What's Coming On Climate Change

[Dardedar]

Bush Crony Global Warming Denier of the Day:



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According to a NPR press release out today, Michael Griffin, President Bush's appointment to the NASA administrator position, states:

...a trend of global warming exists, I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with.” Griffin continues: “I guess I would ask which human beings - where and when - are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.” --LINK


Today, Jim Hansen, a top NASA scientist is coming back at Griffin hard in an exclusive interview with ABC News. Hansen states:

"It's an incredibly arrogant and ignorant statement," Hansen told ABC News. "It indicates a complete ignorance of understanding the implications of climate change."

"It's unbelievable," said Hansen. "I thought he had been misquoted. It's so unbelievable."

LINK

[Doug]

The Wikipedia has this about him:

Griffin has been criticized by space research organizations such as NASA Ames Research Center life sciences group for shifting portions of NASA's budget from science to spaceflight. Griffin had stated that he would not shift "one thin dime" of funding from science to human spaceflight, but less than six months later, in February 2006, NASA revealed a budget that reduced space research funding by about 25%, including indefinite deferrals of planned programs such as the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter, the Terrestrial Planet Finder, and the Space Interferometry Mission.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

What? A Bush appointee lying about what he is going to do to be confirmed in a position! Surely you jest.

Of course he shifted the funding. There's only so much science you can suppress - it's so much easier to just stop the research before it's done.

[Dardedar]

Thunder? It's the Sound of Greenland Melting

Atop Greenland's Suicide Cliff, from where old Inuit women used to hurl
themselves when they felt they had become a burden to their community,
a crack and a thud like thunder pierce the air. "We don't have thunder
here. But I know it from movies," says Ilulissat nurse Vilhelmina
Nathanielsen. "It's the ice cracking inside the icebergs." Greenland's ice
cap is melting, and faster than scientists had thought possible.

LINK

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

The first estimates of an ice-free arctic were around 2100. Because global warming is happening faster than originally thought - each time they measure it's faster than they last thought - the current estimate is 2027. Those who thought - "not my problem, I won't be here" - as selfish and shortsighted as that attitude is - no longer have that "comforting" rationalization. I don't know if I will be here in 2027 but , barring accidents, my sons and grandsons will be. I am damned pissed off at the "leaders" of our country - which produces the most greenhouse admissions and does the least about it - but my phone calls and emails seem to make no difference. We are running out of time for our kids, even more for our grandkids.

[Dardedar]

"Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed environmental agreements with two Canadian provinces that could slow down the biggest oil boom in North American history - the tar sands of Alberta.

snip...

All sides agree that Alberta's tar sands are enormous - an estimated 174 billion barrels of proven reserves, second only to Saudi Arabia's 264 billion barrels. In recent years, as the tar sands production has soared, Canada has overtaken Saudi Arabia as the leading source of U.S. oil imports, and that lead is expected to widen.

The Canadian government forecasts that tar sands production, which has quintupled in the past decade to 1.2 million barrels per day, will reach 3.5 million barrels by 2015 and 4 million barrels by 2020, accounting for more than 80 percent of Canadian oil production. This rate of growth constitutes the biggest oil boom in North American history, and one of the biggest ever worldwide.

In the tar sands region, hundreds of square miles of boreal forest have been scalped and turned into the world's largest strip mines, where the scooped-out sands require the burning of huge amounts of natural gas to separate the oil and refine it.

As a result, the tar sands industry now emits almost three times more greenhouse gas per barrel than conventional oil - a major reason why Canada's emissions have been rising faster than any other developed nation. Since 1990, Canada's total emissions have risen 25.3 percent, a pace of growth far exceeding the 16.3 percent increase in the United States, the second fastest-rising nation, according to U.N. data.

Surprisingly, Schwarzenegger and his Canadian hosts made little mention of the tar sands during his three-day trip to Canada."

LINK

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

Tar sands, like oil shale, are both very plentiful in North America - but there is a hellacious financial as well as environmental price for using them. The fact that they are being used at all is evidence that we have indeed hit "peak". I worked for Bechtel in my younger years and one of the projects I worked on (junior editor) was a proposal to get oil from shale in the "4 Corners" area. Part of the intro section described the abundance of tar sands and oil shale and did a brief rundown on what it takes to get oil out of them. (Dig out, crush, heat to melt the petroleum sludge, collect same and proto-refine it so it can be piped to a regular refinery, "upgrade" it and add it to the petroleum stream...) Fortunately the BLM decided that was a little too much damage to the 4 Corners area and the proposal was dropped. (I worked for Bechtel in 1980-81 & while Reagan was elected, his people hadn't taken over the BLM by the time I left.)

