Global Warming and Water Level Acceleration NEW Theory
So let me explain this quickly and efficiently as i can. cause it will make a difference on how you see global warming.

Most think its the gas emissions from our industrial plants and automobiles. We'll it is, but its so much more.

First off what people don't realize is the water level on our planet is rising at an astonishing rate.
This is the MAIN cause of global warming. Now let me explain.

As the water on our planet rises. The tipping effect is that the more water level on the planet is causing the atmosphere to thin. Yes we are loosing atmosphere due to the rising water on out planet. SO more water less atmosphere. This is a no brainer really. Our gravitational pull of the earth is not enough if our atmosphere is getting pushed up and away from the planet by the rising water.

So where does the water really come from? That too is common sense easy. It comes from the SUN VIA Solar wind. As we circle the sun the hydrogen is caught by the gravity of our planet and pulled in. Oxygen is heavy at sea level but gets pushed into the upper atmosphere by even heavier gasses. They mix in the atmosphere and make rain and clouds under the right pressure and temperature.
So as you can see water has been and will continue to collect on the planet. this is a problem.

You will also see more storms because of the lower pressure in the atmosphere. Its accelerating fast and may already be to late.

There's a whole bunch of new numbers to crunch. Of course you need to verify it yourself. This is the missing part that no one is aware of.
Feel free to contact me. I have answers.

Ghost!

Green China-

an article outlining how in spite of adopting by far the world's most proactive green technologies,

China's relentless pursuit of a western lifestyle ensures a dismal future for the planet-

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/06/green-china/mckibben-text/1

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Arctic Sea Ice Disappearing 50 Years Ahead of the most Pessimistic Prediction!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/science/earth/arctic-sea-ice-stops-melting-but-new-record-low-is-set.html?_r=0

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Climate scientists face organized harassment in U.S.-

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-10/climate-scientists-face-organized-harassment-in-u-s-.html

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Our current infrastructure was built for a different planet

by Kurt Cobb

Published Jul 29 2012 by Resource Insights, Archived Jul 29 2012

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-07-29/our-current-infrastructure-was-built-different-planet

Game Over...Everyone in Denial...Better Record Coral Reefs Now-

As they'll soon disappear forever-

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719

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World Headed to Irreversible Climate Change-


http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-11-11/world-headed-irreversible-climate-change-%E2%80%94-iea


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Tar Sands Pipeline: Silence Is Deadly

By James E. Hansen

04 June, 2011

http://www.countercurrents.org/hansen040611.htm

Scientists say global warming is continuing

Posted 5d 18h ago

By Randolph E. Schmid, AP Science Writer

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/environment/2010-07-28-global-warming_N.htm

Nature Stunner: “Global warming blamed for 40% decline in the ocean’s phytoplankton”

"Microscopic life crucial to the marine food chain is dying out. The consequences could be catastrophic."

July 29, 2010

http://climateprogress.org/2010/07/29/nature-decline-ocean-phytoplankton-global-warming-boris-worm/

Futr, overall, you and I have agreed that the world is getting warmer. Your ski adventures are being cut back due to snow melt and my gardening seasons have been extended due to longer warm periods.

Unfortunately this is a global problem, not solely a United States problem. Without participation of China, India and faster growing economies, a Cap and Trade initiative would be a punishment to the American public, without guaranteeing a solution to the global warming problem. It would most likely make those who control the carbon credits richer.

There will be only one natural solution to global warming and that is Peak Oil, an issue that is largely or totally ignored by Paul Krugman. Peak Oil will be more severe on the economy and all of humanity than global warming and deserves more preparation and initiatives, all in my opinion, of course.

BUT global warming does bother me very much.

sumi

PS Sorry for the late response, but possible rainy weather gives me an opportunity to catch up on the pc and various message boards.

How the Energy Bill {Climate Bill} was defeated-


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/opinion/26krugman.html?src=me&ref=general

Who Cooked the Planet?By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: July 25, 2010

Never say that the gods lack a sense of humor. I bet they’re still chuckling on Olympus over the decision to make the first half of 2010 — the year in which all hope of action to limit climate change died — the hottest such stretch on record.


Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Paul Krugman
Go to Columnist Page »
.Blog: The Conscience of a Liberal.Of course, you can’t infer trends in global temperatures from one year’s experience. But ignoring that fact has long been one of the favorite tricks of climate-change deniers: they point to an unusually warm year in the past, and say “See, the planet has been cooling, not warming, since 1998!” Actually, 2005, not 1998, was the warmest year to date — but the point is that the record-breaking temperatures we’re currently experiencing have made a nonsense argument even more nonsensical; at this point it doesn’t work even on its own terms.

But will any of the deniers say “O.K., I guess I was wrong,” and support climate action? No. And the planet will continue to cook.

So why didn’t climate-change legislation get through the Senate? Let’s talk first about what didn’t cause the failure, because there have been many attempts to blame the wrong people.

First of all, we didn’t fail to act because of legitimate doubts about the science. Every piece of valid evidence — long-term temperature averages that smooth out year-to-year fluctuations, Arctic sea ice volume, melting of glaciers, the ratio of record highs to record lows — points to a continuing, and quite possibly accelerating, rise in global temperatures.

Nor is this evidence tainted by scientific misbehavior. You’ve probably heard about the accusations leveled against climate researchers — allegations of fabricated data, the supposedly damning e-mail messages of “Climategate,” and so on. What you may not have heard, because it has received much less publicity, is that every one of these supposed scandals was eventually unmasked as a fraud concocted by opponents of climate action, then bought into by many in the news media. You don’t believe such things can happen? Think Shirley Sherrod.

Did reasonable concerns about the economic impact of climate legislation block action? No. It has always been funny, in a gallows humor sort of way, to watch conservatives who laud the limitless power and flexibility of markets turn around and insist that the economy would collapse if we were to put a price on carbon. All serious estimates suggest that we could phase in limits on greenhouse gas emissions with at most a small impact on the economy’s growth rate.

So it wasn’t the science, the scientists, or the economics that killed action on climate change. What was it?

The answer is, the usual suspects: greed and cowardice.

If you want to understand opposition to climate action, follow the money. The economy as a whole wouldn’t be significantly hurt if we put a price on carbon, but certain industries — above all, the coal and oil industries — would. And those industries have mounted a huge disinformation campaign to protect their bottom lines.

Look at the scientists who question the consensus on climate change; look at the organizations pushing fake scandals; look at the think tanks claiming that any effort to limit emissions would cripple the economy. Again and again, you’ll find that they’re on the receiving end of a pipeline of funding that starts with big energy companies, like Exxon Mobil, which has spent tens of millions of dollars promoting climate-change denial, or Koch Industries, which has been sponsoring anti-environmental organizations for two decades.

Or look at the politicians who have been most vociferously opposed to climate action. Where do they get much of their campaign money? You already know the answer.

By itself, however, greed wouldn’t have triumphed. It needed the aid of cowardice — above all, the cowardice of politicians who know how big a threat global warming poses, who supported action in the past, but who deserted their posts at the crucial moment.

There are a number of such climate cowards, but let me single out one in particular: Senator John McCain.

There was a time when Mr. McCain was considered a friend of the environment. Back in 2003 he burnished his maverick image by co-sponsoring legislation that would have created a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions. He reaffirmed support for such a system during his presidential campaign, and things might look very different now if he had continued to back climate action once his opponent was in the White House. But he didn’t — and it’s hard to see his switch as anything other than the act of a man willing to sacrifice his principles, and humanity’s future, for the sake of a few years added to his political career.

Alas, Mr. McCain wasn’t alone; and there will be no climate bill. Greed, aided by cowardice, has triumphed. And the whole world will pay the price.


futr

And Now for An Opposite Point of View~

Who says this is an open and closed discussion?lol


http://www.caseyresearch.com/displayCwc.php?id=22

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While Most have Sold their Backbone for a pittance.

A few invest the necessary Time and Effort holding to their priciples.


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/magazine/11Economy-t.html?pagewanted=6&ref=general&src=me

As a footnote 2010 despite a cold winter in the eastern U.s. and midwest is on track to be the warmest year on record worldwide~

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Lovelock: Humans Can't Fix Global Warming

Posted on: Wednesday, 31 March 2010, 06:09 CDT

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1843600/lovelock_humans_cant_fix_global_warming/



A scientist and environmentalist who gained notoriety for proposing that the Earth behaved like an organism now claims that mankind isn't smart enough to deal with global climate change.

British researcher James Lovelock--the man who four decades ago formulated the Gaia hypothesis, which asserts that the living and nonliving systems of the Earth work together like the various parts of a living organism--told Leo Hickman of The Guardian, "I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change."

Also during the Monday interview, Lovelock told Hickman that "modern democracy" was partially to blame for the lack of legitimate response to the global warming issue, and that it should be "put… on hold for a while" in order to formulate a strategy to deal with climate change. He also addressed the "Climategate" scandal, admitting that he had not read the leaked emails but that the alleged content "utterly disgusted" him and that falsifying data was "a sin against the holy ghost of science."

When asked about the United Nations' 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, Lovelock said that it was "doomed to fail… A lot of people put their hearts into it. But I've never felt entirely happy with that sort of environmental wing-ding… It just shows how hopeless humans are… You just can't get all those people to agree."

On Tuesday, Lovelock spoke out again, this time discussing the climate change issue with British television host John Humphrys. During the interview, Humphrys said that the future of humanity was uncertain, but that mankind was "not really guilty… We didn't deliberately set out to heat the world". He also claimed that the only thing that could save the Earth at this point was the Earth itself.

---

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/opinion/l21friedman.html

Tundra Being Replaced by Willows on the North Slope---

Leading to an Explosive Growth in Methane Gas Release into the Atmosphere--

And further acceleration of Global Warming--

http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2229

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Post-human Earth: How the planet will recover from us

30 September 2009 by Bob Holmes

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427281.300-posthuman-earth-how-the-planet-will-recover-from-us.html?full=true

WHEN Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the word Anthropocene around 10 years ago, he gave birth to a powerful idea: that human activity is now affecting the Earth so profoundly that we are entering a new geological epoch.

The Anthropocene has yet to be accepted as a geological time period, but if it is, it may turn out to be the shortest - and the last. It is not hard to imagine the epoch ending just a few hundred years after it started, in an orgy of global warming and overconsumption.

Let's suppose that happens. Humanity's ever-expanding footprint on the natural world leads, in two or three hundred years, to ecological collapse and a mass extinction. Without fossil fuels to support agriculture, humanity would be in trouble. "A lot of things have to die, and a lot of those things are going to be people," says Tony Barnosky, a palaeontologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In this most pessimistic of scenarios, society would collapse, leaving just a few hundred thousand eking out a meagre existence in a new Stone Age.

Whether our species would survive is hard to predict, but what of the fate of the Earth itself? It is often said that when we talk about "saving the planet" we are really talking about saving ourselves: the planet will be just fine without us. But would it? Or would an end-Anthropocene cataclysm damage it so badly that it becomes a sterile wasteland?

The only way to know is to look back into our planet's past. Neither abrupt global warming nor mass extinction are unique to the present day. The Earth has been here before. So what can we expect this time?

Take greenhouse warming. Climatologists' biggest worry is the possibility that global warming could push the Earth past two tipping points that would make things dramatically worse. The first would be the thawing of carbon-rich peat locked in permafrost. As the Arctic warms, the peat could decompose and release trillions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere - perhaps exceeding the 3 trillion tonnes that humans could conceivably emit from fossil fuels. The second is the release of methane stored as hydrate in cold, deep ocean sediments. As the oceans warm and the methane - itself a potent greenhouse gas - enters the atmosphere, it contributes to still more warming and thus accelerates the breakdown of hydrates in a vicious circle.

