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emfx13
Joined: 25 May 2002
Posts: 959
Location: Hayward Ca.U.S.A. |
 Fri Sep 17, 2004 5:05 am
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Will U.S. change tune on Kyoto?
Tadayoshi Sakaguchi / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer
The U.S. government recently released an official report in which it acknowledged global warming is partially induced by human activity.
In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change pointed out in its third report that carbon dioxide emissions were a major causal factor of global warming.
The conclusion presented by the panel, which comprised scientists from all over the world, can be called common sense. But U.S. President George W. Bush took a different view.
Washington stood on the sidelines with Australia as the world agreed to the Kyoto Protocol--the international framework to prevent global warming--in 2001, saying it would adversely affect the U.S. economy, and that scientific mechanism of global warming was uncertain.
The Bush administration was criticized in February by U.S. Nobel laureates who said Washington allowed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to omit a reference to the relationship between global warming and human activity from a report it issued.
But the report--"Our Changing Planet," an official U.S. government document released in late August--clearly addresses the role of human-induced factors in global warming.
The report was compiled by the Climate Change Science Program, comprising experts from the Commerce Department, the State Department, the Environmental Protection Agency and other U.S. government entities.
According to the report, satellite observations showed that the air temperature near the surface of the Arctic rose an average 0.3 C each decade between 1981 and 2001.
The temperature in high-latitude regions in North America rose 1 C during the same period.
Even though natural phenomena, such as volcanic activity, have caused increases in air temperature, "North American temperature changes from 1950 to 1999 were unlikely to be due only to natural climate variations," the report said.
The report clearly indicates that greenhouse gases contributed to global warming.
But the Republican Party reiterated in its recent platform that it was opposed to the Kyoto Protocol. Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic Party's presidential candidate, also is reluctant to ratify the protocol, saying the agreement was not the answer to preventing global warming.
It is unlikely that the report will immediately prompt a change in the U.S. government's stance on global warming. But state governments and the private sector within the United States have implemented their own preventive measures.
In 2002, a law to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles was enacted in California. Ten state governments in the northeast of the country, including New York, set upper limits on carbon dioxide emissions from electric power plants last year and agreed to allow the plants to trade any excess of emission quotas to help them reach set goals.
In Chicago, a new exchange to allow companies to trade such quotas voluntarily was established.
The Chicago Climate Exchange is planning a tie-up with the International Petroleum Exchange in London, eyeing the trade of emission quotas with the European Union from next year.
Saburo Kato, chief director of the Japan Association of Environment and Society for the 21st Century, a nonprofit organization, said, "The American people are not necessarily united on Washington's stance on the Kyoto Protocol."
Kato, who formerly led the Environment Ministry's Global Environment Department, added, "Recently Americans have seen abnormal climate conditions, such as hurricanes that have left a lot of damage in their wake."
"The timing of the report's release, as it coincides with the lead-up to the presidential election, suggests that the Bush administration is hoping to attract a large number of voters who are environmentally conscious," he said.
The report could be a turning point in the White House's stance, which long opposed acknowledging the influence of human activity on global warming.
Trends in the United States have an immense influence on international efforts against global warming. Therefore, the report's importance cannot be overlooked.
http://www.newsindex.com/cgi-bin/resulttick.cgi?http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20040916wo71.htm |
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emfx13
Joined: 25 May 2002
Posts: 959
Location: Hayward Ca.U.S.A. |
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Sat Sep 25, 2004 12:21 pm
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Conference Board Tells Big Fat Global Warming Lies
By Alan Caruba
CNSNews.com Commentary from the National Anxiety Center
September 24, 2004
I think most people, whether they know anything about the science involved, have decided that more than twenty years of lies about "global warming" have failed to demonstrate it is happening or likely to occur any time soon.
Most have concluded, quite sensibly, that the Earth is warmed by the Sun and that there isn't a damned thing we could do about it, if it either warmed or cooled. Moreover, movies showing the Statue of Liberty drowning beneath the waves are about as believable as the "Planet of the Apes" film that showed it washed up on a beach.
