Experts: cold snap doesn't disprove global warming

Beijing had its coldest morning in almost 40 years and its biggest snowfall since 1951. Britain is suffering through its longest cold snap since 1981. And freezing weather is gripping the Deep South, including Florida's orange groves and beaches.

Whatever happened to global warming?

Such weather doesn't seem to fit with warnings from scientists that the Earth is warming because of greenhouse gases. But experts say the cold snap doesn't disprove global warming at all — it's just a blip in the long-term heating trend.

"It's part of natural variability," said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. With global warming, he said, "we'll still have record cold temperatures. We'll just have fewer of them."

Deke Arndt of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., noted that 2009 will rank among the 10 warmest years for Earth since 1880.

Scientists say man-made climate change does have the potential to cause more frequent and more severe weather extremes, such as heat waves, storms, floods, droughts and even cold spells. But experts interviewed by The Associated Press did not connect the current frigid blast to climate change.

So what is going on?

The complete story from abcnews.com is here.

Extreme weather: why has Mother Nature gone bonkers

Mother Nature is in a very, very bad mood.

Much of the Northern Hemisphere is in the grip of arctic air and record snowfalls that have been inflicting hardship and havoc from China to Russia to Western Europe and over to the American Plains.

Meanwhile, the Southern Hemisphere has been experiencing a warmer than average summer.

Planetwide, the weather has become remarkably unpredictable.

There are few precedents for the global sweep of extreme cold and ice that has killed dozens in India, paralyzed life in Beijing and threatened the Florida orange crop. Chicagoans are taking shelter from a potentially deadly freeze, Paris is enduring sunny Siberian cold and Poland has counted at least 13 deaths in record low temperatures of about 13 degrees below zero. A string of deadly avalanches in northern Italy's Alps led to seven deaths.

The complete article on Foxnews.com is here.

60 Amazing Satellite Images of Earth

Looking at nature from different perspectives can create stunning compositions for your photographs.

This couldn’t be more true than when we look at our planet from outer space and appreciate the reality of its beauty from such an incredible and rarely seen perspective.

The images in this compilation are from the Landsat 7 satellite and were created to introduce the general public to the Landsat Program.

Various combinations of the eight Landsat 7 spectral bands were selected to create the vivid RGB composites that we have featured.

Here are 60 absolutely stunning images of the Earth as seen from outer space. Click on the images for large resolution versions which you can use as wallpapers. (thanks to Gizmodo for the link).

Acid oceans, the "evil twin" of climate change

In this photo taken Oct. 30, 2009, Research Director for the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary Andrew DeVogelaere paddles his kayak at the sanctuary in Monterey, Calif. Far from Copenhagen's turbulent climate talks, the sea lions, harbor seals and sea otters reposing along the shoreline and kelp forests of this protected marine area stand to gain from any global deal to cut greenhouse gases. (AP Photo/John Helprin)

MONTEREY BAY NATIONAL MARINE SANCTUARY, Calif. — Far from Copenhagen's turbulent climate talks, the sea lions, harbor seals and sea otters reposing along the shoreline and kelp forests of this protected marine area stand to gain from any global deal to cut greenhouse gases.

These foragers of the sanctuary's frigid waters, flipping in and out of sight of California's coastal kayakers, may not seem like obvious beneficiaries of a climate treaty crafted in the Danish capital. But reducing carbon emissions worldwide also would help mend a lesser-known environmental problem: ocean acidification.

"We're having a change in water chemistry, so 20 years from now the system we're looking at could be affected dramatically but we're not really sure how. So we see a train wreck coming," said Andrew DeVogelaere, the sanctuary's research director, while out kayaking this fall with a reporter in the cold waters.

Nothing in the treaty negotiations specifically addresses the effects of carbon absorption in the oceans on marine life, which studies show is damaging key creatures' hard shells or skeletons.

Oceans absorb about 25 percent of the world's greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere from human activities each year, says a new U.N. report released at the Copenhagen talks this week. That helps slow global warming in the atmosphere, the focus of the Copenhagen talks.

But carbon dissolving in oceans also forms carbonic acid, raising waters' acidity that damages all manner of hard-shelled creatures, and setting off a chain reaction that threatens the food chain supporting marine life, including the lumbering sea mammals along the 276-mile coast of the California sanctuary and the rest of the U.S. West Coast.

