Lame Ducks in Bali

clipped from blogs.wsj.com Frustration with U.S. negotiating tactics at the climate conference burst wide open Thursday, with countries from Germany to Tuvalu blaming the U.S. for torpedoing a new climate-change deal. Europeans have threatened to skip the U.S.-sponsored global warming fest in Hawaii in January in retaliation for the slow-go tactics of U.S. negotiators. But another crew of Americans, skippered by Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, and John Kerry, are getting a hero’s welcome. “People are turning away from the official delegation and they’re starting to face toward the future,” he says. They can’t afford to wait around for the next president.” America’s official negotiators are seen as an increasingly irrelevant nuisance International frustration peaked after the U.S. team blocked language that would establish concrete targets for greenhouse-gas reductions. Sen. Kerry promised the U.S. would take the lead fighting climate change — eventually.

Scientists: Arctic Is Screaming; Global Warming May Have Passed Tipping Point

clipped from www.foxnews.com An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years. Greenland's ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer's end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data 2007 shattered records for Arctic melt in the following ways: 552 billion tons of ice melted this summer from the Greenland ice sheet A record amount of surface ice was lost over Greenland this year Alaska's frozen permafrost is warming White sea ice reflects about 80 percent of the sun's heat off Earth Earth has hit one of his so-called tipping points "At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions."