Climate Articles

UK Climate Change Skeptic Accuses US Prof Of Libel
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) - A Minnesota professor touched off a bitter trans-Atlantic dispute when he posted an extensive online slideshow rebutting a speech by a British climate change skeptic, a cyber flap that's resulted in harsh words and threats of legal action.
John Abraham, a professor of thermal sciences at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, said Friday he decided he had a responsibility as a scientist to challenge remarks that Christopher Monckton made during a speech last October at Bethel University in Arden Hills.
"He presented science that was at odds with the understanding of the vast majority of people working in the field," Abraham said. "The problem with that is that people who listened to his presentation would come away with a misconception about what is known about climate change and what a serious issue this is."
Lord Monckton, the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, says he was libeled. He fired back with letters to officials at St. Thomas, including its president, the Rev. Dennis Dease, demanding that Abraham be disciplined. He also issued his own rebuttal, which runs 99 pages.
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Locking in our future
Today's emissions decisions will drive the planet's weather for generations, panel concludes. The question for policymakers: How much change do we want to dial in? Welcome to the Anthropocene.
Decisions made today about planet-warming emissions will influence climate impacts not just for decades but for centuries and perhaps even millennia, a panel from the National Academy of Sciences warned Friday.
Given the longevity of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, these scientists said, these decisions effectively lock humanity in for a range of impacts, some of which can be "very severe."
"Emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels have ushered in a new epoch where human activities will largely determine the evolution of Earth's climate," the scientists wrote.
"Actions taken during this century will determine whether the Anthropocene climate anomaly will be a relatively short term and minor deviation from the Holocene climate, or an extreme deviation extending over many thousands of years."
The 242-page report was sponsored by the Energy Foundation - a partnership of major foundations interested in clean energy - and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and was chaired by Susan Solomon, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
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Research says climate change undeniable.
International scientists have injected fresh evidence into the debate over global warming, saying that climate change is "undeniable" and shows clear signs of "human fingerprints" in the first major piece of research since the "Climategate" controversy
Global average surface and lower-troposphere temperatures during the last three decades have been progressively warmer than all earlier decades, and the 2000s (2000–09) was the warmest decade in the instrumental record. This warming has been particularly apparent in the mid- and high-latitude regions of the Northern Hemisphere and includes decadal records in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Europe, and the Arctic. The stratosphere continued a long cooling trend, except in the Arctic.
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Global Warming Slows Coral Growth in Red Sea
ScienceDaily (July 16, 2010) - In a pioneering use of computed tomography (CT) scans, scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have discovered that carbon dioxide (CO2)-induced global warming is in the process of killing off a major coral species in the Red Sea. As summer sea surface temperatures have remained about 1.5 degrees Celsius above ambient over the last 10 years, growth of the coral, Diploastrea heliopora, has declined by 30% and "could cease growing altogether by 2070" or sooner, they report in the July 16 issue of the journal Science.
"The warming in the Red Sea and the resultant decline in the health of this coral is a clear regional impact of global warming," said Neal E. Cantin, a WHOI postdoctoral investigator and co-lead researcher on the project. In the 1980s, he said, "the average summer [water] temperatures were below 30 degrees Celsius. In 2008 they were approaching 31 degrees."
Cantin and WHOI Research Specialist Anne L. Cohen, the other lead investigator, said the findings were unexpected because D. heliopora did not exhibit one of the typical signs of thermal stress: bleaching. "These corals looked healthy," said Cohen.
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Global temperatures rise to record levels
The world is enduring the hottest year on record, according to a US national weather analysis, causing droughts worldwide and a concern for US farmers counting on another bumper year.
For the first six months of the year, 2010 has been warmer than the first half of 1998, the previous record holder, by 0.03 degree Fahrenheit, said Jay Lawrimore, chief of climate analysis at the federal National Climatic Data Center.
Period of a El Nino weather pattern is being blamed for the hot temperatures globally.
