News scan...

News scan...

Today during a short drive to meet a friend for dinner in Bristol, I heard Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann's testimony to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism. In his testimony he refused to agree that waterboarding is torture.

Doublespeak! Later in the report a Seton Hall political science prof pointed out that the US prosecuted war criminals for practicing waterboarding in the past, but that no one is willing to go on record today because it opens the door that people who permitted it are guilty of war crimes. And just who are these people? They are guilty of war crimes, and no amount of doublespeak relieves them of their guilt.

Then while flipping through the Truth on line I ran into this little tidbit of new data that says we may have already reached an important tipping point in global warming: an acceleration of the loss of sea ice in the artic. Most computer models didn't have this occurring until 2040.

Note of optimism in the final inches of the story:

NASA scientist James Hansen, the lone-wolf researcher often called the godfather of global warming, on Thursday was to tell scientists and others at the American Geophysical Union scientific in San Francisco that in some ways Earth has hit one of his so-called tipping points, based on Greenland melt data.

'We have passed that and some other tipping points in the way that I will define them,' Hansen said in an e-mail. 'We have not passed a point of no return. We can still roll things back in time - but it is going to require a quick turn in direction.'

Which brings me to my second note of optimism. Instead of reading my blog, you should be reading about my hero the walker. Did anyone hear about the new optimism at the Bali environmental conference: everyone is feeling like the world can progress on these issues because bush has just 1 year left! Maybe we can hurry things along.