By 2100, the report said, some 70 percent of cold water corals — a key refuge and feeding ground for commercially popular fish that also are food for the seals and otters — will be exposed to the harmful effects.

Click here for the complete article.

Wind shear determines whether man-made pollution strengthens thunderstorms

ScienceDaily (Dec. 17, 2009) — New climate research reveals how wind shear -- the same atmospheric conditions that cause bumpy airplane rides -- affects how pollution contributes to isolated thunderstorm clouds. Under strong wind shear conditions, pollution hampers thunderhead formation. But with weak wind shear, pollution does the opposite and makes storms stronger.

The work improves climate scientists' understanding of how aerosols -- tiny unseen particles that make up pollution -- contribute to isolated thunderstorms and the climate cycle. How aerosols and clouds interact is one of the least understood aspects of climate, and this work allows researchers to better model clouds and precipitation.

"This finding may provide some guidelines on how man-made aerosols affect the local climate and precipitation, especially for the places where 'afternoon showers' happen frequently and affect the weather system and hydrological cycle," said atmospheric scientist Jiwen Fan of the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. "Aerosols in the air change the cloud properties, but the changes vary from case to case. With detailed cloud modeling, we found an important factor regulating how aerosols change storms and precipitation."

The rest of this fascinating article is here.

Many goals remain unmet in 5 nations's climate deal

President Obama with Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao, across from him, the prime minister of India, Manmohan Singh, right, and other world leaders at the Copenhagen climate summit on Friday.

COPENHAGEN. President Obama announced here on Friday night that five major nations, including the United States, had together forged a climate deal. He called it “an unprecedented breakthrough” but acknowledged that it still fell short of what was required to combat global warming

The agreement addresses many of the issues that leaders came here to settle. But it has left many of the participants in the climate talks unhappy, from the Europeans, who now have the only binding carbon control regime in the world, to the delegates from the poorest nations, who objected to being left out of the critical negotiations.

By the early hours of Saturday, representatives of the 193 countries who have negotiated here for nearly two weeks had not yet approved the deal and there were signs they might not. But Mr. Obama, who left before the conference considered the accord because of a major storm descending on Washington, noted that the agreement was merely a political statement and not a legally binding treaty and might not need ratification by the entire conference.

The three-page accord that Mr. Obama negotiated with the leaders of China, India, Brazil and South Africa and then presented to the conference did not meet even the modest expectations that leaders set for this meeting, notably by failing to set a 2010 goal for reaching a binding international treaty to seal the provisions of the accord.

The complete New York Times article is here.

Click here for the full text of President Obama's statement, announcing a preliminary climate change agreement.

Weathering a storm of stupidity

Children try to catch fish at a partially dried-up pond in Yingtan, Jiangxi province August 13, 2009.

The spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought. --P.B. Medawar

So what's next? A series of essays by Sarah Palin about the Large Hadron Collider and the mysteries of dark matter? An MIT lecture series by Rush Limbaugh regarding the thermodynamics of black holes? A Festschrift of Sean Hannity's scholarly articles on plate tectonics and volcano formation? Glenn Beck performing live heart-lung transplants on Fox News?

Everybody understands that these things couldn't happen. That when it comes to serious scientific endeavor, years of study and professional apprenticeship are required. In a word, expertise.

Ex-beauty contestants, drive-time DJs, TV sports announcers, hairstylists, newspaper columnists -- basically anybody whose math skills topped out in the 10th grade -- rarely have anything substantive to add to the sum of technical and scientific knowledge. That's what they most resent about it.

It's not impossible that such persons could educate themselves sufficiently to have an informed opinion, but it's rare. Most of us, most of the time, are like historian and blogger Josh Marshall: "The fact that the vast majority of people with specialized knowledge in the field think there's a problem is good enough for me," he wrote. "I can't be knowledgeable about everything. And I'm comfortable with the modern system in which the opinions of really knowledgeable people with expertise counts more in cases like this than people who know nothing at all."

Unless and until, that is, scientific endeavor impinges upon either A) religious belief, or B) the ability of tycoons to keep making money in precisely the way they or their ancestors have always made their money. Then it's every man and woman a climatologist, and every genuine expert an "elitist" enemy of God and the American way -- creationism with a thermometer.

