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Sore Throat
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Climate change might be altering waters along US west coast
 Wed Feb 04, 2009 2:26 am
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/02/climate-change-west-coast-winds
Climate change might be altering waters along US west coast
Scientists believe climate change is the cause of stronger winds that drive upwelling of nutrient-rich deep ocean waters
guardian.co.uk,
The spectre of an ocean floor littered with dead shellfish, rock fish, sea stars and other marine life off the Oregon coast spurred Mark Snyder, a climate change expert, to investigate whether California's coast faced a similar calamity.
It could, the University of California Santa Cruz earth scientist said, citing climate change, which some scientists believe is responsible for stronger and more persistent winds along the coast. There's no debate that windier conditions drive more upwelling of nutrient-rich deep ocean waters.
At normal levels, this upwelling sustains the abundance of marine life, but too much of these rich waters leads to a boom-and-bust cycle that ultimately creates ocean "dead zones" with little or no oxygen. Marine life that can't swim or scuttle away from these lethal zones suffocate.
To assess future wind and upwelling scenarios along the California coast, Snyder and his colleagues at UC Santa Cruz ran climate simulations for two time periods. One spanned from 1968 to 2000, verifying the accuracy of the modelling. The second simulated the region's estimated climate from 2038 to 2070, using the intergovernmental panel on climate change "high-growth" emissions projections. Snyder said he chose the high emissions scenario because today's are exceeding earlier IPCC estimates.
The results showed increases in wind speeds of as much as 2 meters per second, a 40% increase from current wind speeds, which now average 5 meters per second, Snyder said.
The change in wind speeds is already happening, Snyder said. California winds have been growing in strength in the past 30 years.
Snyder said he knows his hypothesis needs more research, so he'll know whether to continue pursuing it or to discard it. The latter is unlikely, he said, given the new cycle of dead zones on the Oregon and Washington coasts that started in 2002.
"It was just chance they found the dead zones in Oregon," Snyder said, describing how fishers reported to marine scientists an alarming number of dead or dying crabs they were pulling up in traps. "It's quite possible these areas could be off the California coast," he said.
After the Oregon fishers reported their sickly catches, and divers described seeing bottom-dwelling fish in high waters or schools of fishes massing near an invisible wall - behind which was low-oxygen water - scientists from Oregon State University, along with state and federal marine experts, began investigating.
That year, and in years since, researchers have sent down a robot equipped with a video camera to record the carnage. They've also deployed a fleet of robotic "gliders" to maintain constant vigil on oxygen levels and other conditions along the Oregon coast, as well as a sophisticated monitoring buoy.
The worst year recorded was 2006, with the dead zone near the coast spreading from southern Oregon into Washington, where dead fish and crabs washed up on beaches along the Olympic Peninsula. Less severe dead zones returned in 2007.
"We've seen areas that are carpeted with dead marine life," said Oregon State marine ecologist Francis Chan. One video image stuck in his mind: A large dead sea star that must have been decades old, rotting in the water. Marine life such as that, which adhere to rocks most of their lives, can't scurry away from suffocating waters, he said. "It was pretty striking."
In normal years, winds blowing from north to south drive upwelling in the spring and summer months off the Pacific coast. These strengthened winds drive surface waters offshore, making room for deeper, nutrient-rich waters to surface, where sunlight triggers a heavy growth of phytoplankton, the bottom rung of the marine food chain.
But when the winds don't slacken and upwelling persists, excess phytoplankton blooms. When the uneaten plankton dies and sinks to the ocean floor, bacteria consuming it deplete the oxygen in the water.
Like so many other climate change projections, the scientists know they can't definitely point to greenhouse gases as the sole culprit behind windier conditions along the coast. But no other explanation fits, given the historical patterns of winds and upwelling, according to a primer from Oregon State on hypoxia, the technical term for oxygen depletion in waters.
A phenomenon called El Niño, which cycles in and out, doesn't explain it, or what's known as decadal oscillations, Chan said. "They're not at play here," Chan said. "So something else is likely at play." |
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Sore Throat
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| Global Warming Forecast to Delay Ozone Layer Recovery
Sat Feb 07, 2009 1:34 am
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http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2009/2009-02-06-02.asp
Global Warming Forecast to Delay Ozone Layer Recovery
BALTIMORE, Maryland, February 6, 2009 (ENS) - Increasing greenhouse gases could stall the recovery of stratospheric ozone in some regions of the Earth, according to new research by a team from Johns Hopkins University. The scientists warn that increased rates of skin cancer in those regions might result.
Darryn Waugh, a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, and his colleagues reported Thursday that climate change could provoke variations in the circulation of air in the lower stratosphere in tropical and southern mid-latitudes, including Australia and South America.
The circulation changes would cause ozone levels in these areas never to return to levels that were present before decline began, even after ozone-depleting substances have been wiped out from the atmosphere.
In tropical and southern mid-latitudes, Waugh says, "Global warming causes changes in the speed that the air is transported into and through the lower stratosphere. You're moving the air through it quicker, so less ozone gets formed."
Researchers at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland collaborated with Waugh in the study. The team forecast effects on ozone recovery by means of simulations using a computer model known as the Goddard Earth Observing System Chemistry - Climate Model.
Waugh says this research will help scientists attribute ozone variations to the right agent.
"Ozone is going to change in response to both ozone-depleting substances and greenhouse gases," he says, "If you don't consider climate change when studying the ozone recovery data, you may get pretty confused."
The research is published in the current issue of "Geophysical Research Letters," a publication of the American Geophysical Union.
Dan Lubin, an atmospheric scientist who has studied the relationship between ozone depletion and variations in the ultraviolet radiation that reaches the Earth, says Waugh's findings could cause health problems for people living in the tropics and southern mid-latitudes if ozone levels never return to pre-1960 levels in those regions.
"The risk of skin cancer for fair-skinned populations living in countries like Australia and New Zealand, and probably in Chile and Argentina too, will be greater in the 21st century than it was during the 20th century," says Lubin, who is at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California and did not participate in the research.
Ozone is a gas which is naturally present in the atmosphere and absorbs harmful ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. In the stratosphere, ozone blocks ultraviolet light that can cause skin cancers, cataracts, and other damage to animals and plants if it reached the surface.
This protective ozone layer has been in decline in the stratosphere since the 1970s due to an increase in atmospheric concentrations of human-made substances such as chlorofluorocarbon and bromofluorocarbon compounds such as refrigerants, solvents, and foam blowing agents.
Since the late 1980s, most countries have adhered to the Montreal Protocol, an international treaty to phase out production of such ozone-depleting substances.
The ozone layer has not grown thinner since 1998 over most of the world, and it appears to be recovering because of reduced emissions of ozone-depleting substances. Antarctic ozone is projected to return to pre-1980 levels by 2060 to 2075.
Not all regions face worse prospects for ozone recovery as a result of climate change, the Johns Hopkins scientists found.
