Global Warming

[Kris]

June 20, 2003

Censorship on Global Warming

When it comes to global warming, the Bush administration seems determined to bury its head in the sand and hope the problem will go away. Worse yet, it wants to bury any research findings that global warming may be a threat to human health or the environment.

The latest example of this ostrichlike behavior involves some heavy-handed censorship of a draft report that is due out next week from the Environmental Protection Agency. As described by Andrew Revkin and Katharine Seelye in yesterday's Times, the report was intended to provide the first comprehensive review of what is known about environmental problems and what gaps in understanding remain to be filled. But by the time the White House Council on Environmental Quality and the Office of Management and Budget finished with it and hammered the E.P.A. into submission, a long section on the risks posed by rising global temperatures was reduced to a noncommittal paragraph.

Gone is any mention that the 1990's are likely to have been the warmest decade in the last thousand years in the Northern Hemisphere. Gone, also, is a judgment by the National Research Council about the likely human contributions to global warming, though the evidence falls short of conclusive proof. Gone, too, is an introductory statement that "Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment." All that is left in the report is some pablum about the complexities of the issue and the research that is needed to resolve the uncertainties.

This is the second shameful case of censorship involving global warming in less than a year. Last September, a whole chapter on climate was deleted from the E.P.A.'s annual report on air-pollution trends. That deed was done by Bush appointees at the agency, with White House approval, possibly because the White House had been angered by a previous report from the State Department suggesting the dire harm that could come from climate change. President Bush had dismissed that report as "put out by the bureaucracy."

The justifications offered for such censorship are feeble. One excuse is that global warming has been discussed in other reports and thus need not be dealt with again. But surely reports billed as comprehensive reviews should be comprehensive.

Another excuse is that the administration's new climate research plan will grapple with the issue. But given what we know about this administration, it seems almost inevitable that the experts who are mobilized to study the question will wind up focusing on uncertainties and the need for further research rather than facing up to the policy implications of the existing data.

Christie Whitman, the E.P.A. administrator, is putting on a brave face after her agency's capitulation. She says she feels "perfectly comfortable" issuing the broader assessment of land, air and water quality without waiting to resolve differences over climate change, where the evidence is less solid. But this sorry trampling of her agency's best judgment suggests that Congress, in confirming a successor after she steps down next week, will need to look hard at how free that person will be to offer the best scientific judgment on environmental issues.


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[DominicanoNYC]

I think the people should know about this problem and the Bush administration is making a bad decision by not telling the people. Everyday I see more H2's and Escalades and those thing are gas guzzlers. That isn't good for the environment and I think that not only the gov't should try and do something, but also these car companies. Have you seeb one Americann hybrid car? Well I haven't and America, being a top world leader in technology, should work towards this goal of fuel efficent cars.

[Kris]

June 21, 2003

When Politics Trumps Science (4 Letters)

To the Editor:

"Report by E.P.A. Leaves Out Data on Climate Change" (front page, June 19) says that an Environmental Protection Agency report due next week on the state of the environment is being edited by the White House to play down the risks of global climate change.

Having served as E.P.A. administrator under both Presidents Nixon and Ford, I can state categorically that there never was such White House intrusion into the business of the E.P.A. during my tenure. The E.P.A. was established as an independent agency in the executive branch, and so it should remain. There appears today to be a steady erosion in its independent status.

I can appreciate the president's interest in not having discordant voices within his administration. But the interest of the American people lies in having full disclosure of the facts, particularly when the issue is one with such potentially enormous damage to the long-term health and economic well-being of all of us.

RUSSELL E. TRAIN
Washington, June 19, 2003

•

To the Editor:

The Environmental Protection Agency is about to issue a report that was edited by the White House to leave out an account of the risks from global warming (front page, June 19). This comes at a time when every day seems to bring new revelations that the administration cooked the books in its drive to plunge the nation into war in Iraq.

The most important issue in the 2004 election should not be national security or the economy. It should be which candidate will tell the unvarnished truth to the American people.

JONATHAN J. MARGOLIS
Boston, June 19, 2003

•

To the Editor:

The report that the Environmental Protection Agency has omitted data on climate change in its "comprehensive review" is extremely disturbing (front page, June 19). Climate change is a scientific, not political, issue. The facts are clear. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 280 to over 360 parts per million as a result of burning fossil fuels. All climate models show that the addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will lead to global warming and changes in precipitation.

Sound governmental policy regarding climate change requires complete, unfettered access to scientific information. Omission of data can lead to policies that endanger the welfare of the nation.

PAUL FALKOWSKI
New Brunswick, N.J., June 19, 2003
The writer is a professor of earth systems at Rutgers University.

•

To the Editor:

The Bush administration's politically motivated "editing" of the Environmental Protection Agency report on global warming (front page, June 19) ought to worry all Americans, whether liberal or conservative. This is another example of the top-down methodology used by members of the administration, in which they first decide on the conclusions they want and then set down to work on providing evidence for them, no matter how flimsy or inaccurate.

When political forces influence scientific inquiry, the result is a misinformed public and a government that fails in its obligation to uphold the public interest.

DAVID MORRIS
Berkeley, Calif., June 19, 2003

•

To the Editor:

Re "Censorship on Global Warming" (editorial, June 20):

The moral integrity of any society is measured, at least in part, by its determination to secure the future for generations that will follow. In this regard, the state of the environment that our children will inherit should be a primary concern.

The Bush administration, however, has exploited the fears resulting from the 9/11 attacks to remove environmental issues from our radar screen. It is the duty of responsible Democrats and Republicans to put these issues back on center stage. Winning the war on terrorism will be pointless unless we are devoting at least as much effort to the war to save the planet.

BOB ROSENBLUTH
Lincolndale, N.Y., June 20, 2003


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

June 26, 2003

An Environmental Report Card

On her way out the door, Christie Whitman has issued the Environmental Protection Agency's first statistical assessment of the nation's environment. The bottom line is that although much remains to be done, things are greatly improved from 30 years ago. The air is healthier, the water cleaner. But underneath the numbers, and of course unobserved in the report, lies an exquisite irony: what has brought us here are the landmark environmental laws of the early 1970's — laws that the industries bankrolling the Bush administration have been fighting tooth and nail ever since, laws that the administration itself has tried to amend or weaken.

The report has already acquired a certain notoriety because it omitted, on White House orders, any meaningful discussion of global warming, a problem that President Bush seems to think will go away if nobody talks about it. In a sense, this may have been the administration's final insult to Mrs. Whitman, who has been bounced around on other issues during her two-plus years as the agency's administrator. Now most people are likely to remember her report, which she had intended as an apolitical statistical portrait, for what it leaves out rather than for the useful information it contains.

On the plus side, the report shows that air pollution has declined by 25 percent over the last three decades even as the country's population, economy and vehicle traffic have exploded. Fully 94 percent of Americans are served by drinking water systems that meet federal health standards, as opposed to 79 percent 10 years ago. Major rivers, like the Hudson, are no longer used as industrial and municipal sewers. Yet in a sense we have just begun. More than 125 million Americans suffer from intermittent unhealthy air, 270,000 miles of rivers and streams remain too polluted for fishing and swimming, coastal estuaries are in generally poor shape, and suburban sprawl continues to devour open space at an alarming rate.

The report is a compelling argument for preserving — and broadening where necessary — the reach of environmental law. Mrs. Whitman recognized as much when, in one of her last acts, she proposed tough new regulations on construction equipment and other diesel-powered off-road vehicles, a huge and lightly regulated source of air pollution. But she has spent most of her tenure playing defense. The administration moved to weaken the existing Clean Air Act without putting anything in its place. It has done little to regulate farm runoff, a major source of water pollution. And Mrs. Whitman herself has set in motion a review of the Clean Water Act that could leave over 60 percent of the nation's streams and 20 million acres of wetlands exposed to development and pollution.

Indeed, before she leaves town, and as a final legacy, Mrs. Whitman might consider taking that unfortunate proposal off the table. That could make her agency's next report even rosier.


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

(Edited by Christian Wieland at 7:58 am on June 26, 2003)

[Kris]

August 23, 2003

Fouling the Air

In defiance of Congress, the courts and the requirements of public health, the administration is on the verge of effectively repealing a key section of the Clean Air Act. According to a report yesterday in The Times, the Environmental Protection Agency plans to issue a final rule next week that would allow thousands of industrial sites, including hundreds of old coal-fired power plants, to make major upgrades without installing new pollution controls, as currently required by law. Eliot Spitzer, New York's attorney general, has rightly vowed to sue the moment the rule becomes final. We are eager to hear Gov. Michael Leavitt of Utah, President Bush's nominee to run the E.P.A., try to defend this decision when he comes up for confirmation in September — especially in light of his own clean-air director's vigorous opposition to the change.

At issue is a provision called "new source review," part of the Clean Air Act amendments of 1977. It requires companies to install modern pollution controls in new plants, and in old plants when they make significant modifications leading to increased emissions. The rule was aimed mainly at older coal-fired power plants, which were temporarily exempted from the act's requirements in the expectation that they would install pollution controls later. New-source review has been in the administration's sights ever since Vice President Dick Cheney all but ordered its abolition in his 2001 energy report. Industry and the administration have argued that the rule is impossibly cumbersome and that other Clean Air Act provisions can achieve the same results. These arguments are only partly true and largely beside the point, which is that until something better comes along, new-source review is an indispensable tool for cleaning the air.

What really bothers industry is that the rule requires significant capital outlays. Many companies have therefore tried to evade it, leading to lawsuits by, among others, Mr. Spitzer. Confronted with industry's howls, the administration decided simply to scuttle the rule. This is hardly the first time that the White House has ordered the rollback of a law that discomfits its friends. But this is a particularly egregious example, and one that could do the environment great harm.


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

August 28, 2003

Politics and Pollution

President Bush's critics have watched with mounting frustration as his administration has compiled one of the worst environmental records in recent history without paying any real political price. One reason may be that the issues at stake are too regional, like forest fires or salmon recovery, or too remote, like global warming. But the administration itself may now have witlessly altered this dynamic with its reckless and insupportable decision to eviscerate a central provision of the Clean Air Act and allow power plants, refineries and other industrial sites to spew millions of tons of unhealthy pollutants into the air.

The proposed changes in the act, formally announced yesterday, are so transparently a giveaway to Mr. Bush's corporate allies and so widely unpopular among the officials responsible for air quality in the individual states that they have already assumed a place in the nascent presidential race. Democratic candidates are competing to see who can express more outrage — John Kerry, for instance, calls the changes a " `get out of jail free' card" for polluters. Moderate Republicans are dismayed and embarrassed. The issue will acquire even greater momentum when the new rules are published as a fait accompli in the Federal Register, and a dozen or more states sue in federal court to have them stayed and then overturned.

