posted January 23, 2005 03:01 PM            

ROCKS THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION
Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told an international conference attended by 114 governments in Mauritius this month that he personally believes that the world has "already reached the level of dangerous concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere" and called for immediate and "very deep" cuts in the pollution if humanity is to "survive".

His comments rocked the Bush administration - which immediately tried to slap him down - not least because it put him in his post after Exxon, the major oil company most opposed to international action on global warming, complained that his predecessor was too "aggressive" on the issue.

A memorandum from Exxon to the White House in early 2001 specifically asked it to get the previous chairman, Dr Robert Watson, the chief scientist of the World Bank, "replaced at the request of the US". The Bush administration then lobbied other countries in favor of Dr Pachauri - whom the former vice-president Al Gore called the "let's drag our feet" candidate, and got him elected to replace Dr Watson, a British-born naturalized American, who had repeatedly called for urgent action.

But this month, at a conference of Small Island Developing States on the Indian Ocean island, the new chairman, a former head of India's Tata Energy Research Institute, himself issued what top United Nations officials described as a "very courageous" challenge.

He told delegates: "Climate change is for real. We have just a small window of opportunity and it is closing rather rapidly. There is not a moment to lose."

Afterwards he told The Independent on Sunday that widespread dying of coral reefs, and rapid melting of ice in the Arctic, had driven him to the conclusion that the danger point the IPCC had been set up to avoid had already been reached.

Reefs throughout the world are perishing as the seas warm up: as water temperatures rise, they lose their colors and turn a ghostly white. Partly as a result, up to a quarter of the world's corals have been destroyed.

And in November, a multi-year study by 300 scientists concluded that the Arctic was warming twice as fast as the rest of the world and that its ice-cap had shrunk by up to 20 per cent in the past three decades.

The ice is also 40 per cent thinner than it was in the 1970s and is expected to disappear altogether by 2070. And while Dr Pachauri was speaking parts of the Arctic were having a January "heatwave", with temperatures eight to nine degrees centigrade higher than normal.

He also cited alarming measurements, first reported in The Independent on Sunday, showing that levels of carbon dioxide (the main cause of global warming) have leapt abruptly over the past two years, suggesting that climate change may be accelerating out of control.

posted January 24, 2005 11:32 AM            

Perhaps Pachauri would be more credible if he had a degree in nuclear physics because the climate on earth is directly related to the output of the nuclear reactor known as the Sun/Sol.

Pachauri is nothing more than a well connected appointee in a field where he has no credible credentials.

posted January 24, 2005 01:24 PM            

For those worried about rising sea levels as...and if...the polar caps melt, you can prove the unscientific nature of that claim by the global warming crowd.

Fill a glass with ice cubes...now fill the glass with water and mark the level of the water on the side of the glass with a marker...in this case, a magic marker . Now, sit the glass on the counter and go about your business. In a couple of hours you can check to see how much the water level has risen when the ice melts. Don't expect to find the water in the glass has overflowed and made a puddle on your counter.
http://www.ncpa.org/iss/env/2002/pd040202b.html
http://www.ncpa.org/iss/env/2002/pd032602b.html
http://www.ncpa.org/iss/env/2002/pd032502d.html
http://www.ncpa.org/iss/env/2002/pd011402d.html
http://www.ncpa.org/iss/env/pd110801d.html

We've had this conversation in the past. I asked what the inhabitants of the Earth were doing 25,000 years ago to cause the Earth to warm and the ice sheets to recede and disappear from Europe and North America.

I also asked what the inhabitants were doing between 1000 and 1300AD to cause the Earth to suddenly warm....and then cool. Fact, the Earth's climate was warmer between 1000 and 1300AD than it is now.

Anyone care to explain that.....in the context of humans causing climate change/global warming?

For that matter, I would be fascinated to know what humans were doing to bring on the last Ice Age. Any ideas?

posted January 24, 2005 05:20 PM            

Yes there have been periods of warming and cooling of the earth but what we are seeing with todays climate is no doubt happening at a pace that is hastened by man's callous disregard for the consequences of releasing massive amounts of Co2 into the atmosphere that was formerly locked deep within the earth.

posted January 24, 2005 07:01 PM            

The countdown to climate-change catastrophe is spelt out by a task force of senior politicians, business leaders and academics from around the world - and it is remarkably brief. In as little as 10 years, or even less, their report indicates, the point of no return with global warming may have been reached.

The report, Meeting The Climate Challenge, is aimed at policymakers in every country, from national leaders down. It has been timed to coincide with Tony Blair's promised efforts to advance climate change policy in 2005 as chairman of both the G8 group of rich countries and the European Union.

And it breaks new ground by putting a figure - for the first time in such a high-level document - on the danger point of global warming, that is, the temperature rise beyond which the world would be irretrievably committed to disastrous changes. These could include widespread agricultural failure, water shortages and major droughts, increased disease, sea-level rise and the death of forests - with the added possibility of abrupt catastrophic events such as "runaway" global warming, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, or the switching-off of the Gulf Stream.

