Tag Archives | Climate Change

Green Fatigue: Who Cares About Global Warming?

By on February 28, 2013 in News 27

Dry river bed in CaliforniaApparently people are fed up with the challenges of stopping or at least slowing the global warming trend. Sam Masters reports that worldwide concerns about climate change have dropped dramatically since 2009, in the Independent:

Public concern about environmental issues including climate change has slumped to a 20-year low since the financial crisis, a global study reveals.

Fewer people now consider issues such as CO2 emissions, air and water pollution, animal species loss, and water shortages to be “very serious” than at any time in the last two decades, according to the poll of 22,812 people in 22 countries including Britain and the US.

Despite years of studies showing the impact of global warming on the planet, only 49 per cent of people now consider climate change a very serious issue – far fewer than at the beginning of the worldwide financial crisis in 2009.

Worries about climate change first dropped in industrialised nations but they have now also fallen in developing economies including Brazil and China, according to the survey by GlobeScan Radar.

… Read the rest

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Unlocking the Conspiracy Mind-Set

By on February 22, 2013 in News 24

Stephan Lewandowsky

Justin Gillis tries to unscramble the conspiracy culture surrounding climate change for the New York Times:

When I first met the NASA climate researcher Gavin Schmidt a few years ago, we discussed the proliferation of material on the Internet attacking mainstream climate science. I asked him whether he thought climate contrarians were flirting with conspiracy theory in their views.

“Flirting?” he said. “No. They’ve already had conspiracy theory out on a hot date, and now it’s the morning after and they’re sitting up in bed, having coffee.”

I happened to recall that conversation the other day as I read the latest chapter of a remarkable back-and-forth between mainstream researchers and climate contrarians.

It all started last year, when a social scientist named Stephan Lewandowsky, of the University of Western Australia, and two colleagues published a rather provocative paper. It was based on an anonymous Internet survey of the readers of climate blogs.

… Read the rest

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Kentucky Town Terrorized By Swarm Of Millions Of Birds

By on February 19, 2013 in News 7

Will global warming do us in by provoking multitudes of agitated, disease-laden birds to descend upon us? Via the Bangor Daily News:

Millions of birds have descended on a small Kentucky city this winter, fouling the landscape, scaring pets and raising the risk for disease in a real-life version of Alfred Hitchcock’s horror film, “The Birds.”

The blackbirds blacken the sky of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, before roosting at dusk, turn the landscape white with bird poop, and the disease they carry can kill a dog and sicken humans.

David Chiles, president of the Little River Audubon Society, said the migratory flocks’ roosting in the city rather than flying further south is tied to climate warming.

The birds also pose a serious health hazard because their droppings can carry a fungal disease which can cause lung infections and symptoms similar to pneumonia. It is particularly dangerous for people with compromised immune systems or respiratory ailments.

… Read the rest

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Institute Pinpoints Which Cities May Be Consumed By Rising Sea Levels

By on February 19, 2013 in News 2

If you’re planning on being cryogenically frozen and then revived in the 22nd century, consider selling your apartment in Tokyo now. New Scientist writes:

Sydney, Tokyo and Buenos Aires watch out. These cities will experience some of the greatest sea level rises by 2100, according to one of the most comprehensive predictions to date.

Sea levels have been rising for over 100 years – not evenly, though. Several processes are at work, says Mahé Perrette of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. Some land is sinking, some is rising. The gravitational pull of disappearing ice sheets lead to a fall in sea levels in their surrounding areas.

Perrette has modeled all of these effects and calculated local sea level rises in 2100 for the entire planet. The global average rise is predicted to be between 30 and 106 centimeters. Coasts around the Indian Ocean will be hard hit, as will Japan, south-east Australia and Argentina.

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Climate Foes Dispute UN Report On Sun’s Role In Global Warming

By on February 3, 2013 in News 14

The sun1Trust Fox News to be in the lead on showcasing climate skeptics delight at a leaked report from the United Nations suggesting that the Sun may be a larger factor in global warming than most scientists have admitted to date:

The Earth has been getting warmer — but how much of that heat is due to greenhouse gas emissions and how much is due to natural causes?

A leaked report by a United Nations’ group dedicated to climate studies says that heat from the sun may play a larger role than previously thought.

“[Results] do suggest the possibility of a much larger impact of solar variations on the stratosphere than previously thought, and some studies have suggested that this may lead to significant regional impacts on climate,” reads a draft copy of a major, upcoming report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The man who leaked the report, StopGreenSuicide blogger Alec Rawls, told FoxNews.com that the U.N.’s statements on solar activity were his main motivation for leaking the document.

