Scientists discover massive methane 'time bomb' under the Arctic seabed

From the Daily Mail

Global warming could rapidly accelerate as millions of tons of methane escape from beneath the Arctic seabed, scientists warned today.

Huge deposits of the greenhouse gas - 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide - are rising to the surface as the Arctic region heats up, according to preliminary findings.

Researchers found massive stores of sub-sea methane in several areas across thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf and observed the gas bubbling up from the sea floor through 'chimneys', according to newspaper reports.

The researchers believe escaping sub-sea methane is connected to rises in temperatures in the Arctic region.

One of the expedition leaders, Orjan Gustafsson, of Stockholm University in Sweden, said researchers had found 'an extensive area of intense methane release'.

'At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane. Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface.

Arctic Melting Shows Global Warming Serious

by David Ljunggren for Reuters

OTTAWA - The incredibly rapid rate at which Canada's Arctic ice shelves are disappearing is an early indicator of the "very substantial changes" that global warming will impose on all mankind, a top scientist said on Wednesday.

Researchers announced late on Tuesday that the five ice shelves along Ellesmere Island in the Far North, which are more than 4,000 years old, had shrunk by 23 percent this summer alone.

The largest shelf is disintegrating and one of the smaller shelves, covering 19 square miles (55 square km), broke away entirely last month.

"Climate models indicate that the greatest changes, the most severe changes, will happen earliest in the highest northern latitudes," said Warwick Vincent, director of the Centre for Northern Studies at Laval University in Quebec.

"This will be the starting point for more substantial changes throughout the rest of the planet.... Our indicators are showing us exactly what the climate models predict," he told Reuters in an interview.

Warming climate threatens Alaska's vast forests

By Chris Baltimore for Reuters

KENAI NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Alaska (Reuters) - Here in a 13,700-year-old peat bog, ecologist Ed Berg reaches into the moss and pulls out more evidence of the drastic changes afoot due to the Earth's warming climate.
Rooting through a handful of mossy duff, Berg, an ecologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, shows remains of shrubs and other plants taking hold over the last 30 years in a patch of ground that has long been too soggy for woody plants to grow.

In other words, the ground is drying out, and the peat bog is turning into forest.
"There has been a big change," Berg said. Core samples taken from the bog show moss nearly 22 feet under the ground, with no sign of trees or shrubs growing here for centuries, Berg said.
In 50 years, the bog could be covered by black spruce trees, he said.

Welcome to Alaska, where the blow of climate change will fall harder than on any other U.S. state.

Switching to coal could be fatal

By Chris Kraul for the LA Times

As the global price of oil and natural gas soars, some customers are taking a new look at other fuels — including coal. And countries such as China and India, whose demand is contributing to the price of petroleum, need even more energy. Besides petroleum products, they are buying vast amounts of coal, as well.

The worldwide demand for oil has its own set of environmental consequences — drilling in pristine areas where it previously was uneconomical and continued emission of greenhouse gases. But environmentalists warn that renewed reliance on coal takes the threat to another level.

“Growing coal use threatens nothing less than the end of civilization as we know it,” said Henry Henderson, the Chicago-based Midwest director of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Wetlands could unleash "carbon bomb"

By Deborah Zabarenko for Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The world's wetlands, threatened by development, dehydration and climate change, could release a planet-warming "carbon bomb" if they are destroyed, ecological scientists said on Sunday.

Wetlands contain 771 billion tons of greenhouse gases, one-fifth of all the carbon on Earth and about the same amount of carbon as is now in the atmosphere, the scientists said before an international conference linking wetlands and global warming.

If all the wetlands on the planet released the carbon they hold, it would contribute powerfully to the climate-warming greenhouse effect, said Paulo Teixeira, coordinator of the Pantanal Regional Environment Program in Brazil.

Comments from the pros on a previous post

Why is this confusing? Because the term 'climate models' is interpreted very differently in the public sphere than it is in the field. For most of the public, it is 'climate models' that are used to project global warming into the future, or to estimate the planet's sensitivity to CO2. Thus a statement like the one above, and the headline that came from it are interpreted to mean that the estimates of sensitivity or of future warming are now in question. Yet this is completely misleading since neither climate sensitivity nor CO2 driven future warming will be at all affected by any revisions in ozone chemistry - mainly for the reason that most climate models don't consider ozone chemistry at all. Precisely zero of the IPCC AR4 model simulations (discussed here for instance) used an interactive ozone module in doing the projections into the future.

Planet Heading Toward Climate ‘Tipping Point’

WASHINGTON - Little time remains for brokering a global deal on climate change, and a successful outcome depends on involvement and commitment by both developed and developing countries.

This message was driven home yesterday by renowned economist Sir Nicholas Stern, speaking at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C.

Stern stressed that by 2050 — the year often used as a target for reducing global emissions — 8 billion of the global population of 9 billion will be living in developing countries. But at least 70 percent of the greenhouse gases polluting the skies today are attributable to developed countries.

If the two sides cannot overcome current disagreements and work together to stop deforestation, develop new technologies for capturing carbon in the air, and set firm targets for reducing pollution, Stern warned, the “cost of inaction will be huge and entail major risks.”

Two years ago Stern produced a controversial report on the economics of climate change, commissioned by the British government, arguing that if governments failed to invest at least 1 percent of their GDP in mitigating global warming, the end result could be a global decline in GDP of as much as 20 percent.

Yesterday, Stern acknowledged that his earlier report probably underestimated the risks and the rapidity with which global warming is taking place, meaning that governments may need to commit 2 percent of GDP to mitigating climate change.

Stern’s warnings came just a day after two other blunt warnings on the impact of climate change.

On Wednesday, 16 national intelligence agencies acknowledged in a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that global climate change presents a threat to U.S. national security — perhaps the most candid assessment to surface publicly in Washington during the Bush era.

NASA warming scientist: 'This is the last chance'

WASHINGTON (AP) — Exactly 20 years after warning America about global warming, a top NASA scientist said the situation has gotten so bad that the world's only hope is drastic action.

James Hansen told Congress on Monday that the world has long passed the "dangerous level" for greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and needs to get back to 1988 levels. He said Earth's atmosphere can only stay this loaded with man-made carbon dioxide for a couple more decades without changes such as mass extinction, ecosystem collapse and dramatic sea level rises.

"We're toast if we don't get on a very different path," Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute of Space Sciences who is sometimes called the godfather of global warming science, told The Associated Press. "This is the last chance."

Hansen brought global warming home to the public in June 1988 during a Washington heat wave, telling a Senate hearing that global warming was already here. To mark the anniversary, he testified before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming where he was called a prophet, and addressed a luncheon at the National Press Club where he was called a hero by former Sen. Tim Wirth, D-Colo., who headed the 1988 hearing.

Agriculture and climate change

Here's a site from reliable folks admonishing more consciousness about how food is produced and delivered.

New Round of Climate Talks Open with Big Agenda, Small Hopes

BONN, Germany: If the devil is in the details, climate change negotiators are about to enter purgatory.
On Monday, some 2,000 delegates from 162 countries and dozens of specialist agencies open a two-week conference, the first to get into the nuts and bolts of a new global warming agreement meant to take effect after 2012.
The meeting builds on a landmark accord reached last December on the Indonesian island of Bali which, for the first time, held out the promise that the United States, China and India will join a coordinated effort to control carbon emissions blamed for the unnatural heating of the Earth.
The Bali conference agreed to conclude a new climate change treaty by December 2009. Another conference four months later in Bangkok adopted a negotiating timetable.
In Bonn, “the real work is now only beginning,” says Yvo de Boer, the U.N.’s top climate change official.
Scientists say the world’s carbon emissions must peak within the next 10 to 15 years and then fall by half by mid-century to avoid potentially catastrophic changes in weather patterns, a rise in sea levels that would threaten coastal cities and the mass extinction of plants and animals.
The new climate change pact will succeed the first phase of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which requires 37 industrialized nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

US Consumers Rank Last In World Survey of Green Habits

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/08/8797/

By Queenie Wong for McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Americans rank last in a new National Geographic-sponsored survey released Wednesday that compares environmental consumption habits in 14 countries.
Americans were least likely to choose the greener option in three out of four categories - housing, transportation and consumer goods_ according to the assessment. In the fourth category, food, Americans ranked ahead of Japanese consumers, who eat more meat and seafood.
The rankings, called “Greendex,” are the first to compare the lifestyles and behaviors of consumers in multiple countries, according to the National Geographic Society.

NPR climate connection

Here's a pretty good site for climate info and discussion of issues and ramifications.

Deep Antarctic waters freshening

By David Fogarty for the Daily Telegraph

SCIENTISTS studying the icy depths of the sea around Antarctica have detected changes in salinity that could have profound effects on the world's climate and ocean currents.
The scientists returned to Hobart on Thursday after a one-month voyage studying the Southern Ocean to see how it is changing and what those changes might mean for global climate patterns.

