2.1 Bushfires in Australia leave path of destruction
2.2 Hobbit-like-humans may emerge as global warming takes hold
2.3 Debunking the Denial: "16 Years of No Global Warming"
2.4 'Stranded" high carbon assets
2.5 Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks
2.6 "Huge Factor" in Global Warming
2.7 Global warming of just 1.5 C would pump out a trillion tonnes of methane and CO2
2.8 Ten years of global warming suppressed by volcanic eruptions, says study
2.9 How to green the world's deserts and reverse climate change
2.10 Climate debate cut from national curriculum for children up to fourteen.
2.11 German institute pulls out of Canadian tar sands project
2.12 Michael Oppenheimer on Global Warming
2.13 Climate change included in US science teaching guidelines for the first time
2.14 Want to Slow Sea Level Rise? Curb 4 Pollutants
2.15 Jeremy Grantham on population growth, China and climate skeptics
2.16 Global carbon dioxide levels set to pass 400 ppm milestone
2.17 Breaking the Climate Science Consensus
2.18 Why I think we're wasting billions on global warming, by top British climate scientist
2.19 Our Global Warming Noose is Cinched Tight With Koch Brother's Money
2.20 Climate change is happening too quickly for species to adapt
2.21 N.Y. professor suggests regulating air conditioning to cool global warming
2.22 Arctic thawing could cost the world $60tn, scientists say
2.23 Last year was one of the hottest twelve months on record
2.24 No Clear Sign That Less Soot, Methane, Reduces Global Warming
2.25 Carbon pricing mechanism for airlines
2.26 Global Warming - Air Temp or Increase in Sea Level?
2.27 Climate change? Try catastrophic climate breakdown
2.28 The dark ages
2.29 By 2047, Coldest Years May Be Warmer Than Hottest in Past
2.30 Natural Gas Leakage / Global Warming
2.31 Typhoon Haiyan / Global Warming
2.32 Corn-based ethanol badly hurting environment
2.33 The myth of global warming 'pause'
2.34 Global Warming Compensation Funds
2.35 Sierra Club Seeks More Ambitious Global-Warming Target
---------------
2.1 Bushfires in Australia leave path of destruction (7/1/2013)
There are fires in five of Australia's six states, with 90 in the most populous state New South Wales, and in mountain forests around the national capital, Canberra.
.. Gillard warned all Australians to be alert as temperatures soared in coming days. "We live in a country that is hot and dry, and where we sustain very destructive fires periodically, so there is always going to be risk," she said.
"We do know over time that as a result of climate change we are going to see more extreme weather events and conditions."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
2.2 Hobbit-like humans may emerge as global warming takes hold (7/1/2013)
Under the Bighorn Basin Coring Project, an international group of 30 scientists have studied vast fossil deposits in rock strata in Wyoming in the US, charting the period 55 million years ago when the Earth's temperature rose suddenly - as it is expected to do this century.
On that occasion it took 10,000 years for the temperature to rise by 6°C. While there were mass extinctions, the timescale gave some plants and animals time to adapt and migrate to survive.
Many species such as horses, insects and earthworms evolved quickly - dwarfism being one of the most widespread and successful strategies.
However this current warming period could take as little as 200 years, according to predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Scientists say this would allow no time for many long-lived species, such as trees, to evolve and migrate.
http://www.edie.net/news/news_
2.3 Debunking the Denial: "16 Years of No Global Warming" (14/1/2013)
The difficulties in debunking blatant antireality are legion. You can make up any old nonsense and state it in a few seconds, but it takes much longer to show why it’s wrong and how things really are.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/
2.4 'Stranded' high carbon assets (11/2/2013)
"Investors continue to deploy hundreds of billions of pounds into polluting and unsustainable sectors," he is expected to say. "In many cases these investments will not be worth what investors think. If investors better understand the risks of investing in these assets they will be attracted to greener alternatives and see them as better business propositions and safer places for their funds."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
2.5 Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks (14/2/2012)
Anonymous billionaires donated $120m to more than 100 anti-climate groups working to discredit climate change science ....
... "The funding of the denial machine is becoming increasingly
invisible to public scrutiny. It's also growing. Budgets for all these
different groups are growing," said Kert Davies, research director of
Greenpeace, which compiled the data on funding of the anti-climate
groups using tax records.
"These groups are increasingly getting money from sources that are
anonymous or untraceable. There is no transparency, no accountability
for the money. There is no way to tell who is funding them," Davies
said.
... The funding stream far outstripped the support from more visible
opponents of climate action such as the oil industry or the conservative
billionaire Koch brothers, the records show. When it came to blocking
action on the climate crisis, the obscure charity in the suburbs was
outspending the Koch brothers by a factor of six to one.
