Archive for the ‘Weather deterioration’ Category

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Mankind warming the oceans – report

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

The world’s oceans are warming up and the rise is both significant and real, according to one of the most comprehensive studies into marine temperature data gathered over the past two decades.

Measuring the temperature of the oceans has not been easy, but the scientists behind the latest study believe there is now incontrovertible evidence to show that the top few hundred metres of the sea are warming – and that this temperature rise is consistent with man-made climate change.

The findings are important because ocean temperatures are seen as a more reliable and convincing signal of global warming than land-based measurements, which are prone to huge variability. This is due to the fluctuating influences of the weather and the spread of cities, which can artificially increase local terrestrial temperatures by the urban “heat island” effect.

Scientists involved in the study have looked at temperature recordings gathered by flotation devices that take measurements of the top 700m of the ocean. They conclude that this upper layer of ocean has warmed significantly between 1993 and 2008 – the period covered by the study – and that this is slightly faster than earlier estimates used in the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

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Senior military leaders announce support for climate bill

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

33 generals, admirals: “Climate change is making the world a more dangerous place” and “threatening America’s security”

The Pentagon affirmed earlier this year that “Climate change, energy security, and economic stability are inextricably linked.”

Today an unprecedented 33 retired US military generals and admirals announced that they support comprehensive climate and energy legislation in a letter to Senators Reid and McConnell as well as a full page ad.  The news release points out:

It was the largest such announcement of support ever, reflecting the consensus of the national security community that climate change and oil dependence pose a threat American security.

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Posted in Climate Change, CounterCurrents, CrashBlogging, Financial melt-down, Politics - The Right Way, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Weather deterioration | No Comments »

Enough is enough, say climate scientists

Monday, May 10th, 2010

A group of climate change scientists who are convinced mankind is slowly destroying the Earth have written an impassioned plea to be taken seriously.

255 members of the US National Academy of Sciences have written an open letter to the Guardian newspaper in the UK, in defence of climate research.

The letter begins by admitting that scientific findings are not always one hundred per cent accurate. And it acknowledges that pioneers like Galileo, Pasteur, Darwin, and Einstein achieved their lofty reputations by challenging what was – at the time – conventional scientific wisdom.

However, the letter goes on to say, there are certain things that are so universally accepted that they can now be considered ‘facts’: our planet is about 4.5bn years old (the theory of the origin of Earth), that our universe was born from a single event about 14bn years ago (the Big Bang theory), and that today’s organisms evolved from ones living in the past (the theory of evolution).

Anthropogenic (ie, caused by man) climate change should be listed among these “certainties” of science, the letter claims.

More… ➡

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‘Worse to come’ bushfire warning

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

Jan 6, 2010

CANBERRA – As firefighters continued to battle huge fronts in Western Australia and Tasmania yesterday, confirmation came that worse lies ahead as the nation is heated further by global warming.

The Bureau of Meteorology said Australia had been getting hotter every decade for the past 70 years and the trend was expected to continue.

Its latest climate statement said the past 10 years were the hottest decade since records began.

Last year – Australia’s second-hottest – produced record-breaking heatwaves that saw temperatures soar to 46.4C in Melbourne and forced Adelaide to endure eight consecutive days above 35C.

The Bureau of Meteorology’s annual climate statement said the mean temperature for the past 10 years had climbed 0.48C above the 1961-1990 average, climbing further last year to 0.9C above the average.

More… ➡

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2009: Second Warmest Year on Record; End of Warmest Decade

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

Very little doubt, except among the denialists and those who don’t understand science, that we are seriously losing ground with the climate.

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Jan. 21, 2010

2009 was tied for the second warmest year in the modern record, a new NASA analysis of global surface temperature shows. The analysis, conducted by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, also shows that in the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest year since modern records began in 1880.

Although 2008 was the coolest year of the decade, due to strong cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean, 2009 saw a return to near-record global temperatures. The past year was only a fraction of a degree cooler than 2005, the warmest year on record, and tied with a cluster of other years — 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007 1998 and 2007 — as the second warmest year since recordkeeping began.

“There’s always an interest in the annual temperature numbers and on a given year’s ranking, but usually that misses the point,” said James Hansen, the director of GISS. “There’s substantial year-to-year variability of global temperature caused by the tropical El Niño-La Niña cycle. But when we average temperature over five or ten years to minimize that variability, we find that global warming is continuing unabated.”

More… ➡

– Research thanks to John K.

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Got Gas?

Sunday, October 18th, 2009

– A good friend of mine sent me this article saying, “Interesting article on natural gas“.

– It is, indeed, an interesting article but I saw it in a different light than many perhaps do.

– My response to my friend:

—

D,

An interesting and potentially game-changing story, indeed.

But, it is a classic case of humanity’s inborn tendency to jump at the short term relief without fairly balancing it against the long-term consequences.

To see the consequences, I’d like to see someone make the assumption that ALL the fossil fuel we burn from here forward is this cleaner gas.   And, to be really fair, we can drop all considerations of the collateral damages associated with obtaining the gas that were mentioned in the article.

Just assume that the world will continue growing and producing and have more babies and all the rest of it for the next 20 to 50 years – all largely fueled by this gas.

The analysis should show what will happen to the CO2 levels in the atmosphere from consuming just this gas.  And then it should consider the consequences of this change in CO2 levels on global weather, ecosystems, environmental refugees, depleted glaciers and winter snow packs, increasing desertification, species die-offs and an entire host of follow-on consequences that will attend continued rising of global CO2 levels.

