Global Warming
gregladen | December 17, 2007The Cost of twenty years of Reagan and Bushes has been very high. In about 1991, I wrote an article for a monthly newspaper in which I summarized the available data for Global Warming, and was very easily able to conclude that it was a real phenomenon with consequences already felt in a number of areas, a reasonably well understood mechanism, and a tangible set of solutions to work on. In 1997, the Kyoto protocol was signed on to by a number of nations (the US not included because of congressional Republican opposition). This month, in Bali, a re-run of something like Kyoto happened, and…
gregladen | December 13, 2007Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice.
Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.
[BBC]
gregladen | December 13, 2007Never mind the debate on science. We've got a new approach cooking up here. It's all about sin.
A RADICAL Christian group with the ear of prominent politicians has blamed "sinful" Australians for the nation's record drought.
Catch the Fires Ministries, which has links to several prominent politicians including Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, has hired Festival Hall so 5000 of its followers can pray for rain on Australia Day.
Leader Danny Nalliah said moral decline, not climate change, was responsible for the drought.
"Australia has turned away from Almighty God ... the sinful condition of…
gregladen | December 12, 2007Scientists studying ancient fish bones in Scandinavia have discovered that warm-water species like anchovies and black sea bream that once thrived in Danish waters during a prehistoric warm period are now returning. Some cold-water species, such as cod, were also abundant during this period, having benefited from a lower fishing effort.
[source]
gregladen | December 12, 2007He's trying so hard to be Ronald Regan that it makes me throw up a little bit inside my mouth. You have to just see it to believe it.
gregladen | December 12, 2007Starting with Los Alamos, repeated atomic explosions altered the isotopic composition of the Earth's atmosphere in a way that is easily seen in historic proxyindicator records such as ice cores, lake cores, tree rings, and so on.
Recently raised cores from the Himalayan ice fields, when analyzed, failed to show this global signal. This strongly suggests that these ice fields have not grown during the last fifty years, or more.
The ice fields provide an important buffer in the headwaters of major rivers relied on today for agriculture and other uses by a very large number of people.…
gregladen | December 10, 2007Sort of. The hurricane that the press ignored until it was impossible to ignore is now listed on Time's Top Ten Natural Disasters of 2007.
I don't like the sound of that at all: "Top Ten Natural Disasters." Maybe I'm used to "top ten" being good things. Maybe that's just me.
Packing winds of over 100 mph, the storm took out power lines and trees, and pulverized mud and thatch homes. The death toll was over 1,000, with more than half a million people forced to flee their homes. But by Bangladesh's sad standards, Sidr was nothing -- a cyclone in 1991 killed an astounding 140,000 people.…
gregladen | December 2, 2007How many times do the Kansans have to go out of their way to prove to the rest of the world that Kansas is a state populated by morons, psychopaths and mental defectives?
Well, OK, I admit, Kansas has no more than the normal share of psychopaths...
Here is the latest, chronicled by Kevin Grandia at De-Smog Blog:
Desperate times, call for desperate arguments.
In a last ditch bid to build two new coal plants in Kansas, Larry Powell (R- Garden City) is making the argument that the new coal plants would be in fact good for local crops.
It's worth mentioning that Garden City, Kansas is also home…
gregladen | December 2, 2007A sizable fraction of the international business community launched an effort to press for mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas emissions yesterday, on the eve of a major round of climate negotiations set to begin Monday in Bali.
In an unprecedented show of solidarity, leaders from 150 global companies endorsed the idea of a legally binding framework in a statement published in the Financial Times newspaper.
[source]
The idea is, of course, that these businesses recognize that this is gong to have to happen, but no one business can do it unilaterally. There are two reasons for that, which are…
gregladen | November 29, 2007There are still climate change deniers out there, and if you are one, I'd like to take a moment to annoy you with the following story:
Nearly 300 cases of chikungunya fever, a virus that previously has been common only in Africa and Asia, were reported in Italy - where only isolated cases of the disease had been seen in the past.
"We were quite surprised," said Stefania Salmaso, director of Italy's Center for Epidemiology at the National Health Institute. "Nobody was expecting that such an unusual event was going to happen."
While the outbreak was largely the result of stronger trade and…
gregladen | November 18, 2007The latest target for demonizing by right-wing talk radio is an 18-year-old Yup'ik Eskimo woman who traveled to Washington, D.C., this month to tell what global warming is doing to her remote home village of St. Michael, Alaska.
Charlee Lockwood spoke of how moose have moved north, berry patches produce less fruit and the catch is declining at her family's fish camp. "Our culture will die because everyone will have to move someplace and there will be no one to teach them," she told a House panel.
Over about 600 radio stations last week, however, talk-radio king Rush Limbaugh declared that…
gregladen | November 17, 2007A few tidbits -- just to give a flavor -- from the Summary for Policymakers, which is available here. (Good luck downloading this file! You may want to wait until everyone is asleep...)
1. Observed changes in climate and their effects
Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level
...
There is observational evidence of an increase in intense tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic since about
1970, with limited evidence…
gregladen | November 17, 2007This report covers six topics:
Greenhouse gas (GHG) emission trends
Mitigation in the short and medium term, across different economic sectors (until 2030)
Mitigation in the long-term (beyond 2030)
Policies, measures and instruments to mitigate climate change
Sustainable development and climate change mitigation
Gaps in knowledge.
This link will eventually get you to the PDF file of the summary for policy makers.
The full report is here.
gregladen | November 17, 2007The following is quoted from the Working Group I report
In the six years since the IPCC's Third Assessment Report (TAR), signifi cant progress has been made in understanding past and recent climate change and in projecting future changes. These advances have arisen from large amounts of new data, more sophisticated analyses of data, improvements in the understanding and simulation of physical processes in climate models and more extensive exploration of uncertainty ranges in model results. The increased confi dence in climate science provided by these developments is evident in this Working…
gregladen | November 15, 2007This is the first in a series of reposts from gregladen.com on global warming.
The IPCC report is out, "An Inconvenient Truth" has been honored by the academy, a sea change is happening in the way that climate change news is being reported, and you can bet the Right Wing and the Ree-pubs are as we speak working up new Talking Points and Spins to deflate the urgency of the issue. It is an axiom that in reporting science, there are two (not one, not three or four, just two) sides to every issue, and one side is the plank nailed to the Democratic Party Platform, and the other side is the…