Planetary Ruin

They cling precariously to the top of what is left of the ice floe, their fragile grip the perfect symbol of the tragedy of global warming.

Captured on film by Canadian environmentalists, the pair of polar bears look stranded on chunks of broken ice.

Although the magnificent creatures are well adapted to the water, and can swim scores of miles to solid land, the distance is getting ever greater as the Arctic ice diminishes.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=433170&in_page_id=1770

“Swimming 100 miles is not a big deal for a polar bear, especially a fat one,” said Dr Ian Stirling of the Canadian Wildlife Service.

“They just kind of float along and kick. But as the ice gets farther out from shore because of warming, it’s a longer swim that costs more energy and makes them more vulnerable.”
The plight of the bears was highlighted as the prospect of a gloomy future emerged from leaks of the most comprehensive report into global warming yet undertaken, which is to be published on Friday.

Concluding that it is “highly likely” that mankind is to blame for climate change, it talks of more droughts, torrential rains, shrinking Arctic ice and glaciers, and rising sea levels for the next century.

And it warns that the effects of a build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will last far longer.

Studies of polar bears have revealed that not only have their numbers declined – by nearly one quarter in just 20 years to around 25,000 – but so has their physique.

The bears can be 10ft tall and 1700lbs in weight, using their body fat to keep them alive when the temperatures plummet in the harshest part of their winter to minus 45C.

But the scientists have observed that in the struggle for survival, the bears – and females especially – are now much thinner.

Scientists believe that four bears which recently drowned off the coast of Alaska had simply been unable to cope with a violent storm.

Dr Stirling says that the phenomenon of a female giving birth to triplets is now part of history with usually only single cubs recorded. Soon, he says, the species may be extinct.

Usually at this time of year, polar bears would be sheltering with their young in the dens they carve for themselves in mountain slopes near the shoreline or in snowdrifts on the sea ice.

But global warming, which has raised the temperature in the Canadian Arctic by 4C in the last 50 years, means their habitat is inexorably disappearing.

In Hudson Bay where the ice melts completely in summer, scientists have noted that it is now happening three weeks earlier than normal.

This is having a catastrophic effect on the bears which hunt seals over the winter and spring before coming ashore where they rely on their build-up of body fat to survive – and feed their cubs.

Reports are now being received of polar bears, perfectly equipped for Arctic survival with two coats of insulating fur and a four inch layer of blubber, scavenging for scraps in rubbish tips and camp sites.

Scientists say the survival of polar bears may rely on special conservation areas, but even that seems a forlorn hope with a United Nations report expected to say that sea levels will carry on rising for over 1,000 years even if greenhouse gases can be curbed.

The report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change draws on the work of 2,500 researchers from more than 130 nations and is the most comprehensive overview of climate change for guiding policy-makers.

It will say that global warming was “very likely” caused by human activity, delegates to a climate change conference said.

Dozens of scientists and bureaucrats have been editing the new report in closed-door meetings in Paris. Their report, which must be unanimously approved, is to be released today.

Two participants, speaking on condition of anonymity because the meetings are confidential, said the group approved the term “very likely” in yesterday’s sessions. That means they agree that there is a 90 percent chance that global warming is caused by humans.

The last report, in 2001, said global warming was “likely” caused by human activity. There had been speculation that the participants might try to change the wording this time to “virtually certain,” which means a 99 percent chance.

The report is considered an authoritative document that could influence government and industrial policy worldwide.

• Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore has been nominated for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his wide-reaching efforts to draw the world’s attention to the dangers of global warming, it emerged when nominations closed.

During eight years as Bill Clinton’s vice president, Gore pushed for climate measures, including for the Kyoto Treaty, and after leaving office in 2001 has campaigned worldwide, especially with his Oscar-nominated documentary on climate change called “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The Nobel Prize winner will be announced in October.

Read more >>

Severe thunderstorms and at least one tornado killed 19 people on Friday when they ripped through Florida in the dead of night, tearing homes to shreds, toppling heavy trucks and leaving a trail of rubble.

More than 1,500 homes, buildings and churches were damaged or destroyed across a wide area of central Florida north of the tourism region around Orlando. But two of the area’s biggest attractions, Walt Disney Co.’s Disney World and Universal Studios Florida, were not affected.

Rescue teams fanned out to search for people who might still be trapped under flattened homes.

Crunched cars were flung onto porches, and battered sofas and fridges stood in piles of debris scattered over the exposed concrete foundations of houses. Dusk till dawn curfews were put into effect in two areas to deter looters.

