U.S. Predicting Steady Increase for Emissions

Published on Saturday, March 3, 2007 by the New York Times
U.S. Predicting Steady Increase for Emissions
by Andrew C. Revkin



The Bush administration estimates that emissions by the United States of gases that contribute to global warming will grow nearly as fast through the next decade as they did the previous decade, according to a long-delayed report being completed for the United Nations.

The document, the United States Climate Action Report, emphasizes that the projections show progress toward a goal Mr. Bush laid out in a 2002 speech: that emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases grow at a slower rate than the economy. Since that speech, he has repeated his commitment to lessening “greenhouse gas intensity” without imposing formal limits on the gases.

Kristen A. Hellmer, a spokeswoman for the White House on environmental matters, said on Friday, “The Climate Action Report will show that the president’s portfolio of actions addressing climate change and his unparalleled financial commitments are working.”

But when shown the report, an assortment of experts on climate trends and policy described the projected emissions as unacceptable given the rising evidence of risks from unabated global warming.

“As governor of Texas and as a candidate, the president supported mandatory limits on carbon dioxide emissions,” said David W. Conover, who directed the administration’s Climate Change Technology Program until February 2006 and is now counsel to the National Commission on Energy Policy, a nonpartisan research group that supports limits on gases. “When he announced his voluntary greenhouse-gas intensity reduction goal in 2002, he said it would be re-evaluated in light of scientific developments. The science now clearly calls for a mandatory program that establishes a price for greenhouse-gas emissions.”

According to the new report, the administration’s climate policy will result in emissions growing 11 percent in 2012 from 2002. In the previous decade, emissions grew at a rate of 11.6 percent, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The report also contains sections describing growing risks to water supplies, coasts and ecosystems around the United States from the anticipated temperature and precipitation changes driven by the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

Drafts of the report were provided to The New York Times by a government employee at the request of a reporter. The employee did not say why this was done, but other officials involved with producing it said they have been frustrated with the slow pace of its preparation. It was due more than one year ago.

The report arrives at a moment when advocates of controls are winning new support in statehouses and Congress, not to mention Hollywood, where former Vice President Al Gore’s cautionary documentary on the subject, “An Inconvenient Truth,” just won an Academy Award. Five western governors have just announced plans to create a program to cap and then trade carbon-dioxide emissions. And on Capitol Hill, half a dozen bills have been introduced to curb emissions, with more expected.

Ms. Hellmer defended Mr. Bush’s climate policy, saying the president was committed to actions, like moderating gasoline use and researching alternative energy, that limited climate risks while also increasing the country’s energy and national security. She said Mr. Bush remained satisfied with voluntary measures to slow emissions.

Myron Ebell, who directs climate and energy policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a group aligned with industries fighting curbs on greenhouse gases, said Mr. Bush was right to acknowledge the inevitability of growing emissions in a country with a growing population and economy. Mr. Ebell added that the United States was doing better at slowing emissions than many countries that had joined the Kyoto Protocol, the first binding international treaty limiting such gases.

“Since 1990, for every 1 percent increase in emissions the economy has grown about 3 percent,” Mr. Ebell said. “That’s good, and it’s better than the European Union’s performance.”

Several environmental campaigners said there was no real distinction between Mr. Bush’s target and “business as usual,” adding that such mild steps were unacceptable given recent findings by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other research groups tying recent warming more firmly than ever to smokestack and tailpipe gases.

“If you set the hurdle one inch above the ground you can’t fail to clear it,” said David D. Doniger, the director of climate policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has long criticized the administration and sought binding cuts in greenhouse gases.

The report is the fourth in a series produced periodically by countries that are parties to the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change, a treaty signed by the first President Bush. It is a self-generated summary of climate-related trends and actions, including inventories of emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, research on impacts of climate change, and policies to limit climate risks and emissions.

The last such report, completed in 2002, put the administration in something of a bind because it listed many harmful or costly projected impacts from human-caused warming. Environmental groups used those findings to press President Bush to seek mandatory caps on greenhouse gases, while foes of such restrictions criticized the findings and criticized the administration for letting them stay in the document.

While that report was approved by senior White House and State Department officials, Mr. Bush quickly distanced himself from it, saying it was “put out by the bureaucracy.”

