Core Dump

This video also looks at whether other planets are also warming, and an Internet myth that NASA is now attributing warming to the sun. In this video I examine the importance of sources -- tracking information back to a source and making sure the source is credible. My sources are cited in the video, but I'll also post them here. Sources are also cited throughout my climate change series. These videos are not a personal opinion or a theory of my own; I'm not a climate scientist or a researcher and I have no qualifications to do anything other than report on what real climate scientists have discovered through their research. So there's no point in disagreeing with me. If you dislike their conclusions, take it up with the researchers I cite. If I've made a mistake in reporting their conclusions, please pooint out the mistake and I will happily correct it. If you think you know better than the experts, write a paper and have it published in a respected, peer-reviewed scientific journal.

Labels: environment, science

With marauding Asian carp on the Great Lakes' doorstep, the federal government has crafted a $78.5 million battle plan that offers no assurance of thwarting an invasion and doesn't use the most promising weapon available to fight it off.

The surest way to prevent the huge, hungry carp from gaining a foothold in the lakes and threatening their $7 billion fishing industry is to sever the link between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River basin, created by engineers in Chicago more than a century ago.

The strategy released by the Obama administration this week agrees only to conduct a long-range study of that idea, which could take years. The government also refuses to shut down two navigational locks on Chicago waterways that could provide an easy pathway for the carp into the lakes, although it promises to consider opening them less often.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment

Labels: environment

The melting ice poses different threats. Barber said the ice is full of toxic contaminants, which are released back into the environment when the ice melts. Wildlife in the Arctic is negatively impacted by the loss of ice and degraded habitat. Animals that live in the Arctic will also experience more competition for resources as species move north. And finally, the melting ice contributes to global warming, and while there was no prediction made as to when we might expect the Arctic to be mostly melted, the impacts will be apparent in the world long before most of the ice is lost. Barber said the warming of the Arctic influenced the jet stream, which then causes warm air to move further north.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment, science

The team used the GRACE satellites to measure tiny fluctuations in the planet’s gravitational field. Researchers often use them to track changes in ice sheets, but this turning these orbiters on California allowed them to see the how much the pull on the planet had lessened there, and thus how much water had been lost from the ground.

The satellites can detect changes in the amount of water in a region but not how much is left. Regardless of how much water remains in the aquifer, the researchers note that a declining water table will degrade water quality and will eventually force Californians to drill deeper wells [Science News]. That’s bad news not just for Californians: the Central Valley accounts for an estimated one-twelfth of the nation’s agricultural production.

“The numbers we’re getting out of this analysis point to groundwater use at unsustainable rates,” said Professor Jay Famiglietti of the University of California, Irvine. “It’s leading to declining water tables, decreased crop sizes, and continued land subsidence – something that has been going on in the Central Valley for decades”

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment

These incidents took place at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis, an Environment Canada facility located at the university. In addition, Dr. Andrew Weaver, a Canadian climate scientist working at the University of Victoria and a key contributor to the Nobel prize-winning work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, had his office broken into twice late last year, and his papers rummaged through and a dead computer stolen. "The key thing is to try to find anybody who's involved in any aspect of the IPCC and find something that you can...take out of context," Dr. Weaver said.

Labels: environment, science

Claim 3: Global warming stopped a decade ago; the earth has been cooling since then.

1998 was the world's warmest year in the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre’s records; recent years have been cooler; therefore, the previous century's global warming trend is over, right?

Anyone with even a glancing familiarity with statistics should be able to spot the weaknesses of that argument. Given the extended duration of the warming trend, the expected (and observed) variations in the rate of increase and the range of uncertainties in the temperature measurements and forecasts, a decade's worth of mild interruption is too small a deviation to prove a break in the pattern, climatologists say.

Recently, Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein asked four independent statisticians to look for trends in the temperature data sets without telling them what the numbers represented. "The experts found no true temperature declines over time," he wrote.

Labels: environment, science

Let's look at the amount of money being spent on lobbying efforts by the fossil fuel industry compared to environmental groups to see their relative influence. According to Center for Public Integrity, there are currently 2,663 climate change lobbyists working on Capitol Hill. That's five lobbyists for every member of Congress. Climate lobbyists working for major industries outnumber those working for environmental, health, and alternative energy groups by more than seven to one. For the second quarter of 2009, here is a list compiled by the Center for Public Integrity of all the oil, gas, and coal mining groups that spent more than $100,000 on lobbying (this includes all lobbying, not just climate change lobbying):

Chevron $6,485,000
Exxon Mobil $4,657,000
BP America $4,270,000
ConocoPhillips $3,300,000
American Petroleum Institute $2,120,000
Marathon Oil Corporation $2,110,000
Peabody Investments Corp $1,110,000
Bituminous Coal Operators Association $980,000
Shell Oil Company $950,000
Arch Coal, Inc $940,000
Williams Companies $920,000
Flint Hills Resources $820,000
Occidental Petroleum Corporation $794,000
National Mining Association $770,000
American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity $714,000
Devon Energy $695,000
Sunoco $585,000
Independent Petroleum Association of America $434,000
Murphy Oil USA, Inc $430,000
Peabody Energy $420,000
Rio Tinto Services, Inc $394,000
America's Natural Gas Alliance $300,000
Interstate Natural Gas Association of America $290,000
El Paso Corporation $261,000
Spectra Energy $279,000
National Propane Gas Association $242,000
National Petrochemical & Refiners Association $240,000
Nexen, Inc $230,000
Denbury Resources $200,000
Nisource, Inc $180,000
Petroleum Marketers Association of America $170,000
Valero Energy Corporation $160,000
Bituminous Coal Operators Association $131,000
Natural Gas Supply Association $114,000
Tesoro Companies $119,000

