Archive for the ‘The Perfect Storm’ Category

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State Dept. petitioned to issue missing and overdue Climate Action Report required by climate treaty

Sunday, November 5th, 2006

U.S. in Violation of International Climate Change Treaty on Eve of Critical Meeting in Kenya

WASHINGTON, D.C. The Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace today petitioned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to produce the overdue U.S. Climate Action Report as required by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The deadline for the fourth U.S. Climate Action Report passed on January 1, 2006—more than 11 months ago. Now the 12th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC will take place in Nairobi, Kenya from November 6-17 without required information from the U.S.

“As the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases and a non-party to the Kyoto Protocol, you would think that the U.S. could at least meet its modest commitment to issue a timely Climate Action Report,” stated Julie Teel, a staff attorney in the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate, Air and Energy Program. “With the daily influx of new scientific and economic data highlighting the urgency of immediate action to address climate change, the Bush administration’s failure to take even this meager step in the right direction is an indicator of just how far out of step it is with the desire of the majority of Americans to do something about global warming.”

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Salt-Water Fish Extinction Seen By 2048

Sunday, November 5th, 2006

Study By Ecologists, Economists Predicts Collapse of World Ocean Ecology

The apocalypse has a new date: 2048.

That’s when the world’s oceans will be empty of fish, predicts an international team of ecologists and economists. The cause: the disappearance of species due to overfishing, pollution, habitat loss, and climate change.

The study by Boris Worm, PhD, of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, — with colleagues in the U.K., U.S., Sweden, and Panama — was an effort to understand what this loss of ocean species might mean to the world.

The researchers analyzed several different kinds of data. Even to these ecology-minded scientists, the results were an unpleasant surprise.

“I was shocked and disturbed by how consistent these trends are — beyond anything we suspected,” Worm says in a news release.

“This isn’t predicted to happen. This is happening now,” study researcher Nicola Beaumont, PhD, of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, U.K., says in a news release.

“If biodiversity continues to decline, the marine environment will not be able to sustain our way of life. Indeed, it may not be able to sustain our lives at all,” Beaumont adds.

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Lloyd’s Releases Second ‘360 Report’ on Climate Change

Friday, November 3rd, 2006

– Well, people can argue back and forth and believe that each other’s opinions are just politically or ideologically motivated but when people like Lloyds of London, the world famous insurance folks, weigh in on the questions, it is worth sitting up and taking notice.

– These folks make their living by predicting the future and you can be sure that the last thing they want to do is to have the accuracy of their predictions (and thus the profitability of their predictions) marred by ideological biases of any kind. So, when they say there’s a coming problem with the climate, you can be pretty sure you are getting the ‘straight stuff’.

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Lloyd’s has released the second installment of its “360 Climate Change” series, entitled “What next for climate change?” Last June it published the first installment, entitled “Climate Change, Adapt or Bust,” which warned insurers to face up to the growing threats involved or risk being “swept away.”

Lloyd’s is providing both technical knowledge and insights to help understand and contain the effects of global warming. In this installment its market experts “highlight the key projects insured in the market that will contribute towards a sustainable future, said the announcement. “This includes ‘waste to energy’ plants, which burn household and industrial waste to give off gas and generate electricity, and wind farms, which are proving a major source of renewable energy.”

The report notes that the Lloyd’s market provides about a third of the insurance for waste to energy plants, and covers about a quarter of the world’s wind farms. Lloyd’s is also setting up a new team of experts to help its insurers prepare for and manage the growing risk of climate change.

Trevor Maynard, Lloyd’s manager of emerging risks who will lead that team, commented: “Climate change is a very real threat. It would be unthinkable for us to ignore one of the biggest dangers we face in the coming decades. Among other things, this market recognizes the importance of developing new technology to create renewable energy.”

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Lloyd’s full ‘360 Climate Change’ report is here.

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Australia defends climate stance

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

Australian Treasurer Peter Costello has said there is “no point” in Australia signing the Kyoto Protocol on climate change unless China and India do too.

Australia, like the US, has refused to ratify the Kyoto agreement, but is set to face increasing pressure to do so in the light of a new hard-hitting study.

A report by former World Bank economist Nicholas Stern warned of severe problems if global warming was ignored.

If there was no action now, he said, the world would face a huge depression.

The UN has also just released new data showing that rich countries have made little overall progress in reducing the production of gases blamed for global warming.

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Kyoto Failing to Cool the Planet

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

The industrialized world’s emissions of greenhouse gases are growing again, despite efforts under the Kyoto Protocol to cap them and stave off global warming, the United Nations reported Monday.

Emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases declined in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the shutdown of polluting factories and power plants in eastern Europe. But now those economies are rebounding, contributing to a 2.4 percent rise in emissions by 41 industrialized nations between 2000 and 2004.

