DIVERSITY OF SPECIES FACES 'CATASTROPHE' FROM CLIMATE CHANGE
rudkla - 12. Apr, 13:36
Global Warming - Globale Erwaermung
Mittwoch, 12. April 2006
Mittwoch, 5. April 2006
Research in Pacific Shows Ocean Trouble
Research fresh off a boat that docked Thursday in Alaska reveals some frightening changes taking place in the Pacific Ocean. As humans are pumping out more carbon dioxide that is helping to warm the planet, the ocean has been doing yeoman's work to lessen the effects - but it's taking a toll.
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/040406EA.shtml
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/040406EA.shtml
rudkla - 5. Apr, 12:48
Dienstag, 4. April 2006
Is It Too Late to Stop Global Warming?
Published on Monday, April 3, 2006 by the Associated Press
by Seth Borenstein
WASHINGTON - A man stands on a railroad track as a train rumbles closer.
"Global warming?" he says. "Some say irreversible consequences are 30 years away. Thirty years. That won't affect me."
He steps off the tracks -- just in time. But behind him is a little girl, left in front of the roaring train.
The screen goes black. A message appears: "There's still time."
It's just an ad, part of a campaign from the advocacy group Environmental Defense, which hopes to convince Americans they can do something about global warming, that there's still time.
But many scientists are not so sure that the oncoming train of global warming can be avoided. Temperatures are going to rise for decades to come because the chief gas that causes global warming lingers in the atmosphere for about a century.
"In the short term, I'm not sure that anyone can stop it," said John Walsh, director of the Center for Global Change and Arctic System Research at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.
There are limits, experts say, to how much individuals can do. The best we can hope for is to prevent the worst -- world-altering disasters such as catastrophic climate change and a drastic rise in sea levels, say 10 leading climate scientists interviewed by The Associated Press. They pull out ominous phrases such as "point of no return."
The big disasters are thought to be just decades away. Stopping or delaying them would require bold changes by people and government.
"The big payoff is going to be for our children," said Tim Barnett, a senior scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. "Together, if we take a concentrated action as a people, we might be able to slow it down enough to avoid these surprises."
But he and other scientists say it's too late to stop people from feeling the heat. Nearly two dozen computer models agree that by 2100, the average global temperature will be 3 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit higher than now, according to Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Even if today the world suddenly stops producing greenhouse gases, temperatures will rise 1 degree by 2050, according to the center.
A British conference on "avoiding dangerous climate change" last year concluded that a rise of just 3 degrees would probably lead to some catastrophic events, especially the melting of the Greenland's polar ice. A study in the journal Science last month said the melting, which is happening faster than originally thought, could trigger a rise of 1 to 3 feet in global ocean levels.
Stephen Schneider of Stanford University put the odds of a massive Greenland melt at 50-50.
But Environmental Defense chief scientist Bill Chameides is more hopeful: "There's a certain amount of warming that's inevitable, but that doesn't mean that we can't avoid the really dangerous things that are happening."
Those dangerous things include: multi-century melts of polar ice sheets and an accompanying major sea level rise, abrupt climate change from a dramatic slowing of the ocean current systems, and the permanent loss of glacier-fed ancient water supplies for China, India and parts of South America.
Despite what scientists say, 70 percent of Americans think it's possible to reduce the effects of global warming, and 59 percent think their individual actions can help, according to a poll commissioned by Environmental Defense as part of its public service campaign.
Climate scientists find themselves in the delicate position of trying to balance calculations that lead to scientific despair with an optimistic public's hope.
"You don't give up," said Schneider, co-director of Stanford's Center for Environmental Science Policy. "If you have high blood pressure, do you sit there till you die or do you take Lasix," the blood pressure medicine.
Both Barnett and Walsh said the question they get most from the public is: What can I do personally about global warming? They tell people to drive less and drive fuel-miserly cars, be more efficient about heating their homes.
But those efforts "are not going to change us from an irreversible course to a reversible one," said Walsh. "What you really want to say is: 'You can't go on like this. We can't go on like this."'
Robert Correll, a top scientist in charge of an eight-country research program into arctic problems caused by global warming, recognizes the contradictions, especially since developing nations such as China, India and those in Africa will play bigger roles in greenhouse gas pollution in the future.
The individual effort, Correll said, "is damn important, but you're not going to make much difference." That requires group or governmental action, he said.
© 2006 Associated Press
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0403-01.htm
by Seth Borenstein
WASHINGTON - A man stands on a railroad track as a train rumbles closer.
"Global warming?" he says. "Some say irreversible consequences are 30 years away. Thirty years. That won't affect me."
He steps off the tracks -- just in time. But behind him is a little girl, left in front of the roaring train.
The screen goes black. A message appears: "There's still time."
It's just an ad, part of a campaign from the advocacy group Environmental Defense, which hopes to convince Americans they can do something about global warming, that there's still time.
But many scientists are not so sure that the oncoming train of global warming can be avoided. Temperatures are going to rise for decades to come because the chief gas that causes global warming lingers in the atmosphere for about a century.
"In the short term, I'm not sure that anyone can stop it," said John Walsh, director of the Center for Global Change and Arctic System Research at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.
There are limits, experts say, to how much individuals can do. The best we can hope for is to prevent the worst -- world-altering disasters such as catastrophic climate change and a drastic rise in sea levels, say 10 leading climate scientists interviewed by The Associated Press. They pull out ominous phrases such as "point of no return."
The big disasters are thought to be just decades away. Stopping or delaying them would require bold changes by people and government.
"The big payoff is going to be for our children," said Tim Barnett, a senior scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. "Together, if we take a concentrated action as a people, we might be able to slow it down enough to avoid these surprises."
But he and other scientists say it's too late to stop people from feeling the heat. Nearly two dozen computer models agree that by 2100, the average global temperature will be 3 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit higher than now, according to Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Even if today the world suddenly stops producing greenhouse gases, temperatures will rise 1 degree by 2050, according to the center.
A British conference on "avoiding dangerous climate change" last year concluded that a rise of just 3 degrees would probably lead to some catastrophic events, especially the melting of the Greenland's polar ice. A study in the journal Science last month said the melting, which is happening faster than originally thought, could trigger a rise of 1 to 3 feet in global ocean levels.
Stephen Schneider of Stanford University put the odds of a massive Greenland melt at 50-50.
But Environmental Defense chief scientist Bill Chameides is more hopeful: "There's a certain amount of warming that's inevitable, but that doesn't mean that we can't avoid the really dangerous things that are happening."
Those dangerous things include: multi-century melts of polar ice sheets and an accompanying major sea level rise, abrupt climate change from a dramatic slowing of the ocean current systems, and the permanent loss of glacier-fed ancient water supplies for China, India and parts of South America.
Despite what scientists say, 70 percent of Americans think it's possible to reduce the effects of global warming, and 59 percent think their individual actions can help, according to a poll commissioned by Environmental Defense as part of its public service campaign.
Climate scientists find themselves in the delicate position of trying to balance calculations that lead to scientific despair with an optimistic public's hope.
"You don't give up," said Schneider, co-director of Stanford's Center for Environmental Science Policy. "If you have high blood pressure, do you sit there till you die or do you take Lasix," the blood pressure medicine.
Both Barnett and Walsh said the question they get most from the public is: What can I do personally about global warming? They tell people to drive less and drive fuel-miserly cars, be more efficient about heating their homes.
But those efforts "are not going to change us from an irreversible course to a reversible one," said Walsh. "What you really want to say is: 'You can't go on like this. We can't go on like this."'
Robert Correll, a top scientist in charge of an eight-country research program into arctic problems caused by global warming, recognizes the contradictions, especially since developing nations such as China, India and those in Africa will play bigger roles in greenhouse gas pollution in the future.
The individual effort, Correll said, "is damn important, but you're not going to make much difference." That requires group or governmental action, he said.
© 2006 Associated Press
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0403-01.htm
rudkla - 4. Apr, 10:26
Montag, 3. April 2006
Church denounces global warming but invests in oil
April 02, 2006
Maurice Chittenden http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2114639,00.html
THE Archbishop of Canterbury has been accused of hypocrisy for lecturing politicians on global warming while the Church of England reaps millions of pounds from shares in oil firms.
Rowan Williams warned last week that climate change was a "huge moral problem" that could cause billions of deaths. He said politicians who reject changes will face "a heavy responsibility before God".
He added that the shortage of fuel supplies for high-fuel economies -- "heavy-car-using economies to put it bluntly" -- will be a factor in destabilising global politics in the next decade.
But an audit of the Church Commissioners' investments shows its oil shares increased in value by £46.9m last year. Its portfolio includes more than £12m of shares in Exxon Mobil, the American oil group blamed for the world's biggest environmental disaster when the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground off Alaska in 1989.
The firm, which has funded research groups that claim climate change is a "myth", is appealing against a £2.8 billion fine for the spillage in the American courts.
Williams is chairman of the commissioners, who also have investments in BP worth £140m and shares in Shell totalling £80m. Another investment is BAA, the airports group, which has been partly blamed for the rise in carbon emissions because of the way it has encouraged cheap air travel.
Dan Lewis, of the Economic Research Council, a think tank, said: "If anyone wanted proof that for some people global warming has become a religion this is it. It is hilarious that the church has shares in Exxon."
But John Reynolds, chairman of the Church of England's ethical advisory group, said: "The investments we have allow us to have an active dialogue with the oil companies about the environment."
A spokeswoman for Lambeth Palace said: "The archbishop's leadership has never been about micro-management and investment decisions. It is more about leading by example."
Informant: Teresa Binstock
Maurice Chittenden http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2114639,00.html
THE Archbishop of Canterbury has been accused of hypocrisy for lecturing politicians on global warming while the Church of England reaps millions of pounds from shares in oil firms.
Rowan Williams warned last week that climate change was a "huge moral problem" that could cause billions of deaths. He said politicians who reject changes will face "a heavy responsibility before God".
He added that the shortage of fuel supplies for high-fuel economies -- "heavy-car-using economies to put it bluntly" -- will be a factor in destabilising global politics in the next decade.
But an audit of the Church Commissioners' investments shows its oil shares increased in value by £46.9m last year. Its portfolio includes more than £12m of shares in Exxon Mobil, the American oil group blamed for the world's biggest environmental disaster when the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground off Alaska in 1989.
The firm, which has funded research groups that claim climate change is a "myth", is appealing against a £2.8 billion fine for the spillage in the American courts.
Williams is chairman of the commissioners, who also have investments in BP worth £140m and shares in Shell totalling £80m. Another investment is BAA, the airports group, which has been partly blamed for the rise in carbon emissions because of the way it has encouraged cheap air travel.
Dan Lewis, of the Economic Research Council, a think tank, said: "If anyone wanted proof that for some people global warming has become a religion this is it. It is hilarious that the church has shares in Exxon."
But John Reynolds, chairman of the Church of England's ethical advisory group, said: "The investments we have allow us to have an active dialogue with the oil companies about the environment."
A spokeswoman for Lambeth Palace said: "The archbishop's leadership has never been about micro-management and investment decisions. It is more about leading by example."
Informant: Teresa Binstock
rudkla - 3. Apr, 12:21
Samstag, 1. April 2006
Fly and be damned
The New Statesman (London)
April 3, 2006
http://www.newstatesman.com/200604030006
Fly and be damned
Cover story
We could close every factory, lock away every car and turn off every light in the country, but it won't halt global warming if we carry on taking planes as often as we do. A voluntary no-flying movement offers the only hope, argues Mark Lynas
Some tout wind turbines or nuclear power. Others insist on micropower or biodiesel. Everyone has a preferred solution to global warming. But few seem to have realised that all their efforts will come to nothing if an increasing number of jet aircraft continue to take to Britain's crowded skies.