So why is the Conference Board, a corporate business think tank, wasting its time announcing, as it did on September 7, that "Growing scientific evidence is confirming that the world's climate is radically changing and that human activity is now contributing to global warming."
The answer is that the Conference Board, in league with the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Environmental Defense, has sadly been sucked into the Great Global Warming Scam (GGWS).
Obviously, no one among the leadership of the Conference Board has a clue about the real science that refutes the GGWS. Instead, they have relied upon a panel of scientists with impressive credentials and affiliations with major universities. However, there are many more scientists with equally impressive credentials that have carefully examined climate records and concluded global warming claims are a complete subversion of the known facts.
The Conference Board report concludes that, "The Earth-for whatever the exact reasons-is on a trajectory toward an ever warmer climate." Someone should tell the Conference Board that the Earth has been warming since the last Ice Age ended eighteen million years ago. Someone should tell the Conference Board that, in the 1970s, environmentalist scientists were predicting a new Ice Age was just around the corner.
Most telling is that wonderful aside "for whatever the exact reasons" that tells us that the Ph.D.s who put the report together were, as always with the GGWS, fudging the fact that the Sun will decide the Earth's temperatures and not "human activity." Naturally, though, the Board's announcement says, "Participating scientists in the report strongly believe that 'a reduction in human-caused emissions is an essential step in any overall strategy for dealing with climate change."
"Human-caused emissions" does not, one presume, include all that methane that vast herds of cattle and other herbivores emit daily. These are the GGWS code words for reversing industrialization, i.e., the burning of fossil fuels for the production of, well, everything. It is the raison d'etre of the United Nations Kyoto Protocols on Climate Change. The United States has firmly rejected it. The Russian Federation wants nothing to do with it. And both China and India are exempt from it. Its impact on developing nations would be devastating and it would reverse the prosperity of industrialized nations.
The Conference Board report cites the usual elements of the GGWS. It talks of ocean warming and the rise in sea levels though it notes that, "both the rate and the amount of sea level rises are, as with most other climate change patterns, subject to uncertainty."
Not really. In 2001, Cecile Cabanes calculated sea-level rise for the last half-century around the world and concluded that in Bangladesh for example, in the last fifty years, it has risen an infinitesimal seven-tenths of an inch! The only uncertainty one should entertain is the level of idiocy the Conference Board report reflects.
The report worried that spring is now arriving (gasp!) on the average, 2.5 days per decade earlier than it did a century ago, but fails to note that, between 1850 and 1950, the Earth warmed about one degree Fahrenheit and then stopped warming! We've already had a half-century since then and if spring is arriving early, who cares?
The report worried about mountain glaciers such as those in Montana's Glacier National Park, "which account for about ten percent of the world's surface water, are melting." Let's make this as easy to understand as possible. In the summer, glaciers melt. If you check out data from the National Climatic data center, you would discover that average summer temperatures over Western Montana showed absolutely no warming trend in the last century.
The thing that got my attention was the way the Conference Board report came out at the same time that the September issue of National Geographic magazine devoted itself to the same GGWS hogwash. It, too, is filled with the same balderdash and gibberish. Patrick J. Michaels, a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute, spotted 35 significant errors put forth as scientific truths. Shame on National Geographic .
This coordination of the assault on the truth about the Earth's climate is a hallmark of environmental organizations and accounts for each new or revised scare campaign they manufacture in their never ending attack on the vast improvement of life on Earth resulting from free market economies and the products and services that result.
Disdain and contempt for human life is the rampant theme of environmentalism. You are still more likely to be threatened by a raging hurricane or a blizzard than from SUV's, pesticides, or the use of coal, oil and natural gas to light, warm or cool your home or apartment.
As the latest phase of the Great Global Warming Scam heats up, you can always use the latest Conference Board report to start a nice blaze in your fireplace if you have one, but remember, this will constitute yet another form of "human emissions."
(Alan Caruba writes "Warning Signs," a weekly column posted at the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center.)
