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Global Warning – Believe It!
The Kilimanjaro as it has not been seen (without snow) in 11,000 years (The Guardian)
(Hat tip to Dismal Science)
The Guardian
Africa’s tallest mountain, with its white peak, is one of the most instantly recognisable sights in the world. But as this aerial photograph shows, Kilimanjaro’s trademark snowy cap, at 5,895 metres (1,934ft), is now all but gone – 15 years before scientists predicted it would melt through global warming.
. Separately, the graph below was published 2 weeks ago in The Economist and it is the graphic illustration of yet another convincing scientific study that global warming is real:
SOME people do not believe global warming is happening; some believe it is happening, but that it is the result of natural variation; and some believe it is being caused by human activity.
A paper presented to the AAAS by Tim Barnett, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, provides further evidence that the third camp is right.
Most published research on climate change looks at the atmosphere. That is partly because the records are good and partly because it is in the atmosphere that the human-induced changes that might be causing it are happening. One of these changes, which would promote global warming, is a rise in the level of so-called greenhouse gases (particularly carbon dioxide) which trap heat from the sun and thus warm the air. Another, which would oppose warming, is a rise in the quantity of sulphate-based aerosols, which encourage cloud formation and thus cool the air by reflecting sunlight back into space.
Dr Barnett, however, thinks that the air is the wrong place to look. He would rather look in the sea. Water has a far higher capacity to retain heat than air, so most of any heat that was causing global warming would be expected to end up in the oceans.
And that was what he found.
Go read the rest of the article, or go directly to the actual research.
@DM btw the boat on my web page is someone else’s 🙂 the one I plan to live on starting fairly soon is a different animal.
I think you mistake the direction of many people’s feelings/concerns. at issue is the question of what a “decent” lifestyle reasonably includes. some of us — self among them — accept the math that says that if SUVs and constant plane travel are defined as part of our “decent lives,” then those third world people for whom you feel such creditable concern will never live even a far more modest “decent” life. we don’t have enough resources for every person to live the (imho grotesque) “American Dream.” the singleminded pursuit of that dream by the lucky few condemns billions to indigence, illness, hunger, premature death.
to deny the math requires a religious faith in miracles rather than a reasonable expectation of science or technology, imho. is the planet of infinite size? no. have the laws of thermodynamics been suspended recently? no. so obviously resources are limited.
and the evidence that we are nudging up against those limits is overwhelming, even if we disqualify a destabilised climate as one of the players in the end game. it doesn’t take any supernatural faith in some kind of neo-Neolithic goddess cult to perceive the problem. [that’s an ad hominem often hurled by defenders of the status quo ante, who meanwhile maintain their own childlike faith in the cult of Infinite Growth and Infallible Technocracy — a modern variant on the Cargo Cult imho. if any faith in the absence of fact can be called “rational” and if “rational” can be defined as “conducive to survival” then it may well be that a Goddess/nature religion would score as more “rational” than a faith in St Milton.]
there are two solutions to global resource depletion — well three if you count unchecked resource exploitation leading to massive die-off, but I prefer not to count that one. one is for the first world elite to continue to consume like there is no tomorrow, and to shove more and more people into abject poverty to compensate, i.e. reduce the number of persons who have (by any definition) a decent lifestyle. this immiseration is happening worldwide even as we speak, and is accelerating even in the wealthy nations. the end state is a far smaller elite and a huge mass of hungry peasants. even if we found it morally acceptable, it is not necessarily a sustainable model because the appetite of elites for resource-squandering is unbounded — cf Rapa Nui. so even if 99.99 percent of the pop is barred from conspicuous consumption, the ruling .01 pct can easily compensate for that by aggrandising their status symbols and their destructive display behaviour. and they are. it is happening all around us: the megayachts, megaSUVs, McMegaMansions.
