[www.noaanews.noaa.gov]

"For scientists studying summer sea ice in the Arctic, it’s not a question of “if” there will be nearly ice-free summers, but “when.” And two scientists say that “when” is sooner than many thought — before 2050 and possibly within the next decade or two.

James Overland of NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and Muyin Wang of the NOAA Joint Institute for the Study of Atmosphere and Ocean at the University of Washington, looked at three methods of predicting when the Arctic will be nearly ice free in the summer. The work was published recently online in the American Geophysical Union publication Geophysical Research Letters.

“Rapid Arctic sea ice loss is probably the most visible indicator of global climate change; it leads to shifts in ecosystems and economic access, and potentially impacts weather throughout the northern hemisphere,” said Overland. “Increased physical understanding of rapid Arctic climate shifts and improved models are needed that give a more detailed picture and timing of what to expect so we can better prepare and adapt to such changes. Early loss of Arctic sea ice gives immediacy to the issue of climate change.”"

Wrong forum, bro

I would love to put in the Other forum but it has become THE political dumpster

LOL...

There's a hopeful video about climate change you might enjoy, despite it being about cattle (not sure if a vegan site will appreciate that aspect), but it's rather hopeful about a holistic approach to reversing desertification, which would suck co2 out of the atmosphere. You can see the video here:

[jameskeeneyhill.com]

Panchito Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I would love to put in the Other forum but it has
> become THE political dumpster

Well, I never!

Speaking of Man-Made Global Warming, I guess you didn't get the memo that it's just not happening.

And like I posted in the Other Topics Forum, thanks loads to the Man-Made Global Warming Alarmists for Geo-Engineering, which is spraying us with toxic chemicals via Chemtrails, which is ruining our health.

Seriously, you don't believe global warming is man-made? With a little ecology 101 you'd know that everything on the planet operates under a system of balance. Everything, from your own body to every ecosystem. This includes the climate. You can't dump billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere year after year after year, while eliminating the trees needed to absorb those gases through deforestation and development, and not expect negative consequences. Just like eating too much refined sugar will throw your body out of balance, an over load of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere has thrown the climate way out of balance, thanks to our activities.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/14/2013 04:55AM by Keen.

video animation of NASA (what Rush Limbo does not want you to see)

photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/archive/PIA13955_Greenland_Ice_Loss_20111205-640.mov

Wow, so Man is Responsible for Greenland Losing Ice Mass since 2003 - what a stretch of the imagination! "Man-Made" Global Warming Alarmists sure have a big ego!

2000 year temperature change (notice 2004)



12000 year temperature change (notice 2004)



love the wows. It means it is digging

Oh, that's the famous Hockey Stick Graph that's been discredited. "RECONSTRUCTED" means there's an agenda.

Hockey Stick Hoax

[conservapedia.com]

"The Hockey Stick Hoax was perpetrated by Michael Mann in the form of a fraudulent reconstruction of the Earth's atmosphere temperature created by Michael Mann from various proxies such as tree rings, superimposed on the record of thermometer readings from ground-based weather stations. The proxy estimates go back 1,000 years, while the thermometer readings date from 1850. It was used to justify the anthropogenic global warming theory (AGW), but the fraud was exposed by two Canadian statistics experts. Mann's graph, which was shaped like a hockey stick, portrayed temperatures as steadily declining since medieval times and then sharply rising in the last century and a half. Notably, his reconstruction fueled claims that 1998 and following years had the highest temperatures in 1,000 years."

*****************

And Michael Mann's been discredited thanks to Climategate -

[conservapedia.com]

"The Climategate scandal erupted on November 19, 2009, when a collection of email messages, data files and data processing programs were leaked from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU) located in the UK, revealing scientific fraud and data manipulation by scientists concerning the Global Warming Theory. The scandal that the suffix –gate implies is the state of climate science over the past decade, revealed by more than a thousand emails, documents, and computer code sets between various prominent scientists. The released information is evidence of deceit by climate scientists, which was kept a secret or hidden from the public until the data was leaked from the CRU. The CRU's apparent obstruction of freedom-of-information requests, as revealed by the leaks, was only the tip of the iceberg. Climategate is said to have revealed the biggest scientific hoax in world history as the worst scandal of this generation."

Keen Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Seriously, you don't believe global warming is
> man-made?


