Washington deluge 'predicted' as first sign of global warming

In an eery coincidence Kim Stanley Robinson, a science-fiction writer predicts in 2003 that a sustained Washington downpour will be the first sign of artificially global climate change. Via :::[Carbon Planet]

...sometime in the near future, a gigantic moisture-thick "stalled front" hangs over Washington for many days. Downpours come continuously, and eventually the city floods. Robinson, who is well-versed in science literature and whose fiction is often praised in technical publications, felt that sustained downpours, not melting ice, would be the first harbinger of artificially induced climate change. And a sustained downpour - worst than the Great Storm of 1871, previously the city's worst-ever - is ongoing in Washington at this writing.

The novel he predicted it in is called Forty Signs of Rain.

Other posts about the Washington deluge:

• Could US energy politics go Category Five?

Other blogs on: global warming climate change washington harbinger

Canadian climate denial sponsored by ExxonMobil

One of the scientists lending his credential to the badly misnamed 'Friends of Science' (friendsofscience.org) is Tim Patterson. Friends of Science is an organisation heavily engaged in global warming denial and one of the 'friends', Tim Patterson, turns out to work closely with the ExxonMobil via Tech Central Science Foundation. To find out more plug his name into the Exxon Secrets database. :::[ExxonSecrets.org].

I have a suggestion for these sorts of pseudo scientific organisations whose only real reason for being seems to be to cover big fossil fuel's polluting agenda; if they have any specific scientific proof that mankind is not causing global warming, then let them publish it in peer reviewed scientific journals. Throw their ideas into the ring and let them slog it out in a Darwinian struggle. If they survive the mauling by our best and brightest, then the public can at least have confidence in the veracity of 'scientific' claims that mankind is not responsible for global warming. Otherwise, it is simply confusing the message in public, and this is irresponsible and cowardly.

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Could US energy politics go Category Five?

At some point time in time, most likely soon, you are going to see something happen that will be big enough to snap the ordinary American right out of their climate change complacency.

It may not just be one big event, it could be a confluence of a number of different events. Perhaps a harbinger of this is when journalists start to regularly use extreme weather metaphors to describe politics and industry. Raymond Learsy of the Huffington Post believes he sees a perfect storm brewing over energy.
:::[A Perfect Storm Is Developing Around Energy Policy: Friedman On TV, Gore In Our Gut]

The speculation about Gore's political ambitions are flying fast and furious. But regardless of whether Gore decides to run again, I sense that something akin to the perfect storm is developing on the issue of energy policy. With $3-a-gallon (and rising) gasoline, an emerging consensus that global warming is real, and a growing sense that Big Oil's hand-in-glove relationship with the administration and Congress harms the average American citizen, Al Gore's return to the public stage may be the critical spark that finally lights a fire under the American electorate.

And yesterday Bill Blakemore of ABCNews announced he also believes he detects a perfect storm in the making. It seems an elm tree has been uprooted and has fallen across the driveway of the White house by a literal storm, and this has served to focus the so called "debate" on global warming. :::[A Perfect Storm Descends Upon The Nations Capital]

June 26, 2006: A perfect storm of drenching rain, irony, political rancor, public fear and - at the last minute like a fierce stroke of lightning - word from the highest court in the land, descended on the nation's capital today.

This storm - pulling in many parts of the global warming emergency - also broke through the White House perimeters and helped bring down a century-old elm tree, laying it across the driveway.

It seems even Mother Nature is not adverse to using the odd bitingly ironic metaphor to make her point. Denying access to and from the White House by use of an uprooted elm (possibly planted by a significant American in the good old days of 'for the people, by the people') until the U.S. Supreme Court announces that it will indeed hear the case brought against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on the grounds that it should have regulated carbon dioxide emissions in order to combat global warming.

How poetic and pithy a protest is that?

Not quite as poetic as the license George W Bush takes with the truth when he holds that there is a scientific global warming debate on whether global warming is man-made or natural. In what is a departure from the way US media generally cover global warming and politics, Blakemore takes the President to task for propagating propaganda:

"I have said consistently," answered Bush, "that global warming is a serious problem. There's a debate over whether it's manmade or naturally caused. We ought to get beyond that debate and start implementing the technologies necessary...… to be good stewards of the environment, become less dependent on foreign sources of oil"

The President - as far as the extensive and repeated researches of this and many other professional journalists, as well as all scientists credible on this subject, can find - is wrong on one crucial and no doubt explosive issue. When he said -— as he also did a few weeks ago - that "There's a debate over whether it's manmade or naturally caused" - well, there really is no such debate.

