posted 03-15-2004 07:26 PM               

I had absolutely nothing to do with him losing his posting privileges at this site.

I resigned from the Council months ago and have no association with this forum other than being a regular poster.

In the past I have had disagreements about decisions to ban people.

In the case of Eduardo Ferreyra I think he provides a valuable service.

It is important that his position receives a full public airing and that it is fully exposed for the unfounded and biased "science" that it is.

I am happy to provide that service.

His name calling is simply a childish response, presumably based on his own frustration for so consistently being proved wrong.

I've taken much worse in my life, and were he sufficiently rational he would clearly understand that such actions on his part only further undermine his tenuous position.

Once again, I doubt that he has the cajones to acknowledge his mistake.

posted 03-15-2004 09:37 PM               

Glaciers and Sea Ice Endangered by Rising Temperatures

Janet Larsen

By 2020, the snows of Kilimanjaro may exist only in old photographs. The glaciers in Montana's Glacier National Park could disappear by 2030. And by mid-century, the Arctic Sea may be completely ice-free during summertime. As the earth's temperature has risen in recent decades, the earth's ice cover has begun to melt. And that melting is accelerating.

In both 2002 and 2003, the Northern Hemisphere registered record-low sea ice cover. New satellite data show the Arctic region warming more during the 1990s than during the 1980s, with Arctic Sea ice now melting by up to 15 percent per decade. The long-sought Northwest Passage, a dream of early explorers, could become our nightmare. The loss of Arctic Sea ice could alter ocean circulation patterns and trigger changes in global climate patterns.

On the opposite end of the globe, Southern Ocean sea ice floating near Antarctica has shrunk by some 20 percent since 1950. This unprecedented melting of sea ice corroborates records showing that the regional air temperature has increased by 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1950.

Antarctic ice shelves that existed for thousands of years are crumbling. One of the world's largest icebergs, named B-15, that measured near 10,000 square kilometers (4,000 square miles) or half the size of New Jersey, calved off the Ross Ice Shelf in March 2000. In May 2002, the shelf lost another section measuring 31 kilometers (19 miles) wide and 200 kilometers (124 miles) long.

Elsewhere on Antarctica, the Larsen Ice Shelf has largely disintegrated within the last decade, shrinking to 40 percent of its previously stable size. Following the break-off of the Larsen A section in 1995 and the collapse of Larsen B in early 2002, melting of the nearby land-based glaciers that the ice shelves once supported has more than doubled.

Unlike the melting of sea ice or the floating ice shelves along coasts, the melting of ice on land raises sea level. Recent studies showing the worldwide acceleration of glacier melting indicate that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's estimate for sea level rise this century—ranging from 0.1 meters to 0.9 meters—will need to be revised upwards. (See table of selected examples of ice melt from around the world.)
http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update32_data.htm

On Greenland, an ice-covered island three times the size of Texas, once-stable glaciers are now melting at a quickening rate. The Jakobshavn Glacier on the island's southwest coast, which is one of the major drainage outlets from the interior ice sheet, is now thinning four times faster than during most of the twentieth century. Each year Greenland loses some 51 cubic kilometers of ice, enough to annually raise sea level 0.13 millimeters. Were Greenland's entire ice sheet to melt, global sea level could rise by a startling 7 meters (23 feet), inundating most of the world's coastal cities.

The Himalayas contain the world's third largest ice mass after Antarctica and Greenland. Most Himalayan glaciers have been thinning and retreating over the past 30 years, with losses accelerating to alarming levels in the past decade. On Mount Everest, the glacier that ended at the historic base camp of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, the first humans to reach the summit, has retreated 5 kilometers (3 miles) since their 1953 ascent. Glaciers in Bhutan are retreating at an average rate of 30—40 meters a year. A similar situation is found in Nepal.

As the glaciers melt they are rapidly filling glacial lakes, creating a flood risk. An international team of scientists has warned that with current melt rates, at least 44 glacial lakes in the Himalayas could burst their banks in as little as five years.

Glaciers themselves store vast quantities of water. More than half of the world's population relies on water that originates in mountains, coming from rainfall runoff or ice melt. In some areas glaciers help sustain a constant water supply; in others, meltwater from glaciers is a primary water source during the dry season. In the short term, accelerated melting means that more water feeds rivers. Yet as glaciers disappear, dry season river flow declines.

The Himalayan glaciers feed the seven major rivers of Asia—the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Salween, Mekong, Yangtze, and Huang He (Yellow)—and thus contribute to the year-round water supply of a vast population. In India alone, some 500 million people, including those in New Delhi and Calcutta, depend on glacier meltwater that feeds into the Ganges River system. Glaciers in Central Asia's Tien Shan Mountains have shrunk by nearly 30 percent between 1955 and 1990. In arid western China, shrinking glaciers account for at least 10 percent of freshwater supplies.

The largest aggregation of tropical glaciers is in the northern Andes. The retreat of the Qori Kalis Glacier on the west side of the Quelccaya Ice Cap that stretches across Peru has accelerated to 155 meters a year between 1998 and 2000—three times faster than during the previous three-year period. The entire ice cap could vanish over the next two decades.

The Antizana Glacier, which provides Quito, Ecuador, with almost half its water, has retreated more than 90 meters over the last eight years. The Chacaltaya Glacier near La Paz, Bolivia, melted to 7 percent of its 1940s volume by 1998. It could disappear entirely by the end of this decade, depriving the 1.5 million people in La Paz and the nearby city of Alto of an important source of water and power.

Africa's glaciers are also disappearing. Across the continent, mountain glaciers have shrunk to one third their size over the twentieth century. On Tanzania's Kilimanjaro, ice cover has shrunk by more than 33 percent since 1989. By 2020 it could be completely gone.

In Western Europe, glacial area has shrunk by up to 40 percent and glacial volume by more than half since 1850. If temperatures continue to rise at recent rates, major sections of glaciers covering the Alps and the French and Spanish Pyrenees could be gone in the next few decades. During the record-high temperature summer of 2003, some Swiss glaciers retreated by an unprecedented 150 meters. The United Nations Environment Programme is warning that for this region long associated with ice and snow, warming temperatures signify the demise of a popular ski industry, not to mention a cultural identity.

Boundaries around Banff, Yoho, and Jasper National Parks in the Canadian Rockies cannot stop the melting of the glaciers there. Glacier National Park in Montana has lost over two thirds of its glaciers since 1850. If temperatures continue to rise, it may lose the remainder by 2030.

In just the past 30 years, the average temperature in Alaska climbed more than 3 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit)—easily four times the global increase. Glaciers in all of Alaska's 11 glaciated mountain ranges are shrinking. Since the mid-1990s, Alaskan glaciers have been thinning by 1.8 meters a year, more than three times as fast as during the preceding 40 years.

The global average temperature has climbed by 0.6 degrees Celsius (1 degree Fahrenheit) in the past 25 years. Over this time period, melting of sea ice and mountain glaciers has increased dramatically. During this century, global temperature may rise between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius, and melting will accelerate further. Just how much will depend in part on the energy policy choices made today.

Be sure to look at the table,

SELECTED EXAMPLES OF ICE MELT AROUND THE WORLD
http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update32_data.htm

********************************************

From Other Sources

Mark A.J. Curran, et al., "Ice Core Evidence for Antarctic Sea Ice Decline Since the 1950s," Science, vol. 302 (14 November 2003), pp. 1203-06.

De Angelis and Skvarca, "Glacier Surge After Ice Shelf Collapse," Science, vol. 299 (7 March 2003).

Mark B. Dyurgerov and Mark F. Meier, "Twentieth Century Climate Change: Evidence from Small Glaciers," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 97, no. 4 (15 February 2000), 1406-11.

Goddard Institute for Space Studies, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Earth Sciences Directorate, "Global Temperature Anomalies in .01 C," http://www.giss.nasa.gov/data, updated January 2001.

IPCC, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis; Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability; and Mitigation. Contributions of Working Group I, II, and III to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press). Text and summaries of each report available at http://www.ipcc.ch.

W. Krabill et al., "Greenland Ice Sheet: High Elevation Balance and Peripheral Thinning," Science, vol. 289 (21 July 2000), pp. 428-30.

Thomas V. Lowell, "As Climate Changes, So Do Glaciers," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 97, no. 4 (15 February 2000), 1351-54.

M.C. Serreze, et al., "A Record Minimum Arctic Sea Ice Extent and Area in 2002," Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 30, no. 3 (2003), pp. 1110-14.

Lars H. Smedsrud and Tore Furevik, "Towards an Ice-Free Arctic?" Cicerone 2/2000.

Lonnie G. Thompson, et al., "Kilimanjaro Ice Core Records: Evidence of Holocene Climate Change in Tropical Africa," Science, vol. 298 (18 October 2002), pp. 589-93

WWF, "Going, Going, Gone!: Climate Change and Global Glacier Decline," news report, 27 November 2003.

LINKS

Global Land Ice Measurements from Space http://www.GLIMS.org

Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado http://instaar.colorado.edu

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change http://www.ipcc.ch

National Snow and Ice Data Center http://www-nsidc.colorado.edu

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change http://www.unfccc.de

World Glacier Inventory http://nsidc.org/data/glacier
_inventory/index.html

World Glacier Monitoring Service http://www.geo.unizh.ch/wgms

Worldwatch Institute Climate Resource Center http://www.worldwatch.org
/topics/energy/climate

posted 03-15-2004 10:58 PM               

Glaciers in the Himalaya are wasting at alarming and accelerating rates, as indicated by comparisons of satellite and historic data, and as shown by the widespread, rapid growth of lakes on the glacier surfaces.

GLIMS: Global Land Ice Measurements from Space

posted 03-15-2004 11:07 PM               

While there are some examples of advancing glaciers, these are the exception, not the rule.

Who says?

The World Glacier Monitoring Service!
http://www.geo.unizh.ch/wgms/

2000/2001
Mean specific (annual) net balance -367 mm
Standard deviation ±707 mm
Minimum value -2090 mm
Maximum value +858 mm
Positive balances 26 %

2. Mass Balance Data 2000/2001 for Selected Glaciers
Name b01
[mm]

CANADA
Helm (1975) -600
Peyto (1966) -920
Place (1965) -760
White (1960) -181
USA
Gulkana (1966) -690
Wolverine (1966) +450
South Cascade (1953) -1570
ECUADOR
Antizana 15 Alpha (1995) -598
BOLIVIA
Chacaltaya (1992)
Zongo (1992)
CHILE
Enchaurren Norte (1976)
ARGENTINA
Martial Este (1998) -691
ICELAND
Hofsjökull N (1988) -580
Hofsjökull SW (1989) -1890
Hofsjökull E (1989) -1550
Brúarjökull (1993) +110
Eyjabakkajökull (1991) +80
Tungnaárjökull (1993) -1710
Köldukvislarjökull (1994) -970
Breidamerkurjökull (1997) -1340
NORWAY
Midtre Lovénbreen (1968)
Hansbreen (1989) -1070
Waldemarbreen (1977) -767
Engabreen (1970) -1530
Austdalsbreen (1988) -1620
Ålfotbreen (1963) -2090
Nigardsbreen (1962) -220
Gråsubreen (1962) 0
Storbreen (1949) -550
Hellstugubreen (1962) -330
Harbardsbreen (1997) -1110
Hardangerjøkulen (1963) -850
Hansebreen (1986) -2720
Jostefonn (1995) --
Langfjordjøkulen (1989) -2280
Midtdalsbreen -640
Storglombreen -1760
SWEDEN
Riukojietna (1986) --
Mårmaglaciären (1990) -400
Storglaciären (1946) -700
Rabots glaciär (1982) -760
FRANCE
Saint Sorlin (1959) +390
Sarennes (1949) +430
SWITZERLAND
Silvretta (1960) +858
Gries (1962) -55
Basódino (1991) +620
AUSTRIA
Sonnblickkees (1959) -399
Wurtenkees (1983) -300
Vernagtferner (1965) -224
Kesselwandferner (1953) +524
Hintereisferner (1953) -173
Jamtalferner (1989) -62
ITALY
Caresèr (1967) -250
Fontana Bianca (1984) +395
SPAIN
Maladeta (1992) +435
RUSSIA
No. 125 (Vodopadniy) (1977)
Maliy Aktru (1962)
Leviy Aktru (1977)
Garabashi (1987) -750
Djankuat (1968) -150
KAZAKHSTAN
Ts. Tuyuksuyskiy (1957) -560
CHINA
Urumqihe S. No. 1 (1959)

Note: numbers in brackets behind the glacier names indicate the beginning of continuous mass balance records.

posted 03-17-2004 11:33 AM               

Do global warming dangers lie under seas?

