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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
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 Sun May 08, 2005 3:18 am
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Sherri,
I applaud your resistance to the govenment's efforts to site a plutonium processing plant in your state of Idaho. As you well know, plutonium is an extremely toxic and dangerous radioactive element.
Go to Netflix and check out the movie "Silkwood".
http://www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?movieid=965563&trkid=181026
Your concern about the health of plankton in the world's ocean is quite astute.
Since phytoplankton help remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, any significant decline in these species would have a devastating feedback that would greatly worsen our current situation.
Check these articles \:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-6-129-2480.jsp
(courtesy of Deborah)
The other CO2 problem
Carol Turley & Jerry Blackford
5 - 5 - 2005
More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere means a warmer world, right? Well, yes. But humans’ fossil-fuel addiction may, if left unchecked, have an equal or even more serious consequence: ocean acidification. Carol Turley and Jerry Blackford explain. {read entire article}
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3879841.stm
Climate warning from the deep
Strange things are happening in the North Sea. Cod stocks are slumping faster than over-fishing can account for, and Mediterranean species like red mullet are migrating north.
Several sea birds are also in trouble. Kittiwake numbers are falling fast and guillemots are struggling to breed.
And, earlier this summer, hundreds of fulmar (a relative of the albatross) corpses washed up on the Norfolk coast, having apparently starved to death.
Scientists suspect these events are linked and they are trying to work out how.
Nothing is certain yet, but some believe a dramatic change in North Sea plankton is responsible. And, what is more, they blame global warming. ...more
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1594/is_5_11/ai_65913632
excerpt
The prestigious journal Science first published Sagarin's findings, as well as a study by John McGowan, a professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, showing what McGowan calls "the largest change ever measured in plankton productivity in the ocean."
McGowan took 42 years of data from the waters off southern California and found a 70 percent drop in the amount of tiny animals, or zooplankton, that form the second-lowest rung of the marine food chain. That drop coincided with an overall sea-surface warming of two to three degrees F. What McGowan observed between San Diego and Point Conception near Lompoc may affect a much larger region: Although there are no long-term numbers further up the West Coast, plankton and temperature shifts tend to be parallel from British Columbia down to Baja California.
http://nigec.ucdavis.edu/publications/ar/annual97/westgec/project27.html
The decrease in zooplankton biomass in the California Current over the past several decades has been attributed to warming and increased thermal stratification of surface waters. If the temporal scale of warming is short and part of a recurrent set of similar variations in the longer record, the system should recover quickly. However, if this decrease is unprecedented in the longer 500y record, it could have a devastating effect on coastal ecosystems, including local fisheries. We propose to develop proxy time series of thermal stratification and circulation for the past 500 years, using the instrumental records of the past 50-100y for calibration. With these time series we will estimate the frequency(ies) of variability affecting the coastal ecosystem and the influence of natural and anthropogenic effects.
By the way, I sympathize with the burden that farmers face with some governmental regulators. You should try to see who the real culprits are however.
I suspect you would find that the majority of "environmentalists" and you actually share many common values.
Also, could I suggest that an excellent resource to expand your understanding of the way the US media works, please also rent the documentary:
"Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media"
http://www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?movieid=60022366&trkid=181026
Last edited by Sore Throat on Sun May 08, 2005 5:34 am; edited 2 times in total |
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ssallen
Joined: 29 Mar 2005
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Sun May 08, 2005 4:26 am
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Thank you Sore Throat. I swear I'm not a goverment $#@#!.
Anyway I beleive there are two different types of enviromentalist.
There are ones that really sincerely care about animals and plants and clean water, and then ones that are just out to take away from farmers.
We are also resisting a coal-burning plant operation.
They want the pollution in Jerome, Idaho but the electricity produced will
go to California.
I have respect for your hard work on global warming.
I am more open minded to it now that a chemtrail activist is a true believer. Last night I went to bed thinking, maybe there is global warming. We need to stick togather. I am new at this so I apologize again for opening my big mouth on your forum. I bet you guys hate newbies. l.o.l.
sherri
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Swamp Gas
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Sun May 08, 2005 2:05 pm
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quote:
Originally posted by ssallen
Keep researching global warming while I'm freezing my ass
off here in Idaho.
An Ice age is always preceded by global warming, at least in theory. The site below has collected some interesting information of trhe teeter toter of global warming and ice age. GW is a cyclical event, but human pollution and sunspot activity are accelerating it, and perhaps could make it more virulent.
http://www.crawford2000.co.uk/iceage.htm
And yes, there are corrupt individuals involved in the environmentalists movement, just like every other field of human activity. I believe the government and energy companies want the public to hate the 60's and enviornmentalists, animal rights activists, gay rights activists, anti-war people, and womyn's rights activists.