The storm hit at 3:15 a.m. (0815 GMT) and a spokesman for the Lake County sheriff’s office said at least one and perhaps two tornadoes touched down in a state that ranks only behind the infamous “Tornado Alley” in the U.S. Midwest for the number of tornado strikes. Most, such as a twister near Orlando on Christmas Day last year, cause no fatalities.

“The death toll is up to 19 now,” said Kevin Lenhart, spokesman for the Lake County emergency operations center. Another 19 people were in hospital.

The emergency center said six were killed in Lady Lake, about 40 miles northwest of Orlando, and 13 in nearby Paisley, on the edge of the Ocala National Forest.

Pastor Howard Roszak of the First Baptist Church in Paisley said two teenage boys who belonged to his church were killed. One of the boys died along with his father, while both parents of the other teen were killed.

‘NOTHING LEFT’

“I know all these kids real good. I love these kids. I hear there is nothing left … just absolutely nothing,” Roszak said, referring to the home of one of the boys.

Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, compared the devastation to a “total war zone about 300 yards wide, about three football fields.”

“The last thing we saw before lifting off was a little fawn whose rear leg was just dangling, limping off on three legs into the woods,” he said after a helicopter tour.

About 1,000 tornadoes hit the United States annually, killing on average 80 people a year, and winter tornadoes appear to be more prevalent during El Nino years, when the waters of the eastern Pacific become unusually warm.

“This is something that we’ve seen here in the past in our state when we’ve had El Nino conditions in place,” said state meteorologist Ben Nelson.

In February 1998, another El Nino year, a swarm of tornadoes killed more than 40 people in central Florida and injured scores more. One narrowly missed the crowded tourist area that includes Disney, Universal Studios and Sea World.

The National Weather Service said it believed more than one tornado touched down on Friday but had yet to ascertain that.

Florida Highway Patrol spokeswoman Kim Miller said the tornado blew over five tractor-trailer rigs at about 3:45 a.m.

“We saw tractor-trailers littered all over the interstate,” she told CNN. “We had a few cars mixed into that.”

The storm knocked out power to more than 42,000 customers but only 7,800 were still without electricity by mid-afternoon, an official with the local utility, Progress Energy, said.

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist declared a state of emergency in four affected counties and the Red Cross opened shelters for people left homeless.

Read more >>

Billions of people will suffer water shortages and the number of hungry will grow by hundreds of millions by 2080 as global temperatures rise, scientists warn in a new report.  The report estimates that between 1.1 billion and 3.2 billion people will be suffering from water scarcity problems by 2080 and between 200 million and 600 million more people will be going hungry.

The assessment is contained in a draft of a major international report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be released later this year, Australia’s The Age newspaper said.

Rising sea levels could flood seven million more homes, while Australia’s famed Great Barrier Reef, treasured as the world’s largest living organism, could be dead within decades, the scientists warn, the newspaper said.

The Age said it had obtained a copy of the report, believed to be one of three prepared for release by the IPCC, which is highly regarded for its neutrality and caution.

Some 500 experts are meeting in Paris this week ahead of the release on Friday of the IPCC’s first report since 2001 on the state of scientific knowledge on global warming.

The report will be followed in April by volumes focusing on the impacts of climate change and on the social-economic costs of reducing the emission of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

A chapter on Australia in the report on global impacts warns that coral bleaching in the Barrier Reef is likely to become an annual occurrence by as early as 2030 due to warmer, more acidic seas.

Bleaching occurs when the plant-like organisms that make up coral die and leave behind the white limestone skeleton of the reef.

The World Heritage site, stretching over more than 345,000 square kilometers (133,000 sq miles) off Australia’s northeast coast, will become “functionally extinct”, the scientists are quoted as saying.

Average global temperatures have already risen about 0.7 to 0.8 degrees since 1900, which the report says contributed to increased bleaching in coral reefs in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean.

At 2.0 to 3.0 degrees above 1900 levels, the report predicts the “complete loss” of Australia’s alpine zones and the possible collapse of South America’s Amazon forest system, causing a “huge loss of biodiversity”.

The human and economic costs of climate change are likely to be highest in poor countries, with water shortages crippling many African nations and increased coastal flooding hitting low-lying countries such as Bangladesh and many Pacific islands, the report says.

Read more >>

U.S. scientists were pressured to tailor their writings on global warming to fit the Bush administration’s skepticism, in some cases at the behest of a former oil-industry lobbyist, a congressional committee heard on Tuesday.

“Our investigations found high-quality science struggling to get out,” Francesca Grifo of the watchdog group Union of Concerned Scientists told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

A survey by the group found that 150 climate scientists personally experienced political interference in the past five years, for a total of at least 435 incidents.

“Nearly half of all respondents perceived or personally experienced pressure to eliminate the words ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’ or other similar terms from a variety of communications,” Grifo said.

