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Ancient heat wave may be wave of future
Robert Boyd, McClatchy Newspapers via Star-Telegram.com
WASHINGTON – It was one of the greatest calamities of all time: Something turned up the Earth’s thermostat, touching off a monstrous heat wave that killed many animals and drove others far from their homes to seek cooler climes.
It occurred 55 million years ago, after the age of the dinosaurs and long before humans appeared. But scientists say today’s global warming means that it could be happening again.
The hot spell, which lasted 50,000 to 100,000 years, goes by the unwieldy name of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. It was caused by a sudden — in geological terms — doubling or tripling of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Climate scientists say the result was an increase of 10 to 12 degrees Fahrenheit above the prevailing temperature.
“In certain regards, the PETM is very similar to what is happening right now,” said Gerald Dickens, an earth scientist at Rice University in Houston. “Just like now, a huge amount of carbon rapidly entered the ocean or atmosphere. The most notable difference is the rate. Things are happening much faster now than during the PETM.”
(28 Aug 2006)
Contributor Greg notes that this article was in several papers.
Global Warning: Devastation of an Atoll
Peter Boehm, Independent/UK via Common Dreams
Villagers on the South Pacific island of Tegua are packing up and leaving their homes for good – the first real victims of increasing sea levels caused by climate change
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As a Pacific island destination, Lateu struggles to sell itself. A typhoon wiped away its only beach a few years ago and today a handful of squalid thatched huts stand forlornly on its coastline. It will soon be a deserted village, its population the first real victims of rising sea levels brought about by global warming.
Even the village’s palm trees are dying, their roots washed away by inexorably rising seas. The roofs of its thatched huts are leaking, there are gaping holes in the palm frond walls. All that remains of several are a few pathetic looking poles, braced against the prevailing wind from the vast expanse of the Pacific.
Lateu’s people don’t bother to patch their huts anymore, and an unpleasant mould covers the ground of every dwelling as a result of frequent flooding. For a while the islanders tried to rise above the surging seas by putting their huts up on makeshift foundations of coral, but they soon gave up. Now they are preparing to move to higher ground, some 300 metres inland, where they have already built six communal structures with financial aid from Canada.
Lateu is the only village on Tegua island, a half-moon-shaped speck of land less than four miles long and 10 miles wide in the South Pacific. It is one of five coral atolls in the Torres Group, 650 miles north of Vanuatu’s main island, Efate. Getting here involves a flight in a small plane that goes once a week to the Torres’ main island, Loh, and a prohibitively expensive, wet and frightening 40-minute ride over the open sea in a fisherman’s boat.
The impact climate change has had on Tegua atoll is hard to ignore. Everywhere on the windward side of the island, palm trees are immersed by the sea. Some have survived the ordeal, others have fallen, littering the shallow waters of the coast line. “At the end of the Eighties, our village was flooded for the first time,” says Reuben Seluin, 63, Lateu’s village head. “Nowadays it happens every other month.”
(30 Aug 2006)
Global Warming Feedback Loop Caused by Methane, Scientists Say
Elizabeth Svoboda, National Geographic News
In the ongoing debate over global warming, climatologists usually peg carbon dioxide as the most dangerous of the atmosphere’s heat- trapping gases.
But methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, might be even more problematic.
According to Tessa Hill, a geologist at the University of California, Davis, more methane is released into the atmosphere from ocean deposits during periods of warming than previously thought.
This expelled methane increases temperatures and releases more methane, creating a positive feedback loop.
The research appears tomorrow in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
(29 Aug 2006)
Caribbean ‘faces stormier future’
BBC
Latin America and the Caribbean face a greater risk of more natural disasters because of environmental degradation and climate change, campaigners warn.
A report by a coalition of environment and aid groups said the region’s weather was becoming less predictable and often more extreme.
Evidence showed many areas were more vulnerable because depleted ecosystems were struggling to adapt, they argued.
The groups said efforts to end poverty were being undermined as a result.
The report, “Up in Smoke? Latin America and the Caribbean,” presented evidence it said showed that the livelihoods of millions of people in the region were at risk, including:
(28 Aug 2006)
Global meltdown
Fred Pearce, The Guardian
Scientists fear that global warming will bring climatic turbulence, with changes coming in big jumps rather than gradually
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Richard Alley’s eyes glint as we sit in his office in the University of Pennsylvania discussing how fast global warming could cause sea levels to rise. The scientist sums up the state of knowledge: “We used to think that it would take 10,000 years for melting at the surface of an ice sheet to penetrate down to the bottom. Now we know it doesn’t take 10,000 years; it takes 10 seconds.”
That quote highlights most vividly why scientists are getting panicky about the sheer speed and violence with which climate change could take hold. They are realising that their old ideas about gradual change – the smooth lines on graphs showing warming and sea level rise and gradually shifting weather patterns – simply do not represent how the world’s climate system works.
Dozens of scientists told me the same thing while I was researching my book The Last Generation. Climate change did not happen gradually in the past, and it will not happen that way in the future. Planet Earth does not do gradual change. It does big jumps; it works by tipping points.
(30 Aug 2006)