At least none above what is proverbially called "the flat earth society" level.

Not one scientist of any credibility on this subject has presented any evidence for some years now that counters the massive and repeated evidence - gathered over decades and come at in dozens of ways by all kinds of professional scientists around the world - that the burning of fossil fuels is raising the world's average temperature.

Or that counters the findings that the burning of these fuels is doing so in a way that is very dangerous for mankind, that will almost certainly bring increasingly devastating effects in the coming decades.

I grew up in a county subject to big thunder storms, every summer day at 3:00pm for 15 minutes the rapidly darkened heavens would open up on an otherwise sunny sky. On occasion one got a sense during the build up of the storm that it was going to be a much bigger one than usual. You could smell the electricity in the air, taste it in your mouth (tastes like blood), and feel the beginnings of a tingle on the back of your neck. And you just knew you were in for one serious doozy.

That's kind of how it feels now, but on a global dimension.

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Ski slope has global warming covered.

Two and a half thousand square metres of the Andermatt Swiss ski resort, next to the Gurschen glacier in central Switzerland was wrapped with white reflective sheeting to protect it from global warming in May: :::[CBC Canada]

Nearly 4 mm thick, the cover is made from synthetic fibres that protect the snow from ultraviolet radiation.

It was laid out on Tuesday by employees of Andermatt Gotthard Sportbahnen, the company that operates ski lifts at the resort.

The company said it took the step because employees had watched the glacier recede 20 metres from one of its lift stations in only 15 years.

Global Warming Watch are not in it to say we told you so, but our prescience is spooky: :::[Day after tomorrow? It's a wrap.]

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Cowards corner: where science and politics converge

On a bloggers conference call this afternoon, Faiz of Think Progress asked Al Gore for a response to the claims by global warming skeptics denying the clear link between global warming and man-made greenhouse gas clearly established by the US National Academy of Sciences report on global warming: :::[Think Progress]

"human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming." National Research Council National Academy of Sciences

One skeptic in question was the Electrcity Daily. The sparkies rag claimed the NAS report cast "serious doubts on the conventional scientific wisdom of man-made climate warming" and that "Those who argue that solar activity drives global climate, not CO2, will take heart." The Electricy Daily readership must be invested in coal, right up to their eyeballs. A swipe was also taken at Al Gore. His documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth" must be biting.

He provided an insight into what happens when science becomes politicised:

He said that global warming skeptics "will seize on anything to say up is down and black is white." Gore explained that science, by nature, thrives on uncertainty and tries to eliminate it; politics, on the other hand, is vulnerable to being paralyzed by uncertainty. When science and politics converge, Gore argued, the chance for "cowardice is high."

Cut though? Yes. Charged? Definately. Contoversial? Surely. But is he giving us a perspicacious grasp, or was he proffering a mere media grab? Is it cowardice for a politician to uphold a lie on behalf of special interest constituents at the expense of the greater community? Gore may have had the other skeptic Faiz referrs to, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), in his sights on that one. Inhofe claimed that, "Today's NAS report reaffirms what I have been saying all along, that Mann's 'hockey stick' is broken."

That is not the way the BBC reports it though: :::[BBC]

The new report, carried out by a panel of the US-based National Research Council (NRC), largely vindicates the researchers' [Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes] work, first published in 1998.

I think Gore is right. It is clear cowardice not to tell to the truth, more so for narrow political gain. You shouldn't have to think too deeply about that one, but what is galling is that the rest of us, and those who come after us, will pick up the tab for listening to this sort of gutlessness. The longer we listen, the bigger the tab will be.

Other blogs on: climate change global warming NAS NRC Al Gore global warming skeptics AGW

World map of renewable energy distribution

Want to know what the world will look like post oil and coal? This groovy little flash program shows how far some countries are on their way to renewable energy independance, and also shows the distribution of regions rich in renewable 'natural assets'. Brazil grows 40% of its motor car fuel as sugarcane ethanol. In Iceland, 93% of homes are powered by geothermal electricity. :::[Popular Science]

Other blogs on: global warming climate change alternative energy energy

Turn global warming off: "You control climate change" campaign

The "Tune in. Turn on. Drop Out" chant of the 60s ain't going to cut it in the mid-noughties era of global warming. Today, in the EU, it is "Turn down. Switch off. Recycle. Walk."