Here are the environmental groups that spent more than $100,000:

Environmental Defense Action Fund $937,500
Nature Conservancy $650,000
Natural Resources Defense Council $277,000
Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund $243,000
National Parks and Conservation Association $175,000
Sierra Club $120,000
Defenders of Wildlife $120,000
Environmental Defense Fund $100,000

If you add it all up, the fossil fuel industry outspent the environmental groups by $36.8 million to $2.6 million in the second quarter, a factor of 14 to 1. To be fair, not all of that lobbying is climate change lobbying, but that affects both sets of numbers. The numbers don't even include lobbying money from other industries lobbying against climate change, such as the auto industry, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, etc.

Friends of Science, a Calgary-based non-profit group, is running a national radio advertising campaign mocking the whole idea of climate change that has mainstream environmental groups miffed.

The groups are claiming that funding for the anti-global warming effort is coming from the oil and gas industry.

James Hoggan, chair of the David Suzuki Foundation, lashed out Tuesday at Friends of Science in a speech in Toronto, calling it one of several “industry front groups” in North America that are trying to create uncertainty about the existence of climate change to undermine next month's United Nations climate change talks in Copenhagen.
The ads, which claim the planet has actually been becoming cooler in the past 10 years, have been running this month in 15 cities, including Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary, according to the Friends of Science group.

Experts around the world believed the ice was recovering because satellite images showed it expanding. But David Barber says the thick, multiyear frozen sheets crucial to the northern ecosystem have been replaced by thin “rotten” ice which can't support the weight of the bears.

“It caught us all by surprise because we were expecting there to be multiyear sea ice – the whole world thought it was multiyear sea ice,” said Dr. Barber, who just returned from an expedition to the Beaufort Sea.

“Unfortunately what we found was that the multiyear [ice] has all but disappeared. What's left is this remnant, rotten ice.”

Permanent ice, which is normally up to 10 metres thick, was easily pierced by the research ship, said Dr. Barber, who holds the Canada research chair in Arctic science at the University of Manitoba.

The team finally reached what it thought was stable ice, only to watch a crack appear just as researchers were preparing to descend onto the floe.

“As I watched, over the course of five minutes, the entire multiyear ice floe broke up into pieces,” Dr. Barber said. “This floe was 10 miles across. Something that's twice the size of Winnipeg, it just broke up right in front of our eyes.”

The ice is unable to withstand battering waves and storms because global warming is rapidly melting it at a rate of 70,000 square kilometres each year, he said.

Multiyear sea ice used to cover 90 per cent of the Arctic basin, Dr. Barber said. It now covers roughly 19 per cent. Where it used to be up to 10 metres thick, it's now two metres at most.

I apologize on behalf of my profession.

If it's true that Canadians and Americans have become less concerned about the potential impact of climate change, and that more consider global warming a hoax, some blame can certainly be directed at the news media.

"The media (are) giving an equal seat at the table to a lot of non-qualified scientists," Julio Betancourt, a senior scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, told a group of environment and energy reporters during a week-long learning retreat in New Mexico.

I was among them, listening to Betancourt and two of his colleagues describe the measurable impacts climate change is having on the U.S. southwest. Drought. More frequent and damaging forest fires. Northward migration of forest and animal species. Hotter, longer growing seasons. Less snow pack. Earlier snow melt.

"The scientific evidence reported in peer-reviewed journals is growing by the day, and it suggests the pace of climate change has surpassed the worst-case scenarios predicted just a few years ago.

The emails, from what I've read, do show that not all scientists agree, that some scientists don't like other scientists, and that some scientists are struggling with the complexity of their work. What these emails do not show is that there's any conspiracy or that consensus around the reality of human-influenced global warming is beginning to crack.

Still, that won't stop the skeptics from cherry picking what's in those emails and claiming this is some kind of smoking gun that will derail Copenhagen. The blogosphere is abuzz, and news media are never ones to turn down a juicy controversy. The timing of the hack makes it all the more suspicious, but no less dramatic.

It's a shame.

Black, they thunder, is white, and – skilled and persistent communicators that they are, with plentiful political, media and industry backing – they manage to convince, or at least confuse, many people.

Keep that in mind when considering the hacking of 4,000 emails and documents from the Climate Research Unit at Britain's University of East Anglia, a major centre of climate change study.

Climate skeptics claim a few bits extracted from those generally innocuous discussions among climate scientists – misunderstood or taken out of context – constitute a scandal. The gist: the scientists faked and fudged numbers, then masked their chicanery by attacking their opponents.

