CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING

Oceans are the Heart and Blood of the Earth — But are They Healthy?

Stephen CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, News, OCEAN, Science

By Stephen Leahyapollo17_earth.jpg

Nov 27 (IPS) – If continents are the Earth’s sturdy bones and the atmosphere its thin skin, then the oceans are its heart, circulatory system and blood. And despite the crucial role played by the oceans in the health of the planet, and to our own health and well-being, there is little monitoring of ocean health.

Once the oceans were too big and too deep to probe, measure and observe, but between satellites, undersea robots, electronically tagged fish and deep sea sensors, scientists now have the tools.

On Tuesday, high-level officials began meeting in Cape Town, South Africa to see if governments have the will to create a Partnership for Observation of the Global Oceans (POGO) — a 10-year project to create a comprehensive monitoring system of what has been described as the last frontier.

“We have pathetically few measurements of the oceans relative to their importance to life on Earth and the extent to which we rely on them for energy, weather, food and recreation,” said D. James Baker, former administrator of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Continue reading →

5 Year Countdown to an Extreme Climate (podcast)

Stephen CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, News

Alex Smith, podcaster extraordinaire and host of Radio Ecoshock, features a blunt and terrifying assessment of climate change by Sir David King, the United Kingdom’s chief scientist.

Smith writes:

“Sir David King warns we are headed toward a hot-state planet, not seen since 55 million years ago (when life huddled on Antarctica).

The only way out, he says, is a binding international agreement by 2009. Even so, we only have a window of 5 years to act, to cut carbon drastically. Otherwise, the global climate may shift by 5 degrees C. ( 9 degrees Fahrenheit) or more. Keep in mind, that’s the just the global average. The arctic may go up 14 degrees or more.”

Listen to Sir David King interview on Australia’s ABC radio network as he addresses a wide range of issues including the so-called sceptics, politics and the latest science.

As Sir David points out the international community must finalize an agreement to dramatically cut emissions of carbon dramatically by 2009. Those negotiations begin in Bali Dec 3. While I won’t be in Bali, I will be writing some stories about the negotiations and the implications.

Related stories:
Climate Change Experts Warn World
Kill Kyoto or Kyoto II Our Only Hope?

Kill Kyoto or Kyoto II Our Only Hope?

Stephen CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, ECOLOGY, Energy, ENVIRONMENT, Global Issues and Perspectives, News

franke-polar-sml.jpg“We don’t have time to start over… global carbon emissions have to peak in 2015 …” — Jonathan Pershing, World Resources Institute

By Stephen Leahy

Nov 21 (IPS) – Total greenhouse gas emissions of 40 industrialised countries rose to a near all-time high in 2005, but the Kyoto Protocol will still exceed its reduction targets, a United Nations agency said two weeks before political leaders meet in Bali, Indonesia to begin negotiations on a new and more aggressive treaty to battle climate change.

“Greenhouse-gas emissions between 1990 and 2000 went down, but then between 2000 and 2005 they increased again, by 2.6 percent,” said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol are expected to achieve reductions of 11 percent compared to 1990 by 2012 if their policies deliver the promised reductions, the UNFCCC report said — a significant achievement and surpassing the Kyoto Protocol target of five percent.

“For the totality of Kyoto signatory countries, reductions of 15 percent are feasible should additional policies be planned and implemented,” de Boer said. Continue reading →

Climate Change Experts Warn World

Stephen CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, ENVIRONMENT, Global Issues and Perspectives, News, Science

“We are riding in an airplane with the bolts falling out while heading into a storm.”

By Stephen Leahy*

TORONTO, Nov 19 (Tierramérica) – In the end, governments accepted evidence from the world’s top scientists that climate change impacts could be abrupt and irreversible, and that they require urgent action.

“The threat is real,” said United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

“I have seen the impacts of climate change in Antarctica and the Amazon with my own eyes,” Ban said in a press conference in Valencia, Spain, at Saturday’s public unveiling of the Synthesis Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“It is a very strong document. It sends a stark message that we face abrupt and irreversible impacts,” said Hans Verolme, director of the climate change programme for the international environmental group WWF.

Continue reading →

‘Climate Apocalypse Around the Corner’ says Renowned Scientist

Stephen CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, ENVIRONMENT, News, Science

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The rapid warming of our planet is unstoppable and will be apocalyptic Professor James Lovelock said in a speech at the Royal Society in London, England 29th October 2007 (video link of speech below)

[See also my 2009 interview with Lovelock “I Hope We Are Civilised When Climate Disaster Hits” -Stephen]

An eminent and influential scientist, Lovelock first proposed the Gaia Hypothesis that the Earth as a single highly complex organism the 1970s. Now proven correct, Lovelock told the experts in attendance that “…now we are at war with the Earth and as in a blitzkrieg, events proceed faster than we can respond“.

james-lovelock.jpgHe calculates that Earth’s average global temperature will shoot up an apocalyptic 6 degrees C when the atmosphere has 500 ppm of CO2 (carbon dioxide). At the current, accelerating rate of CO2 emissions that may come in as soon as 30 years but almost certainly before 2050.