Copyright 2004, Alan Caruba |
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snakelady
Joined: 08 Jun 2004
Posts: 468
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Mon Sep 27, 2004 1:53 pm
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Not sure what this means to you but...... last night on the news they asked a meteorologist( i think that's what he was) if all the hurricanes have anything to do with global warming and he said no. I believe they said 1860 was the year record that we broke. I can't remember how many hurricanes in that year. |
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emfx13
Joined: 25 May 2002
Posts: 959
Location: Hayward Ca.U.S.A. |
| Vanishing Alaska
Tue Sep 28, 2004 10:33 pm
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DO NOT BELIEVE THE MEDIA!Vanishing Alaska
Global warming is flooding villages along the coast. Should they stand and fight—or surrender and move?
By MARGOT ROOSEVELT/SHISHMAREF
VINCENT J. MUSI / AURORA FOR TIME
Millions have been spent on rock seawalls, which quickly fall apart when violent storms come ashore
Special Report: The Green Century
Monday, Sep. 27, 2004
Shishmaref is melting into the ocean. Over the past 30 years, the Inupiaq Eskimo village, perched on a slender barrier island 625 miles north of Anchorage, has lost 100 ft. to 300 ft. of coastline — half of it since 1997. As Alaska's climate warms, the permafrost beneath the beaches is thawing and the sea ice is thinning, leaving its 600 residents increasingly vulnerable to violent storms. One house has collapsed, and 18 others had to be moved to higher ground, along with the town's bulk-fuel tanks.
Giant waves have washed away the school playground and destroyed $100,000 worth of boats, hunting gear and fish-drying racks. The remnants of multimillion-dollar seawalls, broken up by the tides, litter the beach. "It's scary," says village official Luci Eningowuk. "Every year we agonize that the next storm will wipe us out."
The erosion of the island, now only a quarter-mile wide, is not the only ominous sign that large changes are afoot. The ice-fishing season that used to start in October has moved to December because the ocean freezes later each year. Berry picking begins in July instead of August. Most distressing for the Inupiaq is that thin ice makes it harder to hunt oogruk — the bearded seal that is a staple of their diet and culture. At the Nayokpuk Trading Co., where infant formula sells for $21 a package and the only eggs for sale, sent by bush plane, sit broken in their shells, the talk is of the disruption of nature's rhythms. "When was the last time we went hunting on snow machines?" owner Percy Nayokpuk asks a customer. "About 15 years," answers Reuben Weyiouanna. Because a loaded snowmobile would break through the ice, the elders these days have to drag their boats seven miles across the ice to go hunting — and the season begins in May instead of June. "If the weather keeps changing," says Nayokpuk, "it will mean the end of Shishmaref."
The fate of one stubborn little village normally wouldn't make much of a splash. But Shishmaref and other Alaskan settlements are attracting national attention because scientists see them as gloomy harbingers. "Shishmaref is the canary in the coal mine — an indicator of what's to come elsewhere," says Gunter Weller, director of the University of Alaska's Cooperative Institute for Arctic Research.
Global warming, caused in part by the burning of oil and gas in factories and cars, is traumatizing polar regions, where the complex meteorological processes associated with snow, permafrost and ice magnify its effects. A study published in Science last week reported that glaciers in West Antarctica are thinning twice as fast as they did in the 1990s. In Alaska the annual mean air temperature has risen 4°F to 5°F in the past three decades — compared with an average of just under 1°F worldwide. As a result, the state's glaciers are melting; insects are destroying vast swaths of forest; and thawing permafrost is sinking roads, pipelines and homes. Arctic Ocean ice has shrunk 5% to 10%, at an accelerating rate. Says Weller: "There is natural variability, but the evidence is overwhelming that humanity has altered the climate."
It must be said that if Shishmaref sinks beneath the waves, it won't be much of a loss to global tourism. The village is so remote that no road connects it to the outside world. The occasional barge unloads fuel after the ice breaks up, and when the weather is good, battered bush planes ferry in DVDs and cartons of Cheetos from the Sam's Club in Fairbanks. Visually, this village is nothing like the romantic images of Eskimos in igloos from old National Geographic magazines. Weathered clapboard houses, surrounded by rusty engine parts, sit helter-skelter along muddy paths. Indoor plumbing is rare, and drinking water collects in plastic buckets under rain gutters. Empty Coke cans and cigarette packets litter the streets. In the ramshackle town hall, a sign reads, CITY OF SHISHMAREF BINGO WILL NOT BE ACCEPTING ANY MORE PERSONAL CHECKS. Another warns against siphoning gasoline from the village fire truck.
