distribution of solar activity is clearly bi-modal, implying the existence of distinct modes of activity. The main regular activity mode corresponds to moderate activity that varies in a relatively narrow band between sunspot numbers ≈ 20 and 67. The existence of a separate Grand minimum mode with reduced solar activity, which cannot be explained by random fluctuations of the regular mode, is confirmed at a high confidence level,” they state.

There is an indication that the Grand maximum seen between 1950 and 2009 also corresponds to a separate mode of activity, they state, “but the low statistics does not allow us to firmly conclude on this, yet”. The low statistics they refer to are because the solar output seen during this period was only observed once during the 3,000 or so years covered by the study.

The research was based on analysis of carbon-14 and magnetic evidence contained in sediments and rocks to reconstruct solar activity over a 3,000 year period.

The implications of this result are controversial as they appear to fly in the face of evidence presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and accepted by many climate scientists that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) have been the main factor driving up global temperatures in the industrial age and that the sun has played a minor role.

This finding that the period of most intense global warming has coincided with an unprecedented peak in recorded solar output will add pressure onto the IPCC to look again at the interconnection between the sun and the climate.

This is not the first paper this year to potentially finger the sun as an agent in recent global warming. Earlier this year reportingclimatescience.com reported on research from China published in a peer reviewed Chinese language journal that claimed that there is a strong correlation between solar output and the warming of the Earth. The paper implied that the climate models used by the IPCC may have "underestimated" the impact of natural factors on climate change.

The study claimed to demonstrate the existence of significant resonance cycles and high correlations between solar activity and the Earth's averaged surface temperature during centuries, according to an accompanying press release. The press release also claims that a peer reviewer of this paper stated "this work provides a possible explanation for the global warming".

The press release stated: "climate models of IPCC seem to underestimate the impact of natural factors on the climate change, while overstate that of human activities". It added that the study "implies that the "modern maximum" of solar activity agrees well with the recent global warming of the Earth. A significant correlation between them can be found".

This key finding of the Chinese research that there has been a recent peak in solar activity is consistent with the key finding of the Astronomy & Astrophysics paper.
Abstract

Aims. The Sun shows strong variability in its magnetic activity, from Grand minima to Grand maxima, but the nature of the variability is not fully understood, mostly because of the insufficient length of the directly observed solar activity records and of uncertainties related to long-term reconstructions. Here we present a new adjustment-free reconstruction of solar activity over three millennia and study its different modes.

Methods. We present a new adjustment-free, physical reconstruction of solar activity over the past three millennia, using the latest verified carbon cycle, 14C production, and archeomagnetic field models. This great improvement allowed us to study different modes of solar activity at an unprecedented level of details.

Results. The distribution of solar activity is clearly bi-modal, implying the existence of distinct modes of activity. The main regular activity mode corresponds to moderate activity that varies in a relatively narrow band between sunspot numbers 20 and 67. The existence of a separate Grand minimum mode with reduced solar activity, which cannot be explained by random fluctuations of the regular mode, is confirmed at a high confidence level. The possible existence of a separate Grand maximum mode is also suggested, but the statistics is too low to reach a confident conclusion.

Conclusions. The Sun is shown to operate in distinct modes – a main general mode, a Grand minimum mode corresponding to an inactive Sun, and a possible Grand maximum mode corresponding to an unusually active Sun. These results provide important constraints for both dynamo models of Sun-like stars and investigations of possible solar influence on Earth’s climate.
Citation

Evidence for distinct modes of solar activity by I. G. Usoskin, G. Hulot, Y. Gallet, R. Roth, A. Licht, F. Joos, G. A. Kovaltsov, E. Thébaultand A. Khokhlov published inAstronomy and Astrophysics A&A Volume 562, February 2014 http://www.aanda.org/arti...a23391-14/aa23391-14.html

Read the abstract and get the paper here.
See also

Our story on recent Chinese research that suggested the Sun played a significant role in global warming http://www.aanda.org/arti...a23391-14/aa23391-14.html
- Doppleganger

For centuries most Americans have believed that “the shot heard ’round the world” in 1775 from Concord, Massachusetts, heralded the Enlightenment’s entry into history. Early observers of America such as G.W.F. Hegel, Edward Gibbon and Edmund Burke believed that, too. A new kind of republican citizen was rising, amid and against adherents of theocracy, divine-right monarchy, aristocracy and mercantilism. Republican citizens were quickening humanity’s stride toward horizons radiant with promises never before held and shared as widely as they were in America.

The creation of the United States really was a Novus ordo seclorum, a New Order of the Ages, a society’s first self-aware, if fumbling and compromised, effort to live by the liberal expectation that autonomous individuals could govern themselves together without having to impose religious doctrines or mystical narratives of tribal blood or soil. With barely a decorous nod to The Creator, the founders of the American republic conferred on one another the right to have rights, a distinguished group of them constituting the others as “We, the people.”

That revolutionary effort is not just in trouble now, or endangered, or under attack, or reinventing itself. It’s in prison, with no prospect of parole, and many Americans, including me, who wring our hands or wave our arms about this are actually among the jailers, or we’ve sleepwalked ourselves and others into the cage and have locked ourselves in. We haven’t yet understood the shots fired and heard ’round the world from 74 American schools, colleges and military bases since the Sandy Hook School massacre of December 2012.

These shots haven’t been fired by embattled farmers at invading armies. They haven’t been fired by terrorists who’ve penetrated our surveillance and security systems. With few exceptions, they haven’t been fired by aggrieved non-white Americans. They’ve been fired mostly by young, white American citizens at other white citizens, and by American soldiers at other American soldiers, inside the very institutions where republican virtues and beliefs are nurtured and defended.

They’ve been fired from within a body politic so drained of candor and trust that, beneath our continuing lip-service to republican premises and practices, we’ve let a court conflate the free speech of flesh-and-blood citizens with the disembodied wealth of anonymous shareholders. And we’ve let lawmakers, bought or intimidated by gun peddlers and zealots, render us helpless against torrents of marketed fear and vengeance that are dissolving a distinctively American democratic ethos the literary historian Daniel Aaron characterized as “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free.”

Many Americans are adapting to living with variants of force and fraud that erupt in road rage; lethal stampedes by shoppers on sale days; security precautions in their homes against the prospect of armed invasion; gladiatorialization and corruption in sports; nihilism in entertainment that fetishizes violence without context and sex without attachment ; the casino-like financing of utterly unproductive economic activities such as the entertainment I’ve just mentioned and the predatory lending that has tricked millions out of their homes; the commercial groping and goosing of private lives and public spaces, even in the marketing of ordinary consumer goods; and the huge, new prison industry that Americans have created to deter or punish broken, violent men, most of them non-white, only to find schools in even the whitest, “safest” neighborhoods imprisoned by fear of white gunmen who’ve often been students themselves.

Abroad, meanwhile, thousands more shots, fiendish and celebratory, are being fired into the corpses of American national-security and nation-building projects by terrorists and fanatics we were told had been decimated. These projects cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives, limbs, homes and hopes, including those of American soldiers, contractors and idealists. Their sacrifices can’t justify retroactively what shouldn’t have been undertaken in the first place.

Stressed by all this republican derangement, millions are spending billions on palliatives, medications, addictions and even surveillance designed to protect them from themselves. All those vials, syringes, security systems and shootings reflect the insinuation of what Gibbon called “a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire…” until Roman citizens “no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honour, the presence of danger, and the habit of command. They received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign, and trusted for their defence to a mercenary army.” Only a few late-Roman republicans, recalling their old freedoms, concluded, with Livy, that “We have become too ill to bear our sickness or their cures.”

What went wrong?

You might argue, and quite rightly, that “We, the people” have always subverted the truths we’d held to be self-evident, beginning with slavery and continuing with plutocracy. Yet somehow the republic kept experiencing what Lincoln called “a new birth of freedom,” thanks only partly to the fortuitous confluence of two oceans’ protection, a vast continent’s ever-alluring frontier and unending streams of aspiring immigrants:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land,
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates will stand
A mighty woman with a torch
Whose flame is the imprisoned lightning,
And her name: Mother of Exiles

True enough, the republic thus limned by Emma Lazarus in “The New Colossus,” her poem for the Statue of Liberty, needed those exiles for its labor market. And it still had a guiding aristocracy of sorts, but supposedly only “an aristocracy of talent and virtue,” as Jefferson put it, and not one of blood and ill-gotten wealth. True, too, certain lingering Puritan beliefs had nourished in the embattled farmers (and, even long before 1775, in some of the Puritans themselves) a conviction that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God. That injunction to defy worldly power sometimes in the name of a Higher Power legitimated individual conscience and autonomy right up through the nonviolent defiance of the best of the civil-rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s.

But the American emphasis on individual conscience and autonomy also gestated a liberal capitalist republic that has reduced individualism to market exchanges in ways that are now destroying both individuals and the society.

A liberal capitalist republic has to rely on its citizens to uphold voluntarily certain public virtues and beliefs that neither the liberal state nor markets can nourish or defend. The liberal state isn’t supposed to judge between one way of life and another, after all; and markets reward you as a self-interested consumer and investor, not as a citizen who might put such interests aside at times to advance a greater good that self-interest alone can’t achieve.

The moral silence and often bankruptcy of states and markets leaves citizen-leaders to be nourished and trained all the more intensively in institutions that stand somewhat apart from the state and markets. The Puritan founders of America’s oldest colleges understood this, but they expected that those colleges’ graduates would serve a theocratic state that would control markets and everything else. We’re right to dismiss the Puritans’ theocracy because it was repressive and hypocritical. But we’re wrong to have lost a side of its animating spirit that would have kept markets from controlling and devouring republican government and even our bodies and ourselves.

Symptoms and scapegoats hide the disease

Having miscarried republican self-discipline and conviction so badly, we find ourselves scrambling to monitor, measure and control the consequences, such as the proliferation of mental illness and the glorification and marketing of guns, as if these were causing our implosion.

They aren’t. They’re symptoms, not causes — reactions to widespread heartbreak at the breakdown of what Tocqueville called republican habits of the heart that we used to cultivate.

Equally symptomatic, not causal, are self-avowedly “deviant” and “transgressive” gyrations by people who imagine that the sunset of civic-republican order heralds a liberating, Dionysian dawn. Sloughing off our bad old repressions, we’ve been swept up by the swift market currents that turn countercultures into over-the-counter cultures and promote a free-for-all that’s a free-for-none as citizens become customers chasing “freedoms” for sale.

Even our war-makers’ and -mongers’ grand strategies and the growing militarization of our domestic police forces are more symptomatic than causal of the public derangement that’s rising all around us.

But turning the bearers of such frightening symptoms into our primary villains or scapegoats would only deepen our blindness to the disease, which is as old as the biblical worship of the Golden Calf and as new as Goldman Sachs. It runs deeper than anything that anyone but the Puritans and their Old Testament models tried to tackle.

I’m not suggesting we can or should return to Puritanism! Anyone expecting to recover that faith and way of life is stumbling up dry streambeds toward wellsprings that have themselves run dry. But we do need wellsprings that could fortify us to take risks even more daunting than those taken by the embattled farmers. We’d somehow have to reconfigure or abandon empty comforts, escapes and protections that both free-market conservatives and readers of Salon are accustomed to buying and selling, sometimes against our own best hopes and convictions.

Our cure would also require reweaving a fabric of public candor and comity strong enough to resist the rise of ressentiment, a public psychopathology, once associated with the rise of fascism, in which insecurities, envy and hatreds that many have been nursing in private converge in scary public eruptions that diminish their participants even in seeming to make them big. Ressentiment’s “little-big man” seeks easy targets for frustrations borne of exploitation by powers that he’s afraid to face and reckon with head-on. Blaming scapegoats warps his assessment of his hardships and options and drives him to wreak vengeance on them as soon as there are enough little-big men (and women, of course) to do so en masse under a Glenn Beck or a Sarah Palin.

Whether ressentiment erupts in racist violence, sectarian fanaticism, anti-Communist witch hunts, totalitarian show trials, politically correct cultural revolutions or sadistic escapism, its most telling symptoms are paranoia and routinized bursts of hysteria. Under the ministrations of gifted demagogues, its grievances and pain assume a fleeting brilliance that soon collapses, tragi-comically or catastrophically, on its own cowardice and lies.

Its targets often shift. The 9/11 attacks brought a reprieve of sorts to African-Americans, the republic’s most enduring scapegoats, when the burden of white censure pivoted toward Muslims. Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam lost credibility, but so did whites such as the neoconservative Daniel Pipes, who kept on insisting years after 9/11 that the first black president was a Muslim and a friend of terrorists.

The slipperiness of scapegoating became clear to me in 1993, as I wrote about a deranged black gunman, Colin Ferguson, who’d opened fire in a Long Island Rail Road car, killing six passengers. Even while holding him responsible, I saw him bearing symptoms far more widespread than his private demons. Noting Ferguson’s enthusiasm for a politics of rage, paranoia and death threats then prominent on a black radio station and in demagogic street politics, I warned that even deranged loners are sometimes better attuned to our subconscious hatreds and fears than we care to admit. That was true, too, of Jared Loughner, >the white paranoid-schizophrenic and anti-government fantasist who killed a U.S. District Court judge and six other people while trying to kill but severely wounding U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 13 others in 2011.

While apocalyptic religious and racist ranting can provoke emotionally disturbed people, so can journalism and entertainment that massage hatreds too diffuse to be called racist, religious or ideological. Some school shooters nursed the depictions of violence and lust that are pumped incessantly into young Americans’ horizons with the help of new technologies and investment strategies that ride reckless misreadings of the First Amendment. This hasn’t been done with malevolent intent as often as it’s been done in a kind of civic mindlessness by media corporations incentivized and indeed forced by market pressures to bypass our brains and hearts on the way to our lower viscera and wallets by exaggerating fears of armed home invasion, government takeover and vengeful victory by gunplay.

The invisible disease

Even though relatively few young Americans follow these siren songs into acts of destruction, the public fetishizing of sex and violence without context or caring dampens many others’ faith in society during their formative years. You don’t need to know a lot of developmental psychology or anthropology to know that children crave culturally coherent tests of prowess and loyalty in symbolic rites of passage that ratify their communal belonging. When such rites and symbols fail, some flail about, seeking order in private delusions, Dartmouth College fraternities and public orchestrations of ressentiment.

In 1775, most American communities still filtered such basic generational and human needs through traditions that encompassed kinship bonds and seasonal rhythms. In “Common Sense,” Thomas Paine could urge readers to take their recent experiences of monarchy “to the touchstones of nature” and decide whether they would abide the empire’s abuses. Today, those “touchstones of nature” — and with them, republican convictions about selfhood and society — have been torn up by runaway engines and developments in technology, communications and even intimate biology that would terrify Paine, Adam Smith and John Locke, not to mention those who fired the first shot at Concord. This time, we’re all in bed with the enemy. In “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” 40 years ago, Daniel Bell — no anti-capitalist, but prophetic enough about the worship of Golden Calves — argued that free markets no longer make free men because “economic liberalism has become… corporate oligopoly, and, in the pursuit of private wants, a hedonism that is destructive of social needs.”

He warned that consumer capitalism displaces the needs that the early republic filtered through nature’s rhythms and kinship traditions. It displaces those needs with ginned-up “wants” that “by their nature, are unlimited and insatiable….
- watsonnostaw[T]he rational calculation of efficiency and return” displace “the principle of the public household,” strip-mining and selling off fragments of cultural narratives.

Without civic wellsprings and narratives deep and compelling enough to strengthen a society’s adhesives and disciplines in the hearts of its young, neither free-market conservatives nor world-is-flat neoliberal cosmopolitans can reconcile their professed commitments to ordered, republican liberty with their knee-jerk obedience to riptides of destructive investment that are dissolving republican virtue and sovereignty before our eyes.