[Dardedar]

Water World: Slipping Toward Climate Catastrophe
By George Monbiot
Monbiot.com

Thursday 12 July 2007

New reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change might be absurdly optimistic about the pace of melting ice caps and rising sea levels.

George Monbiot is a British journalist and author whose expertise is on climate change and other environmental issues. Monbiot's article reveals that government ineptitude in the face of increasingly frightening scientific data on climate change is not limited to the United States: The UK government is dangerously negligent on energy and climate issues even though it knows better.

Reading a scientific paper on the train this weekend, I found, to my amazement, that my hands were shaking. This has never happened to me before, but nor have I ever read anything like it. Published by a team led by James Hansen at NASA, it suggests that the grim reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change could be absurdly optimistic.

The IPCC predicts that sea levels could rise by as much as 59 centimeters this century. Hansen's paper argues that the slow melting of ice sheets the panel expects doesn't fit the data. The geological record suggests that ice at the poles does not melt in a gradual and linear fashion, but flips suddenly from one state to another. When temperatures increased to 2-3 degrees Celsius above today's level 3.5 million years ago, sea levels rose not by 59 cm but by 25 meters. The ice responded immediately to changes in temperature.

We now have a pretty good idea of why ice sheets collapse. The buttresses that prevent them from sliding into the sea break up; meltwater trickles down to their base, causing them suddenly to slip; and pools of water form on the surface, making the ice darker so that it absorbs more heat. These processes are already taking place in Greenland and West Antarctica.

Rather than taking thousands of years to melt, as the IPCC predicts, Hansen and his team find it "implausible" that the expected warming before 2100 "would permit a West Antarctic ice sheet of present size to survive even for a century." As well as drowning most of the world's centers of population, a sudden disintegration could lead to much higher rises in global temperature, because less ice means less heat reflected back into space. The new paper suggests that the temperature could therefore be twice as sensitive to rising greenhouse gases than the IPCC assumes. "Civilization developed," Hansen writes, "during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12,000 years in duration. That period is about to end."

I looked up from the paper, almost expecting to see crowds stampeding through the streets. I saw people chatting outside a riverside pub. The other passengers on the train snoozed over their newspapers or played on their mobile phones. Unaware of the causes of our good fortune, blissfully detached from their likely termination, we drift into catastrophe.

The rest

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

The only way we will be able to meet - and possibly diminish the severity of - something of this magnitude (without the "Mad Max" end of civilization as we know it scenarios) is to change the tax and accounting structures. Making doing the right thing also the only thing that increases the "bottom line" not only harnesses the power of industry, it has industry pulling us in the direction we need to go. I'm not into the "fear" thing - fear leads to panic and that shuts off logic and critical thinking. Nevermind making the government fear climate change more than they fear the fossil fuel industry - make government see their "bottom line" (votes and tax dollars) are vested in regulating the fossil fuel industry's bottom line to our benefit.

And of course it's coming faster than the IPCC says - that was watered down to be acceptible to the Bushites. Once there's been enough melting to put fissures in a glacier, meltwater under the glacier creates a slide and when the glacier breaks up, it moves out at unbelievable speeds. This isn't a situation of pouring cold tea over a glass of ice, it's a situation of dropping ice cubes into a cup of hot tea. There is a 50-50 or better chance that the world will be totally ice-free by 2100. I'm just hoping there will be enough ice in Glacier National Park in 10 years when I retire and can afford to visit it for me to see if before it's gone.

[Dardedar]

"I used to think it would be so refreshing to run into a prominent creationist who was still honest. I finally gave up. At this point I am finding the same to be true of the leading Anthropogenic Global Warming skeptics. As far as I can see, there are none left." --Timothy Chase

[Dardedar]

Climatologist James Hansen:

"The deceit behind the attempts to discredit evidence of climate change reveals matters of importance. This deceit has a clear purpose: to confuse the public about the status of knowledge of global climate change, thus delaying effective action to mitigate climate change. The danger is that delay will cause tipping points to be passed, such that large climate impacts become inevitable, including the loss of all Arctic sea ice, destabilization of the West Antarctic ice sheet with disastrous sea level rise later this century, and extermination of a large fraction of animal and plant species….