We are with ya 100% on the chemtrails and geo-engineering. It is is just part of a an act of desperation.
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Heard it from a pilot who spoke real gooooood! |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1802
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| Energy Policy by Beavis and Butthead
Sun May 08, 2005 8:29 pm
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http://www.creators.com/opinion_show.cfm?columnsName=miv
American energy policy -- written by Beavis and Butthead.
By Molly Ivins
AUSTIN, Texas -- When the history of this administration is written, I suspect the largest black mark against it will be wasting time. The energy bill just passed by the House is a classic example of frittering away precious time and resources by doing exactly nothing that needs to be done about energy. The bill gives $8.1 billion in new tax breaks to the oil companies, which are already swimming in cash.
ExxonMobil's profits are up 44 percent, Royal Dutch/Shell up 42 percent, etc. According to the business pages, the biggest problem oil executives face is what to do with all their cash. So why give more tax breaks to the oil companies? Makes as much sense as anything else in this energy bill. Nothing about conservation, higher fuel efficiency standards or putting money into renewable energy sources. It's so stupid, it's painful.
And their genius answer to "energy independence"? Drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Look, the total oil under ANWR is 1 billion barrels less than this country uses in a year, according to Robert Bryce, the Texas journalist who specializes in energy reporting. The bill is just riddled with perversity: We continue to subsidize people who buy Hummers, but no longer grant tax rebates to those who buy hybrid cars that are more than six times as fuel efficient. This is not how you get to "energy independence." The United States hit its oil peak back in 1970 -- domestic production has been declining ever since.
I'm not sure I've ever seen anything quite as odd as the right wing's insistence that global warming does not exist. I'm not a climatologist, but I can read what they're saying. In fact, they're screaming it. Rush Limbaugh is not a climatologist, either, nor are any of the rest of these pinheads who seem to think the whole thing is some figment of liberals' imagination.
There's nothing liberal about global warming, it's science. There seems to be some element of childish spite in the refusal to recognize it -- "Boy, we can drive the liberals crazy by pretending it's not happening, ha, ha, ha." If you read right-wing blogs, you find a kind of Beavis and Butthead attitude about the subject, a sort of adolescent-jerk humor. What's astonishing is finding the same attitude among members of Congress. Head-militantly-in-sand is not a solution.
There is a perfect convergence of economic, environmental and energy considerations that all point in the same direction: renewable energy sources. With demand for gasoline soaring worldwide, with the economies of both China and India growing at staggering paces, with the world somewhere near its oil peak now, our dependence on some of the world's most retrograde regimes is only going to get worse and more expensive.
Foreign policy also plays a role here. Let us pass quickly by the administration's pre-war assurances that Iraqi oil would pay for the war -- the country is pumping less now than it did under Saddam Hussein. How smart is it to dick around trying to oust the president of Venezuela? You put a bunch of ideological nutcases in charge of Latin American policy, and you're going to create a lot of enemies down there.
And their answer is to bring back nukes? Let's review the bidding on that one. Aside from Murphy's Law, the problem with nukes is that they create radioactive waste that remains toxic for tens of thousands of years. And we don't know what to do with it. The First Rule of Holes applies -- if you're stuck in one, stop digging. We're already dependent on one form of energy that has a toxic legacy, why in heaven's name walk into another one, this time with foreknowledge of its effects? Especially when there are cheap, reliable, renewable, non-poison-producing alternatives? We're nuts to even think about it. Wind power already has near competitive prices.
Renewable energy sources are not pie-in-the-sky -- they're here right now, and they're going to be a lot cheaper than oil. The single cheapest thing we can do about oil is not use so much of it. Current hybrid technology will not get us to the mythical goal of "energy independence," but at least we can slow down the demand for oil. In theory, it only takes 15 years to replace the entire fleet of American cars now on the road. We don't have another four years to waste.
American energy policy -- written by Beavis and Butthead.
Last edited by Sore Throat on Tue May 10, 2005 12:58 am; edited 1 time in total |
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ssallen
Joined: 29 Mar 2005
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| Plankton
Mon May 09, 2005 4:56 am
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Thanks for the research on plankton.
Plankton is the bottom of the foodchain and many
animals need it to survive.
Thats why I'm so concerened also with chemtrails because
I beleive thats where bird flu is coming from.
It's horrible the way these animals are treated.
Hope things don't heat up to much for the sake of millions
of birds and animals.
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ssallen
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| battery powered hybrid
Mon May 09, 2005 5:10 am
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I'm kinda worried about these batteried powered hybrids.
