Global boom in coal power - and emissions

Al Gore? Are you there? They aren't listening. Speak louder.

Former Vice President and now environmental activist Al Gore descended on Capitol Hill Wednesday, telling two congressional panels that global climate change represents the most dangerous crisis in American history and that the measures needed to fix the problem are far more drastic than anything currently on the table.

Forget the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." Disregard rising public concern over global warming. Ignore the Kyoto Protocol.

The world certainly is – at least when it comes to building new electric-power plants. In the past five years, it has been on a coal-fired binge, bringing new generators online at a rate of better than two per week. That has added some 1 billion tons of new carbon-dioxide emissions that humans pump into the atmosphere each year. Coal-fired power now accounts for nearly a third of human-generated global CO2 emissions.

So what does the future hold? An acceleration of the buildup, according to a [Christian Science] Monitor analysis of power-industry data. Despite Kyoto limits on greenhouse gases, the analysis shows that nations will add enough coal-fired capacity in the next five years to create an extra 1.2 billion tons of CO2 per year.

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World's Most Important Food Crops Hit by Global Warming Effects

Some things are insidious. They creep up on you bit by bit and its easy not to notice. Thank you Al Gore for bringing global warming to the attention of the world.

Rising temperatures between 1981 and 2002 caused a loss in production of wheat, corn and barley that amounted in effect to some 40 million tons a year - equivalent to annual losses of some £2.6bn ($5.05bn).

Although these numbers are not large compared to the world-wide production of cereal crops, scientists warned that the findings demonstrated how climate change was already having an impact on the global production of staple foods. "Most people tend to think of climate change as something that will impact the future, but this study shows that warming over the past two decades has already had real effects on global food supply," said Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, California.

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Another perspective

Courtesy of ASWJ BLOG.

Referring to my earlier post. It seems the media didn't report sheikh Omran's remarks entirely accurately. In fact they fucked them up completely.

..."What we have nowadays? As the most important scientists, when they meet last month, they call them scientists of the day of judgement... did you hear about that meeting? It was the conference in Europe... And when they reveled curtain they put three minutes to twelve. Like three minutes left to the world to finish. Finish because of what? Because of our deeds. Because of our science. Because of our experiments. This Experiments went so wild because there is no control, fear of Allah is not there. So we have now polluted air, polluted water. a waste land..."

...

..."Real civilised person (is the one) who lives harmoniously with the surrounding around them. Who is good, as same as to other human as same to the fish in the water. As same to the bird in the air, as same to the plant in the ground. This is the real civilised person.

This is why you see in our sharia you are not allowed to cut the tree for no reason. Or, to harm bird without reason. But water is must to be looked after. "...

Thank you ASWJ for your input.

I have such great readers. And we correct when we find problems. Gotta love the internets tubes.

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Report: Climate effects here now

Sometimes I feel I'm posting far too much about this subject, but it does seem to be accelerating. When scientists seem to be scared, its serious because they don't panic easily.

The harmful effects of global warming on daily life are already showing up, and within a couple of decades hundreds of millions of people won't have enough water, top scientists are expected to say next month at a meeting in Belgium.

At the same time, tens of millions of others will be flooded out of their homes each year as the Earth reels from rising temperatures and sea levels, according to portions of a draft of an international scientific report obtained by the Associated Press.

Tropical diseases like malaria will spread, the report says. By 2050, polar bears will mostly be found in zoos, their habitats gone. Pests like fire ants will thrive.

For a time, food will be plentiful because of the longer growing season in northern regions. But by 2080, hundreds of millions of people could face starvation, according to the report, which is still being revised.

The draft document by the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change focuses on global warming's effects and is the second in a series of four being issued this year. Written and reviewed by more than 1,000 scientists from dozens of countries, it still must be edited by government officials.

But some scientists said the overall message is not likely to change when it's issued in early April in Brussels, the same city where European Union leaders agreed this past week to drastically cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 2020. Their plan will be presented
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to President Bush and other world leaders at a summit in June.

The report offers some hope if nations slow and then reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions, but it notes that what's happening now isn't encouraging.

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Global warming is human rights issue: Nobel nominee

When is a joke not funny at all? Well we have a good example right here.

It sounds like a sick joke about global warming, with a series of horrible punch lines:

How hot is it? So hot that Inuit people around the Arctic Circle are using air conditioners for the first time. And running out of the hard-packed snow they need to build igloos. And falling through melting ice when they hunt.

