fayfreethinkers.com

Climate change: Frisson-laden year lies ahead

PARIS (AFP) - Nothing beats a whiff of Apocalypse for focussing minds and, next year, climate change will be the big issue that will send an icy shiver down spines followed by a clamour for action.

On February 1, the world's top scientists will issue their first instalment of a massive three-part update on global warming.

It will be the first knowledge review by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 2001 -- and the phone-book-sized report will convey an unvarnished message that will be bleak and quite possibly terrifying.

Those close to the IPCC say it will not only confirm the grim warnings of the past but also amplify them.

It will declare that climate change is already on the march -- and newly-discovered mechanisms in the complex climate system could worsen the threat.

"The [temperature] trends that were expected will be unchanged," says Herve Le Treut, director of research at France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).

"But one can add positive feedbacks that weren't measured a few years ago. The range of possible risks and awareness of them has widened."

In its 2001 report, the IPCC projected that global mean temperatures would rise by between 1.4 and 5.8 C (2.5-10.4 F) by 2100 compared with their 1990 level, depending on the atmospheric levels of carbon pollution, which traps heat from the Sun.

That estimated temperature range will not change, if Le Treut's rough forecast of the IPCC findings is correct.

However, the report will also warn of newly-found "positive feedbacks" -- in ordinary language, vicious circles -- that could accelerate and possibly worsen the effects of climate change.

These include the loss of polar ice and alpine snow cover, which drives up temperatures because of the loss of whiteness which reflects sunlight, and the gradual melting of Siberian permafrost, releasing gigatonnes of carbon that had been stored for millennia in the frozen soil.

The IPCC's 4th Assessment Report "is going to shock a lot of people," says Hans Verolme of the green group WWF.

The long-awaited document comes on the heels of a string of studies in the world's science journals in 2006 that pointed to Greenland's shrivelling icesheet, loss of Antarctic glaciers, acidification of the ocean by absorption of CO2 and hammer blows to biodiversity as species habitat shifts or is destroyed.

Added to that was the report by British economist Sir Nicholas Stern, which highlighted the cost of failing to tackle greenhouse gas pollution.

If no action is taken on emissions, there is a more than a 75-percent chance that global temperatures will rise by between two and three degrees Celsius (3.6-5.4 F) over the next half century, an increase that would slash global economic output by three percent, the Stern Report said.

the rest...

Climate Scientist Says "Kyoto" Barred

A federal climate scientist in Boulder says his boss told him never to
utter the word Kyoto and tried to bar him from using the phrase climate
change at a conference. The allegations come as federal investigators
probe whether Bush administration officials tried to block government
scientists from speaking freely about global warming and attempted to
censor their research.

LINK

Unfortunately, once passed the "tipping point" wherever that is, we will start seeing, as we already have, feedback loops that are not "manmade" in nature and severe enough that all our efforts to reverse the situation may be moot. Hogeye hasn't been right about human v natural causes of global warming to this point, but once the ice sheets and permafrost have melted, it will be a natural process and there will be nothing humans can do to reverse it. Humans definitely got us to this point, and if we'd started actually doing what we are now talking about doing back when Jimmy Carter tried to get things moving, we'd never have gotten here. (Nor would we have had 2 wars for oil, I mean to stabilize the Middle East, in the last 2 decades.) I'm not an optimist like Al Gore. I think we're already passed the tipping point. But I could be wrong, so trying is still a good idea. Aside from which, getting off fossil fuels would help our domestic security (wouldn't have to worry about oil being used to extort certain favors/behaviors by M.E. countries - W says the answer to that fear is war, I say the answer is get off oil) and also improve our jobs/economy situation, so it's worth doing even if we can't stop the massive disruptions that will accompany global warming.

I hope the political IPCC report is as super-alarmist as expected, so that in a few years we can laugh at the amazingly stupid Lysenkoism when it turns out to be yet another chicken little hoax. There's nothing like a government-generated "crisis" to ramp up State power; if its not drugs or terrorism, it's environmental apocalypse. Barbara, the "tipping point" occurred in 950 AD, didn't you know?

BARB
I'm not an optimist like Al Gore.

DAR
I agree. It's going to take a few more Katrina's, heatwaves killing tens of thousands (Europe a couple years ago) and a foot or two rise in the oceans before everyone (sane) gets it.

D.

