Archive for the ‘Climate Change’ Category

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Alarming Growth In Expected Carbon Dioxide Emissions In China, Analysis Finds

Sunday, March 16th, 2008

The growth in China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is far outpacing previous estimates, making the goal of stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gases even more difficult, according to a new analysis by economists at the University of California, Berkeley, and UC San Diego.

Previous estimates, including those used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, say the region that includes China will see a 2.5 to 5 percent annual increase in CO2 emissions, the largest contributor to atmospheric greenhouse gases, between 2004 and 2010. The new UC analysis puts that annual growth rate for China to at least 11 percent for the same time period.

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Carbon Output Must Near Zero To Avert Danger, New Studies Say

Sunday, March 16th, 2008

– This quote, from the article referenced below, is at the core of Perfect Storm concerns:

Although many nations have been pledging steps to curb emissions for nearly a decade, the world’s output of carbon from human activities totals about 10 billion tons a year and has been steadily rising.

— — — — — — —

The task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperatures may be far more difficult than previous research suggested, say scientists who have just published studies indicating that it would require the world to cease carbon emissions altogether within a matter of decades.

Their findings, published in separate journals over the past few weeks, suggest that both industrialized and developing nations must wean themselves off fossil fuels by as early as mid-century in order to prevent warming that could change precipitation patterns and dry up sources of water worldwide.

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Posted in Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Desertification, Food Shortages, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages | No Comments »

Global Warming to Affect U.S. Transport

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

Flooded roads and subways, deformed railroad tracks, and weakened bridges may be the wave of the future with continuing warming, a new study says.

Climate change will affect every type of transportation through rising sea levels, increased rainfall, and surges from more intense storms, the National Research Council said in a report released Tuesday.

Complicating matters, people continue to move into coastal areas, creating the need for more roads and services in the most vulnerable regions, the report noted.

“The time has come for transportation professionals to acknowledge and confront the challenges posed by climate change and to incorporate the most current scientific knowledge into the planning of transportation systems,” said Henry Schwartz Jr., past president and chairman of the engineering firm Sverdrup/Jacobs Civil Inc., and chairman of the committee that wrote the report.

Five Major Threats

The report cites five major areas of growing threat:

—More heat waves, requiring load limits at hot-weather or high-altitude airports and causing thermal expansion of bridge joints and rail track deformities.

(Related story: Global Warming Likely Causing More Heat Waves, Scientists Say [August 1, 2006])

—Rising sea levels and storm surges flooding coastal roadways, forcing evacuations, inundating airports and rail lines, flooding tunnels, and eroding bridge bases.

(Related story: Rising Seas Threaten China’s Sinking Coastal Cities [January 17, 2008])

—More rainstorms delaying air and ground traffic, flooding tunnels and railways, and eroding road, bridge < recent (see>, and pipeline supports.

—More frequent strong hurricanes, disrupting air and shipping service, blowing debris onto roads, and damaging buildings.

—Rising arctic temperatures thawing permafrost, resulting in road, railway, and airport runway subsidence and potential pipeline failures.

(Related story: Arctic Summers Ice Free by 2040, Study Predicts [December 12, 2006])

System Not Built for Change

The nation’s transportation system was built for local conditions based on historical weather data, but those data may no longer be reliable in the face of new weather extremes, the report warns.

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Australia’s food bowl lies empty

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

As the BBC looks at the impact of rising food prices around the world, Sydney correspondent Nick Bryant reports from Australia on how the worst drought on record has slashed its exports of wheat.

Though located in a remote corner of the planet, the fields of Australia’s food bowl are central to the worldwide price of wheat.

In this part of rural New South Wales, water-starved farms and cavernous empty grain silos have the potential to create a ripple effect which spreads around the globe.

And that is precisely what is happening right now.

Low yield

After America, Australia is normally the second largest exporter of grain, and in a good year it would hope to harvest about 25 million tonnes.