The new report has been bogged down for nearly two years. In April 2005, the State Department published a notice in the Federal Register saying it would be released for public comment that summer.

Several government officials and scientists involved with preparing or reviewing parts of the report said that the recent departures of several senior staff members running the administration’s climate research program delayed its completion and no replacements have been named. The delays in finishing the report come even as Mr. Bush has elevated global warming higher on his list of concerns. This year, for the first time since he took office in 2001, he touched on “global climate change” in the State of the Union Message, calling it a “serious challenge.”

The draft report contains fresh projections of significant effects of human-caused warming on the environment and resources of the United States and emphasized the need to increase the country’s capacity to adapt to impending changes.

Drought, particularly, will become a persistent threat, it said: “Warmer temperatures expected with increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases are expected to exacerbate present drought risks in the United States by increasing the rate of evaporation.”

Water supplies in the Northwest and Southwest are also at risk. “Much of the water used by people in the western United States comes from snow melt,” the report said. “And a large fraction of the traditionally snow-covered areas of this region has experienced a decline in spring snow pack, especially since mid-century, despite increases in winter precipitation in many places.” Animal and plant species face risks as climate zones shift but urbanized regions prevent ecosystems from shifting as well, according to the draft report.

“Because changes in the climate system are likely to persist into the future regardless of emissions mitigation, adaptation is an essential response for future protection of climate-sensitive ecosystems,” it said.

© Copyright 2007 New York Times

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Bush Plan does nothing

This from Reuters. Estimates of emissions during the next ten years in US show same rate as previous ten years. That's what you call grabbing the bull by the horns, as they say in Texas.

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Polar year starts with worries of rising seas

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent for Reuters

OSLO (Reuters) - More than 60 nations started the biggest
scientific investigation of the Arctic and Antarctic on
Thursday amid new evidence that global warming is thawing polar
ice and raising sea levels.

About 3,000 children made slushy snowmen and waved bannerssaying "give us back the winter" in Oslo, scientists met in Paris and other experts gathered on a research vessel in CapeTown to mark the start of International Polar Year (IPY).

"The polar year is important for everyone on the planet,"
Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told Reuters when
asked if people living in places such as Africa or Asia should
be interested in science at the icy ends of the earth.

"We are seeing climate change most clearly in the polar areas and research there can give us decisive knowledge in the fight against global warming," he said.

During the U.N.-backed year, about 50,000 experts will be
involved in 228 projects such as studying marine life in the
Antarctic, mapping how winds carry pollutants to the Arctic, or
examining the health of people, polar bears or penguins.

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An excellent page for accessing IPCC AR4

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science/the-ipcc.html#Release_Schedule_for_the_Fourth_Assessme

This from the Union of Concerned Scientists. I find it a lot more usable then the actual IPCC site.

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South Pacific More Vulnerable Than Thought

by Shailendra Singh

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)'s climate coordinator in the South Pacific says that a recent United Nations report on climate change has "underestimated" the threat to millions of people in the region from sea-level rise.

While the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report provides a detailed picture of how humans activity is changing earth's climate by burning fossil fuels, it fails to adequately identify the real risks of sea level rise, something particularly relevant to the Pacific, WWF coordinator Ashvini Fernando told IPS in an interview.

She said that that the danger was graver than outlined in the U.N. report, and that by underestimating it, the report puts at risk millions of people who live on low-lying coasts not just in the Pacific, but also around the world.

"Research using scientific models different to that of the IPCC have predicted much larger increases in sea level, exceeding one metre over the next century," said Fernando, who is regional climate change coordinator for the WWF’s South Pacific programme. "This would have dire implications for the Pacific as this region has many atolls and low-lying coastal areas (which) are only several meters above sea level."

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Warning on Warming from McKibben

[This piece, which appears in the March 15, 2007 issue of The New York Review of Books is posted here with the kind permission of the editors of that magazine.]

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its latest report in early February, it was greeted with shock: "World Wakes to Climate Catastrophe," reported an Australian paper. But global warming is by now a scientific field with a fairly extensive history, and that history helps set the new findings in context -- a context that makes the new report no less terrifying but much more telling for its unstated political implications.

