GLOBAL WARMING: Do trees cause global warming?

Posted on May 26, 2011

U.S. Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican — naturally — from California’s 46th congressional district, doesn’t believe that anthropogenic global warming is occurring. However, he believes that if it is occurring, then governments should implement policies of deforestation to curb carbon dioxide emissions. He asks, “Is there some thought being given to subsidizing the clearing of rainforests in order for some countries to eliminate that production of greenhouse gases?” He continued, “Or would people be supportive of cutting down older trees in order to plant younger trees as a means to prevent this disaster from happening?” Of course, “the focus of global warming policy actually centers [and should center] on keeping the world’s trees standing, especially in places like the Amazon, Congo and Indonesia.” According to Politico, Rohrabacher’s comments are reminiscent of “Ronald Reagan’s much-lampooned statement that trees cause pollution.”

The issue of energy availability, which is connected to environmental degradation and climate change, is perhaps the most important issue facing the world’s governments and their citizens today. However, ignorant statements from politicians such as Rohrabacher will not take us forward or allow us to solve the most pressing problems facing the world today. Ignorant, uninformed, and dithering politicians, who fail to do their homework in order to educate themselves on the most pressing issues, only take us backward at our detriment. More via Politico:

Jay Gulledge, a senior scientist at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, said Rohrabacher is correct that 80 to 90 percent of gross greenhouse gas emissions do come from nature, with humans producing the rest. But it’s that small percentage that is changing the Earth’s climate — not to mention that trees help absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in huge quantities.

“How he’s using it is totally off the wall,” Gulledge said. “It’s beyond the pale. It makes no sense.”

And here’s a nugget from Bill McKibben:

Caution: It is vitally important not to make connections. When you see pictures of rubble like this week’s shots from Joplin, Mo., you should not wonder: Is this somehow related to the tornado outbreak three weeks ago in Tuscaloosa, Ala., or the enormous outbreak a couple of weeks before that (which, together, comprised the most active April for tornadoes in U.S. history). No, that doesn’t mean a thing.

It is far better to think of these as isolated, unpredictable, discrete events. It is not advisable to try to connect them in your mind with, say, the fires burning across Texas — fires that have burned more of America at this point this year than any wildfires have in previous years. Texas, and adjoining parts of Oklahoma and New Mexico, are drier than they’ve ever been — the drought is worse than that of the Dust Bowl. But do not wonder if they’re somehow connected.

If you did wonder, you see, you would also have to wonder about whether this year’s record snowfalls and rainfalls across the Midwest — resulting in record flooding along the Mississippi — could somehow be related. And then you might find your thoughts wandering to, oh, global warming, and to the fact that climatologists have been predicting for years that as we flood the atmosphere with carbon we will also start both drying and flooding the planet, since warm air holds more water vapor than cold air.

It’s far smarter to repeat to yourself the comforting mantra that no single weather event can ever be directly tied to climate change. There have been tornadoes before, and floods — that’s the important thing. Just be careful to make sure you don’t let yourself wonder why all these record-breaking events are happening in such proximity — that is, why there have been unprecedented megafloods in Australia, New Zealand and Pakistan in the past year. Why it’s just now that the Arctic has melted for the first time in thousands of years.

. . .

Better to join with the U.S. House of Representatives, which voted 240 to 184 this spring to defeat a resolution saying simply that “climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.” Propose your own physics; ignore physics altogether. Just don’t start asking yourself whether there might be some relation among last year’s failed grain harvest from the Russian heat wave, and Queensland’s failed grain harvest from its record flood, and France’s and Germany’s current drought-related crop failures, and the death of the winter wheat crop in Texas, and the inability of Midwestern farmers to get corn planted in their sodden fields. Surely the record food prices are just freak outliers, not signs of anything systemic.

It’s very important to stay calm. If you got upset about any of this, you might forget how important it is not to disrupt the record profits of our fossil fuel companies. If worst ever did come to worst, it’s reassuring to remember what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce told the Environmental Protection Agency in a recent filing: that there’s no need to worry because “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations.” I’m pretty sure that’s what residents are telling themselves in Joplin today.

CLIMATE CHANGE policy & politics

Posted on October 25, 2010

Image via Neubie on Flickr

Even with a Democratic majority, climate change legislation didn’t pass, but at least it was there. However, due to widespread climate change denialism within the Republican Party, a GOP win could mean the end of climate change policy altogether. Via NPR:

The more carbon that gets released into the atmosphere, the higher the average temperature rises.

