The atmosphere is to the earth as a layer of varnish is to a desktop globe. It is thin, fragile and essential for preserving the items on the surface.150 years of burning fossil fuel have overloaded the atmosphere to the point where the earth is ill. It now has a fever. Read the detailed article, Soothing Gaia’s Fever for an evocative account of that analogy. The items listed here detail progress on coordinating 6.5 billion people in the most critical project undertaken by humanity.Â
Neville Gillmore Climate change threatens Ganges, Niger and other mighty rivers Digg it Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent The Guardian, Wednesday 22 April 2009 Article history This map shows the change in run-off inferred from streamflow records worldwide between 1948 and 2004, with bluish colors indicating more streamflow and reddish colors less. Graphic: Journal Continue Reading →
ACF urges Senators: fix CPRS, then pass it. Neville Gillmore Date: 22-Apr-2009 The climate change problem is too urgent and Australia has too much to lose for the Parliament not too fix the flaws in the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS), the Australian Conservation Foundation told a Senate inquiry in Melbourne today. ACF executive Continue Reading →
Read Giovanni’s view
In his new book, Heaven and Earth: Climate change – the real science, Prof Plimer, from the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Adelaide, notes that climatic change is ‘the norm’, sea levels rise and fall all the time, and that climate cycles are driven by massive forces completely unrelated to carbon emissions. He says:
“Climate changes in the past have been far greater and far more rapid than anything measured in the present. Not one previous climate change has ever been driven by carbon dioxide. To talk of carbon pollution shows an appalling ignorance of basic school science. Carbon dioxide is plant food, without it humans could not exist.”
The soot from hundreds of millions of open fires in poor households could be responsible for as much as one fifth of the global warming impact produced by humanity each year. Dr Veerabhadran Ramanathan said that while the poorest people on earth produce almost no carbon dioxide emissions, the black carbon from their cooking fires is a major pollutant that has not been discussed to any significant extent. The soot is estimated to kill 1.6 million people directly each year through respiratory disease as well as causing blindness. Significant efforts are being made by aid agencies to replace open cooking fires with fuel efficient stoves.
In a distinct departure from the official US stance under George W Bush, the Environment Protection Authority in that country has named carbon dioxide and five other heat-trapping gases as pollutants which can damage public health and welfare. In 2007, the US was subject to a major advertising campaign that equated Carbon Dioxide with green plants and an outdoor lifestyle under the slogan, “You call it carbon dioxide, we call it life.” Those major lobbying efforts have now been directed into government funding for clean coal, a technology that the coal industry itself dismissed as recently as two years ago as “ludicrously expensive and practically impossible.”
The Inuit Circumpolar conference to be held in Alaska next week will involve indegenous communities around the world in a discussion about protecting their populations from climate chaos. 200 Alaskan communities are dotted on the Arctic coast and five of them have already decided that their communities will have to move as a result of climate change. Most famously, the community of Kivalinawas moved in 2007 after a $US2.5 million sea barrier was destroyed by a wild storm. Most of this coast has been previously protected from ocean storms by sea ice. That ice has now melted exposing the coast and its inhabitants.