Scientist longs to test impact of extra C02 in oceans

By Miguel Llanos

SEATTLE - Ocean chemist Peter Brewer looks at the map on his laptop computer, jealous of what his terrestrial peers have been allowed to do around the globe. Dozens of red dots show where scientists have tested how increases in a gas tied to global warming affect land ecosystems.

Brewer is still waiting for a first red dot under the seas. For all the tests on land, not a single large-scale test has been sanctioned to simulate what the oceans of the late 21st century might look like if emissions of carbon dioxide, or CO2, continue to rise.

This, despite estimates that the oceans have already absorbed 400 billion tons of CO2 from fossil fuels and continue to take in 21 million tons a day -- emissions that many scientists fear are warming the Earth beyond its natural course.

Granted, the oceans are huge carbon reservoirs, naturally holding an estimated 139,000 billion tons of CO2, but what's not known is how much variation is enough to throw the system out of whack.

"The problem," Brewer says, "is that about 50 percent of the 400 billion tons of CO2 we have put in the ocean is in the upper 200 meters. Since the average depth of the ocean is 4,000 meters, we are having a large impact on the shallow surface layers where most marine life is."

Fear of 'unknown territory'

That's not to say Brewer hasn't done some limited testing himself. The senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, he started with a humble beaker and moved up to 20 liters, seeing how a bit of C02 in a specific spot under water changed the chemistry.

But the process of getting wider acceptance for his research has been frustrating.

"For 20 liters of CO2 we needed a permit," he notes. "Our ship let that much out in four minutes!"

On top of that, he says, "it took us six weeks of intense negotiations" with officials at the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, where the test took place.

"It's because of unknown territory," says Brewer. People hear carbon dioxide and immediately alarm bells go off. But he also understands. "It's as if someone came up to you and asked if they could use your backyard."

Why bother?
Brewer's chief concern is the fact that adding C02 to the ocean increases its acidity, or pH level. "There is quite a range of pH" in the seas, he notes, and while many marine animals can migrate through such ranges, many are finely attuned to their pH environment and can't tolerate significant variations.

Brewer points to lab research by Yoshihisa Shirayama, a marine biologist at Kyoto University in Japan, who found significant changes in sea urchin development when CO2 was introduced and changed pH levels.

Chris Field, a Carnegie Institution global ecology researcher at Stanford University, agrees with the pH concerns and notes that acidity is particularly hard on coral reefs. "The effects of ocean CO2 are likely to be mainly on pH," he says, "which alters things like calcification in corals and other organisms with carbonate skeletons."

Brewer sees the pH changes as "an additional insult" on top of other effects of C02 -- in particular, warmer sea temperatures, which are hardest on coral reefs.

pH past, and future?
Brewer has estimated that the surface pH of oceans worldwide is 0.1 units lower than in pre-industrial times.

The pH concerns led to computer modeling by Livermore National Lab researchers Ken Caldeira and Michael Wickett. In a 2003 report in the journal Nature, they found no evidence that ocean pH was ever more than 0.6 units lower than today.

A drop of 0.7 units is possible, they said, warning that "unabated CO2 emissions over the coming centuries may produce changes in ocean pH that are greater than any experienced in the past 300 million years."

That report just looked at pH levels from airborne CO2 emissions that fall into the seas. But oceans could see much more if another idea takes hold: pumping C02 emissions from power plants directly into the waters.

The idea is to trap it there instead of sending it into the atmosphere, where it could be altering global temperatures.

Trees and grasses, which naturally absorb C02 as well, have also been eyed as traps, or sinks, but recent research suggests their contribution will be limited. That's raised the profile of ocean trapping even higher, but it's also been on Brewer's mind.

Next steps

Brewer doesn't claim to know how much additional CO2 marine life can tolerate, but he thinks long-term tests will determine that and he took his passion and his plea to the recent annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"It's the only way to find out how coral reefs, deep-sea fisheries and other marine environments will react to a change in ocean pH," he told reporters and peers in Seattle. "You have to do the experiment."

He's hoping that now, six years after his first beaker test, he can get support for a much grander experiment: a patch of ocean that's marked off with sensors capable of tracking CO2 as it disperses through that area. Brewer figures a good place to start is by a coral reef.

Testing could be five years out still, and Brewer recognizes the challenge of dealing with a test site where the ecosystem moves around with the tides. "Researchers on land have it easy since trees don't move," he notes.

Stanford's Field sympathizes with Brewer, noting that a key obstacle has been how "technically difficult" the research is. "He is one of only a few people who could do this," Field says.

Still, Field thinks science can make room for ocean studies. "I don't think it is a question of whether land or ocean studies are more important," says Field, author of the new book "The Global Carbon Cycle." "But we should do at least a few ocean studies to get a sense of the range of possible effects."

Brewer's earlier, limited tests were funded by the U.S. Energy Department and Japan, and he's confident money wouldn't be an obstacle. What he instead worries about is more frustration in trying to get a test permit.

"Cost is not an issue, it's attitude," he says. When it comes to grasping what's at stake, "there's a very large public gap."

*******************************************

Be sure to check out graphics and additional links at the original site:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4286438/

posted 03-18-2004 09:55 AM            

Monday 15 March 2004

The contempt of the Bush administration for environmentalists and their concerns is well known by now. While evidence of man- made environmental damage mounts, the Bush team resists its implications like a defeated army whose rear guard fights off its pursuers as it retreats. That has been especially true of its handling of the most serious of all environmental issues - global warming.

First, the administration claimed that global warming was the work of liberal hysterics and had been discounted by "more sober scientists." Then, it admitted that it was happening but said there was no proof humans caused it, or could fix it.

Retreat No. 3 was the White House discovery that, yes, indeed, some of the warming was due to human activity, and we should take steps, say, to reduce emissions, but those steps should be voluntary on the part of industry.

There are two scientific theories that have been gaining credence in recent years that challenge the sanity of that kind of resistance to fact - and make no mistake about it, global warming is a fact.

Both theories begin with a phenomenon that is taking place right now. Scientists are beginning to understand climate as a complex interactive system that is affected by everything from the emission of greenhouse gases, to deforestation, to the condition of Arctic and Antarctic glaciers.

It is a system with a feedback mechanism. For example, higher temperatures lead to the melting of sea ice, which exposes more water to the sun. The water absorbs more solar energy, which accelerates global warming, and so on. Scientists fear that such feedbacks might produce a self-sustaining and accelerating warming that is beyond human control.

The second theory goes by the name of Abrupt Climate Change. It suggests that catastrophic results of global warming might not occur gradually, as most have expected, but quite suddenly - within a few years. This theory also starts with the melting of glaciers and sea ice, but involves the dilution of seawater's salinity - or salt content - that results. That salt content is a key element in an ocean current that takes heat from the tropics northward and cold water southward and in the process moderates temperatures in the Eastern United States and much of Europe.

The collapse of this so-called conveyor could, in the worst case, produce a new ice age. The best case would give us severe winters, increasingly violent storms, flooding, drought and high winds around the globe, disrupting food production and energy supplies and raising sea levels high enough to flood coastal cities and make them unlivable.

These are not predictions but real possibilities - far more possible today than scientists had previously believed. And while the politicos in the White House continue to stick their heads in the sand, some at the Pentagon have taken on the task of studying the national- security implications of Abrupt Climate Change.

What they came up with was a world whose "carrying capacity" - the number of people the globe can sustain - is being progressively lowered, a world where war becomes the rule, not the exception, and where wars are no longer fought for ideological, religious, or geopolitical reasons - but for resources and survival. This unclassified Pentagon study, completed last fall, has been released to several news organizations and was highlighted in the Feb. 9 edition of Fortune magazine.

posted 03-18-2004 02:29 PM               

The Ocean in a High CO2 World

An International Science Symposium
May 10-12, 2004
UNESCO Paris, France

The Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) are convening an open symposium on The Ocean in a High-CO2 World on 10-12 May 2004 in Paris, France. The symposium will address the biological and biogeochemical consequences of increasing atmospheric and oceanic CO2 levels, and possible strategies for mitigating such increases. The symposium will include plenary presentations, discussion sessions on research priorities, and a poster session. Papers from the symposium will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans and research priorities will be published separately for the benefit of ocean scientists and research program managers worldwide.

International Planning Committee Members:

Phil Boyd (New Zealand)
Peter Brewer (USA)
Ralph Cicerone (Chair, USA)
Peter Haugan (Norway)
Jim McWilliams (USA)
Liliane Merlivat (France)
Takashi Ohsumi (Japan)
James Orr (Vice-Chair, France)
Silvio Pantoja (Chile)
Hans-Otto Poertner (Germany)

Symposium Coordinators :

posted 03-18-2004 02:30 PM               

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/interna.asp?idnews=22904

ENVIRONMENT:
Prepare for the Worst, Says Next Host of Climate Change Meet

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Mar 17 (IPS) - In the past five international conferences on climate change, hopes have focused on attempts to get the United States and Russia to agree to cut emissions of greenhouse gases. But the wait has been in vain, and the global meetings flopped, one after another.

The strategy at the next conference, to be hosted by Argentina in December, will be to change the central focus of the debate, on the premise that climate change is inevitable even if emissions are drastically cut, and that developing countries must start getting ready to deal with the damages.

Instead of preparing for yet another meeting concentrated on bringing the Kyoto Protocol -- in which industrialised nations agree to meet binding targets for reducing emissions of the gases that cause global warming -- into effect, Argentina proposes discussing the creation of funds and mechanisms for ''adapting'' to the increasingly accelerated phenomenon of global warming.

The Argentine government's initiative, which has the backing of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), will focus on the question of drumming up funds that would enable developing countries to create the infrastructure -- like irrigation or canal systems -- needed to deal with the changes provoked by global warming.

The Tenth Conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP-10) will be held Dec. 6-17 in Buenos Aires.

The Argentine capital also hosted the Fourth Conference. But since no other Latin American country set forth a proposal, the Convention's executive secretariat accepted the offer from Buenos Aires.

The suggestion to discuss the creation of ''adaptation mechanisms'' came from the Argentine Foreign Ministry's director of environmental affairs, Raúl Estrada Oyuela, who took part in the negotiations that led to the implementation of the Convention on Climate Change in 1994, and to the desig n of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.

Before the Protocol can go into effect, it must be ratified by nations whose total combined emissions of greenhouse gases account for 55 percent of global emissions.

The countries that had ratified the Protocol by late 2003 accounted for 44.3 percent of global emissions.

