Bugs and diseases are killing trees at an alarming rate across the West, from the spruce forests of Alaska to the oak woodlands near the San Diego-Tijuana border. Several scientists said the growing threat appears linked to global warming.
Yet another local, traditionally conservative media outlet that is outreporting the supposedly liberal mainstream media (see “NBC News ignores climate change, blows the bark beetle story“). This story has an excellent figure I haven’t seen before:
The story also has some data on total U.S. tree mortality I hadn’t seen:
[This is off topic to the extent that the presidential election is off-topic.]
If you are are like me — and I hope for your sake you’re not — then the campaign’s final days find you scouring the Web for every scrap of information on the state of the presidential race. Here’s a fascinating analysis from Pollster.com looking at the difference between polls that sample people with cell phones and those that don’t:
Letter from Maryland State Police to Josh Tulkin, former deputy director of CCAN. Click to download (via Andy Revkin).
Since 2001, I have devoted my life entirely to the peaceful promotion of windmills and solar panels to solve global warming. Apparently not everyone liked my work, however. Believe it or not, the Maryland State Police put my name in their criminal intelligence database as a “suspected terrorist” as part of their larger program of collecting information about political activists in 2005-2006. I was on this outrageous “watch” list apparently because of a single act of peaceful civil disobedience I participated in outside a coal-fired power plant in 2004.
CCAN’s former deputy director, Josh Tulkin, was also put in the database as was another former CCAN staffer who has chosen to remain anonymous. Neither of these people has ever been arrested for anything in their entire lives.
In all, about one third of the entire Maryland CCAN staff — one of the largest environmental groups in the state — was officially spied on by the police while we peacefully promoted clean electricity and clean cars for Maryland. This is, of course, an outrage and a threat, not just to civil liberties in Maryland, but to the state’s entire environmental community. When people who are trying save the climate and save the Bay are considered terrorists, the world has truly been turned upside down.
Watch the rally we held yesterday:
Please, write an email to Gov. Martin O’Malley (D-MD) asking him to release all surveillance files kept on CCAN staff and other activists statewide. Presently, the police want to destroy the files without releasing printed copies — another outrage. Ask O’Malley to support comprehensive legislation to prevent similar abuses from happening again.
Help end forever these police abuses in Maryland that threaten our climate and clean energy movement, and our right to organize for causes we believe in. Why has our state wasted precious resources creating a “terrorist” watch list of innocent people instead of devoting maximum resources to solving real environmental problems? The real terror in Maryland is the threat of 20 feet of sea-level rise. The real violence is the burning of coal to create electricity while wrecking the climate.
Edited by Joe Romm, we cover climate science, solutions and politics. Columnist Tom Friedman calls us "the indispensable blog" and Time magazine named us one of the 25 "Best Blogs of 2010." Newcomers, start here.
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Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
