The latest in the line of states making global warming policy a reality could be Maryland, whose state legislature will soon be considering its own Global Warming Solutions Act to create a cap-and-trade program and reduce the state’s emissions.

Since the the bill is coming up so early in Maryland’s 2008 General Assembly session, activists are doing their best to make sure strong legislation remains a priority, and they’re calling on voters to turn out and show their support. In fact, they’d like a flood of folks – particularly since Maryland has its share of impacts from climate change. Here are the details from the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, who’s been working with the group Alliance for Global Warming Solutions:

What: Flooding Annapolis with Activists to show our support for Global Warming Solutions in Maryland
When: Thursday, January 17th, 2008. 11 am.
Where: Lawyer’s Mall, next to the Maryland State House. Parking is available at the Navy Stadium for $5 a day, and there are free shuttles that go from there to Lawyer’s Mall every 15 minutes.
Why: Because it’s time that Maryland became a national leader on clean energy and global warming solutions.

The agenda for the day will include the introduction of the bill by Senator Paul Pinsky, other legislators signing a pledge to co-sponsor and champion the bill, and a variety of speakers from the student, business, and environmental communities.

If you can make it, be sure to attend and show your support – and then, if you’d be so kind, keep up the momentum so it can roll into the wee neighboring District of Columbia, to our nation’s capital… (or is that too hopeful until 2009?)

The global warming Deniers (and the rest of us) just can’t catch a break: Vast areas of the Antarctic ice sheet — which has 10 times as much ice as Greenland — is losing mass much faster than anyone expected. And the rate of ice loss has quickened in the last decade. In fact, 2007′s ice loss was 75% higher than 2006′s.

Jeez, it’s almost like … I don’t know … the whole friggin’ planet is melting, and we are to blame! If only we had a group of scientists who would, like, report regularly on the impending catastrophe and explain to us how to avoid it….

As the Washington Post reports:

“Without doubt, Antarctica as a whole is now losing ice yearly, and each year it’s losing more,” said Eric Rignot, lead author of a paper published online in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Note to the Washington Post — one of the many, many reasons traditional media are losing eyeballs to the blogosphere is that your embedded hyperlinks go bizarre places, rather than to, say, the study you are citing!

Here is the link to Nature‘s story on the article (note to Nature — uhh, you folks could include a link to the actual study, too). And here, finally, is the link to the article, “Recent Antarctic ice mass loss from radar interferometry and regional climate modelling” by Eric Rignot et al. A subscription is required for the whole article, but the abstract is available:

Read more

From Hell and High Water (paperback now at Amazon):

The scientific debate is closing (against us) but not yet closed.
–Frank Luntz, conservative strategist, 2002

Global warming is real (conservatives secretly know this).
–David Brooks, New York Times columnist, 2005

The global- warming problem is no longer primarily a scientific matter. Science has told us what we need to know about how life on this planet will be ruined if we stay on our current greenhouse gas emissions path. Global warming is also not a technological problem. We have the technologies to avoid the disasters that await us if we keep doing nothing.

Today, global warming is a problem of politics and political will. We lack the will to take the necessary actions–and many of the actions we are poised to take are either inadequate or ill conceived. The great political tragedy of our time is that conservative leaders in America have chosen to use their superior messaging and political skills to thwart serious action on global warming, thereby increasing the chances that catastrophic climate change will become a reality.

Global warming should not be a partisan issue–not when the health, well- being, and security of the next fifty generations of Americans are at stake. But it has become partisan, at least in this country. In order to determine how to create the politics of action in the next decade, we must understand what the politics of inaction has caused in the past decade. That’s what this chapter is about.