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Post by Watchman on Mar 22, 2006 22:15:24 GMT -5
World waking up to reality but it may already be too late
By Bill Kaufmann
The past few weeks of dire greenhouse gas news has either been a huge conspiracy by scientists everywhere to beggar rich nations or a torrent of inescapable reality-based data.
It's a rare day that goes by without more harrowing revelations on the global warming front -- evidence handily roasting the denial of skeptics.
For the second year in a row, arctic sea ice has failed to re-form, or even return to its long-term average rate of decline.
It's sparked fears global warming has resulted in a winter as well a summer melt in the region.
Other surveys have shown the ice has shrunk by 20% compared to its average volume of two decades ago.
The loss of ice increases the absorption of solar heat, further magnifying the warming trend.
Scientists fear the meltdown typifies changes occurring at a pace far more rapid than thought a mere few years ago.
"One of the big changes this winter is that a large part of the Barents Sea has remained ice-free for the first time," Prof. Peter Wadhams, an arctic ice specialist at Cambridge University told the U.K. newspaper The Independent.
A 10-year NASA survey, the most comprehensive undertaken, shows a net loss of ice sheet covering Greenland and Antarctica amounts to 20 billion net tonnes of water -- equalling all the water used in every sector in the states of New York, Virginia and New Jersey.
Greenland's glaciers have been disintegrating at a dizzying pace that's only now become apparent.
That great island's crumbling ice has been piling into the sea as if transported by a subterranean conveyor belt.
Last week, a Georgia Institute of Technology study bolstered ties between warmer seas and more potent hurricanes.
Acknowledgement that human activity is playing a significant role is becoming as irreversible as the phenomenon itself.
Ice cores lifted from Greenland show CO2 levels at their highest in hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of years.
Atmospheric greenhouse gas levels were at their loftiest in 2004 and are still ballooning.
Other scientists have calculated greenhouse gases are now being released 30 times faster than were the emissions that triggered an era of dramatic warming millions of years ago.
Researchers at a St. Louis, Mo., conference last month heard emissions that took 10,000 years to spark a warming incident 55 million years ago would, at current rates, require a mere three centuries to do the same.
The great meltdown now underway was nowhere to be seen a century ago, or before the impact of the industrial revolution could be felt; ice packs that were growing 20 years ago are now rapidly retreating.
All the warmest years on record have been chalked up in the past decade, while Environment Canada reports this winter has been the nation's balmiest since figures have been kept.
The runaway rapidity of the changes have pretty much ruled out purely natural causes while skeptics who insist the science is turning in their favour are being pushed to the fringe like never before.
Even core supporters of the bumbling George W. Bush have broken ranks with him on climate change.
A coalition of U.S. evangelicals last month issued a call to action on global warming, linking its effects to poverty.
"Christians must care about climate change because we love God the creator," read the coalition's statement.
Large corporations are capitulating to reality, with some like GE reversing their opposition to a UN public/private environmental initiative.
The threat of global warming and humanity's role in it have become so obvious, even the Bush-lite federal Tories are finding it impossible to write off Kyoto.
But their stance is bound to be tied at the hip to that of the Bush administration, whose failure to sign on to any meaningful remedies sets a wretched example to other non-Kyoto signatories like China and India.
Sadly, Canada, with its dismal record on reducing greenhouse gases, isn't in much of a position to lecture the Americans.
And still more depressing news came last week from the Washington-based World Resources Institute which joined a chorus lamenting a climate change tipping point might have already been reached.
It's feared global warming will long continue on an upward trend even if emissions are drastically reduced.
Perversely, that'd be music to the ears of those counselling inertia, or the belief in climate change by flatulence.
Copyright © 2006, Canoe Inc. All rights reserved.
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Post by Watchman on May 5, 2006 15:16:40 GMT -5
Air current vital to climate weakens; humans blamed
By MIKE TONER COX NEWS SERVICE
ATLANTA -- Atmospheric circulation over the Pacific Ocean has weakened significantly during the past century, and scientists say the most likely explanation for the shift is human-induced climate change.
