We need to get prepared for four degrees of global warming, Bob Watson told the Gurdian last week. At first sight this looks like wise counsel from the climate science adviser to Defra. But the idea that we could adapt to a 4C rise is absurd and dangerous. Global warming on this scale would be a catastrophe that would mean, in the immortal words that Chief Seattle probably never spoke, "the end of living and the beginning of survival" for humankind. Or perhaps the beginning of our extinction.

The collapse of the polar ice caps would become inevitable, bringing long-term sea level rises of 70-80 metres. All the world's coastal plains would be lost, complete with ports, cities, transport and industrial infrastructure, and much of the world's most productive farmland. The world's geography would be transformed much as it was at the end of the last ice age, when sea levels rose by about 120 metres to create the Channel, the North Sea and Cardigan Bay out of dry land. Weather would become extreme and unpredictable, with more frequent and severe droughts, floods and hurricanes. The Earth's carrying capacity would be hugely reduced. Billions would undoubtedly die.

Watson's call was supported by the government's former chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, who warned that "if we get to a four-degree rise it is quite possible that we would begin to see a runaway increase". This is a remarkable understatement. The climate system is already experiencing significant feedbacks, notably the summer melting of the Arctic sea ice. The more the ice melts, the more sunshine is absorbed by the sea, and the more the Arctic warms. And as the Arctic warms, the release of billions of tonnes of methane - a greenhouse gas 70 times stronger than carbon dioxide over 20 years - captured under melting permafrost is already under way.

To see how far this process could go, look 55.5m years to the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when a global temperature increase of 6C coincided with the release of about 5,000 gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, both as CO2 and as methane from bogs and seabed sediments. Lush subtropical forests grew in polar regions, and sea levels rose to 100m higher than today. It appears that an initial warming pulse triggered other warming processes. Many scientists warn that this historical event may be analogous to the present: the warming caused by human emissions could propel us towards a similar hothouse Earth.

But what are we to do? All our policies to date to tackle global warming have been miserable failures. The Kyoto protocol has created a vast carbon market but done little to reduce emissions. The main effect of the EU's emissions trading scheme has been to transfer about €30bn or more from consumers to Europe's biggest polluters, the power companies. The EU and US foray into biofuels has, at huge cost, increased greenhouse gas emissions and created a world food crisis, causing starvation in many poor countries.

So are all our efforts doomed to failure? Yes, so long as our governments remain craven to special interests, whether carbon traders or fossil fuel companies. The carbon market is a valuable tool, but must be subordinate to climatic imperatives. The truth is that to prevent runaway greenhouse warming, we will have to leave most of the world's fossil fuels in the ground, especially carbon-heavy coal, oil shales and tar sands. The fossil fuel and power companies must be faced down.

Global problems need global solutions, and we also need an effective replacement for the failed Kyoto protocol. The entire Kyoto system of national allocations is obsolete because of the huge volumes of energy embodied in products traded across national boundaries. It also presents a major obstacle to any new agreement - as demonstrated by the 2008 G8 meeting in Japan that degenerated into a squabble over national emission rights.

The answer? Scrap national allocations and place a single global cap on greenhouse gas emissions, applied "upstream" - for instance, at the oil refinery, coal-washing station and cement factory. Sell permits up to that cap in a global auction, and use the proceeds to finance solutions to climate change - accelerating the use of renewable energy, raising energy efficiency, protecting forests, promoting climate-friendly farming, and researching geoengineering technologies. And commit hundreds of billions of dollars per year to finance adaptation to climate change, especially in poor countries.

Such a package of measures would allow us to achieve zero net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and long-term stabilisation at 350 parts per million of CO2 equivalent. This avoids the economic pain that a cap-and-trade system alone would cause, and targets assistance at the poor, who are least to blame and most need help. The permit auction would raise about $1 trillion per year, enough to finance a spread of solutions. At a quarter of the world's annual oil spending, it is a price well worth paying.

· Oliver Tickell's book Kyoto2 has just been published kyoto2.org

Al Gore, back to you!  

Scientists debate whether we’re changing the climate

The global warming debate isn't likely to cool off anytime soon, with experts disagreeing about its causes, and even its existence.