Yes, I'm serious. I don't believe Man's Activities is changing the Climate. I think it's Natural Cycles. Man may be changing the Weather (not the Climate) by spraying chemtrails, weather modification. Here's what I'm talking about --

Geoengineered Snow Storms Wreaking Havoc around the Globe

[www.geoengineeringwatch.org]

"There is a mountain of data including already conducted experiments, satellite imagery, lab tests of snow, observations on the ground, and multiple existing patents, all of which point solidly to the conclusion that snow storms are being engineered with well established weather modification processes."

*****************

I don't believe Man can manipulate the Temperature of the Planet as a whole. Maybe in cities because of all the people and buildings and vehicles, the temperature would be warmer in summer; maybe in industrial areas the temperature would be warmer, etc., but once you go a certain distance outside of the specific area, or go a certain distance above the earth, the Temperature is Controlled by the Sun, not Man. I think the Sun is More Powerful than Man.

*****************

Didn't I just read that there are a lot more CO2in the atmosphere yet we're not getting 'global warming'.

KidRaw Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Oh, that's the famous Hockey Stick Graph that's
> been discredited. "RECONSTRUCTED" means there's an
> agenda.
>
> Hockey Stick Hoax
>
> [conservapedia.com]
>
> "The Hockey Stick Hoax was perpetrated by Michael
> Mann in the form of a fraudulent reconstruction of
> the Earth's atmosphere temperature created by
> Michael Mann from various proxies such as tree
> rings

nope. here are the data sources of the first graph:

[commons.wikimedia.org]


And here is the data sources of the second graph:

commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png

Where do you get your data sources from, Rush Limbo?

Well, I don't have time to get into a long debate on climate change, especially with someone who gets all of their "facts" from a biased source, so I'll just point out a few things and leave you to believe what you want.

This is the problem with conservatives today. They only get the news they want to hear. Thus I'm sure you missed the news that the email controversy was studied independently. You had a couple of researches who did something stupid, but each committee found that the scientific evidence was still valid. That was picked up and broadcast by some news reports, but I'm sure it wasn't broadcast by fox or other conservative publications.

Google it. Wikipedia will tell you that eight committees investigated the allegations and published reports, finding no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct.

I see you conveniently avoided the part about balance. What don't you understood about ecology and how everything else on the planet operates as a balanced system?

Yes, the sun is more powerful than man. And that is the problem. Man's activities don't sit well under the sun's power. I assume you realize that the surface of the earth is covered mostly by water, and that we have also managed to pollute most or all of it as well, or do you drink directly from the source without a filter. How is it that we've managed to pollute all that water and yet are too weak to have any effect on global temperature? Very strange.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/14/2013 07:05PM by Keen.

Panchito,

I agree that the Other Topics forum has become rather a mess, but it is the right place for this kind of thing, as certain segments of our membership prefer to consider this and similar topics "controversial." Other Topics effectively contains "alternative perspectives" in a single location.

I really don't want this board[or the main forum--thank goodness that one post was quarantined quickly!] into Conspiracy Theory Auxilliary Depot.

Tamukha Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
certain segments of our
> membership prefer to consider this and similar
> topics "controversial." Other Topics effectively
> contains "alternative perspectives" in a single
> location.


Yes, heaven forbid we actually have differing opinions and beliefs on "Man-Made" Global Warming and other topics, rather than marching in lock-step with what our 'leaders' tell us to believe. Some prefer to be "Individuals" rather than "The Collective".

I like individuals Didn't mean bad.

Environment Yes follow the money
The denial industryFor years, a network of fake citizens' groups and bogus scientific bodies has been claiming that science of global warming is inconclusive. They set back action on climate change by a decade. But who funded them? Exxon's involvement is well known, but not the strange role of Big Tobacco. In the first of three extracts from his new book, George Monbiot tells a bizarre and shocking new story
Share 158
inShare.1Email George Monbiot
The Guardian, Monday 18 September 2006
'The impacts of the climate-change deniers sponsored by Exxon have been felt all over the world.' Photograph: AP
ExxonMobil is the world's most profitable corporation. Its sales now amount to more than $1bn a day. It makes most of this money from oil, and has more to lose than any other company from efforts to tackle climate change. To safeguard its profits, ExxonMobil needs to sow doubt about whether serious action needs to be taken on climate change. But there are difficulties: it must confront a scientific consensus as strong as that which maintains that smoking causes lung cancer or that HIV causes Aids. So what's its strategy?