In polar regions and northern mid-latitudes, restoration of ozone in the lower stratosphere will suffer little impact from increasing greenhouse gases, their projections indicate.
In the upper stratosphere, climate change causes a drop in temperatures that slows down some of the chemical reactions that destroy ozone. So, the Johns Hopkins team concludes, recovery might be reached in those parts of the atmosphere earlier than forecast, even decades before the removal of ozone-depleting substances.
While scientists have long suspected that climate change might be altering the dynamics of stratospheric ozone recovery, Waugh's team is the first to estimate the effects of increasing greenhouse gases on the recovery of ozone by region. |
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Sore Throat
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| Scores confirmed dead in worst fires in Australia's history
Sun Feb 08, 2009 7:14 pm
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article5686219.ece
Scores confirmed dead in worst fires in Australia's history
Sophie Tedmanson, Sydney
The deadliest bushfires in Australia's history are still raging across the south of the country, leaving hundreds of homes destroyed and towns decimated.
Described as “hell on earth”, Victoria is currently ablaze with 26 fires, including one with a 60-mile firefront. They began yesterday amid record-breaking temperatures and left a trail of death and devastation across the state, burning through 350,000 hectares. 50 fires are also now burning across the border in New South Wales, where temperatures reached 46C today.
The Australian Army has been called in to assist the thousands of weary firefighters who have been battling the blazes over the past 24 hours, and the government has announced a $10 million (£4.5 million) emergency relief fund to help the thousands of Victorians now left homeless. The fires are now officially the worst in Australia's history, surpassing the death toll of the Ash Wednesday fires which claimed 76 lives when they tore through Victoria and South Australia in February, 1983.
Kevin Rudd, the Australian Prime Minister, toured the worst-affected areas earlier today, offering support to people who had lost everything, and was even a shoulder to cry on for one devastated man.
“Hell in all its fury has visited the good people of Victoria in the last 24 hours,” Mr Rudd said. “And many good people now lie dead.”
John Brumby, the emotional Victorian Premier, said it was one of the “darkest days in Victoria’s history” and described the deadly inferno as “hell on earth”.
The death toll – which has been climbing by the hour – now stands at 84. There are fears it will rise as many people are still missing in the worst affected areas. Two children are among the dead and 18 people remain in critical condition in hospital with burns and other life-threatening injuries.
Witnesses said the inferno was like a nuclear bomb and have told of trees "exploding" with the intensity of the heat. They recounted seeing burned-out cars abandoned as their owners scrambled to reach safety.
Strathewen resident Mary Avola escaped the flames but her husband of 43 years, Peter, died after they fled their home in separate cars trying to reach a nearby sporting oval.
"He was behind me in another car. He was behind me for a while and we tried to reach the oval but the gates were locked," Mrs Avola told Melbourne's Herald Sun website. "He just told me to go and that's the last time I saw him." Authorities have since found his body.
Marie Jones, who was visiting Kinglake, where about 12 people perished, told Melbourne’s The Age newspaper that a badly-burnt man had arrived at the property where she was staying with his baby daughter, and told her his wife and other child had been killed.
"He was so badly burnt - his little girl was burnt, but not as badly as her dad, and he just came down and he said 'Look, I've lost my wife, I've lost my other kid, I just need you to save [my daughter]'," Ms Jones told the newspaper.
700 homes have so far been confirmed lost, with 550 in the area of Kinglake and Kinglake west, about 30 miles north-east of Melbourne, where many of the deaths occurred.
David Jarwood, a spokesman for the Victorian Country Fire Association, referred to the Kinglake complex – two major fires that have joined – which is blazing its way through the area north of Melbourne.
“It is now burning its way into quite rugged terrain, heading towards the Alpine National Park, so it will take many days to get it under control,” Mr Jarwood told The Times.
Another fire is threatening Beechworth in Victoria’s north east.
Other fire-affected areas include the regional city of Bendigo, in central Victoria, and the town of Marysville in the Yarra Valley, which has been destroyed with only one building left standing. In Victoria, 14,000 homes are also without power.
Mr Jarwood said many of the deaths occurred when people waited too long to evacuate their homes and were trapped when the fire hit their vehicles. Six people died in an horrific car crash at Kinglake while they tried to outrun the blaze.
As the Prime Minister announced the emergency bushfire relief fund and the support of the Army, other Australian states banded together with Victoria, with the Premiers of South Australia and New South Wales offering to send firefighters and equipment across the border.
Mr Brumby said the Army would be “providing logistics and support”.
“That will tend to be in terms of fuel, logistic support, dozers, some personnel and they will help control what is a very difficult situation,” Mr Brumby said.
Several of the fires are believed to have been deliberately lit, and arsonists are hampering firefighting efforts with some blamed for relighting fires that had already been extinguished.
Yesterday the temperature reached 46.4C – Melbourne’s hottest day on record. However, conditions look set to improve as the level has lowered across most of the state, and the forecast for the next few days is for more mild temperatures in the low 20s. |
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Sore Throat
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| EPA Warns of Impending Human Threat Due to Global Warming
Sun Feb 08, 2009 7:24 pm
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http://www.naturalnews.com/025555.html
EPA Warns of Impending Human Threat Due to Global Warming
(NaturalNews) The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued a strong warning that global warming will have "substantial human health impacts" within the next few decades. The warning came in a report released only days after the same agency declined to regulate global warming-causing greenhouse gases as pollutants under the Clean Air Act.
"Today typifies the climate-change schizophrenia in the Bush administration," said U.S. Rep. Edward J. Markey, chair of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. "On one hand, government scientists are saying that global warming poses grave threats to our health and our welfare, and, on the other hand, [there] are White House political hacks following the oil industry's bidding to do nothing."
The EPA report warns that rising temperatures will cause air quality to worsen in Eastern cities, as well as more deaths among the elderly, the poor and inner-city dwellers during future heat waves.
"It's going to be hotter; it's going to be hotter sooner in the year than it was in the past," said co-author Kristie Ebi. Young people now living near Washington "[are] going to look back and think back about how nice the summers used to be," she said. "Within 20, 30 years, on average, the [public] should notice that it's warmer."
Global warming is also likely to lead to more frequent and powerful hurricanes, dwindling water supplies in the West, loss of coastal land to rising sea levels and storm surges, and the more rapid spread of food- and water-borne illnesses.
According to the EPA's former deputy associate administrator, Jason K. Burnett, the president's deputy chief of staff for policy originally approved an EPA decision to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as air pollutants, a move supported by several cabinet members and senior administration officials. Before the decision could be made official, however, the White House prohibited the EPA from taking action.
Sources for this story include: www.washingtonpost.com. |
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Sore Throat
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| China Declares Drought Emergency as Crops Threatened
Sun Feb 08, 2009 8:09 pm
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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601080&sid=a2aigv35N2I4&refer=asia
China Declares Drought Emergency as Crops Threatened
By Feiwen Rong
Feb. 6 (Bloomberg) -- China, the world’s largest grain producer, raised its drought-emergency alert to level one, the highest class, for the first time, as dry weather threatened crops, livestock and rural incomes.