If Russia were to ratify the Protocol, the proportion would rise to 61 percent. And if the United States signed and ratified the treaty, the proportion would climb to 80 percent. Only one of them would have to ratify the treaty for it to enter into effect. But neither Washington nor Moscow are willing to do so.

COP-6, which took place in late 2000 in The Hague, was cut short to await the results of the hard-fought elections in the United States, which is responsible for 24 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.

Outgoing president Bill Clinton (1993-2001) had signed the Protocol towards the end of his term. But shortly after taking office, President George W. Bush revoked the U.S. government's signature.

The second half of COP-6 was held in 2001, and no progress was made towards expanding commitments to reduce emissions.

Since then, all eyes have turned towards Russia. After a few hints that it would ratify the Protocol, Moscow failed to do so at COP-8 in New Delhi, India in 2002 and at COP-9, held late last year in Milan, Italy.

The last few conferences were described as dull and ineffective by government delegates and activists alike.

Meanwhile, the process of global warming has not let up.

In the 10 years since the Convention on Climate Change went into effect, greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase, reflecting a ''collective failure'' on the part of the industrialised North, the U.S.-based Global Resources Institute (GRI) said this week.

GRI researchers estimate that emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have increased 11 percent in the past decade, and they project another 50 percent rise by 2020.

A team of 25 scientists and activists who visited the glaciers of Patagonia, the region shared by Argentina and Chile at the extreme southern tip of South America, aboard the Greenpeace ship the Arctic Sunrise in late January and early February found evidence of severe glacial retreat caused by global warming.

Argentina will recommend that the goal of getting Russia and/or the United States to ratify the Protocol should not be put at the top of the agenda, even though it remains the key objective of the negotiations carried out since the Convention on Climate Change was adopted in 1992.

''If Russia ratifies the Protocol before COP-10, then we'll change our plans. But the most reasonable route is to prepare for the worst,'' Estrada Oyuela said at a Mar. 15 meeting of representatives of local NGOs, where he announced the position to be taken by Buenos Aires in its preparations for the conference.

The idea was accepted as ''realistic'' by many of the NGOs taking part in the meeting. ''It doesn't make sense to continue pushing for ratification of the Kyoto Protocol when it is clear that they don't intend to comply with it,'' Anna Petra, with the local EcoLaPaz Environmentalist Association, told IPS.

''We know that even if (the effect of the greenhouse gases) is mitigated, and emissions are drastically reduced, climate change is irreversible, so adaptation is one way to assess how much damage has already been done, and how the vulnerabilities of each country can be addressed,'' said Petra, whose organisation forms part of Friends of the Earth International.

Juan Carlos Villalonga, with Greenpeace-Argentina's energy campaign, agrees: ''The Kyoto Protocol is stuck in a dead-end alley, and I believe Estrada Oyuela's stance is one of good faith, because he recommends not losing any more time in waiting for emissions to be reduced, and suggests that we attempt to do something in terms of adapting to climate change.''

Villalonga noted, for example, that in the pampas of central Argentina, rainfall has increased nearly 40 percent in 30 years due to global warming, and investment is urgently needed to create new networks of canals, dikes, roads and bridges.

Estrada Oyuela's position ''is pragmatic, and we support it,'' said the Greenpeace activist, although he warned of certain risks. On one hand, he expressed the fear that the policies aimed at helping countries deal with climate change could begin to be seen as a solution to the underlying problem.

Villalonga also warned of the risk that the international community could end up facilitating things for countries that refuse to make progress towards eliminating the causes of global warming.

Greenhouse gases are basically the result of the burning of fossil fuels like oil, coal and gas.

''The adaptation mechanisms would be a palliative, but if emissions reduction is not required and the petroleum industry interests aren't touched, there will be no cure for this illness,'' said Villalonga.

Since the climate change conferences got underway in 1992, the emphasis has been on cutting emissions and mitigating their effects, said Estrada Oyuela.

However, it is increasingly important for developing countries to put an emphasis on their vulnerabilities and on measures to address them, he stressed.

The proposal that Argentina will send to the Climate Change Convention General Secretariat in June breaks up the agenda for the December ministerial meeting into four major areas of debate: adaptation; energy and climate change; land use; and the negotiating process itself.

Instead of the traditional series of speeches by environment ministers, Buenos Aires suggests setting up four panels comprised of six ministers and a moderator to discuss the four main areas of debate. All of the regions would be represented on each panel.

''We must bring the big issues that were sent to the parallel meetings back into the conferences,'' Estrada Oyuela told the representatives of civil society Monday.

He was referring to the forums in which NGOs, business chambers, and academics take part, and which have lately been joined by government officials.

posted 03-18-2004 04:55 PM               

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2849885a7693,00.html

Southern Ocean study to better understand global warming

19 March 2004

Scientists on a New Zealand research vessel are to test a theory that fertilising oceans with iron sulphate could slow down global warming.

The experiment will be carried out from the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) vessel Tangaroa, which is due to leave Wellington today for the Southern Ocean.

The trip would be one of this country's largest oceanographic research surveys, Niwa said in a statement yesterday.

On board would be 30 scientists from 17 organisations in six countries, studying how the ocean controlled climate.

Without the oceans taking up about a third of the carbon dioxide humans added to the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels climate change would happen much faster, Niwa said.

posted 03-19-2004 12:09 AM               

http://www.arlingtoninstitute.org/energy_movingamerica.htm

Executive Summary

Recent terrorist events have again raised new questions about the security of U.S. energy. In the light of Middle East regional instability, it is fair to ask: Are there any alternatives to the status quo? How might the U.S. hurry the inevitable shift in primary energy supply, which has happened many times before in history, to a more stable, clean alternative to oil?

This study looks at historical global energy transitions, catalogues the present situation, looks into potential new technologies, envisions a new, all-electric world, and then posits a strategy that could dramatically and fundamentally change the shape of energy usage in the U.S. and the planet in the next fifteen years.

About 26% of the total energy consumption in the United States is used for transportation. Oil, 60% of which is imported, provides nearly all that energy. To solve the problem of dependency on imported oil, changes must occur in the transportation sector.

In sum, it looks like the world - led by the U.S. - is moving toward the day when hydrogen will replace oil as the major source of energy for transportation. The only question is how we get there. There are three major scenarios that describe possible energy environments of the next few decades: Awash in Oil and Gas, Technology Triumphs, and Turbulent World. Within the alternative vagaries of unlimited fossil fuels, new hydrogen-based technologies, or broad-based chaos that begs for change, a path must be planned that is based upon evolutionary change but will respond to revolutionary influences.

Where is this all going in the end? What does the world of transportation look like in, say, 2050? It's our guess that it's an all-electric world. Almost all vehicles (and most of the rest of our tools) will be electrically powered - the question is where and how the electricity is generated. Breakthroughs in generation, distribution and storage are almost inevitable and will eliminate all of the major problems associated with electricity today.

Keeping in mind possible technological breakthroughs that could leap over hydrogen fuel cells and produce electricity directly on a vehicle, we nevertheless jumped into the present methanol-ethanol-natural gas argument as a source for H2 and then assessed all of the major alternative vehicles that are presently under development.

There are a number of fundamental considerations that will always be major factors in any changes to a new energy source: political and economic feasibility, environmental impact, utilization of existing infrastructure, potential geopolitical disruption, et al. Using Think Toolsä technology, we arrayed all of these against all combinations of energy source/vehicle to isolate which options presented the best near-term, mid-term and long-term benefits. Always preserving the capability of rapidly accelerating the pace because of some major event or science breakthrough, a solid 15-year development path was designed.

The beginning of the strategy is already being played out: all manufacturers can now produce E85 engines (that can run on any combination of gasoline and ethanol up to 85% ethanol), with no changes in engineering and manufacturing cost. They should do so immediately. That would open up many hundreds of thousands of new vehicles to using ethanol, a domestically produced alternative fuel that can be distributed through the existing infrastructure with essentially no change at all.

An increasing number of manufacturers are producing hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs). Electricity is produced in an HEV from an internal combustion engine/generator set and stored in batteries. Either the engine or the batteries is then used for powering electric drive motors under the most efficient conditions. HEVs are the first step toward an all-electric vehicle, and if the engine were an E85/HEV engine it would at the same time be much more fuel-efficient while a larger portion of the fuel would come from North America.

Efficiency could be significantly increased above that gained from powertrain upgrades by integrating full-system design measures that take into consideration elements like aerodynamic drag, rolling friction, heating and cooling efficiencies, etc. The best example of this is the Hypercar® that has been developed in Colorado. Hypercar® design ideas combined with the HEV drivetrain could theoretically produce average fuel consumptions around 90 mpg.

The HEV/Hypercar® could easily be upgraded with fuel cells when they become commercially available. That would be a natural evolution along the developmental path to national independence, vehicle efficiency, and environmental friendliness.

posted 03-19-2004 10:37 AM               

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1069534.htm

Study rules out iron-seeding to fight warming

A once-promising theory that seeding oceans with iron to create plankton blooms to extract greenhouse gases from the atmosphere has turned out to be impractical in the long term, a study released says.

A study led by New Zealand's University of Otago of Dunedin found that while a ton of iron would fertilise a phytoplankton bloom, it would also require at least 5,000 tons of silicate to sustain it.

"It's just not practical," Otago oceanographer Philip Boyd said in a paper published in the science journal Nature and issued on Friday by the university.

Phytoplankton harvest sunlight to fix carbon that is then either re-mineralised to form carbon dioxide in the surface waters of the ocean and released back into the atmosphere, or "pumped" down to the deep ocean layer as the plankton sinks.

In 1999, Mr Boyd and a team of other New Zealand and international scientists distributed around 8,000 kilograms of an iron compound in solution over a patch of the Southern Ocean eight kilometres in diameter.

The result was a five-fold increase in phytoplankton stocks during the developing bloom and it was believed that simply adding iron might be the answer to increasing the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide locked up in the ocean.

"What we found, however, is that adding iron to the ocean produces a very different picture in the longer-term," Mr Boyd said.

After 18 days of a similar experiment in the Gulf of Alaska, the iron-induced bloom declined and satellite pictures show merely a ghost of the plankton-rich patch that had blossomed initially.

"We think the decline was initiated by the drop-off in iron levels, but the secondary factor is the removal of all of the silicate by phytoplankton," Mr Boyd said.

"Until now, we had not realised the importance of silicate in causing the bloom's decline and while it might be feasible for us to add iron to the ocean to stimulate blooms, for every ton of it we throw overboard, we'd need to add at least 5,000 tons of silicate to enable the blooms to persist for long enough to impact on atmospheric carbon dioxide levels," he said.

posted 03-19-2004 03:50 PM               

UK wildlife vanishingDwindling populations of animals, insects, and plants spark fears of global extinction

By Catherine Brahic

Two studies published in Science this week paint a stark picture of declining biodiversity in Britain, with serious implications for world ecology. The first study provides strong evidence of shrinking plant, bird and butterfly populations in Britain. The second, on plant biodiversity, points a finger squarely at humankind.

The authors of the first study “tentatively suggest” their results support the hypothesis that world is facing the sixth major extinction in history.

“Evidence of a global extinction crisis has come into sharp focus with these important results from a team of top British scientists analyzing unparalleled datasets for birds, plants, and butterflies in Britain,” commented Mark Collins, director of the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) World Conservation Monitoring Centre, who was not involved in the studies.

Jeremy Thomas, of the British Natural Environment Research Council, and his colleagues compared six national biodiversity surveys. Together, the studies recruited over 20,000 volunteers to survey 1254 species of plants, 201 bird species, and 58 butterfly species. For each set, two surveys were carried out between 13 and 27 years apart.

