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- First, it was looking back to the 1992 World Scientist’s Warning to Humanity.  

- Then, it was turning the calender pages back to 1979 and a meeting held at Woods Hole at which a paper entitled, “The Carbon Dioxide Problem: Implications for Policy in the Management of Energy and Other Resources“.

- Now, we’ll turn the dial on the ‘Wayback Machine‘ all the way back to 1953 and an article in the Popular Mechanics Magazine of the day.

- Truly, this information has been around for awhile.

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- To Climate Progress and the 1953 article…

- A while ago, I wrote a piece about the World Scientists Warning to Humanity 1992.   Now, DotEarth has come up with a similar warning dating back to 1979 which I’ve copied and linked to, below.

- And for those of you who can date your music impressions way back to the 1960’s, how about “Spirit - Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus - Nature’s Way“.   Even back then, I could hear what they were saying:  “It’s nature’s way of telling you; dying trees.”

- It’s not like the writing about the environment hasn’t been on the wall for those who were looking.

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The Cassandra Files: A 1979 Climate Warning

Few things are sadder than looking back and contemplating “what might have been.” It’s certainly not the kind of thing most people want to do at a birthday party.

But that was what happened on Oct. 24 when the Woods Hole Research Center in Woods Hole, Mass., marked the 80th birthday of its founder, the biologist and ecologist George Woodwell, with a symposium on “Ecology and the Public Good.”

One participant, James Gustave Speth, passed out copies of a report he received in July 1979, when he was chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Its title was “The Carbon Dioxide Problem: Implications for Policy in the Management of Energy and Other Resources.” Its lead author was Dr. Woodwell, then the director of the Ecosystems Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory. His coauthors were Gordon J. MacDonald, Roger Revelle and Charles D. Keeling. All were eminent; Dr. Keeling was the first to chart increased concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — a rise known today as the Keeling curve. (Click here to download a PDF of the report.)

The report starts off with a blunt warning: “Man is setting in motion a series of events that seem certain to cause a significant warming of world climates over the next decades unless mitigating steps are taken immediately.” It adds, “ Enlightened policies in the management of fossil fuels and forests can delay or avoid these changes, but the time for implementing the policies is fast passing.”

In a forward he wrote for the reprinted report, Mr. Speth, now the dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Science, tells how the group of scientists prepared it for the White House, and how the Carter administration asked the National Academy of Sciences for guidance on its grim conclusions. While factors like the possible climate buffering influence of the oceans are imperfectly understood, the academy panel said, “if carbon dioxide continues to increase, the study group finds no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible.”

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- Thanks to Dot Earth

- This article is from the NY Times and they insist that folks have an ID and a PW in order to read their stuff. You can get these for free just by signing up. However, a friend of mine suggests the website bugmenot.com as an alternative to having to do these annoying sign ups. Check it out. Thx Bruce S. for the tip.

- What no one seems to talk about much as they all extol the virtues of ‘clean coal’ is that there is not one functional full scale clean coal facility on the planet.  See:  

- It’s all small ‘proof-of-concept’ studies.   And, every time  a clean coal facility was going to be built, thus far, the plans have been scrapped at the 11th hours because of costs.  

- And yet, and yet, the discussion of its virtues goes on and on about how it is going to be a major piece as we plan the future.  What dreams and bullshit we are being fed.

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Big Coal is paying close attention to what the presidential candidates are saying about keeping coal part of the U.S. energy mix.

Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain, unlike President George W. Bush, support setting economy-wide caps on industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. That is a potential problem for the nation’s coal-fired power plants, which produce half the U.S. electricity supply — but also are the country’s leading source in recent years of emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, according to a report last month by the Government Accountability Office.

But as Election Day nears, both candidates are competing over who will do more to support clean-coal initiatives. For that, some credit belongs to Stephen Miller.

Mr. Miller, 55 years old, is president of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a Virginia group funded by the country’s major coal-burning utilities, coal producers and railroads that haul coal. Over the past year, his organization has spent nearly $40 million on television and radio spots and other outreach efforts to bolster public support for coal, and to reinforce fears that limits on its use will raise living costs.

Mr. Miller’s group has been a fixture at presidential campaign events. At the Democratic and Republican conventions, the coalition spent a total of $1.7 million on advertising and street teams of workers who handed out water bottles, hats and literature about coal’s importance to the U.S. economy.