Although atmospheric scientists had studied the problem for decades, global warming first emerged as a public issue in 1988 when James Hansen, a NASA scientist, told Congress that his research, and the work of a handful of other scientists, indicated that human beings were dangerously heating the planet, particularly through the use of fossil fuels. This bold announcement set off a scientific and political furor: many physicists and chemists played down the possibility of serious harm, and many governments, though feeling pressure to react, did little to restrain the use of fossil fuel. "More research" was the mantra everyone adopted, and funding for it flowed freely from governments and foundations. Under the auspices of the United Nations, scientists and governments set up a curious hybrid, the IPCC, to track and report on the progress of that research.

From roughly 1988 to 1995, the hypothesis that burning coal and gas and oil in large quantities was releasing carbon dioxide and other gases that would trap the sun's radiation on Earth and disastrously heat the planet remained just that: a hypothesis. Scientists used every means at their disposal to reconstruct the history of the earth's climate and to track current changes. For example, they studied the concentration of greenhouse gases in ancient air trapped in glacial cores, sampled the atmosphere with weather balloons, examined the relative thickness of tree rings, and observed the frequency of volcanic eruptions. Most of all, they refined the supercomputer models of the earth's atmosphere in an effort to predict the future of the world's weather.

By 1995, the central Herculean tasks of both research and synthesis were largely complete. The report the IPCC issued that year was able to assert that "the balance of evidence suggests" that human activity was increasing the planet's temperature and that it would be a serious problem. This was perhaps the most significant warning our species, as a whole, has yet been given. The report declared (in the pinched language of international science) that humans had grown so large in numbers and especially in appetite for energy that they were now damaging the most basic of the earth's systems -- the balance between incoming and outgoing solar energy. Although huge amounts of impressive scientific research have continued over the twelve years since then, their findings have essentially been complementary to the 1995 report -- a constant strengthening of the simple basic truth that humans were burning too much fossil fuel.

The 1995 consensus was convincing enough for Europe and Japan: the report's scientific findings were the basis for the Kyoto negotiations and the treaty they produced; those same findings also led most of the developed world to produce ambitious plans for reductions in carbon emissions. But the consensus didn't extend to Washington, and hence everyone else's efforts were deeply compromised by the American unwillingness to increase the price of energy. Our emissions continued to soar, and the plans of many of the Kyoto countries in Western Europe to reduce emissions sputtered. (At the same time, most tragically of all, China and India had just begun their rapid industrial takeoffs using precisely the technologies we then knew were wreaking havoc; they did not seek or find much aid from the Western countries that could have encouraged them to take a more benign path.) In 2001, the IPCC issued its Third Assessment Report (TAR), but it coincided with the start of the Bush administration, which refused even to consider a serious policy for climate. The IPCC's new Fourth Assessment of this February (known as AR4) arrives at a more congenial moment, as the new Democratic Congress takes up a wide variety of legislation designed, finally, to curb emissions.

The finding of the new report that attracted the most attention in the press was that scientists were now more confident than ever that the warming we've seen so far (about one degree Fahrenheit in the average global temperature) was caused by human beings. Instead of being merely "likely," the conclusion was now "very likely," which in the IPCC's lexicon means better than a 90% chance. But it's been years since any reputable scientist specializing in climate research doubted that conclusion. More important findings were ignored in accounts of the report and in some cases were obscured by the document's very poor prose, which is much more opaque than its predecessors. Those findings include:

* The amount of carbon in the atmosphere is now increasing at a faster rate even than before.

* Temperature increases would be considerably higher than they have been so far were it not for the blanket of soot and other pollution that is temporarily helping to cool the planet.

* Alternative explanations for some of the warming (for example, sunspot activity and the "urban heat island effect," the raising of temperatures in cities caused by high building densities and the use of heat-retaining materials such as concrete and asphalt) are now known to be relatively negligible.

* Almost everything frozen on earth is melting. Heavy rainfalls are becoming more common since the air is warmer and therefore holds more water than cold air, and "cold days, cold nights and frost have become less frequent, while hot days, hot nights, and heat waves have become more frequent."

These facts serve as the prelude to the most important part of the new document, its predictions for what is to come. Here, too, the news essentially confirms the previous report, and indeed most of the predictions about climate change dating back to the start of research: if we don't take the most aggressive possible measures to curb fossil fuel emissions immediately, then we will see temperature increases of -- at the best estimate -- roughly five degrees Fahrenheit during this century. Technically speaking, that's enormous, enough to produce what James Hansen has called a "totally different planet," one much warmer than that known by any of our human ancestors.