Voyage leader Steve Rintoul said his team found that salty, dense water that sinks near the edge of Antarctica to the bottom of the ocean about 5 km down was becoming fresher and more buoyant.

So-called Antarctic bottom water helps power the great ocean conveyor belt, a system of currents spanning the Southern, Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans that shifts heat around the globe.

Rocky Mountain Climate Org

Looks like an interesting source, has some pdfs on the home page about losing snowpack, and thus water, in the west.

Global Warming Battleground: Coal Plants

By Judy Pasternak

WASHINGTON — Every time a new coal-fired power plant is proposed anywhere in the United States, a lawyer from the Sierra Club or an allied environmental group is assigned to stop it, by any bureaucratic or legal means necessary.

They might frame the battle as a matter of zoning or water use, but the larger war is over global warming: Coal puts twice as much temperature-raising carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as natural gas, second to coal as the most common power plant fuel.

The plant-by-plant strategy is part of a campaign by environmentalists to force the federal government to deal with climate change. The fights are scattered from Georgia to Wyoming, from Illinois to Texas, but the ultimate target is Washington, where the Bush administration has resisted placing limits on carbon dioxide and Congress has yet to act on a global warming bill.

NASA's Top Climate Scientist Says Big Oil is Hiding a "Planet in Crisis"

Global warming has plunged the planet into a crisis and the fossil fuel industries are trying to hide the extent of the problem from the public, NASA's top climate scientist says.

"We've already reached the dangerous level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," according to James Hansen, 67, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. "But there are ways to solve the problem" of heat-trapping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, which Hansen said has reached the "tipping point" of 385 parts per million.

Hansen calls for phasing out all coal-fired plants by 2030, taxing their emissions until then, and banning the building of new plants unless they are designed to trap and segregate the carbon dioxide they emit.

The major obstacle to saving the planet from its inhabitants is not technology, insisted Hansen, named one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2006 by Time magazine.

World cooling on biofuel solution to climate change

by Aubrey Belford

AKARTA (AFP) - Once a golden promise in the fight against climate change, biofuels are fast losing their lustre as high demand for essential crops drives land clearing and pushes up the price of food.
Biofuels made from food crops such as corn, sugar, soybeans and oil palm burn cleaner than fossil fuels, but experts say high demand is sending ripples through the world economy, and could be doing the environment more harm than good.
Rudy Gosal, a 36-year-old courier who queued with hundreds of others in Indonesia's capital in March to buy government-subsidised cooking oil, is one of millions feeling the pinch of the push towards biofuels.

Giant Antarctic Ice Shelf Breaks Into The Sea

by Claire Truscott

A vast hunk of floating ice has broken away from the Antarctic peninsula, threatening the collapse of a much larger ice shelf behind it, in a development that has shocked climate scientists.
Satellite images show that about 160 square miles of the Wilkins ice shelf has been lost since the end of February, leaving the ice interior now “hanging by a thread”.
The collapsing shelf suggests that climate change could be forcing change much more quickly than scientists had predicted.
“The ice shelf is hanging by a thread,” said Professor David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). “We’ll know in the next few days or weeks what its fate will be.”
The Wilkins shelf covers an area of 5,600 square miles (14,500 sq km). It is now protected by just a thin thread of ice between two islands.
Vaughan was a member of the team that predicted in 1993 that global warming could cause the Wilkins shelf to collapse within 30 years

Lovelock and his pessimistic prediction

We're all doomed! 40 years from global catastrophe - and there's NOTHING we can do about it, says climate change expert

The weather forecast for this holiday weekend is wildly unsettled. We had better get used to it.
According to the climate change scientist James Lovelock, this is the beginning of the end of a peaceful phase in evolution.
By 2040, the world population of more than six billion will have been culled by floods, drought and famine.
The people of Southern Europe, as well as South-East Asia, will be fighting their way into countries such as Canada, Australia and Britain.
We will, he says, have to set up encampments in this country, like those established for the hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced by the conflict in East Africa.
Lovelock believes the subsequent ethnic tensions could lead to civil war.
Crackpot or visionary, the fact is that more and more people are paying attention to Lovelock, and that he, himself, supports the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the influential group who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former American vice president Al Gore for their campaigns on global warming.
Lovelock also says that Margaret Thatcher and the Queen are "sympathetic" to his views.
He has been proclaiming his Gaia Theory for a generation. This states that the Earth is a living, self-regulating system and that by filling its atmosphere with CO2 (carbon dioxide emissions) we have destroyed the balance and overheated the planet. We are in the phase when the thermometer suddenly shoots up.
Lovelock believes it is too late to repair the damage. Government targets are "futile". Britain contributes such a tiny amount of emissions compared with countries such as China that our self-regulatory measures are pathetic.
"Everyone could burn coal all day and drive around in 4x4s and it would not make a scrap of difference," he says.
It is hubris, he argues, to believe we can prevent the inevitable consequences of mankind's actions. Lovelock reminds us - in case it has slipped our memory - that the Earth has gone through exactly the same correction before.
"It was last as hot as this 55 million years ago. There was a geological accident in the North Sea, near where Norway is. A volcanic layer of lava came up underneath one of the large petroleum deposits. It vaporised the whole lot, putting into the atmosphere about two million, million tons of crude oil.

Arctic losing long-term ice cover

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News website

The Arctic is losing its old, thick ice faster than in previous years, according to satellite data.
The loss has continued since the end of the Arctic summer, despite cold weather across the northern hemisphere.
The warm 2007 summer saw the smallest area of ice ever recorded in the region, and scientists say 2008 could follow a similar pattern.
Older floes are thicker and less saline than newly-formed ice, meaning they can survive warm spells better.
It is not likely that perennial ice will recover in the long term.
Ice more than two years old now makes up about 30% of all the ice in the Arctic, down from 60% two decades ago.

Could Arctic Ice Melt Spawn New Kind of Cold War?

by Deborah Zabarenko for Reuters

WASHINGTON - With oil above $100 a barrel and Arctic ice melting faster than ever, some of the world’s most powerful countries — including the United States and Russia — are looking north to a possible energy bonanza.

This prospective scramble for buried Arctic mineral wealth made more accessible by freshly melted seas could bring on a completely different kind of cold war, a scholar and former Coast Guard officer says.

While a U.S. government official questioned the risk of polar conflict, Washington still would like to join a 25-year-old international treaty meant to figure out who owns the rights to the oceans, including the Arctic Ocean. So far, the Senate has not approved it.

Unlike the first Cold War, dominated by tensions between the two late-20th century superpowers, this century’s model could pit countries that border the Arctic Ocean against each other to claim mineral rights. The Arctic powers include the United States, Russia, Canada, Denmark and Norway.

"Tipping point" on horizon for Greenland ice

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent for Reuters

OSLO (Reuters) - Global warming this century could trigger a runaway thaw of Greenland's ice sheet and other abrupt shifts such as a dieback of the Amazon rainforest, scientists said on Monday.

They urged governments to be more aware of "tipping points" in nature, tiny shifts that can bring big and almost always damaging changes such as a melt of Arctic summer sea ice or a collapse of the Indian monsoon.

"Society may be lulled into a false sense of security by smooth projections of global change," the scientists at British, German and U.S. institutes wrote in a report saying there were many little-understood thresholds in nature.

"The greatest and clearest threat is to the Arctic with summer sea ice loss likely to occur long before, and potentially contribute to, Greenland ice sheet melt," they wrote in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Tipping elements in the tropics, the boreal zone, and west Antarctica are surrounded by large uncertainty," they wrote, pointing to more potential abrupt shifts than seen in a 2007 report by the U.N. Climate Panel.

A projected drying of the Amazon basin, linked both to logging and to global warming, could set off a dieback of the rainforest.

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Antarctica Lost More Ice in Last 10 Years

By Deborah Zabarenko for Reuters

WASHINGTON - Antarctica lost billions of tons of ice over the last decade, contributing to the rising seas around the world, a climate researcher said on Monday.

The ice melted from two particular parts of the southern continent, according to Eric Rignot and colleagues, who wrote about the phenomenon in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Using satellites to monitor most of Antarctica’s coastline, the scientists estimate that West Antarctica lost 132 billion tons of ice in 2006, compared to about 83 billion tons in 1996. The Antarctic Peninsula, which stretches toward South America, lost about 60 billion tons in 2006.

To put this in perspective, 4 billion tons of ice would be enough to provide drinking water to the more than 60 million people of the United Kingdom for a year, fellow author Jonathan Bamber of the University of Bristol said in a statement.

This ice loss is not from the so-called ice sheets that cover the water around the continent. This melting occurred in the glaciers that cover much of the Antarctic land mass, and when that melts, it contributes to sea level rise in a way that sea ice does not.