No wonder we’re losing our vision, in both senses of the word:

▪ Our foreign-policy savants across the ideological spectrum were too blind see that the Soviet Union was so much weaker than American Cold War propaganda and hysteria insisted that it imploded in 1989. The fabled “missile gap” that John F. Kennedy ran on in 1960 was as imaginary as Saddam Hussein’s WMD, but anyone who tried telling either of those truths was charged with a “failure of nerve” or worse by the blind war-mongers in our midst.

▪ Our business press was too blind to see that a tsunami of predatory lending would wreck the national economy and throw millions from their homes.

▪ Our market-addled Congressional committees and blue-ribbon commissions on national intelligence couldn’t discover, until Edward Snowden revealed it, that public surveillance had taken on an all-devouring life of its own.

▪ Neo-conservative and Vulcan conservative advocates of using American military force to spread democracy abroad couldn’t see that their strategy was doomed because democracy isn’t woven that way and because it was destroying democracy at home in ways that, if unchecked, will destroy the republic whose strengths they’ve so badly misconstrued and betrayed.

▪ Our consumer society, addicted to cheap comforts and quick fixes, can’t see its own Orwellian ensnarement by commercial censors, and it couldn’t take Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” about global warming seriously enough to offset the onrushing damage with the serious sacrifices we have yet to make.

▪ Our gilded political consultants, pollsters and campaign donors were too blind to see the boiling undercurrents that have swept away House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Nor can they see that Cantor’s political demise presages an inflammation of ressentiment so wild that the coming, specious, “Who Lost Iraq?” debate will be accompanied by the shot that some military veteran who feels betrayed will fire at a politician who’s been left holding the empty bag of our civic-republican hopes.

So we are flying almost totally blind, punched bloody by a Hand that we keep insisting is Invisible. We can see only the sickness of the gunmen and of the proliferation of their guns. Treatment of those symptoms is urgently needed, but it will be insufficient to curb the wrecking ball that global capitalism has become on our willfully blind watch, and triage won’t renew the civic fabric.

Exemplary defiance has its place

Whenever republican candor and courage have seemed about to succumb like this to tribal and theocratic delusions or to force and fraud in the past, some citizens have roused others to fend off threats to republican premises and practices:

▪ In 1776 a young schoolteacher named Nathan Hale was caught trying to track and expose the military and intelligence operations of the only established, legitimate government of his time. But just before his hanging he said, “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country” and became an incarnation of a nascent republic.

▪ Hale’s dignity in adversity, unfathomable to many of us these days, anticipated that of Martin Luther King, Jr., and black churchgoers who walked unarmed and trembling toward armed men and dogs with nothing but their faith and their long-shot strategy to delegitimate the seemingly impregnable segregationist establishment of their time by appealing to republican principles and an American civil religion whose theology was as vague as that of the founders.

▪ Hale’s dignity also anticipated that of three Yale seniors I came upon one wintry morning in 1968 as they gave university chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr., their military draft cards to announce their resistance to the U. S. Government on behalf of the American republic.

“The government says we’re criminals, but we say the government is criminal for waging this war,” said one of the seniors, struggling to find his voice. For all we knew, these guys were about to be arrested on the spot, and some of us felt arrested morally by their example because they were ready to pay the penalty of law in order to affirm their commitment to honest law itself.

Coffin, who held to a Calvinist theology that, like King’s, saw resistance to tyranny as obedience to God, was present to bless a courage that few national-security state conservatives understand, in the idiom of an American civil-religion few neoliberals and post-modern leftists understand. When he quoted Dylan Thomas’ “Do not go gentle into that good night; rage, rage, against the dying of the light,” that civil religion seemed to awaken briefly and to walk and talk again, re-moralizing the state and the law, and the silent, wild confusion I was feeling gave way to something like awe. (I described this experience in The Washington Monthly in 2000, during the protracted “election” of George W. Bush.)

▪ Hale’s courage also anticipated Edward Snowden’s. Both young men may have been impetuous and otherwise flawed in some respects, but they showed that resistance to corrupted power requires not only prowess, means, and will, but an elusive, republican sensibility that’s cultivated in civil society and confirmed in little daily interactions long before it emerges in demonstrations of civic courage that startle and move other citizens.

With a wonderment somewhat like Hegel’s, the German political philosopher Jurgen Habermas marveled at this “constitutional patriotism” in American citizens who possessed what Gibbon described as “that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger, and the habit of command.”

When I tell young millennials these stories, though, many of them listen pretty much as they would to tales about knights in shining armor, long ago and far away. Much closer to them are the school shootings and Internet mayhem that make brave citizenship seem archaic, implausible, and irrelevant to self-discovery and social change.

Yet republican expectations do have ways of resurfacing whenever “We, the people” begin to imagine what our lives would be like, singly and together, if we had to live without them. Not everyone can be seduced or intimidated away from them.

Still, so many Americans are generations removed from any easily recoverable religious or ethno-racial identity or other adhesive that we have to ask: Where are the touchstones or narratives strong enough renew public virtues and beliefs that neither markets nor the liberal state do much to nourish or defend?

Nourishing a new liberal order

The question should prompt a quest for a political culture that isn’t too commercial and vapid and that isn’t held together only by demagoguery and delusion. No reconfiguration of today’s capitalism will be possible without something better than that. Yet no think tank, legislature or foundation can carry that quest or that reconfiguration to a just conclusion. Nor can an Occupy Wall Street that isn’t grounded in something deeper than its own noble effort to be the change it wants us all to make.

Nor can our “illness” be cured by champions of a new foreign-policy “realism” such as Robert Kagan, who urge us to face the inevitable challenges of a world where only willpower and force can sustain the liberal order that many Americans take for granted. That’s right as far as it goes, but it begs the question of where willpower comes from and what, within the liberal order itself, is sapping that willpower.

Quoting Michael Ignatieff, Kagan speculates candidly that liberal civilization itself “runs deeply against the human grain and is achieved and sustained only by the most unremitting struggle against human nature.” Perhaps, Kagan adds, “this fragile democratic garden requires the protection of a liberal world order, with constant feeding, watering, weeding, and the fencing off of an ever-encroaching jungle.” But he can’t seem to face the challenge posed by the new shots heard ’round the world from America: The jungle and its encroachments begin not only abroad but within our own garden.

What seems our greatest weakness could be one of our greatest strengths, although it, too, won’t be enough: Even 150 years after the founding, the philosopher George Santayana wrote that Americans still heralded the Enlightenment’s entry into history precisely because they’d “all been uprooted from their several soils and ancestries and plunged together into one vortex, whirling irresistible in a space otherwise quite empty. To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education and a career….”

Although there’s plenty to regret and respect in the traditions we’ve lost, there’s no turning back from the “moral condition” and “career” we face as citizens. We have no choice but to keep faith with the republic and one another. If Americans have a manifest destiny now, it’s to lead in weaving a new republican fabric that markets can serve but not subvert.

In 2008, Barack Obama seemed to incarnate so brilliantly the promise of weaving our diversity into a new republican discipline — he even invoked Puritan and biblical wellsprings in some of his speeches — that many people ’round the world considered him a prophet who would satisfy their hunger for new narratives. Probably no national political leader ever can do that.

The narratives the world needs now will have to come from other prophets and leaders yet unsung. I do think that Americans will be strong among them, if only because we’ve had so much experience generating that hunger by generating the civic-republican-capitalist effort that has failed.

Jim Sleeper is the author of Liberal Racism (1997) and The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (1990)
More Jim Sleeper.

link does not work

Series of decadal sunspot numbers, reconstructed between 1150 BC and 1950 AD. The ensemble mean (solid line) and inferred 95% CI (shading) are shown. Decadal group sunspot numbers directly observed since 1610 AD are shown in red. Horizontal dashed lines define the bounds of the three suggested modes: Grand minimum, Regular and Grand maximum modes, denoted "Min", "Regular" and "Max", respectively. Note that the maximum mode occurred in the second half of the 20th century. Courtesy: authors and Astronomy and Astrophysics.


Research published in an astronomy journal suggests that high solar output seen in the second half of the last century was a once in 3,000 year event.

This astronomical finding based on a careful analysis of sunspot activity has clear implications for climate science as the so called “grand maximum” in solar output identified by the researchers and observed between 1950 and 2009 co-incided with the rapid warming of global surface temperatures seen during the second half of the 20th century.

The international team of space scientists from Finland, France, Switzerland and Russia who authored the paper, “Evidence for distinct modes of solar activity” which appeared in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, do not explicitly link their results to climate science.

They state that the sun has several modes of activity and oscillates between periods of higher and lower output. “The distribution of solar activity is clearly bi-modal, implying the existence of distinct modes of activity. The main regular activity mode corresponds to moderate activity that varies in a relatively narrow band between sunspot numbers ≈ 20 and 67. The existence of a separate Grand minimum mode with reduced solar activity, which cannot be explained by random fluctuations of the regular mode, is confirmed at a high confidence level,” they state.

There is an indication that the Grand maximum seen between 1950 and 2009 also corresponds to a separate mode of activity, they state, “but the low statistics does not allow us to firmly conclude on this, yet”. The low statistics they refer to are because the solar output seen during this period was only observed once during the 3,000 or so years covered by the study.

The research was based on analysis of carbon-14 and magnetic evidence contained in sediments and rocks to reconstruct solar activity over a 3,000 year period.

The implications of this result are controversial as they appear to fly in the face of evidence presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and accepted by many climate scientists that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) have been the main factor driving up global temperatures in the industrial age and that the sun has played a minor role.

This finding that the period of most intense global warming has coincided with an unprecedented peak in recorded solar output will add pressure onto the IPCC to look again at the interconnection between the sun and the climate.

This is not the first paper this year to potentially finger the sun as an agent in recent global warming. Earlier this year reportingclimatescience.com reported on research from China published in a peer reviewed Chinese language journal that claimed that there is a strong correlation between solar output and the warming of the Earth. The paper implied that the climate models used by the IPCC may have "underestimated" the impact of natural factors on climate change.

The study claimed to demonstrate the existence of significant resonance cycles and high correlations between solar activity and the Earth's averaged surface temperature during centuries, according to an accompanying press release. The press release also claims that a peer reviewer of this paper stated "this work provides a possible explanation for the global warming".

The press release stated: "climate models of IPCC seem to underestimate the impact of natural factors on the climate change, while overstate that of human activities". It added that the study "implies that the "modern maximum" of solar activity agrees well with the recent global warming of the Earth. A significant correlation between them can be found".

This key finding of the Chinese research that there has been a recent peak in solar activity is consistent with the key finding of the Astronomy & Astrophysics paper.
Abstract

Aims. The Sun shows strong variability in its magnetic activity, from Grand minima to Grand maxima, but the nature of the variability is not fully understood, mostly because of the insufficient length of the directly observed solar activity records and of uncertainties related to long-term reconstructions. Here we present a new adjustment-free reconstruction of solar activity over three millennia and study its different modes.

Methods. We present a new adjustment-free, physical reconstruction of solar activity over the past three millennia, using the latest verified carbon cycle, 14C production, and archeomagnetic field models. This great improvement allowed us to study different modes of solar activity at an unprecedented level of details.

Results. The distribution of solar activity is clearly bi-modal, implying the existence of distinct modes of activity. The main regular activity mode corresponds to moderate activity that varies in a relatively narrow band between sunspot numbers 20 and 67. The existence of a separate Grand minimum mode with reduced solar activity, which cannot be explained by random fluctuations of the regular mode, is confirmed at a high confidence level. The possible existence of a separate Grand maximum mode is also suggested, but the statistics is too low to reach a confident conclusion.

Conclusions. The Sun is shown to operate in distinct modes – a main general mode, a Grand minimum mode corresponding to an inactive Sun, and a possible Grand maximum mode corresponding to an unusually active Sun. These results provide important constraints for both dynamo models of Sun-like stars and investigations of possible solar influence on Earth’s climate.
Citation

Evidence for distinct modes of solar activity by I. G. Usoskin, G. Hulot, Y. Gallet, R. Roth, A. Licht, F. Joos, G. A. Kovaltsov, E. Thébaultand A. Khokhlov published inAstronomy and Astrophysics A&A Volume 562, February 2014 http://www.aanda.org/arti...a23391-14/aa23391-14.html

Read the abstract and get the paper here.
See also

Our story on recent Chinese research that suggested the Sun played a significant role in global warming http://www.aanda.org/arti...a23391-14/aa23391-14.html
- Doppleganger

[quote=the_cause2000][quote=watsonnostaw]For centuries most Americans have believed that “the shot heard ’round the world” in 1775 from Concord, Massachusetts, heralded the Enlightenment’s entry into history. Early observers of America such as G.W.F. Hegel, Edward Gibbon and Edmund Burke believed that, too. A new kind of republican citizen was rising, amid and against adherents of theocracy, divine-right monarchy, aristocracy and mercantilism. Republican citizens were quickening humanity’s stride toward horizons radiant with promises never before held and shared as widely as they were in America.

The creation of the United States really was a Novus ordo seclorum, a New Order of the Ages, a society’s first self-aware, if fumbling and compromised, effort to live by the liberal expectation that autonomous individuals could govern themselves together without having to impose religious doctrines or mystical narratives of tribal blood or soil. With barely a decorous nod to The Creator, the founders of the American republic conferred on one another the right to have rights, a distinguished group of them constituting the others as “We, the people.”

That revolutionary effort is not just in trouble now, or endangered, or under attack, or reinventing itself. It’s in prison, with no prospect of parole, and many Americans, including me, who wring our hands or wave our arms about this are actually among the jailers, or we’ve sleepwalked ourselves and others into the cage and have locked ourselves in. We haven’t yet understood the shots fired and heard ’round the world from 74 American schools, colleges and military bases since the Sandy Hook School massacre of December 2012.

These shots haven’t been fired by embattled farmers at invading armies. They haven’t been fired by terrorists who’ve penetrated our surveillance and security systems. With few exceptions, they haven’t been fired by aggrieved non-white Americans. They’ve been fired mostly by young, white American citizens at other white citiz

President Obama was happy to announce Friday the next step in his plan to fight global warming: carbon dioxide emissions limits on existing power plants. These limits are predicted to cut U.S. carbon emissions by 30 percent by 2030.

But Obama may be fighting a battle that ended nearly 18 years ago, as global temperatures leveled off in the late 1990s, according to RSS satellite data. Such data shows that there has been no warming since August 1996 — more than 17 years and 9 months ago.

“The 212 months without global warming represents more than half the 423-month satellite data record, which began in January 1979,” wrote UK politician and journalist Christopher Monckton, the third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, last month.

“No one now in high school has lived through global warming,” Monckton wrote, adding that there has been no warming for more than half the 423-month satellite record.

“Recent extreme weather cannot be blamed on global warming, because there has not been any global warming. It is as simple as that,” Monckton added, bashing a claim often made by environmentalists and politicians that a warming world has made weather worse.

The long lull in global warming was first reported by media outlets during 2013. Media outlets have said there has been no warming since 1998, two years later than what Monckton argues.

The Economist reported in March 2013 that “temperatures have not really risen over the past ten years” and that “ over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat.”

“Since 1998, there has been an unexplained ‘standstill’ in the heating of the Earth’s atmosphere,” BBC News reported in June 2013.

There have been a number of explanations for why global warming has been absent the last two decades ranging from an increase in volcanic activity to the theory that warming has been absorbed by the Earth’s oceans. But scientists are still struggling to explain the hiatus in warming.

Despite the lack of certainty, President Obama ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to craft regulations aimed at lowering U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants 30 percent in the coming decades.

This regulation has been heavily opposed by the coal industry, some states and some utilities that rely on coal power. EPA regulations are already forcing hundreds of coal-fired power plants to shut down prematurely, costing jobs and setting the stage for higher energy costs.