"If we were to blow all the fossil fuels into the atmosphere, temperatures would go up to the point where both of these reservoirs of carbon would be released," says oceanographer David Archer of the University of Chicago. No one knows how catastrophic the resulting warming might be.

That's why climatologists are looking with increasing interest at a time 55 million years ago called the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum, when temperatures rose by up to 9 °C in a few thousand years - roughly equivalent to the direst forecasts for present-day warming. "It's the most recent time when there was a really rapid warming," says Peter Wilf, a palaeobotanist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. "And because it was fairly recent, there are a lot of rocks still around that record the event."

By measuring ocean sediments deposited during the thermal maximum, geochemist James Zachos of the University of California, Santa Cruz, has found that the warming coincided with a huge spike in atmospheric CO2. Between 5 and 9 trillion tonnes of carbon entered the atmosphere in no more than 20,000 years (Nature, vol 432, p 495). Where could such a huge amount have come from?

Volcanic activity cannot account for the carbon spike, Zachos says. Instead, he blames peat decomposition, which would have happened not from melting permafrost - it was too warm for permafrost - but through climatic drying. The fossil record of plants from this time testifies to just such a drying episode.

Carbon spike

If Zachos and colleagues are right, then 55 million years ago Earth passed through a carbon crisis very much like the one feared today: a sudden spike in CO2, followed by a runaway release of yet more greenhouse gases. What happened next may give us a glimpse of what to expect if our current crisis hits full force.

Geochemists have long known that when a pulse of CO2 enters the air, much of it quickly dissolves in the upper layer of the ocean before gradually dispersing through deeper waters. Within a few centuries, an equilibrium is reached, with about 85 per cent of the CO2 dissolved in the oceans and 15 per cent in the atmosphere. This CO2 persists for tens or hundreds of thousands of years - what Archer believes will be the "long tail" of the Anthropocene. Until recently, though, climate modellers were a bit fuzzy on what this tail would look like.

"Until we had some case studies from the past, there was always some degree of uncertainty in the models," says Zachos. His studies are beginning to clear up these doubts. Carbonate rocks laid down on the sea floor during the carbon spike, for example, reveal that the oceans quickly became very acidic (Science, vol 308, p 1611). But this extreme acidification lasted just 10,000 or 20,000 years, barely a blink of an eye by geological standards, after which the oceans returned to near-normal conditions for the next 150,000 years. Even the stores of peat and methane hydrates must have regenerated within 2 million years, Zachos says, because at that time the planet underwent another, smaller carbon crisis, which must also have involved peat or methane hydrates. That suggests that the long tail of the Anthropocene is unlikely to last longer than 2 million years - still not long at all by geological standards.

However, today's carbon spike differs from that of the late Palaeocene in one important way: our planet is much cooler than it was back then, so warming is likely to have a more profound effect. During the late Palaeocene, the world was warm and largely ice-free. Now we have bright, shiny ice caps which reflect sunlight back into space. These will melt, giving way to dark, energy-absorbing rock and soil. And with all that meltwater, sea levels will rise and permafrost will thaw more rapidly, boosting warming still further.

This extra nudge could conceivably tip the Earth out of its present cycle of glacials and interglacials and return it to an older, warmer state. "The Earth was ice-free for many millions of years. The current ice ages started only about 35 million years ago, so we might kick ourselves out of that," says Pieter Tans, an atmospheric scientist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado. Even so, the newly ice-free world would merely be reverting to a familiar state. On this reading of the evidence, even the most drastic climate catastrophe would have little chance of pushing the Earth's physical systems into uncharted territory.

Not so, says James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He argues that past episodes are a poor guide to what will happen in the future, for the simple reason that the sun is brighter now than it was then. Add that to the mix and the release of methane hydrates could lead to catastrophic, unstoppable global warming - a so-called "Venus syndrome" (PDF) that causes the oceans to boil away and dooms the Earth to the fate of its broiling neighbour.

So much for the Earth itself - what of life? If Hansen is right, Earth is heading for sterility. But if the lesser scenario plays out instead, it's a very different story.

Conservation biologists say we may already be in the midst of an extinction event that could potentially turn into one of the greatest mass extinctions ever - one that would alter the trajectory of evolution.

Oddly enough, the climatic turmoil of the thermal maximum led to very little loss of biodiversity. "Nobody has ever picked the Palaeocene-Eocene boundary as a major extinction interval. It's not even in the second tier," says Scott Wing, a palaeobotanist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. Instead, the fossil record shows that species simply migrated, following their preferred climate across the globe.

Today, of course, that is often not possible because roads, cities and fields have fragmented so many natural habitats. Polar and alpine species may find their habitat vanishes entirely, and this is not to mention all the other ways people imperil species.

"We're a perfect storm as far as biodiversity is concerned," says David Jablonski, a palaeontologist at the University of Chicago. "We're not just overhunting and overfishing. We're not just changing the chemistry of the atmosphere and acidifying the oceans. We're not just taking the large-bodied animals. We're doing all this stuff simultaneously." Even so, Jablonski thinks humans are unlikely to be capable of causing an extinction comparable to the one at the end of the Permian, 251 million years ago, when an estimated 96 per cent of all marine species and 70 per cent of terrestrial ones bit the dust.

Whether the Anthropocene mass extinction eventually ranks with the Permian or with lesser ones, it would still reshuffle the evolutionary deck. Once again, the past gives us some idea of what we could expect.

The fossil record tells us that every mass extinction plays out differently, because each has its own unique causes. However, there is one common factor: the species at greatest risk are those with the narrowest geographic ranges. Jablonski's studies of fossil marine snails show that species with planktonic larvae - which disperse widely - fare better than species with a more restricted distribution (Science, vol 279, p 1327).

Cockroach world

Add to that massive habitat disturbances, says Jablonski, and a picture emerges of life after the Anthropocene extinction. Small body sizes, fast reproductive rates and an ability to exploit disturbed habitats will all prove advantageous. "It's a rats, weeds and cockroaches kind of world," says Jablonski.

The wave of extinctions is likely to sweep through species in a fairly predictable way. "First we would probably lose the species that are already endangered, then it would work its way down," says Barnosky. "Eventually it would hit some of the species that we don't consider at risk today - for example, many of the African herbivores that today seem to have healthy populations."

However, predictions about the fate of any particular species are almost impossible, as luck will also play a role. The survivors will probably be a more-or-less random selection of weedy plants and opportunistic animals, notes Doug Erwin, a palaeobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution.

If the Anthropocene does end with a mass extinction, the fossil record tells us a lot about what the recovery might look like. Whether the news is good or bad depends on your perspective. "Recoveries from mass extinctions are geologically rapid, but from a human point of view grindingly long. We're talking millions of years," says Jablonski.

Recoveries from mass extinctions are geologically rapid, but from a human point of view grindingly long. We're talking about millions of years.

Immediately after a mass extinction, the fossil evidence suggests that ecosystems go into a state of shock for several million years. For many millions of years after the Permian extinction, for example, marine environments the world over were dominated by the same 25 or 30 species. "It's pretty boring," says Erwin.

Something similar happened on land after the Cretaceous extinction. Pre-extinction plant fossils from western North America testify to flourishing ecosystems, with a variety of insects feeding on a wide assortment of plants. After the extinction, though, both plant and insect diversity drops dramatically, with some insect feeding methods vanishing almost completely.

After that, confusion reigns for 10 million years. There are fossil assemblages with only a few insects and plants, ones with many insects but few plants, others with many plants but few insects - just about everything except what ecologists would call "normal" (Science, vol 313, p 1112). "At no time did we have what I would call a healthy ecosystem, with diverse insects feeding on diverse plants," says Wilf. All the while biodiversity remains low, with few new species evolving. "You're just trying to hang on," says Erwin.

A study of marine fossil diversity bears this out. Nearly a decade ago, James Kirchner of the University of California, Berkeley, and Anne Weil of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, took a database of all known marine fossils and used it to work out how closely peaks of speciation follow peaks of extinction (Nature, vol 404, p 177). "We went into this thinking, like everybody else, that when you have an extinction, you begin repopulating almost immediately," says Kirchner, now at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research in Birmensdorf. Instead, they found that speciation peaks lagged about 10 million years behind extinction peaks. "We pretty much fell out of our chairs," he says.

In fact, for the first few million years after an extinction the speciation rate actually falls. "That suggests to us a sort of wounded biosphere. Extinction events don't just remove organisms from an ecosystem, leaving lots of opportunity for new species to diversify. Instead, what we think happens is that the niches themselves collapse, so you won't have new organisms emerging to occupy them. The niches themselves don't exist any more," says Kirchner.

Eventually, though, evolution wins the day, and after a few tens of millions of years biodiversity rebounds. Sometimes, as after the Ordovician mass extinction 440 million years ago, the new regime looks a lot like the old one. But more often a new world emerges. "You're not re-establishing the old chessboard, you're designing a whole new game," says Erwin.

In the Permian, the oceans were dominated by filter-feeding animals such as brachiopods and sea lilies, which lived their whole lives attached to the bottom. Predators were rare. All that changed after the extinction, leaving a more dynamic and richer ecosystem. "From my point of view, the end-Permian mass extinction was the best thing that ever happened to life," says Erwin.

In a perverse way, then, the bottom line is an encouraging one. Even if we manage to overpopulate and overconsume ourselves back to the Stone Age, the Earth will probably survive. Life will go on. By the time the long tail of the Anthropocene is over, what little was left of humanity will probably be gone. A new geological age will dawn. Shame there won't be anybody around to give it a name.

Editorial: Earth will be OK, but for us it's not so good

Bob Holmes is a consultant for New Scientist based in Edmonton, Canada

Latest Arctic Research Appears to Confirm Causal Connection of Industrial Age to Arctic Melting


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-arctic5-2009sep05,0,3388515.story

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A hundred years ago, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius asked the important question “Is the mean temperature of the ground in any way influenced by the presence of the heat-absorbing gases in the atmosphere?” He went on to become the first person to investigate the effect that doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide would have on global climate. The question was debated throughout the early part of the 20th century and is still a main concern of Earth scientists today.




Arrhenius did very little research in the fields of climatology and geophysics, and considered any work in these fields a hobby. His basic approach was to apply knowledge of basic scientific principles to make sense of existing observations, while hypothesizing a theory on the cause of the “Ice Age.” Later on, his geophysical work would serve as a catalyst for the work of others.

In 1895, Arrhenius presented a paper to the Stockholm Physical Society titled, “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.” This article described an energy budget model that considered the radiative effects of carbon dioxide (carbonic acid) and water vapor on the surface temperature of the Earth, and variations in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. In order to proceed with his experiments, Arrhenius relied heavily on the experiments and observations of other scientists, including Josef Stefan, Arvid Gustaf Högbom, Samuel Langley, Leon Teisserenc de Bort, Knut Angstrom, Alexander Buchan, Luigi De Marchi, Joseph Fourier, C.S.M. Pouillet, and John Tyndall.

Arrhenius argued that variations in trace constituents—namely carbon dioxide—of the atmosphere could greatly influence the heat budget of the Earth. Using the best data available to him (and making many assumptions and estimates that were necessary), he performed a series of calculations on the temperature effects of increasing and decreasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere. His calculations showed that the “temperature of the Arctic regions would rise about 8 degrees or 9 degrees Celsius, if the carbonic acid increased 2.5 to 3 times its present value. In order to get the temperature of the ice age between the 40th and 50th parallels, the carbonic acid in the air should sink to 0.62 to 0.55 of present value (lowering the temperature 4 degrees to 5 degrees Celsius).”




