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UK’s chief scientist issues grim warning on global warming
Sam Knight, UK Times
The Government’s chief scientist today gave his starkest warning yet about the world’s increasing carbon emissions saying that even the best-case scenario put millions of lives at risk by the end of the century.
Professor Sir David King said that a 3C rise in global temperatures is likely within 100 years, a process that will lead to a rise in sea levels and increase in desertification that will place 400 million people at the risk of hunger. Parts of Britain will be flooded as the UK comes under coastal attack.
Developing countries will be the hardest hit, with ecosystems failing to adapt and between 20 million to 400 million tonnes of cereal production being lost, according to Sir David.
He said the temperature rise would be the consequence of carbon dioxide levels of 500 parts per million, roughly double those of the Industrial Revolution. The current carbon dioxide concentration stands at 380 parts per million, already the highest levels likely to have been experienced on Earth for 740,000 years.
(14 April 2006)
Also at Common Dreams. Related story by Associated Press.
Drilling the Wild
A voracious energy policy afflicts our public lands
Ted Kerasote, Field & Stream
Rod and gun in hand, and backing the Second Amendment right to own firearms, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have won the hearts of America’s sportsmen. Yet the two men have failed to protect outdoor sports on the nation’s public lands. With deep ties to the oil and gas industry, Bush and Cheney have unleashed a national energy plan that has begun to destroy hunting and fishing on millions of federal acres throughout the West, setting back effective wildlife management for decades to come.
In his second week in office, President Bush convened a National Energy Policy Development Group, chaired by Vice President Cheney. Meeting with representatives of the energy industry behind closed doors, it eventually released a National Energy Policy, the goal of which was to “expedite permits and coordinate federal, state, and local actions necessary for energy-related project approvals on a national basis.”
Put into practice through a series of executive orders, the policy has prioritized drilling over other uses on federal lands, while relegating long-standing conservation mandates from the 1960s and ’70s to the back burner.
(13 April 2006)
Global warming novel a no-no for Ottawa
Bruce Cheadle, Canadian Press
Government order chills launch of scientist’s climate-change book
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OTTAWA — A scientist with Environment Canada was ordered not to launch his global warming-themed novel Thursday at the same time the Conservative government was quietly axing a number of Kyoto programs.
The bizarre sequence of events on the eve of the Easter long weekend provided an ironic end-note to the week in which Prime Minister Stephen Harper introduced his first piece of legislation — aimed at improving accountability and transparency in government.
The day began with what was supposed to be the low-key launch of an aptly titled novel, Hotter than Hell.
Publisher Elizabeth Margaris said that Mark Tushingham, whose day job is as an Environment Canada scientist, was ordered not to appear at the National Press Club to give a speech discussing his science fiction story about global warming in the not-too-distant future.
(14 April 2006)
Climate change censorship spreads to Canada. -BA
Canada, climate change and “The Weather Makers”
Terry Glavin, Georgia Staight
If you’ve ever been troubled by the grim global-warming scenarios that have been bubbling at the margins of serious public attention all these years, there’s good news: you don’t have to wait any longer to see whether or not there’s really anything to it all.
The future is here now.
The Canadian winter that just ended was the warmest on record. Last year in Greenland, where the summers are now milder than they’ve been in 100,000 years, glaciers shed an amount of water into arctic seas more than twice the annual flow of the Nile River, tripling the yearly loss of Greenland’s glaciers from 10 years ago. There are robins on Baffin Island now, and the people of Pangnirtung are seeing thunder and rain for the first time and walruses, on melting ice floes, are starving to death.
…Like the silenced Hanson, the Australian paleontologist Tim Flannery is convinced that humanity is crossing a tipping point in climate change, and the consequences are likely to be horrific. Unlike Hanson, Flannery is not easily made to shut up.
In his just-released The Weather Makers: How We Are Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth (HarperCollins, $34.95), Flannery presents a panoramic view of the intricate mechanisms of global climate, the geophysical feedback loops that drive it, and the impact humanity is having on the way all these things work.
The book is a tour de force of plain-language science writing.
The first thing to understand is that it really is already too late to stop global warming because the damage has been done, Flannery explains. The great challenge we face is the work of seeing to it that we don’t make matters worse. The only realistic goal now is to slow the rate of global warming and keep the planet’s temperature down, just enough, so as to prevent the deaths of billions of people owing to global droughts, desertification, massive crop failures, and resultant starvation.
(13 April 2006)
Quibble: it’s “Hansen” not “Hanson” and the NASA scientist fought and won his battle against being censored. The general problem of US censorship of climate change remains though. -BA
