Global Warming

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Cost drives Senate climate debate
By H. JOSEF HEBERT,AP
Posted: 2008-06-01 05:02:16

WASHINGTON (AP) - The possible economic cost of confronting global warming - from higher electricity bills to more expensive gasoline - is driving the debate as climate change takes center stage in Congress.

The Senate will begin considering legislation Monday that would mandate a reduction in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from power plants, refineries, factories and transportation, cutting heat-trapping pollution by two-thirds by mid-century.

The debate opens as Americans are reeling over $4 gasoline and soaring expenses to heat and cool their homes. That's making it all that harder to sell the merits of a bill that would transform the nation's energy industries and - as its critics will argue - cause energy prices to increase even more.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., one of the chief sponsors of the bill, says computer studies suggest the overall impact on energy costs could be modest with several projections showing overall continued economic growth. The measure calls for tens of billions of dollars in tax breaks to offset higher energy bills, its sponsors say.

Returning from the Memorial Day recess, lawmakers also have to fix the international food aid and trade components of a farm bill that, through a printing error, were left out of the parchment version that President Bush signed into law last month. And the House and Senate are still working on a bill to fund the Iraq war another year, expand G.I. Bill college benefits and strengthen New Orleans levees.

While this week's Senate debate on global warming is viewed as a watershed in climate change politics, both sides of the issue acknowledge the likelihood of getting the bill passed is slim, at least this year.

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/cost-drives-senate-climate-debate/n20080601050209990005

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White House slams climate bill
Mon Jun 2, 2008 11:54am EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Monday slammed legislation the U.S. Senate will consider this week aimed at controlling climate change, arguing it would cut economic growth and lead to soaring gasoline prices.

"As you can imagine, our opposition to this will be quite strong and we'll be making these points throughout the week," Keith Hennessey, director of President George W. Bush's National Economic Council, said at a White House forum on the economy and taxes.

U.S. gross domestic product could be reduced by as much as 7 percent in the year 2050 and gasoline prices -- already at record highs in the United States-- could soar by as much as 53 cents a gallon by 2030, he said.

The legislation the Senate will debate, which is not expected to become law this year amid a presidential election, could cut total U.S. global warming emissions by 66 percent by 2050, according to a summary of the measure.

U.S. greenhouse gas emissions would drop by about 2 percent per year between 2012 and 2050, based on 2005 emission levels, under the measure.

The bill would cap carbon emissions from 86 percent of U.S. facilities, and emissions from those would be 19 percent below current levels by 2020 and 71 percent below current levels by 2050, according to a summary of the bill's details released by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

The Bush administration has consistently opposed an across-the-board cap-and-trade program for carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas emitted by fossil-fueled vehicles and coal-fired industries, as well as by natural sources including human breath.

http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSN0225568220080602

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Global Warming Comments by John Coleman

Weather Channel Founder John Coleman: Global Warming ‘Greatest Scam in History’

http://media.kusi.clickability.com/documents/Comments+on+Global+Warming02.pdf

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so true. High oil prices will change us all - for the better - we hope!

Our Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman is a buffoon (a Bush/Chenery/big-oil puppet). I watched the energy hearing rerun late last nite - all I can is un-real!

Bodman "I guess I am out of the loop"

Markey "why are we giving Saudi Arabia nuclear technology (proliferation) instead of Solar

Bodamn "Nuclear is cheaper than solar"

LOL

I'm waiting to find the transcript.

Committee Chairman Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) held up the graphic at the hearing, telling Bodman it seemed that the department "instead of insulating the poor against high energy costs . . . is more concerned with insulating themselves against embarrassment."

Bodman said other programs simply "had higher rates of return" than that one.

[sumisu]

>This post really affected me after my having read James Mitchner's novel titled "Chesapeake" published in 1978.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesapeake_(novel)

Sadly, the world seems like it's in an irreversible decline in oh so many aspects.

Thanks for sharing,

sumi

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Melting polar ice threatens worldwide sea-level rise

By Randolph E. Schmid, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON — The rumblings of global warming are echoing across Greenland. Groups of scientists studying ancient climate, tweaking computer models of future climate and even listening to earthquakes add to the evidence that global warming is melting polar ice, according to a series of papers in this week's issue of the journal Science.

Scientists say Greenland's ice sheet is thinning, and predict a 3-foot rise in sea levels by 2100.
John McConnico, AP File

At the current rate of rising temperatures, by the year 2100 Arctic summers could be as warm as they were 130,000 years ago. Back then, in a time known as the last interglacial, the oceans were 20 feet higher than they are now.

That does not mean the researchers are predicting a 20-foot ocean rise by the end of this century; more like a couple of feet, they think. But such a warming is expected to accelerate melting of the polar ice and could lead to considerable additional sea-level rise, they said.

For example:

•At current rate that Earth's temperature is rising, by 2100 it will probably be 4 degrees warmer than it is now, with the Arctic at least as warm as it was 130,000 years ago, reports a research group led by Jonathan T. Overpeck of the University of Arizona.

•Computer models indicate that warming could raise the average temperature in parts of Greenland above freezing for multiple months and could have a substantial impact on melting of the polar ice sheets, according to researchers led by Bette Otto-Bliesner of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Melting could raise sea levels by 1 to 3 feet over the next 100 years to 150 years, she said.

•A team led by Goeran Ekstroem of Harvard University reported an increase in "glacial earthquakes," which occur when giant rivers of ice — some as big as Manhattan — lurch suddenly when lubricated by water from melted ice and snow, causing the ground to tremble.

Otto-Bliesner and Overpeck worked together on looking at ancient climate and assessing whether modern computer models correctly reflect those earlier times.

That allowed them to use the models to look at possible future climate and the potential for rapid polar melting. The researchers studied ancient coral reefs, ice cores and other natural climate records.

"Although the focus of our work is polar, the implications are global," Otto-Bliesner said. "These ice sheets have melted before and sea levels rose. The warmth needed isn't that much above present conditions."

According to the studies, increases in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over the next century could raise Arctic temperatures as much as 5 to 8 degrees.

The warming could raise global sea levels by up to three feet this century through a combination of thermal expansion of the water and melting of polar ice, Overpeck and Otto-Bliesner said.

Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide are chemicals that have been increasing in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, raising fears of altering the planet's climate by trapping heat from the sun.

Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University, who was not part of the research teams, said one point that stands out is "that a modest global warming may put Earth in the danger zone for a major sea level rise due to deglaciation of one or both ice sheets."

Ekstroem and colleagues reported that glacial earthquakes in Greenland occur most often in July and August and have more than doubled since 2002.

"People often think of glaciers as inert and slow-moving, but in fact they can also move rather quickly," Ekstroem said in a statement. "Some of Greenland's glaciers, as large as Manhattan and as tall as the Empire State Building, can move 10 meters in less than a minute, a jolt that is sufficient to generate moderate seismic waves."

Melting water from the surface gradually seeps down, accumulating at the base of a glacier where it can serve as a lubricant allowing the ice to suddenly move downhill, the researchers reported.

"Our results suggest that these major outlet glaciers can respond to changes in climate conditions much more quickly than we had thought," said team member Meredith Nettles of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Between January 1993 and October 2005, seismometers detected 182 quakes in Greenland. All were located in valleys draining the Greenland ice sheet and they ranged in magnitude from 4.6 to 5.1.

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/2006-03-23-sea-level-rise_x.htm

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Report: Chesapeake Bay threatened by sea-level rise

5/23/08

ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — The National Wildlife Federation says rising sea levels caused by global warming could have serious consequences for the Chesapeake Bay region.

A report by the environmental group says a sea-level rise of about two feet would mean coastal habitats would lose more than half their beaches and that low-lying islands could disappear. However, the report does not predict how much sea levels may rise.

The study also says a two-foot rise would mean that more than 415 square miles of open water would replace undeveloped dry land and marshes, an area about the size of Fairfax County, Virginia.

ACROSS THE GLOBE: Melting polar ice threatens worldwide sea-level rise

The National Wildlife Federation says carbon emissions must be reduced 80% by mid-century to prevent catastrophic damage from sea-level rise.

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/2008-05-22-rising_chesapeake_bay_N.htm?csp=34

[sumisu]

Clock running out on irreversible climate change - Part I

Thursday, 15 May 2008

By James Hansen



http://www.sciencealert.com.au/opinions/20081505-17325.html

New York: fifty years ago, Yankee Stadium had about 70,000 seats. It seldom sold out, and almost any kid could afford the cheapest seats. Capacity was reduced to about 57,000 when the stadium was remodeled in the 1970s. Most games sell out now, and prices have gone up.

The new stadium, opening next year, will reduce seating to about 51,800. This intentional contraction is aimed at guaranteeing sellouts, increasing demand, allowing the owners, in short order, to triple prices or more. The owners have learned that scarcity will fatten their wallets. The plan may discriminate against the lower middle class, but as long as the owner is footing the bill without public subsidies, there may be little grounds for complaint.
Now fossil-fuel moguls are intent on hoodwinking the entire planet with an analogous scheme.

The basic trick is oil producers overstating fossil-fuel reserves. Government “energy information” departments parrot industry. Partly because of disinformation, the major efforts needed to develop alternative energies have not been made.

The reality of limited supply forces prices higher. Eventually, sales volume will begin to decline, but fossil-fuel moguls will make more money than ever. They’ll continue to assert that there’s plenty more oil, gas or coal to be found, aiming to keep the suckers on the hook. Indeed, they may find somewhat more in the deep ocean, under national parks, in polar regions, offshore, and in other environmentally sensitive areas. They don’t need much to keep the suckers paying higher and higher prices.

Oil “reserves” suddenly doubled when Organization for the Petroleum Exporting Countries decided that production quotas would be proportional to official reserves. These higher reserves are, at least in part, phantom. Coal “reserves” are based on estimates made many decades ago. Closer study shows that extractable coal reserves are vastly overstated, consistent with present production difficulties and rising prices. The presumed 200-year supply of coal in the United States is a myth, but it serves industry moguls well.

Conventional fossil-fuel supplies are limited, even if we tear up the Earth to extract every last drop of oil and shard of coal. Tearing up the Earth to get at those last drops - Exxon/Mobil proudly advertises that they’re drilling the depths of the ocean and searching the most extreme pristine environments - is as insane as the smoker who trudged four miles through a raging storm to buy a pack of Camel cigarettes to feed his nicotine addiction.

It would be possible to find more fossil fuels, and extend our addiction and pollution of the environment, should we be so foolish as to take the path of extracting unconventional fossil fuels such as tar shale and tar sands on a large scale. That choice cannot be left to the discretion of industry moguls. The planet does not belong to them.

Basic facts on reserves must be combined with basic climate facts described in the paper Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim? (PDF 1.36MB)

Our conclusion is that, if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to the one on which civilisation developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, CO2 must be reduced from its present 385ppm (parts per million) to, at most, 350ppm. We find that peak CO2 can be kept to about 425ppm, with large estimates for oil and gas reserves, if coal use is phased out by 2030 (except where CO2 is captured and sequestered) and unconventional fossil fuels are not tapped substantially. Peak CO2 can be kept close to 400ppm, if actual reserves are closer to those estimated by “peakists”, who believe that the globe is already at peak global oil production, having extracted about half of readily extractable oil resources.

This lower 400ppm peak can be ensured, assuming phase-out of coal emissions by 2030, if a practical limit on reserves is achieved by means of actions that prevent fossil-fuel extraction from public lands, off-shore regions under government control, environmentally pristine regions and extreme environments. The concerned public can influence this matter, but time is short, the industry voice is strong and climate effects have not yet become so obvious to the public as to overwhelm the disinformation from industry moguls.

A near-term moratorium on coal-fired power plants and constraints on oil extraction in extreme environments are essential, because once CO2 is emitted to the air much of it will remain there for centuries. Improved agricultural and forestry practices, mostly reforestation, could draw down atmospheric CO2 by about 50ppm by the end of the century. But a greater drawdown by such more-or-less natural methods seems impractical, making a long-term overshoot of the 350ppm target level, with potentially disastrous consequences, a near certainty if the world stays on its business-as-usual course.

If we choose a different path, which permits the possibility of achieving 350ppm CO2 or lower this century, we can minimise the chance of passing tipping points that spiral out of control, such as disintegration of ice sheets, rapid sea level rise and extermination of countless species. At the same time, we could solve problems that seem intractable, such as acidification of the ocean with consequent loss of coral reefs.

In any event, we must move beyond fossil fuels soon, because a large fraction of CO2 emissions will linger in the atmosphere for many centuries.

The world must move to zero fossil-fuel emissions. This is a fact, a certainty. So why not do it sooner, in time to avert climate crises? At the same time, we halt other pollution that comes from fossil fuels, including mercury pollution, conventional air pollution, problems stemming from mountain-top removal and more.

Breaking an addiction is not easy. But we may be like the smoker who trudged four miles through rain to get a pack of Camels - when he got back to his motel he threw the pack away and never smoked again.

Fossil-fuel addiction is more difficult - one person’s epiphany cannot solve the problem. This problem requires global co-operation. We must be on a new path within the next several years, or reducing CO2 levels this century becomes implausible. Developed countries, the source of most excess CO2 in the air today, must lead in developing clean energy and halting emissions. Yet it is hardly a sacrifice: “Green” jobs will be an economic stimulus and a boon to worker well-being.

A major fight is brewing - it might be called war. On the one side, we find the short-term financial interests of the fossil-fuel industry. On the other side: young people and other beings who will inherit the planet. The fight seems uneven. The fossil-fuel industry is launching a disinformation campaign, and they have powerful influence in capitals around the world.

Young people seem pretty puny in comparison to industry moguls, and animals don’t talk or vote. The battle may start with local and regional skirmishes, one coal plant at a time. But it could build rapidly - we’re running out of time.

Meanwhile, the moguls’ dirtiest trick is spewing “green” messages to the public - propaganda, intended to leave the impression they’re moving in the right direction. Meanwhile they hire scientific has-beens to dispute evidence and confuse the public.

When will we know that the long-term public interest has overcome the greed? When investors, companies and governments begin to invest en masse in renewable energies, when all aim for zero-carbon emissions.

James Hansen is director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Adjunct Professor at the Columbia University Earth Institute.

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Civilization's last chance

The planet is nearing a tipping point on climate change, and it gets much worse, fast.

By Bill McKibben
May 11, 2008

Even for Americans -- who are constitutionally convinced that there will always be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that, and, if necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a Brand New Start -- even for us, the world looks a little terminal right now.

It's not just the economy: We've gone through swoons before. It's that gas at $4 a gallon means we're running out, at least of the cheap stuff that built our sprawling society. It's that when we try to turn corn into gas, it helps send the price of a loaf of bread shooting upward and helps ignite food riots on three continents. It's that everything is so tied together. It's that, all of a sudden, those grim Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and on about the "limits to growth" suddenly seem ... how best to put it, right.

All of a sudden it isn't morning in America, it's dusk on planet Earth.

There's a number -- a new number -- that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

A few weeks ago, NASA's chief climatologist, James Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several coauthors. The abstract attached to it argued -- and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper -- that "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm."

Hansen cites six irreversible tipping points -- massive sea level rise and huge changes in rainfall patterns, among them -- that we'll pass if we don't get back down to 350 soon; and the first of them, judging by last summer's insane melt of Arctic ice, may already be behind us.

So it's a tough diagnosis. It's like the doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way too high and, if you don't bring it down right away, you're going to have a stroke. So you take the pill, you swear off the cheese, and, if you're lucky, you get back into the safety zone before the coronary. It's like watching the tachometer edge into the red zone and knowing that you need to take your foot off the gas before you hear that clunk up front.

In this case, though, it's worse than that because we're not taking the pill and we are stomping on the gas -- hard. Instead of slowing down, we're pouring on the coal, quite literally. Two weeks ago came the news that atmospheric carbon dioxide had jumped 2.4 parts per million last year -- two decades ago, it was going up barely half that fast.

And suddenly the news arrives that the amount of methane, another potent greenhouse gas accumulating in the atmosphere, has unexpectedly begun to soar as well. It appears that we've managed to warm the far north enough to start melting huge patches of permafrost, and massive quantities of methane trapped beneath it have begun to bubble forth.

And don't forget: China is building more power plants; India is pioneering the $2,500 car; and Americans are buying TVs the size of windshields, which suck juice ever faster.

Here's the thing. Hansen didn't just say that if we didn't act, there was trouble coming. He didn't just say that if we didn't yet know what was best for us, we'd certainly be better off below 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

His phrase was: "if we wish to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed." A planet with billions of people living near those oh-so-floodable coastlines. A planet with ever-more vulnerable forests. (A beetle, encouraged by warmer temperatures, has already managed to kill 10 times more trees than in any previous infestation across the northern reaches of Canada this year. This means far more carbon heading for the atmosphere and apparently dooms Canada's efforts to comply with the Kyoto protocol, which was already in doubt because of its decision to start producing oil for the U.S. from Alberta's tar sands.)

We're the ones who kicked the warming off; now the planet is starting to take over the job. Melt all that Arctic ice, for instance, and suddenly the nice white shield that reflected 80% of incoming solar radiation back into space has turned to blue water that absorbs 80% of the sun's heat. Such feedbacks are beyond history, though not in the sense that Francis Fukuyama had in mind.