Although few people have heard of the vast loop of winds known as the Walker Circulation, its effects are felt worldwide -- as disruptive El Niño episodes, seasonal Asian monsoons and the upwelling of cold water from the deep ocean that nourishes marine food chains.
"The Walker Circulation is fundamental to climate throughout the globe, and variations in its intensity and structure affect climate across the planet," Gabriel Vecchi of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research said Wednesday. "The scale of this feature is enormous."
In the current issue of the British journal Nature, Vecchi and a team of scientists report that the Walker Circulation, which is the source of the trade winds in the tropical Pacific, has weakened by 3.5 percent since the mid-1800s. Most of the weakening has occurred in the past 50 years.
Many theoretical studies have suggested that such a change would occur if the world is warming, but the latest research -- based on a half-century of sea-level pressure measurements -- is the first to show that it is actually taking place.
"This rate at which the Walker Circulation is weakening appears to be accelerating," Vecchi says. "We don't know what it's going to do, but the scale of this feature is so enormous that it is basic to the structure of the atmosphere. It spans half the globe."
One hint of what may be in store lies in the natural shift in weather patterns known as El Niño, which brings devastating droughts to Southeast Asia, Indonesia and Australia, violent winter storms to the U.S. West Coast and a sharp decline in fishing along the Pacific coast of South America.
A temporary weakening of the Walker Circulation -- and a slackening of the easterly trade winds -- is one of the key events signaling the onset of a new El Niño. But researchers say any long-term weakening might lead to more frequent, or perhaps even chronic, El Niño-like disruptions across the Pacific basin.
©1996-2006 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
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Post by Watchman on Jul 24, 2006 15:15:46 GMT -5
BY CHARLES J. HANLEY By The Associated Press July 22, 2006
Scientists worldwide are watching temperatures rise, the land turn dry and vast forests go up in flames.
In the Siberian taiga and Canadian Rockies, in southern California and Australia, researchers find growing evidence tying an upsurge in wildfires to climate change, an impact long predicted by global-warming forecasters.
A team at California's Scripps Institution, in a headline-making report this month, found that warmer temperatures, causing earlier snow runoff and consequently drier summers, were the key factor in an explosion of big wildfires in the U.S. West over the last three decades.
Researchers previously reached similar conclusions in Canada, where fire is destroying an average 6.4 million acres a year, compared with 2.5 million in the early 1970s. And an upcoming U.S.-Russian-Canadian scientific paper points to links between warming and wildfires in Siberia, where 2006 already qualifies as an extreme fire season, sixth in the past eight years. Far to the south, meanwhile, in drought-stricken Australia, 2005 was the hottest year on record, and the dangerous bushfire season is growing longer. "Temperature increases are intimately linked with increases in burned areas in Canada, and I would expect the same worldwide," said Mike Flannigan, a veteran Canadian Forest Service researcher.
Nadezda M. Tchebakova, a climatologist at Russia's Sukachev Institute of Forestry, said southern Siberia's average winter temperatures in the 1980-2000 period were 2 to 4 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the pre-1960 norm.
"Snowmelt starts much earlier in the spring," she said by telephone from the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk. "Precipitation is decreasing. This combination of elevated temperatures and decreased precipitation should provide conditions for greater fire occurrence."
As she spoke, newly ignited blazes raced through the conifer forests of Evenkiya, a summer fishing and hunting region north of Krasnoyarsk.
The Sukachev institute's satellite data show that more than 29 million acres - an area the size of Pennsylvania - have been burned in Russia already this year. Orbiting cameras see a red-and-green checkerboard in Siberia, of "hotspots" among endless evergreens.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an authoritative U.N.-sponsored network of scientists, has long predicted that summer drying and droughts would worsen forest fires, which in many regions are primarily set by humans.