By Faye Flam

Monday August 11, 2008

What you hear about global warming can vary as much as, well, the weather.
One day, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is quoted saying: "We simply must do everything we can in our power to slow down global warming before it is too late. The science is clear. The global warming debate is over."

Another day, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum says this: "Americans are coming to understand that global temperatures have actually cooled over the last 10 years and are predicted to continue cooling over the next 10."

On another day, dozens of papers proclaim that the sun is at fault, since the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research demonstrated that the sun has burned brighter in the last 60 years than any time in the last 1,100 years, or 8,000 years, depending on the news source.

Most climatologists maintain that global warming is real and human activity is likely the major contributor. They believe that as we release more CO2 into the atmosphere, the planet will get hotter.

The contradictory statements tend to cluster around a couple of sticking points: the heating trend over the last few years, the influence of the sun, and the lessons from the distant past.

Where there's good agreement is laid out by MIT meteorology professor Richard Lindzen, a critic of Al Gore and others he considers alarmists. In an editorial for the Wall Street Journal several years ago called "Climate of Fear," he wrote that he agrees that global temperature has risen about a degree (Celsius) since the late 19th century.

He also agrees with most other climatologists that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by about 30 percent over the same period, and that CO2 should contribute to future warming, thanks to basic atmospheric physics.

Lindzen, however, said in a recent interview that the carbon dioxide buildup may not be causing the current warming trend, and it therefore may not play a significant role in the future climate.

And the trend may already have turned around, he said. "If you look from 1995 you don't see any change that could be regarded as statistically significant . . . . For the last 13 or 14 years nothing has been happening."

Pennsylvania State University climatologist Richard Alley said the recent cooling claim is everywhere. If you search for the phrase "global warming stopped in 1998," you get thousands of hits, and he's most recently heard this argument from U.S. senators.

He called it "cheating" to start in 1998 and then pick some subsequent cooler year to argue for cooling. It's a little like taking your first measurements in July and your last ones in January, he said.

To understand the climate, you have to look at longer-scale trends, he said, smoothing out those little ripples known as weather.

Over the long term, he said, it's getting hotter. "If you take the last 30 years, it's completely evident that it's going up," he said of the global temperature.

But could it be the work of the sun? Solar physicists say the sun has been temperamental in the past, and flare-ups and calm periods have rocked the climate.

One clue to the sun's variability comes from the Little Ice Age, during the 17th and 18th centuries, when Europe and North America were much colder and snowier than they are today.

During that time, astronomers noted a nearly complete absence of sunspots, said atmospheric physicist Peter Pilewskie from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Called the Maunder Minimum, he said, the coincidence of this spotless period on the sun with the notable chill of the ice age suggests a sun-climate connection.

Could the sun be getting warmer? If that were so, Pilewskie said it would be unlikely to account for more than a fraction of the observed warming trend. With satellites, scientists have been able to record the total radiation emitted by the sun, and found it has changed very little in the last 30 years.

But those records only go back so far. Several years ago, a team from Germany's Max Planck institute published a paper showing that carbon isotopes trapped in tree rings reveal unprecedented solar activity during the 20th century.

Carbon 14, a heavy form of carbon, is formed when cosmic rays from outer space impact carbon on the Earth. The greater the solar activity, the more the sun's magnetic field deflects the cosmic rays and the less carbon 14 should be stored in tree rings.

According to the Max Planck team, we've been experiencing more solar activity in the last 100 years than we did for the last 8,000 years.

Judith Lean, a solar physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory, calls that conclusion erroneous. She said the isotopes also vary much more with changes in the Earth's own magnetic field and processes on the Earth, thus complicating the analysis.

She said the consensus among solar physicists now is that the sun is in a relatively warm phase, but nothing unprecedented and not hot enough to have raised the temperature a degree in the last century.

The other major point of contention surrounds the Earth's erratic climate history, with its many ice ages and long steamy periods. Lindzen argues that the climate is ultimately unstable, and so we should expect constant change regardless of human-generated carbon dioxide.