The website Exxonsecrets.org, using data found in the company's official documents, lists 124 organisations that have taken money from the company or work closely with those that have. These organisations take a consistent line on climate change: that the science is contradictory, the scientists are split, environmentalists are charlatans, liars or lunatics, and if governments took action to prevent global warming, they would be endangering the global economy for no good reason. The findings these organisations dislike are labelled "junk science". The findings they welcome are labelled "sound science".

Among the organisations that have been funded by Exxon are such well-known websites and lobby groups as TechCentralStation, the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Some of those on the list have names that make them look like grassroots citizens' organisations or academic bodies: the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, for example. One or two of them, such as the Congress of Racial Equality, are citizens' organisations or academic bodies, but the line they take on climate change is very much like that of the other sponsored groups. While all these groups are based in America, their publications are read and cited, and their staff are interviewed and quoted, all over the world.

By funding a large number of organisations, Exxon helps to create the impression that doubt about climate change is widespread. For those who do not understand that scientific findings cannot be trusted if they have not appeared in peer-reviewed journals, the names of these institutes help to suggest that serious researchers are challenging the consensus.

This is not to claim that all the science these groups champion is bogus. On the whole, they use selection, not invention. They will find one contradictory study - such as the discovery of tropospheric cooling, which, in a garbled form, has been used by Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday - and promote it relentlessly. They will continue to do so long after it has been disproved by further work. So, for example, John Christy, the author of the troposphere paper, admitted in August 2005 that his figures were incorrect, yet his initial findings are still being circulated and championed by many of these groups, as a quick internet search will show you.

But they do not stop there. The chairman of a group called the Science and Environmental Policy Project is Frederick Seitz. Seitz is a physicist who in the 1960s was president of the US National Academy of Sciences. In 1998, he wrote a document, known as the Oregon Petition, which has been cited by almost every journalist who claims that climate change is a myth.

The document reads as follows: "We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."

Anyone with a degree was entitled to sign it. It was attached to a letter written by Seitz, entitled Research Review of Global Warming Evidence. The lead author of the "review" that followed Seitz's letter is a Christian fundamentalist called Arthur B Robinson. He is not a professional climate scientist. It was co-published by Robinson's organisation - the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine - and an outfit called the George C Marshall Institute, which has received $630,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998. The other authors were Robinson's 22-year-old son and two employees of the George C Marshall Institute. The chairman of the George C Marshall Institute was Frederick Seitz.

The paper maintained that: "We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of the carbon dioxide increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal life than that with which we now are blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution."

It was printed in the font and format of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: the journal of the organisation of which Seitz - as he had just reminded his correspondents - was once president.

Soon after the petition was published, the National Academy of Sciences released this statement: "The NAS Council would like to make it clear that this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences and that the manuscript was not published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-reviewed journal. The petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy."

But it was too late. Seitz, the Oregon Institute and the George C Marshall Institute had already circulated tens of thousands of copies, and the petition had established a major presence on the internet. Some 17,000 graduates signed it, the majority of whom had no background in climate science. It has been repeatedly cited - by global-warming sceptics such as David Bellamy, Melanie Phillips and others - as a petition by climate scientists. It is promoted by the Exxon-sponsored sites as evidence that there is no scientific consensus on climate change.

All this is now well known to climate scientists and environmentalists. But what I have discovered while researching this issue is that the corporate funding of lobby groups denying that manmade climate change is taking place was initiated not by Exxon, or by any other firm directly involved in the fossil fuel industry. It was started by the tobacco company Philip Morris.

In December 1992, the US Environmental Protection Agency published a 500-page report called Respiratory Health Effects of Passive Smoking. It found that "the widespread exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) in the United States presents a serious and substantial public health impact. In adults: ETS is a human lung carcinogen, responsible for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths annually in US non-smokers. In children: ETS exposure is causally associated with an increased risk of lower respiratory tract infections such as bronchitis and pneumonia. This report estimates that 150,000 to 300,000 cases annually in infants and young children up to 18 months of age are attributable to ETS."

Had it not been for the settlement of a major class action against the tobacco companies in the US, we would never have been able to see what happened next. But in 1998 they were forced to publish their internal documents and post them on the internet.