Aviation is the fastest-growing source of greenhouse-gas emissions, already accounting for eight million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year - more than 10 per cent of the UK total. The sheer rate of growth is staggering: at 12 per cent per year, aviation is growing faster here than even in the boom economy of China.
This will be an environmental catastrophe, yet instead of trying to rein in the destructive surge in flying, government ministers are assiduously promoting its growth. The Labour government plans to bulldoze communities across the country for new runways and access roads, pushing the Kyoto goals out of reach for ever and giving a terrible boost to global warming.
A recent letter from Tony Blair to the campaign coalition Stop Climate Chaos shows just what a master of doublethink he has become. The government's initiatives on global warming will "reduce carbon emissions by over seven million tonnes by 2010", he crowed. Even if this were true (which is doubtful), the growth in the aviation sector would more than wipe out these gains by the end of the decade. Blair claims to think that "climate change is, without doubt, the major long-term threat facing our planet", yet the actions of his government make him just as culpable for the coming crisis as more familiar demons such as ExxonMobil or George W Bush.
It has often been said that unlimited growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. If so, then aviation's tumours are metastasising all over Britain. No major city today is complete without its own local airport, offering cheap flights to an ever-increasing list of domestic and international destinations. Heathrow is already making plans for a sixth terminal - even while the fifth is still a gigantic building site - and a third runway. Twelve other airports, including Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Southampton, Norwich and Swansea, are planning large-scale expansions. Six, including Stansted, Edinburgh, Glasgow and possibly Gatwick, may almost double in size with new runways.
As an unavoidable consequence, aviation emissions will double by 2020 and quadruple by 2050, a prospect that makes a mockery of all other national efforts to combat global warming. According to a recent report by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, even if we were to shut down the rest of the economy in order to save on greenhouse-gas emissions, aviation alone would bust the sustainable emissions budget by the middle of the century. Without heating, lights, cars, factories or any of the other sources of pollution, the growth in flying alone will propel us into a future of melting ice caps, spreading deserts, rising sea levels, vanishing farmland and collapsing ecosystems.
The stance of our presumed prime minister-in-waiting, Gordon Brown, is if anything even worse than Blair's - although at least Brown doesn't bother trying to make us believe he knows or cares much about global warming. His Budget tossed a few crumbs in the direction of the environmental movement (pre-sumably with one eye on David Cameron's shiny new micro wind turbine) but, like Bush, Brown insists that nothing should get in the way of economic growth - not even the planet.
A stark example of Brown's poverty of imagination emerged in the Budget: householders, he said, would get support to fluff up their loft insulation, supposedly saving 35,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. Big deal: this is the same amount that a single jumbo jet pumps out in the course of 25 return trips to Miami. And Brown is the biggest aviation enthusiast of all.
He's too canny to draw attention to this openly, of course. You need to read the small print - in this case a couple of paragraphs buried right at the end of chapter three of the pre-Budget report, under a section entitled "Meeting the Productivity Challenge". "The government is committed to meeting the demand for additional runway capacity in the south-east," the report says, in the name of which "a second runway at Stansted should be delivered as soon as possible".
The document goes on to commit the government to supporting Stansted expansion with a "package" of "surface access improvements" - code for new roads and motorways, all of which will be built at public expense, to funnel ever more traffic into the expanding airport.
Clear-sighted MPs on the Commons environmental audit committee have rightly lambasted the government's approach as the same old model of "predict and provide", which brought chaos and endless traffic growth to British roads. Ministers "predict" an increase in aviation passenger journeys from 180 million passengers per year at present to 476 million by 2030. This, the MPs point out, is the equivalent of another Heathrow every five years.
A government truly committed to achieving climate-change goals would rein in demand in the interests of sustainability and future generations. Instead, as the committee charges, "the Department for Transport has forecast future demand and then provided the framework to meet practically all of it. It is actively promoting growth on the scale envisaged", rather than being a neutral arbiter.
Just as building new roads created more traffic to fill them, building new runways and airports will encourage more people to adopt lifestyles that include lots of flying, such as second homes in Malaga, weekend shopping breaks in Prague, or family ties in Sydney.
Just look at where the big money is being spent. The private sector's price tag for Stansted's proposed runway is £2.7bn, somewhere between ten and a hundred times the amount the government puts into its entire climate-change programme, windmills, loft insulation schemes and cycle lanes included.
The government's one response to these concerns has been to seek the inclusion of aviation in the European Emissions Trading Scheme. The vague idea seems to be that airlines would buy carbon credits on the open market to cover their emissions, necessitating equivalent cuts in other polluting sectors of the economy. What happens when there aren't enough credits to go round? The answer seems obvious: given that the rest of the European economy won't want to roll over and shut down, the airlines will just bust the budget.
But maybe there's a technofix, where the white knight of technology miraculously rides to the rescue? The industry claims that its jet engines are becoming steadily more efficient, but the truth is that any likely emissions reductions will be quickly swamped by the increase in flights.
A bolder approach would be to launch aircraft which burn either hydrogen or biofuels. Alas, no experts believe such a thing is even on the radar for decades yet. Hydrogen is too bulky to work as a fuel, and in any case its combustion output of water, when injected high in the stratosphere, would contribute to global warming rather than reducing it. As for biofuels, they don't have the energy density of kerosene (the standard fossil jet fuel), and the business of producing them in large quantities is already endangering food security and boosting deforestation across the tropics. There is simply no possibility that they could be produced in the volume needed to slake the thirst of jet aircraft in the long term.
Another solution we are offered is carbon offsets, a sort of voluntary "tax" on airline tickets which goes to plant trees or fund renewable energy projects in the developing world. One of the companies offering offsets is Climate Care, which uses cash wrung from guilty frequent flyers to fund small-scale projects such as biogas digesters in India or low-energy school lighting in Kazakhstan. The projects undoubtedly bring benefits to their recipient communities, but it is far from clear whether or not they really neutralise the hugely damaging atmospheric impact of flying. Their psychological impact is also questionable: are they simply salving the consciences of people who might otherwise scale back their flights?
In this dreadful, dark picture there is one glimmer of hope. A no-flying movement is beginning to take shape, with many people voluntarily committing not to fly at all for non-essential trips. It is already a sufficiently large market to be taken seriously by the newspaper travel supplements, which are starting to provide information on train or shipping alternatives. And there are benefits. Travel to the Alps by train and you get a real sense of geography, of evolving culture and changing climatic zones. Arrive by air and all you see is identikit airport terminals and thousands of other culture-shocked, aggravated travellers. Slow travel, like slow food, is about clawing back quality of life.
Perhaps it is to this incipient movement that Gordon Brown and Tony Blair should look if they want to avoid going down in history - as they surely will on present form - as villains or fools who chose the wrong side of the struggle against global warming. No, Mr Brown, Stansted's second runway should not be "delivered as soon as possible". No, Mr Blair, Heathrow should not be given a sixth terminal and a third runway.
As the writer George Monbiot has pointed out, the farmland around Heathrow village once grew some of the best apples in England, and the cargo planes bringing out-of-season strawberries from California are touching down on grubbed-out orchards and market gardens. If we begin to rein in aviation, perhaps Britain can flower once again.
Here's a positive vision for the future: rather than opening new runways, the government should be closing them down.
Tim Hermach
Native Forest Council
PO Box 2190 Eugene, OR 97402
541.688.2600
541.461.2156 fax
web page: http://www.forestcouncil.org
DEFENDING LIFE, LAND & LIBERTY
* Honest & Fully Costed Accounting,
* Voices of Integrity, Hope & Reason
* Honest & Uncompromised Education, Advocacy & Litigation
* Real Protection for 650 Million Acres of Federal Land, Rivers & Streams
See for yourself at: http://forestcouncil.org/learn/aerial/index.html
Informant: Scott Munson
April 3, 2006
http://www.newstatesman.com/200604030006
Fly and be damned
Cover story
We could close every factory, lock away every car and turn off every light in the country, but it won't halt global warming if we carry on taking planes as often as we do. A voluntary no-flying movement offers the only hope, argues Mark Lynas
Some tout wind turbines or nuclear power. Others insist on micropower or biodiesel. Everyone has a preferred solution to global warming. But few seem to have realised that all their efforts will come to nothing if an increasing number of jet aircraft continue to take to Britain's crowded skies.
Aviation is the fastest-growing source of greenhouse-gas emissions, already accounting for eight million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year - more than 10 per cent of the UK total. The sheer rate of growth is staggering: at 12 per cent per year, aviation is growing faster here than even in the boom economy of China.
This will be an environmental catastrophe, yet instead of trying to rein in the destructive surge in flying, government ministers are assiduously promoting its growth. The Labour government plans to bulldoze communities across the country for new runways and access roads, pushing the Kyoto goals out of reach for ever and giving a terrible boost to global warming.
A recent letter from Tony Blair to the campaign coalition Stop Climate Chaos shows just what a master of doublethink he has become. The government's initiatives on global warming will "reduce carbon emissions by over seven million tonnes by 2010", he crowed. Even if this were true (which is doubtful), the growth in the aviation sector would more than wipe out these gains by the end of the decade. Blair claims to think that "climate change is, without doubt, the major long-term threat facing our planet", yet the actions of his government make him just as culpable for the coming crisis as more familiar demons such as ExxonMobil or George W Bush.
It has often been said that unlimited growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. If so, then aviation's tumours are metastasising all over Britain. No major city today is complete without its own local airport, offering cheap flights to an ever-increasing list of domestic and international destinations. Heathrow is already making plans for a sixth terminal - even while the fifth is still a gigantic building site - and a third runway. Twelve other airports, including Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Southampton, Norwich and Swansea, are planning large-scale expansions. Six, including Stansted, Edinburgh, Glasgow and possibly Gatwick, may almost double in size with new runways.
As an unavoidable consequence, aviation emissions will double by 2020 and quadruple by 2050, a prospect that makes a mockery of all other national efforts to combat global warming. According to a recent report by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, even if we were to shut down the rest of the economy in order to save on greenhouse-gas emissions, aviation alone would bust the sustainable emissions budget by the middle of the century. Without heating, lights, cars, factories or any of the other sources of pollution, the growth in flying alone will propel us into a future of melting ice caps, spreading deserts, rising sea levels, vanishing farmland and collapsing ecosystems.
The stance of our presumed prime minister-in-waiting, Gordon Brown, is if anything even worse than Blair's - although at least Brown doesn't bother trying to make us believe he knows or cares much about global warming. His Budget tossed a few crumbs in the direction of the environmental movement (pre-sumably with one eye on David Cameron's shiny new micro wind turbine) but, like Bush, Brown insists that nothing should get in the way of economic growth - not even the planet.
A stark example of Brown's poverty of imagination emerged in the Budget: householders, he said, would get support to fluff up their loft insulation, supposedly saving 35,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. Big deal: this is the same amount that a single jumbo jet pumps out in the course of 25 return trips to Miami. And Brown is the biggest aviation enthusiast of all.
He's too canny to draw attention to this openly, of course. You need to read the small print - in this case a couple of paragraphs buried right at the end of chapter three of the pre-Budget report, under a section entitled "Meeting the Productivity Challenge". "The government is committed to meeting the demand for additional runway capacity in the south-east," the report says, in the name of which "a second runway at Stansted should be delivered as soon as possible".
The document goes on to commit the government to supporting Stansted expansion with a "package" of "surface access improvements" - code for new roads and motorways, all of which will be built at public expense, to funnel ever more traffic into the expanding airport.