(As a born-again Christian I see a need for religion and science. Each has it's place. What is troubling, terrifying to me, and many others who respect the scientific method, is the willingness of so many otherwise thoughtful, rational, logical people to "look away" and grasp at straws, rather than confronting what the evidence and science is telling us. Turning this into a political litmus test, a test of one's conservatism or liberalism, totally misses the point. The climate is changing, morphing. Some of this may be "natural", yes, but I don't find it far-fetched that a 38% increase in greenhouse gases correlates well with the 10 warmest years on record, all observed since 1998. The rest of the article is here).

Dome homes could be hurricane-proof

By Adam Hooper

LAKE CHARLES, LA (KPLC) – It is not your typical looking home. But, according to builder David Smith, when it is all finished, your home could begin to save you money.

"This is energy efficient. It will save you any where from 50 percent or better on your electricity costs alone," said David Smith of Smith Family Dome Home Builders.

Besides looking different, a dome home is constructed quite different as well.

"We take a material and we inflate it like a balloon. Then we spray it with a polyurethane foam. We run rebar, and then we spray three and a half to five and a half inches of concrete on the inside," said David Smith.

According to David, dome homes are rated to withstand a category 5 hurricane, and an F5 tornado. For people living along the coast, this could be the answer.

"If you don't want to have to pack your things up and travel, if you want to protect your family and your belongings, you can stay in this house through anything," said David Smith.

And, for those who may be apprehensive about living in a concrete dome, when it is all done, it can look as normal as any other home.

"You can come out from the dome itself and make any kind of designs that you want. You can make the aesthetic appearance anything that you want," said David Smith.

(Call me crazy, but I don't think I want to live in a place where the only way to survive a category 4-5 hurricane is by living in a dome-home. Be sure to send this article to any friends/family in Florida.)

The ongoing debate/firestorm over the recent hacking of climate-related e-mails has lead me to post a few thoughts and responses I've sifted through in recent days, for better or worse. Here goes...

"As a sociologist, I can't imagine what's so unusual about these emails. Science is messy. The brilliance of science as a system isn't its individual findings, but rather how their iterations function as a whole to produce general truths. This is because SCIENCE IS MESSY.

Before deciding to hop on the academic track, I used to be a carpenter. Guess what? Carpentry is messy too. Life is messy. At the end of the day, despite countless dismays, and conversations about how this house will never stand, none of the houses I ever built came crashing down. Why? Because there are a lot of nails and joints in there, and one piece cut too big or too small doesn't make a whole heck of a lot of difference in the end."

- anonymous

From Peter Watts, scientist and author:

"Science doesn’t work despite scientists being asses. Science works, to at least some extent, because scientists are asses. Bickering and backstabbing are essential elements of the process. Haven’t any of these guys ever heard of “peer review”?

"That’s how science works. It’s not a hippie love-in; it’s rugby.

"This is how it works: you put your model out there in the coliseum, and a bunch of guys in white coats kick the shit out of it. If it’s still alive when the dust clears, your brainchild receives conditional acceptance. It does not get rejected. This time."

"As for me, I’ll follow the blogs with interest and see how this all shakes out. But even if someone, somewhere, proves that a handful of climatologists deliberately fudged their findings — well, I’ll be there with everyone else calling to have the bastards run out of town, but it won’t matter much in terms of the overall weight of the data. I went running through Toronto the other day on a 17°C November afternoon. Canada’s west coast is currently underwater. Sea level continues its 3mm/yr creep up the coasts of the world, the western Siberian permafrost turns to slush. Swathes of California and Australia are pretty much permanent firestorm zones these days. The glaciers retreat, the Arctic ice cap shrinks, a myriad migratory species still show up at their northern destinations weeks before they’re supposed to. The pine beetle furthers its westward invasion, leaving dead forests in its wake— the winters, you see, are no longer cold enough to hit that lethal reset button that once kept their numbers in check.

I could go on, but you get my drift. And if the Climate-Change Hoax Machine is powerful enough to do all that, you know what?

They deserve to win."

- Peter Watts (his complete post regarding "email-gate" can be found here).