We've already had enough sea-level rise to endanger 3rd world island and coastal communities. It has to take out Lower Manhattan before Americans will get it (and folks like Hogeye won't get it even then, because it won't be in "Ozarkia").

Bold mine:

***
Gore Urges Scientists to Speak Up
By Douglas Fischer
Contra Costa Times

Friday 15 December 2006

San Francisco - Former Vice President Al Gore, who brought the message of a climate in crisis to the general public, carried the gospel back to those who gave him the data, urging more than 5,000 scientists studying the Earth and its climate to vociferously educate the public to the graveness of global warming.

"I'm asking you very seriously to become much more active," Gore told researchers gathered Thursday for the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting, the world's largest scientific meeting.

Some 15,000 scientists are at the conference. More than one-third filled two giant ballrooms at the Marriott Hotel to capacity hear him talk.

"Get involved. Because so much is at stake."

Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," popularized the significant - and increasingly catastrophic - changes under way on Earth as a result of human activity.

Gore's evidence came largely from those sitting in the audience: Researchers studying Antarctic ice cores, ocean sediments, Arctic sea ice, clouds, mountain glaciers and a host of different planetary systems.

Their most recent evidence, unveiled in the past week, suggests the pace and scope of change surpasses even what scientists suspected a year ago:

* The Antarctic ice core record, for example, now extends back to 800,000 years. Yet scientists studying that record warn that current trends render moot any comparison with information locked in ice: The planet, they say, is warming to a degree unseen in 40 million years, as the first mammals were evolving. Sea sediments bolster that hypothesis.

* Arctic ice could be gone in the summer within 34 years.

That's decades earlier than previously thought, and it rids the Northern Hemisphere of its refrigerator. And "if we allow it to go," Gore said, "it won't come back on any time scale relevant to the human species."

For Gore, the climate crisis is a symptom - "the most prominent and dangerous symptom" - of a larger ailment: Humanity's relationship with the planet.

"We have somehow persuaded ourselves that we really don't have to care that much about what we're doing to future generations," he said.

"We have to find a way to communicate the direness of the situation."

James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, had a front row seat to Gore's hourlong talk.

His name often comes up when talk turns to the need in science for a standard-bearer; more than any scientist, he has generated headlines for his spars with the White House on climate change.

He agreed fully with Gore's call. "Scientists have not done a good job communicating with the public," he said in an interview.

The "huge gap" between where the science is and what the public knows, Hansen added, "is partly our fault and part of the problem."

Dan Kammen, co-director of the University of California's Institute of the Environment and a professor in the Energy and Resources Group, said being a scientist activist has its price. He's lost out on grants because of his political positions on energy and climate issues, he said.

"Some of us have been doing this for some time and at some risk," Kammen said.

Are more scientists likely to heed Gore's call? In a few weeks, a pack of climate scientists and politicians are planning a demonstration in front of the White House.

"There is a lot of frustration" with inaction on curbing carbon emissions, Kammen said. "But science is inherently a discipline of skepticism."

But rare is the scientist who can pack so many colleagues into two ballrooms that, as happened Thursday, organizers must turn people away at the door.

Jerry Porter, an atmospheric scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, could only shake his head in wonder at Gore's grasp of the underlying science and its implications.

"He's a deeper thinker about environmental issues than those of us in the environmental sciences," he said.

LINK

When the major corporations realize THEY are also "at risk" the MSM will push active response to global warming in like of not just an Apollo Project-type response, but a WWII-homefront-type response. And the corporate lobbies will be pushing congress to make the laws and regulations to deal with it. By then it will be too late (if it isn't already and it probably is), but until then for every climate scientist that speaks out, the MSM will counter with a "fair and balanced" interview with an Exxon shill.

DAR
The only thing I wonder about regarding this is if they checked to make sure these islands aren't sinking in relation to the ocean.

***
Disappearing World: Global Warming Claims Tropical Island
By Geoffrey Lean
The Independent UK

Sunday 24 December 2006

For the first time, an inhabited island has disappeared beneath rising seas.

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.

Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.

It has been officially recorded in a six-year study of the Sunderbans by researchers at Calcutta's Jadavpur University. So remote is the island that the researchers first learned of its submergence, and that of an uninhabited neighbouring island, Suparibhanga, when they saw they had vanished from satellite pictures.