Many factors can influence climate on time scales long and short. Slight fluctuations in the Earth's distance from the sun have periodically conspired with the angle of the planet's tilt to create ice ages over the course of the last five million years.

More ancient hot periods that lasted millions of years are raising bigger questions. About 95 million years ago, during the age of the dinosaurs, for example, it was so warm that alligators lived in what's now Canada and tropical trees grew as far north as Greenland. Dinosaurs roamed where penguins and polar bears live today.

It looks as if it would take about eight times today's atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration to make things that hot, said Brian Huber, who studies past climate for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. "This is a challenge for climate modelers - we don't fully understand it," he said.

But it could be that CO2 has a greater warming power than previously realized, in which case we will be in for a more severe global warming than has been predicted, Huber said.

To Lindzen, the inability to fully account for past warm spells makes it hard to trust predictions of our near-term future. "If we knew the answer to things like this, one would have more confidence."

Lindzen takes the view that the climate doesn't need human intervention to change over the course of decades or centuries. "The whole notion that something outside has to cause a change is absurd," he said. "The system is never in equilibrium; it's always wobbly."

But Penn State's Alley said CO2 from volcanoes looks to be the prime suspect for the warm spells of the distant past, and fossil-fuel burning is by far the most likely driver of current trends. "We've looked at the sun. Volcanoes are not doing anything weird. The oceans can dump heat into the atmosphere, but they're getting warmer too," he said.

Perhaps some of the disagreement boils down to a philosophical difference. Some fret over the pace of humanity's impact on the planet, and consider the cautious approach to be to hold off on further changing our atmosphere.

Others are comfortable with the notion of human beings altering the global atmosphere, and argue the cautious approach would be to avoid changing our way of life until we know more.

--------------------------------------------------
Contact staff writer Faye Flam at 215-854-4977 or fflam@phillynews.com


Find this article at:
http://www.philly.com/inquirer.....08102920  
  

THE SKY IS FALLING......THE SKY IS FALLING....

"You're watching the David Suzuki  Network (DSN), brought to you by the Ministry of Environment, who remind you that the seedlings you plant today allows Super Dave to criss-cross the nation in his diesel belching bus so he can continue to misinform the masses.  (ooops did i say that?  

Tune in next week when the President of China drops by to plead his case about being an "emerging nation" and exempting him from participation in the "Global Carbon Offset" game (DSN's top-rated reality show!).

Now this word from Al Gore about the DSN TV series debuting this fall based on his Academy Award-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth". Ummmmm, we seem to be having some trouble connecting via satellite with Mr. Gore live from his swimming pool in Tennessee...guess he didn't buy enough carbon offsets to justify a reliable feed this week!

Also coming to DSN this Fall, a remake of an old classic, "The Odd Couple" starring Arnold & Gordon.  The debut episode will feature the environmentally friendly Governator and Premier Campbell tandem cycling down the Pacific Coast Trail.  

Don't forget there's DSN for Kids, hosted by Uncle Al....our music video channel MuchGreen...and our 24/7/365 "Save the Polar Icecap" telethon where instead of pledging dollars, viewers send in ice shavings from their freezer to patch up the gaping hole at the North Pole.  

Then there's "Tree-cycling" starring the former Bell Mobility beavers Frank & Gordon.  This week the boys show us how to recycling stands of Mountain Pine Beetle infested trees...

D-S-N....now available in HiDef!!!!  

And let's not forget that little hiccup coming in 2012. I think it is being referred to in some circles as: The End Of The World.

Is, perhaps, the answer: Jesus...?

Quoted Text

Is, perhaps, the answer: Jesus...?

Yeah...the answer is Jesus...as in:  Jesus I wish all these science type people would pick a side so we could move foreward on this!!!  All this going around in circles is driving me crazy.

Quoted from pave

And let's not forget that little hiccup coming in 2012. I think it is being referred to in some circles as: The End Of The World.

Is, perhaps, the answer: Jesus...?

Won't this just tick off the British folk if armageddon comes BEFORE their summer Olympics  

Whooo whoo!  Suckers!  they gave us all 100 bucks for nothing......DOH!

Actually I'm gonna bank my $100 to pay for MY version of the Last Supper in 2012!