“President Obama is delivering on his promise to send electricity prices skyrocketing,” Thomas Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research, said in a statement. “With this new rule, Americans can expect to pay $200 more each year for their electricity.”

“On top of higher electricity prices, Obama’s regulatory cap and trade plan will tax American households hundreds of dollars more per year, harming the elderly, the poor, those on fixed incomes, businesses, families, and local institutions like schools and hospitals,” Pyle added.

The EPA argues that the new regulations will actually lower electricity prices 8 percent due to increased energy efficiency and reducing energy demand. But other analyses predict that energy prices will go up.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reported last week that households and businesses could pay $17 billion more per year for energy because of EPA’s carbon limits. Indeed, power prices were already set to rise due to retiring coal plants before the EPA issued its proposed rule.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/20...al-warming/#ixzz34REzc8lt
- Doppleganger

Figure 1. RSS monthly global mean lower-troposphere temperature anomalies (dark blue) and trend (thick bright blue line), September 1996 to June 2014, showing no trend for 17 years 10 months.



Key facts about global temperature

The RSS satellite dataset shows no global warming at all for 214 months from September 1996 to June 2014. That is 50.2% of the entire 426-month satellite record.

The fastest measured centennial warming rate was in Central England from 1663-1762, at 0.9 Cº/century – before the industrial revolution. It was not our fault.

The global warming trend since 1900 is equivalent to 0.8 Cº per century. This is well within natural variability and may not have much to do with us.

The fastest warming trend lasting ten years or more occurred over the 40 years from 1694-1733 in Central England. It was equivalent to 4.3 Cº per century.

Since 1950, when a human influence on global temperature first became theoretically possible, the global warming trend has been equivalent to 1.2 Cº per century.

The fastest warming rate lasting ten years or more since 1950 occurred over the 33 years from 1974 to 2006. It was equivalent to 2.0 Cº per century.

In 1990, the IPCC’s mid-range prediction of the near-term warming trend was equivalent to 2.8 Cº per century, higher by two-thirds than its current prediction.

The global warming trend since 1990, when the IPCC wrote its first report, is equivalent to 1.4 Cº per century – half of what the IPCC had then predicted.

In 2013 the IPCC’s new mid-range prediction of the near-term warming trend was for warming at a rate equivalent to only 1.7 Cº per century. Even that is exaggerated.

Though the IPCC has cut its near-term warming prediction, it has not cut its high-end business as usual centennial warming prediction of 4.8 Cº warming to 2100.

The IPCC’s predicted 4.8 Cº warming by 2100 is more than twice the greatest rate of warming lasting more than ten years that has been measured since 1950.

The IPCC’s 4.8 Cº-by-2100 prediction is almost four times the observed real-world warming trend since we might in theory have begun influencing it in 1950.

Since 1 January 2001, the dawn of the new millennium, the warming trend on the mean of 5 datasets is nil. No warming for 13 years 5 months.

Recent extreme weather cannot be blamed on global warming, because there has not been any global warming. It is as simple as that.
- Doppleganger

Agriculture
•
plastic ties
•
row cover
•
irrigation piping
•
polyethylene
•
polypropylene
•
bags and packaging
•
pesticides and herbicides
•
food preservatives
•
fertilizers
Clothing and Textiles
•
ballet tights
•
nylon cord
•
everything polyester: blouses, pants, pajamas etc.
•
everything permanent press: shirts, dresses etc.
•
beads
•
bracelets
•
pantyhose
•
nylon zippers
•
plastic hangers
•
purses
•
thongs and flip flops
•
earrings
•
ribbons
•
fake fur
•
windbreakers
•
sandals
•
garment bags
•
shoe laces
•
rain coats
•
iron-on patches
•
sneakers
•
sweaters
•
sofa pillow material
•
tote bags
•
umbrellas
Around the Office
•
ball point pens
•
diskettes
•
thermometer
•
Ink
•
computers
•
business card holders
•
copiers
•
waste baskets
•
calculators
•
printer cartridges
•
microfilm
•
name tags
•
binders
•
erasers
•
rulers
•
scotch tape
•
magic markers
•
telephones
Sports, Hobbies and Games
•
backpacks
•
fishing lures
•
air mattresses
•
cameras
•
beach balls
•
fishing poles
•
hang gliders
•
vinyl cases
•
footballs
•
glue containers
•
puzzles
•
darts
•
Frisbees
•
golf ball and golf bags
•
shotgun shells
•
ear plugs
•
knitting needles
•
waterproof clothing
•
stadium cushions
•
earphones
•
yarn
•
kites
•
tennis racquets
•
fabric dye
•
decoys
•
lifejackets
•
nylon strings
•
face protectors
•
volley balls
•
model cars
•
plastic water guns
•
fishing bobbers
•
soccer balls
•
oil paints
•
parachutes
•
fishing cylume
•
light sticks
•
earphones
•
playing cards
•
photographs
•
monofilament fishing lines
•
diving boards
•
poker chips
•
goggles
•
rollerskate and skateboard wheels
•
whistles
•
guitar strings
•
picks
•
rafts
•
ice chests
•
tents
•
sleeping bags
•
pole vaulting poles
•
motorcycle helmets
•
skis, water skis
•
rubber cement
•
plastic flowerpots
•
hot tub covers
•
sails
•
snorkels
•
monkey bars
•
photo albums
•
wet suits
•
flippers
•
tennis balls
•
boats
•
insulated boots
Infants and Children
•
acrylic toys
•
baby oil
•
laundry baskets
•
waterproof pants
•
baby aspirin
•
bath soap
•
mittens
•
pacifiers
•
baby blankets
•
bibs
•
rattles
•
doubleknit shirts
•
baby bottles
•
disposable diapers
•
baby shoes
•
teething rings
•
nipples and binkies
•
dolls
•
stuffed animals
•
baby lotion
Sports, Hobbies and Games
•
allergy medication
•
cotton-tipped swabs
•
inhalers
•
liquid Pepto-Bismol
•
aspirin
•
first aid cream
•
lancets
•
pill cases
•
band aids
•
first aid kits
•
latex gloves
•
prescription bottles
•
burn lotion
•
glycerin
•
mosquito spray
•
rubbing alcohol
•
chap stick
•
heart valve replacement
•
nasal decongestant
•
surgical tape
•
syringes
•
Vaseline
•
antiseptics
•
hearing aids
•
anesthetics
•
artificial limbs
•
eyeglasses and sunglasses
•
antihistamines
•
cortisone
•
vaporizers
•
denture adhesives
•
laxatives
•
Bactine
•
oxygen masks
•
stethoscopes
•
prescription glasses
•
cough syrup
•
hearing aids
Kitchen and Household
•
vinegar bottles
•
egg cartons
•
meat trays
•
trash bags
•
breadboxes
•
freezer containers
•
melamine dishware
•
tumblers
•
cake decorations
•
jars
•
microwave dishes
•
utensils
•
candles
•
freezer bags
•
milk jugs
•
vacuum bottles
•
coasters
•
gelatin molds
•
nylon spatulas
•
wax paper
•
coffee pots
•
ice cream scoops
•
oven bags
•
mops
•
drinking cups
•
ice trays
•
plastic containers
•
fabric softener
•
detergent bottles
•
plastic table service
•
drain stoppers
•
dish drainers
•
lunch boxes
•
pudding molds
•
sponges
•
dish scrubbers
•
brushes
•
baggies
•
drinking straws
•
Styrofoam
•
paper cup dispensers
•
measuring cups
•
Teflon coated pans
•
table cloths
•
refrigerator shelves
Beauty
•
cologne
•
hair brushes
•
lipstick
•
permanent wave curlers
•
perfume
•
hair color
•
mascara
•
petroleum jelly
•
comb
•
foam rubber curlers
•
shampoo
•
contact lenses and cases
•
hair spray
•
hand lotion
•
shaving foam
•
hair dryers
•
shoe inserts
•
dentures
•
body lotion
•
face masks
•
skin cleanser
•
deodorants
•
moisturizing cream
•
soap holders
•
disposable razors
•
leather conditioner
•
mouthwash
•
sunglasses
•
facial toner
•
lens cleanser
•
nail polish
•
sunscreen
•
tooth brushes
•
toothpaste tubes
•
vitamins
•
synthetic wigs
•
bubble bath
•
soap capsules
Furnishings
•
carpet padding
•
Naugahyde
•
Venetian blinds
•
TV cabinets
•
extension cords
•
picture frames
•
flocked wallpaper
•
shower doors
•
Formica
•
refrigerator lining
•
vinyl wallpaper
•
curtains
•
kitchen carpet
•
shag carpet
•
welcome mats
•
fan blades
•
lamps
•
shower curtain
•
patio furniture
•
swings
•
linoleum
•
upholstery
•
rugs
Building and Home
•
caulking material
•
light switch plates
•
plungers
•
faucet washers
•
clotheslines
•
measuring tape
•
polyurethane stain
•
water pipes
•
electric saws
•
paintbrushes
•
propane bottles
•
wood floor cleaner/wax
•
vinyl electrical tape
•
plastic pipe
•
shingles (asphalt)
•
light panels
•
garden hoses
•
plastic wood spackling paste
•
awnings
•
glazing compound
•
Plexiglas
•
spray paint
•
enamel
•
epoxy paint
•
artificial turf
•
folding doors
•
floor wax
•
glue
•
house paint
•
paint rollers
•
toilet seats
•
water pipes
•
putty
•
solvents
•
roofing material
•
plywood adhesive
•
sockets
•
propane
Automotive
•
antifreeze
•
flat tire fix
•
street paving (asphalt)
•
car battery cases
•
coolant
•
motor oil
•
tires
•
loud speakers
•
bearing grease
•
sports car bodies
•
traffic cones
•
car enamel
•
brake fluid
•
dashboards
•
windshield wipers
•
visors
•
car sound insulation
•
oil filters
•
car seats
•
convertible tops
•
fan belts
•
gasoline
Miscellaneous
•
ash trays
•
dog food dishes
•
toolboxes
•
CDs and DVDs
•
balloons
•
dog leashes
•
tape recorders
•
synthetic rubber
•
bubble gum
•
dog toys
•
flashlights
•
nylon ropes
•
bungee straps
•
flight bags
•
disposable lighters
•
cassette player
•
flea collars
•
flutes
•
lighter fluid
•
cigarette cases
•
electric blankets
•
tool racks
•
name tags
•
cigarette filters
•
ammonia
•
newspaper tubes
•
calibrated containers
•
insect repellent
•
phonograph records (vinyl)
•
crayons
•
ice buckets
•
dyes
•
pillows
•
credit cards
•
flashlights
•
fly swatters
•
plastic cup holders
•
dice
•
movie and camera film
•
k-resin
•
rain bonnets
•
luggage
•
video cassettes
•
charcoal lighter
•
rayon
•
safety glasses, gloves, hats
•
shoe polish
•
signs
•
cassette tapes
•
toys
•
watch bands
•
waterproof boots
•
shopping bags
•
bedspreads
•
checkbooks
•
covers
•
tobacco pouches
•
clothes hangers
•
flea collars
•
flavors
•
masking tape
•
safety flares
•
flags
•
butaneAgriculture
•
plastic ties
•
row cover
•
irrigation piping
•
polyethylene
•
polypropylene
•
bags and packaging
•
pesticides and herbicides
•
food preservatives
•
fertilizers
Clothing and Textiles
•
ballet tights
•
nylon cord
•
everything polyester: blouses, pants, pajamas etc.
•
everything permanent press: shirts, dresses etc.
•
beads
•
bracelets
•
pantyhose
•
nylon zippers
•
plastic hangers
•
purses
•
thongs and flip flops
•
earrings
•
ribbons
•
fake fur
•
windbreakers
•
sandals
•
garment bags
•
shoe laces
•
rain coats
•
iron-on patches
•
sneakers
•
sweaters
•
sofa pillow material
•
tote bags
•
umbrellas
Around the Office
•
ball point pens
•
diskettes
•
thermometer
•
Ink
•
computers
•
business card holders
•
copiers
•
waste baskets
•
calculators
•
printer cartridges
•
microfilm
•
name tags
•
binders
•
erasers
•
rulers
•
scotch tape
•
magic markers
•
telephones
Sports, Hobbies and Games
•
backpacks
•
fishing lures
•
air mattresses
•
cameras
•
beach balls
•
fishing poles
•
hang gliders
•
vinyl cases
•
footballs
•
glue containers
•
puzzles
•
darts
•
Frisbees
•
golf ball and golf bags
•
shotgun shells
•
ear plugs
•
knitting needles
•
waterproof clothing
•
stadium cushions
•
earphones
•
yarn
•
kites
•
tennis racquets
•
fabric dye
•
decoys
•
lifejackets
•
nylon strings
•
face protectors
•
volley balls
•
model cars
•
plastic water guns
•
fishing bobbers
•
soccer balls
•
oil paints
•
parachutes
•
fishing cylume
•
light sticks
•
earphones
•
playing cards
•
photographs
•
monofilament fishing lines
•
diving boards
•
poker chips
•
goggles
•
rollerskate and skateboard wheels
•
whistles
•
guitar strings
•
picks
•
rafts
•
ice chests
•
tents
•
sleeping bags
•
pole vaulting poles
•
motorcycle helmets
•
skis, water skis
•
rubber cement
•
plastic flowerpots
•
hot tub covers
•
sails
•
snorkels
•
monkey bars
•
photo albums
•
wet suits
•
flippers
•
tennis balls
•
boats
•
insulated boots
Infants and Children
•
acrylic toys
•
baby oil
•
laundry baskets
•
waterproof pants
•
baby aspirin
•
bath soap
•
mittens
•
pacifiers
•
baby blankets
•
bibs
•
rattles
•
doubleknit shirts
•
baby bottles
•
disposable diapers
•
baby shoes
•
teething rings
•
nipples and binkies
•
dolls
•
stuffed animals
•
baby lotion
Sports, Hobbies and Games
•
allergy medication
•
cotton-tipped swabs
•
inhalers
•
liquid Pepto-Bismol
•
aspirin
•
first aid cream
•
lancets
•
pill cases
•
band aids
•
first aid kits
•
latex gloves
•
prescription bottles
•
burn lotion
•
glycerin
•
mosquito spray
•
rubbing alcohol
•
chap stick
•
heart valve replacement
•
nasal decongestant
•
surgical tape
•
syringes
•
Vaseline
•
antiseptics
•
hearing aids
•
anesthetics
•
artificial limbs
•
eyeglasses and sunglasses
•
antihistamines
•
cortisone
•
vaporizers
•
denture adhesives
•
laxatives
•
Bactine
•
oxygen masks
•
stethoscopes
•
prescription glasses
•
cough syrup
•
hearing aids
Kitchen and Household
•
vinegar bottles
•
egg cartons
•
meat trays
•
trash bags
•
breadboxes
•
freezer containers
•
melamine dishware
•
tumblers
•
cake decorations
•
jars
•
microwave dishes
•
utensils
•
candles
•
freezer bags
•
milk jugs
•
vacuum bottles
•
coasters
•
gelatin molds
•
nylon spatulas
•
wax paper
•
coffee pots
•
ice cream scoops
•
oven bags
•
mops
•
drinking cups
•
ice trays
•
plastic containers
•
fabric softener
•
detergent bottles
•
plastic table service
•
drain stoppers
•
dish drainers
•
lunch boxes
•
pudding molds
•
sponges
•
dish scrubbers
•
brushes
•
baggies
•
drinking straws
•
Styrofoam
•
paper cup dispensers
•
measuring cups
•
Teflon coated pans
•
table cloths
•
refrigerator shelves
Beauty
•
cologne
•
hair brushes
•
lipstick
•
permanent wave curlers
•
perfume
•
hair color
•
mascara
•
petroleum jelly
•
comb
•
foam rubber curlers
•
shampoo
•
contact lenses and cases
•
hair spray
•
hand lotion
•
shaving foam
•
hair dryers
•
shoe inserts
•
dentures
•
body lotion
•
face masks
•
skin cleanser
•
deodorants
•
moisturizing cream
•
soap holders
•
disposable razors
•
leather conditioner
•
mouthwash
•
sunglasses
•
facial toner
•
lens cleanser
•
nail polish
•
sunscreen
•
tooth brushes
•
toothpaste tubes
•
vitamins
•
synthetic wigs
•
bubble bath
•
soap capsules
Furnishings
•
carpet padding
•
Naugahyde
•
Venetian blinds
•
TV cabinets
•
extension cords
•
picture frames
•
flocked wallpaper
•
shower doors
•
Formica
•
refrigerator lining
•
vinyl wallpaper
•
curtains
•
kitchen carpet
•
shag carpet
•
welcome mats
•
fan blades
•
lamps
•
shower curtain
•
patio furniture
•
swings
•
linoleum
•
upholstery
•
rugs
Building and Home
•
caulking material
•
light switch plates
•
plungers
•
faucet washers
•
clotheslines
•
measuring tape
•
polyurethane stain
•
water pipes
•
electric saws
•
paintbrushes
•
propane bottles
•
wood floor cleaner/wax
•
vinyl electrical tape
•
plastic pipe
•
shingles (asphalt)
•
light panels
•
garden hoses
•
plastic wood spackling paste
•
awnings
•
glazing compound
•
Plexiglas
•
spray paint
•
enamel
•
epoxy paint
•
artificial turf
•
folding doors
•
floor wax
•
glue
•
house paint
•
paint rollers
•
toilet seats
•
water pipes
•
putty
•
solvents
•
roofing material
•
plywood adhesive
•
sockets
•
propane
Automotive
•
antifreeze
•
flat tire fix
•
street paving (asphalt)
•
car battery cases
•
coolant
•
motor oil
•
tires
•
loud speakers
•
bearing grease
•
sports car bodies
•
traffic cones
•
car enamel
•
brake fluid
•
dashboards
•
windshield wipers
•
visors
•
car sound insulation
•
oil filters
•
car seats
•
convertible tops
•
fan belts
•
gasoline
Miscellaneous
•
ash trays
•
dog food dishes
•
toolboxes
•
CDs and DVDs
•
balloons
•
dog leashes
•
tape recorders
•
synthetic rubber
•
bubble gum
•
dog toys
•
flashlights
•
nylon ropes
•
bungee straps
•
flight bags
•
disposable lighters
•
cassette player
•
flea collars
•
flutes
•
lighter fluid
•
cigarette cases
•
electric blankets
•
tool racks
•
name tags
•
cigarette filters
•
ammonia
•
newspaper tubes
•
calibrated containers
•
insect repellent
•
phonograph records (vinyl)
•
crayons
•
ice buckets
•
dyes
•
pillows
•
credit cards
•
flashlights
•
fly swatters
•
plastic cup holders
•
dice
•
movie and camera film
•
k-resin
•
rain bonnets
•
luggage
•
video cassettes
•
charcoal lighter
•
rayon
•
safety glasses, gloves, hats
•
shoe polish
•
signs
•
cassette tapes
•
toys
•
watch bands
•
waterproof boots
•
shopping bags
•
bedspreads
•
checkbooks
•
covers
•
tobacco pouches
•
clothes hangers
•
flea collars
•
flavors
•
masking tape
•
safety flares
•
flags
•
butane
Agriculture
•
plastic ties
•
row cover
•
irrigation piping
•
polyethylene
•
polypropylene
•
bags and packaging
•
pesticides and herbicides
•
food preservatives
•
fertilizers
Clothing and Textiles
•
ballet tights
•
nylon cord
•
everything polyester: blouses, pants, pajamas etc.
•
everything permanent press: shirts, dresses etc.
•
beads
•
bracelets
•
pantyhose
•
nylon zippers
•
plastic hangers
•
purses
•
thongs and flip flops
•
earrings
•
ribbons
•
fake fur
•
windbreakers
•
sandals
•
garment bags
•
shoe laces
•
rain coats
•
iron-on patches
•
sneakers
•
sweaters
•
sofa pillow material
•
tote bags
•
umbrellas
Around the Office
•
ball point pens
•
diskettes
•
thermometer
•
Ink
•
computers
•
business card holders
•
copiers
•
waste baskets
•
calculators
•
printer cartridges
•
microfilm
•
name tags
•
binders
•
erasers
•
rulers
•
scotch tape
•
magic markers
•
telephones
Sports, Hobbies and Games
•
backpacks
•
fishing lures
•
air mattresses
•
cameras
•
beach balls
•
fishing poles
•
hang gliders
•
vinyl cases
•
footballs
•
glue containers
•
puzzles
•
darts
•
Frisbees
•
golf ball and golf bags
•
shotgun shells
•
ear plugs
•
knitting needles
•
waterproof clothing
•
stadium cushions
•
earphones
•
yarn
•
kites
•
tennis racquets
•
fabric dye
•
decoys
•
lifejackets
•
nylon strings
•
face protectors
•
volley balls
•
model cars
•
plastic water guns
•
fishing bobbers
•
soccer balls
•
oil paints
•
parachutes
•
fishing cylume
•
light sticks
•
earphones
•
playing cards
•
photographs
•
monofilament fishing lines
•
diving boards
•
poker chips
•
goggles
•
rollerskate and skateboard wheels
•
whistles
•
guitar strings
•
picks
•
rafts
•
ice chests
•
tents
•
sleeping bags
•
pole vaulting poles
•
motorcycle helmets
•
skis, water skis
•
rubber cement
•
plastic flowerpots
•
hot tub covers
•
sails
•
snorkels
•
monkey bars
•
photo albums
•
wet suits
•
flippers
•
tennis balls
•
boats
•
insulated boots
Infants and Children
•
acrylic toys
•
baby oil
•
laundry baskets
•
waterproof pants
•
baby aspirin
•
bath soap
•
mittens
•
pacifiers
•
baby blankets
•
bibs
•
rattles
•
doubleknit shirts
•
baby bottles
•
disposable diapers
•
baby shoes
•
teething rings
•
nipples and binkies
•
dolls
•
stuffed animals
•
baby lotion
Sports, Hobbies and Games
•
allergy medication
•
cotton-tipped swabs
•
inhalers
•
liquid Pepto-Bismol
•
aspirin
•
first aid cream
•
lancets
•
pill cases
•
band aids
•
first aid kits
•
latex gloves
•
prescription bottles
•
burn lotion
•
glycerin
•
mosquito spray
•
rubbing alcohol
•
chap stick
•
heart valve replacement
•
nasal decongestant
•
surgical tape
•
syringes
•
Vaseline
•
antiseptics
•
hearing aids
•
anesthetics
•
artificial limbs
•
eyeglasses and sunglasses
•
antihistamines
•
cortisone
•
vaporizers
•
denture adhesives
•
laxatives
•
Bactine
•
oxygen masks
•
stethoscopes
•
prescription glasses
•
cough syrup
•
hearing aids
Kitchen and Household
•
vinegar bottles
•
egg cartons
•
meat trays
•
trash bags
•
breadboxes
•
freezer containers
•
melamine dishware
•
tumblers
•
cake decorations
•
jars
•
microwave dishes
•
utensils
•
candles
•
freezer bags
•
milk jugs
•
vacuum bottles
•
coasters
•
gelatin molds
•
nylon spatulas
•
wax paper
•
coffee pots
•
ice cream scoops
•
oven bags
•
mops
•
drinking cups
•
ice trays
•
plastic containers
•
fabric softener
•
detergent bottles
•
plastic table service
•
drain stoppers
•
dish drainers
•
lunch boxes
•
pudding molds
•
sponges
•
dish scrubbers
•
brushes
•
baggies
•
drinking straws
•
Styrofoam
•
paper cup dispensers
•
measuring cups
•
Teflon coated pans
•
table cloths
•
refrigerator shelves
Beauty
•
cologne
•
hair brushes
•
lipstick
•
permanent wave curlers
•
perfume
•
hair color
•
mascara
•
petroleum jelly
•
comb
•
foam rubber curlers
•
shampoo
•
contact lenses and cases
•
hair spray
•
hand lotion
•
shaving foam
•
hair dryers
•
shoe inserts
•
dentures
•
body lotion
•
face masks
•
skin cleanser
•
deodorants
•
moisturizing cream
•
soap holders
•
disposable razors
•
leather conditioner
•
mouthwash
•
sunglasses
•
facial toner
•
lens cleanser
•
nail polish
•
sunscreen
•
tooth brushes
•
toothpaste tubes
•
vitamins
•
synthetic wigs
•
bubble bath
•
soap capsules
Furnishings
•
carpet padding
•
Naugahyde
•
Venetian blinds
•
TV cabinets
•
extension cords
•
picture frames
•
flocked wallpaper
•
shower doors
•
Formica
•
refrigerator lining
•
vinyl wallpaper
•
curtains
•
kitchen carpet
•
shag carpet
•
welcome mats
•
fan blades
•
lamps
•
shower curtain
•
patio furniture
•
swings
•
linoleum
•
upholstery
•
rugs
Building and Home
•
caulking material
•
light switch plates
•
plungers
•
faucet washers
•
clotheslines
•
measuring tape
•
polyurethane stain
•
water pipes
•
electric saws
•
paintbrushes
•
propane bottles
•
wood floor cleaner/wax
•
vinyl electrical tape
•
plastic pipe
•
shingles (asphalt)
•
light panels
•
garden hoses
•
plastic wood spackling paste
•
awnings
•
glazing compound
•
Plexiglas
•
spray paint
•
enamel
•
epoxy paint
•
artificial turf
•
folding doors
•
floor wax
•
glue
•
house paint
•
paint rollers
•
toilet seats
•
water pipes
•
putty
•
solvents
•
roofing material
•
plywood adhesive
•
sockets
•
propane
Automotive
•
antifreeze
•
flat tire fix
•
street paving (asphalt)
•
car battery cases
•
coolant
•
motor oil
•
tires
•
loud speakers
•
bearing grease
•
sports car bodies
•
traffic cones
•
car enamel
•
brake fluid
•
dashboards
•
windshield wipers
•
visors
•
car sound insulation
•
oil filters
•
car seats
•
convertible tops
•
fan belts
•
gasoline
Miscellaneous
•
ash trays
•
dog food dishes
•
toolboxes
•
CDs and DVDs
•
balloons
•
dog leashes
•
tape recorders
•
synthetic rubber
•
bubble gum
•
dog toys
•
flashlights
•
nylon ropes
•
bungee straps
•
flight bags
•
disposable lighters
•
cassette player
•
flea collars
•
flutes
•
lighter fluid
•
cigarette cases
•
electric blankets
•
tool racks
•
name tags
•
cigarette filters
•
ammonia
•
newspaper tubes
•
calibrated containers
•
insect repellent
•
phonograph records (vinyl)
•
crayons
•
ice buckets
•
dyes
•
pillows
•
credit cards
•
flashlights
•
fly swatters
•
plastic cup holders
•
dice
•
movie and camera film
•
k-resin
•
rain bonnets
•
luggage
•
video cassettes
•
charcoal lighter
•
rayon
•
safety glasses, gloves, hats
•
shoe polish
•
signs
•
cassette tapes
•
toys
•
watch bands
•
waterproof boots
•
shopping bags
•
bedspreads
•
checkbooks
•
covers
•
tobacco pouches
•
clothes hangers
•
flea collars
•
flavors
•
masking tape
•
safety flares
•
flags
•
butane

