Stop the Global Warming Cover Up!

Just last week, former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) deputy associate administrator Jason K. Burnett announced that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office censored out six pages of congressional testimony to cover up the health threats posed by global warming.

Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had congressional testimony last October that would have detailed the direct impact of global warming on human health, including mortality and the spread of disease.

But the Bush/Cheney administration, fearing her testimony would force it to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels, covered it up.

 Join Senator Barbara Boxer and the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee:

Stop the Global Warming Cover Up!

Target:

EPA administrator Stephen L. Johnson

Sponsored by:

Democratic Senatorial Campaign

Committee  [petition]

 

 

Former EPA deputy associate administrator Jason K. Burnett recently announced that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office censored out six pages of congressional testimony last October to cover up the health threats posed by global warming.

Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had testimony that would have detailed the direct impact of rising global temperatures on human health, including mortality and the spread of disease. But the administration feared her testimony would force it to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. Senate and House committees have been trying for months to get e-mail exchanges and other documents to determine the extent of political influence on government scientists, but have been rebuffed.

It’s time for the EPA to come clean! Join Senator Barbara Boxer and the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee:
Demand that the EPA finally turn over all communications related to its findings about global warming’s consequences on public health and the environment.

 

Dear EPA administrator Stephen L. Johnson,

Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had congressional testimony last October that would have detailed the direct impact of rising global temperatures on human health, including mortality and the spread of disease.

But recently, former EPA deputy associate administrator Jason K. Burnett announced that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office censored out six pages of testimony to cover up the health threats posed by global warming.

In light of Burnett’s allegations, it’s time to come clean.

We urge you to turn over all communications, email exchanges and documents from government scientists, the White House and the Office of the Vice President that detail the consequences of global warming on public health and the environment to congressional investigators. For years, Vice President Dick Cheney has been driving the administration’s policy on global warming, and this recent allegation appears to confirm the worst. We believe it is critical that the agency’s finding that global warming poses a danger to the public — a determination the EPA reached late last year — be released.
We urge you to find the courage or the strength or determination to act immediately.

DOT Buries Report About Global Warming’s Impact On The Gulf Coast

As usual, the tactics of criminals. Hiding information from the citizenry has become commonplace. Aren’t you wondering why they are so much more secretive than any other administration (and were before 9/11). From Facing South:

DOT buries report about global warming’s impact on the Gulf Coast

Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Transportation and Climate Change Science Program released a major report on the likely impacts of global climate change on transportation infrastructure across the Gulf Coast region. If you didn’t hear about it yet, that’s understandable — DOT essentially buried the report while keeping its lead author kept from talking to the press. According to the Government Accountability Project:

…[T]he report, Impacts of Climate Change and Variability on Transportation Systems and Infrastructure: Gulf Coast Study, analyzes how Gulf Coast roads and highways, transit services, oil and gas pipelines, freight handling ports, transcontinental railroad networks, waterway systems, and airports are likely to be harmed by heat waves, extreme precipitation events, sea level rise, increased hurricane intensity, and storm surge damage associated with climate change. The report outlines why changes must be incorporated in transportation planning now in order to avoid serious future problems.

Three hours after the report was posted online Wednesday, DOT issued an uninformative and misleading press release on a separate Web site. The press release lists only one contact — a DOT press official. Reporters who have tried to interview the report’s lead author, Federal Highway Administration official Michael Savonis, have been explicitly told by DOT officials that the author and the press cannot communicate with each other. As lead author, Savonis should be allowed to brief and respond to press inquiries.

“What possible justification can there be for the stealth release of this report?” asks Rick Piltz, director of the Government Accountability Project’s Climate Science Watch. “It’s as though they don’t regard the report as significant — or these findings have significant political implications for policymaking. Burying reports for this reason is wrong and unethical — but we have seen it before.”

To read the full report, click here. For Climate Science Watch’s take on DOT’s actions, click here.

Since the MSM won’t say much…

I have been waiting to hear something about this for two or three says and nothing, really. We are so out of touch, as Americans (in general) that news like this, being critically important to us, isn’t mentioned (except in the slightest fashion) and even when it is, we really do not understand the fullness of its meaning. Global warming is real, but we say that because it snows during a cold snap that this is crazy.

Are people the only blame for this particular phenomena? Over eating salmon or just too many people pulling the water resources (which surely contributes). However, with the lack of rain out west and the fact that overall and on average, it IS warmer now, maybe there is less water to pull from, as well (compounding the issue).

What does this mean? That I won’t get to eat Salmon patties fried in grease?

No, rednecks, it means that we have a natural travesty happening with such a fast and substantial rate of loss of these fish that there is something much worse happening and at stake. As the doctor indicates, this is an indicator fish and the experts can see that this will and IS affecting us humans (more than just eating salmon).