Don't know that much about them. Just while researching plutonium 238
they use it for space "batteries".
Now I maybe way off the shelf here and I don't think they would dare
use 238 in a car battery (who knows) what would they use in a hybrid
car battery? knowing that we would need to produce billions of them.
Dunno just thinking out loud. Oh no I'm not sticking up for the oil industry
here just caught myself on that one. I just wondered about the production
part of batteries and what those emmisions would be like. Any ideas?
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Swamp Gas
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Mon May 09, 2005 2:30 pm
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I doubt even insane people like BushLaden Productions would push Plutonium in Car batteries (On second thought..........This is Bizarro World we live in).
NickelMetal Hydrid is the current type, but it is getting in short supply. Some manufactureres are looking to Lithium Ion batteries, much like computer clock batteries or cell phone, although a much larger capacity. The traditional Lead acid will be around for awhile, and their problem is mainly disposal.
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Heard it from a pilot who spoke real gooooood! |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1802
Location: x |
| Global warming: a clear and present danger
Tue May 10, 2005 12:54 am
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http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-6-129-2488.jsp
Global warming: a clear and present danger
David King
9 - 5 - 2005
The sceptics are wrong: scientific evidence supports the argument that climate change is a real threat that requires urgent and committed action, says the British government’s chief scientific advisor, David King.
The science of climate change is not a new subject. Indeed, the greenhouse gas concept was put forward as long ago as 1827 by the French mathematician Joseph Fourier, who first worked out that our atmosphere absorbs heat that would otherwise radiate out into space. Were it not for the “greenhouse effect”, life on this planet would not exist as we know it. The average temperature would be –180 Centigrade, rather than the relatively balmy 150C that we experience, and there would be much wider variation between daytime and nighttime temperatures.
An Irish-British scientist, John Tyndall, discovered in 1860 that the greenhouse effect is not due to major constituents of nitrogen and oxygen but to the minority gases in our atmosphere, especially water vapour, carbon dioxide and methane: what came to be known as “greenhouse gases”.
The first global warming calculations were offered in 1896 by the Swedish chemist (and 1903 Nobel prizewinner), Svante August Arrhenius. He estimated that if the human population should burn so much fossil fuel that the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere should double, the result would be an average global temperature increase of 5o Centigrade.
He wasn’t far out. The most recent calculation, based on enormous computer programmes at a number of world centres, including the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, yields global temperature increases of 1.5-6oC for a doubling of carbon-dioxide levels.
At the higher end, the impact of such a temperature rise would be immense. For example, the difference in temperature between an ice age and a warm period is about 5-8oC.
I set out this history to make the point that our current understanding of climate change has long roots. There is inevitably much that remains uncertain in the science, given the enormous complexity of the Earth and climate systems themselves. But equally a good deal of the science is now well-established.
Scientific understanding has been enhanced greatly by the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Drawing on the work of around 2,000 scientists worldwide, and with rigorous peer-review processes at its heart, the IPCC represents an unparalleled assessment of the research evidence from leading scientists from across the globe. The work of the IPCC has been vital in underpinning and informing international efforts to tackle climate change, including the Kyoto Treaty.
Nonetheless, it is often reported that scientists themselves cannot agree whether climate change is really happening, whether it is influenced by human activities and whether, even if both things are true, it really matters that much. The bad news is that this is for the most part a pseudo-debate. Tempting as it may be for some to believe that “it’s just the environmentalists doom-saying again”, the reality is that the overwhelming majority of credible scientific opinion is clear on all three points. This includes scientific opinion in the United States as much as elsewhere.
Beyond any reasonable doubt, climate change is happening. Mankind is driving the process mostly through our use of fossil fuels. And it is serious – in my view the most serious and potentially catastrophic problem that we face today.
Unmitigated climate change will both magnify humanity’s existing scourges – poverty, disease, famine – and add to these new ones, such as through increasing climatic extreme events, rising sea levels and flooding on a scale beyond human experience.
So if scientific opinion is so united on these points why does “the debate” on the science continue to be reported?
Part of the answer is in the nature of the media itself, which likes to present two sides of a story. “Scientists agree” is not such a great headline as “scientists at loggerheads”. This applies equally to spheres of science other than climate change.
There is also an issue that some, including some politicians, simply do not want to hear the evidence, regarding the implications as just too unpalatable (and politically unpopular) to be faced.
Sceptics and evidence
A few words are appropriate on the theme of the “climate change sceptics” who overall fall into three camps.
First, there is a very small group of serious scientists who stress the problems of modelling aerosols and cloud cover. They do not reject the greenhouse model, the observed increases in carbon dioxide or the observed increase in global temperature. The best known is the American climatologist, Richard Lindzen.