They skeptics got what they wanted from what many journalists, apparently without embarrassment, call "Climategate." We're now parsing emails and reporting demands for inquiries instead of focusing on the evidence of human-made climate change.

Tellingly, coverage of a new report that shows greenhouse gas emissions are rising and impacts are happening much faster than previously forecast was dwarfed by excitement over the emails.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment, science

It's getting pretty clear what happened. These academics, who were influential in framing the UN climate report on which most of the political decisions on what to do about man-made global warming depend, became alarmed when the data over the past few years didn't support the predictions of their models. At this point they had a choice: to accept the new data and see what that did to the theory, or simply to cover it up because they were convinced the basic theory was correct and the issue was too important to allow the theory to come under serious doubt.

Evidence of vast conspiracy is sorely lacking. Ditto evidence disproving the scientific consensus on climate change. This isn't the "nail in the coffin" of anything. However, the emails do prompt some legit questions about transparency and how professional researchers respond to criticism in the age of the armchair scientist.

In fact, the whole reason the CRU seems to have been hacked is that the Unit was fighting off requests for access to the data sets it used to put together its climate models. This is one of the issues that gets discussed in the e-mails. Basically, some of the CRU researchers didn't want to release the data to people who weren't trained scientists because they were tired of spending their time fighting with bloggers and wanted to focus on research. Which is great, except for two things: First, from what I'm reading it looks like there might have been some ethical lapses in how the researchers went about blocking the release of data; Second, when you block the release of data, no matter what your real reason is, people will assume it's because you're hiding something nefarious. One of the positive outcomes of this whole hacking debacle is that it's forcing some discussion about when circling the wagons becomes protectionism, and might lead to the climate change data sets becoming more open source. Frankly, I think that's a good thing.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment, science

For 31 years, the IMO has operated a policy agreed by the 169 governments that make up the organisation which allows most ships to burn bunker fuel.

Christian Eyde Moller, boss of the DK shipping company in Rotterdam, recently described this as ‘just waste oil, basically what is left over after all the cleaner fuels have been extracted from crude oil. It’s tar, the same as asphalt. It’s the cheapest and dirtiest fuel in the world’.

Bunker fuel is also thick with sulphur. IMO rules allow ships to burn fuel containing up to 4.5 per cent sulphur. That is 4,500 times more than is allowed in car fuel in
the European Union. The sulphur comes out of ship funnels as tiny particles, and it is these that get deep into lungs.

Thanks to the IMO’s rules, the largest ships can each emit as much as 5,000 tons of sulphur in a year – the same as 50million typical cars, each emitting an average of 100 grams of sulphur a year.

With an estimated 800million cars driving around the planet, that means 16 super-ships can emit as much sulphur as the world fleet of cars.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, economics and finance, environment

Labels: economics and finance, environment, photography, places

New satellite information shows that ice sheets in Greenland and western Antarctica continue to shrink faster than scientists thought and in some places are already in runaway melt mode.

British scientists for the first time calculated changes in the height of the vulnerable but massive ice sheets and found them especially bad at their edges. That's where warmer water eats away from below. In some parts of Antarctica, ice sheets have been losing several metres a year in thickness since 2003, according to a paper published online in the journal Nature.

Some of those areas are about a kilometre thick, so they've still got plenty of ice to burn through. But the drop in thickness is speeding up. In parts of Antarctica, the yearly rate of thinning from 2003 to 2007 is 50-per-cent higher than it was from 1995 to 2003. These new measurements, based on 50 million laser readings from a NASA satellite, confirm what some of the more pessimistic scientists thought: The melting along the crucial edges of the two major ice sheets is accelerating and is in a self-feeding loop. The more the ice melts, the more water surrounds and eats away at the remaining ice.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment

Labels: environment, photography

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment, science

But weather alone doesn’t explain the early severity of the disease this year. We’ve had wet, cool summers in the past, but it’s never been this bad. Instead we have to look at two other factors: the origin of the tomato plants many of us cultivate, and the renewed interest in gardening.

According to plant pathologists, this killer round of blight began with a widespread infiltration of the disease in tomato starter plants. Large retailers like Home Depot, Kmart, Lowe’s and Wal-Mart bought starter plants from industrial breeding operations in the South and distributed them throughout the Northeast. (Fungal spores, which can travel up to 40 miles, may also have been dispersed in transit.) Once those infected starter plants arrived at the stores, they were purchased and planted, transferring their pathogens like tiny Trojan horses into backyard and community gardens. Perhaps this is why the Northeast was hit so viciously: instead of being spread through large farms, the blight sneaked through lots of little gardens, enabling it to escape the attention of the people who track plant diseases.

Labels: environment, food

Labels: environment, space

Steven Goodbred, an Earth scientist at Vanderbilt University, said large gravel, marine fossils and other unusual deposits found in sediment cores across the area date to 2,300 years ago.

The size and distribution of material would require a high velocity wave and strong currents to move it, he said, and it is unlikely that short bursts produced in a storm would suffice.

