News and comments on global climate change, global warming and greenhouse effect
Each year, scientists at NASA’S Goddard Institute for Space Studies analyze global temperature data. The past year, 2009, tied as the second warmest year since global instrumental temperature records began 130 years ago. Worldwide, the mean temperature was 0.57°C (1.03°F) warmer than the 1951-1980 base period. And January 2000 to December 2009 came out as the warmest decade on record.
BONN, Germany — The United Nations says formal negotiations on an international treaty to control global warming will resume in Bonn in April, four months after the failed climate change summit in Copenhagen.
U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer said Tuesday the negotiating schedule is being intensified in order to secure a global climate deal at the end of the year. After the Bonn meeting April 9-11, more talks are scheduled there for May 31-June 11.
The next world climate summit is to take place in Cancun, Mexico, from Nov. 29 to Dec. 10.
De Boer, who will resign July 1, said that since Copenhagen 100 countries have submitted individual emission cut targets. He said he saw commitment by governments “to move negotiations forward toward success in Cancun.”
Whatever your thoughts about global warming, you have to feel a little sorry for Phil Jones.
First, the formerly private e-mails of the former director of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England were hacked, leading to the so-called climategate scandal. And now, media everywhere are putting words in Jones’s mouth, words that are the exact opposite of those he actually spoke.
In an interview with the BBC last week, Jones said he is “100-per-cent confident the climate has warmed,” and “there’s evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.”
One day later, the United Kingdom’s Daily Mail newspaper’s headline read: “Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995.”
The fair and balanced FOX-News.comfollowed that up with a story saying that Jones “dropped a bombshell” in admitting “there has been no global warming over the past 15 years.” Similar statements have now been repeated in media and blogs from around the world.
Now, how does “global warming” become “no global warming?” As the Center for Environmental Journalism explains, it’s easy: When the media either don’t, or choose not to, understand the concept of statistical significance.
Jones was asked specifically whether he agreed “that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically significant global warming.” He replied: “Yes, but only just. I calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. The trend (0.12 C) is positive, but not significant at the 95-per-cent significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level.”
A survey of more than 1,000 Americans suggests that we have increasing doubts about the nature of global climate change and the urgency of acting on the science.
Even the group identified as the most “alarmed” among those surveyed – those convinced that global warming is happening, is caused by humans and is a serious and urgent threat – has AP photo India shrunk from 18 to 10 percent of the total, according to the survey conducted by Yale and George Mason universities.
Groups described as “concerned,” “cautious,” and “disengaged” also declined as a percentage of the total surveyed. Only those described as “doubtful” and “dismissive” have grown as percentages of the whole – to 29 percent, from less than 20 percent in a 2008 survey.
The study’s authors attribute the shift to “gloomy unemployment numbers, public frustration with Washington, attacks on climate science and mobilized opposition to national climate legislation.”
But despite our increasing doubts, a strong majority of Americans – in six categories from the “alarmed” to the “dismissive” – still support the allocation of more money for clean energy research, tax rebates for people who make their homes and cars more energy efficient, and they back regulation of carbon dioxide emissions as atmospheric pollutants.
“The fact that five of the six Americas support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant is bound to be of interest to the president, Congress, and the EPA,” said Edward Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. “Some business groups and other special interests as opposing EPA regulation, but most of the American people appear to be for it.”
Scientists who believe global sea levels are going to rise even more than now predicted have scored a victory with the retraction of a less-alarming report from a scientific publication.
That’s bad news for the global warming deniers and Climategate believers.
Here’s what happened: Several scientists published a 2009 study in Nature Geoscience, predicting sea levels would go up 7cm and 82cm by 2100.
However, the authors recently retracted their findings, saying other scientists had pointed out a few mistakes with their methodology.
And who could that have been? Try Martin Vermeer of the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland, and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
Their prediction in another study in 2009: Sea levels would rise between 0.75m to 1.9m by 2100.
On the high level, that’s more than twice the rise predicted by the now-retracted paper.
To read the details, here’s the report from Rahmstorf and Vermeer. It talks about the errors made by the authors of the now-retracted report in Nature Geoscience.
