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
A draft of the unpublished paper co-written by Professor Ross Garnaut says rapid economic growth in China is fuelling the increase and calls for developing countries to commit to binding emissions reduction targets to avoid such a “bleak” outcome.
The 2030 business-as-usual forecast is 11 per cent higher than the worst-case scenario developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Climate change economist Nicholas Stern has urged that the world move to equal per capita emissions by 2050, a move that would require developed countries as a whole to cut their emissions by about 80%. Stern makes the call in a paper co-written with director of the Institute of Sustainable Development and International Relations Laurence Continue Reading →
Critics of programs such as the federal Energy Efficiency Opportunities program and Victoria’s EREP scheme are really just asking to be “left alone” to pursue their “own narrow interests”, says energy efficiency expert Alan Pears. Pears also outlined a strategy to allow the government to act more quickly on energy efficient appliances and criticised energy Continue Reading →
Federal climate change department chief Martin Parkinson yesterday named three areas which he thought would require ‘complementary measures’ in addition to emissions trading. And, as the Wilkins review of existing climate programs calls for public submissions, Parkinson said he hopes state governments will undertake similar assessments of what programs should stay and go. Energy efficiency Continue Reading →
By Volker Mrasek – Der Speigel
Researchers have found alarming evidence that the frozen Arctic floor has started to thaw and release long-stored methane gas. The results could be a catastrophic warming of the earth, since methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. But can the methane also be used as fuel?
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| The Lena River flowing through Russian Siberia and empties into the Arctic Ocean. This satellite image shows the river delta, where methane concentrations are unexpectedly high. |
It’s always been a disturbing what-if scenario for climate researchers: Gas hydrates stored in the Arctic ocean floor — hard clumps of ice and methane, conserved by freezing temperatures and high pressure — could grow unstable and release massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Since methane is a potent greenhouse gas, more worrisome than carbon dioxide, the result would be a drastic acceleration of global warming. Until now this idea was mostly academic; scientists had warned that such a thing could happen. Now it seems more likely that it will.
Russian polar scientists have strong evidence that the first stages of melting are underway. They’ve studied largest shelf sea in the world, off the coast of Siberia, where the Asian continental shelf stretches across an underwater area six times the size of Germany, before falling off gently into the Arctic Ocean. The scientists are presenting their data from this remote, thinly-investigated region at the annual conference of the European Geosciences Union this week in Vienna.
It took almost a month for meltwater to accumulate atop Greenland’s ice sheet in the summer of 2006. It took only 90 minutes for all that water — a lake so large it could fill New Orleans’ Superdome more than 12 times over — to pour through a crack in the kilometer-thick ice below it and drain the lake dry.
At its height, the torrent exceeded that of Niagara Falls, and its rumbling triggered seismic instruments nearby. GPS equipment indicated that the westward flow of ice in the region briefly surged, a sign that the water drained down to the bedrock and temporarily lubricated the boundary between ice and rock.