2.6 "Huge Factor" in Global Warming (16/2/2013)
Thawing
permafrost is emitting more climate-heating carbon faster than
previously realised. Scientists have now learned that when the ancient
carbon locked in the ice thaws and is exposed to sunlight, it turns into
carbon dioxide 40 percent faster.
“This
really changes the trajectory of the debate” over when and how much
carbon will be released as permafrost thaws due to ever warmer
temperatures in the Arctic, says researcher Rose Cory of the University
of North Carolina.
There are 13 million square kilometres of permafrost in Alaska, Canada, Siberia and parts of Europe. As previously reported by IPS,
a 2011 study estimated that global warming could release enough
permafrost carbon to raise global temperatures three degrees C on top of
what will result from human emissions from oil, gas and coal.
... In 2011, Schaefer’s research showed that the permafrost “tipping
point” was just 15 to 20 years away. In light of Cory’s discovery, that
will now have to be revised. The only question is how much sooner.
Prepare for a three to five degree C warmer world, said Sir Robert
Watson the former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC). Speaking at a symposium in London Tuesday, Watson, the science
director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, said the
world has missed its chance to stay below two degrees C.
“All
the evidence, in my opinion, suggests we’re on our way to a three to
five degree C world,” Watson told participants at the symposium.
When
Watson was chair of the IPCC from 1997 to 2002, optimism was high
there’d be a global agreement to limit emissions. “We were hopeful that
emissions would not go up at the tremendous rate they are rising now,”
he told the Climate News Network, a UK journalism news service.
“(Now)
all the promises in the world, which we’re not likely to realise
anyway, will not give us a world with only a two degree C rise.”
----------------------
Are
humans basically doomed? Is there a fatal flaw in human nature (which
is derived from animal nature)? An animal will fight for its survival
against a visible danger, but will be incapable of conceptualizing a
danger 30 years ahead.
Selvaraj
2.7 Global warming of just 1.5 C would pump out a trillion tonnes of methane and CO2 (24/2/2013)
- U.N. studies show global temperatures have already risen by 0.7C
- Huge increase in levels of CO2 could accelerate global warming
- Infrastructure built on top of permafrost across the world would collapse
- Governments currently committed to no more than 2C climate change
Governments
around the world have set themselves the goal of pegging global warming
at less than 2C higher than pre-industrial levels.
Above this point, it is feared climate change could become impossible to control.
But
the new research suggests the tipping point at which large frozen
regions of the Earth start to thaw may be a warming of just 1.5C.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
2.8 Ten years of global warming suppressed by volcanic eruption, says study (4/3/2013)
Ryan Neely, a scientist with NOAA's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science(CIRES)
at the University of Colorado Boulder, led a team of researchers to
investigate temperature and climate factors from 2000 to 2010, looking
for a reason for the lower rate of temperature increase. While some
research was pointing to increased sulphur dioxide emissions from
countries such as China and India, who have increased their emissions by
as much as 60 per cent over that time period (due to burning more
coal), other studies suggested that volcanoes were mainly to blame.
"This
new study indicates it is emissions from small to moderate volcanoes
that have been slowing the warming of the planet," said Neely, who,
according to Science Daily,
also said that these stratospheric sulphur aerosols have countered as
much as 25 per cent of the warming from greenhouse gases.
...
"The biggest implication here is that scientists need to pay more
attention to small and moderate volcanic eruptions when trying to
understand changes in Earth's climate," said Brian Toon, a professor of
atmospheric sciences at CU-Boulder. "But overall these eruptions are not
going to counter the greenhouse effect. Emissions of volcanic gases go
up and down, helping to cool or heat the planet, while greenhouse gas
emissions from human activity just continue to go up."
-----------------
AUSTRALIA'S SUMMER IS HOTTEST ON RECORD:
Australia's summer of 2013 is the hottest on record so far, the country's Bureau of Meteorology announced today (March 1).
The
country's average temperature this summer has been 83.5 degrees
Fahrenheit (28.6 degrees Celsius), 2 degrees F (1 degree C) above
normal. That breaks the previous summer temperature record, set in the
summer of 1997 to 1998, by 0.18 degree F (0.1 degree C).
2.9 How to green the world's deserts and reverse climate change (6/3/2013)
How to green the world's deserts and reverse climate change (Amazing!)
2.10 Climate debate cut from national curriculum for children up to 14 (18/3/2013)
Debate about climate change has
been cut out of the national curriculum for children under 14,
prompting claims of political interference in the syllabus by the
government that has failed "our duty to future generations".
The latest draft guidelines for children in key stages 1 to 3 have no
mention of climate change under geography teaching and a single
reference to how carbon dioxide produced by humans impacts on the
climate in the chemistry section. There is also no reference to
sustainable development, only to the "efficacy of recycling", again as a
chemistry subject.