Still, like many of Alaska's native villages, Shishmaref clings to its subsistence culture. The town supports 10 dog teams, and a local musher, Herbie Nayokpuk, is known statewide as the Shishmaref Cannonball for his top-place finishes in the Iditarod race. Walrus-tusk carving is taught in school, along with the Inupiaq language. And if the town itself is ugly, it is balanced by the desolate beauty of the slate-colored sea, the ducks flying in formation over the lagoon and the musk ox roaming in emerald meadows dotted with wild cotton. Some two-thirds of the local diet still derives from hunting and fishing. In the diamond light of late summer, whole families forage for salmonberries, which the elders eat mixed with grated caribou fat. ("Eskimo ice cream," they call it.) The kids prefer it with Cool Whip.
"This is our grocery store," says Tony Weyiouanna, pulling shimmering white fish from his gill net.
But up and down Alaska's coast, alarm is spreading that the natural bounty on which the culture is built is at risk. At Point Hope, a bowhead-whaling village that dates from 600 B.C., flooding seawater threatens the airport runway and a seven-mile evacuation road. "During storms, people begin to panic," says town official Rex Rock. In the Pribilof Islands, villagers blame global warming along with industrial contaminants for the decline of 20 species, ranging from kelp to sea lion. In Barrow, capital of the oil-rich North Slope Borough, sandbags and dredging haven't protected $500 million in infrastructure. "We are at a crossroads," says Mayor Edith Vorderstrasse. "Is it practical to stand and fight our Mother Ocean? Or do we surrender and move?"
The prospect of relocating whole Eskimo villages — global warming's first American refugees — is gathering political support. Last January, Shishmaref citizens voted to move to a site called Tin Creek, 12 miles away, across a lagoon. And last June, Alaska's powerful Senator, Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, convened federal, state and local officials for a two-day hearing in Anchorage to hear impassioned pleas from village leaders who want help repairing their infrastructure or relocating. Among the most eloquent was Eningowuk, 54, a mother of six who heads the Shishmaref Erosion and Relocation Coalition. "Shishmaref is where it is because of what the ocean, rivers, streams and the land provide to us," she testified. "We are hunters, and we are gatherers. We have been here for countless generations. We value our way of life. It provides for our very existence."
But moving Shishmaref to a more protected location could be prohibitively expensive, especially given the high cost of building in the Arctic. When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers looked at relocating Kivalina, a nearby village of 380 people, the price tag was $100 million to $400 million — roughly $1 million for each resident.
And it wouldn't necessarily stop there. A recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) study found four villages, including Shishmaref, to be in "imminent danger" and 20 others to have serious problems. Overall, 184 out of 213 Alaska native villages face some flooding and erosion, the GAO report noted, although how much is due to global warming and how much to the natural movement of rivers and coasts is uncertain.
Although most Shishmaref residents want to relocate, they also are worried about moving inland. Nayokpuk fears that the cost of living will double if fuel has to be transported over land. And Stanley Tocktoo, the vice mayor, says that it will be harder to dig the ice cellars the villagers use for fermenting their meat in the mud beneath the Tin Creek site than it was in Shishmaref's sand. As his son Harvey, 11, watches a Jackie Chan movie and picks fermented-walrus morsels off his father's plate, Tocktoo reflects that the farther away the village has to move from the ocean, the more trouble it will be "to get access to all this good food."