As Arrhenius predicted, both carbon dioxide levels and temperatures increased from 1900–1999. However, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased much more quickly than he expected, but the Earth hasn't warmed as much as he thought it would. (Graphs by Robert Simmon, based on data from NOAA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies)

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Arrhenius/

Carbon Dioxide at Mauna Loa Observatory



Figure 1: Carbon Dioxide at Mauna Loa Observatory.


There are two obvious things in this record. The first is that there is a steady upward trend of CO2. The second is that there is an annual oscillation of CO2. What is not so obvious on this scale is that the amplitude of the annual cycle is increasing. Here is a link to the NOAA site which has much more information on this figure, as well as global averages and numbers of how much the CO2 increases each year.

The steady upward trend is mostly attributed to the release of CO2 by fossil fuel burning. There has been significant effort to account for all of the sources (and sinks) of carbon dioxide, and the increase both correlates with the increased burning of fossil fuels, and it is generally consistent with amounts that are estimated based on fuel consumption.

Some have criticized the use of these particular observations because they are at Mauna Loa, which is a volcano. While this is true, the observatory at Mauna Loa was chosen because, to a very good approximation, it sees clean maritime air. This is constantly checked. One way it is checked is to calculate trajectories to see where the air being sampled comes from. Here is a link to recent trajectory calculations. If there is active volcanism, then is accounted for in the data quality control. It is found, more and more, that the air at Mauna Loa sees emissions and pollution from Asia. This is much more likely than seeing local volcanism.

There has been some significant effort to calculate the CO2 emissions from volcanoes. In the recent time, last 100 years, this amount is estimated to be more than 100 times smaller than that from fossil fuels. Here is the link to the USGS web site on volcanoes. With satellites and other observing systems, there are not any volcanoes in some hidden part of the world that are unknowingly spewing large amounts of CO2 or SO2 or aerosols into the atmosphere. Really.

Back to the Keeling Curve: The annual cycle in the CO2 is caused by the "breathing" of the terrestrial biosphere; that is, plants. Plants use CO2, and when the northern hemisphere blooms in spring and summer, the plants take up CO2. In fall and winter, there is release of biospheric CO2.

Not completely obvious in this figure, but more obvious in stations from high northern latitudes, the amplitude of the annual cycle is increasing. This increase is directly correlated with the "greening" of both North America and Siberia. Because of the warming at higher latitudes, there is greater growth of trees (easily measured by satellites). This greater growth takes up more CO2. On one hand, this increased "breathing" is consistent with the predictions of global warming; hence, it is part of the finger print that contributes to the validation of the theory. On the other hand, some have maintained that the increased biological activity would "take up the extra CO2." There seems to be no evidence to support this assertion, and the observations suggest that increased biological activity cannot keep up - at least on the time scales we have observed.


While it is possible to substantiate that the Mauna Loa station is not, in general, contaminated by local pollution, this substantiation is not generally accepted as adequate. It needs to be validated. One way to do this is to take observations at many other sites. Here is a list of other sites in the carbon observing network. If you were to study the observations from these sites, you would see a consistent signal. CO2 is increasing; there is biological breathing, and the amplitude of the breathing is increasing. However, the amount of CO2 does vary, especially as a function of latitude. This variation reflects a number of items. First, it reflects the enhanced emissions of the industrialized nations. Second, since these stations are located primarily in the northern hemisphere, there is more CO2 in the north than the south. This difference between the hemispheres can be used to estimate how long it takes the two hemispheres to mix.

I will leave it there. Wait for comments, and ask - what are the differences between the northern and southern hemispheres in terms of CO2?

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/RickyRood/comment.html?entrynum=34&tstamp=200707

G-8 leaders agree on climate target

L'AQUILA, Italy – The Obama administration and other world leaders on Wednesday backed new targets for battling global warming, a move the Bush White House had resisted.

White House officials confirmed that President Barack Obama agreed to language supporting a goal a goal of keeping the world's average temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

The agreement by the Group of Eight industrialized nations, meeting in Italy, marks a significant step in efforts to limit greenhouse gases blamed for the world's rising temperature. The G-8 previously had not been able to agree on that temperature limit as a political goal.

It remains only a target, however, and it is far from clear that it will be met, especially as China, India and other rapidly industrializing nations generate and consume more energy from coal and other sources.

Climate change experts say the 2-degree threshold wouldn't eliminate the risk of runaway climate change but would reduce it. Even a slight increase in average temperatures could wreak havoc on farmers around the globe, as seasons shift, crops fail and storms and droughts ravage fields, scientists say.

The U.S. and other nations objected to a farther-reaching climate goal, supported by some Europeans and environmental activists. It would have committed industrialized nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050, part of a global effort to reduce overall emissions by 50 percent.

G-8 leaders also agreed that the global economy is too shaky to begin rolling back massive fiscal stimulus plans right now, according to a draft statement obtained by The Associated Press.

The leaders said in the draft that they "note some signs of stabilization" but continued to stress the difficult outlook instead of concerns over debt and high spending.

"The economic situation remains uncertain and significant risks remain to economic and financial stability," the draft read. "We will take, individually and collectively, the necessary steps to return the global economy to a strong, stable and sustainable growth path."

The leaders did commit to prepare exit strategies from the "unprecedented and concerted action" that has been taken to boost growth through government spending, low interest rates, and expansive monetary policy. Germany, worried about running up cripping debt, has pressed for spending restraint, while other major economies like Britain, Japan and the United States can't rule out the need to pump in more money.

The measures include continuing their stimulus packages while keeping inflation under control, a particular German concern, while also ensuring that banks have enough cash to keep lending.

In the meantime, the countries will prepare exit strategies, with the help of the International Monetary Fund, which will vary from country to country as the measures themselves have, the draft said.

The leaders gathered Wednesday in the quake-devastated central Italian city of L'Aquila, where they also wrestled matters such as the global rise in temperature. Over dinner later, they planned to turn their attention to world security issues from Iran to North Korea.

Italian host, Premier Silvio Berlusconi, welcomed the leaders, many of whom arrived at the summit in electric cars bearing their nation's flag. President Obama strolled into the summit site for the first G-8 meeting of his presidency.

The abrupt return home of Chinese President Hu Jintao after ethnic tensions soared in China's western Xingjiang territory could weaken trust-building discussions on making further progress on climate change.

China is among five developing market economies — along with Brazil, India, Mexico and South Africa — who are participating in the summit for the fifth straight year, joining from Thursday to discuss bringing them on board, aid and development. Also joining are nine African nations and a forum on climate change.

The summit will also discuss ways to expand the Group of Eight even further amid growing sentiment that world's most-industrialized nations can no longer claim leadership on the global political and economic agenda.

Obama signed an $787 billion economic stimulus bill in February, but experts say only about 15 percent of that has made its way into the economy so far — creating a debate between the wait-and-see camp and economists who urge another stimulus, arguing the recession proved to be deeper and more devastating than originally believed.

The document also calls for a rapid conclusion to the stalled Doha trade round, but failed to set a deadline. G-8 leaders will discuss this with other leaders tomorrow, the statement said.

The G8 draft statement on the economy calls for an "enhanced global framework for financial regulation" and to address flaws in the current system to help prevent future economic crises, but fails to make any concrete proposals. Leaders say they will address issues such as executive pay, definition of capital, risk management and the regulation of hedge funds and credit rating agencies.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/g8_summit

Lots of Current Information on the Subject Here------

The Next generation is in for some Serious Climate Related Problems.

http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientific-assessments/us-impacts

futr

Impact of Melting of Western Antartica on New York&San Francisco:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8050094.stm

Study: Arctic sea ice melting faster than expected


A giant glacier is seen making its way to the waters of Croaker Bay on Devon Island,
which is found in the east Parry Islands north of Baffin Island, Canada

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer Randolph E. Schmid, Ap Science Writer – Fri Apr 3, 1:03 am ET

WASHINGTON – Arctic sea ice is melting so fast most of it could be gone in 30 years. A new analysis of changing conditions in the region, using complex computer models of weather and climate, says conditions that had been forecast by the end of the century could occur much sooner.

A change in the amount of ice is important because the white surface reflects sunlight back into space. When ice is replaced by dark ocean water that sunlight can be absorbed, warming the water and increasing the warming of the planet.

The finding adds to concern about climate change caused by human activities such as burning fossil fuels, a problem that has begun receiving more attention in the Obama administration and is part of the G20 discussions under way in London.

"Due to the recent loss of sea ice, the 2005-2008 autumn central Arctic surface air temperatures were greater than 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) above" what would be expected, the new study reports.

That amount of temperature increase had been expected by the year 2070.

The new report by Muyin Wang of the Joint Institute for the Study of Atmosphere and Ocean and James E. Overland of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, appears in Friday's edition of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

They expect the area covered by summer sea ice to decline from about 2.8 million square miles normally to 620,000 square miles within 30 years.

Last year's summer minimum was 1.8 million square miles in September, second lowest only to 2007 which had a minimum of 1.65 million square miles, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The Center said Arctic sea ice reached its winter maximum for this year at 5.8 million square miles on Feb. 28. That was 278,000 square miles below the 1979-2000 average making it the fifth lowest on record. The six lowest maximums since 1979 have all occurred in the last six years.

Overland and Wang combined sea-ice observations with six complex computer models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to reach their conclusions. Combining several computer models helps avoid uncertainties caused by natural variability.

Much of the remaining ice would be north of Canada and Greenland, with much less between Alaska and Russia in the Pacific Arctic.

"The Arctic is often called the Earth's refrigerator because the sea ice helps cool the planet by reflecting the sun's radiation back into space," Wang said in a statement. "With less ice, the sun's warmth is instead absorbed by the open water, contributing to warmer temperatures in the water and the air."

The study was supported by the NOAA Climate Change Program Office, the Institute for the Study of the Ocean and Atmosphere and the U.S. Department of Energy.

"There's No Reversal Taking Place"

http://www.time.com/time/quotes

Around the globe, sea level is about 6 inches higher than it was 100 years ago, due primarily to warmer sea water, along with glacier melting, and the rate of rise is increasing. Leading glaciologist Dr. Mark Meier told a scientific meeting in February 2002 that accepted estimates of sea level rise were underestimated, due to the rapid retreat of mountain glaciers. His estimates are this melting could contribute 0.65 feet or more to sea level this century, which would be added to rise from expansion of warming sea water for a total of 1 to 2 feet by 2100. This is enough to inundate low lying areas from Pacific islands, to Bangladesh, to Florida's low-lying coast and Everglades (see next). In Alaska, the native village of Shishmaref, in the photo below, is suffering severe effects of sea level rise.



http://www.worldviewofglobalwarming.org/pages/glaciers.html

Time to sell all beach front property I'm afraid

I just saw the following story on a local TV news where they said the house was over a football field away from the beach when it was built.

Storm erosion imperils Plum Island cottage



November 26, 2008 04:59 PM
By Eric Moskowitz, Globe Staff

An oceanfront cottage on Plum Island is in imminent danger of collapsing into the surf and will probably be taken down by public safety officials tonight, the Newbury police chief said.

“We’ve decided that it needs to come down and were just trying to figure out the best way to do and the most prudent,” said Michael Reilly, police chief and the emergency management director for the North Shore town.

A storm coming off the Atlantic earlier this week caused severe erosion, forcing Geraldine Buzzotta, a 79-year-old widow and grandmother of eight, to flee her cottage late Tuesday night.