These suits could easily succeed. The new rules are a clear violation of Congress's intent in 1977, when it required utilities and other polluters to install modern pollution-control technology whenever they modified their plants in ways that increased emissions. The Justice Department identified 51 plants that were in violation of the 1977 rule because they had been upgraded without the required pollution controls. Several of these cases have been resolved in the government's favor, but the administration's action clearly jeopardizes the remaining lawsuits.

As the administration's defense takes shape, the public should beware of half-truths and artful demagogy. One specious line of argument is that the old rule inhibited companies from doing routine maintenance and making plants more efficient. The administration has offered no compelling evidence to support that beyond the anecdotal say-so of a few utilities. A companion argument, made by apologists for the White House, is that the old rule contributed to the blackout. This, too, is nonsense. The blackout was caused by deficiencies in the transmission grid or its management and had nothing to do with environmental regulations or a shortage of power.

This line of reasoning is eerily reminiscent of the efforts to blame environmentalists for the California energy crisis, and is equally as hollow.


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

September 13, 2003

Baked Alaska on the Menu?

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

KAKTOVIK, Alaska

Skeptics of global warming should come to this Eskimo village on the Arctic Ocean, roughly 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle. It's hard to be complacent about climate change when you're in an area that normally is home to animals like polar bears and wolverines, but is now attracting robins.

A robin even built its nest in town this year (there is no word in the local Inupiat Eskimo language for robins). And last year a (presumably shivering) porcupine arrived.

The Okpilak River valley was historically too cold and dry for willows, and in the Inupiat language "Okpilak" means "river with no willows." Yet a warmer, wetter climate means that now it's crowded with willows.

The warming ocean is also bringing salmon, three kinds now, to waters here. The Eskimos say there were almost no salmon a generation ago.

"The weather is different, really different," said 92-year-old Nora Agiak, speaking in the Inupiat language and wearing moose-skin moccasins and a jacket with wolverine fur. "We're not getting as many icebergs as we used to. Maybe the world moved because it's getting warmer."

In the past, I've been skeptical about costly steps (like those in the Kyoto accord) to confront climate change. But I'm changing my mind. The evidence, while still somewhat incomplete, is steadily mounting that our carbon emissions are causing an accelerating global warming that amounts to a major threat to the world in which we live.

Alaska has warmed by eight degrees, on average, in the winter, over the last three decades, according to meteorological records. The U.S. Arctic Research Commission says that today's Arctic temperatures are the highest in the last 400 years, and perhaps much longer.

The U.S. Navy reports that in areas traversed by its submarines, Arctic ice volume decreased 42 percent over the last 35 years, and the average thickness of ice below water declined 4.3 feet. The Office of Naval Research warns that "one plausible outcome" is that the summer Arctic ice cap will disappear completely by 2050.

"We've got climate change," Robert Thompson, a native guide, says flatly. He notes that pack ice, which always used to hover offshore, providing a home for polar bears, now sometimes retreats hundreds of miles north of Kaktovik. That has caused some bears to drown and leaves others stranded on land.

(After a polar bear was spotted outside Kaktovik's post office one snowy morning, the locals explained what to do if you bump into a famished polar bear: Yell and throw stones, and above all, don't run!)

For hundreds of years, the Eskimos here used ice cellars in the permafrost. But now the permafrost is melting, and these ice cellars are filling with water and becoming useless.

Kaktovik's airstrip, 50 years old, has begun to flood because of higher seas, so it may be moved upland. Another native village, Shishmaref, has voted to abandon its location entirely because of rising seas.

In the hamlet of Deadhorse, I ran into an Arctic native named Jackson Snyder, who said that winters were getting "a lot warmer — doesn't get much below 50 below anymore."

That may not seem so bad. But while there will be benefits to a warmer Alaska (a longer growing season, ice-free ports), climate change can also lead to crop failures, spread tropical diseases and turn Bangladesh into tidal pools. The pace of warming may be far too fast for animals, humans or ecosystems to adjust. My advice is that if you're planning a dream home in New Orleans or on the Chesapeake, put it on stilts.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, reflecting a consensus of scientists, concluded that human activity had probably caused most global warming in recent decades. It predicted that in this century, the seas will rise 4 to 35 inches.

Some 14,000 years ago, a warming trend apparently raised the sea level by 70 feet in just a few hundred years. Today's computer models don't foresee a repeat of that, but they also can't explain why it happened then.

That's why I'm changing my mind about the need for major steps to address carbon emissions. Global warming is still an uncertain threat, but it may well become one of the major challenges of this century. Certainly our government should do more about it than censor discussions of climate change in E.P.A. reports.

Unless we act soon, we may find waves lapping the beaches of Ohio.


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Agglomeration]

I really don't expect any surprises from a Republican Administration that doesn't even PRETEND to beenvironmentalist.

[Kris]

Thinning Ice

There has been no end of scholarly studies confirming the gradual rise in global temperatures over the past century. Yet nothing focuses the mind on global warming and its potential consequences quite so sharply as the occasional news flash from some remote corner of the globe documenting startling changes in landscapes once thought to be immutable. Two years ago, for instance, scientists told us that the snows of Kilimanjaro, which inspired Ernest Hemingway's famous short story, could vanish in 15 years, and that the seemingly indestructible glaciers in the Bolivian Andes might not last another 10. Last year brought evidence of disturbing and apparently irreversible changes in Alaska's environment — melting permafrost, sagging roads, dying forests — arising from an astonishing rise of 5.4 degrees in Alaska's average temperature over the past 30 years.

Now comes more unsettling news: a report from three scientists that the Arctic's largest ice shelf — a 150-square-mile, 100-foot-thick mass of ice that has been sitting more or less intact off the northern Canadian coast for 3,000 years — is disintegrating. The scientists say the breakup results from a century-long warming trend that has accelerated in the last two years. It is not yet possible, they say, to tie the melting directly to rising atmospheric concentrations of so-called greenhouse gases, or to the human activities — chiefly the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil — that create these gases. But they warn that a "critical threshold" has been breached, and that on the other side of this threshold lie abrupt changes in natural conditions we have long taken for granted.

There could be a bright side to all this, if it persuaded the Bush administration and Congress to take the issue of climate change more seriously. That is not happening. Mr. Bush remains fixated on a voluntary approach that offers little hope of meaningful reductions in industrial emissions of carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas. Congress, meanwhile, is fashioning an energy bill that will do little to reduce these emissions, and indeed could increase them by heaping new subsidies on the oil, gas and coal industries. Washington's carapace of denial seems sturdier than any glacier.


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

October 27, 2003

Testing the Senate's Mettle

There is a good test of senatorial courage coming this week. For the first time, senators will be asked whether they are prepared to do something serious about global warming. The question comes in the form of a bill by John McCain and Joseph Lieberman that would impose mandatory caps on industrial emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases thought to be heavily responsible for warming the earth's atmosphere. The bill is a long shot. But it will provide the first true test of the sincerity of senators who say they care about the problem and have faulted President Bush for not doing enough.

More broadly, it will also tell us whether the politics of global warming are finally beginning to catch up to the science of global warming. The science seems clear enough, and surveys suggest that the public and many local politicians are worried. But Washington hangs back, fearful of asking the country to make the investments in cleaner fuels, cars and power plants needed to start bringing emissions down.

This fear has been engendered in part by Mr. Bush, who remains stubbornly positioned at the rear of a parade he ought to be leading. Warning of job losses, he has opposed not only the 1997 Kyoto Protocol but even the mildest variations on that agreement. Instead, he offers research into technological fixes (fine, as far as they go) as well as a voluntary program that will allow industrial emissions to grow as long as they increase more slowly than the economy itself, which of course misses the point. The carbon in the atmosphere, already dangerously high, is likely to stay there for a long time. Thus the name of the game is to stabilize and reduce emissions, not merely to slow their growth.

Senators McCain and Lieberman have it right. Their plan would require energy, transportation and manufacturing companies to cut their emissions to 2000 levels by 2010. That isn't asking a lot. According to two reputable studies, the cost would be less than $20 per family per year, and there would be no negative impact on employment. Indeed, the investments in new technologies necessary to achieve the reductions, as well as the money saved on gasoline from more efficient cars, could actually boost the economy. The bill also offers a range of clever economic incentives — chiefly a market-based system of emissions trading, patterned after the highly successful acid rain program in the 1990 Clean Air Act — to help industries keep the costs of compliance low.

Three hours of debate will be allowed for the McCain-Lieberman forces, three for the opposition. The point will undoubtedly be made that America is under no obligation to act as long as developing countries like China increase their emissions. The truth is just the reverse: One cannot expect developing nations to do anything until the United States, the biggest polluter, takes the lead. McCain-Lieberman is a splendid chance to do so.


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[ZippyTheChimp]

Images from the NASA Earth Obervatory webpage:

The minimum concentration of polar sea ice for 1979
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NasaNews/ReleaseImages/20031023/STILLsea79.jpg

The mininum concentration of polar sea ice for 2003
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NasaNews/ReleaseImages/20031023/STILLsea_ice03.jpg

The reduction was measured to be 9% per decade.

[Freedom Tower]

Look though, the ice increased by Japan. How can that be explained?

[ZippyTheChimp]

Japan :?:

[dbhstockton]

Someone should have paid more attention in geography class.

[dbhstockton]

So is that Australia all covered in ice?

[Jasonik]

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/data/ev92/ev9275_NovayaZemlya.A2001161.0905.1km.jpg

Novaya Zemlya [nô"vIu zimlyä'] , archipelago, c.35,000 sq mi (90,650 sq km), in the Arctic Ocean between the Barents and Kara seas, NW Russia. It consists of two main islands (separated by Matochkin Strait) and many smaller ones. The mountains, rising to c.3,500 ft (1,070 m), are a continuation of the Urals. In the north the archipelago is glaciated and covered by arctic desert; the southern part is tundra. Copper, lead, zinc, and asphaltite are found there. Fishing, sealing, and trapping are the chief occupations of the small population, which lives mainly along the western coast. The islands were used for thermonuclear testing by the Russians, who still maintain a nonnuclear weapons test site there. Explored by Novgorodians in the 11th or 12th cent., the islands were sighted by explorers searching for the Northeast Passage in the 1500s. Since the mid-1800s Russians have built settlements and scientific stations there.

Source- The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia

[Freedom Tower]

OK, not Japan. But it's that Japan-shaped island north of Russia. That's what I'm talking about. If you still don't see where the ice increased then I'll just go ahead and say it: On the top of the picture. I wonder why there is an increase of ice there. Maybe the changing ice has nothing to do with global warming if it is increasing in some areas...