Two-thirds of nearby populated island Ghoramara has also been permanently inundated. Dr Sugata Hazra, director of the university's School of Oceanographic Studies, says "it is only a matter of some years" before it is swallowed up too. Dr Hazra says there are now a dozen "vanishing islands" in India's part of the delta. The area's 400 tigers are also in danger.

Until now the Carteret Islands off Papua New Guinea were expected to be the first populated ones to disappear, in about eight years' time, but Lohachara has beaten them to the dubious distinction.

Human Cost of Global Warming: Rising Seas Will Soon Make 70,000 People Homeless

Refugees from the vanished Lohachara island and the disappearing Ghoramara island have fled to Sagar, but this island has already lost 7,500 acres of land to the sea. In all, a dozen islands, home to 70,000 people, are in danger of being submerged by the rising seas.

LINK

DAR
AND I found this while looking for a picture:

Sinking island urged to accept migrants



Four months after Australia refused to take in migrants from the tiny, sinking Pacific nation of Tuvalu, Canberra has asked Tuvalu to take in Middle East asylum seekers.

A Tuvalu government official told the French news agency AFP it had received a verbal request from Australia.

Australia has turned away about 1,500 asylum seekers since August, sending many to small Pacific nations to have their claims processed.

With a total land area of 26 square kilometres and a population of 11,000 people, Tuvalu is one-tenth the size of Washington DC, and spread over nine atolls.

It works out at 403 people per square kilometre compared to 2.4 people to every square kilometre in Australia.

Earlier this year Tuvalu, worried about rising sea levels which it blames on climate change, appealed to New Zealand and Australia to take in some of its islanders.

New Zealand agreed to help, but in July Australian Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock refused.

"They have to meet the normal migration criteria that apply to anybody in the world who wants to come to Australia," he said.

LINK

Atolls usually don't sink - they're eroded away by wave and tidal action. If they're "sinking" now, it's because the sea level is rising. As to Australia - they've never let common decency (or even common sense) interfere with their actions. Refugees aren't immigrants. They can become immigrants if they meet immigration requirements, but they don't start out that way. New Zealand has always been better about that kind of thing. (However, the above stat regarding population density is very misleading, because most of Australia isn't habitable.)

If relocating 70,000 people over the next 8 years is already causing problems, just think what it will be like when the seas rise high enough to threaten places like Hong Kong (and NYC).

Barbara Fitzpatrick wrote:If relocating 70,000 people over the next 8 years is already causing problems, just think what it will be like when the seas rise high enough to threaten places like Hong Kong (and NYC).

DOUG
No doubt Hogeye will say that this happened during the MWP.

TORONTO - A giant ice shelf has snapped free from an island south of the North Pole, scientists said Thursday, citing climate change as a "major" reason for the event.



The Ayles Ice Shelf — all 41 square miles of it — broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 500 miles south of the North Pole in the Canadian Arctic.

Scientists discovered the event by using satellite imagery. Within one hour of breaking free, the shelf had formed as a new ice island, leaving a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake.

See here.


This Ice Shelf no longer exists. it washed away in September 2002. The 80m thick Ward Hunt Ice Shelf is the only ice shelf in the arctic. Nunavut. Canada. (Doug adds: And the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf has now cracked.)

And also see here:
An ancient ice shelf has cracked off northern Ellesmere Island, creating an enormous 66-square-kilometre ice island and leaving a trail of icy blocks in its wake.

"It really is incredible," said Warwick Vincent of Universite Laval, one of the few people to have laid eyes on the scene. "It's like a cruise missile has come down and hit the ice shelf."

The breakup was so powerful, earthquake monitors 250 kilometres away picked up the tremors as the 3,000- to 4,500-year-old shelf tore away from its fjord on Ellesmere.

It broke up 16 months ago, but no one was present to see it. The scientists say they are only now making public details after piecing together what occurred using seismic monitors and Canadian and U.S. satellites.

They say the ice shelf collapse, suspected to have been caused by global warming, is the biggest in Canada in 30 years and is indicative of the transformation under way on Ellesmere, Canada's most northern land mass.

"We are seeing incredible changes," said Vincent, whose group is studying the island's disappearing ice shelves and their unique ecosystems. "People talk of endangered animals - well, these are endangered landscape features and we're losing them."