------------------
Have you ever heard of a business man expressing concern about our
environment? Who hires the engineers who pass out of fancy engineering
institutions like the IITs? Right, businessmen. Then why should
educational institutions bother to teach students about the environment?
The first step to solving many of our problems is to close our
engineering colleges for a year and use this time to revamp the
curriculum.
Selvaraj
2.11 German institute pulls out of Canadian tar sands project (21/3/2013)
Germany’s largest and most prestigious research institute has pulled out of a Canadian government-funded CAN$25 million research project into sustainable solutions to tar sands pollution, citing fears for its environmental reputation.
Mining the sands currently involves the use of huge amounts of water and
chemical solvents to extract oil from bitumen, a viscous substance
found in sand and clay. The extra energy required by the process of
steam injection, strip mining – removing large stretches of overlying
soil – and refining is a turbo-booster to CO2 emissions.
Canada’s tar sands deposits contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide
emitted by global oil use in human history, according to James Hansen,
the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
“If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate,” Hansen famously wrote. It would elevate global temperatures to levels not seen since the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, he added.
... Canada has previously threatened to launch a suit against
the EU at the World Trade Organisation if it proceeds with the Fuel
Quality Directive as planned, and has raised the issue in the context of
a planned $20 billion EU-Canada Free Trade Agreement.
Within Canada though, it is often climate scientists that say they are being persecuted against.
An atmosphere of patriotism has been stirred around tar sands by a
massive PR campaign involving advertisements on national TV and in
cinemas.
Environmental and climate science budgets have been axed, and one of the world’s top Arctic research stations for monitoring global warming has been closed.
Hundreds of scientists have lost their jobs, and those that remain have
been forbidden from talking to the media without a government minder
present.
As such, environmentalists welcomed the pushback from Germany. “A number
of high level EU decision makers have stated that the Canadian lobbying
effort goes beyond what is considered acceptable,” Darek Urbaniak of
Friends of the Earth told EurActiv.
2.12 Michael Oppenheimer on Global Warming (24/3/2013)
Michael Oppenheimer was a Lead Author on the Third and Fourth Assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
2.13 Climate change included in US science teaching guidelines for the first time (10/4/2013)
American school children will for the first time receive extensive lessons on climate change following the adoption on Tuesday of new scienceeducation guidelines.
However, the final standards were substantially weakened from earlier drafts.
The final guidelines cut by about a third the amount of time devoted to a subject seen as critical to future generations.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/2.14 Want to Slow Sea Level Rise? Curb 4 Pollutants (16/4/2013)
Sharp reductions in short-lived airborne pollutants could significantly slow sea level rise before 2100, a new study finds.
The
four pollutants — black carbon, methane, ozone and hydrofluorocarbons —
all cycle through the atmosphere more quickly than carbon dioxide,
which lasts for centuries in the troposphere, the part of the atmosphere
we live in and breathe. Carbon dioxide is the main culprit in Earth's
warming temperatures, which impacts sea level rise both by the expansion
of water as it warms and by the melting of glacial ice.
Cutting
the air pollutants, which all also act to trap heat in the atmosphere
and last anywhere from a week to decade, worldwide by 30 to 60 percent
over the next several decades would lower predicted sea level rise by 22
to 42 percent by 2100, according to the study, published April 14 in
the journal Nature Climate Change.
http://news.discovery.com/2.15 Jeremy Grantham on population growth, China and climate skeptics (24/4/2013)
On climate sceptics:
The misinformation machine is brilliant. As a propagandist myself [he has previously described himself as
GMO's "chief of propaganda" in reference to his official title of
"chief investment strategist"], I have nothing but admiration for their
propaganda. [Laughs.] But the difference is that we have the facts
behind our propaganda. They're in the "screaming loudly" rather than the
"fact based" part of the exercise, because they don't have the facts.
They are masters at manufacturing doubt. What I have noticed on the
blogs and in the comments section under articles is that over several
years, as the scientific evidence for climate change gets stronger, the tone of the sceptics is getting shriller and more vicious and nastier all the time. ...
Continued ...
JEREMY GRANTHAM ON HOW TO FEED THE WORLD AND WHY HE INVESTS IN OIL:
2.16 Global carbon dioxide levels set to pass 400 ppm milestone (30/4/2013)
The
Mauna Loa station, sited at 3,400m and far away from major pollution
sources in the Pacific Ocean, has been monitoring levels for more than
50 years and is considered the gold standard.
"I
wish it weren't true but it looks like the world is going to blow
through the 400ppm level without losing a beat. At this pace we'll hit
450ppm within a few decades," said Ralph Keeling, a geologist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography which operates the Hawaiian observatory.