About 143 million mu (9.5 million hectares) of winter wheat are in drought, more than 40 percent of the crop, and about a third of that is in a “severe” condition, according to the Office of Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters. Some 4.3 million people and 2.1 million large livestock have limited access to drinking water, the office said.
The dry weather may cut grain output, curb exports and hurt efforts by the government to boost farm incomes at a time when 20 million migrant workers have lost their jobs. President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao have ordered “all-out efforts” to fight the drought, the official Xinhua News Agency has said.
The worst dry spell in 50 years may reduce the wheat harvest in summer “by 2-5 percent, or 2 million to 5 million tons,” said Ma Wenfeng, a grains analyst at Beijing Orient Agribusiness Consultant Ltd. Still, China has 60 million tons stored in state-controlled warehouses and has “ample” supply, he said by phone from Beijing today.
Wheat prices jumped the most in two weeks yesterday because of the crop damage in China, the biggest grower. Wheat for March delivery was up 0.2 percent at $5.63 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade at 12:54 p.m. Singapore time today.
‘Supportive’
“This is supportive for the Chicago market,” said Takaki Shigemoto, an analyst at Tokyo-based commodity broker Okachi & Co. “But I don’t think this will push the price sharply higher for now as China appears to have enough stockpiles,” he said.
The State Council has earmarked a further 300 million yuan ($44 million) to a relief fund on top of the 100 million yuan already allocated. The dry conditions have affected about 155 million mu of all crops nationwide and spread to 12 provinces.
“China has ample wheat for now,” Beijing Orient’s Ma said. “The state reserve has the ability to control the wheat market,” he said. The 60 million ton stockpile is equal to more than half of annual production, he said. China boosted its wheat output for the fifth year in 2008 to an estimated 113 million tons, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The drought is the worst to hit northern China in half a century, Xinhua said yesterday, citing a State Council meeting. Average precipitation so far in the winter wheat area is the lowest in 30 years, the China Meteorological Administration said.
Forecast Mostly Dry
Drought-hit areas of northern China will go without rain today, the administration said on its Web site. Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan, Shandong, Anhui and Hubei provinces may get 1 millimeter to 5 millimeters of rain tomorrow and on Feb. 8, it said.
As many as 157 million mu of wheat-growing land were affected by drought in northern China, the Ministry of Agriculture said on its Web site. Almost 65 million mu in Henan, Anhui, Shandong, Hebei, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Gansu and Jiangsu provinces were “severely” affected, it said.
Wheat for May delivery dropped for the first trading day in eight on the Zhengzhou Commodity Exchange, declining 0.4 percent to 2,065 yuan a metric ton.
To contact the reporter on this story: Feiwen Rong in Beijing at frong2@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: February 6, 2009 00:08 EST |
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Sore Throat
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| Climate change even worse than predicted: expert
Sat Feb 14, 2009 9:46 pm
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http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Climate_change_even_worse_than_pred_02142009.html
Climate change even worse than predicted: expert
It seems the dire warnings about the oncoming devastation wrought by global warming were not dire enough, a top climate scientist warned Saturday.
It has been just over a year since the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a landmark report warning of rising sea levels, expanding deserts, more intense storms and the extinction of up to 30 percent of plant and animal species.
But recent climate studies suggest that report significantly underestimates the potential severity of global warming over the next 100 years, a senior member of the panel warned.
"We now have data showing that from 2000 to 2007, greenhouse gas emissions increased far more rapidly than we expected," said Chris Field, who was a coordinating lead author of the report.
This is "primarily because developing countries like China and India saw a huge upsurge in electric power generation, almost all of it based on coal," Field said in a statement ahead of a presentation to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Without decisive action to slow global warming, higher temperatures could ignite tropical forests and thaw the Arctic tundra, potentially releasing billions of tons of carbon dioxide that has been stored for thousands of years.
That could raise temperatures even more and create "a vicious cycle that could spiral out of control by the end of the century."
"We don't want to cross a critical threshold where this massive release of carbon starts to run on autopilot," said Field, a professor of biology and of environmental Earth system science at Stanford University.
The amount of carbon that could be released is staggering.
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and estimated 350 billions tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) has been released through the burning of fossil fuels.
The new estimate of the amount of carbon stored in the Arctic's permafrost soils is around 1,000 billion tons. And the Arctic is warming faster than any other part of the globe.
Several recent climate models have estimated that the loss of tropical rainforests to wildfires, deforestation and other causes could increase the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from 10 to 100 parts per million by the end of the century.
The current level is about 380 parts per million.
"Tropical forests are essentially inflammable," Field said. "You couldn't get a fire to burn there if you tried. But if they dry out just a little bit, the result can be very large and destructive wildfires."
Recent studies have also shown that global warming is reducing the ocean's ability to store carbon by altering wind patterns in the Southern Ocean.
"As the Earth warms, it generates faster winds over the oceans surrounding Antarctica," Field explained.
"These winds essentially blow the surface water out of the way, allowing water with higher concentrations of CO2 to rise to the surface. This higher-CO2 water is closer to CO2-saturated, so it takes up less carbon dioxide from the atmosphere."
Field is co-chair of the group charged with assessing the impacts of climate change on social, economic and natural systems for the IPCC's fifth assessment due in 2014.
The 2007 fourth assessment presented at a "very conservative range of climate outcomes" but the next report will "include futures with a lot more warming," Field said.
"We now know that, without effective action, climate change is going to be larger and more difficult to deal with than we thought." |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
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| Climate warming gases rising faster than expected
Mon Feb 16, 2009 2:35 am
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090215/ap_on_sc/sci_climate_change
Climate warming gases rising faster than expected
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer –
CHICAGO – Despite widespread concern over global warming, humans are adding carbon to the atmosphere even faster than in the 1990s, researchers warned Saturday.
Carbon dioxide and other gases added to the air by industrial and other activities have been blamed for rising temperatures, increasing worries about possible major changes in weather and climate.
Carbon emissions have been growing at 3.5 percent per year since 2000, up sharply from the 0.9 percent per year in the 1990s, Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
"It is now outside the entire envelope of possibilities" considered in the 2007 report of the International Panel on Climate Change, he said. The IPCC and former vice president Al Gore received the Nobel Prize for drawing attention to the dangers of climate change.
The largest factor in this increase is the widespread adoption of coal as an energy source, Field said, "and without aggressive attention societies will continue to focus on the energy sources that are cheapest, and that means coal."
Past projections for declines in the emissions of greenhouse gases were too optimistic, he added. No part of the world had a decline in emissions from 2000 to 2008.
Anny Cazenave of France's National Center for Space Studies told the meeting that improved satellite measurements show that sea levels are rising faster than had been expected.
Rising oceans can pose a threat to low level areas such as South Florida, New York and other coastal areas as the ocean warms and expands and as water is added from melting ice sheets.