Clear-sighted MPs on the Commons environmental audit committee have rightly lambasted the government's approach as the same old model of "predict and provide", which brought chaos and endless traffic growth to British roads. Ministers "predict" an increase in aviation passenger journeys from 180 million passengers per year at present to 476 million by 2030. This, the MPs point out, is the equivalent of another Heathrow every five years.
A government truly committed to achieving climate-change goals would rein in demand in the interests of sustainability and future generations. Instead, as the committee charges, "the Department for Transport has forecast future demand and then provided the framework to meet practically all of it. It is actively promoting growth on the scale envisaged", rather than being a neutral arbiter.
Just as building new roads created more traffic to fill them, building new runways and airports will encourage more people to adopt lifestyles that include lots of flying, such as second homes in Malaga, weekend shopping breaks in Prague, or family ties in Sydney.
Just look at where the big money is being spent. The private sector's price tag for Stansted's proposed runway is £2.7bn, somewhere between ten and a hundred times the amount the government puts into its entire climate-change programme, windmills, loft insulation schemes and cycle lanes included.
The government's one response to these concerns has been to seek the inclusion of aviation in the European Emissions Trading Scheme. The vague idea seems to be that airlines would buy carbon credits on the open market to cover their emissions, necessitating equivalent cuts in other polluting sectors of the economy. What happens when there aren't enough credits to go round? The answer seems obvious: given that the rest of the European economy won't want to roll over and shut down, the airlines will just bust the budget.
But maybe there's a technofix, where the white knight of technology miraculously rides to the rescue? The industry claims that its jet engines are becoming steadily more efficient, but the truth is that any likely emissions reductions will be quickly swamped by the increase in flights.
A bolder approach would be to launch aircraft which burn either hydrogen or biofuels. Alas, no experts believe such a thing is even on the radar for decades yet. Hydrogen is too bulky to work as a fuel, and in any case its combustion output of water, when injected high in the stratosphere, would contribute to global warming rather than reducing it. As for biofuels, they don't have the energy density of kerosene (the standard fossil jet fuel), and the business of producing them in large quantities is already endangering food security and boosting deforestation across the tropics. There is simply no possibility that they could be produced in the volume needed to slake the thirst of jet aircraft in the long term.
Another solution we are offered is carbon offsets, a sort of voluntary "tax" on airline tickets which goes to plant trees or fund renewable energy projects in the developing world. One of the companies offering offsets is Climate Care, which uses cash wrung from guilty frequent flyers to fund small-scale projects such as biogas digesters in India or low-energy school lighting in Kazakhstan. The projects undoubtedly bring benefits to their recipient communities, but it is far from clear whether or not they really neutralise the hugely damaging atmospheric impact of flying. Their psychological impact is also questionable: are they simply salving the consciences of people who might otherwise scale back their flights?
In this dreadful, dark picture there is one glimmer of hope. A no-flying movement is beginning to take shape, with many people voluntarily committing not to fly at all for non-essential trips. It is already a sufficiently large market to be taken seriously by the newspaper travel supplements, which are starting to provide information on train or shipping alternatives. And there are benefits. Travel to the Alps by train and you get a real sense of geography, of evolving culture and changing climatic zones. Arrive by air and all you see is identikit airport terminals and thousands of other culture-shocked, aggravated travellers. Slow travel, like slow food, is about clawing back quality of life.
Perhaps it is to this incipient movement that Gordon Brown and Tony Blair should look if they want to avoid going down in history - as they surely will on present form - as villains or fools who chose the wrong side of the struggle against global warming. No, Mr Brown, Stansted's second runway should not be "delivered as soon as possible". No, Mr Blair, Heathrow should not be given a sixth terminal and a third runway.
As the writer George Monbiot has pointed out, the farmland around Heathrow village once grew some of the best apples in England, and the cargo planes bringing out-of-season strawberries from California are touching down on grubbed-out orchards and market gardens. If we begin to rein in aviation, perhaps Britain can flower once again.
Here's a positive vision for the future: rather than opening new runways, the government should be closing them down.
Tim Hermach
Native Forest Council
PO Box 2190 Eugene, OR 97402
541.688.2600
541.461.2156 fax
web page: http://www.forestcouncil.org
DEFENDING LIFE, LAND & LIBERTY
* Honest & Fully Costed Accounting,
* Voices of Integrity, Hope & Reason
* Honest & Uncompromised Education, Advocacy & Litigation
* Real Protection for 650 Million Acres of Federal Land, Rivers & Streams
See for yourself at: http://forestcouncil.org/learn/aerial/index.html
Informant: Scott Munson
rudkla - 1. Apr, 17:28
POLAR MELTDOWN NEAR: SEAS COULD RISE 3 FEET PER CENTURY
By Ker Than
LiveScience
March 23, 2006
http://www.livescience.com/environment/060323_ice_melt.html
About 130,000 years ago, an ice age ended and there was a period of few centuries before the next one began. During this lull, Earth's temperature warmed, glaciers retreated and ice sheets melted. Sea levels rose by up to 20 feet.
Scientists warn that this could happen again -- and soon. But while the last great thaw was the result of a natural tilt in the Earth's axis towards the Sun, the next one will be caused by humans, some scientists argue.
If global warming continues at its current pace, by 2100 Earth could be up to 8 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it is today. If steps are not taken soon to reduce greenhouse emissions, the Arctic will be as warm as it was 130,000 years ago and similar rises in sea level will occur, according to two new studies released today.
"Although the focus of our work is polar, the implications are global," said Bette Otto-Bliesner from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Colorado, who was involved in both studies. "These ice sheets melted before and sea levels rose. The warmth needed isn't that much above present conditions."
The findings are detailed in the March 24 issue of the journal Science.
Antarctica's role
The studies are the first to definitively link Antarctica to the sea level rises that occurred between the last two ice ages, the researchers say.
Called the Last Interglaciation, this period lasted from about 129,000 to
116,000 years ago. Scientists had previously known that meltwater from Greenland and other Arctic ice sheets were important factors in sea level rises during this period, but it was unclear what Antarctica's contribution was.
The new results, which draw upon a combination of computer simulations and paleoclimate records, suggests that Arctic melting caused sea levels to rise by up to 11 feet during the Last Interglaciation.
This in turn triggered melting in Antarctica, causing sea levels to rise further.
Rising seas
The researchers combined a computer climate prediction model, the NCAR-based Community Climate System Model (CCSM), with ice sheet simulations to estimate what the Earth's climate was like 130,000 years ago.
They crosschecked the computer's estimates with data from natural records of ancient climate change such as sediments, fossils and ice cores.
All the methods indicated similar warming. However, the computer model showed meltwater from Greenland and other Arctic sources raising sea levels by only about 11 feet, while coral records indicate that the sea level actually rose up to 20 feet.
The researchers think this discrepancy can be explained by meltwater from Antarctica, which could have caused sea levels to rise by another 6 to 10 feet.
Rising seas from Arctic meltwater would have destabilized ice shelves in Antarctica, causing them to melt or break apart and fall into the ocean.
"It's just like throwing a bunch of ice cubes into a full glass of water and watching the water spill over the top," said Jonathon Overpeck of the University of Arizona, who was also involved in both studies.
This hypothesis is consistent with earlier studies based on fossilized microscopic marine organisms, which showed that parts of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet disappeared at some point over the last several hundred thousand years.
3 feet per century
Once the researchers were confident that their computer model could accurately simulate past climate conditions, they used it to predict future climate change.
"Getting the past climate change correct in these models gives us more confidence in their ability to predict future climate change," Otto-Bliesner said.
The researchers concluded that if greenhouse gas emissions are not curbed and we continue with "business as usual," Arctic temperatures will become at least as warm as it was during the Last Interglacial.
If this happens, humanity will be committing the planet to a sea level rise as drastic as, or worse than, the 20-foot increase that occurred 130,000 years ago, Overpeck said.
"Paleoclimatic data shows that we could get 3 feet of sea level rise per century," he told LiveScience. "That's what we would be triggering later in the century. We'd be committing to a sea level rise of that magnitude."
Currently, global sea level rises at a rate of about an inch per decade.
Not too late
Scientists warn that if the warming seen 130,000 years ago occurred today, it would be accelerated by global warming and other human activities.
"The ocean is the vehicle by which this heat is getting to the edges of the ice sheets, so if you increase the rate at which you're putting heat into the ocean, then it would further accelerate the melting," said Robert Bindschadler, a glaciologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center who was not involved in the study by Otto-Bliesner and Overpeck.
Bindschadler is the author of another study, also published in this week's issue of Science, which shows how glaciers can be melted from below by pockets of warm water.
The pace of Arctic melting would also quicken because of pollution-darkened snow, scientists say, which absorbs more sunlight and melts faster than regular snow.
The process will become irreversible sometime in the second half of the 21st century unless steps are taken in the next few decades to curb greenhouse gas emissions, Overpeck said.
"We need to start serious measures to reduce greenhouse gases within the next decade. If we don't do something soon, we're committed to four-to-six meters (13 to 20 feet) of sea level rise in the future."
ANTARCTICA'S ATMOSPHERE WARMING DRAMATICALLY, STUDY FINDS
By John Roach
National Geographic News
March 30, 2006
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/03/0330_060330_antarctica.html
The air over Antarctica has warmed dramatically over the past 30 years, according to a new study of archived data collected by weather balloons floated over the icy continent.
The greatest warming -- nearly 1.4ºF (0.75ºC) per decade in the winter -- has occurred about 3 miles (5 kilometers) above the surface.
Scientists are hard pressed to explain the temperature spike, which is three times larger than the global average. The rise cannot be explained by the climate models scientists use to predict the effects of global warming from increased greenhouse gases.
"That could point to some mechanism of climate change we don't understand, a failing in these models, or just a result of natural climate variability," said John Turner, a climate scientist with the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, England.
Meanwhile, surface temperatures have increased 4.5ºF (2.5ºC) in the last 50 years on the Antarctic Peninsula, the mountainous arm that trails toward the southern tip of South America.
"But the rest of Antarctica has done virtually nothing [at the surface]", Turner said.
Turner is the lead author of the study, which appears in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science.
David Bromwich, a meteorologist with the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University in Columbus, said there's "no doubt this [warming] is real."
But, he added, the finding only "deepens the mystery of what's going on over Antarctica."
Potential Implications
According to Turner, the unexpected warming could affect snowfall across the continent, which might have implications for global sea-level rise.
Snowfall records of the past three decades show no change, Turner said. "But measuring snowfall is hard. Measuring temperature is obviously easier," he added.
Scientists expect the warming to create a small increase in snowfall over Antarctica, as the warmer, moister air blows over the continent and is cooled to form snow.
This in turn could mitigate, to a small extent, sea-level rise by "locking up" meltwater in the form of snow.
Since the atmospheric warming is greatest three miles (five kilometers) up in the atmosphere, Turner said it is unlikely to result in extensive melting of ice on the surface. The continent's tallest mountains are 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) high.
Complex Signals
Turner and his colleagues are now trying to understand why the atmosphere warming is disconnected from surface temperatures.
One possibility, he said, is that the region is showing a greater than expected sensitivity to greenhouse gases in the winter.
Antarctica is dark during the winter months, which means there is no sunlight to heat the surface.
However, the heat that is on the surface continues to radiate into the atmosphere, where it is trapped by the blanket of greenhouse gases, Turner explained.
Alternatively, the warming may reflect a change in air circulation patterns, though data collected at Antarctic weather stations suggest this has not happened, he said.
Bromwich, of the Byrd Center, said the findings fit the emerging picture of Earth experiencing the effects of global warming, such as the widely reported melting in the Arctic.