"We had an El Nino episode in the early part of the year that's now faded but that has contributed to the warmth not only in equatorial Pacific but also contributed to anomalously warm global temperatures as well," Lawrimore said.
Abnormally warm temperatures have been registered in large parts of Canada, Africa, tropical oceans and parts of the Middle East.
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Russia swelters in heatwave, many crops destroyed
(Reuters) - Soaring temperatures across large swathes of Russia have destroyed nearly 10 million hectares of crops and prompted a state of emergency to be declared in 17 regions.
On Friday the state-run Moscow region weather bureau said it expected the heatwave, which has gripped the country since late June and is estimated to have already cost the agricultural sector about $1 billion, to continue into next week.
Saturday could see temperatures in Moscow hit 37 Celsius (98.6 Fahrenheit), which would break the previous record of 36.6C. set in 1936.
"It looks like tomorrow could just break the record," the weather bureau's Moscow head Yelena Timakina said.
The high temperatures and tinder dry land have exacerbated the problem of forest fires. Billowing smoke and orange flames encircle Moscow as peat and forest fires resist attempts to extinguish them.
A state of emergency due to what the grain lobby says is the country's worst drought in 130 years, has now been imposed in 17 Russian regions, up from 16 earlier this week.
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Photos Reveal Receding Himalaya Glaciers
"There's a lot of people who either don't understand climate change that well and the effects that it's having, or they want to deny the effect it's having. These pictures are worth a thousand words. We haven't done anything to them except print them."
David Breashears,, a senior fellow with the Center on U.S.-China Relations, referred to the exhibition, "Rivers of Ice: Vanishing Glaciers of the Greater Himalaya," which opened this week at the Asia Society in Manhattan. Mr. Breashears is best known for directing the Imax film, "Everest." In the exhibition, pictures taken as early as 1899 are placed alongside recreations by Mr. Breashears, who photographed the same places from precisely the same vantage, beginning in 2007.
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The forgotten footprint: Nitrogen
You may know your carbon footprint, but do you know your nitrogen footprint? Nitrous oxide is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Nitrogen has been pegged as an over-looked cause of climate change and as a culprit in some of the most insidious forms of environmental pollution.
"Nitrogen's role as a greenhouse gas is mostly as nitrous oxide," said Jeff Merrell, environmental analyst for the Vermont Agency of Natural Resource's Air Pollution Control Division.
Nitrous oxide is ranked as one of the leading causes of climate change. It's one of six gases regulated by the Kyoto Protocol, an international climate change treaty. Nitrous oxide contributes to climate change by absorbing heat from the sun and holding it in the Earth's atmosphere.
"Nitrous oxide has 300 times more global warming potential than carbon dioxide," Merrell said. But, he quickly adds, there is a reason why carbon dioxide gets all the attention: There is just so much more of it.
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Climate Stabilization Targets
Emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels have ushered in a new epoch where human activities will largely determine the evolution of Earth's climate. Because carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is long lived, it can effectively lock the Earth and future generations into a range of impacts, some of which could become very severe. Therefore, emissions reductions choices made today matter in determining impacts experienced not just over the next few decades, but in the coming centuries and millennia. Policy choices can be informed by recent advances in climate science that quantify the relationships between increases in carbon dioxide and global warming, related climate changes, and resulting impacts, such as changes in streamflow, wildfires, crop productivity, extreme hot summers, and sea level rise.
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Lake Superior, a Huge Natural Climate Change Gauge, Is Running a Fever
The Great Lakes are feeling the heat from climate change. As the world's largest freshwater system warms, it is poised to systematically alter life for local wildlife and the tribes that depend on it, according to regional experts. And the warming could also provide a glimpse of what is happening on a more global level, they say.
"The Great Lakes in a lot of ways have always been a canary in the coal mine," Cameron Davis, the senior adviser to the U.S. EPA on the Great Lakes, said last week. "Not just for the region or this country, but for the rest of the world."
And it seems the canary's song is growing ever more halting.