another alternative is that the wealthy first-worlders scale back enough to share resources with others, learning to live within our means and doing what we can to help others to live within our means. this means giving up the cosy notion that there are two separate resource wallets, “their means” and “our means,” and that because we are temporarily richer than they are we have a right to destroy the commons on which all of our lives depend. when China poisons their air with zillions of filthy coal-burning plants, the pollutants eventually reach N Am on the prevailing westerlies. European jet travel damages agriculture in Africa. Americans export their acid rain to Canadian forests. and so on. you can’t fart in a crowded elevator without people noticing,
the argument you field here about the consequences of partial deindustrialisation is imho reductionist and is often called the “Shivering in the Dark” gambit — i.e. asserting that any scaling-back of the excess of the First World hyperconsumer lifestyle is equivalent to an immediate return to the Dark Ages. it is to suggest that somehow if we did not have instant cheap air travel, SUVs, 5000 sq foot homes, high tech cosmetic surgery, high tech medicine devoted solely to extending our 80+ year lifespans by six months or so, 200 channels of cable TV 24 hours a day, 60 inch tv screens, 24×7 air conditioning, cheap sweatshop clothing and snowmobiles and riding mowers and meat for dinner every single day and all the rest — that our lives would be miserable, unbearable, insupportable. I don’t buy it. I don’t have — or choose not to use — most of those things and my life is a delight compared to 99.9 percent of the human lives on this globe.
it is a profound error to romanticise the past but imho a far greater one to romanticise the present.
the burning question on the table is “how much is enough?” — if our answer is “nothing is ever enough and we must always have infinitely More and More,” then we are headed for extinction as surely as any other critter that multiplies and consumes beyond the carrying capacity of its biome. the position to which I have been driven over 20 years of reading and thinking and doing the math, is that what we in the industrialised G8 currently have — those of us in the privileged classes — is Too Much, and that others are paying dearly for it.
I think we can have dental tools in a sustainable future. if we don’t manage to make a transition to a sustainable future then it won’t matter much whether we have dental tools or not.
what is miserable, unbearable, insupportable to me is watching a tiny percentage of the world pop continue gleefully to squander, in obscene luxury and ostentatious display, the resources that might have been adequate to ensure that “decent” lifestyle for a reasonable majority. it is miserable to watch and it is unbearable to participate.
as to newcomer “Finnerty” — welcome to the bar, sir — who wants to bet on the transporter beam as it is “the only possibility” [since the wealthy North could not possibly give up its liposuction equipment, motorised tie racks, electric wheelbarrows etc, perish the thought!] — so far every civilisation that has made that bet, has crashed and vanished from history. a word to the wise: never bet against the house.
oy oy oy, my feet are killing me standing on this soapbox for so long. soon they will be throwing peanut shells — or worse. I subside, I relent, I go and sit down and nurse my soda water in a dark corner.
Posted by: DeAnander | Mar 15 2005 1:45 utc | 38
…Call it the case of the missing “greenhouse gas.” For years, scientists have been trying to figure out where carbon dioxide goes once humans generate it. Significant amounts billow into the atmosphere. But each year, atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been rising only half as fast as humans supply the gas.
The hiding place, it turns out, is the world’s oceans. And the implications for marine life are troubling, researchers say. If industrial CO2 emissions continue to increase at their current rate, by the end of the century the surface waters of the world’s oceans are likely to become more acidic. Though the change appears subtle, it could threaten key organisms at the base of the marine food chain and further endanger shallow-water reefs, which represent some of the most biologically productive ecosystems on the planet. The absorption of this extra carbon dioxide would induce changes in ocean chemistry not seen for at least 20 million years, some researchers say……
A research team, led by marine chemist Christopher Sabine, took on the herculean task of compiling a global picture of the oceans’ CO2 uptake, based on measurements from some 70,000 samples of seawater. The samples were collected worldwide during two large oceanographic projects in the late 1980s and 1990s aimed at measuring ocean circulation and the movement of carbon through the system.
“We’ve known for years that the oceans take up a significant amount of carbon dioxide,” says Dr. Sabine, with the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “But we haven’t been able to quantify it based on direct measurements until now.”
From 1800 to 1994, the team estimates, the oceans soaked up 48 percent of the carbon emitted from human activities, such as burning wood, coal, oil, or gas
The real surprise, however, came from the impact the results had on the overall picture of the globe’s carbon cycle…When the team added the carbon stored in the oceans to the carbon stored in the atmosphere, the total exceeded emissions from human activities alone. After carefully reviewing their data and calculations, they concluded that the “extra” CO2 came from changes in land use, such as deforestation. This suggests that during the same period, the planet’s terrestrial bio-sphere became a net source of, rather than a sink for, carbon dioxide.
Marine biologists, meanwhile, worry about what happens to that carbon once the oceans take it up. When carbon dioxide mixes with seawater, it forms a weak carbonic acid. Over millions of years, erosion has supplied the oceans with vast amounts of dissolved calcium from weathered rock on the continents. This provides a natural buffer against the acid, creating chemical conditions to which some key forms of marine life are finely tuned.