"To understand what is happening to our world, we also need to understand what is happening in Antarctica," Bromwich said.
"This [research] deepens the mystery rather than solves it, but it shows us the direction we should be looking."
Informant: NHNE
--------
Antarctic Air is Warming Faster Than Rest of World
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0331-05.htm
LiveScience
March 23, 2006
http://www.livescience.com/environment/060323_ice_melt.html
About 130,000 years ago, an ice age ended and there was a period of few centuries before the next one began. During this lull, Earth's temperature warmed, glaciers retreated and ice sheets melted. Sea levels rose by up to 20 feet.
Scientists warn that this could happen again -- and soon. But while the last great thaw was the result of a natural tilt in the Earth's axis towards the Sun, the next one will be caused by humans, some scientists argue.
If global warming continues at its current pace, by 2100 Earth could be up to 8 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it is today. If steps are not taken soon to reduce greenhouse emissions, the Arctic will be as warm as it was 130,000 years ago and similar rises in sea level will occur, according to two new studies released today.
"Although the focus of our work is polar, the implications are global," said Bette Otto-Bliesner from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Colorado, who was involved in both studies. "These ice sheets melted before and sea levels rose. The warmth needed isn't that much above present conditions."
The findings are detailed in the March 24 issue of the journal Science.
Antarctica's role
The studies are the first to definitively link Antarctica to the sea level rises that occurred between the last two ice ages, the researchers say.
Called the Last Interglaciation, this period lasted from about 129,000 to
116,000 years ago. Scientists had previously known that meltwater from Greenland and other Arctic ice sheets were important factors in sea level rises during this period, but it was unclear what Antarctica's contribution was.
The new results, which draw upon a combination of computer simulations and paleoclimate records, suggests that Arctic melting caused sea levels to rise by up to 11 feet during the Last Interglaciation.
This in turn triggered melting in Antarctica, causing sea levels to rise further.
Rising seas
The researchers combined a computer climate prediction model, the NCAR-based Community Climate System Model (CCSM), with ice sheet simulations to estimate what the Earth's climate was like 130,000 years ago.
They crosschecked the computer's estimates with data from natural records of ancient climate change such as sediments, fossils and ice cores.
All the methods indicated similar warming. However, the computer model showed meltwater from Greenland and other Arctic sources raising sea levels by only about 11 feet, while coral records indicate that the sea level actually rose up to 20 feet.
The researchers think this discrepancy can be explained by meltwater from Antarctica, which could have caused sea levels to rise by another 6 to 10 feet.
Rising seas from Arctic meltwater would have destabilized ice shelves in Antarctica, causing them to melt or break apart and fall into the ocean.
"It's just like throwing a bunch of ice cubes into a full glass of water and watching the water spill over the top," said Jonathon Overpeck of the University of Arizona, who was also involved in both studies.
This hypothesis is consistent with earlier studies based on fossilized microscopic marine organisms, which showed that parts of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet disappeared at some point over the last several hundred thousand years.
3 feet per century
Once the researchers were confident that their computer model could accurately simulate past climate conditions, they used it to predict future climate change.
"Getting the past climate change correct in these models gives us more confidence in their ability to predict future climate change," Otto-Bliesner said.
The researchers concluded that if greenhouse gas emissions are not curbed and we continue with "business as usual," Arctic temperatures will become at least as warm as it was during the Last Interglacial.
If this happens, humanity will be committing the planet to a sea level rise as drastic as, or worse than, the 20-foot increase that occurred 130,000 years ago, Overpeck said.
"Paleoclimatic data shows that we could get 3 feet of sea level rise per century," he told LiveScience. "That's what we would be triggering later in the century. We'd be committing to a sea level rise of that magnitude."
Currently, global sea level rises at a rate of about an inch per decade.
Not too late
Scientists warn that if the warming seen 130,000 years ago occurred today, it would be accelerated by global warming and other human activities.
"The ocean is the vehicle by which this heat is getting to the edges of the ice sheets, so if you increase the rate at which you're putting heat into the ocean, then it would further accelerate the melting," said Robert Bindschadler, a glaciologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center who was not involved in the study by Otto-Bliesner and Overpeck.
Bindschadler is the author of another study, also published in this week's issue of Science, which shows how glaciers can be melted from below by pockets of warm water.
The pace of Arctic melting would also quicken because of pollution-darkened snow, scientists say, which absorbs more sunlight and melts faster than regular snow.
The process will become irreversible sometime in the second half of the 21st century unless steps are taken in the next few decades to curb greenhouse gas emissions, Overpeck said.
"We need to start serious measures to reduce greenhouse gases within the next decade. If we don't do something soon, we're committed to four-to-six meters (13 to 20 feet) of sea level rise in the future."
ANTARCTICA'S ATMOSPHERE WARMING DRAMATICALLY, STUDY FINDS
By John Roach
National Geographic News
March 30, 2006
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/03/0330_060330_antarctica.html
The air over Antarctica has warmed dramatically over the past 30 years, according to a new study of archived data collected by weather balloons floated over the icy continent.
The greatest warming -- nearly 1.4ºF (0.75ºC) per decade in the winter -- has occurred about 3 miles (5 kilometers) above the surface.
Scientists are hard pressed to explain the temperature spike, which is three times larger than the global average. The rise cannot be explained by the climate models scientists use to predict the effects of global warming from increased greenhouse gases.
"That could point to some mechanism of climate change we don't understand, a failing in these models, or just a result of natural climate variability," said John Turner, a climate scientist with the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, England.
Meanwhile, surface temperatures have increased 4.5ºF (2.5ºC) in the last 50 years on the Antarctic Peninsula, the mountainous arm that trails toward the southern tip of South America.
"But the rest of Antarctica has done virtually nothing [at the surface]", Turner said.
Turner is the lead author of the study, which appears in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science.
David Bromwich, a meteorologist with the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University in Columbus, said there's "no doubt this [warming] is real."
But, he added, the finding only "deepens the mystery of what's going on over Antarctica."
Potential Implications
According to Turner, the unexpected warming could affect snowfall across the continent, which might have implications for global sea-level rise.
Snowfall records of the past three decades show no change, Turner said. "But measuring snowfall is hard. Measuring temperature is obviously easier," he added.
Scientists expect the warming to create a small increase in snowfall over Antarctica, as the warmer, moister air blows over the continent and is cooled to form snow.
This in turn could mitigate, to a small extent, sea-level rise by "locking up" meltwater in the form of snow.
Since the atmospheric warming is greatest three miles (five kilometers) up in the atmosphere, Turner said it is unlikely to result in extensive melting of ice on the surface. The continent's tallest mountains are 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) high.
Complex Signals
Turner and his colleagues are now trying to understand why the atmosphere warming is disconnected from surface temperatures.
One possibility, he said, is that the region is showing a greater than expected sensitivity to greenhouse gases in the winter.
Antarctica is dark during the winter months, which means there is no sunlight to heat the surface.
However, the heat that is on the surface continues to radiate into the atmosphere, where it is trapped by the blanket of greenhouse gases, Turner explained.
Alternatively, the warming may reflect a change in air circulation patterns, though data collected at Antarctic weather stations suggest this has not happened, he said.
Bromwich, of the Byrd Center, said the findings fit the emerging picture of Earth experiencing the effects of global warming, such as the widely reported melting in the Arctic.
"To understand what is happening to our world, we also need to understand what is happening in Antarctica," Bromwich said.
"This [research] deepens the mystery rather than solves it, but it shows us the direction we should be looking."
Informant: NHNE
--------
Antarctic Air is Warming Faster Than Rest of World
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0331-05.htm
rudkla - 1. Apr, 10:19
Dienstag, 28. März 2006
The Pollution Gap
Over 70 million Africans and an even greater number of farmers in the Indian sub-continent will suffer catastrophic floods, disease and famine if the rich countries of the world fail to change their habits and radically cut their carbon emissions.
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/032706EB.shtml
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/032706EB.shtml
rudkla - 28. Mär, 14:42
Earth Is at the Tipping Point
Time Cover Story
No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/032706EA.shtml
No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/032706EA.shtml
rudkla - 28. Mär, 14:24
BE WORRIED, BE VERY WORRIED
By Jeffrey Kluger With reporting by Greg Fulton / Atlanta Dan Cray / Los Angeles Rita Healy / Denver Eric Roston / Washington David Bjerklie, Andrea Dorfman / New York Andrea Gerlin / London Time Magazine
March 26, 2006
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,1176980,00.html
The climate is crashing, and global warming is to blame. Why the crisis hit so soon--and what we can do about it
No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.
It certainly looked that way last week as the atmospheric bomb that was Cyclone Larry -- a Category 5 storm with wind bursts that reached 180 m.p.h. -- exploded through northeastern Australia. It certainly looked that way last year as curtains of fire and dust turned the skies of Indonesia orange, thanks to drought-fueled blazes sweeping the island nation. It certainly looks that way as sections of ice the size of small states calve from the disintegrating Arctic and Antarctic. And it certainly looks that way as the sodden wreckage of New Orleans continues to molder, while the waters of the Atlantic gather themselves for a new hurricane season just two months away. Disasters have always been with us and surely always will be. But when they hit this hard and come this fast -- when the emergency becomes commonplace -- something has gone grievously wrong. That something is global warming.
The image of Earth as organism -- famously dubbed Gaia by environmentalist James Lovelock -- has probably been overworked, but that's not to say the planet can't behave like a living thing, and these days, it's a living thing fighting a fever. From heat waves to storms to floods to fires to massive glacial melts, the global climate seems to be crashing around us. Scientists have been calling this shot for decades. This is precisely what they have been warning would happen if we continued pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, trapping the heat that flows in from the sun and raising global temperatures.
Environmentalists and lawmakers spent years shouting at one another about whether the grim forecasts were true, but in the past five years or so, the serious debate has quietly ended. Global warming, even most skeptics have concluded, is the real deal, and human activity has been causing it. If there was any consolation, it was that the glacial pace of nature would give us decades or even centuries to sort out the problem.
But glaciers, it turns out, can move with surprising speed, and so can nature. What few people reckoned on was that global climate systems are booby-trapped with tipping points and feedback loops, thresholds past which the slow creep of environmental decay gives way to sudden and self-perpetuating collapse. Pump enough CO2 into the sky, and that last part per million of greenhouse gas behaves like the 212th degree Fahrenheit that turns a pot of hot water into a plume of billowing steam. Melt enough Greenland ice, and you reach the point at which you're not simply dripping meltwater into the sea but dumping whole glaciers. By one recent measure, several Greenland ice sheets have doubled their rate of slide, and just last week the journal Science published a study suggesting that by the end of the century, the world could be locked in to an eventual rise in sea levels of as much as 20 ft. Nature, it seems, has finally got a bellyful of us.
"Things are happening a lot faster than anyone predicted," says Bill Chameides, chief scientist for the advocacy group Environmental Defense and a former professor of atmospheric chemistry. "The last 12 months have been alarming." Adds Ruth Curry of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts: "The ripple through the scientific community is palpable."
And it's not just scientists who are taking notice. Even as nature crosses its tipping points, the public seems to have reached its own. For years, popular skepticism about climatological science stood in the way of addressing the problem, but the naysayers -- many of whom were on the payroll of energy companies -- have become an increasingly marginalized breed. In a new TIME/ ABC News/ Stanford University poll, 85% of respondents agree that global warming probably is happening. Moreover, most respondents say they want some action taken. Of those polled, 87% believe the government should either encourage or require lowering of power-plant emissions, and 85% think something should be done to get cars to use less gasoline. Even Evangelical Christians, once one of the most reliable columns in the conservative base, are demanding action, most notably in February, when 86 Christian leaders formed the Evangelical Climate Initiative, demanding that Congress regulate greenhouse gases.