Lake Superior, which is the largest, deepest and coldest of the five lakes, is serving as the "canary for the canary," Davis said at a public meeting of the Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force last week, pointing to recent data trends.
Total ice cover on the lake has shrunk by about 20 percent over the past 37 years, he said. Though the change has made for longer, warmer summers, it's a problem because ice is crucial for keeping water from evaporating and it regulates the natural cycles of the Great Lakes.
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June Was the Fourth Consecutive Month That Was Warmest on Record
ScienceDaily (July 19, 2010) - Each month NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) releases two assessments, one national and one global, of the previous month's climate. These reports include information on the temperature and precipitation levels experienced nationally and globally, providing useful information about these important climate variables in historical perspective. The reports also chronicle any significant weather and climate-related events that occurred during the month. This trusted source of information is used globally by industry and business, government agencies, academia, and members of the public to help inform decision making.
Summary Figures from the Global Report
The global report is a monthly snapshot of the climate system around the globe that informs the public of the current state of the global climate and helps planners, academics and sector users factor the climate's current state and recent trends into their decision making. The report details the average global land temperature, the average global ocean temperature, and the combined average of the two. Instead of using raw temperatures, the report presents temperature anomalies, which means the difference from average temperatures for any given area over a period of time. Using anomalies allows for a more accurate understanding of temperature trends over space and time, even with some fluctuations in data availability.
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Record Global Warm Streak Extended Through June
Last week, while others here at Climate Central were blogging about the East Coast heat wave, I was enjoying some of the cooler weather that much of the West has experienced this spring and summer. But since arriving back in New Jersey, I can't help but think that it is much hotter than usual around here. And according to an announcement yesterday from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), there's some truth to that - it actually has been warmer than average. Much warmer. In fact, last month was the warmest June on record globally and the eighth warmest in the U.S., according to records that date back more than 130 years.
In their monthly report of national climate data, NOAA reported that the June average land surface temperature in the US was more than two degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the long-term average. For the states of New Jersey, Delaware and North Carolina, it was the hottest June on record, and only Oregon and Washington saw cooler than average temperatures. It wasn't just the eastern seaboard that felt the heat; parts of South America, Europe and most of China were subject to record-breaking heat waves.
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A Eulogy to Stephen Schneider
We were greatly saddened to learn that our revered colleague Stephen Schneider passed away this morning.
We are posting a personal account by Ben Santer of Steve's amazing accomplishments and contributions. Ben's account provides a glimpse into what made Steve so special, and why he will be so deeply missed:
Today the world lost a great man. Professor Stephen Schneider – a climate scientist at Stanford University – passed away while on travel in the United Kingdom. Stephen Schneider did more than any other individual on the planet to help us realize that human actions have led to global-scale changes in Earth's climate. Steve was instrumental in focusing scientific, political, and public attention on one of the major challenges facing humanity – the problem of human-caused climate change.
Some climate scientists have exceptional talents in pure research. They love to figure out the inner workings of the climate system. Others have strengths in communicating complex scientific issues to non-specialists. It is rare to find scientists who combine these talents. Steve Schneider was just such a man.
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Accept more poison to get less carbon? Kill this crazy idea NOW
As the U.S. Senate prepares to debate clean energy/climate legislation, some utility companies are quietly pushing a crazy idea.
In exchange for cutting their carbon emissions, power plants want to undermine the EPA and get permission to increase other kinds of dangerous pollution. They even want the go-ahead to dump more sulfur and deadly mercury into our air and water.
This literal "poison pill" proposal would turn progress in climate protection into a devastating setback for the health of all Americans - especially for those who live near power plants. The dirty energy lobby hopes that America can be convinced to accept more poison to get less carbon.
Fortunately, national leaders began sounding the alarm last week. Grist's David Roberts took a break from vacation to alert the nation, calling the utility companies' backroom play potentially the "scam of the century."
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Alaskan glacier detaches itself from seafloor, goes rogue
The study of Columbia Glacier shows the first detailed observation of a glacier undergoing a transition from grounded to floating.