And we have, at best, a few years to short-circuit them -- to reverse course. Here's the Indian scientist and economist Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year (and, by the way, got his job when the Bush administration, at the behest of Exxon Mobil, forced out his predecessor): "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."

In the next two or three years, the nations of the world are supposed to be negotiating a successor treaty to the Kyoto accord (which, for the record, has never been approved by the United States -- the only industrial nation that has failed to do so). When December 2009 rolls around, heads of state are supposed to converge on Copenhagen to sign a treaty -- a treaty that would go into effect at the last plausible moment to heed the most basic and crucial of limits on atmospheric CO2.

If we did everything right, Hansen says, we could see carbon emissions start to fall fairly rapidly and the oceans begin to pull some of that CO2 out of the atmosphere. Before the century was out, we might even be on track back to 350. We might stop just short of some of those tipping points, like the Road Runner screeching to a halt at the very edge of the cliff.

More likely, though, we're the coyote -- because "doing everything right" means that political systems around the world would have to take enormous and painful steps right away. It means no more new coal-fired power plants anywhere, and plans to quickly close the ones already in operation. (Coal-fired power plants operating the way they're supposed to are, in global warming terms, as dangerous as nuclear plants melting down.) It means making car factories turn out efficient hybrids next year, just the way U.S. automakers made them turn out tanks in six months at the start of World War II. It means making trains an absolute priority and planes a taboo.

It means making every decision wisely because we have so little time and so little money, at least relative to the task at hand. And hardest of all, it means the rich countries of the world sharing resources and technology freely with the poorest ones so that they can develop dignified lives without burning their cheap coal.

It's possible. The United States launched a Marshall Plan once, and could do it again, this time in relation to carbon. But at a time when the president has, once more, urged drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, it seems unlikely. At a time when the alluring phrase "gas tax holiday" -- which would actually encourage more driving and more energy consumption -- has danced into our vocabulary, it's hard to see. And if it's hard to imagine sacrifice here, imagine China, where people produce a quarter as much carbon apiece as Americans do.

Still, as long as it's not impossible, we've got a duty to try to push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality. In fact, it's about the most obvious duty humans have ever faced.

After all, those talks are our last chance; you just can't do this one lightbulb at a time.

We do have one thing going for us -- the Web -- which at least allows you to imagine something like a grass-roots global effort. If the Internet was built for anything, it was built for sharing this number, for making people understand that "350" stands for a kind of safety, a kind of possibility, a kind of future.

Hansen's words were well-chosen: "a planet similar to that on which civilization developed." People will doubtless survive on a non-350 planet, but those who do will be so preoccupied, coping with the endless unintended consequences of an overheated planet, that civilization may not.

Civilization is what grows up in the margins of leisure and security provided by a workable relationship with the natural world. That margin won't exist, at least not for long, as long as we remain on the wrong side of 350. That's the limit we face.

Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and the author, most recently, of "The Bill McKibben Reader," is the co-founder of Project 350 ( http://www.350.org ), devoted to reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million. A longer version of this article appears at http://Tomdispatch.com.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-mckibben11-2008may11,0,7434369.story

credit: gloe #msg-29238137

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Climate change 'is accelerating'

David Parsley The Observer, Sunday March 23 2008

This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday March 23 2008 on p2 of the Business news & features section.

The growth of developing economies in Africa, Asia and South America has accelerated global warming far beyond official predictions and it is developed nations that must act to halt the potentially catastrophic consequences, according to a new study from the world's leading temporary power supplier, Aggreko.

The warning, which has shocked environment campaigners, comes from Aggreko's chief executive, Rupert Soames, who said: 'The threat of global warming is far greater than people have previously thought. The consensus figure on the world's power consumption going forward to 2015 is simply wrong.'

Soames is referring to the findings of a report Aggreko commissioned from Oxford Economics, the commercial arm of Oxford University's business college. While the International Energy Authority (IEA), states the annual rate of growth in the planet's power consumption will be 3.3 per cent until 2015, the Aggreko study, which studied the growth of developing economies in greater detail than the IEA, puts the figure at 5 per cent.

'What's happening is the developing economies are growing like topsy,' said Soames. 'There's work coming into these countries and when people earn they want to buy mobile phones, TVs and fridges. Now, who are we to tell the developing economies to go without these things to protect the earth from global warming?'

However, Soames believes the study has produced a solution to increasing concerns over global warming.

'There are about 8,000 power stations in the world and the vast majority are highly polluting coal-fired things,' he said. 'If the world is serious about making an impact against global warming, then just turn the worst 150 polluters around the world into clean nuclear stations and the effect would be the same as if you immediately took every single car in the world off the road. It'd be that dramatic.'

Mary Taylor, energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said the report from Aggreko painted a 'grim picture indeed. The increasing emissions are of huge concern,' she said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/mar/23/climatechange.carbonemissions

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China becoming gold medalist in CO2 emissions

Posted by Harry Fuller March 22nd, 2008

If you believe global warming’s a crock, this blog’s worth another good belly laugh. If you suspect that CO2 and other greenhouse gases could be altering the climate, then this there’s more evidence that the U.S. and China are plunging us into a climatic sauna.

A study published in “Ecological Economics” journal says that previous estimates of China’s CO2 output have been too low. “While there are some substantial differences between estimates from the set of models that appear to have the best forecasting ability,they agree that the magnitude of the increase is quite large relative to existing forecasts of Chinese CO2 emissions. To put the size of the increase in emissions in sharp perspective, it is several times larger than the decrease in emissions that is embodied in the Kyoto protocol. That is, the disagreement between the models is over how many times larger the increase is likely to be.”

The authors of the study did simply accept grand estimates from the Chinese government or monitoring agencies but used estimates of energy use and emissions output at the provincial level. And those numbers add up to a lot more than anybody has been admitting. Of course, a major source of China’s CO2 is burning coal for electricity. China is also in the midst of an on-going construction boom. In the U.S. constructionand building operatios accou t for over half the energy used. Right now that figure could be even higher in China where the number of vehicles is still relatively small and very few homes have air conditioners.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/green/?p=901

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Learning to Love Global Warming

Mar 29 2007

Or why some economists believe climate change may not be such a bad thing after all.



This past winter, I went with my wife and daughter to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where a blooming Japanese apricot tree had been creating headlines. With the temperature in the low 70s, the garden was thronged with people in T-shirts and shorts. ­After looking in astonishment at the pink blossoms that had come out at least two months early, I did a quick cost-benefit analysis of this presumed product of climate change. On the plus side, thousands of New Yorkers had enjoyed a rare winter treat; the entrance fees they paid to the garden had boosted the city’s coffers; and the media industry, a major New York employer, had been supplied with a news story. What about the costs? The only one I could think of was that a few people might have decided they no longer needed a winter vacation, which would hurt the airlines and the Florida tourism industry.


Now that even the Bush administration has accepted the reality of global warming, it may seem gauche to bring up something as base as money. But the fact is that many industries will benefit from rising temperatures. Consider American farming: Though global warming imperils the water supply of California’s Central Valley and rising sea levels threaten Florida’s sugar production, grain producers in the Dakotas and cabbage growers in the Northeast would welcome shorter winters and longer growing seasons. Or take tourism. While some parts of the Mediterranean could eventually become too hot for sunbathing, and Saint-Tropez would suffer as vacationers deserted it for fear of frying, depressed coastal resorts in northwestern Europe would enjoy a resurgence. (Summers in Scarborough, anybody?)


Adding up the economic pluses and minuses of climate change is a vast and quite possibly futile endeavor, but economists have never been ones to let practicality deter them. We do know that tackling global warming will be costly. Power companies will have to invest in cleaner plants, consumers will have to insulate their homes, and governments will have to invest in renewable energy. Al Gore says this spending would be worthwhile, but Danish economist Bjørn Lomborg has pointed out that it could divert resources from other worthy causes such as the treatment and prevention of malaria, which kills more than a million people every year.


The standard way economists evaluate an investment is by placing a dollar value on its costs and benefits. Most studies show that the costs of rising temperatures will probably be relatively modest early on. “Countries in the polar region are likely to receive large benefits from warming, countries in the mid-latitudes will at first benefit and begin to be harmed only if temperatures rise [by more than 4.5°F],” writes Robert Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale. “Summing these regional impacts across the globe implies that warming benefits and damages will likely offset each other until warming passes [4.5°F], and even then [the cost] will be far smaller on net than originally thought.”


This conclusion has led Mendelsohn and other economists to advocate a gradualist approach. Governments would adopt only modest measures, like boosting research into fuel-efficient technologies. Decades into the future, when the world is much richer and technology is more advanced, humankind will be better placed to take more aggressive action. This is an arresting argument, but before you conclude that I am secretly working for a corporate-funded think tank that churns out skeptical studies on global warming, I should add that it depends, crucially, on a subtle ethical judgment that is rarely discussed: How much would you pay today to bequeath your great-great-grandchild $100? In personal and corporate finance, the ­basic rule on a long-term investment is that the promise of $500 in 10 years is worth a good deal less than $500 now. How much less? That depends on the interest rate—also known as the discount rate—that we use to convert future dollars into today’s money. Consider, for the sake of argument, an emission standard for coal-fired power plants that will reduce global warming by enough to generate $100 million of economic benefits in 2107. At a discount rate of 5 percent, the new standard is worth adopting only if the cost to power producers of meeting it is less than $750,000.


Expressed another way, this arithmetic implies that you should be willing to allot just 75 cents now to leave your great-great-grandchild $100. As economist Nicholas Stern noted in a recent report for the British government, this doesn’t seem right. Citing Frank Ramsay, a brilliant Cambridge mathematician of the early 20th century who developed some of the techniques that economists rely on in this area, Stern argued that using market interest rates to evaluate climate change policies is unfair to our descendants, because it undervalues their welfare relative to ours. Using a much lower rate—roughly 2 percent—Stern concluded that tackling climate change now would be much cheaper than allowing it to proceed unabated. In terms of morality, this seems persuasive, but economics is a contentious subject. William Nordhaus, another Yale economist, posed a different question: How much would we pay now to prevent a 0.01 percent decline in world output that starts in 2200 and persists indefinitely? The answer, using Stern’s methods, is about 15 percent of total world consumption, or about $7 trillion. “This seems completely absurd,” Nordhaus wrote.


Who is right? “The real difficulty here is that we are pushing economic analysis to its limits in an area where fundamental problems … remain unresolved,” John Quiggin, an economist at the University of Queensland, wrote in a recent article. “Economists can help to define the issues, but it is unlikely that economics can provide a final answer.”


It may be helpful to think of addressing climate change as an insurance policy rather than an investment. One of the greatest dangers of global warming is that it might start to feed on itself. A wholesale melting of the Greenland and western Antarctic ice caps could produce big changes in ocean and atmospheric currents, which in turn could lead to drastic rises in temperatures and sea levels. Scientists don’t know how likely it is that this will occur, but it’s a possibility that can’t be ruled out.


Economists have great difficulty dealing with risks that can’t easily be quantified, but regular people do it all the time—when they purchase life insurance, for instance. For a 40-year-old male nonsmoker, the annual premium for a $500,000 20-year term life insurance policy can run about $600. Since the typical 40-year-old male earns about $40,000 a year, it appears that he is willing to pay about 1.5 percent of his income for peace of mind.


Statistically speaking, it is unlikely that a 40-year-old man will get run over by a bus in a year’s time, but he takes out a policy just in case. Similarly, there may be only a small probability that unchecked growth in emissions would exacerbate global warming, but why take the risk? The Stern report said that acting now to stabilize carbon emissions at twice their preindustrial levels would cost about 1 percent of annual global output by 2050, which means it would be cheaper than life insurance. If Stern is right, taking immediate action on global warming isn’t just the ethical thing to do; it makes financial sense. But don’t expect the economists to agree on that anytime soon.

http://www.portfolio.com/views/columns/economics/2007/03/29/Learning-to-Love-Global-Warming

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Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling
Michael Asher (Blog) - February 26, 2008 12:55 PM







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World Temperatures according to the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction. Note the steep drop over the last year.
Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.
No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.


Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.

Update 2/27: The graph for HadCRUT (above), as well as the linked graphs for RSS and UAH are generated month-to-month; the temperature declines span a full 12 months of data. The linked GISS graph was graphed for the months of January only, due to a limitation in the plotting program. Anthony Watts, who kindly provided the graphics, otherwise has no connection with the column. The views and comments are those of the author only.

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Alaska town sues companies over warming
By DAN JOLING

February 26, 2008, 10:12PM ET


ANCHORAGE, Alaska

A tiny Alaska village eroding into the Arctic Ocean sued two dozen oil, power and coal companies Tuesday, claiming that the large amounts of greenhouse gases they emit contribute to global warming that threatens the community's existence.

The city of Kivalina and a federally recognized tribe, the Alaska Native village of Kivalina, sued Exxon Mobil Corp. and BP PLC, seven other oil companies, 14 power companies and one coal company in a lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco.

Kivalina is a traditional Inupiat Eskimo village of about 390 people about 625 miles northwest of Anchorage. It's built on an 8-mile barrier reef between the Chukchi Sea and Kivalina River.

Sea ice traditionally protected the community, whose economy is based in part on salmon fishing plus subsistence hunting of whale, seal, walrus, and caribou. But sea ice that forms later and melts sooner because of higher temperatures has left the community unprotected from fall and winter storm waves and surges that lash coastal communities.

"We are seeing accelerated erosion because of the loss of sea ice," City Administrator Janet Mitchell said in a statement. "We normally have ice starting in October, but now we have open water even into December so our island is not protected from the storms."

Relocation costs have been estimated at $400 million or more.

A spokesman for Exxon Mobil, Gantt Walton, said the company was reviewing the lawsuit and had no immediate comment on it.

Steve Rinehart, a spokesman for BP in Alaska, said he had not seen the lawsuit and had no comment.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Kivalina by two nonprofit legal organizations -- The Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment and the Native American Rights Fund -- plus six law firms.

Reached by phone in Boston, attorney Matt Pawa said other lawsuits have been filed seeking damages from global warming, but this is the first one that has a "discretely identifiable victim."

Damage to Kivalina from global warming has been documented in official government reports by the Army Corps of Engineers and the General Accounting Office, Pawa said.

The lawsuit invokes the federal common law of public nuisance, and every entity that contributes to the pollution problem harming Kivalina is liable, Pawa said. "You can sue them one at a time or some subset of them," he said.

The lawsuit also accuses some of the defendants of a conspiracy to mislead the public regarding the causes and consequences of global warming. The suit was filed in California because that's where many of the defendants are located or do business, Pawa said.

Without commenting on the lawsuit, Exxon Mobil's Walton said the company takes the issue of climate change seriously.

"Exxon Mobil is taking action by reducing greenhouse gas emissions in our operations, supporting research into technology breakthroughs and participating in constructive dialogues on policy options with NGOs, industry and policy makers," he said.

The other oil companies named were BP American Inc., BP Products North America Inc., Chevron Corp., Chevron USA Inc., ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell PLC and Shell Oil Co.

Also named were Peabody Energy Corp., a major coal producer, and power companies AES Corp., American Electric Power Co., American Electric Power Services Corp., DTE Energy Co., Duke Energy Corp., Dynegy Holdings Inc., Edison International, MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co., Mirant Corp., NRG Energy Inc., Pinnacle West Capital Corp., Reliant Energy Inc., The Southern Co. and Xcel Energy Inc.

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8V2DBD00.htm

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Doomsday Vault to Protect World's Seeds

AP
Posted: 2008-02-26 06:42:28


A Noah's Ark For Plants --- No, it's not Superman's Fortress of Solitude but it still might help save the world. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened (or is that closed?) its doors on Tuesday. The seed repository is housed in a bunker deep inside an Arctic mountain and is designed to withstand an earthquake or nuclear attack.


LONGYEARBYEN, Norway (Feb. 26) - A "doomsday" seed vault built to protect millions of food crops from climate change, wars and natural disasters opened Tuesday deep within an Arctic mountain in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.

"The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is our insurance policy," Norway's Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told delegates at the opening ceremony. "It is the Noah's Ark for securing biological diversity for future generations."

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai of Kenya were among the dozens of guests who had bundled up for the ceremony inside the vault, about 425 feet deep inside a frozen mountain.

"This is a frozen Garden of Eden," Barroso said.

The vault will serve as a backup for hundreds of other seed banks worldwide. It has the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples from around the world and shield them from man-made and natural disasters.

Dug into the permafrost of the mountain, it has been built to withstand an earthquake or a nuclear strike.

Norway owns the vault in Svalbard, a frigid archipelago about 620 miles from the North Pole. It paid $9.1 million for construction, which took less than a year. Other countries can deposit seeds without charge and reserve the right to withdraw them upon need.

The operation is funded by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which was founded by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and Biodiversity International, a Rome-based research group.

"Crop diversity will soon prove to be our most potent and indispensable resource for addressing climate change, water and energy supply constraints, and for meeting the food needs of a growing population," said Cary Fowler, head of the Global Crop Diversity Trust.

Svalbard is cold, but giant air conditioning units have chilled the vault further to -0.4 Fahrenheit, a temperature at which experts say many seeds could last for 1,000 years.