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China’s Glaciers (and People) are in Trouble

From Celsias Blog

Yes, more bad news about glaciers melting around the world, and this time it is from the “Third Pole” as the Tibet (or Himalayan) Plateau is known.

Western China is experiencing glacial melt in the 7 to 18 percent range in the last five years. The area is part of the so-called Third Pole as it is an area that reflects the sun’s heat, much like the North and South Polar regions. Of course, when the snow and ice melts, it exposes the darker Earth underneath, which then serves as a “heat sink”, which in turn exacerbates the melting and thus exposes more earth and rock, and well, you see where this is heading. A little something called the “Albedo Effect.”

The Third Pole may be even more crucial as it is on a part of the globe that receives much more sunlight than either the Arctic or Antarctic. We have been reading about the ever-quickening loss of ice at the Poles, but now a Chinese survey of the Western part of the country shows that things are much worse than previously thought.

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Oceans’ Growing Acidity Alarms Scientists

by Les Blumenthal for McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Seven hundred miles west of Seattle in the Pacific at Ocean Station Papa, a first-of-its-kind buoy is anchored to monitor a looming environmental catastrophe.

Forget about sea levels rising as glaciers and polar ice melt, and increasing water temperatures affecting global weather patterns. As the oceans absorb more and more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, they’re gradually becoming more acidic.

And some scientists fear that the change may be irreversible.

At risk are sea creatures up and down the food chain, from the tiniest phytoplankton and zooplankton to whales, from squid to salmon to crabs, coral, oysters and clams.

The oceans are already 30 percent more acidic than they were at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, as they absorb 22 tons of carbon dioxide a day. By the end of the century, they could be 150 percent more acidic.

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Ominous Arctic melt worries experts

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON - An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years.

Greenland's ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer's end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by The Associated Press.

"The Arctic is screaming," said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government's snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colo

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Electricity composition by Zip Code

Here's a web site that gives the source mix for local power companies searched by Zip Code, Fast and really informative.

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BP Set To Commit ‘The Biggest Environmental Crime in History’

By Cahal Milmo for the Independaent/UK

The multinational oil and gas producer, which last year made a profit of £11bn, is facing a head-on confrontation with the green lobby in the pristine forests of North America after Greenpeace pledged a direct action campaign against BP following its decision to reverse a long-standing policy and invest heavily in extracting so-called “oil sands” that lie beneath the Canadian province of Alberta and form the world’s second-largest proven oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.

Producing crude oil from the tar sands - a heavy mixture of bitumen, water, sand and clay - found beneath more than 54,000 square miles of prime forest in northern Alberta - an area the size of England and Wales combined - generates up to four times more carbon dioxide, the principal global warming gas, than conventional drilling. The booming oil sands industry will produce 100 million tonnes of CO2 (equivalent to a fifth of the UK’s entire annual emissions) a year by 2012, ensuring that Canada will miss its emission targets under the Kyoto treaty, according to environmentalist activists.

The oil rush is also scarring a wilderness landscape: millions of tonnes of plant life and top soil is scooped away in vast open-pit mines and millions of litres of water are diverted from rivers - up to five barrels of water are needed to produce a single barrel of crude and the process requires huge amounts of natural gas. The industry, which now includes all the major oil multinationals, including the Anglo-Dutch Shell and American combine Exxon-Mobil, boasts that it takes two tonnes of the raw sands to produce a single barrel of oil. BP insists it will use a less damaging extraction method, but it accepts that its investment will increase its carbon footprint.

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U.N. Report Describes Risks of Inaction on Climate Change

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By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL for the NYT

VALENCIA, Spain, Nov. 16 — In its final and most powerful report, a United Nations panel of scientists meeting here describes the mounting risks of climate change in language that is both more specific and forceful than its previous assessments, according to scientists here.

Synthesizing reams of data from its three previous reports, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the first time specifically points out important risks if governments fail to respond: melting ice sheets that could lead to a rapid rise in sea levels and the extinction of large numbers of species brought about by even moderate amounts of warming, on the order of 1 to 3 degrees.

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Waste Heat - the Unsung Solution

By Bill McKibben for Orion Magazine

From his desk in an office in Chicago, Jeff Smith has a bird’s-eye view of the American landscape. Combing through a huge database of information compiled by the EPA, he can, almost literally, peer down every smokestack in the nation and figure out what’s going on inside.

And what he sees is heat. Waste heat—one of the country’s largest potential sources of power, pouring up out of those smokestacks. If it could be recycled into electricity, that heat would generate immense amounts of power without our having to burn any new fossil fuels. By immense, I mean, speaking technically, humongous. Even after he’s winnowed the nation’s half a million smokestacks down to the most likely customers, that leaves twenty-five thousand stacks. “An astronomical number,” Smith says.

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World body warns over ocean 'fertilisation' to fix climate change

LONDON (AFP) - Countries gathered under an international accord on maritime pollution have warned against offbeat experiments to tackle climate change by sowing the sea with chemicals to help soak up airborne carbon dioxide (CO2).
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Parties to the London Convention and London Protocol declared that they hold authority over such experiments, and "large-scale operations" of this kind "are currently not justified," according to a statement issued on Monday.

Several controversial experiments have been carried out or are being planned to "fertilise" areas of the sea with iron or urea to see whether this encourages the growth of plankton.

Much of the CO2 emitted by fossil fuels is dissolved by the sea from the atmosphere.

In turn, microscopic marine plants at the sea surface absorb some of the CO2 through photosynthesis. When they die, they fall to the ocean floor, thus potentially storing the carbon for millions of years.

Defenders of fertilisation say that carbon pollution is so far out of control that a swift fix is needed to avert catastrophe for the climate system.

By accelerating plankton growth, carbon could be massively sucked out of Earth's atmosphere, reducing the warming effect of this greenhouse gas, they argue

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Oceans could absorb far more CO2, says study

PARIS (AFP) - The ocean's plankton can suck up far more airborne carbon dioxide (CO2) than previously realised, although the marine ecosystem may suffer damage if this happens, a new study into global warming says.

The sea has soaked up nearly half of the CO2 that has been emitted by fossil fuels since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

But a key role is played by plant micro-organisms called phytoplankton, which take in the dissolved gas at the ocean's sunlit surface as part of the process of photosynthesis. This plankton dies and eventually sinks to the ocean floor, thus storing the carbon for potentially millions of years.

One of the big questions is how much more of CO2 the sea can absorb.

If, like a saturated sponge, the oceans cannot take up any more, atmospheric concentrations of CO2, the principal greenhouse gas, would sharply rise and stoke global warming.

Another concern is that rising levels of dissolved CO2 also causes acidification of seawater. Wildlife such as coral, which secretes a skeletal structure, are known to be affected by acidification but the impact on other marine species is largely unknown.

In an innovative experiment reported on Sunday in Nature, researchers closed off part of Raune fjord in southern Norway to see how plankton reacted to different levels of CO2

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Most Would Pay Higher Bills To Help Climate: poll

by Jeremy Lovell for Reuters

LONDON - Millions of people around the world are willing to make personal sacrifices, including paying higher bills, to help redress climate change, a global survey said on Monday.

The survey found 83 percent of those questioned believed lifestyle changes would be necessary to cut emissions of climate warming carbon gases.

The survey, conducted by two polling organizations for the BBC World Service, covered 22,000 people in 21 countries.

In 14 of the 21 countries from Canada to Australia, 61 percent overall said it would be necessary to increase energy costs to encourage conservation and reduce carbon emissions.

“People around the world recognize that climate change requires that people change their behavior,” said Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes which conducted the poll with GlobeScan.

“And that to provide incentives for those changes there will need to be an increase in the cost of energy that contributes to climate change,” he added.

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Earth Is Reaching The Point of No Return, Says Major UN Environment Report

Fundamental changes in political policy and individual lifestyles were demanded by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) as it gave warning that the “point of no return” for the environment is fast being approached.

The damage being done was regarded by the UN programme as so serious that it said the time had come for the environment to be a central theme of policy-making instead of just a fringe issue, even though it would damage the vested interests of powerful industries.

Marion Cheatle, of the environment programme, said that damage sustained by the environment was of fundamental economic concern and, if left unchecked, would affect growth.

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States Set to Sue the U.S. Over Greenhouse Gases

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By Danny Hakim for the New York Times

ALBANY, Oct. 23 — New York is one of more than a dozen states, led by California, preparing to sue the Bush administration for holding up efforts to regulate emissions from cars and trucks, several people involved in the lawsuit said on Tuesday.

The move comes as New York and other Northeastern states are stepping up their push for tougher regulation of greenhouse gases as part of their continuing opposition to President Bush’s policies.