And the rise is uneven, with the fastest rising areas at about 1 centimeter — 0.39 inch — per year in parts of the North Atlantic, western Pacific and the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica, she said.
Also, highly promoted efforts to curb carbon emissions through the use of biofuels may even backfire, other researchers said.
Demand for biologically based fuels has led to the growing of more corn in the United States, but that means fields were switched from soybeans to corn, explained Michael Coe of the Woods Hole Research Center.
But there was no decline in the demand for soy, he said, meaning other countries, such as Brazil, increased their soy crops to make up for the deficit.
In turn, Brazil created more soy fields by destroying tropical forests, which tend to soak up carbon dioxide. Instead the forests were burned, releasing the gasses into the air.
The increased emissions from Brazil swamp any declines recorded by the United States, he said.
Holly Gibbs of Stanford University said that if crops like sugar and oil palm are planted after tropical forests are burned, the extra carbon released may be balanced by lower emissions from biofuel in 40 to 120 years, but for crops such as corn and cassava it can take hundreds of years to break equal.
"If we run our cars on biofuels produced in the tropics, chances will be good that we are effectively burning rainforests in our gas tanks," she said.
However, there could be benefits from planting crops for biofuels on degraded land, such as fields that are not offering low productivity due to salinity, soil erosion or nutrient leaching.
"In a sense that would be restoring land to a higher potential," she said. But there would be costs in fertilizer and improved farming practices.
In some cases simply allowing the degraded land to return to forest might be the best answer, she said. |
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Sore Throat
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| The tropics on fire: scientist's grim vision of global warmi
Mon Feb 16, 2009 5:46 pm
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/16/chris-field-wildfires-tropical-forests
The tropics on fire: scientist's grim vision of global warming
Ian Sample, science correspondent
The Guardian,
Tropical forests may dry out and become vulnerable to devastating wildfires as global warming accelerates over the coming decades, a senior scientist has warned.
Soaring greenhouse gas emissions, driven by a surge in coal use in countries such as China and India, are threatening temperature rises that will turn damp and humid forests into parched tinderboxes, said Dr Chris Field, co-chair of the UN's Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Higher temperatures could see wildfires raging through the tropics and a large scale melting of the Arctic tundra, releasing billions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere that will accelerate warming even further, he said.
Field, director of global ecology at the Carnegie Institute, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago at the weekend that the IPCC's last report on climate change in 2007 had substantially underestimated the severity of global warming over the rest of the century.
The report concluded that the Earth's temperature is likely to rise between 1.1C and 6.4C by 2100, depending on future global carbon emissions. "We now have data showing that from 2000 to 2007, greenhouse gas emissions increased far more rapidly than we expected, primarily because developing countries, like China and India, saw a huge upsurge in electric power generation, almost all of it based on coal," Field said. The next report, which Field will oversee, is due in 2014 and will now include future scenarios where global warming is far more serious than previous reports have suggested, he said.
Field said that if the tropics became dry enough for fires to break out, tropical forests would pass a "tipping point" from absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to releasing it.
"Tropical forests are essentially inflammable. You couldn't get a fire to burn there if you tried. But if they dry out just a little, the result can be very large and destructive wildfires. It is increasingly clear that as you produce a warmer world, lots of forested areas that had been acting as carbon sinks could be converted to carbon sources," he said. The result could lead to runaway warming.
Field's warning was echoed by French scientists, who said the IPCC's estimate that sea levels would rise around 40cm by 2100 was likely to be a best case scenario.
Former US vice-president Al Gore, who spoke at the meeting on Friday night, called for a globally coordinated stimulus to tackle climate change. "We've now reached the stage where continuing on our present course will threaten the entirety of human civilisation," he said. |
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Sore Throat
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| Bubbles of warming, beneath the ice
Sun Feb 22, 2009 7:36 pm
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http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-na-global-warming22-2009feb22,0,646220.story
Bubbles of warming, beneath the ice
By Margot Roosevelt
Bering Land Bridge National Preserve, Alaska -- Four miles south of the Arctic Circle, the morning sky is streaked with apricot. Frozen rivers split the tundra of the Seward Peninsula, coiling into vast lakes. And on a silent, wind-whipped pond, a lone figure, sweating and panting, shovels snow off the ice.
The young woman with curly reddish hair stops, scribbles data, snaps a photo, grabs a heavy metal pick and stabs at white orbs in the thick black ice.
"Every time I see bubbles, I have the same feeling," says Katey Walter, a University of Alaska researcher. "They are amazing and beautiful."
Beautiful, yes. But ominous. When her pick breaks through the surface, the orbs burst with a low gurgle, spewing methane, a potent greenhouse gas that could accelerate the pace of climate change across the globe.
International experts are alarmed. "Methane release due to thawing permafrost in the Arctic is a global warming wild card," warned a report by the United Nations Environment Programme last year. Large amounts entering the atmosphere, it concluded, could lead to "abrupt changes in the climate that would likely be irreversible."
Methane (CH4) has at least 20 times the heat-trapping effect of an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide (CO2). As warmer air thaws Arctic soils, as much as 55 billion metric tons of methane could be released from beneath Siberian lakes alone, according to Walter’s research. That would amount to 10 times the amount currently in the atmosphere.
At 32, Walter, an aquatic ecologist, is a rising star among the thousands of scientists who are struggling to map, measure and predict climate change. Parts of her doctoral dissertation on Siberian lakes were published in three prestigious journals in 2007: Science, Nature and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
According to one of her studies, methane emissions from Arctic lakes were a major contributor to a period of global warming more than 11,000 years ago.
"It happened on a large scale in the past, and it could happen on a large scale in the future," says Walter, who refers to potential methane emissions as "a time bomb."
Methane levels in the atmosphere have tripled since preindustrial times. Human activities, including rice cultivation, cattle raising, and coal mining, account for about 70% of releases, according to recent studies. Natural sources, from tropical wetlands to termites, make up the rest. But those estimates had not incorporated the bubbles Walter was probing on an autumn morning on the Seward Peninsula.
That gurgling gas could change the entire model for predicting global warming. And lakes are not the only methane source: Newly discovered seeps -- places where methane leaks to the surface -- from the shallow waters of Siberia's vast continental shelf are also likely to upset previous assumptions.
Walter's work "has gotten a lot of attention," said John E. Walsh, chief scientist of the International Arctic Research Center in Fairbanks. "She found direct evidence of methane releases in high-latitude lakes. That was not fully realized before."
In a field where the science often seems opaque, Walter's research has a flashy side. She enjoys igniting methane seeps with a cigarette lighter, leaping away as the gas flares as high as 20 feet. See Video at LA Times link...Amazing!
"It's fun," she says. "And it is informative."
Videos of the stunts have swept through the Internet, rare visual evidence of possible danger ahead. At a recent Senate hearing, Al Gore played a clip of her lighting a methane seep. The BBC, the Discovery Channel and the History Channel have featured her in documentaries.