Households directly contribute about 16 percent of the EU's greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change is in direct control of householders, and to illustrate the point for the public.advertisements carrying the globe with a thermostat control are spearheading a new advertising awareness campaign launched by European Commission President José Manuel Barroso and Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas in Brussels on 31 May. The slogan is: Turn down. Switch off. Recycle. Walk. You couldn't get a more elegant piece of communication, it's so simple, anyone can turn a dial. But what is more powerful is the empowerment it gives the average punter. If you and I can control up to 16% of greenhouse gas emissions, and offset the rest, we can have a significant control over the impact of climate change on our future. Making things 16% less worse for ourselves is a good thing. It makes it worth doing something about global warming, and it is this point that will allow Joe Punter to come out of understandable global warming denial to take really stock of the situation. And then make a plan. :::[Expatica]

Other blogs on: global+warming, climate+change, downsizing, campaign

Seeds need to survive global warming if we are to.

While the US and Australia continue to contend that there is nothing wrong with global warming that can't be fixed by some future technology, the industrious Norwegians and others are squirreling away nuts. :::[SMH]

ON A Norwegian island 1000 kilometres from the North Pole, a consortium of nations is beginning work on a super-safe repository for "the world's most precious asset": its seeds.

When the chilled vault is completely installed in the permafrost and above the tsunami line some time next year, more than 1 million samples of agricultural seed, from apples to Zinfandel grapes, will be brought to the "seed bank of last resort".

It will be fifty metres long and five metres wide, lined with the hardest of prestressed concrete, and is to be bored into the side of a mountain on the island of Spitsbergen above the village of Longyearbyen. It is vertically high enough to survive sea level rise and tsunami, high enough in lattitude for the temperature to remain insulated from heat for "month, even years" should power fail. Dr Cary Fowler, executive director of the Rome-based Global Crop Diversity Trust, which will manage the repository, said the seeds are, "beyond value, and I don't think anyone can imagine realistic solutions to problems like climate change, water shortage or energy shortage without a system of agriculture that can adapt and change."

Learn more about: :::[Global Crop Diversity Trust]

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Flat Earth Theory #4: Dreaded global cooling didn't happen.

I enjoy coming across devotees of Lomborg's "The Skeptical Environmentalist" as they are thinner on the ground these days than a few years back, most not surviving the Darwinian rigours of peer-reviewed science except in protected, unscientific niches. For those who don't know Bjørn Lomborg, he is able to wave away the entire science of climatology and it's consensus on AGW with his particular brand of magic, that being political science. Joe Duck, a blogger is impressed:

What consistently impresses me the most about Lomborg is his willingness to take on his critics point by point, addressing their concerns with citations and what only appear to be legitimate personal criticisms. (Such as noting that climatologist Schneider used to warn about potentially catastrophic global cooling but now warns of potentially catastrophic global warming).

Well Joe, this one is a sitting duck. Perhaps Lomberg should have pointed out that the proponents of global cooling in the '70s remain scientifically valid today; if the atmosphere had not been cleaned up by successful initiatives as the Clean Air Act and similar ones in Europe, then indeed we would have hit an enormous ramification of global cooling. Same with the ozone hole, it would be bigger and damaging had we not banned CFC's.

Your argument (or rather Lomborg's) goes something like this:

First guy to second: "Mate, you are sitting on a train track, hate to point out the obvious, but if you don't get out of the way you are going to get killed!"

Second guy, as he steps off railway track: "Greenie, hippy, communist, wealth-stealer, you want to take my money and give it to the third world. Al-Gore-for-president freak you are, that's almost a religions belief you are professing, you chicken little alarmist nut."

Later.

First guy: "Wow, good thing that train just missed you... "

Second guy: ".... and I am alive! Just shows you just how wrong you were in the first place! Why should I ever believe you again?"

First guy opens mouth. Closes it. Opens mouth again: "Actually, please don't."

Learn more: :::[Wikipedia/Lomborg]

Other blogs on: global warming global cooling climate change climate science Lomborg skeptic

Grow your own organs in 10 years.

In what must be the penultimate act of self-sustainability a home grown Aussie science breakthrough has us shortly being able to replace our failing organs by growing them. Just in time too I reckon. Could this be our way out of the consequences of global warming? Since we can't prevent Gaia's organs from collapsing, can we regenerate our own to deal with rapid environmental change. :::[Wikipedia/climate surprise].