Stoltenberg and Maathai delivered the first box of seeds to the vault during the opening ceremony — a container of rice seeds from 104 countries.

"This is unique. This is very visionary. It is a precaution for the future," Maathai, a Crop Diversity Trust board member, told The Associated Press after the ceremony.

The seeds are packed in silvery foil containers — as many as 500 in each sample — and placed on blue and orange metal shelves inside three 32-foot-by-88-foot storage chambers. Each vault can hold 1.5 million sample packages of all types of crop seeds, from carrots to wheat.

Construction leader Magnus Bredeli-Tveiten said the vault is designed to withstand earthquakes — successfully tested by a 6.2-magnitude temblor off Svalbard last week — and even a direct nuclear strike.

Many other seed banks are in less protected areas. For example, war wiped out seed banks in Iraq and Afghanistan, and one in the Philippines was flooded in the wake of a typhoon in 2006.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. All active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.
2008-02-25 16:45:59

Svalbard's remote location is meant to ensure biodiversity even in the most extreme scenarios. "So much of the value of Svalbard is that it is so far away from the dangers," one of the designers said. Seed banks in Iraq and Afghanistan were recently wiped out by war and one in the Philippines was flooded after a typhoon in 2006.

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/doomsday-vault-to-protect-worlds-seeds/20080225164509990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001


The vault is protected by armed guards. "My job is to keep away people who aren't supposed to be here -- and guard against polar bears," one vault worker said. An estimated 3,000 polar bears live on the nearby islands. Source: AP

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On the Front Lines Of Climate Change

Thursday, Mar. 29, 2007 By MARK HERTSGAARD

With his curly, salt-and-pepper hair and thoughtful demeanor, Chris West looks like just another mid-career professor as he crosses the streets of Oxford University. But West, trained as a zoologist, is more an activist than an academic these days. From his cramped office around the corner from Balliol College, he directs the government's UK Climate Impacts Program, which educates individuals and businesses in Britain about the risks they face from climate change and the ways to cope with it.


Not long ago, West says, a DuPont executive boasted to him about how well his company was now treating the environment. Jolly good, West replied, but was DuPont also prepared for how the environment might treat DuPont? "I asked how many of his company's 300-odd facilities around the world were located in floodplains," West says. Global warming will bring increased risks to anyone located in a floodplain. "He didn't know," West recalls. "I said, 'Don't you think you should?'"

For years, global warming was discussed in the hypothetical--a threat in the distant future. Now it is increasingly regarded as a clear, observable fact. This sudden shift means that all of us must start thinking about the many ways global warming will affect us, our loved ones, our property and our economic prospects. We must think-- and then adapt accordingly.

When climate scientists use the word adaptation, they are referring to actions intended to safeguard a person, community, business or country against the effects of climate change. Its complement is mitigation--any measure that will reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, such as drawing power from a wind turbine rather than a coal-fired power plant. Mitigation addresses, if you will, the front end of the global-warming problem; by cutting emissions, it aims to slow rising temperatures. Adaptation is the back end of the problem--trying to live with the changes in the environment and the economy that global warming has and will continue to generate.

For years, adaptation was overlooked or disparaged in policy circles; many complained that even discussing it was a sellout that gave governments and others an excuse not to act. Today adaptation has become an accepted part of the discussion. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which will be released April 6 in Brussels, makes it official. "Adaptation to climate change is now inevitable," says Roger Jones of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia, a co-author of the IPCC report. "The only question is whether it will be by plan or by chaos." Jones, like the other contributors to the IPCC report whom I interviewed, speaks here only for himself.

The need for adaptation is rooted in the unhappy fact that we can't turn global warming off, at least not anytime soon. The momentum of the climate system--carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for decades, while oceans store heat for centuries--ensures that no matter how much humanity cuts greenhouse-gas emissions, our previous emissions will keep warming the planet for decades. Even if we were to magically stop all emissions today, "temperatures will keep rising, and all the impacts will keep changing for about 25 years," says Sir David King, chief science adviser to the British government. So while we strive to green our economies, we must also mount a major new effort to strengthen our resilience against the impact on the climate that our past emissions have set in motion.

Public discussion of global warming in the U.S. is years behind the rest of the world, and adaptation is no exception. "You can't adapt to a problem you don't admit exists," notes Richard Klein of the Stockholm Environment Institute, another IPCC co-author. The U.S. has only recently acknowledged global warming, while other countries are already taking concrete action to prepare for its impact. The Netherlands has some of the strongest flood defenses in the world and is making them stronger. Britain has doubled spending on flood and coastal-defense management, to about $1 billion a year. France, Spain and Finland have launched less ambitious adaptation initiatives. Even Bangladesh, one of the world's poorest nations, is taking action.

Nevertheless, adaptation has implicitly emerged on the American agenda, thanks to Hurricane Katrina. The earth's weather system is too complex to pin blame for Katrina definitively on global warming. But unusually strong hurricanes like Katrina are exactly what scientists expect to see--along with fiercer heat waves, harsher droughts, heavier rains and rising sea levels--as global warming intensifies. If the nation is serious about rebuilding New Orleans and its neighbors, it must make them as resilient to global warming as possible. "We have to fight for New Orleans," says Beverly Wright, director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Dillard University. (Her house took on 8 ft. of water after Katrina.) "If we're vigilant, we can make New Orleans the safest coastal city in the world and then use it as a model for how the rest of the country can get ready for global warming."

Unfortunately, New Orleans today remains far from that ideal. Robert Bea, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and former oil-industry engineer, co-authored a landmark report for the National Science Foundation that analyzed why the Federal Government did such a poor job of protecting Louisiana before and after the storm. Most of the problems he identified persist, he says. And that is not Louisiana's problem alone, Bea emphasizes. The Army Corps of Engineers recently announced that 122 major levee systems are less than safe; those levees will face greater stresses with global warming. Extra-strong hurricanes will threaten cities along the entire Gulf and Atlantic coasts. New York City is overdue for a major hurricane; global warming raises the odds.

"All Americans should look carefully at what is and isn't happening in New Orleans," says Mark Davis, professor of environmental law at Tulane University. "If we can't marshal the money, technology and political will to succeed here, I wouldn't be confident we'll do much better in your part of the country either." Meanwhile, Americans can look abroad for examples of how to prepare for climate change.

The Netherlands

It's no surprise that The Netherlands has one of the best records in the world on adaptation. The Dutch have been coping with their low-lying location for nearly 800 years. Dutch law requires that river defenses deliver so-called 1-in-1,250 protection--that is, that they limit the odds of catastrophic system failure and consequent flooding to 1 in 1,250 years. (By comparison, New Orleans' defenses offered 1-in-100-years protection.)

To maintain this level in the face of greater anticipated flows down the Rhine River (thanks partly to accelerated snowmelt in the Alps), the Dutch are radically revising traditional flood-management thinking. Instead of trying to contain floods, they will accommodate the extra water flow by allowing predesignated areas to flood. The strategy is called Living with Water. Near Nijmegen, the oldest town in Holland, a sparsely populated strip of land that is home to farms and a nature reserve will be allowed to flood to spare the more heavily populated areas downstream. Birds in the nature preserve can fly away until the waters recede, but not homeowners, who have protested. One lesson, says Bas Jonkman, an adviser to the Dutch Ministry of Water Management, is that "society must recognize that there will be losers from adaptation, and they must be compensated."

The greatest flood danger to the Netherlands comes from the North Sea, which is more powerful and unpredictable than the Dutch rivers. So, Dutch law has historically required North Sea defenses to deliver a 1-in-10,000-years level of protection. "And now the Parliament wants to raise the North Sea standard to a 1-in-100,000-years level of protection," says Pier Vellinga, a senior government adviser and professor at Wageningen University and Research Center. Vellinga calculates that to maintain this higher level of protection, the Netherlands would have to commit about 0.2% of its GDP annually--some $1.3 billion. The Dutch are straightforward about making adaptation to global warming a high priority. The alternative is the prospect of losing its coastal cities altogether. ("We Are Here to Stay" is the accompanying public slogan.) "We want foreign visitors and investment to keep coming to the Netherlands," Vellinga says, "so we must assure them this will remain a safe place."

Britain

The most visible example of British commitment to adaptation is the Thames Barrier, a set of hulking but beautiful silver floodgates that stretch across the namesake waterway about 11 miles downriver from central London. When the Barrier became operational in 1983, 30 years after the massive flood that motivated its construction, planners expected that it might have to close once or twice a year to keep ocean-storm surges from inundating London. In the past decade, however, the Barrier has been closing an average of 10 times a year. "The Barrier was initially designed to offer a 1-in-2,000-years level of protection," says West of the UK Climate Impacts Program. "But sea-level rise is projected to reduce that to a 1-in-1,000-years level by 2030." In response, the British government is prepared to add 12 in. of protection on top of the existing floodgates--a contingency built into its original design--and to keep building patches and extending the Barrier as necessary. Planners in Britain assume it will have to be replaced within 100 years, but they don't yet know with what.

Adaptation isn't just about building a stronger physical infrastructure. A new urban village is being planned 120 miles north of London that will bring together mitigation and adaptation. "Bilston village will not only be a low-carbon-energy user, it will also try to make itself resilient to future climate changes," says West. For example, it will build flood protection into its design. "This could be a new model for how communities can walk on both legs into the climate future."

Bangladesh

As a low-lying country that faces the sea and drains 92% of the snowmelt from the vast Himalayan mountain range, Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable places on the earth to global warming. Already, sea levels are rising in the Bay of Bengal and pushing salty water inland, lowering the productivity of rice cultivation in the south of the country. Farmers are adapting by switching land over to prawn farming, which tolerates saltier water.

"Bangladeshis have lived with flooding forever. It's part of our culture and essential to our agricultural system," says Saleemul Huq, who directs the climate-change program for the International Institute for Environment and Development. "In the past, we experienced a very big flood about once every 20 years," Huq says. "But in the last 20 years, we've had four very big floods--in 1987, 1988, 1995 and 2005. So it appears that the new pattern is to get a 1-in-20-year flood every five or 10 years." That increase has gotten policymakers' attention. After years of lobbying by Huq and his colleagues, the Ministry of Water Resources recently agreed to incorporate climate-change models into all future planning and decisions.

But because of its poverty--78% of its population lives on less than $2 a day--Bangladesh cannot afford the kind of defenses planned in Europe, or even New Orleans. As a matter of fairness, Huq says, adaptation measures in poor countries should be subsidized by rich countries. "It is poor countries that are suffering the brunt of climate change," he says, "but it is the rich countries' greenhouse-gas emissions that caused this problem in the first place." Britain is already subsidizing a substantial program in Bangladesh that will raise roads, wells and houses above the level of the last major flood. "Bangladesh is a showcase of what will happen under climate change," says Penny Davies, a diplomat at the British High Commission in Dhaka. "It amounts to a testing ground for what island states, including Britain, will need to do to protect ourselves in the years ahead."

New Orleans

By that same logic, the U.S. should be trying to climateproof New Orleans. Much of the city is already below sea level, making its lessons all the more valuable for other coastal communities. Ivor van Heerden, director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, has long urged a big-picture approach to hurricane protection. Restoring coastal wetlands, he says, is as important as building sound levees. During a hurricane, wetlands act like speed bumps, absorbing the force of incoming storm surges so that they are weaker when they reach inland. Louisiana's wetlands have been disappearing at an alarming rate because of imprudent levee building and oil-and-gas development.

Van Heerden calls his three-layered plan "defense in depth": "For your inner layer of defense, you put hardened levees or flood walls in front of major population centers or other high-value assets. You protect that inner layer with a middle layer comprised of as large an expanse of wetlands or swamp as possible. Finally, you protect that middle layer with a third layer--barrier islands out in the ocean proper, which also act to absorb and weaken storm surges."

The Army Corps of Engineers and the government of Louisiana are each preparing plans for flood defense and coastal restoration. But after the Corps's disastrous performance during Katrina, many locals distrust it. The state worries that the Corps, despite reassurances from the director of its civil-works division, will shortchange wetlands protection in favor of its traditional preference for large levees. "We're not going to let them go down that road," says Robert Twilley, chief scientific adviser to the state's planners. "If we don't restore our wetlands, the levees won't last and neither will our economy."

In Louisiana, as elsewhere, smart adaptation requires a lot more than good infrastructure and ecosystem management. Economic viability is also important, and that is not possible without insurance. In Louisiana and Florida, insurance companies responded to the burst of hurricanes in 2004 and 2005 by raising rates significantly, even canceling policies outright. How can hurricane-prone states retain coverage? "The only solution is to get the Federal Government to do what it did after September 11 and recognize that some risks are too large and costly for the private-insurance market to absorb on its own," says James Donelon, the state insurance commissioner of Louisiana. The Terrorism Re-Insurance Act of 2002 made $100 billion in federal money available as a backstop for buildings vulnerable to terrorism. Donelon advocates a similar fund for cities threatened by climate change.

The U.S. has a long way to go before it is climateproof, but so does most of the world. Japan has an impressive, long-standing system of flood control, including the so-called G-Cans project, a massive underground system in Tokyo that can pump 200 tons of water per second out of rivers and into the harbor before the city's streets flood. But former city officials acknowledge that Tokyo's system has reached its capacity. Since global warming is expected to bring Japan more frequent torrential rains, Tokyo will have to upgrade its drainage and sewage systems.

The latest science makes it clear that we will be living with global warming for the rest of our lives. That's not a happy thought, but it's not necessarily dire either. The key is to follow the new rules of life under global warming. Think ahead, adapt as necessary and make sure to cut greenhouse emissions in time. Adaptation won't be cheap. It won't be optional either.

Mark Hertsgaard is the author of Living Through the Storm: Our Future Under Global Warming, forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Treating the First Casualty More than a century of efforts to protect New Orleans from flooding has left the city more vulnerable than ever. The coastline is shattered, and the land is sinking. Proposals for saving southern Louisiana could become a laboratory for U.S. coastal cities threatened by rising seas and stronger storms. [This article consists of a complex diagram. Please see hardcopy of magazine.] THINKING BIG Protecting New Orleans means putting more of everything between the city and the sea. Planners have three main ways to do that: 1 ENHANCE BARRIER ISLANDS Katrina devastated the already withered outer defenses. As the islands shrink, waves reach farther inland 2 RESTORE WETLANDS Walls and channels along the rivers prevent silt from replenishing marshy areas, which can sponge up floodwaters 3 BUILD FLOODGATES AND LEVEES An inner line of gates like this one in the Netherlands could protect the city from storm surges.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1604879,00.html?iid=sphere-inline-sidebar

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Global Warming, Up Close and Personal
Friday, Feb. 22, 2008 By BRYAN WALSH



You think you know climate change. You've seen An Inconvenient Truth. You've noticed the changing and warming weather patterns in your part of the world. You're beginning to suffer from acute ecoanxiety. But to really see global warming in action, you'd need to travel to the Arctic, where climate change is already kicking into high gear. Temperatures are increasing faster in the far north than they are in the more temperate zones in the world, and recent studies indicate that the North Pole could be underwater in the summer in less than 10 years. But seeing the Arctic firsthand isn't easy, unless you're handy with a dogsled — so Will Steger is going to take you there.

Steger is a legendary polar explorer, the first person to make a dogsled trip to the North Pole, and winner of the National Geographic Adventure Lifetime Achievement Award. He's at home in those frozen, hostile parts of the world that few of us will ever tread. But he's also a dedicated environmentalist who was early to ring the alarm bell on global warming, the effects of which he saw firsthand in his frequent polar expeditions, both in the Arctic and Antarctica. To help raise awareness of the damage climate change is wreaking on the polar regions, next month Steger will be leading a team of six young adventurers on a 1,400-mile, 60-day-long dogsled expedition across Ellesmere Island, in the far Canadian Arctic. The rest of us will be able to observe Steger's journey — intended to appeal to what he calls "emerging young leaders" below the age of 30 — on the website http://www.GlobalWarming101.com. "We want to take our audience to the front lines of global warming," says Steger, still trim as a Navy ship at 64. "We provide the spark with this expedition." (Listen to Steger talk about his mission and the impact of climate change on the Arctic on this week's Greencast.)

Steger's expedition will benefit from some celebrity association, with Sam Branson — the 22-year-old son of British airline tycoon Richard Branson — part of the team. Also on the expedition will be 27-year-old Norwegian Sigrid Ekran, who last year became only the second woman to win Rookie of the Year for the Iditarod — not a small deal in the world of dog sledding. The team will be uploading video, text and photos to the website as the journey progresses, allowing classrooms — Steger's foundation is working with the National Education Association on the project — to follow their progress first-hand. "We can actually bring the audience up there," Steger says.

What they'll see may be startling. Climate change has already refashioned the geography of the Arctic, melting glaciers that past adventurers — not to mention the Inuit who make their home in the far north — once journeyed on securely. On a 1995 Arctic expedition, Steger had his own close encounter with climate change, when the ice he was traveling across broke up unexpectedly early, thanks to warmer temperatures. He barely escaped. "I've seen a lot of these changes myself over the past 15 years," he says. "The ice caps are just gone."