[Freedom Tower]

Stockton, that is Greenland covered in ice. Australia is closer to Japan. Which is why if you just skim the picture, as i did, you can mistake the areas for Japan and Australia, although I should've realized there was no ice there.

[Jasonik]

Yeah Stockton, I won't hold it against you. Is Stevie Wonder your geography tutor? :wink: :lol:

Free-T, are you sure it's not Iceland?

[dbhstockton]

So you were just skimming the picture, but you were looking carefully enough to notice that there's slightly more ice in one corner of the image.

The point is that there's less ice, not where it is. It's a computer-generated image anyway.

So Australia is closer to Japan? About as close as we are to Argentina.

You clearly know next to nothing about this topic, other than some propaganda you're ready to spew about doom-and-gloom liberal tax-and-spend tree-hugging environmentalist scientists who are going to destroy America. Spare me.

[Jasonik]

President Bush's critics have watched with mounting frustration as his administration has compiled one of the worst environmental records in recent history without paying any real political price. One reason may be that the issues at stake are too regional, like forest fires or salmon recovery, or too remote, like global warming.

So Bush should pay the political price for forest fires? I thought that was Gray Davis's fault?!

I'm all about holding politicians accountable, but give me a break...forest fires?!

Who is responsible for hurricanes, Fidel Castro?

[ZippyTheChimp]

Bad comparison. Unlike hurricanes, forest fires are influenced by environmental policy.

FT, I would have explained, but if you really thought Japan was next to the ice cap...well, here goes:

The size of the ice cap determines how much sunlight is reflected back away from the earth. The more radiant energy that gets through the atmosphere, the higher the temperature, which in turn melts more ice. The danger is that you can reach a point where the process spirals out of control, and is not affected by any action we take.

The reverse of this process is how an ice-age develops.

[Jasonik]

Bad comparison. Unlike hurricanes, forest fires are influenced by environmental policy.

Zippy, I am not trying to be argumentative, but this just seems absurd.

As far as I know Bush has advocated for more logging and forest management by lumber companies, the very people who would have a great deal to gain if forests were healthy and reached full maturity, not a scorched pile of cinders.

I thought my comparison was apt, in that both phenomena rely on atmospheric conditions, (which can be loosly corrolated to environmental policy), but are random and unpredictable forces of nature that operate in cycles beyond our control.*

*Before settlers moved to California the natives would conduct controlled burns every year to keep these unpredictable fires from popping up, (of course white men knew better than these savages.)

If Bush is against controlled burns conducted by forestry experts then I think his environmental policy stinks with regard to this subject, barring that I think making political hay out of natural disasters is distasteful at the very least.

[Kris]

October 29, 2003

The Warming Is Global but the Legislating, in the U.S., Is All Local

By JENNIFER 8. LEE

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/10/29/national/clim.583.jpg
Workers installed solar panels atop the San Francisco convention center in August, a result of a new California energy initiative.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 28 — Motivated by environmental and economic concerns, states have become the driving force in efforts to combat global warming even as mandatory programs on the federal level have largely stalled.

At least half of the states are addressing global warming, whether through legislation, lawsuits against the Bush administration or programs initiated by governors.

In the last three years, state legislatures have passed at least 29 bills, usually with bipartisan support. The most contentious is California's 2002 law to set strict limits for new cars on emissions of carbon dioxide, the gas that scientists say has the greatest role in global warming.

While few of the state laws will have as much impact as California's, they are not merely symbolic. In addition to caps on emissions of gases like carbon dioxide that can cause the atmosphere to heat up like a greenhouse, they include registries to track such emissions, efforts to diversify fuel sources and the use of crops to capture carbon dioxide by taking it out of the atmosphere and into the ground.

Aside from their practical effects, supporters say, these efforts will put pressure on Congress and the administration to enact federal legislation, if only to bring order to a patchwork of state laws.

States are moving ahead in large part to fill the vacuum that has been left by the federal government, said David Danner, the energy adviser for Gov. Gary Locke of Washington.

"We hope to see the problem addressed at the federal level," Mr. Danner said, "but we're not waiting around."

There are some initiatives in Congress, but for the moment even their backers acknowledge that they are doomed, given strong opposition from industry, the Bush administration — which favors voluntary controls — and most Congressional Republicans.

This week, the Senate is scheduled to vote on a proposal to create a national regulatory structure for carbon dioxide. This would be the first vote for either house on a measure to restrict the gas.

The proposal's primary sponsors, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, see it mainly as a way to force senators to take a position on the issue, given the measure's slim prospects.

States are acting partly because of predictions that global warming could damage local economies by harming agriculture, eroding shorelines and hurting tourism.

"We're already seeing things which may be linked to global warming here in the state," Mr. Danner said. "We have low snowpack, increased forest fire danger."

Environmental groups and officials in state governments say that energy initiatives are easier to move forward on the local level because they span constituencies — industrial and service sectors, Democrat and Republican, urban and rural.

While the coal, oil and automobile industries have big lobbies in Washington, the industry presence is diluted on the state level. Environmental groups say this was crucial to winning a legislative battle over automobile emissions in California, where the automobile industry did not have a long history of large campaign donations and instead had to rely on a six-month advertising campaign to make its case.

Local businesses are also interested in policy decisions because of concerns about long-term energy costs, said Christopher James, director of air planning and standards for the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection. As a result, environmental groups are shifting their efforts to focus outside Washington.

Five years ago the assumption was that the climate treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol was the only effort in town, said Rhys Roth, the executive director of Climate Solutions, which works on global warming issues in the Pacific Northwest states. But since President Bush rejected the Kyoto pact in 2001, local groups have been emerging on the regional, state and municipal levels.

The Climate Action Network, a worldwide conglomeration of nongovernment organizations working on global warming, doubled its membership of state and local groups in the last two years.

The burst of activity is not limited to the states with a traditional environmental bent.

At least 15 states, including Texas and Nevada, are forcing their state electric utilities to diversify beyond coal and oil to energy sources like wind and solar power.

Even rural states are linking their agricultural practices to global warming. Nebraska, Oklahoma and Wyoming have all passed initiatives in anticipation of future greenhouse-gas emission trading, hoping they can capitalize on their forests and crops to capture carbon dioxide during photosynthesis.

Cities are also adopting new energy policies. San Franciscans approved a $100 million bond initiative in 2001 to pay for solar panels for municipal buildings, including the San Francisco convention center.

The rising level of state activity is causing concern among those who oppose carbon dioxide regulation.

"I believe the states are being used to force a federal mandate," said Sandy Liddy Bourne, who does research on global warming for the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group contending that carbon dioxide should not be regulated because it is not a pollutant. "Rarely do you see so many bills in one subject area introduced across the country."

The council started tracking state legislation, which they call son-of-Kyoto bills, weekly after they noticed a significant rise in greenhouse-gas-related legislation two years ago. This year, the council says, 24 states have introduced 90 bills that would build frameworks for regulating carbon dioxide. Sixty-six such bills were introduced in all of 2001 and 2002.

Some of the activity has graduated to a regional level. Last summer, Gov. George E. Pataki of New York invited 10 Northeastern states to set up a regional trading network where power plants could buy and sell carbon dioxide credits in an effort to lower overall emissions. In 2001, six New England states entered into an agreement with Canadian provinces to cap overall emissions by 2010. Last month, California, Washington and Oregon announced that they would start looking at shared strategies to address global warming.

To be sure, some states have decided not to embrace policies to combat global warming. Six — Alabama, Illinois, Kentucky, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Wyoming — have explicitly passed laws against any mandatory reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

"My concern," said Ms. Bourne, "is that members of industry and environment groups will go to the federal government to say: `There is a patchwork quilt of greenhouse-gas regulations across the country. We cannot deal with the 50 monkeys. We must have one 800-pound gorilla. Please give us a federal mandate.' " Indeed, some environmentalists say this is precisely their strategy.

States developed their own air toxics pollution programs in the 1980's, which resulted in different regulations and standards across the country. Industry groups, including the American Chemistry Council, eventually lobbied Congress for federal standards, which were incorporated into the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments.

A number of states are trying to compel the federal government to move sooner rather than later. On Thursday, 12 states, including New York, with its Republican governor, and three cities sued the Environmental Protection Agency for its recent decision not to regulate greenhouse-gas pollutants under the Clean Air Act, a reversal of the agency's previous stance under the Clinton administration.

"Global warming cannot be solely addressed at the state level," said Tom Reilly, the Massachusetts attorney general. "It's a problem that requires a federal approach."

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/10/29/national/27CLIMATEch450.gif

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[ZippyTheChimp]

If you believe that our influence over hurricanes and forest fires is comparable, then yeah, you're right.

[Freedom Tower]

So you were just skimming the picture, but you were looking carefully enough to notice that there's slightly more ice in one corner of the image.

The point is that there's less ice, not where it is. It's a computer-generated image anyway.

So Australia is closer to Japan? About as close as we are to Argentina.

You clearly know next to nothing about this topic, other than some propaganda you're ready to spew about doom-and-gloom liberal tax-and-spend tree-hugging environmentalist scientists who are going to destroy America. Spare me.

Stockton I find your attitude towards me apalling and offensive and I'd appreciate it if you'd cease to talk to me like that. All I pointed out was that for some reason or another a certain part of the globe had an increase in ice. I found that odd. That gives you no right to talk to me as if I am just out to spread propoganda. I clearly know next to nothing? Excuse me for saying so, but I wasn't speaking about this topic in detail. All I did was point out an increase in ice, no harm done. I skimmed the picture quickly, yes. Which is why I mistaked a big island for Australia and a little one for Japan. I should've, obviously, realized that there was no ice cap there. But for some reason I did not realize it. So with that passed, the ice did INCREASE in a certain area. If this change in ice was due to global warming I would just assume there would be NO increase at all. I just pointed out that in the picture ice did increase in some area. Automatically you start typing that I'm out to get liberals. Perhaps there is an error, or maybe there just is more ice there, I don't know. All I did was point it out. But your mocking my mistakes and then turning around to nearly curse me off for being a conservative is nothing less than evil. I expect an apology.

Btw, Jasonik, I know you are just being sarcastic, but no it's not iceland. Iceland, surprisingly is much warmer than Greenland. It's much smaller too.

And Zippy, thanks for explaining some more about this. I didn't realize that ice-caps were important to reflect sunlight. At first I only thought their melting was considered a problem because it was an affect of global warming. In other words, I thought so much attention was being paid to them becuase they showed that the earth was getting increasingly warmer. I didn't know that they also serve a useful purpose in cooling the planet by reflecting sunlight. Interesting stuff.