I received a couple of e-mails from climate change deniers positively giddy about the recent hacking of e-mails from scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit. For people who consistently doubt the veracity of the science surrounding anthropogenic climate change this was the "smoking gun" many had been waiting for, seeming to PROVE that a handful of scientists were secretly plotting and scheming, "manipulating the numbers" to skew the science in favor of man-made climate change. But a closer inspection of the e-mails shows something much less dramatic: that science is inherently messy (because scientists are - surprise! - just as human as the rest of us). They bicker, complain, compete, gossip and vent occasional bursts of rage at professional deniers intent on interfering with their research. I find the timing of all this very curious: with a global climate change summit at Copenhagen just a few weeks away. My hope is that this [pr mess] will shine a bright light on the huge and growing body of science, the mountain of mounting evidence, that people will look at this topic with fresh eyes. My fear is that this will only increase the decibel level of the shouting underway, entrench the skeptics and further embolden the conspiracy theorists who see deception under every rock. The evidence is there, for people truly willing to look. It's easier to follow incendiary blogs and TV talking points than it is to truly sift through the science and assess the evidence objectively. All of us bring along our own biases, even scientists. But when scientists are wrong their peers, their competitors, take JOY in pointing out their mistakes and errors. As you'll see below, science is messy, but the PROCESS eventually comes up with truth, however impermanent. Isaac Newton was a complete jackass (from what I've read) but his theory of gravity still holds up pretty well. For those who see these leaked e-mails as evidence of a vast conspiracy all I can say is be patient. His theory has stood the test of time. Only time will tell if climate change science is the "hot air" skeptics believe it to be. To those who still doubt, all I can say is be prepared for more unpleasant symptoms, bizarre storms, floods, droughts, super-hurricanes and climate oddities in the years ahead. This is a slow-motion transformation, but the paradox remains: by the time the last piece of the (climate) puzzle falls into place it will be far too late to do anything about it. We'll have no choice but to adapt, take it on the chin. I hope we come to our senses before we reach that inevitable "tipping point", but I'm not longer optimistic we'll be able to save ourselves (from ourselves).

For more information on this hacked e-mail tempest in a teapot, including 60 mb worth of leaked e-mail text (most of it mind-numbingly dull) click here for a long, detailed post from boingboing.com's Maggie Koerth-Baker. If you're looking for more ammunition, a point-by-point refutation of all the claims and counterclaims dredged up by persistent deniers, click here to read "How to talk to a climate change skeptic" at scienceblogs.com.

So much for the increasingly partisan, angst-ridden subject of climate change. It's easier to shift gears and focus on weather, which may or may not be safer ground, something almost all of us can agree on. BTW, our record-warm November is not necessarily evidence of climate change. One month doesn't prove anything (even though we're seeing temperatures more than 10 degrees above average, even though November is turning out to be warmer than all of October!) One month does-not-a-trend-make. This is weather, not climate. It's true that Novembers are trending warmer, with less snow, the past 10 consecutive Novembers warm enough to play golf. Ask your grandfather how often he got out to play golf in November when he was growing up. One storm, one week, one month, even an entire season or year doesn't prove anything. What's critical is not what's happening over Minnesota, but the global snapshot, over many years - decades. All of us are armchair experts on weather, the day to day fluctuations and variations. Few of us possess the tools to be able to monitor the entire planet over a long period of time, objectively, comprehensively. I rely on the thousands of PhD climate scientists worldwide who do this for a living. In this crowd, in spite of what you may have read, there is still widespread agreement that the changes are real, happening even faster than the latest 2007 IPCC report predicted across in northern latitudes and polar regions. Sorry, I'll throw my hat in with these guys and gals until a better theory comes along to explain what we're witnessing on a planetary scale.

Hacked e-mail is new fodder for climate dispute

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Published: November 20, 2009

Hundreds of private e-mail messages and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.

The e-mail messages, attributed to prominent American and British climate researchers, include discussions of scientific data and whether it should be released, exchanges about how best to combat the arguments of skeptics, and casual comments — in some cases derisive — about specific people known for their skeptical views. Drafts of scientific papers and a photo collage that portrays climate skeptics on an ice floe were also among the hacked data, some of which dates back 13 years.

In one e-mail exchange, a scientist writes of using a statistical “trick” in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend. In another, a scientist refers to climate skeptics as “idiots.”

Some skeptics asserted Friday that the correspondence revealed an effort to withhold scientific information. “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud,” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming and is criticized in the documents.

Some of the correspondence portrays the scientists as feeling under siege by the skeptics’ camp and worried that any stray comment or data glitch could be turned against them.

The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument. However, the documents will undoubtedly raise questions about the quality of research on some specific questions and the actions of some scientists.

In several e-mail exchanges, Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and other scientists discuss gaps in understanding of recent variations in temperature. Skeptic Web sites pointed out one line in particular: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,” Dr. Trenberth wrote.