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Fears That Seas Soak Up Less Greenhouse Gas

by Andrew Woodcock in London for the Sydney Morning Herald

THE oceans’ ability to act as a “carbon sink” soaking up greenhouse gases appears to be decreasing, research shows, leading to new fears about global warming

Measurements of the North Atlantic taken by British scientists over the decade from the mid-1990s to 2005 show the level of carbon dioxide in its waters fell by about half over that time.

One of the authors of the study, published on Saturday in a paper for the Journal of Geophysical Research, said the change may have been triggered by climate change and may also accelerate the process by leaving more CO2 in the atmosphere.

Natural processes mean the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is reduced when the gas dissolves into the waters of the oceans which cover much of the surface of the earth, turning them into vast “sinks” storing the carbon safely.

But the new study suggests the amount of carbon dioxide entering the oceans is declining, possibly because warmer global weather has heated the water near the surface.

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Oceans may be losing ability to absorb CO2

PARIS (AFP) - The world's oceans may be losing their ability to soak up extra carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, with the risk that this will help stoke global warming, two new studies say.

Absorption of atmospheric CO2 by the North Atlantic plunged by half between the mid-1990s and 2002-5, British researchers say in a paper published in the November issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research.

The data comes from sensors lowered by a container ship carrying bananas, which makes a round trip from the West Indies to Britain every month. It has generated more than 90,000 measurements of ocean CO2.

The finding touches on a key aspect of the global warming question, because for decades the ocean has been absorbing much of the CO2 released into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels.

If the sea performs less well as a carbon sponge, or "sink" according to the technical jargon, more CO2 will remain in the atmosphere, thus accelerating the greenhouse effect.

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Arctic Thaw May Be at ‘Tipping Point’

by Alister Doyle for Reuters

OSLO - A record melt of Arctic summer sea ice this month may be a sign that global warming is reaching a critical trigger point that could accelerate the northern thaw, some scientists say.0928 06

“The reason so much (of the Arctic ice) went suddenly is that it is hitting a tipping point that we have been warning about for the past few years,” James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told Reuters.

The Arctic summer sea ice shrank by more than 20 percent below the previous 2005 record low in mid-September to 4.13 million sq km (1.6 million sq miles), according to a 30-year satellite record. It has now frozen out to 4.2 million sq km.

The idea of climate tipping points — like a see-saw that suddenly flips over when enough weight gets onto one side — is controversial because it is little understood and dismissed by some as scaremongering about runaway effects.

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Refiners Dismiss Ethanol Coalition Claims as Ludicrous Attempt at Damage Control

"A summer full of unfavorable studies and criticism may be enough for ACE to invest in Beltway public relations damage control, but the facts about ethanol's drawbacks cannot be disputed, and policymakers should be aware of the significant consequences American consumers and the environment could face should they increase the federal mandate and subsidies for biofuels."

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--NPRA, the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, Executive Vice President Charles T. Drevna today dismissed baseless claims made by the American Coalition for Ethanol (ACE) that oil companies are "discouraging ethanol use by not passing along the cost-benefits to consumers."

"ACE's statement is absolutely ludicrous given the facts," Drevna said. "According to a number of studies, there are very few cost benefits to be 'passed down.' A FarmEcon.com study said only last week that '(i)n total, the costs of ethanol paid by taxpayers, fuel purchasers and the food system is about $31 billion in 2007, or about $4.40 per gallon of ethanol produced. Corrected for the energy content of ethanol relative to gasoline, this is equivalent to a wholesale gasoline price of $6.67 per gallon. Ethanol is not a cheap source of energy, it is about 3 times as expensive as gasoline.' The study also stated that '(t)he ethanol subsidy program is now increasing the cost of food production though side effects on major crop prices and plantings. The cost increases are already starting to show up in the prices of meat, poultry, dairy, bread, cereals and many other products made from grains and soybeans.'(1)

"A summer full of unfavorable studies and criticism from economists and environmentalists alike may be enough for ACE to invest in Beltway public relations damage control, but the facts about ethanol's drawbacks cannot be disputed, and policymakers should be aware of the significant consequences American consumers and the environment could face should they increase the federal mandate and subsidies for biofuels."

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Global Warming Impact Like ‘Nuclear War’

By Jeremy Lovell for Reuters

London - Climate change could have global security implications on a par with nuclear war unless urgent action is taken, a report said on Wednesday.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) security think-tank said global warming would hit crop yields and water availability everywhere, causing great human suffering and leading to regional strife

While everyone had now started to recognize the threat posed by climate change, no one was taking effective leadership to tackle it and no one could tell precisely when and where it would hit hardest, it added.

“The most recent international moves towards combating global warming represent a recognition … that if the emission of greenhouse gases … is allowed to continue unchecked, the effects will be catastrophic — on the level of nuclear war,” the IISS report said.

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Bush must release global warming reports

By TERENCE CHEA, Associated Press Writer

SAN FRANCISCO - A federal judge ordered the Bush administration to issue two scientific reports on global warming, siding with environmentalists who sued the White House for failing to produce the documents.

U.S. District Court Judge Saundra Armstrong ruled Tuesday that the Bush administration had violated a 1990 law when it failed to meet deadlines for an updated U.S. climate change research plan and impact assessment.

Armstrong set a March 1 deadline for the administration to issue the research plan, which is meant to guide federal research on climate change. Federal law calls for an updated plan every three years, she said. The last one was issued in 2003.

The judge set a May 31 deadline to produce a national assessment containing the most recent scientific data on global warming and its projected effects on the country's environment, economy and public health. The government is required to complete a national assessment every four years, the judge ruled.

The last one was issued by the Clinton administration in 2000.

The administration had claimed that it had discretion over how and when it produced the reports — an argument the judge rejected Tuesday.

"The defendants are wrong," Armstrong wrote in the 38-page ruling. "Congress has conferred no discretion upon the defendants as to when they will issue revised Research Plans and National Assessments."

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Trees Won't Fix Global Warming

by Andrea Thompson
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.com

The plan to use trees as a way to suck up and store the extra carbon dioxide emitted into Earth's atmosphere to combat global warming isn't such a hot idea, new research indicates.

Scientists at Duke University bathed plots of North Carolina pine trees in extra carbon dioxide every day for 10 years and found that while the trees grew more tissue, only the trees that received the most water and nutrients stored enough carbon dioxide to offset the effects of global warming.

The Department of Energy-funded project, called the Free Air Carbon Enrichment (FACE) experiment, compared four pine forest plots that received daily doses of carbon dioxide 1.5 times current levels of the greenhouse gas in Earth's atmosphere to four matched plots that didn't receive any extra gas.

The treated trees produced about 20 percent more biomass on average, but since water and nutrient availability differed across the plots, averages don't tell the whole story, the researchers noted.

"In some areas, the growth is maybe five to 10 percent more, and in other areas it's 40 percent more," said FACE project director Ram Oren of Duke University. "So in sites that are poor in nutrients and water we see very little response. In sites that are rich in both, we see a large response."

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Analysts See ‘Simply Incredible’ Shrinking of Floating Ice in the Arctic

by Andrew C. Revkin for the New York Times

The area of floating ice in the Arctic has shrunk more this summer than in any other summer since satellite tracking began in 1979, and it has reached that record point a month before the annual ice pullback typically peaks, experts said yesterday.0810 02

The cause is probably a mix of natural fluctuations, like unusually sunny conditions in June and July, and long-term warming from heat-trapping greenhouse gases and sooty particles accumulating in the air, according to several scientists.

William L. Chapman, who monitors the region at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and posted a Web report on the ice retreat yesterday, said that only an abrupt change in conditions could prevent far more melting before the 24-hour sun of the boreal summer set in September. “The melting rate during June and July this year was simply incredible,” Mr. Chapman said. “And then you’ve got this exposed black ocean soaking up sunlight and you wonder what, if anything, could cause it to reverse course.”

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Coral reefs dying faster than expected

By MICHAEL CASEY, AP Environmental Writer

BANGKOK, Thailand - Coral reefs in much of the Pacific Ocean are dying faster than previously thought, according to a study released Wednesday, with the decline driven by climate change, disease and coastal development.
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Researchers from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill found that coral coverage in the Indo-Pacific — an area stretching from Indonesia's Sumatra island to French Polynesia — dropped 20 percent in the past two decades.

About 600 square miles of reefs have disappeared since the 1960s, the study found, and the losses were just as bad in Australia's well-protected Great Barrier Reef as they were in poorly managed marine reserves in the Philippines.

"We found the loss of reef building corals was much more widespread and severe than previously thought," said John Bruno, who conducted the study along with Elizabeth Selig. "Even the best managed reefs in the Indo-Pacific suffered significant coral loss over the past 20 years."