Within two months of its publication, Philip Morris, the world's biggest tobacco firm, had devised a strategy for dealing with the passive-smoking report. In February 1993 Ellen Merlo, its senior vice-president of corporate affairs, sent a letter to William I Campbell, Philip Morris's chief executive officer and president, explaining her intentions: "Our overriding objective is to discredit the EPA report ... Concurrently, it is our objective to prevent states and cities, as well as businesses, from passive-smoking bans."

To this end, she had hired a public relations company called APCO. She had attached the advice it had given her. APCO warned that: "No matter how strong the arguments, industry spokespeople are, in and of themselves, not always credible or appropriate messengers."

So the fight against a ban on passive smoking had to be associated with other people and other issues. Philip Morris, APCO said, needed to create the impression of a "grassroots" movement - one that had been formed spontaneously by concerned citizens to fight "overregulation". It should portray the danger of tobacco smoke as just one "unfounded fear" among others, such as concerns about pesticides and cellphones. APCO proposed to set up "a national coalition intended to educate the media, public officials and the public about the dangers of 'junk science'. Coalition will address credibility of government's scientific studies, risk-assessment techniques and misuse of tax dollars ... Upon formation of Coalition, key leaders will begin media outreach, eg editorial board tours, opinion articles, and brief elected officials in selected states."

APCO would found the coalition, write its mission statements, and "prepare and place opinion articles in key markets". For this it required $150,000 for its own fees and $75,000 for the coalition's costs.

By May 1993, as another memo from APCO to Philip Morris shows, the fake citizens' group had a name: the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition. It was important, further letters stated, "to ensure that TASSC has a diverse group of contributors"; to "link the tobacco issue with other more 'politically correct' products"; and to associate scientific studies that cast smoking in a bad light with "broader questions about government research and regulations" - such as "global warming", "nuclear waste disposal" and "biotechnology". APCO would engage in the "intensive recruitment of high-profile representatives from business and industry, scientists, public officials, and other individuals interested in promoting the use of sound science".

By September 1993, APCO had produced a "Plan for the Public Launching of TASSC". The media launch would not take place in "Washington, DC or the top media markets of the country. Rather, we suggest creating a series of aggressive, decentralised launches in several targeted local and regional markets across the country. This approach ... avoids cynical reporters from major media: less reviewing/challenging of TASSC messages."

The media coverage, the public relations company hoped, would enable TASSC to "establish an image of a national grassroots coalition". In case the media asked hostile questions, APCO circulated a sheet of answers, drafted by Philip Morris. The first question was:

"Isn't it true that Philip Morris created TASSC to act as a front group for it?

"A: No, not at all. As a large corporation, PM belongs to many national, regional, and state business, public policy, and legislative organisations. PM has contributed to TASSC, as we have with various groups and corporations across the country."

There are clear similarities between the language used and the approaches adopted by Philip Morris and by the organisations funded by Exxon. The two lobbies use the same terms, which appear to have been invented by Philip Morris's consultants. "Junk science" meant peer-reviewed studies showing that smoking was linked to cancer and other diseases. "Sound science" meant studies sponsored by the tobacco industry suggesting that the link was inconclusive. Both lobbies recognised that their best chance of avoiding regulation was to challenge the scientific consensus. As a memo from the tobacco company Brown and Williamson noted, "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy." Both industries also sought to distance themselves from their own campaigns, creating the impression that they were spontaneous movements of professionals or ordinary citizens: the "grassroots".

But the connection goes further than that. TASSC, the "coalition" created by Philip Morris, was the first and most important of the corporate-funded organisations denying that climate change is taking place. It has done more damage to the campaign to halt it than any other body.

TASSC did as its founders at APCO suggested, and sought funding from other sources. Between 2000 and 2002 it received $30,000 from Exxon. The website it has financed - JunkScience.com - has been the main entrepot for almost every kind of climate-change denial that has found its way into the mainstream press. It equates environmentalists with Nazis, communists and terrorists. It flings at us the accusations that could justifably be levelled against itself: the website claims, for example, that it is campaigning against "faulty scientific data and analysis used to advance special and, often, hidden agendas". I have lost count of the number of correspondents who, while questioning manmade global warming, have pointed me there.