(A smoking gun that disproves climate change, evidence of massive scientific cover-up? I doubt it - but I fear it's more ammunition to fuel conspiracy theories, leading to more delay, more confusion, more obfuscation and denial. The complete New York Times article is here).

Changes in the climate and a windier Great Lake

By HENRY FOUNTAIN

Published: November 16, 2009

Chalk up another effect of climate change: it’s getting windier over Lake Superior.

That is the conclusion of a study by scientists who have looked at the effects of increasing surface water temperatures in the lake and air temperatures over it. The water has warmed faster than the air, creating instability in the air mass that results in stronger winds.

Ankur R. Desai of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an author of the study in Nature Geoscience, said the effect was due to ice, or lack of it.

“Less ice in the winter means stronger winds in the summer,” Dr. Desai said.

Ice coverage of Lake Superior has declined in recent decades, which means that the lake starts to warm sooner, becoming stratified. The earlier this stratification occurs, Dr. Desai said, the warmer the top layer gets in the summer.

Data from buoys and satellites showed that this warming outpaced that of the air above it. That means the thermal gradient between the two was reduced.

The rest of the New York Times article is here.

Climatologists baffled by global warming "time out"

A Sunny Mystery. Could the sun be responsible for the apparent "pause" in global warming? Perhaps. The lack of sunspots on the surface of the sun has been striking in recent years. A lack of sunspots often correlates with colder periods here on the Earth. Could there be factors beyond man-made greenhouse gases to explain what's happening on a global scale? Absolutely.

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.

At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average.

Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth's average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.

Ironically, climate change appears to have stalled in the run-up to the upcoming world summit in the Danish capital, where thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, business leaders and environmental activists plan to negotiate a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Billions of euros are at stake in the negotiations.

(It's true that - averaged over the entire planet - global temperatures appear to have plateaued for the first decade of the 21st century, although profound changes continue to be witnessed in far northern latitudes - from Greenland to Alaska and the depth/quality of arctic ice). To read the entire article in Germany's premier investigative news magazine, "Der Spiegel" click here.

In nod to global warming, Navy prepares for an "ice-free" Arctic

The dwindling Arctic ice cap has launched an international race for control of northern waters: Russia, Canada, Denmark, and even China are hustling to expand their military presence, plant flags and eye those 90 billion barrels of natural gas under the cap. Now the U.S. Navy’s getting ready for the thaw, with a strategic plan to maximize the U.S. stake up north.

The Navy’s Arctic Roadmap (.pdf), written by the recently launched Navy Task Force Climate Change (TFCC), opens with an acknowledgment that worldwide temperatures are on the rise — especially up north. “The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe. While significant uncertainty exists in projections for Arctic ice extent, the current scientific consensus indicates the Arctic may experience nearly ice-free summers sometime in the 2030s,” the document notes.

Then the Arctic Roadmap sets out a three-phase plan to secure U.S. interests in the Arctic. Because there’s a lot at stake under that melting cap: energy reserves, transport lanes and potential territory disputes.

(With a son at the U.S. Naval Academy this article definitely caught my eye. I wonder how much oil might be lurking under the North Pole? I fear we may soon find out. The complete article can be found at Wired.com by clicking here).

Record high temperatures far outpace record lows across USA

This graphic shows the ratio of record daily highs to record daily lows observed at about 1,800 weather stations in the 48 contiguous United States from January 1950 through September 2009. Each bar shows the proportion of record highs (red) to record lows (blue) for each decade. The 1960s and 1970s saw slightly more record daily lows than highs, but in the last 30 years record highs have increasingly predominated, with the ratio now about two-to-one for the 48 states as a whole. (Credit: Copyright UCAR, graphic by Mike Shibao)


ScienceDaily (Nov. 13, 2009) — Spurred by a warming climate, daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental United States, new research shows. The ratio of record highs to lows is likely to increase dramatically in coming decades if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb.

"Climate change is making itself felt in terms of day-to-day weather in the United States," says Gerald Meehl, the lead author and a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). "The ways these records are being broken show how our climate is already shifting."

The study, by authors at NCAR, Climate Central, The Weather Channel, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters. It was funded by the National Science Foundation, NCAR's sponsor, the Department of Energy, and Climate Central.