Second, there is another small group of scientists who appear at every meeting but are not seriously regarded. These include a Danish scientist who argues, without any proper evidence, that sea levels are not rising at all; a French scientist who claims from a study of records of tea plantation companies in Tanzania that there has been no temperature increase around Kilimanjaro despite the loss of 85% of its ice cap (which has been dated back to the last ice age) over the past 100 years; and a British scientist who says that global warming is happening but is due to increased solar activity (his model has no basis in measurements).
Third, there is a very vocal group of professional lobbyists. Some have had scientific training, but most have not. They manage to make their voice heard as they are articulate and clearly well-funded. They fall into the same category as lobbyists for the tobacco companies who claim that links between smoking and ill-health are still not proven.
In summary, it is quite clear that the balance of international scientific opinion is enormously in support of the conclusion that climate change is a real and present danger, requiring urgent and committed action. It nonetheless remains a significant issue, in terms of gaining wider political and public consensus on the need for action, that the arguments put forward by the sceptics gain publicity and influence far beyond that which can be justified by the standing of the individuals concerned, by the validity of their arguments, and by the scientific credibility of the evidence that they are able to put forward.
I therefore welcome this openDemocracy debate as a contribution to public engagement and understanding on this critical issue. |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1802
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| Britain faces big chill as ocean current slows
Tue May 10, 2005 12:55 am
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1602579,00.html
Britain faces big chill as ocean current slows
Jonathan Leake, Science Editor
CLIMATE change researchers have detected the first signs of a slowdown in the Gulf Stream — the mighty ocean current that keeps Britain and Europe from freezing.
They have found that one of the “engines” driving the Gulf Stream — the sinking of supercooled water in the Greenland Sea — has weakened to less than a quarter of its former strength.
The weakening, apparently caused by global warming, could herald big changes in the current over the next few years or decades. Paradoxically, it could lead to Britain and northwestern and Europe undergoing a sharp drop in temperatures.
Such a change has long been predicted by scientists but the new research is among the first to show clear experimental evidence of the phenomenon.
Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, hitched rides under the Arctic ice cap in Royal Navy submarines and used ships to take measurements across the Greenland Sea.
“Until recently we would find giant ‘chimneys’ in the sea where columns of cold, dense water were sinking from the surface to the seabed 3,000 metres below, but now they have almost disappeared,” he said.
“As the water sank it was replaced by warm water flowing in from the south, which kept the circulation going. If that mechanism is slowing, it will mean less heat reaching Europe.”
Such a change could have a severe impact on Britain, which lies on the same latitude as Siberia and ought to be much colder. The Gulf Stream transports 27,000 times more heat to British shores than all the nation’s power supplies could provide, warming Britain by 5-8C.
Wadhams and his colleagues believe, however, that just such changes could be well under way. They predict that the slowing of the Gulf Stream is likely to be accompanied by other effects, such as the complete summer melting of the Arctic ice cap by as early as 2020 and almost certainly by 2080. This would spell disaster for Arctic wildlife such as the polar bear, which could face extinction.
Wadhams’s submarine journeys took him under the North Polar ice cap, using sonar to survey the ice from underneath. He has measured how the ice has become 46% thinner over the past 20 years. The results from these surveys prompted him to focus on a feature called the Odden ice shelf, which should grow out into the Greenland Sea every winter and recede in summer.
The growth of this shelf should trigger the annual formation of the sinking water columns. As sea water freezes to form the shelf, the ice crystals expel their salt into the surrounding water, making it heavier than the water below.
However, the Odden ice shelf has stopped forming. It last appeared in full in 1997. “In the past we could see nine to 12 giant columns forming under the shelf each year. In our latest cruise, we found only two and they were so weak that the sinking water could not reach the seabed,” said Wadhams, who disclosed the findings at a meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna.
The exact effect of such changes is hard to predict because currents and weather systems take years to respond and because there are two other areas around the north Atlantic where water sinks, helping to maintain circulation. Less is known about how climate change is affecting these.
However, Wadhams suggests the effect could be dramatic. “One of the frightening things in the film The Day After Tomorrow showed how the circulation in the Atlantic Ocean is upset because the sinking of cold water in the north Atlantic suddenly stops,” he said.
“The sinking is stopping, albeit much more slowly than in the film — over years rather than a few days. If it continues, the effect will be to cool the climate of northern Europe.”
One possibility is that Europe will freeze; another is that the slowing of the Gulf Stream may keep Europe cool as global warming heats the rest of the world — but with more extremes of weather. |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
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| Silenced Science: Arctic Ozone Loss
Tue May 10, 2005 1:09 am
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http://www.coastalpost.com/05/05/05.htm
Silenced Science: Arctic Ozone Loss
By Jim Scanlon
Vital information on environmental change is being withheld from the public by the print and broadcast media.
