Consensus grows on climate change
By Roger Harrabin, Environment Correspondent, BBC News
The global scientific body on climate change will report soon that only greenhouse gas emissions can explain freak weather patterns. Simultaneous changes in sea ice, glaciers, droughts, floods, ecosystems, ocean acidification and wildlife migration are taking place. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had previously said gases such as CO2 were “probably” to blame. Its latest draft report will be sent to world governments next month.
A source told the BBC: “The measurements from the natural world on all parts of the globe have been anomalous over the past decade. “If a few were out of kilter we wouldn’t be too worried, because the Earth changes naturally. But the fact that they are virtually all out of kilter makes us very concerned.” He said the report would forecast that a doubling of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere would bring a temperature rise of 2-4.5C, or maybe higher. This is an increase on projections in the last IPCC report, which suggested that the rise could be as little as 1.5C.
Can you hear the responses to this new IPCC report now, before they even happen? I knew you could. In this corner, the most current research, done by environmental scientists who would almost certainly love to find that no problem exists but who can merely report overwhelming and multiply redundant evidence that we are in deep trouble. In the other corner, a hack novelist who makes egregious and elementary mistakes in every book he’s written, a handful of well-funded PR flacks, and the conservative wing of the carbon-burning industry along with its wholly owned subsidiary, the White House.
Wait: I left out the ten thousand screaming wingnuts who claim they can determine what is and isn’t sound climate science, thought they think the Southern Oscillation is what Ed Sullivan couldn’t show when Elvis sang.
We are in for an interesting next few decades, my friends. Despite my having quit drinking, I still mourn the impending loss of Islay, which may well find itself under a bit of ice when the Gulf Stream shuts down. I never thought much of ice in single malt.
In my hemisphere, some species may be able to move farther north. Even some plants might do so. My totem animal, the Joshua tree, grows iin thick groves at the current northern limit of its range, and if climate changes slowly enough to permit migration of both trees and the moths that pollinate them, we may see Joshua tree forests in Elko. And most people seeing them wouldn’t think them out of place.
But some species are already trapped. I’d better get into the Yosemite backcountry to commune with Harley’s relatives, the pikas. Already restricted to the high alpine country, intolerant of higher temperatures at lower elevations, they have nowhere to go if their redoubts get too warm.
The thing that galls me most? We could lose them, and the Joshua trees, and the red spruce. Cardinals could nest on the shores of Hudson Bay. The last polar bears could drown. And the denialists, the sheep who bleat the latest lie from Exxon/Mobil’s policy office, the drones who claim the hockey stick graph is a lie… they would never notice, because so few of them arise from their fat asses to get outside and look at the world as it melts.
My apple tree never lost its leaves this winter. New ones are already growing. It is a Granny Smith, so I may get a few small flowers anyway, despite the lack of “chilling hours” the orchardists pray for. How often do apple trees in the Bay Area keep their leaves all winter? I don’t know, but something tells me it’s unusual.
What’s Tuvaluan for “canary in the mine”?
http://www.southpacific.org/text/tuvalu.html
“It’s feared that within a century rising ocean levels will inundate these low-lying atolls and Tuvalu will cease to exist. Coastal erosion is already eating into shorelines, and seawater has seeped into the groundwater, killing coconut trees and flooding the taro pits. Sea walls may slow the erosion, but as ocean levels continue to rise, the entire population of Tuvalu may eventually have to evacuate, third-world victims of first-world affluence.”
Maybe its because I got a Georgia Tech education, but it seems so freakin obvious. We obviously have enough greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere today to heat up the planet. So even if we cut our current emissions all the way down to whatever rate the gasses leave the atmosphere, we’d still be heating the planet up.
At what time were we just putting gasses in the atmosphere at the same rate they’d come out of the atmosphere ... 50 years ago? a 100 years ago? Whatever it is, its sure a lot less than what we are putting out today. A whole lot less.
Saw the other day they are talking about the Greenland ice cap melting causing a 5 meter rise in sea level. I guess you could always go get a USGS map and find say the 10 meter line. That’s future beachfront property. :)
Everyone in Denver relaxed and stopped worrying about the drought last year I guess but it has been extremely warm, windy and dry this winter. There was even a small wildfire outside of Lyons in February.
The world feels wrong.
I haven’t stopped drinking and a world without Lagavulin . . . well, it’s not that important but I would miss it. The world does feel wrong. Here it is March in Minnesota and the uncovered grass is brown. I commented yesterday to a colleague that the Twin Cities now gets the kind of winters southern Iowa got thirty years ago and he looked at me with a surprised, “Hey, you’re right.” I was in Duluth two weeks ago and the story was that Lake Superior isn’t frozen over for the first time in memory.
Remember Crichton’s baleful warnings about how Japan was going to engulf the west economically in his novel Rising Sun? That turned out to be a bust, didn’t it?
Let’s see. If the mean high tide line establishes the boundaries for public use and access, and we have rising sea levels, then we will have a whole bunch of new public lands available to us, all around the Bay Area, coastal Pacific, most of Puget Sound and up into the various “locked” lakes, and so forth. Silver lining, or warning that we shall start seeing those sorts of laws revoked or changed, all so very soon (even before “they” admit that there is a climate change problem)?
I don’t know how long ago Chris stopped drinking, for me it is going on 16 years, but damn do i love to sniff the scotches (and good wines). I was always a Laphroaig man (the 15 year old is so very good), but did enjoy Laguvalin. Just the other day i asked the bartender at a highend hotel down the street to let me smell the cork from a 30 year old Balvenie single malt stored in one barrel per year. It is reputably one of the more expensive scotches in the world, and i needed to find out why? All i can say is that i sure wish i drank at this point in my life. Wow. Course i would love to try the 40 year old Laphroaig, but at a 1000 pounds a bottle it is just a bit over the budget of all the bars i know.