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- I’ve been on for sometime about New Zealand, as any long term reader of this Blog knows.   Indeed, my wife and I have secured resident visas for NZ as a sort of insurance policy.  

- This means that we now have the permanent right to live there, if we want to for the rest of our lives.  And, we may well do so when we’re ready to retire. 

- If the world begins to crumble as a result of the numerous threats that I an others have detailed, then moving there will certainly look like a good move.

- We’re not the only folks to think so.   I came across a reference to the article, below, on a friend’s Blog and I found it interesting reading, indeed.

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Is the end really, finally nigh? And if it is, what are you going to do about it? John McCrone meets some South Islanders who are getting ready for the end of the world as we know it.

The ‘twin tsunamis’ of global warming and peak oil could spell TEOTWAWKI - the end of the world as we know it - and already, quietly, some people are getting prepared because they believe we are talking years rather than decades.

Helen, a petite 42-year-old Nelson housewife, is racing to build her own personal TEOTWAWKI lifeboat.

Earlier this year, she and her American husband cashed-up  to buy a 21ha farm in a remote, easily defensible, river valley backing onto the Arthur Range, north-west of Nelson.

The site ticks the right boxes. Way above sea level. Its own spring and stream. Enough winter sun. A good mix of growing areas. A sprinkling of neighbouring farms strung along the valley’s winding dirt-track road.

The digger was to arrive this week to carve out the platform for an adobe eco-house. A turbine in the stream will generate power. A composting toilet will deal with sewage.

Then there is the stuff that could really get her labelled as a crank (and why she would prefer to remain relatively anonymous, at least until she is completely set up). Back at her rented house in Nelson, Helen shows the growing collection of horse-drawn ploughs, wheat grinders, treadle sewing machines and other rusting relics of the pre-carbon era, she believes she will need the day the petrol pumps finally run dry.  here is the library of yellowing books from colonial times, telling how to make your own soap, spin candlewicks, care for clydesdale horses.

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- research thanks to Brian C.

Arctic scientists discover new global warming threat as melting permafrost releases millions of tons of a gas 20 times more damaging than carbon dioxide.

The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.

The Independent has been passed details of preliminary findings suggesting that massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats.

Underground stores of methane are important because scientists believe their sudden release has in the past been responsible for rapid increases in global temperatures, dramatic changes to the climate, and even the mass extinction of species. Scientists aboard a research ship that has sailed the entire length of Russia’s northern coast have discovered intense concentrations of methane – sometimes at up to 100 times background levels – over several areas covering thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf.

In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through “methane chimneys” rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a “lid” to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.

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- None of this is new.  But, it is getting closer.

- See: , , , , and

- Not the first time I’ve written on this and I doubt it will be the last.

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A senior US Coast Guard commander has warned of the risk of conflict in the Arctic, unless disputes over international borders are resolved.

Speaking to the BBC during an Arctic patrol flight, Rear Adm Gene Brooks, in charge of the Coast Guard’s vast Alaska region, appealed for a diplomatic deal.

“The potential is there with undetermined boundaries and great wealth for conflict, or competition.

“There’s always a risk of conflict,” Adm Brookes said.

He added that this was especially the case “where you do not have established, delineated, agreed-upon borders”.

Russia is staking the largest claim to the Arctic, after planting a flag at the North Pole last summer, but Denmark, Norway, Canada and the United States are all involved in border disputes as well.

The admiral’s warning comes as the Arctic sea-ice has, for a second year running, retreated far more dramatically than the long-term average. The latest satellite analysis shows this year’s melt closely following last year’s record thaw.

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Failure to take urgent action to curb climate change is effectively violating the human rights of people in the poorest nations, an aid charity warns.

A report by Oxfam International says emissions, primarily from developed countries, are exacerbating flooding, droughts and extreme weather events.

As a result, harvests are failing and people are losing their homes and access to water, the authors observe.

They say human rights need to be at the heart of global climate policies.

Oxfam will be submitting its report, called Climate Wrongs and Human Rights, to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

Righting wrongs

“Climate change was first seen as a scientific problem, then an economic one,” explained report author Kate Raworth. “Now it is becoming a matter of international justice.

The global impacts of climate change meant that nations had to be held accountable for the consequences of their actions, Ms Raworth said.

“Litigation is seldom the best way to solve a dispute.

“That is why we need a strong UN deal in 2009 to cut emissions and support adaption,” she added, referring to next year’s key UN climate summit where a future global climate strategy is expected to be agreed.