"If we're wrong, it was one heck of a storm," said Dr Goodbred.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment, history

Labels: environment, video

What makes up our world? Dive into this photo-mosaic portrait of the Earth to see it through the eyes of users like you. It's made up of hundreds of photos of the natural world, each submitted by users to My Shot. (Submit a photo) Move the yellow square over an area you would like to explore, click, and go. Double-click on an image to see more information about it. Keep clicking—and diving deeper into the Infinite Photograph—to get a truly boundless picture of Earth.

Labels: environment, photography

Labels: environment, news, places

Sometimes known as Wat Lan Kuad, or Temple of a Million Bottles, the monks now use the empties to construct almost everything on the site, from the crematorium to the toilets.

The disused bottles don’t fade, provide good lighting and are easy to clean. And the eco-friendliness does not just stop at glass – mosaics around the temple, mostly of Buddha, are made out of bottle caps.

Labels: environment

Labels: environment, science

Labels: environment, science

About two years ago, I realised that the military in
various countries were starting to do climate change scenarios in-house --
scenarios that started with the scientific predictions about rising
temperatures, falling crop yields, and other physical effects, and examined
what that would do to politics and strategy.
The scenarios predicted failed states proliferating because
governments couldn't feed their people; waves of climate refugees washing
up against the borders of more fortunate countries; even wars between
countries that shared the same rivers. So I started interviewing everybody
I could get access to: not only senior military people but scientists,
diplomats and politicians.
About seventy interviews, a dozen countries and eighteen
months later, I have reached four conclusions that I didn't even suspect
when I began the process. The first is simply this: the scientists are
really scared. Their observations over the past two or three years suggest
that everything is happening a lot faster than their climate models
predicted.
This creates a dilemma for them, because for the past decade they have been
struggling against a well-funded campaign that cast doubt on the phenomenon
of climate change. Now, finally, people and even governments are listening.
Even in the United States, the world headquarters of climate change denial,
85 percent of the population now sees climate change as a major issue, and
both presidential candidates in last month's election promised 80 percent
cuts in American emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment

Labels: environment, photography, places, space

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment, science

Labels: computing, environment

The rule changes include getting wolves off the Endangered Species List, allowing power plants to operate near national parks, relaxing regulations for factory farm waste and making it easier for mountaintop coal-mining operations. None have found much favour with environmental groups.

Labels: environment, politics

“Having such extreme melting so far north, where it is usually colder than the southern regions is extremely interesting,” Professor Tedesco said. “In 2007, the record occurred in southern Greenland, mostly at high elevation areas where in 2008 extreme snowmelt occurred along the northern coast.”

Tedesco says that the runoff is 88 percent higher than the 1979 – 2007 mean. In addition, analysis of ground measurements from World Meteorological Organization automatic weather stations located close to where the record snowmelt was observed indicate surface/air maximum temperatures up to 3° Celsius above average.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment

Underground stores of methane are important because scientists believe their sudden release has in the past been responsible for rapid increases in global temperatures, dramatic changes to the climate, and even the mass extinction of species. Scientists aboard a research ship that has sailed the entire length of Russia's northern coast have discovered intense concentrations of methane – sometimes at up to 100 times background levels – over several areas covering thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf.

In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through "methane chimneys" rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a "lid" to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment

Labels: environment

• Dr. Jeff Masters' Wunderblog on the Weather Underground site is probably the best weather-related blog on the Internet. Masters is a meterologist and has access to information and resources that most weatherbloggers lack. The Weather Underground site has several other blogs that also worth looking at.
• Brendan Loy is a self-described weather nerd who gained his 15 minutes of fame by being one of the first bloggers to predict that Hurricane Katrina might hit New Orleans. He's the first person interviewed in Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke movie about the disaster. Although he's a lawyer, not a meterologist, he does know his stuff and unlike some other bloggers, he's not prone to sensationalism.
• Alan Sullivan is a sailor, poet, aspiring SF novelist, and weather blogger living in South Florida.
• Eric Berger writes for the Houston Chronicle.
• Eye of the Storm is a weather blog from Charles Fenwick.
  

Labels: environment

The geopolitical implications of this gathering crisis for world oil supply 2010-15 are immense. The risk of further military interventions and conflicts in the Middle East is clearly high. Total world oil reserves are estimated at 2.5-2.9 trillion barrels, of which half has now been already consumed, while half of the 51 oil-producing countries reported output declines in 2006. Non-Opec production is expected to peak and decline within the next five years, driven mainly by burgeoning demand from China and the US, together with restricted output from Iraq. Then in the following five years Opec's diminishing spare capacity will probably become increasingly unable to accommodate short-term fluctuations, depending on how fast world demand grows and how extensively Opec invests in new capacity. The latter may well not raise production capacity high enough or quickly enough, whether for political reasons or because internal decision-making is too slow or the security environment too hostile.

Labels: environment, politics

THE last ice age 13,000 years ago took hold in just one year, more than ten times quicker than previously believed, scientists have warned.
Rather than a gradual cooling over a decade, the ice age plunged Europe into the deep freeze, German Research Centre for Geosciences at Potsdam said.

Cold, stormy conditions caused by an abrupt shift in atmospheric circulation froze the continent almost instantly during the Younger Dryas less than 13,000 years ago – a very recent period on a geological scale.