Over the past five years, however, evidence has been mounting that rising CO2 levels could pose major challenges to these life forms by altering this balance.
By some measures, rising CO2 levels during the industrial age already have increased the oceans’ acidity by roughly 0.1 pH units. By the end of this century, the reduction could reach 0.4 units. That may not sound like much, but researchers point out that each whole-number shift in pH represents a 10-fold change.
Oceans to acid: Oceans act as giant sponges for CO2 – but what eases global warming harms marine life.
…..According to research by Christopher Sabine of the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) the ocean has taken up approximately 120 billion metric tonnes of carbon generated by human activities since 1800.
“The same pollution that we believe is heating the world’s oceans through global warming is also altering their chemical balance,” Professor John Raven, chair of the working group, said.
…..The oceans are now slightly alkaline — the opposite of acidic. Researchers are not suggesting the seas will become as acidic as soft drinks, but they say the shift toward the acid end of the scale is accelerating.
The change over the last century already matches the magnitude of the change that occurred in the entire 10,000 years preceding the industrial age.
Oceans’ acidity worries experts.
Climate change may be veering out of control before we understand the consequences, say scientists studying the world’s oceans.
If carbon dioxide emissions keep rising, surface waters could become more acidic than they have been for 300 million years – except perhaps during global catastrophes. And this warning follows a report that the biological productivity of the oceans has fallen by six per cent since the 1980s.
“We are changing the chemistry of the ocean and we don’t know what it’s going to do,” says Ken Caldeira, a climate specialist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
As the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere rises, more of the gas reacts with seawater to produce bicarbonate and hydrogen ions, increasing the acidity of the surface layer of water. Ocean pH was 8.3 after the last ice age and 8.2 before CO2 emissions took off in the industrial era. It is now 8.1.
Climate change: Alarm over acidifying oceans.
I think we’ve got ample evidence here to get Ned Ludd a posthumous pardon. As for the rest of you, you’re all as guilty as hell and boy, will I make you pay for it……
Posted by: Mother Nature | Mar 15 2005 5:03 utc | 43
Thanks for the correction Jerome. I seem to recall the reduced hydro story from Europe came from Italy not France, but it is now a dim memory so cannot swear to it. The impact of shallower/warmer waters on power plants relying on river cooling is just as good an example of cascading failure.
In theory, local agricultural failures also cascade, in the sense that they place additional load on long-haul food transport — or they would in a saner food economy anyway 🙂 given our insane habit of hauling the average foodstuff some 3 to 5 thousand miles before the consumer actually eats it, local variation due to crop failure may not make much of a difference to the annual fuel consumption and carbon debt of the agribiz sector. Sigh. They certainly make a difference to food prices, and in the third world we allow people to die in large numbers when local food supplies fail, so to those people it makes a pretty big difference when drought or flood wrecks the harvest. I an writing in haste (lunch break) so forgive please a certain jumpiness in the train of thought…
Many things regulate or govern (in the steam engine sense) the runoff of precip from highland to lowland. Snowpack helps deliver a chunk of the winter’s precip in a steady drip rather than a flood. Soil absorbency and porosity is assisted by a healthy ecosystem of trees, shrubs, grasses etc. — when this ecosystem is stripped and the rootmass dies, soil may (a) be displaced in mudslides and avalanches, or (b) turn into impervious hardpan which absorbes almost nothing. In each case flooding becomes more likely as the unchecked volume of water rushes downhill.
In turn the migration of soil down into river and stream valleys tends to choke watercourses and damage the biotic substructures than maintain soil health in valleys. When tree cover is reduced past a certain tipping point, the result can be a droughtward change in the local climate, thus exacerbating the problem. In other words, deforestation (by chainsaw and axe or by drought) causes drought, and drought causes more deforestation (by wildfire, arson, and the failure of temperate tree species to survive the sudden change of conditions). Thus the desertification cycle; once a thriving biome is wrecked beyond a certain point, the drift towards desert is self-propelling.
It is these feedback loops that make system failures (of which environmental breakdown is just one instance) so unpredictable, and sometimes wildly accelerating. Cascading failure, rather than simple single-point failure, is the cause of most engineering disasters… Complex systems have both resilience (elasticity in which one subsystem compensates for the failure of another, or checks the excess of another) and vulnerability to “chain reaction” or positive-feedback runaway failures. A great deal of the debate over climate change — aside from purely greed-headed shilling by those who benefit most from the status quo — is about the relative resilience or vulnerability of essential ecosystems and of human culture.