A collection of new global-warming books is hitting the shelves in response to that awakening interest, followed closely by TV and theatrical documentaries. The most notable of them is An Inconvenient Truth, due out in May, a profile of former Vice President Al Gore and his climate-change work, which is generating a lot of prerelease buzz over an unlikely topic and an equally unlikely star. For all its lack of Hollywood flash, the film compensates by conveying both the hard science of global warming and Gore's particular passion.
Such public stirrings are at last getting the attention of politicians and business leaders, who may not always respond to science but have a keen nose for where votes and profits lie. State and local lawmakers have started taking action to curb emissions, and major corporations are doing the same. Wal-Mart has begun installing wind turbines on its stores to generate electricity and is talking about putting solar reflectors over its parking lots. HSBC, the world's second largest bank, has pledged to neutralize its carbon output by investing in wind farms and other green projects. Even President Bush, hardly a favorite of greens, now acknowledges climate change and boasts of the steps he is taking to fight it. Most of those steps, however, involve research and voluntary emissions controls, not exactly the laws with teeth scientists are calling for.
Is it too late to reverse the changes global warming has wrought? That's still not clear. Reducing our emissions output year to year is hard enough. Getting it low enough so that the atmosphere can heal is a multigenerational commitment. "Ecosystems are usually able to maintain themselves," says Terry Chapin, a biologist and professor of ecology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. "But eventually they get pushed to the limit of tolerance."
CO2 AND THE POLES
As a tiny component of our atmosphere, carbon dioxide helped warm Earth to comfort levels we are all used to. But too much of it does an awful lot of damage. The gas represents just a few hundred parts per million (p.p.m.) in the overall air blanket, but they're powerful parts because they allow sunlight to stream in but prevent much of the heat from radiating back out. During the last ice age, the atmosphere's CO2 concentration was just 180 p.p.m., putting Earth into a deep freeze. After the glaciers retreated but before the dawn of the modern era, the total had risen to a comfortable 280 p.p.m. In just the past century and a half, we have pushed the level to 381 p.p.m., and we're feeling the effects. Of the 20 hottest years on record, 19 occurred in the 1980s or later. According to NASA scientists, 2005 was one of the hottest years in more than a century.
It's at the North and South poles that those steambath conditions are felt particularly acutely, with glaciers and ice caps crumbling to slush. Once the thaw begins, a number of mechanisms kick in to keep it going. Greenland is a vivid example. Late last year, glaciologist Eric Rignot of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and Pannir Kanagaratnam, a research assistant professor at the University of Kansas, analyzed data from Canadian and European satellites and found that Greenland ice is not just melting but doing so more than twice as fast, with 53 cu. mi. draining away into the sea last year alone, compared with 22 cu. mi. in 1996. A cubic mile of water is about five times the amount Los Angeles uses in a year.
Dumping that much water into the ocean is a very dangerous thing. Icebergs don't raise sea levels when they melt because they're floating, which means they have displaced all the water they're ever going to. But ice on land, like Greenland's, is a different matter. Pour that into oceans that are already rising (because warm water expands), and you deluge shorelines. By some estimates, the entire Greenland ice sheet would be enough to raise global sea levels 23 ft., swallowing up large parts of coastal Florida and most of Bangladesh. The Antarctic holds enough ice to raise sea levels more than 215 ft.
FEEDBACK LOOPS
One of the reasons the loss of the planet's ice cover is accelerating is that as the poles' bright white surface shrinks, it changes the relationship of Earth and the sun. Polar ice is so reflective that 90% of the sunlight that strikes it simply bounces back into space, taking much of its energy with it. Ocean water does just the opposite, absorbing 90% of the energy it receives. The more energy it retains, the warmer it gets, with the result that each mile of ice that melts vanishes faster than the mile that preceded it.
That is what scientists call a feedback loop, and it's a nasty one, since once you uncap the Arctic Ocean, you unleash another beast: the comparatively warm layer of water about 600 ft. deep that circulates in and out of the Atlantic. "Remove the ice," says Woods Hole's Curry, "and the water starts talking to the atmosphere, releasing its heat. This is not a good thing."
A similar feedback loop is melting permafrost, usually defined as land that has been continuously frozen for two years or more. There's a lot of earthly real estate that qualifies, and much of it has been frozen much longer than two years -- since the end of the last ice age, or at least 8,000 years ago. Sealed inside that cryonic time capsule are layers of partially decayed organic matter, rich in carbon. In high-altitude regions of Alaska, Canada and Siberia, the soil is warming and decomposing, releasing gases that will turn into methane and CO2. That, in turn, could lead to more warming and permafrost thaw, says research scientist David Lawrence of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. And how much carbon is socked away in Arctic soils? Lawrence puts the figure at 200 gigatons to 800 gigatons. The total human carbon output is only 7 gigatons a year.
One result of all that is warmer oceans, and a result of warmer oceans can be, paradoxically, colder continents within a hotter globe. Ocean currents running between warm and cold regions serve as natural thermoregulators, distributing heat from the equator toward the poles. The Gulf Stream, carrying warmth up from the tropics, is what keeps Europe's climate relatively mild. Whenever Europe is cut off from the Gulf Stream, temperatures plummet. At the end of the last ice age, the warm current was temporarily blocked, and temperatures in Europe fell as much as 10 °F, locking the continent in glaciers.
What usually keeps the Gulf Stream running is that warm water is lighter than cold water, so it floats on the surface. As it reaches Europe and releases its heat, the current grows denser and sinks, flowing back to the south and crossing under the northbound Gulf Stream until it reaches the tropics and starts to warm again. The cycle works splendidly, provided the water remains salty enough. But if it becomes diluted by freshwater, the salt concentration drops, and the water gets lighter, idling on top and stalling the current. Last December, researchers associated with Britain's National Oceanography Center reported that one component of the system that drives the Gulf Stream has slowed about 30% since 1957. It's the increased release of Arctic and Greenland meltwater that appears to be causing the problem, introducing a gush of freshwater that's overwhelming the natural cycle. In a global-warming world, it's unlikely that any amount of cooling that resulted from this would be sufficient to support glaciers, but it could make things awfully uncomfortable.
"The big worry is that the whole climate of Europe will change," says Adrian Luckman, senior lecturer in geography at the University of Wales, Swansea. "We in the U.K. are on the same latitude as Alaska. The reason we can live here is the Gulf Stream."
DROUGHT
As fast as global warming is transforming the oceans and the ice caps, it's having an even more immediate effect on land. People, animals and plants living in dry, mountainous regions like the western U.S. make it through summer thanks to snowpack that collects on peaks all winter and slowly melts off in warm months. Lately the early arrival of spring and the unusually blistering summers have caused the snowpack to melt too early, so that by the time it's needed, it's largely gone. Climatologist Philip Mote of the University of Washington has compared decades of snowpack levels in Washington, Oregon and California and found that they are a fraction of what they were in the 1940s, and some snowpacks have vanished entirely.
Global warming is tipping other regions of the world into drought in different ways. Higher temperatures bake moisture out of soil faster, causing dry regions that live at the margins to cross the line into full-blown crisis. Meanwhile, El Nino events -- the warm pooling of Pacific waters that periodically drives worldwide climate patterns and has been occurring more frequently in global-warming years -- further inhibit precipitation in dry areas of Africa and East Asia. According to a recent study by NCAR, the percentage of Earth's surface suffering drought has more than doubled since the 1970s.
FLORA AND FAUNA
Hot, dry land can be murder on flora and fauna, and both are taking a bad hit. Wildfires in such regions as Indonesia, the western U.S. and even inland Alaska have been increasing as timberlands and forest floors grow more parched. The blazes create a feedback loop of their own, pouring more carbon into the atmosphere and reducing the number of trees, which inhale CO2 and release oxygen.
Those forests that don't succumb to fire die in other, slower ways. Connie Millar, a paleoecologist for the U.S. Forest Service, studies the history of vegetation in the Sierra Nevada. Over the past 100 years, she has found, the forests have shifted their tree lines as much as 100 ft. upslope, trying to escape the heat and drought of the lowlands. Such slow-motion evacuation may seem like a sensible strategy, but when you're on a mountain, you can go only so far before you run out of room. "Sometimes we say the trees are going to heaven because they're walking off the mountaintops," Millar says.
Across North America, warming-related changes are mowing down other flora too. Manzanita bushes in the West are dying back; some prickly pear cacti have lost their signature green and are instead a sickly pink; pine beetles in western Canada and the U.S. are chewing their way through tens of millions of acres of forest, thanks to warmer winters. The beetles may even breach the once insurmountable Rocky Mountain divide, opening up a path into the rich timbering lands of the American Southeast.
With habitats crashing, animals that live there are succumbing too. Environmental groups can tick off scores of species that have been determined to be at risk as a result of global warming. Last year, researchers in Costa Rica announced that two-thirds of 110 species of colorful harlequin frogs have vanished in the past 30 years, with the severity of each season's die-off following in lockstep with the severity of that year's warming.
In Alaska, salmon populations are at risk as melting permafrost pours mud into rivers, burying the gravel the fish need for spawning. Small animals such as bushy-tailed wood rats, alpine chipmunks and pinon mice are being chased upslope by rising temperatures, following the path of the fleeing trees. And with sea ice vanishing, polar bears -- prodigious swimmers but not inexhaustible ones -- are starting to turn up drowned. "There will be no polar ice by 2060," says Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation. "Somewhere along that path, the polar bear drops out."
WHAT ABOUT US?
It is fitting, perhaps, that as the species causing all the problems, we're suffering the destruction of our habitat too, and we have experienced that loss in terrible ways. Ocean waters have warmed by a full degree Fahrenheit since 1970, and warmer water is like rocket fuel for typhoons and hurricanes. Two studies last year found that in the past 35 years the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes worldwide has doubled while the wind speed and duration of all hurricanes has jumped 50%. Since atmospheric heat is not choosy about the water it warms, tropical storms could start turning up in some decidedly nontropical places. "There's a school of thought that sea surface temperatures are warming up toward Canada," says Greg Holland, senior scientist for NCAR in Boulder. "If so, you're likely to get tropical cyclones there, but we honestly don't know."
WHAT WE CAN DO
So much for environmental collapse happening in so many places at once has at last awakened much of the world, particularly the 141 nations that have ratified the Kyoto treaty to reduce emissions -- an imperfect accord, to be sure, but an accord all the same. The U.S., however, which is home to less than 5% of Earth's population but produces 25% of CO2 emissions, remains intransigent. Many environmentalists declared the Bush Administration hopeless from the start, and while that may have been premature, it's undeniable that the White House's environmental record -- from the abandonment of Kyoto to the President's broken campaign pledge to control carbon output to the relaxation of emission standards -- has been dismal. George W. Bush's recent rhetorical nods to America's oil addiction and his praise of such alternative fuel sources as switchgrass have yet to be followed by real initiatives.
The anger surrounding all that exploded recently when NASA researcher Jim Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a longtime leader in climate-change research, complained that he had been harassed by White House appointees as he tried to sound the global-warming alarm. "The way democracy is supposed to work, the presumption is that the public is well informed," he told TIME. "They're trying to deny the science." Up against such resistance, many environmental groups have resolved simply to wait out this Administration and hope for something better in 2009.
