Global Warming

SEVERE flooding, heat-related deaths, unhealthy air, loss of species and damage to agriculture and industry are some of the threats we face as a result of global warming. PennEnvironment reports that this state is a leading contributor to global warming in the U.S., responsible for 1 percent of total global emissions. But there's hope. Congress can tackle global warming through clean-energy solutions and capping global warming pollution. It's called the American Clean Energy & Security Act. Without serious action, Pennsylvania will continue to be affected by global warming.

ON FEB. 15, the eve of the effective date of the Kyoto Treaty on global warming, I introduced the Pennsylvania Greenhouse Gas Reduction Act (H.B. 500), which would represent an important first step for Pennsylvania in addressing global climate change. Our federal government's failure to sign on to Kyoto makes it even more important for individual states to take action. Pennsylvania has a particular responsibility to act. Our state alone produces about 1 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, more than 105 developing nations combined.

It's a change of weather, all right. Whoever the next president is, he or she will support federal laws that regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. In speeches this week in Oregon, Sen. John McCain came out for the idea, joining Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. McCain's plan is more business-friendly than those of his two Democratic rivals for president. But this general agreement signals a welcome and needed swing away from the stubborn policies of the Bush administration. It's hard to overstate the coming change in the White House.

HMMM. DO THE folks at Big Oil care about the fate of the planet? Really care? Last week, Exxon's CEO urged a slow-down of moves to address global warming, called U.S. energy independence unrealistic and mocked biofuels as "moonshine. " And the American Enterprise Institute (which gets some funding from Exxon) offered scientists $10,000 to dispute the new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a report that gave a "90 percent certainty" to human activity causing global warming.

The contempt of the Bush administration for environmentalists and their concerns is well known by now. While evidence of man- made environmental damage mounts, the Bush team resists its implications like a defeated army whose rear guard fights off its pursuers as it retreats. That has been especially true of its handling of the most serious of all environmental issues - global warming. First, the administration claimed that global warming was the work of liberal hysterics and had been discounted by "more sober scientists.

Predicted changes from global warming - hotter summers, less snowy winters, flooding and erosion along the Jersey coast - are taken to new levels of the nitty-gritty in a comprehensive look at trends in the Northeastern United States released yesterday after two years of study. Heat-stressed cows might produce 20 percent less milk. Major crops such as corn and blueberries could slack off. The makeup of forests in Pennsylvania and New Jersey would change, with cascading effects on birds and other species that live there.

An Inconvenient Truth, the Oscar-winning 2006 documentary about Al Gore's little slide show, offers a wealth of facts, figures and graphs on the state of the planet and its grim future if current global warming trends are not reversed. It will fall to today's children, though, to keep environmental awareness at the forefront as they become architects, engineers and consumers themselves - children who are not yet patient or verbal enough to sit through An Inconvenient Truth. Arctic Tale conveys the message to kids in an endearing story wrapped around some of the most compelling footage ever captured at the top of the world.

I 'M DISAPPOINTED by the Daily News' lack of coverage on last week's historic opportunity to cap U.S. global-warming pollution. You remained silent while Sens. Specter and Santorum rejected this opportunity. The McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act would have required a reduction in global-warming pollution to 2000 levels by 2010, a long-overdue first step to stopping global warming. Scientists warn that doing nothing to reduce global-warming pollution will increase the frequency and severity of costly extreme weather events like drought, floods and hurricanes.

Gov. Christie has received a well-deserved failing grade for his environmental policies. He appointed a global-warming skeptic to the Board of Public Utilities, and an opponent of the Highlands Act to the council that must enforce that water- and land-preservation law. He put industry representatives in water-quality positions, pulled out of a regional program to reduce greenhouse gases, and weakened rules allowing beach access. No wonder the New Jersey Environmental Federation gave Christie a D-minus on his environmental policies.