[dbhstockton]

I'm sure your interest in pointing out what you saw as an anomaly -- even though you admit you didn't even know what you were looking at -- was purely objective and soley in the interest of detached curiosity.

[Freedom Tower]

Yes, that is true. I wasn't here for any political agenda. It was completely objective, even though I was confused. I just was curious as to why the ice gained in one place, while decreasing everywhere else. It is obvious global warming is a problem, I wasn't trying to disprove that fact, and it is doing harm to the world. All I was wondering abot was what caused the increase in that location. The decrease in overall ice is alarming, I agree.

[NYatKNIGHT]

In the Atlantic, the Gulf Stream carries warm surface water up past Norway. Climate and water temperatures are warmer there than in Alaska even though they are the same latitude because Alaska has no warm current along its coast.

If the world grows warmer, the ice caps start to melt, and cold fresh water is released into the adjacent ocean. Scientists fear that this would stop the Gulf Stream from coming as far north, so even though temperatures rise globally, they may plummet locally in places in the north Atlantic. That's how ice can build up in some places where it wasn't before (like in that picture) even though there's lots more ice melting everywhere else.

So global warming doesn't necessarily mean it gets warmer everywhere - Britain and Ireland could become frigid - but it could wreak havoc on the climate, affecting temperatures, rainfall, storm patterns, the list goes on. And sea levels would rise the more the polar ice caps melt. For coastal cities like New York, well, click here (http://forums.wirednewyork.com/viewtopic.php?t=816&highlight=).

[Freedom Tower]

NYatKnight, you must know a lot about this process. Just today I found an article online making what you stated a few months ago seem as a new shocking revelation. It is shocking, though. Look, this is from www.cnn.com:

(I sure hope this is not why it is so cold in the Northeast right now)

N. America, Europe to cool as world warms?
Wednesday, January 21, 2004 Posted: 11:26 AM EST (1626 GMT)

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (Reuters) -- Parts of Europe and North America could get drastically colder if warming Atlantic ocean currents are halted by a surprise side-effect of global warming, scientists said on Wednesday.

The possible shut-down of the Gulf Stream is one of several catastrophic changes -- ranging from collapses of fish stocks to more frequent forest fires -- that could be triggered by human activities, they said in a book launched in Sweden.

"In the worst case it (the Gulf Stream) could shut down... it might even happen this century," said Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. "This would trigger a regional cooling, but not an Ice Age."

Climate models indicated a surge of fresh water into the North Atlantic from a melting of northern glaciers caused by global warming could stop the current that sweeps warm waters from the Gulf of Mexico toward Europe.

"The Eastern coast of Canada and the United States would also be affected. This is sometimes wrongly perceived as a European problem by American politicians," he told Reuters.

He said the Gulf Stream had collapsed about 20 times in the past 100,000 years, most recently at the tail of the last Ice Age about 8,000 years ago after an abrupt melting of icecaps.

If the Gulf Stream stopped, average temperatures might fall by 5-10 Celsius (10-20F) in Scandinavia or by 3-4C in Germany.

By contrast, global warming, widely blamed on emissions of gases like carbon dioxide from cars and factories, is expected to raise global average temperatures by 1.4-5.8C by 2100.

The U.N. Kyoto Protocol on limiting global warming hinges on Russia's yes or no. Moscow is undecided and President Vladimir Putin said his country might benefit from warmer world weather, though a halt of Gulf Stream would make northwest Russia colder.

Rahmstorf's study was included in a new book, "Global Change and the Earth System: a planet under pressure," which looks at the impact of the surge in the human population to six billion people, ranging from stripped forests to rising temperatures.

"A major finding is that change will not be progressive. There will be abrupt changes and tipping points," said Will Steffen, executive director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program which issued the book based on work by 5,000 scientists.

"Never before have we seen the range of change or the rate of change at the same time," he told Reuters.

"You can get to a point where forests are too hot and too dry and sudden fires rip through them," he said, referring to blazes last year in nations from Australia to France. "Global warming may make these events more frequent."

And another report indicated that fish stocks might not recover even if nations ban fishing. Depletion of cod stocks, for instance, lets smaller species flourish and these may prey on the young of any surviving cod and prevent stock recovery.

[NYatKNIGHT]

Last week, conservative media attempted to make Al Gore look foolish for making a speech about global warming on the coldest day of the year. The joke's on them though, extreme hot AND cold weather is a direct result of global warming. Not that our current cold weather is necessarily the result of global warming, but the freezing weather in no way undermined the speech.

http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/data/2004/01/15/20040115_193004_agwarm.htm

[ZippyTheChimp]

And they don't bother to explain that global warming would affect climate, which is more important than hot and cold weather.

[dbhstockton]

Dumb!

[Kris]

January 25, 2004

Warming Up

That President Bush ignored the environment in his State of the Union address was either an admission that he has nothing to boast about on the issue or a judgment that nobody cares enough about it to make a difference in the presidential race. Whatever the reason, he has created a policy vacuum that offers substantial rewards for any ambitious Democrat willing to fill it.

Nowhere is this truer than on global warming. Each day brings evidence that the climate is changing, that the consequences are likely to be unpleasant and that the responses offered by the administration and its allies in Congress are inadequate.

Two recent reports illustrate the dangers. A study by an international research team, published in Nature, warned that unabated warming could drive 15 to 37 percent of 1,103 living species the team studied toward extinction by 2050. Shortly thereafter came an ominous report by The Times's Andrew Revkin on warming's impact in the Arctic, where the sea ice is in rapid retreat, and its potentially devastating effect on Alaska's fragile tundra.

Two other reports, meanwhile, documented the need for more aggressive public policies. A Washington Post survey found that only a tiny number of American companies, 54 at last count, have agreed to participate in Mr. Bush's program of voluntary reductions of global warming gases — the strategy Mr. Bush chose when he rejected the mandatory emissions caps called for in the Kyoto Protocol. As further evidence of industry's indifference, The Times's Danny Hakim disclosed recently that Subaru — a company that has marketed itself as environmentally friendly — had decided to redesign its popular Outback wagon as a "light truck," so as to avoid the tougher fuel economy standards that apply to ordinary cars.

Subaru, of course, is hardly the first car company to take advantage of this country's porous fuel economy regulations. But like the companies that feel safe in ignoring Mr. Bush's half-hearted appeals for voluntary restraints, Subaru's decision reflects the failure of the administration and Congress to send tough regulatory signals that will make industry sit up and pay attention.

As this page has noted before, simply closing the so-called S.U.V. loophole, and making light trucks as efficient as ordinary cars, would save a million barrels of oil a day, reducing global warming gases while easing our reliance on imported oil. More broadly, the country needs something along the lines of the bill sponsored by Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman, which would require economywide reductions in emissions while establishing market mechanisms to ease the cost of compliance. It is encouraging in this regard that nearly all the Democratic candidates, some more aggressively than others, have embraced the idea of binding limits on emissions of carbon dioxide.

Mr. Bush regards mandatory emissions caps as "top-down" regulatory management and therefore unacceptable. But his own bottom-up voluntarism is going nowhere. Meanwhile Alaska melts. The McCain-Lieberman bill did better than anyone expected last year. It deserves another try.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

January 28, 2004

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Global Chilling

By PAUL R. EPSTEIN

BOSTON — It seemed incongruous when former Vice President Al Gore gave a speech on global warming on a bitterly cold day in New York City this month. But in fact it was an appropriate topic: New Yorkers may be able to blame the city's current cold spell — the most severe in nearly a decade — on global warming.

Global warming doesn't mean that every place on the globe gets warmer. The weather history that can be read in polar ice-core samples indicates that previous periods of warming affected North America and Europe far differently than they did the tropics — the Northern Hemisphere got a lot colder.

It's far too early to say for sure, but the same processes may be at work today. In the past 50 years, the top two miles of the world's oceans have warmed significantly, and that warming is melting sea ice. In just four decades, the thickness of summer North Polar floating ice shrank 44 percent. In addition, warming makes droughts drier and longer, and when the evaporated water returns to earth it does so in heavier downpours.

Normally, water circulates in the North Atlantic like this: Cold, salty water at the top sinks; that sinking water acts as a pump, pulling warm Gulf Stream water north and thus moderating winter weather. But now, fresh water from the thawing ice and heavier rain is accumulating near the ocean's surface; it's not sinking as quickly. (The tropics are faced with the opposite phenomenon. According to Dr. Ruth Curry and her colleagues at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the tropical Atlantic is becoming saltier; as warming increases, so does evaporation, which leaves behind salt.) The "freshening" in the North Atlantic may be contributing to a high-pressure system that is accelerating trans-Atlantic winds and deflecting the jet stream — changes that may be driving frigid fronts down the Eastern Seaboard. The ice-core records demonstrate that the North Atlantic can freshen to a point where the deep-water pump fails, warm water stops coming north, and the northern ocean suddenly freezes, as it did in the last Ice Age. No one can say if that is what will happen next. But since the 1950's, the best documented deep-water pump, between Iceland and Scotland, has slowed 20 percent.

Why now? After all, the planet's previous periods of global warming resulted from changes in the earth's tilt toward the sun, and recent calculations of these cycles indicate that our hospitable climate was not due to have ended any time soon. But because of the warming brought by the buildup of carbon dioxide, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels, the equations have changed. We are entering uncharted waters. It's something for New Yorkers to ponder as they bundle up.

Paul R. Epstein is associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[ZippyTheChimp]

How Oceans Regulate Climate (http://terra.nasa.gov/FactSheets/Oceans/)

Gulfstream images from TERRA satellite. The colors represent differences in water temperature from cold to warmer PURPLE BLUE GREEN YELLOW RED. Black areas are land or missing data.

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/data/ev253/ev25320_image04242003_1km.jpg

The Gulfstream passes the New York Bight
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/Images/gulf_stream_modis.gif

The Gulfstream is one of the strongest ocean currents, moving northeast from the Gulf of Mexico at 4 miles per hour. The warm moist air it carries influences climate in northwestern Europe.

[Kris]

February 23, 2004

Uses and Abuses of Science

Although the Bush administration is hardly the first to politicize science, no administration in recent memory has so shamelessly distorted scientific findings for policy reasons or suppressed them when they conflict with political goals. This is the nub of an indictment delivered last week by more than 60 prominent scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates. Their statement was accompanied by a report published by the Union of Concerned Scientists, listing cases where the administration has manipulated science on environmental and other issues.