An expensive precedent may be set here. If global warming ever begins washing away coastal towns in the rest of the U.S., the cost of mass relocations would be unimaginable. But Shishmaref's villagers are adamant about their need to stay together, and they greet with horror any suggestion that they be dispersed to Nome or Kotzebue. The village — where everyone knows everyone else's name, and everyone is more or less related to everyone else — must relocate as a whole, or it would be the "annihilation of our community by dissemination," says Eningowuk. Whatever the solution, the Inupiaq are looking for it to be paid for by the folks who sent them global warming in the first place. And who would that be? "The Nalauqmiu — white people," says Eningowuk with a rueful smile.
http://www.newsindex.com/cgi-bin/resulttick.cgi?http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101041004-702149,00.html |
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emfx13
Joined: 25 May 2002
Posts: 959
Location: Hayward Ca.U.S.A. |
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Sun Oct 03, 2004 6:10 pm
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Australia would be crazy to sign Kyoto protocol, says minister
CANBERRA: Australia would be “crazy” to ratify the Kyoto protocol because it would raise power prices and cost the country jobs, Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane said yesterday after Russia moved to approve the climate change treaty.
Macfarlane said the Kyoto treaty – aimed at cutting the emission of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming – could not work because key emitters like the United States, China and Indonesia would never sign up.
Despite not signing up to the pact, Macfarlane said Australia, which accounts for 2.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, was on track to meet its Kyoto target of restricting any increase in emissions to eight per cent by 2012.
The move to approve Kyoto by Russia, which accounts for 17% of world emissions, takes the pact a step close to being enforced worldwide.
The pact has been ratified by 122 nations so far. – Reuters |
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emfx13
Joined: 25 May 2002
Posts: 959
Location: Hayward Ca.U.S.A. |
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Sun Oct 03, 2004 6:10 pm
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Australia would be crazy to sign Kyoto protocol, says minister
CANBERRA: Australia would be “crazy” to ratify the Kyoto protocol because it would raise power prices and cost the country jobs, Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane said yesterday after Russia moved to approve the climate change treaty.
Macfarlane said the Kyoto treaty – aimed at cutting the emission of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming – could not work because key emitters like the United States, China and Indonesia would never sign up.
Despite not signing up to the pact, Macfarlane said Australia, which accounts for 2.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, was on track to meet its Kyoto target of restricting any increase in emissions to eight per cent by 2012.
The move to approve Kyoto by Russia, which accounts for 17% of world emissions, takes the pact a step close to being enforced worldwide.
The pact has been ratified by 122 nations so far. – Reuters |
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emfx13
Joined: 25 May 2002
Posts: 959
Location: Hayward Ca.U.S.A. |
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Mon Oct 04, 2004 2:34 pm
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Australia defies new pressure to sign Kyoto after Russia moves to ratify
Fri Oct 1, 2:30 AM ET
SYDNEY (AFP) - Prime Minister John Howard refused to bow to renewed pressure to back the Kyoto Protocol (news - web sites) on global warming after Russia ended years of hesitation by moving to become the latest signatory to the pact.
Howard said Australia intended to meet the emissions targets set by the protocol, but under existing rules the country would be disadvantaged if it were to sign the climate change treaty.
"The difficulty by ratifying, through ratifying under the present conditions, is that countries like China and Brazil and Indonesia would not be subject to the emissions targets we'd be subject to," he told a Melbourne radio station.
"Therefore it would be more attractive for industry to invest in those countries rather than Australia and that would take investment and also jobs out of our country."
His remarks followed renewed demands by the opposition Labor Party backed by a coalition of environmental groups in the last days of campaigning for the October 9 election, for Australia to join the international community in signing the accord.
Australia, like the United States, which has also stood firm in its rejection of the accord despite Russia's decision, refused to sign it in 2001, arguing it was too costly and unfair because developing countries are not bound to make specific pollution cuts.
Opposition Labor leader Mark Latham said that without a national commitment to reversing global warming -- the aim of the Kyoto protocol -- many of Australia's great natural wonders would be under threat.
He said the world-renowned Great Barrier Reef which draws hundred of thousands of tourists a year, could suffer disastrous coral bleaching, while salt water could flood, and destroy, the Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory.
"We're at risk of losing our natural assets," Latham told Australian television. "And (that's) all the more reason for Australia to follow the international pattern, become part of Kyoto, become part of the effort against global warming."
