Columbia Citizen and executive director of Hanford Challenge, Tom Carpenter writes this op-ed in the Times:

This leads to the question of what we can expect next, now that we have had a financial meltdown, a coal mine disaster, and an oil drilling explosion, all within the last two years. A nuclear disaster at a cleanup site like Hanford is to be avoided at all costs. The persistence of radioactivity in the environment for thousands of years makes large areas of land uninhabitable, and wreaks an ongoing and incalculable human health toll. Prevention, rather than reaction, to such tragedies should be driving law and policy.

read more...

Hillman City neighbor Pramila Jayapal has co-written an op-ed with Gloria Steinem: Surprise! Immigration Is a Woman's Issue!

Thanks to Erica Barnett (also a neighbor) who posted about the piece on Publicola.

Pramila has pointed to another must-read by a Columbia Citizen, Naomi Ishisaka's Head First, about her experience with a brain tumor. It appears in this month's Seattle Magazine.

Somehow Rainier Valley fell off the map. It's only slightly less embarrassing than this 2008 P-I gaffe:

Hi guys:

Your listings this year are fun. I love the interface.

I always take these with some salt. This year I'll need to have my sodium checked. Please see attached.

In "diversity" (A really crummy way to measure this, btw. I'm white, and I'd like to have some part in diversity. Try something like Simpson's index instead) Columbia City comes in below "New Holly"-Othello and… everywhere else. This week my co-worker joked that our deputy mayor is the sole representative of Columbia City's diversity. More grist here for that mill…

Columbia Citizens would certainly benefit from an academic degree or two, and whoa — no kids! You know, I've been suspicious about that Pied Piper children's series in Mt. Baker.

Seems like this list is due for an update, and hopefully a prominently stated correction. Would you let Stefan know please?

Thanks.

S.

First off, happy 5th birthday to me. It has been exactly 5 years to the day that I have officially launched the blog http://ampmsucks.blogspot.com/ with the single focused goal of getting BP to clean up their AMPM Store at 5620 MLK. If you would have read through the blog you would know that I have turned them in countless times to the DPD, the police, the community and anyone and everyone else I could think of. Including this post where I actually provided the police with photos of AMPM workers taking the trash off of their property and dumping it in the yard of a nearby abandon house!

Please excuse me if I sound a little short fused about this, but after 5 years of begging and pleading I am running out of patience. 5 YEARS! It is no wonder that BP is consistently rated as one of the worst polluters on the planet, they can't even be bothered to pick up the trash around their little convenience store here in Columbia City.

The only silver lining from this massive oil spill disaster is that it calls more attention to just how terrible of a company BP is. They are bad for the planet, they are bad for America, they are bad for the community and they are bad for you.

Seems like this ought to be in violation of at least these:
■Inoperable or junk cars parked in yards.
■Junk stored outside in residential zones, including discarded or used building materials, scrap metal, car parts, and old furniture

I've lost track of how many times I've written BP asking them to clean up their property here in Columbia City but it is obvious that they are a company with a deep lack of concern for the environment and for the community. Please act locally by not supporting BP, especially not patronizing the AMPM store at 5620 MLK. These photos that I am including here are from trash dumped at their site and abandon vehicles which they have refused to clean up.

Give me a call. I'll take you out to coffee.

I agree with you on this point: whatever the science, there's certainly nothing wrong with working toward more responsible uses of natural resources. It always good to leave things nicer than you found them.

I am a global warming skeptic. The earth is either cooling are warming; there is no "official temp". The Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period, etc. all tell us that the temp fluctuates for reasons still not yet fully understood by modern science.

That said, it can't be good to release all of the carbon the earth has stored over millions of years into the atmosphere. To think otherwise is foolish. So global warming? Meh. Supporting leadership to reduce our collective carbon emissions? Sign me up. Why wouldn't you want to live in cleaner and greener America?

If you ask me the problem is that certain skeptics are coming off too heavily handed and defensive. If you want to throw down, brother, you best have a thick skin.

And just a tip…no one is going to take your relevant arguments seriously if you spout off nonsense about the eventual abolishment of private property.

People on the forums mostly get excited about great new shops opening up and ways to improve the community. It's always been a friendly, civil place.

