Cuba Libre
Well-Known Member
He he he !
Climate: LNG in B.C. vs Alberta tarsands
- Thread starter Foxsea
- Start date
- Status
SpringVelocity
Crew Member
Yah a deleted my post didn't read it...That was another article..
Big Green Machine
Well-Known Member
That guy worked for BP. Hmmmmm
OldBlackDog
Well-Known Member
So. You just go by what scientist you like?
I thought all scientists were acceptable according to a number of posters here?
I thought all scientists were acceptable according to a number of posters here?
SpringVelocity
Crew Member
Reposted from Wikipedia:
Koonin received his Bachelor of Science from Caltech and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.In 1975, Koonin joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology as a Professor of Theoretical Physics, including a 9-year term as the Institute's provost. In 2004, Koonin joined BP plc serving as their Chief Scientist where he was responsible for guiding the company’s long-range technology strategy, particularly in alternative and renewable energy sources. In 2009, he was appointed the U.S. Department of Energy’s second Senate-confirmed Under Secretary for Science serving from May 19, 2009 through November 18, 2011. He left that post in November 2011 for a position at the Institute for Defense Analyses. On April 23, 2012, Koonin was named director of NYU's Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP).
He has served on numerous advisory bodies for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy and its various national laboratories.Koonin's research interests have included theoretical nuclear, many-body, and computational physics, nuclear astrophysics, and global environmental science.
Koonin received his Bachelor of Science from Caltech and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.In 1975, Koonin joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology as a Professor of Theoretical Physics, including a 9-year term as the Institute's provost. In 2004, Koonin joined BP plc serving as their Chief Scientist where he was responsible for guiding the company’s long-range technology strategy, particularly in alternative and renewable energy sources. In 2009, he was appointed the U.S. Department of Energy’s second Senate-confirmed Under Secretary for Science serving from May 19, 2009 through November 18, 2011. He left that post in November 2011 for a position at the Institute for Defense Analyses. On April 23, 2012, Koonin was named director of NYU's Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP).
He has served on numerous advisory bodies for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy and its various national laboratories.Koonin's research interests have included theoretical nuclear, many-body, and computational physics, nuclear astrophysics, and global environmental science.
Last edited by a moderator:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/un-...k-for-global-plan-to-curb-emissions-1.2772496
UN Climate Summit to lay groundwork for global plan to curb emissions
Thousands march in support of climate action Sunday
By Margo McDiarmid, CBC News Posted: Sep 21, 2014 5:00 AM ET Last Updated: Sep 21, 2014 4:00 PM ET
Demonstrators make their way down Sixth Avenue in New York during the People's Climate March on Sunday, Sept. 21. The march, along with similar events worldwide, comes two days before the United Nations Climate Summit, where world leaders will convene for a meeting aimed at galvanizing political will for a new global climate treaty by the end of 2015.
Demonstrators make their way down Sixth Avenue in New York during the People's Climate March on Sunday, Sept. 21. The march, along with similar events worldwide, comes two days before the United Nations Climate Summit, where world leaders will convene for a meeting aimed at galvanizing political will for a new global climate treaty by the end of 2015. (Jason DeCrow/Associated Press)
World climate change rallies
Elizabeth May at NYC climate rally
Greenhouse gases grew at alarming rate in 2013, UN weather agency says
Global investors push for carbon pricing ahead of UN climate summit
UN climate talks fracture over future of carbon markets
IMF head says world must come to grips with climate change costs
Environmental groups think this week's UN Climate Summit could help move the world towards a new global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas pollution.
Global investors push for carbon pricing ahead of UN climate summit
Greenhouse gases grew at alarming rate in 2013, UN says
There will be more than 125 world leaders at the summit on Tuesday, the largest number of heads of government to ever attend a climate summit.
It's been convened by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon as way to generate momentum for next year's climate conference in Paris. The hope is that Tuesday's summit will see leaders outline their plan of action for next year that could result in a new climate deal.
"That meeting will play a critical role in the Paris agreement," said Tim Gray, executive director of the group Environmental Defence.
There's been a lot of global foot-dragging over crafting a new climate agreement in the last few years, but environmental groups say next week could change that.
Thousands march in New York
A key reason for their optimism is the response to the People's Climate March in New York on Sunday leading up to the summit.
About 100,000 people marched through the streets to press for action on climate change. Luminaries included actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, New York mayor Bill de Blasio and primatologist Jane Goodall.
Over 1,000 organizations signed up to participate, and thousands of Canadians were expected to take part. There also 70 events planned in communities across Canada.
Climate change greenhouse gas
World leaders will convene in New York this week to lay out plans for a new agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions. (Peter Andrews/Reuters)
The sheer size of the New York event is unprecedented, according to environmental activist Tzeporah Berman.
"We've seen a dramatic rise of extreme weather," said Berman in an interview with CBC News.
"So now people are starting to see and feel the impacts of climate change and that's why you see so many buses of Hurricane Katrina survivors coming to this march and, in fact, impacted communities and indigenous communities are leading this march."
And it's not just environmental activists. The UN Secretary General, U.S. senators and Canadian politicians including Green Party Leader Elizabeth May and Ontario's Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, Glen Murray, were also expected to be there.
Murray will march "to emphasize the importance of co-operation and collaboration with our partners if we are to overcome the challenge before us," said a statement from his office.
Canada's controversial climate legacy
But the momentum will need to continue as political leaders get down to business on Tuesday.
U.S. President Obama will address the summit during the day-long event. Prime Minister Stephen Harper will be in New York but is not going to the climate summit; Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq will represent Canada.
"Through the course of the meetings Minister Aglukkaq will highlight the domestic and international actions that Canada is taking to address climate change," said a statement from Aglukkaq's office.
"The government is doing this through a sector-by-sector regulatory approach to reduce Canada's greenhouse gas emissions, record investments in green energy and taking a leadership role in international climate efforts."
But critics predict that Canada will be in for some serious criticism over the continued lack of national regulations to control greenhouse gas emissions from the country's largest source of carbon pollution — the energy industry.
"Despite repeated promises since 2008, Canada has given the oil industry a free pass," said Tim Gray in a briefing with reporters. "There is not a single federal law or regulation addressing carbon pollution from the tar sands or any other oil and gas facility in the country."
Obama looks to craft global deal
In contrast, the U.S. has introduced proposed measures to curb its largest source of carbon pollution — coal-fired power plants.
Obama sees action on climate as his legacy and the summit this week could outline his approach to crafting a new global deal, according to Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington.
"He will be speaking to the world to say 'Yes I'm serious about dealing with this challenge and here are the set of measures I'm doing to deliver upon our commitments,'" said Schmidt.
But the bottom line is the summit will be a partial success if leaders can simply avoid the sniping and finger-pointing that has marred previous climate gatherings.
Tzeporah Berman predicts a shift in attitude towards climate change and its effects may play a role this time.
"It's not just scientists and environmental groups calling for these changes now," said Berman. "It's all of these conservative bodies. It's banks, it's world governments, it's the International Energy Agency."
UN Climate Summit to lay groundwork for global plan to curb emissions
Thousands march in support of climate action Sunday
By Margo McDiarmid, CBC News Posted: Sep 21, 2014 5:00 AM ET Last Updated: Sep 21, 2014 4:00 PM ET
Demonstrators make their way down Sixth Avenue in New York during the People's Climate March on Sunday, Sept. 21. The march, along with similar events worldwide, comes two days before the United Nations Climate Summit, where world leaders will convene for a meeting aimed at galvanizing political will for a new global climate treaty by the end of 2015.
Demonstrators make their way down Sixth Avenue in New York during the People's Climate March on Sunday, Sept. 21. The march, along with similar events worldwide, comes two days before the United Nations Climate Summit, where world leaders will convene for a meeting aimed at galvanizing political will for a new global climate treaty by the end of 2015. (Jason DeCrow/Associated Press)
World climate change rallies
Elizabeth May at NYC climate rally
Greenhouse gases grew at alarming rate in 2013, UN weather agency says
Global investors push for carbon pricing ahead of UN climate summit
UN climate talks fracture over future of carbon markets
IMF head says world must come to grips with climate change costs
Environmental groups think this week's UN Climate Summit could help move the world towards a new global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas pollution.
Global investors push for carbon pricing ahead of UN climate summit
Greenhouse gases grew at alarming rate in 2013, UN says
There will be more than 125 world leaders at the summit on Tuesday, the largest number of heads of government to ever attend a climate summit.
It's been convened by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon as way to generate momentum for next year's climate conference in Paris. The hope is that Tuesday's summit will see leaders outline their plan of action for next year that could result in a new climate deal.
"That meeting will play a critical role in the Paris agreement," said Tim Gray, executive director of the group Environmental Defence.
There's been a lot of global foot-dragging over crafting a new climate agreement in the last few years, but environmental groups say next week could change that.
Thousands march in New York
A key reason for their optimism is the response to the People's Climate March in New York on Sunday leading up to the summit.
About 100,000 people marched through the streets to press for action on climate change. Luminaries included actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, New York mayor Bill de Blasio and primatologist Jane Goodall.
Over 1,000 organizations signed up to participate, and thousands of Canadians were expected to take part. There also 70 events planned in communities across Canada.
Climate change greenhouse gas
World leaders will convene in New York this week to lay out plans for a new agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions. (Peter Andrews/Reuters)
The sheer size of the New York event is unprecedented, according to environmental activist Tzeporah Berman.
"We've seen a dramatic rise of extreme weather," said Berman in an interview with CBC News.
"So now people are starting to see and feel the impacts of climate change and that's why you see so many buses of Hurricane Katrina survivors coming to this march and, in fact, impacted communities and indigenous communities are leading this march."
And it's not just environmental activists. The UN Secretary General, U.S. senators and Canadian politicians including Green Party Leader Elizabeth May and Ontario's Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, Glen Murray, were also expected to be there.
Murray will march "to emphasize the importance of co-operation and collaboration with our partners if we are to overcome the challenge before us," said a statement from his office.
Canada's controversial climate legacy
But the momentum will need to continue as political leaders get down to business on Tuesday.
U.S. President Obama will address the summit during the day-long event. Prime Minister Stephen Harper will be in New York but is not going to the climate summit; Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq will represent Canada.
"Through the course of the meetings Minister Aglukkaq will highlight the domestic and international actions that Canada is taking to address climate change," said a statement from Aglukkaq's office.