“However, vulnerable countries do need options to protect themselves. Rich country polluters have been fully aware of their culpability for many years.”

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The unprecedented drought that has gripped the southwestern United States isn’t almost over, researchers say, it may have only just begun.

That’s the consensus of all but 1 of the 19 climate models used as the basis for this week’s upcoming report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), according to a new analysis.

Richard Seager, a senior research scientist with the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, and co-authors report their findings today in the online advance version of the journal Science.

Based on the climate models, the U.S. Southwest and parts of northern Mexico could become as arid as the North American Dust Bowl conditions of the 1930s, the study authors report.

“If these models are correct, the levels of aridity of the recent multiyear drought [will] become the new climatology of the American Southwest,” the team writes.

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- “Climate change is not a natural disaster but has largely been caused by wealthy countries emitting greenhouse gases during their industrialisation,” says McGranahan. “Yet the poorest countries that have contributed least to the problem are most vulnerable to its effects. It is therefore incumbent on rich nations to help poorer ones to adapt to the changes ahead.”

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Science Daily  The first global study to identify populations at greatest risk from rising sea levels and more intense cyclones linked to climate change will be published next month in the peer-reviewed journal Environment and Urbanization.

The research shows that 634 million people one tenth of the global population live in coastal areas that lie within just ten metres above sea level.

It calls for action to limit the effects of climate change, to help people migrate away from risk and to modify urban settlements to reduce their vulnerability. But it warns that this will require enforceable regulations and economic incentives, both of which depend on political will, funding and human capital.

Key findings of the study by Gordon McGranahan of the International Institute for Environment and Development (UK) and his colleagues, Deborah Balk and Bridget Anderson, at the City University of New York and Columbia University, are that:

• Nearly two-thirds of urban settlements with more than 5 million inhabitants are at least partially in the 0-10 metre zone.
• On average, 14 percent of people in the least developed countries live in the zone (compared to 10 percent in OECD countries).
• 21 percent of the urban populations of least developed nations are in the zone (11 percent in OECD countries).
• About 75% of people in the zone are in Asia. 21 nations have more than half of their population in the zone (16 are small island states).
• Poor countries and poor communities within them are most at risk.

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- Global Warming and Global Climate Change. People expect to be able to go and look at their thermometers and see a gradual creeping up of the indicator.  Well, I don’t think it is going to happen so neatly as that. 

- Weather events are systems and systems are a mix of stability and chaos.  The more complex the system, the the harder it is to untangle all the factors that feed into its states.  Weather is a very complex system and as we continue to pump more and more CO2 and Methane into the atmosphere, I expects the system will grow unstable at its current resting point and as it seeks toward a new equilibrium, it will exhibit instability. 

- Weather events will exhibit wilder and wilder swings as the system seeks to incorporate the greenhouse gases we’re adding. And  I believe this instability will continue so long as we keep changing the composition of the atmosphere.  And, beneath the surface fluctuations, the average temperatures will, indeed, creep up in most places.

- Here in New Zealand this summer, it has been unusually cool.   In fact, Wellington, the capital, experienced the coldest December on record in 2006.  In the Pacific Northwest of the US, where I normally live, they’ve had an absolutely dismal winter this year.  Record floods, huge wind storms and snow on the ground for  a week or more in an area that often sees winters without any snow.  The US’s mid-west is in the vise of a huge deep-freeze and a month or so back, New York City was having record-breaking tee-shirt weather one day and snow storms the very next day. Now we’re reading about a huge storm pounding Northern Europe. 

- Yes, I know weather is variable and we’ve seen all of this before.  It is the larger patterns I’m referring to here - the trends emerging from the noise.  Keep watching.

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At least 25 people have been killed as violent storms lashed northern Europe, causing travel chaos across the region.

Britain was the worst hit with nine people killed as rain and gusts of up to 99mph (159km/h) swept the country.

Hurricane-force winds battering Germany have claimed at least seven lives. The other deaths were reported in France, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands.

The severe weather has forced hundreds of flight, rail and ferry cancellations and prompted road and school closures.

Meteorologists at London’s Met Office said the winds reached “severe gale force” as they crossed Britain and were the highest recorded since January 1990.

They warned the weather system would intensify as it moved east across the continent - with Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany expected to be worst hit overnight.

Winds of almost 105mph (170km/h) were recorded late on Thursday in Germany, prompting the national rail company to suspend all its services, leaving passengers stranded.

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