Martin W

For generations of Maplewood residents, the coming of winter meant the return of a tableau worthy of the most clichéd Currier and Ives print. Magically, the township’s public works employees would throw a switch or turn a knob and suddenly water would begin to flow from a creek in Memorial Park into an adjacent low-lying field.

It being winter, the water would freeze quickly, and for the next two to three months the township’s children and their nostalgic parents would have access to one of the joys of living in a snow-belt suburb: a frozen pond for ice skating.
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The park should have been flooded by now. But township officials don’t flood the park anymore, and while many experts say that you can’t directly attribute localized weather events to global warming, the fact remains that the water rarely freezes and thus becomes just another tourist trap for Canada geese.

as scientists try to forecast how global warming might affect the nation’s most geographically diverse state, they envision a landscape that could look quite different by the end of this century, if not sooner. Where celebrities, surfers and wannabes mingle on Malibu’s world-famous beaches, there may be only sea walls defending fading mansions from the encroaching Pacific. In Northern California, tourists could have to drive farther north or to the cool edge of the Pacific to find what is left of the region’s signature wine country. Abandoned ski lifts might dangle above snowless trails more suitable for mountain biking even during much of the winter. In the deserts, Joshua trees that once extended their tangled, shaggy arms into the sky by the thousands may have all but disappeared.

Global warming has caused some of China’s glaciers — a source for many of Asia’s greatest rivers — to have melted by more than 18 percent over the past five years, state media reported Friday.

A survey of nearly 20,000 square kilometres (8,000 square miles) of China’s glaciers showed they were on average 7.4 percent smaller than five years ago, Caijing magazine said, citing a government-funded survey.

I am writing regarding the article “Alarmism is not the way to tackle climate change”, by Kendra Okonski, of the International Policy Network. Finding the article highly unbalanced, I checked re the network, and learned it has received over US$390,000 from ExxonMobil – surely the most infamous supporter of global warming “sceptics”.

Given this, Okonski’s claim of “biases” – towards global warming “alarmism” – resulting from funding by “powerful interest groups” is ludicrous. Her piece is riddled with cherry picked facts, half truths, or worse.

It’s immensely deceptive to claim, “The science of climate change remains hotly contested.” No, it does not; witness the standpoints of august bodies such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Britain’s Royal Society, and our own Hong Kong Observatory. Among all but a tiny minority of actual scientists, there is no longer debate over whether warming due to greenhouse gases is real – instead, any debates are now over just how severe it will be, and what measures are needed to ensure we don’t devastate the world as we know it.

Okonski asserts the International Government Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “is also biased towards alarmism” – which is curious, given that some of the more alarming forecasts of scientists have been removed during the editing process. She appears oblivious to the fact that some observed changes – such as melting of Arctic ice, and expansion of the Tropics, have proceeded more swiftly than in even some of the more alarming forecasts.

While noting the number of people killed by weather disasters has fallen since good records began, Okonski fails to mention vastly improved warning systems, and Oxfam’s report that the number of number of natural disasters has increased fourfold since two decades ago.

With no scientific foundation whatsoever, Okonski claims the best thing to do about climate change is adapting, while helping people create wealth. Here, she is seemingly blinded to the obvious: if the worst of climate change predictions come true, adaptation will prove impossible for countless people, and there will be widespread economic reversals.

Overall, it seems Okonski’s piece stems from fear of doing the right thing, and adopting measures that economists have suggested could cost 1 percent of world income. With climate change real, the outcomes uncertain yet potentially devastating, it is alarming to read calls for yet more procrastination.

The evidence before the Committee leads to one inescapable conclusion: the Bush Administration has engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming.

In 1998, the American Petroleum Institute developed an internal “Communications Action Plan” that stated: “Victory will be achieved when … average citizens ‘understand’ uncertainties in climate science … [and] recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.’” The Bush Administration has acted as if the oil industry’s communications plan were its mission statement. White House officials and political appointees in the agencies censored congressional testimony on the causes and impacts of global warming, controlled media access to government climate scientists, and edited federal scientific reports to inject unwarranted uncertainty into discussions of climate change and to minimize the threat to the environment and the economy.
The White House Censored Climate Change Scientists

The White House exerted unusual control over the public statements of federal scientists on climate change issues. It was standard practice for media requests to speak with federal scientists on climate change matters to be sent to CEQ for White House approval.

another petition spokesman, Andrew Pitman of Australia, said some scientists declined to sign the declaration, “on grounds that we need to cut much more deeply.”