The report says this point will be two degrees centigrade above the average world temperature prevailing in 1750 before the industrial revolution, when human activities - mainly the production of waste gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), which retain the sun's heat in the atmosphere - first started to affect the climate. But it points out that global average temperature has already risen by 0.8 degrees since then, with more rises already in the pipeline - so the world has little more than a single degree of temperature latitude before the crucial point is reached.

More ominously still, it assesses the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere after which the two-degree rise will become inevitable, and says it will be 400 parts per million by volume (ppm) of CO2.

The current level is 379ppm, and rising by more than 2ppm annually - so it is likely that the vital 400ppm threshold will be crossed in just 10 years' time, or even less (although the two-degree temperature rise might take longer to come into effect).

"There is an ecological timebomb ticking away," said Stephen Byers, the former transport secretary, who co-chaired the task force that produced the report with the US Republican senator Olympia Snowe. It was assembled by the Institute for Public Policy Research in the UK, the Center for American Progress in the US, and The Australia Institute. The group's chief scientific adviser is Dr Rakendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The report urges all the G8 countries to agree to generate a quarter of their electricity from renewable sources by 2025, and to double their research spending on low-carbon energy technologies by 2010. It also calls on the G8 to form a climate group with leading developing nations such as India and China, which have big and growing CO2 emissions.

"What this underscores is that it's what we invest in now and in the next 20 years that will deliver a stable climate, not what we do in the middle of the century or later," said Tom Burke, a former government adviser on green issues who now advises business.

The report starkly spells out the likely consequences of exceeding the threshold. "Beyond the 2 degrees C level, the risks to human societies and ecosystems grow significantly," it says.

"It is likely, for example, that average-temperature increases larger than this will entail substantial agricultural losses, greatly increased numbers of people at risk of water shortages, and widespread adverse health impacts. [They] could also imperil a very high proportion of the world's coral reefs and cause irreversible damage to important terrestrial ecosystems, including the Amazon rainforest."

It goes on: "Above the 2 degrees level, the risks of abrupt, accelerated, or runaway climate change also increase. The possibilities include reaching climatic tipping points leading, for example, to the loss of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets (which, between them, could raise sea level more than 10 meters over the space of a few centuries), the shutdown of the thermohaline ocean circulation (and, with it, the Gulf Stream), and the transformation of the planet's forests and soils from a net sink of carbon to a net source of carbon."

posted January 24, 2005 07:11 PM            

You would have become more aware had you performed the simple experiment I posted.

Fact, about half the area of Antarctica is floating ice that thaws in summer and freezes in winter....without the dreaded rising of the ocean levels. How do you account for that?

Fact, the entire land area of Antarctica is about 75% of the land area of the United States....2.7 million square miles vs 3.5+ million square miles....not to be confused with miles square.

The temperature range in the Antarctic summer is between about 5 degrees and -30 degrees F.

The Arctic is not a land mass at all but IS a floating block of ice. The Arctic intersects continental land masses but is not a land mass itself. All or most of the weight of the Arctic is floating and therefore displacing water and raising the sea levels. If it all melted and if all the floating ice of the Antarctic melted, it wouldn't raise the sea levels at all.

I will concede that if all the ice covering the actual land mass of the continent of Antarctica melted, it would raise sea levels dramatically. Fat chance though.

I have noted the scientific credentials of those claimed to be experts in global warming by the global warming crowd....not very impressive. Further, the computer models they dream up to predict temperature changes didn't work...being off in some cases by a factor of 10. Junk science at it's worst and their scientific methods don't even rise to the level of junk. Manipulating the data to fit the theory is the worst kind of junk science.

The Sun is throwing off more radiation as it periodically does which accounts for almost all the warming of the Earth.

posted January 27, 2005 10:23 PM              

Carbon Dioxide Levels Sky High
MAUNA LOA OBSERVATORY, Hawaii, March 20, 2004

(AP) Carbon dioxide, the gas largely blamed for global warming, has reached record-high levels in the atmosphere after growing at an accelerated pace in the past year, say scientists monitoring the sky from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.

The reason for the faster buildup of the most important “greenhouse gas” will require further analysis, the U.S. government experts say.

“But the big picture is that CO2 is continuing to go up,” said Russell Schnell, deputy director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's climate monitoring laboratory in Boulder, Colo., which operates the Mauna Loa Observatory on the island of Hawaii.

Carbon dioxide, mostly from burning of coal, gasoline and other fossil fuels, traps heat that otherwise would radiate into space. Global temperatures increased by about 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius) during the 20th century, and international panels of scientists sponsored by world governments have concluded that most of the warming probably was due to greenhouse gases.

The climatologists forecast continued temperature rises that will disrupt the climate, cause seas to rise and lead to other unpredictable consequences, unpredictable in part because of uncertainties in computer modeling of future climate.

Before the industrial age and extensive use of fossil fuels, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stood at about 280 parts per million, scientists have determined.

Average readings at the 11,141-foot Mauna Loa Observatory, where carbon dioxide density peaks each northern winter, hovered around 379 parts-per-million on Friday, compared with about 376 a year ago.