Buzzotta was in the home with her 27-year-old grandson when they heard crackling sounds underfoot. She left with only her 2-year-old Chihuahua, leaving behind 43 years of accumulated memories, photographs, and personal effects, including her wedding ring.

When she returned this morning about 9 a.m., she found that the home had been blocked off by yellow caution tape, and officials were trying to determine whether it could be salvaged. The decks alongside the house and the center support beams under the home had collapsed, Reilly said.

A range of local officials, from the police and emergency management department to the fire department, the building department, and the conservation office, huddled throughout the day and communicated with state and federal officials trying to determine a course of action for taking down the home in an environmentally sensitive area.

High tide in Newbury tomorrow is 11:03 p.m.

Buzzotta lost her husband, Mario, a former Winchester police lieutenant, two years ago after 56 years of marriage. He built up the cottage from a crumbling shack into what would become a comfortable, year-round home.

“Oh, I wonder if he's looking down,” Buzzotta said as she stood along the edge of Northern Avenue with family and friends. “This was his dream.”

http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2008/11/storm_erosion_d.html

More Evidence With Respect to Rapid Melting of Glaciers!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27894721/

futrcash

Swedish researchers confirm Siberian seabead methane leak

Published: 30 Aug 08 11:55 CET

The Local
Sweden's News In English

http://www.thelocal.se/14032/20080830/

Swedish researchers working on an international mission have confirmed that methane, a potent greenhouse gas, has started to leak from the permafrost under the Siberian seabed, Dagens Nyheter reported on Saturday.

"The permafrost now has small holes. We have found elevated levels of methane above the water surface and even more in the water just below. It is obvious that the source is the seabed," Örjan Gustafsson, the Swedish leader of the International Siberian Shelf Study, told the newspaper.

The tests were carried out in the Laptev and east Siberian seas and used much more precise measuring equipment than previous studies, he said.

Methane is more than 20 times more efficient than carbon dioxide in trapping solar heat.

Scientists fear that global warming may cause Siberia's permafrost to thaw and thereby release vast amounts of methane into the atmosphere. The effects of global warming are already most visible in the Arctic region.

The Russia-Swedish expedition appeared to confirm a longer term trend based on readings by Russian researcher Igor Semiletov who first detected higher methane readings at several locations in the region in 2003.

HAARP CBC Broadcast Weather control part 1 -

Antarctica was ice free 40M yrs ago

July 28, 2008

SNAPSHOT OF PAST CLIMATE REVEALS NO ICE IN ANTARCTICA MILLIONS OF YEARS AGO

A snapshot of New Zealand's climate 40 million years ago reveals a greenhouse Earth, with warmer seas and little or no ice in Antarctica, according to research published this week in the journal Geology.

The study suggests that Antarctica at that time was yet to develop extensive ice sheets. Back then, New Zealand was about 1100 km further south, at the same latitude as the southern tip of South America – so was closer to Antarctica – but the researchers found that the water temperature was 23-25 degrees C at the sea surface and 11-13 degrees C at the bottom.

"This is too warm to be the Antarctic water we know today," said Dr Catherine (Cat) Burgess from Cardiff University's School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, and lead-author of the paper. "And the seawater chemistry shows there was little or no ice on the planet."

These new insights come from the chemical analysis of exceptionally well preserved fossils of marine micro-organisms called foraminifers, discovered in marine rocks from New Zealand. The researchers tested the calcium carbonate shells from these fossils, which were found in 40 million-year-old sediments on a cliff face at Hampden Beach, South Island.

"Because the fossils are so well preserved, they provide more accurate temperature records." added Dr Burgess. "Our findings demonstrate that the water temperature these creatures lived in was much warmer than previous records have shown."

"Although we did not measure carbon dioxide, several studies suggest that greenhouse gases forty million years ago were similar to those levels that are forecast for the end of this century and beyond.

Our work provides another piece of evidence that, in a time period with relatively high carbon dioxide levels, temperatures were higher and ice sheets were much smaller and likely to have been completely absent."

The rock sequence from the cliff face covers a time span of 70,000 years and shows cyclical temperature variations with a period of about 18,000 years. The temperature oscillation is likely to be related to the Earth's orbital patterns.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/MediaAlerts/2008/2008072827309.html

Global Warming vs Global Dimming

Ocean deadzone spawned bacteria wreaking havoc on west coast fish farms

http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/story/418473.html

Make wise decisions

Pia Laipert

Saturday, June 07, 2008



http://www.nwherald.com/articles/2008/06/07/opinion/letters/doc484b39630d4fc368140220.txt

To the Editor:

For the last couple of decades, global warming has been a growing problem. Yet it seems as if a lot of people, especially Americans, are ignoring the issues. As Americans, we make up about 5 percent of the world's population, yet we contribute 25 percent of the world's emissions.

We complain about gas prices, and we still buy SUVs and Hummers, knowing full well that they cost a lot of money to fill and use a lot of gas. It's time for people to start realizing that some of the choices we make are not helping and, in some cases, making things worse.

There is a native American proverb that states, "We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children." Not only are people not conscious of the fact that they do not own the world and its resources, but we children of America need to start making some changes on how things are done.

Soon, it will be our time to run this country, and we should start by making wise decisions that not only help us in the present, but preserve the earth for future generations.

Pia Laipert

Algonquin

Forecasters offer little hope as West sizzles

Triple-digit temperatures to set records; heat wave to last until next week

8:17 p.m. ET, Fri., July. 6, 2007

HELENA, Mont. - If a record-breaking heat wave doesn’t lift soon, cattle rancher Sharon McDonald may see her hay crop turn to dust.

Oppressive temperatures eased a bit in some parts of the West, but McDonald’s central Montana ranch baked under triple-digit heat. Forecasters reported little relief in the days ahead, saying the weather system that brought the high temperatures could last well into next week.

In Montana, where cattle outnumber residents by more than 2 to 1, livestock and people sought shade and drought-weary farmers watched for damage to grain.

“We are trying to get our hay up before it disintegrates,” said McDonald, a rancher near Melville. “It just gets crispy and just falls apart.”

Warnings of excessive heat were posted Friday for much of Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Oregon and Washington state.

Air conditioners — and even swamp coolers — were predictably hot sellers at the hardware store.

“I’m telling you, it has been nuts,” said Dennis VanDyke, a manager at Power Townsend in Helena. “The only thing I am getting calls for is air conditioners.”

VanDyke said some people prefer swamp coolers, which use a fan and the condensation of water to cool the air, over the more power-hungry air conditioning units.

“They are being bought faster than we can put them on the shelves,” he said.

Records set
In Montana, temperatures above 100 are usually not seen until August. The normal July high in Helena is 83 degrees — not the 105 expected Friday.

By midday, records were already set or tied in the Montana cities of Cut Bank, Great Falls, Havre, and Bozeman.

The Montana Department of Transportation said it was putting maintenance crews to work early in the morning so they could finish by midday.

In Boise, where it was headed well above 100 degrees Friday, some found it was too hot to play at a public water fountain.

“We’ll probably leave soon. Two or three o’clock is about my limit before I want to get in some air conditioning,” mother Monica Player said as children ran through jets of water.

Temperatures were expected to ease slightly in Southern California. Phoenix saw a modest drop, a relatively cooler 111 degrees compared to 115 Thursday. With the approach of Arizona’s summer rainy season, humidity levels have started climbing along with power demand.

Heat remained an issue along the border. The bodies of six suspected illegal immigrants have been found since Monday in southern Arizona deserts, all likely victims of heat illness while trying to walk into the U.S. from Mexico. The toll, while high, is not unusual during hot spells in the region.

'A hot start'
In central Oregon, population growth and a burgeoning demand for air conditioning meant a rise in electricity demand. The Bonneville Power Administration said it was worried fires could damage transmission lines and cause outages.

Officials said the fire season could turn fearsome following the dry heat.

“It’s an early start and a hot start,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Chris Velver in Great Falls.

The National Forest Service reported at least 16 fires over 500 acres in size burning throughout the West, including three new ones that sparked Thursday.

The agency said fire danger was most extreme in Arizona, California, Oregon and Utah — although a “red flag” warning was posted for much of the West.

'A good long while'
Velver said temperatures in Montana could start to fall a bit by Saturday. In eastern Oregon, which set 15 record highs on Thursday, temperatures were expected to fall off to between 94 and 100 degrees.

But the heat will hover over most of the far West through at least the end of next week, said Kelly Redmond, a regional climatologist for the National Weather Service. He said it could migrate further inland and cover more of the West, including Colorado, as the week goes on.

“It looks like it is going to stay place for a good long while,” he said.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19619641/

Climate change link seen in surge of Western blazes

Study correlates warming trend with wildfires
Dennis O'Brien, Baltimore Sun

Friday, July 7, 2006 (two years old - even truer today)

Rising temperatures and earlier melting of snowpacks have sharply increased the number of Western wildfires -- and scientists say to expect more of the same if the trend persists.

Researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of Arizona examined 34 years of forest fire reports in 11 Western states and found the number of fires increased in size and severity since 1987, the same year that spring and summer temperatures began to rise.

"It's a very good snapshot of what's been happening in the Western forests over the past three decades," said lead author Anthony Westerling, a fire climatologist at UC Merced.

Westerling conducted the research while at the Scripps Institution. The findings were published today in Science.

The researchers examined U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service records of every forest fire that burned at least 1,000 acres from 1970 to 2003. They found that of 1,166 fires in that period, four-fifths of them, or about 900, occurred after 1987.

They also found that air temperatures from 1987 to 2003 were 1.6 degrees higher than during the previous 17 years; that 6.5 times more acreage burned during that warmer period; and that the firefighting season increased by 78 days, the study says.

The reason is simple: Warmer springs and longer dry seasons are creating more kindling in the Western woods, the researchers say.

The biggest increase in forest fires was in the northern Rockies, in the mountains around Yellowstone National Park and the Bitterroot Range, at elevations between 6,000 and 8,000 feet, the study says. It is in those areas that melting snowpacks have the most significant role in determining forest fire risk, Westerling said.

The study does not prove that human-induced climate change is causing more forest fires, Westerling said. But it does show that more fires are likely to start if the warming trend continues.

Researchers did not address why temperatures have risen. The study says temperatures in the 11 states from 1987 to 2003 were the warmest since 1895, when record keeping began.

The study does not examine trends beyond the Western states. Nationwide, wildfires burned an average of 3.6 million acres in the 1990s, but that number shot up to a record 8.4 million acres in 2000. That remained a record until 2005, when 8.6 million acres burned, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

Federal agencies spend more than $1 billion a year fighting wildfires, according to the study.

Forestry officials have debated for years whether climate change or forest management policies have been contributing more to the recent conflagrations in the Western forests. For example, experts argue over whether to allow naturally occurring fires to burn so that they clear small trees and underbrush that are potential fuel for larger fires.

Westerling said the research shows that clearing brush and other management practices will work in some places, but not in lands such as the northern Rockies, where climate is a major factor.

"It's not that they do no good," he said. "It's just not a one-size-fits-all silver bullet that's going to fit in every area."

Forest management is a major issue in the West, particularly as homes and communities are built in lands that were once pristine forests.

"On one hand, the Forest Service recognizes how we need to let some fires burn, but as the West develops, you have more people," said Grant Meyer, a geologist at the University of New Mexico who studies erosion and long-term forest fire trends. "People want trees around them, but they don't want the fires anywhere near them, or even the smoke."

The study establishes a link between the increase in forest fires and the changing climate, said Steven Running, a professor in the School of Forestry at the University of Montana who wrote an accompanying article about the report for Science.