Make no doubt, however, if tipping points are passed, if we, in effect, destroy Creation, passing on to our children, grandchildren, and the unborn a situation out of their control, the contrarians who work to deny and confuse will not be the principal culprits. The contrarians will be remembered as court jesters. There is no point to joust with court jesters. They will always be present. They will continue to entertain even if the Titanic begins to take on water. Their role and consequence is only as a diversion from what is important.

The real deal is this: the ‘royalty’ controlling the court, the ones with the power, the ones with the ability to make a difference, with the ability to change our course, the ones who will live in infamy if we pass the tipping points, are the captains of industry, CEOs in fossil fuel companies such as EXXON/Mobil, automobile manufacturers, utilities, all of the leaders who have placed short-term profit above the fate of the planet and the well-being of our children. The court jesters are their jesters, occasionally paid for services, and more substantively supported by the captains’ disinformation campaigns."

[Dardedar]

"Too Late to Avoid Global Warming," Say Scientists
By Cahal Milmo
The Independent UK

Wednesday 19 September 2007

A rise of two degrees centigrade in global temperatures - the point considered to be the threshold for catastrophic climate change which will expose millions to drought, hunger and flooding - is now "very unlikely" to be avoided, the world's leading climate scientists said yesterday.

The latest study from the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) put the inevitability of drastic global warming in the starkest terms yet, stating that major impacts on parts of the world - in particular Africa, Asian river deltas, low-lying islands and the Arctic - are unavoidable and the focus must be on adapting life to survive the most devastating changes.

For more than a decade, EU countries led by Britain have set a rise of two degrees centigrade or less in global temperatures above pre-industrial levels as the benchmark after which the effects of climate become devastating, with crop failures, water shortages, sea-level rises, species extinctions and increased disease.

Two years ago, an authoritative study predicted there could be as little as 10 years before this "tipping point" for global warming was reached, adding a rise of 0.8 degrees had already been reached with further rises already locked in because of the time lag in the way carbon dioxide - the principal greenhouse gas - is absorbed into the atmosphere.

The IPCC said yesterday that the effects of this rise are being felt sooner than anticipated with the poorest countries and the poorest people set to suffer the worst of shifts in rainfall patterns, temperature rises and the viability of agriculture across much of the developing world.

In its latest assessment of the progress of climate change, the body said: "If warming is not kept below two degrees centigrade, which will require the strongest mitigation efforts, and currently looks very unlikely to be achieved, the substantial global impacts will occur, such as species extinctions, and millions of people at risk from drought, hunger, flooding."

Under the scale of risk used by IPCC, the words "very unlikely" mean there is just a one to 10 per cent chance of limiting the global temperature rise to two degrees centigrade or less.

Professor Martin Parry, a senior Met Office scientist and co-chairman of the IPCC committee which produced the report, said he believed it would now be "very difficult" to achieve the target and that governments need to combine efforts to "mitigate" climate change by reducing CO2 emissions with "adaptation" to tackle active consequences such as crop failure and flooding.

Speaking at the Royal Geographical Society, he said: "Ten years ago we were talking about these impacts affecting our children and our grandchildren. Now it is happening to us."

The Rest

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

Of course it's too late to avoid meltdown. If we'd made the changes back in the 1970s when we got the first warning signs, we could have avoided this. Thank you neocons. The questions now are 1) what can we do to mitigate the "worst possible" scenario - which is the one we'll get if we just keep talking and don't actually do anything, and 2) what must we do to survive this massive distruption in the environment we and the rest of present life evolved for?

The American Farmland Trust says that at the rate we are going (2 million acres of farmland lost to development and 2 billion tons of topsoil lost to erosion annually) America will be a net importer of food by 2050. By 2050 at the rate the world is going, there may not be anyone to import food from.

[Dardedar]

Scientist: Greenhouse Gas Levels Grave
The Associated Press

Tuesday 09 October 2007

Sydney, Australia - Strong worldwide economic growth has accelerated the level of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere to a dangerous threshold scientists had not expected for another decade, according to a leading Australian climate change expert.

Scientist Tim Flannery told Australian Broadcasting Corp. that an upcoming report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will contain new data showing that the level of climate-changing gases in the atmosphere has already reached critical levels.

Flannery is not a member of the IPCC, but said he based his comments on a thorough review of the technical data included in the panel's three working group reports published earlier this year. The IPCC is due to release its final report synthesizing the data in November.

"What the report establishes is that the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is already above the threshold that can potentially cause dangerous climate change," Flannery told the broadcaster late Monday. "We are already at great risk of dangerous climate change, that's what these figures say. It's not next year or next decade, it's now."