Is this a kick along for nuclear? If we can replace radioactive body parts with our own, non-rejectable body parts who cares where we place the nuclear power plants? If your neighbourhood finds it's supprise host to them then just order up complete organ redundancy. The nuclear plant will take 13 years to build, it will only take 10 years to completely regenerate lungs... that's three years of breathing space. Nuclear debate over.

Prime Minister John Howard's original future technology fix to the current problem of global warming has nothing on this little beauty. You read it first on Global Warming Watch.

Other blogs on: global warming climate change sustainability health medicine nuclear energy

Global warming solution is to free the market.

I believe the solution to global warming is going to be a free-market based one, which is why I am linking to this article. But first I want to tell you what I think.

Just as democracy operates best with an informed populace, so the free-market operates best with fully informed consumers. However we don't have a free market, and symptomatic of this is the unprecedented global warming that we are experiencing. The carbon cycle is out of kilter, with a build-up in the atmosphere trapping more heat than is reflected back into space, slowly heating the globe.

The reason why carbon is bottlenecking in the atmosphere is that we pump it up there, as a gasseous by-product of anciently sunk carbon dioxide, the fossil fuel energy we now use. Consumers have imperfect information about this, and it's effects when they fill up at the pump. They don't know that it was sunk for a good reason. Not because the knowledge is not there, it's been out there since 1988, but because it has been distorted by the purveyors of fossil fuels.

This hasn't been helped by our free-market economics theories and practices that seek to increase their margins by externalising costs of goods: :::[Planet Ark]

OSLO - The world must lay to rest a "myth" that protecting the environment harms economic growth, the new head of the UN Environment Programme said on Thursday.

Achim Steiner, a 45-year-old German, said he would seek to involve consumers, governments, businesses and activists in developing new economic mechanisms to protect the planet from threats ranging from climate change to pollution.

"Care for the environment is often portrayed as detrimental to economic growth," he told on his first day as head of the United Nations' top environment body.

"We hope to lay that myth to rest in the 21st century," he said by telephone from UNEP headquarters in Nairobi, setting out priorities for a four-year term.

Most conventional economic theory places no value on natural phenomena such as the coastline protection given by coral reefs or forests' role in absorbing heat-trapping carbon dioxide.

Steiner said a shift was needed to recognise the "enormous wealth of nature's services" underpinning all life on earth. In turn, that would show that environmental protection is a condition for economies to survive and thrive in the long term.

"We have to get environmental concerns into the mainstream of economics... to include what we are consuming and destroying," he said.

The article goes on to talk about how carbon trading places commercial activity in an economic system that recognises the fine business sense in keeping our common natural capital in good working order. If vigorous free market competition was happening within this framework then we would have the formula for species longevity. If one of us cuts corners to accumulate wealth, sell of a bit of the proverbial farm and the rest of us down the river, we are all ultimately poorer for it. We need economic thinking that has us as stewards of the planet, rather than masters of it. The reward is that we become masters of our destiny. The planet is like that.

Learn more about carbon trading: :::[Carbon Planet]

Other blogs on: global warming, climate change, environmental economics, carbon trading

Earth to climate model science: don't forget the permafrost!

Take a frozen meat and vege dinner out of your freezer, leave it and in a few days it rots, releasing carbon dioxide as bacteria breaks thawing organic matter down. Now take ancient woolly mammoth bones and grasslands locked in a million-square-kilometre stretch of Siberian permafrost, raise the global average temperature by one degree celcius over 100 years and it rots, releasing carbon dioxide as bacteria breaks thawing organic matter down. This analogy is provided by University of Florida botany professor, Ted Schuur, who with colleagues published a report in yesterday's issue of Science journal. :::[SMH]

... while other global warming researchers were factoring carbon reserves in the ocean, and in current soils and vegetation on the earth into their calculations, they had overlooked vast amounts of carbon trapped in permafrost in the northern plains of Siberia and central Alaska.

If all the permafrost thawed and was released as heat-trapping carbon dioxide, it could nearly double the 730 billion tonnes of carbon now in the atmosphere, the scientists said.

Carbon stored over tens of thousands of years could bubble up from thawed soil in as little as 100 years.

