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Dismay over Nuclear ‘Solution’ to Climate Problem
Haider Rizvi, OneWorld US
The UN’s experts on climate change are facing the wrath of many environmental groups this week for embracing the notion that additional use of nuclear power could be helpful in the fight against global warming.
Last weekend, at the end of an international meeting held in Bangkok, Thailand, the UN scientists called for governments to renew their energy policies in order to address climate change and its disastrous impact on the world’s human, plant, and animal life.
The proposed new policies, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), increasingly demand a significant shift from fossil-fuel-based energy sources to clean and alternative ones.
But in emphasizing this, the IPCC also suggested the world’s policy makers forge ahead with more exploitation of nuclear technologies to meet the growing needs for energy consumption.
Though pleased with most of the panel’s recommendations, many environmentalists seem inclined to question the international body of eminent scientists’ inclusion of nuclear energy among their recommendations on clean sources of energy.
(9 May 2007)
Also at Common Dreams.
Ready for 110 degrees?
NASA warns climate change could cook Atlantans
Mike Toner, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Peak summer temperatures in Atlanta and the Southeast could reach as high as 110 degrees if climate change continues at its current pace, NASA scientists warned Wednesday.
A new computer analysis by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York suggests that during July and August, maximum daily temperatures could average 100 to 110 degrees in cities like Atlanta and as far north as Washington and Chicago, making once-rare temperatures more commonplace.
The hottest temperature recorded in Atlanta in the last 77 years was a stifling 105-degree reading on July 13, 1980. Elsewhere – most recently in Greenville, in Meriwether County, in August 1983 – the temperature has actually reached a scorching 112, which is the all-time state record.
Based on the latest NASA analysis, however record setting temperatures like those could become regular features of summer heat waves.
Although models of global warming often predict higher average temperatures as the world warms, the latest study is one of the first to look at potential weather extremes on a regional basis.
The findings, in fact, are so recent that they were not included in this year’s report on the impacts of warming issued last month by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
(9 May 2007)
China says threat from global warming ‘urgent’
AFP
China this year faces its greatest threat in a decade from typhoons, floods, droughts and other extreme weather caused by climate change, state media reported on Thursday.
“The situation is urgent,” Zheng Guoguang, China’s top meteorologist, was quoted as saying by the China Daily newspaper.
“Temperatures in most areas will be higher this year than in previous years, and typhoons are expected to arrive in larger numbers than last year.”
Zheng told a Beijing conference that China also could expect flooding due to heavy rainfalls in the centre of the country along the Yangtze River, China’s longest river and a regular source of floods.
The same is expected in northern China, particularly the Inner Mongolia region traversed by the Yellow River, known as “China’s sorrow” for its own deadly history.
Zheng, who heads the China Meteorological Administration, blamed global climate change for the increased risks, the paper said.
(10 May 2007)
Climate change issue heats Capitol Hill
Deborah Zabarenko, Reuters
Global warming was impossible to avoid on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, with a trio of hearings on the consequences or cures for climate change and another on the related question of endangered wildlife.
But even as the climate change issue spurred debate among U.S. lawmakers, a demographer said that while Americans take this matter seriously, they are lukewarm about taking any tough action to control it.
“It’s real, it’s serious — impressions of that are certainly growing,” said Karlyn Bowman, who watches polling data at the pro-business American Enterprise Institute. “But in terms of what people are willing to do: They’re willing to do things that are easy … It just isn’t a top-tier issue.”
(10 May 2007)
Fiddling with figures while the Earth burns
Jonathan Leake, UK Times
The latest initiatives to stop global warming won’t save us, James Lovelock tells Jonathan Leake
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If you want to get some idea of what much of the Earth might look like in 50 years’ time then, says James Lovelock, get hold of a powerful telescope or log onto Nasa’s Mars website. That arid, empty, lifeless landscape is, he believes, how most of Earth’s equatorial lands will be looking by 2050. A few decades later and that same uninhabitable desert will have extended into Spain, Italy, Australia and much of the southern United States.
“We are on the edge of the greatest die-off humanity has ever seen,” said Lovelock. “We will be lucky if 20% of us survive what is coming. We should be scared stiff.”
Lovelock has delivered such warnings before, but this weekend they have a special resonance. Last week in Bangkok, Thailand, the world’s governments finalised this year’s third and final report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) setting out how humanity might save itself from the worst effects of climate change.
In it was a message of hope, albeit a faint one. The report set out a complex mix of political, economic and technological solutions. If they all worked, said the report, they could achieve huge cuts in the 25 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) released by humanity into the air each year, thus keeping global temperature rises below 3C.
At the same time in Cologne, Germany, 4,000 sharp-suited bankers, lawyers and financial traders at Carbon Expo 2007 were congratulating themselves on the booming new markets in carbon credits that will, they boasted, save the world as well as making them rich.
…For Lovelock, however, such dreams are dangerous nonsense on a par with a drowning man clutching at straws. “It’s all ridiculous,” he sighed. “These new markets do some good in that they generate wealth and keep these people employed, but they and the IPCC are just raising false hopes. We have done too much damage to the world and now it is changing too fast for us to make much difference.”
(6 May 2007)
Greens praise News Corp climate pledge
AAP, The Australian
THE Australian Greens have congratulated media mogul Rupert Murdoch on his pledge to make News Corporation carbon-neutral by 2010.
The News Corp chairman and chief executive officer announced the plan, which applies across the media group’s global operations, in New York last night.
With the company’s carbon footprint estimated at 641,150 tonnes, Mr Murdoch said his strategy would be to reduce energy use as much as possible and switch to renewable energy sources.
“Can I congratulate Rupert Murdoch for moving to have a carbon-neutral News Corporation,” Senator Brown told reporters.
“I think we do need leadership from the big end of town on that.
“I’m not in the habit of being a eulogiser of Rupert Murdoch, but credit where it’s due, and that’s a great move, and I hope that example will be followed by other people in the business.”
(10 May 2007)
From Big Gav’s Peak Energy, which continues to be a rich source of links, excerpts and commentary.