That’s a scientific fact.

Human activities, such as driving, flying, building and even turning on the lights, are the biggest contributor to the release of carbon.

That too, is a fact.

And yet the majority of Republicans running for House and Senate seats this year disagree.

. . .

Bill McKibben, scholar in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont and the founder of 350.org, says it is a tragedy that conservatives are turning their back on the science behind climate change.

“On this issue maybe more than most, we need that interplay of liberal and conservative,” he says. “Liberals are good at sort of pointing the way forward in kind of progressive new directions and conservatives are good at providing the anchor that says human nature won’t go along with that. That back and forth has been very useful.”

If Republicans take control of the House this November, McKibben says, he doesn’t see a future for climate change policy.

“Look, the Democrats — with a huge majority — couldn’t pass climate change legislation even of a very, very weak variety this year, so I doubt there’ll be any action over the next two years.”

That is, unless conservatives decide to team up with liberals.

“We desperately need conservatives at the forefront of the fight,” McKibben says. “The sooner that conservatives are willing to accept the science, the reality, the sooner we can get to work with their very important help in figuring out what set of prescriptions, what combination of market and regulation will be required in order to deal with the most serious problem we’ve ever stumbled into.”

Despite the lack of merit in their own explanations for the nonexistence of climate change, Republicans reject years of peer-reviewed climate research and observations. Apparently, former Vice President Dick Cheney was the catalyst for the widespread climate change denialism within the Republican Party. Via the New York Times:

According to Congressional inquiries, White House officials, encouraged by Mr. Cheney’s office, forced the Environmental Protection Agency to remove sections on climate change from separate reports in 2002 and 2003. (Christine Todd Whitman, then the E.P.A. administrator, has since described the process as “brutal.”)

The administration also sought to control or censor Congressional testimony by federal employees and tampered with other reports in order to inject uncertainty into the climate debate and minimize threats to the environment.

Nothing, it seemed, could crack the administration’s denial — not Tony Blair of Britain and other leaders who took climate change seriously; not Mrs. Whitman (who eventually quit after being undercut by Mr. Cheney, who worked for the energy company Halliburton before he became vice president and received annual checks while in office); and certainly not the scientists.

In 2007, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its most definitive statement on the human contribution to climate change, Mr. Cheney insisted that there was not enough evidence to just “sort of run out and try to slap together some policy that’s going to try to solve the problem.” To which Mrs. Whitman, by then in private life, said: “I don’t see how he can say that with a straight face anymore.”

Nowadays, it is almost impossible to recall that in 2000, George W. Bush promised to cap carbon dioxide, encouraging some to believe that he would break through the partisan divide on global warming. Until the end of the 1990s, Republicans could be counted on to join bipartisan solutions to environmental problems. Now they’ve disappeared in a fog of disinformation, an entire political party parroting the Cheney line.

Since the Tea Party movement is rife in climate-change denialism, big polluters, which are corporations that acquire their profits from polluting the environment, are backing the Tea Party. Via the Guardian:

BP and several other big European companies are funding the midterm election campaigns of Tea Party favourites who deny the existence of global warming or oppose Barack Obama’s energy agenda, the Guardian has learned.

An analysis of campaign finance by Climate Action Network Europe (Cane) found nearly 80% of campaign donations from a number of major European firms were directed towards senators who blocked action on climate change. These included incumbents who have been embraced by the Tea Party such as Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, and the notorious climate change denier James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma.

The report, released tomorrow, used information on the Open Secrets.org database to track what it called a co-ordinated attempt by some of Europe’s biggest polluters to influence the US midterms. It said: “The European companies are funding almost exclusively Senate candidates who have been outspoken in their opposition to comprehensive climate policy in the US and candidates who actively deny the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and is caused by people.”

Obama and Democrats have accused corporate interests and anonymous donors of trying to hijack the midterms by funnelling money to the Chamber of Commerce and to conservative Tea Party groups. The Chamber of Commerce reportedly has raised $75m (£47m) for pro-business, mainly Republican candidates.

“Oil companies and the other special interests are spending millions on a campaign to gut clean-air standards and clean-energy standards, jeopardising the health and prosperity of this state,” Obama told a rally in California on Friday night.

