Thread: Clinton.

"The oceans act as a "sink" for CO2 and hold 60 times more of it
than does the atmosphere."

That calculation involves quite a large assumption but it is in many way irrelevant.

We have interupted the ice-age cycle.

If you look at how ice ages cycle what occurs is atmospheric CO2 levels rise, causing polar ice to melt, this causes the volume of the sea to increase resulting in increased absorption of CO2, which decreases atmospheric CO2 levels, which causes a decrease in ambient temperature and hence the formation of more polar ice, which decreases the volume of the oceans which increases the amount of atmospheric CO2.......... rinse repeat.

Now instead of the usual decrease in CO2 levels that occurs where we are in the cycle we see an increase,

We have delayed the next ice age but if we keep increasing the amount of CO2 we give out, we will reach the next ice age trigger point, then we will be in trouble.

"And finally, I say to you, our weather forecasters can't even
predict the weather for a few hours ahead of a broadcast with *any*
accuracy-- how do you think _anyone_ can forecast it for the next
centure"

You are mixing two extremely different ideas, accurate local weather predictions are impossible over long periods of time because the weather is chaotic, however large scale climate changes like ice ages etc., follow very repeatable non-chaotic patterns.

Washington diary

New Scientist vol 174 issue 2349 - 29 June 2002, page 59


Andreas Frew finds officials thinking the unthinkable


SOME called it a small miracle. But perhaps they spoke too soon. What they found miraculous was a report from the Bush administration earlier this month about global warming. It stated in utmost detail that the planet was indeed warming up, with many chapters and verses about the painful consequences for North America. And, mirabile dictu, it said that human activity is most probably a significant part of the cause.

From the start of his administration, and even before, President Bush has said that there's not enough evidence to blame the oil industry and factories and cars and coal-fired power plants for the rise in temperature. Why the change of heart? Well, perhaps there wasn't one. The next day, after headlines ballyhooed the new Bush view, the President was asked about the report at a press conference. He said, yes, I saw what the "bureaucracy" wrote in the report. The tone, if not the words, was dismissive.

So what is one to make of this? Are some reckless, faceless bureaucrats now jobless and headless as well? Details have not been revealed. But the President's top environmental adviser told one journalist that the report is no big surprise: Bush always believed the science showed that humans are contributing to global warming. He went on to say that the report was only stating what "could" happen in the future, not what "would" happen, so no action to mitigate warming was required yet.

Hmmm. Linnaeus once said that nature does not move in fits and starts. Obviously he knew nothing of politics.

THERE are any number of slogans that we Americans like to use routinely to define our identity: "In God we trust", "E pluribus unum", "The melting pot", "Land of the free and the home of the brave". But it's easy to get the feeling that the proper slogan should be, "It can't happen here". Because we rarely get nailed, Americans suffer from a false sense of invulnerability.

That's why the 11 September terror attacks were so very devastating. Not only was the loss of life horrifying, and the destruction of a New York landmark appalling, but the attack proved that the US is not, in fact, immune to foreign threats.

Right now a serious round of finger-pointing is under way in Washington over who might have known enough to suspect that a terror act was imminent last fall, and if they did know, why they didn't have the wit or moxie to do something about it. It's much more soothing to think that one person or one agency screwed up than to face the possibility that we may be under a cloud of risk for quite some time to come.

FEDERAL animal health officials must be looking at the current furore and getting a knot in their stomachs. While giving no guarantees that the unthinkable is truly impossible, these officials have done their level best to convince people that they need not worry about BSE or foot and mouth disease (FMD) entering the US. They show slides with a map of the US with a high picket fence around it, as much as to say "nothing gets in without our say so".

But if you leave Washington and listen to the rank-and-file veterinarians instead of the political appointees, you get a different picture. Port inspectors are overburdened, existing rules aren't being enforced, laboratory facilities for quick diagnoses are antiquated and inefficient.

And while everybody visiting Britain last summer had to wipe his or her feet before returning to the US, one gets no sense of extra caution prompted by a recent FMD outbreak in South Korea, where thousands of soccer-mad tourists are running amok before returning home. The animal health people on the ground say we've kept FMD out by luck as much as by planning.

Invulnerability is a worthy goal for superheroes, but it's probably a hopeless quest for most countries, even if they are superpowers.


