Climate Articles

AP IMPACT: Statisticians reject global cooling
WASHINGTON - Have you heard that the world is now cooling instead of warming? You may have seen some news reports on the Internet or heard about it from a provocative new book.
Only one problem: It's not true, according to an analysis of the numbers done by several independent statisticians for The Associated Press.
The case that the Earth might be cooling partly stems from recent weather. Last year was cooler than previous years. It's been a while since the super-hot years of 1998 and 2005. So is this a longer climate trend or just weather's normal ups and downs?
In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time.
"If you look at the data and sort of cherry-pick a micro-trend within a bigger trend, that technique is particularly suspect," said John Grego, a professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina.
Read More...

Dead Zones Doubling Every Decade
Earth's oceans currently have more than 400 dead zones, oxygen-starved areas that are hundreds or thousands of square miles and virtually devoid of life during summer months.
The tally is doubling every decade, according to the National Science Foundation.
Most dead zones, including one in the Gulf of Mexico, are caused by pollution that is dumped into oceans by rivers. It works like this:
Each year, spring runoff washes nitrogen-rich fertilizers from farms in the Mississippi River basin and carries them into the river and the streams that feed it. The nitrogen eventually empties out of the mouth of the Mississippi and into the Gulf of Mexico, where tiny phytoplankton feed off of it and spread into an enormous bloom.
Read More...

Science: CO2 levels haven't been this high for 15 million years, when it was 5^o to 10^oF warmer and seas were 75 to 120 feet higher
You would have to go back at least 15 million years to find carbon dioxide levels on Earth as high as they are today, a UCLA scientist and colleagues report Oct. 8 in the online edition of the journal Science.
"The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today - and were sustained at those levels - global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland," said the paper's lead author, Aradhna Tripati, a UCLA assistant professor in the department of Earth and space sciences and the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences.
"Carbon dioxide is a potent greenhouse gas, and geological observations that we now have for the last 20 million years lend strong support to the idea that carbon dioxide is an important agent for driving climate change throughout Earth's history," she said.
Read More...

Winter as we know it on the way out
BEIRUT: It's autumn but many Lebanese are still happily whiling away their weekends at the beach, taking advantage of the apparent Indian summer while it lasts. As the beach-goers perspire from the hot weather, many environmental experts are starting to sweat over what they claim is the first sign of climate change.
They say Lebanon is already feeling the heat of a warmer world and warn the country's four distinct seasons will be reduced to one long, hot and dry season and a much shorter winter period if global action to mitigate climate change isn't adopted immediately. Environmentalists have already predicted Lebanon's average summer temperatures will increase by 1.2 degrees centigrade.
Read More...

Fossil Fuels' Hidden Cost Is in Billions, Study Says
WASHINGTON - Burning fossil fuels costs the United States about $120 billion a year in health costs, mostly because of thousands of premature deaths from air pollution, the National Academy of Sciences reported in a study issued Monday.
The damages are caused almost equally by coal and oil, according to the study, which was ordered by Congress. The study set out to measure the costs not incorporated into the price of a kilowatt-hour or a gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel.
The estimates by the academy do not include damages from global warming, which has been linked to the gases produced by burning fossil fuels. The authors said the extent of such damage, and the timing, were too uncertain to estimate.
Nor did the study measure damage from burning oil for trains, ships and planes. And it did not include the environmental damage from coal mining or the pollution of rivers with chemicals that were filtered from coal plant smokestacks to keep the air clean.
Read More...

Arctic lake undergoing unprecedented changes due to warming
The Arctic should be growing cooler, but a new sediment core taken from an Arctic lake reveals that the lake's ecology and chemistry has been transformed by unnatural warming beginning in the 1950s. The sediment core proves that changes happening in the lake during the Twentieth Century are unprecedented over the past 200,000 years. Headed by University of Colorado scientist Yarrow Axelford, the study retrieved the sediment core from the bottom of a thirty foot deep lake on Baffin Island. Importantly the sediment core goes back 80,000 years further than any other core retrieved from the Greenland ice sheet, providing researchers with the longest timescale yet of changes in the Arctic climate.
Read More...