Scientists are human; they do not wait for proof; many devote their professional lives to seeking evidence for hypotheses (especially well-funded hypotheses) they’ve chosen to believe.

a consensus apparently suffices as proof of itself.

With politicians and lobbyists, of course, you are dealing with sophisticated people versed in the ways of public opinion whose very prosperity depends on positioning themselves via such cascades. Their reactions tend to be, for that reason, on a higher intellectual level.

More than 3,000 flying foxes dropped dead, falling from trees in Australia. Giant squid migrated north to commercial fishing grounds off California, gobbling anchovy and hake. Butterflies have gone extinct in the Alps. While humans debate at U.N. climate change talks in Bali, global warming is already wreaking havoc with nature. Most plants and animals are affected, and the change is occurring too quickly for them to evolve. "A hell of a lot of species are in big trouble," said Stephen E. Williams, the director of the Centre for Tropical Biodiversity & Climate Change at James Cook University in Australia. "I don’t think there is any doubt we will see a lot of (extinctions)," he said. "But even before a species goes extinct, there are a lot of impacts. Most of the species here in the wet tropics would be reduced to … 15 percent of their current habitat." … With warmer weather, 60 percent of plant and animal species are migrating, breeding and blooming earlier in the spring, Parmesan said. But not all are, and that could upset relationships between birds and the insects they feed on as well as insects and the flowers they pollinate.

Chinese photographers said the South China tiger on digital pictures, released by forestry authorities and widely discussed on the Internet, is a fake.

A preparatory digital picture appraisal center under the China Photographers Society, released the results on Sunday after a team of photographic experts assessed the 40 digital pictures provided by NetEase, a Chinese Internet company.

The center said technological analysis from last Tuesday through Sunday showed the South China tiger on the 40 pictures was not real and could not serve as evidence for the existence of the wild animal.

The pictures must have been taken by people with photographic experience or under guidance and could not be done independently by a person without any photographic experience, claimed experts.

Chinese government officials have refused to concede photographs of a rare South China tiger in the wild are fake, a day after the China Photographers Society confirmed the images were not real.

Speaking at a press conference on Tuesday, State Forestry Administration spokesman Cao Qingyao reserved judgment on the authenticity of the controversial pictures which have caused a storm on the Internet, saying more concrete evidence was needed.

Earth’s tropical belt seems to have expanded a couple hundred miles over the past quarter century, which could mean more arid weather for some already dry subtropical regions, new climate research shows. … The newest study, published Sunday in the new scientific journal Nature Geoscience, shows that by using the weather definition, the tropics are expanding toward Earth’s poles more than predicted. And that means more dry weather is moving to the edges of the tropics in places like the U.S. Southwest. …