"Each
year, the concentration of CO2 at Mauna Loa rises and falls in a
sawtooth fashion, with the next year higher than the year before. The
peak of the sawtooth typically comes in May. If CO2 levels don't top
400ppm in May 2013, they almost certainly will next year," Keeling said.
CO2
atmospheric levels have been steadily rising for 200 years, registering
around 280ppm at the start of the industrial revolution and 316ppm in
1958 when the Mauna Loa observatory started measurements. The increase
in the global burning of fossil fuels is the primary cause of the
increase.
...
"The 400ppm threshold is a sobering milestone, and should serve as a
wake up call for all of us to support clean energy technology and reduce
emissions of greenhouse gases, before it's too late for our children
and grandchildren," said Tim Lueker, an oceanographer and carbon cycle
researcher with Scripps CO2 Group.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/2.17 Breaking the Climate Science Consensus (6/6/2013)
So
just in case anyone wasn’t sure, a major study of almost 12,000
scientific papers on global warming between 1991 and 2011 finds less
than one per cent disagree that humans are the main cause.
Published in the journal Environmental Research Letters,
the study led by John Cook, the Australia-based founder of Skeptical
Science, confirms the debate about the causes of global warming had all
but vanished in the scientific literature by the early 1990s. Almost all the research says it’s mostly caused by humans.
For any followers of climate science in journals (the place where it actually matters) the finding wasn’t really news at all.
Yet
survey after survey finds the public still thinks scientists are
arguing over the causes of global warming and the media continues to
attempt to resuscitate long-dead ideas.
...
In 1998, the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine published a
petition containing the names of 17,000 “scientists” which would later
build to more than 31,000. The OISM petition project declared there was “no convincing scientific evidence” that greenhouse gas emissions would cause catastrophic climate change. Regulations to cut emissions would harm the environment, the petition said.
Skeptical Science analysed
the qualifications of the signatories, and found 18,000 had qualified
in fields unrelated to climate science, such as engineering, computer
science and mathematics. Of the 13,245 scientists left (which
represented only 0.1 per cent of science graduates) Skeptical Science
found only a tiny fraction had qualified in a science remotely relevant
to climate change.
Along
with the petition was a letter written by Dr Frederick Seitz, a
celebrated physicist and president of the US National Academy of
Sciences from 1962 to 1969. Seitz claimed “research data on climate
change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful” and that
in fact extra CO2 would be environmentally helpful. Seitz had worked as a
consultant for cigarette giant RJ Reynolds – earning $540,000 over the
years – and helped hand out more than $45 million of the cigarette
maker’s money for medical “research”.
http://www.desmogblog.com/2.18 Why I think we're wasting billions on global warming, by top British climate scientist (1/7/2013)
Do I think we’re doomed to disastrous warming? Absolutely not.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
------------------
If there
is no danger of disastrous warming, what is the purpose of this
article? Is the world economy affected by countries voluntarily reducing
their consumption of coal and oil?
2.19 Our Global Warming Noose is Cinched Tight With Koch Brother's Money (2/7/2013)
The New Yorker made the Koch brothers famous for exposing their creation of the "grassroots" Tea Party movement, but a jaw-dropping new analysis of
the billionaires' donations shows in detail how the Kochs have created
their own simulacrum of society, with its own relentlessly pro-business,
anti-regulation reality. The Kochs are essentially shortening the life span of the human race: the
private foundations they fund work tirelessly to convince lawmakers
that global warming is imaginary, and members of Congress who sign a pledgeto look the other way on climate change are rewarded with campaign donations.'
... The
executive editor for the Investigative Reporting Workshop explained to
Mayer why the center chose the Koch brothers as subjects: “There is no
other corporation in the U.S. today, in my view, that is as unabashedly,
bare-knuckle aggressive across the board about its own self-interest,
in the political process, in the nonprofit-policy-advocacy realm, even
increasingly in academia and the broader public marketplace of ideas.”
---------------------
Bringing Global Warming into a Lab
Selvaraj
2.20 Climate change is happening too quickly for species to adapt (15/7/2013)
"We
found that, on average, species usually adapt to different climatic
conditions at a rate of only by about 1C per million years," Wiens
explained. "But if global temperatures are going to rise by about four
degrees over the next 100 years as predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
that is where you get a huge difference in rates. What that suggests
overall is that simply evolving to match these conditions may not be an
option for many species."
The
study indicates there is simply not enough time for species to change
their morphologies – for example, by altering their bodies' shapes so
they hold less heat – to compensate for rising heat levels. Too many
generations of evolutionary change are required. Nor is moving habitat
an option for many creatures. "Consider a species living on the top of a
mountain," says Wiens. "If it gets too warm or dry up there, they can't
go anywhere."
