Global warming tipping point preached

The Wahington Post reckons the central debate around climate change has shifted from whether humans are causing global warming to whether its too late to do anything about it.

There has been quite the line up of highly respected climate scientists to broach the "tipping point" scenario recently. James Lovelock, developer of the Gaia hypothesis, claims in his new book The Revenge of Gaia that global warming is now irreversible. Sir Crispin Tickell, the man who convinced Margaret Thatcher that global warming was real, predicts that the human population will drop from 6 billion in 2006 to 2.3 billion people in 2206. James E. Hansen, longtime director of the NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and leading authority on the earth's climate system has been trying to say his piece but is being methodically silenced by the Bush Administration who are intent on controlling the message the US public gets to hear.

The debate has been intensifying because Earth is warming much faster than some researchers had predicted. James E. Hansen, who directs NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, last week confirmed that 2005 was the warmest year on record, surpassing 1998. Earth's average temperature has risen nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past 30 years, he noted, and another increase of about 4 degrees over the next century would "imply changes that constitute practically a different planet."

"It's not something you can adapt to," Hansen said in an interview. "We can't let it go on another 10 years like this. We've got to do something."

So what should we expect to happen in the forseeable future, if we waste the next ten years and assuming it is not already too late to do something?

There are three specific events that these scientists describe as especially worrisome and potentially imminent, although the time frames are a matter of dispute: widespread coral bleaching that could damage the world's fisheries within three decades; dramatic sea level rise by the end of the century that would take tens of thousands of years to reverse; and, within 200 years, a shutdown of the ocean current that moderates temperatures in northern Europe.

Tags: Global+Warming, Climate+Change, CO2, Energy, Science, News, Politics, Bush, Sustainability, Tipping+Point

Bush tries to silence top NASA climate scientist.

It's nice to know that NASA's mission statement includes the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet", and a shame that the US Commander-in-Chief has no such plans:

The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.

Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. "They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public," he said.

[....]

"Communicating with the public seems to be essential," he said, "because public concern is probably the only thing capable of overcoming the special interests that have obfuscated the topic."

Dr. Hansen, 63, a physicist who joined the space agency in 1967, is a leading authority on the earth's climate system. He directs efforts to simulate the global climate on computers at the Goddard Institute in Morningside Heights in Manhattan.

Since 1988, he has been issuing public warnings about the long-term threat from heat-trapping emissions, dominated by carbon dioxide, that are an unavoidable
byproduct of burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels. He has had run-ins with politicians or their appointees in various administrations, including budget watchers in the first Bush administration and Vice President Al Gore.

Isn't this the same Bush who said that Intelligent Design should be taught alongside the Theory of Evolution in science classes as a competing theory?

Tags: Climate+Change, Global+Warming, NASA, Goddard+Institute

Earth to Bush: I'm melting!

Whatever happened to the Pentagon telling George Bush that the other GW, global warming GW, is an even bigger threat to the planet than terrism?:

Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us · Secret report warns of rioting and nuclear war · Britain will be 'Siberian' in less than 20 years · Threat to the world is greater than terrorism Mark Townsend and Paul Harris in New York Sunday February 22, 2004 The Observer Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters.. A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world. The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents. 'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.' The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.

Maybe he just didn't believe the Pentagon. Well, we have had the world's hottest year on record and Hurricane Katrina since then and we can see from the US's inability to stop Iran and North Korea from steadily becoming nuclear powers that the Pentagon prediction about the emergence of rogue nuclear states is not completely improbable.

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Green electricity affordable if you try.

The Australian head of state's representative in Australia really isn't a bad old bloke. Whatever foreign royal Governor-General Michael Jeffery represents he does have his head in the right place with his Australia Day call for Australians to recognise global warming as one of the greatest threats to our future.

But when loyal subject E. Suchet of St Ives, Sydney decided to heed the Queen's man and do something about minimising global warming his enthusiasm was short lived:

Green at a premium

Our Governor-General warns us of the cost of global warming ("Our golden soil is in danger, Jeffery warns", January 27). I took him at his word, and phoned my energy company to find out the cost of getting "green" energy. I was told "20 per cent extra". So much for that idea.