The man who runs it is called Steve Milloy. In 1992, he started working for APCO - Philip Morris's consultants. While there, he set up the JunkScience site. In March 1997, the documents show, he was appointed TASSC's executive director. By 1998, as he explained in a memo to TASSC board members, his JunkScience website was was being funded by TASSC. Both he and the "coalition" continued to receive money from Philip Morris. An internal document dated February 1998 reveals that TASSC took $200,000 from the tobacco company in 1997. Philip Morris's 2001 budget document records a payment to Steven Milloy of $90,000. Altria, Philip Morris's parent company, admits that Milloy was under contract to the tobacco firm until at least the end of 2005.

He has done well. You can find his name attached to letters and articles seeking to discredit passive-smoking studies all over the internet and in the academic databases. He has even managed to reach the British Medical Journal: I found a letter from him there which claimed that the studies it had reported "do not bear out the hypothesis that maternal smoking/ passive smoking increases cancer risk among infants". TASSC paid him $126,000 in 2004 for 15 hours' work a week. Two other organisations are registered at his address: the Free Enterprise Education Institute and the Free Enterprise Action Institute. They have received $10,000 and $50,000 respectively from Exxon. The secretary of the Free Enterprise Action Institute is Thomas Borelli. Borelli was the Philip Morris executive who oversaw the payments to TASSC.

Milloy also writes a weekly Junk Science column for the Fox News website. Without declaring his interests, he has used this column to pour scorn on studies documenting the medical effects of second-hand tobacco smoke and showing that climate change is taking place. Even after Fox News was told about the money he had been receiving from Philip Morris and Exxon, it continued to employ him, without informing its readers about his interests.

TASSC's headed notepaper names an advisory board of eight people. Three of them are listed by Exxonsecrets.org as working for organisations taking money from Exxon. One of them is Frederick Seitz, the man who wrote the Oregon Petition, and who chairs the Science and Environmental Policy Project. In 1979, Seitz became a permanent consultant to the tobacco company RJ Reynolds. He worked for the firm until at least 1987, for an annual fee of $65,000. He was in charge of deciding which medical research projects the company should fund, and handed out millions of dollars a year to American universities. The purpose of this funding, a memo from the chairman of RJ Reynolds shows, was to "refute the criticisms against cigarettes". An undated note in the Philip Morris archive shows that it was planning a "Seitz symposium" with the help of TASSC, in which Frederick Seitz would speak to "40-60 regulators".

The president of Seitz's Science and Environmental Policy Project is a maverick environmental scientist called S Fred Singer. He has spent the past few years refuting evidence for manmade climate change. It was he, for example, who published the misleading claim that most of the world's glaciers are advancing, which landed David Bellamy in so much trouble when he repeated it last year. He also had connections with the tobacco industry. In March 1993, APCO sent a memo to Ellen Merlo, the vice-president of Philip Morris, who had just commissioned it to fight the Environmental Protection Agency: "As you know, we have been working with Dr Fred Singer and Dr Dwight Lee, who have authored articles on junk science and indoor air quality (IAQ) respectively ..."

Singer's article, entitled Junk Science at the EPA, claimed that "the latest 'crisis' - environmental tobacco smoke - has been widely criticised as the most shocking distortion of scientific evidence yet". He alleged that the Environmental Protection Agency had had to "rig the numbers" in its report on passive smoking. This was the report that Philip Morris and APCO had set out to discredit a month before Singer wrote his article.

I have no evidence that Fred Singer or his organisation have taken money from Philip Morris. But many of the other bodies that have been sponsored by Exxon and have sought to repudiate climate change were also funded by the tobacco company. Among them are some of the world's best-known "thinktanks": the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Frontiers of Freedom Institute, the Reason Foundation and the Independent Institute, as well as George Mason University's Law and Economics Centre. I can't help wondering whether there is any aspect of conservative thought in the United States that has not been formed and funded by the corporations.

Until I came across this material, I believed that the accusations, the insults and the taunts such people had slung at us environmentalists were personal: that they really did hate us, and had found someone who would pay to help them express those feelings. Now I realise that they have simply transferred their skills.

While they have been most effective in the United States, the impacts of the climate-change deniers sponsored by Exxon and Philip Morris have been felt all over the world. I have seen their arguments endlessly repeated in Australia, Canada, India, Russia and the UK. By dominating the media debate on climate change during seven or eight critical years in which urgent international talks should have been taking place, by constantly seeding doubt about the science just as it should have been most persuasive, they have justified the money their sponsors have spent on them many times over. It is fair to say that the professional denial industry has delayed effective global action on climate change by years, just as it helped to delay action against the tobacco companies.

