World-News

San Jose Mercury News

09/21/06

California filed a lawsuit against the six largest automakers operating in the United States, contending that car and truck emissions are causing global warming, injuring the state's environment, economy and endangering public health. The complaint, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Oakland, is the latest escalation in an ongoing clash between states and the U.S. auto industry over global warming. The California complaint contends that under federal and state common law the automakers have created a public nuisance by producing millions of vehicles that collectively emit massive quantities of carbon dioxide...

https://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/15571350.htm


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

By Michael McCarthy,
Environment Editor
Published: 20 September 2006

https://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article1621770.ece

The global sea level rise caused by climate change, severely threatening many of the world's coastal and low-lying areas from Bangladesh to East Anglia, is proceeding faster than UN scientists predicted only five years ago, Professor Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, said yesterday.

Climate change is causing sea levels to rise around the world because water expands in volume as it warms, and because land-based ice, such as that contained in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, adds to the volume when it melts and slips into the sea.

The present prediction of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, from its third assessment report in 2001, is that global sea levels will rise by between 9cm and 88cm by 2100, depending on a number of factors including how far emissions are controlled, with a best guess of about 50cm over the century.

Rises of this order will present a substantial threat of flooding, storm surge and even complete submersion of many of the world's populous low-lying areas,such as Bangladesh, the Nile Delta and even London.

But the new evidence, from a series of scientific papers published this year, indicates that this rate would be exceeded, said Professor Rapley, who runs the world's leading institute on Antarctic science - although he could not say what any new rate would be.

Professor Rapley was speaking at the Liberal Democrat conference in Brighton, at a meeting of the Climate Clinic, formed by Britain's leading green groups, with The Independent as media partner, to press for tougher political action on climate change. "We have learned in the last 18 months that the ice sheets are capable in selected areas of much more rapid changes and dynamic discharges than we previously thought," he said.

Last week, two American studies showed that the melting of the winter sea ice in the Arctic had accelerated enormously in the past two years, with a section the size of Turkey disappearing in just 12 months.

The global sea level rise caused by climate change, severely threatening many of the world's coastal and low-lying areas from Bangladesh to East Anglia, is proceeding faster than UN scientists predicted only five years ago, Professor Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, said yesterday.

Climate change is causing sea levels to rise around the world because water expands in volume as it warms, and because land-based ice, such as that contained in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, adds to the volume when it melts and slips into the sea.

The present prediction of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, from its third assessment report in 2001, is that global sea levels will rise by between 9cm and 88cm by 2100, depending on a number of factors including how far emissions are controlled, with a best guess of about 50cm over the century.

Rises of this order will present a substantial threat of flooding, storm surge and even complete submersion of many of the world's populous low-lying areas,such as Bangladesh, the Nile Delta and even London.

But the new evidence, from a series of scientific papers published this year, indicates that this rate would be exceeded, said Professor Rapley, who runs the world's leading institute on Antarctic science - although he could not say what any new rate would be.

Professor Rapley was speaking at the Liberal Democrat conference in Brighton, at a meeting of the Climate Clinic, formed by Britain's leading green groups, with The Independent as media partner, to press for tougher political action on climate change. "We have learned in the last 18 months that the ice sheets are capable in selected areas of much more rapid changes and dynamic discharges than we previously thought," he said.

Last week, two American studies showed that the melting of the winter sea ice in the Arctic had accelerated enormously in the past two years, with a section the size of Turkey disappearing in just 12 months.


Informant: binstock

JIM HANSEN ON "THE THREAT TO THE PLANET"

ClimateScienceWatch
Monday, September 11, 2006

https://www.climatesciencewatch.org/index.php/csw/details/hansen-threat-talk/

Jim Hansen's presentation https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/threattalk_complete_05Sept2006.pdf (6.6 MB) this summer at the SOLAR 2006 Conference on Renewable Energy in Denver, which he has made available on his Columbia University Web site, integrates a wide range of scientific findings on global climate change with forthright and striking statements about their implications. Government officials should pay attention to this assessment.