The process by which the IPCC conducts its deliberations -- scientists and national government representatives quibbling at enormous length over wording and interpretation -- is Byzantine at best, and makes the group's achievements all the more impressive. But it sacrifices up-to-the-minute assessment of data in favor of lowest-common-denominator conclusions that are essentially beyond argument. That's a reasonable method, but one result is that the "shocking" conclusions of the new report in fact lag behind the most recent findings of climate science by several years.

That's most obvious here in the discussion of the rise in sea level. Researchers know that sea levels will rise fairly quickly this century, in part because of the melting of mountain glaciers and in part because warm water takes up more space than cold. The new assessment refines the calculations of the rise in sea level and puts the best estimate at a foot or two, which is actually slightly less than the last assessment in 2001. Though it doesn't sound like much, a couple of feet is actually a large amount -- enough to inundate many low-lying areas and drown much of the Earth's coastal marshes and wetlands. Still, it might be more or less manageable.

During the last eighteen months, however, new research has indicated that a far more rapid rise in sea level may be possible, because the great ice sheets of Greenland and the Antarctic appear to have begun moving more quickly toward the sea. Some of this research appeared in Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth, and James Hansen has written in The New York Review about this new information; it is responsible for much of the recent increase in the level of alarm. But it is not included in the IPCC report, except as a caveat: "larger values cannot be excluded, but understanding of these effects is too limited to assess their likelihood or provide a best estimate or an upper bound for sea level rise."

In short, the new report is a remarkably conservative document. That it is still frightening in its predictions simply indicates the huge magnitude of the changes we're now causing, changes far larger than most people fully understand. Even using its conservative projections, the panel states unequivocally that typhoons and hurricanes will likely become more intense; that sea ice will shrink and perhaps disappear in the summertime Arctic; that snow cover will contract. Later this year, a second working group will outline the effects of these changes on humans, translating inches of sea-level rise into numbers of refugees, showing the effects of increases in temperature and humidity on malaria-carrying mosquitoes as well as the impact of heat waves on crop losses. The language will still be bloodless, but the findings obviously won't.

The IPCC has always avoided taking political positions -- it doesn't recommend specific policies -- and it continues this tradition with its new report. In its discussions of the momentum of climate change, however, it does introduce one particularly disturbing statistic. Because of the time lag between carbon emissions and their effect on air temperature, even if we halted the increase in coal, oil, and gas burning right now, temperatures would continue to rise about two tenths of a degree Celsius per decade. But, the report writes, "if all radiative forcing agents [i.e., greenhouse gases] are held constant at year 2000 levels, a further warming trend would occur in the next two decades at a rate of about 0.1ºC per decade."

Translated into English, this means, to put it simply, that if world leaders had heeded the early warnings of the first IPCC report, and by 2000 had done the very hard work to keep greenhouse gas emissions from growing any higher, the expected temperature increase would be half as much as is expected now. In the words of the experts at realclimate.org, where the most useful analyses of the new assessment can be found, climate change is a problem with a very high "procrastination penalty": a penalty that just grows and grows with each passing year of inaction.

This is why the most important news about climate at the moment may come not from the IPCC but from Washington. After twenty years of inactivity -- a remarkably successful bipartisan effort to accomplish nothing -- the first few weeks of the new Congress have witnessed a flurry of activity. A series of bills have been introduced by people ranging from California Representative Henry Waxman and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to Arizona's John McCain that would call for more or less aggressive carbon reduction targets. Some of the bills would set in place a "cap-and-trade" system that would set overall limits on emissions of carbon dioxide but would allow companies to freely buy and sell credits permitting them to emit certain amounts of it; this would produce a market for carbon-cutting measures.