Running hopes to include Westerling's findings in a report on the ecological consequences of climate change for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international group examining the issue.

Like hurricanes along the Eastern Seaboard, forest fires have become a visible symbol for many in the West of the possible effects of climate change, Running said. "Only a hurricane is over in a day or two; these forest fires can last for months."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/07/MNG7JJR8521.DTL&feed=rss.news


330 active fires are buring today! (per CNN just now) All adding prodigous amounts of CO2 - another positive feed back loop, not good.

-------

Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Record Heat, Gusting Winds Create “Explosive” Fire Conditions out West


BOTTOM LINE WEATHER POINTS

– Temperatures in California soaring past 100ºF, 10º to 20º above normal.
– Record heat, gusting winds creating unprecedented fire-risk conditions in California.
– Storm Exchange forecasted “nightmare” conditions for California firefighters last week.

Global Warming Has Devastating Effect on Coral Reefs, Study Shows

Sean Markey for National Geographic News

May 16, 2006

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/05/warming-coral.html

Eight years after warming seas caused the worst coral die-off on record, coral reefs in the Indian Ocean are still unable to recover, biologists say.

Many reefs have been reduced to rubble, a collapse that has deprived fish of food and shelter.



A diver swims over the collapsed remains of a coral reef near Africa's Seychelles islands. A new study shows that a large die-off that occurred among reefs there in 1998 has resulted in local fish extinctions and limited coral recovery.
[Photograph courtesy University of Newcastle Upon Tyne/PNAS]

As a result, fish diversity has tumbled by half in some areas, say authors of the first long-term study of the effects of warming-caused bleaching on coral reefs and fish.

The study focused on reefs near Africa's Seychelles islands, north of Madagascar (see Seychelles map), which sustained heavy losses from bleaching in 1998.

"The outlook for recovery is quite bleak for the Seychelles," said lead study author Nicholas Graham, a tropical marine biologist at England's University of Newcastle Upon Tyne.

The study, in today's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, predicts that isolated reef ecosystems like that around the Seychelles will suffer the most from global warming-caused bleaching events.

Warming Oceans

Small but prolonged rises in sea temperature force coral colonies to expel their symbiotic, food-producing algae, a process known as bleaching.

While the dying reefs, which turn ghostly white, can recover from such events, many do not.

In 1998 an El Niño weather pattern sparked the worst coral-bleaching event ever observed.

"Over 16 percent of the world's reefs … were lost in that one year," said Graham, part of a team that recently received an unrelated research grant from the National Geographic Society Committee for Research and Exploration. (National Geographic News is a part of the National Geographic Society.)

"It was a huge event."

In the western Indian Ocean, regional currents compounded the heat effect, bleaching 90 percent of the coral reefs there.

With data from a 1994 survey in hand, researchers returned to the Seychelles in 2005 to study the bleaching event's long-term impact on coral reefs and fish communities.

Surveying 60,000 square yards (50,000 square meters) of coral reef across 21 sites, researchers found that fish diversity declined the most on reefs that had sustained physical and biological erosion.

The finding by U.K., Australian, and Seychelles researchers confirms what many scientists had long suspected.

The census also revealed that four fish species—butterfly ish, damselfish, and two wrasses—may now be locally extinct. Six other fish species have declined to critically low numbers.

Describing reefs in the inner Seychelles as in "various states of collapse," Graham says it appears unlikely they can recover.

He says the reefs are too isolated to recruit young coral from other reef systems.

"Coral cover at the moment is at about seven and a half percent [of previous levels] in the [inner] Seychelles," Graham said.

"However less than one percent of that is fast-growing [branching] and plating corals, which in other places in the world are often the ones that come back and start a recovery process."

Reefs Vanishing Worldwide

Experts say word of vanishing coral reefs has become all too familiar.

"By and large, reefs have collapsed catastrophically just in the three decades that I've been studying them," said Nancy Knowlton, a marine biology professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.

Knowlton, who is also a member of National Geographic Society Committee for Research and Exploration, notes that corals live precariously close to their thermal limits.

As a result, even the most isolated reefs are vulnerable to the effects of global warming.

"These increasingly warm temperatures that we've been seeing in the last couple of decades have been tipping reefs over in terms of these fast bleaching events," she said.

Graham, the study author, says that while local and regional resource managers can mitigate some damage to coral reefs, broader action is required.

"Bleaching is a global issue, and it's driven by global warming," Graham said. "So the onus is on all of us, really."

"We need to reduce greenhouse gases and take these issues seriously."

Free Email News Updates
Sign up for our Inside National Geographic newsletter. Every two weeks we'll send you our top stories and pictures (see sample).

>"we're driving ever faster toward the edge of the cliff."

I disagree with the above statement. We're already over the cliff, but have not yet crashed.

In the very near future, we will see devastating effects of Global Warming beyond the polar ice cap melt.

sumisu

>"we're driving ever faster toward the edge of the cliff."

I disagree with the above statement. We're already over the cliff, but have not yet crashed.

In the very near future, we will see devastating effects of Global Warming beyond the polar ice cap melt.

sumisu

U.S. Moving Toward Ban on New Coal-Fired Power Plants

Lester R. Brown

February 14, 2008 - 2

In a report compiled in early 2007, the U.S. Department of Energy listed 151 coal-fired power plants in the planning stages and talked about a resurgence in coal-fired electricity. But during 2007, 59 proposed U.S. coal-fired power plants were either refused licenses by state governments or quietly abandoned. In addition to the 59 plants that were dropped, close to 50 more coal plants are being contested in the courts, and the remaining plants will likely be challenged as they reach the permitting stage.

What began as a few local ripples of resistance to coal-fired power is quickly evolving into a national tidal wave of grassroots opposition from environmental, health, farm, and community organizations and a fast-growing number of state governments. The public at large is turning against coal. In a September 2007 national poll by the Opinion Research Corporation about which electricity source people would prefer, only 3 percent chose coal.

One of the first major coal industry setbacks came in early 2007, when environmental groups convinced Texas-based utility TXU to reduce the number of planned coal-fired power plants in Texas from 11 to 3. And now even those 3 proposed plants may be challenged. Meanwhile, the energy focus within the Texas state government is shifting to wind power. The state is planning 23,000 megawatts of new wind-generating capacity (equal to 23 coal-fired power plants).

In May, Florida’s Public Service Commission refused to license a huge $5.7-billion, 1,960-megawatt coal plant because the utility could not prove that building the plant would be cheaper than investing in conservation, efficiency, and renewable energy sources. This argument by Earthjustice, a non-profit environmental legal group, combined with widely expressed public opposition to any more coal-fired power plants in Florida, led to the quiet withdrawal of four other proposals for coal plants in the state. Republican Governor Charlie Crist, who is keenly aware of Florida’s vulnerability to rising seas, is actively opposing new coal plants and has announced that the state plans to build the world’s largest solar-thermal power plant.

The principal reason for opposing new coal plants is the mounting concern about climate change. Another emerging reason is soaring construction costs. And then there are intensifying health concerns about mercury emissions and the 23,600 U.S. deaths per year from power plant air pollution. (See data.)

Utilities have argued that carbon dioxide (CO2) from coal plant smokestacks could be captured and stored underground, thus helping keep hope for the industry alive. But on January 30, 2008, the Bush administration announced that it was pulling the plug on a joint project with 13 utilities and coal companies to build a demonstration coal-fired power plant in Illinois with underground carbon sequestration because of massive cost overruns. The original cost of $950 million when the project was announced in 2003 had climbed beyond $1.5 billion by early 2008, with further rises in prospect. The cancellation effectively moves the date for any coal plants with carbon sequestration so far into the future that this technology has little immediate relevance.

Some utilities are being refused licenses for coal plants because they have not examined alternative methods of satisfying demand, such as increasing the efficiency of electricity use. For example, insulating buildings greatly reduces energy needs for heating and cooling. Shifting to more-efficient light bulbs would save enough electricity to close 80 U.S. coal power plants.

The Sierra Club, the national leader on this issue, is working with hundreds of local groups to mount legal challenges in state after state. Other national groups that are actively involved include the Rainforest Action Network, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Environmental Defense. Information on the grassroots momentum to oppose coal plants is tracked on the Web site Coal Moratorium NOW!.

States that are working to reduce carbon emissions are banding together to discourage other states from building new coal plants simply because it would cancel their own carbon reduction efforts. In late 2006, for instance, the attorneys general of California, Wisconsin, New York, and several other northeastern states wrote to Kansas health officials urging them to deny permits for two new coal power plants of 700 megawatts each. The permits were subsequently denied, citing that carbon dioxide is an air pollutant and should be regulated, as determined in an April 2007 Supreme Court ruling. And in a letter on January 22, 2008, a similar grouping of states urged South Carolina’s Department of Health and Environmental Control to refuse a permit for the proposed 600-megawatt Pee Dee coal plant.

Coal’s future is also suffering as Wall Street turns its back on the industry. In July 2007, Citigroup downgraded coal company stocks across the board and recommended that its clients switch to other energy stocks. In January 2008, Merrill Lynch also downgraded coal stocks. In early February 2008, investment banks Morgan Stanley, Citi, and J.P. Morgan Chase announced that any future lending for coal-fired power would be contingent on the utilities demonstrating that the plants would be economically viable with the higher costs associated with future federal restrictions on carbon emissions. On February 13, Bank of America announced it would follow suit.

In August 2007, coal took a heavy political hit when U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who had been opposing three coal-fired power plants in his own state, announced that he was now against building coal-fired power plants anywhere in the world. Investment banks and political leaders are beginning to see what has been obvious for some time to climate scientists, such as NASA’s James Hansen who says that it makes no sense to build coal-fired power plants when we will have to bulldoze them in a few years.

In early November 2007, Representative Henry Waxman of California announced his intention to “introduce legislation that establishes a moratorium on the approval of new coal-fired power plants under the Clean Air Act until EPA finalizes regulations to address the greenhouse gas emissions from these sources.” If a national moratorium is passed by Congress, it will mark the beginning of the end for coal-fired power in the United States.

We may be on the verge of a monumental victory in the worldwide effort to stabilize climate. In our new book, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, I propose cutting carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020. The first step is to stop building any new coal-fired power plants. If the United States imposes a moratorium on such construction, as Denmark and New Zealand have already done, it would send a powerful signal to the rest of the world, bolstering the effort to cut carbon emissions. The next steps are to quickly exploit the vast worldwide potential to raise energy efficiency and to massively develop renewable sources of energy, such as wind, solar, and geothermal, in order to phase out existing coal-fired power plants.

The world is moving toward a political tipping point on the climate issue. If it comes soon enough, we may yet avoid catastrophic climate change.

http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2008/Update70.htm

Global boom in coal power – and emissions

A Monitor analysis shows the potential for an extra 1.2 billion tons of carbon released into the atmosphere per year.

By Mark Clayton | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the March 22, 2007 edition

Forget the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." Disregard rising public concern over global warming. Ignore the Kyoto Protocol.

The world certainly is – at least when it comes to building new electric-power plants. In the past five years, it has been on a coal-fired binge, bringing new generators online at a rate of better than two per week. That has added some 1 billion tons of new carbon-dioxide emissions that humans pump into the atmosphere each year. Coal-fired power now accounts for nearly a third of human-generated global CO2 emissions.

So what does the future hold? An acceleration of the buildup, according to a Monitor analysis of power-industry data. Despite Kyoto limits on greenhouse gases, the analysis shows that nations will add enough coal-fired capacity in the next five years to create an extra 1.2 billion tons of CO2 per year.

