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August 12, 2010

John Vidal | guardian.co.uk

2010 sees record highs in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine but also many African, Middle Eastern and Latin American countries

2010 is becoming the year of the heatwave, with record temperatures set in 17 countries.

Record highs have occurred in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine – the three nations at the centre of the eastern European heatwave which has lasted for more than three weeks – but also African, Middle Eastern and Latin American countries.

Temperatures in Moscow, which have been consistently 20C above normal, today fell to 31C (86F), and President Dmitry Medvedev cancelled a state of emergency in three out of seven Russian regions affected by forest fires.

Thousand of hectares of forest burned in the fires, killing 54 people and leaving thousands homeless. For days, Moscow was shrouded in smog, and environmentalists raised fears that the blaze could release radioactive particles from areas contaminated in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Wildfires have also swept through northern Portugal, killing two firefighters and destroying 18,000 hectares (44,500 acres) of forests and bushland since late July. Some 600 firefighters were today struggling to contain 29 separate fires.

But the extreme heat experienced in Europe would barely have registered in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Niger, Pakistan and Sudan, all of which have recorded temperatures of more than 47C (115F) since June. The number of record highs is itself a record – the previous record was for 14 new high temperatures in 2007.

The freak weather conditions, which have devastated crops and wildlife, are believed to have killed thousands of elderly people, especially in Russia and northern India. The 2003 European heatwave killed about 15,000 people.

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Saturday 14 August 2010

by: Mickey Z., t r u t h o u t | Interview

While some humans choose to deny the existence of climate change, many have responded by changing the way they live. However, as freelance journalist and specialist on international affairs and geopolitics Gwynne Dyer warns, it's gonna take a lot more than recycled toilet paper to deal with the mess we've created. "We are heading for the brink very fast," he warns, and that's why his new book is required reading. "Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats" has been called "a truly important and timely book," but I'd go much further than that. In fact, I'll declare that this may be the most important book you'll read this year.

To help spread the urgency, I recently spoke with Dyer and the results are below.

Mickey Z.: Just as it seems Americans are finally catching on about greener living, more and more folks like yourself are warning that CFL bulbs, recycled toilet paper and bringing your own bag to the store is not exactly going to turn things around. What do you feel an eco-minded person can learn from "Climate Wars"?

Gwynne Dyer: Most of the things people do to be eco-minded are useful in various way - fewer trees get cut down, less electricity is used, local pollution is cleaned up - but the problem of climate change is global and it can only be dealt with on the global scale. Changing the light bulbs reduces the amount of electricity you use, but if that electricity is coming from a coal-fired power plant you are still pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every time you turn the light on. Unfortunately, there is a limit to the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that we can put into the atmosphere before we reach the point of no return and we are getting close.

MZ: What do you mean by "point of no return"?

GD: The "point of no return" is where we lose control of the process and the warming goes runaway and most climate scientists reckon it is around +2 degrees C (+3.5 degrees F). Once the warming passes that point, the warmth itself triggers various natural "feedbacks" like the melting of the permafrost around the Arctic, which would release huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. So long as it is mainly our own carbon dioxide emissions that are causing the warming, we are in control, at least in theory, because we could stop the warming by stopping our emissions. Past the "point of no return," nature takes over and cutting our own emissions would no longer stop the warming. Stopping our own emissions is not easy, of course, because the fossil fuels we burn - coal, oil and gas - currently provide about 80 percent of the energy we use. Alternative energy technologies are available, but they are not being put into use fast enough to make much difference. At the moment, human greenhouse gas emissions are still RISING at between 2 and 3 percent a year, where they should actually be falling by about 4 or 5 percent a year if we are to have any hope of stopping before we hit runaway warming.

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Sunday 15 August 2010

by: Elizabeth McGowan  |  SolveClimate

Washington D.C. is projected to see 100 summer days above 90 degrees by 2050, if emissions continue unabated.

Washington - When "snowmageddon" buried the nation's capital in February, Sen. Jim Inhofe's grandchildren delved into the record-shattering drifts to construct an igloo near the U.S. Capitol.

They jokingly labeled it Al Gore's new home.

Six months later, the thought of taking refuge in an icy shelter is quite appealing to heat-weary Washingtonians. While the Oklahoma Republican senator used the igloo to tweak the former vice president and as a prop in his relentless crusade to prove global warming a hoax, climate scientists are once again emphasizing that current and upcoming weather extremes are no laughing matter.

Oppressive temperatures gripping Southern and Eastern U.S. states this summer will only worsen if little is done to curb greenhouse gases, according to an August report update from the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), a conservation group.