The Pollyannas assume that either or both elements (humans and the biotic infrastructure we need to survive) are infinitely resilient. The Kassandras assume that cascading failure and unintended consequences are an ever-present possibility or even an inevitability. One thing is for sure — once a cascading failure starts, it is very hard to apply the brakes.
Most of the problems posed by the human release of too much previously-sequestered carbon (by longstanding agricultural practise as well as by the fossil fuel orgy) are such that our instinctive response is to “solve” them by burning more fossil fuel. More air conditioners, more megaprojects (seawalls, flood barriers, reconstruction after storm damage). More desperately intensive agriculture on the diminishing arable area left to us. More long-haul food transport as the number of productive ag areas declines. Our fishing fleets travelling further and further to seek ocean protein, as we liquidate
entire fishing grounds. All this means more fossil fuel, more carbon release.
When you were a kid, did you ever have a “Chinese Finger Trap” toy? Right now the industrialised West and its slavish imitators have got a hammer (fossil fuel hyperconsumption married to Taylorism, Cartesian reductionism, monoculture and centralised technomanagerial control). So every damn thing looks like a nail, including our own thumb. Applying yesterday’s solution to today’s problem just makes today’s problem worse. Positive feedback.
I understand Colman’s point about the industrial revolution having made (some of) our lives amazingly comfortable and interesting compared to, say, the lives of our great-grandparents. However, we have achieved this by the equivalent of spending our entire life savings on furnishing the livingroom with genuine leather Eames chairs. Looks nice, it’s really comfy and the neighbours are impressed as hell, but now there’s nothing in the bank. Fisheries, soils, forests, reefs, snowpack, lakes, rivers, species diversity — we’ve “spent” them in our rush to have a comfy, stylish livingroom. What does that leave for our kids, or their kids? Is that really prosperity and progress? or just piss-poor household management? Are we truly the wealthiest generation in history — or the most bankrupt?
Posted by: DeAnander | Mar 15 2005 21:16 utc | 62
DeA: Yep, I remember reading that several counrties came sloe to shut down nuke plants, or even actually shut a few, because there was nearly no water anymore in the rivers, and they couldn’t cool them. Faced between reenacting Chernobyl and letting some elder people die from overheating, the authorities chose the latter.
It may have just been water temp in France, but the Po was close to dust bowl in N Italy, and the Danube was so low that ships sunk during WWII and NATO bombings on Serbia were rising out of the water. Though the culprit wasn’t lack of snow during winter than a massive evaporation due to the heat, and an overconsumption of water to drink, water the lawn, and other necessary or ludicrous human activities.
I’d also suppose that if people actually would have used AC if they could have implemented it quickly. It probably was one of the few time where it would have been useful. Ironically, I think I heard that AC sales peaked in the next spring, but the summer was pretty mediocre and people just had useless overpriced AC.
Snowpack: there’s another big trouble for mountain area. Loss of snowpack means that the whole area stops freezing all year’s long. The mountain’s side is no longer solidly frozen, and the permafrost melts, disappears. The mountain’s side the slides down with the next rain, or for steeper side, you have some big rocks falling down. Some impressive mountainous forms and cliffs actually exist only because the whole thing is frozen deep down and sticks together this way; heat it on, and it comes down. In the long run, this will be a real risk in the Rockies and the Alps, because resorts not only lose their customer base with lack of snow, but their infrastructure can collapse, or be crushed by mudlside or falling rocks – when not the town itself.
Colman: Yep, of course, Western lifestyle is considerably better than 150 years ago, even on average. The trick, alas, as far as I can see, is that 150 years ago some elite had a great lifestyle because it relied on the local (notably British) factory workers to do slave labor for them. Now, the people who can benefit of a good lifestyle are far more, and logically the slave-labor base has been increased to encompass the planet in a globalised capitalist system – instead of a national system in the 19th. The average British misery of Dickens isn’t anymore, because we have shifted on a global average misery of Dickensian proportions. In case people overlooked it, half the planet works for 2 dollars a day.