Andreas Frew

Miserly attitude to climate rubbished

New Scientist vol 174 issue 2347 - 15 June 2002, page 5


Fighting global warming would barely dent the world's economy


PEOPLE will be five times as rich in a hundred years' time. And if we are willing to postpone that prosperity by just two years, we could fix global warming into the bargain.

That's the startling conclusion of leading US climate scientist Stephen Schneider and Swedish energy economist Christian Azar, who are about to publish a bruising assault on the Bush administration's claims that international plans to curb climate change would cripple the US and world economies.

"The wild rhetoric about enslaving the poor and bankrupting the economy to do climate policy is fallacious, even if one accepts the conventional economic models," Schneider told New Scientist. He says the economic arguments need to be put in context, and called on climate scientists to take a tougher stand against the doom-mongers who say action would be too costly.

Schneider's assault comes a week after a further blow was dealt to the prospects that the Kyoto Protocol will come into force. Australian Prime Minister John Howard announced that his government would not ratify the protocol, claiming it would "cost jobs and damage our industry".

The Bush administration, and now apparently Howard, have taken their tone from leading environmental economists such as Yale's William Nordhaus, who has argued that "a vague premonition of some potential disaster is insufficient grounds to plunge the world into depression". But, says Schneider, over a century even the trillions of dollars thought necessary to halt global warming would be a blip compared with the economic advances predicted by the same experts.

Many climate scientists have become frustrated by what they regard as the dead hand of economic orthodoxy in academic analyses of the costs and benefits of action to halt global warming. But in a forthcoming issue of the journal Ecological Economics, Schneider and Azar tackle the economists head-on, taking their own numbers and putting a dramatic new spin on them.

Last year's report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change included the economists' assessment that stabilising atmospheric carbon dioxide at twice pre-industrial concentrations by 2100 would cost between $1 trillion and $8 trillion. It sounds a lot, says Schneider, but the money would be all but invisible against the 2 per cent a year economic growth predicted by the same economists.

Without action to halt global warming, economists predict that the world as a whole will be 10 times as rich by 2100, and people on average will be five times as well off. Adding on the costs of tackling warming, says Schneider, would postpone this target by a mere two years. "To be 10 times richer in 2100 versus 2102 would hardly be noticed." Similarly, meeting the terms of the Kyoto Protocol would mean industrialised countries "get 20 per cent richer by June 2010 rather than in January 2010".

Put that way, he believes, the American public and politicians could be convinced that curbing greenhouse emissions is a necessary insurance policy against the potential dangers of climate change.


Fred Pearce

They paved paradise

New Scientist vol 174 issue 2344 - 25 May 2002, page 16


Will we ever opt out of rampant, planet-choking development?


WITHIN just 30 years, almost three-quarters of the planet's natural land surface will be carved up by human activity. Roads, mines, cities and farms will have obliterated and fragmented the rainforests of the Amazon and central Africa, filled Asian air with smogs, and stifled coastal waters poisoned by toxic red tides.

But it doesn't have to be like that. This week the UN has released a pioneering report that attempts to map out the environmental choices facing the planet in the early 21st century. If we stopped putting market forces first, and instead pursued a more environmentally based route to economic development, the figure could be cut to 55 per cent. And in places, the call of the wild could return to the suburbs.

The report implicitly attacks the stance of the US and the World Trade Organization, which claim markets will generate the wealth to solve environmental ills. A bad environment is an economic millstone, it says.

Klaus Töpfer, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, launched the report, saying: "We now have hundreds of declarations and treaties designed to address environmental problems. Now let's find the political courage and innovating financing needed to implement them."

The report, by UNEP scientists, presents a stark choice. Staying with a "markets first" approach will keep us burning ever more coal and oil, and raise emissions of carbon dioxide from the current 6.5 billion tonnes a year to 16 billion tonnes by 2032. Global warming will accelerate fast. But moving onto a "sustainability first" path could harness wind and solar power to keep emissions down to 8 billion tonnes, with the climate set to stabilise by mid-century.

Putting markets first would also mean almost 3 per cent of the land would be covered in concrete, as the world becomes ever more suburbanised. The figure would reach 5 per cent across Asia. But building more compact cities and encouraging people to live closer to their work could keep it below 2 per cent.

If markets let rip, says the report, we can kiss goodbye to most of the planet's surviving wild places, and say hello to a huge increase in natural disasters triggered by extreme weather and deforested hillsides. Some 85 per cent of Latin America will be carved up by development—the highest figure for any continent and a death knell for the Amazon rainforest. The rapidly melting Arctic will be peppered with mines and hydropower plants.