Also in Science journal is a pay per view story on what I can only interpret as the extremes the US Government is prepared to go to to maintain their global warming denialism: :::[sciencemag.org]

on 5 June, the U.S. government decided to strip several climate instruments off a suite of polar-orbiting satellites intended to provide the next generation of weather and climate-monitoring data for military, civilian, and scientific users.

Maybe there is a fair enough explanation but this does fit a pattern of previous denial. And take it to new heights.

Learn: :::[Wikipedia/Permafrost]:::[Science Magazine]

Other posts on the thawing permafrost:

• Permafrost semiperming

global warning climate change cnvironment ccience co2 permafrost arctic

Global warming awareness: even in America

An interesting, more 'real world' comparison to my "Greatest Fears" straw poll. There is movement at the station: :::[Blog For Clean Air]

59% [of Americans] say climate change warrants "some action" or "immediate" steps, up from 51% in 1999

Wall St. Journal/NBC poll

I wondered whether this figure is much lower than for the rest of the world. I googled up a BBC report of the Pew Global Attitudes Project of 17,000 people in 15 countries, including the US, between 31 March and 14 May 2006. :::[BBC]

The survey found concern over bird flu was largely confined to Asia, while two-thirds of people surveyed in each country said they were worried by global warming.

Concern over the greenhouse effect was highest in India and Japan and lowest in the US and China.

The survey interviewed people in China, Egypt, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Indonesia, Japan, Jordan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, Spain, Turkey and the US.

Margin of error: two to six percentage points.

Not that much lower; 59% versus 66.6%. The rest of the Pew findings were a bit scalding for the US with respect to the rest of the world's attitudes to them at the moment, and that seems to be about Iraq, but I am sure that some must come from the fact that the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitting nation refuses to engage in meaningful emissions management. If so, a reversal will redeem US's international goodwill, always good for business. Iraq the 'issue' will fade one day, although I'm not brave enough to predict when.

But global warming is only going to get worse.

By showing genuine leadership on climate change now, they won't squander that leadership in generations to come.

global warning climate change pandemic bird flu H5N1 terrorism war on terror WoT iraq

Seventy one per cent fear global warming most.

Final results of our first poll, "Greatest Fears", are in. As you can see 71% of readers of Global Warming Watch pick global warming as their greatest fear. I am very pleased to have such an astute audience, and one that hasn't had the frighteners put on them by the war on terror media hype. But that is all this means. The sample is small (n=59) but probably representative (I have had 3,547 unique visits). When the population was 22 the percentage nominating global warming as their greatest fear was 68%. How the poll results would be in the wider world, across a broader selection of people, I am curious about.

Quick question ...Which is your biggest fear? Global warming 71.2% 42 Global terror 16.9% 10 Global pandemic 11.9% 7 total votes: 59 powered by blogpoll

I am open to suggestions for a new poll. What I currently have in mind is something like "Do you expect to see extreme climate change in your lifetime? Or "What is going to come first? Peak Oil or Rapid Climate Change?

global warning climate change pandemic bird flu H5N1 terrorism war on terror WoT iraq

Global warming consensus solid since 1988

As we have seen with the CEI carbon dioxide commercial, and from other activity, the public understanding of the 'scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming' is subject to an ongoing FUD marketing onslaught with the latest salvo coming from Dr Bob Carter saying there is no such thing. Pity that Carter is funded by ExxonMobil to say these things, or he could be bearing good news. But he is not.

Science Magazine details the scientific consensus on climate change that was first articulated in 1988 when the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Programme co-established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with the express purpose of evaluating climate science to inform public policy. Their information:

"Human activities ... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents ... that absorb or scatter radiant energy. ... [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations"

The article further details the chorus of other American scientific bodies with a relevance to climate science who have made statements in support of the conclusion that global warming is man-made:

• The American Meteorological Society
• The American Geophysical Union
• The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Not only is the consensus firm and conclusive, there is no scientific dissent to the consensus. A study of 928 climate-change scientific abstracts published in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 showed no disagreement with the scientific consensus:

The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.

Think about it, we've had a solid scientific consensus that we are causing global warming since 1988. How do we explain that to the grandkids? Our inaction can only be excused by action now.

The CEI commercial - 'Carbon dioxide: Some call it pollution. We call it life'.

• CO2 counter commercial punches above weight
  Or how to get a good Google listing without realising
• Carbon dioxide spot: They call it an ad, we call it a lie
  Or how I got mad, and then a little bit even

Other blogs on: global warming climate change climate science science skeptics scientific consensus