But the complex science of Arctic methane is only beginning to be understood. In the desolate wilderness of the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve, a sense of urgency is palpable among Walter and three fellow researchers, hunkered down in neon-orange tents.
An occasional helicopter ferries supplies from Nome, the closest town, soaring over scattered herds of caribou. A red fox scampers through the brush. Across a snowfield, bear tracks recede into the distance, a reminder that field science isn't for sissies.
"Can you shoot a gun?" Walter asks a visitor, as she heads out to one of 20 lakes she is surveying. When the answer is noncommittal, she hands over bear spray and instructs: "Don't use it until the bear is right up close, facing you."
Nowhere is the evidence of a heating planet more dramatic than in the polar regions. Over the last 50 years, the Arctic has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the globe. Last summer, for the first time in recorded history, the North Pole could be circumnavigated. Ice sheets on Greenland and West Antarctica are melting rapidly. Polar bears and emperor penguins are threatened with extinction.
Even as glaciers and sea ice have captured the most headlines, growing concern is now focused on the transformation of permafrost -- soils that are frozen year-round.
Today, 20% of Earth's land surface is locked up in a deep freeze. But scientists predict that air temperature in the Arctic is likely to rise as much as 6 degrees Celsius (10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. That is expected to boost the emission of carbon compounds from soils.
The upper 3 meters (about 10 feet) of permafrost store 1.7 trillion metric tons of carbon, more than double the amount in the atmosphere today, according to a recent study in the journal Bioscience
"We are seeing thawing down to 5 meters," says geophysicist Vladimir Romanovsky of the University of Alaska. "A third to a half of permafrost is already within a degree to a degree and a half [Celsius] of thawing."
If only 1% of permafrost carbon were to be released each year, that could double the globe's current annual carbon emissions, Romanovsky notes. "We are at a tipping point for positive feedback," he warns, referring to a process where warming spurs emissions, which in turn generate more heat, in an uncontrollable cycle.
Walter's work is crucial, according to Romanovsky and others, because global warming hinges partly on the ratio of how much carbon is released as CO2 vs. how much as methane, a molecule that contains both carbon and hydrogen. Methane, although a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, breaks down more quickly. But when it does, it oxidizes into a carbon dioxide molecule, which can last more than a century in the atmosphere.
Out on the lake, Walter explains: When organic matter (dead plants and animals) rots in the ground, it gives off carbon dioxide. Much of the organic material of thawed permafrost is expected to release carbon dioxide.
But as ice inside permafrost melts, small sinkholes open in the ground and fill with water, joining together to form millions of ponds and lakes. Organic matter slips from eroding shorelines to lake bottoms, where microbes feed on it. Because lake bottoms are oxygen-free, the microbes generate methane in addition to carbon dioxide -- as in the burping La Brea tar pits.
"These lakes are getting bigger -- in some places by a meter a year," Walter says, scooping out slush from the hole she has punched through 6 inches of ice. Into the seep, she inserts a plastic umbrellalike contraption fitted with a bottle to collect gas and a suspended brick to hold it straight.
Before Walter perfected the methane trap, when she was a graduate student in Siberia, she would swim in near-freezing water, dodging leeches and muskrats. Once she caught pneumonia. Another time, her hair caught on fire as she ignited a methane seep.
On the Seward Peninsula trip, she hikes up to eight miles a day from lake to lake through snowdrifts. Her hip is black and blue from a fall through the ice. "Methane is hard work," she says with a smile.
At each seep, Walter places a small red flag so her colleagues can find the bubbles. Lawrence Plug, a geophysicist from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia; Guido Grosse, a German geologist; and Benjamin M. Jones, a U.S. Geological Survey researcher, help shovel off the ice in straight-line paths, take notes on the size of each bubble group, record the location with global positioning system devices, and measure the depth of the lakes.
In the evening, in a cramped cook tent, jars of peanut butter and Nutella sit amid satellite data maps and a textbook on "Applied Linear Statistical Models." Frosted hats and mittens drip from a clothesline. Jones cooks up a batch of hamburger as Walter labels methane bottles with a marker and enters data into her laptop.
Over the next two years, the researchers, funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA, will move between Siberia and Alaska. They will drill permafrost cores, map seeps and analyze data to produce a model of how methane from Arctic lakes might affect Earth's future climate.
"By figuring out how quickly permafrost thawed in the past, we can test our models to predict how fast it could thaw in the next 100 years," says Plug, who will make the complex calculations. "If the temperature warms a couple of degrees Celsius, the lakes could expand at two or three times their current rate."
Elsewhere, scientists cast a wary eye toward clouds of methane bubbles roiling the waters of the Siberian continental shelf. Those emissions, possibly from sub-surface permafrost, are even harder to measure than lake emissions.
Meanwhile, researchers are debating the possibility of eventual seeps from methane hydrates -- icy formations beneath the continental shelves and the ocean bottom, and far below land-based permafrost.
Walsh, at the International Arctic Research Center, emphasizes the "huge range of uncertainty" as to how much climate change methane emissions could trigger. "The potential is there for large releases. But there is also a risk of alarmism."
To many Alaskans, it is hardly news that permafrost is thawing: Across the state, houses have been collapsing and trees tipping over. Researchers estimate that repairing affected schools, roads and bridges will cost up to $6 billion over the next two decades.
But the global implications have yet to sink in.
Out on the wild frontier of climate research, far from the legislatures and the diplomatic gatherings where climate policy is debated, Katey Walter and her colleagues focus on what they call "ground truthing."
And beyond that laborious data-gathering, Walter has a mission: to spread the word about what is happening. At the beginning of her field trip, she stops in Nome and leads a group of fifth-graders, many from Alaska Native tribes, out to poke holes in the ice of a nearby lake and light methane flares.
She talks to them about people who live in faraway cities, driving automobiles and working in industries that emit carbon dioxide. And how that causes warming that is felt in the Arctic. And why, even though there are so few people in Alaska, the ice around them is melting.
"That's what we're studying," she explains. "It's all related."
margot.roosevelt@latimes.com |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1802
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| Dire Climate Change Scenario: Mass Migrations, Extended Worl
Sun Feb 22, 2009 7:52 pm
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/21/lord-nicholas-stern-paint_n_168865.html
Lord Nicholas Stern Paints Dire Climate Change Scenario: Mass Migrations, Extended World War
CHARLES J. HANLEY
CAPE TOWN, South Africa — If we don't deal with climate change decisively, "what we're talking about then is extended world war," the eminent economist said.
His audience Saturday, small and elite, had been stranded here by bad weather and were talking climate. They couldn't do much about the one, but the other was squarely in their hands. And so, Lord Nicholas Stern was telling them, was the potential for mass migrations setting off mass conflict.
"Somehow we have to explain to people just how worrying that is," the British economic thinker said.