Surely our governments should be encouraging the use of safer energy, and subsidising to a greater extent solar panels on roofs and water storage from gutters. Makes sense to me. When will it make sense to politicians?

E. Suchet St Ives

SMH Letters to the Editor January 28, 2006

Mr Suchet, if you conserve 20 per cent of your electricity output and buy green electricity at a 20 percent premium, then you break even, the evironment wins and you leave a better legacy for your children and grandchildren. Plus you make green energy more economical and this has a positive multiplier effect throughout society whereas exactly the opposite happens when you purchase coal generated electricity.

Don't believe you can save 20 per cent on your electricity bills? 15 percent of EnergyAustralia's customers billed by time of day are achieving exactly that under a scheme designed to stop the conservers of electricity subsidising the people with air conditioners.

A survey of 3000 EnergyAustralia customers being billed under the new time-of-use system found the average saving was about 10 per cent, compared with a flat tariff.

Almost 15 per cent of customers were saving 20 per cent or more on their bills.

But customers with higher bills used at least 50 per cent more peak-time energy than the average customer, EnergyAustralia said.

Under time-of-use pricing, the peak period is between 2pm and 8pm on weekdays, when the cost of electricity is higher than the traditional flat tariff.

For the rest of the week, the price of electricity is lower than that paid by customers under a flat tariff.

Of the 3000 surveyed, the average residential customer consumed only 21 per cent of their electricity during the peak period, compared with about 25 per cent for customers on a flat tariff.

"The feedback we have had from customers is they have been able to save money with small changes to their electricity use by simply using appliances like dishwashers, washing machines, dryers and pool pumps when power is cheaper," Mr Maltabarow said. "I don't make any apologies for mandating time-of-use across the system."

EnergyAustralia is installing "smart" electricty meters in 200,000 Sydney homes and is now able to bill heavy users, such as people with air conditioners, for their drain on the system by charging peak, shoulder and off-peak pricing periods as opposed to a flat tariff.

EnergyAustralia is also experimenting with other pricing arrangements, and hopes the move away from a flat tariff will eventually cut its ballooning capital works program, with the savings passed on to customers.

Air-conditioners are responsible for more than half the growth in peak electricity demand in NSW.

That growth is soaking up a large part of the capital spent by firms such as EnergyAustralia to deliver electricity.

The reason why is that the network has to be engineered to accommodate electricity peaks.

Tags: Climate+Change, Global+Warming, Energy, Electricity, Green+Energy, Co2

Human race to drop 60% over 200 years.

When James Lovelock said last week that global warming was now irreversible, I hoped he was just pushing his new book. Now the man who convinced Margaret Thatcher that global warming was real, Sir Crispin Tickell, predicts that, in 200 years, there could be as few as 2.3 billion people because rising sea levels and temperatures will make some areas uninhabitable and, coupled with social factors, depress birth rates.

ONE of Britain's leading environmentalists will today sound a doomsday warning to the world: humanity's very existence is under threat from climate change and, even if we survive, the population will crash to about a third of its current level ...

But he also says our survival is "not guaranteed" and that the presence of humans on the planet could be "no more than a somewhat messy episode
in the history of the Earth".

Tags: Global+Warming, Climate+Change, Sustainability, News, Politics, Energy, Nuclear

Ethanol debate: plenty more mileage left.

Alexander Farrell at the University of California Berkeley looked at six studies used to argue for and against the development of ethanol as an energy source to conclude that the current ethanol manufacture from grain is expensive and contributes to pollution and greenhouse gases but better 'cellulosic' technology will make ethanol 'a really good fuel for the United States'.

"At the moment, cellulosic technology is just too expensive. If that changes - and the technology is developing rapidly - then we might see cellulosic technology enter the commercial market within five years."

Tags: Global+Warming, Climate+Change, Ethanol, Fuel, Energy, News, Blog

Greens need a heart.

The green political movement is fast finding its place as the third political force in Australia, and around the world, and realising the need to define itself into a field long dominated by a left vs. right, labour vs. capital debate. The thrust of an article by writer Hilary Burden in today's SMH is that the conservation vs. development debate is 30 years old and both sides have dug in, erected idiological walls and taken intractable positions where differences seem irreconcilable. And that the greens need to re-invent themselves to move to a more influential center much like Ariel Sharon abandoning Likud to form a new party at the center or the IRA disbanding to take an active role in democratic politics.