Those accelerating the buildup are not the usual suspects.

Take China, which is widely blamed for the rapid rise in greenhouse-gas emissions. Indeed, China accounted for two-thirds of the more than 560 coal-fired power units built in 26 nations between 2002 and 2006. The Chinese plants boosted annual world CO2 emissions by 740 million tons (see chart). But in the next five years, China is slated \to slow its buildup by half, according to industry estimates, adding 333 million tons of new CO2 emissions every year. That's still the largest increase of any nation. But other nations appear intent on catching up.

"Really, it's been the story of what China is doing," says Steve Piper, managing director of power forecasting at Platts, the energy information division of McGraw-Hill that provided country-by-country power-plant data to the Monitor. "But it's also a story of unabated global growth in coal-fired power. We're seeing diversification away from pricier natural gas and crude oil. Coal looks cheap and attractive (yes in 2007, but today - no) - and countries with coal resources see an opportunity that wasn't there before."



For example, the United States is accelerating its buildup dramatically. In the past five years it built 2.7 gigawatts of new coal-fired generating capacity. But in the next five years, it is slated to add 37.7 gigawatts of capacity, enough to produce 247.8 million tons of CO2 per year, according to Platts. That would vault the US to second place –just ahead of India – in adding new capacity.

Even nations that have pledged to reduce global warming under the Kyoto treat are slated to accelerate their buildup of coal-fired plants. For example, eight EU nations – Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic – plan to add nearly 13 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity by 2012. That's up from about 2.5 gigawatts over the past five years.

New countries join coal-fired binge

In all, at least 37 nations plan to add coal-fired capacity in the next five years – up from the 26 nations that added capacity during the past five years. With Sri Lanka, Laos, and even oil-producing nations like Iran getting set to join the coal-power pack, the world faces the prospect five years from now of having 7,474 coal-fired power plants in 79 countries pumping out 9 billion tons of CO2 emissions annually – out of 31 billion tons from all sources in 2012.

"These numbers show how far in the wrong direction the world is poised to go and indicate a lot of private sector investors still don't get it in terms of global warming," says David Hawkins, climate center director of the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington. "This rapid building of global-warming machines – which is what coal-power plants are – should be a wakeup call to politicians that we're driving ever faster toward the edge of the cliff."

But the cliff can be avoided, some researchers say, without having to reduce the world's energy consumption.

If carbon dioxide gas could be captured at power plants and then pumped underground and permanently "sequestered" in layers of rock, then coal might continue to be used without damaging the climate, concluded a major report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released last week.

In that light, whether or not China decides to build power plants that sequester carbon dioxide underground will be a central question. Right now, based on those power plants that Platt's has been able to verify, overall construction growth could be tapering off. But none of them is expected to sequester emissions – and estimates of how many plants China expects to build vary widely.

So far there are 100 power plants with firm construction plans compared to 361 built in the previous five years, according to Platts. But other analysts, pointing to official government reports, say the total may be far higher.

Chinese government reports, for instance, tout coal-power plant building far in excess of what Platt's and others have been able to verify – about 170 gigawatts of new coal-power over the past three years, according to China expert Philip Andrews-Speed, director of the Centre for Energy, Petroleum and Mineral Law and Policy at the University of Dundee in Scotland.

"If the Chinese are right then it's a much worse problem than we might think," says Christopher Bergesen, a Platts expert who oversees power-plant data collection. He acknowledges Platts data may be a conservative base line for China. But until China reveals plant-specific data, not just aggregate numbers, he and other researchers can't be sure how fast China is building power plants that spur global warming.

That leaves climate scientists and policy experts wondering how to influence power-plant construction in China and India. A huge factor is whether the EU and the US are able to persuade the Chinese to build plants that capture and sequester CO2. Much depends on the US because China is unlikely to sequester its carbon dioxide if the US does not, analysts say.

"The Chinese won't be able to go forward by themselves," says Dr. Andrews-Speed. "They are going to need, EU, Japan, and US together to help them and set a good example."

Right now, the US is planning to build more than 150 coal-fired power plants that don't sequester their emissions, according to the US Department of Energy. Platts short list of those most likely to be built in five years lists 64 power plants – which would still vault the US into a virtual tie with India at 38,000 megawatts of new output.

If that happens, the US alone would add 250 million tons a year of CO2 emissions to the atmosphere - on top of the billions its power plants already emit. The recent decision by new owners of TXU not to build eight coal-fired power plants gives some reason for hope.

But if the US began building plants that stuff the CO2 underground, the picture could change dramatically, experts say. At least five bills now pending in Congress would effectively put a price on CO2, but just two of those push sequestration.

"The good news is the politicians have their hands on the steering wheel," Dr. Hawkins says. "If they would just turn the wheel toward sequestration, then we don't have to go over this cliff."

Impact on climate models

To date, many climate models have not fully accounted for the worldwide acceleration of coal-plant building, scientists say.

"The phenomenon ... would lead to greater CO2 emissions than most 'business as usual' forecasts project," says Robert Socolow, co-director of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative at Princeton University in an e-mail. "Fortunately the world has now begun to take CO2 seriously, and coal-power emissions will be target No. 1 worldwide over the next decade. The fact that the US is waking up at last will give us the opportunity to have a positive effect on CO2 policy in the rest of the world,"he adds.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0322/p01s04-wogi.htm

>When it comes to a life threatening or life changing event, mankind collectively will not take steps to avoid potential catastrophes. This behavior is inconceivable and makes makes no sense.

Since global warming does not have a deadline attached to it, then the obvious evidence is ignored. Case in point, the adverse effects of a Y2K meltdown received considerable attention and prevention because the date was fixed. It had a definitive D-Day attached to it. Global warming does not have this definitive date, so it is continually put off.

James Hansen is to global warming as M. King Hubbert was to Peak Oil. Both were correct and both were generally ignored.

By the way, global warming will be accelerated with Peak Oil, as more coal and wood will be burned, ultimately incinerating the planet. Yes, we are toast.

In the end, society's progress was actually its regress.

sumi

NASA Climate Scientist Says "We're Toast"

Two Decades After His First Warning, Global Warming Expert Says Situation Has Worsened

Comments 350

WASHINGTON, June 24, 2008

(AP) Exactly 20 years after warning America about global warming, a top NASA scientist said the situation has gotten so bad that the world's only hope is drastic action.

James Hansen told Congress on Monday that the world has long passed the "dangerous level" for greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and needs to get back to 1988 levels. He said Earth's atmosphere can only stay this loaded with man-made carbon dioxide for a couple more decades without changes such as mass extinction, ecosystem collapse and dramatic sea level rises.

"We're toast if we don't get on a very different path," Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute of Space Sciences who is sometimes called the godfather of global warming science, told The Associated Press. "This is the last chance."

Hansen brought global warming home to the public in June 1988 during a Washington heat wave, telling a Senate hearing that global warming was already here. To mark the anniversary, he testified before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming where he was called a prophet, and addressed a luncheon at the National Press Club where he was called a hero by former Sen. Tim Wirth, D-Colo., who headed the 1988 hearing.

To cut emissions, Hansen said coal-fired power plants that don't capture carbon dioxide emissions shouldn't be used in the United States after 2025, and should be eliminated in the rest of the world by 2030. That carbon capture technology is still being developed and not yet cost efficient for power plants.

Burning fossil fuels like coal is the chief cause of man-made greenhouse gases. Hansen said the Earth's atmosphere has got to get back to a level of 350 parts of carbon dioxide per million. Last month, it was 10 percent higher: 386.7 parts per million.

Hansen said he'll testify on behalf of British protesters against new coal-fired power plants. Protesters have chained themselves to gates and equipment at sites of several proposed coal plants in England.

"The thing that I think is most important is to block coal-fired power plants," Hansen told the luncheon. "I'm not yet at the point of chaining myself but we somehow have to draw attention to this."

Frank Maisano, a spokesman for many U.S. utilities, including those trying to build new coal plants, said while Hansen has shown foresight as a scientist, his "stop them all approach is very simplistic" and shows that he is beyond his level of expertise.

The year of Hansen's original testimony was the world's hottest year on record. Since then, 14 years have been hotter, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Two decades later, Hansen spent his time on the question of whether it's too late to do anything about it. His answer: There's still time to stop the worst, but not much time.

"We see a tipping point occurring right before our eyes," Hansen told the AP before the luncheon. "The Arctic is the first tipping point and it's occurring exactly the way we said it would."

Hansen, echoing work by other scientists, said that in five to 10 years, the Arctic will be free of sea ice in the summer.

Longtime global warming skeptic Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., citing a recent poll, said in a statement, "Hansen, (former Vice President) Gore and the media have been trumpeting man-made climate doom since the 1980s. But Americans are not buying it."

But Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., committee chairman, said, "Dr. Hansen was right. Twenty years later, we recognize him as a climate prophet."


http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/06/24/tech/main4204994.shtml?source=RSSattr=HOME_4204994

Don't give up

Michael Pollan

The Guardian, Friday June 6 2008

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/06/ethicalliving.food


Photograph: PA/Haydn West

Do you feel it's a waste of time trying to prevent climate change? That reducing your carbon footprint is pointless when someone else is happy to increase theirs? That changing lightbulbs is a futile gesture? Well don't, says Michael Pollan, because even small changes in your lifestyle - and your thinking - can help save the world.

Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it's not an easy one to answer. I don't know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in An Inconvenient Truth came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to ... change our lightbulbs. That's when it got really depressing. The immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart.

But the drop-in-the-bucket issue is not the only problem lurking behind the "Why bother?" question. Let's say I do bother, big time. I turn my life upside-down, start biking to work, plant a big garden, turn down the thermostat so low I need the Jimmy Carter signature cardigan, forsake the clothes dryer for a laundry line across the yard, trade in the SUV for a hybrid, get off the beef, go completely local. I could theoretically do all that, but what would be the point when I know full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his first car (Chinese car ownership is where America's was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who is positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I'm struggling no longer to emit. So what exactly would I have to show for all my trouble?

A sense of personal virtue, you might suggest, somewhat sheepishly. But what good is that when virtue itself is quickly becoming a term of derision? And not just on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal or on the lips of the American vice-president, Dick Cheney, who famously dismissed energy conservation as a "sign of personal virtue". No, it seems the epithet "virtuous", when applied to an act of personal environmental responsibility, may be used only ironically. Tell me: how did it come to pass that virtue - a quality that for most of history has generally been deemed, well, a virtue - became a mark of liberal softheadedness? How peculiar, that doing the right thing by the environment - buying the hybrid, eating like a locavore - should now set you up for ridicule.

And even if in the face of this derision I decide I am going to bother, there arises the whole vexed question of getting it right. Is eating local or walking to work really going to reduce my carbon footprint? According to one analysis, if walking to work increases your appetite and you consume more meat or milk as a result, walking might actually emit more carbon than driving. A handful of studies have recently suggested that in certain cases under certain conditions, produce from places as far away as New Zealand might account for less carbon than comparable domestic products. True, at least one of these studies was co-written by a representative of agribusiness interests in (surprise!) New Zealand, but even so, they make you wonder. If determining the carbon footprint of food is really this complicated, and I've got to consider not only "food miles" but also whether the food came by ship or truck and how lushly the grass grows in New Zealand, then maybe on second thoughts I'll just buy the imported chops, at least until the experts get their footprints sorted out.