The IPCC report doesn't call for particular reduction figures. It does, however, make clear that reduction in emissions must be quick and deep. There is no more optimistic alternative. Even if we do everything right, we're still going to see serious increases in temperature, and all of the physical changes (to one extent or another) predicted in the report. However, there's reason to hope that if the US acts extremely aggressively and quickly we might be able to avoid an increase of two degrees Celsius, the rough threshold at which runaway polar melting might be stopped. This means that any useful legislation will have to feature both a very rapid start to reductions and a long and uncompromising mandate to continue them. Sanders's bill, also endorsed by California's Barbara Boxer, who heads the relevant committee, comes closest to that standard. It calls for an eventual 80% cut in emissions by 2050. McCain's bill, cosponsored by one of his challengers for the presidency, Barack Obama, is somewhat weaker in its eventual targets. But the bargaining has barely begun, and in any event quick initial implementation of any cuts will be almost as important as the final numbers.

No one expects President Bush to sign such a bill. In fact, it was widely considered a minor miracle that he uttered the words "climate change" in this year's State of the Union address. (His limp proposal, centering on alternative fuels for some vehicles, was equally widely considered a dud.) What's happening now has much to do with positioning for the next presidential election, and the legislation that will eventually be passed and signed in 2009. What the IPCC report makes clear by implication is that that legislation will be our last meaningful chance: anything less than an all-out assault on carbon in our economy will be rendered meaningless by the increasing momentum of global warming. And of course by now our economy is only part of the problem. Though we use more energy per capita than any other country, the Chinese may pass us in total carbon emissions by decade's end. Even if we start to get our own house in order, we'll need to figure out how, with desperate speed, to lead an equally sweeping international response.

The only really encouraging development is the groundswell of public concern that has built over the last year, beginning with the reaction to Hurricane Katrina and Al Gore's movie. In January, a few of us launched an initiative called stepitup07.org. It calls for Americans to organize rallies in their own communities on April 14 asking for congressional action. In the first few weeks the website was open, more than six hundred groups in forty-six states registered to hold demonstrations -- this will clearly be the largest organized response to global warming yet in this country. The groups range from environmental outfits to evangelical churches to college sororities, united only by the visceral sense (fueled in part by this winter's bizarre weather) that the planet has been knocked out of whack. The IPCC assessment offers a modest account of just how far out of whack it is -- and just how hard we're going to have to work to have even a chance at limiting the damage.

[Note: This piece reviews Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis: Summary for Policymakers, Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, 18 pp. It can be found by clicking here.]

Bill McKibben is a frequent contributor to The New York Review and is scholar in residence at Middlebury College and the author of The End of Nature and Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.

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Peru's glacier vanishing, scientists warn

The world's largest tropical glacier is in danger of disappearing within five years, according to international researchers meeting this week in San Francisco.

Ohio State glaciologist Lonnie Thompson and a team of scientists said they have found evidence the Qori Kalis glacier of the Quelccaya ice cap in the Peruvian Andes could lose half its mass in 12 months and could be gone five years from now.

An explorer looks on in the Pastoruri glacier in Huaraz in November 2006. Ice atop the Cordillera Blanca, the largest glacier chain in the tropics, is melting quickly because of rising temperatures.An explorer looks on in the Pastoruri glacier in Huaraz in November 2006. Ice atop the Cordillera Blanca, the largest glacier chain in the tropics, is melting quickly because of rising temperatures.
(Karel Navarro/Associated Press)

Thompson gave his presentation Thursday at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He told reporters afterward there was little mankind could do to stop the decline of the glacier and others like it.

"The lower elevation tropical glaciers are going right now, no matter what we do we're going to lose the glaciers on [Mount] Kilimanjaro and we're going to lose the lower elevation glaciers in the Andes," said Thompson.

The Quelccaya ice cap covers 44 square kilometres in the Cordillera Oriental region and is the world's largest tropical ice mass. Its biggest glacier, the Qori Kalis, has receded by at least 1.1 kilometres since 1963, when the first formal measurements were taken. The rate of retreat has increased from six metres per year between 1963 and 1978 to 60 metres per year now, said Thompson.

The region also includes Peru's Cordillera Blanca, or White Mountain Range, one of the Andean country's most famous natural landmarks.

Climate change research has focused on melting glaciers in the north and south poles, but tropical glaciers also play a valuable role in local ecosystems as they feed rivers that supply fresh water to areas like Peru's arid coast.

Thompson worries the problem of global warming won't be addressed until things get worse.

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Greenhouse Gases Hit New High, Rise Accelerates

From Reuters by Alister Doyle

OSLO - Greenhouse gases widely blamed for causing global warming have jumped to record highs in the atmosphere, apparently stoked by rising emissions from Asian industry, a researcher said on Friday.