Agriculture
•
plastic ties
•
row cover
•
irrigation piping
•
polyethylene
•
polypropylene
•
bags and packaging
•
pesticides and herbicides
•
food preservatives
•
fertilizers
Clothing and Textiles
•
ballet tights
•
nylon cord
•
everything polyester: blouses, pants, pajamas etc.
•
everything permanent press: shirts, dresses etc.
•
beads
•
bracelets
•
pantyhose
•
nylon zippers
•
plastic hangers
•
purses
•
thongs and flip flops
•
earrings
•
ribbons
•
fake fur
•
windbreakers
•
sandals
•
garment bags
•
shoe laces
•
rain coats
•
iron-on patches
•
sneakers
•
sweaters
•
sofa pillow material
•
tote bags
•
umbrellas
Around the Office
•
ball point pens
•
diskettes
•
thermometer
•
Ink
•
computers
•
business card holders
•
copiers
•
waste baskets
•
calculators
•
printer cartridges
•
microfilm
•
name tags
•
binders
•
erasers
•
rulers
•
scotch tape
•
magic markers
•
telephones
Sports, Hobbies and Games
•
backpacks
•
fishing lures
•
air mattresses
•
cameras
•
beach balls
•
fishing poles
•
hang gliders
•
vinyl cases
•
footballs
•
glue containers
•
puzzles
•
darts
•
Frisbees
•
golf ball and golf bags
•
shotgun shells
•
ear plugs
•
knitting needles
•
waterproof clothing
•
stadium cushions
•
earphones
•
yarn
•
kites
•
tennis racquets
•
fabric dye
•
decoys
•
lifejackets
•
nylon strings
•
face protectors
•
volley balls
•
model cars
•
plastic water guns
•
fishing bobbers
•
soccer balls
•
oil paints
•
parachutes
•
fishing cylume
•
light sticks
•
earphones
•
playing cards
•
photographs
•
monofilament fishing lines
•
diving boards
•
poker chips
•
goggles
•
rollerskate and skateboard wheels
•
whistles
•
guitar strings
•
picks
•
rafts
•
ice chests
•
tents
•
sleeping bags
•
pole vaulting poles
•
motorcycle helmets
•
skis, water skis
•
rubber cement
•
plastic flowerpots
•
hot tub covers
•
sails
•
snorkels
•
monkey bars
•
photo albums
•
wet suits
•
flippers
•
tennis balls
•
boats
•
insulated boots
Infants and Children
•
acrylic toys
•
baby oil
•
laundry baskets
•
waterproof pants
•
baby aspirin
•
bath soap
•
mittens
•
pacifiers
•
baby blankets
•
bibs
•
rattles
•
doubleknit shirts
•
baby bottles
•
disposable diapers
•
baby shoes
•
teething rings
•
nipples and binkies
•
dolls
•
stuffed animals
•
baby lotion
Sports, Hobbies and Games
•
allergy medication
•
cotton-tipped swabs
•
inhalers
•
liquid Pepto-Bismol
•
aspirin
•
first aid cream
•
lancets
•
pill cases
•
band aids
•
first aid kits
•
latex gloves
•
prescription bottles
•
burn lotion
•
glycerin
•
mosquito spray
•
rubbing alcohol
•
chap stick
•
heart valve replacement
•
nasal decongestant
•
surgical tape
•
syringes
•
Vaseline
•
antiseptics
•
hearing aids
•
anesthetics
•
artificial limbs
•
eyeglasses and sunglasses
•
antihistamines
•
cortisone
•
vaporizers
•
denture adhesives
•
laxatives
•
Bactine
•
oxygen masks
•
stethoscopes
•
prescription glasses
•
cough syrup
•
hearing aids
Kitchen and Household
•
vinegar bottles
•
egg cartons
•
meat trays
•
trash bags
•
breadboxes
•
freezer containers
•
melamine dishware
•
tumblers
•
cake decorations
•
jars
•
microwave dishes
•
utensils
•
candles
•
freezer bags
•
milk jugs
•
vacuum bottles
•
coasters
•
gelatin molds
•
nylon spatulas
•
wax paper
•
coffee pots
•
ice cream scoops
•
oven bags
•
mops
•
drinking cups
•
ice trays
•
plastic containers
•
fabric softener
•
detergent bottles
•
plastic table service
•
drain stoppers
•
dish drainers
•
lunch boxes
•
pudding molds
•
sponges
•
dish scrubbers
•
brushes
•
baggies
•
drinking straws
•
Styrofoam
•
paper cup dispensers
•
measuring cups
•
Teflon coated pans
•
table cloths
•
refrigerator shelves
Beauty
•
cologne
•
hair brushes
•
lipstick
•
permanent wave curlers
•
perfume
•
hair color
•
mascara
•
petroleum jelly
•
comb
•
foam rubber curlers
•
shampoo
•
contact lenses and cases
•
hair spray
•
hand lotion
•
shaving foam
•
hair dryers
•
shoe inserts
•
dentures
•
body lotion
•
face masks
•
skin cleanser
•
deodorants
•
moisturizing cream
•
soap holders
•
disposable razors
•
leather conditioner
•
mouthwash
•
sunglasses
•
facial toner
•
lens cleanser
•
nail polish
•
sunscreen
•
tooth brushes
•
toothpaste tubes
•
vitamins
•
synthetic wigs
•
bubble bath
•
soap capsules
Furnishings
•
carpet padding
•
Naugahyde
•
Venetian blinds
•
TV cabinets
•
extension cords
•
picture frames
•
flocked wallpaper
•
shower doors
•
Formica
•
refrigerator lining
•
vinyl wallpaper
•
curtains
•
kitchen carpet
•
shag carpet
•
welcome mats
•
fan blades
•
lamps
•
shower curtain
•
patio furniture
•
swings
•
linoleum
•
upholstery
•
rugs
Building and Home
•
caulking material
•
light switch plates
•
plungers
•
faucet washers
•
clotheslines
•
measuring tape
•
polyurethane stain
•
water pipes
•
electric saws
•
paintbrushes
•
propane bottles
•
wood floor cleaner/wax
•
vinyl electrical tape
•
plastic pipe
•
shingles (asphalt)
•
light panels
•
garden hoses
•
plastic wood spackling paste
•
awnings
•
glazing compound
•
Plexiglas
•
spray paint
•
enamel
•
epoxy paint
•
artificial turf
•
folding doors
•
floor wax
•
glue
•
house paint
•
paint rollers
•
toilet seats
•
water pipes
•
putty
•
solvents
•
roofing material
•
plywood adhesive
•
sockets
•
propane
Automotive
•
antifreeze
•
flat tire fix
•
street paving (asphalt)
•
car battery cases
•
coolant
•
motor oil
•
tires
•
loud speakers
•
bearing grease
•
sports car bodies
•
traffic cones
•
car enamel
•
brake fluid
•
dashboards
•
windshield wipers
•
visors
•
car sound insulation
•
oil filters
•
car seats
•
convertible tops
•
fan belts
•
gasoline
Miscellaneous
•
ash trays
•
dog food dishes
•
toolboxes
•
CDs and DVDs
•
balloons
•
dog leashes
•
tape recorders
•
synthetic rubber
•
bubble gum
•
dog toys
•
flashlights
•
nylon ropes
•
bungee straps
•
flight bags
•
disposable lighters
•
cassette player
•
flea collars
•
flutes
•
lighter fluid
•
cigarette cases
•
electric blankets
•
tool racks
•
name tags
•
cigarette filters
•
ammonia
•
newspaper tubes
•
calibrated containers
•
insect repellent
•
phonograph records (vinyl)
•
crayons
•
ice buckets
•
dyes
•
pillows
•
credit cards
•
flashlights
•
fly swatters
•
plastic cup holders
•
dice
•
movie and camera film
•
k-resin
•
rain bonnets
•
luggage
•
video cassettes
•
charcoal lighter
•
rayon
•
safety glasses, gloves, hats
•
shoe polish
•
signs
•
cassette tapes
•
toys
•
watch bands
•
waterproof boots
•
shopping bags
•
bedspreads
•
checkbooks
•
covers
•
tobacco pouches
•
clothes hangers
•
flea collars
•
flavors
•
masking tape
•
safety flares
•
flags
•
butane

