The New York Times Yelling 'Fire' on a Hot Planet
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"The Yale group calls global warming "the perfect problem" — meaning that a confluence of characteristics make it hard, if not impossible, to solve. Its impact remains clouded with scientific uncertainty, its effects will be felt over generations, and it is being amplified by everything from microwaving a frozen dinner to bringing electricity to an Indian village.

"I wish I were more optimistic of our ability to get a broad slice of the public to understand this and be motivated to act," said David G. Hawkins, who directs the climate program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a private group.

In an e-mail message, he wrote: "We are sensory organisms; we understand diesel soot because we can smell it and see it. Getting global warming is too much of an intellectual process. Perhaps pictures of drowning polar bears (which we are trying to find) will move people but even there, people will need to believe that those drownings are due to our failure to build cleaner power plants and cars.""

redux [04.02.06]
BBC News Unexpected warming in Antarctica

"Winter air temperatures over Antarctica have risen by more than 2C in the last 30 years, a new study shows.

Research published in the US journal Science says the warming is seen across the whole of the continent and much of the Southern Ocean.

The study questions the reliability of current climate models that fail to simulate the temperature rise."

CNN Be worried, be very worried

"From heat waves to storms to floods to fires to massive glacial melts, the global climate seems to be crashing around us.

The problem -- as scientists suspected but few others appreciated -- is that global climate systems are booby-trapped with tipping points and feedback loops, thresholds past which the slow creep of environmental decay gives way to sudden and self-perpetuating collapse. That's just what's happening now."

CBS News Rewriting The Science

"As a government scientist, James Hansen is taking a risk. He says there are things the White House doesn't want you to hear but he's going to say them anyway.

Hansen is arguably the world's leading researcher on global warming. He's the head of NASA's top institute studying the climate. But this imminent scientist tells correspondent Scott Pelley that the Bush administration is restricting who he can talk to and editing what he can say. Politicians, he says, are rewriting the science."

"What James Hansen believes is that global warming is accelerating. He points to the melting arctic and to Antarctica, where new data show massive losses of ice to the sea. "

BBC News Consensus grows on climate change

"A source told the BBC: "The measurements from the natural world on all parts of the globe have been anomalous over the past decade.

"If a few were out of kilter we wouldn't be too worried, because the Earth changes naturally. But the fact that they are virtually all out of kilter makes us very concerned.""

The New York Times More Greenland Ice Flowing Into Sea, in Sign of Warming
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"The amount of ice flowing into the sea from large glaciers in southern Greenland has almost doubled in the last 10 years, possibly requiring scientists to increase estimates of how much seas could rise under the influence of global warming, according to a study to be published Friday in the journal Science.

The authors said there is evidence that the rise in flows will soon spread to glaciers farther north on the vast island of Greenland, which is covered with an ancient ice sheet nearly two miles high in places that holds enough water to raise global sea levels 20 feet or more should it all flow into the ocean."

BBC News Climate 'warmest for millennium'

"In the late 20th Century, the northern hemisphere experienced its most widespread warmth for 1,200 years, according to the journal Science."

""The last 100 years is more striking than either [the Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age]. It is a period of widespread warmth affecting nearly all the records that we analysed from the same time," co-author Timothy Osborn told the BBC."

The New York Times Evangelical Leaders Join Global Warming Initiative
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"Despite opposition from some of their colleagues, 86 evangelical Christian leaders have decided to back a major initiative to fight global warming, saying "millions of people could die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors.""

""For most of us, until recently this has not been treated as a pressing issue or major priority," the statement said. "Indeed, many of us have required considerable convincing before becoming persuaded that climate change is a real problem and that it ought to matter to us as Christians. But now we have seen and heard enough.""