View of smokestacks, about 200m (656 feet) high, at a thermal power plant in Inchon, west of Seoul, February 1, 2007. Greenhouse gases have hit a new record in the atmosphere and the build-up is accelerating, apparently because of industrial growth in Asia, a researcher said on Friday.

"Levels are at a new high," said Kim Holmen, research director of the Norwegian Polar Institute which oversees the Zeppelin measuring station on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard about 1,200 km (750 miles) from the North Pole.

He told Reuters that concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas emitted largely by burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars, had risen to 390 parts per million (ppm) from 388 a year ago.

Levels have hit peaks almost every year in recent decades, bolstering theories of warming, and are far above 270 ppm before the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century. Climate scientists say the heat-trapping gas is blanketing the planet.

Holmen said the increase of 2 ppm from 2006 reflected an accelerating rise in recent years. "When I was young, scientists were talking about 1 ppm rise" every year, he said. "Since 2000 it has been a very rapid rate."

"The large increases in release rates are definitely in the Asian economies," led by China, he said. China is opening coal-fired power plants at the rate of almost one a week.

SPRING FALL

Carbon dioxide concentrations peak just before the northern hemisphere spring, when plants start soaking up the gas as they grow. Southern hemisphere seasons have less effect since there are fewer land masses -- and plants -- south of the equator.

The Zeppelin station is run in cooperation with Stockholm University and is one of the main measuring points along with a station in Hawaii. Remoteness from industrial centers helps.

Scientists say the concentration of carbon dioxide, according to the modern records, is at its highest in the atmosphere in at least 650,000 years.

The world's top climate scientists said in a report on February 2 they were more than 90 percent certain that human activities, led by burning fossil fuels, were to blame for warming. That was up from 66 percent certainty in a previous report in 2001.

The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that temperature rises were set to accelerate and could gain by between 1.1 and 6.4 Celsius (2.0-11.5 Fahrenheit) by 2100, bringing more floods, droughts and rising sea levels.

Apart from human emissions from burning fossil fuels, he said there were other factors that could affect carbon dioxide levels in future.

On the one hand, plants may grow more in a warmer world, soaking up more carbon dioxide. But if the soil gets warmer, dead plants and leaves may rot more in winter, releasing more carbon.

Any heating of the oceans may means less absorption of carbon dioxide, partly because the greater buoyancy of warmer water inhibits a mixing with deeper levels.

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Al Gore's climate change mega-concert

LOS ANGELES (AFP) - Former US vice-president and the producers of Live 8 plan to rock the world with top artists like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Mana in a massive 24-hour global concert to save the planet from global warming.

Scheduled to take place at key capitals around the globe on July 7, Live Earth is expected to pull an audience of two billion people across multiple media -- live, online, by broadcast and on wireless devices -- Gore and the promoters said Thursday in a press conference.

Under the banner "Save Our Selves" -- SOS -- the mega-concert will be held "on 7/7/07 across all seven continents" aiming to trigger an international movement to combat global warming. "In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to reach billions of people," said Gore, an environmental activist and former presidential candidate.

"We are launching SOS and Live Earth to begin a process of communication that will mobilize people all over the world to take action," he said. Gore has undertaken a one-man crusade warning of the dire threat posed by global warming and his documentary on the subject, "An Inconvenient Truth," is nominated for an Oscar at this year's Live shows are planned for Shanghai, Sydney, Johannesburg, and London, and yet-undecided sites in Brazil, Japan, the United States, and possibly other countries.

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Snowless in Tokyo

TOKYO (AFP) - Tokyo has set a record for its longest snowless winter
amid growing worldwide concerns about global warming, according to
meteorologists.

The metropolitan area of the capital has not had snow this season,
making it the longest snowless winter since statistics were first kept
in 1876, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.

The previous record was set in 1960 when the season's first snowfall was
observed on February 10.

"Since we do not forecast any snowfall in the Tokyo area at least over
the next week, the record is likely to be extended further," an agency
official said.

Tokyo has never had a winter without any snow, he said.