There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing nothing, but perhaps the most insidious is that, whatever we do manage to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and it has arrived well ahead of schedule. Scientists' projections that seemed dire a decade ago turn out to have been unduly optimistic: the warming and the melting is occurring much faster than the models predicted. Now truly terrifying feedback loops threaten to boost the rate of change exponentially, as the shift from white ice to blue water in the Arctic absorbs more sunlight and warming soils everywhere become more biologically active, causing them to release their vast stores of carbon into the air. Have you looked into the eyes of a climate scientist recently? They look really scared.

So do you still want to talk about planting gardens? I do.

Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It's hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: "Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [NB!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money." So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle - of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70% of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we're living our lives suggests we're not really serious about changing - something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking - passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists - that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It's hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Thirty years ago, Wendell Berry, the farmer and writer, put forward a blunt analysis of precisely this mentality. He argued that the environmental crisis of the 70s - an era innocent of climate change; what we would give to have back that environmental crisis! - was at its heart a crisis of character and would have to be addressed first at that level: at home, as it were. He was impatient with people who wrote cheques to environmental organisations while thoughtlessly squandering fossil fuel in their everyday lives - the 70s equivalent of people buying carbon offsets to atone for their SUVs. Nothing was likely to change until we healed the "split between what we think and what we do". For Berry, the "Why bother?" question came down to a moral imperative: "Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognising our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live."

For Berry, the deep problem standing behind all the other problems of industrial civilisation is "specialisation", which he regards as the "disease of the modern character". Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: we're producers (of one thing) at work, consumers of a great many other things the rest of the time, and then once a year or so we vote as citizens. Virtually all of our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another - our meals to agribusiness, health to the doctor, education to the teacher, entertainment to the media, care for the environment to the environmentalist, political action to the politician.

As Adam Smith and many others have pointed out, this division of labour has given us many of the blessings of civilisation. Specialisation is what allows me to sit at a computer thinking about climate change. Yet this same division of labour obscures the lines of connection - and responsibility - linking our everyday acts to their real-world consequences, making it easy for me to overlook the coal-fired power plant that is lighting my screen, or the mountaintop in Kentucky that had to be destroyed to provide the coal to that plant, or the streams running crimson with heavy metals as a result.

Of course, what made this sort of specialisation possible in the first place was cheap energy. Cheap fossil fuel allows us to pay distant others to process our food for us, to entertain us and to (try to) solve our problems, with the result that there is very little we know how to accomplish for ourselves. Think for a moment of all the things you suddenly need to do for yourself when the power goes out - up to and including entertaining yourself. Think, too, about how a power failure causes your neighbours - your community - to suddenly loom so much larger in your life. Cheap energy allowed us to leapfrog community by making it possible to sell our speciality over great distances as well as summon into our lives the specialities of countless distant others.

Here's the point: cheap energy, which gives us climate change, fosters precisely the mentality that makes dealing with climate change in our own lives seem impossibly difficult. Specialists ourselves, we can no longer imagine anyone but an expert, or anything but a new technology or law, solving our problems. Gore asks us to change the lightbulbs because he probably can't imagine us doing anything much more challenging, like, say, growing some portion of our own food. We can't imagine it, either, which is probably why we prefer to cross our fingers and talk about the promise of ethanol and nuclear power - new liquids and electrons to power the same old cars and houses and lives.

The "cheap-energy mind", as Berry called it, is the mind that asks, "Why bother?" because it is helpless to imagine - much less attempt - a different sort of life, one less divided, less reliant. Since the cheap-energy mind translates everything into money - its proxy - it prefers to put its faith in market-based solutions: carbon taxes and pollution-trading schemes. If we could just get the incentives right, it believes, the economy will properly value everything that matters and nudge our self-interest down the proper channels. The best we can hope for is a greener version of the old invisible hand. Visible hands it has no use for.

But while some such grand scheme may well be necessary, it is doubtful that it will be sufficient or that it will be politically sustainable before we have demonstrated to ourselves that change is possible. Merely to give, to spend, even to vote, is not to do, and there is so much that needs to be done - without further delay. In the judgment of James Hansen, the Nasa climate scientist who began sounding the alarm on global warming 20 years ago, we have only 10 years left to start cutting - not just slowing - the amount of carbon we're emitting or face a "different planet". Hansen said this more than two years ago, however; two years have gone by, and nothing of consequence has been done. So: eight years left to go - and a great deal left to do.

Which brings us back to the "Why bother?" question and how we might better answer it. The reasons not to bother are many and compelling, at least to the cheap-energy mind. But let me offer a few admittedly tentative reasons that we might put on the other side of the scale:

If you do bother, you will set an example for other people. If enough other people bother, each one influencing yet another in a chain reaction of behavioural change, markets for all manner of green products and alternative technologies will prosper and expand. (Just look at the market for hybrid cars.) Consciousness will be raised, perhaps even changed: new moral imperatives and new taboos might take root in the culture. Driving an SUV or eating a 24oz steak or illuminating your house like an airport runway at night might come to be regarded as outrages to human conscience. Not having things might become cooler than having them. And those who did change the way they live would acquire the moral standing to demand changes in behaviour from others - from other people, other corporations, even other countries.
All of this could, theoretically, happen. What I'm describing (imagining would probably be more accurate) is a process of viral social change, and change of this kind, which is nonlinear, is never something anyone can plan or predict or count on. Who knows, maybe the virus will reach all the way to Chongqing and infect my Chinese evil twin. Or not. Maybe going green will prove a passing fad and will lose steam after a few years, just as it did in the 80s, when Ronald Reagan took down Jimmy Carter's solar panels from the roof of the White House.

Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it's one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren't great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can't prove that it will. That, after all, was precisely what happened in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, when a handful of individuals such as Václav Havel and Adam Michnik resolved that they would simply conduct their lives "as if" they lived in a free society. That improbable bet created a tiny space of liberty that, in time, expanded to take in, and then help take down, the whole of the eastern bloc.

So what would be a comparable bet that the individual might make in the case of the environmental crisis? Havel himself has suggested that people begin to "conduct themselves as if they were to live on this earth for ever and be answerable for its condition one day". Fair enough, but let me propose a slightly less abstract and daunting wager. The idea is to find one thing to do in your life that doesn't involve spending or voting, that may or may not virally rock the world but is real and particular (as well as symbolic) and that, come what may, will offer its own rewards. Maybe you decide to give up meat, an act that would reduce your carbon footprint by as much as a quarter. Or you could try this: determine to observe the Sabbath. For one day a week, abstain completely from economic activity: no shopping, no driving, no electronics.

But the act I want to talk about is growing some - even just a little - of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don't - if you live in a high-rise, or have a garden shrouded in shade - look into getting an allotment. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it's one of the most powerful things an individual can do - to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.

A great many things happen when you plant a vegetable garden, some of them directly related to climate change, others indirect but related nevertheless. Growing food, we forget, comprises the original solar technology: calories produced by means of photosynthesis. Years ago the cheap-energy mind discovered that more food could be produced with less effort by replacing sunlight with fossil-fuel fertilisers and pesticides, with a result that the typical calorie of food energy in your diet now requires about 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce. It's estimated that the way we feed ourselves (or rather, allow ourselves to be fed) accounts for about a fifth of the greenhouse gas for which each of us is responsible.

Yet the sun still shines down on your garden, and photosynthesis still works so abundantly that in a thoughtfully organised vegetable patch (one planted from seed, nourished by compost from the kitchen and involving not too many drives to the garden centre), you can grow the proverbial free lunch - CO2-free and money-free. This is the most-local food you can possibly eat (not to mention the freshest, tastiest and most nutritious), with a carbon footprint so faint that even the New Zealand lamb council dares not challenge it. And while we're counting carbon, consider too your compost pile, which shrinks the heap of garbage your household needs trucked away even as it feeds your vegetables and sequesters carbon in your soil. What else? Well, you will probably notice that you're getting a pretty good workout there in your garden, burning calories without having to get into the car to drive to the gym. (It is one of the absurdities of the modern division of labour that, having replaced physical labour with fossil fuel, we now have to burn even more fossil fuel to keep our unemployed bodies in shape.) Also, by engaging both body and mind, time spent in the garden is time (and energy) subtracted from electronic forms of entertainment.

You begin to see that growing even a little of your own food is, as Berry pointed out 30 years ago, one of those solutions that, instead of begetting a new set of problems - the way "solutions" such as ethanol or nuclear power inevitably do - actually beget other solutions, and not only of the kind that save carbon. Still more valuable are the habits of mind that growing a little of your own food can yield. You quickly learn that you need not be dependent on specialists to provide for yourself - that your body is still good for something and may actually be enlisted in its own support. If the experts are right, if both oil and time are running out, these are skills and habits of mind we're all very soon going to need. We may also need the food. Could gardens provide it? Well, during the second world war victory gardens supplied as much as 40% of the produce Americans ate.

But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbours, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools. You will have reduced the power of the cheap-energy mind by personally overcoming its most debilitating weakness: its helplessness and the fact that it can't do much of anything that doesn't involve division or subtraction. The garden's season-long transit from seed to ripe fruit - will you get a load of those courgettes! - suggests that the operations of addition and multiplication still obtain, that the abundance of nature is not exhausted. The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

· Michael Pollan is the author of In Defence of Food: An Eater's Manifesto.

The melting of Himalayan glaciers threatens the water supply to the world's rivers

#msg-29857137

The Science of Denial

Published: June 4, 2008



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/opinion/04wed2.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

The Bush administration has worked overtime to manipulate or conceal scientific evidence — and muzzled at least one prominent scientist — to justify its failure to address climate change.

Its motives were transparent: the less people understood about the causes and consequences of global warming, the less they were likely to demand action from their leaders. And its strategy has been far too successful. Seven years later, Congress is only beginning to confront the challenge of global warming.

The last week has brought further confirmation of the administration’s cynicism. An internal investigation by NASA’s inspector general concluded that political appointees in the agency’s public affairs office had tried to restrict reporters’ access to its leading climate scientist, Dr. James Hansen. He has warned about climate change for 20 years and has openly criticized the administration’s refusal to tackle the issue head-on.
More broadly, the investigation said that politics played a heavy role in the office and that it had presented information about global warming “in a manner that reduced, marginalized or mischaracterized climate-change science made available to the general public.”

Meanwhile, the administration finally agreed, under duress, to release a Congressionally mandated report on the effects of climate change on various regions of the United States. Some of the report’s predictions, like the inevitable loss of coastal areas to rising seas, were not new. Others were, including warnings of a potential increase in various food- and water-borne viruses.

What was most noteworthy about the latter report was that it made it to the light of day. A 1990 law requires the president to give Congress every four years its best assessment of the likely effects of climate change. The last such assessment was undertaken by President Clinton and published in 2000. Mr. Bush not only missed the 2004 deadline but allowed the entire information-gathering process to wither. Only a court order handed down last August in response to a lawsuit by public interest groups forced him to deliver this month.

This administration long ago secured a special place in history for bending science to its political ends. One costly result is that this nation has lost seven years in a struggle in which time is not on anyone’s side.

More Carbon Dioxide, Please

Raising a scientific question.

By Roy Spencer

There seems to be an unwritten assumption among environmentalists — and among the media — that any influence humans have on nature is, by definition, bad. I even see it in scientific papers written by climate researchers. For instance, if we can measure some minute amount of a trace gas in the atmosphere at the South Pole, well removed from its human source, we are astonished at the far-reaching effects of mankind’s “pollution.”

But if nature was left undisturbed, would it be any happier and more peaceful? Would the carnivores stop eating those poor, defenseless herbivores, as well as each other? Would fish and other kinds of sea life stop infringing on the rights of others by feasting on them? Would there be no more droughts, hurricanes, floods, heat waves, tornadoes, or glaciers flowing toward the sea?