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Global warming doubles number of hurricanes, study finds

by Maxim Kniazkov

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Global warming's effect on wind patterns and sea temperatures have more than doubled the annual number of hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean over the past century, says a new study by US scientists.
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Excerpts from the study by Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Peter Webster of Georgia Institute of Technology were released in the United States late Sunday.

The analysis identifies three periods since 1900, during which the average number of hurricanes and tropical storms surged dramatically and then remained elevated and relatively steady.

The first period, between 1900 and 1930, saw an average of six Atlantic tropical cyclones, of which four were hurricanes and two were tropical storms.

From 1930 to 1940, the annual average increased to 10, consisting of five hurricanes and five tropical storms.

In the most recent period, from 1995 to 2005, the average reached 15, of which eight were hurricanes and seven were tropical storms.

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Small Ice Sources Pose Big Threat to Rising Seas

Andrea Thompson LiveScience Staff Writer

Apparently, “don’t sweat the small stuff” doesn’t apply to sea-level rise due to global warming: Scientists have found that smaller glaciers and ice caps, not Earth's expansive polar ice sheets, could cause the majority of the rise due to melting by 2100.

As snow accumulates on the upper portions of a glacier, the ice thickens and begins to flow down. The rate of flow partly determines how fast the glacier melts.

With rising temperatures, the surface of the glacier melts faster, and the water created percolates down through the ice, making the bed of the glacier more slippery and causing the ice to flow faster.

"Faster flow means more ice discharged to the ocean, which will then melt," Meier explained.

Glaciers high in mountain ranges such as the Alps also melt by flowing in this way, and their melt water runs into rivers and eventually into the ocean.

IPCC's missing info

Meier and his colleagues emphasized these types of losses in their study, detailed in the July 19 online issue of the journal Science, because considerations of flow rates were largely absent from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) estimates.

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Gore Slams US-Led Climate Pact as Sham

by Michelle Nichols for Reuters

NEW YORK - Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore slammed the United States and some other big polluters for forming what he called a sham global warming pact separate from the rest of the world.

0705 09 1 2Those countries — including Australia, China, India, South Korea and Japan — must join the rest of the world in a new deal to fight global warming, Gore told Reuters ahead of Saturday’s Live Earth concerts aimed at raising awareness of climate change.

In an interview, Gore expressed doubts about the motives of the United States and Australia, which both eschewed the Kyoto Protocol, for creating the six-member pact called the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate.

“With all due respect I think the Asia-Pacific initiative is more of a Potemkin Village approach,” he said, referring to the fake villages set up by Russian general Grigory Potemkin in the Crimea in 1787 to impress Catherine the Great.

“It has been organized by the two developed countries that alone among the world community have refused to join in on the Kyoto Protocol,” said Gore, whose documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” about global warming won two Academy Awards this year.

The Kyoto Protocol obligates about 35 rich nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. It expires in 2012 and U.N.-led talks on a replacement pact are expected to start in December

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Greenland Ice Melt Speeds Up

Warming: Trend is Confirmed via Satellite, Flyovers
by David Perlman for the San Francisco Chronicle

NASA scientists reading signals from a satellite in orbit, and flying aboard a low-flying plane over Greenland, are finding fresh evidence of melting snows and thinning glaciers in vast areas of the massive island.0602 01Their observations confirm the climate’s warming trend in the far northern reaches of the world, they say, where changes in the circulation of waters feeding into the Arctic Ocean are altering crucial patterns of ocean currents there with effects that are increasingly uncertain.

The pace of glaciers sliding into the sea along Greenland’s southwestern coast “is speeding like gangbusters this year,” said William Krabill, leader of a NASA team that has just ended a three-week airborne mission probing glacier dynamics with lasers and radar.

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Earth, Inc. Sliding Into Bankruptcy

by Stephen Leahy for Inter Press Service

Build a shrimp farm in Thailand by cutting down mangrove forests and you will net about 8,000 dollars per hectare. Meanwhile, the destruction of the forest and pollution from the farm will result in a loss of ecosystems worth 35,000 dollars/ha per year.0530 02Many leading development institutions and policy-makers still fail to understand that this ruthless exploitation for short-term profits could trigger an Enron-like collapse of “Earth, Inc.”, experts say.

For example, the World Bank and other economic development agencies would happily loan a shrimp farmer 100,000 dollars to clear more mangroves.

All economies depend on the natural capital lying within nature’s lands, waters, forests, and reefs, but humans have often treated them as if they had little value or were inexhaustible.

“Up till now, humans have been exploiting natural capital to maximize production of food, timber, oil and minerals at the expense of soil, water and biodiversity,” said Janet Ranganathan, director of people and ecosystems at the Washington-based World Resources Institute.

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Greenpeace warns China of glacier retreat threat

BEIJING (Reuters) - Accelerated glacier melting in the mountains of Tibet could choke off water sources vital for large parts of China, the environmental group Greenpeace said on Wednesday, warning of a chain-reaction of damage from global warming.

Across the Qinghai-Tibet highland that spans much of western China, global warming is speeding the retreat of glaciers, stoking evaporation of glacial and snow run-off, and leaving dwindling rivers dangerously clogged with silt, Greenpeace activists said at the release of a report on climate change in the region.

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U.S. to reject climate deal

By DAVID STRINGER, Associated Press Writer

LONDON - The United States is preparing to reject new targets on climate change at a Group of Eight summit next month, dashing German and British hopes for a new global pact on carbon emissions, according to comments on a document released by the environmental group Greenpeace.

The White House on Saturday declined to confirm the comments were from U.S. officials, but said discussions continued about what the G-8 leaders will say.

"Our challenge and opportunity is in developing an approach that is appropriate and conducive to all these major emitting countries," said Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, holding the rotating presidency of both the G-8 bloc of industrialized nations and the European Union, wants the June meeting to agree to targets for cuts in greenhouse gas output and a timetable for a major agreement on emissions reduction to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.

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Rising corn prices hit grocery shoppers' pocketbooks

The rising demand for corn as a source of ethanol-blended fuel is largely to blame for increasing food costs around the world, and Canada is not immune, say industry experts.

Food prices rose 10 per cent in 2006, "driven mainly by surging prices of corn, wheat and soybean oil in the second part of the year," the International Monetary Fund said in a report.

"Looking ahead, rising demand for biofuels will likely cause the prices of corn and soybean oil to rise further," the authors wrote in the report released last month.

Statistics Canada says consumers in the country paid 3.8 per cent more for food in April 2007, compared to the same month last year.

Jyoti Sahasrabudhe, an independent food industry consultant in Calgary, says consumers would be amazed to learn just how much of their food contains corn.

In a recent trip to the grocery story with CBC News, Sahasrabudhe underlined the point.

"For example, in the sushi in the California rolls, we've got hydrolyzed corn protein. Here we are looking at coiled garlic sausage and I believe we will find some modified cornstarch. It's used as a thickener to bind all the ingredients together," said Sahasrabudhe.

"Corn has so many uses throughout the food chain as feed for animals, as an ingredient on its own. I don't know that a relatively inexpensive substitute for all those functions could be found."

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World Biodiversity Day: Climate Change Also Drives Evolution

by Julio Godoy for Inter Press Service

BERLIN - New scientific evidence confirms that human action, such as carbon emissions causing global warming, and industrial-scale search for food, is decimating biodiversity - and, in some cases, is driving threatened species to evolve and adapt at unexpected speed to new living conditions.

An example of this evolution accelerated by human action is the new sexual behaviour of codfish, says the Austrian biologist Ulf Dieckmann, an evolution and ecology researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), near Vienna. 0522 05

According to Dieckmann, codfish has within a couple of decades adapted to new age structure within its own species, provoked by fishery.

Until some decades ago, codfish reached sexual maturity at the age of 10, and only when it measured at least one metre. Now, codfish reaches sexual maturity at the age of six, and when it measures only 65 centimetres, Dieckmann told IPS.

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Smithsonian accused of altering global warming exhibit

By BRETT ZONGKER, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The Smithsonian Institution toned down an exhibit on climate change in the Arctic for fear of angering Congress and the Bush administration, says a former administrator at the museum.

Among other things, the script, or official text, of last year's exhibit was rewritten to minimize and inject more uncertainty into the relationship between global warming and humans, said Robert Sullivan, who was associate director in charge of exhibitions at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

Also, officials omitted scientists' interpretation of some research and let visitors draw their own conclusions from the data, he said. In addition, graphs were altered "to show that global warming could go either way," Sullivan said.

"It just became tooth-pulling to get solid science out without toning it down," said Sullivan, who resigned last fall after 16 years at the museum. He said he left after higher-ups tried to reassign him.