The new findings will add to fears of a serious risk of this happening again in the UK and western Europe – and soon.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment

Need I note that Bangladesh and Egypt are both hot-zone countries, as are other riot-prone countries like Indonesia and China?

When millions of people have no source of protein besides poultry, and H5N1 breaks out in that poultry, we can't expect that culls will go smoothly. We can't expect that culls will happen at all.

Nor can we expect to drive to work in bio-fuelled cars, listening with a clear conscience to the sad news from Asia and Africa.

Labels: environment, health, politics

Labels: environment, photography

Below is a complete listing of the articles in "How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic," a series by Coby Beck containing responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming. There are four separate taxonomies; arguments are divided by:

* Stages of Denial,
* Scientific Topics,
* Types of Argument, and
* Levels of Sophistication.

Labels: environment, science

Recent market research indicates that up to 40 percent of households surveyed in selected metropolitan areas want to live in walkable urban areas, said Leinberger. The desire is also substantiated by real estate prices for urban residential space, which are 40 to 200 percent higher than in traditional suburban neighborhoods -- this price variation can be found both in cities and small communities equipped with walkable infrastructure, he said.

The result is an oversupply of depreciating suburban housing and a pent-up demand for walkable urban space, which is unlikely to be met for a number of years. That's mainly, according to Leinberger, because the built environment changes very slowly; and also because governmental policies and zoning laws are largely prohibitive to the construction of complicated high-density developments.

Labels: environment, society

Something else happened that day, too. Mike Lazaridis, co-inventor of the BlackBerry, pledged another $50-million of his own money for his brainchild, a tiny outfit called the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, just a few dozen miles down the 401 from the doomed GM plant. The news scarcely rated a mention. But why should it? A handful of big brains arguing about Big Bangs simply can't compete with a thousand angry auto workers who've lost their livelihoods.

Mr. Lazaridis is worried about the future, too, but not of union work. He's worried whether we'll have enough brains. "The number of PhDs the Chinese plan to graduate within the next 10 years is greater than the entire population of Canada," he says. He is a tall, soft-spoken man with a shock of snow-white hair. "We can't beat them on scale. We have to do it by smarts. The only way to get ahead of that tsunami is to invest in quality."

Mr. Lazaridis and his team are among the most successful wealth-creators in the world. The company he started, Research in Motion, is the most valuable enterprise in Canada. It's worth nearly $75-billion - around eight times more than all of General Motors. Its products are in demand worldwide, and its prospects look extremely bright. Over the next two years, RIM will hire as many people as GM is laying off just a few miles away

To the surprise of no one, the Senate on Friday failed to pass a bill that would have taken the fight against global warming right to the streets and smokestacks of the United States. With a hostile administration in the White House and a group of entrenched Republican lawmakers who still haven't grasped the economic reality that failing to slow climate change will ultimately cost the country far more money than combating it, there was little chance of passage this year. Fortunately, though, the political climate is changing as fast as planet Earth's.

Labels: environment, politics

n his study's scenario, methane frozen together with water in what's known as a clathrate (or gas hydrate) became destabilized at lower latitudes and began to release methane gas. The warming this gas induced began a cascade of clathrate destabilization running up towards the poles, acting as a runaway feedback mechanism that rapidly changed the earth's climate from glacial to tropical.

Kennedy chose the period known as the Marinoan deglaciation because he sees parallels from that distant event with the rapid rise in temperatures the Earth is now experiencing due to increased so-called radiative forcing from higher levels of greenhouse gases.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment

Echoing comments last week by Willie Walsh, chief executive of British Airways, Branson said: "Oil prices will continue to rise due to a combination of global demand and falling reserves. The strong airlines will survive, but one or more major US carriers will go out of business this year."
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The sentiment was echoed by the aviation analyst Chris Avery, of JP Morgan, who calculates that most of the major European carriers face huge increases to their fuel bills as their hedging positions run out. Avery said BA will have to pay an extra £1bn in fuel costs this year, while Lufthansa will have to find an extra €2bn (£1.6bn) by 2009. Virgin Atlantic's fuel bill is 70pc hedged over the next year.

The world's premier energy monitor is preparing a sharp downward revision of its oil-supply forecast, a shift that reflects deepening pessimism over whether oil companies can keep abreast of booming demand.

The Paris-based International Energy Agency is in the middle of its first attempt to comprehensively assess the condition of the world's top 400 oil fields. Its findings won't be released until November, but the bottom line is already clear: Future crude supplies could be far tighter than previously thought.

A pessimistic supply outlook from the IEA could further rattle an oil market that already has seen crude prices rocket over $130 a barrel, double what they were a year ago. U.S. benchmark crude broke a record for the fourth day in a row, rising 3.3% Wednesday to close at $133.17 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Labels: environment, politics, technology

The $119,000 Kenworth, marketed as the company's most aerodynamic truck ever, has a streamlined wedge shape and eliminates projections such as the smokestacks. The result, Rethwisch said, is an increase from 4.5 mpg in the Peterbilt to the Kenworth's 6.5 mpg, which saves him upward of $2,000 a month at the pump.