The Republican-dominated Congress has not been much more encouraging. Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman have twice been unable to get through the Senate even mild measures to limit carbon. Senators Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman, both of New Mexico and both ranking members of the chamber's Energy Committee, have made global warming a high-profile matter. A white paper issued in February will be the subject of an investigatory Senate conference next week. A House delegation recently traveled to Antarctica, Australia and New Zealand to visit researchers studying climate change. "Of the 10 of us, only three were believers," says Representative Sherwood Boehlert of New York. "Every one of the others said this opened their eyes."
Boehlert himself has long fought the environmental fight, but if the best that can be said for most lawmakers is that they are finally recognizing the global-warming problem, there's reason to wonder whether they will have the courage to reverse it. Increasingly, state and local governments are filling the void. The mayors of more than 200 cities have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, pledging, among other things, that they will meet the Kyoto goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in their cities to 1990 levels by 2012. Nine eastern states have established the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative for the purpose of developing a cap-and-trade program that would set ceilings on industrial emissions and allow companies that overperform to sell pollution credits to those that underperform -- the same smart, incentive-based strategy that got sulfur dioxide under control and reduced acid rain. And California passed the nation's toughest automobile-emissions law last summer.
"There are a whole series of things that demonstrate that people want to act and want their government to act," says Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense. Krupp and others believe that we should probably accept that it's too late to prevent CO2 concentrations from climbing to 450 p.p.m. (or 70 p.p.m. higher than where they are now). From there, however, we should be able to stabilize them and start to dial them back down.
That goal should be attainable. Curbing global warming may be an order of magnitude harder than, say, eradicating smallpox or putting a man on the moon. But is it moral not to try? We did not so much march toward the environmental precipice as drunkenly reel there, snapping at the scientific scolds who told us we had a problem.
The scolds, however, knew what they were talking about. In a solar system crowded with sister worlds that either emerged stillborn like Mercury and Venus or died in infancy like Mars, we're finally coming to appreciate the knife-blade margins within which life can thrive. For more than a century we've been monkeying with those margins. It's long past time we set them right.
Informant: NHNE
March 26, 2006
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,1176980,00.html
The climate is crashing, and global warming is to blame. Why the crisis hit so soon--and what we can do about it
No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.
It certainly looked that way last week as the atmospheric bomb that was Cyclone Larry -- a Category 5 storm with wind bursts that reached 180 m.p.h. -- exploded through northeastern Australia. It certainly looked that way last year as curtains of fire and dust turned the skies of Indonesia orange, thanks to drought-fueled blazes sweeping the island nation. It certainly looks that way as sections of ice the size of small states calve from the disintegrating Arctic and Antarctic. And it certainly looks that way as the sodden wreckage of New Orleans continues to molder, while the waters of the Atlantic gather themselves for a new hurricane season just two months away. Disasters have always been with us and surely always will be. But when they hit this hard and come this fast -- when the emergency becomes commonplace -- something has gone grievously wrong. That something is global warming.
The image of Earth as organism -- famously dubbed Gaia by environmentalist James Lovelock -- has probably been overworked, but that's not to say the planet can't behave like a living thing, and these days, it's a living thing fighting a fever. From heat waves to storms to floods to fires to massive glacial melts, the global climate seems to be crashing around us. Scientists have been calling this shot for decades. This is precisely what they have been warning would happen if we continued pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, trapping the heat that flows in from the sun and raising global temperatures.
Environmentalists and lawmakers spent years shouting at one another about whether the grim forecasts were true, but in the past five years or so, the serious debate has quietly ended. Global warming, even most skeptics have concluded, is the real deal, and human activity has been causing it. If there was any consolation, it was that the glacial pace of nature would give us decades or even centuries to sort out the problem.
But glaciers, it turns out, can move with surprising speed, and so can nature. What few people reckoned on was that global climate systems are booby-trapped with tipping points and feedback loops, thresholds past which the slow creep of environmental decay gives way to sudden and self-perpetuating collapse. Pump enough CO2 into the sky, and that last part per million of greenhouse gas behaves like the 212th degree Fahrenheit that turns a pot of hot water into a plume of billowing steam. Melt enough Greenland ice, and you reach the point at which you're not simply dripping meltwater into the sea but dumping whole glaciers. By one recent measure, several Greenland ice sheets have doubled their rate of slide, and just last week the journal Science published a study suggesting that by the end of the century, the world could be locked in to an eventual rise in sea levels of as much as 20 ft. Nature, it seems, has finally got a bellyful of us.
"Things are happening a lot faster than anyone predicted," says Bill Chameides, chief scientist for the advocacy group Environmental Defense and a former professor of atmospheric chemistry. "The last 12 months have been alarming." Adds Ruth Curry of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts: "The ripple through the scientific community is palpable."
And it's not just scientists who are taking notice. Even as nature crosses its tipping points, the public seems to have reached its own. For years, popular skepticism about climatological science stood in the way of addressing the problem, but the naysayers -- many of whom were on the payroll of energy companies -- have become an increasingly marginalized breed. In a new TIME/ ABC News/ Stanford University poll, 85% of respondents agree that global warming probably is happening. Moreover, most respondents say they want some action taken. Of those polled, 87% believe the government should either encourage or require lowering of power-plant emissions, and 85% think something should be done to get cars to use less gasoline. Even Evangelical Christians, once one of the most reliable columns in the conservative base, are demanding action, most notably in February, when 86 Christian leaders formed the Evangelical Climate Initiative, demanding that Congress regulate greenhouse gases.
A collection of new global-warming books is hitting the shelves in response to that awakening interest, followed closely by TV and theatrical documentaries. The most notable of them is An Inconvenient Truth, due out in May, a profile of former Vice President Al Gore and his climate-change work, which is generating a lot of prerelease buzz over an unlikely topic and an equally unlikely star. For all its lack of Hollywood flash, the film compensates by conveying both the hard science of global warming and Gore's particular passion.
Such public stirrings are at last getting the attention of politicians and business leaders, who may not always respond to science but have a keen nose for where votes and profits lie. State and local lawmakers have started taking action to curb emissions, and major corporations are doing the same. Wal-Mart has begun installing wind turbines on its stores to generate electricity and is talking about putting solar reflectors over its parking lots. HSBC, the world's second largest bank, has pledged to neutralize its carbon output by investing in wind farms and other green projects. Even President Bush, hardly a favorite of greens, now acknowledges climate change and boasts of the steps he is taking to fight it. Most of those steps, however, involve research and voluntary emissions controls, not exactly the laws with teeth scientists are calling for.
Is it too late to reverse the changes global warming has wrought? That's still not clear. Reducing our emissions output year to year is hard enough. Getting it low enough so that the atmosphere can heal is a multigenerational commitment. "Ecosystems are usually able to maintain themselves," says Terry Chapin, a biologist and professor of ecology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. "But eventually they get pushed to the limit of tolerance."
CO2 AND THE POLES
As a tiny component of our atmosphere, carbon dioxide helped warm Earth to comfort levels we are all used to. But too much of it does an awful lot of damage. The gas represents just a few hundred parts per million (p.p.m.) in the overall air blanket, but they're powerful parts because they allow sunlight to stream in but prevent much of the heat from radiating back out. During the last ice age, the atmosphere's CO2 concentration was just 180 p.p.m., putting Earth into a deep freeze. After the glaciers retreated but before the dawn of the modern era, the total had risen to a comfortable 280 p.p.m. In just the past century and a half, we have pushed the level to 381 p.p.m., and we're feeling the effects. Of the 20 hottest years on record, 19 occurred in the 1980s or later. According to NASA scientists, 2005 was one of the hottest years in more than a century.
It's at the North and South poles that those steambath conditions are felt particularly acutely, with glaciers and ice caps crumbling to slush. Once the thaw begins, a number of mechanisms kick in to keep it going. Greenland is a vivid example. Late last year, glaciologist Eric Rignot of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and Pannir Kanagaratnam, a research assistant professor at the University of Kansas, analyzed data from Canadian and European satellites and found that Greenland ice is not just melting but doing so more than twice as fast, with 53 cu. mi. draining away into the sea last year alone, compared with 22 cu. mi. in 1996. A cubic mile of water is about five times the amount Los Angeles uses in a year.
Dumping that much water into the ocean is a very dangerous thing. Icebergs don't raise sea levels when they melt because they're floating, which means they have displaced all the water they're ever going to. But ice on land, like Greenland's, is a different matter. Pour that into oceans that are already rising (because warm water expands), and you deluge shorelines. By some estimates, the entire Greenland ice sheet would be enough to raise global sea levels 23 ft., swallowing up large parts of coastal Florida and most of Bangladesh. The Antarctic holds enough ice to raise sea levels more than 215 ft.
FEEDBACK LOOPS
One of the reasons the loss of the planet's ice cover is accelerating is that as the poles' bright white surface shrinks, it changes the relationship of Earth and the sun. Polar ice is so reflective that 90% of the sunlight that strikes it simply bounces back into space, taking much of its energy with it. Ocean water does just the opposite, absorbing 90% of the energy it receives. The more energy it retains, the warmer it gets, with the result that each mile of ice that melts vanishes faster than the mile that preceded it.
That is what scientists call a feedback loop, and it's a nasty one, since once you uncap the Arctic Ocean, you unleash another beast: the comparatively warm layer of water about 600 ft. deep that circulates in and out of the Atlantic. "Remove the ice," says Woods Hole's Curry, "and the water starts talking to the atmosphere, releasing its heat. This is not a good thing."
A similar feedback loop is melting permafrost, usually defined as land that has been continuously frozen for two years or more. There's a lot of earthly real estate that qualifies, and much of it has been frozen much longer than two years -- since the end of the last ice age, or at least 8,000 years ago. Sealed inside that cryonic time capsule are layers of partially decayed organic matter, rich in carbon. In high-altitude regions of Alaska, Canada and Siberia, the soil is warming and decomposing, releasing gases that will turn into methane and CO2. That, in turn, could lead to more warming and permafrost thaw, says research scientist David Lawrence of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. And how much carbon is socked away in Arctic soils? Lawrence puts the figure at 200 gigatons to 800 gigatons. The total human carbon output is only 7 gigatons a year.
One result of all that is warmer oceans, and a result of warmer oceans can be, paradoxically, colder continents within a hotter globe. Ocean currents running between warm and cold regions serve as natural thermoregulators, distributing heat from the equator toward the poles. The Gulf Stream, carrying warmth up from the tropics, is what keeps Europe's climate relatively mild. Whenever Europe is cut off from the Gulf Stream, temperatures plummet. At the end of the last ice age, the warm current was temporarily blocked, and temperatures in Europe fell as much as 10 °F, locking the continent in glaciers.
What usually keeps the Gulf Stream running is that warm water is lighter than cold water, so it floats on the surface. As it reaches Europe and releases its heat, the current grows denser and sinks, flowing back to the south and crossing under the northbound Gulf Stream until it reaches the tropics and starts to warm again. The cycle works splendidly, provided the water remains salty enough. But if it becomes diluted by freshwater, the salt concentration drops, and the water gets lighter, idling on top and stalling the current. Last December, researchers associated with Britain's National Oceanography Center reported that one component of the system that drives the Gulf Stream has slowed about 30% since 1957. It's the increased release of Arctic and Greenland meltwater that appears to be causing the problem, introducing a gush of freshwater that's overwhelming the natural cycle. In a global-warming world, it's unlikely that any amount of cooling that resulted from this would be sufficient to support glaciers, but it could make things awfully uncomfortable.
"The big worry is that the whole climate of Europe will change," says Adrian Luckman, senior lecturer in geography at the University of Wales, Swansea. "We in the U.K. are on the same latitude as Alaska. The reason we can live here is the Gulf Stream."