The
crucial point of the study is that it stresses a fact that is often
conveniently ignored by climate change deniers. It is not just the
dramatic nature of the changes that lie ahead – melting icecaps, rising
sea levels and soaring temperatures – but the extraordinary speed at
which they are occurring. Past transformations that saw planetary
temperatures soar took millions of years to occur. The one we are
creating will take only a few generations to take place. Either
evolution speeds up 10,000-fold, which is an unlikely occurrence, or
there will be widespread extinctions.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/2.21 N.Y. professor suggests regulating air conditioning to cool global warming (23/7/2013)
SACRAMENTO
- Americans with air conditioning in their homes have likely
been getting a lot of use out of their systems recently. But are people
overusing their A/C?
Since
air conditioners were first put on the market in 1939, they've been
part of everyday life in the American household, as well as at work, in
the car or inside stores and restaurants.
Eric
Klinenberg, professor of sociology at New York University wrote an
opinion piece in Time magazine recently, pointing out that global energy
consumption is soaring. The expectation of air conditioning convenience
is spreading to countries where American culture carries influence.
For example, sales of air conditioners rose 20 percent in India and China last year.
...
According to Stan Cox, author of the 2010 book "Losing Our Cool", air
conditioning in the United States already has a global-warming impact
equivalent to every U.S. household driving an extra 10,000 miles per
year.
-----------------
Use
of air conditioning will also probably lead to negative health
outcomes. There is an urgent need to change engineering education. The
supreme court had mandated that environmental education should be made
compulsory in our schools and colleges. We are still to hear of any
enthusiastic response to this suggestion from our engineering colleges.
Selvaraj
2.22 Arctic thawing could cost the world $60tn, scientists say (24/7/2013)
Rapid thawing of the Arctic could
trigger a catastrophic "economic timebomb" which would cost trillions
of dollars and undermine the global financial system, say a group of
economists and polar scientists.
Governments
and industry have expected the widespread warming of the Arctic region
in the past 20 years to be an economic boon, allowing the exploitation
of new gas and oilfields and enabling shipping to travel faster between
Europe and Asia. But the release of a single giant "pulse" of methane
from thawing Arctic permafrost beneath the East Siberian sea "could come
with a $60tn [£39tn] global price tag", according to the researchers
who have for the first time quantified the effects on theglobal economy.
Even
the slow emission of a much smaller proportion of the vast quantities
of methane locked up in the Arctic permafrost and offshore waters could
trigger catastrophic climate change and "steep" economic losses, they say.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/2.23 Last year was one of the hottest twelve months on record (9/8/2013)
Last
year was one of the hottest twelve months on record, according to a new
report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
that analyzed global temperatures and climate trends.
The
US government agency’s report was assembled by over 380 scientists from
52 countries. In addition to analyzing temperature data, the annual
report also gave the status of other global climate indicators and
significant weather events, using data collected by monitoring stations
from around the world.
“Many
of the events that made 2012 such an interesting year are part of the
long-term trends we see in a changing and varying climate – carbon
levels are climbing, sea levels are rising, Arctic sea ice is melting, and our planet as a whole is becoming a warmer place,” said acting NOAA Administrator Kathryn D. Sullivan.
“This
annual report is well-researched, well-respected, and well-used; it is a
superb example of the timely, actionable climate information that
people need from NOAA to help prepare for extremes in our ever-changing
environment.”
------------------------
American consumers of conservative media like Fox News distrust climate scientists and don't believe the planet is warming
A new study published in the journal Public Understanding of Science (PDF available here)
surveyed a nationally representative sample of over 1,000 Americans in
2008 and 2011 about their media consumption and beliefs about climate change.
The results suggest that conservative media consumption (specificallyFox News and Rush Limbaugh)
decreases viewer trust in scientists, which in turn decreases belief
that global warming is happening. In contrast, consumption of
non-conservative media (specifically ABC, CBS,NBC, MS
The
study also examined previous research on this issue and concluded that
the conservative media creates distrust in scientists through five main
methods:
1) Presenting contrarian scientists as "objective" experts while presenting mainstream scientists as self-interested or biased.
2) Denigrating scientific institutions and peer-reviewed journals.
3) Equating peer-reviewed research with a politically liberal opinion.
4) Accusing climate scientists of manipulating data to fund research projects.
-------------------
Unless there is a major change in the way information is presented to the public our juice is going to be cooked.
The fossil fuel economy - where human effort got replaced by energy
derived from fossil fuels, which drove world wide prosperity over the
last 200 years, and which altered our philosophies in every way
imaginable - is coming to an end.
In
a workable fossil fuel economy, there is a large margin of safety, and
it does not matter how our media encourages us to waste our time and our
energy on trivial issues.
With
increasing energy scarcity on the other hand we have to learn to be
smarter and we just cannot afford to have a media which:
1. Deliberately misinforms us.
2. Wastes our time on trivial issues.
Taking small steps in the right direction we can create change.