President Bush's supporters promptly denounced the statement and the report as an overdrawn and politically motivated work issued in an election year by an advocacy group known for its liberal disposition. Tellingly, however, neither Mr. Bush's friends nor the White House denied that any of the incidents listed in the report — all had been reported before in newspapers, trade magazines and scientific journals — had occurred. The best they could muster was a lame rejoinder from Dr. John Marburger III, Mr. Bush's science adviser, who said that these were disconnected episodes reflecting normal bureaucratic disagreements, none of them adding up to a "pattern" of distortion or disrespect for science.

We respectfully urge Dr. Marburger to look again. On global warming alone, the administration belittled, misrepresented, altered or quashed multiple reports suggesting a clear link between greenhouse gas emissions and the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil. A study detailing the impact of mercury emissions from power plants was sanitized to industry specifications. Another study suggesting that a Congressional clean-air bill would achieve greater pollution reductions than Mr. Bush's own plan, at approximately the same cost, was withheld. It does not take much effort to find a pattern of suppressing inconvenient facts that might force Mr. Bush's friends in the oil, gas and coal industries to spend more on pollution control.

The report details similar shenanigans involving other agencies, including Agriculture, Interior and even, on reproductive health issues, the Centers for Disease Control. It also criticizes the administration for stacking advisory committees with industry representatives and disbanding panels that provided unwanted advice. Collected in one place, this material gives a portrait of governmentwide insensitivity to scientific standards that, unless corrected, will further undermine the administration's credibility and the morale of its scientists.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

Architectural Global Warming (http://www.architectureweek.com/2004/0218/environment_1-1.html)

[Kris]

June 15, 2004

California Leads on Warming

Filling a leadership vacuum left by President Bush and Congress, states have been forced to lead the fight against global warming. Yesterday California unveiled an ambitious proposal to require automakers to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases linked to global warming by as much as 30 percent over the next decade.

The plan will almost certainly be challenged in court by the automakers and possibly by the Bush administration. Given California's long history as an innovator in environmental policy, however, the initiative is likely to inspire similar efforts in other states and may have the further salutary effect of forcing the issue of climate change — which even Senator John Kerry has shown little inclination to tackle — onto the campaign agenda.

The plan grows out of legislation passed by the California Legislature two years ago. It would require manufacturers to start reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the 2009 model year with the aim of achieving a 30 percent reduction by 2015. Since carbon dioxide and other gases linked to global warming cannot be filtered in the same way that catalytic converters filter out harmful smog-forming particles, the only way to cut global warming emissions is to reduce fuel use. That means making more fuel-efficient cars.

The manufacturers are likely to argue in court that this is merely a backdoor way of mandating a tougher fuel-economy standard, which under current law is a federal responsibility. The manufacturers will also complain about having to sell cars in states with different regulatory mandates. This is a legitimate problem, for which Washington must be blamed. Given the federal indifference, California cannot be expected to refrain from acting on its own to address global warming.

The state's plan still faces further regulatory and legislative review. Nevertheless, whatever emerges is likely to serve as a template for similar action in other states, particularly on the East Coast, where concern over global warming runs high. In New York, Gov. George Pataki, for instance, is organizing a 10-state regional plan to cut power plant emissions, and he has announced that he will follow California's lead on automobiles. Altogether, more than 30 states have approved global warming laws of one sort or another, many of them aimed at encouraging greater use of less-polluting fuels.

All of that leaves Washington bringing up the rear of a parade it ought to be leading. Mr. Bush reneged on his 2000 campaign promise to impose mandatory caps on carbon dioxide, and Congress has rejected all efforts to mandate meaningful increases in fuel efficiency.

Local measures alone are never going to solve the climate-change problem, which will ultimately require a global response. And that battle will never be fully joined unless America joins it. But the palpable concern on the state level may in time serve as a goad to national action.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[krulltime]

CITY, 8 STATES SUE POLLUTERS


July 21, 2004

ALBANY — Eight states and New York City will announce a lawsuit today seeking to force five of the country's largest power producers to cut carbon-dioxide emissions and curb global warming, according to a draft statement obtained by The Associated Press.

The suit is being filed in Manhattan federal court.

The five utilities own 174 fossil fuel-burning power plants that produce 646 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, about 10 percent of the nation's total, the suit will charge.

A spokesman for New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said the lawsuit would, "for the first time, put global warming on the litigation map." AP


Copyright 2004 NYP Holdings, Inc.

[Bob]

Global warming is just so much bile. Ugh! Such pap!

Look, the Earth has gone through many hot/cold cycles in its billions of years of existence. We had ice ages as recently as several thousand years ago, with ice as much as a mile thick covering what is now New England and New York. Where did the ice go? The Earth warmed up and the ice receded. Mother Nature globally warmed!

Now, come on you big environmentalists. Are you against Mother Nature? What if she wanted to globally COOL? Would you be against that?

OK, I know what your answer will be: this time, we're doing it instead of Mother Nature. So, that makes it bad. Sorry, folks, but I don't buy any of it. "Global warming" is junk science!

[ZippyTheChimp]

Your post is "no science."

What is occurring now is not as gradual as movement in and out of ice-ages.

The last glacial period ended 10.000 years ago. We are now in an interglacial period, which statistically lasts about 12,00 years. It is interesting to note that human civilization, with the beginnings of agriculture, began after the last ice-age. Maybe our destiny is to solve this problem between the extremes.

You can allow global warming to quickly cause environmental changes that we will be in no position to rectify, but I would rather wait the 2,000 years and deal with the next ice-age.

We should be off-planet by then. We have to get off eventually anyway. The earth has about a half billion years left.

[Jasonik]

http://www.bobfromaccounting.com/3_11_02/sunlarge.gif (http://www.bobfromaccounting.com/3_11_02/bushputsmanonsun.html) :wink:

[Kris]

July 22, 2004

City Joins Suit Against 5 Power Companies

By JULIA PRESTON and ANDREW C. REVKIN

New York City officials, evoking an apocalyptic vision of Manhattan's tunnels flooded and Kennedy Airport under water, joined a federal suit brought yesterday by New York and seven other states against five of the country's largest power companies in an effort to curb global warming.

New York was the only city to join the suit, which was brought by states dissatisfied with the Bush administration's policies on controlling emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that has been linked to the significant warming of the earth in recent decades.

Painting a scenario that could have come from "The Day After Tomorrow," the city's top lawyer, Michael A. Cardozo, detailed the "extraordinary impact" he said global warming could one day have on New York. It could bring a sharp increases in asthma cases, he said, as well as erosion of beaches in Queens and the Bronx and flooding of Staten Island wetlands.

"And it can mean, to put this most dramatically, flooding of the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels and on the landing strips at La Guardia and Kennedy Airports," Mr. Cardozo said.

While city officials did not suggest that any of those calamities were imminent, they accepted Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's view that the scientific evidence was "rock solid" that carbon dioxide concentrations contributed to global warming.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg decided to participate in the suit - a clear challenge to President Bush's approach to pollution control - because he believes that the city should not delay action on the issue, Mr. Cardozo said.

The companies named in the suit, which was filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, are the American Electric Power Company, the Southern Company, the Tennessee Valley Authority, Xcel Energy and the Cinergy Corporation. The other states participating are Connecticut, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin, Iowa and California. The companies, the largest emitters of carbon dioxide in the United States, do not, for the most part, operate in the Northeast. The suit is the first by local governments to try to force companies outside their jurisdictions to curb carbon dioxide emissions.

The companies condemned the suit yesterday, accusing the attorneys general of the eight states of trying to dictate federal pollution policy and punish a small group of utilities for a worldwide problem.

"We view this simply as an effort to legislate through litigation rather than pursuing standards through Congress," said Steven Brash, a spokesman for Cinergy, which is based in Cincinnati.

The lawsuit divided environmental groups, dismaying some who had been working with big power companies, including several of the defendants, to get them to reduce emissions. Representatives of several groups said the suit erred by lumping the companies together, regardless of whether they had made efforts to curb carbon dioxide.

American Electric Power, while long criticized for its sooty pollution, has gained praise from environmentalists for its commitments to cut emissions. Eileen Claussen, the president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, which has worked with the company, called the suit "slightly perverse."

"Of course we need a national program and of course we need some legislation," she said. "The real question is, does this help you get there? It's not clear to me that this lawsuit will help."

In a new approach, the suit charges that the utilities are creating a "public nuisance," global warming, that harms residents in the states bringing the action. The suit seeks a court order requiring the companies to reduce their emissions by at least 3 percent per year for 10 years, said Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general. No monetary damages are sought.

"We're here because the federal government has abdicated its responsibility and has in fact resisted our court action," Mr. Blumenthal said.

During his 2000 campaign, Mr. Bush promised to restrict carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, but abandoned that pledge early in his term. The Bush administration has called for voluntary measures to slow the growth of emissions.

Most scientists now agree that most of a decades-long warming trend is caused by rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Yet scientific projections of the possible local impacts have remained laced with caveats.

One of the hardest things to predict is the potential impact of shifting climate conditions on health. In a 2001 report, for example, the National Research Council of the National Academies said projections of health impacts were "highly uncertain."


July 28, 2004

A Novel Tactic on Warming

Moving aggressively to compensate for Washington's unwillingness to tackle the threat of global warming, New York, seven other states and New York City filed suit last week against five of the country's largest power companies. Though the suit's legal prospects are unclear, its political implications are not. Once again, the states are asserting their right to remedy environmental problems that the Bush administration and Congress have ignored.

The lawsuit is the first by local governments aimed at forcing companies outside their jurisdictions to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, the gas believed to be largely responsible for the warming trend. The list of defendants reads like a who's who of the industry: the American Electric Power Company, the Southern Company, the Tennessee Valley Authority, Xcel Energy and the Cinergy Corporation. Together, they own or operate 174 power plants in 20 states that emit almost a quarter of the utility industry's carbon dioxide emissions and about 10 percent of the nation's total emissions.

The companies do not dispute the notion that carbon dioxide is a big contributor to climate warming. They complain instead that they are being unfairly singled out and, further, that the states are usurping Congress's power to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. But since neither Congress nor the administration has shown much interest in pushing comprehensive legislation to regulate these gases, the states can hardly be blamed for using the levers at hand.

The attorneys general, including Eliot Spitzer of New York, are to some extent in uncharted legal waters. The novel basis for their action is the common law of public nuisance, and the states will have to persuade a judge that global warming is a "public nuisance'' that harms, or might harm, the residents of the states bringing the action.

They could well prevail. Few mainstream scientists doubt that the threat of warming is real and that carbon dioxide is a major cause. Moreover, this particular group of attorneys general, mostly Northeasterners, have already demonstrated an ability to use the courts to force action on problems that Washington ignores - most recently lawsuits pressuring utilities to reduce emissions of nitrogen and sulfur dioxide. Their hope now is to do the same with a gas that could ultimately prove far more dangerous.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[ZippyTheChimp]

October 26, 2004
THE ENVIRONMENT

NASA Expert Criticizes Bush on Global Warming Policy

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

A top NASA climate expert who twice briefed Vice President Dick Cheney on global warming plans to criticize the administration's approach to the issue in a lecture at the University of Iowa tonight and say that a senior administration official told him last year not to discuss dangerous consequences of rising temperatures.