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January world's hottest on record: Japan

TOKYO (AFP) - Last month was the world's hottest January on record, in further evidence that greenhouse gas emissions are causing global warming, Japanese scientists said temperatures across the planet were 0.45 degrees Celsius above average in January, the highest since figures were first compiled in 1891, the Japan Meteorological Agency said Friday.

It said that temperatures were particularly high in eastern Russia and northern Europe.

"Reasons behind the high temperatures are considered to be the impact of global warming due to an increase in carbon dioxide, along with El Nino and the cyclical natural movement in temperatures," an agency statement said.

The study came a week after a UN report blamed human activities for global warming and predicted a rise in typhoons, droughts and other natural disasters.

The report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that temperatures could rise by between 1.1 and 6.4 degrees Celsius by 2100.

Japan, the host of the landmark Kyoto Protocol meant to fight global warming, has experienced an unusually warm winter with little snow.

However, the Meteorological Agency said Japan's temperature in January was only the fourth highest on record, at 1.44 degrees above normal. The record was in January 1989 when temperatures in Japan were 2.09 degrees higher.

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Been on Vacation

Back now.

Swiss Glaciers melting rapidly

BRUSSELS - Receding Alpine glaciers are appearing a sure telltale of
global warming. In Switzerland, 84 out of 85 glaciers under observation
became shorter in 2006.The hot summers and the lack of precipitation in
recent years will accelerate the melting process even more, scientists
say.

Glaciers are large masses of snow, ice and rock debris that
accumulate in great quantities and begin to flow downwards under
pressure of their own weight. They are formed when yearly snowfall in a
region far exceeds the amount of snow and ice that melts in a given
summer, like in the Swiss Alps.

The results published by the Swiss Academy of Sciences confirm
the measurements of previous campaigns, which clearly showed that Swiss
glaciers are shrinking. Approximately three-quarters of the observed
shrinkage in 2006 is between one and 30 metres.

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Landmark UN Study Backs Climate Theory

A major new
United Nations report shows global scientists are more convinced than
ever that human activity is causing climate change, the Toronto Star has learned.

The rate of warming between now and 2030 is likely to be twice that of the previous century, it says.

And it concludes that most of the global warming since the middle of
the last century has been caused by man-made greenhouse gases

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Warning from Stephen Hawking

A Warning from a very wise man

Published: January 2007

Climate change stands alongside the use of nuclear weapons as one ofthe greatest threats posed to the future of the world, the Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking has said
Professor Hawking said that we stand on the precipice of a second nuclearage and a period of exceptional climate change, both of which could destroythe planet as we know it.

Sweden's Tree Line Moving at Fastest Rate for 7,000 Years

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/0116-06.htm

Climate change
over the past two decades has caused Sweden's tree line to move north
at a faster rate than at any time in the past 7,000 years, Swedish
researchers have said.

Autumn-coloured trees are pictured in the Swedish county of Jaemtland. Climate change over the past two decades has caused Sweden's tree line to move north at a faster rate than at any time in the past 7,000 years, Swedish researchers have said.(AFP/File/Sven Nackstrand)

"The tree line has moved by up to 200 meters (656 feet) in some places.
Trees have not grown at such high levels for around 7,000 years," Leif
Kullman, a professor at Umeaa University's department of ecology and
environmental science, told AFP Tuesday.

The tree line represents a limit in mountainous, northern and southern latitudes beyond which trees do not grow.

"Recordings began in 1915 but the trend has intensified in the past 15 to 20 years," Kullman said.

Sweden's climate in the past 20 years was as mild as it had been some 7,000 years ago, he added.

While
some of the change could be explained by natural phenomena such as the
reduction in global volcanic activity -- allowing more sunlight to warm
the Earth -- the trend was clearly provoked for the most part by
man-made factors.

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Lloyd's boss demands action on climate change

Here's a link to the Lloyds report that goes with the announcement

http://www.lloyds.com/NR/rdonlyres/6498A184-F610-449F-9AA9-91C205622BC8/0/WhatNextforClimateChange.pdf

World faces hottest year ever, as El Niño combines with global warming

From the Independent



Looks like another record breaker

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New ocean rising prediction

A leading German researcher has upped the ante on sea-level rise.

New Data Show Global Warming Kills Marine Life - Yahoo! News

New Data Show Global Warming Kills Marine Life - Yahoo! News