Though I also agree with you that if we can manage to live with a strongly reduced Western lifestyle, it’s feasible and most people wouldn’t suffer much. Like you, my own estimates are that my way of life should be cut by half to get a sustainable system providing a real life for humans (as opposed to mere survival, which is what most of mankind gets now and which simply can’t go on because there’ll come a time where they won’t accept it and would rather wreck the whole house rather than eternally live like beasts). As far as I’m concerned, this require some serious adjustments, but is doable. More efficient equipment, cutting plane travels even more, better choice of food, and most of all a global effort to change energy sources and electronic tools’ efficiency – something no single people can do but that has to be forced upon by govt on the industry. There’s still the serious issue of population, because even something like 1/4 of US lifestyle isn’t realistic for 6 bio people, imho, so birth control and family planning should be strengthened in a way or another – unless we want to wait for the next bird flu (or a nastier bug, or hunger, or war) to cleanse a third of the species.
BTW, is it just me or is Kos down?
Posted by: CluelessJoe | Mar 15 2005 23:33 utc | 67
NEW SCIENTIST – No matter how well the world controls emissions of greenhouse gases, global climate change is inevitable, warn two new studies which take into account the oceans’ slow response to warming.
Even if greenhouse gases never rise beyond their present level, temperatures and sea levels will continue rising for another century or more because of a time lag in the oceans’ response to atmospheric temperatures, say researchers.
This time lag means policymakers cannot afford to wait to tackle climate change until its consequences become painful, because by then they will already be committed to further change, they urge. “The feeling is that if things are getting bad, you hit the stop button. But even if you do, the climate continues to change,” says Gerald Meehl, a climatologist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
Meehl and his colleagues used two sophisticated computer models of global climate to predict what would happen under various scenarios for greenhouse gas emission controls, taking into account the oceanic time lag. Their most optimistic scenario – in which atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are capped at year 2000 levels – would require severe cuts in CO2 emissions, far beyond those set in the Kyoto protocol.
REUTERS – Even if people stopped pumping out carbon dioxide and other pollutants tomorrow, global warming would still get worse, two teams of researchers reported on Thursday. Sea levels will rise more than they have already risen, worsening the damage caused by extreme high tides and storm surges, and droughts, heat waves and storms will become more severe, the climate experts predicted. That makes immediate action to slow global warming even more vital, the teams at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado report in the journal Science.
“Even if we stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations, the climate will continue to warm, and there will be proportionately even more sea level rise,” said the NCAR’s Gerald Meehl, who led one of the two studies.
“The longer we wait, the more climate change we are committed to in the future.”
Virtually no one disagrees that human activity is fueling global warming, and a global treaty signed in Kyoto, Japan, aims to reduce polluting emissions. But the world’s biggest polluter, the United States, has withdrawn from the 1997 treaty, saying its provisions would hurt the U.S. economy.
(hat tip: Sam Smith, prorev.com, Mar 18 2005)
As Mike Roselle commented earlier this month (in an otherwise rather silly space-filler article)
Speaking of important, useless information on printed material, I was reading a newspaper. After reading it I must say that there was another thing that pissed me off. Climate change. I read about it in the paper this morning. It’s here. But that’s not what pissed me off. I sorta knew that already. It’s the fact that I have been reading about it for some twenty-five years in the same papers. Everyone on the whole planet knows about climate change and what causes it. We’ve all known for some time. The only scientists who still deny both climate change and the causes of it are on the oil company payroll and even they don’t believe what they are saying. They can’t really believe that the best way to stop global warming is to burn more coal and uranium. They get paid to say things that they don’t believe. So, it’s just natural for them to perform their daily duties professionally and diligently.
The only person on the planet who doesn’t believe in climate change is either in the White House, or he’s out golfing, or invading a small country. This guy is obviously insane or heavily medicated. His handicap alone is evidence of the fact. Although I don’t think he loses many golf games. How can we convince this guy that if he is a World Leader (which by the way I also read in the newspaper) that he should read the newspaper? He’d only have to read the headlines. Hell, I’d read more newspapers if I had my picture in them as much as he did.
Like I said, I am tired of just talking and reading about climate change, when there’s only one person on Earth who needs to read only one newspaper. I do know how to solve this. If a million lowbaggers come to Washington D.C. on the Fourth of July with small handheld magnifying glasses, we could assemble across the street in Lafayette Park and all focus all our magnifying glasses on the oval office at once and burn a message on the desk Teddy Roosevelt once sat at. I’m working on the messaging.
Posted by: DeAnander | Mar 18 2005 22:57 utc | 78
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