"The government is doing this through a sector-by-sector regulatory approach to reduce Canada's greenhouse gas emissions, record investments in green energy and taking a leadership role in international climate efforts."
But critics predict that Canada will be in for some serious criticism over the continued lack of national regulations to control greenhouse gas emissions from the country's largest source of carbon pollution — the energy industry.
"Despite repeated promises since 2008, Canada has given the oil industry a free pass," said Tim Gray in a briefing with reporters. "There is not a single federal law or regulation addressing carbon pollution from the tar sands or any other oil and gas facility in the country."
Obama looks to craft global deal
In contrast, the U.S. has introduced proposed measures to curb its largest source of carbon pollution — coal-fired power plants.
Obama sees action on climate as his legacy and the summit this week could outline his approach to crafting a new global deal, according to Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington.
"He will be speaking to the world to say 'Yes I'm serious about dealing with this challenge and here are the set of measures I'm doing to deliver upon our commitments,'" said Schmidt.
But the bottom line is the summit will be a partial success if leaders can simply avoid the sniping and finger-pointing that has marred previous climate gatherings.
Tzeporah Berman predicts a shift in attitude towards climate change and its effects may play a role this time.
"It's not just scientists and environmental groups calling for these changes now," said Berman. "It's all of these conservative bodies. It's banks, it's world governments, it's the International Energy Agency."
Ultimately, OBD - it is the PUBLISHED science that stands. That is - the data and the peer-reviewed reports in the science - NOT the media.
The reason people follow affiliations is that when - IN THE MEDIA - people start beaking off - we can follow and track financial gains which could have an impact on whether or not media spokespersons are being honest about their biases.
Don't confuse media releases and published science. They are 2 very different sources of information.
Last edited by a moderator:
OldBlackDog
Well-Known Member
reply x prohibited[?] Posted: 6 days ago
Looking for volunteers to pass out flyers at Climate March (Midtown)
© craigslist - Map data © OpenStreetMap
(google map) (yahoo map)
compensation: $50
Years Of Living Dangerously, an Emmy Award winning television series about climate change, currently seeks a few volunteers to pass out flyers during the People's Climate March on Sunday, Sept 21st.
Time: 11:00am
Payment is $50 per volunteer.
Please send a short email about why you'd like to volunteer with the Years of Living Dangerously team during the Climate March. Confirmation and specific details will be given upon receipt of email.
Looking for volunteers to pass out flyers at Climate March (Midtown)
© craigslist - Map data © OpenStreetMap
(google map) (yahoo map)
compensation: $50
Years Of Living Dangerously, an Emmy Award winning television series about climate change, currently seeks a few volunteers to pass out flyers during the People's Climate March on Sunday, Sept 21st.
Time: 11:00am
Payment is $50 per volunteer.
Please send a short email about why you'd like to volunteer with the Years of Living Dangerously team during the Climate March. Confirmation and specific details will be given upon receipt of email.
Importing air pollution from China
Mercury from Asia contributes 20 to 30 per cent of the poison deposited in U.S.
By Andrew Lee, CBC News Posted: Sep 21, 2014 1:04 PM ET Last Updated: Sep 21, 2014 1:04 PM ET
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/importing-air-pollution-from-china-1.2773267
China's air problem
People's Climate Marches around the world
China's farmers, consumers feeling the effects of widespread soil pollution
China pollution is so bad Panasonic pays extra for work there
Air pollution kills 7 million people every year globally, WHO finds
Global investors push for carbon pricing ahead of UN climate summit
Global warming dials up our risks, UN report says
Climate change: 4 countries that are fighting the trend
Formula E racing is in infancy but will drive broader innovation
Perhaps the best explanation I have heard about China’s air problem is from Karl Pilkington, famous as the blunt-talking star of the Sky Television series Idiot Abroad.
Pilkington had just landed — and looking outside, asks the camera operator following him, “Is it cloudy or is it pollution... it's not worth having in HD is it? Nothing looks crisp. Everything is sort of hazy.... like some sort of Kate Bush video or something."
China pollution so bad Panasonic pays extra to work there
Record smog in China closes schools, roads
Beijing's 'Airpocalypse' - CBC's 'The National'
Air pollution kills 7 million people every year says WHO
I ran into another bitter Brit in Tiananmen Square, who had a very expensive Nikon with even more expensive lenses. He was fuming that he couldn’t take a clear picture. Every picture was hazy. He said all the megapixels and pricey glass won’t fix that.
I tried to explain to him the best photos were of the pollution but that didn’t sit well with him as he wanted to take photos like the brochures of China’s amazing monuments — images, which are almost always retouched, with a clear blue sky as a background.
China burns about as much coal as the rest of the world combined.
1 of 7
Stories like this aren’t news to Dan Jaffe, **** a professor of atmospheric and environmental chemistry at the University of Washington. He follows air in Asia closely. More precisely, he follows it as it travels around the world and comes to North America.
“We know this pollution impacts all the way from Alaska down to Southern California," said Jaffe. "It takes five to eight days for air that is over China to arrive in the United States [depending on the wind].
What the wind brings
From a mountain-top facility on Mount Bachelor in Oregon, they have been analyzing what the wind brings them.
“We've documented long-range transportation of pollutants to North America. What we know is that mercury from Asia contributes 20 to 30 per cent of the mercury that is deposited here in the United States." He goes on to list an array of other toxic chemicals, “carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, sulfur. A whole witches' brew of pollutants, including ozone, gets moved across."
Jaffe knows what many people do not — the smog that makes headlines in Beijing or Shanghai does not stop at the edge of those mega cities.
Giant swathes of China, both rural and urban, are regularly cloaked in air pollution. I once travelled 1,200 kilometres from Beijing to Shanghai by rail and never left dense smog. People in China longingly speak of “blue sky days." When people show their vacation pictures from abroad they show pictures of the sky and people marvel about the clarity of the air.
China pollution
A bad air day in Beijing. China is the number one producer of greenhouse gases. The country has doubled its use of coal-fired plants since 2003. (CBC News)
I asked a woman in a Beijing park about the air on a typical day last week and she responded, “It's bad, can it be good?” Her friend argued: "Today is OK. It’s cloudy but not hazardous [the worst air quality level]."
Hu Xiaohu, a young university student, was sitting nearby and offered this perspective. “I come from Xingtai, I think the air is much better than in my hometown” (Xingtai has the worst air pollution in China). He says it’s rare to see the sun and “at night, I’ve never seen stars.”
Xingtai is a coal-mining hub and has a massive coal-fired electrical plant. It only had 38 days when the air met Chinese national standards in 2013.
Coal consumption doubles
China hungrily consumes coal, and since 2003, it has doubled its coal use. Mercury is released into the air when coal is burned.
Xia Yishan is with the China Energy Strategy Research Centre at China’s Institute of International Studies and is an expert on energy.
“Our country's coal production is number one in the world, the percentage of coal energy consumption is also number one.” China is also the No. 1 producer of greenhouse gases as well.
While there is some talk that China’s coal consumption has peaked, Xia Yishan says it may still increase a little then stabilize. Currently, China burns about as much coal as the rest of the world combined. Xia says that China has started to burn coal more efficiently in some cases.
'The air goes around the planet in three weeks. So something that happens on one continent — you are going to feel the effect.'
- Dan Jaffe, professor of atmospheric and environmental chemistry
Dan Jaffe has noticed less sulfur in his measurements of what comes over the Pacific. Yet, he says that is one of the easier pollutants to clean. Others are more challenging.
“The hard one is carbon dioxide, which is global warming. They are harder and more expensive to control and nobody is doing it yet.”
“We have one planet,” says Jaffe. “The air goes around the planet in three weeks. So something that happens on one continent — you are going to feel the effect.”
Jaffe ended our interview with a stark warning about what may come. Even if China caps its coal consumption, other countries are lining up to burn more coal.
“If India starts developing coal plants in the same way China has ... I think we really have a big problem on our hands”
It is predicted that India’s production of coal-fired electricity will triple by 2020 and Asia’s use of coal-fired energy will increase by 50 per cent (Source: Coal-fired Boilers: World Analysis and Forecast published by the McIlvaine Company. 2013).
Xia Yishan knows “the pollution issue is without borders."
Mercury from Asia contributes 20 to 30 per cent of the poison deposited in U.S.
By Andrew Lee, CBC News Posted: Sep 21, 2014 1:04 PM ET Last Updated: Sep 21, 2014 1:04 PM ET
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/importing-air-pollution-from-china-1.2773267
China's air problem
People's Climate Marches around the world
China's farmers, consumers feeling the effects of widespread soil pollution
China pollution is so bad Panasonic pays extra for work there
Air pollution kills 7 million people every year globally, WHO finds
Global investors push for carbon pricing ahead of UN climate summit
Global warming dials up our risks, UN report says
Climate change: 4 countries that are fighting the trend
Formula E racing is in infancy but will drive broader innovation
Perhaps the best explanation I have heard about China’s air problem is from Karl Pilkington, famous as the blunt-talking star of the Sky Television series Idiot Abroad.
Pilkington had just landed — and looking outside, asks the camera operator following him, “Is it cloudy or is it pollution... it's not worth having in HD is it? Nothing looks crisp. Everything is sort of hazy.... like some sort of Kate Bush video or something."
China pollution so bad Panasonic pays extra to work there
Record smog in China closes schools, roads
Beijing's 'Airpocalypse' - CBC's 'The National'
Air pollution kills 7 million people every year says WHO
I ran into another bitter Brit in Tiananmen Square, who had a very expensive Nikon with even more expensive lenses. He was fuming that he couldn’t take a clear picture. Every picture was hazy. He said all the megapixels and pricey glass won’t fix that.
I tried to explain to him the best photos were of the pollution but that didn’t sit well with him as he wanted to take photos like the brochures of China’s amazing monuments — images, which are almost always retouched, with a clear blue sky as a background.
China burns about as much coal as the rest of the world combined.
1 of 7
Stories like this aren’t news to Dan Jaffe, **** a professor of atmospheric and environmental chemistry at the University of Washington. He follows air in Asia closely. More precisely, he follows it as it travels around the world and comes to North America.
“We know this pollution impacts all the way from Alaska down to Southern California," said Jaffe. "It takes five to eight days for air that is over China to arrive in the United States [depending on the wind].