Steger and his teammates hope to jolt the young people of the world into action on global warming. For their generation, says Sam Branson, "climate change is definitely going to be the biggest issue." There's still hope for the worst effects of global warming to be avoided, if we can come together globally, and projects like Steger's can only help. But the truth is that for the Arctic, at least, the sheer momentum of greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere means that profound climatic change is virtually unavoidable, no matter what we do. "Within a decade or less, it's going to be impossible to reach the North Pole," says Steger. "If we're not taking action immediately, we're running out of time." Man your computers — GlobalWarming101.com might give you a last glimpse of a dying polar world.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1715522,00.html

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Dead zones off Oregon and Washington likely tied to global warming, study says

Low-oxygen areas that show scant signs of sea life have expanded. 'We seem to have crossed a tipping point,' a scientist says.

By Kenneth R. Weiss, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
February 15, 2008


NEWPORT, ORE. -- -- Peering into the murky depths, Jane Lubchenco searched for sea life, but all she saw were signs of death.

Video images scanned from the seafloor revealed a boneyard of crab skeletons, dead fish and other marine life smothered under a white mat of bacteria. At times, the camera's unblinking eye revealed nothing at all -- a barren undersea desert in waters renowned for their bounty of Dungeness crabs and fat rockfish.


- Altered Oceans

"We couldn't believe our eyes," Lubchenco said, recalling her initial impression of the carnage brought about by oxygen-starved waters. "It was so overwhelming and depressing. It appeared that everything that couldn't swim or scuttle away had died."

Upon further study, Lubchenco and other marine ecologists at Oregon State University concluded that that the undersea plague appears to be a symptom of global warming. In a study released today in the journal Science, the researchers note how these low-oxygen waters have expanded north into Washington and crept south as far as the California state line. And, they appear to be as regular as the tides, a lethal cycle that has repeated itself every summer and fall since 2002.

"We seem to have crossed a tipping point," Lubchenco said. "Low-oxygen zones off the Northwest coast appear to be the new normal."

Although scientists continue to amass data and tease out the details, all signs in the search for a cause point to stronger winds associated with a warming planet.

If this theory holds up, it means that global warming and the build-up of heat-trapping gases are bringing about oceanic changes beyond those previously documented: a rise in sea level, more acidic ocean water and the bleaching of coral reefs.

Low-oxygen dead zones, which have doubled in number every decade and exist around the world, have a variety of causes.

A massive dead zone off Louisiana is created each spring by a slurry of nutrient-rich farm runoff and sewage that flows out the Mississippi River, causing algae to bloom riotously, die and drift to the bottom to decompose. Bacteria then take over. In the process of breaking down the plant matter, they suck the oxygen out of the seawater, making it unable to support most forms of sea life.

Off Oregon, the dead zone appears to form because of changes in atmospheric conditions that create the oceanic river of nutrient-rich waters known as the California Current.

The California Current along the West Coast and the similar Humboldt Current off Peru and Benguela Current off South Africa are rarities. These powerful currents account for only about 1% of the world's oceans but produce 20% of the world's fisheries.

Their productivity comes from wind-driven upwelling of nutrient-rich waters from the deep. When those waters reach the surface and hit sunlight, tiny ocean plants known as phytoplankton bloom, creating food for small fish and shellfish that in turn feed larger marine animals up the food chain.

What's happening off Oregon, scientists believe, is that as land heats up, winds grow stronger and more persistent. Because the winds don't go slack as they used to do, the upwelling is prolonged, producing a surplus of phytoplankton that isn't consumed and ultimately dies, drifts down to the seafloor and rots.

"It fits a pattern that we're seeing in the Benguela Current," said Andrew Bakun, a professor at the University of Miami's Pew Institute for Ocean Science who wasn't part of the Oregon study. "It's reasonable to think these hypoxic and anoxic zones will increase as more greenhouse gases build up in the atmosphere."

The Benguela Current has seen sporadic dead zones. There, rotting clumps of algae have also released clouds of hydrogen sulfide gas that smell like rotten eggs and poison sea life. Residents along the coast of South Africa and Namibia have witnessed waves of rock lobsters crawl onto shore to escape the noxious gases.

Bakun considers the Benguela, the world's most powerful current, to be a harbinger of changes in other currents. His theory is that warm, rising air over the land makes upwelling more frequent and more intense. The phenomenon, he said, is complicated by decades of heavy fishing that has reduced schools of sardines to a tiny fraction of their former abundance.

Not enough fish remain to consume phytoplankton before it dies and settles on the bottom, creating an anoxic dead zone.

Crab fisherman were the first to take note of Oregon's dead zone. Al Pazar recalls his alarm in 2002 when he pulled up his traps and found something seriously amiss.

"It was a good amount of crabs," Pazar said. "But they were dead, or dying or very, very weak. Those that we managed to keep alive didn't survive for long."

The fishermen called Oregon State, which dispatched a boat of researchers to investigate.

"It was a big mystery," Lubchenco said. "We didn't know what was killing them."

Fishermen found other oddities. As they pulled up their crab traps, they found baby octopuses, about the size of silver dollars, inching their way up the lines toward the buoys floating on the surface.

"I'd tell my crewmen, be careful with these cute little things," said Dennis Krulich, a longtime fishermen in Newport. "Peel them off the rope, and we'll put them back."

Only later did he realize that these babies were coming up from oxygen-depleted waters that hover near the seafloor, climbing to save their lives. "In 30 years of crabbing, I'd never seen anything like it before, Krulich said. "It's spooky, this dead-zone thing."

The size of the zone has fluctuated over the years. In 2006, it was the largest ever measured, covering an expanse slightly larger than Rhode Island.

Last year, it was smaller but detected over a longer stretch of coastline.

To make sure the phenomenon was actually new, Oregon State marine ecologist Francis Chan reconstructed data from water sampling at 3,100 stations dating to 1950.

He found that low-oxygen areas have long existed in deeper waters, but there was virtually no evidence until recently of hypoxic waters in prime fishing waters, which extend down to 165 feet.

"It's pretty clear this is unprecedented," Chan said. "It's never been detected since we began to measure oxygen levels."

So far, the seasonal dead zones, which begin as early as June and wrap up in September, have not hurt the crab fishery, which mostly operates in the winter. Many crabs and fish manage to flee the low-oxygen area. And fishermen have learned to set their traps in the wasteland of the previous year's dead zones, to catch crabs that return to feed on the detritus of all the suffocated animals.

Scientists say seafood caught in low-oxygen zones is not harmful to eat

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-deadzone15feb15,0,6082397,full.story

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Bill would require California's science curriculum to cover climate change

SOME THINK SCIENCE ISN'T DEFINITIVE ENOUGH TO TEACH
By Paul Rogers
Mercury News

Article Launched: 02/15/2008 01:42:53 AM PST

A Silicon Valley lawmaker is gaining momentum with a bill that would require "climate change" to be among the science topics that all California public school students are taught.

The measure, by state Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, also would mandate that future science textbooks approved for California public schools include climate change.

"You can't have a science curriculum that is relevant and current if it doesn't deal with the science behind climate change," Simitian said. "This is a phenomenon of global importance and our kids ought to understand the science behind that phenomenon."

The state Senate approved the bill, SB 908, Jan. 30 by a 26-13 vote. It heads now to the state Assembly. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has taken numerous actions to reduce global warming, but he has yet to weigh in on Simitian's bill. Other Republicans in the Capitol, however, are not happy about the proposal.

Some say the science on global warming isn't clear, while others worry the bill would inject environmental propaganda into classrooms.

"I find it disturbing that this mandate to teach this theory is not accompanied by a requirement that the discussion be science-based and include a critical analysis of all sides of the subject," said Sen. Tom McClintock, R-Thousand Oaks, during the Senate debate.

Only two Republicans voted for the bill, Sen. Abel Maldonado, R-San Luis Obispo, and

Sen. Tom Harman, R-Costa Mesa. Maldonado's district includes Los Gatos, Morgan Hill, parts of San Jose, Scotts Valley, Watsonville and Monterey. Harman represents Orange County. All 13 of the no votes were from Republicans.

One of the opponents, Sen. Jeff Denham, R-Modesto, said he wants guarantees that the views of global warming skeptics will be taught.

"Some wouldn't view them as skeptics. Some would view them as the right side of the issue," said Denham, an Atwater almond farmer who also runs a plastics recycling business.

"We don't have complete factual information yet," Denham said. "From what I have seen the Earth has heated and cooled on its own for centuries. I don't know that there's anything that is a direct cause of that right now, but we can do a better job of cleaning up our planet."

Simitian noted that his bill wouldn't dictate what to teach or in what grades, but rather would require the state Board of Education and state Department of Education to decide both.

Although global warming is mentioned in high school classes about weather, it is currently not required to be covered in all textbooks, said the head of the California Science Teachers Association.

"This is a great idea. I don't think there's any reason to talk about politics," said Christine Bertrand, the group's executive director. "There's no argument that there is climate change. The argument is how much is caused by the activities of mankind."

Bertrand said teachers would have plenty to discuss: rising levels of carbon dioxide, how temperatures are measured globally, and what is known and not known about global warming.

Meanwhile, the 10 hottest years - ranked by global surface temperature - since 1880 all have occurred since 1995, according to the National Climatic Data Center, a federal agency in North Carolina.

In 2005, America's most prestigious scientific body, the National Academy of Sciences, issued a statement with the headline "Climate change is real." It was signed by the national scientific academies of Japan, Britain, Canada, China, Germany, Italy, France, Russia, India and Brazil. Citing direct measurements of air and oceans, along with melting glaciers, it noted:

"There is now strong evidence that significant global warming is occurring. . . . It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities. This warming has already led to changes in the Earth's climate."



IF YOU'RE INTERESTED

To read the bill, go to www.senate.ca.gov, click "legislation" and type SB 908.

http://www.mercurynews.com/education/ci_8269190

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GM's Bob Lutz: Global warming is a "total crock of sh*t"

Posted Feb 13th 2008 9:17AM by Lascelles Linton
Filed under: EV/Plug-in, Hybrid, GM, Toyota


According to D Magazine, at a private lunch, GM chairman Maximum Bob Lutz said global warming is a "total crock of shit." Bob adds "I'm a skeptic, not a denier. Having said that, my opinion doesn't matter." Speaking about the battery-driven Volt, Lutz said, "I'm motivated more by the desire to replace imported oil than by the CO2 [argument]." At the lunch Bob also said hybrids like the Prius make "make no economic sense" and the Volt is exciting for him because "it's the last thing anybody expected from GM." Don't hold back Bob, tell us what you really think.

Gallery: Chevy Volt Concept

Gallery: 2007 Toyota Prius Touring

Related:

* Bob Lutz video: it's "immaterial" who's first on EVs, guarantees "internal" release date for Volt
* Videos: Bob Lutz says Toyota will have egg on its face come Easter
* Bob Lutz has egg on his face: drivable Volt in June

[Source: D Magazine via Jalopnik]

Tags: Bob-Lutz, Chevy-Volt, electric-car, Global-Warming, GM, hybrid, Prius, Toyota

* Read
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* Comments [393]

Related Headlines

* What do you want to know about the Volt and plug-in Prius? (22 days ago - 9 Comments)
* Autoblog Green Podcast #19 - Chicago Auto Show 2008 wrap-up (4 days ago - 1 Comment)
* Does the Archbishop of Canterbury drive a Civic or Prius hybrid? (6 days ago - 5 Comments)
* Report: global market for PHEV will reach 130,000 by 2015 (8 days ago - 4 Comments)
* Bob Lutz explains exactly why Volt delayed: batteries late, engineers want perfect software (28 days ago - 31 Comments)

Reader Comments
(Page 1)

1. OK Bob, just ignore every climate scientist that's not on the GM payroll.
I get the feeling Bob's words will echo thru time to show what a bunch of idiots 'we' were to ignore human induced climate change.

Posted at 9:44AM on Feb 13th 2008 by Rich

2. Time to boycott new car sales especially GM. Kick 'em while their down.
"For the fourth quarter, GM posted a loss of $722 million, or $1.28 per share, "

Posted at 9:58AM on Feb 13th 2008 by Spike

3. Bob is bordering on Senility and his only reality is what he thinks is good for GM.

People being concerned about GW and the Environment is bad for GM (and its monster trucks), therefore it is a Crock of Sh*t.

Ethanol gets GM Cafe credits, therefore ethanol is goodness and light.

GM does squat in diesels and has a bad reputation with them, there for Diesels are bullsh*t.

Likewise with hybrids.

Except of course the Volt which will probably run on E85 and be double good.


Basically so far Bob supports the largest boondoggle going corn ethanal and craps all over actually proven efficiency booster like diesel and hybrids.

Is ther anyone who looks on Bob as more than comic relief, GM's version of Bagdad Bob (There are no tanks anywhere...)??


Posted at 10:02AM on Feb 13th 2008 by Snowdog

4. Oh yeah, I bash GM and a bunch of people here give me crap about it. Lutz is a putz. Look at him, you think he gives a crap?

Posted at 10:03AM on Feb 13th 2008 by Mort

5. Wow, really makes me want to buy a Volt. Sorry GM, I'll take my business else where.

Posted at 10:20AM on Feb 13th 2008 by david

6. In PR terms, Bob Lutz is a loose cannon and getting worse by the day. The folks in the corporate marketing department at GM must be tearing their hair out constantly running damage control for him.

Frankly, given the still-precarious state of the company's finances, I'm surprised Rick Wagoner hasn't yet asked him to choose his words a lot more carefully - or else stop talking to the media. The Volt program would survive for as long as GM could afford to fund it, even if Lutz were no longer its colorful public champion.

Posted at 10:47AM on Feb 13th 2008 by rgseidl

7. Mr. Lutz is off base here.

This planet is getting warmer. So is Mars.

Damn SUVs! Damn Sun!

Posted at 11:00AM on Feb 13th 2008 by Tim

8. Yah, there's no toxic spew in the air. Lies, all lies.

Posted at 11:15AM on Feb 13th 2008 by Mort

9. Many of you are being ridiculous. I don't agree with Lutz, but I would say that many other execs from other companies share the same sentiment on global warming. He is forthright enough to speak his mind which is in a way respectable. That doesn't mean you boycott a whole company for one executive's comments. There are hundreds of thousands of other employees like you and me that don't deserve such punishment. Don't forget how important one of the few domestic manufacturers of durable products is to our economy. It's not just cars, it's the supporting health care, legal services, advertising agencies, suppliers, suppliers of suppliers, etc...

Also, if you would do your research you would see that GM's vehicles are very competitive (if not best), with fuel economy in vehicle segments that sell the most, like mid-sized sedans and full size trucks. Not everybody wants to buy a hybrid. And where is credit for GM’s hybrid buses that save tons of fuel every year? I rarely see it.

Any company would and should take advantage of the political climate and regulations as they relate to ethanol. To not do so would be irresponsible to its shareholders and to its future. Money from that helps fund vehicles like the Volt and future fuel cell vehicles. You can blame the politicians for the policies, but don't blame corporations for taking advantage of them. If they don’t, the competitors will. Japanese companies take advantage of working their employees way too hard, (sometimes to death), currency manipulation and socialized medicine. Gasoline IC Engine Hybrids are a stop-gap measure but admittedly GM should have done more earlier with these. GM does sell many diesels in Europe. It's a global company. They are planning on bringing diesels to the US although I agree that they could have done it earlier too. Emissions laws have been changing though and it's not easy to just "bring it over". There are lots of government regulations and manufacturing issues that need to be overcome. Don't forget that buying products from overseas uses lots of energy in transport. Buying local with manufactured goods is beneficial just as it is with food.

All corporations are greedy and evil to some extent because they are in existence to make money. Other social responsibilities usually fall by the wayside. When they don't it's a pleasant surprise. And when they do say they care, it's usually just a PR spin.

Sorry for the long rant and the lack of flow.

Atul
http://www.thingsivenoticed.com

Posted at 11:21AM on Feb 13th 2008 by UH2L

10. Nice. Bob isn't dead.
He won't be invited to Bilderberg.
How could he be a 'denier' when it [AGW] hasn't been proven.

Take some off that righteous indignation and start kickin' ass!

Posted at 11:35AM on Feb 13th 2008 by MikeW

11. Just because something is popularly accepted, doesn't make it true. There's plenty of evidence to indicate global warming has nothing to do with emissions. Lutz may not be that far off. Don't dismiss his views, just because you don't like them.

Posted at 11:44AM on Feb 13th 2008 by brn

12. I have no idea whether climate change is real and human-caused, but by no means will I simply listen, sheep-like, to what scientists are saying as if it is gospel.

What most people fail to understand is that it is absolutely impossible to generate a cause-and-effect conclusion in this field, because there is no way to create a properly representative experiment. Therefore, all we really have is a tiny sliver of correlational data (only slightly over 100 years of data on a phenomenon for which thousands or possibly millions of years' worth would be needed to make a solid conclusion), which as any scientist will admit is not proof. In fact, anyone telling you about "proof" is not a scientist, because scientists don't believe in "proof," only evidence and probabilities.

That said, I don't really feel I have enough information to form an opinion on this issue. I will say this, however: if global warming is real and caused by human CO2 generation, then we're completely screwed. I think we're already past the point of no return if climate change is caused by us. If it isn't, it's still better to be using sustainable energy that we can get without tearing up the earth or destroying the life that occurs naturally upon it.