"The Peterbilt is the classiest and coolest-looking truck around," said Rethwisch, who hauls dairy products from Wisconsin to California and goes home loaded with produce. "But cool only goes so far when fuel prices are so high."

Labels: environment, technology

Labels: environment, photography

Labels: environment

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'

Labels: environment, politics

Remember the buzz about killer bees? So do we, fondly. Because it turns out bees are really important, but since late 2006 they've been disappearing for reasons nobody can quite explain. And it's not just honey supplies that will suffer if the bees bite it. You can also kiss your fruits and veggies good-bye. "You could have the perfect field, soil, and sun, and if the pollinator was not there you'd have a vine and no fruit," says Dr. Jeff Pettis, head USDA bee researcher. With honeybees pollinating more than a quarter of the world's food supply, that's a lot of empty vines (and stomachs). The financial impact of a bee-free season would be $75 billion. Perhaps Albert Einstein put it best: "If the bee disappears from the surface of the Earth, man will have no more than four years to live."

Labels: environment

If only we had called it "climate climax". Climate climax sounds like something worth worrying about when Ban Ki-moon and the UN's latest report call for urgent action. Alas, global warming sounds all too soothing, especially for those living in Skegness.

We have been slow to take up the challenge presented by global warming. This country has its problems: turkeys looking forward to Christmas have been prematurely slaughtered. But there's a wonderful crop of apples, some still on the trees, nestling among the leaves in November. As a nation, the British have always had a problem with how to get agitated. It was one reason for inventing cricket. Imagine if a game of football lasted for five days.

Science fiction writers find difficulty in dealing with the global threat, never mind recycling. There has always been a journalistic flavour to science fiction. If an SF catastrophe happens, it happens right now, and LA goes promptly up in smoke. If aliens from Alpha Centauri invade us five centuries from today - well, that's philosophy, isn't it? They will come to teach us to behave or maybe to wipe us out entirely. To serve us right. We have been so self-indulgent, so foolish, we of the self-promoting homo sapiens species.

We have multiplied beyond our means, just as SF always said. No one took much notice. Except, that is, for Gaia. As James Lovelock has said, Gaia stands for Earth with its rocks, seas and atmosphere, together with all living things: Mother Earth. And mothers won't stand for too much abuse. Mothers can get nasty.

Labels: environment, SF

For those of us raised in the Roman faith, there's nothing strange about mixing wine and church, even before lunch. So, fortified by fizzy, I step onto the 12:30 to Paris, walking past Greenpeace demonstrators who are here to support Eurostar's green initiatives (the trains to the continent are deemed carbon-neutral, a claim verified by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth). One activist tells me to protest against the construction of the third runway at Heathrow; I tell him that if I never visit Heathrow again, I'll die happy.

“Welcome to an historic journey,” the conductor announces as we roll out of the station and into the heart of Europe's largest engineering project, which has been completed, improbably, on time and on budget. The station renovation and construction of a dedicated high-speed track from London to the Channel Tunnel cost more than $10-billion; the new route shaves 20 minutes off the London-Paris run, bringing it down to two hours and 15 minutes.

Labels: environment, technology

The picture is just as serious in the upper Great Lakes and is particularly grave in Lake Superior, where water levels have hovered below average since 1998 and, based on provisional data, set record lows in August and September. It is the longest stretch of below-average readings at Lake Superior since the Corps of Engineers started tracking the Great Lakes’ levels in 1918.

On average, 240 million tons of cargo travel across the Great Lakes every year. The United States fleet circulating in the Great Lakes has 63 ships, which have lost a total of 8,000 tons of cargo capacity for every inch of water the lakes have fallen below normal this year, said James H. I. Weakley, president of the carriers’ association. Those 8,000 tons, he said, correspond to enough iron ore to produce 6,000 cars, or enough coal to provide electricity to the Detroit area for three hours, or enough stone to build 24 houses.

Labels: environment

Labels: environment

In the Southwest this past summer, the outlook was equally sobering. A catastrophic reduction in the flow of the Colorado River — which mostly consists of snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains — has always served as a kind of thought experiment for water engineers, a risk situation from the outer edge of their practical imaginations. Some 30 million people depend on that water. A greatly reduced river would wreak chaos in seven states: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. An almost unfathomable legal morass might well result, with farmers suing the federal government; cities suing cities; states suing states; Indian nations suing state officials; and foreign nations (by treaty, Mexico has a small claim on the river) bringing international law to bear on the United States government. In addition, a lesser Colorado River would almost certainly lead to a considerable amount of economic havoc, as the future water supplies for the West’s industries, agriculture and growing municipalities are threatened. As one prominent Western water official described the possible future to me, if some of the Southwest’s largest reservoirs empty out, the region would experience an apocalypse, “an Armageddon.”

Labels: environment

Labels: environment, technology

Labels: environment, history

Intuitively what the market was doing made sense. Highly improbable events were especially unsettling. The person who insured others against an unlikely event faced not only the problem of judging its likelihood; even if he knew how often it would occur, he didn’t know when it would occur. Even if you had complete certainty that a U.S. stock-market crash happened just once every 25 years, you still didn’t know which year. If you had set up a business to sell crash insurance in January 1987, you would have been bankrupted by the crash in October; on the other hand, if you had gone into the business in 1988, you would have gotten rich. There was no justice in it. The catastrophic risk-taker was a bit like a card counter at the blackjack table allowed to play only a few hands: yes, the odds are in his favor, but he doesn’t always get to play long enough for the odds to determine the outcome.