What the wind brings
From a mountain-top facility on Mount Bachelor in Oregon, they have been analyzing what the wind brings them.
“We've documented long-range transportation of pollutants to North America. What we know is that mercury from Asia contributes 20 to 30 per cent of the mercury that is deposited here in the United States." He goes on to list an array of other toxic chemicals, “carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, sulfur. A whole witches' brew of pollutants, including ozone, gets moved across."
Jaffe knows what many people do not — the smog that makes headlines in Beijing or Shanghai does not stop at the edge of those mega cities.
Giant swathes of China, both rural and urban, are regularly cloaked in air pollution. I once travelled 1,200 kilometres from Beijing to Shanghai by rail and never left dense smog. People in China longingly speak of “blue sky days." When people show their vacation pictures from abroad they show pictures of the sky and people marvel about the clarity of the air.
China pollution
A bad air day in Beijing. China is the number one producer of greenhouse gases. The country has doubled its use of coal-fired plants since 2003. (CBC News)
I asked a woman in a Beijing park about the air on a typical day last week and she responded, “It's bad, can it be good?” Her friend argued: "Today is OK. It’s cloudy but not hazardous [the worst air quality level]."
Hu Xiaohu, a young university student, was sitting nearby and offered this perspective. “I come from Xingtai, I think the air is much better than in my hometown” (Xingtai has the worst air pollution in China). He says it’s rare to see the sun and “at night, I’ve never seen stars.”
Xingtai is a coal-mining hub and has a massive coal-fired electrical plant. It only had 38 days when the air met Chinese national standards in 2013.
Coal consumption doubles
China hungrily consumes coal, and since 2003, it has doubled its coal use. Mercury is released into the air when coal is burned.
Xia Yishan is with the China Energy Strategy Research Centre at China’s Institute of International Studies and is an expert on energy.
“Our country's coal production is number one in the world, the percentage of coal energy consumption is also number one.” China is also the No. 1 producer of greenhouse gases as well.
While there is some talk that China’s coal consumption has peaked, Xia Yishan says it may still increase a little then stabilize. Currently, China burns about as much coal as the rest of the world combined. Xia says that China has started to burn coal more efficiently in some cases.
'The air goes around the planet in three weeks. So something that happens on one continent — you are going to feel the effect.'
- Dan Jaffe, professor of atmospheric and environmental chemistry
Dan Jaffe has noticed less sulfur in his measurements of what comes over the Pacific. Yet, he says that is one of the easier pollutants to clean. Others are more challenging.
“The hard one is carbon dioxide, which is global warming. They are harder and more expensive to control and nobody is doing it yet.”
“We have one planet,” says Jaffe. “The air goes around the planet in three weeks. So something that happens on one continent — you are going to feel the effect.”
Jaffe ended our interview with a stark warning about what may come. Even if China caps its coal consumption, other countries are lining up to burn more coal.
“If India starts developing coal plants in the same way China has ... I think we really have a big problem on our hands”
It is predicted that India’s production of coal-fired electricity will triple by 2020 and Asia’s use of coal-fired energy will increase by 50 per cent (Source: Coal-fired Boilers: World Analysis and Forecast published by the McIlvaine Company. 2013).
Xia Yishan knows “the pollution issue is without borders."
OldBlackDog
Well-Known Member
William M. Gray
Professor Emeritus
Department of Atmospheric Science
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523
If you were to ask ten people on the street if mankind’s activities are causing global warming, at least seven or eight out of ten would likely say yes. This is due to nearly 25 years of gross exaggeration of the human-induced global warming threat by scientists, environmentalists, politicians, and the media who wish to profit from the public’s lack of knowledge on this topic. Many have been lead to believe that Al Gore’s movie and book, An Inconvenient Truth, provides incontrovertible evidence that human-induced global warming is a real threat. Yet, contrary to what is heard from warming advocates, there is considerable evidence that the global warming we have experienced over the last 30 years and over the last 100 years is largely natural. It is impossible to objectively determine the very small amount of human-induced warming in comparison to the large natural changes which are occurring.
Many thousands of scientists from the US and around the globe do not accept the human-induced global warming hypothesis as it has been presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports over the last 15 years. The media has, in general, uncritically accepted the results of the IPCC and over-hyped the human aspects of the warming threat. This makes for better press than saying that the climate changes we have experienced are mostly natural. The contrary views of the many warming skeptics have been largely ignored and their motives denigrated. The alleged ‘scientific consensus’ on this topic is bogus. As more research on the human impact on global temperature change comes forth, more flaws are being found in the hypothesis.
It must be pointed out that most climate research is supported by the federal government. All federally sponsored researchers need positive peer-reviews on their published papers and grant proposals. This can be difficult for many of the ‘closet’ warming skeptics who receive federal grant support. Many are reluctant to give full expression of their views due to worries over continuing grant support. It is difficult to receive federal grant support if one’s views differ from the majority of their peers who receive support to find evidence of the warming threat. The normal scientific process of objectively studying both sides of a question has not yet occurred. Such open dialogue has been discouraged by warming advocates.
Implementation of the proposed international treaties restricting future greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 20 to 80 percent of current emissions would lead to a large slowdown in the world’s economic development and, at the same time, have no significant impact on the globe’s future temperature.
Many of the Global Climate Model (GCMs) simulations by large US and foreign government laboratories and universities on which so much of the warming science scenarios are based have basic flaws. These global models are not able to correctly model the globe’s small-scale precipitation processes. They have incorrectly parameterized the rain processes in their models to give an unrealistically enhanced warming influence to CO2. This is the so called positive water-vapor feedback. The observations I have been analyzing for many years show that the globe’s net upper-level water vapor does not increase but slightly decreases with warming. These GCMs also do not yet accurately model the globe’s deep ocean circulation which appears to be the primary driving mechanism for most of the global temperature increases that has occurred over the last 30 and last 100 years.
GCMs should not be relied upon to give global temperature information 50 to 100 years into the future. GCM modelers do not dare make public short-period global temperature forecasts for next season, next year, or a few years hence. This is because they know they do not have shorter range climate forecast skill. They would lose credibility if they issued shorter-range yearly forecasts that could be verified. Climate modelers live mostly in a ‘virtual world’ of their own making. This virtual world is isolated from the real world of weather and climate. Few of the GCM modelers have any substantial weather or short- range climate forecasting experience.
It is impossible to make skillful initial value numerical predictions beyond a few weeks. Although numerical weather prediction has shown steady and impressive improvements since its inception in 1955, these forecast improvements have been primarily made through advancements in the measurement (i.e. satellite) of the wind and pressure fields and the advection/extrapolation of these fields forward in time 10-15 days. For skillful numerical prediction beyond a few weeks, it is necessary to forecast changes in the globe’s complicated energy and moisture fields. This entails forecasting processes such as amounts of cloudiness, condensation heating, evaporation cooling, cloud-cloud-free radiation, air-sea moisture-temperature flux, etc. It is impossible to accurately code all these complicated energy-moisture processes, and integrate these processes forward for hundreds of thousands of time steps and expect to obtain anything close to meaningful results. Realistic climate forecasting by numerical processes is not possible now and, due to the complex nature of the earth’s climate system, may never be possible.
Global temperatures have always fluctuated and will continue to do so regardless of how much anthropogenic greenhouse gases are put into the atmosphere.
The globe has many serious environmental problems. Most of these problems are regional or local in nature, not global. Forced global reductions in human-produced greenhouse gases will not offer much benefit for the globe’s serious regional and local environmental problems. We should, of course, make all reasonable reductions in greenhouse gases to the extent that we do not pay too high an economic price. We need a prosperous economy to have sufficient resources to further adapt and expand energy production.
Even if CO2 is causing very small global temperature increases there is hardly anything we can do about it. China, India and third world countries will not limit their growing greenhouse gas emissions. Many experts believe that there may be net positive benefits to humankind through a small amount of global warming. It is known that vegetation and crops tend to benefit from higher amounts of atmospheric CO2, particularly vegetation which is under temperature or moisture stress.
I believe that in the next few years the globe is going to continue its modest cooling period of the last decade similar to what was experienced in the 30 years between the mid-1940s and the mid-1970s. This will be primarily a result of changes in the globe’s deep ocean circulation. I am convinced that in 15-20 years we will look back on this period of global warming hysteria as we now look back on other popular and trendy scientific ideas that have not stood the test of time.
______________________________________________________________________
The author is a Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University where he has worked since 1961. He holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago in Geophysical Science. He has issued Atlantic basin seasonal hurricane forecasts since 1984.
Professor Emeritus
Department of Atmospheric Science
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523
If you were to ask ten people on the street if mankind’s activities are causing global warming, at least seven or eight out of ten would likely say yes. This is due to nearly 25 years of gross exaggeration of the human-induced global warming threat by scientists, environmentalists, politicians, and the media who wish to profit from the public’s lack of knowledge on this topic. Many have been lead to believe that Al Gore’s movie and book, An Inconvenient Truth, provides incontrovertible evidence that human-induced global warming is a real threat. Yet, contrary to what is heard from warming advocates, there is considerable evidence that the global warming we have experienced over the last 30 years and over the last 100 years is largely natural. It is impossible to objectively determine the very small amount of human-induced warming in comparison to the large natural changes which are occurring.
Many thousands of scientists from the US and around the globe do not accept the human-induced global warming hypothesis as it has been presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports over the last 15 years. The media has, in general, uncritically accepted the results of the IPCC and over-hyped the human aspects of the warming threat. This makes for better press than saying that the climate changes we have experienced are mostly natural. The contrary views of the many warming skeptics have been largely ignored and their motives denigrated. The alleged ‘scientific consensus’ on this topic is bogus. As more research on the human impact on global temperature change comes forth, more flaws are being found in the hypothesis.
It must be pointed out that most climate research is supported by the federal government. All federally sponsored researchers need positive peer-reviews on their published papers and grant proposals. This can be difficult for many of the ‘closet’ warming skeptics who receive federal grant support. Many are reluctant to give full expression of their views due to worries over continuing grant support. It is difficult to receive federal grant support if one’s views differ from the majority of their peers who receive support to find evidence of the warming threat. The normal scientific process of objectively studying both sides of a question has not yet occurred. Such open dialogue has been discouraged by warming advocates.
Implementation of the proposed international treaties restricting future greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 20 to 80 percent of current emissions would lead to a large slowdown in the world’s economic development and, at the same time, have no significant impact on the globe’s future temperature.
