Global Warming Knowledge Test

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Disaster waiting to happen...

Melting mountains a 'time bomb'
April 15, 2008 - GLACIERS and mountain snow are melting earlier in the year than usual, meaning the water has already gone when millions of people need it during the summer when rainfall is lower, scientists warn.

"This is just a time bomb,'' hydrologist Carmen de Jong at a meeting of geoscientists in Vienna said. Those areas most at risk from a lack of water for drinking and agriculture include parts of the Middle East, southern Africa, the United States, South America and the Mediterranean.

Rising global temperatures mean the melt water is occurring earlier and faster in the year and the mountains may no longer be able to provide a vital stop gap. "In some areas where the glaciers are small they could be gone in 30 or 50 years time and a very reliable source of water, especially for the summer months, may be gone.''

Ms De Jong was referring to parts of the Mediterranean where her research was focused but she said the threat also applied to the entire Alps region and other global mountain sources. Daniel Viviroli, from the University of Berne, believes nearly 40 per cent of mountainous regions could be at risk, as they provide water to populations which cannot get it elsewhere.

He said the Earth's sub-tropic zones, which are home to 70 per cent of the world's population, are the most vulnerable. And with the global population expected to expand rapidly, there may not always be enough water to drink, let alone to water crops, which use about 70 per cent of melt-water.

More Melting mountains a 'time bomb' | NEWS.com.au

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Lake pollution threatens water supply
April 15, 2008 - A POLLUTION-linked algae bloom has reappeared in China's third-largest lake, prompting renewed fears for the drinking water supplies of millions of residents.

Taihu Lake in eastern China has seen a re-emergence of algae growth that last year forced authorities to cut water supplies to 2.3 million residents of the nearby city of Wuxi last May, the People's Daily said today. The lake in Jiangsu province, long celebrated through Chinese history as one of the country's most scenic bodies of water, has been massively polluted by the dumping of sewage and industrial and agricultural waste.

The water crisis last year made it a symbol of China's nationwide problem of deteriorating water quality, with even Premier Wen Jiabao publicly calling for the lake to be cleaned up. Drinking supplies were cut off for days last year after residents complained of foul water coming out of their taps, causing a crisis that sparked panic hoarding of water.

Authorities now fear that could happen again in coming months, the People's Daily, the Communist Party's main mouthpiece, said in a story posted on its website. Conditions were ripe for a recurrence of the problem, caused by a combination of pollution and warm weather, the paper quoted Lin Zexin, vice head of the Taihu Administrative Bureau, as saying.

More Lake pollution threatens water supply | NEWS.com.au

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Granny an' possum battenin' down the hatches...

Was Al Gore Right On Hurricanes And Global Warming?
16 April 2008 - The biggest blow-up in the science community about Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" was not over the 20 foot ocean rises but the images of Hurricane Katrina and the implication that global warming had a hand in it.

Scientists at the Carnegie Institution say there may be something to it, though indirectly. The Earth’s jet streams, the high-altitude bands of fast winds that strongly influence the paths of storms and other weather systems, are shifting — it could be argued that is in response to global warming.

The Carnegie scientists determined that over a 23-year span from 1979 to 2001 the jet streams in both hemispheres have risen in altitude and shifted toward the poles. The jet stream in the northern hemisphere has also weakened. These changes fit the predictions of global warming models and have implications for the frequency and intensity of future storms, including hurricanes.

Cristina Archer and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology tracked changes in the average position and strength of jet streams using records compiled by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the National Centers for Environmental Protection, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

The data included outputs from weather prediction models, conventional observations from weather balloons and surface instruments, and remote observations from satellites. The results are published in the April 18 Geophysical Research Letters.

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A Green Future
17 Apr.`08 - How to Win the War on Global Warming

Americans don't like to lose wars—which makes sense, since we have so little practice with it. Of course, a lot depends on how you define just what a war is. There are shooting wars—the kind that test our mettle and our patriotism and our resourcefulness and our courage—and those are the kind at which we excel. But other struggles test those qualities too. What else was the Great Depression or the space race or the construction of the railroads or the eradication of polio but a massive, often frightening challenge that we decided as a culture we ought to rise up and face? If we indulge in a bit of chest-thumping and flag-waving when the job is done, well, we earned it.