The expert, Dr. James E. Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, expects to say that the Bush administration has ignored growing evidence that sea levels could rise significantly unless prompt action is taken to reduce heat-trapping emissions from smokestacks and tailpipes.

Many academic scientists, including dozens of Nobel laureates, have been criticizing the administration over its handling of climate change and other complex scientific issues. But Dr. Hansen, first in an interview with The New York Times a week ago and again in his planned lecture today, is the only leading scientist to speak out so publicly while still in the employ of the government.

In the talk, Dr. Hansen, who describes himself as "moderately conservative, middle-of-the-road" and registered in Pennsylvania as an independent, plans to say that he will vote for Senator John Kerry, while also criticizing some of Mr. Kerry's positions, particularly his pledge to keep nuclear waste out of Nevada.

He will acknowledge that one of the accolades he has received for his work on climate change is a $250,000 Heinz Award, given in 2001 by a foundation run by Teresa Heinz Kerry, Mr. Kerry's wife. The awards are given to people who advance causes promoted by Senator John Heinz, the Pennsylvania Republican who was Mrs. Heinz Kerry's first husband.

But in an interview yesterday, Dr. Hansen said he was confident that the award had had "no impact on my evaluation of the climate problem or on my political leanings."

In a draft of the talk, a copy of which Dr. Hansen provided to The Times yesterday, he wrote that President Bush's climate policy, which puts off consideration of binding cuts in such emissions until 2012, was likely to be too little too late.

Actions to curtail greenhouse-gas emissions "are not only feasible but make sense for other reasons, including our economic well-being and national security," Dr. Hansen wrote. "Delay of another decade, I argue, is a colossal risk."

In the speech, Dr. Hansen also says that last year, after he gave a presentation on the dangers of human-caused, or anthropogenic, climate shifts to Sean O'Keefe, the NASA administrator, "the administrator interrupted me; he told me that I should not talk about dangerous anthropogenic interference, because we do not know enough or have enough evidence for what would constitute dangerous anthropogenic interference."

After conferring with Mr. O'Keefe, Glenn Mahone, the administrator's spokesman, said Mr. O'Keefe had a completely different recollection of the meeting. "To say the least, Sean is certain that he did not admonish or even suggest that there be a throttling back of research efforts" by Dr. Hansen or his team, Mr. Mahone said.

Dr. Franco Einaudi, director of the NASA Earth Sciences Directorate at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and Dr. Hansen's supervisor, said he was at the meeting between Dr. Hansen and Mr. O'Keefe. Dr. Einaudi confirmed that Mr. O'Keefe had interrupted the presentation to say that these were "delicate issues" and there was a lot of uncertainty about them. But, he added: "Whether it is obvious to take that as an order or not is a question of judgment. Personally, I did not take it as an order."

Dr. John H. Marburger III, the science adviser to the president, said he was not privy to any exchanges between Dr. Hansen and the administrator of NASA. But he denied that the White House was playing down the risks posed by climate change.

"President Bush has long recognized the serious implications of climate change, the role of human activity, and our responsibility to reduce emissions,'' Dr. Marburger said in an e-mailed statement. "He has put forward a series of policy initiatives including a commitment to reduce the greenhouse gas intensity of our economy.''

In the interview yesterday, Dr. Hansen stood by his assertions and said the administration risked disaster by discouraging scientists from discussing unwelcome findings.

Dr. Hansen, 63, acknowledged that he imperiled his credibility and perhaps his job by criticizing Mr. Bush's policies in the final days of a tight presidential campaign. He said he decided to speak out after months of deliberation because he was convinced the country needed to change course on climate policy.

Dr. Hansen rose to prominence when, after testifying at a Senate hearing in the record-warm summer of 1988, he said, "It is time to stop waffling so much and say the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[ZippyTheChimp]

October 30, 2004

Big Arctic Perils Seen in Warming, Survey Finds

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

A comprehensive four-year study of warming in the Arctic shows that heat-trapping gases from tailpipes and smokestacks around the world are contributing to profound environmental changes, including sharp retreats of glaciers and sea ice, thawing of permafrost and shifts in the weather, the oceans and the atmosphere.

The study, commissioned by eight nations with Arctic territory, including the United States, says the changes are likely to harm native communities, wildlife and economic activity but also to offer some benefits, like longer growing seasons. The report is due to be released on Nov. 9, but portions were provided yesterday to The New York Times by European participants in the project.

While Arctic warming has been going on for decades and has been studied before, this is the first thorough assessment of the causes and consequences of the trend.

It was conducted by nearly 300 scientists, as well as elders from the native communities in the region, after representatives of the eight nations met in October 2000 in Barrow, Alaska, amid a growing sense of urgency about the effects of global warming on the Arctic.

The findings support the broad but politically controversial scientific consensus that global warming is caused mainly by rising atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, and that the Arctic is the first region to feel its effects. While the report is advisory and carries no legal weight, it is likely to increase pressure on the Bush administration, which has acknowledged a possible human role in global warming but says the science is still too murky to justify mandatory reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions.

The State Department, which has reviewed the report, declined to comment on it yesterday.

The report says that "while some historical changes in climate have resulted from natural causes and variations, the strength of the trends and the patterns of change that have emerged in recent decades indicate that human influences, resulting primarily from increased emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, have now become the dominant factor."

The Arctic "is now experiencing some of the most rapid and severe climate change on Earth," the report says, adding, "Over the next 100 years, climate change is expected to accelerate, contributing to major physical, ecological, social and economic changes, many of which have already begun."

Scientists have long expected the Arctic to warm more rapidly than other regions, partly because as snow and ice melt, the loss of bright reflective surfaces causes the exposed land and water to absorb more of the sun's energy. Also, warming tends to build more rapidly at the surface in the Arctic because colder air from the upper atmosphere does not mix with the surface air as readily as at lower latitudes, scientists say.

The report says the effects of warming may be heightened by other factors, including overfishing, rising populations, rising levels of ultraviolet radiation from the depleted ozone layer (a condition at both poles). "The sum of these factors threatens to overwhelm the adaptive capacity of some Arctic populations and ecosystems," it says.

Prompt efforts to curb greenhouse-gas emissions could slow the pace of change, allowing communities and wildlife to adapt, the report says. But it also stresses that further warming and melting are unavoidable, given the century-long buildup of the gases, mainly carbon dioxide.

Several of the Europeans who provided parts of the report said they had done so because the Bush administration had delayed publication until after the presidential election, partly because of the political contentiousness of global warming.

But Gunnar Palsson of Iceland, chairman of the Arctic Council, the international body that commissioned the study, said yesterday that there was "no truth to the contention that any of the member states of the Arctic Council pushed the release of the report back into November." Besides the United States, the members are Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia and Sweden.

Mr. Palsson said all the countries had agreed to delay the release, originally scheduled for September, because of conflicts with another international meeting in Iceland.

The American scientist directing the assessment, Dr. Robert W. Corell, an oceanographer and senior fellow of the American Meteorological Society, said the timing was set during diplomatic discussions that did not involve the scientists.

He said he could not yet comment on the specific findings, but noted that the signals from the Arctic have global significance.

"The major message is that climate change is here and now in the Arctic," he said.

The report is a profusely illustrated window on a region in remarkable flux, incorporating reams of scientific data as well as observations by elders from native communities around the Arctic Circle.

The potential benefits of the changes include projected growth in marine fish stocks and improved prospects for agriculture and timber harvests in some regions, as well as expanded access to Arctic waters.

But the list of potential harms is far longer.

The retreat of sea ice, the report says, "is very likely to have devastating consequences for polar bears, ice-living seals and local people for whom these animals are a primary food source."

Oil and gas deposits on land are likely to be harder to extract as tundra thaws, limiting the frozen season when drilling convoys can traverse the otherwise spongy ground, the report says. Alaska has already seen the "tundra travel" season on the North Slope shrink to 100 days from about 200 days a year in 1970.

The report concludes that the consequences of the fast-paced Arctic warming will be global. In particular, the accelerated melting of Greenland's two-mile-high sheets of ice will cause sea levels to rise around the world.


Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Bob]

Oh no! The sky is falling. We'd better legislate something!

[ZippyTheChimp]

When one has no factual argument, ridicule is usually the best course.

All the benefits of a cleaner environment that we enjoy today were legislated. If you don't think the Clean Water Act is important, then you are dumber than a bear - who doesn't pee where he drinks.

[Bob]

A major difference between leftists and everybody else is that leftists appear to have no sense of humor. DARE to even slightly disagree with a leftist, and you risk being called stupid, a moron, a monkee, etc. etc. (look at what passes for "discourse" on these pages.)

Well, here's some news. I am not a leftist. Count me as one of many who oppose your tired litany of "social causes" and bankrupt idealogies, and who are sick of the left's lack of civility, unwillingness to tolerate dissent, and a tendency to rapidly foam at the mouth. The left has no concept that it's possible to disagree with someone, without being disagreeable.

In short, the left needs to LIGHTEN UP. And THEN, it can go on and legislate something.

[ZippyTheChimp]

The reason that discourse is not generally exchanged with you (not a group, but you in particular) on social issues in this forum, is that you don't seem to be willing to engage in it. Rather, you make cryptic, one liners that are curiously third person. You don't seem to actually take a position on anything, instead resorting to dissmissive sarcasm.

You might refer to your own posts in the Bush Police State thread. Are your replies informative, are they discourse?

If you were in disagreement with the article, you could have responded to it with your own views. I am going to respond to your condesending remarks in kind.

[Edward]

Meteorologist Likens Fear of Global Warming to 'Religious Belief'
By Marc Morano
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
December 02, 2004

Washington (CNSNews.com) - An MIT meteorologist Wednesday dismissed
alarmist fears about human induced global warming as nothing more than
'religious beliefs.'

"Do you believe in global warming? That is a religious question. So is
the second part: Are you a skeptic or a believer?" said Massachusetts
Institute of Technology professor Richard Lindzen, in a speech to about
100 people at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

"Essentially if whatever you are told is alleged to be supported by 'all
scientists,' you don't have to understand [the issue] anymore. You
simply go back to treating it as a matter of religious belief," Lindzen
said. His speech was titled, "Climate Alarmism: The Misuse of 'Science'"
and was sponsored by the free market George C. Marshall Institute.
Lindzen is a professor at MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and
Planetary Sciences.