"We need national leadership," added Latham. "This is a big issue for Australia. I can't understand, given the high stakes involved, why Mr Howard is so backward on this big environmental issue."
Two major environmental groups, the Australian Conservation Foundation and Greenpeace, have also argued that Australia's position on Kyoto islolates it as a global voice on environmental issues.
Greenpeace spokeswoman Catherine Fitzpatrick said the Russian decision demonstrated that Howard's position was "indefensible". |
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emfx13
Joined: 25 May 2002
Posts: 959
Location: Hayward Ca.U.S.A. |
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Tue Oct 05, 2004 8:05 am
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Asian glaciers shrinking at alarming rate
www.chinaview.cn 2004-10-05 11:31:49
BEIJING, Oct. 5 (Xinhuanet) -- Glaciers around the Qinghai-Tibet plateau are shrinking at an alarming rate.
Chinese and American scientists announced this on the basis of long term studies in the region, China Radio International reported Monday.
They point out that the glaciers have shrunk by an average of seven percent a year over the past 40 years.
Scientists warn that ever smaller glaciers will mean less and less water in the rivers they feed, seriously threatening the hundreds of millions of people who depend on them and accelerating the already very serious problem of desertification.
Glaciers all around the world, as well as the polar ice sheets, are shrinking faster and faster. The reason is generally agreed to be global warming.
(CRIENGLISH.com)
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emfx13
Joined: 25 May 2002
Posts: 959
Location: Hayward Ca.U.S.A. |
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Wed Oct 06, 2004 5:02 pm
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Kerry's Strategic Ambiguity on Kyoto
By Patrick Goodenough
CNSNews.com Commentary
October 04, 2004
Insert the term "Kyoto" into the internal search engine on the John Kerry for President website, and -- perhaps surprisingly for an issue on which President Bush has been so widely criticized around the world -- only five results appear.
One of the five items posted on the Kerry-Edwards site is an excerpt from a Time magazine article, in which Kerry is praised as "a consistent environmentalist" who "backed the Kyoto Protocols."
Another has the League of Conservation Voters calling Kerry an "environmental champion" who "strongly advocated for U.S. participation in the Kyoto accords and other international environmental initiatives ..."
A third result brings up a university newspaper interview with Chris Heinz, Teresa Heinz Kerry's son, who says of Kerry: "He is not the type to run away from Kyoto."
A fourth relates not to Kerry's position on Kyoto but Bush's -- a newspaper article in which Teresa Heinz Kerry is described as being "dismayed" at Bush's statement that the Kyoto Protocol was "dead on arrival." (The article does point out that Heinz Kerry herself is "not a down-the-line defender of Kyoto.")
By now the environmentally-conscious -- or simply curious -- reader will be forgiven for thinking that the Kerry camp supports Kyoto, the global 1994 treaty that aims to combat climate change by requiring industrialized countries to reduce emissions of what proponents call "greenhouse gases."
But then up comes the fifth result for "Kyoto" on the Kerry website.
"John Kerry and John Edwards believe that the Kyoto Protocol is not the answer."
Huh? That's right. In a document entitled "The Kerry-Edwards plan for clean coal" the Kerry camp explains that there are problems with the Kyoto Protocol.
"Unlike the current Administration, John Kerry and John Edwards will offer an alternative to the Kyoto process that leads the world toward a more equitable and effective answer, while preserving coal miners' jobs," the document declares.
By now thoroughly puzzled, the reader may look further on the Kerry website, and find the key platform document on the environment -- "The Kerry-Edwards Vision for a Cleaner Environment."
But the 14-page document does not refer once to Kyoto -- even in the short section on "global warming."
Elsewhere on the campaign site, the reader will learn that "the nation's oldest, largest and most influential environmental group," the Sierra Club, has endorsed Kerry.
"Kerry has been a leading voice for the need to take immediate significant steps to combat global warming," it says. "He was a participant in the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio and a delegate to the 1997 Kyoto and 2000 Hague climate talks."
Okay, it doesn't specifically say Kerry supports Kyoto, but that is surely the impression given.