Their comparison revealed population declines in all three groups. Twenty-eight percent of plant species declined over 40 years, 54% of bird species decreased over 20 years, and an astonishing 71% of butterfly species declined over 20 years. Among these, two species were present in the first survey, but not seen during the second.

Previous predictions that we could be heading to the sixth major species extinction have all been based on small numbers of species, mostly birds and plants. The inclusion of butterflies in Thomas' survey is significant because insects make up 54% of the planet's fauna and flora.

“This has led many to suggest that insects would be more resilient to extinction,” said Sandy Knapp of the London Natural History Museum, who was not part of the studies. “The lesson and warning is there for all to see—we are poised on the verge of the sixth extinction crisis. Britain, by virtue of its well known, well studied biodiversity, is the canary for the rest of the globe.”

Thomas remained cautious, underlining that the comparative figures for Britain would have to carry over to global populations for the warning to hold true.

Also in Science this week is a study led by PhD student Carly Stevens of The Open University. This research indicates a clear and direct relation between the amount of nitrogen pollution in an ecosystem and the decline of that system's biodiversity.

Stevens and colleagues monitored 68 grasslands across Great Britain over 2 years. “In areas of high pollution,” she said, “the species richness is significantly lower than areas of low pollution. No other environmental variable could explain the observations so well.”

Together, the two studies make rather bleak reading. Scientists are uncertain what caused each of the past five extinctions, said Thomas, but most agree on physical factors such as asteroids, volcanic eruptions, and climate change. If human environmental pollution were the cause of the disappearance of all forms of life, it would be the first time that an “organic factor” had brought about a mass extinction.

Intensive livestock farming and fossil fuel combustion are the primary culprits for nitrogen pollution, said Stevens. “Nitrogen pollution has been a long-term problem in the UK, and the effects we are seeing are cumulative.”

Collins said that current efforts to preserve global biodiversity are undoubtedly falling short of what is needed, adding: “Inorganic nitrogen has now been recognized as a global problem—it's time to take some serious and coordinated action.”

Links for this article
J.A. Thomas et al., “Comparative losses of British butterflies, birds, and plants and the global extinction crisis,” Science, 303:1879-1881, March 19, 2004. http://www.sciencemag.org

C.J. Stevens et al., “Impact of nitrogen deposition on the species richness of grasslands,” Science, 303:1876-1979, March 19, 2004. http://www.sciencemag.org

United Nations Environmental Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre http://www.unep-wcmc.org/index.html

Natural Environment Research Council http://www.nerc.ac.uk

posted 03-19-2004 04:36 PM            

Environmental Activist Show Their Colors; Human (bad) Grant Money (good)...03/18/04
by Mitch Battros (ECTV) http://www.earthchangestv.com/

The latest article circulating the internet is put out by a group of environmental extremist. It is exactly as I predicted in my article posted on February 25th outlining what we would see beginning in March. Below is the latest article coming out of the UK Independent.

'Sixth Mass Extinction Is Unfolding': http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=502762

And guess who is responsible? That's right, you sick pathetic humans. Here are two excerpts "Scientists have accumulated the most detailed data to date indicating that human activity is systematically stripping the planet of its rich biodiversity." And yet more twisted environmental propaganda fighting for the almighty research dollar. "This represents the sixth great wave of extinction, fully compatible with the big five mass extinctions of the geological past, but different in that it results from the activities of a single other species [humans] rather than from external environmental changes."

The following is from my Feb. 25th article attacking the other propaganda story suggesting the Pentagon supports theories of global warming caused by humans. http://www.earthchangestv.com/mitch/26mitch.php

"I will go on record as saying “we will see none of these things”. What we will see is a barrage of PSA’s telling us 1) how to recycle, 2) not to cut trees, 3) not to drive big cars, 4) restrict, and heavily fine polluters….and this list goes on even further than the above.

Now please read carefully. I am not opposed to messages coming out for humans to practice responsibility and remain aware of our environment. This is our home, and we should treat it as such. Believe me, I do my part. However, this is not what the article is telling us, now is it? No. What we have are the same lies, deception, and manipulation put upon us, which is really no different than what the bubba bush regime has being doing to US citizens ever since he took office. How pathetic for those to use the same ‘bait and switch’ techniques which I would assume, the environmental activists themselves would despise most fervently.

So let’s see what the future will bring. I have publicly made my statement and prediction. Watch for PSA’s (public service announcements) beginning the first week of March. I expect organizations such as ‘GreenPeace’ to rev up their engines. It wouldn’t surprise me to see Ralph Nader jump into the picture about the same time. Again, I’m not against being environmentally responsible, but being manipulated puts a bad taste in my mouth.

I have been on record since 1997 stating my research, and that of many others far beyond my credentials, suggest the trend we are in today and trends for the near and far future, have been tracked, recorded, monitored, and predicted through current instruments, and through ancient text, artifacts and documents. What the sum of all gathered material suggest, is what we see today is nothing more than a very natural cycle the Earth has seen many times before. Yes, this is to say 'global warming' was here before one single human on Earth. Then again when there were 1000 humans on Earth, and when there were 1 million humans on Earth, and even now when thereare billions of humans on Earth. Empirical data suggest we would be experiencing so-called 'global warming' if there were no humans alive today. The same applies to the opposite, or more accurately put co-existing 'ice age'.

On at least 50 "live" television shows, and hundreds of articles authored by me, I have said over and over again, "yes it is true, we would experience climate shifts if no one was here to see it". I also make clear, keeping in mind many environmentalist who follow the show, that current empirical evidence also suggest, that yes, fossil fuel and other human pollutants do contribute to our climate and weather today. Most research material suggests perhaps as much as 15% to 18%.

This flies in the face of staunch environmentalists who proclaim "we are the cause of the Earth dying", stating humans are 100% responsible for the cause of today’s extreme weather shifts. This simply is not true. But having said this, I have on numerous occasions as mentioned above, stated clearly and with self-conviction, that 15% to 18% is a significant number. Something we do have control over, and can by self discipline have a marginal effect strictly related to "cleaner air". However, nothing suggests it would have any effect on climate change. Yes, I do recycle. Yes, I do drive effectively. And yes, I even ride my bike during summer months. Probably more because I simply love to ride, but as a consequence, it does help the environment. Finally, my message is this. It is important to be responsible. This is our home, and it is getting smaller everyday.

For those of you who commented on my "playing into George Bush's hands". Do I really need to comment on how I feel about bubba bush? I think even the most recent members to ECTV know my stance on this dim wit!

posted 03-19-2004 04:56 PM               

West Faces Drought, Wildfires - NOAA

By Christopher Doering
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Drought conditions blanketing much of the Western United States are not expected to improve this spring, leading to more potential for "large, destructive" fires in some areas, U.S. government weather forecasters said on Friday.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned in its spring weather outlook, which covers the April-June period, that above average precipitation during the winter has done little to improve multi-year drought conditions in Western states such as Arizona, New Mexico, Idaho and Montana.

The West has "a long way to go and the odds are against them that there will be any substantial relief during the spring for the areas that are in severe or exceptional drought," said NOAA administrator Conrad Lautenbacher.

The weather agency said there is a good likelihood for below-normal temperatures in the northern Great Plains and above-normal temperatures in Alaska, the Southwest and parts of the South.

The absence of El Niño and La Niña - two weather patterns that allow for greater forecast certainty - will bring average precipitation and temperatures to the Eastern states, but there could be wide swings in weather conditions, NOAA said.

DROUGHT IN THE WEST

Some Western areas are entering their sixth year of drought, which has shriveled crops, drained water reservoirs and sparked fires in bone-dry forests. NOAA estimated drought had affected more than 50 percent of the West.

The United States overall is projected to have a normal wildfire season, but persistent drought and insect damage in Wyoming, Colorado and parts of the Southwest have created "a greater potential for large, destructive fires."

Even though states in the Rocky Mountain region had a wet winter and have had quenching precipitation in recent weeks, a substantial water-deficit in many areas means several years of normal precipitation will be needed to replenish reservoirs.

Water shortages will be felt the most in Arizona and New Mexico, where parched soil will soak up any water before it reaches streams or rivers.

Chris Pacheco, resource conservationist with the U.S. Agriculture Department's Natural Resources Conservation Service, said the recent rains are a short-term buffer for drought-stricken areas.

"Next year we're going to be back in the same boat with low reservoir storage," he said.
As of March 1, record or near-record low reservoir levels existed in many parts of the West, with capacity below 50 percent in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico.

Snowpack levels are above average throughout much of the West. Water levels also are higher than normal in the Pacific Northwest, northern Nevada and the northern Rockies in Montana and Idaho, which depend on waterflow to generate power at hydroelectric plants.

FARMERS BENEFIT FROM WINTER SNOWS

Forecasters said "timely rains" will further ease current water shortages from previous droughts in the northern and central Plains.

Spring wheat planted last autumn is beginning to break dormancy in the Midwest. Significant precipitation in early March has been beneficial for winter wheat in eastern Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Texas.

Moisture is still scarce in eastern Colorado, Montana and the Dakotas, and could jeopardize prospects for yields during harvest, according to forecasters.

posted 03-19-2004 05:16 PM               

The origins of human-influenced climate change may be traced back 5,000 years

By Richard Lovett

March 17, 2004

Global warming is usually presumed to be a modern problem: a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution and its intensive use of carbon dioxide-producing fossil fuels. But humans have been changing the earth's climate for thousands of years, says William Ruddiman, an emeritus professor of environmental sciences from the University of Virginia. And the changes have been substantial.

Even before the start of the industrial era, Ruddiman says, our ancestors may have warmed the globe sufficiently to stave off a new ice age.

Ice ages are caused by variations in the Earth's orbit that alter the amount of sunlight reaching Canada, Siberia and Alaska during the brief arctic summer. During high-sunlight cycles, there's enough warmth to melt the previous winter's snows. During cold cycles, there isn't, and the snow gradually accumulates into glaciers.

These orbital variations occur in well-understood, long-term cycles. But the climate is also affected by cyclical changes in the atmospheric levels of two important greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane, which trap solar heat that would otherwise radiate back into space.

Methane is produced when vegetation decays beneath swamps and marshes. Scientists can use ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica to measure the amount of methane in the atmosphere during the past 400,000 years. These studies indicate that during eras when the Northern Hemisphere receives weaker summer sunlight, swamps and marshes shrink. In eras when solar energy is higher, rainfall increases and marshes expand.

Based on the pattern of prior cycles, methane levels should have reached a peak 11,000 years ago and been dropping ever since. But the Greenlandic ice cores show that 5,000 years ago, something went awry, and methane levels began to rise.

"You have to throw 395,000 years of history out the window to come up with a natural explanation for this," Ruddiman said in San Francisco last December, at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

His not-so-natural alternative?

Five thousand years ago was just about the time people started creating artificial marshes to grow rice in Southeast Asia.

By 2,000 years ago, rice farmers had already used up the flat land of the valleys and were beginning to build the hillside terraces we see today, releasing more and more methane as more paddies were built.

At the same time, something was increasing the atmospheric content of carbon dioxide. The Greenlandic and Antarctic ice cores show that carbon dioxide levels fluctuate on natural cycles of 22,000, 41,000 and 100,000 years. According to these patterns, carbon dioxide, like methane, should have reached a peak 11,000 years ago and dropped ever since.

But it, too, dropped for only the first half of that cycle, then started to rebound – so much so that at the start of the industrial age, the level was already 15 percent "too" high.

Previous scientists have posited various natural theories for the reversal of carbon dioxide levels. One theory is that changes in ocean chemistry are causing the seas to disgorge large quantities of previously absorbed carbon dioxide. Another is that it is due to a natural decline in forests, which remove large quantities of carbon dioxide from the air to form branches, leaves, bark and roots. When forests die, all of that stored carbon dioxide is returned to the air.

