Planetary Ruin

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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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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Reducing carbon dioxide emissions from the production, operation and disposal of computers is to be the aim of a new government taskforce.
Computers and other IT equipment have been blamed for causing as much global warming as the airline industry.

The taskforce will oversee the piloting of a “green PC” service in which individual machines use 98% less energy than standard PCs.

IT equipment is thought to generate 35m tonnes of harmful CO2 gas each year.

Data centres

The public-private “Green Shift” taskforce will be led by Manchester City Council.

The “green PC” service works by hosting functions such as office applications, email and internet surfing on data centres rather than on individual computers.

The data centres will be energy efficient and can be accessed through a small desktop box.

The Green Shift programme will also aim to use 75% fewer resources in the production of PCs.

Local Government Minister Phil Woolas said: “Cyber-warming is a massive issue and that is why we have taken decisive action with the appointment of the taskforce.

“The new taskforce is the first of its kind in the world and is a sign of how serious the UK is about tackling this issue.

“Innovative proposals like the green PC service are essential if we are to tackle climate change.

“Only if all of our communities are engaged in action to tackle climate change will we be successful.”

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Droves of cats and kittens are swarming into animal shelters nationwide, and global warming is to blame, according to one pet adoption group.

Several shelters operated by a national adoption organization called Pets Across America reported a 30 percent increase in intakes of cats and kittens from 2005 to 2006, and other shelters across the nation have reported similar spikes of stray, owned and feral cats.

The cause of this feline flood is an extended cat breeding season thanks to the world’s warming temperatures, according to the group, which is one of the country’s oldest and largest animal welfare organizations.

“Cats are typically warm-weather, spring-time breeders,” said the group’s president, Kathy Warnick. “However, states that typically experience primarily longer and colder winters are now seeing shorter, warmer winters, leading to year-round breeding.”

“Basically, there is no longer a reproduction lull with cat breeding cycles, and unfortunately, it seems more people are bringing boxes of kittens into our agencies during winter now,” she added.

Studies have shown that global warming is altering the breeding seasons of other animals, such as migratory birds and penguins.

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Debate raged on Friday after NASA chief Michael Griffin said he was unsure global warming was a “problem we must wrestle with,” drawing the ire of his own agency’s top climate change expert.
Griffin, who has come under fire in Congress for cutting programs aimed at monitoring climate change, said in a US radio interview Thursday he had “no doubt that a trend of global warming exists.”

But, he told National Public Radio, “I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with.”

James Hansen, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s top official on climate change, expressed shock at Griffin’s comments in a later interview with NPR.

Asked his response, Hansen said: “I almost fell off my chair.”

“It was a shocking statement because of the level of ignorance it indicated with regard to the current situation,” Hansen told NPR.

“He seemed unaware that 170 nations agreed that climate change is a serious problem with enormous repercussions, and that many people will suffer if it is not addressed,” he said.

Griffin said it was “NASA’s responsibility to collect, analyze and release information,” according to a statement issued later.

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George W. Bush on Thursday unveiled a striking about-face on global warming, calling on the world’s leading economies to join the US in agreeing a global target to reduce carbon dioxide emissions before the end of his term in office.

The US president was speaking just ahead of a G8 summit at which climate change was expected to be high on the agenda of European governments. He explained that his apparent conversion – which follows almost seven years of having rejected precisely the road he outlined – was prompted by new scientific findings.

But Mr Bush made no pledge on the size of emissions cuts that the US would be prepared to sign up to and gave no indication of a timeframe. The White House also ruled out carbon trading as the way to cutting emissions.

Environmental campaigners accused the president of cynically seeking to circumvent the Kyoto process, which the United Nations is seeking to renew at talks in December. Others accused him of a ploy to derail tougher European proposals.

Mr Bush said: “Science has deepened our understanding of climate change and opened new possibilities for confronting it.

“By the end of next year, America and other nations will set a long-term global goal for reducing greenhouse gases.”

He said the US would convene a series of multilateral meetings involving the biggest polluters – including China and India – to seek agreement on a reduction target and how to achieve it.

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In another attempt to cause death and decease through the shear stupidity of science…. Can scientists guarantee that meat that is grown in a lab, by means other than the natural order, will have unforseen consequences?

