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Wildfires release 15 times more toxic mercury
The Hamilton Spectator
Vastly increased emissions of highly toxic mercury are an unexpected result of climate change in Canada’s northern woods.
New data suggest wildfires release 15 times more of the poisonous element into the air than previously thought, more than every U.S. coal-fired power plant combined. And those emissions could double again as the boreal forest grows hotter and drier.
“This could be quite significant,” said Mike Flannigan of the Canadian Forest Service, who co-authored the recently published scientific paper.
Scientists have long known that forest fires release mercury into the atmosphere. But researchers assumed peatlands — widespread in the vast boreal forest stretching across nearly every Canadian province — released the potent neurotoxin at the same rate as trees and other so-called “first fuels.”
But Flannigan and his American colleagues at the United States Geological Service found that mercury tends to concentrate in boggy peatlands.
(19 Sept 2006)
England’s warming ‘not natural’
BBC
Temperatures in central England are about 1C higher than in the 1950s, and humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions are the reason, a new study indicates.
Researchers at the Meteorological Office analysed temperature records going back almost 350 years.
In 1950, the average temperature was about 9.4C; now it is about 10.4C.
Computer models of climate demonstrate that the warming observed over the past 50 years is extremely unlikely to be part of a natural cycle.
Recent studies show British animals migrating northwards, and spring arriving earlier right across Europe.
These are also thought to be signs of temperatures rising in Britain and western Europe, in step with the planet as a whole.
(19 Sept 2006)
SoCal Edison’s Ziegler says regionally focus on global warming will not be effective (video and transcript)
Monica Trauzzi, E&E TV
As California leads the way in creating a mandatory cap on greenhouse gas emissions, the state’s utilities are responding to the mandate. During today’s OnPoint, Southern California Edison’s Senior Vice President of Customer Service Lynda Ziegler discusses the new mandate. She talks about her company’s efforts to increase energy efficiency and the use of renewables. Ziegler also discusses SoCal Edison’s new next-generation meters, which will give customers real-time readings of energy usage.
(19 Sept 2006)
Many more video interviews on energy and climate change are online at OnPoint Episodes.
Bush’s climate-controlled White House
Paul D. Thacker, Salon
The administration claims it wasn’t trying to tell government scientists what to say about climate change, but e-mails obtained by Salon prove otherwise.
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In February, there were several press reports about the Bush administration exercising message control on the subject of climate change. The New Republic cited numerous instances in which top officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and scientists at the National Hurricane Center sought to downplay links between more-intense hurricanes and global warming. NOAA scientist Thomas Knutson told the Wall Street Journal he’d been barred from speaking to CNBC because his research suggested just such a link.
At the time, Bush administration officials denied that they did any micromanaging of media requests for interviews. But a large batch of e-mails obtained by Salon through a Freedom of Information Act request shows that the White House was, in fact, controlling access to scientists and vetting reporters. (The e-mails were provided to several members of Congress for comment; Rep. Henry Waxman’s office has now published them here.)
(19 Sept 2006)
Summary by David Roberts at Gristmill.
Biz Bang
Big business increasingly acting to fight climate change
Gr8st
More and more big companies are waking up and smelling the climate change, recognizing that it could have a notable impact on their bottom lines, according to the fourth annual survey by the Carbon Disclosure Project. The CDP, backed by large institutional investors, got responses from 360 of the Financial Times 500 major companies; 87 percent said climate change represented “commercial risks and/or opportunities,” but only 48 percent had formal programs for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.
A handful of firms are leading the way by offsetting their emissions in order to become carbon-neutral, including HSBC, Europe’s largest bank. Other companies are taking the smaller step of offsetting emissions from their employees’ business travel. “We think this is the start of an industry-wide philosophical shift, not a passing trend,” said Susan Gurley, head of the Virginia-based Association of Corporate Travel Executives.
(19 Sept 2006)
The denial industry
George Monbiot, The Guardian
For years, a network of fake citizens’ groups and bogus scientific bodies has been claiming that science of global warming is inconclusive. They set back action on climate change by a decade. But who funded them? Exxon’s involvement is well known, but not the strange role of Big Tobacco. In the first of three extracts from his new book, George Monbiot tells a bizarre and shocking new story
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ExxonMobil is the world’s most profitable corporation. Its sales now amount to more than $1bn a day. It makes most of this money from oil, and has more to lose than any other company from efforts to tackle climate change. To safeguard its profits, ExxonMobil needs to sow doubt about whether serious action needs to be taken on climate change. But there are difficulties: it must confront a scientific consensus as strong as that which maintains that smoking causes lung cancer or that HIV causes Aids. So what’s its strategy?