Some tipping points have been reached. Positive feedbacks “on heating from the melting of floating Arctic and Antarctic ice alone is causing an acceleration of system-driven heating whose total will soon or already be greater than that from all of the pollution CO2 that we have so far added.”

What Do We Do Now……?

Lovelock’s Five Step Survival Guide: Continue reading →

Acid Oceans to ‘Dissolve’ Coral Reefs in 30 years

Stephen CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, ECOLOGY, Energy, ENVIRONMENT, Indigenous People, News, OCEAN, Science , , ,

By Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Nov 12, 2007 (IPS)

Coral reefs face certain extinction in a few decades unless there are unprecedented reductions in carbon emissions, leading Australian scientists warn.

Corals around the world may be nothing but rubble before a child born today turns 30 years old, and almost certainly before they’re 50.

The reason? Rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere are turning the oceans acidic far faster than previously observed.

“It isn’t just the coral reefs which are affected. A large part of the plankton in the Southern Ocean, the coccolithophorids, are also affected,” said Malcolm McCulloch, an environmental research scientist at the Australian National University in Canberra.

[Update Sept 2010 – wide spread coral bleaching reported;  What if our air was 30% more acidic like the Oceans? May be 120% more acidic by 2060]

“These (coccolithophorids) drive ocean productivity and are the base of the food web which supports krill, whales, tuna and our fisheries,” McCulloch said in a statement. Continue reading →

Energy Use On Suicidal Path

Stephen CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, Energy, ENVIRONMENT, News, Science, sustainability , , , , , ,

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“If we get that kind of increase it will be societal suicide”

By Stephen Leahy

Nov 9 (IPS) – Today’s skyrocketing fossil fuel use will accelerate far faster in the coming decades, driving oil prices higher and virtually guaranteeing catastrophic climate change in the decades to come, energy experts say.

Emissions of greenhouse gases could increase a staggering 57 percent by 2030 if current trends continue, and with the strong growth of coal and oil energy use in India and China, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported this week.

“If we get that kind of increase it will be societal suicide,” says Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University.

“It really is a huge increase,” Schmidt told IPS. Continue reading →

Canada’s Shocking Environmental Decline

Stephen CANADA, CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, ENVIRONMENT, News, sustainability , , , ,

 

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By Stephen Leahy* – IPS/IFEJ

In the past 15 years, all of Canada’s environmental indicators have suffered, say experts who distribute the blame among local and national governments, businesses and the public.

TORONTO, Nov 5 2007 (Tierramérica).

In the 1980s, Canada was a bright green engine of change, pushing the global community forward on sustainable development and global warming. But now it is falling behind in almost every environmental aspect.

The lead author of the landmark 1987 Bruntland Report, “Our Common Future“, was Canadian Jim MacNeill. The very first international climate change meeting involving scientists and political leaders was held in Toronto in 1988.

Canadian Maurice Strong organized the first World Conference on the Environment in Stockholm in 1972, was the first executive director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), and was secretary-general of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

But after this flourish on the world stage, Canada sat back and did virtually nothing domestically. The country ranks 28th out of 30 high-income countries in terms of environmental sustainability, according to an independent Canadian study. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranked Canada 27th in terms of environmental performance. Continue reading →

The Coming Oxygen Crisis?

Stephen CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, Forests, Global Issues and Perspectives, Health, OCEAN, Science, sustainability

“I have no idea how this will affect oxygen levels but it is something we should be thinking about.” — Bradley Cardinale, biologist, University of California,

By Stephen Leahy


Credit:NASA

The Amazon River and rainforest viewed from space.

Nov 6 (IPS) – Plants are the only source of oxygen on Earth — the only source. Studies around the world show that as plant species become extinct, natural habitats can lose up to half of their living plant biomass.

Half of the oxygen they produced is lost. Half of the water, food and other ecological services they provide are lost.

If a forest loses too many unique species, it can reduce the total number of plants in that forest by half, says Bradley Cardinale, lead author of the meta-analysis published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“Those unique species are not replaceable. Nothing takes their place. It was a really shocking finding for me,” Cardinale, a biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told IPS. “That’s how much biodiversity matters.”

Continue reading →

Climate Change Shifts Into Fast Forward

Stephen CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, Energy, ENVIRONMENT, Global Issues and Perspectives, News, OCEAN, Science

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By Stephen Leahy

Oct 26 (IPS) – Global warming has been compared to a slow-moving train wreck, in which the passengers are blissfully unaware of the coming catastrophe.

With the shocking loss of the Arctic sea ice this summer and several new reports this week that oceans and tropical forests are now absorbing less of the world’s steadily rising carbon emissions, our collective train wreck appears to have already tipped into fast forward.

“Global warming is a big feature of our lives now. It is no longer something that only future generations will have to cope with,” said Ted Scambos, senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in the U.S. city of Boulder, Colorado.

The major ecosystems that absorb carbon emissions from the atmosphere are failing, and it is happening faster than anticipated, Scambos told IPS.

Continue reading →