Planetary Ruin

Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, argues in the Financial Times that ambitious environmentalism is the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity.

Mr Klaus writes that “global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem” and the issue “is more about social than natural sciences and more about man and his freedom than about tenths of a degree Celsius changes in average global temperature.”

Do you agree? Or do small climate changes demand far-reaching restrictive measures? Mr Klaus will answer your questions in an online.

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The mud at the bottom of B.C. fjords reveals that solar output drives climate change – and that we should prepare now for dangerous global cooling

Politicians and environmentalists these days convey the impression that climate-change research is an exceptionally dull field with little left to discover. We are assured by everyone from David Suzuki to Al Gore to Prime Minister Stephen Harper that “the science is settled.” At the recent G8 summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel even attempted to convince world leaders to play God by restricting carbon-dioxide emissions to a level that would magically limit the rise in world temperatures to 2C.

The fact that science is many years away from properly understanding global climate doesn’t seem to bother our leaders at all. Inviting testimony only from those who don’t question political orthodoxy on the issue, parliamentarians are charging ahead with the impossible and expensive goal of “stopping global climate change.” Liberal MP Ralph Goodale’s June 11 House of Commons assertion that Parliament should have “a real good discussion about the potential for carbon capture and sequestration in dealing with carbon dioxide, which has tremendous potential for improving the climate, not only here in Canada but around the world,” would be humorous were he, and even the current government, not deadly serious about devoting vast resources to this hopeless crusade.

Climate stability has never been a feature of planet Earth. The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder. As recently as 6,000 years ago, it was about 3C warmer than now. Ten thousand years ago, while the world was coming out of the thou-sand-year-long “Younger Dryas” cold episode, temperatures rose as much as 6C in a decade — 100 times faster than the past century’s 0.6C warming that has so upset environmentalists.

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“Where did the water go?” asks Ted Shalifor, manager of a marina and campground on Lake Superior’s Chippewa Indian Reservation.
The water on Lake Superior is so low that he couldn’t put his docks in the water this year. Where he used to see water, he now sees sandbars.

Lake Superior, the world’s largest freshwater lake, has dropped to its lowest level in 81 years. The water is 20 inches below average and a foot lower than just a year ago.

The dropping levels have had serious environmental and economic consequences. Wetlands have dried up. Power plants run at half capacity. Cargo ships carry partial loads. Boaters struggle to find a place to dock.

The changes can be seen all along the 2,800-mile shore of Lake Superior, the coldest and deepest of the Great Lakes. The water has receded, sometimes 50 feet or more, from its normal shoreline.

Lake Huron and Lake Michigan are at low levels, as well, although not quite as extreme.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota and elsewhere study whether Lake Superior’s low water levels are a result of global warming. The average water temperature of Lake Superior has risen 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1979.

A drought and warm weather are the immediate cause of the drop in water levels. In the past year, precipitation was 6 inches less than the average of 31 inches. The lake’s southern shore had a green Christmas in 2006. The ice and snow pack that usually cover the lake arrived late, allowing water to evaporate.

“It’s been a long time since we’ve been this low, but it has happened,” says Tim Calappi, a hydraulic engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers, which tracks water levels. “We still think this is within the range of what’s normal, but we have to wait and see.”

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On the same day, NASA chief Michael Griffin commented in a US radio interview that “I am not sure that it is fair to say that (global warming) is a problem that we must wrestle with”.

NASA is an agency that knows a thing or two about climate change. As Griffin added: “We study global climate change, that is in our authorisation, we think we do it rather well.

“I’m proud of that, but NASA is not an agency chartered to, quote, battle climate change.”

Such a clear statement that science accomplishment should carry primacy over policy advice is both welcome and overdue.

Nonetheless, there is something worrying about one of Griffin’s other statements, which said that “I have no doubt . . . that a trend of global warming exists”.

Griffin seems to be referring to human-caused global warming, but irrespective of that his opinion is unsupported by the evidence.

The salient facts are these. First, the accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4 per cent) in atmospheric CO2.

Second, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 per cent).

Third, there are strong indications from solar studies that Earth’s current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades.

How then is it possible for Griffin to assert so boldly that human-caused global warming is happening?

Well, he is in good company for similar statements have been made recently by several Western heads of state at the G8 summit meeting. For instance, German Chancellor Angela Merkel asserts climate change (i.e. global warming) “is also essentially caused by humankind”.

In fact, there is every doubt whether any global warming at all is occurring at the moment, let alone human-caused warming.

For leading politicians to be asserting to the contrary indicates something is very wrong with their chain of scientific advice, for they are clearly being deceived. That this should be the case is an international political scandal of high order which, in turn, raises the question of where their advice is coming from.

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Six scientists from some of the leading scientific institutions in the United States have issued what amounts to an unambiguous warning to the world: civilisation itself is threatened by global warming.

They also implicitly criticise the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for underestimating the scale of sea-level rises this century as a result of melting glaciers and polar ice sheets.

Instead of sea levels rising by about 40 centimetres, as the IPCC predicts in one of its computer forecasts, the true rise might be as great as several metres by 2100. That is why, they say, planet Earth today is in “imminent peril”.

In a densely referenced scientific paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A some of the world’s leading climate researchers describe in detail why they believe that humanity can no longer afford to ignore the “gravest threat” of climate change.

“Recent greenhouse gas emissions place the Earth perilously close to dramatic climate change that could run out of control, with great dangers for humans and other creatures,” the scientists say. Only intense efforts to curb man-made emissions of carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases can keep the climate within or near the range of the past one million years, they add.

The researchers were led by James Hansen, the director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who was the first scientist to warn the US Congress about global warming.

The other scientists were Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha and Gary Russell, also of the Goddard Institute, David Lea of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Mark Siddall of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York.