“This means that industrialized countries will need to intensify their efforts to implement strong policies which reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” said Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. climate treaty secretariat, referring to taxes on carbon-based fuels, energy-efficiency regulations and other steps.

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Stern Review on the economics of climate change

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

– this is a major report on the economics of climate change by the British Government.

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Stern Review final report

The pre-publication edition of the Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change is available to be downloaded below either on a chapter-by-chapter basis or in parts covering broader themes. The report is available in Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF). If you do not have Adobe Acrobat installed on your computer you can download the software free of charge from the Adobe website. For alternative ways to read PDF documents and further information on website accessibility visit the HM Treasury accessibility page.

Hardcopies will be available from January at a charge of c. £29.99 + £3.50 postage and packing (quoting ISBN number: 0-521-70080-9). Copies can be ordered from Cambridge University Press via the website http://www.cambridge.org/9780521700801, by fax on +44 (0)1223 315052 or post from the following address: Science Marketing, Freepost, Cambridge University Press, The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge, CB2.

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GLOBAL WARMING REPORT: Right-Wing Fiction vs. Economic Reality

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

As the scientific consensus on the reality of global warming’s effects have strengthened, global warming deniers have resorted to arguing that, even if it is real, it’s too expensive to mitigate. Some examples:

National Review’s Jason Steorts: “Even if warming is predominately the result of human activity, and even if its harms will outweigh its benefits, the question is whether it will be bad enough to justify the economic castration that significant greenhouse-gas reductions would require.”

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK): “The Kyoto Protocol is a lot of economic pain for no climate gain.”

Rush Limbaugh: “Would you get off the global warming stuff, some people are saying. No, I’m not going to get off of it because what’s at stake is the US economy, folks, what’s at stake is our lifestyle. The people that are trying to force this on everybody and take the natural fluctuations of our climate.”

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Ocean dead zone off Oregon dissipating

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

GRANTS PASS, Ore. – An ocean dead zone off Oregon that killed fish, crabs and sea worms in an area bigger than Rhode Island last summer lasted nearly three times longer than any of its predecessors before dissipating with autumn’s change in the weather, scientists said Monday.

This year’s dead zone off Oregon ran for 17 weeks, compared to the previous high of six weeks in 2004, and saw oxygen readings near zero that left the ocean bottom littered with dead crabs, sea stars and sea anemones. This is the fifth straight year the dead zone returned. It covered 70 miles of the central Oregon Coast and there are indications a dead zone also formed off southern Washington.

Southerly winds in recent weeks have flushed out the oxygen-depleted waters that were stuck along the Continental Shelf off the central Oregon Coast, and put an end to the condition known as ocean upwelling that triggered the dead zone, Jack Barth, professor of physical oceanography at Oregon State University, said from Corvallis.

“The fact that we’ve seen five in five years now, and this one in 2006 was the most devastating does not bode well for the future,” Jane Lubchenco, a professor of marine biology at OSU who served on the Pew Oceans Commission, said from Corvallis. “We’re seeing a system that is acting very sporadically. It’s changing in ways we haven’t seen before, or at least we haven’t documented before. We can trace all those changes to changes in the winds.”

A recent United Nations report listed 200 dead zones around the world, including one off the mouth of the Mississippi River in the Gulf of Mexico. Almost all of them are caused by fertilizer and pollution running down rivers to feed huge algae blooms, which die and decompose on the bottom, depleting the water of oxygen.

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research thx to MD

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Senators call on Exxon to stop funding climate change denial lobby

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

In an act of surprising bi-partisanship so close to the mid-term elections, Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Jay Rockefeller (D-W.VA) have penned a letter to ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson demanding that Exxon, “end any further financial assistance [to groups] whose public advocacy has contributed to the small but unfortunately effective climate change denial myth.” The Senators singled out the Washington lobby group Competitive Enterprise Institute, whose penchant for promoting junk science on climate change has been stoked over the years by over $2 million oily dollars from ExMo.

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The Synthesizer

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

“Let the waters teem with countless living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of heaven.'” E.O. Wilson is quoting from the biblical account of the fifth day of creation. “Isn’t that lovely?” he asks, his voice lilting with pleasure. “Whether you believe that there is a god who touched the universe with a magic wand or not, it’s a command—[one] I think scientists could respond to as well as religious folk.”

Wilson sits in his office on the fourth floor of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, across the hall from the university’s world-famous ant collection. His hands move in animated gestures, his shoulders falling forward into a natural hunch—the “lifetime posture” he developed by his late teens from stooping low to the ground to inspect small creatures.

The reference to biodiversity in the seminal text of Judeo-Christian culture resonates deeply with Wilson. Raised a Baptist and “born again” as a teenager, he has championed biodiversity as an academic and a writer for more than 50 years. His new book, The Creation, is an appeal to the religious right to “consider forming an alliance to do something that science and religion, the most powerful social forces in the world, are uniquely prepared to do: save the creation.”

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