DROUGHT
As fast as global warming is transforming the oceans and the ice caps, it's having an even more immediate effect on land. People, animals and plants living in dry, mountainous regions like the western U.S. make it through summer thanks to snowpack that collects on peaks all winter and slowly melts off in warm months. Lately the early arrival of spring and the unusually blistering summers have caused the snowpack to melt too early, so that by the time it's needed, it's largely gone. Climatologist Philip Mote of the University of Washington has compared decades of snowpack levels in Washington, Oregon and California and found that they are a fraction of what they were in the 1940s, and some snowpacks have vanished entirely.
Global warming is tipping other regions of the world into drought in different ways. Higher temperatures bake moisture out of soil faster, causing dry regions that live at the margins to cross the line into full-blown crisis. Meanwhile, El Nino events -- the warm pooling of Pacific waters that periodically drives worldwide climate patterns and has been occurring more frequently in global-warming years -- further inhibit precipitation in dry areas of Africa and East Asia. According to a recent study by NCAR, the percentage of Earth's surface suffering drought has more than doubled since the 1970s.
FLORA AND FAUNA
Hot, dry land can be murder on flora and fauna, and both are taking a bad hit. Wildfires in such regions as Indonesia, the western U.S. and even inland Alaska have been increasing as timberlands and forest floors grow more parched. The blazes create a feedback loop of their own, pouring more carbon into the atmosphere and reducing the number of trees, which inhale CO2 and release oxygen.
Those forests that don't succumb to fire die in other, slower ways. Connie Millar, a paleoecologist for the U.S. Forest Service, studies the history of vegetation in the Sierra Nevada. Over the past 100 years, she has found, the forests have shifted their tree lines as much as 100 ft. upslope, trying to escape the heat and drought of the lowlands. Such slow-motion evacuation may seem like a sensible strategy, but when you're on a mountain, you can go only so far before you run out of room. "Sometimes we say the trees are going to heaven because they're walking off the mountaintops," Millar says.
Across North America, warming-related changes are mowing down other flora too. Manzanita bushes in the West are dying back; some prickly pear cacti have lost their signature green and are instead a sickly pink; pine beetles in western Canada and the U.S. are chewing their way through tens of millions of acres of forest, thanks to warmer winters. The beetles may even breach the once insurmountable Rocky Mountain divide, opening up a path into the rich timbering lands of the American Southeast.
With habitats crashing, animals that live there are succumbing too. Environmental groups can tick off scores of species that have been determined to be at risk as a result of global warming. Last year, researchers in Costa Rica announced that two-thirds of 110 species of colorful harlequin frogs have vanished in the past 30 years, with the severity of each season's die-off following in lockstep with the severity of that year's warming.
In Alaska, salmon populations are at risk as melting permafrost pours mud into rivers, burying the gravel the fish need for spawning. Small animals such as bushy-tailed wood rats, alpine chipmunks and pinon mice are being chased upslope by rising temperatures, following the path of the fleeing trees. And with sea ice vanishing, polar bears -- prodigious swimmers but not inexhaustible ones -- are starting to turn up drowned. "There will be no polar ice by 2060," says Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation. "Somewhere along that path, the polar bear drops out."
WHAT ABOUT US?
It is fitting, perhaps, that as the species causing all the problems, we're suffering the destruction of our habitat too, and we have experienced that loss in terrible ways. Ocean waters have warmed by a full degree Fahrenheit since 1970, and warmer water is like rocket fuel for typhoons and hurricanes. Two studies last year found that in the past 35 years the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes worldwide has doubled while the wind speed and duration of all hurricanes has jumped 50%. Since atmospheric heat is not choosy about the water it warms, tropical storms could start turning up in some decidedly nontropical places. "There's a school of thought that sea surface temperatures are warming up toward Canada," says Greg Holland, senior scientist for NCAR in Boulder. "If so, you're likely to get tropical cyclones there, but we honestly don't know."
WHAT WE CAN DO
So much for environmental collapse happening in so many places at once has at last awakened much of the world, particularly the 141 nations that have ratified the Kyoto treaty to reduce emissions -- an imperfect accord, to be sure, but an accord all the same. The U.S., however, which is home to less than 5% of Earth's population but produces 25% of CO2 emissions, remains intransigent. Many environmentalists declared the Bush Administration hopeless from the start, and while that may have been premature, it's undeniable that the White House's environmental record -- from the abandonment of Kyoto to the President's broken campaign pledge to control carbon output to the relaxation of emission standards -- has been dismal. George W. Bush's recent rhetorical nods to America's oil addiction and his praise of such alternative fuel sources as switchgrass have yet to be followed by real initiatives.
The anger surrounding all that exploded recently when NASA researcher Jim Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a longtime leader in climate-change research, complained that he had been harassed by White House appointees as he tried to sound the global-warming alarm. "The way democracy is supposed to work, the presumption is that the public is well informed," he told TIME. "They're trying to deny the science." Up against such resistance, many environmental groups have resolved simply to wait out this Administration and hope for something better in 2009.
The Republican-dominated Congress has not been much more encouraging. Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman have twice been unable to get through the Senate even mild measures to limit carbon. Senators Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman, both of New Mexico and both ranking members of the chamber's Energy Committee, have made global warming a high-profile matter. A white paper issued in February will be the subject of an investigatory Senate conference next week. A House delegation recently traveled to Antarctica, Australia and New Zealand to visit researchers studying climate change. "Of the 10 of us, only three were believers," says Representative Sherwood Boehlert of New York. "Every one of the others said this opened their eyes."
Boehlert himself has long fought the environmental fight, but if the best that can be said for most lawmakers is that they are finally recognizing the global-warming problem, there's reason to wonder whether they will have the courage to reverse it. Increasingly, state and local governments are filling the void. The mayors of more than 200 cities have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, pledging, among other things, that they will meet the Kyoto goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in their cities to 1990 levels by 2012. Nine eastern states have established the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative for the purpose of developing a cap-and-trade program that would set ceilings on industrial emissions and allow companies that overperform to sell pollution credits to those that underperform -- the same smart, incentive-based strategy that got sulfur dioxide under control and reduced acid rain. And California passed the nation's toughest automobile-emissions law last summer.
"There are a whole series of things that demonstrate that people want to act and want their government to act," says Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense. Krupp and others believe that we should probably accept that it's too late to prevent CO2 concentrations from climbing to 450 p.p.m. (or 70 p.p.m. higher than where they are now). From there, however, we should be able to stabilize them and start to dial them back down.
That goal should be attainable. Curbing global warming may be an order of magnitude harder than, say, eradicating smallpox or putting a man on the moon. But is it moral not to try? We did not so much march toward the environmental precipice as drunkenly reel there, snapping at the scientific scolds who told us we had a problem.
The scolds, however, knew what they were talking about. In a solar system crowded with sister worlds that either emerged stillborn like Mercury and Venus or died in infancy like Mars, we're finally coming to appreciate the knife-blade margins within which life can thrive. For more than a century we've been monkeying with those margins. It's long past time we set them right.
Informant: NHNE
rudkla - 28. Mär, 00:23
Montag, 27. März 2006
TIDES TURNING
By Susanna Schrobsdorff
Newsweek March 26, 2006
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12001020/site/newsweek/
A new book predicts that climate change is likely to be abrupt and cataclysmic -- and that these sudden shifts could cripple national economies.
Last week, Britain¹s Prince Charles called climate change "the No. 1 risk in the world, ahead of terrorism and demographic change.² But the prince, a long-time environmentalist, has some unlikely competition for the year¹s most strident statement on global warming. In a Feb. 6 address to the United Nations Security Council, conservative Republican Sen. Richard Lugar called for action on global warming, citing recent advances in scientific knowledge on the subject: ³The problem [of climate change] is real and caused by man-made emissions of greenhouse gasses, including carbon dioxide from fossil fuels.² He went on to add that climate change could ³bring drought, famine, disease, mass migration and rising sea levels threatening coasts and economies worldwide, all of which could lead to political conflict and instability.²
Lugar is not the only one reassessing global warming. Last week, insurers, bruised by a devastating 2005 Atlantic storm season that saw an all-time high of 14 hurricanes, announced plans to establish a climate-change task force under the auspices of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. Record insurance-industry losses of $30 billion from 2004¹s hurricanes in the United States were dwarfed by the more than $60 billion in insurance losses in 2005 from Hurricane Katrina alone. The industry says must recalibrate its risk models to account for the hurricanes and other severe weather from inland tornados, brushfires, ice storms and drought.
None of this is news to award-winning environmental journalist Eugene Linden. In his new book, ³The Winds of Change² (Simon & Schuster), Linden traces cycles of climate change and how civilizations have responded throughout history. He reports that these shifts tend to be abrupt and catastrophic ³flickerings,² not the gradual warming we¹ve generally expected. And while Linden acknowledges the controversy and contradictions in the science of predicting global warming, he says: ³We know enough to realize that this is a very big deal, and we know it¹s happening much faster than we expected.² NEWSWEEK¹s Susanna Schrobsdorff spoke with Linden about the science and politics of environmental change. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: Did the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina affect public attitudes about environmental issues?
EUGENE LINDEN: Yes, I think Katrina was a tectonic shift. People have begun to appreciate that weather can be a weapon of mass destruction. Katrina did more economic damage than the [9/11] World Trade Center attacks. The signals have become incontrovertible and the naysayers just sound silly.
NEWSWEEK: There was a lot of speculation that the intensity of Hurricane Katrina was related to global warming. Is there any consensus on that?
LINDEN: There¹s never going to be perfect knowledge here, but we know that hot water is the energy source for hurricanes. We also know that you¹ve seen the world warm over the last few years, and hurricanes have intensified over the last 30 years. With global warming you¹d expect more intense storms, and that¹s exactly what we are seeing.
NEWSWEEK: The Bush administration been criticized for downplaying the risks of global warming. Has that changed in the wake of the costly 2005 hurricane season?
LINDEN: The Bush administration is in an extreme denial position. They have just had contempt for the problem as far as I can see. But we cannot wait until January of 2009 [when Bush leaves office] to start taking action. I think the business community will bring more pressure on them to do something. And the fact that Christian evangelicals are speaking out on environmental issues will help, as well. I think George Bush can change his mind on this. The world needs him to change his mind.
NEWSWEEK: We usually think of global warming as a very slow process. But you say it¹s happening more quickly than predicted.
LINDEN: As recently as the 1980s, most scientists thought that climate change was a gradual and incremental affair. Then with the studies on the Greenland ice core, and seabed studies and all sorts of other studies, they have confirmed that climate has tended to flip back and forth and that historically it has gone through flickering stages, between warm and cold, as it seeks a new equilibrium. These flickering stages can last decades, creating whipsaw changes in climate that could be ruinous.
NEWSWEEK: Are we prepared for sudden environmental changes?
LINDEN: If climate change was gradual and incremental, societies could deal with it and adjust their behavior to the risk. But if it¹s rapid and extreme, there¹s no society on earth that can deal with it. In fact, economists can¹t even model the impact. Most of the economic modeling you see about climate change is built on a gradual and incremental model, which doesn¹t exist in the environmental record. Even an economy that could absorb the cost of Katrina would have difficulty with a cluster of intense weather shocks -- droughts, floods and ice storms and hurricanes.
NEWSWEEK: You write about ancient civilizations wiped out by cycles of climate change. What do you say to those who question whether current warming is caused by human activities like the burning of fossil fuels?
LINDEN: If it¹s natural, we¹re really screwed; if it¹s human, which is likely, then at least we can do something about it. So I¹d be hoping it¹s man-made. The one variable that¹s really out of whack with history is the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide has marched in lockstep with global warming. The signs are all around us -- and so are the solutions.