But Ruddiman suggests that humans might be the cause. Studies of pollen particles trapped in lake-bed sediments allow scientists to trace the spread of wheat, peas, lentils, flax and barley across regions that were naturally forest. As far back as 10,000 years ago, he says, people were beginning to cut down forests to make room for farming.

These facts may have been overlooked by climate modelers, but they are well-known to historical geographers. In 1989, Ian G. Simmons of the University of Durham, England, wrote that by 2,000 years ago, large segments of Southeast Asia, China, Southwestern Asia and the Mediterranean region were "greatly" deforested.

And in a 2003 book, "Deforesting the Earth," Oxford geography professor Michael Williams reported that humans were already cutting down European forests 6,000 years ago, and that American Indians were clearing forests in the Mississippi River Valley as far back as 7,000 years ago to plant squash, sunflowers, maize and beans.

"Most of Eurasia was deforested by the time of Christ," Ruddiman says.

Counting trees
In an effort to quantify the amount of preindustrial deforestation, Ruddiman turned to the Domesday Book, a census of Britain conducted by William the Conqueror in 1086 A.D. In addition to counting people, William's census takers tallied the extent of forests, fields and pastures. According to figures in the Domesday Book, the 1.5 million people then living in England had already cut down 85 percent of their nation's trees.

Extrapolating these per-capita land-clearing figures to the 57 million people living in China a thousand years earlier, plus the millions more in India, Southeast Asia and the Roman Empire, Ruddiman calculates that 2,000 years ago, deforestation was already quite extensive.

Already, he says, tree cutting had released 700 to 900 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the air – enough to offset the natural decline and start driving levels of the gas back up again, thousands of years before anyone was using significant quantities of coal or oil.

All of that carbon dioxide, Ruddiman adds, would warm the Earth by about 1.4 degrees – roughly the same amount that industrial-era emissions are believed to have warmed it to date (but not by as much as today's emissions are expected to warm it in the future).

How plague played in
The effect, he says, is stronger at high latitudes – strong enough that climate models show that if people hadn't cut down so many trees, ice sheets might again be forming in parts of Canada such as Labrador and Baffin Island.

Ruddiman backs up his tree-cutting theory by pointing to several dips in the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide that occurred over the past 2,000 years. None was large – only a few parts per million – but they appear to be too large to be explained by natural factors such as volcanic emissions.

One of these dips occurred during the height of the Roman Empire. Another occurred in the 1400s, and a third occurred between 1500 and 1750 A.D. All of these, he says, link to periods when plagues killed off sizable fractions of the world's population.

The first occurred at a time when bubonic plague killed 20 million people in China and the Roman Empire. The second correlates to the Black Death, which killed one-third of the people of Europe in its first year alone. The third was during an era when 90 percent of the 50 million to 120 million people living in Central and South America died of smallpox, measles and other European diseases, the single largest mass mortality in history.

When that many people die, farms are abandoned and trees grow back quickly enough to take significant amounts of carbon dioxide back out of the air.

Historical accounts of the Black Death, Ruddiman says, are full of stories about millions of abandoned farms. "These accounts don't give numbers of farms or acreage," he says, "but it's immense."

Ralph Keeling, a professor of geochemistry at UCSD's Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, says that confirmation of Ruddiman's theory will await the drilling of ice cores going back more than 400,000 years.

That's because astronomical factors make our current interglacial period more akin to one that occurred slightly too early to show up on today's oldest cores. If that earlier warm spell shows the same methane and carbon dioxide anomalies we see in the past 8,000 years, then the cause is natural, and Ruddiman's theory goes down the drain.

"He's making an appealing argument that is at least plausible," Keeling says, "but it could turn out to be wrong as we get better evidence."

Ruddiman admits that his thesis is controversial, referring to it as "an outrageous challenge to the conventional wisdom." But he also believes he's onto a previously overlooked link between history and climate modeling.

"The most in-your-face statement I can make is that humans stopped a glaciation," he says. "And I think there's a strong case that can be made for that."

Keeling doubts that the effect was strong enough to have staved off glaciers, but he agrees that Ruddiman is asking good questions. "At some level," he says, "it seems inevitable that early agriculture would have had an impact on the atmosphere. The question is simply how big that impact was."

posted 03-19-2004 05:17 PM               

Annan warns of climate change risks

United Nations chief Kofi Annan has warned that the first signs of disastrous climate change may already be visible as he lobbies for the Kyoto Protocol.

The global warming pact has been hamstrung by United States opposition and Russian reticence.

Mr Annan made the warning in a message to mark the 10th anniversary of the coming into force of Kyoto's parent treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

"Some of the effects of climate change are by now inevitable and, indeed, we may already be seeing - in the increased incidence of drought, floods and extreme weather events that many regions are experiencing - some of the devastation that lies ahead," he said.

Kyoto's "lack of entry into force remains a major hurdle to effective action," the UN secretary-general said.

"I call again on those countries that have not yet ratified the protocol to do so, and show that they are truly committed to shouldering their global responsibilities."

The UNFCCC is the key agreement to have emerged from the 1992 Rio Summit, giving birth to a raft of treaties and initiatives aimed at tackling the planet's environmental ills.

The Kyoto Protocol was signed as a framework agreement in 1997 under which rich industrialised countries would curb emissions of "greenhouse" gases - carbon pollution from the burning of fossil fuels that scientists say is dangerously affecting Earth's fragile climate system.

It took four years to negotiate the protocol's highly detailed rulebook but by that time the United States had quit the process under a controversial decision by President George W Bush.

He questions the scientific evidence for global warming and says Kyoto is both too costly for the US economy and unfair because the detailed pollution cuts only applied to developed countries.

The US pullout has deprived Kyoto of support from its biggest carbon polluter and left it perilously short of failing to muster enough support to take effect.

Under the protocol's rules, ratification by Russia is now essential for the deal to become an international treaty.

But Russia has been dragging its feet about ratification, notably holding out for further concessions from the European Union (EU), Kyoto's champion.

posted 03-20-2004 01:17 PM               

CO2 Hits Record Levels, Researchers Find

By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent

MAUNA LOA OBSERVATORY, Hawaii - Carbon dioxide, the gas largely blamed for global warming, has reached record-high levels in the atmosphere after growing at an accelerated pace in the past year, say scientists monitoring the sky from this 2-mile-high station atop a Hawaiian volcano.

The reason for the faster buildup of the most important "greenhouse gas" will require further analysis, the U.S. government experts say.

"But the big picture is that CO2 is continuing to go up," said Russell Schnell, deputy director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's climate monitoring laboratory in Boulder, Colo., which operates the Mauna Loa Observatory on the island of Hawaii.

Carbon dioxide, mostly from burning of coal, gasoline and other fossil fuels, traps heat that otherwise would radiate into space. Global temperatures increased by about 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius) during the 20th century, and international panels of scientists sponsored by world governments have concluded that most of the warming probably was due to greenhouse gases.

The climatologists forecast continued temperature rises that will disrupt the climate, cause seas to rise and lead to other unpredictable consequences — unpredictable in part because of uncertainties in computer modeling of future climate.

Before the industrial age and extensive use of fossil fuels, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stood at about 280 parts per million, scientists have determined.

Average readings at the 11,141-foot Mauna Loa Observatory, where carbon dioxide density peaks each northern winter, hovered around 379 parts per million on Friday, compared with about 376 a year ago.

That year-to-year increase of about 3 parts per million is considerably higher than the average annual increase of 1.8 parts per million over the past decade, and markedly more accelerated than the 1-part-per-million annual increase recorded a half-century ago, when observations were first made here.

Asked to explain the stepped-up rate, climatologists were cautious, saying data needed to be further evaluated. But Asia immediately sprang to mind.

"China is taking off economically and burning a lot of fuel. India, too," said Pieter Tans, a prominent carbon-cycle expert at NOAA's Boulder lab.

Another leading climatologist, Ralph Keeling, whose father, Charles D. Keeling, developed methods for measuring carbon dioxide, noted that the rate "does fluctuate up and down a bit," and said it was too early to reach conclusions. But he added: "People are worried about `feedbacks.' We are moving into a warmer world."

He explained that warming itself releases carbon dioxide from the ocean and soil. By raising the gas's level in the atmosphere, that in turn could increase warming, in a "positive feedback," said Keeling, of San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects that, if unchecked, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations by 2100 will range from 650 to 970 parts per million. As a result, the panel estimates, average global temperature would probably rise by 1.4 to 5.8 degrees Celsius (2.7 and 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit) between 1990 and 2100.

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol (news - web sites) would oblige ratifying countries to reduce carbon dioxide emissions according to set schedules, to minimize potential global warming. The pact has not taken effect, however.

The United States, the world's biggest carbon dioxide emitter, signed the agreement but did not ratify it, and the Bush administration has since withdrawn U.S. support, calling instead for voluntary emission reductions by U.S. industry and more scientific research into climate change.

posted 03-22-2004 11:23 AM               

Africa Braces for the Fallout of Global Warming

A number of African scientists are urging governments on the continent to take measures to prepare for the impacts of global warming. "Climate change is now with us and poised to change our pattern of life," said Dr. Cecil Machena, a Zimbabwean ecologist and conservationist. "Yet few people know what climate change is all about."

The vast majority of the greenhouse gases behind global warming have been released by industrial countries like the United States and Europe. Scientists expect, however, that climate disruptions will take their heaviest toll on poor nations, which have contributed relatively little to the problem in the past century.

"African countries are expected to be the hardest hit by climate change because they have the least resources to adapt," said Brett Orlando, a climate expert at the World Conservation Union (IUCN). "The difference between impacts on developing and industrialized countries is categorical. In industrialized countries one speaks of loss of property and income, whereas in developing countries one speaks of loss of life and livelihood."

A recent report from scientists at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom concludes that current trends of droughts in Southern Africa are likely linked to climate change. "It is becoming increasing likely that [human-caused] emissions of greenhouse gases, and other atmospheric pollutants, are changing global and regional climates," finds the report.

While occasional droughts are common in the region, the scientists found that the last 20 years "have seen a trend towards reduced rainfall," as well as an increase in the number of serious droughts -- two or three during the early 1990s alone. "The decade 1986-95, as well as being the warmest this century, has also been the driest," according to the report, which is titled "Climate Change and Southern Africa."

The researchers recommend that Southern African countries should change their agricultural policies in anticipation of the negative impacts of climate change on crop yields. "The clearest objective at present is to prepare for changing climatic hazards by reducing vulnerability, by developing monitoring capabilities, and enhancing the responsiveness of the agricultural sector to forecasts of production and food crises," concludes the report.

However, few efforts are currently underway to address the anticipated impacts of climate change in Southern Africa. "Very few governments, particularly in the South, are prepared to mainstream climate change issues in development processes," said Dr. Machena, who is director of the Africa Resources Trust.

And yet the impact of climate on the poor is a serious concern. "Rural people in less-developed countries are more dependent on local resources, so when land is degraded or access is cut off, those people are particularly hard hit," said Dr. Peter Veit, the World Resources Institute's regional director for Africa.

The Africa Resources Trust has called on Southern African governments to take steps now that will help people cope with hotter, drier weather, coastal storm surges, and other anticipated effects of climate change. Dr. Machena has proposed that countries invest in drought-resistant crops and promote forestation projects around farmlands, which would protect watersheds and create belts of vegetation to link up national parks and other habitats threatened by climate change.