In-Flight Entertainment Stories By Helen Simpson Alfred A. Knopf. 176 pp. $24. If the prospect of short stories about everyday life makes your heart sink a little, in fear of too much precious observation, read Helen Simpson's stories. A simple act such as dropping the kids off at school is dissected and the layers of fear, ambivalence, even deceit that occupy the driver emerge. Is this what my life has come to, the driver might think. Or, Did I delete that incriminating e-mail before I left?

A NEW SCIENTIFIC study says the chance of flooding that's bad enough to have once been dubbed a "once-a-century" event has more than doubled along the New Jersey coast and elsewhere. And by 2030, many coastal areas, including 22 New Jersey municipalities, could regularly see coastal flooding of historic proportions as a rise in sea level and storm surge combine to raise waters four feet above the local high-tide line. In short, the report from the nonprofit Climate Central in Princeton titled Surging Seas blames global warming.

A new scientific study says the chance of flooding bad enough to once be dubbed once-a-century events has more than doubled along the coast of New Jersey and elsewhere. The report from the nonprofit Climate Central in Princeton entitled "Surging Seas" says that by 2030 many coastal areas could see massive storm surges. The study, which can be found at sealevel.climatecentral.org, projects that those areas will experience severe coastal flooding of historic proportions. In short, it blames global warming and rising sea levels for doubling the risk of extreme coastal flooding.

AIKEN, S.C. - Rick Santorum yesterday branded Mitt Romney a liberal, said Newt Gingrich's policy positions have been "all over the place" and laughed that Ron Paul has been running for president "since 1938," looking to capture the GOP presidential nomination even if it takes harsh words for fellow Republicans. Santorum, a longtime footnote in the GOP contest now attracting scrutiny, tried to punch his way to the top of the pack with scathing critiques of his rivals ahead of Saturday's South Carolina primary.

After taking a battering from a variety of economic storms, state and local governments throughout the region are getting a warm embrace from nature this winter. So far, an official 0.5 inches of snow has been measured in Philadelphia. That's exactly 116.0 inches less snow than in the previous two seasons, which featured an unprecedented four snows of 15-plus inches, and more snow-fighting overtime than the typical municipal manager would care to think about. Depending on the perspectives, those snows proved that global warming was an Al Gore fantasy or that worldwide warming truly had nudged the climate into a new mode of operation.

A warmer world evidently is also a wilder and weirder one. That's a reasonable conclusion based on the utterly unreasonable behavior of the atmosphere in 2011, a year characterized by the improbable mixed with the unbelievable. Philadelphia smashed precipitation records that will not easily be matched. Since Jan. 1, more than five feet of rain and melted snow and ice have fallen atop the official measuring station. As early as the end of February, the region had had about twice its normal snowfall.

It's Iowa minus one month, and, barring yet another resurrection, or something of similar improbability, it's Mitt Romney vs. Newt Gingrich. In a match race, here's the scorecard: Romney has managed to weather the debates unscathed. However, the brittleness he showed when confronted with the kind of informed follow-up questions that Bret Baier tossed his way last week on Fox's Special Report - the kind of scrutiny one doesn't get in multiplayer debates - suggests that Romney may become increasingly vulnerable as the field narrows.

WASHINGTON - Think of the Texas drought, floods in Thailand and Russia's devastating heat waves as coming attractions in a warming world. That's the warning from top climate scientists and disaster experts after meeting in Africa. The panel said the world needed to get ready for more dangerous and "unprecedented extreme weather" caused by global warming. These experts fear that without preparedness, crazy weather extremes may overwhelm some locations, making some places unlivable. The Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a special report on global warming and extreme weather Friday after meeting in Kampala, Uganda.

I'm afraid I can't get too excited about the Newt Gingrich boomlet. The field general of the Revolution of 1994 is suddenly out in front of the Republican presidential primary polls, but I can't help thinking that he will soon go the way of Rick Perry and Herman Cain. It's not Gingrich's disparaging of President Obama's "Kenyan, anticolonial" worldview. Or the six-figure bills he and his third wife ran up at Tiffany's. Or the cruise of the Greek islands that led much of his staff to quit in frustration.