Climate – Aug 6

August 6, 2006

Click on the headline (link) for the full text.

Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage


More Frequent Heat Waves Linked to Global Warming

Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post
U.S. and European Researchers Call Long Hot Spells Likely
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Heat waves like those that have scorched Europe and the United States in recent weeks are becoming more frequent because of global warming, say scientists who have studied decades of weather records and computer models of past, present and future climate.

While it is impossible to attribute any one weather event to climate change, several recent studies suggest that human-generated emissions of heat-trapping gases have produced both higher overall temperatures and greater weather variability, which raise the odds of longer, more intense heat waves.

Last week, Paul Della-Marta, a researcher at Switzerland’s Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology, presented findings at an international conference on climate science in Gwatt, Switzerland, showing that since 1880 the duration of heat waves in Western Europe has doubled and the number of unusually hot days in the region has nearly tripled.
(4 Aug 2006)


Eugene Linden: The gathering apocalypse

Eugene Linden, Star Tribune (Minnesota)
As the weather gradually unmoors from its normal patterns, at some point we’ll have no choice but to realize that global warming is upon us.

I’ve written a good deal about global warming over the years, but like most people, I still have a hard time envisioning how we will know when the apocalypse arrives. Nobody will ring a bell to announce that a climate-change event has begun, and it’s easy to ignore the signals that climate is changing. After all, we’ve always had extreme weather, and it’s possible that what signifies the point of no return will not be in the realm of weather anyway but rather a derivative effect such as a financial crisis or crop failure.
(2 Aug 2006)


Methane Burps and Heat Waves: Global Warming Made Visible

Bill Blakemore, ABC News
Super Computer Predicts Rising Temperatures as Escaping Gas Bubbles Up Through the Sea
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Visualization can be a powerful aid to realization, and two such aids to realizing the great and imminent danger of global warming have just come to light.

One paints a remarkable picture of the output of an immense supercomputer hidden in the basement of a futuristic government building in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies that requires a special pass. The other reveals a scene on the sea floor off the coast of California, previously requiring SCUBA gear and a waterproof map.

Now you can see both by just clicking on the “Video – click to watch” caption under the picture next to this story.

The gigantic super-computer in the basement of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., is so big you can walk down the aisles inside it, the walls of the sleek black servers at either elbow, wrapped in the constant hum of air coolers and countless trillions of silicon chip operations working day and night to calculate the climate future over the next several decades of the only home we’ve got: Earth.

“These super computers are getting more and more powerful every year,” scientist Jerry Meehl told us as he gave us the tour. “It makes the computers we were using for global warming predictions back in the 1980s look primitive.”

And even those computers, we now know from events such as the double heat wave just past, were predicting accurately.
(4 Aug 2006)


Parody of Al Gore film tied to ExxonMobil lobbying firm

Raw Story
An online parody of Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, has been tied to a lobbying firm which counts ExxonMobil among its clients, The Wall Street Journal reported today.

The online YouTube profile, which is where the film is hosted, indicates that it was made by a twenty-nine year old working in his Beverly Hill basement. A Wall Street Journal investigation included and email exchange with the gentleman, nicknamed “Toutsmith.” Research in to the routing of the email revealed that it was sent from the offices of DCI Group, the firm which ExxonMobil has a contract with.
(3 Aug 2006)