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UN climate scientists issue dire warning
David Adam, The Guardian
The Earth’s temperature could rise under the impact of global warming to levels far higher than previously predicted, according to the United Nations’ team of climate experts.
A draft of the next influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report will tell politicians that scientists are now unable to place a reliable upper limit on how quickly the atmosphere will warm as carbon dioxide levels increase. The report draws together research over the past five years and will be presented to national governments in April and made public next year. It raises the possibility of the Earth’s temperature rising well above the ceiling quoted in earlier accounts.
Such an outcome would have severe consequences, such as the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet and disruption of the Gulf Stream ocean current.
The shift in position comes as Tony Blair is expected to pledge today to work towards a date for stabilising international greenhouse gas emissions when he meets Stop Climate Chaos, the climate change equivalent of Make Poverty History. The group is campaigning for a target date of 2015 for stabilisation, saying a later date would endanger the planet.
(28 February 2006)
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(February 2006)
Armed forces are put on standby to tackle threat of wars over water
Ben Russell and Nigel Morris, The Independent (UK) via Common Dreams
Across the world, they are coming: the water wars. From Israel to India, from Turkey to Botswana, arguments are going on over disputed water supplies that may soon burst into open conflict.
Yesterday, Britain’s Defence Secretary, John Reid, pointed to the factor hastening the violent collision between a rising world population and a shrinking world water resource: global warming.
In a grim first intervention in the climate-change debate, the Defence Secretary issued a bleak forecast that violence and political conflict would become more likely in the next 20 to 30 years as climate change turned land into desert, melted ice fields and poisoned water supplies.
Climate campaigners echoed Mr Reid’s warning, and demanded that ministers redouble their efforts to curb carbon emissions.
Tony Blair will today host a crisis Downing Street summit to address what he called “the major long-term threat facing our planet”, signalling alarm within Government at the political consequences of failing to deal with the spectre of global warming.
(28 February 2006)
Learning from the ruins (Lester Brown)
Peter Day, BBC
I was talking the other day to Lester Brown about the Sumerians. They invented the wheel in about 3500 BC but could not invent themselves out of eventual disaster.
Lester Brown is one of the great pioneer environmentalists. He mentioned the Sumerians because they may have a lesson for us all. As he tells, it, the lesson goes like this…
…The similarity to our own times is pretty obvious. We have built our civilisation on fossil fuels and carbon emissions. But now it is time to pay for the past, and we may not be able to do it.
However, Lester Brown is not yet totally in despair.
(28 February 2006)
Montana climate panel to be named soon – “stunning response”
Associated Press via The Missoulian
GREAT FALLS – Gov. Brian Schweitzer’s call for people to serve on a new state committee examining climate change has drawn a stunning response, members soon will be named and their inaugural meeting likely will be in late May or early June, a state administrator says.
“The overwhelming reaction I seem to be getting now is ‘It’s about time,’ ” said Richard Opper, head of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality.
Climate studies in western Montana show spring weather arrives two to three weeks earlier than it did 50 years ago. Missoula’s annual average temperature is up 2 degrees over the same period, and the number of frost-free days in the growing season increased by about 16.
“As every winter ticks by and we keep not getting the winters we used to, I’m having more people who are saying, ‘Uh-oh, there seems to be more to this than year-to-year variability,’ ” said Steve Running, an ecology professor at the University of Montana School of Forestry.
…Opper said states must take the lead in dealing with the climate issue. The frequency of drought in the West is a clear indicator of major change, he told the Great Falls Tribune.
“Just how big of a two-by-four do we need to be hit over the head with?” he said. “To have two severe droughts back to back, it’
(28 February 2006)
U.S. greenhouse gas growth rate rose in 2004, says EPA
Timothy Gardner, Reuters
NEW YORK — The growth rate of U.S. emissions of gases blamed for global warming rose in 2004, as the country burned more fossil fuel for transportation and electricity, according to federal environment regulators.
The United States, the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases, released about 7.075 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent last year, according to a draft report from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
(28 February 2006)
