Climate Articles
Tidbits - Bottled Water
Nearly 200 billion liters of bottled water were consumed worldwide in 2008. Although the figure was up more than 5 percent over 2007, it marks a decline in the growth rate over previous years, which saw annual gains of 6-10 percent. The rise in per capita consumption also tapered off to a rate near 4 percent, reaching 30 liters per person. Most of the bottles sold contain non-sparkling water, which accounts for 90 percent of the total volume.
The United States continues to lead the world in bottled water use, accounting for more than 16 percent of the global total. (See Figure 2.) However, consumption there contracted by 1 percent to reach 32.8 billion liters, the only decline in the last 10 years. Producers' revenues also dropped, down 3.2 percent to $11.2 billion. Overall, though, their revenues have increased 83 percent since 2000.
Elsewhere in the Americas, Mexico is now the second largest market in the world, with 24.6 billion liters or 12 percent of the global total in 2008. And Brazil is the fourth largest, at 14.2 billion liters and 7 percent of the global total.
40th Anniversary of Earth Day - April 22, 2010
Forty years after the first Earth Day, the world is in greater peril than ever. While climate change is the greatest challenge of our time, it also presents the greatest opportunity - an unprecedented opportunity to build a healthy, prosperous, clean energy economy now and for the future.
Earth Day 2010 can be a turning point to advance climate policy, energy efficiency, renewable energy and green jobs. Earth Day Network is galvanizing millions who make personal commitments to sustainability. Earth Day 2010 is a pivotal opportunity for individuals, corporations and governments to join together and create a global green economy. Join the more than one billion people in 190 countries that are taking action for Earth Day.
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Must-see video lays out the empirical evidence for human-caused global warming
Our favorite climate de-crocker, Peter Sinclair has a terrific new video on the basic facts of climate science (with links to the literature):
Sinclair makes good use of my video interview with Dr. Christopher Field (for full interview, see "Videos: How we know humans are changing the climate and Why climate change is a clear and present danger").
In recommending the video, Skeptical Science notes:
A common skeptic argument is that there is no empirical evidence for man-made global warming. People who make this claim can't have looked very hard. As most don't have the time to scour through the peer-reviewed scientific literature, the multiple lines of independent evidence for global warming are given here….
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Walk for Water - 30 Schools in 30 Days Campaign
Between World Water Day (3/22) and Earth Day 2010 (4/22), the BARKA Foundation is calling on schools nationwide to organize "Peace, Water & Wisdom Walks" in honor of Earth Day's 40th anniversary. This initiative will raise awareness of global water scarcity and support efforts for clean water initiatives in Burkina Faso, West Africa. You can even 'walk' your class through World Water Day by learning about this initiative through BARKA's educational water curriculum and Walk-for-Water guides.
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The Wrong Kind of Green
Why did America's leading environmental groups jet to Copenhagen and lobby for policies that will lead to the faster death of the rainforests--and runaway global warming? Why are their lobbyists on Capitol Hill dismissing the only real solutions to climate change as "unworkable" and "unrealistic," as though they were just another sooty tentacle of Big Coal?
At first glance, these questions will seem bizarre. Groups like Conservation International are among the most trusted "brands" in America, pledged to protect and defend nature. Yet as we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world's worst polluters--and burying science-based environmentalism in return. Sometimes the corruption is subtle; sometimes it is blatant. In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate, waiting to be exposed.
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Toles on scientific uncertainty
The Washington Post's premier political cartoonist offers his take on the issue of the day:
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Climate change melts Antarctic ice shelves: USGS
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Climate change is melting the floating ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula, giving scientists a preview of what could happen if other ice shelves around the southern continent disappear, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said on Monday.
The ice has retreated so far from the land mass that Charcot Island, which has long been connected to the peninsula by an ice bridge, emerged as a real island again last year, a USGS scientist said.
"This is the first time since people have been observing the area, since the 1800s, that that ice shelf has not hitched together Charcot Island and the peninsula," scientist Jane Ferrigno said in a telephone interview.
The Antarctic Peninsula extends further northward than the rest of the roughly circular ice-covered continent, and it is warmer than the rest of Antarctica. But even in the peninsula's coldest, southern part, ice shelves are vanishing.
Research by the USGS was the first to show that every ice front on the southern section of the peninsula has been retreating from 1947 to 2009, with the most dramatic changes since 1990.
A study of the phenomenon by the USGS in collaboration with the British Antarctic Survey and assistance from the Scott Polar Research Institute and Germany's Bundesamt fur Kartographie and Geodasie was posted at pubs.usgs.gov/imap/i-2600-c/ in February; a statement was released on Monday.