The authors of the retracted paper pointed to Rahmstoorf and Vermeer as the reason behind the retraction.
BEIJING (Reuters) – President Hu Jintao said on Tuesday China was committed to fighting climate change, both at home and in cooperation with the rest of the world, but stopped short of offering any new policies.
Britain, Sweden and other countries have accused China of obstructing December’s Copenhagen climate summit, which ended with a non-binding accord that set a target of limiting global warming to a maximum 2 degrees Celsius but was scant on details.
Chinese officials have said their country would never accept outside checks of its plans to slow greenhouse gas emissions and could only make a promise of “increasing transparency.”
Hu told a study meeting attended by senior politicians, including Premier Wen Jiabao, that China took the problem seriously, state television reported.
“We must fully recognize the importance, urgency and difficulty of dealing with climate change,” the report paraphrased Hu as saying. “We must make it an important strategy for our socio-economic development.”
The government says some areas of the country are already seeing the effects of climate change, with higher temperatures and reduced rainfall in some parts and stronger storms in others.
China has pledged to cut the amount of carbon dioxide produced for each unit of economic growth by 40-45 percent by 2020, compared with 2005 levels.
This “carbon intensity” goal would let China’s greenhouse gas emissions keep rising, but more slowly than economic growth.
Hu said energy saving, emission cuts and environmental awareness must be inculcated into not only every government worker but Chinese society as a whole, state television said.
WASHINGTON %u2014 Facing wide criticism over their recent finding that greenhouse gases endanger the public welfare, top Environmental Protection Agency officials said Monday that any regulation of such gases would be phased in gradually and would not impose expensive new rules on most American businesses.
The E.P.A.%u2019s administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, wrote in a letter to eight coal-state Democrats who have sought a moratorium on regulation that only the biggest sources of greenhouse gases would be subjected to limits before 2013. Smaller ones would not be regulated before 2016, she said.
%u201CI share your goals of ensuring economic recovery at this critical time and of addressing greenhouse gas emissions in sensible ways that are consistent with the call for comprehensive energy and climate legislation,%u201D Ms. Jackson wrote.
The eight Democratic senators, led by John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, said hugely significant decisions about energy, the economy and the environment should be made by elected representatives, not by federal bureaucrats.
The senators, who earlier questioned broad cap-and-trade legislation pushed by the Obama administration, join a number of Republican lawmakers, industry groups and officials from Texas, Alabama and Virginia in challenging the proposed E.P.A. regulations of industrial sources. Senate Republicans are going a step further, seeking to prevent the agency from taking any action to limit greenhouse gases, which are tied to global warming.
Ms. Jackson warned that if the Republicans thwarted the agency%u2019s efforts to address climate change, it would kill the deal negotiated last year to limit carbon pollution from cars and light trucks and would have a chilling effect on the government%u2019s scientific studies of global warming.
%u201CIt also would be viewed by many as a vote to move the United States to a position behind that of China on the issue of climate change, and more in line with the position of Saudi Arabia,%u201D Ms. Jackson wrote.
The group led by Mr. Rockefeller asked Ms. Jackson to suspend any E.P.A. regulations of stationary sources %u2014 including coal-burning power plants and large industrial facilities %u2014 while Congress considers comprehensive energy and climate change legislation. The House passed a major climate and energy bill last summer that would have overridden some of the agency%u2019s regulatory authority. The Senate, however, has not acted on the issue and there is considerable doubt that it will do so this year.
%u201CE.P.A. actions in this area would have enormous implications, and these issues need to be handled carefully and appropriately dealt with by the Congress, not in isolation by a federal environmental agency,%u201D Mr. Rockefeller said.
The Democrats who joined Mr. Rockefeller are Senators Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Mark Begich of Alaska, Carl Levin of Michigan, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia and Max Baucus of Montana.
Manufacturers, oil companies and business coalitions also filed petitions objecting to the proposed rules.
Environmental advocates said the E.P.A. was justified in declaring carbon dioxide and gases that contribute to global warming to be dangerous pollutants under the Clean Air Act and was moving cautiously to regulate them.