Many of the Global Climate Model (GCMs) simulations by large US and foreign government laboratories and universities on which so much of the warming science scenarios are based have basic flaws. These global models are not able to correctly model the globe’s small-scale precipitation processes. They have incorrectly parameterized the rain processes in their models to give an unrealistically enhanced warming influence to CO2. This is the so called positive water-vapor feedback. The observations I have been analyzing for many years show that the globe’s net upper-level water vapor does not increase but slightly decreases with warming. These GCMs also do not yet accurately model the globe’s deep ocean circulation which appears to be the primary driving mechanism for most of the global temperature increases that has occurred over the last 30 and last 100 years.
GCMs should not be relied upon to give global temperature information 50 to 100 years into the future. GCM modelers do not dare make public short-period global temperature forecasts for next season, next year, or a few years hence. This is because they know they do not have shorter range climate forecast skill. They would lose credibility if they issued shorter-range yearly forecasts that could be verified. Climate modelers live mostly in a ‘virtual world’ of their own making. This virtual world is isolated from the real world of weather and climate. Few of the GCM modelers have any substantial weather or short- range climate forecasting experience.
It is impossible to make skillful initial value numerical predictions beyond a few weeks. Although numerical weather prediction has shown steady and impressive improvements since its inception in 1955, these forecast improvements have been primarily made through advancements in the measurement (i.e. satellite) of the wind and pressure fields and the advection/extrapolation of these fields forward in time 10-15 days. For skillful numerical prediction beyond a few weeks, it is necessary to forecast changes in the globe’s complicated energy and moisture fields. This entails forecasting processes such as amounts of cloudiness, condensation heating, evaporation cooling, cloud-cloud-free radiation, air-sea moisture-temperature flux, etc. It is impossible to accurately code all these complicated energy-moisture processes, and integrate these processes forward for hundreds of thousands of time steps and expect to obtain anything close to meaningful results. Realistic climate forecasting by numerical processes is not possible now and, due to the complex nature of the earth’s climate system, may never be possible.
Global temperatures have always fluctuated and will continue to do so regardless of how much anthropogenic greenhouse gases are put into the atmosphere.
The globe has many serious environmental problems. Most of these problems are regional or local in nature, not global. Forced global reductions in human-produced greenhouse gases will not offer much benefit for the globe’s serious regional and local environmental problems. We should, of course, make all reasonable reductions in greenhouse gases to the extent that we do not pay too high an economic price. We need a prosperous economy to have sufficient resources to further adapt and expand energy production.
Even if CO2 is causing very small global temperature increases there is hardly anything we can do about it. China, India and third world countries will not limit their growing greenhouse gas emissions. Many experts believe that there may be net positive benefits to humankind through a small amount of global warming. It is known that vegetation and crops tend to benefit from higher amounts of atmospheric CO2, particularly vegetation which is under temperature or moisture stress.
I believe that in the next few years the globe is going to continue its modest cooling period of the last decade similar to what was experienced in the 30 years between the mid-1940s and the mid-1970s. This will be primarily a result of changes in the globe’s deep ocean circulation. I am convinced that in 15-20 years we will look back on this period of global warming hysteria as we now look back on other popular and trendy scientific ideas that have not stood the test of time.
______________________________________________________________________
The author is a Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University where he has worked since 1961. He holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago in Geophysical Science. He has issued Atlantic basin seasonal hurricane forecasts since 1984.
GLG
Well-Known Member
Science Shows Up in Force at People's Climate March
Scientists who do not typically take a policy position make an exception for climate change
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/science-shows-up-in-force-at-people-s-climate-march/
The People's Climate March may end up being the biggest protest to urge action to restrain global warming yet. The march in New York City on September 21 is predicted to draw more than 100,000 people, which would top the tens of thousands who showed up in Copenhagen back in 2009. But how many scientists, whether they study climate change or not, will be there?
The idea of the march—first proposed by writer and activist Bill McKibben of 350.org—is intended to remind world leaders gathering in New York City for a United Nations climate summit that people around the world demand action to halt global warming. And action to combat climate change is what many scientists have been calling for since at least the 1970s, in a series of scientific publications and reports, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change series. "Writing more such articles is not going to change minds," says geologist James Powell of the University of Southern California, who is attending the march and helping to organize scientific involvement. "We need to do something more dramatic." Like many older scientists, Powell says he is doing it for his grandchildren. "I imagine my grandchildren and their children decades in the future asking: 'What did grandpa do?' I want to have an answer."
Powell, who was president of both Franklin and Marshall College and Reed College during the apartheid divestment movement, believes that it will take political muscle to force politicians to act. So he partnered with former professional biologist Lucky Tran to help organize Science Stands, which helped attract scientists from across the country and organizations such as the New York Academy of Sciences, which urged member via email to gather at the American Museum of Natural History to participate in the march. "If the most well-informed citizens are not willing to act, what hope do we have of averting climate catastrophe?" asks Pattanun "Ploy" Achakulwisut, a PhD student in atmospheric science. She enlisted other graduate students from Harvard University to join the march, partially with the help of a scientist / superhero posterexhorting scientists to "mobilize march [and] make history."
As the world's most famous physicist Albert Einstein is once reputed to have said: "those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act," a sentiment echoed by conservation biologist Jessica Hellman of the University of Notre Dame, who notes that it is also now time to adapt to the climate change already detected and underway.
Such communication to leaders and individuals is vital, according to scientific organizations like the American Geophysical Union. "While AGU is not a sponsor or participant in this particular event, we strongly encourage our member scientists to talk to their communities and their elected leaders about the impacts climate change is already having on their communities and families," says Chris McEntee, executive director of the premier planetary science organization. "Unfortunately, our window for meaningful action won't be open forever."
Many branches of science are likely to be represented at the march: climate scientists of course, but also geologists, meteorologists, materials scientists and even engineers. "I'm marching because last Christmas, my hometown of Winchester—the ancient capital of England—saw its worst flooding in at least a quarter of a millennium," says Geoffrey Supran, a PhD candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of 70 MIT students and faculty attending the march. "We have the technologies to begin to tackle the climate crisis. What we lack is the political will to make it happen."
In the lab, Supran has worked on trying to make more efficient photovoltaic cells to convert sunshine to electricity and better light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, to cut down on the amount of electricity needed to produce lighting. Such technologies can help reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That effort may include using more solar, wind, geothermal, hydropower and/or nuclear power, as well as placing a price on the CO2 pollution from burning fossil fuels. Many economists believe such a switch to renewable sources of energy can contribute to a stronger economy and better human lives rather than slow such growth. And the infrastructure decisions made in the next 15 years or so will determine levels of greenhouse gas pollution for the remainder of the century. At the same time, technologies to pull CO2 back out of the atmosphere may prove vital since atmospheric concentrations are nearing 400 parts-per-million—and rising.
Scientists have not traditionally expressed policy preferences, preferring to maintain a stance of impartiality. Such dispassion, neutrality and objectivity will remain fundamental to the scientific method. At the same time, says Powell, "we have detected a threat, the greatest threat ever detected in human history." Sea level risealone could force mass migration inland here in the U.S. in coming centuries, he says. "At this point we need to abandon our reticence and speak out forcefully, and just speaking may not be enough."
That's because the threat is large. As a geologist, Powell notes that by burning fossil fuels humans have sped up geologic processes like climate change more than 1000-fold. Whereas the Earth cooled or warmed over centuries or millennia in the past, it is now warming over the course of decades and even years. A new record for total CO2 pollution was set in 2013—including the fastest rate of CO2 pollution growth—and is likely to be broken again this year.
Or, as paleoclimatologist Peter deMenocal of Columbia University puts it: the "modern climate is exceptionally warm relative to the last millennium, and future decades will be another world, unlike anything modern civilization has ever seen. This is a really sobering fact."
So he will be joining the march along with Columbia colleagues and his twin 8-year-old girls. "It's important they witness that a lot of people care about this issue and are willing to do something about it," he says. "This is about their future."
Scientists who do not typically take a policy position make an exception for climate change
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/science-shows-up-in-force-at-people-s-climate-march/
The People's Climate March may end up being the biggest protest to urge action to restrain global warming yet. The march in New York City on September 21 is predicted to draw more than 100,000 people, which would top the tens of thousands who showed up in Copenhagen back in 2009. But how many scientists, whether they study climate change or not, will be there?
The idea of the march—first proposed by writer and activist Bill McKibben of 350.org—is intended to remind world leaders gathering in New York City for a United Nations climate summit that people around the world demand action to halt global warming. And action to combat climate change is what many scientists have been calling for since at least the 1970s, in a series of scientific publications and reports, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change series. "Writing more such articles is not going to change minds," says geologist James Powell of the University of Southern California, who is attending the march and helping to organize scientific involvement. "We need to do something more dramatic." Like many older scientists, Powell says he is doing it for his grandchildren. "I imagine my grandchildren and their children decades in the future asking: 'What did grandpa do?' I want to have an answer."
Powell, who was president of both Franklin and Marshall College and Reed College during the apartheid divestment movement, believes that it will take political muscle to force politicians to act. So he partnered with former professional biologist Lucky Tran to help organize Science Stands, which helped attract scientists from across the country and organizations such as the New York Academy of Sciences, which urged member via email to gather at the American Museum of Natural History to participate in the march. "If the most well-informed citizens are not willing to act, what hope do we have of averting climate catastrophe?" asks Pattanun "Ploy" Achakulwisut, a PhD student in atmospheric science. She enlisted other graduate students from Harvard University to join the march, partially with the help of a scientist / superhero posterexhorting scientists to "mobilize march [and] make history."
As the world's most famous physicist Albert Einstein is once reputed to have said: "those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act," a sentiment echoed by conservation biologist Jessica Hellman of the University of Notre Dame, who notes that it is also now time to adapt to the climate change already detected and underway.
Such communication to leaders and individuals is vital, according to scientific organizations like the American Geophysical Union. "While AGU is not a sponsor or participant in this particular event, we strongly encourage our member scientists to talk to their communities and their elected leaders about the impacts climate change is already having on their communities and families," says Chris McEntee, executive director of the premier planetary science organization. "Unfortunately, our window for meaningful action won't be open forever."