An Alaskan glacier has lost its footing with the seafloor and is floating in the ocean, new first-of-their-kind observations show.
The observations have implications for predicting the sea level rise that could accompany global warming and the melting of glaciers around the world.
Glaciers are huge rivers of ice formed when snow and ice accumulate over hundreds and thousands of years. They are found at the Earth's poles and in some mountain ranges. These icy rivers move slowly over time, some eventually dumping ice chunks into the sea, a process known as calving - a leading source of additional water for the world's oceans.
"It's like a big conveyor belt pushing the ice out to the sea," said glaciologist and team member Shad O'Neel of the U.S. Geological Survey in Anchorage, Alaska. Some glaciers are what are called "grounded," meaning they rest on the ocean floor, while others float on top of the ocean waters as they run into the sea.
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Disappearing glaciers - Photos
This aerial photograph, taken Aug. 17, 2007, shows melting glaciers near Ilulissat in Greenland. According to the AFP, Greenland's glaciers are melting at a faster rate than ever, some moving up to 38 yards a day.
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Big Chunk of Ice Breaks Off of Greenland Glacier
A 2.7-square-mile (7-square-kilometer) section of the glacier broke up on July 6 and 7 and was spotted in NASA satellite images.
Greenland's ice sheet, which is 2 miles (3.2 km) thick and covers an area about the size of Mexico, has been losing ice mass at an accelerating rate over the last decade. The ice sheet discharges much of its ice through fast moving glaciers that flow into the sea, with large chunks breaking off into the ocean.
The breakup last week pushed the calving front – where the ice sheet meets the ocean – back nearly a mile (1.5 km) in one day. The front is now farther inland than at any time previously observed.
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Scientists Estimate Impact of Temperature Change on Environment
If global temperatures rise, fueled by carbon-dioxide emissions, there will be long-term consequences in rainfall, crop production and wildfires, according to a new report issued Friday by the National Research Council, a nonprofit group that provides science-policy advice to the government.
Friday's report, put out by a panel of scientists from government agencies and academic institutions, attempts to quantify the potential impact of temperature change on the environment. Carbon dioxide is the dominant gas linked to climate change and is known to linger in the environment. Not all scientists agree that man-made emissions are fueling a warming of the climate, but many are concerned about what carbon-dioxide output now could mean into the future.
The report estimates that for every one degree increase in global temperature, rainfall would rise or fall 5% to 10%, in different regions around the world, corn crops would be reduced by that same amount and the amount of area burned by wildfires will increase two to fourfold.
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When Climate Change Becomes a Health Issue, Are People More Likely to Listen?
ScienceDaily (July 20, 2010) - Framing climate change as a public health problem seems to make the issue more relevant, significant and understandable to members of the public -- even some who don't generally believe climate change is happening, according to preliminary research by George Mason University's Center for Climate Change Communication (4C).
The center recently conducted an exploratory study in the United States of people's reactions to a public health-framed short essay on climate change. They found that on the whole, people who read the essay reacted positively to the information.
Previous research conducted by Mason investigators and others, using people's beliefs, behaviors and policy preferences about global warming as assessed in a national survey, identified six distinct segments of Americans, termed Global Warming's Six Americas.
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Amazon drought raises research doubts
A once-in-a-century drought struck much of the Amazon rainforest in 2005, reducing rainfall by 60–75% in some areas - and giving scientists a window on to a future coloured by climate change.
The drought foreshadowed the Amazon drying that many climate modellers expect to see in a warmer world. But five years on, a spate of research, including 13 papers published on 20 July in a special issue of the journal New Phytologist , shows that researchers are still grappling with the impact of drought and what it could reveal about the fate of the world's largest tropical forest, a major carbon storehouse.
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Poison Ivy Growing Faster, More Virulent
Lewis Ziska, plant physiologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's agricultural research service, says rising carbon dioxide levels and forest disruption are making poison ivy spread faster, grow larger, show up in new places and become more toxic. He tells host Michele Norris what makes the plant uniquely affected and how to treat skin that's been exposed.
