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Airborne particles -sea salt, sand & Carbon Black, are a major cause of climate change, bigger than Greenhouse Gases
Walter Derzko, Smart Economy
Airborne particles -sea salt, sand, carbon black pollution, forest fires among others, are a major cause of climate change
The local effect of atmospheric aerosols can be greater than the Greenhouse Effect
Conventional Wisdom
A scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science and his colleagues caused a storm in the atmospheric community when they suggested a few years back that tiny airborne particles, known as aerosols, may be one of the main culprits causing climate change – having, on a local scale, an even greater impact than the greenhouse gases effect.
Attempts to understand how these particles influence clouds have generated many uncertainties.
(18 July 2006)
A very worthwhile article explaining the complicated cooling and heating influences of airborne particles. -AF
Pacific mangroves disappearing
AAP, TVNZ.co.nz
Global warming could lead to the destruction of more than half the mangrove wetlands of some Pacific islands, wiping out or reducing marine breeding grounds that support multi-million dollar fisheries, a UN report says.
A UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report looking at the impact of rising seas on mangroves in 16 Pacific nations found the worst hit-islands would be American Samoa, Fiji, Tuvalu and the Federated States of Micronesia.
The report found that these island nations could lose more than half their mangroves by the end of the century.
“The true economic value of ecosystems like mangroves is now starting to emerge,” said report co-ordinator Kitty Simonds.
“Mangroves are important nurseries for fish, act to filter coastal pollution and are important sources of timber and construction materials for local communities,” she said.
The report said goods and services generated by mangroves may be worth an average of US$900,000 per square kilometre, depending on their location and uses.
An estimated 75% of commercially caught prawns in Australia’s tropical state of Queensland depend on mangroves. In Malaysia, a 400 sq km managed mangrove forest in Matang supports a fishery worth US$100 million a year.
Mangroves also protect islands from flooding during storms, with mangroves estimated to reduce wave energy by 75%, said the report.
(17 July 2006)
Scorching U.S.: First Half of 2006 Sets Heat Record
Sara Goudarzi, LiveScience
The average temperatures of the first half of 2006 were the highest ever recorded for the continental United States, scientists announced today.
Temperatures for January through June were 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average.
Scientists have previously said that 2005 was the warmest year on record for the entire globe.
(14 July 2006)
Drought threatens Amazon basin
Paul Brown, The Guardian
On the vast expanse of water where the silty Amazon mingles with the coffee-coloured Rio Negro, Amazon Indians and church leaders floated out yesterday to bless the waters and protect them from drought.
Such a prospect seems incredible in Manaus, a Brazilian port city where both the Amazon and Rio Negro are more than five miles wide and 300 metres deep. At more than 1,000 miles from the sea, the two streams can be navigated by oceangoing ships and already dwarf every other river in the world in terms of volume.
But last year the worst drought in more than a century hit the Amazon basin, drying up tributaries more than a mile wide and prompting Brazil to declare a state of emergency across the entire region.
Tens of thousands were cut off as rivers that are the main means of transportation were turned into mudflats and grasslands, leaving boats stranded among millions of rotting fish on the baked mud.
Locals hoped the drought was a once-in-a-generation event, but already there are signs that the extreme conditions of last year are returning.
(17 July 2006)
Related: Eating the Amazon: The fight to curb corporate destruction (soy farming)
U.N. panel says global warming threatens parks, but decides against action
Greenwire, World Business Council for Sustainable Development
The U.N. World Heritage Committee yesterday officially recognized global warming as a threat to natural and cultural heritage sites, but rejected attempts to endorse emissions cuts or add parks such as Mount Everest and Montana’s Glacier National Park to its “danger list.”
(11 July 2006)
Global Warming Is Happening
Mae Wan Ho, Institute of Science in Society
Climate change scepticism is politically motivated, the evidence is all around us. Good science is about dispelling common prejudice, not taking leave of common sense.
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There is little doubt that global warming is happening and happening fast (Abrupt climate change happening, SiS 20) [1]. But the public may have been distracted by the disproportionate attention the mainstream press has been giving to ‘sceptics’ of climate change. Their most recent effort in April 2006 was billed as an open letter signed by “more than 60 leading international climate change experts” [2] and addressed to Canada’s new Conservative Prime Minister praising his commitment to review the Kyoto protocol on reducing emissions.
Climate change sceptics are having a field day in the United States where a powerful anti-science lobby has effectively taken over science policy on a whole range of issues including climate change.
The US Congress asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to report on the controversy surrounding the papers published in the late 1990s by climate scientists Michael Mann and colleagues [3] who concluded that the warming in the Northern Hemisphere in the last decades of the 20th century was unprecedented in the past thousand years.
In June 2006, the NAS released a report on the new study [4], concluding that the “recent warmth is unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia”, and “supports the conclusion that human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming.”
I don’t really think they could have concluded otherwise…
(18 July 2006)
An intro to current climate science complete with some observations on the nature of scientific evidence, competition and genetic determism. -AF