Every cloud has a silver lining, and the silver lining in a big Republican win is the Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas tailoring rule. Via the Emerging Issues Law Blog:

The Tailoring Rule covers large industrial facilities like power plants and oil refineries that are responsible for 70 percent of the GHGs from stationary sources. The proposals announced are a critical component for implementing the Tailoring Rule and would ensure that GHG emissions from these large facilities are minimized in all 50 states and that local economies can continue to grow.

The Clean Air Act requires states to develop EPA-approved implementation plans that include requirements for issuing air permits. When federal permitting requirements change, as they did after EPA finalized the GHG Tailoring Rule, states may need to modify these plans.

In the first rule, EPA is proposing to require permitting programs in 13 states to make changes to their implementation plans to ensure that GHG emissions will be covered. All other states that implement an EPA-approved air permitting program must review their existing permitting authority and inform EPA if their programs do not address GHG emissions.

Because some states may not be able to develop and submit revisions to their plans before the Tailoring Rule becomes effective in 2011, in the second rule, EPA is proposing a federal implementation plan, which would allow EPA to issue permits for large GHG emitters located in these states. This would be a temporary measure that is in place until the state can revise its own plan and resume responsibility for GHG permitting.

States are best-suited to issue permits to sources of GHG emissions and have long-standing experience working together with industrial facilities. EPA will work closely and promptly with states to help them develop, submit, and approve necessary revisions to enable the affected states to issue air permits to GHG-emitting sources. Additionally, EPA will continue to provide guidance and act as a resource for the states as they make the various required permitting decisions for GHG emissions.

EPA will accept comment on the first proposal for updated state implementation plans for 30 days after publication in the Federal Register. A hearing on the second proposal for the federal implementation plan was held on August 25, 2010, and the EPA will accept comment for 30 days after that hearing. The agency is working to finalize these rules prior to January 2, 2011, the earliest GHG permitting requirements will be effective.

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CLIMATE CHANGE: As the hacked e-mail controversy spins, the Earth continues to warm

Posted on December 7, 2009

As climate change disbelievers cynically spin and take advantage of the so-called Climategate controversy, the Earth’s climate, landscapes, and oceans continue to change due to anthropogenic influences. These data and observations point to a warming earth: (1) the earth continues to warm as CO₂ rises, resulting in a greenhouse effect—in fact “the decade of the 2000s will end as the warmest ever on global temperature charts;” (2) the Arctic continues to warm and Arctic sea ice continues to melt and set records, as the U.S. Coast Guard is forced to patrol further north and the region is closed to fishing (consequently, observations are prompting policy decisions); (3) for people living in the Arctic region, such as the Inuit, coastal erosion is claiming villages and livelihoods as (4) sea levels continue to rise; (5) the Greenland Ice Sheet continues to melt faster than expected; (6) the Arctic tree line continues to advance north as the Earth warms; (7) tundra melting is increasing and consequently, the tundra is becoming greener, but a dangerous feedback loop is also occurring; (8) upward migrations of alpine species are observable, as are latitudinal migrations of animals such as birds and mammals; (9) glacial melting continues to increase; (10) oceans are becoming more acidic with time as atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide increase (in fact, “the oceans have absorbed about 50% of the carbon dioxide (CO₂) released from the burning of fossil fuels, resulting in chemical reactions that lower ocean pH”); (11) ocean acidification has negative impacts on calcifying organisms, thus ocean food chains; and (12) desertification is expanding as the Earth warms. Yet cynics, politicians, pundits, and liars such as Sarah Palin, George Will, and Jim Inhofe, continue to immerse themselves in willful ignorance. The situation is heartbreaking, because denialism has certainly resulted in lost opportunities and time. Where were these denialists when the Bush II Administration was actively suppressing climate change data and muzzling government scientists? Where were the cynics when fake lobbying letters were tied to coal and power companies? Their behavior is revealing. From Scientific American:

Arctic sea ice continues to dwindle—as do glaciers across the globe; average temperatures have increased by 0.7 degree Celsius in the past century and the last decade is the warmest in the instrumental record; spring has sprung forward, affecting everything from flower blossoms to animal migrations; and the concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases continue to rise, reaching 387 parts per million in 2009, a rise of 30 percent since 1750.

