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Greenhouse Gases, Carbon Dioxide and Methane, Rise Sharply in 2007 |
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ScienceDaily
Thursday 24 April 2008
Last year alone global levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the primary driver
of global climate change, increased by 0.6 percent, or 19 billion tons. Additionally
methane rose by 27 million tons after nearly a decade with little or no increase.
NOAA scientists released these and other preliminary findings today as part
of an annual update to the agency's greenhouse gas index, which tracks
data from 60 sites around the world.
The burning of coal, oil, and gas, known as fossil fuels, is the primary source
of increasing carbon dioxide emissions. Earth's oceans, vegetation, and soils
soak up half of these emissions. The rest stays in the air for centuries or
longer. Twenty percent of the 2007 fossil fuel emissions of carbon dioxide are
expected to remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years, according to the
latest scientific assessment by the International Panel on Climate Change.
Viewed another way, last year's carbon dioxide increase means 2.4 molecules
of the gas were added to every million molecules of air, boosting the global
concentration to nearly 385 parts per million (ppm). Pre-industrial carbon dioxide
levels hovered around 280 ppm until 1850. Human activities pushed those levels
up to 380 ppm by early 2006.
The rate of increase in carbon dioxide concentrations accelerated over recent
decades along with fossil fuel emissions. Since 2000, annual increases of two
ppm or more have been common, compared with 1.5 ppm per year in the 1980s and
less than one ppm per year during the 1960s.
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By Volker Mrasek
Der Spiegel
Thursday 17 April 2008
A storehouse of greenhouse gases is opening
in Siberia.
Researchers have found alarming evidence that the frozen Arctic floor has started
to thaw and release long-stored methane gas. The results could be a catastrophic
warming of the earth, since methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than
carbon dioxide. But can the methane also be used as fuel?
It's always been a disturbing what-if scenario for climate researchers: Gas
hydrates stored in the Arctic ocean floor - hard clumps of ice and methane,
conserved by freezing temperatures and high pressure - could grow unstable
and release massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Since methane is
a potent greenhouse gas, more worrisome than carbon dioxide, the result would
be a drastic acceleration of global warming. Until now this idea was mostly
academic; scientists had warned that such a thing could happen. Now it seems
more likely that it will.
Russian polar scientists have strong evidence that the first stages of melting
are underway. They've studied largest shelf sea in the world, off the coast
of Siberia, where the Asian continental shelf stretches across an underwater
area six times the size of Germany, before falling off gently into the Arctic
Ocean. The scientists are presenting their data from this remote, thinly-investigated
region at the annual conference of the European Geosciences Union this week
in Vienna.
In the permafrost bottom of the 200-meter-deep sea, enormous stores of gas
hydrates lie dormant in mighty frozen layers of sediment. The carbon content
of the ice-and-methane mixture here is estimated at 540 billion tons. "This
submarine hydrate was considered stable until now," says the Russian biogeochemist
Natalia Shakhova, currently a guest scientist at the University of Alaska in
Fairbanks who is also a member of the Pacific Institute of Geography at the
Russian Academy of Sciences in Vladivostok.
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Timeline for Irreversible Climate Change |
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By James Hansen
YaleGlobal Online
Wednesday 23 April 2008
Fifty years ago, Yankee Stadium had about 70,000 seats. It seldom sold out,
and almost any kid could afford the cheapest seats. Capacity was reduced to
about 57,000 when the stadium was remodeled in the 1970s. Most games sell out
now, and prices have gone up.
The new stadium, opening next year, will reduce seating to about 51,800. This
intentional contraction is aimed at guaranteeing sellouts, increasing demand,
allowing the owners, in short order, to triple prices or more. The owners have
learned that scarcity will fatten their wallets. The plan may discriminate against
the lower middle class, but as long as the owner is footing the bill without
public subsidies, there may be little grounds for complaint.
Now fossil-fuel moguls are intent on hoodwinking the entire planet with an
analogous scheme.
The basic trick is oil producers overstating fossil-fuel reserves. Government
"energy information" departments parrot industry. Partly because of
disinformation, the major efforts needed to develop alternative energies have
not been made.
The reality of limited supply forces prices higher. Eventually, sales volume
will begin to decline, but fossil-fuel moguls will make more money than ever.
They'll continue to assert that there's plenty more oil, gas or coal to be found,
aiming to keep the suckers on the hook. Indeed, they may find somewhat more
in the deep ocean, under national parks, in polar regions, offshore, and in
other environmentally sensitive areas. They don't need much to keep the suckers
paying higher and higher prices.
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By Bill McKibben
Mother Jones
May/June 2008 Issue
Greed has helped destroy the planet - maybe now it can help save it.
Since
I spend most of my time haplessly battling global warming, I encounter
a fair number of climate-change skeptics. They're usually clutching
some tattered study about tropospheric temperatures from six years
back, or muttering about sunspots, but they're almost never carefully
weighing the actual current science. The wellspring of their skepticism
lies not in chemistry or in physics but in ideology, and their
syllogism goes something like this:
Markets solve all problems;
Markets are not solving global warming;
QED, global warming is not a problem.