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New Research Sheds Light On Antarctic Ice Melting
There may be no polar bears at the South Pole, but there sure is a lot of ice. In fact, more than 90 percent of the Earth's glacial ice is in Antarctica. Now, new research shows the continent's ice is melting in more places than previously known. Host Guy Raz speaks to scientist Jane Ferrigno of the U.S. Geological Survey about the Antarctic Peninsula's ice retreat.
In Antarctica, you'll find 90 percent of the world's glacial ice, but new research from the U.S. Geological Survey shows that every ice front in the southern part of the Antarctic Peninsula is retreating.
Jane Ferrigno is the lead author of that new report. She says scientists have known for a while that some of the peninsula's ice shelves are breaking up.
Ms. JANE FERRIGNO (Geologist, U.S. Geological Survey): That started at least a decade ago in the northern part of the peninsula, but we looked at all the ice fronts on the peninsula from north to south.
In the southern area, we're finding that all the ice fronts are retreating. In the northern part of the peninsula, the majority of ice fronts are retreating, and that's something we neither expected but we're highly interested in finding that out.
RAZ: At a peninsula, the area where this research was focused on, is sort of like a canary in the coal mine, right? I mean, what does it tell us about larger trends?
Ms. FERRIGNO: The fact that the ice shelves are changing on the peninsula is a significant signal that global change, climate warming, is affecting the ice cover of Antarctica. It's affecting first the area that's towards the north, that's slightly warmer, but the effect of the warming has traveled from the northern part of the peninsula to the southern part of the peninsula, where it's colder.
Our next concern is to see exactly what's happening in the continent itself. We've seen some changes there, but we need to look closely and see what else might be happening.
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Despite Climategate, IPPC Mostly Underestimates Climate Change
Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, James McCarthy of the Harvard Medical School Center for Health and the Global Environment noted that the IPCC usually errs on the conservative side. Steve Mirsky reports
Lost in the coverage of the so-called climategate email controversy is a key point about the IPCC's track record of climate change estimates. James McCarthy is on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School Center for Health and the Global Environment. He spoke February 21st at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego:
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Belief In Climate Change Hinges On Worldview
Over the past few months, polls show that fewer Americans say they believe humans are making the planet dangerously warmer, despite a raft of scientific reports that say otherwise.
This puzzles many climate scientists — but not some social scientists, whose research suggests that facts may not be as important as one's beliefs.
Take, for example, a recent debate about climate change on West Virginia public radio.
"It's a hoax," said coal company CEO Don Blankenship, "because clearly anyone that says that they know what the temperature of the Earth is going to be in 2020 or 2030 needs to be put in an asylum because they don't."
On the other side of the debate was environmentalist Robert Kennedy, Jr.
"Ninety-eight percent of the research climatologists in the world say that global warming is real, that its impacts are going to be catastrophic," he argued. "There are 2 percent who disagree with that. I have a choice of believing the 98 percent or the 2 percent."
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Barrow, Alaska: Ground Zero for Climate Change
Scientists converge on the northernmost city in the United States to study global warming's dramatic consequences
No roads lead to Barrow, Alaska. To reach America's northernmost city (pop. 4,500), you must fly or, sea ice permitting, take a ship. Barrow's residents use cars or four-wheel-drive ATVs in town and have been known to hunt caribou on snowmobiles, even in summer. The treads leave dark trails in the tundra, the blanket of spongy brown and green vegetation that stretches south for hundreds of miles. I was coming in on a U.S. Coast Guard C-130 transport plane. Looking down through a small window I saw a triangular-shaped town hugging the edge of the continent at the junction of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. It was August, and the ocean looked as black as anthracite.
The city's small wooden homes were built on pilings to keep them from melting the permafrost, which would cause them to sink. I saw jumbles of vehicles, fish-drying racks and small boats in front yards. The roads looked muddy. I saw a large supermarket and a new hospital going up near some office buildings. To the north, along a coast road, I spotted Quonset huts marking my destination—a repurposed World War II-era U.S. Navy base. Concerns about climate change have turned a drizzle of visiting scientists into a flood; I've visited Barrow when scientists filled every bed on the former base, bunked ten to a room in a dilapidated house in town and slept in cots laid out in rows in the community center.
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Waiting to Inhale: Deep-Ocean Low-Oxygen Zones Spreading to Shallower Coastal Waters
Oxygen-deprived areas in the world's oceans, usually found in deeper water are moving up to offshore areas and threatening coastal marine ecosystems by spurring the die-off of some species and overpopulation of others
A plague of oxygen-deprived waters from the deep ocean is creeping up over the continental shelves off the Pacific Northwest and forcing marine species there to relocate or die. Since 2002 tongues of hypoxic, or low-oxygen, waters from deeper areas offshore have slipped into shallower near-shore environments off the Oregon coast, although not close enough to be oxygenated by the waves. The problem stems from oxygen reduction in deep water, a phenomenon that some scientists are observing in oceans worldwide, and that may be related to climate change.