Global temperatures rose an average 1 degree Fahrenheit in the 20th century, and warming will continue as long as manmade "greenhouse gases," mostly carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning, accumulate in the atmosphere, the panel says.
"The change is much more rapid than initially forecast 10 or 15 years ago," Brian Stocks, a retired Canadian Forest Service scientist, said of the fires. "It seems people are finally beginning to take a look at it."
The Scripps study, in the journal Science, was unique in collating detailed data from 34 years of U.S. western wildfires with temperature, snowmelt and streamflow records. Wildfire frequency varies widely from year to year, but the California researchers found a clear trend: The average number of large fires almost quadrupled between the first and second halves of that period.
They also looked at land-use changes and forest management practices, but concluded they were secondary factors in the upsurge of fires. There were "many more wildfires burning in hotter than in cooler years," they reported.
Such detailed data don't exist on a global scale. Doing a similar study in Russia would be difficult because Soviet-era records are unreliable. And specialists caution that wildfires remain complex phenomena. In many regions, slash-and-burn farmers, arsonists and others start most fires, and fire professionals say modifying human behavior is key.
But although humans are the prime cause, "coupled with climate change, things are becoming worse," said Johann Goldammer, director of the Global Fire Monitoring Center at Germany's Freiburg University.
A nonhuman cause, meanwhile, may be on the rise. Warming in high northern latitudes is expected to generate more lightning, igniting more forest fires, notes the report by NASA's Amber J. Soja, Tchebakova and other U.S., Russian and Canadian scientists.
Their paper, upcoming in the U.S. journal Global and Planetary Change, looks at how current reality compares with still other effects of climate change previously foreseen for northern, boreal regions - Siberia, Canada, Alaska.
"The forest in Siberia is shifting northward, and the forest-steppe (mixed forest and plain) is replacing it in the south," Tchebakova said. "Those were the predictions."
In Alaska, the international team found a decline in growth of white spruce trees and a spread of forest insect infestation - also both predicted in computerized climate-change scenarios.
Goldammer pointed out that boreal forests may be crucially linked to the fate of the global environment, since the forests and their peat soils hold about one-third of Earth's stored carbon.
Forest and peat fires release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, adding to climate warming, which in turn will intensify forest fires, further worsening warming in a planetary feedback loop.
"This is a carbon bomb," Goldammer said of the northern forest. "It's sitting there waiting to be ignited, and there is already ignition going on."
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Post by Watchman on Aug 15, 2006 12:16:42 GMT -5
'Biblical disasters' predicted as global warming intensifies The Earth faces a bleak future of floods, droughts and forest fires due to the continued effects of global warming, scientists have warned. Researchers from Bristol University's Quantifying and Understanding the Earth System (Quest) team claim that climate change protocols such as Kyoto may have come too late to stop widespread natural disasters in the coming years. They assert that the current levels of greenhouse gas emissions are sufficient to cause significant forest losses across Europe, Asia, North America, Central America and the Amazon basin. North and South America are apparently particularly vulnerable to forest fires as a result, the scientists write, with semi-arid regions across the world at high risk of similar occurrences. The Quest team claims that droughts are most likely to occur in areas currently suffering from freshwater shortages, such as west Africa and Central America, although Mediterranean countries and eastern states in the US are also susceptible. All of the above factors will then contribute to floods in tropical regions of Africa and central and South America, the researchers write, as a sudden lack of trees will ultimately lead to excessive levels of water run-off. Mark Scholze, the lead author of study, writes in today's edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: "Most importantly we show the steeply increasing risks, and increasingly large areas affected, associated with higher warming levels. "This analysis represents a considerable step forward for discussions about dangerous climate change and its avoidance." Under the terms of the Kyoto protocol, originally conceived in 1997 but not enforced until 2005, the UK, as with other developed nations, is required to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by five per cent compared to their levels in 1990 within the next two years. The treaty has yet to be ratified by either Australia or the US, by far the single largest contributor to global greenhouse gas levels. © 2004-2006 www.InTheNews.co.uk
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Post by Watchman on Jan 10, 2007 15:42:36 GMT -5
Climate Experts Worry as 2006 Is Hottest Year on Record in U.S.