But the country remains in the grip of the worst drought in a century, which is why the 2006 crop yielded only 9.8m tonnes.

Global wheat stocks are at their lowest levels since 1979, and the ongoing Australian drought is one of the reasons why.

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Southern Baptists Back a Shift on Climate Change

Friday, March 14th, 2008

Signaling a significant departure from the Southern Baptist Convention’s official stance on global warming, 44 Southern Baptist leaders have decided to back a declaration calling for more action on climate change, saying its previous position on the issue was “too timid.”

The largest denomination in the United States after the Roman Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, with more than 16 million members, is politically and theologically conservative.

Yet its current president, the Rev. Frank Page, signed the initiative, “A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change.” Two past presidents of the convention, the Rev. Jack Graham and the Rev. James Merritt, also signed.

“We believe our current denominational engagement with these issues has often been too timid, failing to produce a unified moral voice,” the church leaders wrote in their new declaration.

A 2007 resolution passed by the convention hewed to a more skeptical view of global warming.

In contrast, the new declaration, which will be released Monday, states, “Our cautious response to these issues in the face of mounting evidence may be seen by the world as uncaring, reckless and ill-informed.”

The document also urges ministers to preach more about the environment and for all Baptists to keep an open mind about considering environmental policy.

Jonathan Merritt, the spokesman for the Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative and a seminarian at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., said the declaration was a call to Christians to return to a biblical mandate to guard the world God created.

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– 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 :arrow: as an alternative to having to do these annoying sign ups. Check it out. Thx Bruce S. for the tip.

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EU warns of climate change threat

Thursday, March 13th, 2008

An EU report says climate change will have a growing impact on global security, multiplying existing threats such as shortages of food and water.

It warns that climate change could cause millions of people to migrate towards Europe as other parts of the world suffer environmental degradation.

States that are “already fragile and conflict prone” could be over-burdened, the report says.

EU proposals to tackle climate change will be discussed by leaders this week.

The stark warning from the report – drawn up by the EU’s foreign affairs chief Javier Solana and the European Commission – is that climate change is not just a threat in itself – it is “a threat multiplier”.

It says shortages of food and water – even radicalisation and state failure – are likely to get worse if no action is taken.

Africa is likely to be especially at risk, which means migration could intensify, both within Africa itself and towards Europe.

EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner told the BBC: “If the weakest countries cannot adapt, it may lead to, for instance, more forced migration, and even possibly radicalisation and state failure, causing internal and external security risks.”

Polar icecaps

The report also highlights the Arctic as a possible area of future conflict. With the melting of the polar icecaps, new waterways and trade routes are opening up.

The region is rich in untapped oil and gas resources, and last year Russia staked its claim by planting a flag on the seabed beneath the North Pole.

There is, it says, “an increasing need to address the growing debate over territorial claims and access to new trade routes”.

But the report does not offer much in the way of specific solutions. It recommends more dialogue, international co-operation and further research.

The EU prides itself on being a world leader on climate change, but turning talk into action is not easy.

On the one hand, the EU scheme for carbon emissions trading is being expanded to take in aviation for the first time.

But plans to limit car emissions and switch to renewable energy are being hampered by objections from industries and some member states, which say they are being unfairly penalised.

To the original article…  ➡

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Climate change’s most deadly threat: drought

Thursday, March 13th, 2008

Anthropologist Brian Fagan uses Earth’s distant past to predict the crises that may lie in its future.

Spring is on its way back to northern latitudes. In many locales, it will arrive earlier than “normal,” yielding, ostensibly, a longer growing season, a hotter summer, balmier autumn, and future winters will lack their ferocious post-Pleistocene bites.

While vineyards are being planned for northern England, millions of residents around desiccated Atlanta are praying for enough rain to flow through their taps.

Brian Fagan believes climate is not merely a backdrop to the ongoing drama of human civilization, but an important stage upon which world events turn.