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America’s Parting Gift to Britain’s PM is Climate Action Refusal

NO! to CO2 Emissions Targets. NO! to a Successor to Kyoto. NO! to a Carbon Trading Market. As Blair Leaves Washington, US Hardens Stance on Climate Change

by Daniel Howden the Independent/UK

WASHINGTON - As Tony Blair left Washington yesterday for his last visit as Prime Minister, the Bush administration was acting to scupper international efforts to combat climate change.

Less than 24 hours earlier, Mr Blair had basked in the apparent support of President George Bush for his stated aim of avoiding catastrophic global warming. But it seems his appeals have fallen on deaf ears. While Mr Bush was eulogizing his friend in the White House rose garden, the President’s delegation at a United Nations meeting in Bonn was working to stop any progress on setting up a carbon trading scheme and emissions caps.

Harlan Watson, President Bush’s chief climate negotiator, rejected any caps on US emissions or participation in carbon trading. “That’s not our agenda,” he said.

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New global warming threat from Southern Ocean

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Climate change has weakened the Southern Ocean's ability to absorb the globe's excess carbon dioxide, a factor that could accelerate global warming, international scientists have found.
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A study published in the journal Science revealed that since 1981, the Southern Ocean has been taking up less carbon dioxide -- five to 30 percent less per decade -- than researchers had predicted previously.

At the same time carbon dioxide emissions rose by 40 percent, the study found. The reason for the slowdown is more winds over the Southern Ocean since 1958, caused by human-produced greenhouse gases and ozone depletion.

The winds have led to a release of stored carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This prevented further absorption of greenhouse gases in the ocean's carbon "sink" -- a natural carbon reservoir, according to the study.

"This is serious," said Corinne Le Quere, a scientist who led the research by the University of East Anglia, the British Antarctic Survey, and the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Jena, Germany.

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Climate chnage accelerating Evolution in some species

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/05/evolution_climate_change.php

Scientists have mostly discussed and understood evolution as a process whose effect can only be ascertained over the course of thousands, if not millions of years. In essence, evolution is defined as a change in a population's genetic composition over many generations, due to the effect of natural selection acting on individual genetic variation, that results in the development of new species. And although this notion still holds true for the most part, researchers have increasingly begun to notice the growing role that climate change has played in accelerating the rate of evolution in certain species.

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Hybrid Cars' Fantasy Mileage Ratings Drive Into the Sunset

By John Gartner for Wired

Hybrid car economics will face a new road test this month with the arrival of fresh models sporting revised mileage ratings from the Environmental Protection Agency.

This year, new test standards have forced manufacturers to lower advertised efficiency claims on most models compared to previous years, and car lots are bracing for a tougher environment for hybrid sales.

It will "make for an interesting summer," said Phil Reed, the fuel economy guide editor at auto website Edmunds.com. The estimations are based on data from Edmunds.com that assumes 15,000 miles driven per year and gasoline at an average price of $2.70.

Hybrids can cost from $1,500 to $4,500 more than their gas-only equivalents. The new mileage estimates mean it will take longer to recoup that extra cost in money saved on gas. Experts say the shift could dampen demand, although some hybrids will look better on paper than others.

According to a formula devised by Edmunds, it would take nearly 10 years to recoup the extra costs after buying a 2007 Mercury Mariner Hybrid, up from 6.6 according to the old mileage ratings. For the 2007 Honda Accord and Honda Civic hybrids it takes 14.5 and 6.5 years, respectively.

The 2007 Toyota Prius remains a good bargain when compared to a similarly equipped 2007 Toyota Camry -- it takes just 1.2 years to break even.

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Climate Change May Be Cause of Seabird Deaths

For the third year in a row, large numbers of seabirds have washed up dead on beaches in California and Oregon, apparent casualties of shifts in the California Current’s primary productivity.

Bill Sydeman, director of marine ecology at PRBO Conservation Science in Petaluma, believes that changes in productivity, which have translated into less food for seabirds, may in part be the result of climate change, a sort of regional footprint of the global warming trend.

“I think the bird deaths relate to long-term climate-related issues,” Sydeman said. “We are seeing that it doesn’t take much warming, at the wrong time of year, to push the California Current system into a less productive state. This may be the consequence of global warming. The system is primed to be warm and somewhat unproductive.”

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Warming Triggers ‘Alarming’ Retreat of Himalayan Glaciers

by Tim Johnson for McClatchy Newspapers

KAROLA PASS, Tibet - The glaciers of the Himalayas store more ice than anywhere on Earth except for the polar regions and Alaska, and the steady flow of water from their melting icepacks fills seven of the mightiest rivers of Asia.

Now, due to global warming and related changes in the monsoons and trade winds, the glaciers are retreating at a startling rate, and scientists say the ancient icepacks could nearly disappear within one or two generations.

Curiously, there’s little sense of crisis in some of the mountainous areas. Indeed, global warming is making the lives of some high-altitude dwellers a little less severe.

Here at the foot of the towering Nojin Gangsang mountain, an ice-covered 23,700-foot peak, herders notice the retreat of the glaciers but say they feel grateful for the milder winters and increasing vegetation on mountain slopes in summers.

But for people living in the watershed of the Himalayas and other nearby mountain ranges along the Tibetan Plateau, glacial melt could have catastrophic consequences.

Himalayan glaciers release water steadily throughout the year, most critically during the hot, dry, sunny periods when water is most needed. Once they vanish, major lifeline rivers such as the Ganges and Indus could become more seasonal, and large tributaries may dry up completely during non-monsoon periods

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Arctic Sea Ice Melting Faster, a Study Finds

By Andrew Revkin for the New York Times

Climate scientists may have significantly underestimated the power of global warming from human-generated heat-trapping gases to shrink the cap of sea ice floating on the Arctic Ocean, according to a new study of polar trends.

The study, published online today in Geophysical Research Letters, concluded that an open-water Arctic in summers could be more likely in this century than had been estimated in the latest international review of climate research released in February by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“There are huge changes going on,” said Julienne Stroeve, a lead author of the new study and a researcher at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. “Just with warm waters entering the Arctic, combined with warming air temperatures, this is wreaking havoc on the sea ice, really.”

The intergovernmental panel concluded that if emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide were not significantly reduced, the region could be end up bereft of floating ice in summers sometime between 2050 and the early decades of the next century.

For the new study, Dr. Stroeve and others at the ice center reviewed nearly six decades of measurements by ships, airplanes and satellites estimating the maximum and minimum area of Arctic sea ice, which typically expands most in March and shrinks most in September.

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Climate Report to Warn Time Running Out in Greenhouse Gas

By Marlowe Hood for Agence France Presse

Time is running out to cut the greenhouse-gas emissions that drive climate change, but much can be done at a modest cost to attack the looming crisis, according to experts gathering for new talks.0429 03Fierce debate is expected however at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) meeting which starts in Bangkok on Monday to hammer out a new all important summary for governments.

A draft of the report to be agreed by experts on the United Nation’s main authority on climate change says there is scant time to waste.

“Mitigation efforts over the next two to three decades will determine to a large extent the long-term global mean temperature increase and the corresponding climate change impacts that can be avoided,” says the draft which has been seen by AFP.

Using a smart mix of policies and technologies, the cost of stabilizing carbon pollution at nearly 75 percent above today’s levels would be just 0.2 percent of world gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030.

That price would rise to 0.6 percent of global GDP if the world stabilized carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions at a level roughly 50 percent higher than today, they calculate.

The sticking points expected at the debate include emissions caps, taxes on CO2 emissions and references to the Kyoto Protocol — an approach that is anathema to President George W. Bush.

There could also be squabbles over nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuels and over carbon storage, a nascent technology for storing greenhouse gases deep underground.

The report to be released on Friday is the last in a massive three-volume update of knowledge on climate change, based on the work of some 2,500 scientists

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Global Warming Called Security Threat

By Andrew C. Revkin / Timothy Williams for the New York Times

WASHINGTON - For the second time in a month, private consultants to the government are warning that human-driven warming of the climate poses risks to the national security of the United States.A report, scheduled to be published on Monday but distributed to some reporters yesterday, said issues usually associated with the environment - like rising ocean levels, droughts and violent weather caused by global warming - were also national security concerns.

“Unlike the problems that we are used to dealing with, these will come upon us extremely slowly, but come they will, and they will be grinding and inexorable,” Richard J. Truly, a retired United States Navy vice admiral and former NASA administrator, said in the report.

The effects of global warming, the study said, could lead to large-scale migrations, increased border tensions, the spread of disease and conflicts over food and water. All could lead to direct involvement by the United States military.

The report recommends that climate change be integrated into the nation’s security strategies and says the United States “should commit to a stronger national and international role to help stabilize climate changes at levels that will avoid significant disruption to global security and stability.”