That year-to-year increase of about 3 parts per million is considerably higher than the average annual increase of 1.8 parts per million over the past decade, and markedly more accelerated than the 1-part-per-million annual increase recorded a half-century ago, when observations were first made here.

Asked to explain the stepped-up rate, climatologists were cautious, saying data needed to be further evaluated. But Asia immediately sprang to mind.

“China is taking off economically and burning a lot of fuel. India, too,” said Pieter Tans, a prominent carbon-cycle expert at NOAA's Boulder lab.

Another leading climatologist, Ralph Keeling, whose father, Charles D. Keeling, developed methods for measuring carbon dioxide, noted that the rate “does fluctuate up and down a bit,” and said it was too early to reach conclusions. But he added: “People are worried about `feedbacks.' We are moving into a warmer world.”

He explained that warming itself releases carbon dioxide from the ocean and soil. By raising the gas's level in the atmosphere, that in turn could increase warming, in a “positive feedback,” said Keeling, of San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects that, if unchecked, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations by 2100 will range from 650 to 970 parts per million. As a result, the panel estimates, average global temperature would probably rise by 1.4 to 5.8 degrees Celsius (2.7 and 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit) between 1990 and 2100.

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol would oblige ratifying countries to reduce carbon dioxide emissions according to set schedules, to minimize potential global warming. The pact has not taken effect, however.

The United States, the world's biggest carbon dioxide emitter, signed the agreement but did not ratify it, and the Bush administration has since withdrawn U.S. support, calling instead for voluntary emission reductions by U.S. industry and more scientific research into climate change.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/20/tech/main607629.shtml

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Global warming could be twice as bad as feared: computer model
01-27-2005, 01h34
- (climateprediction.net)
PARIS (AFP) - Global warming may be twice as bad as expected, according to a new assessment of a commonly-used yardstick of possible carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution.

Until now, most computer models of climate change predict that if atmospheric levels of CO2 reach double of the pre-industrial age, the Earth's surface temperature will be between two and five C (3.6-9.0 F) warmer when compared with 1990 levels.

But a study published Thursday in the British science journal Nature suggests that the temperature rise could be much higher -- of between nearly two (3.6 F) and more than 11 C (19.8 F).

The research comes from a highly ambitious project in "shared computing," in which more than 90,000 people in more than 140 countries downloaded a special programme to crunch through data on their personal computer.

The screensaver software, which operates when the PC is not in use, was first pioneered by a US project, SETIAhome, which sifts through radio noise from deep space that, it is hoped, may one day contain a signal from extra-terrestrial life.

The organisers of the climateprediction.net project used the volunteers' spare commuting power to run through more than 2,000 different models on possible climate change.

Once the first batch of results was obtained, the researchers selected those models that had simulated the past climate accurately.

These best-performing models were then asked to predict how much the Earth would warm after CO2 concentrations had doubled from the pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million (ppm).

The responses ranged from 1.9 (3.4 F) to 11.5 C (20.7 F), "substantially greater" than the conventional model, they found. Most estimates clustered around 3.4 C.

By comparison, the top UN scientific authority on global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), estimated in 2001 that there would be a temperature rise of between 1.4 C (2.5 F) and 5.8 C (10.4 F) from 1990-2100.

Those figures were respectively based on CO2 scenarios that ranged from 540 to 970 ppm by the end of this century.

Current CO2 levels, as recorded in March 2004 at a Hawaii monitoring station, stood at 379 ppm. In 2000, they were 368 ppm.

The burning of oil, gas and coal, the drivers of the Industrial Revolution and the foundation of the world economy today, is releasing into the atmosphere billions of CO2 that have lain buried for millions of years.

The gas hangs in the atmosphere, trapping heat from the Sun that otherwise would radiate safely back into space.

Scientists say this unbridled pollution is bound to have an effect on the world's delicately-balanced climate system.

Their big challenge, though, is to figure out when, where and how the effects will kick in, and if the change will be gradual or if there will be a "tipping point" beyond which change will be cataclysmic.

While there are many uncertainties, recent evidence suggests that carbon pollution is worsening faster than thought and that the first signs of climate change are already visible, in the form of extreme weather events such as recurrent El-Ninos, droughts, floods and storms.
http://www.turkishpress.com/world/news.asp?id=050127013448.04srrxg9.xml

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Associated Press
Update 4: Blair: U.S. Must Work With Rest of World
01.26.2005, 07:42 PM

British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Wednesday the United States must do more to address the concerns of the rest of the world if it expects support for its own policies, and he cited global warming as a prime example.
http://www.forbes.com/associatedpress/feeds/ap/2005/01/26/ap1784867.html

posted February 01, 2005 07:02 PM              

CRAP. YOU WOULD THINK SHE WAS AMERICAN OR SOMETHING.

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~*~ Cusp: Gemini/Cancer, Cancer rising, Taurus moon ~*~

posted February 02, 2005 01:31 AM              

why aren't you answering my question?

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~*~ Cusp: Gemini/Cancer, Cancer rising, Taurus moon ~*~