I also think that climate change won't be so bad overall. Yes, it will suck for us humans, but I think we're rather arrogant to have put ourselves above the rest of the ecosystem in the first place, and it's about time nature gave us the slap across the face we so richly deserve. Interestingly enough, the oil reserves we're chewing through now are, in fact, the result of global warming events long past. When the earth warms, lots of animals and plants end up getting buried alive, and over time the energy that made up their bodies gets slowly converted into crude. So it has been, so it will be. With or without humans.

Posted at 11:51AM on Feb 13th 2008 by Steve

13. I mostly agree with Bob Lutz. I don't think global warming is total bunk, I think it's more like 90% bunk.

Even the IPCC scientists (who won a Nobel for their work) only concluded that human activity is "likely" causing some global warming. If you read their report without mass-media hype, you will find that manmade CO2 emissions are "likely" causing a modest, manageable warming trend -- not a global catastrophe.

Lutz is absolutely right in his priorities. Getting the USA off its dependence on foreign oil is a pressing problem right now. Global oil depletion is staring us in the face, and will become a pressing problem real soon now. In terms of urgency, global warming is a distant third.

Posted at 12:09PM on Feb 13th 2008 by Tony Belding

14. I used to work for a guy like this and every time he opened his mouth, the rest of us braced ourselves, wondering how much business he'd drive away.

While Lutz's opinions are his prerogative, as a representative of a MUCH larger pool of people and resources you think he'd be a little more sensitive in his wording, whether or not those words represent truth/fact/whatever. (There's a lot of debate on that here, and I don't think that's the point.)

It's disappointing that prudence in character isn't required for a leader of a global economic machine. I can think several examples, but you probably see where I'm going.

Posted at 12:44PM on Feb 13th 2008 by zaedrus

15. And people wonder why GM's not more into EVs and hybrids than they are :)

Re, global warming: I love how people who've never read a single published paper on the subject suddenly become experts when the topic of global warming comes up.

* "because there is no way to create a properly representative experiment."

There are, and have been thousands. Furthermore, there are both bottom-up and top down studies, and only bottom-up relate to experiments.

* Therefore, all we really have is a tiny sliver of correlational data (only slightly over 100 years of data on a phenomenon for which thousands or possibly millions of years' worth would be needed to make a solid conclusion)

Apparently you've never heard of ice cores, sediment cores, varves, dendrochronology, coral clocks, or the geological column itself.

* "In fact, anyone telling you about "proof" is not a scientist, because scientists don't believe in "proof," only evidence and probabilities."

Love this logic. If you can't prove it, it's not real. Science doesn't prove things. Hence, it's not real.

* "That said, I don't really feel I have enough information to form an opinion on this issue. "

And yet you have one that you're shouting to the hilltops about. Which pretty much defines the global warming debate, which is between those who've actually *read the freaking research* and those who "don't have enough opinion to form an opinion", yet state it anyways as though they can merely "assume" what the evidence is like.

* " I will say this, however: if global warming is real and caused by human CO2 generation, then we're completely screwed."

Not even close. Depending on the amount of action taken, the IPCC forecasts for 2100 range from 1.1 to 6.4C

* "Yes, it will suck for us humans, but I think we're rather arrogant to have put ourselves above the rest of the ecosystem in the first place"

Humans are the *most* adaptable species on the planet. A polar bear can't simply take off a coat or switch from eating seal to eating beef, but a human can. The only thing that limits our adaptation to climate change, in general, are physical constraints -- infrastructure, resistance to populations moving, etc.

Furthermore, the issue is not that the planet is warming. In general, warmer times have been more hospitable for life (with a few major exceptions). The problem is that we're warming at a rate completely unprecidented in at least the past 650,000 years, according to ice and sediment cores.

* "Even the IPCC scientists (who won a Nobel for their work) only concluded that human activity is "likely" causing some global warming."

You've obviously never read any part of any of the recent IPCC reports. First off, according to the terminology laid out in the fourth assessment report WG1 technical summary, page 22, the categories range from "Very low confidence" (less than 1 in 10 chance) to "very high confidence (at least 9 in 10 chance). They go into detail on that page about the types of uncertainties and how they're assessed if you're interested:

http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_TS.pdf

There is also "likelyhood terminology", ranging from "exceptionally unlikely" (99%). "Very likely" is ">90%".

That said, the summary states:

---
Current concentrations of atmospheric CO2 and CH4 far exceed pre-industrial values found in polar ice core records of atmospheric composition dating back 650,000 years. Multiple lines of evidence confirm that the post-industrial rise in these gasses does not stem from natural mechanisms.

The total radiative forcing of the Earth's climate due to increases in the concentrations of the LLGHGs CO2, CH4 and N2O, and *very likely* the rate of increase in the total forcing due to these gasses over the period since 1750, are unprecidented in more than 10,000 years. It is *very likely* that the sustained rate of increase in the combined radiative forcing from these greenhouse gasses of about +1 W m^-2 over the past four decades is at least six times faster than at any time during the two millenia before the Industrial Era, the period for which ice core data has the required temporal resolution. The radiative forcing due to these LLGHGs has the highest level of confidence of any forcing agent.

The concentration of atmospheric CO2 has increased from a pre-industrial value of about 280 ppm to 379 ppm in 2005. Atmospheric CO2 concentration increased by only 20 ppm over the 8000 years prior to industrialisation; multi-decadal to centennial-scale variations were less than 10 ppm and *likely* due mostly to natural processes. However, since 1750, the CO2 concentration has risen by nearly 100 ppm. The annual CO2 growth rate was larger during the last 10 years (1995–2005 average: 1.9 ppm yr–1) than it has been since continuous direct atmospheric measurements began (1960–2005 average: 1.4 ppm yr–1).

Increases in atmospheric CO2 since pre-industrial times are responsible for a radiative forcing of +1.66 ± 0.17 W m–2; a contribution which dominates all other radiative forcing agents considered in this report. For the decade from 1995 to 2005, the growth rate of CO2 in the atmosphere led to a 20% increase in its radiative forcing.

Emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel use and from the effects of land use change on plant and soil carbon are the primary sources of increased atmospheric CO2. Since 1750, it is estimated that about 2/3rds of anthropogenic CO2 emissions have come from fossil fuel burning and about 1/3rd from land use change. About 45% of this CO2 has remained in the atmosphere, while about 30% has been taken up by the oceans and the remainder has been taken up by the terrestrial biosphere. About half of a CO2 pulse to the atmosphere is removed over a time scale of 30 years; a further 30% is removed within a few centuries; and the remaining 20% will typically stay in the atmosphere for many thousands of years.

In recent decades, emissions of CO2 have continued to increase (see Figure TS.3). Global annual fossil 25 Technical Summary CO2 emissions3 increased from an average of 6.4 ± 0.4 GtC yr–1 in the 1990s to 7.2 ± 0.3 GtC yr–1 in the period 2000 to 2005. Estimated CO2 emissions associated with land use change, averaged over the 1990s, were4 0.5 to 2.7 GtC yr–1, with a central estimate of 1.6 Gt yr-1. Table TS.1 shows the estimated budgets of CO2 in recent decades.
---

Why is it that when scientists come up with some new theoretical nanotechnology or biotech, or whatnot, they're brilliant and one paper is as good as good, but when *tens of thousands* of papers covering *hundreds of lines of evidence* reviewed by essentially the whole scientific community point to one thing, suddenly the scientists are automatically wrong and you *don't even need to read the research* to conclude that they're wrong?

Now, please -- before you keep "not having opinions" while at the same time stating your non-opinions about how scientists on the subject are all idiots and there's no real evidence, how about you take just an hour to at least *skim* the IPCC report. Some background.

* There are four assessment reports that have been assembled over the years
* Each has several working groups, each represented by several hundred scientists from around the world, covering all of the research published in peer-reviewed journals that applies at all to their group. WG1, for example, covers the evidence for climate change and human influences.
* Each working group is broken down into sections -- for example, solar radiation forcing. These reports tend to be a couple hundred pages long, although merely listing all of the peer-reviewed papers on the subject typically takes over a dozen pages packed full of references. Remember, the group here is merely summarizing all of the papers, not doing any research (the IPCC does no research on its own)
* All of these long, technical summaries are gathered together into a single, long technical summary for the whole working group.
* This technical summary is then boiled down into a brief(er) summary for policymakers.

Please -- if you don't have time to read it all, or even to read a significant fraction of it, please take a few minutes and *at least skim*. Know what you're talking about *before* you talk about it:

http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html

Posted at 12:54PM on Feb 13th 2008 by meme

16. The enemy of my enemy is my friend (at least for now).

In this case the enemy is high gas consuming vehicles.

Posted at 1:00PM on Feb 13th 2008 by jpm100

17. Take a box and fill it with air. Shine an ifrared lamp at it. Measure how much heat the air absorbs.

Repeat the experiment, but add extra CO2 to the air in the box. The air with extra CO2 absorbs more infrared radiation, and gets hotter.

Viola! You have just proved the underlying principle of global warming. You do not need climate models, supercomputers, correlational data, or statistical analysis. This experiment is completely repeatable, 100% of the time.

Posted at 1:10PM on Feb 13th 2008 by BlackbirdHighway

18. So what did they call it when the last ice age ended and it got really warm?

Posted at 1:12PM on Feb 13th 2008 by steven

19. Steven (#18)

Don't even try to use logic. Religious zealots NEVER listen to logic. Only dogma matters to them.

Liberals and other zealots only respond to logic by placing some label on the one with the opposing view. To "Man-Made Global Warming" zealots, common sense like natural sun cycles is simply heresy.

Some things like human nature NEVER change.

Posted at 1:53PM on Feb 13th 2008 by Tim

20. Whether Bob personally subscribes to the theory of Global Warming or not, is pretty much immaterial. His company is making rapid and major advances to the same destination global warming advocates are headed anyway, by reducing oil consumption in their products. The best way for us as consumers to thwart global warming, (if that is our belief) is to vote with our wallets and buy the most fuel efficient products. And then, as a added benefit, our dependancy on foreign oil will also diminish.

Again, regardless of whether or not he thinks diesels will catch on in the U.S., his Company is charging ahead to produce future diesel offerings in many more of it's vehicles, some of which come to mind are the half ton pick-ups, Tahoes, and some Cadillacs. And you know what?--if people buy a lot of them, they will make them available in more of their vehicles. We need to provide the market, and then they will follow through with the products.

Posted at 2:11PM on Feb 13th 2008

http://www.autobloggreen.com/2008/02/13/gms-bob-lutz-global-warming-is-a-total-crock-of-sh-t/

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Methane traps infared 20X greater than CO2

Methane is another atmospheric constituent whose concentration has increased in recent years. Methane is also a greenhouse gas that is about twenty times as effective on a molecule for molecule basis as is CO2. One methane molecule will absorb 20 times as much infrared radiation as CO2. Its lifetime is much shorter than carbon dioxide, however, so this partially compensates for its higher absorption.

Actually, methane is the most rapidly increasing greenhouse gas. Figure 7 shows the present concentration of methane, in parts per million by volume (ppm), to be about 1.7 ppm. Updated values are given by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center. Sometimes methane concentration is given in parts per billion by volume (ppb), and then would have a value of 1700 ppb. The numerical values show that methane is much less abundant than carbon dioxide which has a present concentration of about 360 ppm. However, the curve shows that the concentration is increasing at about 1% per year. If we look at a longer term, as shown in figure 8, we see that concentrations have increased substantially since the Industrial Revolution. Estimate of atmospheric methane from a thousand years ago suggest values around 0.7 ppm (700 ppb) which were constant until about the late 1700s. Since that time, concentrations have more than doubled. If we examine the Antarctic ice core data going back 160,000 years, we see that methane levels fluctuated between about 300 parts per billion and 700 parts per billion until the Industrial Revolution when it began its climb to near 1700 parts per billion (figure 9).

]
figure 9 & 10

Sources of Methane
What are the sources of methane (figure 10)? The 1992 Report of the Intergorvernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lists the largest natural source of methane to be wetlands, which produce 115 teragrams (1012 grams) of carbon annually. The uncertainty in these numbers, however, is very large. Termites are very significant producers of methane in that they eat wood and release methane in the digestion process. The ocean produces about 10 teragrams per year of methane, and fresh water and methane hydrate contribute smaller amounts.

Anthropogenic sources include coal mining, natural gas and petroleum industry at about 100 teragrams, which is almost as much as natural wetlands. Rice paddies produce on the order of 60 teragrams by means of a process where methane produced in the soil is able to travel up to the hollow stem of the rice plant and be released into the atmosphere without passing through the water which would tend to suppress the evolution of methane gas (figure 11).


figure 11

Enteric fermentation, the digestion process in ruminant animals such as cattle, sheep and goats, produces very large amounts of methane. Animal wastes produce about 25 teragrams; domestic sewage, 25 teragrams; landfills about 30 teragrams; and biomass burning, about 40 teragrams. Some landfills are now being tapped for their methane as a source of power production. This makes good sense on the basis of global warming in addition to getting a "free" source of combustion gas. Burning one methane molecule produces one CO2 molecule, but the global warming potential is reduced by a factor of 20 because the carbon dioxide molecule is only about one-twentieth as effective as the methane molecule in absorbing infrared radiation.

Increases in animal populations are contributing to the increase in atmospheric methane. Figure 12 shows recent increases in several different classes of livestock. If humans continue to have an appetite for meat, the upward trend in animal production and resulting production of methane will likely continue. A particular situation to watch is the development and possible dietary changes in China. If we examine the eating habits of Japan, South Korea, and other Asian nations that have developed very rapidly, one of the significant changes that occurs during economic development is that people's eating habits change from eating primarily grains, mainly rice in these cases, to substantial increases in meat. The big question on the horizon right now is what's going to happen in China? China has an enormous population and it is developing extremely rapidly. If China follows the pattern of other Asian nations, the demand for meat will increase dramatically. I have estimated that if every person in China at a MacDonald's Quarter Pounder every 10 days, raising the beef to meet this demand would consume all the corn grown in Iowa.




Sinks for Methane

Sinks for methane include atmospheric removal of about 470 units, removal by soil of about 30 teragrams, leaving an atmospheric increase of about 32 units. By taking subtotals of natural and anthropogenic sources, it is easy to see that humans contribute at least as much as natural sources and possible much more. Such numbers as these are consistent with the observed build-up of methane in the atmosphere in the last 200 years.

http://www.iitap.iastate.edu/gccourse/chem/carbon/carbon_lecture_new.html

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How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic

Below is a complete listing of the articles in "How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic," a series by Coby Beck containing responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming. There are four separate taxonomies; arguments are divided by:

(the following are all links!) see http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/12/17/223957/72

Stages of Denial,
Scientific Topics,
Types of Argument, and
Levels of Sophistication.
Individual articles will appear under multiple headings and may even appear in multiple subcategories in the same heading.