Labels: environment, politics

This July's major loss of sea ice will amplify sea ice loss the remainder of the summer, due to a positive feedback loop. As sea ice melts in response to rising temperatures, more of the dark ocean is exposed, allowing it to absorb more of the sun's energy. This further increases air temperatures, ocean temperatures, and ice melt in a process know as the "ice-albedo feedback" (albedo means how much sunlight a surface reflects). The July 2007 ice loss may mean that a runaway "ice-albedo feedback" has taken hold, which will amplify until the Arctic Ocean is entirely ice-free later this century. Other scientists will disagree, but I believe that such a runaway ice-albedo feedback has taken hold.

The melting of the Arctic sea ice will not raise ocean levels appreciably, since the ice is already floating in the ocean. However, it will bring warmer temperatures to the Arctic, which will accelerate the melting of the Greenland Ice Cap. This ice sheet holds enough water to raise sea level 20 feet--though much less melting is expected this century, with only a 0.6-1.9 foot sea level rise predicted. Loss of Arctic sea ice will also dramatically change the global weather and precipitation patterns. For example, the jet stream should move further north, bringing more precipitation to the Arctic, and more frequent droughts over the U.S. In any case, the reduced Artic sea ice should give us another delayed start to winter in the Northern Hemisphere this year.

Labels: environment

The most important thing to remember about the drowning of New Orleans is that it wasn't a natural disaster. It was a man-made disaster, created by lousy engineering, misplaced priorities and pork-barrel politics. Katrina was not the Category 5 killer the Big Easy had always feared; it was a Category 3 storm that missed New Orleans, where it was at worst a weak 2. The city's defenses should have withstood its surges, and if they had we never would have seen the squalor in the Superdome, the desperation on the rooftops, the shocking tableau of the Mardi Gras city underwater for weeks. We never would have heard the comment "Heckuva job, Brownie." The Federal Emergency Management Agency (fema) was the scapegoat, but the real culprit was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which bungled the levees that formed the city's man-made defenses and ravaged the wetlands that once formed its natural defenses. Americans were outraged by the government's response, but they still haven't come to grips with the government's responsibility for the catastrophe.

They should. Two years after Katrina, the effort to protect coastal Louisiana from storms and restore its vanishing wetlands has become one of the biggest government extravaganzas since the moon mission—and the Army Corps is running the show, with more money and power than ever. Many of the same coastal scientists and engineers who sounded alarms about the vulnerability of New Orleans long before Katrina are warning that the Army Corps is poised to repeat its mistakes—and extend them along the entire Louisiana coast. If you liked Katrina, they say, you'll love what's coming next.

Labels: environment, places, politics

Labels: environment

We only have one planet to experiment with, and unexpected side effects and the consequences of these actions on a massive scale are so hard to predict. In the new trilogy, the big projects they do -- particularly the release of the engineered lichen -- are incredibly dangerous and unadvisable. What I wanted to suggest is that if things got desperate enough, there are governments that could decide to do things on their own and not wait for the rest of the world to approve. That could get bad.

In terms of geo-engineering, there's hardly a single project I think would be advisable. But if we fail to decarbonize, and it's 5 or 7 degrees hotter in 2050, there will be scientists and engineers saying they can fix it all with a silver bullet. And then the idea will be on the table.

If you pour salt in the North Atlantic because it's gotten too fresh and stalled the Gulf Stream, as in my book, then you're doing something relatively benign and un-dangerous. Salt would quickly diffuse; it wouldn't change much in the environment. It would be an attempt at remediation.

Labels: environment, SF

Labels: environment

When I look at all of this, I see a handful of the 100 large solar system bodies showing some evidence of local warming (Jupiter’s spot), some evidence of systemic warming with known causes that are a lot more likely than the Sun heating up (like well-understood orbital variations), and some evidence that any warming experienced by these bodies is possibly being exaggerated in the reporting.

I also see cherry-picking, with no mention of the other planets and moons in the solar system.

Labels: environment, science

In recent interviews with The Miami Herald and other media, Proenza has strongly criticized leaders of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for spending millions of dollars on a public-relations campaign when hurricane forecasters deal with budget shortfalls.

One of his main concerns has been the imminent demise of a key weather satellite called QuikScat, launched in 1999 and long past its designed lifetime.

No replacement currently is in development and the loss of QuikScat could diminish the accuracy of some hurricane forecasts by up to 16 percent, Proenza and other experts have said. …

Labels: environment, politics

Solar power from both the Moon and from satellites would provide energy for operations in space and could be beamed down to Earth using either lasers or microwaves. The great advantage of beamed power is that it does not have to be transmitted across the giant transcontinental grids as it done today. Multiple solar power satellites, along with a large set of arrays on the Moon, would be the basis of a system that would be far more robust and reliable than our current one, which suffers from occasional blackouts such as the one suffered along the US East Coast in August 2003, or the terrorist campaign that is being carried out today against the Iraqi electricity grid.