Dutch researchers are trying to grow pork meat in a laboratory with the goal of feeding millions without the need to raise and slaughter animals.

“We’re trying to make meat without having to kill animals,” Bernard Roelen, a veterinary science professor at Utrecht University, said in an interview.

Although it is in its early stages, the idea is to replace harvesting meat from livestock with a process that eliminates the need for animal feed, transport, land use and the methane expelled by animals, which all hurt the environment, he said.

“Keeping animals just to eat them is in fact not so good for the environment,” said Roelen. “Animals need to grow, and animals produce many things that you do not eat.”

Developed nations are expected to consume an average of 43 kg per capita of poultry, beef, pork and other meats this year, an amount that rises around 2 percent annually, data from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation shows.

Asked whether people would be repulsed by lab-grown meat, Roelen said he believed there would be enough demand, as much of what people eat today is already extensively processed, from the feed that animals consume to the conditions under which they are raised and the preparation of meat after slaughter.

“I can imagine that some people will have problems with it,” he said. “People might think it is artificial. But some people might not realize that some part of the meat they eat is artificial.”

Research is also under way in the United States, including one experiment funded by U.S. space agency NASA to see whether meat can be grown for astronauts during long space missions.

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (news, bio, voting record) said Monday she led a congressional delegation to Greenland, where lawmakers saw “firsthand evidence that climate change is a reality,” and she hoped the Bush administration would consider a new path on the issue.

After meeting with German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel, Pelosi praised Berlin for its leadership on the issue.

Her trip comes ahead of next week’s Group of Eight summit and a climate change meeting next month involving the leading industrialized nations and during a time of increased debate over what should succeed the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 international treaty that caps the amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted from power plants and factories in industrialized countries. It expires in 2012.

President Bush rejected that accord, saying it would harm the U.S. economy and unfair excludes developing countries like China and India from its obligations. Pelosi, who strongly disagrees with that decision and many other of Bush’s environmental policies, said Friday she said she wants to work with the administration rather than provoke it.

Pelosi said she hoped Bush would be open to considering a “different way” in the future.

The California Democrat pointed to her delegation’s weekend stop in Greenland, “where we saw firsthand evidence that climate change is a reality; there is just no denying it.”

“It wasn’t caused by the people of Greenland — it was caused by the behavior of the rest of the world,” she said.

Scientists have noticed that Greenland’s output of ice into the North Atlantic had increased dramatically, doubling over the decade that ended in 2005.

“We hope that we can all assume our responsibilities with great respect and that our administration will be open to listening to why it is important to go forward perhaps in a different way than we have proceeded in the past,” she told reporters.

Gabriel and Chancellor Angela Merkel have made the fight against global warming a key point of Germany’s presidencies of the G-8 and        European Union. Still, Merkel has said that progress at the June 6-8 summit in Heiligendamm is not assured.

According to comments on a document released by the environmental group Greenpeace, the Bush administration is preparing to reject new targets on climate change at the summit. The White House declined to confirm the comments were from U.S. officials.

“We regret very much that we must so far have the impression that it is difficult to reach concrete results with the American administration,” Gabriel said after meeting Pelosi.

Gabriel said industrial nations must take joint responsibility for the global warming that has occurred thus far.

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Drug-resistant staph infections have spread to the urban poor, rising almost seven-fold in recent years in some Chicago neighborhoods, a new study finds.

Researchers said the crowded living conditions of public housing and jails may speed up the person-to-person spread of infection.

The superbugs, first seen mainly in hospitals and nursing homes, have turned up recently among athletes, prisoners and people who get illegal tattoos.

Called methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, these staph germs can cause skin infections that in rare cases have led to pneumonia, bloodstream infections and a painful, flesh-destroying condition. MRSA is hard to treat because the bacteria have developed resistance to the penicillin drug family.

From 2000 to 2005, the infection rate seen in patients seeking care at Chicago’s main public hospital and its affiliated clinics climbed from 24 cases per 100,000 to 164 cases per 100,000, the study found.

Dr. Bala Hota of Chicago’s Stroger Hospital, a lead author of the study, said the increase is similar to that seen in other cities.

Public housing could be a bridge between high-risk people, the researchers wrote in their study, which appears in Monday’s Archives of Internal Medicine.

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