Stages of Denial
There's nothing happening
Inadequate evidence
There is no evidence
One record year is not global warming
The temperature record is simply unreliable
One hundred years is not enough
Glaciers have always grown and receded
Warming is due to the Urban Heat Island effect
Mauna Loa is a volcano
The scientists aren't even sure
Contradictory evidence
It's cold today in Wagga Wagga
Antarctic ice is growing
The satellites show cooling
What about mid-century cooling?
Global warming stopped in 1998
But the glaciers are not melting
Antarctic sea ice is increasing
Observations show climate sensitivity is not very high
Sea level in the Arctic is falling
Some sites show cooling
No consensus
Global warming is a hoax
There is no consensus
Position statements hide debate
Consensus is collusion
Peiser refuted Oreskes
We don't know why it's happening
Models don't work
We cannot trust unproven computer models
The models don't have clouds
If aerosols are blocking the sun, the south should warm faster
Observations show climate sensitivity is not very high
Prediction is impossible
We can't even predict the weather next week
Chaotic systems are not predictable
We can't be sure
Hansen has been wrong before
If we can't understand the past, how can we understand the present?
The scientists aren't even sure
They predicted global cooling in the 1970s
Climate change is natural
It happened before
It was warmer during the Holocene Climatic Optimum
The medieval warm period was just as warm as today
Greenland used to be green
Global warming is nothing new!
The hockey stick is broken
Vineland was full of grapes
It's part of a natural change
Current global warming is just part of a natural cycle
Mars and Pluto are warming too
CO2 in the air comes mostly from volcanoes
The null hypothesis says global warming is natural
Climate is always changing
Natural emissions dwarf human emissions
The CO2 rise is natural
We are just recovering from the LIA
It's not caused by CO2
Climate scientists dodge the subject of water vapor
Water vapor accounts for almost all of the greenhouse effect
There is no proof that CO2 is causing global warming
Mars and Pluto are warming too
CO2 doesn't lead, it lags
What about mid-century cooling?
Geological history does not support CO2's importance
Historically, CO2 never caused temperature change
It's the sun, stupid
Climate change is not bad
The effects are good
What's wrong with warmer weather?
The effects are minor
Change is normal
Climate change can't be stopped
Too late
Kyoto is a big effort for almost nothing
It's someone else's problem
Why should the U.S. join Kyoto when China and India haven't?
The U.S. is a net CO2 sink
Economically infeasible
Climate change mitigation would lead to disaster
Scientific Topics
Temperature
There is no evidence
The temperature record is simply unreliable
One hundred years is not enough
Current global warming is just part of a natural cycle
What's wrong with warmer weather?
It's cold today in Wagga Wagga
Warming is due to the Urban Heat Island effect
The satellites show cooling
Global warming stopped in 1998
They predicted global cooling in the 1970s
Some sites show cooling
Atmosphere
Extreme events
Temperature records
One record year is not global warming
It's cold today in Wagga Wagga
Storms
Droughts
Cryosphere
Glaciers
Glaciers have always grown and receded
But the glaciers are not melting
Sea ice
Antarctic sea ice is increasing
Ice sheets
Antarctic ice is growing
Greenland used to be green
Oceans
Sea level in the Arctic is falling
Modeling
Scenarios
Kyoto is a big effort for almost nothing
Hansen has been wrong before
Uncertainties
We can't even predict the weather next week
Chaotic systems are not predictable
We cannot trust unproven computer models
The models don't have clouds
Climate forcings
Solar influences
Mars and Pluto are warming too
It's the sun, stupid
Greenhouse gases
Climate scientists dodge the subject of water vapor
Water vapor accounts for almost all of the greenhouse effect
There is no proof that CO2 is causing global warming
CO2 doesn't lead, it lags
CO2 in the air comes mostly from volcanoes
What about mid-century cooling?
Geological history does not support CO2's importance
Natural emissions dwarf human emissions
Mauna Loa is a volcano
The CO2 rise is natural
Historically, CO2 never caused temperature change
The US is a net CO2 sink
Observations show climate sensitivity is not very high
Aerosols
What about mid-century cooling?
If aerosols are blocking the sun, the south should warm faster
Paleo climate
Holocene
It was warmer during the Holocene Climatic Optimum
The medieval warm period was just as warm as today
Greenland used to be green
The hockey stick is broken
Vineland was full of grapes
We are just recovering from the LIA
Ice ages
CO2 doesn't lead, it lags
Global warming is nothing new!
Geologic history
What's wrong with warmer weather?
Geological history does not support CO2's importance
Climate is always changing
Historically, CO2 never caused temperature change
If we can't understand the past, how can we understand the present?
Scientific process
Global warming is a hoax
There is no proof that CO2 is causing global warming
There is no consensus
The null hypothesis says global warming is natural
Position statements hide debate
If we can't understand the past, how can we understand the present?
The scientists aren't even sure
Consensus is collusion
Peiser refuted Oreskes
Types of Argument
Uninformed
There is no evidence
One record year is not global warming
One hundred years is not enough
There is no proof that CO2 is causing global warming
What's wrong with warmer weather?
Climate change mitigation would lead to disaster
There is no consensus
We cannot trust unproven computer models
Misinformed
It was warmer during the Holocene Climatic Optimum
The medieval warm period was just as warm as today
Antarctic ice is growing
CO2 in the air comes mostly from volcanoes
Greenland used to be green
The satellites show cooling
Natural emissions dwarf human emissions
It's the sun, stupid
The U.S. is a net CO2 sink
But the glaciers are not melting
Antarctic sea ice is increasing
They predicted global cooling in the 1970s
Vineland was full of grapes
Cherry Picking
It's cold today in Wagga Wagga
Antarctic sea ice is growing
The satellites show cooling
Global warming stopped in 1998
Antarctic sea ice is increasing
Vineland was full of grapes
Observations show climate sensitivity is not very high
The sea level in the Arctic is falling
Some sites show cooling
Urban Myths
The medieval warm period was just as warm as today
CO2 in the air comes mostly from volcanoes
Greenland used to be green
Hansen has been wrong before
They predicted global cooling in the 1970s
Vineland was full of grapes
FUD
The temperature record is simply unreliable
Glaciers have always grown and receded
Climate scientists dodge the subject of water vapor
Water vapor accounts for almost all of the greenhouse effect
Current global warming is just part of a natural cycle
Kyoto is a big effort for almost nothing
Mars and Pluto are warming too
It's cold today in Wagga Wagga
CO2 doesn't lead, it lags
There is no consensus
Antarctic ice is growing
Warming is due to the Urban Heat Island effect
We can't even predict the weather next week
Chaotic systems are not predictable
What about mid-century cooling?
The null hypothesis says global warming is natural
Geological history does not support CO2's importance
Climate is always changing
Natural emissions dwarf human emissions
Mauna Loa is a volcano
Global warming is nothing new!
The CO2 rise is natural
The hockey stick is broken
Historically, CO2 never caused temperature change
The models don't have clouds
Global warming stopped in 1998
If we can't understand the past, how can we understand the present?
If aerosols are blocking the sun, the south should warm faster
The scientists aren't even sure
Antarctic sea ice is increasing
Peiser refuted Oreskes
Vineland was full of grapes
Observations show climate sensitivity is not very high
Sea level in the Arctic is falling
We are just recovering from the LIA
Non Scientific
Global warming is a hoax
Kyoto is a big effort for almost nothing
Why should the U.S. join Kyoto when China and India haven't?
Hansen has been wrong before
Position statements hide debate
The scientists aren't even sure
Consensus is collusion
They predicted global cooling in the 1970s
Underdog Theories
Crackpottery
Levels of Sophistication
Silly
There is no evidence
Global warming is a hoax
One record year is not global warming
Climate change mitigation would lead to disaster
Mars and Pluto are warming too
Mauna Loa is a volcano
Naive
One hundred years is not enough
Glaciers have always grown and receded
Why should the U.S. join Kyoto when China and India haven't?
It's cold today in Wagga Wagga
CO2 in the air comes mostly from volcanoes
We can't even predict the weather next week
We can not trust unproven computer models
The satellites show cooling
Natural emissions dwarf human emissions
The models don't have clouds
Global warming stopped in 1998
It's the sun, stupid
If we can't understand the past, how can we understand the present?
The scientists aren't even sure
Vineland was full of grapes
Some sites show cooling
Specious
The temperature record is simply unreliable
Climate scientists dodge the subject of water vapor
There is no proof that CO2 is causing global warming
Current global warming is just part of a natural cycle
It was warmer during the Holocene Climatic Optimum
The medieval warm period was just as warm as today
What's wrong with warmer weather?
Kyoto is a big effort for almost nothing
CO2 doesn't lead, it lags
There is no consensus
Antarctic ice is growing
Warming is due to the Urban Heat Island effect
Greenland used to be green
What about mid-century cooling?
The null hypothesis says global warming is natural
Geological history does not support CO2's importance
Climate is always changing
Global warming is nothing new!
The CO2 rise is natural
Historically, CO2 never caused temperature change
Hansen has been wrong before
Position statements hide debate
But the glaciers are not melting
If aerosols are blocking the sun, the south should warm faster
Antarctic sea ice is increasing
Consensus is collusion
They predicted global cooling in the 1970s
Peiser refuted Oreskes
Vineland was full of grapes
Scientific
Water vapor accounts for almost all of the greenhouse effect
Chaotic systems are not predictable
The hockey stick is broken
Observations show climate sensitivity is not very high
Sea level in the Arctic is falling
We are just recovering from the LIA

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/12/17/223957/72

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South Pole May Hold Secrets Of Life
Scientists Explore Antarctic's Mysteries, From Ancient Air Samples To Buried Neutrinos

SOUTH POLE, Feb. 12, 2008

(CBS) This is the second part of a series on the effects of global warming in Antarctica.


Welcome to the Earth's air conditioner.

At the South Pole it's 48 degrees below zero on a typical summer day. Antarctica holds 90 percent of the Earth's ice - that's seven million cubic miles of it.

At the South Pole, the enormity of the Antarctic Ice Sheet is striking. Beneath the spot on Antarctica where CBS News correspondent John Blackstone reported, the ice is two miles thick, and it stretches over an area larger than the United States and Mexico combined. The ice is so thick, it buries entire Antarctic mountain ranges.

It's so cold at the South Pole, the snow never melts; it just turns to ice and gets thicker. Now the secrets of the ice are coming into focus.

"For me, the really cool thing about Antarctic ice is the bubbles," said Kendrick Taylor, a Glaciologist from the Wais Divide Ice Core Project.

Those bubbles are samples of the earth's ancient atmosphere, trapped in the ice. For Taylor, the ice is like a library, stacked with climate records going back thousands of years. He expects his ice core samples will confirm a key argument in global warming.

"The current levels of greenhouse gases are much higher than they've been at any time during the last 650,000 years, and it's all due to human activity," he said.

When CBS News last visited Antarctica in 1999, the geodesic dome of the American scientific station was already disappearing under the snow. Now there's a new state-of-the-art station for dozens of scientists and support workers.

It's on stilts so it can be raised as the snow builds around it.

No one owns the South Pole, but the American presence makes a subtle point about who's in charge; discouraging the kind of competing land-grabs currently happening at the North Pole, where Russia even sent a submarine to plant its flag in the ocean floor beneath it.

"This station represents the United States presence in playing a key role in scientific research in understanding our planet better," said Jerry Marty, South Pole Station Manager.

So the National Science Foundation is funding ambitious experiments like the $272 million telescope drilled into the ice. It detects neutrinos - powerful particles from space that travel right through the Earth - and may reveal how the universe was formed.

"There is a chance that this telescope will have great discoveries that no one is able to predict," said physicist Mark Krasberg.

Looking down may yield even more immediate breakthroughs … under the ice in the ocean around Antarctica. From fish with anti freeze in their blood, this is one of the last largely undisturbed ecosystems on earth.

And it's filled with unusual creatures that somehow survive when they should be freezing.

"Here's a sea spider, if you'd like to hold him," said Cara Sucher, picking up another creature, this one round and jelly-like. "What's interesting about this guy, his shell is on the inside."

"There's a lot these organisms can do which would be really great for humans to understand and apply to human biology," said USF biologist Deneb Karentz.

Like how doctors can use cold fluids to keep critically ill patients alive. Cool science from a frozen continent.



© MMVIII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/02/12/eveningnews/main3823432.shtml

--------------



Manhattan if (when?) the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica melts.


http://absentofi.blogspot.com/2007/02/implications-of-rising-sea-levels.html

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The greatest threat of climate change for human beings lies in the potential destabilization of the massive ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, a catastrophe that would be as irreversible as the extinction of species.

Future rise in the sea level depends, dramatically, on the increase in greenhouse gases, which will largely determine the amount of global warming.

To arrive at an effective policy we can project two scenarios concerning climate change. In the business-as-usual scenario, annual emissions of CO2 continue to increase at the current rate for at least 50 years. In the alternative scenario, CO2 emissions level off this decade, slowly decline for a few decades, and by mid-century decrease rapidly, aided by new technologies.

The business-as-usual scenario yields an increase of about 5 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming during this century, while the alternative scenario yields an increase of less than 2 degrees Fahrenheit during the same period.

The last time that the Earth was five degrees warmer was 3 million years ago, when the sea level was about 80 feet higher.



In that case, the world would lose Shanghai, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Venice and New York. . In the US, 50 million people live below that sea level. China would have 250 million displaced persons. Bangladesh would produce 120 million refugees, practically the entire nation. India would lose the land of 150 million people.

A rise in sea level, necessarily, begins slowly. Massive ice sheets soften before rapid disintegration and melting occurs and sea level rises. The Earth's history reveals cases in which sea level, once ice sheets began to collapse, rose 1 meter every 20 years for centuries, calamity for hundreds of cities throughout the world.

Satellite images and other data have revealed the initial response of ice sheets to global warming. The area on Greenland in which summer melting of ice took place increased more than 50 percent during the last 25 years. The volume of icebergs from Greenland has doubled in the last 10 years.

The effect of this loss of ice on the global sea level is small so far, but accelerating. The likelihood of the sudden collapse of ice sheets increases as global warming continues. For example, wet ice is darker; thus, as ice sheets continue to melt they absorb more sunlight and melt even faster.



The business-as-usual scenario, with 5 degrees Fahrenheit global warming and 10 degrees Fahrenheit at the ice sheets, would certainly lead to their disintegration. The only question is when the collapse will begin. The business-as-usual scenario, which could lead to an eventual sea level rise of 80 feet, with 20 feet or more per century, could produce global chaos, leaving fewer resources with which to mitigate the change in climate. The alternative scenario, with global warming under 2 degrees Fahrenheit, still produces a rise in the sea level, but the slower rate allows time to develop strategies for adapting to the changes.

The Earth's creatures, save for one species, do not have thermostats in their living rooms that they can adjust for an optimum environment. But people – those with thermostats – must take notice, and turn down the world’s thermostat before it is too late.

Jim Hansen is director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and adjunct professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University's Earth Institute. A longer version of this article was published by “The New York Review of Books.”

© 2006 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization

http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=8305

]

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CNN transcript on a trip to Greenland

from our "Planet in Peril" series
Aired May 25, 2007 - 22:00 ET

Good evening, everyone.

We are about as deep in the Arctic as you can get. We are about 300 miles north of the

Arctic Circle in a research station called -- called Swiss Camp. Here, researchers and

scientists from -- from NASA and the University of Colorado have been working for years,

trying to understand the amount of climate change that has taken place here in Greenland

-- of course, climate change, in large part, due to global warming -- and how that's

going to impact all of us around the world, in particular, how it's going to -- what it

means for -- for sea levels around the world.

This camp is extremely desolate. The conditions are brutal. It is extremely cold. You can

see the -- the tents where these scientists are living for several weeks out of each

year. It is an extremely remote camp.

We will have a lot more from here later on in the program.

KING: And don't go anywhere. Anderson joins us from Greenland next -- tonight, his

journey to an island discovered only after the ice melted. It's another dramatic example

of our "Planet in Peril."

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KING: A breathtaking view is the latest stop on our "Planet in Peril" series,(r)MD-BO¯

Swiss Camp, Greenland, right near the top of the world, a place where you can actually

watch global action -- global warming in action.

Anderson and his team are at a research station on the western side of Greenland's giant

ice sheet. Scientists there have been monitoring the effects of global warming for more

than a decade. And what they're finding is quite sobering.

We have this report from Anderson Cooper, who has been up in Greenland now for two days.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

COOPER: This is where we're headed?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes. We're headed for -- that island there. The three fingers is very

diagnostic of it on the map.

COOPER: Uh-huh.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's a very unusual feature.

COOPER: It looks like three fingers...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes. It looks...

(CROSSTALK)

COOPER: ... jutted out.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: ... a bit like a hand.

COOPER: And this is -- on the map, it looks like this is part of the land mass of

Greenland.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

(CROSSTALK)

COOPER: It's attached by ice.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

COOPER: But that's not true.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No, it's not true. And we didn't know that until 2005, when we sailed

in there, serendipitously, and found that it had broken away.

COOPER: It's an extraordinary sight to be flying over Greenland, as we are, in a

helicopter right now.

It's a sea of ice and snow, interrupted by jagged peaks. I have never seen anything like

it. It's -- it's almost disorienting, though. It's hard to tell. We're -- we're traveling

up along -- the Atlantic Ocean is on our right. But it's hard to tell where the ice ends

and where the ocean begins.

This is the island right here.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No one has ever been here before. We're the first people ever to walk

here.

COOPER: No one's ever been here, really?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No. We're the first to ever walk here.

COOPER: What you're looking at is the -- the edge of a glacier.

And, back in 2004, if we were here, you wouldn't have been able to see that, because

there was a continuous ice sheet, basically, an ice bridge, which connected that glacier

to the glacier we're standing on right now.

So, when you look at the map of Greenland, it looks as if where we are now is actually

part of the mainland. But it's not.

And it was Dennis Schmidt (ph) who, back in 2005, discovered that, in fact, this is an

island. And he named it Warming Island, because he knew, even then, that this is a prime

example of -- of the effects that climate change is having on -- in Greenland.

Where were you when you first noticed it?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We -- I was right in here. I was...

COOPER: You were on a boat right in the water?

HILL: Yes, a small boat right in the water, the coming up to the cliff face, and looking

through there and seeing that it was open water, and then becoming confused, disoriented,

thinking -- my first thought was, I'm not where I think I am. Something's completely

wrong here.

It took me one minute of looking around, 360 degrees, and, then, thinking, no, I am where

I think I am. This place has completely changed.

COOPER: You realize this, where we're standing, is the newest island in the world?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes. That -- that hit me at that moment. And that -- that was the

moment of revelation, you know, the discovery.

COOPER: You have to be very careful when you're walking on an ice sheet or walking on a

glacier, because there can be hidden crevasses, which you can really fall into, and that

would be the end of you.

But the actual thickness of the ice in Greenland has become a cause of concern to -- to

scientists who are studying it. It's diminished greatly over the last several decades. In

fact, in some spots, in the last 40 years, the -- the ice thickness has diminished by as much as 40 percent. (ie almost half has already melted!)

Greenland is like no other place I have ever been. It's, of course, the world's largest

island, about a third the size of the United States. Eighty-two percent of it is covered

in ice. But the ice is melting. There's no doubt about it.