We are now faced with a similarly momentous challenge: global warming. The steady deterioration of the very climate of our very planet is becoming a war of the first order, and by any measure, the U.S. is losing. Indeed, if we're fighting at all—and by most accounts, we're not—we're fighting on the wrong side. The U.S. produces nearly a quarter of the world's greenhouse gases each year and has stubbornly made it clear that it doesn't intend to do a whole lot about it. Although 174 nations ratified the admittedly flawed Kyoto accords to reduce carbon levels, the U.S. walked away from them. While even developing China has boosted its mileage standards to 35�m.p.g., the U.S. remains the land of the Hummer. Oh, there are vague promises of manufacturing fuel from switchgrass or powering cars with hydrogen—someday. But for a country that rightly cites patriotism as one of its core values, we're taking a pass on what might be the most patriotic struggle of all. It's hard to imagine a bigger fight than one for the survival of the country's coasts and farms, the health of its people and the stability of its economy—and for those of the world at large as well.

The rub is, if the vast majority of people increasingly agree that climate change is a global emergency, there's far less consensus on how to fix it. Industry offers its plans, which too often would fix little. Environmentalists offer theirs, which too often amount to naive wish lists that could cripple America's growth. But let's assume that those interested parties and others will always be at the table and will always—sensibly—demand that their voices be heard and that their needs be addressed. What would an aggressive, ambitious, effective plan look like—one that would leave us both environmentally safe and economically sound?

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Water rising around Tuvulu too...

Help needed for sinking islands
April 22, 2008 - MALDIVES President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom has made an impassioned plea for a cut in global greenhouse gas emissions, warning that rising sea levels could submerge his paradise island chain.

He launched a book at the UN-backed Business for the Environment conference in Singapore today to highlight the threat to his South Asian tropical island chain famed for its white sandy beaches, clear waters and swaying palm trees. "My people are blessed with one of the most beautiful settings that nature has to offer... To many people across the world, our shores have indeed become an earthly paradise. This paradise, though, is endangered,'' he said.

"Each year, the seas that make up 99 per cent of the Maldives are rising, and, slowly but surely, engulfing our 1192 low-lying islands and posing serious risks to the lives and livelihoods of the people.'' He said he chose the title of Paradise Drowning for his book because "it evokes an image fraught with great danger'' and "most clearly encapsulates the threat of climate change and sea-level rise to my people.''

Speaking to reporters later, Mr Gayoom said his government could only do a little to prevent sea water engulfing the islands as building protective walls on the islands was too expensive. He said the real culprit for rising sea levels was global warming, and the solution lay in countries around the world cutting carbon dioxide emissions which have been blamed for the phenomenon.

More Help needed for sinking islands | NEWS.com.au

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New solar cycle may mean a turn-around in global warming...

World might be heading towards Ice Age
April 23 : Scientists have warned that the world might once again be heading towards an Ice Age, with global warming approaching a possible end.

Evidence in support of this theory has come from pictures obtained from the US Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, which showed no spots on the sun, thus determining that sunspot activity has not resumed after hitting an 11-year low in March last year. A sunspot is a region on the sun that is cooler than the rest and appears dark.

Some scientists believe a strong solar magnetic field, when there is plenty of sunspot activity, protects the earth from cosmic rays, cutting cloud formation, but that when the field is weak - during low sunspot activity - the rays can penetrate into the lower atmosphere and cloud cover increases, cooling the surface. According to Australian astronaut and geophysicist Phil Chapman, this might have caused the world to cool quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7C.

"This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930," said Dr Chapman. "If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over," he added.

Dr Chapman has proposed preventive, or delaying, moves to slow the cooling, such as bulldozing Siberian and Canadian snow to make it dirty and less reflective. "My guess is that the odds are now at least 50:50 that we will see significant cooling rather than warming in coming decades," he said.