We must become aware and divert our attentions from the fear mongering of “Terraists” and truly confront the fearful events that face all of humanity. 

From Firedoglake by Kirk James Murphy, M.D.

Salmon: Canaries in The Water Mine

The largest salmon run in the largest estuary on this hemisphere’s Pacific Coast has collapsed. Why care about a bunch of fish and a big marsh? Well, healthy salmon runs require healthy water: fresh and salt. Crashing salmon runs tell us something in the water(s) has gone terrribly wrong. SF Bay fresh water is sucked up to supply central California crops and communities and Southern California taps. With over 17 million people in the LA area alone, and with California producing over half the nation’s fruit, vegetables, and nuts, SF Bay water affects the price of your greens - and the health of your family, wherever they live. And the salmon tell us the Bay is very sick.

How could the fate of one bay and one fish have such a huge impact? Well, estuaries are the final common pathway that carry a whole river - or multiple rivers - to the sea. The estuary that is the San Francisco Bay holds the water draining from almost one-half the land area of California: the estaury alone covers almost 1,600 square miles. The Sacramento River drains all water from the lands south of Mount Shasta (near the Oregon border) down through the Central Valley to Sacramento, and the San Joaquin River - when it flows - carries water from the arid counties north of the LA sprawl up to join with the Sacramento. Together, the two rivers formed the Bay. For millenia, both rivers carried spring flood waters from the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada across their respective valleys, covering the land between the Sierras and California’s coastal mountainns with a deep layer of rich fertile soil. This ancent gift created the most productive soils in America. Though much of this priceless resource has been covered by sprawl, the remaining soil is rich enough to produce 30 Billion dollars in produce each year, generating 100 Billion dollars for California’s economy.

WTF does all this have to do with salmon? Well, salmon depend on healthy fresh water for the beginning of their lives - and to begin the next generation. Each new generation of salmon arises from eggs laid and fertilized by their parents, who beat their way back upstream to spawn - and then die - in the precise stretch of water where they hatched out. On the way upstream, the adult salmon stop eating: their bodies nourish them. The hatchlings chow down in fresh water, swim out to sea and fatten up, and return to fresh water a few years later to begin the cycle anew. Salmon are so tied into West Coast biology that the nutrients the adult fish carry upstream in their bodies nourish the forests surrounding spawning beds: the trees return the favor by shading streams, keeping the water cool enough so the eggs and hatchlings will survive. A salmon “run” is the group of salmon that hatch out in a given stream or river at a certain time of year. Although the California coast once supported runs all the way south to Santa Barbara, with abundant runs in every season, the last decades have seen so much habitat destruction and water diversion that only two large river systems - the Sacramento and the Klamath - are healthy enough to support commercial salmon fisheries.

Even those two systems are teetering. If “crashing salmon runs” in California seems like a repeat, you’re right. Federally subsidized alfalfa farmers on/around the Klamath Basin use more water than the Klamath can sustain. In 2002, Rove/Cheney intervened to divert scarce flows to the Klamath welfare farmers. Result? 70,000 salmon downstream died as the now-shallow Klamath overheated. This caused a partial shut down of Pacific Coast salmon fisheries in 2005-2006, with net costs in the tens of millions.

The Klamath salmon died on their way out to sea. The now-collapsed Sacramento RIver salmon run was healthy enough as the left the Sacramento RIver on the way to the ocean for their return date with last fall - but that run was decimated.

The chinook salmon runs in the Sacramento River are the second lowest ever recorded, and the 90,000 adult fish are only one-tenth the all-time high (800,000 recorded five years ago)

What do the salmon meet as they leave the Sacramento for the sea? Well, they meet the immense pumps that suck up fresh water from the San Francisco Bay estuary (aka the Delta) and pump it to water lawns and subsidized commodity crops - along with water for 20 million Californians.

The Sacramento River’s “missing salmon” were juveniles migrating to sea in spring 2005, when state and federal water managers “set records for pumping delta water south,” said Mike Sherwood, an attorney with Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental legal group that has been jousting with water managers over water exports.

These pumps so damage the Delta’s aquasystems that last month a Federal judges ordered large decreases in the volume of water siphoned out of the Delta, in the hope of preventing extinction of several (non-salmon) fish species.

The court action comes too late for the Sacramento salmon run - and the thousands of fishermen and millions of families looking forward to this delicious gift. Yesterday - with the full agreement of West Coast fishermen - Federal officials proposed closure of the entire Sacramento salmon season. Early season fishing was ordered closed a few days ago.

We clever humans just crashed the biggest indicator species for half of all the land in California. As the salmon collapse, why should we expect to do better?

Bon appetit.