Once a person becomes a believer of global warming, "you never have to
defend this belief except to claim that you are supported by all
scientists -- except for a handful of corrupted heretics," Lindzen added.

According to Lindzen, climate "alarmists" have been trying to push the
idea that there is scientific consensus on dire climate change.

"With respect to science, the assumption behind the [alarmist] consensus
is science is the source of authority and that authority increases with
the number of scientists [who agree.] But science is not primarily a
source of authority. It is a particularly effective approach of inquiry
and analysis. Skepticism is essential to science -- consensus is
foreign," Lindzen said.

Alarmist predictions of more hurricanes, the catastrophic rise in sea
levels, the melting of the global poles and even the plunge into another
ice age are not scientifically supported, Lindzen said.

"It leads to a situation where advocates want us to be afraid, when
there is no basis for alarm. In response to the fear, they want us to do
what they want," Lindzen said.

Recent reports of a melting polar ice cap were dismissed by Lindzen as
an example of the media taking advantage of the public's "scientific
illiteracy."

"The thing you have to remember about the Arctic is that it is an
extremely variable part of the world," Lindzen said. "Although there is
melting going [on] now, there has been a lot of melting that went on in
the [19]30s and then there was freezing. So by isolating a section ...
they are essentially taking people's ignorance of the past," he added.

'Repetition makes people believe'

The climate change debate has become corrupted by politics, the media
and money, according to Lindzen.

"It's a sad story, where you have scientists making meaningless or
ambiguous statements [about climate change]. They are then taken by
advocates to the media who translate the statements into alarmist
declarations. You then have politicians who respond to all of this by
giving scientists more money," Lindzen said.

"Agreement on anything is taken to infer agreement on everything. So if
you make a statement that you agree that CO2 (carbon dioxide) is a
greenhouse gas, you agree that the world is coming to an end," he added.

"There can be little doubt that the language used to convey alarm has
been sloppy at best," Lindzen said, citing Nazi propagandist Joseph
Goebbles and his famous observation that even a lie will be believed if
enough people repeat it. "There is little question that repetition makes
people believe things [for] which there may be no basis," Lindzen said.

He believes the key to improving the science of climate change lies in
altering the way scientists are funded.

'Alarm is the aim'

"The research and support for research depends on the alarm," Lindzen
told CNSNews.com following his speech. "The research itself often is
very good, but by the time it gets through the filter of environmental
advocates and the press innocent things begin to sound just as though
they are the end of the world.

"The argument is no longer what models are correct -- they are not --
but rather whether their results are at all possible. One can rarely
prove something to be impossible," he explained.

Lindzen said scientists must be allowed to conclude that 'we don't have
a problem." And if the answer turns out to be 'we don't have a problem,'
we have to figure out a better reward than cutting off people's funding.
It's as simple as that," he said.

The only consensus that Lindzen said exists on the issue of climate
change is the impact of the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty to
limit greenhouse gases, which the U.S. does not support.

Kyoto itself will have no discernible effect on global warming
regardless of what one believes about climate change," Lindzen said.

"Claims to the contrary generally assume Kyoto is only the beginning of
an ever more restrictive regime. However this is hardly ever mentioned,"
he added.

The Kyoto Protocol, which Russia recently ratified, aims to reduce the
emission of greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by the year 2010. But
Lindzen claims global warming proponents ultimately want to see a 60 to
80 percent reduction in greenhouse gasses from the 1990 levels. Such
reductions would be economically disastrous, he said.

"If you are hearing Kyoto will cost billions and trillions," then a
further reduction will ultimately result in "a shutdown" of the economy,
Lindzen said.

[fioco]

I certainly don't put any energy into the Chicken Little hystericism regarding global warming. Why just the othe day, I -- hmmm, does the floor seem damp to you? -- Anyway, as I was say (glub, glub) ing . . . . (gluuub.)

[Ninjahedge]

I think there should be cause for concern, not alarm over Global Warming.

At the VERY least, reducing the gasses that are reputed to cause it would make us all, literally, breathe easier.

Is there some development that would be hindered by more restrictive environmental strictures? Will we not get the Super Ford Explorer out in time to drive the kids through 14 feet of snow in the suburbs. On a snow day? (I hate those commercials).

I don't know.

All i know is that the only arguement about these regulations and taking it seriously is that companies would not be able to make as much as they could without them.

So, while this scientist is fair in asserting that this should not be blown out of proportion due to the sheer # of scientists supporting it (most scientists agree that Sex transmits diseases and causes unwanted pregnancies, but I do not see them screaming about that.....much.), it should also not be swept under the rug just because a few make fun of it (like bob) crying "the sky is falling".

[ZippyTheChimp]

His interpretation of the data is as valid as the opposing viewpoint, and is crucial for scientific inquiry, but he loses a bit of credibility by associating his opposition with uninformed alarmists.

The argument about the economic costs is an old one - the same complaints over automobile emissions werer made decades ago by the industry.

We can't develop the technology.
We won't be able to sell cars.

Now, when the subject of further restrictions comes up, they say

Look how we have reduced emissions.

[Ninjahedge]

When they get their emmissions to 0, then we will talk.

[Edward]

The global warming does exist, and there is good data to support it, however whether this warming is caused by human activity is not currently known. When there is no clear answer from science, public policy still has to be made.

There is a limited amount of money to be spent, whether it’s public money, or corporations. Ideally the money would be spent proportional to the risks. However frequently the money is being spent based on perception of risks. For example, billions are being spent on cleaning up every atom in the nuclear industry, with no measurable benefit to society. The same money spent on cleaner air – closing the coal powered power plants - will result in measurable benefit – less asthma and lung cancer. The same money spent on transportation safety would result in measurable benefit – less accidents.

At the VERY least, reducing the gasses that are reputed to cause it would make us all, literally, breathe easier.
Not really. Implementation of Kyoto protocol will not make your breathing easier.

Is there some development that would be hindered by more restrictive environmental strictures? Again – if the global warming is not caused by human activity – then there are many places where money could be spent with benefit to society.

[Ninjahedge]

But if the theory is that global warming is caused primarily by carbon dioxide emmisions, and that a reduction in these emmisions would help to eliminate the man-made portion of GW, what is the point in not allowing them?

I have not read the Kyoto agreement, so i am not familiar with its specifics, but since when is reduction in CO2 emmisions bad for breathing?

And what benefits are we restricting by increasing envirnmental restrictions?

[Edward]

Read the second paragraph in my post above. If the money is spent on reducing CO2 emissions, it is not spent on some other projects. If the global warming is not caused by human activity, then there is no public benefit in spending the money. And if this money would have been spent on some other projects - for example, reducing air pollution by closing coal power plants - there would be a public benefit.

[Ninjahedge]

I see what you are saying Ed, but equating the ammount of funds available as if it came from one source is not exactly valid.

Making emmission standards higher on automobiles does not mean that the $$ for reducing coal emmisions would be reduced. The two industries are not directly related.

Requiring the US to actively participate in funding these requirements would cause a shortage, but so long as the restrictions are gradual enough, the need based innovations would be encouraged to develop at a sustainable rate when funded by public need.

[Edward]

Making emmission standards higher on automobiles does not mean that the $$ for reducing coal emmisions would be reduced. The two industries are not directly related.


My statement referred to a much broader scale, you are interpreting it too narrowly. Stricter environmental standards will increase cost of doing business and everyone will ultimately pay for it - the price of your bus or subway or plane ticket will increase, you books or MP3 player will cost more etc.

Don't get me wrong - I am not against stricter environmental standards. I just think that the policy decisions have to take into account actual risks, not perception of risks or political games.

[Ninjahedge]

Well, I guess that is why they have to work to get these things implemented, not decree them with a short timetable.

Do not allow these power companies to "buy back" environmental restrictions (I heard they can do that in some areas) to lessen their overall costs.

Too much pressure stifles change, but a little incentive promotes more efficient modes of achieving the needs of the company.

[ZippyTheChimp]

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3

Continued Sea Ice Decline in 2005

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/Images/nsidc_sea_ice_2005.gif

Since 1978, satellites have made continuous observations of Arctic sea ice. In that time, sensors have found an overall decline in its extent. Beginning in 2002, this decline steepened, with early onset of springtime melt north of Siberia and Alaska. Beyond summertime melt, Arctic sea ice further surprised researchers in the winter of 2004-2005. “Even if sea ice retreated a lot one summer, it would make a comeback the following winter, when temperatures fall well below freezing,” explains Florence Fetterer of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). “But in the winter of 2004-2005, sea ice didn't approach the previous wintertime level.” With the exception of May 2005, every month between December 2004 and September 2005 saw the lowest monthly average since the satellite record began.

This graph shows the five-day mean sea ice extent for July through September for the years 2002 through 2005. All four years were below the average sea ice extent for 1979-2000 (gray line). In fact, recent sea ice extent falls below the 1979-2000 average by an area twice the size of Texas. On September 19, 2005 (the latest date shown on this graph), Arctic sea ice extent fell to 5.35 million square kilometers (2.06 million square miles). It continued to decline until September 21, 2005, when it dropped to 5.32 million square kilometers (2.05 million square miles). This new low was 670,000 square kilometers (approximately 258,000 square miles) below the previous record low in 2002.

From 1979 through 2001, the rate of September Arctic sea ice decline was just over 6.5 percent per decade. The September 2002 minimum increased this rate to 7.3 percent. Incorporating the sea ice extent projection for 2005 increased the rate to approximately 8 percent per decade.

Patterns of natural variability play a part in Arctic sea ice decline. The Arctic Oscillation is a major atmospheric circulation pattern that can take a positive or negative mode. In its positive mode, it sets up winds that tend to break up sea ice and flush it out of the Arctic, and the thin ice left behind is more likely to melt. In its strongly positive phase in the early to mid-1990s, the oscillation may have made sea ice more vulnerable to summertime melt. Since the late 1990s, however, the Arctic Oscillation has exhibited a more neutral mode, while sea ice has continued to decline. Sea ice decline has persisted through different patterns of precipitation, wind, and local temperature variation. Researchers have found marked declines in sea ice difficult to explain without considering overall Arctic warming.

Sea ice decline is likely to affect future temperatures in the region. Because it is white or light in color, sea ice reflects much of the Sun’s radiation back into space, whereas dark ocean water absorbs more of the Sun’s energy. As sea ice melts, more exposed ocean water changes the Earth’s albedo, or fraction of energy reflected away from the planet. The increased absorption of energy further warms the planet. “Feedbacks in the system are starting to take hold,” says NSIDC’s lead scientist Ted Scambos. “There doesn't appear to be a way to turn this around, or even slow it down,” in a warming climate. Claire Parkinson, senior scientist of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center points out a potential mitigating factor, noting that “the reduced sea ice coverage will lead to more wintertime heat loss from the ocean to the atmosphere, and perhaps, therefore, to colder water temperatures and further ice growth.”