Take the greener road, however, and everything changes. The report paints a picture of a Europe full of train-riding, waste-recycling, telecommuting vegetarians where the suburbs and fields are given back to nature.

A quarter of all preventable illnesses are down to dirty water and air, says the report. In India alone, urban air pollution costs a billion dollars a year in disease and lost crops. Water pollution costs another $6 billion and soil erosion deprives the country of $2 billion in lost productivity. The poor, says the report, need the environment the most, not the least.

Just as soon as someone dares mention the US in a less than favourable light and its off. A bunch of patriots spouting propaganda, disinformation and misinformation. Defying all logic and discounting any truth.

couldnt have said it any better this is the truth...

Nasty neighbours

New Scientist vol 174 issue 2338 - 13 April 2002, page 9


In a warmer world will species survive new predators?


MANY ecosystems face meltdown as global warming gathers pace. A new study suggests that fewer species than expected will become extinct—but they are set for a turbulent time as the ecosystems they live in become unrecognisable.

Conventional models of warming assume that most species and ecosystems will migrate gradually towards the poles or up mountainsides. "That is too simplistic," says A. Townsend Peterson of the University of Kansas, who has investigated the likely effects in Mexico, a major centre of biological diversity. "The effects will be a lot more complicated, and often a lot more drastic."

In reality, complex communities of species with intimate relationships with each other will be blown apart, with highly unpredictable results. Climate change will "bring together new hosts and parasites, new predators and prey", says Peterson. Under such circumstances, the actual changes in temperature could be the least concern for many species.

Peterson's conclusions are based on a detailed analysis of what climate change could hold for some 1800 species of birds, mammals and butterflies in Mexico. He has mapped the current geographical range of each by combining records from collections held in natural history museums around the world with software that can identify the species' ecological niches. And he has used simulations of likely climate change to plot where species might end up in 50 years' time.

The result is a lot more complicated than conventional predictions based on climate alone. The greatest disruption to individual species, he says, may come from the "reshuffling" of ecosystems rather than the warming itself.

Take one species, an endemic Mexican bird called the West Mexican chachalaca, which is something like a cross between a turkey and a pheasant and is named after the sound of its loud cry. If climate were all that mattered the bird might expand its range by up to 75 per cent, says Peterson. But in the real world, the bird will probably lose about a quarter of its habitat and be holed up in the foothills of the Sierra Madre del Sur.

The good news is that, while up to a fifth of Mexico's endemic species may lose most of their range, many fewer are likely to become extinct than had been feared. The bad news is that the ecological changes in many places could be catastrophic. As old ecosystems disappear, new ones with unknown properties will emerge, says Peterson.

In some places in Mexico, the "turnover" of species will exceed 40 per cent, as dozens disappear or are displaced by invaders. This kind of ecological meltdown is likely in the Chihuahua desert and the Baja California peninsula in the north, he says. Meanwhile, some mountain areas could become "refugee camps" for displaced species.

The findings raise questions about the effectiveness of plans being devised by conservationists to protect wildlife during climate change by creating natural "corridors" through which animals and plants can migrate as temperatures change. If Peterson is right, then the corridors will be chaotic places full of unexpected perils.


Fred Pearce

It's started...

New Scientist vol 173 issue 2336 - 30 March 2002, page 11


A CLEAR pattern of ecological change triggered by global warming is already emerging, according to a worldwide review. And it can be seen from the polar wastes to the tropical oceans.

Butterflies, birds and other highly mobile species are moving to new habitats to survive. But creatures that can't move, such as corals, are suffering. "The implications of such large-scale, consistent responses to relatively low average rates of climate change are large," says Gian-Reto Walther of the Institute of Geobotany at the University of Hanover in Germany, who led the study. "The projected warming for the coming decades raises even more concern."

Butterflies, which can flit cross-country, are proving to be among the most sensitive indicators of global warming. Across North America and Europe they have shifted their range northwards by up to 200 kilometres. Plants lag behind, and larger animals are often hemmed in by cities and highways.

Another visible consequence of warming is the early arrival of spring. This is an almost universal phenomenon, says Walther. Plants are blossoming, eggs hatching and frogs spawning earlier. In Britain, spring butterflies are appearing an average of six days earlier than they did two decades ago.