This
proof has certain logical shortcomings, beginning with the fact that
it's illogical. But it is emotionally comforting. For those who wanted
to stop thinking about politics and responsibility and morality and
science and all that stuff, the advent of Reagan-era market
fundamentalism was a godsend, and anything that threatens to disrupt it
is an identity-challenging tilt of the psychic pinball machine.
So
what I tend to say to these people is, I hear you. Markets are
powerful. Let's think about why they've failed here and how to make
them work.
And there's a one-word answer: information.
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Governors Unite to Cut Emissions |
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By Adrianne Appel
Inter Press Service
Sunday 20 April 2008
New
Haven - U.S. state governors say they are fed up with the George W.
Bush administration's foot-dragging on climate change and will go ahead
- and around - the White House to reduce greenhouse gases.
On
Friday, 18 states signed a declaration committing themselves to "the
effort to stop global warming" during a series of discussions and a
ceremony at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
"In
the absence of federal leadership the states have stepped up," said
Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who spoke at the ceremony with
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine.
The
U.S. is the world's number one greenhouse gas polluter, and the 18
states emit as much greenhouse gas as the biggest nations in Europe
combined. Any reduction would be significant for the health of the
planet, said Daniel Esty, director of the Yale Centre for Environmental
Law and Policy.
Many
of the states, like New Jersey and Massachusetts, have acted on their
own, without federal encouragement or support, and put in place plans
to significantly reduce greenhouse gases by 2020, through tougher
controls on power plants, financial incentives to encourage more green
power, grants and discounts for businesses and consumers who use
alternative energy and changes in land use.
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Stop Waiting for "Leaders" to Act on Global Warming |
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By Peter Asmus
The Christian Science Monitor
Tuesday 22 April 2008
Greener energy in your community depends on strong grass roots.
Stinson
Beach, California - The success of the environmental movement in
calling attention to the dangers of global warming has led to an ironic
outcome: It's become easier for the public to adopt a passive approach
as we wait on world leaders to sign emissions treaties or huge
corporations to "go green." This Earth Day, stop waiting! There are new
ways for you to fight climate change in your own backyard.
One
of the most promising models is called "Community Choice Aggregation."
CCA is the legal term for an innovative way for cities and counties to
purchase electricity by votes of local governments.
Previously,
the only way for a local government to have a say in where the
community's power came from was to establish a municipally owned
utility. The CCA process provides an easier way to switch to an
earth-friendlier power supply without taking on the burden of managing
the power lines, collecting bills, and the divisive politics involved
with the expensive process of bringing energy under municipal control.
This
type of community energy planning is happening in a big way in
California's Marin County, where I live. Granted, this is an area just
north of San Francisco that's heavily populated with tree huggers. But
other parts of California, from the Central Valley to Los Angeles, are
investigating CCA models. (Massachusetts and Ohio have already enacted
CCA programs, but the motivation in these states was more for local
control and cutting costs, not saving the environment.)
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March the Warmest on Record Over World's Land Surfaces |
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By Randolph E. Schmid
The Associated Press
Sunday 20 April 2008
Washington - Planet Earth continues to run a fever.
Last
month was the warmest March on record over land surfaces of the world
and the second warmest overall worldwide. For the United States,
however, it was just an average March, the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration reported Thursday.
NOAA's
National Climatic Data Center said high temperatures over much of Asia
pulled the worldwide land temperature up to an average of 40.8 degrees
Fahrenheit (4.9 degrees Celsius), 3.2 degrees (1.8 C) warmer than the
average in the 20th century.
While
Asia had its greatest January snow cover this year, warm March readings
caused a rapid melt and March snow cover on the continent was a record
low.
Global
ocean temperatures were the 13th warmest on record, with a weakening of
the La Nina conditions that cool the tropical Pacific Ocean.
Overall
land and sea surface temperatures for the world were second highest in
129 years of record keeping, trailing only 2002, the agency said.
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Merrill Lynch's Carbon Bet |
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By Marc Gunther
Fortune
Friday 18 April 2008
Why a Wall Street firm wants to save a forest in Sumatra.
The
business of "carbon farming" is growing fast - and Merrill Lynch is the
latest big company to bet that it will become profitable.
What's
carbon farming, you ask? It's a business designed to recognize the
value created when trees store carbon dioxide and prevent global
warming. So people who plant new trees or prevent existing trees from
destruction can get paid for doing so.
That
doesn't mean that the tree in your backyard or mine will help pay
college tuition or fund a 401(k). For now, the payments are going to
villagers in the developing world who agree to protect endangered
forests. Starbucks, Marriott and Rio Tinto, among others, have all
agreed to finance projects designed to deter deforestation.
This week, Merrill Lynch announced
that it will invest $9 million to help save a tropical forest in Aceh,
Indonesia. It's the first time a Wall Street firm has invested in
carbon farming, and let's be clear: this isn't philanthropy of public
relations; it's strictly business.
In
fact, the man who put the deal together to save the 1.9-million acre
forest, called Ulu Masen, believes it could be a very big business. "It
will be the biggest carbon project in the history of the world if we
can pull it off," says Dorjee Sun, the 31-year-old founder of an
Australian startup company called Carbon Conservation.
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