Earlier this year Bush administration political operatives made an unsuccessful attempt to muzzle climate scientist Jim Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Dr. Hansen is now speaking freely about his analysis of the threat of dangerous global climate change. This in itself is a success story. We would like to see more federal climate scientists both able and willing to put forward an assessment of the climate change problem to a wider audience.

But overcoming overt censorship is just one necessary step. We still need to have policymakers and the public pay attention to the analysis, seek to understand it, and give it their most serious consideration. The President saw fit to meet over lunch with science fiction novelist Michael Crichton, author of State of Fear, a piece of pseudo-scientific drivel steeped in the views of the global warming denial machine. We wonder: Are any high government officials having lunch with Jim Hansen and other leading climate scientists?

Hansen's presentation begins with 12 pages of text, which annotates 52 pages of slides, including scientific charts. It should be generally accessible to most attentive non-technical readers. See also his book and movie review https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2006/2006_Hansen.pdf , "The Threat to the Planet," in the New York Review of Books. His Columbia University Web site https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/ contains valuable documents, as does his NASA Web site https://www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/jhansen.html .


Informant: NHNE

By Dennis Bueckert
Canadian Press Sunday,
September 17, 2006

https://www.canada.com/components/print.aspx?id=60ef5280-2704-4150-bf86-e09b79e622a6&k=94705

OTTAWA - Canada and the United States are launching a $17.5-million study to determine why water levels in the upper Great Lakes have declined to near-record lows.

The study by the International Joint Commission will consider a number of possible causes, from climate change to erosion caused by dredging in the St. Clair River.

Environment Minister Rona Ambrose announced $500,000 for the study last week. But officials say that is just the first installment in what will be a major, five-year research effort.

Ambrose noted that water levels in Georgian Bay together with Lakes Huron and Michigan were as much as 45 centimeters below average this summer.

"Clearly, the health of this ecosystem has global significance," she told a news conference at Parry Sound. "Change is already upon us."

Huron and Michigan are at their lowest levels since the 1960s and Lake Superior is at its lowest since 1926, reports the Canadian Hydrology Service at Burlington, Ont.

The decline has caused problems for navigation, recreation, power generation and the ecology of the area. Wetlands are drying up, docks are stranded and beaches in some areas are overgrown with weeds.

"People that have lived along the shoreline and thought they have a million-dollar property no longer do, because instead of having a nice beach or a nice rocky shoreline in front, they've got muck with bullrushes growing in it," said Mary Muter of the Georgian Bay Association.

Citing a study by Blair Associates of Oakville, Muter said the Lake Huron-Michigan water level decreased by 2.4 cm between 2000 and 2005, which she described as a major drop.

"If you converted half a centimeter into volume of water you'd be talking millions of gallons of water."

Yet the lower lakes, Ontario and Erie, are at or slightly above normal levels, which has scientists baffled. Normally, water levels throughout the lakes would rise and fall more or less in tandem.

Computer models simulating climate change predict that water levels will decline throughout the Great Lakes, but don't explain why the upper lakes would be affected more than the others.

"The real thing that's got everybody concerned is not only are Lake Michigan and Huron dropping, but they're dropping relative to Erie," said Frank Quinn, a hydrology consultant at Tecumseh, N.Y.

"The lakes have been low in the past, but the graphs show that all of a sudden starting probably in the late 1980s or early 1990s there came a major difference in the water levels.

"If it was just generally low lake levels you would expect to find the same problem on Erie and Huron."

One possible explanation is that global warming has changed rainfall patterns, said Ralph Moulton at the Canadian Hydrology Service.

There has been unusually low rainfall this year in Northern Ontario compared with the southern part of the province, but it's not clear if that is part of a trend.

Another possible culprit is dredging in the St. Clair River when the St. Lawrence Seaway was being completed. The theory is that the dredging led to accelerated erosion, allowing increased outflow to Lake Erie.

"By dredging they removed the hard covering core of the bottom sediments," said Muter. "Once you remove that layer you expose soft eroding clay to a very high current there."

She said there is a lot of concern about property values around Georgian Bay.


