Opponents to the idea assert the idea all but abandons the scientific method, upon which modern civilization depends, in favor of what Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists says is reminiscent of “the Salem witch trials, based on myth.”

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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.

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Last week, I received an email from a reader in Estonia (I was just as surprised we were big in the Baltics as you) who indicated 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.” Two of the pieces the reader pointed me to were authored by Robert Brisnmead, who, evidently, is a devoted climate change denier. The third was a longer, more detailed piece.

The reader also passed along a summary of the take-home arguments he gleaned in his newfound readings that I thought I would share with you. I’m only passing these along because the reader seemed like a friendly chap, not because I buy it. Do with it as you please.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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

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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.

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“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.”

According to Wikipedia, the Bell Labs Science Series:

“[C]ombined scientific footage, live actors and animation to convey scientific concepts and history in a lively, entertaining way, and the bald, bespectacled and affable Dr. Baxter served as narrator, lecturer and Master of Ceremonies.”

Okay, so they were teaching this stuff in schools in the late 50’s and early 60’s? Granted, Dr. Research was a professor of English, but it is clear he’s not making the stuff up himself. It seems that “the bald, bespectacled and affable” Dr. Baxter was on to something, huh? See for yourself (Running time: 1 min., 19 sec.). This post contains additional media. Click here to view the full post.

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The report, Scientific Assessment of the Effects of Global Change on the United States, was released today by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. According to the Government Accountability Project, the study was “years overdue under a requirement of law” and was prepared only after a federal court order last year set a release deadline of May 31, 2008.

Among the report’s highlights (or lowlights, depending on your perspective):

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The Amazon is without a doubt one of the planet’s most valuable and important ecological resources; and not for logging. The rainforest contains approximately one tenth of the total carbon stored in land ecosystems, and recycles much of the rain that falls upon its leafy canopy.

Thus, any major change to its vegetation has massive implications for the global climate system.

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According to Cristina Archer and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, Earth’s jet streams are shifting; possibly as a result of global warming. However they are upfront with the fact that they need to do more research before they can pinpoint what will happen, and why it is happening.

Jet streams are the high-altitude bands of fast moving wind that influence the paths of storms and other weather systems. “The jet streams are the driving factor for weather in half of the globe,” says Archer. “So, as you can imagine, changes in the jets have the potential to affect large populations and major climate systems.”

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I call this story “How to Successfully Undermine Good Ideas” thanks to a recent article written over at LiveScience.com entitled “Top 10 Craziest Environmental Ideas.” And, in short, several of their “zany ideas” are possible chances for survival.

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Researchers at the University of Colorado in Boulder, US, found that Earth’s atmosphere contained very little light-blocking volcanic dust. During the eclipse, Earth blocks sunlight from reaching the moon – hence why the moon is obscured in darkness for a time. Naturally, some light will make it through, refracted through the Earth’s atmosphere.

However the amount that refracts through is normally tempered by how much volcanic dust is in the atmosphere to block it. “All the big dimmings of the Moon during eclipses can be attributed to specific volcanoes,” says Richard Keen of UC Boulder.

Keen and his fellow researchers at UC Boulder have been charting the brightness of lunar eclipses back to 1960, as well as adding a few years either side of the 1883 eruption of Indonesia’s Krakatoa volcano to the mix. From this data, they have been tracking the changes in opacity of Earth’s atmosphere.

This obviously has implications for our climate in that, the less dust there is reflecting light away from the planet’s surface the more there is reaching it.

Keen and his colleagues calculate that, because more sunlight is reaching the surface, Earth should be 0.1 to 0.2° Celsius warmer in recent years than it was back in the late 60s.

This increase in temperature is a hitherto unforeseen addition to the .06° Celsius rise that our planet has encountered of late. The IPCC has pinned the majority of that warming on greenhouse gas. They add that other factors including fluctuating patterns in ocean circulation and slight changes in the Sun’s brightness could also have influenced the climate.

“All of these have been contributing to a warming, adding on top of each other,” Keen told New Scientist. “The difficulty is, of course, what are the relative magnitudes [of these effects],” he says.

Susan Solomon of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado, a member of the Nobel-prize-winning team that put together the 2007 IPCC report said however that volcanic haze fluctuations were introduced in to the models used for their report. She disputes Keen’s concerns; “There’s no evidence for a significant warming trend over the last several decades [due to a decline in volcanic haze],” she told New Scientist. “In fact, it’s exactly the opposite.”

Solomon notes that over the past 40 years – compared to the 20 years prior – the amount of haze in the stratosphere has been higher. Thus, over the past 60 years, there would have – if anything – been a slight cooling trend if volcanic haze were the only influence on the climate.

And while Keen acknowledges this, he argues that the relatively long period since 1995 with a relatively haze-free atmosphere could be having a considerably larger than anticipated impact on our climate. He points also to theories of long term effects through the current-day heating of our oceans, as an impact the added sunshine could be having.

Keen is now compiling more precise estimates of the brightness of our most recent lunar eclipse, occurring on the 20-21 of last February, so that the amount of haze in the atmosphere can be calculated more efficiently.