Already in the last 30 years, at least 400,000 square miles of sea ice has melted. That's

about the size of Texas and California combined. And, as the ice melts, it affects sea

levels around the world, which impacts tens of millions of people.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Everyone has to be worried about this. It's not just for the people in

the northern latitudes. That rise in sea level, because of the changing ice cap here,

will affect people in New Zealand and Australia and everywhere else in the world.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COOPER: This is Anderson Cooper.

And I'm here with wildlife biologist Jeff Corwin. We're in Swiss Camp, which is in the

interior of Greenland, about 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

This is about as remote a place you can possibly get for -- for a live shot.

JEFF CORWIN, HOST, "THE JEFF CORWIN EXPERIENCE": But the -- the upside of this, this is

just absolutely tropical.

(LAUGHTER)

COOPER: That's right.

CORWIN: I have never -- it's so cold right now.

(LAUGHTER)

CORWIN: I have all these layers on, and my fingers are frozen.

COOPER: This -- this camp is run by Dr. Conrad Stephan (ph) with the University of (17 seasons on the ice)

Colorado. There are also scientists and researchers here from NASA.

The -- the point of this camp is to study the amount of climate change that has taken

place in Greenland and that is taking place, and what kind of an impact the climate

change here is going to have on all of us around the world.

CORWIN: Absolutely.

It's really remarkable. We're standing here on top of well over 3,000 feet of ice. And (over a mile thick!)

there's a sense of permanency to this place. But, if there's anything I have learned from

this expedition, is that global warming is really not a problem about the future, as much as it is about the present.

We often talk about, how does climate change impact the generations to come? But it's

impacting the planet now. And you can see it in the way this ice is shifting, the way

it's melting. And a lot of that discovery has come from the researchers and the

scientists working at this field center.

COOPER: In the last 30 -- 30 years, the average temperature here in Greenland has risen

2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. That's more than double the -- the rise in temperatures anywhere

else around the world.

And, obviously, that impacts the ice here. And, as the ice here melts, sea levels around

the world can rise.

CORWIN: Absolutely.

And Greenland is losing an incredible amount of ice. If you were here 10 years ago, this

place would have been at a state of equilibrium, which means the ice that they lost

during summer was gained by the snowfall and frozen water during winter.

But, today, it's actually losing ice at about 100 billion tons a year. I mean, that's

incredible. One hundred billion tons of ice is disappearing.

And, of course, it just doesn't go up in smoke. The ice melts. Not only do you have to

deal with water being lifted up, with the potential sea level going up virtually 20 feet,

but also salinity. People aren't thinking about this problem. What happens when a

saltwater environment becomes more fresh lake?

COOPER: The -- this -- this camp, as we said, is incredibly desolate. You can see behind

us, these are the tents where Dr. Stephan (ph) and the other researchers actually live.

It's where we're...

CORWIN: And where we're staying.

COOPER: ... we're staying for the next couple days.

And you've heard about the land of the midnight sun. It is past midnight now. It's about

12:20 or 12:30. The sun is still up in the sky. And it remains 24 hours a day of

sunlight. So it's very disorienting.

It's also very surreal. If you look out past the tents all the way to the horizon, you

really can't tell at times where the ice ends and where the sky begins. You can get very

easily lost out here.

CORWIN: This is what's really amazing. If you were back home, for example, in New York,

and you could see where the skyline is, you could see where the horizon is.

But if you look, there's horizon all the way around you, which is really incredible.

You're that close to the top of the world, that you don't get sort of a dividing point.

You're completely surrounded by the top of the world.

COOPER: It's a remarkable place to be here. The work that they are doing is incredibly

important. We're going to have more on it in our "Planet in Peril" series in the days

ahead.

Let's go back to John King right now in New York -- John.

KING: Anderson, thank you. Fascinating stuff. And good to see both you and Jeff. And our

thanks to the producer, Charlie Moore, on that trip and the crew, as well. Trust us when

we tell you, it is not easy to get a live television signal out of the top of the world.

It's great to see Anderson and Jeff. And we'll see more, as he said, in the days ahead.

And ahead tonight, take a ride with Anderson to the opposite side of the Arctic, to some

of the hottest spots on earth.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0705/25/acd.01.html

VIDEO: Greenland's melting ice sheet 4:26min
Rising temperatures are causing Greenland's ice sheet -- the second largest in the world -- to melt.
Greenland's ice is 1,500 miles long and over a mile deep!
Added On October 23, 2007
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/living/2007/10/23/cooper.planet.in.peril.greenland.cnn?iref=videosearch

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Warming may lead to cooling?

The oceanic thermal conveyor (transfering tropical heat to the poles) may be shut down because melting poles are flooding the poles with fresh water, which is less dense than saltwater and will not sink, hence cooling begins again at the poles



The global conveyor belt thermohaline circulation is driven primarily by the formation and sinking of deep water (from around 1500m to the Antarctic bottom water overlying the bottom of the ocean) in the Norwegian Sea. This circulation is thought to be responsible for the large flow of upper ocean water from the tropical Pacific to the Indian Ocean through the Indonesian Archipelogo. The two counteracting forcings operating in the North Atlantic control the conveyor belt circulation: (1) the thermal forcing (high-latitude cooling and the low-latitude heating) which drives a polar southward flow; and (2) haline forcing (net high-latitude freshwater gain and low-latitude evaporation) which moves in the opposite direction. In today's Atlantic the thermal forcing dominates, hence, the flow of upper current from south to north.

When the strength of the haline forcing increases due to excess precipitation, runoff, or ice melt the conveyor belt will weaken or even shut down. The variability in the strength of the conveyor belt will lead to climate change in Europe and it could also influence in other areas of the global ocean. The North Atlantic atmosphere-ocean-cryosphere system appears to have natural cycles of many timescales in switching the conveyor belt. Periodic movement of excessive ice from the Arctic into the Greenland Sea appears to be responsible for the interdecadal variability of the conveyor belt. There is no evidence yet that the influx of interdecadal switching extends beyond the North Atlantic Ocean. .

Next: Potential impact of sea-level rise on Bangladesh
Vital Climate Graphics : Potential Impacts of Climate Change


http://www.grida.no/climate/vital/32.htm

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Mount Tambora exploded in 1815. It was 1000 times larger than Mt. Saint Helen's eruption. 35 cubic miles of dust and ash was sent to 14,000ft, above the weather which could not not "wash it out"



Global effects
See also: Year Without a Summer

Sulfate concentration in ice core from Central Greenland, dated by counting oxygen isotope seasonal variations. There is an unknown eruption around 1810s. Source: Dai (1991).[23]The 1815 eruption released sulfur into the stratosphere, causing a global climate anomaly. Different methods have estimated the ejected sulfur mass during the eruption: the petrological method; an optical depth measurement based on anatomical observations; and the polar ice core sulfate concentration method, using cores from Greenland and Antarctica. The figures vary depending on the method, ranging from 10 Tg S to 120 Tg S.[4]

In the spring and summer of 1816, a persistent dry fog was observed in the northeastern U.S. The fog reddened and dimmed the sunlight, such that sunspots were visible to the naked eye. Neither wind nor rainfall dispersed the "fog". It was identified as a stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil.[4] In summer 1816, countries in the Northern Hemisphere suffered extreme weather conditions, dubbed the Year Without a Summer. Average global temperatures decreased about 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1.3 °F),[2] enough to cause significant agricultural problems around the globe. On 4 June 1816, frosts were reported in Connecticut, and by the following day, most of New England was gripped by the cold front. On 6 June 1816, snow fell in Albany, New York, and Dennysville, Maine.[4] Such conditions occurred for at least three months and ruined most agricultural crops in North America. Canada experienced extreme cold during that summer. Snow 30 cm (12 in) thick accumulated near Quebec City from 6 to 10 June 1816.

1816 was the second coldest year in the northern hemisphere since AD 1400, after 1601 following the 1600 Huaynaputina eruption in Peru.[17] The 1810s are the coldest decade on record, a result of Tambora's 1815 eruption and other suspected eruptions somewhere between 1809 and 1810 (see sulfate concentration figure from ice core data). The surface temperature anomalies during the summer of 1816, 1817 and 1818 were −0.51, −0.44 and −0.29 °C, respectively.[17] As well as a cooler summer, parts of Europe experienced a stormier winter.

This pattern of climate anomaly has been blamed for the severity of typhus epidemic in southeast Europe and the eastern Mediterranean between 1816 and 1819.[4] Much livestock died in New England during the winter of 1816–1817. Cool temperatures and heavy rains resulted in failed harvests in the British Isles. Families in Wales traveled long distances as refugees, begging for food. Famine was prevalent in north and southwest Ireland, following the failure of wheat, oat and potato harvests. The crisis was severe in Germany, where food prices rose sharply. Due to the unknown cause of the problems, demonstrations in front of grain markets and bakeries, followed by riots, arson and looting, took place in many European cities. It was the worst famine of the 19th century.[4]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Tambora



Pinatubo Volcano in the Philipines. It ranks as No. 21 on the list of deadliest volcanos. Eight hundred people lost their lives when Pinatubo erupted as recently as 1991.

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Greenland ice melt shocks scientists

Rising sea level - Climate models failed to foresee the acceleration, and the far-reaching effects are likely to bring more Northwest rain

Sunday, September 09, 2007
MICHAEL MILSTEIN The Oregonian Staff

KANGERLUSSUAQ, Greenland -- The vast ice sheet that coats Greenland up to 2 miles thick is reacting to global warming far faster than scientists thought it would.



It makes some of them wonder whether they've underestimated the speed of changes a warmer climate brings.

A few decades ago, Greenland's glaciers had little bearing on Oregon. Now they're melting and sliding into the ocean quickly enough to measurably -- though slightly -- raise the sea level on the coast of Oregon and around the world.

It is the acceleration that stuns scientists. Greenland's glaciers are adding up to 58 trillion gallons of water a year to the oceans, more than twice as much as a decade ago and enough to supply more than 250 cities the size of Los Angeles, NASA research shows.

That's particularly unsettling because elaborate climate models that scientists use to estimate the effects of global warming did not foresee it. Scientists themselves never imagined Greenland's ice, which holds enough water to raise sea levels 23 feet and sits in position to influence Northwest weather, would move so quickly.

"The overriding mind-set was that it would take many centuries to change in any significant way," said Robert Bindschadler, a leading ice researcher and chief scientist at NASA's Hydrospheric and Biospheric Sciences Laboratory. "The whole community was astonished at how rapidly these really large glaciers are accelerating."

So much ice is disappearing so rapidly that the earth beneath Greenland is rising -- bouncing back like a bathroom scale when you step off it. Researchers helicoptering around Greenland are now dotting its coast with global positioning units to track that rise.

Higher temperatures are melting more of the ice sheet, at higher elevations than ever known before.

Offshore, the sea level is rising faster than ever in modern times, approaching speeds scientists did not expect until later this century. Greenland is a question mark that, if its ice continues the rush seaward, could push the seas even higher, even faster.

Scientists know that seas rose as fast as a foot a decade -- some 10 times faster than today -- when the climate warmed in the past at the rate it is now. Greenland probably contributed much of that.

"You don't need to melt much of Greenland to have a pretty big effect," said Christina Hulbe, a professor at Portland State University who specializes in the behavior of glaciers. "The fact that it's already happening faster than people thought possible -- that's reason to be concerned."

Though predictions of higher temperatures, melting ice and rising seas as the world warms may strike some as overstated, scientists now wonder whether they might actually be understated.

"Feedback" mechanisms

In particular, climate models that did not foresee Greenland's rapid changes might not fully recognize "feedback" mechanisms where warming drives changes that, in turn, drive even more rapid warming.

"I think they're too conservative," Bindschadler said. "I have no doubt that sea level will rise, and it will probably rise at an increasing rate."

Though climate models project melting of ice, they have a tougher time foreseeing changes in the way the ice moves -- something scientists still do not clearly understand, but which is turning out to be a dominant means of delivering ice to the sea.

Those forces within ice operate on such small scales, they remain out of focus of the global climate models that provide most forecasts of climate change.

"There's no way they can get it right," Hulbe said.

Greenland's ice is vulnerable to warming for some of the same reasons that glaciers on Mount Hood and throughout the Cascades are vulnerable. Both lie in climates mild enough that only slight warming can rapidly speed their disintegration.

The difference is that Greenland contains thousands of times more ice, and though melting of Cascade glaciers affects the Northwest, the melting of Greenland affects the world.

It's clear that the climate has changed radically and rapidly in the past, with Greenland at the center of that change. Climate records suggest that modern humans have lived in a period of climatic calm and that wild swings in climate -- even without human-driven climate change -- are much more the rule than the exception.

"Everyone around the world could experience abrupt climate change in the future," said Ed Brook, a professor at Oregon State University who examines ice cores from Greenland that reveal how the climate has behaved in the past. "We don't really know why they happen, but we know that Greenland is where they happen."


Irreversible slide?

A central question is whether warming has already pushed Greenland into an irreversible slide that will change the world, as it has before.

Greenland, about three times the size of Texas, strongly affects the world's climate. The Nazis, recognizing that influence, installed secret weather stations along its coast during World War II that U.S. troops worked feverishly to destroy.

Researchers now believe the influence reaches as far as the Pacific Northwest, and will probably alter Northwest weather as ice covering the ocean around Greenland melts away. That ice is also shrinking faster than models predicted, setting off a rush by nearby nations to claim rights to possible oil reserves below.

More Arctic sea ice melted this summer than ever before recorded, and many suspect it will disappear entirely by midcentury.

The melting removes an insulating blanket from the ocean surface, releasing warmth from the water into the cold air above as towering columns of warmer air.

Those columns appear to reorient global air flows the way a boulder falling into a stream reorients the current, said Jacob Sewall, a professor of geosciences at Virginia Tech, who has used atmospheric models to study the effect. The result is that the stream that carries storms over the West Coast of North America shifts north, turning much of California drier, and the Northwest wetter.

"Instead of hitting near San Francisco, they'll be pushed to the north and come in over Oregon," Sewall said. "The ice changes we're seeing now appear to be following this pattern. We're already seeing some of these precipitation shifts in western North America."

It signals how what might seem like a subtle change as far away as Greenland makes a difference in Oregon.

"It's not just that the polar bears no longer have ice," Sewall said. "This can have a far-field effect as well."

Michael Milstein: 503-294-7689; michaelmilstein@ news.oregonian.com


http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/1189232816204570.xml&coll=7

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Glacial ice and rising sea levels

glacial ice is melting adding to the oceans volume. As long as the trend is in place and not reversing, shorelines will be going under.

Every month there are astronomical high tides. My brothers house has the harbor/river rise to the top of his 3 foot high wall during these monthly astronomical tides. If a tide gets 1 foot higher than that, his basement will be full and his house will look like an island once a month. Kind of scary seeing that tide that lasts for about 3 days every month.

Grounded ice is ice resting on the ground rather than floating. The melting of floating ice will not change sea level: the mass of this ice is equal to that of the water it displaces - compare the water level in a covered glass of water with floating ice cubes before and after they melt.

There is a lot of ice resting on top of Antarctica, a land mass. The north pole ice cap is a floater.

"...scientists estimate that if Greenland's ice sheet melts, seas would rise 23 feet -- 40 feet if West Antarctica's ice also melts. ..."

http://scarborough.esva.net/NewDocs/The_Eastern_Shore_News___Picardi_5_12_07.doc


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Coastal areas of Greenland may melt, but they only cover a small area because Greenland is surrounded by mountains. Here is a Greenland before ice, and how much there is today.



The Greenland icecap contains 1/8th of the total global ice-mass. The total ice-mass on earth is 30 million. cubic km; Antarctica has 27 million.cubic km; Greenland 2.5 million. cubic km.

The mean height of the Greenland icecap: 2135 meters; 65% of the area lies above 2000 meters; That is why Greenland deserves the name most extreme highland in the world.

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From 1996 to 2000, widespread Greenland glacial acceleration was found at latitudes below 66 degrees north. This acceleration extended to 70 degrees north by 2005. The researchers estimated the ice mass loss resulting from enhanced glacier flow increased from 63 cubic kilometers in 1996 to 162 cubic kilometers in 2005. Combined with the increase in ice melt and in snow accumulation over that same time period, they determined the total ice loss from the ice sheet increased from 96 cubic kilometers in 1996 to 220 cubic kilometers in 2005. To put this into perspective, a cubic kilometer is one trillion liters (approximately 264 billion gallons of water), about a quarter more than Los Angeles uses in one year.

Glacier acceleration has been the dominant mode of mass loss of the ice sheet in the last decade. From 1996 to 2000, the largest acceleration and mass loss came from southeast Greenland. From 2000 to 2005, the trend extended to include central east and west Greenland.

"In the future, as warming around Greenland progresses further north, we expect additional losses from northwest Greenland glaciers, which will then increase Greenland's contribution to sea level rise," Rignot said.

