A broad coalition of the grassroots progressive movement is launching a 24-hour effort to mobilize 500,000 people opposing Republican efforts to approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. GOP senators “plan to file an amendment mandating the project to the Senate transportation package Monday,” the Hill reports. In a Daily Kos diary, 350.org founder Bill McKibben — who led thousands of Americans who got arrested last summer in front of the White House in opposition to the pipeline — explains the “powerful, unified fight” to “keep this pipeline dead“:

We’re going to war at noon eastern today–non-violent war, but a powerful, unified fight against the heart of right-wing power, the fossil fuel industry. We’re out to collect half a million emails in 24 hours telling the Senate: back up the president and keep this pipeline dead. It’s going to be the most concentrated burst of environmental activism this millennium–and it needs you.

This effort includes a diverse coalition of the national environmental movement — including the Environmental Defense Fund, Rainforest Action Network, the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the National Wildlife Federation and Green For All. As McKibben said, it’s “everyone else who’s ever tried to save a whale, clean a lake, build a park, find a solar job.”

The 24-hour push isn’t just a “green” cause, but one of the American progressive movement. Other organizations participating in the petition drive include MoveOn, Credo, Democracy for America, Public Citizen, Change.org, the Labor Network for Sustainability, and businesses like Patagonia.

Bill McKibben will be on the Colbert Report tonight to discuss the effort to prevent the destruction of our climate for the profit of foreign oil companies.

Any morally acceptable pathway to prevent catastrophic global warming includes broad access to affordable birth control for the world’s women. The conservative war on birth control is a war on women’s rights, and thus on the rights of us all. Manmade global warming is one of the most troubling symptoms of economic and social injustice around the planet, and the ”countries in the developing world least responsible for the growing emissions are likely to experience the heaviest impact of climate change, with women bearing the greatest toll.” Researchers have found that empowering women to reduce unplanned pregnancies is one of the most cost-effective ways to combat greenhouse pollution, as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson discussed at the Durban climate conference last December:

In addressing climate resilience, Robinson stressed the importance of focusing on health and burden impacts of climate change. One of the keys is access to reproductive health for women.

”The sexual and reproductive health and rights community should challenge the global architecture of climate change, and its technology focus, and shift the discussion to a more human-based, rights-based adaptation approach,” said a Lancet editorial in 2009. ”Such a strategy would better serve the range of issues pivotal to improving the health of women worldwide.”

“Increasing women’s reproductive rights should be at the heart of the climate discussion, in the same basket as strategies like increasing energy efficiency and researching new technologies,” Robert Engelman of Worldwatch said in 2010.

As Nick Kristoff said in 2011, family planning is a solution to “climate change to poverty to civil wars,” but it has become a “victim of America’s religious wars.”

The more world leaders focus on giving women and girls the tools of empowerment — access to family planning, education, and the political and economic system — the better future all of us will have.

A world where women and girls have more power is a healthier world.

As the United States has a freakishly warm and calm winter, Europe has been experiencing a frighteningly cold and dangerous season. Hundreds have died in frigid temperatures, snow and ice storms, and floods. This freakish weather in the Northern Hemisphere is connected by unusual behavior in the jet stream, which scientists are attributing to the dramatic changes in the Arctic caused by global warming pollution. In a new paper published in Tellus, scientists at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research find that declines in summer Arctic sea ice are a factor in changing the Arctic Oscillation, the circulation pattern that dominates winter weather:

Scientists at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, say the frigid, snowy European winter has its origins in a warm Arctic summer. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that July 2011 was the fourth-warmest July on record. A warm summer in the Arctic cuts the amount of sea ice. NOAA reports that sea-ice levels last July were the lowest in three decades.

The effect is twofold, the Wegener scientists report. First, less ice means less solar heat is reflected back into the atmosphere. Rather, it is absorbed into the darker ocean waters. Second, once that heat is in the ocean, the reduced ice cap allows the heat to more easily escape into the air just above the ocean’s surface. Because warmer air tends to rise, the moisture-laden air near the ocean’s surface rises, creating instability in the atmosphere and changing air-pressure patterns, the scientists say.

In an interview with Conducive Chronicle, Dr. Jeff Masters explained why greenhouse pollution should be considered the most likely suspect for unprecedented behavior in the climate system:

The laws of physics demand that the huge amount of heat-trapping gases humans are pumping into the atmosphere must be significantly altering the fundamental large-scale circulation pattern of the atmosphere. Unprecedented behavior like we’ve witnessed in the configuration of the winter jet stream over North America — with the four most extreme years since 1865 occurring since 2006 — could very well be due to human-caused climate change. Something is definitely up with the weather, and it is clear to me that over the past two years, the climate has shifted to a new state capable of delivering rare and unprecedented weather events. Human emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide are the most likely cause of such a shift in the climate.

It’s critical to note that the southern hemisphere is also experiencing utterly extreme weather during its summer: Australia is deluged by flood, and heat waves and drought are crippling South America and Africa.

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (D-CO), elected in 2010 in one of the states most affected by climate change, now questions whether it is even happening. Hickenlooper told a Denver audience that he wouldn’t say “the sky is falling and that climate change is happening,” the Pueblo Chieftain reports:

I’m not going to go out and say the sky is falling and that climate change is happening, but I’m very concerned about the risk of climate change. That many smart people are that worried, that I’d be a fool not to be concerned.”

A former geologist, Hickenlooper had expressed skepticism of the overwhelming scientific consensus about global warming at a speech before mining executives during the 2010 campaign. “I don’t think that the scientific community has decided with certainty that climate change is as catastrophic as so many people think,” he said.

That year, approximately 100,000 spruce trees a day were killed by a spruce beetle infestation spurred by warming temperatures in Colorado.

Also in 2010, ThinkProgress Green interviewed some of Colorado’s many climate scientists to respond to global warming conspiracy theorist Ken Buck, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate. “There is no controversy about the role human actions have made to alter the climate system through the emissions of greenhouse gases over the past 150 years,” Dennis Ojima, chair of Colorado State’s Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory and a senior scholar with the Heinz Center said.

“It’s very likely it’s disruptive to anything we’re doing and take for granted at the moment,” Caspar M. Ammann, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research cautioned.

In 2009, Hickenlooper wasn’t as scornful of the scientific threat of carbon pollution from fossil fuels, instead calling it “one of the greatest challenges of our time.” Writing in the forward for “How the West Was Warmed,” Hickenlooper said that “the Rocky Mountain region is a showcase for both the most immediate and most dramatic impacts of global warming, from the mountain pine beetle epidemic to shrinking glaciers.”

(HT Colorado Independent)