World might be heading towards Ice Age

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In a New Climate Model, Short-Term Cooling in a Warmer World
May 1, 2008 - After decades of research that sought, and found, evidence of a human influence on the earth’s climate, climatologists are beginning to shift to a new and similarly daunting enterprise: creating decade-long forecasts for climate, just as meteorologists routinely generate weeklong forecasts for weather.

One of the first attempts to look ahead a decade, using computer simulations and measurements of ocean temperatures, predicts a slight cooling of Europe and North America, probably related to shifting currents and patterns in the oceans. The team that generated the forecast, whose members come from two German ocean and climate research centers, acknowledged that it was a preliminary effort. But in a short paper published in the May 1 issue of the journal Nature, they said their modeling method was able to reasonably replicate climate patterns in those regions in recent decades, providing some confidence in their prediction for the next one.

The authors stressed that the pause in warming represented only a temporary blunting of the centuries of rising temperatures that scientists have projected if carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases continue accumulating in the atmosphere. “We’re learning that internal climate variability is important and can mask the effects of human-induced global change,” said the paper’s lead author, Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany. “In the end this gives more confidence in the long-term projections.”

The new study focused on relationships between short-term climate trends and a system of currents in the Atlantic Ocean, called the meridional overturning circulation, which undergo periodic changes. The predictions were made by repeatedly running a simulation of the global climate and adjusting conditions in the simulated oceans to match temperature measurements. To get a computer-generated simulation of the climate for the 1990s, for example, the model ran from the 1950s through the 1980s, with sea temperatures adjusted to reflect the real world, then ran without further inputs for 10 more years.

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Growing Ocean Dead Zones Leave Fish Gasping...

Warming Climate Leaves Fish Gasping
May 3, 2008 - "Dead zones" containing too little oxygen for fish to breathe are growing as global temperatures increase.

Warmer water dissolves less oxygen, so as temperatures rise, oxygen vanishes from oceans. Marine biologists are warning that if dead zones continue expanding, oceanic "deserts" could massively deplete marine life and fish stocks. Previous studies have shown that surface layers of the ocean can be depleted of oxygen by pollution draining out from rivers, as in the Gulf of Mexico. However the new study finds depletion at intermediate ocean depths, between 300 and 700 metres. There has also been evidence of oxygen depletion closer to the sea bed in some regions, such as the Arabian Sea, but no one has looked before in detail at intermediate depths.

"From our observations we can only tell what happened in the past 50 years, but we need to find out what will happen in the future," says Lothar Stramma of the University of Kiel, Germany. Stramma's team used data from historical records of oceanic oxygen concentrations, collected mainly from research vessels. They combined it with recent data from buoys newly equipped to measure oxygen concentrations, as well as temperature and salinity. "We added our own data from recent cruises and floats where available to continue the older data set to the present," says Stramma.

The combined data set shows that, over the past 50 years, large volumes of ocean previously rich in oxygen have become "oxygen minimum zones" (OMZs) containing less than 120 micromoles of oxygen per kilogram of water. These are the concentrations at which fish, squid, crustaceans and other marine creatures begin to suffocate and die. On average, the team calculate that oxygen dropped by between 0.90 and 0.34 micromoles per kilogram of ocean per year.

More ABC News: Warming Climate Leaves Fish Gasping

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Study: Warming water means less oxygen for sea life
WASHINGTON — Low-oxygen zones where sea life is threatened or cannot survive are growing as the oceans are heated by global warming, a new study warns.

Oxygen-depleted zones in the central and eastern equatorial Atlantic and equatorial Pacific oceans appear to have expanded over the last 50 years, researchers report in Friday's edition of the journal Science. Low-oxygen zones in the Gulf of Mexico and other areas also have been studied in recent years, raising concerns about the threat to sea life.

