Word: arctics
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...requires laying down one's arms, and few of those who fight the same old battles have any interest in conceding. They want to win. On Wednesday, environmental groups responded with outrage to Obama's decision, fearing that drilling would damage sensitive marine environments, especially in the vulnerable Alaskan Arctic, a region over which greens have been fighting oil companies for years. "Today's announcement is unfortunately all too typical of what we have seen so far from President Obama - promises of change, a year of deliberation, and ultimately, adoption of flawed and outdated Bush policies," said Brendan Cummings, senior...
...McDonnell supports oil and gas exploration.) Leases in the vast Beaufort and Chukchi seas, north of Alaska, which had been up for sale under the Bush Administration, will be withdrawn for now while the Interior Department takes another look at the environmental risks of drilling in the delicate Arctic. "We're relieved that the Administration is going to depend on science in making decisions in the Arctic," says Bill Eichbaum, vice president of Arctic and marine policy for the World Wildlife Fund...
Ultimately, that is what's at stake. Environmentalists may be justified in arguing that a little bit of extra oil simply isn't worth the risks of drilling in vulnerable coastal ecosystems in the Atlantic and the Arctic. But unless we find a way to break our addiction to oil and develop viable, scaled-up energy alternatives, we'll be fighting this same battle over and over again. If environmentalists block oil exploration in the U.S., we'll look for it elsewhere - perhaps in the eastern Amazon, where much of the rain forest is already under oil and gas leases...
Plenty of these climate effects had already been observed at the time of the 2007 IPCC report, including warming temperatures, shifts in rainfall (wet regions getting wetter, dry regions getting drier) and the increase in summer meltback of Arctic sea ice. Those patterns have continued, and in some cases gotten worse...
...while he considers Shakhova's data absolutely convincing, he's less convinced that these emissions are necessarily new. "In the context of the global methane cycle, has this been accelerating recently, or has it been going on for some time?" Heimann says. "It may be related to recent Arctic warming, but I don't know." (See the top 10 green ideas...