Eight related empirical studies concerning drastically reduced springtime Arctic ozone appeared in the November 1997 issue of Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). These peer-reviewed articles were submitted by prestigious authors (including one Nobel Prize winner) from a number of well-known scientific institutions, mostly in the US and Canada. (The Professional and Scholarly Division of the Association of American Publishers subsequently acclaimed this issue of GRL the "best single issue of a journal" for 1997.)
Despite the enormous attention devoted to the massive springtime loss of stratospheric ozone in the Southern Hemisphere (the Antarctic Ozone Hole was recognized officially in the pages of Nature in 1985), there has been no mention in news sections of either Nature or Science of the massive ozone loss in the north that has been occurring regularly since 1993. Neither has there been mention of this phenomena in the general media.
It is inconceivable that the editors and staff of Nature or Science were unaware of the significance of these findings. Similarly, the New York Times? Science Times also ignored the Arctic ozone story but chose to write feature articles on two other stories that appeared in this issue: "Dinosaurs With Feathers" and "Deadly Relic of the Great War." How could ScienceTimes editors have missed the ozone story?
The appearance of the Antarctic Ozone Hole was a major cultural phenomena that lead to the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement to reduce ozone- destroying chemicals. The appearance of a second ozone hole over the Northern Hemisphere less than a decade later would appear to require even more rigorous changes. That may be why there is such reluctance to acknowledge the crisis.
Although the stratospheric load of ozone-depleting substances such as chlorine and bromine has not yet peaked, scientists routinely speak of "he recovery of the ozone layer." The implication of decreasing stratospheric temperature is that a reduction in chemicals that catalyze ozone destruction will not, in and of itself, promote "ozone recovery." Colder conditions increase the ozone-destroying efficiency of these chemicals.
Chlorine-gas emissions are expected to peak between 2000 and 2010, but if fossil-fuel burning is not curtailed radically, ozone loss from greenhouse-gas- induced stratospheric cooling is likely to increase in both severity and duration over the coming decades. Stratospheric cooling may push the maximum level of Arctic ozone-depletion back to between 2010 and 2019. This means that increased levels of springtime ultraviolet radiation will rain down on densely populated parts of Eurasia and North America for the next two decades.
Climate change on the order of 10,000 years is often described as "rapid." When unprecedented climate-change occurs in a decade or two, this can only be described as "catastrophic." That is what we are seeing right now.
Increasing concentrations of heat-trapping gases contribute to ozone depletion by lowering stratospheric temperatures and creating a more stable polar vortex that extends the colder temperatures into the springtime.
Nature's June 25 news section reported that "Ozone recovery will be a long- term affair." The short news article criticized India, China, and Third World nations for releasing ozone-destroying chemicals but failed to mention the ozone-depleting role of the "greenhouse effect" (primarily caused by fossil-fuel burning in the industrialized North).
In a letter in the April 9 issue of Nature, Drew T. Shindell, David Rind and Patrick Lonergan from NASA?s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Center for Climate Systems Research [Columbia University, 2880 Broadway, New York, NY 10025], noted that "Increased concentrations of greenhouse gases might be at least partly responsible for the very large Arctic ozone losses observed in recent winters." According to computer models, Arctic ozone losses will peak in the decade from 2010 to 2019 with local losses of up to two-thirds of the Arctic ozone column in the worst years.
The situation in the Arctic has enormous implications for the operation of the unregulated free market of the modern "combustion economies." Considering the resistance by US energy corporations to the Kyoto Climate Summit proposals, this news, if it is ever reported by the mainstream media, will not be welcomed.
What You Can Do: Send copies of this article to your political and media representatives. The American Geophysical Union will address these topics at its December 1998 meeting in San Francisco.
Jim Scanlon is a reporter for the Coastal Post [PO Box 31, Bolinas, CA 94924. (415) 868-1600, www.coastalpost.com] in which a longer version of this story first appeared.
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Coastal Post writer Jim Scanlon dead at 71
Point Reyes Light - April 21, 2005
http://www.ptreyeslight.com/stories/apr21_05/scanlon.html
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Jim Scanlon, citizen ozone scientist
http://www.sas.org/tcs/weeklyIssues/2004-05-21/editorial/ |
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Sore Throat
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| David Bellamy's inaccurate and selective figures on glaciers
Tue May 10, 2005 7:14 pm
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http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/sciences/story/0,12243,1480375,00.html
Junk science
David Bellamy's inaccurate and selective figures on glacier shrinkage are a boon to climate change deniers
George Monbiot
Tuesday May 10, 2005
The Guardian
For the past three weeks, a set of figures has been working a hole in my mind. On April 16, New Scientist published a letter from the famous botanist David Bellamy. Many of the world's glaciers, he claimed, "are not shrinking but in fact are growing ... 555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980". His letter was instantly taken up by climate change deniers. And it began to worry me. What if Bellamy was right?