Continued expansion of these zones could have dramatic consequences for both sea life and coastal economies, said the team led by Lothar Stramma of the University of Kiel in Germany. The finding was not surprising, Stramma said, because computer climate models had predicted a decline in dissolved oxygen in the oceans under warmer conditions.

Warmer water simply cannot absorb as much oxygen as colder water, explained co-author Gregory C. Johnson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. There are complex biological and chemical interactions in these low-oxygen regions, Stramma commented, adding that this needs to be more closely studied.

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Temporary cooling...

Lull in warming puts scientists on guard
May 10, 2008 - A new study suggesting a possible lull in manmade global warming has raised fears of a reduced urgency to battle climate change.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of hundreds of scientists, last year said global warming was "unequivocal" and that manmade greenhouse gas emissions were "very likely" part of the problem. And while the study published in the journal Nature last week did not dispute manmade global warming, it did predict a cooling from recent average temperatures through 2015, as a result of a natural and temporary shift in ocean currents.

The IPCC predicted global temperature increases this century of 1.8 to 4 degrees Celsius. The Nature paper has sparked worries that briefly cooler temperatures may take the heat out of action to fight the threat of more droughts and floods, while a debate about the article's findings has also underlined uncertainty about such forecasting.

Most scientists oppose the minority that has used the present lull in warming to cast doubt on the size of threat from manmade global temperature rises. "Let's say there wasn't much of a warming for the next 10 years, how will the public and politicians play this out?" said Bob Watson, former IPCC head and current chief scientific adviser to Britain's environment ministry. He said it was important to explain that fluctuations were an expected part of a general, manmade warming trend.

More Lull in warming puts scientists on guard | NEWS.com.au

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Can we afford it at this time of high gas and food prices?...

Climate Change Bill Would Damage the Economy, Critics Say
June 05, 2008 - The Senate has started debating a bill that would set caps on greenhouse gas emissions - a bill that opponents say could wind up costing Americans trillions of dollars and do more harm than good. Environmentalists, however, laud the legislation as Congress' biggest action yet to battle climate change.

The Climate Security Act, sponsored by Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Warner (R-Va.), proposes setting caps on the greenhouse gases emitted by U.S. power plants, transportation, manufacturing, and natural gas sources. The caps will become more restrictive in coming decades, and the eventual objective is to reduce total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 66 percent below the 2005 level by the year 2050. Under the proposal, companies may trade, save and borrow emission allowances. Supporters say the government will use the money raised by the auction of set-aside allowances to develop new technologies and protect low- and middle-income Americans from high energy costs.

In an address Monday, President Bush said he opposed the Lieberman-Warner bill, which he said would impose $6 trillion in new costs on the U.S. economy. "There's a much better way to address the environment than imposing these costs on the job creators, which will ultimately have to be borne by American consumers," he said.

Free-market groups say the legislation would damage the economy and do little to reverse or halt climate change - even if global warming really is a man-made phenomenon, an idea that many conservatives question. Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said the bill would dramatically increase energy prices and slow economic growth. The poorest Americans would be hardest hit by the increased price of energy, Ebell said, making the bill an "economic train wreck."

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... just as with universal health care - how we gonna pay for it?

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Not a pleasant experience...

Kidney Stone Ailments Forecast To Go Up 25 Percent In 2050 Due To Global Warming
July 15, 2008 - A University of Texas Southwestern Medical School study linked the rise in kidney stone ailments to global warming.

The connection of kidney stone with warm weather has been established based on statistics that southeastern states have 50 percent higher incident than northeastern states. Kidney stones, although on the rise nationwide since 1976, were observed to have higher rates of occurrence during summer. With global warming even the northeastern region will likely experience higher incidents with an estimated 1.6 million new cases by 2050.

The rise in kidney stone incidents by 25 percent in 2050 will be accompanied by a corresponding annual $900 million hike in kidney-related treatment bills compared with 2000 levels. The high-risk zones will expand to 56 percent of states by 2050 and 70 percent by 2095. David Goldfarb of the New York University Medical center said, quoted by the USA Today, "Everyone on warmer temperatures is at higher risk for kidney stones, so the findings make perfect sense."

