Green Options

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce seeks to put climate science on trial.

Most of you know by now that deforestation, and the emissions that cleared forestlands add to the atmosphere, exacerbates climate change. But it may come as a surprise to learn that the opposite is true. New scientific findings suggest that climate change is threatening remaining forests more dramatically than previously suspected.

Until recently, climate scientists thought that trees, and the biodiversity they support, could withstand a temperature rise lower than 3C. New findings, announced at last month’s Copenhagen “Congress” to discuss climate issues, estimate that a 3C temperature rise will result in a 75% loss of forests. The report’s sponsoring organization, the UK Meteorological Office’s climate change research division, has said that a 4C temperature rise - consistent with current human activities - will cause 85% of trees to disappear.

Under even the most conservative climate change scenario - a 1C temperature jump - will kill off one third of Amazonian forests, which alone contain one tenth of total carbon stored in land ecosystems.

Scientists now estimate that the chance of staying below a 2C temperature rise are only 50%, even if drastic cuts in emissions take place over the next ten years. Already, a .75C temperature rise above pre-industrial has been locked-in, with another .6C expected, based solely upon current levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Last week I received an email from a reader in Estonia who seemed to indicate that he used to be a believer in the global warming phenomenon until he “read some quite believable articles suggesting that man made Global Warming is a hoax.”

Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence, a handful of deniers manage to keep arguing about the existence, causes, and likely outcomes of global warming. Not to be outdone by this conventional irrationality, we have a few oddballs on the ‘believing’ side of the fence too.

Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment, a new-age religious cult based out of Yelm, Washington, makes exaggerated, doomsday predictions about global warming to instill fear in its followers and convince them to build underground shelters to protect from the “Days to Come.“

According to the prophesies made by the spiritual school, the human population at the end of 2012 will be two-thirds what it is now, and those who survive in the long term will do so by stocking up on food, water, and medical supplies and by having an underground shelter to protect them from the dangers of a rapidly changing earth.

There is almost nothing quite as intriguing and interesting as learning of a new experiment. And while Bunsen burners and the like may be OK for some of you, for me, get me outside and in some dirt any day.

A new experiment, being conducted at Imperial College London’s Silwood Park campus in Berkshire, will attempt to determine how the British plant ecosystem will be affected by future changes to climate and biodiversity.

With this experiment, however, there will be no computer simulations. Instead, scientists and researchers will be conducting the experiment outside, with 168 plots of grassland ecosystem at their fingertips. This will give a clear insight into how the ecosystems will hold up under a variety of different situations.

August saw the fastest retreat of arctic sea ice on record, according to new NASA data. During that month, sea ice melted at a rate of 32,700 square miles per day, compared with 24,400 square miles per day in 2007. The rate of decline is even more dramatic when compared with the 30-year average rate of decline, 19,700 miles per day.

The accelerated seasonal retreat of sea ice surprised NASA scientists, who expected a more moderate retreat on the tail of a la Niña year. Moreover, the data show that one cold year, when sea ice levels are able return to normal, is not enough to counter the long-term melting of the arctic.

According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), Arctic sea ice cover appears to have reached its minimum extent for the year, the second-lowest extent recorded since the dawn of the satellite era.

While above the record minimum Arctic sea ice extent set on September 16, 2007, this year further reinforces the strong negative trend in summertime ice extent observed over the past thirty years.

Despite overall cooler summer temperatures, the 2008 minimum extent is only 390,000 square kilometers (150,000 square miles), or 9.4%, more than the record-setting 2007 minimum. The 2008 minimum extent is 15.0% less than the next-lowest minimum extent set in 2005 and 33.1% less than the average minimum extent from 1979 to 2000.

This season further reinforces the long-term downward trend of sea ice extent.

Even though the sea ice didn’t retreat this year as much as last summer, “there was no real sign of recovery,” said Walt Meier of NSIDC. This year was cooler and other weather conditions weren’t as bad, he said.

“We’re kind of in a new state of the Arctic basically, and it’s not a good one,” Meier said. “We’re definitely sliding towards a point where the summer sea ice will be gone.”

One of my passions in life is climate science and research, and I am a strong defender of the science proving anthropogenic global warming. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has long attempted to bring to the forefront the scientific facts about humanities effects on the environment. Naturally, there have been those who have set out to simply ignore or discredit them at every turn.

One of the focuses of their attacks has been what some call the “notorious hockey stick” graph. The graph shows a fluctuating temperature variation over the past 2000 years (including the Medieval Warming period), with a marked spike at the end; in other words, a flat (for a given value of flat, see graph below) line and a curve at the end, similar to a hockey stick. You will have seen the graph if you’ve watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

Now, a new report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled “Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia” has once again validated the science behind the hockey stick graph.

Ever found yourself making it to the end of a week, hoping for a sunny weekend in which to lie outside or head to the beach or do some gardening, only to wake up on Saturday morning to overcast skies? I bet it’s happened before, probably more than once.

Well it seems that, according to Spanish researchers, this may not be Gods attempt at humor, but rather our own doing.

One of the biggest problems facing meteorologists and climate scientists is the fact that we simply don’t have long term climate data. Sure, we’ve seen our planet get hotter and nastier in the last few decades, but, did it happen the same time a hundred years ago? What we’ve needed are data from the past, so that we can see just what is happening.

And thanks to Captain Cook and Lord Nelson and the East India Trading Company, a wealth of information has been uncovered by experts from the British Meteorological Office.

“Even now, man may be unwittingly changing the world’s climate through the waste products of his civilization. Due to our release through factories and automobiles every year, of more than 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide… our atmosphere seems to be getting warmer.” - Dr. Frank C. Baxter (1958)