By Marc Kaufman Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, January 10, 2007; Page A01
Last year was the warmest in the continental United States in the past 112 years -- capping a nine-year warming streak "unprecedented in the historical record" that was driven in part by the burning of fossil fuels, the government reported yesterday.
According to the government's National Climatic Data Center, the record-breaking warmth -- which caused daffodils and cherry trees to bloom throughout the East on New Year's Day -- was the result of both unusual regional weather patterns and the long-term effects of the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Pam Decker took advantage of Saturday's unusually warm temperature to cut the grass outside her home in Cumberland, Md. Pam Decker took advantage of Saturday's unusually warm temperature to cut the grass outside her home in Cumberland, Md.
Even by the standards of a year in which winter has seemed to miss the Washington region, Saturday's record high temperatures at two area airports are called "absurdly warm."
"People should be concerned about what we are doing to the climate," said Jay Lawrimore, chief of the climate monitoring branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Burning of fossil fuels is causing an increase in greenhouse gases, and there's a broad scientific consensus that is producing climate change."
The center said there are indications that the rate at which global temperatures are rising is speeding up.
Average temperatures nationwide in 2006 were 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the mean temperatures nationwide for the 20th century, the agency said. It reported that seven months in 2006 were much warmer than average, and that last month was the fourth-warmest December on record. Average temperatures for all 48 contiguous states were above or well above average, and New Jersey logged its hottest temperatures ever.
Many researchers are concerned that rising temperatures could lead to widespread melting of the polar ice caps, resulting in higher sea levels and more extreme droughts and storms. But NOAA also pointed to one silver lining: The unusually warm temperatures from October to December helped keep residential energy use for heating 13.5 percent below the average for that period.
NOAA said an El Nino weather pattern in the equatorial Pacific also contributed to the warm temperatures by blocking cold Arctic air from moving south and east across the nation.
Climate experts generally do not make much of temperature fluctuations over one or two years, but Lawrimore said the record 2006 temperatures were part of a long and worrisome trend. For instance, NOAA said, the past nine years have all been among the 25 warmest years on record for the continental United States.
Advocates for more action to control carbon dioxide emissions also voiced concern.
"No one should be surprised that 2006 is the hottest year on record for the U.S.," said Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a public interest group. "When you look at temperatures across the globe, every single year since 1993 has been in the top 20 warmest years on record."
"Realistically, we have to start fighting global warming in the next 10 years if we want to secure a safe environment for our children and grandchildren," she said.
Lawrimore said other NOAA research has found that the rate of temperature increase has been significantly greater in the past 30 years than at any time since the government started collecting national temperature data in 1895. Globally, 2005 was the hottest year on record, Lawrimore said, and 2006 was slightly cooler.
He said that although there is a scientific consensus that carbon dioxide from cars, power plants and factories is leading to global warming, there is no consensus yet on whether the warming will increase more quickly or more slowly in the future. Some researcher have predicted that temperatures worldwide will increase by a catastrophic 7 to 8 degrees on average by the end of the century, while others project an increase of a more modest 2 degrees by century's end.
The burning of oil and other fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, which rises, blankets the Earth and traps heat. Climate scientists report that there has not been this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the past 650,000 years.
The Bush administration has rejected proposals to cap carbon dioxide emissions or impose carbon taxes as a way to limit global warming. Lawrimore said he believes the problem could and should be addressed by developing new technologies for powering vehicles and industry.
Late December's springlike temperatures in the eastern two-thirds of the country made it the fourth-warmest December on record in the United States and contributed greatly to the record high for the year. Several Northern cities were unusually warm -- with Boston 8 degrees above average and Minneapolis-St. Paul 17 degrees above average for the last three weeks of the month.
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