… Read the rest

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Demonstrating the Explosion of Daily Record Highs, Easy as Pie

By on January 21, 2013 in News 10

Whether or not global warming is being caused wholly or in part by human activity, and regardless of the mechanisms involved, here’s a graph demonstrating that the United States is getting hotter.  Andrew Freedman writes at Climate Central:

As the climate has warmed during the past several decades, there has been a growing imbalance between record daily high temperatures in the contiguous U.S. and record daily lows. A study published in 2009 found that rather than a 1-to-1 ratio, as would be expected if the climate were not warming, the ratio has been closer to 2-to-1 in favor of warm temperature records during the past decade (2000-2009). This finding cannot be explained by natural climate variability alone, the study found, and is instead consistent with global warming.

When you look at individual years, the imbalance can be more stark. For example, through late June 2012, daily record highs were outnumbering record daily lows by a ratio of 9-to-1.The study used computer models to project how the records ratios might shift in future decades as the amount of greenhouse gases in the air continues to increase.

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The Myth of Human Progress

By on January 20, 2013 in News 41

Picture: Steve F-E-Cameron (CC)

Chris Hedges writes at Truthdig:

Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.

… Read the rest

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2012: The Year We Did Our Best to Abandon the Natural World

By on January 4, 2013 in News 21

Picture: USDOD (PD)

George Monbiot writes in the Guardian:

It was the year of living dangerously. In 2012 governments turned their backs on the living planet, demonstrating that no chronic problem, however grave, will take priority over an immediate concern, however trivial. I believe there has been no worse year for the natural world in the past half-century.

Three weeks before the minimum occurred, the melting of the Arctic’s sea ice broke the previous record. Remnants of the global megafauna – such as rhinos and bluefin tuna – were shoved violently towards extinction. Novel tree diseases raged across continents. Bird and insect numbers continued to plummet, coral reefs retreated, marine life dwindled. And those charged with protecting us and the world in which we live pretended that none of it was happening.

Their indifference was distilled into a great collective shrug at the Earth Summit in June. The first summit, 20 years before, was supposed to have heralded a new age of environmental responsibility.

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NOAA: ’2012 Was an Active [Hurricane] year, But Not Exceptionally So

By on December 1, 2012 in News 2

Via WattsUpWithThat.com

Busy 2012 hurricane season continues decades-long high activity era in the Atlantic

Four U.S. land-falling storms include devastating Sandy and Isaac

November 30 marks the end of the 2012 Atlantic Hurricane season, one that produced 19 named storms, of which 10 became hurricanes and one became a major hurricane. The number of named storms is well above the average of 12. The number of hurricanes is also above the average of six, but the number of major hurricanes is below the average of three.

Based on the combined number, intensity, and duration of all tropical storms and hurricanes, NOAA classifies the season as above-normal. 2012 was an active year, but not exceptionally so as there were 10 busier years in the last three decades.

This season marks the second consecutive year that the mid-Atlantic and Northeast suffered devastating impacts from a named storm. Sandy, and Irene last year, caused fatalities, injuries, and tremendous destruction from coastal storm surge, heavy rainfall, inland flooding, and wind.

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Four Lectures on Climate Change: Kevin Anderson, Andrew Simms, Gwynne Dyer, and Daniel Nocera

By on November 28, 2012 in News 24

via chycho

We have treated the world as a garbage dump. The damage we have done has been devastating and the repercussions unimaginable.

From the disappearing bees to plastic waste vortex’s in the oceans, from the commodification of water to increasing CO2 emissions for cheap gasoline, from deforestation (pdf) to the melting ice caps, from fracking to the oil sands, our politics, our economics, and our way of life are devastating ecosystems across the globe.

The simple fact is that even though it is our technological evolution that is bringing about an economic metamorphosis that we see manifesting itself as a global financial crisis, it will be the environmental revolution forcing our civilization to implement the concept of sustainability that will finally transform our society. In essence, we need to seriously rethink our current economic system.

There are positive changes taking place on the political front, and then some, but we are losing the battle:

“Humans must immediately implement a series of radical measures to halt carbon emissions or prepare for the collapse of entire ecosystems and the displacement, suffering and death of hundreds of millions of the globe’s inhabitants, according to a report commissioned by the World Bank.

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