Examination of the Sierra Club's website merely adds to this perception. In a document claiming to help voters to "make an informed decision on November 2nd" Sierra says Bush "backed away from the Kyoto treaty to reduce international greenhouse gas emissions..."
But in the opposite column, it says Kerry "introduced legislation to address change and cut greenhouse gas emissions."
It's hard not to get the impression that the Kerry camp -- and its cheerleaders in the green movement -- would like voters to think the candidate is Kyoto-friendly.
And it's not just the campaign website. A search elsewhere on the worldwide web reveals that, in a MoveOn.org interview in June 2003, Kerry said: "I have also called on Bush to stop blocking progress and to engage in international efforts to mitigate the threat of climate change" (emphasis added).
Surely, to most audiences, that last nine-word phrase is nothing if not a synonym for the Kyoto Protocol?
Either groups like the Sierra Club think that Kerry supports Kyoto, and are going to be sorely disappointed if he is elected and proves otherwise.
Or they know he doesn't support the pact but are sure as heck not going to say so -- they are, after all, trying to get their supporters to vote for this man (and they are well aware that independent candidate Ralph Nader is a staunch supporter of Kyoto.)
Here's another environmentalist who is either going to be disappointed or is simply being dishonest. In an op-ed piece in an Indiana paper Saturday, the director of the Hoosier Environmental Council explains why he's going to vote for Kerry.
"This president has ignored scientific evidence that human actions were contributing to climate-altering conditions," David van Gilder writes. "He rejected the Kyoto Treaty."
As for Kerry, however, "he and Sen. John Edwards have pledged to reverse every harmful environmental executive order and regulation from the Bush administration."
Reverse every order and regulation? Surely that list, from an environmental activist's point of view, would include -- even lead with -- Bush's 2001 decision to walk away from the Kyoto Protocol?
Reasons
When the president took that widely-condemned decision, he argued that ratifying the treaty would harm the U.S. economy and American workers.
He also pointed out that the drafters of Kyoto kindly chose to exempt developing nations from having the cut their emissions of pollutants. These developing countries include such giants as China (number two on the list of greenhouse gas emitters, after the U.S.) and India (number six on the list).
Kerry also has reasons for opposing Kyoto.
In his "The Kerry-Edwards plan for clean coal" document, two are given -- it requires the U.S. to commit to "infeasible" emission reductions in the short term; and in the long-term the obligations imposed on all countries are too little to solve the problem.
Another of his reasons for rejecting the pact emerges in an article in an Oct. 1 article on Science magazine's website, which compares the candidates' views on scientific issues.
"President Bush rejected the Kyoto Protocol, stubbornly walking away from the negotiating table altogether and eroding our relations with global allies," Kerry says.
"John Edwards and I will take the United States back to the negotiating table, rebuild relations with other nations, and work with them to include the United States -- as well as developing nations -- in the solution."
The reference there to "developing nations" suggests that Kerry shares the concerns of Bush -- and many Kyoto-skeptics -- that countries like China and India are exempt.
There are big differences, of course, between the candidates' views on climate change.
"The scientific evidence is clear that global warming is already happening and rising levels of global warming pollution are making the problem worse," Kerry said in the Science magazine article.
By contrast, Bush noted that the National Academy of Sciences, in a 2001 review of current scientific thinking on climate change, found that \ldblquote... a causal linkage between the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the observed climate changes during the 20th century cannot be unequivocally established."
The point here isn't so much whether Kerry's views on Kyoto are right or wrong.
It is, rather, the fact that his campaign seems content to allow green-minded voters to think he's onside on Kyoto, when in reality he has some serious concerns about the treaty and likely has little intention -- if elected -- to ratify it.
It's enough to make a tree-hugger weep.
(Patrick Goodenough is CNSNews.com's Pacific Rim Bureau Chief.)