· This is an edited extract from Heat, by George Monbiot, published by Allen Lane. To order a copy for £16.99 with free UK p&p (rrp £17.99), go to Guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/19/2013 09:28PM by riverhousebill.

Climate Change Poem
Posted by pacificrisa on Thursday, July 26, 2012 · Leave a Comment

inShare.0ShareMarshall Islander Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner Presents Poem on Climate Change
Marshall Islander Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s poem “Tell Them” has recently been receiving increased attention online. The poem represents a unique viewpoint on the effects of climate change, from the perspective of an artist and a native Islander. The poem in its entirety can be found below.

“A poet, writer, artist, and journalist, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner studied creative writing at Mills College and taught as a Student Teacher Poet (STP) with Poetry for the People. She has participated in Youthspeaks Hawaii, the artist collective formally known as The Bombshelter Crew and the queer Pacific Islander artist collective One Love Oceania (OLO), and Voices of Our Nations (VONA). She has also performed “Iep Jaltok” at various solo performance theater venues including City Solo, Third Root Art Collective’s “For Colored Girls Only” show, and CounterPulse’s “Words First.” She currently writes the blog Iep Jaltok (yiyip jalteq), the title of which refers to “a basket whose opening is facing the speaker.” The term, Jetnil-Kijiner writes, also is used to describe “female children” who represent “a basket whose contents are made available to her relatives. Also refers to matrilineal society of the Marshallese.”” (http://jacket2.org/commentary/ocean-leveling-land-0, accessed 7/25/12)

A video of Jetnil-Kijiner performing her poem can be found here. More information about Jetnil-Kijiner can be found on her blog: [jkijiner.wordpress.com].



“Tell Them”

I prepared the package
for my friends in the states
the dangling earrings woven
into half moons black pearls glinting
like an eye in a storm of tight spirals
the baskets
sturdy, also woven
brown cowry shells shiny
intricate mandalas
shaped by calloused fingers
Inside the basket
a message:

Wear these earrings
to parties
to your classes and meetings
to the grocery store, the corner store
and while riding the bus
Store jewelry, incense, copper coins
and curling letters like this one
in this basket
and when others ask you
where you got this
you tell them

they’re from the Marshall Islands

show them where it is on a map
tell them we are a proud people
toasted dark brown as the carved ribs
of a tree stump
tell them we are descendents
of the finest navigators in the world
tell them our islands were dropped
from a basket
carried by a giant
tell them we are the hollow hulls
of canoes as fast as the wind
slicing through the pacific sea
we are wood shavings
and drying pandanus leaves
and sticky bwiros at kemems
tell them we are sweet harmonies
of grandmothers mothers aunties and sisters
songs late into night
tell them we are whispered prayers
the breath of God
a crown of fushia flowers encircling
aunty mary’s white sea foam hair
tell them we are styrofoam cups of koolaid red
waiting patiently for the ilomij
tell them we are papaya golden sunsets bleeding
into a glittering open sea
we are skies uncluttered
majestic in their sweeping landscape
we are the ocean
terrifying and regal in its power
tell them we are dusty rubber slippers
swiped
from concrete doorsteps
we are the ripped seams
and the broken door handles of taxis
we are sweaty hands shaking another sweaty hand in heat
tell them
we are days
and nights hotter
than anything you can imagine
tell them we are little girls with braids
cartwheeling beneath the rain
we are shards of broken beer bottles
burrowed beneath fine white sand
we are children flinging
like rubber bands
across a road clogged with chugging cars
tell them
we only have one road

and after all this
tell them about the water
how we have seen it rising
flooding across our cemeteries
gushing over the sea walls
and crashing against our homes
tell them what it’s like
to see the entire ocean__level___with the land
tell them
we are afraid
tell them we don’t know
of the politics
or the science
but tell them we see
what is in our own backyard
tell them that some of us
are old fishermen who believe that God
made us a promise
some of us
are more skeptical of God
but most importantly tell them
we don’t want to leave
we’ve never wanted to leave
and that we
are nothing without our islands.

Because some people think that the non-existent 'man-made' Global Warming has no effect on our health, I have continued debunking the myth in this discussion in the Other Topics Forum -

[www.rawfoodsupport.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/22/2013 08:26PM by KidRaw.