He is a scientist, formerly a senior lecturer at the University of Durham. He knows, in other words, that you cannot credibly cite data unless it is well-sourced. Could it be that one of the main lines of evidence of the impact of global warming - the retreat of the world's glaciers - is wrong?
The question could scarcely be more important. If man-made climate change is happening, as the great majority of the world's climatologists claim, it could destroy the conditions that allow human beings to remain on the planet. The effort to cut greenhouse gases must come before everything else. This won't happen unless we can be confident that the science is right. Because Bellamy is president of the Conservation Foundation, the Wildlife Trusts, Plantlife International and the British Naturalists' Association, his statements carry a great deal of weight. When, for example, I challenged the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders over climate change, its spokesman cited Bellamy's position as a reason for remaining sceptical.
So last week I telephoned the World Glacier Monitoring Service and read out Bellamy's letter. I don't think the response would have been published in Nature, but it had the scientific virtue of clarity: "This is complete $#@#!." A few hours later, they sent me an email: "Despite his scientific reputation, he makes all the mistakes that are possible." He had cited data that was simply false, he had failed to provide references, he had completely misunderstood the scientific context and neglected current scientific literature. The latest studies show unequivocally that most of the world's glaciers are retreating.
But I still couldn't put the question out of my mind. The figures that Bellamy cited must have come from somewhere. I emailed him to ask for his source. After several requests, he replied to me at the end of last week. The data, he said, came from a website called www.iceagenow.com. Iceagenow was constructed by a man called Robert W Felix to promote his self-published book about "the coming ice age". It claims that sea levels are falling, not rising; that the Asian tsunami was caused by the "ice age cycle"; and that "underwater volcanic activity - not human activity - is heating the seas".
Is Felix a climatologist, a volcanologist or an oceanographer? Er, none of the above. His biography describes him as a "former architect". His website is so bonkers that I thought at first it was a spoof. Sadly, he appears to believe what he says. But there, indeed, was all the material that Bellamy cited in his letter, including the figures - or something resembling the figures - he quoted. "Since 1980, there has been an advance of more than 55% of the 625 mountain glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring group in Zurich." The source, which Bellamy also cited in his email to me, was given as "the latest issue of 21st Century Science and Technology".
21st Century Science and Technology? It sounds impressive, until you discover that it is published by Lyndon LaRouche. Lyndon LaRouche is the American demagogue who in 1989 received a 15-year sentence for conspiracy, mail fraud and tax-code violations. He has claimed that the British royal family is running an international drugs syndicate, that Henry Kissinger is a communist agent, that the British government is controlled by Jewish bankers, and that modern science is a conspiracy against human potential.
It wasn't hard to find out that this is one of his vehicles: LaRouche is named on the front page of the magazine's website, and the edition Bellamy cites contains an article beginning: "We in LaRouche's Youth Movement find ourselves in combat with an old enemy that destroys human beings ... it is empiricism."
Oh well, at least there is a source for Bellamy's figures. But where did 21st Century Science and Technology get them from? It doesn't say. But I think we can make an informed guess, for the same data can be found all over the internet. They were first published online by Professor Fred Singer, one of the very few climate change deniers who has a vaguely relevant qualification (he is, or was, an environmental scientist). He posted them on his website, www.sepp.org, and they were then reproduced by the appropriately named junkscience.com, by the Cooler Heads Coalition, the US National Centre for Public Policy Research and countless others. They have even found their way into the Washington Post.
They are constantly quoted as evidence that man-made climate change is not happening. But where did they come from? Singer cites half a source: "A paper published in Science in 1989." Well, the paper might be 16 years old, but at least, and at last, there is one. Surely?
I went through every edition of Science published in 1989, both manually and electronically. Not only did it contain nothing resembling those figures, throughout that year there was no paper published in this journal about glacial advance or retreat.
So it wasn't looking too good for Bellamy, or Singer, or any of the deniers who have cited these figures. But there was still one mystery to clear up. While Bellamy's source claimed that 55% of 625 glaciers are advancing, Bellamy claimed that 555 of them - or 89% - are advancing. This figure appears to exist nowhere else. But on the standard English keyboard, 5 and % occupy the same key. If you try to hit %, but fail to press shift, you get 555, instead of 55%. This is the only explanation I can produce for his figure. When I challenged him, he admitted that there had been "a glitch of the electronics".