Labels: environment, space

Labels: environment, technology

Labels: environment

think I was first struck by the potential impact of climate change when a US climate scientist I met at a conference told me he had bought a house in Canada "because it makes good financial sense: that's where the water will be".

At the time, the fact that someone close to the latest developments in climate science should make financial decisions based on climate change was a pretty convincing argument.

Labels: environment, politics

The seismic jolt that unleashed the deadly Solomons tsunami this week lifted an entire island metres out of the sea, destroying some of the world's most pristine coral reefs.

In an instant, the grinding of the Earth's tectonic plates in the 8.0 magnitude earthquake Monday forced the island of Ranongga up three metres (10 foot).

Submerged reefs that once attracted scuba divers from around the globe lie exposed and dying after the quake raised the mountainous landmass, which is 32-kilometres (20-miles) long and 8-kilometres (5-miles) wide.

Corals that used to form an underwater wonderland of iridescent blues, greens and reds now bleach under the sun, transforming into a barren moonscape surrounding the island.

The stench of rotting fish and other marine life stranded on the reefs when the seas receded is overwhelming and the once vibrant coral is dry and crunches underfoot.

Labels: environment

Lori Fenton at the Carl Sagan Center, Mountain View, California, and colleagues looked at maps of Mars's 'albedo', a measure of how much light reflects off a surface. By comparing a map from 1976-78 with one from 1999-2000, they found "some pretty dramatic changes", says Fenton. In particular, the southern highlands region of Mars had darkened significantly.

The darkening is thanks to the clearance of light-coloured dust that covers the planet's darker bedrock, they propose. When the Sun's light hits dark rock it warms the surface, and the heat is kept in by the atmosphere. This warming kicks up winds, which swirl any dust around and can even make dust devils. This sweeps the light-coloured dust into pockets, revealing more bedrock and causing further heating.

Labels: environment, space

Labels: environment

Labels: environment, history

Before the greenish radar scans, before blurry photographs from atellites, before television or television meteorologists, and before the snappy twenty-fourhour-a-day Weather Channel, there was this: the faint flicker of lightning and the distant growl of thunder on the prairie’s horizon. This was what amounted to a storm warning on the plains.

The far, open sky filled with mountainous cauliflower clouds that grew fat with rain and hail, and those dark olive-hued clouds could conceal the most powerful force known in nature—or not. No one knew for sure, no mere mortal could; after all, the tornado, or cyclone as it was called on the plains, was an act of God, an Old testament punishment for ill deeds or a test of faith. It was capricious and deadly, leaving the living to bear witness that the great wind came straight from heaven, or so it seemed.

Labels: books, environment, history

The draft report says that hundreds of millions of Africans and tens of millions of Latin Americans who now have water will be short of it in less than 20 years. By 2050, more than a billion people in Asia could face water shortages. By 2080, water shortages could threaten 1.1 billion to 3.2 billion people, depending on the level of greenhouse gases that cars and industry spew into the air.

It says that death rates for the world’s poor from conditions worsened by the changes global warming brings, like malnutrition and diarrhea, will rise by 2030. By 2080, 200 million to 600 million people could be hungry because of global warming’s effects, it says.

Labels: environment

Labels: environment

“Please be advised that all foreign travel requests (SF 1175 requests) and any future travel requests involving or potentially involving climate change, sea ice and/or polar bears will also require a memorandum from the regional director to the director indicating who’ll be the official spokesman on the trip and the one responding to questions on these issues, particularly polar bears.”

The sample memorandums, described as to be used in writing travel requests, indicate that the employee seeking permission to travel “understands the administration’s position on climate change, polar bears, and sea ice and will not be speaking on or responding to these issues.”

Labels: environment, politics

Wall Street investment tycoon Henry Kravis, the original "Barbarian at the Gate," is buying into Texas coal plants so they won't exist. The great and the good at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, were corporate green all the way. Austin has proclaimed itself the world capital of the war on climate change. Britain's Stern Report on the economics of climate change proves that it's cheaper to run a world than to wreck it. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has figured out that a climate crisis is as scary as a nuclear exchange. And there is an absolute explosion of trendy green design Web logs, of which mine, Viridiandesign.org, was one of the first.

Labels: environment, politics

Ohio State glaciologist Lonnie Thompson and a team of scientists said they have found evidence the Qori Kalis glacier of the Quelccaya ice cap in the Peruvian Andes could lose half its mass in 12 months and could be gone five years from now.

The Quelccaya ice cap covers 44 square kilometres in the Cordillera Oriental region and is the world's largest tropical ice mass. Its biggest glacier, the Qori Kalis, has receded by at least 1.1 kilometres since 1963, when the first formal measurements were taken. The rate of retreat has increased from six metres per year between 1963 and 1978 to 60 metres per year now, said Thompson.

Labels: environment, science

Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That's a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson.

Smithfield Foods actually faces a more difficult task than transmogrifying the populations of America's thirty-two largest cities into edible packages of meat. Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best estimates put Smithfield's total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company's slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.

Labels: environment, politics