In the case of global warming, the alleged culprit — carbon dioxide — just happens to be necessary for life on Earth. How can Al Gore say with a straight face that we are treating the atmosphere like an “open sewer” by dumping carbon dioxide into it? Would he say the same thing if we were dumping more oxygen into the atmosphere? Or more nitrogen?

As a climate researcher, I am increasingly convinced that most of our recent global warming has been natural, not manmade. If true, this would mean that global temperatures can be expected to peak in the coming years (if they haven’t already), and global cooling will eventually ensue.

Just for the sake of argument, let us assume that manmade global warming really is a false alarm. In that case, we would still need to ask: What are the other negative effects of pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere?

Well, plant physiologists have known for a long time that most vegetation loves more carbon dioxide. It grows faster, is more drought-tolerant, and is more efficient in its water use. While the pre-industrial CO2 concentration of the atmosphere was only about 280 parts per million (ppm) by volume, and now it is around 380 ppm, some greenhouses pump it all the way up to around 1,000 ppm. How can environmentalists claim that helping vegetation to grow is a bad thing?

The bigger concern has been the possible effect of the extra CO2 on the world’s oceans, because more CO2 lowers the pH of seawater. While it is claimed that this makes the water more acidic, this is misleading. Since seawater has a pH around 8.1, it will take an awful lot of CO2 it to even make the water neutral (pH=7), let alone acidic (pH less than 7).

Still, the main worry has been that the extra CO2 could hurt the growth of plankton, which represents the start of the oceanic food chain. But recent research (published on April 18 in Science Express) has now shown, contrary to expectations, that one of the most common forms of plankton actually grows faster and bigger when more CO2 is pumped into the water. Like vegetation on land, it loves the extra CO2, too!

It is quite possible that the biosphere (vegetation, sea life, etc.) has been starved for atmospheric CO2. Before humans started burning fossil fuels, vegetation and ocean plankton had been gobbling up as much CO2 out of the atmosphere as they could, but it was like a vacuum cleaner trying to suck through a stopped-up hose.

Now, no matter how much CO2 we pump into the atmosphere each year, the biosphere takes out an average of 50 percent of that extra amount. Even after we triple the amount of CO2 we produce, nature still takes out 50 percent of the extra amount.


I think it is time for scientists to consider the possibility that more CO2 in the atmosphere might, on the whole, be good for life on Earth. Oh, I’m sure there will be some species which are hurt more than helped, but this is true of any change in nature. There are always winners and losers.

For instance, during a strong El Niño event, trillions of animals in the ocean die as the usual patterns of ocean temperature are disrupted. When Mother Nature does something like this it is considered natural. Yet, if humans were to do such a thing, it would be considered an environmental catastrophe. Does anyone else see something wrong with this picture?

The view that nature was in some sort of preferred, yet fragile, state of balance before humans came along is arbitrary and philosophical — even religious. It is entirely possible that there are other, more preferable states of balance in nature which are more robust and less fragile than whatever the state of nature was before we came along.

You would think that science is the last place you would find such religious opinions, yet they dominate the worldview of scientists. Natural scientists tend to worship nature, and they then teach others to worship nature, too . . . all under the guise of “science.”

And to the extent that this view is religious, then making environmental laws based upon that view could be considered a violation of the establishment of religion clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

The automatic assumption that mankind’s production of CO2 by burning of fossil fuels is bad for the environment needs to be critically examined. Unfortunately, scientists who question that point of view are immediately branded as shills for Big Oil.

But since I am already accused of this (falsely, I might add), I really don’t mind being one of the first scientists to raise the issue.

— Dr. Roy W. Spencer is a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He is author of the new book, Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians, and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MWJlODMxYmUzYWNmZGZiM2NhNmExYTYyNDUzYmViZjQ

The 800,000 Year Evolution Of Greenhouse Gases

POSTED: Tuesday, May 20, 2008

FROM BLOG: Scientific Blogging - 25 of the world's top scientists write on the latest developments in space, medicine, biology,earth science, physics and neuroscience.

The following blog post is from an independent writer and is not connected with Reuters News. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not endorsed by Reuters.com.

Greenhouse gases are not all bad. With 90,000 out of every 100,000 years in the planet's history being ice ages, greenhouse gases are absolutely necessary for maintaining the climate we enjoy.

In the absence of greenhouse gases like water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, etc, the average temperature on earth would be -18°C - pretty darn cold and basically unable to sustain life. However, there can be too much of a good thing.

The concentration and composition of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has fluctuated throughout history but has been climbing more recently due to human activity - namely, there are three times as many of us as 100 years ago and that results in more methane from us, more fossil fuel combustion, more methane from livestock and various gases due to development of agriculture to feed an increased population.

Studying the evolution of these concentrations allows us to better understand their interaction with the earth's climate, and this type of study is done with ice cores, which contain the only available records of greenhouse gas levels.

In order to predict the evolution of greenhouse gases, it is essential to retrace their past evolution as far back in time as possible. By analyzing ice cores extracted from Antartica through the EPICA (1) ice coring project, French researchers from LGGE-OSUG (2) and LSCE-IPSL (3),supported by international partners (4), have managed to push back the "age" of previous records.

For the first time, they have reconstituted tthe evolution, over 800,000 years, of levels of carbon dioxide and methane, the two main greenhouse gases after water vapor. With these new numbers, the researchers now have access to data which will help them better predict future climate changes on earth.

An ice core drilled in Antartica near the Franco-Italian base Dome Concordia, as part of the EPICA project, reached 3270 meters in December 2004, stopping a few meters above solid rock. At these depths, the ice dates back 800,000 years, or 8 glaciary-interglaciary climatic cyles.

This is the oldest ice ever cored until now, and the analysis of gas bubbles trapped in the ice has allowed recordings of levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) in the atmosphere 800,000 years ago (previous recordings only went back as far as 650,000 years ago). In light of these new measurements, researchers have access, for the first time, to reference curves for levels of CO2 and CH4, showing the evolution of the gases in ancient times.

This is important information for scientists attempting to understand the correlation between climate change on earth and the carbon cycle. These results give hope for better predictions of future levels of greenhouse gases, and in theory, of the earth's climate.

This work confirms the close correlation between temperatures recorded in Antartica in the past and atmospheric levels of CO2 and CH4. Another significant observation is that, at least in the last 800,000 years, greenhouse gas levels have never been as high as they are today (current levels surpass 380 ppmv (5) for CO2 and 1800 ppbv (6) for CH4).

The CO2 curve also shows that the lowest levels ever recorded were 172 ppmv, 667,000 years ago. Moreover, researchers have shown the existence of a modulation in atmospheric CO2 levels on a relatively long time scale, namely several hundreds of thousands of years. This unique phenomenon could stem from the more of less significant intensity of continental erosion which affects the carbon cycle over large time scales.

Thanks to the remarkably detailed records of atmospheric methane, researchers have noted an increase over time in the periodicity of a component called precession. This signal, which is correlated to monsoon intensities in South East Asia over millenia, probably reflects an intensification of the monsoon in tropical regions over the last 800,000 years.

The methane curve shows rapid fluctuations at the millenial scale which are recurrent for each ice age. The mark of such events can also been seen in the CO2 signal from 770,000 years ago, when the earth entered a new ice after the magnetic reversal which occurred 780,000 years ago. This rapid climate variability is apparently related to fluctuations in the thermohalin (large scale circulation of water, which helps to redistribute temperature around the globe). The issue of why this phenomemon appears at the beginning of the ice ages remains to be explained.

NOTES:

(1) Coordinated by the European Science Foundation (ESF) and the European Union, EPICA, or "European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica", is supported financially by the EU and the 10 countries participating in the drilling (Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK). French researchers are supported by the Agence nationale de la recherche (ANR), the Institut national des sciences de l'univers (INSU-CNRS) and CEA. Field logistics at Dom C are organized by Institut polaire français Paul-Emile Victor (IPEV), together with the National Italian Program for Antarctic research. EPICA was awarded the Prix Descartes for research in March 2008.

(2) Laboratoire de glaciologie et géophysique de l'environnement, CNRS / Université Joseph Fourier (3) Laboratoire des sciences du climat et de l'environnement, CNRS / CEA/ Université Versailles Saint Quentin (4) Institut de Physique and Centre Oeschger sur la recherche climatique of Université de Berne (Switzerland), among others.

(5) This means that for every million air molecules, 380 are CO2molecules. ppmv = part per million in volume.

(6) This means that for every billion air molecules, 1800 are CH4 molecules. ppbv = part per billion in volume.

Articles: Lüthi, D., M. Le Floch, B. Bereiter, T. Blunier, J.-M. Barnola, U. Siegenthaler, D. Raynaud, J. Jouzel, H. Fischer, K. Kawamura, and T.F. Stocker, 'High-resolution carbon dioxide concentration record 650,000-800,000 years before present, Nature 453, 379-382 (15 May 2008) doi:10.1038/nature06949

Loulergue, L., A. Schilt, R. Spahni, V. Masson-Delmotte,T. Blunier, B. Lemieux, J.-M. Barnola, D. Raynaud, T.F. Stocker, and J. Chappellaz, 'Orbital and millennial-scale features of atmospheric CH4 over the last 800,000 years', Nature 453, 383-386 (15 May 2008) doi:10.1038/nature06950

http://tinyurl.com/4fdhul

Increasing rates of greenhouse emissions

POSTED: Thursday, April 24, 2008
FROM BLOG: NewsHog - Politics, Foreign Affairs, Opinion and the "News Less Traveled" From a Transatlantic Progressive.

The following blog post is from an independent writer and is not connected with Reuters News. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not endorsed by Reuters.com.

By Fester

The first rule of getting out of a hole is to stop digging any deeper. The second rule is to start filling in the hole by creating a controlled collapse of option space.

We are still digging a deeper hole with greenhouse gas levels and the digging has increased in speed and impact as we get closer and closer to tipping points that could cascade in destructive, non-linear fashion. Science daily.com is reporting that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has increased by 2.5 parts per million in the past year to a total of 385 ppm.

Viewed another way, last year’s carbon dioxide increase means 2.4 molecules of the gas were added to every million molecules of air, boosting the global concentration to nearly 385 parts per million (ppm). Pre-industrial carbon dioxide levels hovered around 280 ppm until 1850. Human activities pushed those levels up to 380 ppm by early 2006.

The rate of increase in carbon dioxide concentrations accelerated over recent decades along with fossil fuel emissions. Since 2000, annual increases of two ppm or more have been common, compared with 1.5 ppm per year in the 1980s and less than one ppm per year during the 1960s.

One of the major contributors to the faster rise in atmospheric CO2 and methane concentrations is the melting of permafrost and tundra regions due to previous global warming. These areas are releasing more greenhouse gases into the air while absorbing fewer gases. This is an example of a short term positive feedback loop where increased emissions leads to warming which leads to more emissions and thus more warming.

One of the major concerns is a rapid disruption of the ocean currents and the transfer of thermal energy from the topics to the temperate and sub-arctic regions. The Antarctica currents are becoming less salty and less dense which means cold water may sink slower and that would slow down the tropical to sub-tropical energy transfer. If this actually occurs, most of Europe will have Russian style winters and the Indian Ocean becomes significantly cooler as well which would disrupt the monsoon systems that water the crops for 25% of the world's population.

We are seeing increasing costs become more probable and yet we are still increasing the size and the difficulty of corrective action or at least mitigating action.

http://www.reuters.com/article/blogBurst/environment?type=environmentNews