If temperatures were not warming, the number of record daily highs and lows being set each year would be approximately even. Instead, for the period from January 1, 2000, to September 30, 2009, the continental United States set 291,237 record highs and 142,420 record lows, as the country experienced unusually mild winter weather and intense summer heat waves.

(Check out the ratio of record highs to record lows in the graphic above. It's pretty obvious that something is going on, with more than twice as many record highs as lows in the last decade. Climate "deniers" insist that global temperatures have leveled off or even fallen, but then why is the ratio of records so out of whack? Another important piece of the climate puzzle). The complete article is here.

Paying the climate change premium

Ready to have your insurance rates go up? That’s what one industry group says will happen as climate change disrupts the world’s weather.

The Association of British Insurers said the cost of flood and windstorm damage would rise for insurers as global temperatures increased.

This would lead to higher premiums for consumers and a restriction of cover as insurers would need more reserves.
…
“These findings have serious implications for insurers, householders, businesses and governments,” said Nick Starling, the ABI’s director of general insurance and health.

“The continued widespread availability of property insurance in the future depends on taking action now to manage the threats of climate change.”

We normally think of the insurance industry as conservative, but when it comes to climate change, it’s been extremely aggressive. After all, that’s what the insurers do: analyze and seek to minimize risk–and global warming has made them increasingly worried about their bottom line. In fact, it’s the industry’s very conservativeness that made it one of the first to bang the drum about the perils of a warming world.

For example: Swiss Re, the world’s largest re-insurer, keeps three climatologist on staff. It has tracked rising damages from natural disasters for decades. Something like 20 years ago, it released its first report warning of the road that lay ahead. The graph up above is from a report they released on the future impacts of climate change.

The rest of the article is here.

Survey: Economists see threat in climate change

By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

Researchers who deal in cold numbers rather than warming climates believe the "significant benefits from curbing greenhouse-gas emissions would justify the costs of action," a new survey finds.

In fact, the survey of economists finds 94% believe the U.S. should join climate agreements to limit global warming.

The survey results to be released today come as debate over the economics of global warming moves center stage in Washington, D.C. Republican senators boycotted a hearing Tuesday over an Environmental Protection Agency analysis about the costs of a clean-energy bill. In addition, the United States and European Union are preparing for a December meeting in Copenhagen to discuss a climate treaty.

"An economist tree hugger is an imaginary creature," says Michael Livermore of New York University's Institute for Policy Integrity, which conducted the survey. "But we found that economists really see climate change poses a lot of risk to the economy."

The survey approached the 289 economists who had published climate-related studies in the top 25 economics journals in the past 15 years. About half, 144, responded, and 75% agreed or strongly agreed on the "value" of greenhouse-gas controls.

The complete article in USA Today is here.

Arctic sea ice reaches third lowest minimum extent in '09

On Sept 12, 2009, the extent of sea ice in the Arctic reached the third lowest level ever recorded since satellite records began in 1979. The National Snow and Ice Data Center estimates that the overall extent dropped to 5.1 million square kilometers, well below the average minimum extent of 6.71 million square kilometers (1979-2000). Only 2007 and 2008 have had lower ice extents. The small increase in 2009 was mostly due to ice spreading caused by strong polar winds. Ice concentration and thickness, however, have not increased, making predictions about a rebound in Arctic ice premature at this moment.

NOAA has the full story (complete with an animation showing this year's retreat of sea ice) here.

Global surface temperature was second warmest for September

The combined global land and ocean surface temperature was the second warmest September on record, according to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. Based on records going back to 1880, the monthly National Climatic Data Center analysis is part of the suite of climate services NOAA provides.

NCDC scientists also reported that the average land surface temperature for September was the second warmest on record, behind 2005. Additionally, the global ocean surface temperature was tied for the fifth warmest on record for September.

Global Temperature Highlights

• The combined global land and ocean surface temperature was 1.12 degrees F above the 20th century average of 59.0 degrees F. Separately the global land surface temperature was 1.75 degrees F above the 20th century average of 53.6 degrees F.
  
  
• Warmer-than-average temperatures engulfed most of the world’s land areas during the month. The greatest warmth occurred across Canada and the northern and western contiguous United States. Warmer-than-normal conditions also prevailed across Europe, most of Asia and Australia.
  
  
• The worldwide ocean temperature tied with 2004 as the fifth warmest September on record, 0.90 degree F above the 20th century average of 61.1 degrees F. The near-Antarctic southern ocean and the Gulf of Alaska featured notable cooler-than-average temperatures.

