lightblueline

In Ventura, Alec Loorz is working to show the city where the twenty-foot line above sea level is. Alec is currently 13, and is working with his friends to mark the city of Ventura with more than one-hundred poles to illustrate the dangers of climate change. His website is http://kids-vs-global-warming.com/. Check it out! Alec and his mother, Virginia, have come up to Santa Barbara to help out with new ideas for the lightblueline effort.

September 20, 2007: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center: Press Release
NASA Researchers Find Snowmelt in Antarctica Creeping Inland

In its first issue of this new school year, the Westmont Horizon student newspaper covered the dynamic happenings over the lightblueline environmental public awareness art project.
The article was authored by Jedd Goble.
With permission we are including the text of this article below:

Dividing Line

Newsweek's cover story (August 13, 2007) looked at how the "debate" over climate change has been reshaped as a struggle between the world's science organizations and skeptics, many of whom have been paid to keep the "debate" active, even though the scientific community no longer debates the existance of human induced climate change.

Sharon Begley's story can be read here: The Truth About Denial

Below are some excerpts:

The Santa Barbara Independent (August 9, 2007) covered the Historic Landmark Commission's 5-2 approval of the lightblueline educational art project.

You can read the whole article here: Light Blue Line Not Erased

Below are excerpts:

The US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works just released (July 30) a report from their visit to Greenland:

"Washington, DC – Ten United States Senators returned Sunday from a two-day trip to Greenland to view the effects of global warming, and to learn more about the impacts of changing climate on the ice and glaciers of the world’s largest island.

The National Environmental Trust has posted a set of animations showing how the IPCC-predicted sea-level rise and a hurricane would effect cities up and down the eastern seaboard. The site has a load of educational information about climate change and its environmental effects.

Use this link to view: Animations of Sea-level Rise

Urgency

The last two years have seen a remarkable turnaround in public perceptions of climate change, especially in the United States. Some critical threshhold seems to finally have been breached, and we see now that both the House of Representatives and Senate are at last considering meaningful legislative proposals to deal with the anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions that are a major cause of warming. Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, was clearly an important catalyst for change. Another catalyst has been the release this year of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC: see www.ipcc.ch.) The IPCC was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Association and United Nations Environment Programme, with a mission to assess the scientific basis for human-induced climate change, and to recommend policy options for what to do about the problem. The IPCC has released four comprehensive reports in its 19 year history, each sounding a successively more urgent warning about the impacts of fossil fuel burning on climate. Now, in its latest report, the IPCC states that most of the increase in temperature (about 0.7 °C or 1.3 °F since the start of the industrial revolution, with most of that increase in the last 40 years) is “very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.” In IPCC terminology, very likely means with greater than 90% probability. In 2001, the Third IPCC report had put the probability of human influence on climate at 67%. The new assessment, based on decades of intensive and increasingly sophisticated experimental observations and computer modeling, is the most authoritative statement yet, and has been a clear driver for the recent legislative initiatives. This is the good news.

The Post's article outlines the state of scientific research on polar ice and sea level rise. It's worth a read. You can read the entire article here: Clues to Rising Seas Are Hidden in Polar Ice Below are some excerpts:

Clues to Rising Seas Are Hidden in Polar Ice
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 16, 2007; Page A06

"Few consequences of global warming pose as severe a threat to human society as sea-level rise. But scientists have yet to figure out how to predict it.

On July 4, the Santa Barbara Sound covered the Santa Barbara City Council approval of the lightblueline project.

Eric Lindberg wrote the following: Council approves "Lightblueline" project

You can follow the link above to the Santa Barbara Sound website or read the blog below:
"A public art project depicting the potential effects of climate change on Santa Barbara’s coastline received a vote of support from Santa Barbara City Council yesterday.