A report recently published in the journal Nature concludes that if no action is taken to address global warming, climate shifts could soon surpass habitat loss and other threats to wildlife and plants. The study, which examined six biodiversity-rich regions around the world representing 20 percent of the Earth's land area, projects that the consequences could be significant for Africa.

Important African conservation areas, such as Kruger National Park, could risk losing up to 60 percent of their species. More than one-third of the 300 plant species studied in South Africa are expected to die out, including the country's national flower, the King Protea.

Using the current distributions of 1,103 plants, mammals, birds, reptiles, frogs, butterflies and other invertebrates, the scientists developed computer models to simulate the ways species' ranges are expected to move in response to changing temperatures and climatic conditions.

The study found that 15 to 37 percent of species sampled could be threatened with extinction by 2050 as a result of their inability to adapt to changes in climate. "If the projections can be extrapolated globally, and to other groups of land animals and plants, our analyses suggest that well over a million species could be threatened with extinction as a result of climate change," said lead author Chris Thomas of the University of Leeds, United Kingdom. (WRI Features)

--30--

By Emmanuel Koro, a contributor to WRI Features (features@wri.org)

For more information, contact:

posted 03-22-2004 09:26 PM            

Where did you get that Fantastic picture of the "spiral" trail #3 you posted over at Arianna's. That was absolutely incredible the first I have seen of over hundreds of of pictures I have viewed of the "twisted rope" or "barbed wire" effect other than the video I myself shot back in March of 03.

posted 03-23-2004 01:06 AM               

Scientists warn of climate change dangers

The World Today - Tuesday, 23 March , 2004
Reporter: Kirsten Aiken

HAMISH ROBERTSON: Judging by the massive coverage it's received in the international and local media in recent weeks, it would be fair to assume that terrorism is the greatest problem now facing the world.

But that's not the view of a group of politicians, scientists and academics meeting in Britain. As Kirsten Aiken reports from London, they believe that climate change is the fundamental threat, and that countries should embrace the spirit of the Kyoto protocol.

KIRSTEN AIKEN: Scientists and conservationists have long warned of the dangers climate change will unleash on mankind. But a recent report by the Global Business Network in the United States significantly ups the ante of a lack of action, and warns of a terrifying future.

It reads:

"Major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a Siberian climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world."

Overnight, three of the world's leading think-tanks – the Australia Institute, the Centre for American Progress in Washington DC, and the Institute for Public Policy Research in London – launched an international task force on climate change.

TONY MCMICHAEL: This really is a major problem, and we can't afford to put it on the backburner any longer.

KIRSTEN AIKEN: Professor Tony McMichael, Director of the National centre for Epidemiology at the Australian national University is one of three Australians on the task force.

TONY MCMICHAEL: I think the climate of opinion is beginning to shift, and it's doing so partly because people can see that world weather patterns are becoming more unstable, more extreme. We're seeing hotter heatwaves, we're seeing more severe drought, we're seeing more storms and people are starting to make the connection that this is a manifestation of the climate change process.

KIRSTEN AIKEN: Professor McMichael, the UK's chief scientists warns climate change is a greater threat to mankind than terrorism. Is that a view you also subscribe to?

TONY MCMICHAEL: One could say that in the medium to longer term, this really is probably the greatest global problem that we face today.

KIRSTEN AIKEN: How do you rate Australia's progress, or lack of it, on this issue?

TONY MCMICHAEL: Well, it's been very disappointing that our national government has not been prepared to put its shoulder top the wheel, along with many other of the world's countries and ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

I think informally, we're beginning to move in the direction of that protocol, because communities, including the Australian community increasingly recognise that this is a problem, it's going to have a range of potentially serious social, economic, public health and environmental effects.

KIRSTEN AIKEN: In complete agreement is fellow task force member, NSW Premier Bob Carr.

BOB CARR: We've got to recognise though, that there's an international stand-off when it comes to signing Kyoto – Australia's not signing Kyoto, that's a disgraceful decision by Canberra. And recognising that we've got to seek to build on Kyoto and perhaps tackle the task in manageable bite-size chunks.

KIRTSEN AIKEN: With the majority of Labor governments you could've started work on an emissions trading network. It is true that Australia is lagging on this issue, isn't it?

BOB CARR: Well, not as far as NSW is concerned. We've not only… we legislated for carbon trading in 1996, we've undertaken a range of other actions as well. But trading will only take off as on the scale it ought to take off, if the national government commits itself to all that goes with Kyoto.

KIRSTEN AIKEN: The Federal Government will get that chance when the taskforce makes its recommendations early next year, and when Australia and the United States – as the two countries to have rejected Kyoto – will undoubtedly face increasing pressure top rejoin the multilateral process.

posted 03-23-2004 06:21 PM               

Global Warming as a Weapon of Mass Destruction

We are carbonizing the oceans with dire consequences

By Bruce E. Johansen

Lord Peter Levene, board chair of Lloyd’s of London, says that terrorism is not the insurance industry’s biggest worry, despite the fact that his company was the largest single insurer of the World Trade Center. Levene says that Lloyd’s, like other large international insurance companies, is bracing for an increase in weather disasters related to global warming. Likewise, following his assignment as chief weapons inspector in Iraq, Hans Blix said: “To me the question of the environment is more ominous than that of peace and war. We will have regional conflicts and use of force, but world conflicts I do not believe will happen any longer. But the environment, that is a creeping danger. I’m more worried about global warming than I am of any major military conflict.” Sir John Houghton, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, agrees. “Global warming is already upon us,” he said. “The impacts of global warming are such that that I have no hesitation in describing it as a weapon of mass destruction.” So what do they know that George W. Bush doesn’t?

Weather is the story; climate is the plot. We are carbonizing the oceans, with dire implications for life in them. As the 21st century dawned, carbon-dioxide levels were rising in the oceans more rapidly than any time since the age of dinosaurs. In a report published September 25, 2003 in Nature, oceanographers Ken Caldeira and Michael E. Wickett wrote: “We find that oceanic absorption of CO2 from fossil fuels may result in larger pH changes over the next several centuries than any inferred in the geological record of the past 300 million years, with the possible exception of those resulting from rare, extreme events such as bolide impacts or catastrophic methane hydrate degassing.” (A “bolide” is a large extraterrestrial body, usually at least a half mile in diameter, perhaps much larger, that impacts the earth at a speed roughly equal to that of a bullet in flight.)

Rising carbon dioxide levels in the oceans could threaten the health of many marine organisms, beginning with the plankton at the base of the food chain. “If we continue down the path we are going, we will produce changes greater than any experienced in the past 300 million years—with the possible exception of rare, extreme events such as comet impacts,” Caldeira, of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, warned. Since carbon dioxide levels began to be measured on a systemic basis worldwide in 1958, its concentration in the atmosphere has risen 17 percent.

Until now, some climate experts have asserted that the oceans would help to control the rise in carbon dioxide by acting as a filter. However, Caldeira and Michael Wickett said that carbon dioxide that is removed from the atmosphere enters the oceans as carbonic acid, gradually altering the acidity of ocean water. According to their studies, the change over the last century already matches the magnitude of the change that occurred in the entire 10,000 years preceding the industrial age. Caldeira pointed to acid rain from industrial emissions as a possible precursor of changes in the oceans. “Most ocean life resides near the surface, where the greatest change would be expected to come, but deep ocean life may prove to be even more sensitive to changes,” Caldeira said.

Marine plankton and other organisms whose skeletons or shells contain calcium carbonate, which is dissolved by acid solutions, may be particularly vulnerable. Coral reefs—already suffering from pollution, rising ocean temperatures, and other stresses—are comprised almost entirely of calcium carbonate. “It’s difficult to predict what will happen because we haven’t really studied the range of impacts,” Caldeira said. “But we can say that if we continue business as usual, we are going to see some significant changes in the acidity of the world’s oceans.”

Along the same line, warming seas also are devastating plankton, eroding the ocean’s food chain. Global warming is contributing to an “ecological meltdown,” with devastating implications for fisheries and wildlife. The “meltdown” begins at the base of the food chain, as increasing sea temperatures kill plankton. Fish stocks and sea-bird populations are declining as well.

Scientists at the Sir Alistair Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science in Plymouth, England, which has been monitoring plankton growth in the North Sea for more than 70 years, have said that an unprecedented warming of the North Sea has driven plankton hundreds of miles to the north. They have been replaced by smaller, warm-water species that are less nutritious. Over-fishing of cod and other species has played a role, but fish stocks have not recovered after cuts in fishing quotas.

The number of salmon returning to British waters are now half of what they were 20 years ago, and a decline in plankton populations is a major factor. “A regime shift has taken place and the whole ecology of the North Sea has changed quite dramatically,” said Dr. Chris Reid, the foundation’s director. “We are seeing a collapse in the system as we knew it. Catches of salmon and cod are already down and we are getting smaller fish. We are seeing visual evidence of climate change on a large-scale ecosystem. We are likely to see even greater warming, with temperatures becoming more like those off the Atlantic coast of Spain or further south, bringing a complete change of ecology.”

Research by the British Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has established that seabird colonies off the Yorkshire coast and the Shetlands this year suffered their worst breeding season since records began, with many abandoning nesting sites. Sea-bird populations are falling in large part because sand eels are declining. The sand eels feed on plankton. This survey concentrated on kittiwakes, one breed of sea birds, but other species that feed on the eels, including puffins and razorbills, also have been seriously affected.

Sand eels also comprise a third to half of the North Sea catch, by weight. They have heretofore been caught in huge quantities by Danish factory ships, which turn them into food pellets for pigs and fish. During the summer of 2003, the Danish fleet caught only 300,000 English tons of its 950,000-ton quota, a record low.

Beware the Methane Burp

Yesterday’s SUV exhaust does not become today’s rising temperature, not immediately. Through an intricate feedback loop, fossil fuel burned today is expressed in warming 30 to 50 years later. Today we are seeing temperatures related to fossil-fuel emissions from roughly 1960, when fossil fuel consumption was much lower. Today’s fossil-fuel emissions will be expressed in the atmosphere about 2040.

Increasing levels of greenhouse gases near the surface hold heat there, impeding radiation into the upper layers of the atmosphere. As the surface warms, the stratosphere cools. The chemical reactions that consume the ozone that protects us from ultraviolet radiation accelerate as the air chills. Thus, the area of depleted ozone over Antarctica remains at near-record size respite the fact that chloroflourocarbons (CFCs), the culprits on ozone depletion, have now been banned for more than 15 years.

In his book, When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), Michael J. Benton describes a mass extinction at the end of the Permian period, about 250 million years ago, when at least 90 percent of life on Earth died. The extinction probably was initiated by massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia. According to present theories, the eruptions injected massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, causing a number of biotic feedbacks that accelerated global warming of about 6 degrees Celsius. In a chapter titled “What Caused the Biggest Catastrophe of all Time?” Benton sketches how the warming (which was accompanied by anoxia) may have fed upon itself: “The end-Permian runaway greenhouse may have been simple. Release of carbon dioxide from the eruption of the Siberian Traps [volcanoes] led to a rise in global temperatures of 6 degrees Celsius or so. Cool polar regions became warm and frozen tundra became unfrozen. The melting might have penetrated to the frozen gas hydrate reservoirs located around the polar oceans, and massive volumes of methane may have burst to the surface of the oceans in huge bubbles.

This further input of carbon into the atmosphere caused more warming, which could have melted further gas hydrate reservoirs. So the process went on, running faster and faster. The natural systems that normally reduce carbon dioxide levels could not operate, and eventually the system spiraled out of control, with the biggest crash in the history of life.”

