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Telescopes ‘worthless’ by 2050 due to climate change and contrails
Paul Rincon, BBC
Ground-based astronomy could be impossible in 40 years because of pollution from aircraft exhaust trails and climate change, an expert says.
Aircraft condensation trails – known as contrails – can dissipate, becoming indistinguishable from other clouds.
If trends in cheap air travel continue, says Professor Gerry Gilmore, the era of ground astronomy may come to an end much earlier than most had predicted.
Aircraft along with climate change will contribute to increased cloud cover.
(2 March 2006)
Air travel is also a contributor to climate change.
Global warming – Even a small temperature gain could spell doom for many Northwest ski resorts
Richar L. Hill, Oregonian
CORVALLIS This winter’s deep snow in the Cascades is a snowboarder’s dream, but a new study suggests that ski areas may have fewer such bonanza seasons if Northwest temperatures continue to rise as they have for decades.
Projecting warmer weather from a climate model keyed to the Pacific Northwest, researchers at Oregon State University identify 19 ski areas in the Cascade and Olympic mountain areas as being “at risk” of substantially fewer cold, and snowy, winters by midcentury.
They calculate that Mt. Hood Meadows Ski Resort, for example, now faces warm winters about 7 percent of the time but by 2040 would have warm winters nearly half the time. If the projections prove accurate, lower elevation ski areas, such as Cooper Spur and Mt. Hood Skibowl, would be especially hard-hit, going to warm winters nearly 75 percent of the time, up from between 30 percent and 40 percent now.
(8 March 2006)
Related articles in Seattle Times and Bellingham Herald.
The planet can’t wait
Climate change is real and must be addressed now
David Ignatius, Washington Post
The warnings are coming from frogs and beetles, from melting ice and changing ocean currents, and from scientists and responsible politicians around the world. And yet what is the U.S. government doing about global warming? Nothing. That should shock the conscience of Americans.
Actually, the Bush administration’s policy is worse than doing nothing. It has resisted efforts by other nations to discuss new actions that could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide before the global climate reaches a disastrous tipping point. And it muzzles administration scientists to keep them from warning about the seriousness of the issue. The administration’s position is that more research is needed — and then, as evidence grows that humans are adding to global warming, it calls for still more research.
Congress is no better. Most members apparently are waiting for permission from lobbyists and campaign contributors before getting serious about climate change.
(8 March 2006)
Oil industry targets EU climate policy
David Adam, The Guardian
· US lobby seeks to derail Kyoto measures
· Documents show plan to sway post-2012 agenda
Lobbyists funded by the US oil industry have launched a campaign in Europe aimed at derailing efforts to tackle greenhouse gas pollution and climate change.
Documents obtained by Greenpeace and seen by the Guardian reveal a systematic plan to persuade European business, politicians and the media that the EU should abandon its commitments under the Kyoto protocol, the international agreement that aims to reduce emissions that lead to global warming. The disclosure comes as United Nations climate change talks in Montreal on the future of Kyoto, the first phase of which expires in 2012, enter a critical phase.
The documents, an email and a PowerPoint presentation, describe efforts to establish a European coalition to “challenge the course of the EU’s post-2012 agenda”. They were written by Chris Horner, a Washington DC lawyer and senior fellow at the rightwing thinktank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has received more than $1.3m (£750,000) funding from the US oil giant Exxon Mobil. Mr Horner also acts for the Cooler Heads Coalition, a group set up “to dispel the myth of global warming”.
The PowerPoint document sets out plans to establish a group called the European Sound Climate Policy Coalition. It says: “In the US an informal coalition has helped successfully to avert adoption of a Kyoto-style program. This model should be emulated, as appropriate, to guide similar efforts in Europe.”
During the 1990s US oil companies and other corporations funded a group called the Global Climate Coalition, which emphasised uncertainties in climate science and disputed the need to take action. It was disbanded when President Bush pulled the US out of the Kyoto process. Its website now says: “The industry voice on climate change has served its purpose by contributing to a new national approach to global warming.”
(8 Decenber 2005)
Note that the article is three months old. Recommended by “backstop” at peakoil-dot-com.
Field Trip
Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Field Notes From a Catastrophe” gives climate change a human face
Denis Hayes, Grist
…Kolbert has now done for climate disruption what she did for celebrities [in a previous book]. She has taken a topic that many people think of as an impersonal collection of hurricanes, spreading deserts, and rising oceans — or perhaps as two lines crossing on a graph some decades from now — and given it a human face. And, as important, given it urgency.
Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change is an extraordinary piece of reporting. Like Kolbert’s earlier book, most of this one appeared first in the New Yorker. The author visits, among other locations, Alaska, Greenland, Yorkshire, and Oregon — places where people are studying, or simply experiencing, every facet of global warming.
…Rob Socolow, codirector of Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative, deftly summarizes the central theme of the book: “I’ve been involved in a number of fields where there’s a lay opinion and a scientific opinion,” he told Kolbert. “And in most cases it’s the lay community that is more exercised, more anxious … But in the climate case, the experts — the people who work with climate models every day, the people who do ice cores — they are more concerned. They are going out of their way to say, ‘Wake up!'”
Elizabeth Kolbert allows them to say “Wake up!” to an audience they would otherwise never reach. For the sake of the planet, I hope that audience, especially in America, is enormous — and that it includes all the political wonks who loved her first book so much.
(9 March 2006)
Better Read Than Dead
Three new books put the spotlight on our warming world
Denis Hayes, Grist
Here at Grist, we tend to be good at detecting extremely subtle patterns.
…Lately, we’ve noticed a whole mess of books emerging about climate change. If the whims of publishers are any indication, this climate thing might just be real. We hereby review a few of the shiniest tomes coming out this spring — and if our keen insights on other matters are any indication, this won’t be the last of them.
The Weather Makers, by Tim Flannery, Atlantic Monthly Press, 357 pgs, 2006.
The Winds of Change, by Eugene Linden, Simon & Schuster, 320 pgs, 2006.
The North Pole Was Here, by Andrew C. Revkin, Kingfisher Press, 128 pgs, 2006.
(9 March 2006)
