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Sunday 07 March 2010

by: Les Blumenthal  |  McClatchy Newspapers

Washington - Lower levels of oxygen in the Earth's oceans, particularly off the United States' Pacific Northwest coast, could be another sign of fundamental changes linked to global climate change, scientists say.

They warn that the oceans' complex undersea ecosystems and fragile food chains could be disrupted.

In some spots off Washington state and Oregon, the almost complete absence of oxygen has left piles of Dungeness crab carcasses littering the ocean floor, killed off 25-year-old sea stars, crippled colonies of sea anemones and produced mats of potentially noxious bacteria that thrive in such conditions.

Areas of hypoxia, or low oxygen, have long existed in the deep ocean. These areas - in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans - appear to be spreading, however, covering more square miles, creeping toward the surface and in some places, such as the Pacific Northwest, encroaching on the continental shelf within sight of the coastline.

"The depletion of oxygen levels in all three oceans is striking," said Gregory Johnson, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle.

In some spots, such as off the Southern California coast, oxygen levels have dropped roughly 20 percent over the past 25 years. Elsewhere, scientists say, oxygen levels might have declined by one-third over 50 years.

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If you want to know how much carbon dioxide Americans emit into the atmosphere, it's not enough to look just at the gases that pour from our smokestacks and tailpipes. We also import goods that were made in factories that produced carbon dioxide. In fact, a new study finds that worldwide, about a quarter of emissions are actually the result of imported and exported goods and services.

Take China, for example. A few years ago, China overtook the United States as the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide, but Steve Davis of the Carnegie Institution for Science says, "Nearly a quarter of the emissions that are produced in China are ultimately exported to consumers elsewhere."

The United States consumes a lot of those carbon-intensive exported goods. So we are in some ways responsible for those emissions. It's still the case that most of the U.S. carbon emissions come from burning coal and oil and natural gas.

But if you add our imports and subtract our exports, the study shows our carbon footprint is about 11 percent bigger than our official emissions numbers suggest. Imports make up an even bigger fraction of Europe's emissions.

"It was pretty surprising to see that between a third and a half of all the emissions related to goods consumed in European countries actually occur outside of their borders," Davis says.

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Friday 26 February 2010

by: Alain Lipietz  |  Alternatives Economiques

There are not many people left today who oppose the environment to jobs. Several recent studies confirm: the more invested in "green conversion," the more jobs can be created.

The crisis of the free-market, productivist model that was "the sole policy possible" for a quarter century has come to pass. Even workers in the car and truck industry are convinced that the previous model is dead and only a conversion to new production lines may save their jobs.

But, perhaps, we don't adequately gauge that every delay in "green conversion" is a delay in job creation. On that subject, one often hears established interests object: "Agreed, nothing will be as it was before; we will take off again in the direction of another model, but we need to take existing jobs into account and not go too fast." Take existing jobs into account? Agreed, if that means using existing competencies and even existing installations in the best way possible for green conversion, but the second phrase is absurd. Delaying green conversions and new green activities is delaying job creation. Without counting the strictly environmental aspect of the problem: any delay in the battle against climate change is irrevocable.

This pressure of lost time, which plays not only against the climate, but also against employment, results from the dual nature of green conversion: as "conversion" and as "green." We know that we must redirect transportation toward public transportation, insulate all buildings (and especially older buildings) and re-establish short - and, if possible, organic - networks in agriculture and food. Now, the simple act of redirection involves work and the future - stabilized - regime will create more jobs on an ongoing basis. It's a bit like the ten first years of Fordism in France (1945-1955): on the one hand, we had to rebuild the country, and on the other, what we were rebuilding was an almost full-employment regime. The two effects are indistinguishable in the beginning, which made people fear a return of the Great Depression once the reconstruction was over. That didn't happen.

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By Bill McKibben

Twenty-one years ago, in 1989, I wrote what many have called the first book for a general audience on global warming. One of the more interesting reviews came from the Wall Street Journal.  It was a mixed and judicious appraisal.  “The subject,” the reviewer said, “is important, the notion is arresting, and Mr. McKibben argues convincingly.”  And that was not an outlier: around the same time, the first president Bush announced that he planned to “fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.”

I doubt that’s what the Journal will say about my next book when it comes out in a few weeks, and I know that no GOP presidential contender would now dream of acknowledging that human beings are warming the planet.  Sarah Palin is currently calling climate science “snake oil” and last week, the Utah legislature, in a move straight out of the King Canute playbook, passed a resolution condemning "a well organized and ongoing effort to manipulate global temperature data in order to produce a global warming outcome" on a nearly party-line vote.

And here’s what’s odd. In 1989, I could fit just about every scientific study on climate change on top of my desk. The science was still thin.  If my reporting made me think it was nonetheless convincing, many scientists were not yet prepared to agree.

Now, you could fill the Superdome with climate-change research data. (You might not want to, though, since Hurricane Katrina demonstrated just how easy it was to rip holes in its roof.) Every major scientific body in the world has produced reports confirming the peril. All 15 of the warmest years on record have come in the two decades that have passed since 1989. In the meantime, the Earth’s major natural systems have all shown undeniable signs of rapid flux: melting Arctic and glacial ice, rapidly acidifying seawater, and so on.

Somehow, though, the onslaught against the science of climate change has never been stronger, and its effects, at least in the U.S., never more obvious: fewer Americans believe humans are warming the planet.  At least partly as a result, Congress feels little need to consider global-warming legislation, no less pass it; and as a result of that failure, progress towards any kind of international agreement on climate change has essentially ground to a halt.