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emfx13
Joined: 25 May 2002
Posts: 959
Location: Hayward Ca.U.S.A. |
| Antarctica Is Getting Ready to Really Heat Up
Fri Oct 08, 2004 4:00 pm
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Antarctica Is Getting Ready to Really Heat Up
Summary - (Oct 7, 2004) With all this talk of global warming, it may come as a surprise that Antarctica has actually been mostly getting colder over the last 30 years. But new research from NASA indicates that this trend is about to reverse, and the continent will warm over the next 50 years. Researchers found, ironically, that low ozone levels actually made the continent colder, but with restrictions on ozone-destroying chemicals around the planet, this cooling effect is going to go away as the ozone layer returns. If temperatures rise too high, the continent's ice sheets will melt and slide into the ocean, raising water levels around the world.
Full Story - While Antarctica has mostly cooled over the last 30 years, the trend is likely to rapidly reverse, according to a computer model study by NASA researchers. The study indicates the South Polar Region is expected to warm during the next 50 years.
Findings from the study, conducted by researchers Drew Shindell and Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), New York, appeared in the Geophysical Research Letters. Shindell and Schmidt found depleted ozone levels and greenhouse gases are contributing to cooler South Pole temperatures.
Low ozone levels in the stratosphere and increasing greenhouse gases promote a positive phase of a shifting atmospheric climate pattern in the Southern Hemisphere, called the Southern Annular Mode (SAM). A positive SAM isolates colder air in the Antarctic interior.
In the coming decades, ozone levels are expected to recover due to international treaties that banned ozone-depleting chemicals. Higher ozone in the stratosphere protects Earth's surface from harmful ultraviolet radiation. The study found higher ozone levels might have a reverse impact on the SAM, promoting a warming, negative phase. In this way, the effects of ozone and greenhouse gases on the SAM may cancel each other out in the future. This could nullify the SAM's affects and cause Antarctica to warm.
"Antarctica has been cooling, and one could argue some regions could escape warming, but this study finds this is not very likely," Shindell said. "Global warming is expected to dominate in future trends."
The SAM, similar to the Arctic Oscillation or Northern Annular Mode in the Northern Hemisphere, is a seesaw in atmospheric pressure between the pole and the lower latitudes over the Southern Ocean and the tip of South America.
These pressure shifts between positive and negative phases speed-up and slow down the westerly winds that encircle Antarctica. Since the late 1960s, the SAM has more and more favored its positive phase, leading to stronger westerly winds. These stronger westerly winds act as a kind of wall that isolates cold Antarctic air from warmer air in the lower latitudes, which leads to cooler temperatures.
Greenhouse gases and ozone depletion both lower temperatures in the high latitude stratosphere. The cooling strengthens the stratospheric whirling of westerly winds, which in turn influences the westerly winds in the lower atmosphere. According to the study, greenhouse gases and ozone have contributed roughly equally in promoting a strong-wind, positive SAM phase in the troposphere, the lowest part of the atmosphere.
Shindell and Schmidt used the NASA GISS Climate Model to run three sets of tests, each three times. For each scenario, the three runs were averaged together. Scenarios included the individual effects of greenhouse gases and ozone on the SAM, and then a third run that examined the effects of the two together.
The model included interactions between the oceans and atmosphere. Each model run began in 1945 and extended through 2055. For the most part, the simulations matched well compared with past observations.
Model inputs of increasing greenhouse gases were based upon observations through 1999, and upon the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change mid-range estimates of future emissions. Stratospheric ozone changes were based on earlier NASA GISS model runs that were found to be in good agreement with past observations and similar to those found in other chemistry-climate models for the future.
Shindell said the biggest long-term danger of global warming in this region would be ice sheets melting and sliding into the ocean. "If Antarctica really does warm up like this, then we have to think seriously about what level of warming might cause the ice sheets to break free and greatly increase global sea levels," he said.
In the Antarctic Peninsula, ice sheets as big as Rhode Island have already collapsed into the ocean due to warming. The warming in this area is at least partially a result of the strengthened westerly winds that pass at latitudes of about 60 to 65 degrees south. As the peninsula sticks out from the continent, these winds carry warm maritime air that heats the peninsula.
Original Source: NASA News Release
 http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/antarctica_getting_ready_heat_up.html?7102004
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