Carbon dioxide up 2.4 ppm on last year

Here's the sobering bit: The average annual increase of carbon dioxide between 1979 and 2007 is only 1.65 parts per million (ppm). Suddenly, we are measuring a 0.5% rise in a year.

Researchers from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) reported new data that shows a higher than usual average increase in carbon dioxide levels over the last 30 years.

The recently released report from NOAA scientists is an annual update to the agency’s greenhouse gas index, which tracks data from 60 regions around the world. Concentrations may have increased by as much as 0.5% from 2006 to 2007.

That was the consequence of the rise of China and India, Business-As-Usual in the United States and Australia, and, I believe, the successful shilling by the AGW denial industry (See post below).

The above link goes on to talk about a sharp rise in methane levels as well.

Global Warning Climate Change Energy

Global warming boon for brain-eating amoeba

Sensational headline — one with some basis in fact:

"This is definitely something we need to track," said Michael Beach, a specialist in recreational waterborne illnesses for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."This is a heat-loving amoeba. As water temperatures go up, it does better," Beach said. "In future decades, as temperatures rise, we'd expect to see more cases."

The villain is a killer amoeba, Naegleria fowleri (nuh-GLEER-ee-uh FOWL'-erh-eye), that enters the body through the nose and attacks the brain where it feeds until you die. The good news is that it has only killed six boys and young men this year, the bad news is that this is a spike; it has killed 23 people in the United States, from 1995 to 2004.

The other bad news is that it's only getting hotter.

Global Warning Climate Change

NSW battered by a 1 in 30 year storm

I heard on the news that seven people have died in the same storm that has driven a coal tanker aground in Nobby's beach in Newcastle. The urgency seems to have come off that crisis, it is not breaking up, but the weather is set to get worse.

clipped from www.smh.com.au Saturday June 9, 2007 945pm AEST Weather set to get worse 7:50pm | Newcastle and Hunter Valley residents braced for more severe weather after enduring the brunt of a one-in-30-year storm. Photos: Storms lash NSW Search continues for missing father Bodies of a mother and her three children found after road collapsed beneath car. Salvage team boards beached ship

Blogger Vuivee's reaction to weather.

Bush seriously considers 50% emissions cut by 2050

Full marks to the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, for turning Bush's forward thrust on climate change into advantage with a neat little judo throw to extract "serious consideration" for her preferred benchmark of 50% cuts by 2050 - backed by the EU, Canada and Japan. Sure, Bush didn't commit to any targets, but he also didn't expect to find himself suddenly lying on his back being helped up by a smiling Merkel. Ippon to the Chancellor - a classic demonstration of back-rub blow-back.

clipped from news.bbc.co.uk G8 leaders agree to climate deal Leaders of the G8 nations have agreed to seek "substantial" cuts in emissions in an effort to tackle climate change. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the G8 would negotiate within a UN framework to seek a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol by the end of 2009. No mandatory target was set for the cuts, but Mrs Merkel's preference for a 50% emissions cut by the year 2050 was included in the agreed statement. "We agreed... that CO2 emissions must first be stopped and then followed by substantial reductions," the German chancellor said. Global greenhouse gas emissions must stop rising, followed by substantial global emission reductions. G8 statement BBC Reaction to climate deal In pictures: Anti-G8 protests Her preferred benchmark of 50% cuts by 2050 - backed by the EU, Canada and Japan - would be given serious consideration, she said. From the agreed text published on the G8 website; the leaders agreed to take "strong and early" action. "Taking into account the scientific knowledge as represented in the recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] reports, global greenhouse gas emissions must stop rising, followed by substantial global emission reductions," the text says. Global Warning Climate Change Energy

Costa Rica to be carbon neutral by 2030

In the early 1893 New Zealand was the first nation in the world to enfranchise women. Look at the revolution this started. Can you conceive that women shouldn't have the vote?

Nobody can take that away from the Kiwis (Even though the Aussies came a close second in 1901). If Costa Rica does achieve their ambition to become the first carbon neutral country, nobody will be able take that from them either. Our future lies in a world where we cannot conceive of not striving to be carbon neutral.

clipped from www.radioaustralia.net.au Green trail-blazer Costa Rica is drawing up plans to cut its net greenhouse gas emissions to zero before 2030, the government says. Environment Minister Roberto Dobles says the tiny, jungle-cloaked Central American nation aims to be the first nation to offset all its carbon. He says the country plans to clean up its fossil fuel-fired power plants, promote hybrid vehicles and increase tree planting to balance its emissions. "The goal is to be carbon neutral," Mr Dobles told Reuters news agency on Thursday. "We'd like to do it in the next 20 years." He said Costa Rica will also eliminate net emissions of other greenhouse gases. Costa Rica is a leader on green issues, with protected areas like national parks and biological reserves covering more than a quarter of its territory. The country generates 78 per cent of its energy with hydroelectric power and another 18 per cent by wind or geothermally. It now plans to cut emissions from transport, farming and industry. Global Warning Climate Change Energy

Manhattan ice island found 50 kms offshore

The first major ice-shelf calving in 25 years, in 2005, from the Ayles Ice Shelf in the Arctic, is slightly thicker than anticipated; Between 42-45m (138-148ft) - the equivalent of the height of a 10-storey building.