Selvaraj
P.S. The problem is not created wholly by our media. We also have our
political leaders, economists and our engineers and scientists to thank
for the present situation - who do not wish to acknowledge that ground
realities are changing at a rapid clip.
2.24 No Clear Sign That Less Soot, Methane, Reduces Global Warming (15/8/2013)Reducing emissions of only soot and methane won’t do as much to reduce global warming as some previous research has suggested, according to a new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).'
... Soot, also known as black carbon, is made of fine, carbon-based particles that are given off by car and truck tailpipes and wood stoves. Methane,
the main component of natural gas, is released from leaking pipelines,
coal mines, oil wells, cattle, rice paddies and landfills.
Both soot and methane remain in the atmosphere for relatively short
periods of time – a few weeks for soot and up to a decade for methane.
But carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for 1,000 years or more, Smith and colleagues said in their report.
... “Focusing
on soot and methane may be worth targeting for health reasons, as
previous studies have identified substantial health benefits from
reducing those emissions,” Smith noted.
“To stabilize the global climate, however, the focus needs to be on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases,” he concluded.
http://www.redorbit.com/news/2.25 Carbon pricing mechanism for airlines (5/9/2013)
Washington has finally emerged to push for Wednesday's text blocking any global carbon pricing mechanism until 2016 at the earliest. It also insisted that states and regional blocs only charge for emissions over their own land airspace – thus omitting the 78% of emissions that take place over water.
http://www.theguardian.com/
2.26 Global Warming - Air Temp or Increase in Sea Level? (9/9/2013)
The climate has not been warming over the past 15 years at rates predicted earlier, the latest report of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to be released September end, is going to say.
Climate
change is affecting ecosystems all across the globe. Now, scientists
have discovered that as conditions change, rising ocean temperatures
will upset natural cycles of carbon dioxide, nitrogen and phosphorous in
the world's oceans. This could have major implications for the Earth's
chemical cycles, which are crucial to the regulation of various natural
systems.
Sea level rise
is accelerating three to four times faster along the densely populated
east coast of the US than other US coasts, scientists have discovered.
The zone, dubbed a "hotspot" by the researchers, means the ocean from
Boston to New York to North Carolina is set to experience a rise up a third greater than that seen globally.
-----------------
So, is the climate warming or is it not warming? Do we have to stop worrying?
I
am genuinely puzzled as to why scientists are projecting the average
global air temperature as the basic measure to determine whether the
planet is warming.
Theoretically it is possible for the air temperature
not to show any warming, even as ice on the planet continues to melt
soaking up the heat generated by global warming. It is elementary
physics that ice at zero degrees C will absorb 80 calories of heat per
gram of ice and transform to water at zero degrees C. There is
absolutely no increase in temperature, and the heat so absorbed is known
as latent heat.
The more logical measure of global warming is
increase in the level of the oceans caused by melting of ice on the
globe. (Once all the ice melts, the global air temperature will surely
rise - at a rapid clip). The good thing about this is that as water
seeks its own level the effect of global warming on the planet as a
whole will be roughly averaged out.
So is the statement that "The
climate has not been warming over the past 15 years at rates predicted
earlier" true? Let us look at the graphs showing the increase in the
level of the oceans.
This graph indicates that between the year 1870 and 2010, the increase in the effect of global warming has remained steady.
This graph provides data till 2012. This graph shows an
anomaly in 2011, where sea levels actually dropped (only to come back to
the earlier trend by the end of the year.
Do these two graphs indicate that "The climate has not been warming over the past 15 years at rates predicted earlier"?
Regards,
Selvaraj
Already, a thousand blogs and columns insist the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's
new report is a rabid concoction of scare stories whose purpose is to
destroy the global economy. But it is, in reality, highly conservative.
Reaching
agreement among hundreds of authors and reviewers ensures that only the
statements which are hardest to dispute are allowed to pass. Even when
the scientists have agreed, the report must be tempered in another
forge, as politicians question anything they find disagreeable: the new report received 1,855 comments from 32 governments, and the arguments raged through the night before launch.
In
other words, it's perhaps the biggest and most rigorous process of peer
review conducted in any scientific field, at any point in human
history.
There
are no radical departures in this report from the previous assessment,
published in 2007; just more evidence demonstrating the extent of global
temperature rises, the melting of ice sheets and sea ice, the retreat
of the glaciers, the rising and acidification of the oceans and the
changes in weather patterns. The message is familiar and shattering:
"It's as bad as we thought it was."
...
But denial is only part of the problem. More significant is the
behaviour of powerful people who claim to accept the evidence. This week
the former Irish president Mary Robinson added her voice to a call that
some of us have been making for years: the only effective means of
preventing climate breakdown is to leave fossil fuels in the ground.
