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Ex-Premier Carr takes up climate lobbyist role
Australian Associated Press
FORMER NSW premier Bob Carr will chair an advisory council for the newly formed Climate Institute, which has been established with a $10 million grant from a philanthropic group, the Poola Charitable Foundation.
Mr Carr is behind a publicity campaign aimed at highlighting the dangers of climate change and convincing governments to take action. The Climate Institute is a national organisation which will be chaired by prominent academic and researcher Clive Hamilton.In a statement today, Mr Carr said climate change was the most serious problem facing humanity. “This exceptional donation will enable the formation of a body dedicated to shifting the debate to ensure the crisis is addressed and dealt with,” he said.
Dr Hamilton said the Climate Institute would develop a five-year program to alert the public to the threats posed by global warming, and the economic opportunities of shifting to a low-carbon future.
(27 October 2005)
Mr Carr resigned three months ago, to widespread surprise, and already has signed up as a consultant with aggressive infrastructure-focused Macquarie Bank. Australian politicians are bothered by no regulatory ‘cooling off’ period after they leave office.-LJ
Global warming strengthens hurricanes
Dr. Brenda Ekwurzel, MinutemanMedia.org via Common Dreams
Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma made clear to the public there is a link between global warming and the power — not frequency — of hurricanes. Warm water in the Gulf of Mexico helped transform three mild tropical storms into the most powerful category of hurricanes possible. Hurricane Wilma was classified as the most intense hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic basin and was the third Category 5 hurricane this season.
It is impossible to blame any one weather event — be it a hurricane or a heat wave or a blizzard — on global warming. That is because weather is not climate. Climate represents average conditions over multiple seasons or decades. A longer perspective is essential to see climate shifts above the natural variation.
Recent research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows that a combined measure of duration and intensity of hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean has doubled over the last 30 years. Similarly, a Georgia Tech study this summer showed that the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has increased in the last 30 years, while the number of Category 1, 2, and 3 storms has decreased. These trends correspond to increases in average ocean surface temperatures over the same period. This is not surprising, since warm oceans fuel hurricanes just as gasoline fuels a fire.
Climate scientists around the world are certain that rising ocean temperatures are in large part a result of global warming. Most of the strongest hurricanes on record have occurred during the past 15 years, when ocean surface temperatures climbed to record levels.
The bottom line is that global warming is creating more intense hurricanes…
Brenda Ekwurzel, PhD. is a climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). She has done climate research at the University of Arizona, Columbia University and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. UCS is an independent nonprofit alliance of 50,000 concerned citizens and scientists across the country. UCS augments rigorous scientific analysis with innovative thinking and committed citizen advocacy to build a cleaner, healthier environment and a safer world.
(26 October 2005)
Biodiversity may help slow disease spread: experts
Alister Doyle, Yahoo!News
Better protection for the diversity of the planet’s creatures and plants could help shield humans from diseases like AIDS, Ebola or bird flu and save billions of dollars in health care costs, researchers said on Tuesday.
They said human disruptions to biodiversity — from roads through the Amazon jungle to deforestation in remote parts of Africa — had made people more exposed to new diseases that originate in wildlife.
“Biodiversity not only stores the promise of new medical treatments and cures, it buffers humans from organisms and agents that cause disease,” scientists from the Diversitas international group said in a statement.
“Preventing emerging diseases through biodiversity conservation is far more cost effective than developing vaccines to combat them later,” it said ahead of a November 9-10 conference of 700 biodiversity experts in Oaxaca, Mexico.
(25 October 2005)
Global-warming skeptics under fire
Antonio Regalado, Wall Street Journal
Two new papers question results used to challenge influential climate study
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Two global-warming skeptics who questioned an influential climate study and prompted a congressional inquiry are now facing critics of their own, as a pair of new research papers take issue with their results.
The new findings are the latest round in a politically charged dispute over the “hockey stick,” a widely publicized graphic showing that temperatures during the late 20th century were likely higher than at any time in the past 1,000 years.
The hockey stick, so-called because global temperatures show a sharp blade-like rise in recent decades, was prominently featured in a 2001 United Nations report that said the burning of fossil fuels is the cause of global warming.
A dispute erupted earlier this year when oil and minerals consultant Stephen McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick, both Canadians, published a scientific study detailing possible mathematical errors in the hockey-stick result.
Michael Mann, the Pennsylvania State University climatologist who was the author of the hockey-stick findings, claimed the charges were part of a campaign to cast doubt on global warming.
(26 October 2005)
Access to this free feature from the WSJ was sporadic; sometimes it would come up, other times not.
Forest biodiversity impacts on carbon fixing
Study of tropical forests finds low tree diversity = less greenhouse benefit
Science Daily
With human emissions of carbon dioxide on the rise, there is growing interest in maintaining the Earth’s natural mechanisms that absorb and store carbon. A new study released this week in the on-line edition of the journal Science suggests that tree diversity in tropical forests plays a crucial role in determining how much carbon these natural storehouses are able to hold, as well as their ability to provide other crucial ecosystem services such as preventing erosion.
The study was led by Daniel Bunker and Shahid Naeem from the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology at Columbia University and Fabrice DeClerck from the Earth Institute at Columbia University. They simulated variations in forest diversity that resulted from a range of different extinction scenarios: those governed by biological characteristics such as low growth rate or limited growing range, those resulting from human activities such as selective logging, and those arising from environmental changes such as widespread drought.
As a result of the simulations, they found that the types of trees remaining after each scenario played out had a large and widely varying effect on the amount of carbon a forest would be able to store.
(26 October 2005)