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Aquatic Dead Zones
The size and number of marine dead zones-areas where the deep water is so low in dissolved oxygen that sea creatures can't survive-have grown explosively in the past half-century. Red circles on this map show the location and size of many of our planet's dead zones. Black dots show where dead zones have been observed, but their size is unknown.
It's no coincidence that dead zones occur downriver of places where human population density is high (darkest brown). Some of the fertilizer we apply to crops is washed into streams and rivers. Fertilizer-laden runoff triggers explosive planktonic algae growth in coastal areas. The algae die and rain down into deep waters, where their remains are like fertilizer for microbes. The microbes decompose the organic matter, using up the oxygen. Mass killing of fish and other sea life often results.
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Amazon Storm Killed Half a Billion Trees
A violent storm ripped through the Amazon forest in 2005 and single-handedly killed half a billion trees, a new study reveals.
The study is the first to produce an actual tree body count after an Amazon storm.
An estimated 441 million to 663 million trees were destroyed across the whole Amazon basin during the 2005 storm, a much greater number than previously suspected.
In some areas of the forest, up to 80 percent of the trees were killed by the storm. A severe drought was previously blamed for the region's tree loss in 2005.
"We can't attribute [the increased] mortality to just drought in certain parts of the basin - we have solid evidence that there was a strong storm that killed a lot of trees over a large part of the Amazon," said forest ecologist and study researcher Jeffrey Chambers of Tulane University in New Orleans, La.
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Heat Waves could be Commonplace in the U.S. by 2039, Stanford Study Finds
Exceptionally long heat waves and other hot events could become commonplace in the United States in the next 30 years, according to a new study by Stanford University climate scientists.
"Using a large suite of climate model experiments, we see a clear emergence of much more intense, hot conditions in the U.S. within the next three decades," said Noah Diffenbaugh, an assistant professor of environmental Earth system science at Stanford and the lead author of the study.
Writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), Diffenbaugh concluded that hot temperature extremes could become frequent events in the U.S. by 2039, posing serious risks to agriculture and human health.
"In the next 30 years, we could see an increase in heat waves like the one now occurring in the eastern United States or the kind that swept across Europe in 2003 that caused tens of thousands of fatalities," said Diffenbaugh, a center fellow at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment. "Those kinds of severe heat events also put enormous stress on major crops like corn, soybean, cotton and wine grapes, causing a significant reduction in yields."
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How hot is it? Masters reports nine countries have smashed all-time temperature records,...'
"...making 2010 the year with the most national extreme heat records." It's so hot the Washington Post almost gets the story right! A heat wave of unprecedented intensity has brought the world's largest country its hottest temperature in history:
Globally, NOAA just reported that June is the fourth month in a row of record global temperatures, and the first half of 2010 is on a record pace. This is all the more powerful evidence of human-caused warming "because it occurs when the recent minimum of solar irradiance is having its maximum cooling effect," as a recent must-read NASA paper notes.
If the planet as a whole is busting global records, you wouldn't be surprised if national temperature records were dropping like overheated flies. And they are, as uber-meteorologist Jeff Masters reported last week:
A withering heat wave of unprecedented intensity brought the hottest temperatures in recorded history to six nations in Asia and Africa, plus the Asian portion of Russia, in June 2010….
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Climate Change Causes Larger, More Plentiful Marmots, Study Shows; Implications for Many Creatures That Hibernate
ScienceDaily (July 21, 2010) - Results from a decades-long research project show that mountain rodents called marmots are growing larger, healthier and more plentiful in response to climate change.
The groundbreaking study, published in Nature, is the first to reveal that changes in seasonal timing can increase body weight and population size simultaneously in a species -- findings likely to have implications for a host of other creatures, especially those that hibernate.
Established by Kenneth Armitage, KU professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology, the long-standing investigation tracks yellow-bellied marmots in Colorado.