Nor has the fundamental physics of the greenhouse effect changed: CO2 in the atmosphere continues to trap heat that would otherwise slip into space, as was established by Irish scientist John Tyndall in 1859. “There is a natural greenhouse effect, that’s what keeps the planet livable,” noted climate modeler Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) during a Friday conference call with reporters organized by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. “Without it, we’d be 33 degrees Celsius colder than we are. That’s been known for hundreds of years.”

. . .

In fact, nothing in the stolen e-mails or computer code undermines in any way the scientific consensus—which exists among scientific publications as well as scientists—that climate change is happening and humans are the cause. “There is a robust consensus that humans are altering the atmosphere and warming the planet,” said meteorologist Michael Mann of The Pennsylvania State University, who also participated in the conference call and was among the scientists whose e-mails have been leaked. “Further increases in greenhouse gases will lead to increasingly greater disruption.”

Some of the kerfuffle rests on a misreading of the e-mails’ wording. For example, the word“trick” in one message, which has been cited as evidence that a conspiracy is afoot, is actually being used to describe a mathematical approach to reconciling observed temperatures with stand-in data inferred from tree ring measurements.

Climate Cover-Up tracks the aggressive global warming denial movement to frustrate climate science and obscure the debate on climate change. From DeSmogBlog:

Starting in the early 1990s, three large American industry groups set to work on strategies to cast doubt on the science of climate change. Even though the oil industry’s own scientists had declared, as early as 1995, that human-induced climate change was undeniable, the American Petroleum Institute, the Western Fuels Association (a coal-fired electrical industry consortium) and a Philip Morris-sponsored anti-science group called TASSC all drafted and promoted campaigns of climate change disinformation.

The success of those plans is self-evident. A Yale/George Mason University poll taken late in 2008 showed that — 20 years after President George H.W. Bush promised to beat the greenhouse effect with the “White House effect” — a clear majority of Americans still say they either doubt the science of climate change or they just don’t know. Climate Cover-Up explains why they don’t know. Tracking the global warming denial movement from its inception, public relations advisor James Hoggan (working with journalist Richard Littlemore), reveals the details of those early plans and then tracks their execution, naming names and exposing tactics in what has become a full-blown attack on the integrity of the public conversation.

The attempt to access private e-mails and spin climate change data goes beyond hacking. From Climate Progress:

It has now been reported that the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Center is not the only victim of such a criminal invasion: burglars and hackers have also attacked the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis at the University of Victoria in British Columbia:

Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria scientist and key contributor to the Nobel prize-winning work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says there have been a number of attempted breaches in recent months, including two successful break-ins at his campus office in which a dead computer was stolen and papers were rummaged through.

These attacks go beyond simple burglary. University of Victoria spokeswoman Patty Pitts told the National Post “there have also been attempts to hack into climate scientists’ computers, as well as incidents in which people impersonated network technicians to try to gain access to campus offices and data.”

For thirty years, defenders of a pollution-based economy have intimidated, smeared, and suppressed climate science, using a playbook perfected by the tobacco industry and Karl Rove. Now — as the United States, led by President Barack Obama, finally appears ready to join the world in the fight against global warming — the opponents of reform are resorting to criminal desperation, harkening back to the paranoia-fueled extremes of Richard Nixon.

However, do to exaggeration, the so-called Climategate may turn against climate change deniers. More from mongabay.com:

Even the Washington Post, which has come under fire from climatologists for publishing several op-eds by George Will denying climate change, has stated that “none of [the emails] seriously undercuts the scientific consensus on climate change” and “by our reckoning — and that of most scientists, policymakers and almost every government in the world — the probability that the planet will warm in the long term because of human activity is extremely high, and the probability that allowing it to do so unabated will have disastrous effects is unacceptably large”.

Also in the Washington Post, science historian and author of The Discovery of Global Warming, Spencer Weart, calls the belief in a conspiracy on climate change “extraordinary and, frankly, weird”. He explains that “in blogs, talk radio and other new media, we are told that the warnings about future global warming issued by the national science academies, scientific societies, and governments of all the leading nations are not only mistaken, but based on a hoax, indeed a conspiracy that must involve thousands of respected researchers”.

Video: Climate change denialists, whether amateurs or professionals like FOX NEWS or Rush Limbaugh, should do their due diligence before jumping on the conspiracy bandwagon (e.g., completely read, research, and fact check the claims:

On the Net:

Portions of Arctic Coastline Eroding, No End in Sight, Says New Study

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