Press any minister on this matter in private and, in one way or another,
they will concede the point. Yet no government will act on it.
As
if to mark the publication of the new report, the Department for
Business, Innovation and Skills has now plastered a giant poster across
its ground-floor windows: "UK oil and gas: Energising Britain. £13.5bn
is being invested in recovering UK oil and gas this year, more than any
other industrial sector."
...
It doesn't matter how many windmills or solar panels or nuclear plants
you build if you are not simultaneously retiring fossil fuel production.
We need a global programme whose purpose is to leave most coal and oil and gas reserves in the ground, while developing new sources of power and reducing the amazing amount of energy we waste.
2.28 The dark ages (1/10/2013)
'Carbon budget' talks urgent, warns Lord Stern ...
... He
added: "Given that the world is currently emitting about 50 billion
tonnes of greenhouse gases in terms of carbon-dioxide-equivalent each
year, this report implies that, even if we were to stay at current
levels, we would exhaust the emissions budget within 15 to 25 years."
----------------
It
terms of solving problems of this nature we must consider the 20th
century and the early 21st, as being analogous to the dark ages...
**The
Medieval period distinguishes itself as a transitional age. The name
alone, meaning Middle Ages denotes that it came between two great
ages: the classical civilization of the Ancient World and the
Renaissance which followed. It was a long, slow era which can be divided
into two primary periods.
The
Early Middle Ages, which are generally defined as having lasted between
500 and 900 CE are sometimes referred to the Dark Ages, since the great
civilization of Rome had now collapsed ...
The
world has now shrunk, nation states behaving like tribal warriors
(armed with atomic weapons), and interested only in leveraging their own
positions is not going to lead anywhere. The problem is not only with
nation states but also with various disciplines like economics,
engineering, medicine, media, politics... they all seem to be interested
only in feathering their own nests.
I
think the problems of global warming, peak oil and resource depletion
are solvable. First we need a change in mindset (1) basically we are all
under the same roof, if the building collapses it will fall on our
collective heads. (2) We need to be honest in our discussions, not just
bluff it out. (3) We need to use our brains - educate ourselves.
Selvaraj
If
greenhouse emissions continue their steady escalation, temperatures across most
of the earth will rise to levels with no recorded precedent by the middle of
this century, researchers said Wednesday.
Scientists
from the University of Hawaii at Manoa calculated that by 2047, plus or minus
five years, the average temperatures in each year will be hotter across most
parts of the planet than they had been at those locations in any year between
1860 and 2005.
To put it
another way, for a given geographic area, “the coldest year in the future will
be warmer than the hottest year in the past,” said Camilo Mora, the lead scientist on a paper published in the journal Nature.
Methane’s green credentials only apply when the gas is burned. If it escapes into the atmosphere instead, methane acts as a potent greenhouse gas — in fact, it is over 20 times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.
------------------------------
AS FOSSIL FUELS GO, NATURAL gas has a pretty good reputation. When burned, it emits roughly half as much carbon dioxide as coal, and it is cheap and plentiful, partly because new techniques — such as hydraulic fracturing, better known as “fracking” — have opened up access to vast new deposits. For environmentalists, low-carbon sources such as solar are still preferable, but, while we wait for those technologies to mature, gas is seen as a way to wean ourselves off coal...
This thinking has changed
energy policies across the world. Many governments now see a switch from
coal-fired power plants to gas as a way to reconcile energy demands and
climate change. In his 2012 state of the union address, Barack Obama
noted that America’s natural gas supplies can last a century and
promised to take “every possible action” to safely exploit them. Using
gas proved, he added, that “we don’t have to choose between our
environment and our economy”...
But not everyone agrees.
In 2011, a landmark paper was published in the journal Climatic Change. The
study concluded that burning natural gas — and in particular gas
obtained through fracking — was worse for the climate than burning coal.
The study drew a lot of attention, both positive and negative. Time magazine
described the paper as one of the most controversial scientific studies
of the year, and named its authors, Cornell University researchers
Robert Howarth and Anthony Ingraffea, among the world’s most influential
people.
The Cornell study focused on a poorly
understood problem with methane, the main constituent of natural gas.
Methane’s green credentials only apply when the gas is burned. If it
escapes into the atmosphere instead, methane acts as a potent greenhouse
gas — in fact, it is over 20 times more effective at trapping heat than
carbon dioxide. The issue was well known but little studied: methane
does not hang around in the atmosphere for long, so scientists had
assumed that the odd leak would not undermine its use as a bridge fuel.
Howarth
and Ingraffea punctured that assumption. As much as six per cent of the
natural gas produced for our energy needs, they said, leaked into the
atmosphere somewhere between extraction and use. The figure included gas
that escaped from wells during extraction, losses at processing
facilities and leaks from the systems used to transport and store the
fuel. For gas obtained through fracking, the upper limit was even
higher — almost eight per cent — due to increased emissions from the
rock-fracturing technique.