"We started this research in 1962, and every summer we'd record basic demography such as the age of the animals, gender, body mass, who survived and who reproduced," Armitage said. "At the time we started, we had no idea that climate change was going to be a problem. But we collected that basic demography to use as a foundation for other kinds of study."
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FEATURE-Scientists dig deep into ocean warming conundrum
* Warming deep oceans means higher sea levels
* Oceans act like flywheel for global climate
* Scientists unsure if climate change is causing warming
* Dearth of long-term data is hampering researchers
SINGAPORE, July 22 (Reuters) - In the remote, frigid abyss of the deep oceans, temperatures are slowly rising. Not by much, but spread over the vast depths of the deep the change is significant, adding to sea level rise and possibly heralding even greater impacts for mankind and the planet.
While scientists aren't yet certain if the warming is caused by climate change, they are scrambling to learn more about what's going on. This is because the layer starting roughly 2 kilometres (one mile) from the surface makes up about half the world's oceans and plays a key role in regulating the planet's climate.
"A decade or so ago we had this picture in our minds that deep oceans were pretty stable and that things didn't change much there," said oceanographer Steve Rintoul of Australia's state-backed science and research body CSIRO.
"What's changed in the last decade is that we've started to accumulate enough measurements to show there are widespread changes happening in the deep ocean. And those include really remarkably widespread warming of the deepest layers of the ocean," he told Reuters from Hobart, Tasmania.
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Study: Global warming will worsen smog
Rising temperatures in coming decades will have one more unpleasant effect in Southern California, scientists say: They will make smog worse as well.
A new report that combines smog statistics with climate models says that in 40 years, global warming could push Southern California toward 25 additional days when smog levels violate federal standards for exposure to ozone.
By 2100, that could rise to as many as 50 days. And that's if emissions remain at about 1990-2004 levels, a reference period used in the study.
The study looked at all of California; the South Coast Air Basin, which includes Orange County, and the San Joaquin Valley were identified as those with the worst ozone problems.
"What we're seeing is that there is definitely a climate penalty for ozone pollution in California," said Michael J. Kleeman, lead author of the study and a professor at UC Davis. "That will have to eventually be offset with more emission controls in order to protect public health."
Ground-level ozone can irritate lungs and aggravate asthma and other lung conditions.
The ozone is "cooked" into existence from ozone precursors in the presence of sunlight. Warmer temperatures speed chemical reactions, Kleeman said, and the emission of the chemical precursors of ozone also rise -- for example, evaporation of gasoline from cars.
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White-bark pine ravaged throughout Yellowstone
The clear, high peaks of the greater Yellowstone region once were studded with huge stands of majestic white-bark pine forests, some of the trees 1,000 years old.
A decade or so ago, big pockets of rust started appearing as the green pine needles succumbed to infestation and disease. Since then, it's become worse: Unable to fend off invading armies of mountain pine beetles, large swaths of the forest have simply died. An alarming part of the high-elevation landscape across the mountains of Wyoming, eastern Idaho and southern Montana is gradually turning eerie and gray.
"You get a picture of how breathtaking it is from the air," said Louisa Willcox, a senior researcher with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has completed a first-ever aerial survey of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem to document the extent of the threat to the region's white-bark pine forests. "All the gray you see in the eastern part of Yellowstone Park and the Absaroka Mountans are gray ghosts [of dead trees]. Basically, white-bark pine [there] is functionally gone, functionally lost."
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Arctic Ocean full up with carbon dioxide
Loss of sea ice is unlikely to enable Arctic waters to mop up more carbon dioxide from the air.
As climate scientists watched the Arctic's sea-ice cover shrink year after year, they thought there might be a silver lining: an ice-free Arctic Ocean could soak up large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere, slowing down the accumulation of greenhouse gases and climate change.