The hypoxic seawater is distinct from the well-known "dead zones" that form at the mouths of the Mississippi and other rivers around the world. Those areas result from agricultural runoff, which lead to algae blooms that consume oxygen. Rather, the Pacific Northwest problem is broader and more mysterious.
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Most Credible Climate Skeptic Not So Credible After All
Patrick Michaels has more credibility than your average climate skeptic. Unlike some of the kookier characters that populate the small world of climate denialists—like Lord Christopher Monckton, a sometime adviser to Margaret Thatcher who claims that "We are a carbon-starved planet," or H. Leighton Steward, a retired oil executive and author of a best-selling diet book who argues that carbon dioxide is "green"—Michaels is actually a bona fide climate scientist. As such, he's often quoted by reporters as a reasonable expert who argues that global warming has been overhyped. But what Michaels doesn't mention in his frequent media appearances is his history of receiving money from big polluters.
Michaels, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, has some impressive-sounding credentials. He has a PhD in ecological climatology and is a senior fellow in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. He's a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and a former program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. He regularly touts his work as a contributing author and reviewer of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. (Almost every climate scientist in the world has at some point contributed to or reviewed an IPCC study.) Unlike climate skeptics who implausibly claim that there's no such thing as global warming, Michaels accepts that it's happening, but downplays the severity of the problem and the role that human activity plays in the phenomenon.
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A quiet sun won't save us from global warming
EVEN if the sun were to quieten down appreciably for the rest of this century, it would still be business as usual for global warming.
The sun goes through an 11-year solar cycle during which its luminosity varies according to the number of sunspots appearing on its face. The normal cycle has a small effect on Earth's weather. But sometimes lulls in sunspot activity can last several decades, driving down the sun's luminosity to a "grand minimum". The Maunder minimum lasted from 1645 to 1715 and may have contributed to the little ice age.
Stefan Rahmstorf and Georg Feulner of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany modelled what would happen to temperatures on Earth if a grand minimum started now and lasted until 2100. They found that while temperatures would go down by as much as 0.3 C, global warming would push up temperatures by 3.7 to 4.5 C - more than negating any effect of a global minimum (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2010gl042710, in press).
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Improving How Scientists Communicate About Climate Change
The need is urgent for climate scientists to communicate more effectively to policymakers and the public. This article details some of the problems with how climate scientists communicate and offers practical suggestions for improvement. For example, scientists can improve their effectiveness by avoiding jargon as well as words that mean different things to scientists than to non-scientists. They can use appropriate metaphors and re-frame poorly framed questions. As policymakers grapple with the climate challenge, scientists should take the opportunity and responsibility of clearly communicating what the wider world needs to know about this issue.
Saying scientists are not doing a terribly good job communicating climate science is like saying the status quo media are not doing a terribly good job communicating climate science. But then the media doesn't suffer the consequences of that failure.
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Al Gore's must read op-ed in the NY Times (annotated): We Can't Wish Away Climate Change
It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.
That how Al Gore's op-ed big Sunday NY Times op-ed begins.
Since the anti-science disinformers get such absurdly unjustified amount of ink these days — even in the paper of record (see "NYT Faces Credibility Siege over Unbalanced Climate Coverage" — the least I can do is excerpt an actual science-based analysis at length. I've added links to the relevant scientific literature:
Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.
But what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake.
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How do you convince people of global warming in a snowstorm?
Criticisms of climate change science are piling up as public concern wanes. But evidence of global warming continues to accumulate.
The dead of winter - especially this winter with its massive snow storms in the eastern United States - is not the easiest time to make the case for global warming. Short-term weather events and long-range climate change are not the same thing, of course, but it's hard to separate them in the public's mind.
But it's even harder these days to convincingly argue that climate change is a reality.
"Gloomy unemployment numbers, public frustration with Washington, attacks on climate science, and mobilized opposition to national climate legislation represent a 'perfect storm' of events that have lowered public concerns about global warming even among the alarmed," says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change.
Yale and George Mason University recently polled on the question. Since 2008, the number of people who don't believe global warming is happening has more than doubled to 16 percent. At the same time, those "alarmed" at the prospect of climate change has dropped from 18 percent to just 10 percent, and those who say they're "concerned" has dropped from 33 percent to 29 percent.
As often happens, shifting attitudes change the political dynamic.
At the environment web site Grist, Amanda Little writes, "Sen. James Inhofe (R) of Oklahoma, one of the world's most vociferous climate skeptics, is practically giddy these days."
In the wake of recent scandals and heightened criticism of climate scientists, Inhofe is leading the charge against the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 with former Vice President Al Gore.