That's the good news.

clipped from news.bbc.co.uk Scientists in the Arctic have just carried out the first research on a huge iceberg the size of Manhattan. Some 16km long and 5km wide (10x3 miles), Ayles Ice Island broke away from the Canadian Arctic coast in 2005, but has only recently been identified. Researchers have now landed on the giant berg with a BBC team and planted a tracking beacon on its surface. This will allow the island's progress to be monitored as currents push it around the Arctic Ocean. The team wants to know why this Ice Island formed Tracking the island For 3,000 years, this colossal block of ice was securely fixed to the coast as part of the Ayles Ice Shelf - but now it is drifting free. Its current location is about 600km (400 miles) from the North Pole, in what is one of the fastest warming regions on Earth. Global Warning Climate Change

Global warming to change time as we know it.

Jochem Marotzke and research partners at the Max Planck Institute in Germany has published one of the most surprising effects anticipated by global warming in the March 28 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

This adds to LiveScience's Top Ten Surprising Things About Global Warming... making it a Top Eleven, I guess.

clipped from www.livescience.com In the next two centuries, global warming could cause the days to grow slightly shorter on Earth, a new study finds. Another effect of warming, however, might actually lengthen the day. As ocean water gets warmer due to climate, seawater expands thereby raising sea levels and changing the ocean’s circulation and even exerting more pressure on the ocean floor below in some areas, explained Jochem Marotzke of the Max Planck Institute in Germany. These pressure changes won’t be uniform across the globe, because global warming will cause the ocean to warm more in some places than in others. But over time, the differences will redistribute Earth’s ocean water, pushing it away from deep waters and onto shallower coastal shelf areas, primarily toward the North Pole. Like the physics behind a figure skater pulling in her arms to cause a faster spin, the pressure transfer would shift the ocean’s mass toward Earth’s axis of rotation

Latest global warming first: Climate refugees face mass exodus

Last year we heard of Shishmaref, an Alaskan Inuit village that had to relocate, and Puvirnituq, in Northern Quebec where igloos are no longer viable, but Bangladesh has 140 million people

"Bangladesh is nature's laboratory on disaster management," said Ainun Nishat, Bangladesh representative of the World Conservation Union and a government adviser on climate change. As temperatures rise and more severe weather takes hold worldwide, "this is one of the countries that is going to face the music most," he said.

Bangladesh is hardly the only low-lying nation facing tough times as the world warms. But scientists say it in many ways represents climate change's "perfect storm" of challenges because it is extremely poor, extremely populated and extremely susceptible.

clipped from www.chicagotribune.com ANTARPARA, Bangladesh -- Muhammad Ali, a wiry 65-year-old, has never driven a car, run an air conditioner or done much of anything that produces greenhouse gases. But on a warming planet, he is on the verge of becoming a climate refugee. In the past 10 years the farmer has had to tear down and move his tin-and-bamboo house five times to escape the encroaching waters of the huge Jamuna River, swollen by severe monsoons that scientists believe are caused by global warming and greater glacier melt in the Himalayas. Now the last of his land is gone, and Ali squats on a precarious piece of government-owned riverbank -- the only ground available -- knowing the river probably will take that as well once the monsoons start this month. "Where we are standing, in five days it will be gone," he predicts. "Our future thinking is that if this problem is not taken care of, we will be swept away."

Latest global warming first: Climate Wars

We've already had the world's first climate refugees, are we having the world's first climate war in Sudan? Will climate change soon cause the world's first western agricultural collapse, in Australia, if the rains don't fall this month?

clipped from www.climateark.org All of the predicted catastrophic consequences of climate change are happening already, though not yet ramped up to their full potential for death and destruction. We are already witnessing the world's first climate change war in Darfur, Sudan [more | more2]; and the first continental scale emergency in Australia's "big dry" drought. It has been suggested that the real root of the Darfur conflict is ferocious drought and famine that since mid-1980s transformed Sudan and the whole Horn of Africa "Those who were prepared to kill, rape and pillage were drawn from the ranks of the desperate, ripped from their traditional way of life by a catastrophic change in the weather.. there is the very real prospect it [climate change] will lead to more conflicts like Darfur

Global Warning Climate Change