Many branches of science are likely to be represented at the march: climate scientists of course, but also geologists, meteorologists, materials scientists and even engineers. "I'm marching because last Christmas, my hometown of Winchester—the ancient capital of England—saw its worst flooding in at least a quarter of a millennium," says Geoffrey Supran, a PhD candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of 70 MIT students and faculty attending the march. "We have the technologies to begin to tackle the climate crisis. What we lack is the political will to make it happen."
In the lab, Supran has worked on trying to make more efficient photovoltaic cells to convert sunshine to electricity and better light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, to cut down on the amount of electricity needed to produce lighting. Such technologies can help reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That effort may include using more solar, wind, geothermal, hydropower and/or nuclear power, as well as placing a price on the CO2 pollution from burning fossil fuels. Many economists believe such a switch to renewable sources of energy can contribute to a stronger economy and better human lives rather than slow such growth. And the infrastructure decisions made in the next 15 years or so will determine levels of greenhouse gas pollution for the remainder of the century. At the same time, technologies to pull CO2 back out of the atmosphere may prove vital since atmospheric concentrations are nearing 400 parts-per-million—and rising.
Scientists have not traditionally expressed policy preferences, preferring to maintain a stance of impartiality. Such dispassion, neutrality and objectivity will remain fundamental to the scientific method. At the same time, says Powell, "we have detected a threat, the greatest threat ever detected in human history." Sea level risealone could force mass migration inland here in the U.S. in coming centuries, he says. "At this point we need to abandon our reticence and speak out forcefully, and just speaking may not be enough."
That's because the threat is large. As a geologist, Powell notes that by burning fossil fuels humans have sped up geologic processes like climate change more than 1000-fold. Whereas the Earth cooled or warmed over centuries or millennia in the past, it is now warming over the course of decades and even years. A new record for total CO2 pollution was set in 2013—including the fastest rate of CO2 pollution growth—and is likely to be broken again this year.
Or, as paleoclimatologist Peter deMenocal of Columbia University puts it: the "modern climate is exceptionally warm relative to the last millennium, and future decades will be another world, unlike anything modern civilization has ever seen. This is a really sobering fact."
So he will be joining the march along with Columbia colleagues and his twin 8-year-old girls. "It's important they witness that a lot of people care about this issue and are willing to do something about it," he says. "This is about their future."
GLG
Well-Known Member
GLG
Well-Known Member
I see you just can't help yourself with that Watts up with that denial website.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/09/21/paid-volunteers-for-the-nyc-climate-march/
I found it very entertaining the lengths that crew go to circle their wagons.
I would not be surprised if old watts placed the CL add himself.... LOL
Did find one nugget of truth worth sharing....
[nehulN3qddo] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nehulN3qddo
OldBlackDog
Well-Known Member
So, how is that going in china and in india?
Guess who buys most of our natural resourses?
Guess who we the canadians just signed an agreement with.
Guess who if they do not now, will control the oil sands and the coal mines.
If you want change you have to change the government with a new agenda.
There is no government out there to do that with.
Guess who buys most of our natural resourses?
Guess who we the canadians just signed an agreement with.
Guess who if they do not now, will control the oil sands and the coal mines.
If you want change you have to change the government with a new agenda.
There is no government out there to do that with.
http://www.theguardian.com/environm...e-summit-is-guilty-of-a-major-sin-of-omission
The UN's New York climate summit is guilty of a major sin of omission
Despite a key role in cutting emissions, the ocean is completely absent from Ban Ki-moon’s climate meeting for world leaders
David Miliband, José María Figueres and Trevor Manuel
theguardian.com, Monday 22 September 2014 12.07 BST
Global warming could lead to smaller fish, according to the University of British Columbia. Photograph: Boris Horvat/AFP/Getty Images
On Tuesday, the UN headquarters in New York is hosting the largest gathering of world leaders ever to address climate change. It is an enormously important event, intended to catalyse action ahead of next year’s Paris conference – where leaders have pledged to reach a new global climate agreement, and a great credit to secretary general Ban Ki-moon and his team.
But the summit is guilty of a major sin of omission: the ocean, over two-thirds of the planet, is completely absent from the programme. It is neither one of the eight “action areas” on which governments and other key players are invited to announce bold new commitments, nor one of the “thematic sessions” where states and stakeholders will share solutions. The summit is keeping its feet firmly on dry land and is highlighting the huge gap between scientific knowledge and political action.
The Global Ocean Commission is dismayed that the ocean appears to have been relegated to the status of an afterthought, something to bring up occasionally in the context of other, apparently more essential, concerns. This is particularly shocking coming at the end of a year in which the ocean has been consistently listed among the most critical elements of the climate change challenge, by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), and numerous scientific studies and reports – including our own report released in June.
Science is showing us that there can be no solution to the climate challenge without a healthy ocean, which is currently in sharp decline. The ocean absorbs a quarter of man-made CO2 emissions, and has taken on 90% of the extra heat generated since the industrial revolution. Without the ocean to clean up our mess, the impacts of climate change would already be far more severe.
This is where the alarm bells about ocean health should start ringing: human pressures on the ocean – both its chemical composition and its immeasurable biodiversity – are undermining its ability to carry out the essential services on which we all depend. The latest edition of the WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin warns that the increasing acidification of the ocean has caused its capacity to absorb our carbon emissions to drop to 70% what it was at the start of the industrial era, and this could fall to just 20% by the end of the century.
Alarming current rates of ocean acidification, unprecedented in 300 million years, are directly caused by that fact that it takes in 4 kg of CO2 per day per person on the planet. It is therefore right that the overriding goal of negotiations must be to reduce carbon emissions as much, as rapidly and as equitably as possible. But, in parallel, we must boost resilience to climate change. This includes taking urgent steps to reverse ocean decline and stimulate its recovery.
Sea creatures are not only valuable for food, they are directly involved in the climate equation. A study we commissioned earlier this year found that deep-sea life alone absorbs 1.5bn tonnes of CO2 and buries half a billion tonnes of carbon on the seabed every year – a sequestration service worth US$148bn, compared with the paltry US$16bn that high seas fishing fleets get for their annual catch.
This adds up to a convincing climate argument for taking rapid steps. It is ludicrous to perpetuate a situation where governments and businesses are scrambling to try and reduce their carbon emissions, while we carry on squandering a natural resource that is providing that service for free.
By omitting the ocean, the summit is sending a very negative message. As an event billed as an opportunity to catalyse commitments to action in the areas most important for keeping global temperature increase below 2C. Yet the message is painfully clear: despite the science, for some at least the ocean is not a top priority for climate action.
It is not enough for the ocean to be an uncredited crosscutting issue; it must be front and centre as the world puts together its long-awaited plan of attack.
The ocean is both a victim of, and a fundamental part of the solution to, climate change. It is completely out of step with reality not to highlight it as a major concern at the upcoming climate summit or at forthcoming climate negotiations and meetings. Even at this eleventh hour we believe it can and must be done.
• David Miliband, José María Figueres and Trevor Manuel are co-chairs of the Global Oceans Commission
The UN's New York climate summit is guilty of a major sin of omission
Despite a key role in cutting emissions, the ocean is completely absent from Ban Ki-moon’s climate meeting for world leaders
David Miliband, José María Figueres and Trevor Manuel
theguardian.com, Monday 22 September 2014 12.07 BST
Global warming could lead to smaller fish, according to the University of British Columbia. Photograph: Boris Horvat/AFP/Getty Images
On Tuesday, the UN headquarters in New York is hosting the largest gathering of world leaders ever to address climate change. It is an enormously important event, intended to catalyse action ahead of next year’s Paris conference – where leaders have pledged to reach a new global climate agreement, and a great credit to secretary general Ban Ki-moon and his team.
But the summit is guilty of a major sin of omission: the ocean, over two-thirds of the planet, is completely absent from the programme. It is neither one of the eight “action areas” on which governments and other key players are invited to announce bold new commitments, nor one of the “thematic sessions” where states and stakeholders will share solutions. The summit is keeping its feet firmly on dry land and is highlighting the huge gap between scientific knowledge and political action.
The Global Ocean Commission is dismayed that the ocean appears to have been relegated to the status of an afterthought, something to bring up occasionally in the context of other, apparently more essential, concerns. This is particularly shocking coming at the end of a year in which the ocean has been consistently listed among the most critical elements of the climate change challenge, by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), and numerous scientific studies and reports – including our own report released in June.
Science is showing us that there can be no solution to the climate challenge without a healthy ocean, which is currently in sharp decline. The ocean absorbs a quarter of man-made CO2 emissions, and has taken on 90% of the extra heat generated since the industrial revolution. Without the ocean to clean up our mess, the impacts of climate change would already be far more severe.
This is where the alarm bells about ocean health should start ringing: human pressures on the ocean – both its chemical composition and its immeasurable biodiversity – are undermining its ability to carry out the essential services on which we all depend. The latest edition of the WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin warns that the increasing acidification of the ocean has caused its capacity to absorb our carbon emissions to drop to 70% what it was at the start of the industrial era, and this could fall to just 20% by the end of the century.
Alarming current rates of ocean acidification, unprecedented in 300 million years, are directly caused by that fact that it takes in 4 kg of CO2 per day per person on the planet. It is therefore right that the overriding goal of negotiations must be to reduce carbon emissions as much, as rapidly and as equitably as possible. But, in parallel, we must boost resilience to climate change. This includes taking urgent steps to reverse ocean decline and stimulate its recovery.
Sea creatures are not only valuable for food, they are directly involved in the climate equation. A study we commissioned earlier this year found that deep-sea life alone absorbs 1.5bn tonnes of CO2 and buries half a billion tonnes of carbon on the seabed every year – a sequestration service worth US$148bn, compared with the paltry US$16bn that high seas fishing fleets get for their annual catch.
This adds up to a convincing climate argument for taking rapid steps. It is ludicrous to perpetuate a situation where governments and businesses are scrambling to try and reduce their carbon emissions, while we carry on squandering a natural resource that is providing that service for free.
By omitting the ocean, the summit is sending a very negative message. As an event billed as an opportunity to catalyse commitments to action in the areas most important for keeping global temperature increase below 2C. Yet the message is painfully clear: despite the science, for some at least the ocean is not a top priority for climate action.
It is not enough for the ocean to be an uncredited crosscutting issue; it must be front and centre as the world puts together its long-awaited plan of attack.