Agriculture
•
plastic ties
•
row cover
•
irrigation piping
•
polyethylene
•
polypropylene
•
bags and packaging
•
pesticides and herbicides
•
food preservatives
•
fertilizers
Clothing and Textiles
•
ballet tights
•
nylon cord
•
everything polyester: blouses, pants, pajamas etc.
•
everything permanent press: shirts, dresses etc.
•
beads
•
bracelets
•
pantyhose
•
nylon zippers
•
plastic hangers
•
purses
•
thongs and flip flops
•
earrings
•
ribbons
•
fake fur
•
windbreakers
•
sandals
•
garment bags
•
shoe laces
•
rain coats
•
iron-on patches
•
sneakers
•
sweaters
•
sofa pillow material
•
tote bags
•
umbrellas
Around the Office
•
ball point pens
•
diskettes
•
thermometer
•
Ink
•
computers
•
business card holders
•
copiers
•
waste baskets
•
calculators
•
printer cartridges
•
microfilm
•
name tags
•
binders
•
erasers
•
rulers
•
scotch tape
•
magic markers
•
telephones
Sports, Hobbies and Games
•
backpacks
•
fishing lures
•
air mattresses
•
cameras
•
beach balls
•
fishing poles
•
hang gliders
•
vinyl cases
•
footballs
•
glue containers
•
puzzles
•
darts
•
Frisbees
•
golf ball and golf bags
•
shotgun shells
•
ear plugs
•
knitting needles
•
waterproof clothing
•
stadium cushions
•
earphones
•
yarn
•
kites
•
tennis racquets
•
fabric dye
•
decoys
•
lifejackets
•
nylon strings
•
face protectors
•
volley balls
•
model cars
•
plastic water guns
•
fishing bobbers
•
soccer balls
•
oil paints
•
parachutes
•
fishing cylume
•
light sticks
•
earphones
•
playing cards
•
photographs
•
monofilament fishing lines
•
diving boards
•
poker chips
•
goggles
•
rollerskate and skateboard wheels
•
whistles
•
guitar strings
•
picks
•
rafts
•
ice chests
•
tents
•
sleeping bags
•
pole vaulting poles
•
motorcycle helmets
•
skis, water skis
•
rubber cement
•
plastic flowerpots
•
hot tub covers
•
sails
•
snorkels
•
monkey bars
•
photo albums
•
wet suits
•
flippers
•
tennis balls
•
boats
•
insulated boots
Infants and Children
•
acrylic toys
•
baby oil
•
laundry baskets
•
waterproof pants
•
baby aspirin
•
bath soap
•
mittens
•
pacifiers
•
baby blankets
•
bibs
•
rattles
•
doubleknit shirts
•
baby bottles
•
disposable diapers
•
baby shoes
•
teething rings
•
nipples and binkies
•
dolls
•
stuffed animals
•
baby lotion
Sports, Hobbies and Games
•
allergy medication
•
cotton-tipped swabs
•
inhalers
•
liquid Pepto-Bismol
•
aspirin
•
first aid cream
•
lancets
•
pill cases
•
band aids
•
first aid kits
•
latex gloves
•
prescription bottles
•
burn lotion
•
glycerin
•
mosquito spray
•
rubbing alcohol
•
chap stick
•
heart valve replacement
•
nasal decongestant
•
surgical tape
•
syringes
•
Vaseline
•
antiseptics
•
hearing aids
•
anesthetics
•
artificial limbs
•
eyeglasses and sunglasses
•
antihistamines
•
cortisone
•
vaporizers
•
denture adhesives
•
laxatives
•
Bactine
•
oxygen masks
•
stethoscopes
•
prescription glasses
•
cough syrup
•
hearing aids
Kitchen and Household
•
vinegar bottles
•
egg cartons
•
meat trays
•
trash bags
•
breadboxes
•
freezer containers
•
melamine dishware
•
tumblers
•
cake decorations
•
jars
•
microwave dishes
•
utensils
•
candles
•
freezer bags
•
milk jugs
•
vacuum bottles
•
coasters
•
gelatin molds
•
nylon spatulas
•
wax paper
•
coffee pots
•
ice cream scoops
•
oven bags
•
mops
•
drinking cups
•
ice trays
•
plastic containers
•
fabric softener
•
detergent bottles
•
plastic table service
•
drain stoppers
•
dish drainers
•
lunch boxes
•
pudding molds
•
sponges
•
dish scrubbers
•
brushes
•
baggies
•
drinking straws
•
Styrofoam
•
paper cup dispensers
•
measuring cups
•
Teflon coated pans
•
table cloths
•
refrigerator shelves
Beauty
•
cologne
•
hair brushes
•
lipstick
•
permanent wave curlers
•
perfume
•
hair color
•
mascara
•
petroleum jelly
•
comb
•
foam rubber curlers
•
shampoo
•
contact lenses and cases
•
hair spray
•
hand lotion
•
shaving foam
•
hair dryers
•
shoe inserts
•
dentures
•
body lotion
•
face masks
•
skin cleanser
•
deodorants
•
moisturizing cream
•
soap holders
•
disposable razors
•
leather conditioner
•
mouthwash
•
sunglasses
•
facial toner
•
lens cleanser
•
nail polish
•
sunscreen
•
tooth brushes
•
toothpaste tubes
•
vitamins
•
synthetic wigs
•
bubble bath
•
soap capsules
Furnishings
•
carpet padding
•
Naugahyde
•
Venetian blinds
•
TV cabinets
•
extension cords
•
picture frames
•
flocked wallpaper
•
shower doors
•
Formica
•
refrigerator lining
•
vinyl wallpaper
•
curtains
•
kitchen carpet
•
shag carpet
•
welcome mats
•
fan blades
•
lamps
•
shower curtain
•
patio furniture
•
swings
•
linoleum
•
upholstery
•
rugs
Building and Home
•
caulking material
•
light switch plates
•
plungers
•
faucet washers
•
clotheslines
•
measuring tape
•
polyurethane stain
•
water pipes
•
electric saws
•
paintbrushes
•
propane bottles
•
wood floor cleaner/wax
•
vinyl electrical tape
•
plastic pipe
•
shingles (asphalt)
•
light panels
•
garden hoses
•
plastic wood spackling paste
•
awnings
•
glazing compound
•
Plexiglas
•
spray paint
•
enamel
•
epoxy paint
•
artificial turf
•
folding doors
•
floor wax
•
glue
•
house paint
•
paint rollers
•
toilet seats
•
water pipes
•
putty
•
solvents
•
roofing material
•
plywood adhesive
•
sockets
•
propane
Automotive
•
antifreeze
•
flat tire fix
•
street paving (asphalt)
•
car battery cases
•
coolant
•
motor oil
•
tires
•
loud speakers
•
bearing grease
•
sports car bodies
•
traffic cones
•
car enamel
•
brake fluid
•
dashboards
•
windshield wipers
•
visors
•
car sound insulation
•
oil filters
•
car seats
•
convertible tops
•
fan belts
•
gasoline
Miscellaneous
•
ash trays
•
dog food dishes
•
toolboxes
•
CDs and DVDs
•
balloons
•
dog leashes
•
tape recorders
•
synthetic rubber
•
bubble gum
•
dog toys
•
flashlights
•
nylon ropes
•
bungee straps
•
flight bags
•
disposable lighters
•
cassette player
•
flea collars
•
flutes
•
lighter fluid
•
cigarette cases
•
electric blankets
•
tool racks
•
name tags
•
cigarette filters
•
ammonia
•
newspaper tubes
•
calibrated containers
•
insect repellent
•
phonograph records (vinyl)
•
crayons
•
ice buckets
•
dyes
•
pillows
•
credit cards
•
flashlights
•
fly swatters
•
plastic cup holders
•
dice
•
movie and camera film
•
k-resin
•
rain bonnets
•
luggage
•
video cassettes
•
charcoal lighter
•
rayon
•
safety glasses, gloves, hats
•
shoe polish
•
signs
•
cassette tapes
•
toys
•
watch bands
•
waterproof boots
•
shopping bags
•
bedspreads
•
checkbooks
•
covers
•
tobacco pouches
•
clothes hangers
•
flea collars
•
flavors
•
masking tape
•
safety flares
•
flags
•
butane
- kicksave856

...

Twenty-year hiatus in rising temperatures has climate scientists puzzled

DEBATE about the reality of a two-decade pause in global warming and what it means has made its way from the sceptical fringe to the mainstream.

In a lengthy article this week, The Economist magazine said if climate scientists were credit-rating agencies, then climate sensitivity - the way climate reacts to changes in carbon-dioxide levels - would be on negative watch but not yet downgraded.

Another paper published by leading climate scientist James Hansen, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says the lower than expected temperature rise between 2000 and the present could be explained by increased emissions from burning coal.

For Hansen the pause is a fact, but it's good news that probably won't last.

International Panel on Climate Change chairman Rajendra Pachauri recently told The Weekend Australian the hiatus would have to last 30 to 40 years "at least" to break the long-term warming trend.

But the fact that global surface temperatures have not followed the expected global warming pattern is now widely accepted.


read more
http://www.telegraph.co.u...uld-be-worried-about.html




- Doppleganger

Why is it the Human caused CO2 that is driving any measurable Global warming?

How could 3.4% of the total CO2 that is only 3.62% of all Greenhouse gases that constitutes only 2% of the total Atmosphere have any measurable impact on Global temperatures???

Why is it NOT the other 96.38% of CO2 that comes from Natural sources (not man made)?




- Doppleganger

The Great Green Con no. 1: The hard proof that finally shows global warming forecasts that are costing you billions were WRONG all along


No, the world ISN'T getting warmer (as you may have noticed). Now we reveal the official data that's making scientists suddenly change their minds about climate doom. So will eco-funded MPs stop waging a green crusade with your money? Well... what do YOU think?

The Mail on Sunday today presents irrefutable evidence that official predictions of global climate warming have been catastrophically flawed.

The graph on this page blows apart the ‘scientific basis’ for Britain reshaping its entire economy and spending billions in taxes and subsidies in order to cut emissions of greenhouse gases. These moves have already added £100 a year to household energy bills

http://www.dailymail.co.u...billions-WRONG-along.html
- Doppleganger

Climate was HOTTER in Roman, medieval times than now: Study
IPCC has got it all wrong,

http://www.theregister.co..._study_of_climate_change/



In AD 1000, the Earth was experiencing an episode of climate warming similar to that of the present day. Temperatures in many parts of the world seem to have risen by at least two or three degrees Fahrenheit. Although the scale of this "global warming" may seem small, its effects on human societies were profound. In Europe, several centuries of long hot summers led to an almost unbroken string of good harvests, and both urban and rural populations began to grow. These centuries are known as the Medieval Warm Period. One of the more dramatic consequences of the Medieval Warm Period was the expansion of Viking settlements in the North Atlantic. From their Icelandic base (established in AD 870), the Norse people began to move west and north to Greenland, Canada, and eventually above the Arctic Circle.


The Medieval Warm Period was a time of warm weather around 800-1300 AD, during the European Medieval period. Initial research on the MWP and the following Little Ice Age (LIA) was largely done in Europe, where the phenomenon was most obvious and clearly documented. The Vikings took advantage of ice-free seas to colonize Greenland and other outlying lands of the far north.


"The climate at this time was very warm, much warmer than it is today, and crops were able to do well. It seems likely that the name "Greenland" was given to the country, not just as wishful thinking, but because it was a climatic fact at that time. The mild climatic period was fairly short-lived in geologic terms - by about 1200 AD, the ever-increasing cold was making life extremely difficult, and some years no supply ships were able to reach Greenland through the ice-choked seas. During this period, Norway had assumed responsibility for supplying the Norse settlers in Greenland, but as the climate worsened it became a very difficult task.


