Global warming is real. Only fools question it now.

Kenneth Anderson writes the following:

the imagery of the arctic ice pack that Christian presented was most assuredly evidence of global warming. She presented two Landsat (I think) images of the arctic ice pack, one from September 1991 and another from September 2001. The differences could only be more striking if the latter image had no ice at all. It was truly frightening. But the interesting aspect of this part of the talk was Christian stating that, amongst the arctic nations, there was no disagreement as to whether global warming was happening or whether the arctic ice pack was shrinking. It was. And every state department from every arctic nation was well past such arguments; the ice cap had shrunk, now how do we exploit that? The real discussion taking place within these governments was how to now specify the newly available shipping lanes and negotiators from Canada, the US, Russia, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Iceland are now developing specifications for such shipping lanes (where bilge purges can occur, etc.).

That was an eye opener. While the State Department of the United States is actively engaged in negotiations about how best to use newly available arctic shipping lanes, George Bush and company still insist that there is doubt that global warming is real. George, you need to check in and see what the State Department is up to these days.

So the real question is how do we get back to "reality-based" government?

Want evidence of global warming that you can see? The Gulf of Mexico is half a degree centigrade warmer than ten years ago. Warm water adds energy to hurricanes. Both Katrina and Rita were category 1 and 2 hurricanes when they hit Florida. Both immediately jumped to category 5 as soon as they entered the warmer Gulf of Mexico.