Rick Piltz, a former U.S. government scientist who said he resigned in 2005 after pressure to soft-pedal findings on global warming, told the committee in prepared testimony that former White House official Phil Cooney took an active role in casting doubt on the consequences of global climate change.

Cooney, who was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute before becoming chief of staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, resigned in 2005 to work for oil giant ExxonMobil.

Documents on global climate change required Cooney’s review and approval, Piltz said.

“His edits of program reports, which had been drafted and approved by career science program managers, had the cumulative effect of adding an enhanced sense of scientific uncertainty about global warming and minimizing its likely consequences,” Piltz said.

Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat who chairs the committee, complained that the White House has balked at supplying documents requested over six months to investigate these allegations.

“The committee isn’t trying to obtain state secrets or documents that could affect our immediate national security,” Waxman said. “We are simply seeking answers to whether the White House’s political staff is inappropriately censoring impartial government scientists.”

Kristen Hellmer of the Council on Environmental Quality said the council had been cooperating with Congress. When asked about allegations of political interference in scientific documents, she said, “We do have in place a very transparent system in science reporting.”

The hearing was one of two on Tuesday spotlighting global climate change; a Senate forum featured testimony from members including presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois among Democrats and Republican John McCain of Arizona.

President George W. Bush’s position on global warming has evolved over his presidency, from open skepticism about the reality of the phenomenon to acknowledgment at a global summit last year that climate change is occurring and human activities speed it up.

In his State of the Union address on January 23, Bush called climate change “a serious challenge” that should be addressed by technology and greater use of alternative sources of energy. But he stopped short of calling for mandatory limits on U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas blamed in part for global warming.

These discussions are part of the run-up to release of a major United Nations report on climate change, scheduled for Friday in Paris. Drafts of the report strengthened the case that humans are the principal cause of global warming after 1950.

Read more >>

 Former Vice President Al Gore was nominated for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his wide-reaching efforts to draw the world’s attention to the dangers of global warming, a Norwegian lawmaker said Thursday.
“A prerequisite for winning the Nobel Peace Prize is making a difference, and Al Gore has made a difference,” Conservative Member of Parliament Boerge Brende, a former minister of environment and then of trade, told The Associated Press.

Brende said he joined political opponent Heidi Soerensen of the Socialist Left Party to nominate Gore as well as Canadian Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier before the nomination deadline expired Thursday.

“Al Gore, like no other, has put climate change on the agenda. Gore uses his position to get politicians to understand, while Sheila works from the ground up,” Brende said.

During eight years as Bill Clinton’s vice president, Gore pushed for climate measures, including for the Kyoto Treaty. Since leaving office in 2001 he has campaigned worldwide, including with his Oscar- nominated documentary on climate change called “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Norwegian lawmakers are among the thousands of people and groups with rights to nominate Nobel candidates. Others include members of national governments, past laureates, members of the awards committee and its staff, and many university professors.

The winner is traditionally announced in mid-October, with the prize always presented on the Dec. 10 anniversary of the death of its creator, Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel.

Read more >>

Delaware’s state climatologist has found himself in the middle of a political squall after taking skeptical stands on global warming and climate change — in one case directly contradicting the state’s own policy.

David R. Legates, a University of Delaware geography professor, co-wrote a “friend of the court” brief that opposed Delaware’s position in a multi-state U.S. Supreme Court case.

In the appeal, state regulators argued that carbon dioxide from new cars should be regulated because of evidence the gas was contributing to rising global temperatures, climate shifts and changes in the environment. The Bush administration and industry critics opposed the demand, saying the dire warnings are unproven.

Enter Legates, a Ph.D. climatologist who received the title of state climatologist in 2005 from Daniel Leathers, now the head of the University of Delaware’s geography department.

Legates joined a group of scientists late last year in urging the court to reject the state claims, in a brief filed by the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute.

“It is simply impossible to conclude that the net effect of greenhouse gases endangers human health and welfare,” the brief said.

The institute has sued the government in the past to block some fuel economy standards for automobiles.

Two sides of the coin

The appearance of Delaware’s climatologist on the other side of the court case left some state Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control officials frustrated.

“He’s taken a position that ‘The climate is changing, but we don’t have any danger signs,’ ” said Ali Mirzakhalili, air quality management chief for DNREC.

Recently branded “a favorite scientist of the global warming denial machine” by one national environmental group, Legates said he was following scientific evidence in arguing the institute’s position in the court case. He has taken similar positions dating back to at least 1998, while a professor at Louisiana State University.

“The science brought in by the one side had given a more extremist view of climate change,” Legates said. “What we’re trying to say is, the science isn’t necessarily that well settled, and in many cases it isn’t that extreme. I’m not saying it isn’t a problem.”