Aside from an expected rise in kidney stone ailments, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said global warming may also bring with it more deadly heat waves, algae blooms that infect marine life with toxins and the faster spread of certain insect-borne diseases like Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

Kidney Stone Ailments Forecast To Go Up 25 Percent In 2050 Due To Global Warming | AHN | July 15, 2008

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Getting drier?

Is world's wettest place getting drier?
Monday, 21 July 2008 - World's wettest town hit by changing weather

The town of Cherrapunjee, in the north-eastern Indian state of Meghalaya, is reputed to be the wettest place in the world. But there are signs that its weather patterns may be being hit by global climate change. "Not without reason has Cherrapunjee achieved fame as being the place with the heaviest rainfall on earth," wrote German missionary Christopher Becker more than 100 years ago.

"One must experience it to have an idea of the immense quantity of rain which comes down from the skies, at times day and night without a stop. It is enough to go a few steps from the house to be drenched from head to foot. An umbrella serves no purpose."

Late monsoon

But according to Cherrapunjee's most renowned weather-watcher, Denis Rayen, the climate of the town is changing fast. "In the days of the Raj, the British used to come here to the the Khasi hills to escape the heat - we are 4,823ft (1,484m) above sea level," he says. "But today I am not sure they would be able to do that, because it is getting a lot hotter here and the monsoon is arriving later."

Official figures compiled by the Indian Meteorological Office in the nearby city of Guwahati back up Mr Rayen's arguments that north-east India as a whole is getting hotter. "The average temperature for Guwahati at this time of the year should be around 32C - but this year the temperature has been as high as 38C," said weather expert Harendas Das.

More BBC NEWS | South Asia | Is world's wettest place getting drier?

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Listening to the glaciers melt...

The Sound of Melting Glaciers Stirs Alarm
August 08, 2008 - In the Indian Himalayas, You Can Hear Climate Change Before You Can See It; Glaciers of the Indian Himalayas Have Never Melted So Quickly

In the Indian Himalayas, you can literally hear the glaciers melting. The river that rushes through the Lahaul-Spiti Valley is fed almost entirely by melt from the surrounding glaciers. The sound of the river's rapids has never been this loud. The level of the water has never been this high. In other words, the glaciers have never receded this quickly. "I've never seen such a high water level in this river," says Syed Hasnain, a senior glaciologist at the Energy Resources Institute who has been visiting the Chhota Shigri glacier for 23 years.

"This is 100 percent glacial melt," he adds, standing at the base of the glacier, yelling over the sound of the river. "After 40 years or 50 years, there won't be any flow in this river, and the entire valley will be dried up." The 15,000 Himalayan glaciers that create the "Water Tower of Asia" -- the largest block of fresh water outside the Polar Ice Caps -- have been melting forever. But they are suddenly melting so fast that they are drying up. It will take decades, but at the rate the earth is warming, they may simply disappear.

"Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world," the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned last year. "If the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate." The consequences of that would be enormous. More than a billion people need the rivers supported by the Himalayan glaciers to survive. Across Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh, rivers that flow from the glaciers give people their water for drinking, irrigation and hydropower. "We are going to be doomed in the future," Hasnain says. The "entire global community will be affected. It's not only the region will be affected."

And, in India, climate change could imperil the world's oldest religion. More than 400 million people live off the Ganges River, and the world's billion Hindus consider its water sacred. One drop of Ganges water, they believe, can cure a lifetime of sin. The glacier that feeds the Ganges, the Gangotri, is melting three times as fast as it was last century. "Global warming, I think, will finish the globe, will finish Ganga, will finish all of us," says Veer Bhadra Mishra, former chairman of civil engineering at Banaras Hindu University, referring to the Ganges by its commonly used name, Mother Ganga. "We are an endangered species of human beings, and we need your attention, and we need your support, so that our life is saved, and our culture is saved."

Why the Glaciers Are Melting