The ocean is both a victim of, and a fundamental part of the solution to, climate change. It is completely out of step with reality not to highlight it as a major concern at the upcoming climate summit or at forthcoming climate negotiations and meetings. Even at this eleventh hour we believe it can and must be done.
• David Miliband, José María Figueres and Trevor Manuel are co-chairs of the Global Oceans Commission
Last edited by a moderator:
http://www.pressprogress.ca/en/post...any-his-colleagues-are-climate-change-deniers
SEP 22, 2014 by PressProgress
National Post editor explains why many of his colleagues are climate change deniers
Why do National Post columnists publish piece after piece attacking climate science?
According to the guy who edits them, it's because they're blinded by ideology.
Here's what Jonathan Kay, the National Post's comments page editor and a guy who is generally considered a right-of-centre commentator in his own right, said on CBC's The National Sunday night, just after the largest ever climate change march and on the eve of the United Nations Climate Summit on Tuesday.
"The people I work with at the National Post — because there are some colleagues I have who are what you may call 'climate change deniers' — generally the one universal aspect is that they tend to be right-wing in their thinking, they see market-based solutions as the solution to enriching our society in every respect and it bothers them, the idea that here's this problem that cannot be solved with unfettered industrial activity."
Watch the remarkable and breathtakingly frank admission about why "they end up rejecting the climate change science":
<iframe width="870" height="490" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/z1YnJa5-wZk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
For those keeping track, this isn't the first time Kay has heaped scorn on colleagues for writing with horse blinders on.
In 2010, Kay condemned the "paranoid" writings of climate change deniers promoting the idea that "global warming is some sort of giant intellectual fraud." He elaborated: "one can't help but be reminded of the folks who point out the fluttering American flag in the moon-landing photos, or the 'umbrella man' from the Zapruder film of JFK's assassination."
"In the case of global warming, this dissonance is especially traumatic for many conservatives, because they have based their whole worldview on the idea that unfettered capitalism — and the asphalt-paved, gas-guzzling consumer culture it has spawned — is synonymous with both personal fulfillment and human advancement. The global-warming hypothesis challenges that fundamental dogma, perhaps fatally."
In that instance, Kay singled out Terence Corcoran and Rex Murphy. He pointed to the latter's prediction that we had reached "the church of global warming's Galileo moment" and Murphy's reference to the "growing skepticism about the theory of man-made climate change.
Kay added: "Fine-sounding rhetoric — but all of it nonsense."
Well, that explains that.
Wonder if the same ideological tunnel-vision Kay describes explains why the National Post consistently tries to derail attempts to find solutions to climate change or make sure industry has adequate checks and balances too?
SEP 22, 2014 by PressProgress
National Post editor explains why many of his colleagues are climate change deniers
Why do National Post columnists publish piece after piece attacking climate science?
According to the guy who edits them, it's because they're blinded by ideology.
Here's what Jonathan Kay, the National Post's comments page editor and a guy who is generally considered a right-of-centre commentator in his own right, said on CBC's The National Sunday night, just after the largest ever climate change march and on the eve of the United Nations Climate Summit on Tuesday.
"The people I work with at the National Post — because there are some colleagues I have who are what you may call 'climate change deniers' — generally the one universal aspect is that they tend to be right-wing in their thinking, they see market-based solutions as the solution to enriching our society in every respect and it bothers them, the idea that here's this problem that cannot be solved with unfettered industrial activity."
Watch the remarkable and breathtakingly frank admission about why "they end up rejecting the climate change science":
<iframe width="870" height="490" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/z1YnJa5-wZk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
For those keeping track, this isn't the first time Kay has heaped scorn on colleagues for writing with horse blinders on.
In 2010, Kay condemned the "paranoid" writings of climate change deniers promoting the idea that "global warming is some sort of giant intellectual fraud." He elaborated: "one can't help but be reminded of the folks who point out the fluttering American flag in the moon-landing photos, or the 'umbrella man' from the Zapruder film of JFK's assassination."
"In the case of global warming, this dissonance is especially traumatic for many conservatives, because they have based their whole worldview on the idea that unfettered capitalism — and the asphalt-paved, gas-guzzling consumer culture it has spawned — is synonymous with both personal fulfillment and human advancement. The global-warming hypothesis challenges that fundamental dogma, perhaps fatally."
In that instance, Kay singled out Terence Corcoran and Rex Murphy. He pointed to the latter's prediction that we had reached "the church of global warming's Galileo moment" and Murphy's reference to the "growing skepticism about the theory of man-made climate change.
Kay added: "Fine-sounding rhetoric — but all of it nonsense."
Well, that explains that.
Wonder if the same ideological tunnel-vision Kay describes explains why the National Post consistently tries to derail attempts to find solutions to climate change or make sure industry has adequate checks and balances too?
http://billmoyers.com/2014/09/19/can-still-tackle-global-warming-five-solutions/
We Can Still Tackle Global Warming — Here Are Five Solutions
September 19, 2014
by Joshua Holland
A proposed 220-kilometer bike “superhighway” that could be built on London’s existing railway lines. (Image: Foster + Partners architects)
“Mother Earth” will be fine whether or not we protect the planet from catastrophic global warming. We’re fighting for human habitat — for our own future on this spaceship.
The good news is that we can prevail with minimal costs if we act decisively over the next 15 years. That’s the conclusion of a report released this week by The Global Commission on Climate and the Economy, a group of former senior government officials advised by some of the world’s leading economists.
As The New York Times reported, the commission found that “an ambitious series of measures to limit emissions would cost $4 trillion or so over the next 15 years, an increase of roughly 5 percent over the amount that would likely be spent anyway on new power plants, transit systems and other infrastructure.”
When the secondary benefits of greener policies — like lower fuel costs, fewer premature deaths from air pollution and reduced medical bills — are taken into account, the changes might wind up saving money.
The solutions are there; the roadblocks are political and cultural.
The politics are straightforward: corporations that wield disproportionate political power tend to focus on short-term profits, and the investments required to combat climate change are significant. Fossil fuel companies’ market valuations are based on their proven reserves, and 80 percent of those reserves have to stay in the ground if we’re to avert catastrophic climate change.
The other reality is that, at least to some degree, we’re going to have to change the way we live. As Naomi Klein told BillMoyers.com this week, “if we’re going to get off fossil fuels by midcentury, which we need to do, we are going to need to consume less. And that’s the piece that nobody wants to talk about.”
What might we be doing if there were no oil industry shills muddying the waters around climate change and the climate change deniers were run out of Congress? If we followed the science, here are some of the things we could be doing right now.
1. Move Toward Sane Subsidies
Transportation and the generation of electricity account for a huge share of global greenhouse gas emissions – in the US, the two sectors account for about 60 percent of what we contribute to our warming planet.
According to the Global Commission, worldwide subsidies for fossil fuels total $600 billion per year, while governments around the world only subsidize renewable energy to the tune of $100 billion.
Those numbers are out of whack. The point of subsidizing something is to intervene in the market in order to encourage more of its production. We’re subsidizing the industries that threaten our future with six times the resources than we do those that will help address the problem. While the price of solar and wind energy are falling rapidly, the process of transitioning to renewables would move a lot faster if our subsidies aligned with the imperative of saving our habitat.
Consider the impact that might have on cars alone. According to the industry forecaster IHS Automotive, worldwide sales of electric cars will remain shy of 1 million by 2020. A big part of the reason cleaner cars haven’t taken off is that the citizens of many countries enjoy cheap, heavily subsidized gas. In the US, where gas currently sells for less than $4 per gallon, the actual cost of that same gallon would be around $1.65 higher if we included only direct subsidies to oil companies. When you include indirect subsidies – like providing security to energy companies’ overseas operations or picking up the costs of health care caused by pollution – some estimate that the cost of gas would exceed $15 per gallon. If we had to pay the true price of gas, those electric vehicles that get 100 miles to the gallon would look a lot more attractive.
2. A Global Apollo Program
In 1961, John F. Kennedy announced the ambitious goal of landing men on the surface of the moon by the end of that decade. Over the next eight years, 400,000 Americans and 20,000 industrial firms and universities made it happen – at a cost, in today’s dollars, of around $200 billion. It was arguably the single biggest mobilization of resources any country had ever undertaken during peacetime.
Getting the Earth’s climate under control will require similarly massive investments. According to economist Robert Pollin, the US, which is responsible for about 17 percent of global emissions, could reduce its footprint by 40 percent by investing 1.2 percent of our economic output into new infrastructure over the next 20 years — enough to reach our target of reducing emissions by 40 percent.
The Global Commission estimates that the world will have to spend around $90 trillion over the next 15 years on energy infrastructure regardless of whether or not we tackle climate change. The authors write that “by combining renewable energy with reduced fossil fuel investment, more compact cities, and more efficiently managed energy demand,” we can create a low-carbon economy by spending an additional $4.2 trillion… [and] these higher capital costs could potentially be fully offset by lower operating costs, for example from reduced expenditure on fuel.” That’s a modest five percent increase in spending up front, which may pay for itself entirely down the road.
Germany is already undergoing an energy revolution by taking a similar approach, albeit on a much smaller scale. The New York Times reported this week that the German government has invested $140 billion in wind and solar energy, and will soon get twice the share of its power from renewables — 30 percent — as the US. And The Times points out that “Germany’s relentless push into renewable energy has implications far beyond its shores.”
By creating huge demand for wind turbines and especially for solar panels, it has helped lure big Chinese manufacturers into the market, and that combination is driving down costs faster than almost anyone thought possible just a few years ago.
As a result, “electric utility executives all over the world are watching nervously as technologies they once dismissed as irrelevant begin to threaten their long-established business plans.” That’s precisely the kind of “disruption” we’ll need to preserve our habitat, and it began with significant public investments by the German government.
..continued
We Can Still Tackle Global Warming — Here Are Five Solutions
September 19, 2014
by Joshua Holland
A proposed 220-kilometer bike “superhighway” that could be built on London’s existing railway lines. (Image: Foster + Partners architects)
“Mother Earth” will be fine whether or not we protect the planet from catastrophic global warming. We’re fighting for human habitat — for our own future on this spaceship.
The good news is that we can prevail with minimal costs if we act decisively over the next 15 years. That’s the conclusion of a report released this week by The Global Commission on Climate and the Economy, a group of former senior government officials advised by some of the world’s leading economists.