The complete article from NOAA is here.

Our Three Bombs

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: October 6, 2009

I am a 56-year-old baby boomer, and looking around today it’s very clear that my generation had it easy: We grew up in the shadow of just one bomb — the nuclear bomb. That is, in our day, it seemed as if there was just one big threat that could trigger a nonlinear, 180-degree change in the trajectory of our lives: the Soviets hitting us with a nuke. My girls are not so lucky.

Today’s youth are growing up in the shadow of three bombs — any one of which could go off at any time and set in motion a truly nonlinear, radical change in the trajectory of their lives.

The first, of course, is still the nuclear threat, which, for my generation, basically came from just one seemingly rational enemy, the Soviet Union, with which we shared a doctrine of mutual assured destruction. Today, the nuclear threat can be delivered by all kinds of states or terrorists, including suicidal jihadists for whom mutual assured destruction is a delight, not a deterrent.

But there are now two other bombs our children have hanging over them: the debt bomb and the climate bomb.

As we continue to build up carbon in the atmosphere to unprecedented levels, we never know when the next emitted carbon molecule will tip over some ecosystem and trigger a nonlinear climate event — like melting the Siberian tundra and releasing all of its methane, or drying up the Amazon or melting all the sea ice in the North Pole in summer. And when one ecosystem collapses, it can trigger unpredictable changes in others that could alter our whole world.

To read the rest of the Op-Ed in the New York Times click here.

Climate change threaten's America's National Parks

Yellowstone is losing its white-bark pines (whose nuts are an important food source for the park's grizzlies). Rocky Mountain National Park is losing most, if not all, of its mature lodgepole pines. Mesa Verde has already lost most of its pinon pine trees. And more than trees are suffering from climate change: We might pack it in and pack it out, but human-generated greenhouse gas emissions have put our national parks in big trouble.

National Parks in Peril: The Threats of Climate Disruption, a report released by the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization in collaboration with the National Resources Defense Council on October 1, identified the 25 national parks most adversely affected by climate change. Though the report stresses that all 391 parks are threatened, the report’s authors established 11 different types of risk to assess which parks were in the greatest danger. Whether it be due to loss of ice and snow, higher seas and coastal storms, intolerable heat or other factors, these parks are feeling the affects of a warming climate, now:

-Acadia National Park
-Assateague Island National Seashore
-Bandelier National Monument
-Biscayne National Park
-Cape Hatteras National Seashore
-Colonial National Historic Park
-Denali National Park
-Dry Tortugas National Park
-Ellis Island National Monument
-Everglades National Park
-Glacier National Park
-Great Smokey Mountains National Park
-Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore
-Joshua Tree National Park
-Lake Mead National Recreation Area
-Mesa Verde National Park
-Mount Rainier National Park
-Padre Island National Seashore
-Rocky Mountain National Park
-Saguaro National Park
-Theodore Roosevelt National Park
-Virgin Islands National Park/Virgin Islands Coral Reef National Monument
-Yellowstone National Park
-Yosemite National Park
-Zion National Park

The report appealed to the Obama administration, Congress, and the National Park Services Department to accept that human disruption of the climate is the greatest threat ever to our national parks. It urges them to consider and implement 32 actions specific to national parks, including setting aside additional national park land, making a national commitment to becoming carbon neutral at all park sites, drastically lowering greenhouse gas emissions (20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050 based on current levels), and accelerating the implementation of clean energy technologies.

The report closes with a quote from Mike Finley, the former superintendent of Everglades, Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks:

The establishment and protection of the National Park System is one of the best ideas that America has institutionalized. Our parks provide inspiration, education, and enjoyment. Moreover, they represent some of our greatest resources of genetic and biological diversity and intact ecosystems. They are our seed banks for restoring the nation’s lands and waters already ravaged by our careless development and the early impacts of climate change. In one sense, they represent a life boat for our biological future. We need to take immediate action to reduce our use of fossil fuels and the resulting climate disruption before we sink our life boat and destroy the values and purposes of our national parks for future generations.

Looking for ways you can keep our parks from sinking under the weight of climate change? Check out:

Save Yellowstone and the Greater Rockies

The Rocky Mountain Climate Organization

National Resources Defense Council

And look for tips to green up your life in BACKPACKER's Green Scene.

-Jessie Lucier

National Parks in Peril

For the complete PDF click here.

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