In a simplistic way, both greens and business alike may benefit from an intellectual de-clutter. The old wardrobe of thought edited, shaped to suit a fresh, more mature way of living in your skin; one that has the capacity to attract new, fresh responses.

What seems in the air more than ever now is that people like less being labelled green or right wing. Often their concerns meet over the fence, making the old labels seem wrong, or at least not completely right.

This strikes a cord with me as I dislike being labled either left or right wing because I can identify with aspects of both. I don't mind the green label but it would be more accurate to call me green-tinged; of course the economy is important but it exists within the environment. I am pro-business, yet abhor the corporate practice of externalising costs.

Hillary Burden argues for breaking out of old and inhibiting paridigms to see the way forward:

People need to be free to earn a living, and make money. These people may also be concerned about the environment. They are not two different breeds of people, though historically they are. All business people are not sharks, and all greens are not tree dwellers.

The debate may yet be won by people from both sides who can meet in the middle and make sense of it without calling each other names. Or using them. Start fresh and unvested.

Also in today's SMH, David McKnight makes a similar point:

But the Greens are not a rebirth of the left. In spite of their tough criticism of corporate power, they do not propose the abolition of capitalism. The clash between labour and capital is not fundamental to world view. Rather, it is about humanity's relationship with nature.

According to the Greens leader and author Drew Hutton, green politics are about "changing the nature of human relationships with the planet and other species on the planet".

The economic battle is not to redistribute wealth or abolish the market but to make the economy sustainable. Some greens have seized on the market mechanism as one way of allocating scarce resources, by attributing a much higher value to water, coal, oil and other finite resources. In its own way this is the direction of the Kyoto agreement.

He claims that the central idea of the Greens is a conservatism of a new kind, arguing that modern economics brings radical changes and political support for the Greens is the instinctive conservative reaction to this change.

An ever-expanding capitalism runs up against the environmental limits of the world and the freer play of markets and globalisation has the effect of making communal life less traditional. The security associated with regular jobs, stable community and family life and social solidarity is undermined by the spread of markets beyond the economy.

As a result of this radicalism, he argues, "what might be called philosophic conservatism - a philosophy of protection, conservation and solidarity - acquires a new relevance for political radicalism today".

The old paradigm of right, meaning conservative, and left, meaning radical, is eroding. A conservative frame of mind does not necessarily rely on the old verities of race, church and nation.

He develops his arguements well, to finish with a message to the Greens.

If the Greens are to consolidate their gains and expand, they need to recognise that part of their message is a conservative one. It is deeply attractive to certain conservative instincts and this should not be a matter for embarrassment but for celebration.

The image of green politics as left-wing and radical not only drives away potential supporters, it more importantly straitjackets new politics into old categories.

Coinciding with these articles is a release of the Australian Bureau of Statistcs (ABS) 2006 Year Book report that suggests the Greens might might find fertile ground from re-inventing, reinvigorating and re-engaging with what is the biggest block of voters:

Australians are becoming greener, older and stay married longer.

A snapshot of the nation, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 2006 Year Book released today, shows as the population ages, Aussies are also thinking more about the environment.

Almost three-quarters of Australians have installed dual-flush toilets, just under half of all households have water-saving showers and 16 per cent are recycling or reusing water.

Recycling has almost become universal with 98 per cent of people throwing bottles, tins and milk cartons in their coloured-lidded wheelie bins regularly.

Tags: Global+Warming, Climate+Change, Politics, Greens, News, Australia, Earth

Extreme climate change now irreversible.

Global warming has reached the point of no return and our planet can only keep heating up according to the leading scientist Sir James Lovelock who developed the theory that the Earth is like a living organism in totality. Known as the Gaia hypothesis it was first broached in 1975 and introduced the concept of the earth's biomass having homeostasis, or self-regulating feedback systems, to a non technical audience. These regulatory feedback loops maintain the conditions to sustain life on the planet.