As The New York Times reported, the commission found that “an ambitious series of measures to limit emissions would cost $4 trillion or so over the next 15 years, an increase of roughly 5 percent over the amount that would likely be spent anyway on new power plants, transit systems and other infrastructure.”
When the secondary benefits of greener policies — like lower fuel costs, fewer premature deaths from air pollution and reduced medical bills — are taken into account, the changes might wind up saving money.
The solutions are there; the roadblocks are political and cultural.
The politics are straightforward: corporations that wield disproportionate political power tend to focus on short-term profits, and the investments required to combat climate change are significant. Fossil fuel companies’ market valuations are based on their proven reserves, and 80 percent of those reserves have to stay in the ground if we’re to avert catastrophic climate change.
The other reality is that, at least to some degree, we’re going to have to change the way we live. As Naomi Klein told BillMoyers.com this week, “if we’re going to get off fossil fuels by midcentury, which we need to do, we are going to need to consume less. And that’s the piece that nobody wants to talk about.”
What might we be doing if there were no oil industry shills muddying the waters around climate change and the climate change deniers were run out of Congress? If we followed the science, here are some of the things we could be doing right now.
1. Move Toward Sane Subsidies
Transportation and the generation of electricity account for a huge share of global greenhouse gas emissions – in the US, the two sectors account for about 60 percent of what we contribute to our warming planet.
According to the Global Commission, worldwide subsidies for fossil fuels total $600 billion per year, while governments around the world only subsidize renewable energy to the tune of $100 billion.
Those numbers are out of whack. The point of subsidizing something is to intervene in the market in order to encourage more of its production. We’re subsidizing the industries that threaten our future with six times the resources than we do those that will help address the problem. While the price of solar and wind energy are falling rapidly, the process of transitioning to renewables would move a lot faster if our subsidies aligned with the imperative of saving our habitat.
Consider the impact that might have on cars alone. According to the industry forecaster IHS Automotive, worldwide sales of electric cars will remain shy of 1 million by 2020. A big part of the reason cleaner cars haven’t taken off is that the citizens of many countries enjoy cheap, heavily subsidized gas. In the US, where gas currently sells for less than $4 per gallon, the actual cost of that same gallon would be around $1.65 higher if we included only direct subsidies to oil companies. When you include indirect subsidies – like providing security to energy companies’ overseas operations or picking up the costs of health care caused by pollution – some estimate that the cost of gas would exceed $15 per gallon. If we had to pay the true price of gas, those electric vehicles that get 100 miles to the gallon would look a lot more attractive.
2. A Global Apollo Program
In 1961, John F. Kennedy announced the ambitious goal of landing men on the surface of the moon by the end of that decade. Over the next eight years, 400,000 Americans and 20,000 industrial firms and universities made it happen – at a cost, in today’s dollars, of around $200 billion. It was arguably the single biggest mobilization of resources any country had ever undertaken during peacetime.
Getting the Earth’s climate under control will require similarly massive investments. According to economist Robert Pollin, the US, which is responsible for about 17 percent of global emissions, could reduce its footprint by 40 percent by investing 1.2 percent of our economic output into new infrastructure over the next 20 years — enough to reach our target of reducing emissions by 40 percent.
The Global Commission estimates that the world will have to spend around $90 trillion over the next 15 years on energy infrastructure regardless of whether or not we tackle climate change. The authors write that “by combining renewable energy with reduced fossil fuel investment, more compact cities, and more efficiently managed energy demand,” we can create a low-carbon economy by spending an additional $4.2 trillion… [and] these higher capital costs could potentially be fully offset by lower operating costs, for example from reduced expenditure on fuel.” That’s a modest five percent increase in spending up front, which may pay for itself entirely down the road.
Germany is already undergoing an energy revolution by taking a similar approach, albeit on a much smaller scale. The New York Times reported this week that the German government has invested $140 billion in wind and solar energy, and will soon get twice the share of its power from renewables — 30 percent — as the US. And The Times points out that “Germany’s relentless push into renewable energy has implications far beyond its shores.”
By creating huge demand for wind turbines and especially for solar panels, it has helped lure big Chinese manufacturers into the market, and that combination is driving down costs faster than almost anyone thought possible just a few years ago.
As a result, “electric utility executives all over the world are watching nervously as technologies they once dismissed as irrelevant begin to threaten their long-established business plans.” That’s precisely the kind of “disruption” we’ll need to preserve our habitat, and it began with significant public investments by the German government.
..continued
3. Build Smarter
We’re going to have to build smarter and live in denser communities.
Cities are currently the home to about half of the world’s population, but they account for 80 percent of our economic output and 70 percent of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions.
The Global Commission estimates that over the next two decades, “nearly all of the world’s net population growth is expected to occur in urban areas, with about 1.4 million people – close to the population of Stockholm – added each week.”
How we grow those cities will have a huge impact. Urban development is now haphazard and largely unplanned. But as the authors of the Global Commission’s report point out, “pioneering cities across the world are demonstrating [that] more compact and connected urban development, built around mass public transport, can create cities that are economically dynamic and healthier, and that have lower emissions.” They add that “such an approach to urbanization could reduce urban infrastructure capital requirements by more than $3 trillion over the next 15 years.”
Stockholm, Sweden, has a model of sustainability in a development called Hammarby Sjöstad, which was built in a formerly bleak industrial area. According to its website, “the City has imposed tough environmental requirements on buildings, technical installations and the traffic environment from day one.”
Everybody who lives in Hammarby Sjöstad is a part of an eco-cycle. The eco-cycle solution in Hammarby Sjöstad is called the Hammarby Model and handles energy, waste, sewage and water for both housing and offices.
The goal is to create a residential environment based on sustainable resource usage. Energy consumption and the waste production are to be minimized while the resource saving, reusing and recycling are maximized.
4. Rethink Transportation
Transportation accounts for 28 percent of America’s greenhouse gas emissions, and because of our sprawling exurbs, relatively low population density and firm embrace of our car culture, this is a source emissions that will be especially challenging for us to address.
But in recent years, we’ve taken some important if incremental steps in this area. The Obama administration’s vehicle efficiency standards, enacted in 2013, are expected to cut tailpipe emissions from cars and light truck in half by 2025. Next year, the EPA will issue similar standards for heavy trucks.
But further efforts – and more creative thinking – are required. Light rail and other forms of public transit make it possible for people to ditch their cars. A number of US cities are investing in gondolas as a form of public transit; in South America, they’ve already proven to be “cleaner, more efficient and quieter than gas-guzzling buses — all crucial features in the age of climate change,” according to The International Business Times.
In Copenhagen, they’ve built a four-lane bicycle “superhighway” connecting the city to nearby suburbs. It’s the first of many Danish cities to do so, and as Time Magazine reported, “cycle superhighways could increase the number of cyclists by 30 percent, adding 15,000 more cyclists to the superhighway network, saving 7000 tons of CO2 and 300 million Danish Krones in health costs per year.” In Mälmo, Sweden, efforts to make the city more bike-friendly have paid off handsomely – cycling has increased by 30 percent in each of the past four years, and the city is now investing in a bike highway that will connect it to the neighboring city of Lund.
The greenhouse effects of flying are becoming a hot-button issue. One roundtrip flight from San Francisco “creates a warming effect equivalent to 2 or 3 tons of carbon dioxide per person,” according to The New York Times – that’s around 20 to 30 percent of what the typical European’s carbon footprint is for an entire year. But most commercial flights in the US are less than 500 miles, and a 2006 study by the Center for Neighborhood Technology found that “a full network of high-speed trains could save as much as 6 billion pounds of Carbon Dioxide per year.” Magnetic levitation, or MagLev train systems promise to be even greener.
5. The Bare Minimum: Take the Conservative Approach
Just as the broad structure of Obamacare was first developed by conservative wonks as a “free market” approach to expanding healthcare coverage — only to be demonized later on as a pernicious form of socialism — so too began the move toward “cap-and-trade” in the Reagan White House.
There are modest emissions trading systems already in place around the world, and they’ve proven to be effective – usually in combination with a straightforward tax on greenhouse gas emissions.
Alone, these schemes aren’t sufficient for the challenge at hand, but if expanded, and in combination with other efforts to tackle the climate crisis, cap-and-trade and carbon taxes represent a solid step toward sustainability.
A Little Light in a Dark Picture
As BillMoyers.com’s John Light points out, the latest IPCC report is “bleak, to say the least.” It gets worse: a study led by Harvard scientific historian Naomi Oreskes found that scientists tend to err “on the side of least drama,” suggesting that the IPCC’s projections probably understate the severity of the problem. And, as Naomi Klein told BillMoyers.com this week, there’s a “procrastination penalty” when it comes to emissions, and we’ve waited far longer than we should have to act on the science that was available to us 20 years ago.
The fossil fuel industry has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in a network of climate “skeptics” to muddy the waters around climate change, and that effort has been a success: while there’s a solid scientific consensus that human activities are warming the planet, a 2012 Pew Poll found that only 45 percent of Americans knew that there’s virtually no debate among climatologists over the basic facts.
Despite that bleak outlook, it’s encouraging that people all over the world are taking concrete steps in the right direction. It’s good to know that there are solutions out there – that it’s the political will that’s lacking, rather than some sort of impossible-to-overcome technological challenges. And grassroots movements have changed many political landscapes in the past.
So we still have the ability to correct our course – it’s entirely in our hands.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
We’re going to have to build smarter and live in denser communities.
Cities are currently the home to about half of the world’s population, but they account for 80 percent of our economic output and 70 percent of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions.
The Global Commission estimates that over the next two decades, “nearly all of the world’s net population growth is expected to occur in urban areas, with about 1.4 million people – close to the population of Stockholm – added each week.”
How we grow those cities will have a huge impact. Urban development is now haphazard and largely unplanned. But as the authors of the Global Commission’s report point out, “pioneering cities across the world are demonstrating [that] more compact and connected urban development, built around mass public transport, can create cities that are economically dynamic and healthier, and that have lower emissions.” They add that “such an approach to urbanization could reduce urban infrastructure capital requirements by more than $3 trillion over the next 15 years.”
Stockholm, Sweden, has a model of sustainability in a development called Hammarby Sjöstad, which was built in a formerly bleak industrial area. According to its website, “the City has imposed tough environmental requirements on buildings, technical installations and the traffic environment from day one.”
Everybody who lives in Hammarby Sjöstad is a part of an eco-cycle. The eco-cycle solution in Hammarby Sjöstad is called the Hammarby Model and handles energy, waste, sewage and water for both housing and offices.