"At that time, the inner regions of the long fjords where the settlements where located were very different from today. Excavations show that there were considerable birch woods with trees up to 4 to 6 meters high in the area around the inner parts of the Tunuliarfik- and Aniaaq-fjords, the central area of the Eastern settlement, and the hills were grown with grass and willow brushes. This was due to the medieval climate optimum. The Norse soon changed the vegetation by cutting down the trees to use as building material and for heating and by extensive sheep and goat grazing during summer and winter. The climate in Greenland was much warmer during the first centuries of settlement but became increasingly colder in the 14th and 15th centuries with the approaching period of colder weather known as the Little Ice Age."


The Medieval Warm Period coincides with the Vikings' settlement of Greenland, Iceland and possibly North America. Farmsteads with dairy cattle, pigs, sheep and goats were prevalent in Iceland and along the southern coast of Greenland. Even England was able to compete economically with France in wine production. On the other hand, agriculture steadily declined at higher latitudes during the Little Ice Age, while mortality rates and famines increased. By 1500, settlements in Greenland had vanished and the inhabitants of Iceland were struggling to survive.



During the 9th & 10th centuries the Vikings reached Iceland and Greenland during the milder condition that prevailed during Medieval Warm Period. Norse settlers arrived in Iceland in the 9th and Greenland in the 10th century with an agricultural practice based on milk, meat and fibre from cattle, sheep, and goats. The settlers were attracted by green fields and a relatively good climate and driven there by population pressures in Scandinavia. They were able to sail to Iceland and Greenland as well as Labrador because of a decrease in sea ice in the North Atlantic.


The Medieval Warm Period was a time of unusually warm climate in Europe from about 850 until 1250 AD. The warm climate overlaps with a time of high solar activity called the Medieval Maximum. The warmer climate caused historic events such as the spread of Viking settlements in Northern Europe. The Vikings were likely better able to explore and colonize many areas in Northern Europe during this time because the warm climate. They traveled by boats to Greenland among other places through seas that, with cooler climates are typically full of dangerous sea ice. During this time, grape vineyards, which require moderate temperatures and a long growing season, were as far north as England. In comparison, today grapes vineyards are only typically as far north as France in Europe.


Between the 9th and 14th century there was a "Medieval Warm Period", when the average temperature in the Northern Hemisphere reached its highest point in the past 4,000 years, which was only about 1°C higher than at present. It has been documented that during this period, American oysters (Crassostrea virginica) and bay scallops (Aequipecten irradiens) formed populations as far north as Sable Island. Neither of these species exists there today. Radiocarbon dating of relict oyster and bay scallop shells compare reasonably well with the dates of the post-glacial warm period. From the 16th to the 19th century there was a "Little Ice Age", when the average temperature of the Northern Hemisphere was a degree or two cooler than now. It is during this time that salmon are hypothesized to have relocated to the New England area. Salmon may have migrated from Europe after the end of the Pleistocene, across the Atlantic. Immediately prior to the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period diminished sea pack ice around Iceland and Greenland.
- Doppleganger

It’s been a cool summer so far for many across the U.S. as 1,097 record low temperatures were set in August, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) temperature data.

NOAA reports that 1,097 “low maximum” temperature records were broken between Aug. 1 and Aug. 23 at locations across the country this year. This means that these temperatures on the day they were recorded were the coolest on record.

After a particularly long and frigid winter, summer for much of the U.S. has been cooler than normal, according to NOAA data. The average temperature for July was just 73.3 degrees Fahrenheit — 0.3 degrees below the 20th century average. The average maximum temperature was 85.8 degrees Fahrenheit, or 0.9 degrees below average.

“Below-average temperatures stretched from the Midwest, through the Mississippi River Valley, and into parts of the Southeast, where 13 states had one of their 10 coolest July’s on record. Arkansas and Indiana each had their coolest July on record,” NOAA noted in its July climate release.

“There were more than twice as many record cool temperatures during July (5,508) than record warm temperatures (2,605), with most of the cool temperature records (3,333) being cool daytime temperatures and most of the warm temperature records (1,882) being warm nighttime temperatures,” NOAA added.

But the whole country did not experience such a cool summer. The West Coast saw above average temperatures and California is in the midst of drought. NOAA says that “the Intermountain West to the Pacific Coast. Six states had one of their 10 warmest July’s on record, but no state was record warm for the month.”

Even with the warm weather and dryness, wildfires have been lower as well this season. Only about 2.9 million acres have been burned this year, according to government data — well below the 5.8 million acre yearly average for the nine years.

NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center projects that parts of the South and Northeast will experience above normal temperatures this fall. The West Coast will also see a warmer fall while the Midwest and some Mountain states get hit with below normal temperatures.

The Farmer’s Almanac, however, predicts another harsh winter in store for the U.S.

“Shivery and shovelry are back,” the Almanac’s managing editor Sandi Duncan told the Associated Press. “We’re calling for some frigid conditions, bitter conditions.”

The Farmer’s Almanac is reportedly accurate about 80 percent of the time and relies upon a secret mathematical formula to make its predictions. The formula supposedly uses sunspots, tides and planetary positions.

The Almanac made a more accurate weather prediction for the U.S. than NOAA did last winter, which saw harsh weather. But the Almanac incorrectly predicted this summer was going to be “exceptionally hot across much of North America, with ‘oppressive’ humidity throughout the eastern half of the United States.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/20...-in-august/#ixzz3BUsC5y5O

Australian scientists with the Bureau of Meteorology have been accused of manipulating the country’s temperature record to make it seem it’s gotten warmer over the decades, The Australian newspaper reports.

Dr. Jennifer Marohasey claims the BOM’s adjusted temperature records are “propaganda” and not science, according to the Australian. Marohasey said she analyzed raw temperature data from places across Australia and compared them to BOM data.

The result: the BOM’s adjusted data creates an artificial warming trend. Marohasey said BOM adjustments changed Aussie temperature records from a slight cooling trend to one of “dramatic warming” over the past century.

BOM disagreed with Marohasey and told the Australian that the agency “used world’s best practice and a peer reviewed process to modify the physical temperature records that had been recorded at weather stations across the country.”

The process used by the BOM is called “homogenization” which corrects for anomalies in the raw temperature data. The agency said it was “very unlikely” that “data homogenisation impacted on the empirical outlooks.”

“All of these elements are subject to change over a period of 100 years, and such non-climate ­related changes need to be ­accounted for in the data for ­reliable analysis and monitoring of trends,” the BOM told the Australian.

But Marohasey said she found instances where the BOM made “no change in instrumentation or siting and no inconsistency with nearby stations” but added there was a “dramatic change in temperature trend towards warming after homogenisation.”

Marohasey is not the first to find inconsistencies between raw temperature records and “homogenized” data.

Climate blogger Steven Goddard has criticized U.S. government scientists for manipulating the raw temperature record to show a rapidly warming trend.

“Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been ‘adjusting’ its record by replacing real temperatures with data ‘fabricated’ by computer models,” writes Christopher Booker for the Telegraph.

“The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data,” Booker writes. “In several posts headed ‘Data tampering at USHCN/GISS,’ Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time.”

“These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on ‘fabricated’ data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century,” Booker adds.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/20...ature-data/#ixzz3BUtcXrw6

The Obama administration is working to forge a sweeping international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions, but without ratification from Congress.

In preparation for this agreement, to be signed at a United Nations summit meeting in 2015 in Paris, the negotiators are meeting with diplomats from other countries to broker a deal to commit some of the world’s largest economies to enact laws to reduce their carbon pollution. But under the Constitution, a president may enter into a legally binding treaty only if it is approved by a two-thirds majority of the Senate.

To sidestep that requirement, President Obama’s climate negotiators are devising what they call a “politically binding” deal that would “name and shame” countries into cutting their emissions. The deal is likely to face strong objections from Republicans on Capitol Hill and from poor countries around the world, but negotiators say it may be the only realistic path.

“If you want a deal that includes all the major emitters, including the U.S., you cannot realistically pursue a legally binding treaty at this time,” said Paul Bledsoe, a top climate change official in the Clinton administration who works closely with the Obama White House on international climate change policy.

Lawmakers in both parties on Capitol Hill say there is no chance that the currently gridlocked Senate will ratify a climate change treaty in the near future, especially in a political environment where many Republican lawmakers remain skeptical of the established science of human-caused global warming.

“There’s a strong understanding of the difficulties of the U.S. situation, and a willingness to work with the U.S. to get out of this impasse,” said Laurence Tubiana, the French ambassador for climate change to the United Nations. “There is an implicit understanding that this not require ratification by the Senate.”

American negotiators are instead homing in on a hybrid agreement — a proposal to blend legally binding conditions from an existing 1992 treaty with new voluntary pledges. The mix would create a deal that would update the treaty, and thus, negotiators say, not require a new vote of ratification.

Countries would be legally required to enact domestic climate change policies — but would voluntarily pledge to specific levels of emissions cuts and to channel money to poor countries to help them adapt to climate change. Countries might then be legally obligated to report their progress toward meeting those pledges at meetings held to identify those nations that did not meet their cuts.

“There’s some legal and political magic to this,” said Jake Schmidt, an expert in global climate negotiations with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group. “They’re trying to move this as far as possible without having to reach the 67-vote threshold” in the Senate.

The strategy comes as scientists warn that the earth is already experiencing the first signs of human-caused global warming — more severe drought and stronger wildfires, rising sea levels and more devastating storms — and the United Nations heads toward what many say is the body’s last chance to avert more catastrophic results in the coming century.

At the United Nations General Assembly in New York next month, delegates will gather at a sideline meeting on climate change to try to make progress toward the deal next year in Paris. A December meeting is planned in Lima, Peru, to draft the agreement.

In seeking to go around Congress to push his international climate change agenda, Mr. Obama is echoing his domestic climate strategy. In June, he bypassed Congress and used his executive authority to order a far-reaching regulation forcing American coal-fired power plants to curb their carbon emissions. That regulation, which would not be not final until next year, already faces legal challenges, including a lawsuit filed on behalf of a dozen states.

But unilateral action by the world’s largest economy will not be enough to curb the rise of carbon pollution across the globe. That will be possible only if the world’s largest economies, including India and China, agree to enact similar cuts.

The Obama administration’s international climate strategy is likely to infuriate Republican lawmakers who already say the president is abusing his executive authority by pushing through major policies without congressional approval.

“Unfortunately, this would be just another of many examples of the Obama administration’s tendency to abide by laws that it likes and to disregard laws it doesn’t like — and to ignore the elected representatives of the people when they don’t agree,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader, said in a statement.

A deal that would not need to be ratified by the United States or any other nation is also drawing fire from the world’s poorest countries. In African and low-lying island nations — places that scientists say are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change — officials fear that any agreement made outside the structure of a traditional United Nations treaty will not bind rich countries to spend billions of dollars to help developing nations deal with the forces of climate change.

Poor countries look to rich countries to help build dams and levees to guard against coastal flooding from rising seas levels, or to provide food aid during pervasive droughts.

“Without an international agreement that binds us, it’s impossible for us to address the threats of climate change,” said Richard Muyungi, a climate negotiator for Tanzania. “We are not as capable as the U.S. of facing this problem, and historically we don’t have as much responsibility. What we need is just one thing: Let the U.S. ratify the agreement. If they ratify the agreement, it will trigger action across the world.”

Observers of United Nations climate negotiations, which have gone on for more than two decades without achieving a global deal to legally bind the world’s biggest polluters to carbon cuts, say that if written carefully such an agreement could be a creative and pragmatic way to at least level off the world’s rapidly rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

About a dozen countries are responsible for nearly 70 percent of the world’s carbon pollution, chiefly from cars and coal-fired power plants.

At a 2009 climate meeting in Copenhagen, world leaders tried but failed to forge a new legally binding treaty to supplant the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Instead, they agreed only to a series of voluntary pledges to cut carbon emissions through 2020.

The Obama administration’s climate change negotiators are desperate to avoid repeating the failure of Kyoto, the United Nations’ first effort at a legally binding global climate change treaty. Nations around the world signed on to the deal, which would have required the world’s richest economies to cut their carbon emissions, but the Senate refused to ratify the treaty, ensuring that the world’s largest historic carbon polluter was not bound by the agreement.

Seventeen years later, the Senate obstacle remains. Even though Democrats currently control the chamber, the Senate has been unable to reach agreement to ratify relatively noncontroversial United Nations treaties. In 2012, for example, Republican senators blocked ratification of a United Nations treaty on equal rights for the disabled, even though the treaty was modeled after an American law and had been negotiated by a Republican president, George W. Bush.

This fall, Senate Republicans are poised to pick up more seats, and possibly to retake control of the chamber. Mr. McConnell, who has been one of the fiercest opponents of Mr. Obama’s climate change policy, comes from a coal-heavy state that could be an economic loser in any climate-change protocol that targets coal-fired power plants, the world’s largest source of carbon pollution.

The Obama administration is working to forge a sweeping international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions, but without ratification from Congress.

In preparation for this agreement, to be signed at a United Nations summit meeting in 2015 in Paris, the negotiators are meeting with diplomats from other countries to broker a deal to commit some of the world’s largest economies to enact laws to reduce their carbon pollution. But under the Constitution, a president may enter into a legally binding treaty only if it is approved by a two-thirds majority of the Senate.

To sidestep that requirement, President Obama’s climate negotiators are devising what they call a “politically binding” deal that would “name and shame” countries into cutting their emissions. The deal is likely to face strong objections from Republicans on Capitol Hill and from poor countries around the world, but negotiators say it may be the only realistic path.

“If you want a deal that includes all the major emitters, including the U.S., you cannot realistically pursue a legally binding treaty at this time,” said Paul Bledsoe, a top climate change official in the Clinton administration who works closely with the Obama White House on international climate change policy.

Lawmakers in both parties on Capitol Hill say there is no chance that the currently gridlocked Senate will ratify a climate change treaty in the near future, especially in a political environment where many Republican lawmakers remain skeptical of the established science of human-caused global warming.

“There’s a strong understanding of the difficulties of the U.S. situation, and a willingness to work with the U.S. to get out of this impasse,” said Laurence Tubiana, the French ambassador for climate change to the United Nations. “There is an implicit understanding that this not require ratification by the Senate.”

American negotiators are instead homing in on a hybrid agreement — a proposal to blend legally binding conditions from an existing 1992 treaty with new voluntary pledges. The mix would create a deal that would update the treaty, and thus, negotiators say, not require a new vote of ratification.

Countries would be legally required to enact domestic climate change policies — but would voluntarily pledge to specific levels of emissions cuts and to channel money to poor countries to help them adapt to climate change. Countries might then be legally obligated to report their progress toward meeting those pledges at meetings held to identify those nations that did not meet their cuts.

“There’s some legal and political magic to this,” said Jake Schmidt, an expert in global climate negotiations with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group. “They’re trying to move this as far as possible without having to reach the 67-vote threshold” in the Senate.

The strategy comes as scientists warn that the earth is already experiencing the first signs of human-caused global warming — more severe drought and stronger wildfires, rising sea levels and more devastating storms — and the United Nations heads toward what many say is the body’s last chance to avert more catastrophic results in the coming century.

At the United Nations General Assembly in New York next month, delegates will gather at a sideline meeting on climate change to try to make progress toward the deal next year in Paris. A December meeting is planned in Lima, Peru, to draft the agreement.

In seeking to go around Congress to push his international climate change agenda, Mr. Obama is echoing his domestic climate strategy. In June, he bypassed Congress and used his executive authority to order a far-reaching regulation forcing American coal-fired power plants to curb their carbon emissions. That regulation, which would not be not final until next year, already faces legal challenges, including a lawsuit filed on behalf of a dozen states.

But unilateral action by the world’s largest economy will not be enough to curb the rise of carbon pollution across the globe. That will be possible only if the world’s largest economies, including India and China, agree to enact similar cuts.