The website Exxonsecrets.org, using data found in the company’s official documents, lists 124 organisations that have taken money from the company or work closely with those that have. These organisations take a consistent line on climate change: that the science is contradictory, the scientists are split, environmentalists are charlatans, liars or lunatics, and if governments took action to prevent global warming, they would be endangering the global economy for no good reason. The findings these organisations dislike are labelled “junk science”. The findings they welcome are labelled “sound science”.
(19 Sept 2006)
Inconvenient Truths (for Al Gore and the Rest of the Planet)
Geoffrey Lean, lndependent/UK
The truth behind Gore’s extraordinary documentary about the perils of global warming is that he might have become President had he campaigned in office.
Geoffrey Lean traces the conversion of one man, his country and a reluctant world
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Suddenly global warming has come in from the cold. A potent combination of startling natural events, growing public pressure, and pioneering political commitments has brought it storming up the agenda.
Even many of the previously sceptical are now convinced. For example, who would have thought the leader of the Conservative Party would become Britain’s most potent champion of radical action to combat climate change, or that he would share platforms with the leader of Friends of the Earth?
And who would have imagined Arnold Schwarzenegger – famous as for his devotion to the Humvee, the greatest of the gas guzzlers – would defy his party, as Governor of California, to drive through the world’s most ambitious programme for cutting the pollution that causes global warming?
And as we report (right), even the “Toxic Texan” himself – President George W Bush, who set out to kill the Kyoto Protocol and all international attempts to tackle the problem – is laying the ground for a U-turn.
These dramatic changes of heart are not happening among scientists. There has long been more unanimity in the scientific community about the reality of global warming than over any other environmental issue I have known; a recent survey of 928 scientific papers found not a single one that dissented.
Nor are they occurring in public opinion, which is becoming steadily more convinced, and alarmed – even in the United States.
(17 Sept 2006)
Paying the Freight for Polluting the Air: Europe Takes the Lead
Braden Phillips, NY Times
…Offsetting has its critics, who say that emissions must be reduced rather than offset, and that some companies have adopted the practice to make a show of their green credentials. Nevertheless, offsetting is becoming increasingly popular.
Over all, business travel can account for less than 5 percent to more than 40 percent of a company’s carbon dioxide emissions. A manufacturer with a local operation will travel less, while a global operation in the services sector will travel more. Going green has its price, and so far more European than American companies have been willing to pay it.
(18 Sept 2006)
Pat Robertson’s climate change conversion
Bill Berkowitz, Working for Change
Global warming brouhaha heating up among conservative evangelicals
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While this summer’s record-setting heat wave may have convinced televangelist Pat Robertson that global warming is a clear and present danger, a healthy number of conservative evangelicals, academics, theologians, and political leaders still have their doubts. In a sweltering summertime concurrence, both Robertson’s conversion and a report from a group calling itself the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance (ISA) came while many Americans were escaping the heat by shuffling off to movie theaters to see Al Gore’s critically acclaimed film “An Inconvenient Truth.” Reaction to Gore’s film — which was scorched by the conservative media — Robertson’s second thoughts, and the ISA report are all indicative of how conservatives are responding to global warming.
A clearly distressed Robertson told his 700 Club audience that he now believed that global warming is real. Commenting on the heat wave that had been gripping the nation, Robertson said:
I tell you stay in doors ladies and gentleman. Stay cool. Get fans or whatever. And the poor, they need emergency fans and ice to cool down — the number of people dead. I have not been one who believed in the global warming. But I tell you, they are making a convert out of me as these blistering summers. They have broken heat records in a number of cities already this year and broken all-time records and it is getting hotter and the ice caps are melting and there is a build up of carbon dioxide in the air. We really need to address the burning of fossil fuels. If we are contributing to the destruction of the planet we need to do manage about it.
…Some longtime Robertson critics, and mainstream environmentalists, choose to ridicule his comments, but the Rev. Jim Ball, a spokesperson for the Evangelical Climate Initiative, saw them in a different light: Bell said that he thought Robertson’s conversion demonstrates “the kind of leadership we need to move beyond the vague concern of some religious figures.”
(14 Sept 2006)
