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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