The Obama administration’s international climate strategy is likely to infuriate Republican lawmakers who already say the president is abusing his executive authority by pushing through major policies without congressional approval.

“Unfortunately, this would be just another of many examples of the Obama administration’s tendency to abide by laws that it likes and to disregard laws it doesn’t like — and to ignore the elected representatives of the people when they don’t agree,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader, said in a statement.

A deal that would not need to be ratified by the United States or any other nation is also drawing fire from the world’s poorest countries. In African and low-lying island nations — places that scientists say are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change — officials fear that any agreement made outside the structure of a traditional United Nations treaty will not bind rich countries to spend billions of dollars to help developing nations deal with the forces of climate change.

Poor countries look to rich countries to help build dams and levees to guard against coastal flooding from rising seas levels, or to provide food aid during pervasive droughts.

“Without an international agreement that binds us, it’s impossible for us to address the threats of climate change,” said Richard Muyungi, a climate negotiator for Tanzania. “We are not as capable as the U.S. of facing this problem, and historically we don’t have as much responsibility. What we need is just one thing: Let the U.S. ratify the agreement. If they ratify the agreement, it will trigger action across the world.”

Observers of United Nations climate negotiations, which have gone on for more than two decades without achieving a global deal to legally bind the world’s biggest polluters to carbon cuts, say that if written carefully such an agreement could be a creative and pragmatic way to at least level off the world’s rapidly rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

About a dozen countries are responsible for nearly 70 percent of the world’s carbon pollution, chiefly from cars and coal-fired power plants.

At a 2009 climate meeting in Copenhagen, world leaders tried but failed to forge a new legally binding treaty to supplant the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Instead, they agreed only to a series of voluntary pledges to cut carbon emissions through 2020.

The Obama administration’s climate change negotiators are desperate to avoid repeating the failure of Kyoto, the United Nations’ first effort at a legally binding global climate change treaty. Nations around the world signed on to the deal, which would have required the world’s richest economies to cut their carbon emissions, but the Senate refused to ratify the treaty, ensuring that the world’s largest historic carbon polluter was not bound by the agreement.

Seventeen years later, the Senate obstacle remains. Even though Democrats currently control the chamber, the Senate has been unable to reach agreement to ratify relatively noncontroversial United Nations treaties. In 2012, for example, Republican senators blocked ratification of a United Nations treaty on equal rights for the disabled, even though the treaty was modeled after an American law and had been negotiated by a Republican president, George W. Bush.

This fall, Senate Republicans are poised to pick up more seats, and possibly to retake control of the chamber. Mr. McConnell, who has been one of the fiercest opponents of Mr. Obama’s climate change policy, comes from a coal-heavy state that could be an economic loser in any climate-change protocol that targets coal-fired power plants, the world’s largest source of carbon pollution.
- watsonnostaw

CO2 is NOT pollution.

The Obama administration is working to forge a sweeping international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions, but without ratification from Congress.

In preparation for this agreement, to be signed at a United Nations summit meeting in 2015 in Paris, the negotiators are meeting with diplomats from other countries to broker a deal to commit some of the world’s largest economies to enact laws to reduce their carbon pollution. But under the Constitution, a president may enter into a legally binding treaty only if it is approved by a two-thirds majority of the Senate.

To sidestep that requirement, President Obama’s climate negotiators are devising what they call a “politically binding” deal that would “name and shame” countries into cutting their emissions. The deal is likely to face strong objections from Republicans on Capitol Hill and from poor countries around the world, but negotiators say it may be the only realistic path.

“If you want a deal that includes all the major emitters, including the U.S., you cannot realistically pursue a legally binding treaty at this time,” said Paul Bledsoe, a top climate change official in the Clinton administration who works closely with the Obama White House on international climate change policy.

Lawmakers in both parties on Capitol Hill say there is no chance that the currently gridlocked Senate will ratify a climate change treaty in the near future, especially in a political environment where many Republican lawmakers remain skeptical of the established science of human-caused global warming.

“There’s a strong understanding of the difficulties of the U.S. situation, and a willingness to work with the U.S. to get out of this impasse,” said Laurence Tubiana, the French ambassador for climate change to the United Nations. “There is an implicit understanding that this not require ratification by the Senate.”

American negotiators are instead homing in on a hybrid agreement — a proposal to blend legally binding conditions from an existing 1992 treaty with new voluntary pledges. The mix would create a deal that would update the treaty, and thus, negotiators say, not require a new vote of ratification.

Countries would be legally required to enact domestic climate change policies — but would voluntarily pledge to specific levels of emissions cuts and to channel money to poor countries to help them adapt to climate change. Countries might then be legally obligated to report their progress toward meeting those pledges at meetings held to identify those nations that did not meet their cuts.

“There’s some legal and political magic to this,” said Jake Schmidt, an expert in global climate negotiations with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group. “They’re trying to move this as far as possible without having to reach the 67-vote threshold” in the Senate.

The strategy comes as scientists warn that the earth is already experiencing the first signs of human-caused global warming — more severe drought and stronger wildfires, rising sea levels and more devastating storms — and the United Nations heads toward what many say is the body’s last chance to avert more catastrophic results in the coming century.

At the United Nations General Assembly in New York next month, delegates will gather at a sideline meeting on climate change to try to make progress toward the deal next year in Paris. A December meeting is planned in Lima, Peru, to draft the agreement.

In seeking to go around Congress to push his international climate change agenda, Mr. Obama is echoing his domestic climate strategy. In June, he bypassed Congress and used his executive authority to order a far-reaching regulation forcing American coal-fired power plants to curb their carbon emissions. That regulation, which would not be not final until next year, already faces legal challenges, including a lawsuit filed on behalf of a dozen states.

But unilateral action by the world’s largest economy will not be enough to curb the rise of carbon pollution across the globe. That will be possible only if the world’s largest economies, including India and China, agree to enact similar cuts.

The Obama administration’s international climate strategy is likely to infuriate Republican lawmakers who already say the president is abusing his executive authority by pushing through major policies without congressional approval.

“Unfortunately, this would be just another of many examples of the Obama administration’s tendency to abide by laws that it likes and to disregard laws it doesn’t like — and to ignore the elected representatives of the people when they don’t agree,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader, said in a statement.

A deal that would not need to be ratified by the United States or any other nation is also drawing fire from the world’s poorest countries. In African and low-lying island nations — places that scientists say are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change — officials fear that any agreement made outside the structure of a traditional United Nations treaty will not bind rich countries to spend billions of dollars to help developing nations deal with the forces of climate change.

Poor countries look to rich countries to help build dams and levees to guard against coastal flooding from rising seas levels, or to provide food aid during pervasive droughts.

“Without an international agreement that binds us, it’s impossible for us to address the threats of climate change,” said Richard Muyungi, a climate negotiator for Tanzania. “We are not as capable as the U.S. of facing this problem, and historically we don’t have as much responsibility. What we need is just one thing: Let the U.S. ratify the agreement. If they ratify the agreement, it will trigger action across the world.”

Observers of United Nations climate negotiations, which have gone on for more than two decades without achieving a global deal to legally bind the world’s biggest polluters to carbon cuts, say that if written carefully such an agreement could be a creative and pragmatic way to at least level off the world’s rapidly rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

About a dozen countries are responsible for nearly 70 percent of the world’s carbon pollution, chiefly from cars and coal-fired power plants.

At a 2009 climate meeting in Copenhagen, world leaders tried but failed to forge a new legally binding treaty to supplant the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Instead, they agreed only to a series of voluntary pledges to cut carbon emissions through 2020.

The Obama administration’s climate change negotiators are desperate to avoid repeating the failure of Kyoto, the United Nations’ first effort at a legally binding global climate change treaty. Nations around the world signed on to the deal, which would have required the world’s richest economies to cut their carbon emissions, but the Senate refused to ratify the treaty, ensuring that the world’s largest historic carbon polluter was not bound by the agreement.

Seventeen years later, the Senate obstacle remains. Even though Democrats currently control the chamber, the Senate has been unable to reach agreement to ratify relatively noncontroversial United Nations treaties. In 2012, for example, Republican senators blocked ratification of a United Nations treaty on equal rights for the disabled, even though the treaty was modeled after an American law and had been negotiated by a Republican president, George W. Bush.

This fall, Senate Republicans are poised to pick up more seats, and possibly to retake control of the chamber. Mr. McConnell, who has been one of the fiercest opponents of Mr. Obama’s climate change policy, comes from a coal-heavy state that could be an economic loser in any climate-change protocol that targets coal-fired power plants, the world’s largest source of carbon pollution.
The Obama administration is working to forge a sweeping international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions, but without ratification from Congress.

In preparation for this agreement, to be signed at a United Nations summit meeting in 2015 in Paris, the negotiators are meeting with diplomats from other countries to broker a deal to commit some of the world’s largest economies to enact laws to reduce their carbon pollution. But under the Constitution, a president may enter into a legally binding treaty only if it is approved by a two-thirds majority of the Senate.

To sidestep that requirement, President Obama’s climate negotiators are devising what they call a “politically binding” deal that would “name and shame” countries into cutting their emissions. The deal is likely to face strong objections from Republicans on Capitol Hill and from poor countries around the world, but negotiators say it may be the only realistic path.

“If you want a deal that includes all the major emitters, including the U.S., you cannot realistically pursue a legally binding treaty at this time,” said Paul Bledsoe, a top climate change official in the Clinton administration who works closely with the Obama White House on international climate change policy.

Lawmakers in both parties on Capitol Hill say there is no chance that the currently gridlocked Senate will ratify a climate change treaty in the near future, especially in a political environment where many Republican lawmakers remain skeptical of the established science of human-caused global warming.

“There’s a strong understanding of the difficulties of the U.S. situation, and a willingness to work with the U.S. to get out of this impasse,” said Laurence Tubiana, the French ambassador for climate change to the United Nations. “There is an implicit understanding that this not require ratification by the Senate.”

American negotiators are instead homing in on a hybrid agreement — a proposal to blend legally binding conditions from an existing 1992 treaty with new voluntary pledges. The mix would create a deal that would update the treaty, and thus, negotiators say, not require a new vote of ratification.

Countries would be legally required to enact domestic climate change policies — but would voluntarily pledge to specific levels of emissions cuts and to channel money to poor countries to help them adapt to climate change. Countries might then be legally obligated to report their progress toward meeting those pledges at meetings held to identify those nations that did not meet their cuts.

“There’s some legal and political magic to this,” said Jake Schmidt, an expert in global climate negotiations with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group. “They’re trying to move this as far as possible without having to reach the 67-vote threshold” in the Senate.

The strategy comes as scientists warn that the earth is already experiencing the first signs of human-caused global warming — more severe drought and stronger wildfires, rising sea levels and more devastating storms — and the United Nations heads toward what many say is the body’s last chance to avert more catastrophic results in the coming century.

At the United Nations General Assembly in New York next month, delegates will gather at a sideline meeting on climate change to try to make progress toward the deal next year in Paris. A December meeting is planned in Lima, Peru, to draft the agreement.

In seeking to go around Congress to push his international climate change agenda, Mr. Obama is echoing his domestic climate strategy. In June, he bypassed Congress and used his executive authority to order a far-reaching regulation forcing American coal-fired power plants to curb their carbon emissions. That regulation, which would not be not final until next year, already faces legal challenges, including a lawsuit filed on behalf of a dozen states.

But unilateral action by the world’s largest economy will not be enough to curb the rise of carbon pollution across the globe. That will be possible only if the world’s largest economies, including India and China, agree to enact similar cuts.

The Obama administration’s international climate strategy is likely to infuriate Republican lawmakers who already say the president is abusing his executive authority by pushing through major policies without congressional approval.

“Unfortunately, this would be just another of many examples of the Obama administration’s tendency to abide by laws that it likes and to disregard laws it doesn’t like — and to ignore the elected representatives of the people when they don’t agree,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader, said in a statement.

A deal that would not need to be ratified by the United States or any other nation is also drawing fire from the world’s poorest countries. In African and low-lying island nations — places that scientists say are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change — officials fear that any agreement made outside the structure of a traditional United Nations treaty will not bind rich countries to spend billions of dollars to help developing nations deal with the forces of climate change.

Poor countries look to rich countries to help build dams and levees to guard against coastal flooding from rising seas levels, or to provide food aid during pervasive droughts.

“Without an international agreement that binds us, it’s impossible for us to address the threats of climate change,” said Richard Muyungi, a climate negotiator for Tanzania. “We are not as capable as the U.S. of facing this problem, and historically we don’t have as much responsibility. What we need is just one thing: Let the U.S. ratify the agreement. If they ratify the agreement, it will trigger action across the world.”

Observers of United Nations climate negotiations, which have gone on for more than two decades without achieving a global deal to legally bind the world’s biggest polluters to carbon cuts, say that if written carefully such an agreement could be a creative and pragmatic way to at least level off the world’s rapidly rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

About a dozen countries are responsible for nearly 70 percent of the world’s carbon pollution, chiefly from cars and coal-fired power plants.

At a 2009 climate meeting in Copenhagen, world leaders tried but failed to forge a new legally binding treaty to supplant the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Instead, they agreed only to a series of voluntary pledges to cut carbon emissions through 2020.

The Obama administration’s climate change negotiators are desperate to avoid repeating the failure of Kyoto, the United Nations’ first effort at a legally binding global climate change treaty. Nations around the world signed on to the deal, which would have required the world’s richest economies to cut their carbon emissions, but the Senate refused to ratify the treaty, ensuring that the world’s largest historic carbon polluter was not bound by the agreement.

Seventeen years later, the Senate obstacle remains. Even though Democrats currently control the chamber, the Senate has been unable to reach agreement to ratify relatively noncontroversial United Nations treaties. In 2012, for example, Republican senators blocked ratification of a United Nations treaty on equal rights for the disabled, even though the treaty was modeled after an American law and had been negotiated by a Republican president, George W. Bush.

This fall, Senate Republicans are poised to pick up more seats, and possibly to retake control of the chamber. Mr. McConnell, who has been one of the fiercest opponents of Mr. Obama’s climate change policy, comes from a coal-heavy state that could be an economic loser in any climate-change protocol that targets coal-fired power plants, the world’s largest source of carbon pollutioThe Obama administration is working to forge a sweeping international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions, but without ratification from Congress.

In preparation for this agreement, to be signed at a United Nations summit meeting in 2015 in Paris, the negotiators are meeting with diplomats from other countries to broker a deal to commit some of the world’s largest economies to enact laws to reduce their carbon pollution. But under the Constitution, a president may enter into a legally binding treaty only if it is approved by a two-thirds majority of the Senate.

To sidestep that requirement, President Obama’s climate negotiators are devising what they call a “politically binding” deal that would “name and shame” countries into cutting their emissions. The deal is likely to face strong objections from Republicans on Capitol Hill and from poor countries around the world, but negotiators say it may be the only realistic path.

“If you want a deal that includes all the major emitters, including the U.S., you cannot realistically pursue a legally binding treaty at this time,” said Paul Bledsoe, a top climate change official in the Clinton administration who works closely with the Obama White House on international climate change policy.

Lawmakers in both parties on Capitol Hill say there is no chance that the currently gridlocked Senate will ratify a climate change treaty in the near future, especially in a political environment where many Republican lawmakers remain skeptical of the established science of human-caused global warming.

“There’s a strong understanding of the difficulties of the U.S. situation, and a willingness to work with the U.S. to get out of this impasse,” said Laurence Tubiana, the French ambassador for climate change to the United Nations. “There is an implicit understanding that this not require ratification by the Senate.”

American negotiators are instead homing in on a hybrid agreement — a proposal to blend legally binding conditions from an existing 1992 treaty with new voluntary pledges. The mix would create a deal that would update the treaty, and thus, negotiators say, not require a new vote of ratification.