The oxygen-starved aftermath of this immense global belch of methane left land animals gasping for breath and caused the Earth’s largest mass extinction, suggests new research. Greg Retallack, an expert in ancient soils at the University of Oregon, has speculated that the same methane “belch” was of such a magnitude that it caused mass extinction via oxygen starvation of land animals. Bob Berner of Yale University has calculated that a cascade of effects on wetlands and coral reefs may have reduced oxygen levels in the atmosphere from 35 percent to just 12 percent over 20,000 years. Marine life also may have suffocated in the oxygen-poor water.

Events 250 million years ago are of more than academic interest today because the 6 degrees Celsius that Benton estimates triggered these events is roughly the same temperature rise forecast for the Earth by the IPCC by the end of this century.

In Abrupt Climate Change (2002), Richard B. Alley wrote that climate may change rapidly (as much as 16 degrees Celsius within a decade or two) “when gradual causes push the Earth system across a threshold. Just as the slowly increasing pressure of a finger eventually flips a switch and turns on a light....” Half the North Atlantic warming since the last ice age was achieved, writes Alley, within one decade. The temperature record for Greenland, according to Alley’s research, more resembles a jagged row of very sharp teeth than a gradual passage from one epoch to another. According to Alley: “Model projections of global warming find increased global precipitation, increased variability in precipitation, and summertime drying in many continental interiors, including “grain belt” regions. Such changes might produce more floods and more droughts.” Human emissions of greenhouse gases may provide enough of a change to trigger such a rapid change.

By 2000, the hydrological cycle seemed to be changing more quickly than temperatures. Warmer air holds more moisture, making rain (and sometimes snow) more intense. Warmer air also increases evaporation, paradoxically intensifying drought at the same time. With sustained warming, usually wet places generally seem to be receiving more rain than before; dry places often receive less rain and become subject to more persistent drought. In many places, drought or deluge is becoming the weather regime du jour. Atmospheric moisture increases more rapidly than temperature; over the United States and Europe, atmospheric moisture increased 10 to 20 percent from 1980 to 2000. “That’s why you see the impact of global warming mostly in intense storms and flooding like we have seen in Europe,” Kevin Trenberth, a scientist with National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) told London’s Financial Times.

As if on cue to support climate models, the summer of 2002 featured a number of climatic extremes, especially regarding precipitation. Excessive rain deluged Europe and Asia, swamping cities and villages and killing at least 2,000 people, while drought and heat scorched the United States’ west and eastern cities. Climate skeptics argued that weather is always variable, but other observers noted that extremes seemed to be more frequent than before. A year later, following episodic floods during the summer of 2002, Europe experienced some of it highest (and longest-sustained) temperatures in recorded history, causing (by various estimates) between 19,000 and 35,000 excess deaths. As much as 80 percent of the grain crop died in eastern Germany, site of some of 2002’s worst floods.

“In a hotter climate, your chances of being caught with either too much or too little are higher,” said Dr. John M. Wallace, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington. Government scientists have measured a rise in downpour-style storms in the United States during the last century. “Over the past 50 years, said Wallace, winter precipitation in the Sierra Nevada has been falling more and more in the form of rain, increasing flood risks, instead of as snow, which supplies farmers and taps alike as it melts in the spring.”

The World Water Council report compiled statistics indicating that between 1971 and 1995 floods affected more than 1.5 billion people worldwide, or 100 million people a year. An estimated 318,000 were killed and more than 18 million left homeless. The economic costs of these disasters rose to an estimated $300 billion in the 1990s from about $35 billion in the 1960s. Global warming is causing changes in weather patterns as growing populations migrate to vulnerable areas, increasing costs of individual weather events, said William Cosgrove, vice president of the World Water Council. Scientists cited by the World Water Council expect that climate changes during the 21st century will lead to shorter and more intense rainy seasons in some areas, as well as longer, more intense droughts in others, endangering some crops and species and causing a drop in global food production.

Examples abound of increasing extremes in precipitation. November 2002, December 2002, and January 2003 were Minneapolis-St. Paul’s driest in recorded history. These followed the wettest June through October there in more than 100 years. In December 2002, Omaha recorded its first month with no measurable precipitation. In March 2003, having endured its driest year in recorded history during 2002, Denver, Colorado recorded 30 inches of snow in one storm. Some areas of the drought-parched Front Range received as much as ten feet of snow in the same storm. After that one storm, drought conditions returned.

Roughly half the United States was under serious drought conditions during the summer of 2002. The drought was occasionally punctuated by torrential rains. On September 13, 2002, for example, drought-stricken Denver was inundated by floods from a fast-moving thunderstorm that caused widespread flooding. Similar events took place south of Salt Lake City. Ten days later, a flooding cloudburst inundated similarly drought-stricken Atlanta. On September 10, 2002, six months’ worth of rain fell in a few hours in the Gard, Herault, and Vaucluse departments in the south of France, drowning at least 20 people. In the village of Sommieres, near Nimes, a usually-tiny stream exploded to a width of 300 meters, cutting off road traffic.

The suburbs of Chicago received 8 to 13 inches of rain the night of August 12, 2002, in a summer that included devastating floods in Prague and Dresden, as well as parts of southern China. India had a variable monsoon—some areas flooded, while others went dry. Severe summer floods in Europe during 2002 may be an indicator of an emerging pattern, according to Jens H. and Ole B. Christensen, who modeled precipitation patterns in Europe under warming conditions of a type that may be prominent in the area by 2070 to 2100. “Our results,” they wrote in Nature, “indicate that episodes of severe flooding may become more frequent, despite a general trend toward drier summer conditions.” The trend toward drought or deluge will intensify as warming distorts the hydrological cycle. A warming atmosphere will contain more water vapor, which will provide “further potential for latent-heat release during the buildup of low-pressure systems, thereby possibly both intensifying the systems and making more water available for precipitation,” Christensen and Christensen wrote.

Annual mean precipitation amounts over the United States have been increasing at two to five percent per decade, according to atmospheric scientists Ken Trenberth and colleagues (writing in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society), with “most of the increase related to temperature and hence in atmospheric water-holding capacity…. There is clear evidence that rainfall rates have changed in the United States…. The prospect may be for fewer but more intense rainfall—or snowfall—events.” Individual storms may be further enhanced by latent heat release, which supplies even more moisture during individual storms.

Generally, higher temperatures enhance evaporation, with some compensatory cooling when water is available. Increased evaporation also intensifies drought, which, to some degree, compounds itself as moisture is depleted, leading “to increased risk of heat waves and wildfires in association with such droughts; because once the soil moisture is depleted then all the heating goes into raising temperatures and wilting plants.”

In mountain areas, wrote Trenberth, “The winter snowpack forms a vital resource, not only for skiers, but also as a freshwater resource in the spring and summer as the snow melts. Yet warming makes for a shorter snow season with more precipitation falling as rain rather than snow, earlier snowmelt of the snow that does exist, and greater evaporation and ablation. These factors all contribute to diminished snowpack. In the summer of 2002, in the western parts of the United States, exceptionally low snowpack and subsequent low soil moisture likely contributed substantially to the widespread intense drought because of the importance of recycling [in the hydrological cycle]. Could this be a sign of the future?”

The insurance companies, whose business is making book on the future, are watching the weather—and they are worried.

posted 03-23-2004 06:47 PM               

GOP split by environment strategy

Talking points rile moderates as party looks to fight with Democrats

WASHINGTON -- Republican House leaders are warning their members that "Democrats will hit us hard on the environment" this election year.

Their advice? Tell voters that global warming has not been proved, that there are no clear links between air pollution and childhood asthma and that America’s rivers and lakes aren’t nearly as polluted as the Environmental Protection Agency says they are.

Moderate Republicans fear the "talking points" in a memo from the House Republican Conference could make their party appear indifferent to the health threats of smoggy skies or mercury-contaminated fish. And that could hurt them in tight races where they must appeal to middle-of-the-road voters.

Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords, who left the Republican Party in 2001 to become an independent partly because he didn’t think the GOP was pro-environment, called the memo "outlandish" and an attempt to deceive voters. He said he hopes moderate Republicans will help thwart the conservatives’ strategy.

Republican House leaders recently sent the memo to GOP press secretaries to use to beat back accusations from Democrats and conservation groups that Republicans are anti-environment. The memo charges Democrats with trying to hype pollution problems to frighten voters into supporting them.

Among the memo’s assertions: "Global warming is not a fact," "links between air quality and asthma in children remain cloudy" and the EPA is exaggerating when it says at least 40 percent of U.S. streams, rivers and lakes are too polluted for drinking, fishing or swimming.

"Republicans can’t stress enough that extremists are screaming ‘Doomsday!’ when the environment is actually seeing a new and better day," says the Feb. 4 memo put out by the communications office of the House Republican Conference.

Every GOP House member belongs to the conference, which is led by Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois, Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri and conference chairwoman Deborah Pryce of Ohio.

But the leaders’ message is meeting resistance from Republican centrists, who dispute key details and don’t like its tone.

Rep. Mike Castle, R-Del., who won high marks from the League of Conservation Voters for his pro-environment votes, says the strategy is too negative and defensive and doesn’t address the fact that pollution continues to be a health threat.

"If I tried to follow these talking points at a town hall meeting with my constituents, I’d be booed," said Castle, who heads a group of 69 moderate House members, senators and governors.

The communications director for the Republican House Conference said lawmakers don’t have to use the talking points.

"It’s up to our members if they want to use them or not," said Greg Crist. "We’re not stuffing it down their throats."

He said the memo was spurred by concerns that environmental groups were using myths about the poor state of the environment to try to make Republicans look bad.

"We wanted to show how the environment has been improving," Crist said. "We wanted to provide the other side of the story."

But Jeffords -- the ranking member on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee -- said the memo distorts reality.

"It’s so incredible that they have this denial of any responsibility for the serious situation we have in this country as far as the environment goes," Jeffords said. "They have a head-in-the-sand approach to it. They’re just sloughing off the human health impacts -- the premature deaths and asthma attacks caused by power plant pollution."

The Vermont senator said he believes moderate Republicans -- such as Castle in the House and Sens. Olympia Snowe of Maine and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island -- won’t go along with the plan.

Jeffords and Snowe recently introduced legislation to increase funding to fight water pollution.

"We have hopes that there are enough people in Congress who care more about the people hurt by pollution than about the money polluters give to political campaigns," Jeffords said.

posted 03-24-2004 04:52 PM               

Combating Climate Change: Economic Opportunity or Economic Suicide?

From UN Environment Programme
Tuesday, March 23, 2004

Message By Klaus Toepfer, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), on the 10th Anniversary of the Coming into Force of the Climate Change Convention (21 March 2004)

Nairobi, 19 March 2004 - When teams from the United States and Britain invented the first computers, they cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars and were thought luxuries with little mass-market appeal.
Indeed there was a time when it was thought that a modern industrialized country might, at a pinch, need only one or two computers.
Today, such a short-term, blinkered view seems amusing. Millions of people across the globe are now employed in the computer and related industries. The Internet revolution, based on the computer and computerised telecommunications, is creating a new, electronic-based, industrial and commercial age.

We are now on the verge on another, separate but related industrial leap forward where the inefficient use of fossil fuels such as coal and oil is being reduced, and where, like the typewriter and the punch card machine of yesteryear, new competition is starting to make its mark.

Modern conventional power stations are almost twice as efficient as those a few decades ago.

Alternative energies, in the form of solar and wind power, are coming of age and the costs per unit of electricity continue to tumble.

Fuel cells, powered by methane, ethanol or hydrogen, are out of the laboratory. Most car-makers including Toyota and Daimler Chrysler have at least one demonstration vehicle being road tested.

General Motors, for example, reckons it will have a commercial vehicle available by 2010. California's new governor has pledged to have hydrogen fuelling stations along major highways by a similar date.