Brasilia, 27 November 2007—With governments preparing to gather in Bali,
Indonesia to discuss the future of the Kyoto Protocol, the United Nations Development
Programme’s Human Development Report has warned that the world should focus on the
development impact of climate change that could bring unprecedented reversals in
poverty reduction, nutrition, health and education.
The report, Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a
divided world, provides a stark account of the threat posed by
global warming. It argues that the world is drifting towards a
“tipping point” that could lock the world’s poorest countries
and their poorest citizens in a downward spiral, leaving
hundreds of millions facing malnutrition, water scarcity,
ecological threats, and a loss of livelihoods.
“Ultimately, climate change is a threat to humanity as a whole.
But it is the poor, a constituency with no responsibility for the
ecological debt we are running up, who face the immediate and
most severe human costs,” commented UNDP Administrator
Kemal Dervi_.
The report comes at a key moment in negotiations to forge a
multilateral agreement for the period after 2012—the expiry
date for the current commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol.
It calls for a “twin track” approach that combines stringent
mitigation to limit 21st Century warming to less than 2°C
(3.6°F), with strengthened international cooperation on
adaptation.
On mitigation, the authors call on developed countries to
demonstrate leadership by cutting greenhouse gas emissions by
at least 80% of 1990 levels by 2050. The report advocates a
mix of carbon taxation, more stringent cap-and-trade
programmes, energy regulation, and international cooperation
on financing for low-carbon technology transfer.
Turning to adaptation, the report warns that inequalities in
ability to cope with climate change are emerging as an
increasingly powerful driver of wider inequalities between and
within countries. It calls on rich countries to put climate change
adaptation at the centre of international partnerships on poverty
reduction.
“We are issuing a call to action, not providing a counsel of
despair,” commented lead author Kevin Watkins, adding,
“Working together with resolve, we can win the battle against
climate change. Allowing the window of opportunity to close
would represent a moral and political failure without precedent
in human history.” He described the Bali talks as a unique opportunity to put the interests of the world’s poor at the
heart of climate change negotiations.

More than four times the number of natural disasters are occurring now than did two decades ago, British charity Oxfam said in a study Sunday that largely blamed global warming.

“Oxfam… says that rising green house gas emissions are the major cause of weather-related disasters and must be tackled,” the organisation said, adding that the world’s poorest people were being hit the hardest.

The world suffered about 120 natural disasters per year in the early 1980s, which compared with the current figure of about 500 per year, according to the report.

“This year we have seen floods in South Asia, across the breadth of Africa and Mexico that have affected more than 250 million people,” noted Oxfam director Barbara Stocking.

“This is no freak year. It follows a pattern of more frequent, more erratic, more unpredictable and more extreme weather events that are affecting more people.”
…
Floods and wind-storms have increased from 60 events in 1980 to 240 last year, with flooding itself up six-fold.

But the number of geothermal events, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, has barely changed.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon calling on the United States and China to take global warming as the “challenge of our age.” In his address that accompanied the release of the IPCC report, Ban said, “The world’s scientists have spoken, clearly and with one voice. In Bali, I expect the world’s policy makers to do the same.”

Ban listed several threatened world “treasures,” such as melting Antarctic ice and the drying out of the Amazon rainforest into a savanna. He talked of children wearing protective clothing for ultraviolet radiation in Punta Arenas, Chile, under the hole in the ozone layer. “These scenes are as frightening as a science fiction movie,” Ban said. “But they are more terrifying because they are real.”

Bush officials treat this as fiction. The United States reportedly tried to eliminate a part of the report that detailed possible outcomes of global warming, such as a melting of ice sheets more rapidly than originally thought. The prospect of melting is considered so dire that it “would make it not just difficult, but impossible to adapt successfully” to climate change, Princeton scientist Michael Oppenheimer said in The New York Times.

Yet, when queried as to what level of global warming the White House found acceptable, senior environmental adviser James Connaughton said incredibly, “We don’t have a view on that.”

Here at home, many governors with a longer view, both Democrat and Republican, are taking matters into their own hands.
…
In dire scenarios of climate change, many islands will be swamped. The White House is the last island of ignorance in a fast-rising sea.

Chinese Internet users have pointed to a Chinese New Year poster as proof that a controversial photograph of a tiger purportedly snapped in the wild is fake, local media reported on Monday.
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The emergence online of a commemorative Chinese New Year’s poster of a tiger reclining on a rock produced in 2002 has been cited as proof that Zhou faked the image.

The poster’s manufacturer was quoted by local media reports as saying that the tiger’s “stripes, bearing and motion are exactly the same as the New Year’s poster.”

Luo Guanglin, general manager of Yiwushi Vista Print Packing Co Ltd, told Reuters by telephone that the tiger on the poster his company produced was “very similar” to Luo’s.

“I can’t say whether Zhou’s tiger is the same. That’s for experts to decide… But it is very similar, over 90 percent similar,” Luo said.

While the tigers are placed in different settings — Zhou’s in a forest, and Vista’s on a rock in a gushing stream — the stripes and pose of the tiger look similar to the naked eye.