Source: NASA

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The two recent programs on PBS NOVA "Dimming of the Sun" and the catastrophic melting of ice dams in the recent past and in geological times are alarming when applied to Greenland's ice melting. If the first program is correct, then we can expect the global warming to be much higher than now - once India and China clean up their air pollution. According to the dimming of the sun program, the sun has been dimmed 10% since the 1950's due to air pollution and this has caused a cooling effect that has canceled the global warming effect. Once the air pollution is stopped, the warming will take over and be rapid, easily reaching the necessary 3 degrees in a few years that is needed to melt Greenland's ice. The second article that is important is the way ice reacts when under the tremendous pressure of its own weight. The weight of the ice causes it to melt. It must be at a lower temperature to freeze when under pressure. This means that as the ice in Greenland warms up, it will begin to melt from the bottom up and not the top down as is usually assumed. The base foundation will become melted and the whole mass of ice could then melt and travel on a bed of water, and with the rapid fracturing and heating of the ice due to motion, the entire ice in Greenland could melt and slide into the ocean in a huge wave of rapid ice flows. This happened in Canada after the last ice age. This ice flow will be of biblical proportions, swamping cities overnight if it were to all go at once as it is likely to do. This is the most likely scenario because the water will build up underneath the ice - out of sight - and then let go in one major catastrophic event. Now that you see how the physics works, how can you believe in the theory of a slow and benign melting of Greenland's ice? The geological evidence points and warning signs point to a major world wide catastrophe that may occur in the not too distant future.

http://www.physorg.com/news10948.html

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(Venus, which has an atmosphere that consists of 90 percent carbon dioxide, is 500 degrees Celsius warmer than it would be without the CO2 layer.)

What we have done is enhance the greenhouse effect by adding an infrared absorber, namely CO2

Yes H2O, NO2, SO2 and CH4 are infrared absorbers too and we are raising these concentrations as well. However, the atmosphere's ability to hold these is limited as they precipitate out (except methane). Whats true though is that a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor. Now there's a positive feed back loop thats making infrared trapping worse.

Americans eat 90,000 cows a day! (CowProtection.com) There is an ever increasing number of farting cows, lol

The bulk of Earth's atmosphere is comprised of N2 (4/5ths) and O2 (1/5) These diatomic molecules absorb and re-emit light wavelengths, not infrared wavelengths like tri-atomic molecules. This is why the sky lights up blue as that is the preferred absorbed wavelength, second it green. When the sun is at high noon there is only 100 miles of atmosphere between us and the sun. Since the blue has been scattered out yellow (red+green) remains. When the sun is near the horizon the sun rays travel through some 8,000 miles of atmosphere scattering out all the green as well as the blue wavelengths. That leaves the red we see. On the moon, the sun appears white as none of the component color wavelengths are scattered

R+G+B = W

btw, water vapor scatters all light wavelengths as well infrared. Hence the sky whitens or appears hazy when the humidity is high.

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Greenland: Where Towering Icebergs Raise Sea Levels

Scientists, Tourists Visit Glacier Threatened by Global Warming

By BILL BLAKEMORE
Sept. 9, 2007
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Share Scientists packed the C-130 taking us to Greenland — the vast and wild land that now attracts ice experts from many countries to assess the danger of global warming.

The Jakobshavn glacier and ice fjord at Ilulissat, jammed with towering icebergs, are breathtaking to see, but scientists report they are now pouring out some 20 million tons of frozen water into the ocean every day. (diluting the salinity)

It is helping to raise sea levels at a rate scientists say could devastate the homes and properties of hundreds of millions of people on the world's coastlines by mid-century.

As climate experts become more and more familiar here, some Greenlanders also hope that global warming will bring them a lot more tourists.

It's clearly beginning to, and one local tour guide and shop owner overflows with stories about global warming:

"I never seen, like now, the last six, seven years, the bay doesn't freeze any more. No more ice," Silverio Scivoli, owner of Tourist Nature, told us over a cup of hot tea in the back of his shop.

He showed us satellite photos depicting the long retreat of the Jakobshavn glacier, which has been pulling back since the industrial revolution accelerated the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels.

"In 1850, the glacier was here. Now, we are down here," Scivoli said.

Now, the glacier is melting even faster. It has retreated nine miles in only the last five years.

An Italian couple visiting Ilulissat told us global warming spurred them to visit this remote land.

"We were afraid this could disappear in the next years, and so, we wanted to see it," Roberta Romagnolo told us, looking out over the iceberg-packed outlet of the Jakobshavn ice fjord.

Local fishermen in the Ilulissat harbor told us the icebergs coming down the fjord from the Jakobshavn glacier are not as huge as they used to be, and stream past much more quickly now.

It is anecdotal evidence that dovetails exactly with data compiled by scientists trying to understand the effect of global warming on Greenland's ice sheet.

We accompanied Romagnolo and four other European tourists paying $500 each for a spectacular helicopter ride up the ice fjord to a remote mountain peak where you can still see the fast-retreating face of the glacier.

In fact, all that's left of the Jakobshavn glacier — which was once a protruding "ice tongue" floating out into the ice fjord — is a retreating crescent, eating back up into the overall Greenland ice sheet.

But, to look at this retreating glacier face from a windy peak a few miles away, is to be overwhelmed by the bleak magnificence of the Greenland ice sheet — the only ice sheet in the northern hemisphere left over from the last ice age. It's so big, it generates its own super-cooled atmosphere.

That, and its location so far north, mean it simply never melted, even as the rest of North America reappeared after the ice age was done.

Next, we went where tourists can't go, and the plane needed skis.

Summit Camp is an outpost run by the National Science Foundation at the center of Greenland's ice sheet, which is two miles thick, meaning we landed 10,000 feet above sea level.

After you deplane, your taxi is a sled pulled by snowmobiles driven by cheerful and hardy (they have to be) scientists and their support staff.

The thin air makes you dizzy — ten minutes off the plane, you're already winded, and you quickly see the value of the advice given before take off: "Once you get to Summit Camp, force yourself to take it easy."

We had landed in a snow storm.

Scientists have predicted that global warming would produce more summer precipitation, which, at this elevation, is mostly snow, and it has.

To the surprise of scientists who did not expect it, there are now, for the first time, also reports of rain at the highest elevations on the ice sheet.

That worries scientists even more, because it means more water that might seep down into the ice sheet and help disintegrate it.

There's a warm central house at Camp Summit, with a friendly common area and terrific food, including the best soup this correspondent has ever tasted. Quality of food is understood, by the managers of this remote site, to be important for morale, as scientists work against the elements.

But, another caution I'd been given also panned out: almost none of the first-timers at Summit sleep through the first night.

You start to fall asleep in the tents, pitched on the snow-covered ice, then wake up, heart racing, and gasping for air as your body's autonomic nervous system tries to figure out why it isn't getting enough oxygen.

By the second day, my body adjusted, and I found that, when you explore the vast open white spaces — step out into the sparkling snow — then, the immensity of it all is exhilarating. Summit Camp is the newest of what will now be a system of six observatories around the world run by the U.S., all of them monitoring the warming atmosphere as global warming advances. At Summit Camp, they will try to gauge how quickly climate change might destabilize this ice sheet, which would raise worldwide sea levels even faster.

That's something we were reminded of two days later on a boat carrying tourists through the towering icebergs at the mouth of the Ilulissat ice fjord.

The tourists were toasting their chilly, but cheerful, trip with drinks, cooled by chunks broken off the mountainous white masses crowding in around the little boat.

These were, of course, only the tips of the true icebergs — nine-tenths of each hidden out of sight (as the true magnitude of the global warming crisis still seems to be) now flowing faster and faster out into a warming sea.

Greenland: Where Towering Icebergs Raise Sea Levels

http://abcnews.go.com/WN/story?id=3579084&page=1

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What Global Warming Looks Like

New Report Visualizes Impact of Sea Level Rise on U.S. Coastal Cities

By CLAYTON SANDELL
Sept. 14, 2007


New York by 2030

Share Edward Mazria wants people to know how rising sea levels — made worse by global warming — will affect residents along U.S. coastlines.

Goodbye, Hollywood, Fla. So long, Boston. New Orleans? Forget about it.

"We're not talking about South Sea islands and Bangladesh here," Mazria said. "We're talking about the U.S. being physically under siege with a very small increment of sea level rise."

Mazria isn't a climatologist. He's not even a scientist. He's an architect who gave up running his company in January to devote his time to a nonprofit group he founded several years ago. Called Architecture 2030, the organization tries to bring attention to the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that the building sector contributes to global warming through inefficient electricity use, lighting, heating and cooling.

"The building sector is responsible for close to half of all energy consumption in this country and close to half of all greenhouse gas emissions," he said. Buildings are the single largest contributor to global warming, he said, emitting more than even automobiles.

To demonstrate Mazria's point, Architecture 2030 has compiled a report that features images depicting the dramatic effects of sea level rise — from about 3 to 16 feet — on 21 cities around the country.


The 2030 Challenge

The chief villain contributing to global warming, Mazria said, is coal that is burned in power plants to generate electricity in buildings. Mazria's group has issued the "2030 Challenge," calling for greatly improved efficiency standards in new and renovated buildings in the coming decades. The goal is to make buildings "carbon neutral" by 2030.

The plan has been adopted by the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the American Institute of Architects, among others. If the goal can be reached, Mazria said, demand for coal should drop dramatically.

"Seventy-six percent of the energy produced in this country goes just to operating buildings. That's heating, lighting, cooling and hot water," Mazria said. "Our focus has been on how to reduce the demand side so we don't need the new coal plants."

So Long, Boston


Boston by 2030

The images of cities under a layer of water in the Architecture 2030 report are eye-opening. Mazria said they took a year to compile, using government elevation data combined with Google Earth maps.

Images of major US cities inundated by sea level rise
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/popup?id=3599774

The results show wide swaths of Miami and Hollywood, Fla., under water after just 3 feet of sea level rise. With about 5 feet of sea level rise, Galveston, Texas, would lose its airport and much of the area around it. And if San Francisco sees a 8-foot sea level rise, the waters of McCovey Cove would be lapping across the infield at AT&T Park.

Sea level rise of 3 feet by the end of this century may seem apocalyptic, but some leading scientists say <b.it is a very real possibility. In a report issued earlier this year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — it's made up of thousands of scientists from around the world — said various warming scenarios could raise sea levels anywhere from 7 to 23 inches.

Many researchers, however, consider the panel's estimates conservative because of the uncertain contribution that melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica could make to sea level in coming decades.

"We do not have good models that include all of the relevant physics for the ice sheets," said James Hansen, a top climate scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. But Hansen said that if humans continue to heat the atmosphere in a business-as-usual fashion — and the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets start to collapse — all bets are off.

"Once a collapse starts, things can happen very rapidly," Hansen said. "I would expect that it's almost certain that before the end of the century we would have sea level rise measured in meters. At least one or 2 or 3 meters [ 6 to 9 feet] this century if we follow business as usual."

With so many people around the world living within several meters of sea level, the implications could be catastrophic.

"A large fraction of people live within several meters' elevation of sea level," said Hansen. "So we would be talking about hundreds of millions of people being displaced if sea level goes up a few meters. So we really can't afford to go down that path."

Mazria, like Hansen, believes humans must act now to dramatically reduce the use of coal. The Architecture 2030 report claims that any other measures proposed to fight global warming are almost futile. Consider the following statistics, which were calculated by Architecture 2030 using government data.

"Wal-Mart is investing a half billion dollars to reduce the energy consumption and CO2 emissions of their existing buildings by 20 percent over the next seven years," the report stated. "If every Wal-Mart Supercenter met this target, the CO2 emissions from only one medium-sized coal-fired power plant, in just one month of operation each year, would negate this entire effort."

"California passed legislation to cut CO2 emissions in new cars by 25 percent and in SUVs by 18 percent, starting in 2009. If every car and SUV sold in California in 2009 met this standard, the CO2 emissions from only one medium-sized coal-fired power plant, in just eight months of operation each year, would negate this entire effort."

Grim figures, for sure, But Mazria doesn't want anyone to lose hope, either.

"The American public is exceptional at taking a hold of a problem and solving it," he said. "If there's a need to do something, we'll do it."

Bill Blakemore contributed to this report.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/TenWays/story?id=3602227&page=1

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Biofuels Deemed a Greenhouse Threat

by ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

Published: February 8, 2008

Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these “green” fuels are taken into account, two studies being published Thursday have concluded.

The benefits of biofuels have come under increasing attack in recent months, as scientists took a closer look at the global environmental cost of their production. These latest studies, published in the prestigious journal Science, are likely to add to the controversy.

These studies for the first time take a detailed, comprehensive look at the emissions effects of the huge amount of natural land that is being converted to cropland globally to support biofuels development.

The destruction of natural ecosystems — whether rain forest in the tropics or grasslands in South America — not only releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere when they are burned and plowed, but also deprives the planet of natural sponges to absorb carbon emissions. Cropland also absorbs far less carbon than the rain forests or even scrubland that it replaces.

Together the two studies offer sweeping conclusions: It does not matter if it is rain forest or scrubland that is cleared, the greenhouse gas contribution is significant. More important, they discovered that, taken globally, the production of almost all biofuels resulted, directly or indirectly, intentionally or not, in new lands being cleared, either for food or fuel.

“When you take this into account, most of the biofuel that people are using or planning to use would probably increase greenhouse gasses substantially,” said Timothy Searchinger, lead author of one of the studies and a researcher in environment and economics at Princeton University. “Previously there’s been an accounting error: land use change has been left out of prior analysis.”

These plant-based fuels were originally billed as better than fossil fuels because the carbon released when they were burned was balanced by the carbon absorbed when the plants grew. But even that equation proved overly simplistic because the process of turning plants into fuels causes its own emissions — for refining and transport, for example.

The clearance of grassland releases 93 times the amount of greenhouse gas that would be saved by the fuel made annually on that land, said Joseph Fargione, lead author of the second paper, and a scientist at the Nature Conservancy. “So for the next 93 years you’re making climate change worse, just at the time when we need to be bringing down carbon emissions.”

The Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change has said that the world has to reverse the increase of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 to avert disastrous environment consequences.

In the wake of the new studies, a group of 10 of the United States’s most eminent ecologists and environmental biologists today sent a letter to President Bush and the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, urging a reform of biofuels policies. “We write to call your attention to recent research indicating that many anticipated biofuels will actually exacerbate global warming,” the letter said.

The European Union and a number of European countries have recently tried to address the land use issue with proposals stipulating that imported biofuels cannot come from land that was previously rain forest.

But even with such restrictions in place, Dr. Searchinger’s study shows, the purchase of biofuels in Europe and the United States leads indirectly to the destruction of natural habitats far afield.

For instance, if vegetable oil prices go up globally, as they have because of increased demand for biofuel crops, more new land is inevitably cleared as farmers in developing countries try to get in on the profits. So crops from old plantations go to Europe for biofuels, while new fields are cleared to feed people at home.

Likewise, Dr. Fargione said that the dedication of so much cropland in the United States to growing corn for bioethanol had caused indirect land use changes far away. Previously, Midwestern farmers had alternated corn with soy in their fields, one year to the next. Now many grow only corn, meaning that soy has to be grown elsewhere.

Increasingly, that elsewhere, Dr. Fargione said, is Brazil, on land that was previously forest or savanna. “Brazilian farmers are planting more of the world’s soybeans — and they’re deforesting the Amazon to do it,” he said.

International environmental groups, including the United Nations, responded cautiously to the studies, saying that biofuels could still be useful. “We don’t want a total public backlash that would prevent us from getting the potential benefits,” said Nicholas Nuttall, spokesman for the United Nations Environment Program, who said the United Nations had recently created a new panel to study the evidence.

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World View: Greg Winter and Libby Rosenthal discuss the downsides of biofuels. (mp3)“There was an unfortunate effort to dress up biofuels as the silver bullet of climate change,” he said. “We fully believe that if biofuels are to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem, there urgently needs to be better sustainability criterion.”

The European Union has set a target that countries use 5.75 percent biofuel for transport by the end of 2008. Proposals in the United States energy package would require that 15 percent of all transport fuels be made from biofuel by 2022. To reach these goals, biofuels production is heavily subsidized at many levels on both continents, supporting a burgeoning global industry.

Syngenta, the Swiss agricultural giant, announced Thursday that its annual profits had risen 75 percent in the last year, in part because of rising demand for biofuels.

Industry groups, like the Renewable Fuels Association, immediately attacked the new studies as “simplistic,” failing “to put the issue into context.”

“While it is important to analyze the climate change consequences of differing energy strategies, we must all remember where we are today, how world demand for liquid fuels is growing, and what the realistic alternatives are to meet those growing demands,” said Bob Dineen, the group’s director, in a statement following the Science reports’ release.

“Biofuels like ethanol are the only tool readily available that can begin to address the challenges of energy security and environmental protection,” he said.

The European Biodiesel Board says that biodiesel reduces greenhouse gasses by 50 to 95 percent compared to conventional fuel, and has other advantages as well, like providing new income for farmers and energy security for Europe in the face of rising global oil prices and shrinking supply.

But the papers published Thursday suggested that, if land use is taken into account, biofuels may not provide all the benefits once anticipated.

Dr. Searchinger said the only possible exception he could see for now was sugar cane grown in Brazil, which take relatively little energy to grow and is readily refined into fuel. He added that governments should quickly turn their attention to developing biofuels that did not require cropping, such as those from agricultural waste products.

“This land use problem is not just a secondary effect — it was often just a footnote in prior papers,”. “It is major. The comparison with fossil fuels is going to be adverse for virtually all biofuels on cropland.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/science/earth/08wbiofuels.html?hp