The Ayles ice shelf was one of six ice shelves left in Canada, remnants of a vast icy fringe that used to cover the top end of Ellesmere.

...The shelves are 90 per cent smaller than they were when Arctic explorer Robert Peary crossed them in 1906. And the Ayles ice shelf can be erased from Canada's maps.

"It no longer exists," Vincent said.

Things like this (loss of the Ayles ice shelf) are why I think we're past the point of no return. If we stopped using fossil fuels today, and we won't of course, what we've done to date will keep warming things for another 25 years. By then most, if not all, the ice/glaciers will be gone - and most permafrost will have thawed and given up their trapped methane, giving more fuel to global warming.

DAR
Realclimate is an excellent, award winning, non-political, scientific site devoted to publishing timely and accurate information regarding global warming. They give their "Best Of" for 2006. Links backing up the claims are provided at the link. Readers might recognize some of these from the debates around here:

***
2006 Year in review

A lighthearted look at the climate science goings-on over the last year:

Best highlight of the gap between the 'two cultures':
Justice Scalia: 'Troposphere, whatever. I told you before I'm not a scientist. That's why I don't want to have to deal with global warming' .

Least effective muzzling of government climate scientist by a junior public affairs political appointee:
George Deutsch met his match in Jim Hansen.

Best (err... only) climate science documentary on public release:
An Inconvenient Truth.

Most worn out contrarian cliche:
Medieval English vineyards.

Previously prominent contrarian cliche curiously not being used any more:
"The satellites show cooling"

Most bizarre new contrarian claim:
"Global warming stopped in 1998".
By the same logic, it also stopped in 1973, 1983, and 1990 (only it didn't).

Most ironic complaint about 'un-balanced' climate coverage on CNN:
Pat Michaels (the most interviewed commentator by a factor of two) complaining that he doesn't get enough exposure.

Most dizzying turn-around of a climate skeptic:
Fred Singer "global warming is not happening" (1998,2000, 2002, 2005) to global warming is "unstoppable" (2006)

Best popular book on the climate change:
Elizabeth Kolbert's "Field Notes from a Catastrophe"

Least unexpected observations:
(Joint winners) 2006 near-record minima in Arctic sea ice extent, near-record maxima in Northern Hemisphere temperatures, resumed increase in ocean heat content, record increases in CO2 emissions

Best actual good news:
Methane concentrations appear to have stabilised. Maybe they can even be coaxed downward....

Biggest increase in uncertainty as a function of more research:
Anything to do with aerosols.

Least apologetic excuse for getting a climate story wrong:
Newsweek explains its 1975 'The Cooling World' story.

Most promising newcomer on the contrarian comedy circuit:
Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

Least accurate attempted insinuation about RealClimate by a congressional staffer:
'There's so much money': Marc Morano (Senate EPW outgoing majority committee staff, 5:30 into the mp3 file)

Most revealing insight into the disinformation industry (fiction):
Thank you for smoking

Most revealing insight into the disinformation industry (non-fiction) and year's best self-parody:
'CO2 is life'

link

I'm afraid their "best good news" of methane concentrations have stabilized is not going to turn out to be accurate - at least not if the permafrost continues to thaw. That and the melting of polar ice are what could push/will push global warming into the "unstoppable force" category.

The Men in Blue have a global warming clip. Good stuff.

LINK

I don't know if I'd call it good - scary is more like it. Somebody sent me a clip - I think it was Larry Woodall - saying it's time to shift presentation of global warming. Most people believe it now, but continual focus on the devestating possibilities is just scaring the heck out of everyone & sending them into another Y2K-type panic (where they hoard canned goods and weapons). Environmentalists now need to present global warming as something we can stop, since we started it - and what needs to be done. I agree with the article.

Yes, I know the solution(s) are complex in specifics, but conceptually fairly straightforward and pretty obvious to those of us who've been on this band wagon since the beginning - but the newbies are freaking. Panic has never brought a viable solution to any crisis. (Diverts the blood & oxygen from the brain to the hands and feet for one thing, making thinking a bit difficult.) Now the push needs to be what can be done 1) by individuals (both personally and to push the public and private sectors), 2) by local community organizations, including government (city & county, 3) by larger, state-wide organizations, including the state, 4) by national governmental and non-governmental entities, and 5) by international governmental and non-governmental entities. The lovely thing about concentrating on what needs to be done rather than the devestation of not doing anything is that what's good for global warming - getting off fossil fuels - is good for the economy/jobs and good for domestic security, so it can be sold to the few remaining "unbelievers" on the other benefits.

