Is spring actually here? We are definitely getting tired of snow stories. It’s time for some sun. And then the drought stories!
At which point we will ask ourselves: What ever happened to worrying about global warming? You may remember what a big deal President Obama made about climate change in his Inaugural Address. It definitely looked as if the ozone layer was making a comeback. Later, in the State of the Union speech, Obama came back to his battle cry again and urged Congress “to get together, pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change, like the one John McCain and Joe Lieberman worked on together a few years ago.”
Urging the House and Senate to follow the lead of the two most notorious shape shifters in recent political history was perhaps not a favorable omen.
Nor was the fact that earlier this month, a deeply noncontroversial Senate resolution commemorating International Women’s Day had to be taken back and edited because someone objected to a paragraph — which had been in an almost identical version passed in the last Congress — stating that women in developing countries “are disproportionately affected by changes in climate because of their need to secure water, food and fuel for their livelihood.”
You may be wondering who the objecting senator was. Normally, these things are supposed to be kind of confidential, but in this case the lawmaker in question is proud to let you know that he is — yes! — Ted Cruz of Texas.
“A provision expressing the Senate’s views on such a controversial topic as ‘climate change’ has no place in a supposedly noncontroversial resolution requiring consent of all 100 U.S. senators,” a Cruz spokesman said.
Do you think everything in the world is now about Senator Ted Cruz? Sure seems like it. Although I would discount the rumors that he is responsible for the helium shortage or the sinkhole epidemic.
There was a time, children, when the Republican Party was a hotbed of environmental worrywarts. The last big clean air act of the Bush I administration passed the House 401 to 21. But no more, no more. You’re not going to get any sympathy for controlling climate change from a group that doesn’t believe the climate is actually changing. As Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader, used to say, “Only nature can change the climate — a volcano, for instance.”
It’s sort of ironic. These are the same folks who constantly seed their antideficit speeches with references to our poor, betrayed descendants. (“This is a burden our children and grandchildren will have to bear.”) Don’t you think the children and grandchildren would appreciate being allowed to hang onto the Arctic ice cap?
In his cheerleading State of the Union speech, the president did mention that if Congress, by any wild chance, failed to take action, the administration would do some things on its own. The Obama White House accomplished quite a bit without legislative help during the first term, imposing some big new regulations on automobile fuel efficiency, encouraging the production of biofuels and creating new standards on home appliances. It’s a pretty impressive record, given the fact that the mere implementation of a Bush-era regulation on light bulb efficiency was enough to spark the Michele Bachmann Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act, and Senator Rand Paul’s historic dual-purpose rant claiming that the administration favored “a woman’s right to an abortion, but you don’t favor a woman’s or a man’s right to choose what kind of light bulb.”
The light bulb standards survived. The world continues to turn.
But a carbon tax/fee is the key to controlling climate change. That or just letting the next generation worry about whether the Jersey Shore is going to wind up lapping Trenton. Currently, majority sentiment in Congress is to hope for the best and pass the baton to the grandchildren. (When it comes to rising-sea-level denial, the champion may be North Carolina, where the Legislature has voted to base state coastal management policy on historic trends rather than anything the current experts have to say. “This means that even though North Carolina scientists predict 39 inches of sea-level rise within the century, North Carolina, by its own law, is only allowed to prepare for 8. King Canute would be so proud,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island in a recent speech.)
Congressional stalwarts are working new carbon-tax legislation, but don’t hold your breath. This month, during a free-for-all of amendments in the Senate budget debate, Whitehouse actually did propose a nonbinding resolution establishing “a fee on carbon pollution.” The amendment failed, 41 to 58.
“We were pretty stoked at how well it did. It was 42 counting Frank Lautenberg, who wasn’t there,” Whitehouse said in a phone interview.
That’s the ticket. When all else fails, we’re going for major league optimism. The grandchildren will at least appreciate the perseverance.
Ted Cruz Cuts Climate Change Mention In Senate International Women's Day Resolution
Ted Cruz cut a mention of climate change in an International Women's Day resolution, reported Gail Collins of The New York Times (Photo by T.J. Kirkpatrick/Getty Images)
By Luke Johnson Posted: 03/29/2013 10:19 am EDT | Updated: 03/29/2013 3:43 pm EDT
A provision in the resolution, very similar to one passed in 2011 [ http://beta.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/senate-resolution/90/text ], said women "are disproportionately affected by changes in climate because of their need to secure water, food and fuel for their livelihood."
Cruz objected earlier this month. "A provision expressing the Senate's views on such a controversial topic as 'climate change' has no place in a supposedly noncontroversial resolution requiring consent of all 100 U.S. senators," a Cruz spokesman told the Times.
The provision merely noted "changes in climate" and did not even address the supposedly controversial question of whether climate change is caused by humans. In fact, 97 to 98 percent of climate scientists agree that climate change is anthropogenic, according to the National Academy of Sciences [ http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/04/1003187107.abstract ].
The impact of climate change on women is real. Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights, spoke about the threat towards women in the developing world.
"Seventy to 80 percent of the farmers are women. So if the seasons are not cyclical, and they’re not anymore -- there are long periods of drought and flash flooding -- it’s women who have to adapt. Women on the whole don’t get agriculture training," she told The Daily Beast on March 8 [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/08/mary-robinson-climate-change-s-gender-gap.html ], International Women's Day.
Study Links Temperature to Peruvian Glacier’s Growth and Retreat
Qori Kalis, a glacier descending from the Quelccaya ice cap in Peru, is melting rapidly. This image was taken in 2008. Credit Lonnie Thompson/Ohio State University
The Qori Kalis glacier in Peru in 1978. Credit Lonnie Thompson/Ohio State University
By JUSTIN GILLIS FEB. 25, 2014
Sitting on a flat volcanic plain 18,000 feet above sea level, the great Quelccaya ice cap of Peru is the largest piece of ice in the tropics. In recent decades, as scientists have watched it melt at an accelerating pace, it has also become a powerful symbol of global warming.