Short-term thinkers are enthusiastic about these new gas producing technologies because they allow us, for the moment, to avoid having to deal with the really tough long term questions regarding what we have to do to get into a sustainable long-term homeostatic balance with the planet’s ecosphere.

Long term, it’s really the only question that matters much.

Everything else is an avoidance or a denial that only take us further down the road wherein we do not solve this problem and cause a major crater in the Earth’s evolutionary history; killing many species, altering the weather for tens of thousands of years and killing the majority of the human beings alive and reducing the ones that survive to miserable circumstances.

Not an insignificant outcome – and all the more terrible because, difficult as it may be, we could avoid most of it if we had the grit and the will to do so.

Dennis

Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, Conflict, CrashBlogging, Deforestation, Desertification, Extinctions, Food Shortages, Immigration Stress, Mental Irrationality, Pollution, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages, Weather deterioration | No Comments »

Australians sweat out warmest winter

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

SYDNEY – Australia is in the throes of probably its warmest winter ever, with records smashed up and down the country.

Lying awake at night in pools of sweat, Australians have been wondering which hemisphere they live in.

Now the Bureau of Meteorology has confirmed that this is set to be the hottest August on record, by a big margin – and, if forecasts for the next few days are correct, the hottest winter.

The bureau, which spends much of its time dampening speculation that weather patterns have changed, issued a “special climate statement” describing the heatwave as “highly abnormal”.

It blamed hot air accumulating over central Australia during the past two or three weeks, without southerly fronts arriving to blow it away, as would usually be expected.

Nearly a dozen towns have broken winter records by more than four or five degrees, while some coastal areas of northern New South Wales and southern Queensland experienced their warmest day of 2009 in August, surpassing the midsummer temperatures of January and February.

More… ➡

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Another one bites the dust, literally: Bolivia’s 18,000 year-old Chacaltaya glacier is gone

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

Like the Wicked Witch of the West, the world is melting — and fast.

The University of Zurich’s World Glacier Monitoring Service reported earlier this year, “The new data continues the global trend in accelerated ice loss over the past few decades.” The rate of ice loss is twice as fast as a decade ago.  “The main thing that we can do to stop this is reduce greenhouse gases” said Michael Zemp, a researcher at the University of Zurich’s Department of Geography.

This is all sadly consistent with other recent research (see Another climate impact comes faster than predicted: Himalayan glaciers “decapitated” and AGU 2008: Two trillion tons of land ice lost since 2003 and links below).

And this country isn’t being spared — see “Another climate impact coming faster than predicted: Glacier National Park to go glacier-free a decade early.”

But the story of the week, from the Miami Herald, is Chacaltaya, which means ”cold road” — and like our Glacier National Park, it is gonna need a new name [maybe “not-so-cold cul-de-sac”]:

If anyone needs a reminder of the on-the-ground impacts of global climate change, come to the Andes mountains in Bolivia. At 17,388 feet above sea level, Chacaltaya, an 18,000 year-old glacier that delighted thousands of visitors for decades, is gone, completely melted away as of some sad, undetermined moment early this year….

More… ➡

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‘Safe’ climate means ‘no to coal’

Saturday, May 2nd, 2009

About three-quarters of the world’s fossil fuel reserves must be left unused if society is to avoid dangerous climate change, scientists warn.

More than 100 nations support the goal of keeping temperature rise below 2C.

But the scientists say that without major curbs on fossil fuel use, 2C will probably be reached by 2050.

Writing in Nature, they say politicians should focus on limiting humanity’s total output of CO2 rather than setting a “safe” level for annual emissions.

The UN climate process focuses on stabilising annual emissions at a level that would avoid major climate impacts.

But this group of scientists says that the cumulative total provides a better measure of the likely temperature rise, and may present an easier target for policymakers.

“To avoid dangerous climate change, we will have to limit the total amount of carbon we inject into the atmosphere, not just the emission rate in any given year,” said Myles Allen from the physics department at Oxford University.

“Climate policy needs an exit strategy; as well as reducing carbon emissions now, we need a plan for phasing out net emissions entirely.”

More… ➡

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Mental Irrationality, Pollution, The Perfect Storm, Weather deterioration | No Comments »

An introduction to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

– This is a great place to start if you want to get the big overview of Global Climate Change and its consequences.   And recall that this, as big as it is, is only a part of the bigger picture that I’ve been calling The Perfect Storm.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

In this post, I will examine the key impacts we face by 2100 if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path. I will focus primarily on:

  • Staggeringly high temperature rise, especially over land — some 15°F over much of the United States
  • Sea level rise of 5 feet, rising some 6 to 12 inches (or more) each decade thereafter
  • Dust Bowls over the U.S. SW and many other heavily populated regions around the globe
  • Massive species loss on land and sea — 50% or more of all life
  • Unexpected impacts — the fearsome “unknown unknowns”
  • More severe hurricanes — especially in the Gulf

Equally tragic, as a 2009 NOAA-led study found, these impacts be “largely irreversible for 1000 years.”

More… ➡ <== Please continue, this is well worth a good read!

Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Deforestation, Desertification, Extinctions, Food Shortages, Ocean Acidification, Ocean Dead Zones, Pandemics, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages, Weather deterioration | No Comments »

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