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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