Informant: NHNE

16.09.2006

Konsequenzen aus dem bevorstehenden Klimawandel hat Astrid Klug, Parlamentarische Staatssekretärin im Bundesumweltministerium, gefordert.

https://sonnenseite.kjm4.de/ref.php?id=d874168301ms10

by Michael McCarthy

Published: 15 September 2006

https://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article1603643.ece

Ten years ago, when the world was groping its way towards the signing of the 1997 Kyoto protocol, the sense that the issue needed to be tackled urgently was largely based on one thing only: computer programs.

Predictions from supercomputer models of the earth's atmosphere, about how global warming would progress, were the main drivers of that heroic effort to agree international reductions in the greenhouse gases which cause it.

These immense mathematical structures looked forward a full century (and still do) at the rise in carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere, and how that would worsen the greenhouse effect; and their predictions were enough to get the Kyoto protocol signed (but not, thanks to George Bush, enough to make it work).

Yet what was almost completely missing from the climate debate a decade ago was observation: evidence of actual effects that the warming was having. This absence contributed to the sense, still widespread, that global warming is a distant problem, its consequences a century away.

Things have changed. Since the turn of the millennium, observations of the concrete effects of rising temperatures have started to mount up: the unprecedented European heatwave of 2003, which killed more than 30,000 people; the UK's record temperature topping 100F for the first time in that year; the record US hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005, culminating in Katrina; and most of all, the melting ice.

The great ice masses are now shrinking rapidly everywhere; almost every mountain glacier, the great Greenland ice sheet, the great ice sheets of Antarctica, the legendary African snow on the top of Mt Kilimanjaro, and the ice of the Arctic, whose rate of disappearance, we now learn, has increased explosively.

It means two things: firstly, you can't deny it any more. Last week, we had the remarkable spectacle of The Economist magazine, climate change sceptic-in-chief, cheerleader to the American business community, coughing, shuffling, looking at its feet and admitting gruffly, well, perhaps there is something in this global warming stuff, after all.

Secondly, it's coming, to you. Doesn't matter you're not bothered about it. Doesn't matter you're thinking about your next holiday, or the state of your marriage or the next Big Brother. This vast phenomenon that is going to change the world unthinkably is coming right to your doorstep. A lot sooner than you think.

Ten years ago, when the world was groping its way towards the signing of the 1997 Kyoto protocol, the sense that the issue needed to be tackled urgently was largely based on one thing only: computer programs.

Predictions from supercomputer models of the earth's atmosphere, about how global warming would progress, were the main drivers of that heroic effort to agree international reductions in the greenhouse gases which cause it.

These immense mathematical structures looked forward a full century (and still do) at the rise in carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere, and how that would worsen the greenhouse effect; and their predictions were enough to get the Kyoto protocol signed (but not, thanks to George Bush, enough to make it work).

Yet what was almost completely missing from the climate debate a decade ago was observation: evidence of actual effects that the warming was having. This absence contributed to the sense, still widespread, that global warming is a distant problem, its consequences a century away.

Things have changed. Since the turn of the millennium, observations of the concrete effects of rising temperatures have started to mount up: the unprecedented European heatwave of 2003, which killed more than 30,000 people; the UK's record temperature topping 100F for the first time in that year; the record US hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005, culminating in Katrina; and most of all, the melting ice.

The great ice masses are now shrinking rapidly everywhere; almost every mountain glacier, the great Greenland ice sheet, the great ice sheets of Antarctica, the legendary African snow on the top of Mt Kilimanjaro, and the ice of the Arctic, whose rate of disappearance, we now learn, has increased explosively.

It means two things: firstly, you can't deny it any more. Last week, we had the remarkable spectacle of The Economist magazine, climate change sceptic-in-chief, cheerleader to the American business community, coughing, shuffling, looking at its feet and admitting gruffly, well, perhaps there is something in this global warming stuff, after all.

Secondly, it's coming, to you. Doesn't matter you're not bothered about it. Doesn't matter you're thinking about your next holiday, or the state of your marriage or the next Big Brother. This vast phenomenon that is going to change the world unthinkably is coming right to your doorstep. A lot sooner than you think.


Informant: binstock

https://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article1603660.ece


Informant: binstock