Getting Hot

The WAPO is wrong Lieberman is an independent not a Democrat. Here is his latest outrage!

Lieberman Helps Collect Cash for Collins
Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) is never going to win any popularity contests among his party's liberal base -- a fact he seems decidedly unconcerned about despite his 2006 Democratic primary loss to Ned Lamont.
Democrats' 2000 vice-presidential nominee Joe Lieberman is helping raise money for Republican Susan Collins of Maine.
Not only has Lieberman endorsed Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine.) -- one of Democrats' biggest targets in the 2008 cycle -- but he's planning to co-host a fundraiser for her on June 21 in Washington, D.C.
The event, which will be held in a Capitol Hill location still to be determined, will feature Lieberman and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) -- a very rare bipartisan fundraiser. Attendees are being asked to raise $3,000; $2,000 would come in the form of a political action committee donation while the other $1,000 would be a personal contribution, according to an electronic invite for the fundraiser obtained today by The Fix.
"Let's try to make this a bi-partisan tour de force," reads the invite.
"Senator Specter approached Senator Collins with the idea of doing a joint fundraising event with Senator Lieberman," said Collins spokeswoman Jen Burita. "Both senators are colleagues with whom she works well and good friends, so we thought it was a great idea."
Lieberman's willingness to work openly for Collins's reelection will surely not sit well with Democratic strategists who want Rep. Tom Allen (D) to oust the two-term incumbent. For Lieberman, his support of Collins is payback. She was one of a handful of senators who campaigned for him in the general election following his loss in the Democratic primary to Lamont. (He ran for and won reelection as an independent.) Lieberman and Collins also serve together as the chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in the Senate.
The Republican strategy in the race is clearly to kill Allen's candidacy in the crib. The National Republican Senatorial Committee is up with an Internet ad that dissects Allen's own Web announcement.
Despite the state's Democratic lean -- John Kerry won it by 9 points in 2004 -- Collins cruised to victory in 2002 over a candidate that Democrats were certain could beat her. Collins benefited from President Bush's overall popularity and the strength of the Republican brand at that time.
Over the past six years much has changed. Democrats will work to hang Bush and the war in Iraq around Collins's neck, but the junior Senator from Maine has shown a willingness to punch back when necessary.
_______________________________________

Ten-year Warming Window Closing By David Adam The Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday 12 May 2007
Climate change may have passed a key tipping point that could mean temperatures rising more quickly than predicted and it being harder to tackle global warming, research suggests.
Scientists at Bristol University say a previously unexplained surge of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere in recent years is due to more greenhouse gas escaping from trees, plants and soils. Global warming was making vegetation less able to absorb the carbon pollution pumped out by human activity.
Such a shift would worsen the gloomy predictions of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which warned last week that there is less than a decade to tackle rising emissions to avoid the worst effects of global warming.
The prediction came as an equally stark warning was issued that global warming was contributing to increased conflict over dwindling resources.
At the moment about half of human carbon emissions are re-absorbed into the environment, but the fear among scientists is that increased temperatures will reduce this effect. Wolfgang Knorr, a climate researcher at Bristol, said: "We could be seeing the carbon cycle feedback kicking in, which is good news for scientists because it shows our models are correct. But it's bad news for everybody else." Measurements of carbon dioxide in samples of air show a sharp increase since the turn of the century, with unusually high levels in four of the past five years. The spike does not seem to match the pattern of increased emissions from fossil-fuel burning, and can only be partly explained by natural events such as fires and weather phenomena including El Nino.
Dr Knorr's team compared the high carbon dioxide measurements in the atmosphere for 2002-03 with simulations of how soils and plants, including trees, behave under different conditions. They found the extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could be accounted for by plants taking up less carbon because of unusually dry and hot conditions.
Writing in Geophysical Research Letters, they say: "We find that the remarkable feature of the 2002-03 anomaly seems to be that climate fluctuations - not only related to El Nino and occurring across all latitudes - acted together to create an unusually strong out-gassing of CO2 of the terrestrial biosphere. Further research will be required to investigate if this fluctuation carries features of projected future climate change."
The British Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, warned on Thursday that climate change could spawn a new era of conflicts over water and other scarce resources. She said climate-driven conflicts were already under way in Africa. Underlying the Darfur crisis was a struggle between nomadic and pastoral communities for resources made more scarce through a changing climate.
Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute in London on Thursday, Mrs Beckett quoted evidence that a similar conflict was brewing in Ghana where Fulani cattle herdsmen are reportedly arming themselves to take on local farmers in a confrontation over water and land as climate change expands the Sahara Desert.
The Foreign Secretary said the Middle East - with 5 per cent of the world's population but only 1 per cent of its water - would be particularly badly affected, with Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq hard-hit by a drop in rainfall.
"Resource-based conflicts are not new, but in climate change we have a new and potentially disastrous dynamic."
Her speech echoed a similar warning from the European Commission in January that global warming could trigger regional conflicts, poverty, famine, mass migration and the spread of infectious diseases such as malaria and dengue fever.
The British Government has this year tried to focus global attention on climate change as a security threat, and Mrs Beckett used the British chairmanship of the United Nations security council in April to convene the council's first debate on the issue.
Meanwhile at the UN, a vote is due overnight on whether Zimbabwe will take over the chairmanship of the Commission on Sustainable Development, which oversees environmental issues in the developing world.