These circumstances are the current results of global climate change, according to Nobel Peace Prize nominee Sheila Watt-Cloutier, an Inuit born inside the Canadian Arctic, who maintains this constitutes a violation of human rights for indigenous people in low-lying areas throughout the world.

Watt-Cloutier and Martin Wagner, an attorney with the environmental law firm Earthjustice, argued this case on Thursday before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States in Washington.

"We weren't going to go to court," Watt-Cloutier said in a telephone interview after her testimony to the commission. "It wasn't about lawsuits and suing for damage or compensation.

"It was more about really trying to get the world to pay attention and see this as a human rights issue."

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New international deal on global warming agreed in Washington

This has to be the most lamed ass news report I've ever seen.

A new international agreement has been reached on tackling global warming.

World leaders have been meeting in Washington.

Developing nations will have to face targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions as well as rich countries.

It comes as researchers in the US reveal January was the hottest on record across the planet.

Its the equivalent of: some people met and discussed some important shit and came to some agreements. Oh yeah, it was in Washington DC.

(courtesy link)

Is global warming changing the weather?

Violent hurricanes, typhoons, record snowfall, ice storms in Texas and now this.

Snow fell on Nepal's capital, Kathmandu, for the first time in 63 years on Wednesday, stirring excitement and curiosity among residents and their children.

"I have never seen it snow in Kathmandu in all my life," said 45-year-old housewife Manju Shrestha, playing in the snow with her young children.

Weather officials said the brief snowfall, which lasted only a few minutes, was the result of a "westerly disturbance" over Nepal that earlier in the week caused heavy rains.

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Don't understand global warming?

UPDATE: Although this may well be what a before and after pic of the earth might look like, the second one is of Jupiter's moon and not the earth. Sorry if I mislead anyone. The original source must also have been mistaken.

We have visual aids. Before.


After.


Got it?

(via Norm Roberts)

Must Read IMHO

The prescient Fidel Castro. It kinda gives ya the shivers.

Sometimes I'm dumbfounded

Truth is I often am dumbfounded and dumblosted. I was gonna post this for your amusement and then found something even more interesting.

It seems the public is aware, sorta, of global warming.

Bimbette #1: The weather has been crazy.
Bimbette #2: Yeah, I thought we were having global warming yesterday.

--1 train

This is the one that made me lose it.

Gucci girl #1: Okay, let's play 'Would You Rather?'!
Gucci girl #2: Okay.
Gucci girl #1: Would you rather... be an auto mechanic or... die of breast cancer?

--F train

Overheard by: My sister

Both from Overheard in New York.

Global warming

I am truly shocked, shocked I say, by this report.

Forty-five nations answered France's call Saturday for a new environmental body to slow inevitable global warming and protect the planet, perhaps with policing powers to punish violators.

Absent were the world's heavyweight polluter, the United States, and booming nations on the same path as the U.S. China and India.

Well, maybe not so much.

How much more damage can we expect in the next couple years under Bush? Just asking.

All snark aside, someone has to convince China and India to buy into the program. They're energy demands will skyrocket in the coming years.

For more information: the Kyoto Protocol (Wikipedia).

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When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?

Bush was warned al-Qaeda was determined to attack US.

Bush was given detailed information about how to protect US after the 9/11 attack.

Bush was told our ports are not properly protected.

Bush was told he needed many more troops than planned in Iraq to have any chance for success.

Bush was given detailed information about how to handle the disaster in Iraq.

Bush was told a SURGE™ would not work.

Now Bush has been given information about the dangers of global warming.

Bush didn't use the information from the first six reports. Why does anyone think he would act on the seventh? Just asking.

The Bush administration says a new United Nations report on the dangers of global warming is very valuable, but stopped short of calling for mandatory government controls on greenhouse gasses.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] released a study Friday warning that human activities are 'very likely' to blame for global warming, and that the world can expect the trend to continue.

U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said the Bush administration welcomed the report, but repeated the administration's opposition to mandating caps on the emission of greenhouse gasses. Greenhouse gasses are produced by fossil fuels and carbon-intensive industries.

I will post this slowly so even the most obtuse amongst us can understand.

Bush. Doesn't. Care. What. The. Fuck. The. Facts. Are.

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Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study

Now who in the world would do something like that? Can you say ExxonMobil through the American Enterprise Institute? I new you could.