Yet the idea that the ice cap has retreated over time because of a change in temperature, rather than other possible factors like reduced snowfall, has always been more of a surmise than a proven case. In fact, how to interpret the disappearance of glaciers throughout the tropics has been a scientific controversy.
Now, a group of scientists is presenting new findings suggesting that over the centuries, temperature is the main factor controlling the growth and retreat of the largest glacier emerging from the ice cap. If they are right, then Quelccaya’s recent melting could indeed be viewed as a symbol of the planetary warming linked to human emissions of greenhouse gases.
In a paper [ http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/early/2014/02/24/G35245.1.abstract ] released on Tuesday by the journal Geology, a group led by Justin S. Stroup and Meredith A. Kelly of Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., used elaborate techniques to date the waxing and waning over the past 500 years of the glacier, called Qori Kalis.
The new paper suggests that the glacier sometimes grew during periods when the accumulation of ice in the region was relatively low, and conversely, that it retreated during some periods of high ice accumulation.
Dr. Kelly and Mr. Stroup conclude that the glacier is sensitive to temperature and that other factors, like the amount of snowfall, are secondary, thus supporting a view long held by Dr. Thompson that the glacier can essentially be viewed as a huge thermometer.
“The big driver is temperature,” said Dr. Thompson, who was not involved in the new paper.
Assuming it holds up, that is a sobering finding, considering how fast the Qori Kalis glacier is now retreating. Dr. Thompson documented [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/world/americas/1600-years-of-ice-in-perus-andes-melted-in-25-years-scientists-say.html (third item in the post to which this is a reply)] last year that a part of the glacier that had apparently taken 1,600 years to grow had melted in a mere 25 years. He interpreted that as a sign that human emissions and the resultant warming have thrown the natural world far out of kilter.
Qori Kalis is hardly an outlier, though: land ice is melting virtually everywhere on the planet. That has been occurring since a 500-year period called the Little Ice Age [ http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/344106/Little-Ice-Age-LIA ] that ended in about 1850, but the pace seems to have accelerated substantially in recent decades as human emissions have begun to overwhelm the natural cycles.
In the middle and high latitudes, from Switzerland to Alaska, a half-century of careful glaciology has established that temperature is the main factor controlling the growth and recession of glaciers.
But the picture has been murkier in the tropics. There, too, glaciers are retreating, but scientists have had more trouble sorting out exactly why.
That glaciers should exist at all in the warmest part of the earth is perhaps strange; they do so only in high, cold mountain regions. The tropical glaciers receive intense sunlight virtually year-round. Ice atop these glaciers can sometimes vaporize without even passing through a stage as liquid water. Over short periods, at least, the tropical glaciers appear to be sensitive to changes in clouds and many other factors.
One group of scientists is coming to the conclusion that even in these conditions, temperature is nonetheless the main factor controlling the ebb and flow of tropical glaciers over centuries.
But a second group believes that in some circumstances, at least, a tropical glacier’s long-term fate may reflect other factors. In particular, these scientists believe big changes in precipitation can sometimes have more of a role than temperature.
In interviews and emails, scientists from both groups praised the new paper for its reconstruction of the Qori Kalis glacier’s movements, a feat that required a decade of intensive labor.
A core finding is that the Peruvian glacier was expanding during the Little Ice Age. That adds to a growing body of research suggesting that the cooling during that mysterious event was global in scope, which may in turn help scientists determine the causes.
“I think it’s a great study,” said Aaron E. Putnam of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, who has done extensive work on glaciers in New Zealand. “They do something that I haven’t seen done in such an elegant way.”
But some scientists were critical of the paper’s broader assertion about temperature as the controlling factor for the glacier. “I actually believe that finding is probably accurate, but I don’t see that they make a compelling case for that with this study,” said Douglas R. Hardy of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who worked extensively on Quelccaya, including documenting a recent, sharp increase of air temperatures.
Dr. Hardy and several of the other critics noted that the Kelly paper’s temperature conclusion depended strongly on a record of ice accumulation over centuries that Dr. Thompson had compiled by drilling into Quelccaya. The ice has been compressed over time, so the evidence requires considerable interpretation.
All of the scientists involved in the debate over tropical glaciers believe that global warming is a problem and that human emissions pose a long-term threat to the planet. But the unresolved controversy has served as fodder for skeptics of global warming, who say the scientists do not really know what is going on.
The biggest scientific battle has been fought not over Quelccaya but over Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. There, too, Dr. Thompson has asserted that the glaciers atop the mountain — the “snows of Kilimanjaro,” in Ernest Hemingway’s phrase — are disappearing because of planetary warming.
But Dr. Hardy and other scientists, like Georg Kaser of the University of Innsbruck in Austria, have argued that it is actually a series of other factors, primarily a reduction in precipitation, that is starving the Kilimanjaro glaciers.
That group says the precipitation decline could be, at least in part, a secondary effect of global warming, caused by rising temperatures in the Indian Ocean.
Dr. Kelly is now looking for evidence that may shed light on the Kilimanjaro debate.
Her method involves dating ridges of rock and debris, known as moraines, that glaciers leave at their far edges.
Mount Kilimanjaro does not have the right kind of rock, but she has begun a study of glacial moraines in the Rwenzori Mountains, 500 miles away in Uganda, that could eventually show whether glaciers in Africa tend to behave in the same way as the one in Peru.
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