While Gaia hypothesis has had it's critics it was a model that helped facilitate my understanding of complex interactions like the carbon cycle, so it is with interest that I note of Lovelock's predictions in his new book The Revenge of Gaia. Predictions based on his assertion that the feedback mechanisms that are used to cool the earth are now working to amplify anthropogenic warming from our CO2 emissions:

• by 2100 Europe and southern Australia would be 8 degrees hotter than they are today
• he cannot see the United States or the economies of China and India cutting back in time and they are the main source of CO 2 emissions
• he predicts efforts to slow it may already be doomed
• billions would die by the end of the century, and civilisation as it is known would be unlikely to survive
• the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic, where the climate remains tolerable

These climate change preditions make for a gloomy outlook and I'm the glass half full type, so how much weight should The Revenge of Gaia be approached with?

Professor Lovelock is a controversial but respected scientist who gave a briefing on global warming in 1989 to the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. Two years ago he caused a furore in the environment movement by urging greens to embrace nuclear power to reduce global warming gases.

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AP6 climate talks raises temperatures

The people are not fooled by the recent Sydney AP6 industry-friendly climate smokescreen as the Letters to the Editor of the SMH demonstrate:

Hot air does little to cool the greenhouse.

Along with the world's, my temperature was rising when reading the results of the government climate change junket ("Greenhouse battle handed to industry", January 13). What on earth did the government representatives actually do? The only outcome I see is that they have now officially rubber- stamped further destruction of the world's climate by the world's biggest polluting companies and countries.

My temperature finally boiled over when I read a quote from the US representative that nuclear energy would be "discussed by the renewable energy group because many people consider it a renewable source". How do you renew uranium? Is Kakadu renewable? I would laugh if I could stop crying in despair.

Damien Quinnell Menai

John Howard has just pledged to spend $1 a person a year for the next five years to slash greenhouse gas emissions. Maybe he should spend $2.50 a person, as he did with his industrial reforms campaign, to explain why his el cheapo solution will work.

Stephen Wong Castlecrag

How could you possibly expect industry leaders to look after the health of the planet when the best they can do is to reward themselves with the highest possible salaries while their fellow workers, who are deemed lower on the status ladder, can earn up to 250 times less. Can those who think so highly of themselves be truly trusted to think of others?

Richard Nohra Hurlstone Park

Why does John Howard speak at these conferences? It would be much simpler if he rose after an American and just said "ditto".

Jim Ruxton Pymble

One hundred million dollars from our guys? That's about two Liberal government ad campaigns. And $69 million from the United States? That's about $10 million less than what they spent investigating Bill Clinton's fib and a semen stain.

Ross Sharp Toowong (Qld)

Tags: News, Politics, Global Warming, Greenhouse, Climate Change

The office doesn't recycle? Take it to the union.

The BBC explores what roles trade unions can play in building a greener planet:

The trade union movement has a critical role to play in building a cleaner and more just planet, argues the Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) in our new series of opinion pieces on the BBC News website entitled The Green Room.

It is a way for unions, who are under threat by an idiological pro-business, anti-environment government in Australia, to stay relevant in the face of their disempowerment.

In 2006 I don't need a union to negotiate my pay and conditions, but I would join a union if it meant they could put some pressure on my company and industry to conduct their business in a more environmentally friendly way. Work has no more claim on the environment than I do just because they pay me, and a union kind evens up the bargaining power.

At the recent AP6 climate talks the onus was put on companies to voluntarily do something about global warming. I can't see how this would work in the real word .... unless, of course, union were to hold business to account for their environmental impact.




Technorati Tags: Global+Warming, trade+union, sustainability, Natural+Capitalism

Why so damn cool about global warming?

For the life of me I can't understand why people at large are not more concerned with global warming. So I started the poll posted to the right to find answers. So far:

Quick question ...Which is your biggest fear?
Global warming	100%	6
Global pandemic	0%	0
Global terror	0%	0
total votes: 6
powered by blogpoll

Six responses isn't going to yield much information. So, please, if you have got this far then tell me what your greatest fear is and come back after answering the poll.