These
numbers were shockingly high, more than double the official estimates
from the Environmental Protection Agency. And they changed the impact of
natural gas on the climate. At six per cent, natural gas comes out the
same as coal when considering emissions over a 100-year period, but
worse over 20 years. At eight per cent, natural gas is worse than coal,
regardless of the time period. Howarth and Ingraffea weren’t suggesting
that consumers should revert to coal-fired hearths. But that big bet on
gas? Suddenly it was being called into question.
The
gulf between the official numbers and the Cornell estimates wasn’t a
surprise to some. John Bosch oversaw emissions estimates for the EPA for
more than 30 years before retiring in 2009. Emissions estimates were
based on voluntary participation from industry, and only companies with
good leak management programs volunteered. “My experience is that when
regulators start looking at actual emissions the figure can easily
double,” says Bosch. In fact, when real measurements are taken, the
difference sometimes turns out to be even greater than that. In 1988,
one oil refinery in Sweden recorded gas emissions that were 20 times
higher than official estimates for the same facility. More recent data
from natural gas processing plants in Canada put emissions at between
four and eight times official levels...
https://medium.com/stories-2.31 Typhoon Haiyan / Global Warming (11/11/2013)
The head of the Philippines delegation at UN climate talks in Poland has said he will stop eating until participants make "meaningful" progress.
In an emotional speech, Yeb Sano linked the "staggering" devastation caused by Typhoon Haiyan to a changing climate.
Mr Sano said he was speaking on behalf of those who lost their lives in the storm and his fast would last until "we stop this madness".
His speech brought tears to the eyes of other delegates and a standing ovation...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. & Director of Pandora's Promise
Spar Over Nuclear Power:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
2.32 Corn-based ethanol badly hurting environment (12/11/2013)
But the ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than the government admits today.
As farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and polluted water supplies, an Associated Press investigation found.
.. The numbers behind the ethanol mandate have become so unworkable that, for the first time, the EPA is soon expected to reduce the amount of ethanol required to be added to the gasoline supply. An unusual coalition of big oil companies, environmental groups and food companies is pushing the government to go even further and reconsider the entire ethanol program.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-
2.33 The myth of the global warming 'pause' (18/11/2013)
Two university scientists have found that the “pause” or “hiatus” in
global temperatures can be largely explained by a failure of climate
researchers to record the dramatic rise in Arctic temperatures over the
past decade or more.
http://www.independent.co.uk/
----------------
Amazing that are our scientists are too
lazy to their jobs properly. You don't need a supercomputer to do such a
calculation, even the back of an envelope should do.http://www.independent.co.uk/
----------------
http://warmingofglobe.
2.34 Global Warming Compensation Funds (18/11/2013)
“Compensation for what?” Juergen Lefevere, deputy delegation chief for the European Commission, said in an interview. “We’re turning a discussion on a challenge that we have ahead of us into a blame-game of who’s responsible for what and when.”
The scale of what the cost of the mechanism could be is the first things giving rich nations reason for pause. Annual economic losses from natural disasters have almost quadrupled in the past three decades, the World Bank said in a report.
Losses Quantified
The average reported losses rose from around $50 billion a year in the 1980s to almost $200 billion a year in the past decade, totaling $3.8 trillion from 1980 to 2012, according to the report released today, which used data by Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurer. Three-quarters of the total was due to extreme weather, it said...http://www.bloomberg.com/news/
------------------
$100 billion can be collected yearly by collecting from all nations an amount proportional to their GDP. The world GDP is around $ 70 trillion; India's contribution, having a GDP of around $ 2 trillion will come to around $ 3 billion; the contribution of USA, with a GDP of $ 16 trillion will come to around $ 23 billion; contribution of Philippines, with GDP of $250 billions will come to $350 millions.
Selvaraj
2.35 Sierra Club Seeks More Ambitious Global-Warming Targets (24/11/2013)
After shifting its position last year to outright oppose natural gas, the Sierra Club, one of the oldest, largest, and most influential environmental groups in the world, is now in the process of setting an even more ambitious global-warming target.
The group's official position is to oppose any new natural-gas dependence and to wean the country off fossil fuels by 2050. Now, the Sierra Club group is looking to move that date earlier by 20 years, Executive Director Michael Brune told National Journal in an interview this week.
"We're in the process of moving up the date. We are exploring what it would take to get off coal and gas by 2030 in the power sector," Brune said. "We're looking at it sector by sector. We're first focusing on the power sector."
Right now, almost 70 percent of America's electricity is powered by coal and natural gas; nuclear power, which the Sierra Club also opposes, makes up about 20 percent; and wind and solar make up about 3 percent.
http://www.nationaljournal.
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