Draft Gore 2008 PAC

[A recent posting to the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) mailing list. It is interesting how broadly Al is referenced as having something to do with something important. I've removed the author's contact information, leaving just the "what if" from deep in the heart of network operator country, where we all know how much Al did for the net. ebw]

A number of people have bemoaned the lack of any IPv6-only killer-content that would drive a demand for IPv6. I've thought about this, and about the government's push to make IPv6 a reality. What occurred to me is there is a satellite sitting in storage that would provide such content:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triana_(satellite)

Al Gore pushed for this satellite, Triana, to provide those on earth with a view of the planet among its scientific goals. The Republicans referred to it as an "overpriced screen saver," though the effect even of just the camera component on people's lives and how they treat the planet could be considerable.

By combining the launch of Triana with feeding the still images and video from servers only connected to native IPv6 bandwidth, the government would provide both a strong incentive for end users to want to move to IPv6, and a way to get the people of this planet to stop from time to time and ponder the future of the earth.

Of course getting this done any time soon would require getting the present administration to reverse its bias against Triana and global warming. But it seemed to me an interesting way to advance two goals in synergy.

The New York Times is running Al Gore's Moving Beyond Kyoto in today's (Sunday, July 1st) edition.

The Iraq War bill (Emergency Supplemental, HR 1591) contained $3bn in drought relief for 2005 and 2006. Click on the thumbnail for the sequence from March 8th to May 22nd -- the "rainy season" in the Plains states and west. Note also the conditions in the South East.

The combined global land and ocean surface temperature was the sixth warmest on record in February, but a record warm January helped push the winter (December-February) to its highest value since records began in 1880 (1.30 degrees F/0.72 degrees C above the 20th century mean). El Niño conditions contributed to the season’s record warmth, but the episode rapidly weakened in February, as ocean temperatures in the central equatorial Pacific cooled more than 0.5 degrees F/0.3 degrees C and were near average for the month.

Separately, the global December-February land-surface temperature was the warmest on record, while the ocean-surface temperature tied for second warmest in the 128-year period of record, approximately 0.1 degree F (0.06 degrees C) cooler than the record established during the very strong El Niño episode of 1997-1998.

During the past century, global surface temperatures have increased at a rate near 0.11 degrees F (0.06 degrees C) per decade, but the rate of increase has been three times larger since 1976, or 0.32 degrees F (0.18 degrees C) per decade, with some of the largest temperature increases occurring in the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.