Scott seems like a nice, stand-up guy, as far as I can tell. The Citizens site is a great service he's set up for the neighborhood.

Go troll somewhere else.

Climate change is not a global conspiracy… sorry. Everyone in the reality-based community agrees.
Scientific opinion on climate change.(Wikipedia list)

You're going to cite James Inhofe's blog? Really? The guy is nuts. He's one of the most backwards, anti-science right-wing senators out there.

It's obvious that no one's going to convince you otherwise on this issue, and you're not winning anyone over (why resurrect a 3 month old thread?), so maybe save all the copy-pasting of bogus info for a different forum.

However, none of these people who are so hell-bent on making the information I have been posting seem worthless can provide any shred of fact or support to suggest what I have posted is incorrect.

The entire crux of their argument is, in fact, based on your belief that these folks are infalllible and perfect, and that anyone who challenges what they deem to be the "status quo" is a nut job.

How convenient for them to be able to argue their points this way. Don't deal with the information at hand — far better to simply call it the work of complete nutjobs and lunatics.

So fellas… that doesn't work on people who have brains. This is Seattle, remember? Land of the intellectual. How did you morons becomes so entrenched here?

Don't you wish life was so easy… you fight like a sissy, from an intellectual standpoint. Why don't you be a man and use your brain, and present some fact-based research for crying out loud?

I refuse to be manipulated with your emotionally-based (fact-less) garbage.

This Scott Ringgold character who runs this forum works for the city government. Part of his job is to implement this UN Agenda 21 crap in this neighborhood. He'll deny this up and down, while at the same time he links his own "sustainable development" web site directly to this forum. How obtuse.

So of course he's going to do everything in his power to downplay the information I have presented here. Scott is completely biased. But Scott seems to be a complete idiot, since he can't support what he believes with any level of research of fact.

It's far easier for him to tell his buddies to post on this forum, and attack the information I presented by calling it "conspiracy theory."

Way to go, geniuses.

Prove to me that harmless CO2 emissions from human beings are going to cause a climate catastrophe. Show me the science that convinced you so completely. What the hell did you base this religious-fervor upon?

Before you run off with your mouth about conspiracy theories, maybe you can prove that none of this information below is real…

** March 16, 2009 — 650 international scientists, many of them current and former United Nations IPCC scientists who have now turned against the UN, wrote the latest 231-page report to the US Senate Minority Committee debunking man-made climate change. This is 12 times more than the 52 scientists who signed the UN report supporting man-made climate change in 2007.

(Source: http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=2158072E-802A-23AD-45F0-274616DB87E6 )
** Petition Project: 31,478 American scientists have signed this petition (see http://www.petitionproject.org/ which requires a hand-written signature and paper form submission), including 9,029 with PhDs.
The purpose of the Petition Project is to demonstrate that the claim of “settled science” and an overwhelming “consensus” in favor of the hypothesis of human-caused global warming and consequent climatological damage is wrong. No such consensus or settled science exists. As indicated by the petition text and signatory list, a very large number of American scientists reject this hypothesis.
** Professor Mojib Latif, the leading scientist of the IPCC (the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change) has admitted that the Earth's temperature has not increased in nine years, and that we're entering a period of steady or cooling temperatures that will possibly last until 2020 or 2030.

Despite no global warming in 10 years and record-setting cold in 2007-2008, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change (IPCC) and computer modelers who believe that CO2 is the cause of global warming still predict the Earth is in store for catastrophic warming in this century. IPCC computer models have predicted global warming of 1° F per decade and 5-6° C (10-11° F) by 2100, which would cause global catastrophe with ramifications for human life, natural habitat, energy and water resources, and food production. All of this is predicated on the assumption that global warming is caused by increasing atmospheric CO2 and that CO2 will continue to rise rapidly. However, records of past climate changes suggest an altogether different scenario for the 21st century. Rather than drastic global warming at a rate of 0.5 ° C (1° F) per decade, historic records of past natural cycles suggest global cooling for the first several decades of the 21st century to about 2030, followed by global warming from about 2030 to about 2060, and renewed global cooling from 2060 to 2090 (Easterbrook, D.J., 2005, 2006a, b, 2007, 2008a, b); Easterbrook and Kovanen, 2000, 2001). Climatic fluctuations over the past several hundred years suggest ~30 year climatic cycles of global warming and cooling, on a general rising trend from the Little Ice Age.