That such developments are happening is in no small measure due to United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change whose entry into force this month we celebrate and the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty spawned by the Convention designed to achieve cut backs in emissions of the gases that cause global warming.

The Protocol's creation, in Japan in 1997, followed compelling evidence from the 2,000 or so scientists of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change that the unbridled use of fossil fuels will trigger catastrophic, global effects including extreme, floods, droughts, sea level rise and the spread of disease.

Few dispute these findings. What is slowing action are those whose abacuses and calculating machines are whirring trying to balance the Euros, Dollars, Rubles and Yen.
Russia, whose ratification would bring Kyoto into force, has some who are convinced that the costs of compliance outweigh the economic advantages.

Other voices, expressing similar concerns, continue to be voiced in the United States. New ones are exercising their vocal chords in Europe.

I would ask those who view the Kyoto Protocol as a strait-jacket, as a constraint to economic growth, to think again and look beyond the simple sums and narrow calculations.

Firstly, the targets for the first phase of greenhouse reductions, just over five per cent between 2008 and 2012, are modest to say the least.

Secondly, the Protocol was designed to be flexible. There are numerous actions that governments and industry can take, both at home and abroad, to cut back and offset emissions, including carbon trading.
Indeed, the European Commission estimates that its Europe-wide trading scheme will reduce the costs of compliance by 35 per cent, or Euros 1.3 billion by 2010.
Provisions, such as the Clean Development Mechanism where industrial countries can offset their emissions by clean and green energy schemes in developing countries, will not only deliver much needed electricity to poorer parts of the world. They should increase the markets, exports and job creation prospects at home and abroad.
The economic benefits of reducing our dependency on fossil fuels go further. Munich Re, one of the world's biggest re-insurance companies, estimates that economic losses as a result of mainly climate-related disasters, reached some $65 billion in 2003.
Then there are other economic impacts as a result of a continued, inefficient use of carbon-based fuels including those on human health and habitats and ecosystems, like forests and lakes.

Estimating the precise, wider economic impacts, is no simple task. But David Pearce, a leading economics professor at University College London, has had a stab for the United Kingdom.

Air pollution from traffic could be costing that country as much as $ 5 billion a year, mainly through ill health.

New economic costs may be just on the horizon. In Jeju, South Korea, at the end of this month UNEP will hold its annual gathering of environment ministers. Dust storms and dead zones in the oceans will be prominently highlighted along with their links to pollution and climate change.
Avoiding the massive threats posed by climate change and significant impacts of related air pollution requires imagination, vision and above all courage.

There is also a moral dimension, given that those likely to suffer the most are the poorest of the poor, whose responsibility for unleashing the calamities of climate change are almost, if not totally, zero.

Fighting climate change requires governments, business and citizens across the globe to harness the technologies in the pipeline and act to develop those still in the laboratory or the fertile, creative minds of the next generation of engineers.
Imaginative tax systems and fiscal measures that stimulate innovation and life-style changes need to be part of the package. A fully operational Kyoto Protocol gives us the collective impetus to bring about change sooner rather than later.

For the longer we delay, the more costly the price tag of inaction for people across the globe will be.

So the Kyoto Protocol is not a recipe for economic disaster, quite the contrary. In the long run, it is likely to generate prosperity and financial savings rather than economic suicide.

Sure there will be losers, as with the dawn of the computer where makers of typewriters, punch card machines and tabulators spring to mind.

However not all went the way of the dinosaur. Some, like IBM, had the vision to restructure their old businesses and embrace the computer age. There may have been some pain, but the overall, long-term gain for those willing to change can, as 'Big Blue" showed, be enormous.

For more information, contact:

posted 03-24-2004 08:51 PM               

Tinkering with clouds

Researchers say evolving technologies could allow manipulation of major weather patterns. But should humans tamper?

By Peter N. Spotts | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

On Sept. 11, 1992, hurricane Iniki slammed into the Hawaiian island of Kauai, packing winds gusting up to 175 m.p.h.

The storm inflicted an estimated $2 billion in damage and 105 casualties, damaged or destroyed 10,000 homes and businesses, and left once-lush tropical mountainsides looking as though they'd been mowed by a giant weed-whacker.

Ross Hoffman, an atmospheric scientist, looks back on the tragedy and asks a daring question: What might it have taken to nudge the hurricane's track 70 miles farther west - just enough to avoid the damage and casualties the storm left in its wake?

Over the past two decades, the idea of modifying large-scale storms such as hurricanes has lain dormant, following 20 years of inconclusive research. Now, however, a small group of atmospheric scientists is giving the concept a fresh look.

Armed with a deeper understanding of how the storms and atmosphere work and with more
sophisticated tools to measure and model atmospheric conditions, these scientists are seeking to move from Mark Twain's lament that no one does anything about the weather toward science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke's vision of modifying weather for humanity's benefit.

It is a long-term vision, acknowledges Dr. Hoffman, a vice president with Atmospheric and Environmental Research, Inc., a research and consulting firm in Lexington, Mass. Tugging on a hurricane's atmospheric reins is at least 30 to 40 years away, he estimates.

Others, such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel, suggest such capabilities are "perhaps 100 years out."

"Before we can really control weather," Hoffman says, "we have to be able to observe the weather and forecast the weather much better than we do now."

More broadly, he adds, society must grapple with an increasingly common question as science places in human hands the ability to manipulate a range of physical processes at their most fundamental levels: "Even if we can do this, is this something we really want to do?"

Human activity has been a factor in weather

Indeed, humans have been modifying weather inadvertently as well as intentionally for decades.

For example, researchers in 1998 and 1999 looked at the impact of air pollution over the Indian Ocean. They found an unexpectedly large amount of pollution, including dark soot and the much tinier dark aerosols, over the northern Indian Ocean. The soot came from burning coal and wood and from inefficiently burned diesel fuel on the Indian subcontinent. Researchers discovered that the soot and dark aerosols reradiated heat from the sun, drying out the surrounding air and suppressing cloud formation.

Meanwhile, according to the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization (WMO), at least 25 countries are engaged in weather modification projects to enhance rain and snowfall, or suppress hail. In the United States, 12 states have had weather modification programs. Texas runs a program at the county level for rain enhancement, while North Dakota is focusing on hail suppression.

These efforts have grown out of research dating back to the late 1940s, when scientists first discovered that dry ice and silver iodide particles could act as seeds to stimulate droplet formation in clouds.

While the concept has been easy to demonstrate in the lab, meeting the same level of scientific proof in the field has been more difficult.

A range of studies over the years has cast doubts on cloud-seeding techniques (see chart), especially the use of dry ice particles.

Natural variability in clouds and rainfall make it hard to verify scientifically if seeding is having any affect, says Brant Foote, director of the research applications program at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

Researchers seeded hurricanes in a 20-year federal research project dubbed Project Storm Fury. Scientists were testing the idea that seeding could be used to take some of the punch out of hurricanes before they made landfall. But the program foundered on inconclusive results.

Federal funds for weather-modification research have dried up as well. According to Colorado State University atmospheric scientist William Cotton, federal dollars for weather modification research peaked at roughly $19 million a year in the 1970s. They dropped to less than $5 million a year during the '90s, and now hover at about $500,000.

The field has entered what Dr. Cotton calls the "dark ages," where weather-modification programs are forging ahead with little or no scientific research programs to back them. The efforts are driven by dwindling groundwater supplies in many parts of the world, along with the demands growing populations are placing on rivers and reservoirs.

Yet, some analysts say, the science behind climate and meteorology has advanced to the point where weather modification deserves another, closer look.

"We know so much more about the physics, and computer modeling is so much better, that it's time to revisit the subject," says James Baker, former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Before leaving office, Dr. Baker commissioned a National Research Council study on weather-modification science and future research needs. The results are due by April.

In the meantime, researchers are finding funds where they can. Hoffman, for example, has drawn funding from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Institute for Advanced Concepts in Atlanta for modeling studies he and his colleagues have been carrying out on hurricane Iniki. "We're not aiming to eliminate hurricanes, but to control their paths so they do not strike population centers," he says.

Initial results in a "proof of concept" simulation suggest that Iniki could have been nudged sufficiently with one-time changes in sea-level temperatures and winds roughly 30 hours before landfall. To trigger those changes artificially in one shot, however, "would take way too much energy.... It's unrealistic," Hoffman acknowledges.

He adds, however, that any operational system for steering severe storms would likely make several less energy-intensive changes as time progresses. A second round of modeling now under way is aimed at more clearly identifying the energy needs such efforts might require.

MIT's Dr. Emanuel notes that while some of the approaches to delivering or removing the energy needed to shift weather systems are exotic, they needn't be.

Even a 1 degree Celsius change in temperature can have a large effect over time, he notes. That change could be achieved by having aircraft lay out "black contrails" - thin manmade clouds - roughly 600 miles long and 60 miles wide to cool the atmosphere beneath by obscuring sunlight.

Potential ethical and legal implications

Yet as researchers weigh the scientific and technical aspects of large-scale weather modification, they remain mindful of its two-edged nature.

Hoffman notes that during the Vietnam War, the US military seeded monsoon clouds in Operation Popeye in an attempt to use weather to hamper troop and supply movements along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. When information about the program was declassified in the mid-1970s, the international community established the UN Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques.

Several scientific bodies, such as the WMO and the US American Meteorological Society, have issued cautionary policy statements on weather modification.

But Hoffman notes that a broader discussion is needed as technologies emerge that make large-scale weather modification possible. "If these trends continue, in a few decades we'll have all the parts we need to put a system together."

The ethical and legal implications are vast, he says. "Any change in weather helps some people and hurts others. Cost versus benefit is a difficult question. Is this something we want to do?"

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Note: thanks to arkansas skywatcher

posted 03-24-2004 10:26 PM               

Record retreat in Swiss glaciers in 2003 due to climate change: scientists

Switzerland's glaciers melted by a record amount during 2003 under the onslaught of long-term climate change, a top Swiss science academy said Tuesday.
The retreat of the glaciers in the Swiss Alps reached up to 150 metres, with an overall melting exceeding that observed in any year since measurements began in the 19th century, according to the Swiss Academy of Natural Sciences.

And the shrinkage of the mountain ice was not the direct result of record hot summer temperatures in Switzerland and Europe last year, it added.

"The overall view that emerges is of a clarity never seen before since annual measurements started in 1880. None of the glaciers progressed or were stationary," the academy in Bern said in a statement.

"These observations should not be associated directly with the extreme summer heat, the length of the glaciers reacts with a delay to the change in climate," it added.

One of the academy's scientists explained that the overall length of the glaciers reflected a warming of the climate over several years rather than immediate shifts in temperature.

More complex measurements of the thickness of the ice cover -- which is affected by short-term heat -- on three glaciers also showed melting last year exceeding the levels measured through the 1990s, said Andreas Bauder.

"The length change sums up all the climatic influences," he told AFP.

"The glacier measurements are one of the best ways of documenting climate change," Bauder added.

The academy also cautioned that the advance of some glaciers occasionally observed in recent years was caused by residues of old snow, and was not due to the freezing of new rainfall during cold weather.

Overall, glaciers in the heart of Europe's biggest mountain range stopped advancing about 50 years ago, Bauder pointed out.

The Swiss length measurements were based on regular data recorded on 96 Alpine glaciers.

Climate change has been blamed on global warming caused by the rise in air pollution from greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

Bauder said scientists were not able to predict longer term trends for the ice floes but felt confident enough to forecast that the Swiss glaciers would again shrink in 2004.

"The glaciers will retreat, just on the signals we had in the last couple of years," he observed.