Stern, author of a major British government report detailing the cost of climate change, was one of a select group of two dozen _ environment ministers, climate negotiators and experts from 16 nations _ scheduled to fly to Antarctica to learn firsthand how global warming might melt its ice into the sea, raising ocean levels worldwide.
Their midnight flight was scrubbed on Friday and Saturday because of high winds on the southernmost continent, 3,000 miles from here. While waiting at their Cape Town hotel for the gusts to ease down south, chief sponsor Erik Solheim, Norway's environment minister, improvised with group exchanges over coffee and wine about the future of the planet.
"International diplomacy is all about personal relations," Solheim said. "The more people know each other, the less likely there will be misunderstandings."
Understandings will be vital in this "year of climate," as the world's nations and their negotiators count down toward a U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen in December, target date for concluding a grand new deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol _ the 1997 agreement, expiring in 2012, to reduce carbon dioxide and other global-warming emissions by industrial nations.
Solheim drew together key players for the planned brief visit to Norway's Troll Research Station in East Antarctica.
Trying on polar outfits for size on Friday were China's chief climate negotiator Xie Zhenhua, veteran U.S. climate envoy Dan Reifsnyder, and environment ministers Hilary Benn of Britain and Carlos Minc Baumfeld of Brazil.
Later, at dinner, the heavyweights heard from smaller or poorer nations about the trials they face as warming disrupts climate, turns some regions drier, threatens food production in poor African nations.
Jose Endundo, environment minister of Congo, said he recently visited huge Lake Victoria in nearby Uganda, at 80,000 square kilometers (31,000 square miles) a vital source for the Nile River, and learned the lake level had dropped 3 meters (10 feet) in the past six years _ a loss blamed in part on warmer temperatures and diminishing rains.
In the face of such threats, "the rich countries have to give us a helping hand," the African minister said.
But it was Stern, former chief World Bank economist, who on Saturday laid out a case to his stranded companions in sobering PowerPoint detail.
If the world's nations act responsibly, Stern said, they will achieve "zero-carbon" electricity production and zero-carbon road transport by 2050 _ by replacing coal power plants with wind, solar or other energy sources that emit no carbon dioxide, and fossil fuel-burning vehicles with cars running on electric or other "clean" energy.
Then warming could be contained to a 2-degree-Celsius (3.4-degree-Fahrenheit) rise this century, he said.
But if negotiators falter, if emissions reductions are not made soon and deep, the severe climate shifts and sea-level rises projected by scientists would be "disastrous."
It would "transform where people can live," Stern said. "People would move on a massive scale. Hundreds of millions, probably billions of people would have to move if you talk about 4-, 5-, 6-degree increases" _ 7 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit. And that would mean extended global conflict, "because there's no way the world can handle that kind of population move in the time period in which it would take place."
Melting ice, rising seas, dwindling lakes and war _ the stranded ministers had a lot to consider. But many worried, too, that the current global economic crisis will keep governments from transforming carbon-dependent economies just now. For them, Stern offered a vision of working today on energy-efficient economies that would be more "sustainable" in the future.
"The unemployed builders of Europe should be insulating all the houses of Europe," he said.
After he spoke, Norwegian organizers announced that the forecast looked good for Stern and the rest to fly south on Sunday to further ponder the future while meeting with scientists in the forbidding vastness of Antarctica. |
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PAK
Joined: 03 Feb 2006
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Mon Feb 23, 2009 1:28 am
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Gosh Sorethroat, you must have a whole priesthood behind you to post so much BS coming from the TOP. My only solace in all this is written in LE BIB, "even the ELECT will be deceived." BREATHE DEEPLY - You're expendable.
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... we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably will always exist to get people to love their servitude. Aldous Huxley |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1802
Location: x |
| Risks of Global Warming Rising: Is It Too Late to Reverse Co
Sat Feb 28, 2009 1:19 am
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http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=risks-of-global-warming-rising
Risks of Global Warming Rising: Is It Too Late to Reverse Course?
The negative impacts of climate change are beginning to appear--and we may soon cross a threshold of significant damage
By David Biello
The risk of catastrophic climate change is getting worse, according to a new study from scientists involved with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Threats—ranging from the destruction of coral reefs to more extreme weather events like hurricanes, droughts and floods—are becoming more likely at the temperature change already underway: as little as 1.8 degree Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) of warming in global average temperatures.
"Most people thought that the risks were going to be for certain species and poor people. But all of a sudden the European heat wave of 2003 comes along and kills 50,000, [Hurricane] Katrina comes along and there's a lot of data about the increased intensity of droughts and floods. Plus, the dramatic melting of Greenland that nobody can explain certainly has to increase your concern," says climatologist Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, who co-authored the research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences as well as in several IPCC reports. "Everywhere we looked, there was evidence that what was believed to be likely has happened. Nature has been cooperating with [climate change] theory unfortunately."
Schneider and his colleagues updated a graph, dubbed the "burning embers," that is designed to map the risks of damage from global warming. The initial version of the graph [left] drawn in 2001 had the risks of climate change beginning to appear after 3.6 or 5.4 degrees F (2 to 3 degrees C) of warming, but the years since have shown that climate risks kick in with less warming.
According to the new graph, risks to "unique and threatened systems" such as coral reefs and risks of extreme weather events become likely when temperatures rise by as little as 1.8 degrees F from 1990 levels, which is on course to occur by mid-century given the current concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases. In addition, risks of negative consequences such as increased droughts and the complete melting of ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica definitively outweigh any potential positives, such as longer growing seasons in countries such as Canada and Russia.
"We're definitely going to overshoot some of these temperatures where we see these very large vulnerabilities manifest," says economist Gary Yohe of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., another co-author. "We're going to have to learn how to adapt."
Adaptation notwithstanding, Yohe and Schneider say that scientists must also figure out a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to reverse the heating trend to prevent further damage.
Several bills pending in Congress would set a so-called cap-and-trade policy under which an overall limit on pollution would be set—and companies with low output could sell their allowances to those that fail to cut emissions as long as the total stays within the total pollution cap. Any such federal policy would put a price on carbon dioxide pollution, which is currently free to vent into the atmosphere, Yohe note. He, however, favors a so-called carbon tax that would set a fixed price for such climate-changing pollution rather than the cap-and-trade proposals favored by the Obama administration. "It's a predictable price, not a thing that bounces around."
But even with such policies in place—not only in the U.S. but across the globe—climate change is a foregone conclusion; global average temperatures have already risen by at least 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit (0.6 degree C) and further warming of at least 0.7 degree F (0.4 degree C) is virtually certain, according to the IPCC. And a host of studies, including a recent one from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have shown that global warming is already worse than predicted even a few years ago. The question is: Will it be catastrophic or not? "We've dawdled, and if we dawdle more it will get even worse," Schneider says. "It's time to move." |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1802
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| Carbonated Oceans
Thu Mar 05, 2009 7:36 pm
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http://explorations.ucsd.edu/Features/2009/Carbonated_Oceans/
Carbonated Oceans
As carbon dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere, about one-third of the excess is taken up by the oceans, where it converts to an acidic form with potentially dangerous ecosystem consequences.