Exxon Cuts Ties to Global Warming Skeptics
MSNBC News

Friday 12 November 2007

Oil giant also in talks to look at curbing greenhouse gases.

New York - Oil major Exxon Mobil Corp. is engaging in industry talks on possible U.S. greenhouse gas emissions regulations and has stopped funding groups skeptical of global warming claims - moves that some say could indicate a change in stance from the long-time foe of limits on heat-trapping gases.

Exxon, along with representatives from about 20 other companies, is participating in talks sponsored by Resources for the Future, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit. The think tank said it expected the talks would generate a report in the fall with recommendations to legislators on how to regulate greenhouse emissions.

Mark Boudreaux, a spokesman for Exxon, the world's biggest publicly traded company, said its position on climate change has been "widely misunderstood and as a result of that, we have been clarifying and talking more about what our position is."

Boudreux said Exxon in 2006 stopped funding the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a nonprofit advocating limited government regulation, and other groups that have downplayed the risks of greenhouse emissions.

CEI acknowledged the change. "I would make an argument that we're a useful ally, but it's up to them whether that's in the priority system that they have, right or wrong," director Fred Smith said on CNBC's "On the Money."

...

Some see Exxon's participation in the talks, coupled with its pledge to stop funding CEI, as early signs of a possible policy change.

"The fact that Exxon is trying to debate solutions, instead of whether climate change even exists, represents an important shift," said Andrew Logan, a climate expert at Ceres, a coalition of investors and environmentalists that works with companies to cut climate change risks.

Exxon's funding action was confirmed this week by its vice president for public affairs. Kenneth Cohen told the Wall Street Journal that Exxon decided in late 2005 that its 2006 nonprofit funding would not include CEI and "five or six" similar groups.

Cohen declined to identify the other groups, but their names could become public this spring when Exxon releases its annual list of donations to nonprofit groups.

Scoring Oil

In a report last year on how oil majors are addressing global warming emissions, Ceres gave Exxon a 35 - the worst of any company. Oil majors BP and Royal Dutch Shell got 90 and 79, respectively.

"Given how large and influential Exxon is and that they are basically the last big industry climate skeptic standing, even small moves can have a very big impact," said Logan.

But he said it was too early to tell the substance of the change. "The devil is in the details," he said.

Cohen told the Wall Street Journal that while questions remain about the degree to which fossil fuels are contributing to warming, the computer modelling on what the future may hold "has gotten better."

And, he said, "we know enough now - or, society knows enough now - that the risk is serious and action should be taken."

The rest...

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Warming of Mass Distruction. Little comedy clip.

NOAA REPORTS 2006 WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD FOR U.S.
General Warming Trend, El Niño Contribute to Milder Winter Temps

Jan. 9, 2007 — The 2006 average annual temperature for the contiguous U.S. was the warmest on record and nearly identical to the record set in 1998, according to scientists at the NOAA National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. Seven months in 2006 were much warmer than average, including December, which ended as the fourth warmest December since records began in 1895. (Click NOAA image for larger view of U.S. state temperature rankings for 2006. Click here for high resolution version. Please credit “NOAA.”)

Based on preliminary data, the 2006 annual average temperature was 55 degrees F—2.2 degrees F (1.2 degrees C) above the 20th Century mean and 0.07 degrees F (0.04 degrees C) warmer than 1998. NOAA originally estimated in mid-December that the 2006 annual average temperature for the contiguous United States would likely be 2 degrees F (1.1 degrees C) above the 20th Century mean, which would have made 2006 the third warmest year on record, slightly cooler than 1998 and 1934, according to preliminary data. Further analysis of annual temperatures and an unusually warm December caused the change in records.

NOAA image of national temperatures for the contiguous United States from 1895 to 2006.These values were calculated using a network of more than 1,200 U.S. Historical Climatology Network stations. These data, primarily from rural stations, have been adjusted to remove artificial effects resulting from factors such as urbanization and station and instrument changes, which occurred during the period of record. (Click NOAA image for larger view of national temperatures for the contiguous United States from 1895 to 2006. Click here for high resolution version. Please credit “NOAA.”)