Global climate changes have been far more intense (12 to 20 times as intense in some cases) than the global warming of the past century, and they took place in as little as 20–100 years. Global warming of the past century (0.8° C) is virtually insignificant when compared to the magnitude of at least 10 global climate changes in the past 15,000 years. None of these sudden global climate changes could possibly have been caused by human CO2 input to the atmosphere because they all took place long before anthropogenic CO2 emissions began. The cause of the ten earlier ‘natural’ climate changes was most likely the same as the cause of global warming from 1977 to 1998.

When the Royal Society of New Zealand recently claimed that the earth was warming, Society member and climatologist Dr. Vincent Gray responded:

“This statement is a lie. The globe is currently cooling. ……..there are currently nine authorities currently involved in providing a dataset of monthly global temperature anomalies. They are:

NOAA’s National Climate Data Center (NCDC, GHCN-COADS)

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS)

Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (HadCRUT2v)

NOAA radiosonde network , (RATPAC)

Hadley Centre Radiosonde Network (HadAT2)

University of Alabama Lower Troposphere TLT MSU (UAH )

Remote Sensing Systems Lower Troposphere TLT MSU (RSS)

National Center for Environmental Protection Reanalysis (NCEP50)

European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts Reanalysis (ERA40)

Eight of these authorities agree that the globe is currently cooling. Only GISS disagrees.” (Source: http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-1/finalreport/default.htm )

** Who stands to gain from man-made global warming?

March 25, 2009 — While on the board of a Chicago-based charity, Barack Obama helped fund a carbon trading exchange that will likely play a critical role in the cap-and-trade carbon reduction program he is now trying to push through Congress as president.

The “privately-owned” Chicago Climate Exchange is heavily influenced by Obama cohorts Al Gore and Maurice Strong (Strong has played a critical role in working with the UN to globalize the environmental movement).

For years now Strong and Gore have been cashing in on that lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming.

Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, Wikipedia-described as “the world’s first and North America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil.”

Gore, self-proclaimed Patron Saint of the Environment, buys his carbon off-sets from himself–the Generation Investment Management LLP, “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and Washington, D.C., of which he is both chairman and founding partner. The Generation Investment Management business has considerable influence over the major carbon credit trading firms that currently exist, including the Chicago Climate Exchange.

(Source: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/first100days/2009/03/25/obama-helped-fund-carbon-scheme/ )

** What is the United Nation’s Agenda 21, what is sustainable development, and how do these fit into the information above?

As described in this article on Sustainable Development, Agenda 21 was the main outcome of the United Nation's Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Agenda 21 outlines, in detail, the UN's vision for a centrally managed global society. This contract binds governments around the world to the United Nation's plan for controlling the way we live, eat, learn, move and communicate - all under the noble banner of saving the earth. If fully implemented, Agenda 21 would have the government involved in every aspect of life of every human on Earth.

Agenda 21 spreads it tentacles from Governments, to federal and local authorities, and right down to community groups (see the Agenda 21 local planning guide at http://www.crossroad.to/text/articles/la21_198.html ). Chapter 28 of Agenda 21 specifically calls for each community to formulate its own Local Agenda 21: ”Each local authority should enter into a dialogue with its citizens, local organizations, and private enterprises to formulate 'a Local Agenda 21.' Through consultation and consensus-building, local authorities would learn from citizens and from local, civic, community, business and industrial organizations and acquire the information needed for formulating the best strategies.” - Agenda 21, Chapter 28, sec 1.3

Source: http://www.green-agenda.com/agenda21.html

RELATED SOURCES:
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=1646
Michael R. Fox, Ph.D., a science and energy reporter for Hawaii Reporter and a science analyist for the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, is retired and now lives in Eastern Washington. He has nearly 40 years experience in the energy field. He has also taught chemistry and energy at the University level. His interest in the communications of science has led to several communications awards, hundreds of speeches, and many appearances on television and talk shows. He can be reached via email at mailto:mike@foxreport.org

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