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Global warming, in capsule form
David Roberts, Gristmill
In the midst of a long post on Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer’s coal-to-liquid-fuel plans, Oil Drummer Stuart Staniford provides a handy one-paragraph-long roundup of evidence on global warming. The next time someone you know asks about it, just cut and paste this paragraph and send it to them. Warming cliff notes!
[W]e are reaching the point where we can see that we are starting to make massive, probably irreversible, changes to our climate. The glaciers are in full retreat almost everywhere, the Arctic is melting (with total melting of the summer sea ice possible, though not certain, as early as 2020), the permafrost is melting, and releasing large amounts of methane, which is a very powerful global warming gas, while in the last thirty years, droughts have doubled due to warming, hurricanes are much more intense all over the globe, and are showing up in places they never did before in recorded history. Scientists have been projecting changes in ocean circulation, and lo-and-behold, they are starting to show up, including changes to the North Atlantic Circulation, although major change here was previously thought unlikely this century. There is some possibility of changes in deepwater circulation destabilizing methane hydrates in the ocean, particularly in South East Asian deeps. Oh, and the Greenland ice sheet is now melting much faster than climatologists expected, and the West Antarctic ice sheet is starting to collapse, though again, this was previously thought unlikely. Also paleoclimatological studies have made it clear that in the past the climate abruptly flipped between modes, sometimes with dramatic change in as little as three years. And we are making rapid changes in carbon dioxide, known to be critically important in regulating the temperature of this sensitive climatic system for a century now.
As he says, “maybe there’s some scientific doubt still on any individual piece of the picture, but the gestalt is starting to look extremely alarming.” Yes.
(18 October 2005)
China Crisis: threat to the global environment
Michael McCarthy, The Independent
Western politicians queue up to sing its praises. Economists regard it with awe and delight. Other countries are desperate to imitate it. Yet there is another side to China’s exploding, double-digit-growth miracle economy – it is turning into one of the greatest environmental threats the earth has ever faced.
An ominous sign of the danger is given in a groundbreaking report from Greenpeace, published today, which maintains that China is now by far the world’s biggest driver of rainforest destruction. The report documents the vast deforestation driven by the soaring demands of China’s enormous timber trade – the world’s largest – as the country’s headlong economic development sucks in ever-more amounts of the earth’s natural resources.
Citing figures from the International Tropical Timber Organisation, the Greenpeace study says that nearly five out of every 10 tropical hardwood logs shipped from the world’s threatened rainforests are now heading for China – more than to any other destination.
Yet deforestation is only one of the threats to the planet posed by an economy of 1.3 billion people that has now overtaken the United States as the world’s leading consumer of four out of the five basic food, energy and industrial commodities – grain, meat, oil, coal and steel. China now lags behind the US only in consumption of oil – and it is rapidly catching up.
Because of their increasing reliance on coal-fired power stations to provide their energy, the Chinese are firmly on course to overtake the Americans as the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, and thus become the biggest contributors to global warming and the destabilisation of the climate. If they remain uncontrolled, the growth of China’s carbon dioxide emissions over the next 20 years will dwarf any cuts in CO2 that the rest of the world can make.
(19 October 2005)
Article goes on to talk about stresses to the world’s food system as China begins to import grain.
Environmental studies waived in push for new oil, gas drilling
John Heilprin,, Associated Press via ENN
Local residents will no longer be consulted every time wells are proposed
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WASHINGTON – In an aggressive push by the Bush administration to open more public land to oil and gas production, the Interior Department has quit conducting environmental reviews and seeking comments from local residents every time drilling companies propose new wells.
Field officials have been told to begin looking at issuing permits based on past studies of an entire project, even though some of those assessments may be outdated. The instructions are in a directive from the department’s Bureau of Land Management expected to cover hundreds of anticipated new drilling applications.
President Bush and Congress authorized the streamlining as part of a 1,724-page energy bill signed into law in August. BLM officials, saying the need for energy supplies is immediate, showed unusual speed implementing it. Kathleen Clarke, the agency’s director, sent out the new guidance Sept. 30.
(19 October 2005)
Also posted at MSNBC.
Ocean warming threatens Antarctic wildlife
David Adam, The Guardian
Scientists working in Antarctica have discovered an alarming rise in sea temperature that threatens to disrupt populations of penguins, whales, seals and a host of smaller creatures within a few decades.
The new study shows the ocean west of the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed by more than a degree since the 1960s – confounding computer models and experts who believed that a combination of ice, winds and currents would keep the water cool and shield fragile marine creatures from the effects of climate change. This is the first evidence that the key Southern Ocean is getting warmer: a finding with potentially severe implications for wildlif
(19 October 2005)
Related story from New Scientist (UK) : Antarctic glaciers calving faster into the ocean.