Massive African lake could dry up, U.N. agency says
(CNN) -- Up to 30 million people are facing "a humanitarian disaster" as one of Africa's biggest lakes shrinks, a United Nations agency warned Thursday.
Lake Chad was about the size of Maryland -- bigger than Israel or Kuwait -- in 1963, satellite images show. By 2001, it covered less than one-fifth of that area -- making it smaller than Delaware or Mauritius.
The drying-up of the shallow lake is fueling conflict and migration, the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization said.
Once one of the biggest bodies of water in the world, it could disappear entirely in about 20 years, the FAO said, citing forecasts from the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
"If that happens it's going to be a disaster," Parviz Koohafkan, director of the Land and Water Division of the FAO, told CNN by phone from Rome.
The Lake Chad basin is "one of the most important agriculture heritage sites in the world -- the biodiversity, the migratory birds, not to mention more than 20 million people living out of Lake Chad -- fisherpeople, farmers."
Read More...

Tallying Biofuels' Real Environmental Cost
The promise of biofuels like ethanol is that they will someday help the world grow its way out of its addiction to oil. Nine billion gallons of corn ethanol were produced in the U.S. in 2008, while countries like Brazil have already widely replaced gasoline with ethanol from sugar cane and countless start-ups are working to bring cellulosic and other second-generation biofuels to market. The reasoning is that if we use greener biofuels in place of gasoline, it will significantly enhance our effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.
But the question is, Are biofuels really green? A pair of new studies in the Oct. 22 issue of Science damningly demonstrate that the answer is no, at least not the way we currently create and use them. In the first study, a team of researchers led by Jerry Melillo of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., projected the effects of a major biofuel expansion over the coming century and found that it could end up increasing global greenhouse-gas emissions instead of reducing them.
Read More...

New poll finds climate action support; Chamber accelerates lobbying
New survey finds US and 37 others demand more aggressive climate action
The first-ever deliberative global survey of citizen opinion, World Wide Views on Global Warming (WWViews) has found that people from diverse backgrounds in the US and worldwide overwhelmingly want faster action, deeper GHG emissions cuts and stronger enforcement than either US climate legislation proposals or Copenhagen treaty conference preparations are currently contemplating. Among the survey's findings:
* 90% of U. S. participants say it is urgent to reach a tough, new agreement at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December and not punt to subsequent meetings;
* 89% said by 2020 emissions should be cut 25-40% below 1990 levels (the Kerry Boxer Senate bill would cut US emissions 20% below 2005 levels);
* 71% want nations that fail to meet their obligations under a new agreement to be penalized severely or significantly;
* 69% believe the price of fossil fuels should be increased.
These views were echoed across 37 other countries on six continents. Global results showed participants wanted more aggressive action than their delegates to Copenhagen envision, including:
Read More...

CLIMATE CHANGE: How Eco-Friendly Is Natural Gas?
BUENOS AIRES, Oct 22 (IPS) - Natural gas, a non-renewable yet plentiful energy source, is being promoted by the gas industry as part of the solution to climate change. But experts say that its contribution to global warming is only slightly less than that of coal and oil.
Methane, the main component of natural gas, is a fossil fuel like crude and coal; when burned it produces carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, so called because they trap the heat of the sun's rays in the atmosphere, warming the earth's surface. Methane itself is a powerful greenhouse gas.
Experts say that natural gas is the cleanest of the fossil fuels, but it is not in the same league as renewable energy sources.
Natural gas could play "a key role" in the mitigation of climate change, Roberto Brandt, chair of the coordinating committee of the International Gas Union (IGU) which has a membership of 750 experts from industry associations in over 100 countries, told IPS.
Brandt, who took part in the 24th World Gas Conference held Oct. 5-9 in Buenos Aires, insisted that natural gas is an abundant and growing resource that is 25-30 percent less polluting than oil and its by-products, and 45-50 percent cleaner than coal and its derivatives.
These data, which will be presented in December at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 15) in Copenhagen, were confirmed, but also qualified, by experts from the Argentine non-governmental Bariloche Foundation, which works for sustainable development.
"In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, natural gas is a lesser evil than the heavier solid and liquid fossil fuels," economist Osvaldo Girard�n of the Bariloche Foundation, who is a co-author of the Argentine national report on emissions to be presented at COP 15, told IPS.
Read More...