Countries would be legally required to enact domestic climate change policies — but would voluntarily pledge to specific levels of emissions cuts and to channel money to poor countries to help them adapt to climate change. Countries might then be legally obligated to report their progress toward meeting those pledges at meetings held to identify those nations that did not meet their cuts.

“There’s some legal and political magic to this,” said Jake Schmidt, an expert in global climate negotiations with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group. “They’re trying to move this as far as possible without having to reach the 67-vote threshold” in the Senate.

The strategy comes as scientists warn that the earth is already experiencing the first signs of human-caused global warming — more severe drought and stronger wildfires, rising sea levels and more devastating storms — and the United Nations heads toward what many say is the body’s last chance to avert more catastrophic results in the coming century.

At the United Nations General Assembly in New York next month, delegates will gather at a sideline meeting on climate change to try to make progress toward the deal next year in Paris. A December meeting is planned in Lima, Peru, to draft the agreement.

In seeking to go around Congress to push his international climate change agenda, Mr. Obama is echoing his domestic climate strategy. In June, he bypassed Congress and used his executive authority to order a far-reaching regulation forcing American coal-fired power plants to curb their carbon emissions. That regulation, which would not be not final until next year, already faces legal challenges, including a lawsuit filed on behalf of a dozen states.

But unilateral action by the world’s largest economy will not be enough to curb the rise of carbon pollution across the globe. That will be possible only if the world’s largest economies, including India and China, agree to enact similar cuts.

The Obama administration’s international climate strategy is likely to infuriate Republican lawmakers who already say the president is abusing his executive authority by pushing through major policies without congressional approval.

“Unfortunately, this would be just another of many examples of the Obama administration’s tendency to abide by laws that it likes and to disregard laws it doesn’t like — and to ignore the elected representatives of the people when they don’t agree,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader, said in a statement.

A deal that would not need to be ratified by the United States or any other nation is also drawing fire from the world’s poorest countries. In African and low-lying island nations — places that scientists say are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change — officials fear that any agreement made outside the structure of a traditional United Nations treaty will not bind rich countries to spend billions of dollars to help developing nations deal with the forces of climate change.

Poor countries look to rich countries to help build dams and levees to guard against coastal flooding from rising seas levels, or to provide food aid during pervasive droughts.

“Without an international agreement that binds us, it’s impossible for us to address the threats of climate change,” said Richard Muyungi, a climate negotiator for Tanzania. “We are not as capable as the U.S. of facing this problem, and historically we don’t have as much responsibility. What we need is just one thing: Let the U.S. ratify the agreement. If they ratify the agreement, it will trigger action across the world.”

Observers of United Nations climate negotiations, which have gone on for more than two decades without achieving a global deal to legally bind the world’s biggest polluters to carbon cuts, say that if written carefully such an agreement could be a creative and pragmatic way to at least level off the world’s rapidly rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

About a dozen countries are responsible for nearly 70 percent of the world’s carbon pollution, chiefly from cars and coal-fired power plants.

At a 2009 climate meeting in Copenhagen, world leaders tried but failed to forge a new legally binding treaty to supplant the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Instead, they agreed only to a series of voluntary pledges to cut carbon emissions through 2020.

The Obama administration’s climate change negotiators are desperate to avoid repeating the failure of Kyoto, the United Nations’ first effort at a legally binding global climate change treaty. Nations around the world signed on to the deal, which would have required the world’s richest economies to cut their carbon emissions, but the Senate refused to ratify the treaty, ensuring that the world’s largest historic carbon polluter was not bound by the agreement.

Seventeen years later, the Senate obstacle remains. Even though Democrats currently control the chamber, the Senate has been unable to reach agreement to ratify relatively noncontroversial United Nations treaties. In 2012, for example, Republican senators blocked ratification of a United Nations treaty on equal rights for the disabled, even though the treaty was modeled after an American law and had been negotiated by a Republican president, George W. Bush.

This fall, Senate Republicans are poised to pick up more seats, and possibly to retake control of the chamber. Mr. McConnell, who has been one of the fiercest opponents of Mr. Obama’s climate change policy, comes from a coal-heavy state that could be an economic loser in any climate-change protocol that targets coal-fired power plants, the world’s largest source of carbon pollutioThe Obama administration is working to forge a sweeping international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions, but without ratification from Congress.

In preparation for this agreement, to be signed at a United Nations summit meeting in 2015 in Paris, the negotiators are meeting with diplomats from other countries to broker a deal to commit some of the world’s largest economies to enact laws to reduce their carbon pollution. But under the Constitution, a president may enter into a legally binding treaty only if it is approved by a two-thirds majority of the Senate.

To sidestep that requirement, President Obama’s climate negotiators are devising what they call a “politically binding” deal that would “name and shame” countries into cutting their emissions. The deal is likely to face strong objections from Republicans on Capitol Hill and from poor countries around the world, but negotiators say it may be the only realistic path.

“If you want a deal that includes all the major emitters, including the U.S., you cannot realistically pursue a legally binding treaty at this time,” said Paul Bledsoe, a top climate change official in the Clinton administration who works closely with the Obama White House on international climate change policy.

Lawmakers in both parties on Capitol Hill say there is no chance that the currently gridlocked Senate will ratify a climate change treaty in the near future, especially in a political environment where many Republican lawmakers remain skeptical of the established science of human-caused global warming.

“There’s a strong understanding of the difficulties of the U.S. situation, and a willingness to work with the U.S. to get out of this impasse,” said Laurence Tubiana, the French ambassador for climate change to the United Nations. “There is an implicit understanding that this not require ratification by the Senate.”

American negotiators are instead homing in on a hybrid agreement — a proposal to blend legally binding conditions from an existing 1992 treaty with new voluntary pledges. The mix would create a deal that would update the treaty, and thus, negotiators say, not require a new vote of ratification.

Countries would be legally required to enact domestic climate change policies — but would voluntarily pledge to specific levels of emissions cuts and to channel money to poor countries to help them adapt to climate change. Countries might then be legally obligated to report their progress toward meeting those pledges at meetings held to identify those nations that did not meet their cuts.

“There’s some legal and political magic to this,” said Jake Schmidt, an expert in global climate negotiations with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group. “They’re trying to move this as far as possible without having to reach the 67-vote threshold” in the Senate.

The strategy comes as scientists warn that the earth is already experiencing the first signs of human-caused global warming — more severe drought and stronger wildfires, rising sea levels and more devastating storms — and the United Nations heads toward what many say is the body’s last chance to avert more catastrophic results in the coming century.

At the United Nations General Assembly in New York next month, delegates will gather at a sideline meeting on climate change to try to make progress toward the deal next year in Paris. A December meeting is planned in Lima, Peru, to draft the agreement.

In seeking to go around Congress to push his international climate change agenda, Mr. Obama is echoing his domestic climate strategy. In June, he bypassed Congress and used his executive authority to order a far-reaching regulation forcing American coal-fired power plants to curb their carbon emissions. That regulation, which would not be not final until next year, already faces legal challenges, including a lawsuit filed on behalf of a dozen states.

But unilateral action by the world’s largest economy will not be enough to curb the rise of carbon pollution across the globe. That will be possible only if the world’s largest economies, including India and China, agree to enact similar cuts.

The Obama administration’s international climate strategy is likely to infuriate Republican lawmakers who already say the president is abusing his executive authority by pushing through major policies without congressional approval.

“Unfortunately, this would be just another of many examples of the Obama administration’s tendency to abide by laws that it likes and to disregard laws it doesn’t like — and to ignore the elected representatives of the people when they don’t agree,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader, said in a statement.

A deal that would not need to be ratified by the United States or any other nation is also drawing fire from the world’s poorest countries. In African and low-lying island nations — places that scientists say are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change — officials fear that any agreement made outside the structure of a traditional United Nations treaty will not bind rich countries to spend billions of dollars to help developing nations deal with the forces of climate change.

Poor countries look to rich countries to help build dams and levees to guard against coastal flooding from rising seas levels, or to provide food aid during pervasive droughts.

“Without an international agreement that binds us, it’s impossible for us to address the threats of climate change,” said Richard Muyungi, a climate negotiator for Tanzania. “We are not as capable as the U.S. of facing this problem, and historically we don’t have as much responsibility. What we need is just one thing: Let the U.S. ratify the agreement. If they ratify the agreement, it will trigger action across the world.”

Observers of United Nations climate negotiations, which have gone on for more than two decades without achieving a global deal to legally bind the world’s biggest polluters to carbon cuts, say that if written carefully such an agreement could be a creative and pragmatic way to at least level off the world’s rapidly rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

About a dozen countries are responsible for nearly 70 percent of the world’s carbon pollution, chiefly from cars and coal-fired power plants.

At a 2009 climate meeting in Copenhagen, world leaders tried but failed to forge a new legally binding treaty to supplant the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Instead, they agreed only to a series of voluntary pledges to cut carbon emissions through 2020.

The Obama administration’s climate change negotiators are desperate to avoid repeating the failure of Kyoto, the United Nations’ first effort at a legally binding global climate change treaty. Nations around the world signed on to the deal, which would have required the world’s richest economies to cut their carbon emissions, but the Senate refused to ratify the treaty, ensuring that the world’s largest historic carbon polluter was not bound by the agreement.

Seventeen years later, the Senate obstacle remains. Even though Democrats currently control the chamber, the Senate has been unable to reach agreement to ratify relatively noncontroversial United Nations treaties. In 2012, for example, Republican senators blocked ratification of a United Nations treaty on equal rights for the disabled, even though the treaty was modeled after an American law and had been negotiated by a Republican president, George W. Bush.

This fall, Senate Republicans are poised to pick up more seats, and possibly to retake control of the chamber. Mr. McConnell, who has been one of the fiercest opponents of Mr. Obama’s climate change policy, comes from a coal-heavy state that could be an economic loser in any climate-change protocol that targets coal-fired power plants, the world’s largest source of carbon pollutio
- watsonnostaw

fascinating

The Obama administration is working to forge a sweeping international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions, but without ratification from Congress.

In preparation for this agreement, to be signed at a United Nations summit meeting in 2015 in Paris, the negotiators are meeting with diplomats from other countries to broker a deal to commit some of the world’s largest economies to enact laws to reduce their carbon pollution. But under the Constitution, a president may enter into a legally binding treaty only if it is approved by a two-thirds majority of the Senate.

To sidestep that requirement, President Obama’s climate negotiators are devising what they call a “politically binding” deal that would “name and shame” countries into cutting their emissions. The deal is likely to face strong objections from Republicans on Capitol Hill and from poor countries around the world, but negotiators say it may be the only realistic path.

“If you want a deal that includes all the major emitters, including the U.S., you cannot realistically pursue a legally binding treaty at this time,” said Paul Bledsoe, a top climate change official in the Clinton administration who works closely with the Obama White House on international climate change policy.

Lawmakers in both parties on Capitol Hill say there is no chance that the currently gridlocked Senate will ratify a climate change treaty in the near future, especially in a political environment where many Republican lawmakers remain skeptical of the established science of human-caused global warming.

“There’s a strong understanding of the difficulties of the U.S. situation, and a willingness to work with the U.S. to get out of this impasse,” said Laurence Tubiana, the French ambassador for climate change to the United Nations. “There is an implicit understanding that this not require ratification by the Senate.”

American negotiators are instead homing in on a hybrid agreement — a proposal to blend legally binding conditions from an existing 1992 treaty with new voluntary pledges. The mix would create a deal that would update the treaty, and thus, negotiators say, not require a new vote of ratification.

Countries would be legally required to enact domestic climate change policies — but would voluntarily pledge to specific levels of emissions cuts and to channel money to poor countries to help them adapt to climate change. Countries might then be legally obligated to report their progress toward meeting those pledges at meetings held to identify those nations that did not meet their cuts.

“There’s some legal and political magic to this,” said Jake Schmidt, an expert in global climate negotiations with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group. “They’re trying to move this as far as possible without having to reach the 67-vote threshold” in the Senate.

The strategy comes as scientists warn that the earth is already experiencing the first signs of human-caused global warming — more severe drought and stronger wildfires, rising sea levels and more devastating storms — and the United Nations heads toward what many say is the body’s last chance to avert more catastrophic results in the coming century.

At the United Nations General Assembly in New York next month, delegates will gather at a sideline meeting on climate change to try to make progress toward the deal next year in Paris. A December meeting is planned in Lima, Peru, to draft the agreement.

In seeking to go around Congress to push his international climate change agenda, Mr. Obama is echoing his domestic climate strategy. In June, he bypassed Congress and used his executive authority to order a far-reaching regulation forcing American coal-fired power plants to curb their carbon emissions. That regulation, which would not be not final until next year, already faces legal challenges, including a lawsuit filed on behalf of a dozen states.

But unilateral action by the world’s largest economy will not be enough to curb the rise of carbon pollution across the globe. That will be possible only if the world’s largest economies, including India and China, agree to enact similar cuts.

The Obama administration’s international climate strategy is likely to infuriate Republican lawmakers who already say the president is abusing his executive authority by pushing through major policies without congressional approval.

“Unfortunately, this would be just another of many examples of the Obama administration’s tendency to abide by laws that it likes and to disregard laws it doesn’t like — and to ignore the elected representatives of the people when they don’t agree,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader, said in a statement.

A deal that would not need to be ratified by the United States or any other nation is also drawing fire from the world’s poorest countries. In African and low-lying island nations — places that scientists say are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change — officials fear that any agreement made outside the structure of a traditional United Nations treaty will not bind rich countries to spend billions of dollars to help developing nations deal with the forces of climate change.

Poor countries look to rich countries to help build dams and levees to guard against coastal flooding from rising seas levels, or to provide food aid during pervasive droughts.

“Without an international agreement that binds us, it’s impossible for us to address the threats of climate change,” said Richard Muyungi, a climate negotiator for Tanzania. “We are not as capable as the U.S. of facing this problem, and historically we don’t have as much responsibility. What we need is just one thing: Let the U.S. ratify the agreement. If they ratify the agreement, it will trigger action across the world.”

Observers of United Nations climate negotiations, which have gone on for more than two decades without achieving a global deal to legally bind the world’s biggest polluters to carbon cuts, say that if written carefully such an agreement could be a creative and pragmatic way to at least level off the world’s rapidly rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

About a dozen countries are responsible for nearly 70 percent of the world’s carbon pollution, chiefly from cars and coal-fired power plants.

At a 2009 climate meeting in Copenhagen, world leaders tried but failed to forge a new legally binding treaty to supplant the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Instead, they agreed only to a series of voluntary pledges to cut carbon emissions through 2020.

The Obama administration’s climate change negotiators are desperate to avoid repeating the failure of Kyoto, the United Nations’ first effort at a legally binding global climate change treaty. Nations around the world signed on to the deal, which would have required the world’s richest economies to cut their carbon emissions, but the Senate refused to ratify the treaty, ensuring that the world’s largest historic carbon polluter was not bound by the agreement.

Seventeen years later, the Senate obstacle remains. Even though Democrats currently control the chamber, the Senate has been unable to reach agreement to ratify relatively noncontroversial United Nations treaties. In 2012, for example, Republican senators blocked ratification of a United Nations treaty on equal rights for the disabled, even though the treaty was modeled after an American law and had been negotiated by a Republican president, George W. Bush.

This fall, Senate Republicans are poised to pick up more seats, and possibly to retake control of the chamber. Mr. McConnell, who has been one of the fiercest opponents of Mr. Obama’s climate change policy, comes from a coal-heavy state that could be an economic loser in any climate-change protocol that targets coal-fired power plants, the world’s largest source of carbon pollution.
- watsonnostaw

Interesting, I'd like more details on this though.

Although it has some very important and beneficial effects, CO2 meets the legal and encyclopedic definitions of a "pollutant", and human CO2 emissions pose a threat to public health and welfare.