So my market researcher friend doesn't point out my poll is going to show bias towards GW by virtue of the self-selecting audience of Global Warming Watch, I considered tagging this post across a broad spectrum of unrelated subjects, but reconsidered when I realised that this is spam by another name.

If you have a blog and are interested in exploring this line of enquiry then please link my post. The more respondents, the more accurate this (admittedly unscientific) survey will be. If results are promising I will ask further questions to try to understand what it is that is stopping voters worldwide from taking the effective action we need to to minimise climate change.

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AP6 a whole lot of hot air

The inaugral Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (AP6) has come up with a rather unimpressive resolve to invent new technologies to make fossil fuels 'cleaner'. To this end it is pledging $A170 million over 5 years.

Too little, too late, wrong focus. Global warming was flagged as a problem to the world by the revelations of the first report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990, which pointed to strong and growing evidence of temperature rise, sea level rise and other changes resulting from rising emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases.

That report stressed the need for a 60 to 80 percent cut in CO2 emissions just to stabilise rising atmospheric concentrations of this greenhouse gas. Australia's government responds 16 years later by pledging $A25 million for the next 5 years - their way to avoid the only real effective course of action, and that is to set an effective target for the reduction of CO2 emissions.

Tags: Climate+Change, Global+Warming, Earth, CO2, AP6, Kyoto

$A2.6 trill will suck carbon out air not ground.

'$A2.6 trillion pledged towards fighting global warming', would be a great storyline. Instead the headline is Iraq war bill could top $2.6 trillion.

Welcome to the real world but, momentarily, my reverie revived me, and I glimpsed a time when global public pressure dislodges the corporate logjam that is stopping the universal acknowledgement that we have to do something very real about combatting very real global warming.

It's not like the money could not be found, the bill has to be paid, it's just a question of priorities; saving the planet for the future or getting the oil for the now, planting trees or pushing torture, algal photosynthetic bloomings or aerial phosphorous bombing.

Ok, I know that the science of seeding oceans with iron filings to create CO2 sucking algal blooms to effect global cooling has been debunked, but the point is that this the direction this inventive, survivalistic species should be heading in.

Because even when we are wrong sometimes, we can't be as wrong spending $2.6 trillion to find out we were wrong in Iraq.

Tags: Global+Warming, Climate+Change, Co2, carbon+sink, environment, news, Iraq, Bush, oil, fossil+fuels, global+cooling

Ian Plimer cool on global warming

Professor of geology at the University of Adelaide, Ian Plimer, says since we will all be coal in a million years (ok, so I'm paraphrasing), why worry about global warming?

Does it matter if sea level rises a few metres or global temperatures rise a few degrees? No. Sea level changes by up to 400m, atmospheric temperatures by about 20C, carbon dioxide can vary from 20 per cent to 0.03 per cent, and our dynamic planet just keeps evolving.

....

The planet's best friend is human resourcefulness with a supportive, strong economy and reduced release of toxins. The greenhouse gases - nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide and methane - have been recycled for billions of years without the intervention of human politics.

Ian Plimer also makes his living selling this line through the auspices of the Institute of Public Affairs, an Australian right-wing think tank.

Tags: Global+Warming, Climate+Change, Economy, News, Politics, Australia, Carbon+Dioxide, Earth, Planet, Climate+Skeptic, Science, Geology, Climate+Science, Kyoto

RealClimate, keepin' it real for 12 months

Happy birthday to a much needed climate scientists forum who are doing a great job demystifying the global warming news making it into the mainstream media every day:

RealClimate has been online for just over a year, and so this is probably a good time to review the stories we've covered and assess how well the whole project is working out.

Over the last 12 months, we've tackled a 100+ scientific topics that range from water vapour feedbacks, the carbon cycle, climate sensitivity, satellite/surface temperature records, glacier retreat, climate modellinghurricanes. We've had guest postings that span questions of Martian climate change to Arctic ozone depletion and solar forcing. We've crossed virtual swords with Michael Crichton, the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, George Will, Nigel Lawson, Fox News and assorted documentary makers (though only one person ever threatened to sue us). Hopefully our contributions have interested, intrigued and occasionally amused (at least a few of you...).

Keep on keepin' it real.

Tags: Global Warming, Climate Change, News, Media, Science, Climate Science