The goal is to create a residential environment based on sustainable resource usage. Energy consumption and the waste production are to be minimized while the resource saving, reusing and recycling are maximized.
4. Rethink Transportation
Transportation accounts for 28 percent of America’s greenhouse gas emissions, and because of our sprawling exurbs, relatively low population density and firm embrace of our car culture, this is a source emissions that will be especially challenging for us to address.
But in recent years, we’ve taken some important if incremental steps in this area. The Obama administration’s vehicle efficiency standards, enacted in 2013, are expected to cut tailpipe emissions from cars and light truck in half by 2025. Next year, the EPA will issue similar standards for heavy trucks.
But further efforts – and more creative thinking – are required. Light rail and other forms of public transit make it possible for people to ditch their cars. A number of US cities are investing in gondolas as a form of public transit; in South America, they’ve already proven to be “cleaner, more efficient and quieter than gas-guzzling buses — all crucial features in the age of climate change,” according to The International Business Times.
In Copenhagen, they’ve built a four-lane bicycle “superhighway” connecting the city to nearby suburbs. It’s the first of many Danish cities to do so, and as Time Magazine reported, “cycle superhighways could increase the number of cyclists by 30 percent, adding 15,000 more cyclists to the superhighway network, saving 7000 tons of CO2 and 300 million Danish Krones in health costs per year.” In Mälmo, Sweden, efforts to make the city more bike-friendly have paid off handsomely – cycling has increased by 30 percent in each of the past four years, and the city is now investing in a bike highway that will connect it to the neighboring city of Lund.
The greenhouse effects of flying are becoming a hot-button issue. One roundtrip flight from San Francisco “creates a warming effect equivalent to 2 or 3 tons of carbon dioxide per person,” according to The New York Times – that’s around 20 to 30 percent of what the typical European’s carbon footprint is for an entire year. But most commercial flights in the US are less than 500 miles, and a 2006 study by the Center for Neighborhood Technology found that “a full network of high-speed trains could save as much as 6 billion pounds of Carbon Dioxide per year.” Magnetic levitation, or MagLev train systems promise to be even greener.
5. The Bare Minimum: Take the Conservative Approach
Just as the broad structure of Obamacare was first developed by conservative wonks as a “free market” approach to expanding healthcare coverage — only to be demonized later on as a pernicious form of socialism — so too began the move toward “cap-and-trade” in the Reagan White House.
There are modest emissions trading systems already in place around the world, and they’ve proven to be effective – usually in combination with a straightforward tax on greenhouse gas emissions.
Alone, these schemes aren’t sufficient for the challenge at hand, but if expanded, and in combination with other efforts to tackle the climate crisis, cap-and-trade and carbon taxes represent a solid step toward sustainability.
A Little Light in a Dark Picture
As BillMoyers.com’s John Light points out, the latest IPCC report is “bleak, to say the least.” It gets worse: a study led by Harvard scientific historian Naomi Oreskes found that scientists tend to err “on the side of least drama,” suggesting that the IPCC’s projections probably understate the severity of the problem. And, as Naomi Klein told BillMoyers.com this week, there’s a “procrastination penalty” when it comes to emissions, and we’ve waited far longer than we should have to act on the science that was available to us 20 years ago.
The fossil fuel industry has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in a network of climate “skeptics” to muddy the waters around climate change, and that effort has been a success: while there’s a solid scientific consensus that human activities are warming the planet, a 2012 Pew Poll found that only 45 percent of Americans knew that there’s virtually no debate among climatologists over the basic facts.
Despite that bleak outlook, it’s encouraging that people all over the world are taking concrete steps in the right direction. It’s good to know that there are solutions out there – that it’s the political will that’s lacking, rather than some sort of impossible-to-overcome technological challenges. And grassroots movements have changed many political landscapes in the past.
So we still have the ability to correct our course – it’s entirely in our hands.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
OldBlackDog
Well-Known Member
Surprising PNAS paper: CO2 emissions not the cause of U.S. West Coast warming
Anthony Watts / 1 hour ago September 22, 2014
The rise in temperatures along the U.S. West Coast during the past century is almost entirely the result of natural forces — not human emissions of greenhouse gases, according to a major new study released today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Northeast Pacific coastal warming since 1900 is often ascribed to anthropogenic greenhouse forcing, whereas multidecadal temperature changes are widely interpreted in the framework of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which responds to regional atmospheric dynamics. This study uses several independent data sources to demonstrate that century-long warming around the northeast Pacific margins, like multidecadal variability, can be primarily attributed to changes in atmospheric circulation. It presents a significant reinterpretation of the region’s recent climate change origins, showing that atmospheric conditions have changed substantially over the last century, that these changes are not likely related to historical anthropogenic and natural radiative forcing, and that dynamical mechanisms of interannual and multidecadal temperature variability can also apply to observed century-long trends.
From a Seattle Times newspaper story: (h/t Dale Hartz)
The vast majority of coastal temperature increases since 1900 are the result of changes in winds over the eastern Pacific Ocean, the authors found. But they could find no evidence that those weather patterns were themselves being influenced by the human burning of fossil fuels.
…
Since the ocean is the biggest driver of temperature changes along the coast, the authors tracked land and sea surface temperatures there going back 113 years. They found that virtually all of the roughly 1 degree Celsius average temperature increase could be explained by changes in air circulation.
“It’s a simple story, but the results are very surprising: We do not see a human hand in the warming of the West Coast,” said co-author Nate Mantua, with NOAA Fisheries Southwest Fisheries Science Center. “That is taking people by surprise, and may generate some blowback.”
Source: http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2024601865_climateweatherstudyxml.html
The paper:
Atmospheric controls on northeast Pacific temperature variability and change, 1900–2012
James A. Johnstone and Nathan J. Mantua
Abstract
Over the last century, northeast Pacific coastal sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and land-based surface air temperatures (SATs) display multidecadal variations associated with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, in addition to a warming trend of ∼0.5–1 °C. Using independent records of sea-level pressure (SLP), SST, and SAT, this study investigates northeast (NE) Pacific coupled atmosphere–ocean variability from 1900 to 2012, with emphasis on the coastal areas around North America. We use a linear stochastic time series model to show that the SST evolution around the NE Pacific coast can be explained by a combination of regional atmospheric forcing and ocean persistence, accounting for 63% of nonseasonal monthly SST variance (r = 0.79) and 73% of variance in annual means (r = 0.86). We show that SLP reductions and related atmospheric forcing led to century-long warming around the NE Pacific margins, with the strongest trends observed from 1910–1920 to 1940. NE Pacific circulation changes are estimated to account for more than 80% of the 1900–2012 linear warming in coastal NE Pacific SST and US Pacific northwest (Washington, Oregon, and northern California) SAT. An ensemble of climate model simulations run under the same historical radiative forcings fails to reproduce the observed regional circulation trends. These results suggest that natural internally generated changes in atmospheric circulation were the primary cause of coastal NE Pacific warming from 1900 to 2012 and demonstrate more generally that regional mechanisms of interannual and multidecadal temperature variability can also extend to century time scales.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/09/16/1318371111.abstract
September 22, 2014 in Oceans, PDO.
Anthony Watts / 1 hour ago September 22, 2014
The rise in temperatures along the U.S. West Coast during the past century is almost entirely the result of natural forces — not human emissions of greenhouse gases, according to a major new study released today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Northeast Pacific coastal warming since 1900 is often ascribed to anthropogenic greenhouse forcing, whereas multidecadal temperature changes are widely interpreted in the framework of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which responds to regional atmospheric dynamics. This study uses several independent data sources to demonstrate that century-long warming around the northeast Pacific margins, like multidecadal variability, can be primarily attributed to changes in atmospheric circulation. It presents a significant reinterpretation of the region’s recent climate change origins, showing that atmospheric conditions have changed substantially over the last century, that these changes are not likely related to historical anthropogenic and natural radiative forcing, and that dynamical mechanisms of interannual and multidecadal temperature variability can also apply to observed century-long trends.
From a Seattle Times newspaper story: (h/t Dale Hartz)
The vast majority of coastal temperature increases since 1900 are the result of changes in winds over the eastern Pacific Ocean, the authors found. But they could find no evidence that those weather patterns were themselves being influenced by the human burning of fossil fuels.
…
Since the ocean is the biggest driver of temperature changes along the coast, the authors tracked land and sea surface temperatures there going back 113 years. They found that virtually all of the roughly 1 degree Celsius average temperature increase could be explained by changes in air circulation.
“It’s a simple story, but the results are very surprising: We do not see a human hand in the warming of the West Coast,” said co-author Nate Mantua, with NOAA Fisheries Southwest Fisheries Science Center. “That is taking people by surprise, and may generate some blowback.”
Source: http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2024601865_climateweatherstudyxml.html
The paper:
Atmospheric controls on northeast Pacific temperature variability and change, 1900–2012
James A. Johnstone and Nathan J. Mantua
Abstract
Over the last century, northeast Pacific coastal sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and land-based surface air temperatures (SATs) display multidecadal variations associated with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, in addition to a warming trend of ∼0.5–1 °C. Using independent records of sea-level pressure (SLP), SST, and SAT, this study investigates northeast (NE) Pacific coupled atmosphere–ocean variability from 1900 to 2012, with emphasis on the coastal areas around North America. We use a linear stochastic time series model to show that the SST evolution around the NE Pacific coast can be explained by a combination of regional atmospheric forcing and ocean persistence, accounting for 63% of nonseasonal monthly SST variance (r = 0.79) and 73% of variance in annual means (r = 0.86). We show that SLP reductions and related atmospheric forcing led to century-long warming around the NE Pacific margins, with the strongest trends observed from 1910–1920 to 1940. NE Pacific circulation changes are estimated to account for more than 80% of the 1900–2012 linear warming in coastal NE Pacific SST and US Pacific northwest (Washington, Oregon, and northern California) SAT. An ensemble of climate model simulations run under the same historical radiative forcings fails to reproduce the observed regional circulation trends. These results suggest that natural internally generated changes in atmospheric circulation were the primary cause of coastal NE Pacific warming from 1900 to 2012 and demonstrate more generally that regional mechanisms of interannual and multidecadal temperature variability can also extend to century time scales.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/09/16/1318371111.abstract
September 22, 2014 in Oceans, PDO.
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