Asian pollution could spur U.S., European warming

Asian pollution from Asian power plants, cooking and heating could create summer hot spots in the central United States and southern Europe by mid-century, U.S. climate scientists reported on Thursday.

Unlike the long-lived greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, the particle and gas pollution cited in this report only stays in the air for a few days or weeks but its warming effect on the climate half a world away could last for decades, the scientists said.

Global warming: Western U.S. feels the heat

High-elevation white bark pines, which have endured droughts and lightning and insect attacks in life spans as long as 1,000 years, are being killed by a tiny beetle whose numbers were once limited by a bitter winter climate.

“What you are seeing is a natural process on steroids: All these trees will be toast unless the pace of global warming is drastically slowed,” said Diana Tombeck, a University of Colorado-Denver professor. She studies white bark pine and calls it “a foundation species.”

Global Warming: Warmer Seas Linked To Strengthening Hurricanes, According to New Research

“As seas warm, the ocean has more energy that can be converted to tropical cyclone wind,” Elsner said. “Our results do not prove the heat-engine theory. We just show that the data are quite consistent with it.”

Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology first suggested the possible connection between global warming and increases in tropical cyclone intensity in a 2005 paper. He linked the increased intensity of storms to the heating of the oceans, which has been attributed to global warming.

New Study Confirms Accuracy of Hockey Stick Global Warming Graph

New research now supports the infamous “hockey stick”� graph that shows temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere beginning to skyrocket around the time of the Industrial Revolution, illustrating the link between human activity and global warming.

When the graph was first developed in 1998, scientists had to rely primarily on tree ring measurements to estimate the temperature in earlier centuries, and the graph is routinely criticized by climate skeptics who question the science it is based on. For the new study, scientists were able to examine many other temperature indicators in the natural record—including coral reef skeletons, ice cores, sea-floor sediment, stalagmites and stalactites—and they reached the same conclusions. The hockey stick stands.

Amazon deforestation jumps 69% in 2008
Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon increased 69 percent in the past 12 months as high commodity prices have driven forest conversion for ranches and cropland, according to preliminary figures released by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE). The increase comes after three consecutive years of declining deforestation in Brazil.

INPE data shows that 8,147 square kilometers (3,145 square miles) of forest were cleared between August 2007 and August 2008, a 69 percent increase over the 4,820 square kilometers (1,861 square miles) razed in the previous period [see note below]. Degradation due to logging affects a larger area but is not reported in INPE figures.

Canada’s ice shelves lost 23% of their area this summer

A 19-square-mile (50 sq km) chuck of ice shelf broke off from Canada’s Ellesmere Island in the northern Arctic, reports the Associated Press. The Manhattan-sized ice shelf is now adrift in the Arctic Ocean. It is the largest of more than 83 sq mi (214 sq km) of ice shelf that has broken up in the Canadian Arctic this year.

“These substantial calving events underscore the rapidity of changes taking place in the Arctic,” said Derek Mueller, an expert in Northern and Polar Studies at Trent University. “These changes are irreversible under the present climate and indicate that the environmental conditions that have kept these ice shelves in balance for thousands of years are no longer present.”

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Timeout from environmental doom news – i gotta go get mixers. i suggest the same… unless of course you don’t have booze… then you’ll need to get booze and mixers… maybe even some of them corn nuts, too and a microbrew.

back and less sober soon

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ahh.. much better now. where were we? oh yeah, the death of Gaia…

and old but good one – a little reminder of how the United States plans on coping with climate change. Notice there is no mention of taxation, nor of ecological remediation what-so-ever. The guvment will cope with climate change in the same fashion as it does most other issues: military might.

An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security

Notice how many of the speculations from the paper’s imagined “worse case scenarios” have already happened or are beginning to occur.

Example:
Floating ice in the northern polar seas, which had already lost 40% of its mass from 1970 to 2003, is mostly gone during summer by 2010. As glacial ice melts, sea levels rise and as wintertime sea extent decreases, ocean waves increase in intensity, damaging coastal cities. Additionally millions of people are put at risk of flooding around the globe (roughly 4 times 2003 levels), and fisheries are disrupted as water temperature changes cause fish to migrate to new locations and habitats, increasing tensions over fishing rights.

Most of the world, and especially the gun-slingin’ technophiles of the US gov and military completely underestimated the severity of climate change. They are completely unprepared to deal with the consequences in any meaningful way. Most of the communities hit by climate-linked disasters are still in the dark – spreading awareness to these groups will be one of our most powerful fulcrums to create mass social resistance and change.

If we hope to adjust to the radical lifestyle changes advocated by recent climate science we must do so outside and against our government, the energy industries supporting this economy, and the military and police forces hired to impose their policy.

Here’s another revealing passage:

Drawing on abundant archaeological and ethnological data, LeBlanc argues that historically humans conducted organized warfare for a variety of reasons, including warfare over resources and the environment. Humans fight when they outstrip the carrying capacity of their natural environment. Every time there is a choice between starving and raiding, humans raid. From hunter/gatherers through agricultural tribes, chiefdoms, and early complex societies, 25% of a population’s adult males die when war breaks out.

Peace occurs when carrying capacity goes up, as with the invention of agriculture, newly effective bureaucracy, remote trade and technological breakthroughs. Also a large scale die-back such as from plague can make for peaceful times—-Europe after its major plagues, North American natives after European diseases decimated their populations (that’s the difference between the Jamestown colony failure and Plymouth Rock success). But such peaceful periods are short-lived because population quickly rises to once again push against carrying capacity, and warfare resumes. Indeed, over the millennia most societies define themselves according to their ability to conduct war, and warrior culture becomes deeply ingrained. The most combative societies are the ones that survive.

However in the last three centuries, LeBlanc points out, advanced states have steadily lowered the body count even though individual wars and genocides have grown larger in scale. Instead of slaughtering all their enemies in the traditional way, for example, states merely kill enough to get a victory and then put the survivors to work in their newly expanded economy. States also use their own bureaucracies, advanced technology, and international rules of behavior to raise carrying capacity and bear a more careful relationship to it.

All of that progressive behavior could collapse if carrying capacities everywhere were suddenly lowered drastically by abrupt climate change. Humanity would revert to its norm of constant battles for diminishing resources, which the battles themselves would further reduce even beyond the climatic effects. Once again warfare would define human life.

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Glaciers In The Pyrenees Will Disappear In Less Than 50 Years, Study Finds
60% of Pyrenean glaciers have melted

There are currently only 21 glaciers in the Pyrenees (ten on the Spanish side and eleven on the French side) covering an area of 450 hectares. In just 15 years, since 1990, glaciological calculations have shown that rapid melting has caused the total regression of the smallest glaciers and 50%-60% of the surface area of the largest glaciers.

According to this pioneering study, between 1880 and 1980, at least 94 glaciers disappeared in the Iberian Peninsular, and since the 1980s, the remaining 17 glaciers have disappeared. Glaciers are sensitive “geoindicators of climate change, and features of high heritage value, in a clear process of melting, and therefore possible disappearance”, González Trueba pointed out to SINC.