Flannery, whose recent book "The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth," made best-seller lists worldwide, said the data showed that the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions had reached about 455 parts per million by mid-2005, well ahead of scientists' previous calculations.

"We thought we'd be at that threshold within about a decade, that we had that much time," Flannery said. "I mean, that's beyond the limits of projection, beyond the worst-case scenario as we thought of it in 2001," when the last major IPCC report was issued.

LINK

[Dardedar]

Ice Caps Melting Fast: Say Goodbye to the Big Apple?
By Paul Brown
AlterNet.org

Wednesday 10 October 2007

The talk of sea level rise should not be in centuries, it should be decades or perhaps even single years. And coastal regions like New York and Florida are in the front line for devastation.

It is hard to shock journalists and at the same time leave them in awe of the power of nature. A group returning from a helicopter trip flying over, then landing on, the Greenland ice cap at the time of maximum ice melt last month were shaken. One shrugged and said:"It is too late already."

What they were all talking about was the moulins, not one moulin but hundreds, possibly thousands. "Moulin" is a word I had only just become familiar with. It is the name for a giant hole in a glacier through which millions of gallons of melt water cascade through to the rock below. The water has the effect of lubricating the glaciers so they move at three times the rate that they did previously.

Some of these moulins in Greenland are so big that they run on the scale of Niagra Falls. The scientists who accompanied these journalists on the trip were almost as alarmed. That is pretty significant because they are world experts on ice and Greenland in particular. We were visiting Ilulissat, Greenland, once a stronghold of Innuit hunters but now with so little ice that the dog sleds are in danger of falling through even in the depth of winter. But it is not the lack of sea ice that worries scientists and should be of serious concern to the inhabitants of coastal zones across the world. Cities like New York and states like Florida are in the front line.

Scientists know this already, but just to give you some idea of the problem, the Greenland ice cap is melting at such a fast rate it is triggering earthquakes as pieces of ice several cubic kilometres in size break up.

Scientists say the acceleration of melting and subsequent speeding up of giant glaciers could be catastrophic in terms of sea level rise and make previous predictions published this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) far too low. The glacier at Ilulissat, which it is believed spawned the iceberg which sank the Titantic, is now flowing three times faster into the sea than it was 10 years ago.

Robert Correll, chairman of the Artic Climate Impact Assessment, from Washington told me:"We have seen a massive acceleration of the speed with which these glaciers are moving into the sea. The ice is moving at 2 metres an hour on a front five kilometres long and 1,500 metres deep. "That means that this one glacier puts enough fresh water into the sea in one day to provide drinking water for a city the size New York or London for a year."

Professor Correll, who is also director of the global change programme at the Heinz Centre in Washington said the estimates of sea level rise in the IPCC report in February had been "conservative" and based on data two years old. The range of rise this century had been predicted to be 20 to 60 centimetres, but would be the upper end of this range at a minimum and some now believed it could be two metres. This would have catastrophic effects for European and US coastlines.

He said newly invented ice penetrating radar showed that the melt water was pouring through to the bottom of the glacier creating a melt water lake 500 metres deep causing the glacier "to float on land. "These melt water rivers are lubricating the glacier, like applying oil to a surface and causing it to slide into the sea. It is causing a massive acceleration which could be catastrophic."

The glacier is now moving at 15 kilometres a year into the sea although in periodic surges it moves even faster. He has seen a surge, which he had measured as moving five kilometres in 90 minutes - an extraordinary event.

If all of Greenland melts, something we were previously assured would take thousands of years, but now could be hundreds, then sea level round the world would rise seven metres. That is without any contribution from the Antarctic, the glaciers of Alaska, the Rockies, the Himalayas, or the ocean water expanding as it warms.

The rest

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

The only thing that will get us off fossil fuels - I'm not going to say before it's too late because it's already too late - is the very simple but highly unlikely change in the U.S. budget that ONLY gives tax breaks, subsidies, or any other kind of federal support to businesses (and individuals) who each year reduce their fossil fuel use by a minimum of 10% over what the previous year's use was. That's all it would take, that's what it would take. It ain't gonna happen. Yes, we are going to lose most of the "Big Apple" - more important for my 3rd favorite activity (eating), we are going to lose Florida. Say goodby to the "Florida Sunshine Tree." And salt water migrating up the Rio Grande may take the Valley as well.

[Dardedar]