So, in Bellamy's poor typing, we have the basis for a whole new front in the war against climate science. The 555 figure is now being cited as definitive evidence that global warming is a "fraud", a "scam", a "lie". I phoned New Scientist to ask if Bellamy had requested a correction. He had not.
It is hard to convey just how selective you have to be to dismiss the evidence for climate change. You must climb over a mountain of evidence to pick up a crumb: a crumb which then disintegrates in the palm of your hand. You must ignore an entire canon of science, the statements of the world's most eminent scientific institutions, and thousands of papers published in the foremost scientific journals. You must, if you are David Bellamy, embrace instead the claims of an eccentric former architect, which are based on what appears to be a non-existent data set. And you must do all this while calling yourself a scientist. |
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Deborah
Joined: 30 Jul 2000
Posts: 731
Location: East Coast |
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Tue May 10, 2005 11:18 pm
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10 April 2005
Swiss wrap glacier to slow ice melt
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/05/10/swiss.glacier.reut/
GEMSSTOCK, Switzerland (Reuters) -- Alarmed by the retreat of its Alpine glacier, a Swiss ski resort on Tuesday wrapped part of the shrinking ice-cap in a giant blanket in a bid to reduce the summer melt.
If successful, officials at the Gemsstock resort above Andermatt in central Switzerland expect the example to be followed elsewhere in the Alps, where scientists say glaciers are under threat from global warming.
"We think it will become common practice to cover parts of the glaciers," Urs Elmiger, a board member of Andermatt Gotthard Sportbahnen, the cable car operator behind the project, told Reuters.
A thin protective layer of artificial textiles, including polyester, was laid over an area of 3-4,000 square meters (yards). The fleece-like material, hard to distinguish with the naked eye from snow, will reflect the rays of the sun.
The 100,000 Swiss franc ($83,000) blanket will protect one of the main glacier access ramps, which has to be rebuilt each autumn at the start of the ski season to cover a yawning 20-meter gap opened up by the ice melt.
"It needs a lot of work, energy and money to rebuild. And one day, if the melt increases, the cost of rebuilding the ramp will be very, very high," said Elmiger.
But scientists stressed that while such defensive actions could prove valuable in selected spots, such as access areas or cable car installations, they were not a solution to the overall problem of the vanishing ice fields worldwide.
"It may be useful very locally, but it would be totally unfeasible -- economically and ecologically -- to cover completely even a small glacier," said geography professor Wilfried Haeberli of the University of Zurich.
The Alpine glaciers -- also in Austria, France and Italy -- are losing one percent of their mass every year and, even supposing no acceleration in that rate, will have all but disappeared by the end of the century.
More hot, dry summers like that of 2003 in Europe, when the loss speeded to five percent, could cut the life expectancy to no more than 50 years, Haeberli added.
"We estimate that by the end of the 21st century, with a medium-type climate scenario, about five percent of what existed in the 1970s will have survived," he told Reuters.
For Martin Hiller, spokesman on climate change for environmentalist group WWF International, who was on hand to witness the Alpine experiment, the move was positive but offered no real answer to ice loss.
"The solution is to switch to clean energy, we need to cut down on harmful pollutants, such as CO2 (carbon dioxide)," he said. |
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Deborah
Joined: 30 Jul 2000
Posts: 731
Location: East Coast |
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Wed May 11, 2005 1:35 am
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...the remaining (75% of the trees) "were simply ripped out of the ground, roots and all..."
What do people think when they read something like this, anyway? Do they think this is some kind of a movie? How about 12 inches of rain in North Carolina last week? Tornado watches in southern California last winter? 23 inches of snow in Ohio in April? What do people think is going on??
Unbelievable.
But then the media aren't lifting much of a finger to clarify any connections between these increasingly extreme events and the systemic destabilization that's driving them. Are they.
FACTFILE: Sweden's worst-ever winter storm
http://www.helsinginsanomat.fi/english/article/1101979448086
The winter storm of January 9th 2005 is regarded as the worst natural catastrophe to befall Sweden in the modern era. In the south of the country, winds of more than 40 metres a second (144 km/hour, 90 mph) were recorded. Seven people were killed.
More than 400,000 households were without electricity as a result. After as long as three weeks, around 14,000 households had still not been reconnected to the grid.
Around 80 million cubic metres of wood were damaged or came down overnight in the south of the country, roughly the equivalent of an entire year's normal felling for Sweden as a whole.
According to the Swedish Forest Administration, the cost of the storm damage comes close to EUR 2,000 million.
