Planted Six Feet Under

Maybe my nieces and nephews will forgive our generation one day for failure on climate change, but I doubt it.

More than half of common species of plants and a third of animal species are likely to see their living space halved by 2080 on current trends of carbon emissions, a climate study said on Sunday.

Output of man-made greenhouse gases is putting Earth on track for four degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100 compared with the pre-industrial 18th century, it said.

The unprecedented speed of warming will be a shock for many species, as it will badly affect the climatic range in which they can live, it warned.

Investigators from Britain’s University of East Anglia looked at 48,786 species and measured how their range would be affected according to models of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

Fifty-five percent of plants and 35 percent of animals could see their living space halved by 2080 at current emission growth for CO2, they found. The figures take into account the species’ ability to migrate into habitat that may open up as a result of warming.

This is a greatly conservative estimate.  The other end of the spectrum is that 80 years from now, Earth will be largely a wasteland with a broken ecosystem, and humanity is going to have tremendous difficulty even surviving.  That's not taking into account the massive superstorms that will pound the planet as a direct result of climate change.

We're decades past being able to save ourselves.  It's now a question of how bad we'll let it get.  The answer appears to be "an unabated march to catastrophe."

Selling Doom And Gloom

The gang over at WIN THE MORNING tried to slip this one out there Friday, but it got run over by the IRS story.  Still, expect more of the notion that the Democrats are increasingly doomed, because, well, they're always doomed.  Even when they win.

One of the Democrats’ most veteran strategists warns that the party is “in decline” and “at considerable risk” when President Barack Obama is no longer on the scene.

“Since Obama was elected President, the Democrats have lost nine governorships, 56 members of the House and two Senate seats,” Doug Sosnik, the political director in Bill Clinton’s White House, writes in a new memo.

Oh gosh, a former Clinton political director is warning that Barack Obama is screwing everything up.  There's a shocker.  So who else should we blame?  Sosnick provides a helpful checklist:

• Obama’s personal popularity does not easily translate for other candidates. The president is not building the Democratic Party’s institutional apparatus in a way that it will thrive when he’s gone.

• The losses in the 2010 midterms gave Republicans control of the redistricting process, which will be in effect until after the 2020 census. This gives the GOP a structural advantage in keeping the House.

• Millennials, born 1981 to 1994, and Generation X’ers, born 1965 to 1980, are voting Democratic, but a plurality identify themselves as independents — which makes them less reliable.

• Democrats cannot count on the same level of African-American turnout without Obama at the top of the ticket. Sosnik cites new analysis showing that in 2012 for the first time ever eligible black voters turned out a higher rate than whites.

Obama lost the House in 2010, thanks to "unreliable" voters (anyone under 50) and black voters who will abandon the party once Obama is gone.

In other words, Sosnik is blaming Obama, and me.   Black voters under 48.  Specifically.  And he's setting us up for the fall in 2014 and 2016.

Expect that to be the theme going forward from the Hillary camp.  Not all Obama Derangement Syndrome sufferers are Republicans.

StupidiNews!

• The toll of those injured in yesterday's mass shooting at a New Orleans second-line Mother's Day parade has reached 19, including 2 children.
• Some 30 years after the bombings he was convicted for, infamous Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal heads back to a French court to appeal his sentence.
• Former Pakistani PM Nawaz Sharif 's party won nearly an outright majority of seats in this weekend's election, vaulting Sharif back to power.
• Bangladesh's parliament is considering raising the country's minimum wage from $39 a month after last month's deadly factory collapse toll reached 1,100 dead.
• An experimental parasail-powered flying car crashed near a Canadian elementary school in British Columbia, no serious injuries reported.