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Over 1,000 Climate Rallies Planned This Weekend

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/11/459/

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How Trees Might Not Be Green in Carbon Offsetting Debate

by Alok Jha for the Guardian

It may have become the penance of choice for the environmentally conscious individual, but planting trees to offset carbon emissions could contribute to global warming if they are planted outside the tropics, scientists believe.They argue that most forests do not have any overall effect on global temperature but, by the end of the century, forests in the mid and high latitudes could make their parts of the world more than 3C warmer than would have occurred if the trees did not exist. 0410 07

Govindasamy Bala, an atmospheric scientist at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in the US, has shown that only tropical rainforests are beneficial in helping slow global warming. The problem is that while the carbon dioxide forests use for photosynthesis indirectly helps cool the Earth by reducing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, forests also trap heat from the sunlight they absorb.

Dr Bala and his colleague, Ken Caldeira of the department of global ecology at the Carneige Institute in Standford, used a computer model to show that, outside a thin band around the equator, forests end up trapping more heat than they help to get rid of through a cut in carbon dioxide. Planting trees above 50 degrees latitude - the equivalent of Scandinavia or Siberia in the northern hemisphere - can also cover up tundra normally blanketed in heat-reflecting snow.

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Would $4 Gas Change Your Summer Travel Plans?

Seems like we've found the threshold price for petrol that would affect consumption, but then the dominoes start to fall. Tourism as a form of consumerism is front-line vulnerable. The shift from long-distance to local tourism was predicted in the early seventies, but nobody then had any idea how long it would take before it happened.

From the linked site:

It’s no secret that gas prices are unusually high for this time of year and that they’re going to continue to rise throughout the summer’s peak driving season. How high will they go? While nobody knows for sure, several analysts are predicting that before this summer is over, the national average gas price will top $4 per gallon for the first time in history.

So, what would happen to the summer travel season if these predictions prove to be true and the average gasoline price actually does climb above $4 per gallon? According to a recent poll, it looks like the summer travel season could come to a grinding halt.

When asked “If gas hits $4 per gallon this summer, will it cause you to travel less?” 74% of respondents stated that they would in fact travel less. A total of 17% of respondents stated that they would not travel less, 7% said they were not planning on traveling anyway and 2% said they were unsure how $4 gas would impact their summer travel plans.

Obviously, this isn’t very good news for beach towns and other summer vacation spots, many of whom rely on summer tourists to provide much of the year’s revenue. If gas prices were to force people to “vacation” closer to home, many beach shops and restaurants could be in danger of going out of business.

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Stop Shopping … or the Planet Will Go Pop

by David Smith for the Observer

‘Many big ideas have struggled over the centuries to dominate the planet,’ begins the argument by Jonathon Porritt, government adviser and all-round environmental guru.’Fascism. Communism. Democracy. Religion. But only one has achieved total supremacy. Its compulsive attractions rob its followers of reason and good sense. It has created unsustainable inequalities and threatened to tear apart the very fabric of our society. More powerful than any cause or even religion, it has reached into every corner of the globe. It is consumerism.’

According to Porritt, the most senior adviser to the government on sustainability, we have become a generation of shopaholics. We are bombarded by advertising from every medium which persuades us that the more we consume, the better our lives will be. Shopping is equated with fun, fulfilment and self-identity. It is also, Porritt warns, killing the planet. He argues, in an interview with The Observer, that merely switching to ‘ethical’ shopping is not enough. We must shop less.

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Mountaineers testify to warming's effect

by JOHN HEILPRIN, Associated Press Writer Sat Apr 7, 6:36 PM ET

BEND, Ore. - Mountaineers are bringing back firsthand accounts of vanishing glaciers, melting ice routes, crumbling rock formations and flood-prone lakes where glaciers once rose.
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The observations are transforming a growing number of alpine and ice climbers, some of whom have scientific training, into eyewitnesses of global warming. Increasingly, they are deciding not to leave it to scientists to tell the entire story.

"I personally have done a bunch of ice climbs around the world that no longer exist," said Yvon Chouinard, a renowned climber and surfer and founder of Patagonia, Inc., an outdoor clothing and gear company that champions the environment. "I mean, I was aghast at the change."

Chouinard pointed to recent trips where the ice had all but disappeared on the famous Diamond Couloir of 16,897-foot Mount Kenya, and snow was absent at low elevations on 4,409-foot Ben Nevis, Britain's highest peak, in the Highlands of northwest Scotland. He sees a role for climbers in debating climate change, even if their chronicles are unscientific.

"Most people don't care whether the ice goes or not, the kind of ice that we climb on and stuff," he said. But climbers' stories, he added, can "make it personal, instead of just scientists talking about it. Telling personal stories might hit home to some people."

Alpine climbers are worrying about the loss of classic routes and potential new lines up mountains that are melting, from the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest and the Alps in Europe to the Andes in South America and the Himalaya in Asia.

Their anecdotes often reflect what science is finding, but with stories and pictures from places where most scientists aren't able to reach.

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Dire Warming Report too Soft, Scientists Say

By Alan Zarembo / Thomas H. Maugh II for the Los Angeles Times

A new global warming report issued Friday by the United Nations paints a near-apocalyptic vision of Earth’s future: hundreds of millions of people short of water, extreme food shortages in Africa, a landscape ravaged by floods and millions of species sentenced to extinction.Despite its harsh vision, the report was quickly criticized by some scientists who said its findings were watered down at the last minute by governments seeking to deflect calls for action.

“The science got hijacked by the political bureaucrats at the late stage of the game,” said John Walsh, a climate expert at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who helped write a chapter on the polar regions.

Even in its softened form, the report outlined devastating effects that will strike all regions of the world and all levels of society. Those without resources to adapt to the changes will suffer the most, according to the study from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“It’s the poorest of the poor in the world, and this includes poor people even in prosperous societies, who are going to be the worst hit,” said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, which released the report in Brussels.

The report is the second of four scheduled to be issued this year by the U.N., which marshaled more than 2,500 scientists to give their best predictions of the consequences of a few degrees increase in temperature. The first report, released in February, said global warming was irreversible but could be moderated by large-scale societal changes.

That report said with 90% confidence that the warming was caused by humans, and its conclusions were widely accepted because of the years of accumulated scientific data supporting them.

In contrast, the latest report was more controversial because it tackled the more uncertain issues of the precise effects of warming and the ability of humans to adapt to them.

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Palm Oil: The Biofuel of the Future Driving an Ecological Disaster Now

by Ian MacKinnon from the Guardian

KALIMANTAN, Indonesia - The numbers are damning. Within 15 years 98% of the rainforests of Indonesia and Malaysia will be gone, little more than a footnote in history. With them will disappear some of the world’s most important wildlife species, victims of the rapacious destruction of their habitat in what conservationists see as a lost cause. 0404 07Yet this gloomy script was supposed to have included a small but significant glimmer of hope. Oil palm for biofuel was to have been one of the best solutions in saving the planet from greenhouse gases and global warming. Instead the forests are being torn down in the headlong rush to boost palm oil production.

More startling is that conservationists believe the move to clear land for this “green fuel” is often little more than a conspiracy, providing cover to strip out the last stands of timber not already lost to illegal loggers. In one corner of Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, a mere 250,000 hectares or 1,000 sq miles - almost twice the size of Greater London - of the 6m hectares of forest allocated for palm oil by the government have actually been planted.

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Global warming driving Australian fish south

By Michael Byrnes for Reuters

Global warming is starting to have a significant impact on Australian marine life, driving fish and seabirds south and threatening coral reefs, Australia's premier science organization said on Wednesday.

But much more severe impacts could occur in coming decades, affecting sea life, fishing communities and tourism.

In particular, warmer oceans, changes in currents, disruption of reproductive cycles and mass migration of species would affect Australia's marine life, particularly in the southeast.

Already, nesting sea turtles, yellow-fin tuna, dugongs and stinging jellyfish are examples of marine life moving south as seas warm, said the report by the government-backed Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.

"It's not a disaster for the ones that can move south. It is for the ones that can't move south," lead author of the report, Dr Alistair Hobday, told Reuters.

"If you're at the tip of Tasmania, you've got nowhere else to go," he said, referring to Australia's southern island state, the last major part of Australia before the Antarctic.

Atlantic salmon, which are farmed in Tasmania, face a bleak future. Salmon farming businesses would become largely unviable as the ocean warmed the predicted one to two degrees over the next 30 years, Hobday said.

Fisheries and aquaculture are worth more than A$2.5 billion a year the report, "Impacts of Climate Change on Australian Marine Life," says. It is the first major study in the Australian region to combine the research of climate modelers, ecologists and fisheries and aquaculture scientists.

Coral in the Great Barrier Reef off Australia's northeast may be hit by more frequent bleaching events, every two or three years compared with five or six years at present.

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Climate Science and The Politics of Economic Growth

by John Buell in the Bangor Daily News

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The politics of global warming is a telling and consequential instance of economic power corrupting political judgment.