Sweden is unable to use all the storm-damaged timber itself, but a part of the logs and wood for papermaking is being shipped to plants in Finland.
The clean-up operation in the forested areas to the south of lakes Vättern and Vanern is on the same scale as the hypothetical cutting of six years' worth of felling.
Estimates indicate that only a maximum of 25% of the trees broke off at the crowns or on the trunks, and the remainder were simply ripped out of the ground, roots and all.
Some 80% of the fallen trees were firs and Norway spruces, with Scots pines accounting for 15%, and birches for 5%. Around one-third of the trees are regarded as being suitable for logging.
Sweden's timber harvesting and transport capacity is not sufficient for the task in hand, at least not given the pressing nature of the operation. There are hundreds of teams from other countries at work in Southern Sweden. The average distance to ports is 50 to 100 kilometres, but there is not sufficient haulage capacity either on land or by sea.
More than 50 Finnish timber harvesters and as many forest tractors are engaged in the work, and at least 200 men. A team of 50 Finnish electrical riggers was airlifted to Southern Sweden in mid-January to help with the task of repairing the electricity grid (see linked article from 12.1.2005). |
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Deborah
Joined: 30 Jul 2000
Posts: 731
Location: East Coast |
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Wed May 11, 2005 2:24 am
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Re:
Coastal Post writer Jim Scanlon dead at 71
Point Reyes Light - April 21, 2005
http://www.ptreyeslight.com/stories/apr21_05/scanlon.html
This is a great loss to everyone who cares about what's going on with our environmental systems. What a tragedy this man died at such a relatively young age. He was not only a superb observer, he had the gift of being able to clearly articulate his observations to a wide readership. I know I'll miss his lucid and well-researched articles and I don't doubt for a second that I'm not alone in this regard.
By the way, he's absolutely right about the suppression of data on recent Arctic stratospheric ozone loss. It's been very hard to find much of anything substantive in the last few months.
Here's one of his older pieces for those who haven't read it:
The Coastal Post - May, 1997
Jet Planes Pose Serious Environmental Threat;
Can Anything Be Done About Contrails?
http://www.coastalpost.com/97/5/1.htm
The following excerpt is an example of what I mean by "lucid":
..... Once at cruising altitude in the upper troposphere (and often in the stratosphere) where the temperature is very low, very dry and relatively much cleaner than lower, closer to earth, the waste gases have different, sometimes very complicated effects---which are not accounted for.
The earth really isn't a sphere, it really isn't round and neither is the boundary between the highly changeable troposphere and the stable stratosphere. One bobs and ripples and intermingles on top the other somewhat like a layer of oil on water. The stratosphere is warmer than the upper troposphere. There is a structure---a changing structure, but still a structure.
Warming a normally much colder part of the atmosphere breaks down this structure. Water is a very potent "greenhouse gas"---much more effective than carbon dioxide and other pollutants---and it is being introduced in massive, ever increasing amounts just under, and just over, the defining boundary in the structure.
When the jet aircraft fly in the stratosphere the chemical reactions of exhaust gases reduce natural ozone, cooling the warmer air above the boundary, and allowing energetic ultra-violet radiation to penetrate lower where it warms the air and may even reach the surface of the earth.
Flying just below the boundary exhaust gases produce ozone and other heat-trapping gases which warm cold air, further distorting the boundary. With large numbers of aircraft flying fixed routes, the effects become more pronounced..... |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1802
Location: x |
| Global warming threatening ‘roof of the world’
Thu May 12, 2005 7:05 pm
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http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_12-5-2005_pg4_4
Global warming threatening ‘roof of the world’
BEIJING: Chinese scientists warn the fragile environment of the Tibet-Qinghai plateau, known as the roof of the world, is under serious threat from global warming and pollution, state media said Wednesday.
Covering more than 360,000 square kilometers (140,000 square miles), the plateau is the cradle of three key Chinese rivers - the Yangtze, Yellow and Lancang - and home to many rare animals, plants and medicinal herbs.
But a decades-long study by the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau Study Institute of the Chinese Academy of Scientists warns the area is deteriorating due to climate change, overgrazing and increasing human activity, Xinhua news agency said.
Researchers found the climate of the plateau, which has an average elevation of 4,461 metres (14,721 feet) and includes Mount Everest, has warmed, rainfall has increased and glaciers have shrunk.
“From the 1980s on, the plateau has experienced a period in which the temperature has obviously been on the high side,” the report said, noting that the days above freezing were increasing.
“Despite the increased rainfall, the area of glaciers is shrinking,” it added. The report did not state what effect this could have, although Himalayan and Tibetan plateau glaciers feed Asia’s greatest rivers. |
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