Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Climate change forecast getting worse
Ruth Laugesen, (New Zealand)
…in recent months, a cascade of new scientific evidence on climate change has made even mainstream scientists increasingly concerned about what lies ahead. One is Dr David Wratt, leader of the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research’s national climate centre.
“Over the past few months in particular, knowledgeable scientists have got more concerned that there might not be just a gradual bit of warming, but there could be some more substantial and worrying things happen,” he says.
So what are they worrying about, and should we be worried too?
Among the public, many believe the main scientific debate is whether climate change is for real. After all, American President George Bush is reluctant to address climate change, so perhaps there is something to what the sceptics say.
But for scientists, the caravan moved on some time ago. Now the most urgent question is not whether climate change is real, but how serious and rapid it will be, and whether it will soon be too late to do anything to stop it.
(27 February 2006)
Round-up of recent studies.
More bad news about global warming
Michael Lucking, EV World
It occurred to me, as I was writing a readers’ reply to John Atchesons’ article – “Hotter, Faster, Worser” that the latent heat of evaporation and the latent heat of thawing has not been included in global warming models.
This is bad because we are all under the impression that the temperature of earth has only risen 0.7degrees C. It would have heated up more had it not been for the latent heat of evaporation and the latent heat of thawing that has absorbed a great deal of heat.
When you put an ice cube in your drink, you are using the ice cubes’ latent heat of thawing to keep your drink cold. That ice cube is absorbing heat from your drink as it melts. It takes about .093 kilowatt-hours to melt a liter of ice. More graphically, it would take a 100 watt light bulb just under an hour to melt a liter of ice. It takes about 7 times more heat to evaporate water as it does to thaw ice. Imagine you have a pot with 1 liter of water on the stove. If the element is 1500 watts, the water should boil off in about 30 minutes.
For this blog, I will just do the calculation for the thawing of arctic ice. I will leave the evaporating of water for another time as I have not seen any firm data on increases in earths’ water evaporation.
ice from the Greenland Ice Sheet is disappearing into the sea at twice the rate it was five years ago. Researchers from Nasa and the University of Kansas found more than 200cukm of ice was dumped into the sea last year
Source: Climate change forecast getting worse
I got out my calculator and did the math. The thawing of 200 cubic kilometers of ice would absorb 2,123 Gigawatts of heat. So, earth should be warmer but we have been keeping our planet cool by spending our ice and water reserves. This is not good.
(28 February 2006)
‘Rapid warming’ spreads havoc in Canada’s forests
Tiny beetles destroying pines
Doug Struck, Washington Post
QUESNEL, B.C. — Millions of acres of Canada’s lush green forests are turning red in spasms of death. A voracious beetle, whose population has exploded with the warming climate, is killing more trees than wildfires or logging.
The mountain pine beetle has infested an area three times the size of Maryland, devastating swaths of lodgepole pines and reshaping the future of the forest and the communities in it.
“It’s pretty gut-wrenching,” said Allan Carroll, a research scientist at the Pacific Forestry Centre in Victoria, whose studies tracked a lock step between warmer winters and the spread of the beetle. “People say climate change is something for our kids to worry about. No. It’s now.”
Scientists fear the beetle will cross the Rocky Mountains and sweep across the northern continent into areas where it used to be killed by severe cold but where winters now are comparatively mild.
(1 March 2006)
Consensus grows on climate change (IPCC)
Roger Harrabin, BBC
The global scientific body on climate change will report soon that only greenhouse gas emissions can explain freak weather patterns. Simultaneous changes in sea ice, glaciers, droughts, floods, ecosystems, ocean acidification and wildlife migration are taking place.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had previously said gases such as CO2 were “probably” to blame. Its latest draft report will be sent to world governments next month.
A source told the BBC: “The measurements from the natural world on all parts of the globe have been anomalous over the past decade.
“If a few were out of kilter we wouldn’t be too worried, because the Earth changes naturally. But the fact that they are virtually all out of kilter makes us very concerned.”
He said the report would forecast that a doubling of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere would bring a temperature rise of 2-4.5C, or maybe higher. This is an increase on projections in the last IPCC report, which suggested that the rise could be as little as 1.5C.
(1 Mar 2006)