But research published in Science today suggests that part of the Arctic Ocean has already mopped up so much CO2 that it could have almost reached its limit1. Wei-Jun Cai, a biogeochemist at the University of Georgia in Athens and an international team sampled the amount of CO2 in the surface waters of the Canada Basin, in the western Arctic Ocean. "We found that ice-free basin areas had rather high CO2 values that approached atmospheric levels," says Cai. "It was not expected."
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Risk of Water Scarcity Increasing for 1,100 U.S. Counties
WASHINGTON, DC, July 21, 2010 (ENS) - One out of three U.S. counties is facing a greater risk of water shortages by mid-century due to global warming, finds a new report by Tetra Tech for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
For 412 of these counties the risk of water shortages will be "extremely high," according to the report, a 14-fold increase from previous estimates.
In the Great Plains and Southwest United States, water sustainability is at extreme risk finds the report, which is based on publicly available water use data from across the United States.
"This analysis shows climate change will take a serious toll on water supplies throughout the country in the coming decades, with over one out of three U.S. counties facing greater risks of water shortages," said Dan Lashof, director of the Climate Center at NRDC. "Water shortages can strangle economic development and agricultural production and affected communities."
"As a result," he said, "cities and states will bear real and significant costs if Congress fails to take the steps necessary to slow down and reverse the warming trend."
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Indoor Living and the Global Greenhouse
The Garrison Institute, just down the hill from my home in the Hudson River valley, has organized an exploration of the role of the human mind, with all of its strengths and weaknesses, in both creating the climate challenge and potentially overcoming it. The next effort is a session for a variety of specialists in studies of buildings and behavior.
Given that humans are spending ever more time indoors, with all the heating, cooling and lighting potentially attending such a lifestyle, finding big cuts in energy use in structures can make a big dent in greenhouse-gas emissions and energy appetites. (I took the photo above while touring Toronto's vast underground city beneath the city.) The challenge and opportunity in fast-growing developing countries is particularly acute. According to some analysts, more square footage of structures will be built in the next few decades than has been built by human societies in all previous history. As I wrote recently, one steamy Asian city, Mumbai, is estimated to have potential demand for air conditioning equalling a fourth of all the air conditioning used in the United States today.
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You can't explain away climate change
Some hold that global warming stopped in 1998, but scientists know better.
You probably won't hear it from columnist George F. Will, Fox News commentators or the plethora of conservative blogs that have claimed global warming essentially stopped in 1998, but recent figures released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show that global land and ocean surface temperatures in June were the highest since record-keeping began in 1880. What's more, the first half of 2010 was the hottest such period ever recorded, and Arctic sea ice melted at a record-setting pace in June.
The heat can probably be attributed at least in part to periodic and entirely natural changes in ocean temperatures and surface air pressure - the El Niño/La Niña phenomena most likely played a role. But the fact that peak years are getting hotter while even relatively "cool" years now tend to remain above historical averages (the 10 warmest years on record all occurred within the last 15 years, according to the NOAA) shows that something else is at work. A consensus of climate scientists worldwide, including not only the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change but the national scientific academies of the United States and the rest of the developed world, have identified that "something else" as anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gases, which reflect the sun's heat back onto the Earth rather than letting it escape into space.
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Deep Underground, Miles of Hidden Wildfires Rage
Three blistering fires are blazing through Wyoming's scenic Powder River Basin, but firefighters aren't paying any attention. Other than a faint hint of acrid odors and a single ribbon of smoke rising from a tiny crack beyond the nearby Tongue River, a long look across the region's serene grassland shows no sign of trouble.
That's what makes the three infernos, and the toxins they spew, so sinister. Their flames are concealed deep underground, in coal seams and oxygen-rich fissures, which makes containment near impossible. Shielded from fire hoses and aerial assaults, the flames are chewing through coal seams 20 feet thick, spanning 22 acres. They're also belching greenhouse gases and contaminants, contributing to an out-of-sight, out-of-mind environmental hazard that extends far beyond Wyoming's borders. "Every coal basin in the world has fires sending up organic compounds that are not good for you," says Mark Engle, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who studies the Powder River Basin, "but unless you live close to them you probably never see them."
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