In many cases these shifts are causing ecological chaos. Migrating birds are arriving in Europe too late to produce offspring during the height of the caterpillar season, for example.

The disruption has hit wilderness areas everywhere. In places, the planet is blooming. Mosses stretch across previously bare ground in Antarctica. But since 1998 an estimated 16 per cent of the world's coral reefs have died from bleaching, triggered by record temperatures.


Fred Pearce

The world can't wait

New Scientist vol 173 issue 2330 - 16 February 2002, page 5


METHANE has always been the joker in the greenhouse pack. Cows expel it, deforesters and rice farmers dump it into the air and landfills can free it in explosive quantities. But because the sources are so diffuse, methane never quite seems the threat to the world's climate that carbon dioxide does. This is starting to look like a mistake. CO2 remains the number one cause of global warming. But methane is not far behind. And, as we report this week (see "Cap a landfill—save the planet"), a little-known rule in the Kyoto Protocol is underplaying methane's significance.

The problem is that methane lasts in the air only about a decade. But while it's there it acts as a potent warming agent. CO2 acts more gently, but lingers for a century or more. The protocol's emissions targets lump all greenhouse gases together and assess their relative warming effects over a century—a timescale that hides the short-term impact of methane. In essence, it assumes that we only need to worry about the climate in a century's time, not tomorrow.

It would be crazy to dismantle the protocol. But with global warming apparently accelerating, it's time to think about the short term, perhaps by adding a methane target in the next negotiating round. Meanwhile, nations such as Britain, which claim they can meet their Kyoto quotas with room to spare, should target methane now. Otherwise the joker could have the last laugh.

Originally posted by Sayeh
No, using the rules prescribed by the highest court in the land, the United States Supreme Court, Bush won by 493 votes.

He won by one electoral vote, I think.

That's one of the fundamental reasons America is not a _democracy_, it is a *REPUBLIC*. So we don't have "mob rule". the electoral college knew what was best for the people and made the right choice with Bush.

We are the only country in the world that uses the electoral system. I guess places like France and Canada are governed by "mob rule"?

Big Apple under water

New Scientist vol 173 issue 2326 - 19 January 2002, page Page 9


Global warming is threatening to flood parts of New York City this century. Many of the area's rail, subway and road tunnel entrances are less than 3 metres above sea level. This leaves them vulnerable to flooding during a "hundred-year" storm. But sea levels will rise anywhere from 24 to 108 centimetres by 2080, warns Vivien Gornitz of Columbia University, which means that less severe, more frequent storms will put them at risk (Global and Planetary Change vol 32, p 61). If sea levels had been around half a metre higher during a storm in December 1992, the tunnels would have been inundated, she says.

For you Clyde-

> SOME called it a small miracle. But perhaps they spoke too soon. What they found miraculous was a report from the Bush administration earlier this month about global warming. It stated in utmost detail that the planet was indeed warming up, with many chapters and verses about the painful consequences for North America. And, mirabile dictu, it said that human activity is most probably a significant part of the cause.

---

I find it very interesting that all the posts following my own only quote media articles with no factual statistics in any of them-- still just opinion. The above quote from the Bush administration isn't even credible-- it's politically motivated and does not quote science.

I'm disappointed that none of you even followed the links I provided. Just proves my point. You don't want to know the truth. typical.

However, if you go look at the links I provided, you will see the actual scientific data in graphs charts and more, that disprove the politically, money-motivated idea of global warming.

You all give yourself too much credit to think man can affect the global environment in any drastic way. And pray tell, what makes you think that global warming, if it existed as a man-made issue, is a bad thing? A hot steamy jungle would promote lots of life.

ONCE AGAIN-- I SUGGEST YOU DISSENTERS READ THE MATERIAL I'VE PROVIDED IN ITS ENTIRETY-- GO TO THE LINKS-- AND if that doesn't convince you, then you are proving my point.

In my book, 2 + 2 = 4.

ciao

Oh, and for you jerks quoting from "New Scientist"--

I remind you this dot-com was started for financial gain, not scientific research. Not only do they tell you they rely on opinions from journalists for most of their material, but that they further specifically disclaim the accuracy of any information they publish.

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A such, it is not a credible or even valuable source-- it does not seek the truth, but seeks subscriptions. Hence it will publish only the one-side flamboyant view that the "world is doomed, doomed, doomed!!!!!!"

wise up, crackers.