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

The UN report was written by international experts and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science. It will underpin international negotiations on new emissions targets to succeed the Kyoto agreement, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft last year and invited to comment.

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees.

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Warming 'likely' man-made, unstoppable

It looks like the new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is going to be as frightening as I anticipated.

The world's leading climate scientists said global warming has begun, is "very likely" caused by man, and will be unstoppable for centuries, according to a report obtained Friday by The Associated Press.

The scientists - using their strongest language yet on the issue - said now that world has begun to warm, hotter temperatures and rises in sea level "would continue for centuries" no matter how much humans control their pollution. The report also linked the warming to the recent increase in stronger hurricanes.

"The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and ocean, together with ice-mass loss, support the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that global climate change of the past 50 years can be explained without external forcing, and very likely that is not due to known natural causes alone," said the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] - a group of hundreds of scientists and representatives of 113 governments.

The phrase "very likely" translates to a more than 90 percent certainty that global warming is caused by man's burning of fossil fuels. That was the strongest conclusion to date, making it nearly impossible to say natural forces are to blame.

And this should surprise no one. One of the scientists involved has gotten so frustrated he emailed a reporter about the problems the panel's encountering.

Scientists involved in the discussions said today that the U.S. delegation, led by political appointees [surprise!], was pressing to play down language pointing to a link between intensification of hurricanes and warming caused by human activity.

“They have tended to highlight uncertainties on certain issues,” a scientist involved in the negotiations said in an e-mail message sent to a reporter today. The scientist sent the message on the condition of anonymity.

On Wednesday night, the same scientist, frustrated with efforts by China and the United States to avoid language that might box them in on policy options, e-mailed that “this is becoming an impossible process.”

Global warming: the 'spin'

Of course we all knew this. I've posted a few times on this suppression of information or outright false statements being fed to US.

Federal scientists have been pressured by the White House to play down global warming, advocacy groups testified Tuesday at the Democrats' first investigative hearing since taking control of Congress.

The hearing focused on allegations that White House officials for years have micromanaged the government's climate programs and has closely controlled what scientists have been allowed to tell the public.

"It appears there may have been an orchestrated campaign to mislead the public about climate change," said Rep. Henry Waxman D-Calif. Waxman is chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee and a critic of the Bush administration's environmental policies, including its views on climate.

...

At the House hearing, two private advocacy groups produced a survey of 279 government climate scientists showing that many of them say they have been subjected to political pressure aimed at downplaying the climate threat. Their complaints ranged from a challenge to using the phrase "global warming" to raising uncertainty on issues on which most scientists basically agree, to keeping scientists from talking to the media.

The survey and separate interviews with scientists "has brought to light numerous ways in which U.S. federal climate science has been filtered, suppressed and manipulated in the last five years," Francesca Grifo, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the committee.

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Global warming: the vicious cycle

Perhaps this study will be taken more seriously than the 3 earlier reports.

The effects of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide are being felt on every inhabited continent in the world with very different parts of the climate now visibly responding to human activity.

These are among the main findings of the most intensive study of climate change by 2,000 of the world's leading climate scientists. They conclude that there is now little doubt that human activity is changing the face of the planet.

In addition to rising surface temperatures around the world, scientists have now linked man-made emissions of greenhouse gases to significant increases in ocean temperatures, rises in sea levels and the dramatic melting of Arctic sea ice over the past 35 years.

A draft copy of the fourth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that global temperature rises this century of between 2C and 4.5C [35F and 40F] are almost inevitable. Ominously, however, it also says that much higher increases of 6C [42F] "or more" cannot be ruled out.

The final version of the IPCC's latest report is to be published on Friday but a draft copy, seen by The Independent, makes it clear that climate change could be far worse than previously thought because of potentially disastrous "positive" feedbacks which could accelerate rising temperatures.

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Smoke and mirrors

Don't know why I've ignored this nor why most others have.

George Bush proposes to deal with climate change by means of smoke and mirrors. So what’s new? Only that it is no longer just a metaphor. After six years of obfuscation and denial, the US government now insists that we find ways to block some of the sunlight reaching the earth. This means launching either mirrors or clouds of small particles into the atmosphere.

The demand appears in a recent US memo to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It describes “modifying solar radiance” as “important insurance” against the threat of climate change(1). A more accurate description might be important insurance against the need to cut emissions.

The footnote(1) is in the original article.

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