Still, recent trends caused concern. Walt Meier of NSIDC remarks, “Having four years in a row with such low ice extents has never been seen before in the satellite record. It clearly indicates a downward trend, not just a short-term anomaly.”


http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=16978

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/Images/june_2005_seaice.jpg

June marks the beginning of the melt season for Arctic sea ice, which reaches its minimum extent at the end of the season in September. In the past few Septembers, Arctic sea ice concentration (the amount of ice in a given area) has been markedly reduced. September 2002 set a new record low at 15 percent below average. It was followed closely (http://nsidc.org/news/press/20041004_decline.html) by September 2003 and September 2004. So far, 2005 is shaping up to be another record-low sea ice year in the Arctic.



This image shows places where Arctic sea ice was above (blue) or below (red) average in June 2005, the end of the first month of the melt season. The images are made from data from the satellite-based, Scanning Multi-channel Microwave Radiometer (SMMR) and Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I). Ice-free areas appear in light gray, and landmasses appear in dark gray. The black line shows the median ice edge for 1979 through 2000. Except for a small area in the East Greenland Sea, Arctic sea ice has retreated almost everywhere in June 2005. The month set a new record low: 6 percent below the long-term mean for June sea ice extent. During the melt season in any year, some areas may experience positive anomalies—higher than average sea ice concentration—or negative anomalies—lower than average ice concentrations. Most anomalies occur along the margins of the ice cap, but they can also occur near the pole at the end of the melt season. Few if any anomalies occur near the pole in June.

Different explanations have been proposed for Arctic sea ice decline, including the strong positive mode of the Arctic Oscillation (AO). This oscillation is an alternating pattern of atmospheric pressure at polar latitudes and mid-latitudes. In the early 1990s, the AO was in positive mode. In that mode, the AO produces a strong polar vortex, and resulting winds tended to flush older, thicker ice out of the Arctic. Since the late 1990s, however, the AO has been much more neutral, yet Arctic sea ice decline continues. Another explanation for declining sea ice is climate change. Global temperatures have risen, and climate models generally agree that one of the strongest signals of greenhouse warming is a loss of Arctic sea ice. Changes in surface albedo provide another, related explanation. Just as light clothes reflect the Sun’s heat on a hot day, bright sea ice reflects much of the Sun’s energy back into space. As sea ice melts, less energy is reflected back into space, and more energy is absorbed by the darker ocean waters. This creates a “feedback loop” in which sea ice decline fosters further decline.

Even after warm summers, Arctic sea ice has typically recovered in wintertime, but this has changed in recent years. Besides showing dramatic retreat in the summer, Arctic sea ice has begun to decline in the wintertime (http://nsidc.org/news/press/20050318_arcdec.html) as well. Some scientists have begun to wonder whether Arctic sea ice has crossed a critical threshold from which it can’t recover.

Image courtesy of Ken Knowles and Terry Haran, National Snow and Ice Data Center (http://nsidc.org/). Information provided by Julienne Stroeve, Walt Meier, Florence Fetterer, Ken Knowles, and Mark Serreze, NSIDC.


Funny stuff on page 1 of this thread. Worth a look.

[BrooklynRider]

Is this the result of evolution or intelligent design?

[ryan]

http://www.venganza.org/images/noodledoodlewall.jpg

Perhaps we should pray to the Flying Spaghetti Monster (http://www.venganza.org/) for ice.

[lofter1]

Tonight (9.29.05) on CNN Lou Dobbs had a guest named Scott Stevens, a former weather forecaster who now has a website called www.weatherwars.info (http://www.weatherwars.info/) and he is of the belief (seemingly well thought through and documented) that various governments are playing with the weather as a weapon.

It could be that this guy has too much free time on his hands, or he could be on to something. If nothing else the website has some very cool video.

The transcript from that show explains the premise http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0509/29/ldt.01.html (scroll down -- it's the last segment of the show).

Here's what was said on the show:

LOU DOBBS / CNN 09.29.2005

DOBBS: My next guest tonight is make some remarkable assertions about the causes of our recent violent weather. He says we face the manmade threat of terrorist hurricanes. He says Katrina, for example, was created by the Japanese mafia using Russian-made technology. I'm joined now by former TV weatherman and operators of Weatherwars.info. Scott Stevens.

Scott, by any standard, this is about as outlandish an assertion as I've heard made recently. What has been the reaction?

SCOTT STEVENS, WEATHERWARS.INFO: Reaction has certainly been mixed. Some people have been familiar with the man's work that I referenced, which is Lieutenant Colonel Tom Bearden's (ph) material who was in the know through the 70s, and 80s, and 90s when this technology was first made aware to those in power. But the problem with this technology -- Scalar waves, is we don't really know who is doing it. One thing we do know is that it is being done.

DOBBS: Well, you say we do know that. What evidence do we have of any part of these assertions you're making?

STEVENS: OK. What we're looking at is a quote by Defense Secretary Cohen back in 1997 where he specifically stated that others, terrorists, were engaging in a type of ecoterrorism where they could alter the climate, set off earthquakes and volcanoes. So, that technology has been developed. The question we've all wondered was it deployed. And the Russians boasted they had in the past.

And what got my attention was viewing satellite imagery where the clouds and storm behavior was simply not natural.

DOBBS: In putting forward your theories, which are remarkable, what -- is there anything about Katrina, for example, any part of that storm that is a clue to what you're saying?

STEVENS: Well, getting a category 5 in any location is an incredible achievement. And then to have back-to-back inside of a month is just astounding. But there was geometry, and once you learn that this technology is at work and study the signatures that result in the cloud cover, these hurricanes are replete with these odd signatures, these geometries. And they become more pronounced as they approached category 4 and 5 status.

DOBBS: Let me ask you, we talked with NOAA, we've talked with Goddard Space Center and weather people, none of whom would talk to us on the record about you. Has any professional meteorologist, any group, assessed what you've done and said this makes sense or you're just as crazy as you can be?

STEVENS: No. I get encouragement. Actually there's both. There's those that assume straight up that it can't happen, and in scientific method you can't go into any discussion assuming that it's an impossibility. The only thing keeping us from doing it is our intention to do it.

DOBBS: Scott Stevens, weatherwars.info, we thank you for being here. Intriguing assertion. Thank you, Scott.

[Ninjahedge]

What a whacko.

Science can't say it is impossible, but it is awfully difficult to be able to say that a thing like this could happen by shooting ray-guns at it.

UNLIKE an earthquake or Volcano, a hurricane does NOT have the energy already stored up. You have to GET THAT ENERGY into the storm somehow. The main way is through thunderstorm formation and evaporation of warm waters (etc), to say that you could shoot a beam at it......

Scalar waves, phegh.



And as for Earthquakes and volcanoes, I love how pseudo-science gets everyones attension in things like this. Puh-lease. You can say that something is used, such as possibly an explosion, to weaken the holding sones that keep plates from slipping and whatnot, but trying to do something that would be a low-energy method (like harmonic resonance) would not be wide-scale applicable and it would be VERY difficult to use properly to achieve the desired result.

I really hate death-ray scientists.

[lofter1]

Tesla's Death Ray

http://www.parascope.com/en/0996/tesla4.htm


Nikola Tesla's historic laboratory and wireless communications facility known as Wardenclyffe, located about 65 miles east of New York City on the North Shore of Long Island.


The distinctive 187 foot tall tower was demolished in 1917, but the sturdy 94 foot square building still remains standing in silent testimony to Tesla's unfulfilled dream.



http://www.tfcbooks.com/images/articles/tower_sb.gif

http://www.parascope.com/en/0996/tesla4.jpg

Tesla's Wardenclyffe laboratory,
where he tested his death ray.

[BrooklynRider]

What a whacko...And as for Earthquakes and volcanoes, I love how pseudo-science gets everyones attension in things like this. Puh-lease. You can say that something is used, such as possibly an explosion, to weaken the holding sones that keep plates from slipping and whatnot, but trying to do something that would be a low-energy method (like harmonic resonance) would not be wide-scale applicable and it would be VERY difficult to use properly to achieve the desired result.

I really hate death-ray scientists.

The knee jerk reaction is amusing. It seems people give zero credence to anything that is outside their own range of knowledge or believe. The guy is a scientist and his explanations and photographic back up is impressuve.

I find the reaction very limited view and just surprising. No curiosity. No consideration that everyone and thing in the world is not necessarily benevolent. We know governments can play with weather (cloud seeeding for one) why not develop a weapon that has built in plausible denial.

With regard to earthquakes, you don't find it at all suspect that a major earthquake (9.0?) off the Indonesian Banda Aceh coast in December 2004 sets off a monstrous tsunami, yet, an earthquake of the same magnitude in March, the same place, doesn't cause a ripple? There are arguments out there that the tsunami was, in fact, caused by joint nuclear testing by Israel and India in that volatile part of the Indian Ocean. Seems plausible to me. It was convenient enough to scrub Banda Aceh clean of rebels and armed militants - it was like pinpoint accuracy the way ir cleansed the island in the exacrt location of Exxon's gas reserves.

[ZippyTheChimp]

There is so much non-science, or maybe science laziness, evident in some of these theories, which tend to involve malevolence by one or more governments.

The obvious question is how much energy is released by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, and how does that compare to a nuclear detonation? This same question came up in the Tsunami thread, and I searched and found many sources of data and posted:

The largest nuclear explosion was the 1954 test Castle Bravo, 20 megatons. 20 megatons is 1300 Hiroshima bombs. A 9.0 earthquake releases the energy of 25-30 Castle Bravos, or 32,500 - 39,000 Hiroshimas

As to why an earthquake will produce a tsunami and another of equal magnitude in the same place will not, the answer is simple and readily available online.

The plate movement must vertically displace the water to produce the wave. A horizontal movement will not produce a tsunami (or at least not one as significant in size). However, a seismometer will not differentiate between the two events, and will record both as 9.0. If the seismometer could detect the vertical movement, there would be no need for tsunami detectors throughout the ocean.

[ryan]

As to why an earthquake will produce a tsunami and another of equal magnitude in the same place will not, the answer is simple and readily available online.

Wet blanket. The conspiracy theories are waaay more interesting.

[BrooklynRider]

Wet blanket. The conspiracy theories are waaay more interesting.

I at least gey to exercise my neck by constantly looking over my shoulder.

I guess I just feel we live in a largely malevolent world, where power and greed are the driving forces - against man's better nature.