As it turns out, the anecdotal evidence of climate change in this, the 21st century, shares much in common with a historical antecedent, the Medieval Warm Period, circa AD 800 to 1200, that radically shaped societies across the globe.

The Medieval Warm Period was a time when the capacity of agriculture rapidly expanded and enabled people to flourish in Europe. Yet elsewhere, extended lack of rainfall, or too much of it, brought famine, plagues, and wars.

This bout of global warming was followed by the Little Ice Age that lasted roughly from AD 1300 until the middle of the 19th century and cast Europe and North America back into a big chill. Since then, mean global temperature has been slowly and steadily rising, accompanied by huge leaps in agricultural output and skyrocketing human population.

Today, climate experts tell us that over the past two decades, temperature has registered an alarming unnatural spike and is expected to keep climbing.

Despite the well-established fact that Earth is heating up, skeptics still are trying to poke holes in the assertion that it is owed to humans pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere. Climate change is, and always has been cyclical, they say. Or maybe, some insist, it is God who has his hand on the thermostat.

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New Research Confirms Antarctic Thaw Fears

Friday, March 7th, 2008

New research confirms that ice sheets in West Antarctica are thinning at a far faster rate than in past millennia. Although scientists are divided as to the cause of the melt, many feel it is directly related to climate change.

The boom must have been deafening last fall as the gigantic chunk of ice finally broke off from the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica. For almost a year, the creaks and groans from the river of ice had presaged the birth of a new, expansive iceberg. And finally it was there — 34 kilometers long by 20 kilometers wide, an area almost as great as that of New York City.

But as dramatic as the iceberg birth was, it has become a common spectacle in recent years. The gigantic ice shelf that extends into the ocean off of West Antarctica is crumbling — and the glaciers on the continent behind the ice shelf are flowing with increasing speed toward the sea. Concern among scientists is increasing just as quickly. Should the melt-rate continue, or accelerate, many experts fear that the resulting rise in the ocean level could be catastrophic.

Just what is behind the meltdown, however, is not entirely clear. Whereas it is not difficult to pinpoint global warming caused by human activity for increasing temperatures in the Arctic, the southern end of the planet is more difficult. The western side of the continent is thawing out wherever one looks, but on the eastern side, not much is happening.

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Global Warming Skeptics Insist Humans Not at Fault

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

– I think these folks are playing with a few cards missing from their deck myself. 

= = = = = = = = = =

When Christopher Monckton, who served as a special adviser to former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, ponders the current political push to curb greenhouse gases linked to climate change, he thinks of King Canute.

According to Monckton, Canute — the Viking who ruled England along with much of Scandinavia nearly a thousand years ago — took his courtiers to the ocean’s edge one day, set down his throne and ordered the tide not to come in. The tide, of course, came in, and the king got his feet wet.

The lesson? The king taught his advisers “humility,” Monckton said, by showing them that even he, a king, could not control nature. In the same way, he argued, modern-day politicians should not fool themselves into thinking that humanity is having a big impact on climate.

Monckton, along with other high-profile global warming skeptics such as University of Virginia professor emeritus S. Fred Singer and Virginia state climatologist Patrick J. Michaels, are gathered in New York this week for a conference aimed at challenging the idea that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank funded by energy and health-care corporations as well as conservative foundations and individuals, the 2 1/2 -day session poses a stark contrast to the near-unanimous chorus of concern expressed by top U.S. politicians and most of the scientific mainstream.

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React to Warming Now While Costs Still Low, OECD Urges

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

The world must respond to climate change and other environmental challenges now while the cost is low or else pay a stiffer price later for its indecision, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said Wednesday.

A new report by the 30-nation organization looks at “red light issues” in the environment, including global warming, water shortages, energy, biodiversity loss, transportation, agriculture, and fisheries.

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Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Deforestation, Desertification, Financial melt-down, Food Shortages, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages | No Comments »

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