"There is a crisis of confidence in the IPCC," Inhofe said in a Senate speech earlier this month. "The challenges to the integrity and credibility of the IPCC merit a closer examination by the US Congress."
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The 'climate change debate' is Science vs. Snake Oil
According to the mainstream media, there is a controversy over the validity of climate science, in particular the conclusion that the warming of the planet by greenhouse gas emissions poses a risk to the public:
"Iceberg Ahead: Climate scientists who play fast and loose with the facts are imperiling not just their profession but the planet" — Newsweek, 2/19/10
"Controversies Create Opening for Critics" — Wall Street Journal, 2/17/10
"Series of missteps by climate scientists threatens climate-change agenda" — Washington Post, 2/14/10
"Climate-Change Debate Is Heating Up in Deep Freeze" — The New York Times, 2/11/10
Let's take a look at who is on either side of this so-called climate-change debate:
These Groups Say The Danger Of Manmade Global Warming Is A . . .
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Facing Reality
As global temperatures reach record highs, freak weather continues to leave destruction in its wake. Heatwaves bake Australia and Singapore. After the billion-dollar losses from the series of "Snowmageddon" storms depressed the U.S. economy, a new "meteorological bomb exploded" over New York and New England last week. Fueled by "very warm sea surface temperatures," the extreme storm Xynthia pushed record heat and killer winds through western Europe. Every ice front in southern Antarctica is retreating.
Meanwhile, politicians in Washington attempting to craft climate and clean energy legislation are weathering a political storm. Industrial polluters fuel a relentless assault on the legitimacy of climate science and lobby to prevent the Obama administration from taking away lucrative subsidies. Right-wing pundits crow that public understanding of the scientific consensus on manmade global warming is declining. And the mainstream press reports on the propaganda campaigns to discredit scientists as a "climate-change debate," as if physical reality were something decided by the poll results.
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"Just the facts" on climate science
The Chicago Tribune Online has a helpful Q&A that summarizes where climate science stands today. It also addresses the IPCC, emails, and temperature stations issues.
Its "just the facts" approach is superior to more than 90% of what has been written by the media these days (see Boykoff on "Exaggerating Denialism: Media Representations of Outlier Views on Climate Change" and here):
The only small flaw in the piece is it only randomly links to original sources, so I have added the relevant links below.
Is there scientific consensus?
The 2007 report from the IPCC, a group of scientists from 113 countries who studied the peer-reviewed research, concluded they are 90 percent confident that global warming is caused by humans. Scientific research does not claim anything with absolute certainty, but this is about as close as it gets.
The conclusion that humans are causing global warming also is shared by the National Academy of Sciences, the nation's leading scientific advisory body, and similar academies in 18 other countries.
The level of confidence has increased over the years as research improved. A 1975 report from the National Academy concluded "we do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course. Without the fundamental understanding, it does not seem possible to predict climate."
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After Two Decades of Delay, A Chance to Save Bluefin Tuna - by carl safina
The obscenely profitable market for bluefin tuna in Japan has led to years of overfishing and left the world's bluefin population badly depleted. A ban on the bluefin trade, if adopted at international talks this month, would go a long way toward giving this magnificent fish a chance to recover.
Twenty years ago, I first proposed a ban on international trade in Atlantic bluefin tuna. The population that breeds in the Gulf of Mexico was down by about 80 percent. The population that breeds in the Mediterranean was down by half. Now, things are worse, and the principality of Monaco has made another proposal to ban international trade in this species. It is gaining momentum, and on March 3 the United States announced its support for the initiative. The European Union, which has been wavering in the face of pressure from its fishing industry and Japan, should now end its fence sitting and get behind this proposal.
Such a trade ban is enacted under a treaty called CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species). CITES is why, for instance, there's a ban on ivory (which is why there are still elephants in Africa).
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Methane bubbles in Arctic seas stir warming fears
OSLO (Reuters) - Large amounts of a powerful greenhouse gas are bubbling up from a long-frozen seabed north of Siberia, raising fears of far bigger leaks that could stoke global warming, scientists said.
It was unclear, however, if the Arctic emissions of methane gas were new or had been going on unnoticed for centuries -- since before the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century led to wide use of fossil fuels that are blamed for climate change.
The study said about 8 million tonnes of methane a year, equivalent to the annual total previously estimated from all of the world's oceans, were seeping from vast stores long trapped under permafrost below the seabed north of Russia.
"Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap," Natalia Shakhova, a scientist at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska, said in a statement. She co-led the study published in Friday's edition of the journal Science.
The experts measured levels of methane, a gas that can be released by rotting vegetation, in water and air at 5,000 sites on the East Siberian Arctic Shelf from 2003-08. In some places, methane was bubbling up from the seabed.
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