New Scientist - Lunar eclipse may shed light on climate change

Image Courtesy of NASA

That isn’t to say that scientific debate is not necessary or needed; only, that it seems that the obvious seems to bypass people as simply another annoying fact against their chosen belief.

In addition, there are those who feel that they have an ace up their sleeves when they talk to me. They feel that knowledge of increasingly colder temperatures and unexpected snow storms is evidence not of global warming, but of global cooling. They put the card down on the table with a grin. They seem to exude complete confidence in me not having a full house of cards that were actually dealt to me.

In other words, how come people look at the recent weird weather anomalies which most climate change advocates will themselves use as proof of a changing planet, but fail to look at years of steadily climbing temperatures?

All of that is simply by way of pointing to new research showing that greenhouse gas emissions will have to be entirely eliminated in order for our climate to stabilize and to prevent our temperatures from rising.

In response to that I say two things; a) well duh and b) why, for the love of Pete, did it take a scientific study to bring this to peoples attention?

Damon Matthews from Concordia University in Canada and Ken Caldeira from Carnegie Institute for Science, Stanford, in the US, are the men behind this research. They show that our current efforts to simply stabilize our emissions – rather than eradicating our emissions – are simply not enough.

“Even if we eliminated carbon dioxide today we are still committed to a global temperature rise of around 0.8 ºC lasting at least 500 years,” says Caldeira. As to why carbon dioxide persists so long, Caldeira points to the slow response time of our many oceans. “It takes a lot of energy to heat them up and then a long time for them to cool back down,” he adds.

Their study used a global climate model that, instead of only looking at what happens when the emissions have stabilized, looked at how greenhouse emissions need to change in order to stabilize the global temperature.

Matthews and Caldeira created four models, each of which began with a single pulse of carbon dioxide in to a pre-industrial atmosphere (to mimic but simplify the steady increase of carbon dioxide emissions over the past hundred years or so). Pulse sizes of 50, 200, 500 and 2000 billion tons of carbon made up the four models.

At the end of a 500 year period in which the model calculated global temperatures and atmospheric and ocean carbon dioxide levels, the pair found that between 20% and 35% of the initial pulse had remained in the simulated atmosphere. This was true for even the smallest emission pulse. The remainder of the carbon had been absorbed by land and ocean carbon sinks.

The existence of original carbon dioxide at the end of the 500 year period signifies that global warming took place over the entire period of time. For the four simulations, respectively, global temperatures stabilized at 0.09, 0.34, 0.88 and 3.6 ºC above pre-industrial levels.

This research has received academic support from those such as Roger Pielke, a climate policy expert at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “This research makes the case that simply stabilising concentrations is insufficient to stabilise temperatures. Their argument, if widely accepted, raises the bar on what it means to mitigate climate change,” he says.

Matthews and Caldeira warned in their report, though unrealistically (and probably knowingly so), that the current emission targets for 2050 were simply insufficient. “It is technologically challenging, but not impossible. The biggest challenge will be to get political consensus,” says Caldeira.

Now, to be fair, a zero emissions future is not out of the realm of scientific possibility. In my opinion, it’s out of the realm of political possibility, but let’s all just revolt and do away with that issue. Costa Rica is already aiming towards zero emissions, and with new tools such as renewable energy, electric cars and carbon capture there are experts who believe this is a feasible goal.

Dave Reay, a climate scientist at the University of Edinburgh, is one who believes this, “If used on a large enough scale then new technologies like carbon capture could get us to zero emissions.”

Either way, it is good to at least see the evidence in the scientific world for those who hadn’t been in a position to see the obvious. As the photo suggests, the future is in our own hands!

Check out Shirley Siluk Gregory’s previous brief on this issue here.

So, in this spirit, for the first time West Antarctica (or the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS)) is to be monitored, 24/7, 365 days a year, to witness the interaction between ice and the earth below. The mission, to be lead by a team from Ohio State University, has just been awarded $4.5 million by the National Science Foundation.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007 at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, saw Terry Wilson, leader of the mission entitled POLENET, explained how they would overcome the harsh conditions.

First off is to fly ski-equipped aircraft to remote locations across the WAIS, and plant the instruments – GPS trackers and seismic sensors – on the bedrock that cradles the WAIS. These instruments will send signals back to the United States via satellite, and work year round.

“We’ll be able to do systems-scale science in Antarctica. That wasn’t possible before,” said Wilson, associate professor of earth sciences at Ohio State. “This instrumentation is designed to run and record data year-round, through the dark polar night. Previous instrument deployments have largely operated only for a few months, or less, each year. This allows us to do new science.”

The first expeditions for POLENET began arriving in early December, and by the end of February 2008 the POLENET scientists plan to have 17 new GPS trackers installed across the WAIS, along with about 11 new seismic sensors. By 2010 the network will be complete, and will hopefully record data well in to 2012.

International Polar Year Newswire - Scientists to Monitor West Antarctica 24/7