As state climatologist, a position the state doesn’t fund, Legates collects and shares climate data with the National Climatic Data Center, the Northeast Regional Climate Center and the National Weather Service office in Mt. Holly, N.J. Similar positions exist in 41 other states and Puerto Rico, generally staffed by state employees or university staffers.

“I don’t think the doctor [Legates] speaks for the state’s position,” said Philip Cherry, a DNREC administrator who recently invited Legates to address agency employees. “I think the governor speaks for the state’s position.”

Delaware has accepted the view human activities contribute to global warming, and changes are needed to curb risks of sea level rise and climate change. The state adopted a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in 2000.

An updated report on global warming and its consequences by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due Friday, is expected to include forecasts of rising sea levels and changing weather and climate conditions worldwide.

Legates disputes warnings

Federal scientists have long warned that sea-level increases could be most pronounced along the mid-Atlantic, including the shores of the Chesapeake Bay and Delaware Bay.

Some forecasts have predicted that Delaware could lose 50 percent or more of its tidal wetlands under worst-case scenarios.

But during a presentation sponsored by the conservative Heritage Foundation last year, Legates said, “This has become climate alarmism.”

Then in early 2006, the National Policy Research Center, a conservative think tank, published a paper by Legates saying science “does not support claims of drastic increases in global temperatures over the 21st century, nor does it support claims of human influence on weather events and other secondary effects of climate change.”

NPRC listed Legates as an adjunct scholar at the time the paper was released, as well as director of the University of Delaware’s Climatic Research Center.

In 2003 Legates was called to testify in the U.S. Senate by Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla, a global warming skeptic prone to talk of “debunking” scientific climate change conclusions that are now widely accepted.

During that testimony Legates disputed findings of the international panel, saying researchers failed to prove recent warming trends or that human causes are “the only significant factor.”

Wilmington resident Chad Tolman, a retired DuPont Co. research scientist who held positions with the National Academy of Sciences, said Legates’ position clashed awkwardly with most Delaware scientists.

“I just don’t know how, in the face of all the evidence, [he] maintains [his] position,” Tolman said.

Cherry, who is managing Delaware’s efforts with other states to cap regional greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, said Legates was free to take a stand that contradicts Delaware.

“But I have to say he’s in the very small minority,” Cherry said

Read more >>

The Eiffel Tower’s 20,000 sparkling bulbs went dark for five minutes Thursday night and the lights went out at the Colosseum in Rome and the Greek parliament in Athens in a demonstration of concern about climate change across the European continent.

Environmental activists timed the lights-out protest before the release Friday of a major climate change report that will warn of a worsening threat from global warming.

The City of Light dimmed between 7:55 p.m. and 8 p.m. when lights were switched off at the Eiffel Tower as well as the Paris’ Hilton, where many of the scientists and officials from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are staying as they work on the climate change report. The hotel even switched off its electric revolving front door.

The scientists’ long-awaited report says global warming is “very likely” man-made, the most powerful language ever used on the issue by the world’s leading climate scientists, delegates who have seen the report said Thursday.

And the document, the most authoritative science on the issue, says the disturbing signs are already visible in rising seas, killer heat waves, worsening droughts and stronger hurricanes.

The protest extended to the southeastern city of Grenoble where a campaign rally organized by French Socialist presidential candidate Segolene Royal went ahead in the dark after organizers pulled the plug on lights in the meeting hall. The hall’s microphones and speakers worked during the blackout.

Royal, a former environment minister, has pledged to make the fight against climate change her top ecological priority if elected in France’s April-May elections.

Individuals also heeded the lights-out call by France’s Alliance for the Planet which organized the demonstration.

“I think it’s an important gesture,” said Chantal Bericault, who said she turned off all electrical appliances in her apartment in the chic 8th district of the French capital. Bericault, a jewelry store owner, said she had even braved her building’s stairs in the dark.

Some experts frowned on the lights-out, saying it could consume more energy than it conserves because of a power spike when people turn the lights back on. They warned it could possibly cause brownouts or even blackouts, though no problems were immediately reported.

Several European cities staged symbolic blackouts along with Paris.

Authorities in Rome switched off the lights at two of the Italian capital’s most popular monuments, the Colosseum and the Capitol.

In Spain, Madrid’s city hall turned off one of the capital’s most emblematic monuments, the Puerta de Alcala arch. In the southern city of Seville, local authorities did the same with the famous Giralda Tower, and the Mediterranean city of Valencia also turned out lights at some landmark buildings.

In the Greek capital, Athens, lights illuminating several public buildings — including the parliament, city hall, and Foreign Ministry — were temporarily turned off.

Read more >>