By Robert Monroe
Like a sinkful of hard water deposits suddenly doused with vinegar, the shells of tiny marine snails in Victoria Fabry's test tanks don't stand a chance.
Fabry, a biological oceanographer and visiting researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, studies the effects of ocean acidification on the mollusks known as pteropods. In one experiment, only 48 hours of exposure to slightly corrosive seawater caused normally smooth shells to become frayed at the edges on their way to eventual dissolution, severely diminishing their owners' chances of survival.
The acidity of the water in Fabry's lab had been ratcheted up to levels that might not be seen until the end of the century, but she and other scientists fear that ongoing acidification of ocean water could be causing a slow-motion destruction of ocean ecosystems now.
The loading of carbon dioxide into oceans is a consequence of fossil fuel use that has only begun to be widely recognized as problematic in the past decade. Its subsequent effects on seawater chemistry have the potential to spread ecological disaster to a variety of industries dependent on the seas.
To understand what the world might expect, several Scripps research teams are drawing on the institution's expertise in long-term climate data collection and on new technologies that will help them understand when, where, and how ocean chemistry changes when the seas are overwhelmed by increasing infusions of carbon dioxide. They are joining a growing number of international scientists who are turning their attention to the issue. Their collective hope is to understand whether the oceans are approaching a tipping point of widespread damage and to see what can be done to prevent it.
"We know the oceans are getting more acidic. We know lab experiments have shown that organisms find living more difficult as the CO2 increases," said Scripps marine chemist Andrew Dickson, who is collaborating with Fabry to build a network of observing stations off the California coast. "Studies that can clarify how important this is for ecosystems remain to be designed and done."
Impairing Nemo
As humans burn oil and coal, carbon dioxide is released and accumulates in the atmosphere. A little less than half of it stays in the sky and about a third enters the oceans, dissolving into seawater at the ocean surface.
When ocean water absorbs CO2, the two react to form carbonic acid. The acid reacts with carbonate ions, making the ions less available in ocean waters to shell-forming organisms. Robbed of sufficient quantities of a main ingredient for their shells, these organisms may become less hardy and less able to replenish their numbers.
The trend scientists are seeing might seem small. The average pH of water at the ocean's surface has fallen from 8.16 to 8.05 since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the advent of fossil fuel use. Pure water in comparison has a pH of 7.
But marine organisms that build shells have grown accustomed to a certain chemical background and they do not take such a decrease well, especially at the pace scientists are documenting. The rate of change that marine creatures have endured in fewer than three centuries is 100 times faster than the rate of change over the preceding 850,000 years. And once the lower pH water is there, it will be there for a long time because of the slow pace of ocean circulation. Dickson likens it to pouring cream in a cup of coffee and stirring it once every 1,000 years.
As a relatively well-studied example of acidification's effects, the pteropod has become what ocean acidification researchers consider their canary in the coal mine. The snails, however, are not the only organisms that are sensitive. Nearly all marine life forms that build calcium carbonate shells are jeopardized by the rising acidity of the oceans. That long list includes corals as well as commercially important marine invertebrates such as abalone, sea urchins, clams, and mussels.
Even fishes might be susceptible to problems as carbonic acid amasses in their tissues. A new study led by Australia's James Cook University found that acidification diminishes the ability of larval clownfish, the colorful species popularized in the film "Finding Nemo," to use the olfactory cues they need to locate suitable habitats.
And though they are not themselves harvested as food, pteropods and other vulnerable zooplankton and phytoplankton have an indirect but profound value to fisheries, being a key part of the diet of pink salmon, mackerel, and cod.
Scientists are concerned less about a sudden mass die-off of shelled organisms than about a persistent assault on their health that won't relent for centuries. Coral reefs, for instance, may reach the point at which they erode faster than they grow by the mid-21st Century, according to some estimates.
"These organisms are likely to have difficulty in secreting their shells in a fully functional way which could alter their reproductive success and their population abundances," said Mark Ohman, a Scripps biological oceanographer who recently added carbon dioxide measurements to the data he regularly collects through the California Current Ecosystem Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program led by Scripps.
But at this point, only the chemical basics of acidification are well understood. New discoveries have the feel of breaking news. Richard Feely and other researchers at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory made headlines in 2008 when they discovered that masses of acidic water were encroaching on the continental shelf off the West Coast to a surprising extent. The onslaught appears to change throughout the year and scientists still do not understand fully how much pH fluctuates seasonally in coastal waters. They also aren't sure how far masses of lower pH water stretch geographically.
Acidification's potential threat to the California Current, which encompassed most of the area studied by Feely, is making the economically vital ocean region a research target zone. Because Scripps is the home of a key repository of long-term data about the current and greenhouse gases, the institution is becoming a center of ocean acidification studies.
From the Archives
Two key monuments to fastidious long-term data gathering reside at Scripps. The California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) was launched just after World War II after the West Coast sardine fishery collapsed. It provides a continuous record of temperature, plankton abundance, and other key indicators of the state of the ocean. For most of the program's existence, these data have been gathered quarterly. In 1958, Charles David Keeling initiated measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at a weather station atop Hawaii's Mauna Loa. Monthly averages are plotted to this day on the iconic graph known as the Keeling Curve.
Both time series and their offshoots help characterize trends in ocean acidification that were present before scientists knew to look for them. Ohman notes that records from CalCOFI are providing "six decades of context" in the form of proxy data ranging from temperature to nutrient concentration. This information will help scientists reconstruct the rate of change in the California Current's acidity. Scientists also hope that the record can tell them not only about acidity trends but how climate cycles like El Niño cause such trends to fluctuate.
The Keeling Curve provides indirect evidence that not all human carbon dioxide emissions remain in the atmosphere and present-day researchers credit that record for prompting scientists to look for signs of acidification in the oceans. Papers about the phenomenon first started appearing in the 1970s and a decade later, Keeling started a similar time-series of seawater carbon dioxide content and alkalinity levels near Bermuda. Subsequent work by Dickson established the reference standards for measurements of carbon dioxide content and alkalinity of ocean water that have helped researchers uniformly measure trends in acidification.
"The Mauna Loa CO2 time series is the most famous example of what impact you get if you collect very long time series," said Uwe Send, a Scripps physical oceanographer collaborating with Ohman, Fabry, and Dickson, "and we are trying to do the same kind of thing in the ocean in important and representative or critical locations."
Dis-solution
Last November, Send, Ohman and NOAA researcher Chris Sabine deployed a mooring with carbon dioxide sensors 250 kilometers (155 miles) southwest of Point Conception, Calif. Contributions from those sensors and several others attached to the mooring feed into data collected by the LTER project, a National Science Foundation-supported program building from CalCOFI that aims to answer scientists' questions about the interplays between California Current organisms and their changing ocean environment.