NEWSWEEK: What are the solutions?
LINDEN: In a perfect world, it¹s a carbon tax. But you can also look at the California situation when they had their energy crisis in 2001. It was amazing how good people were in reducing their energy use. Consumers can change their buying habits on a dime. There is enormous power to address this problem. But the main thing is that internationally, we have to get China and India in the game. And because we¹re the world¹s largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, the U.S. government has to take a strong stand on this.
NEWSWEEK: What potential economic repercussions are there from climate change at this pace?
LINDEN: To put it in perspective, an El Nino [a major temperature fluctuation in surface waters of the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean] might represent a 1 degree change in global temperatures. The 1998 El Nino did about $100 billion dollars' damage to the global economy, but you have to scale up for each level of change dramatically because you pass what are called tipping points or thresholds. Katrina was only marginally more powerful than previous hurricanes, but it did over a hundred times the damage. A flood that¹s 10 percent higher than a previous flood can cause 10 times as much damage if it overtops levees. Even a 2 degree warming in the next 20 or 30 years could be incredibly ruinous just because it could impose a tax on everybody in every in terms of ice storms and disruption in weather and business.
NEWSWEEK: What kind of tax?
LINDEN: For example, if insurance starts to rise in certain areas, and it already has in coastal areas, you get repercussions for the housing market. People have huge amounts tied up in housing and an enormous number of jobs and spending are in housing. And of course the financial system, which prices these risks, has to absorb it. The system is going to shift the risk back to individuals or government -- that¹s what business does, and that¹s how risk gets aggregated. As these risks begin to become monetized, and if global warming intensifies, it could eventually cause an economy to come to a halt.
NEWSWEEK: How have insurance companies reacted to the intensity of the storms we¹ve already seen?
LINDEN: Traditionally, they¹ve only looked back at what past weather has done, but now they are starting to base rates on anticipated changes in weather. Rates in some parts of south Florida have almost doubled. Flood insurance may end up being 10 times more expensive in parts of New Orleans as it was before. And some have even pulled out of Cape Cod [in Massachusetts], which is [more than] 1,000 miles away from where Katrina hit. That¹s how risk diffuses. And if an insurance company backs out, what bank is going to assume that risk? It causes real problems up the economic chain.
NEWSWEEK: Are other industries making plans to cope with the risk of global warming?
LINDEN: One of the things we¹re seeing right now is a change in attitudes in corporate America about climate change and emissions. Jack Welch [former CEO of General Electric] was famously dismissive of climate change and global warning. But Jeffrey Immelt [Welch¹s successor at GE] has acknowledged the seriousness of it and other environmental concerns -- and that¹s one of the largest corporations on the planet. I think that big business is actually going to put pressure on the White House to actually do something on climate change and emissions because they¹d rather deal with one uniform policy than 17 different policies. And a lot of these big companies are multinationals. Even if the United States doesn¹t take the issue seriously, a lot of other places do, and they have to operate in those markets.
NEWSWEEK: You write that humans are notoriously bad at assessing risk. Is that also why we haven¹t been more concerned about climate change before this?
LINDEN: With a long-wavelength phenomenon like climate change, by the time the signals come it¹s often too late. To paraphrase [Secretary of State] Condi Rice [in her pre-war statements on Iraq¹s nuclear capabilities], you don¹t want to have knowledge of global warming come when we have a ruined economy as a result of global warming. This is science in real time. We know enough to realize that this is a very big deal, and we know it¹s happening much faster than we expected.
Informant: NHNE
Newsweek March 26, 2006
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12001020/site/newsweek/
A new book predicts that climate change is likely to be abrupt and cataclysmic -- and that these sudden shifts could cripple national economies.
Last week, Britain¹s Prince Charles called climate change "the No. 1 risk in the world, ahead of terrorism and demographic change.² But the prince, a long-time environmentalist, has some unlikely competition for the year¹s most strident statement on global warming. In a Feb. 6 address to the United Nations Security Council, conservative Republican Sen. Richard Lugar called for action on global warming, citing recent advances in scientific knowledge on the subject: ³The problem [of climate change] is real and caused by man-made emissions of greenhouse gasses, including carbon dioxide from fossil fuels.² He went on to add that climate change could ³bring drought, famine, disease, mass migration and rising sea levels threatening coasts and economies worldwide, all of which could lead to political conflict and instability.²
Lugar is not the only one reassessing global warming. Last week, insurers, bruised by a devastating 2005 Atlantic storm season that saw an all-time high of 14 hurricanes, announced plans to establish a climate-change task force under the auspices of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. Record insurance-industry losses of $30 billion from 2004¹s hurricanes in the United States were dwarfed by the more than $60 billion in insurance losses in 2005 from Hurricane Katrina alone. The industry says must recalibrate its risk models to account for the hurricanes and other severe weather from inland tornados, brushfires, ice storms and drought.
None of this is news to award-winning environmental journalist Eugene Linden. In his new book, ³The Winds of Change² (Simon & Schuster), Linden traces cycles of climate change and how civilizations have responded throughout history. He reports that these shifts tend to be abrupt and catastrophic ³flickerings,² not the gradual warming we¹ve generally expected. And while Linden acknowledges the controversy and contradictions in the science of predicting global warming, he says: ³We know enough to realize that this is a very big deal, and we know it¹s happening much faster than we expected.² NEWSWEEK¹s Susanna Schrobsdorff spoke with Linden about the science and politics of environmental change. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: Did the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina affect public attitudes about environmental issues?
EUGENE LINDEN: Yes, I think Katrina was a tectonic shift. People have begun to appreciate that weather can be a weapon of mass destruction. Katrina did more economic damage than the [9/11] World Trade Center attacks. The signals have become incontrovertible and the naysayers just sound silly.
NEWSWEEK: There was a lot of speculation that the intensity of Hurricane Katrina was related to global warming. Is there any consensus on that?
LINDEN: There¹s never going to be perfect knowledge here, but we know that hot water is the energy source for hurricanes. We also know that you¹ve seen the world warm over the last few years, and hurricanes have intensified over the last 30 years. With global warming you¹d expect more intense storms, and that¹s exactly what we are seeing.
NEWSWEEK: The Bush administration been criticized for downplaying the risks of global warming. Has that changed in the wake of the costly 2005 hurricane season?
LINDEN: The Bush administration is in an extreme denial position. They have just had contempt for the problem as far as I can see. But we cannot wait until January of 2009 [when Bush leaves office] to start taking action. I think the business community will bring more pressure on them to do something. And the fact that Christian evangelicals are speaking out on environmental issues will help, as well. I think George Bush can change his mind on this. The world needs him to change his mind.
NEWSWEEK: We usually think of global warming as a very slow process. But you say it¹s happening more quickly than predicted.
LINDEN: As recently as the 1980s, most scientists thought that climate change was a gradual and incremental affair. Then with the studies on the Greenland ice core, and seabed studies and all sorts of other studies, they have confirmed that climate has tended to flip back and forth and that historically it has gone through flickering stages, between warm and cold, as it seeks a new equilibrium. These flickering stages can last decades, creating whipsaw changes in climate that could be ruinous.
NEWSWEEK: Are we prepared for sudden environmental changes?
LINDEN: If climate change was gradual and incremental, societies could deal with it and adjust their behavior to the risk. But if it¹s rapid and extreme, there¹s no society on earth that can deal with it. In fact, economists can¹t even model the impact. Most of the economic modeling you see about climate change is built on a gradual and incremental model, which doesn¹t exist in the environmental record. Even an economy that could absorb the cost of Katrina would have difficulty with a cluster of intense weather shocks -- droughts, floods and ice storms and hurricanes.
NEWSWEEK: You write about ancient civilizations wiped out by cycles of climate change. What do you say to those who question whether current warming is caused by human activities like the burning of fossil fuels?
LINDEN: If it¹s natural, we¹re really screwed; if it¹s human, which is likely, then at least we can do something about it. So I¹d be hoping it¹s man-made. The one variable that¹s really out of whack with history is the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide has marched in lockstep with global warming. The signs are all around us -- and so are the solutions.
NEWSWEEK: What are the solutions?
LINDEN: In a perfect world, it¹s a carbon tax. But you can also look at the California situation when they had their energy crisis in 2001. It was amazing how good people were in reducing their energy use. Consumers can change their buying habits on a dime. There is enormous power to address this problem. But the main thing is that internationally, we have to get China and India in the game. And because we¹re the world¹s largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, the U.S. government has to take a strong stand on this.
NEWSWEEK: What potential economic repercussions are there from climate change at this pace?
LINDEN: To put it in perspective, an El Nino [a major temperature fluctuation in surface waters of the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean] might represent a 1 degree change in global temperatures. The 1998 El Nino did about $100 billion dollars' damage to the global economy, but you have to scale up for each level of change dramatically because you pass what are called tipping points or thresholds. Katrina was only marginally more powerful than previous hurricanes, but it did over a hundred times the damage. A flood that¹s 10 percent higher than a previous flood can cause 10 times as much damage if it overtops levees. Even a 2 degree warming in the next 20 or 30 years could be incredibly ruinous just because it could impose a tax on everybody in every in terms of ice storms and disruption in weather and business.
NEWSWEEK: What kind of tax?
LINDEN: For example, if insurance starts to rise in certain areas, and it already has in coastal areas, you get repercussions for the housing market. People have huge amounts tied up in housing and an enormous number of jobs and spending are in housing. And of course the financial system, which prices these risks, has to absorb it. The system is going to shift the risk back to individuals or government -- that¹s what business does, and that¹s how risk gets aggregated. As these risks begin to become monetized, and if global warming intensifies, it could eventually cause an economy to come to a halt.
NEWSWEEK: How have insurance companies reacted to the intensity of the storms we¹ve already seen?
LINDEN: Traditionally, they¹ve only looked back at what past weather has done, but now they are starting to base rates on anticipated changes in weather. Rates in some parts of south Florida have almost doubled. Flood insurance may end up being 10 times more expensive in parts of New Orleans as it was before. And some have even pulled out of Cape Cod [in Massachusetts], which is [more than] 1,000 miles away from where Katrina hit. That¹s how risk diffuses. And if an insurance company backs out, what bank is going to assume that risk? It causes real problems up the economic chain.
NEWSWEEK: Are other industries making plans to cope with the risk of global warming?
LINDEN: One of the things we¹re seeing right now is a change in attitudes in corporate America about climate change and emissions. Jack Welch [former CEO of General Electric] was famously dismissive of climate change and global warning. But Jeffrey Immelt [Welch¹s successor at GE] has acknowledged the seriousness of it and other environmental concerns -- and that¹s one of the largest corporations on the planet. I think that big business is actually going to put pressure on the White House to actually do something on climate change and emissions because they¹d rather deal with one uniform policy than 17 different policies. And a lot of these big companies are multinationals. Even if the United States doesn¹t take the issue seriously, a lot of other places do, and they have to operate in those markets.
NEWSWEEK: You write that humans are notoriously bad at assessing risk. Is that also why we haven¹t been more concerned about climate change before this?
LINDEN: With a long-wavelength phenomenon like climate change, by the time the signals come it¹s often too late. To paraphrase [Secretary of State] Condi Rice [in her pre-war statements on Iraq¹s nuclear capabilities], you don¹t want to have knowledge of global warming come when we have a ruined economy as a result of global warming. This is science in real time. We know enough to realize that this is a very big deal, and we know it¹s happening much faster than we expected.
Informant: NHNE
rudkla - 27. Mär, 23:51