%u201CThese answers from Lisa Jackson hopefully will reassure the authors of the letter that the E.P.A. is proceeding in a very measured way and doing what is achievable and affordable to curb global warming pollution and focusing as they should on the biggest sources like power plants and not small businesses,%u201D said David Doniger, climate policy director of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Sign in to Recommend Next Article in Business (30 of 47) � A version of this article appeared in print on February 23, 2010, on page A19 of the New York edition.
WASHINGTON, Feb 22 (Reuters) – Climate change is melting the floating ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula, giving scientists a preview of what could happen if other ice shelves around the southern continent disappear, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said on Monday.
The ice has retreated so far from the land mass that Charcot Island, which has long been connected to the peninsula by an ice bridge, emerged as a real island again last year, a USGS scientist said.
“This is the first time since people have been observing the area, since the 1800s, that that ice shelf has not hitched together Charcot Island and the peninsula,” scientist Jane Ferrigno said in a telephone interview.
The Antarctic Peninsula extends further northward than the rest of the roughly circular ice-covered continent, and it is warmer than the rest of Antarctica. But even in the peninsula’s coldest, southern part, ice shelves are vanishing.
Research by the USGS was the first to show that every ice front on the southern section of the peninsula has been retreating from 1947 to 2009, with the most dramatic changes since 1990.
Feb. 22 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. said it wants to reach a legally binding climate-change agreement at a summit in Mexico in December, a sign President Barack Obama hasn’t given up the fight for a global accord to limit greenhouse gases.
The pact should cover “all major economies,” and include elements from the non-binding Copenhagen Accord made in December, the State Department said in a letter released today by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC.
With China and India resisting mandatory curbs on their emissions and legislation in the U.S. outlining domestic commitments stalled in the Senate, Obama is attempting to keep the talks alive. A two-year push for a treaty ended in December with a voluntary deal that wasn’t accepted by all of the 193 nations present.
“Mexico is an ambitious time frame, but a year later it’s very possible,” Saleemul Huq, head of climate change at the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development said today in a telephone interview.
The fight against global warming has been beset in recent months by the failure of the UNFCCC to secure a treaty in Copenhagen and the resignation last week of its chief diplomat, Yvo de Boer. Impediments to a legally binding deal include the lack of a U.S. domestic law and a reluctance of India and China to adopt mandatory emissions targets.
Here’s a recent headline that caused a few double takes in Washington, D.C.: “Global warming hearing postponed because of snow.”
Yes, nothing gives an unearned boost to global warming skeptics like back-to-back snowstorms variously nicknamed “snow-pocalypse” and “snow-mageddon,” among other less-charitable labels in the nation’s capital.
Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe, an outspoken skeptic of global warming and warm friend of his state’s oil and gas industries, recently mocked Al Gore, climate activist and former vice president. Inhofe posted photos on his Facebook page of his family building an igloo near the Capitol with a sign that read “Al Gore’s new home.” Har, har.
But, contrary to popular belief, a robust snowfall does not mean global warming is a myth.
In fact, scientists have been warning for at least two decades that global warming could make snowstorms more severe. Snow has two simple ingredients: cold and moisture. Warmer air collects moisture like a sponge until it hits a patch of cold air. When temperatures dip below freezing, a lot of moisture creates a lot of snow.
A rise in global temperature can create all sorts of havoc, ranging from hotter dry spells to colder winters, along with increasingly violent storms, flooding, forest fires and loss of endangered species.
That’s simple science even for me, a guy whose scientific education pretty much ended with the old “Watch Mr. Wizard” TV show and a subscription to Popular Mechanics.
Yet, confusion about that simple science is one of the reasons why experts and activists increasingly prefer the term “climate change” as less confusing and politically loaded than “global warming.” Still, confusion and politics persist. Fox News host Sean Hannity cheerfully asserted that the storm “would seem to contradict Al Gore’s hysterical global warming theories.” His fellow Fox host Glenn Beck agreed, mocking the very idea that “warming” could lead to more snow.
Sure, it’s laughable if you believe in the very unscientific theory of simple observational research, which means you base your views about global warming on your own weather.