Fabry and Dickson are leading efforts to deploy two more carbon dioxide sensors this year, one in Carlsbad, Calif., and the other off the Northern California city of Trinidad. The latter launch is part of a California Ocean Protection Council-funded project in which Fabry will conduct complementary tests in the lab to understand how varying pH levels affect marine organisms at different stages of development.
The moored sensors off California are a small contribution to much larger efforts on the global scale. Send is co-leading the international OceanSITES program, which is building a network of stations around the world oceans to collect long time series of changes in ocean climate, carbon, and ecosystems, including acidification.
It took 50 years of case-building on the part of scientists before the world began to respond aggressively to the global warming threat resulting from atmospheric CO2 increases. Because the chemical consequences of adding fossil fuel-derived greenhouse gases is indisputable, Fabry and Dickson hope that the wait for prudent actions will be a shorter one when it comes to the seas.
"What we're doing now will have impacts in our lifetime," said Fabry. "We are certainly leaving a legacy to our children and grandchildren and they're going to ask what did we do about it." |
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PAK
Joined: 03 Feb 2006
Posts: 1324
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Thu Mar 05, 2009 10:00 pm
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Global Warming Alarmist James Hansen’s Former NASA Supervisor Calls Him An “Embarrassment”January 28, 2009 · Filed Under Global Warming, Science
The guy who really kick started the fraudulent global warming panic around the world is Dr. James Hansen. He’s Dr. Al Gore’s closest ally and deputy fear monger. Hansen is the chief climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).
Hansen’s former boss at NASA is now speaking out and says Hansen’s global warming warming alarmism is an embarrassment to NASA based on fraudulent science.
Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, Dr. John S. Theon, the former supervisor of James Hansen, NASA’s vocal man-made global warming fear soothsayer, has now publicly declared himself a skeptic and declared that Hansen “embarrassed NASA” with his alarming climate claims and said Hansen was “was never muzzled.” Theon joins the rapidly growing ranks of international scientists abandoning the promotion of man-made global warming fears.
“I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man made,” Theon wrote to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. “I was, in effect, Hansen’s supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results,” Theon, the former Chief of the Climate Processes Research Program at NASA Headquarters and former Chief of the Atmospheric Dynamics & Radiation Branch explained.
“Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress,” Theon wrote. [Note: NASA scientist James Hansen has created worldwide media frenzy with his dire climate warning, his call for trials against those who dissent against man-made global warming fear, and his claims that he was allegedly muzzled by the Bush administration despite doing 1,400 on-the-job media interviews!\
Theon is in good company when it comes to his skepticism on global warming. Contrary to what Al Gore is telling the congress on Capital Hill this very day, the scientific community is in no way in agreement about global warming. In fact, every single day more scientists come forward and join the chorus of those who know Gore and Hansen are liars engaged in one of the biggest cons of all time.
“As Chief of several of NASA Headquarters’ programs (1982-94), an SES position, I was responsible for all weather and climate research in the entire agency, including the research work by James Hansen, Roy Spencer, Joanne Simpson, and several hundred other scientists at NASA field centers, in academia, and in the private sector who worked on climate research,” Theon wrote of his career. “This required a thorough understanding of the state of the science.
I have kept up with climate science since retiring by reading books and journal articles,” Theon added. (LINK) Theon also co-authored the book “Advances in Remote Sensing Retrieval Methods.” [Note: Theon joins many current and former NASA scientists in dissenting from man-made climate fears.
A small sampling includes: Aerospace engineer and physicist Dr. Michael Griffin, the former top administrator of NASA, Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology, and formerly of NASA, Geophysicist Dr. Phil Chapman, an astronautical engineer and former NASA astronaut, Award-Winning NASA Astronaut/Geologist and Moonwalker Jack Schmitt, Award-winning NASA Astronaut and Physicist Walter Cunningham of NASA's Apollo 7, Chemist and Nuclear Engineer Robert DeFayette was formerly with NASA's Plum Brook Reactor, Hungarian Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA's Ames Research Center, Climatologist Dr. John Christy, Climatologist Dr. Roy W. Spencer, Atmospheric Scientist Ross Hays of NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility]
Fighting global warming has become big business much like the war on drugs — except that drugs and drug addiction are real unlike global warming. Al Gore has made more than $100 million dollars since leaving politics and embarking on his global warming crusade. All those “carbon credits” that latte sipping liberals are always buying to offset their “carbon footprint” come from several companies the largest of which is owned by Al Gore. Moreover, Al claims to be “carbon neutral” because of the carbon offsets he buys — except that he buys them from himself.
Evidence is in fact continuing to mount that the earth is in fact cooling rather than warming. Of course to the global warming loons it’s because of global warming that it’s been so cold this winter just like it was because of global warming that summer was so hot. Everything proves global warming while nothing disproves it in the minds of some.
The Obama administration is about to base our entire economy and a lot of our foreign policy on what is a complete and total lie. The global warming agenda is a socialist, anti-capitalist, and anti-business agenda that is aimed at dismantling our way of life.
-Chris Jones
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... we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably will always exist to get people to love their servitude. Aldous Huxley |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1802
Location: x |
| So who is John S Theon?
Sat Mar 07, 2009 4:02 am
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http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/01/so_who_is_john_s_theon.php
So who is John S Theon?
The usual denialists (e.g. The Register) are excited because some guy they never heard of before has joined Inhofe's merry band, writing:
"I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man made."
M. J. Murphy has some information about Theon. It seems that Inhofe's claim that Theon was Hansen's supervisor is completely untrue:
Theon wrote to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. "I was, in effect, Hansen's supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results. I did not have the authority to give him his annual performance evaluation...
Read the last bit closely. Being "in effect" Hansen's supervisor is here contrasted with being "in reality" Hansen's supervisor--being the guy who gives Hansen his annual performance appraisal, in other words--which, frankly, does linguistic violence to the term.
Gavin Schmidt writes:
Dr. Theon appears to have retired from NASA in 1994, some 15 years ago. Until yesterday I had never heard of him (despite working with and for NASA for the last 13 years). His insights into both modelling and publicity appear to date from then, rather than any recent events. He was not Hansen's 'boss' (the director of GISS reports to the director of GSFC, who reports to the NASA Administrator). His "some scientists" quote is simply a smear - which scientists? where? what did they do? what data? what manipulation? This kind of thing plays well with Inhofe et al because it appears to add something to the 'debate', but in actual fact there is nothing here. Just vague, unsubstantiated accusations.
And Joe Romm finds some more misrepresentations in Inhofe's press release:
The Morano post blares:
NYT's Revkin chides Hansen for promoting sea level claims that are not 'even physically possible'
But let's go the link and see what Revkin actually wrote. ...
Sea level is a case in point. Jim's views are clearly at the upper boundary of what many glaciologists and oceanographers together see as realistic, or even physically possible, in a warming world.
Whether you agree with Revkin or Hansen on the science, Revkin never asserted that Hansen promoted sea level claims that were not even physically possible. |
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