The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which adds further support for the relationship of greenhouse gases to global climate change, has provoked an odd reaction among many business leaders. Even some who have long denied any connection between hydrocarbons and global warming now concede the link, but they take a new tack. They claim that any serious attempt to slow the pace of global warming will do serious damage to the national economy. They can reach this conclusion because they equate their short-term bottom line with “the economy,” and surprisingly many in the media follow them in this judgment.

Oil industry defenders portray leading climate scientists as hell bent to place draconian curbs on the U.S. economy. Yet prominent climate scientists are, if anything, too restrained in their pronouncements. Even the most conservative introductory economics texts, like that by former chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers Gregory Mankiw, recognize that markets have imperfections. When the purchase and use of a commodity harms third parties, government has an appropriate role in taxing and thus discouraging consumption of that commodity. In the world of economic textbooks, a neutral and informed government calculates the extent of the damage and enacts an appropriate tax.

Yet in our contemporary corporate economy, oil, auto, and private utility interests have enormous market power, which they eagerly translate into political power. They already enjoy vast favors in the forms of subsidized leases, government supported highways and emergency services, and lower tax rates. A tax on gas that reflected not only carbon content but much of our military cost as well as air pollution, congestion, and highway accidents would substantially impact several key corporations. Nonetheless, is their welfare synonymous with “the economy?”

Tax and regulatory policy in the late eighties and nineties led to major gains in energy efficiency and if anything were very beneficial to overall economic development. James Hansen, one of the mad scientists most reviled by leading oil companies, has put this case in language that reads as though it came straight out of market economics 101: “The U.S. is still only half as efficient in its use of energy as Western Europe, i.e., the U.S. emits twice as much CO2 to produce a unit of GNP, partly because Europe encourages efficiency by fossil fuel taxes. Available technologies would allow great improvement of energy efficiency, even in Europe. Economists agree that the potential could be achieved most effectively by a tax on carbon emissions… The tax could be revenue-neutral … leaving government revenue unchanged; and it should be introduced gradually. The consumer who makes a special effort to save energy could gain, benefiting from the tax credit or decrease while buying less fuel; the well-to-do consumer who insisted on having three Hummers would pay for his own excesses.”

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Supreme Court Rules Against Bush in Global Warming Case

by James Vicini for Reuters

WASHINGTON - In a defeat for the Bush administration, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday that a U.S. government agency has the power under the clean air law to regulate greenhouse gas emissions that spur global warming. The nation’s highest court by a 5-4 vote said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency “has offered no reasoned explanation” for its refusal to regulate carbon dioxide and other emissions from new cars and trucks that contribute to climate change.

The ruling came in one of the most important environmental cases to reach the Supreme Court in decades. It marked the first high court decision in a case involving global warming.

Greenhouse gases occur naturally and are also emitted by cars, trucks and factories into the atmosphere. They can trap heat close to the earth’s surface like the glass walls of a greenhouse.

Such emissions have risen steeply over the past century and many scientists see a connection between this rise and an increase in global average temperatures and a related increase in extreme weather, wildfires, melting glaciers and other damage to the environment.

Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the court majority, rejected the administration’s argument that it lacked the power to regulate such emissions. He said the EPA’s decision was “arbitrary, capricious or otherwise not in accordance with law.”

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Scientists say Antarctic ice sheet is thinning

HOUSTON (Reuters) - A Texas-sized piece of the Antarctic ice sheet is thinning, possibly due to global warming, and could cause the world's oceans to rise significantly, polar ice experts said on Wednesday.

They said "surprisingly rapid changes" were occurring in Antarctica's Amundsen Sea Embayment, which faces the southern Pacific Ocean, but that more study was needed to know how fast it was melting and how much it could cause the sea level to rise.

The warning came in a joint statement issued at the end of a conference of U.S. and European polar ice experts at the University of Texas in Austin.

The scientists blamed the melting ice on changing winds around Antarctica that they said were causing warmer waters to flow beneath ice shelves.

The wind change, they said, appeared to be the result of several factors, including global warming, ozone depletion in the atmosphere and natural variability.

The thinning in the two-mile-(3.2-km)- thick ice shelf is being observed mostly from satellites, but it is not known how much ice has been lost because data is difficult to obtain on the remote ice shelves, they said.

Study is focusing on the Amundsen Sea Embayment because it has been melting quickly and holds enough water to raise world sea levels six meters, or close to 20 feet, the scientists said

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Climate Change: Coastal Mega-Cities in for a Bumpy Ride

by Srabani Roy

NEW YORK - About 643 million people, or one-tenth of the world’s population, who live in low lying coastal areas are at great risk of oceans-related impacts of climate change, according to a global research study to be released next month.The study, by researchers at Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Sciences Information Network and the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development, is the first of its kind. The researchers identified populations, particularly urban populations, at greatest risk from rising sea levels and more intense storms due to climate change.

0328 07“Of the more than 180 countries with populations in the low-elevation coastal zone, 130 of them — about 70 percent — have their largest urban area extending into that zone,” said Bridget Andersen, a research associate at CIESIN, in a statement.

“Furthermore, the world’s largest cities — those with more than five million residents — have on average one-fifth of their population and one-sixth of their land area within this coastal zone.”

The study, which will be published in the peer-reviewed journal Environment and Urbanization, assesses the risks to populations and urban settlements along coastal areas that are less than 10 meters above sea level, referred to as the low-elevation coastal zone, or LECZ. Although globally this zone accounts for only two percent of the world’s land area, it contains 10 percent of the world’s population and 13 percent of the world’s urban population, the study found.

The 10 countries with the largest number of people living in this vulnerable, low-elevation zone, include in descending order: China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, Egypt, the United States, Thailand and the Philippines.

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Global Warming Study Warns of Vanishing Climates

by James Randerson from the Guardian

By the end of the century up to two fifths of the land surface of the Earth will have a hotter climate unlike anything that currently exists, according to a study that predicts the effects of global warming on local and regional climates. And in the worst case scenario, the climatic conditions on another 48% of the land surface will no longer exist on the planet at all.The changes - which will have a devastating affect on biodiversity hotspots such as the Amazonian and Indonesian rainforests - will wipe out numerous species that are unable to move to stay within their preferred climate range. These species will either have to evolve rapidly or die.

“There is a real problem for conservation biologists,” said the lead author, John Williams, at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “How do you conserve the biological diversity of these entire systems if the physical environment is changing and potentially disappearing?”

Studies already suggest that the ranges of species are shifting towards the poles at around six kilometers a decade, but what will happen when the rate of change intensifies?

His team used emissions scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the international scientific group that advises policymakers - to predict where changes in temperature and precipitation will occur.

As is already happening, the analysis predicts that as the planet warms climate zones will move north and south towards the poles. To work out the significance of these changes, the team compared them with the climate variation that occurs naturally. They attach greater weight to changes in regions that are relatively stable. This suggests that some of the worst impacts will happen in tropical and subtropical regions as they shift to new climatic conditions not currently seen.

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Antarctic melting may be speeding up

From Reuters by Michael Byrnes

HOBART (Reuters) - Rising sea levels and melting polar ice-sheets are at upper limits of projections, leaving some human population centers already unable to cope, top world scientists say as they analyze latest satellite data.

A United Nations report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in February projected sea level gains of 18-59 centimeters (7-23 inches) this century from temperature rises of 1.8-4.0 Celsius (3.2-7.8 Fahrenheit).

"Observations are in the very upper edge of the projections," leading Australian marine scientist John Church told Reuters.

"I feel that we're getting uncomfortably close to threshold," said Church, of Australia's CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research said.

Past this level, parts of the Antarctic and Greenland would approach a virtually irreversible melting that would produce sea level rises of meters, he said.

There has been no repeat in the Antarctic of the 2002 break-up of part of the Larsen ice shelf that created a 500 billion ton iceberg as big as Luxembourg.

But the Antarctic Peninsula is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth, and glaciers are in massive retreat.

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Global Warming Activists Try to Stir Americans to Change

From the San Francisco Chronicle by Robert Collier

WASHINGTON - Washington is suddenly debating global warming this week, but the big challenge remains outside the Beltway -- coaxing Americans to adopt new technologies and change their energy-guzzling lifestyles.


A crowd gathers on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, March 20, 2007, during a rally against global warming. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
While former Vice President Al Gore prodded Congress to act Wednesday, activists in the Bay Area and nationwide were preparing a pressure campaign that they hope will boost their movement's public support, which recent opinion polls show to be respectable yet hardly overwhelming.

Environmentalists say the attention brought by Gore and his Oscar-winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," is a godsend.

"Things are changing fast, and most people in Washington believe that there's more than enough public support now to enact federal legislation," said David Hawkins, director of the climate program at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Recent polls, however, suggest that public sentiment is soft.

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