In their 29-page paper, “Climate Change and trace gases”, the scientists frequently stray from the non-emotional language of science to emphasise the scale of the problems and dangers posed by climate change.

In an email to The Independent, Dr Hansen said: “In my opinion, among our papers this one probably does the best job of making clear that the Earth is getting perilously close to climate changes that could run out of our control.”

The unnatural “forcing” of the climate as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threatens to generate a “flip” in the climate that could “spark a cataclysm” in the massive ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, the scientists write.

Dramatic flips in the climate have occurred in the past but none has happened since the development of complex human societies and civilisation, which are unlikely to survive the same sort of environmental changes if they occurred now.

“Civilisation developed, and constructed extensive infrastructure, during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12,000 years in duration. That period is about to end,” the scientists warn. Humanity cannot afford to burn the Earth’s remaining underground reserves of fossil fuel. “To do so would guarantee dramatic climate change, yielding a different planet from the one on which civilisation developed and for which extensive physical infrastructure has been built,” they say.

Dr Hansen said we have about 10 years to put into effect the draconian measures needed to curb CO2 emissions quickly enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperature. Otherwise, the extra heat could trigger the rapid melting of polar ice sheets, made far worse by the “albedo flip” – when the sunlight reflected by white ice is suddenly absorbed as ice melts to become the dark surface of open water.

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It might be only one week to Midsummer, but nobody seems to have told mother nature. Snow has returned to parts of central Sweden, with five centimetres falling in some places.

The snowfall came in the mountainous Härjedalen area of northern Dalarna. A meteorologist from weather service SMHI told Svenska Dagbladet that snow was unusual at this time of year, usually falling roughly once every ten years.

The snow follows weeks of warm summer weather, but a low pressure area caused a turn in conditions. Temperatures are expected to rise again tomorrow, reaching 15 to 18 degrees, SMHI predicts.

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Torrential rain has killed at least 71 people in floods, house collapses and rockslides across southern China with more heavy rain predicted for much of this week, state media said on Monday.

About 643,000 people were evacuated and some 56,000 houses destroyed and 104,000 damaged, the official Xinhua news agency said, citing an unnamed official at the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

“We’ve got experience of floods, but I’ve never known a flood like this,” Zhong Shizhan, a resident of Mei county in Guangdong province, was quoted as saying by the Southern Metropolis Daily.

The National Meteorological Centre forecast heavy rain south of the Yangtze, China’s longest river, and continued downpours in the south of the country until Thursday.

One official said the rain had stopped in the northeastern Guangdong city of Meizhou where a local government Web site showed pictures of people standing waist deep in brown flood waters and others filling sandbags to keep the waters at bay.

Nearly 9 million people had been affected. Thirteen people were missing and 3.43 billion yuan ($446.8 million) of damage caused.

A total of 350,000 ha, or 1,350 sq miles, of crops had been damaged and 57,600 ha had been destroyed.

From Wednesday to Saturday, continuous rain, mudslides and floods hit the provinces of Hunan, Guangdong, Guangxi, Guizhou, Jiangxi and Fujian.

China’s typhoon season is just getting under way in the south. Experts last month warned that the Yangtze could flood badly this year for the first time since 1998 when flooding killed more than 3,000 people. 

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DENVER,  Did you have frost on your windows this morning? It felt more like March or early April along the Front Range.

The temperature at Denver International Airport fell to 31 degrees at 5:44 a.m. Friday, setting a new record low for the date.

This shattered the old record of 37 degrees, last set in 1974.

The new record low will also become the latest freeze on record for the city of Denver. The previous date of latest freeze ever recorded was June 2, 1951.

Temperatures have only dropped below freezing two other times during the month of June; in 1919 and 1951.

The coldest June temperature ever recorded was 30 degrees on June 2, 1951.

Every time there is a new weather record set for the city of Denver, the debate about where the official weather station is located arises.

It is a known fact that in most cases, temperatures are cooler at DIA than in downtown Denver.

However, weather records are only 100 to 150 years old in most cases, and there are’t any other sources of data prior to the mid-1800s to use as a comparison.

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Denver is gearing up to fight global warming, and residents may soon be asked to make personal sacrifices to help save the planet.
The new plan is aimed at making Denver a national leader in reducing gas emissions that have been linked to global warming, giving a major push to alternative energy, stepping up recycling and changing building codes to encourage energy conservation.

But the proposal also contains some ideas that may be unpopular, such as penalizing heavy users of electricity and natural gas and basing auto insurance premiums on the number of miles traveled.

The ambitious goal is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 4.4 million metric tons by 2020, the equivalent of eliminating two small coal-fired power plants or taking 500,000 cars off the road.

Mayor John Hickenlooper has made the “climate action plan” a centerpiece of his second term in office. More than two dozen people from business and community groups met for several months with city staff to hammer out the plan. Many of them fear Colorado will be slammed hard by global warming, with more droughts and forest fires.

“There was a sense we have to be bold,” said Beth Conover, director of Greenprint Denver, the city office that coordinated the plan. “What’s the cost of inaction to our water supply and tourism industry?”

Much of the city’s plan involves finding ways to encourage energy conservation by mandating efficiency standards for new construction and setting standards for older homes that would be enforced when the home is sold.

The city also would give incentives for car pooling and the use of hybrids and other low-polluting vehicles, possibly by giving them priority in parking.

To cut back on use of landfills – methane gas from landfills is a major contributor to global warming – the plan would encourage recycling and charge residents for the amount of trash they throw away.

Denver may ask voters to approve higher rates for “excessive” use of electricity and natural gas. The plan also floats the idea of using insurance premiums to penalize people who drive long distances.

“You can think of them as penalties or you can think of them as market signals,” said Conover. “There’s some choice involved.”

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