"2010 is a sample of what's to come," said Amanda Staudt, lead climate scientist for the report titled "Extreme Heat in Summer 2010: A Window on the Future."

"Global warming is bringing more frequent and severe heat waves, which will seriously impact vulnerable populations."

It is a supplement to the federation's 2009 report "More Extreme Heat Waves: Global Warming's Wake-Up Call."

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Monday 09 August 2010

by: Pete Spotts  |  The Christian Science Monitor | Report

With 3-1/2 months left before a United Nations climate summit in Cancun, Mexico, the spade work ahead of the meeting seems to be turning up more boulders than a New England plow.

Last week, negotiators from 194 countries met in Bonn, Germany, and made little progress in any of six broad areas covered by a join-if-you-like plan that emerged from last December's climate negotiations in Copenhagen.

Instead, it appears that the most significant progress on some issues will take place outside the UN process, where key countries are working to set up a "quick-start" adaptation fund for developing countries and approaches to increase efforts to combat deforestation.

Ironically, some specialists say, UN negotiations are becoming the venue for smaller sets of countries to work on these outside efforts.

If the size of the current UN negotiating text is any indication, the process to have been thrown into reverse – at least for now.

"The frustrating thing about the past week in Bonn is that the text doubled in size again," says Andrew Deutz, senior policy advisor for UN affairs at the Nature Conservancy. "If you want to get an agreement on the text by Cancun, we should be narrowing, rather than expanding."

Via CarbonFund.org

July 29, 2010

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its State of the Climate in 2009, saying a detailed review of 10 climate indicators points out that “global warming is undeniable.”

The indicators reviewed in the government’s report, from surface and sea-surface temperatures to measurements of heat content in the oceans and sea levels, have all trended higher. Moreover, in the past 30 years, each decade has gotten warmer with the 2000′s being the warmest on record.

“The NOAA Report, in confirming the certainty and severity of climate change, is a call to action for policymakers, business leaders and individuals to reduce our climate impact,” said Eric Carlson, President, Carbonfund.org. “What makes this report compelling is that it shows the problem is far greater than rising sea levels and heat waves. World food supplies, public health and the viability of many populated areas are also in jeopardy.”

Over 300 scientists from 48 countries analyzed the climate data. “When we follow decade-to-decade trends using multiple data sets and independent analyses from around the world, we see clear and unmistakable signs of a warming world,” said Dr. Peter Stott, contributor to the report and head of climate monitoring and attribution at the UK Met Office Hadley Centre. You can view the report’s summary by clicking here or download the full report.

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Friday 06 August 2010

by: Max Ajl, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

Last week, Senate majority leader Harry Reid glumly announced that the Democratic leadership lacked the votes to push through even truncated carbon-limiting legislation, which would have called for carbon caps on power plants. "We don't have a single Republican to work with us ... We know where we are ... We don't have the votes." The Senate had long ago abandoned trying to pass Lieberman-Kerry (the American Power Act), the twin of the Waxman-Markey boondoggle, which the House passed last year. Reid's admission that they couldn't attract Republican support is basically true. What he might have added is that the bill wouldn't have had uniform support from Democrats, either. Senators from states specializing in coal extraction and manufacturing weren't going to support a bill against which their constituents - coal companies and industrial enterprises - were lobbying.

Immediately, chatter turned to why the bill died. The New York Times opined, "Reid abandoned the fight for meaningful energy and climate legislation. The Republicans - surprise - had been fiercely obstructionist. But the Democratic leaders let them get away with it, as did the White House." Wily Republicans and weak Democrats - pretty familiar narrative trope, same one we see about ending the massacres in Afghanistan, too. David Roberts at Grist offered a different explanation: the undemocratic structure of the Senate, alongside the now nearly built-in requirement for a filibuster-proof supermajority, combined with a weak economy that generates suspicion over potentially expensive green climate bills. Roberts flirted a bit with a more compelling explanation - that the American people see the issue as economy versus ecology, the product of 40 years of brainwashing from the "right," and so, as a result, they "were just bound to be indifferent and/or suspicious of grand environmental initiatives during a time of economic pain." There's a bit more truth there, but not enough. Roberts doesn't quite get it: he starts off his piece with the pregnant lead-in, "With the climate bill officially dead ..."

That one line exemplifies the main problem with nearly all the commentary we're likely to see on the death of the senatorial climate bill. The bulk of it - even by purported progressives - elides a basic logical problem. The climate bill didn't die: it couldn't. Death has a pre-requisite: life. In this case the bill never met that qualification.