Posts from — March 2008

Australian ABC News reports today that Dr James Hansen has sent a letter to Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd urging him to stop the mining and exports of coal. Australia is one of the world’s biggest coal producers. However, both India and China produce more coal than the Aussies. China is the world leader with 2.4 Mt, eight times as much as Australia’s output. But I guess they are pardoned being in need of fast development.

Coal is Australia’s largest commodity export and a vital national resource. It provides 85 percent of Australia’s electricity production. So what James Hansen is suggesting is practically a total blackout of the Land Down Under.

The other night, I amused myself by looking up all the people on IPCC’s Core Writing Team (the 4th report). Here are the results of the Swedish jury:

Name - Title
Bernstein, Lenny - Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering
Bosch, Peter - Technical Support Unit
Canziani, Osvaldo - Professor, Applied Meteorology
Chen, Zhenlin - Deputy Director-General of the Department of International Cooperation, China Meteorological Administration
Christ, Renate - Secretary IPCC
Davidson, Ogunlade - Professor, Mechanical Engineering
Hare, William - B.Sc. in Environmental Science and Physics, visiting scientist on leave from Greenpeace
Huq, Saleemul - B.Sc. and Ph.D. in Plant Sciences
Karoly, David - Professor, Meteorology
Kattsov, Vladimir - Doctor of Sciences in Physics and Mathematics with a specialty in atmosphere and hydrosphere physics
Kundzewicz, Zbyszek- International Association of Hydrological Sciences
Liu, Jian - Secretariat, IPCC
Lohmann, Ulrike - Professor, Experimental Atmospheric Physics
Manning, Martin - Former head of the IPCC Technical Support Unit, Professor at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand
Matsuno, Taroh - Fundamental contributions to the theory of waves and wave flow interaction in geophysical systems
Menne, Bettina - Medical Officer, WHO
Metz, Bert - Dr. in Chemical Engineering
Mirza, Monirul - Environmental scientist
Nicholls, Neville - Senior Principal Research Scientist and Leader, Climate Forecasting Group, Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre
Nurse, Leonard - M.Sc. Climatology
Pachauri, Rajendra - Chairman, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Palutikof, Jean - Technical Support Unit IPCC
Parry, Martin - Professor, Environmental Science
Qin, Dahe - Head of the China Meteorological Administration
Ravindranath, Nijavalli - BSc. and MSc. in Agriculture, Ph.D. in Humanities-Economics
Reisinger, Andy - Ph.D. in Environmental Physics
Ren, Jiawen - Research specialty: glaciology
Riahi, Keywan - Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, Industrial Management, and Economics
Rosenzweig, Cynthia - B.Sc. in Agricultural Sciences
Rusticucci, Matilde - Meteorologist
Schneider, Stephen - Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and Plasma Physics
Sokona, Youba - Executive Secretary of the Sahara and Sahel Observatory (OSS)
Solomon, Susan - Atmospheric Chemistry
Stott, Peter - Climate scientist
Stouffer, Ronald - M.Sc. in Meteorology
Sugiyama, Taishi - Senior Researcher at the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry
Swart, Rob - Head of the Technical Support Unit
Tirpak, Dennis, Director of the Global Change Division, Office of Policy and Planning, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
Vogel, Coleen - Professor, Sustainability, climatologist by training
Yohe, Gary - M.A., Mathematics, M.Phil. and Ph.D., Economics, Environmental economist

40 people, whereof 18 with a clear link to climate studies. Although I could be wrong, since I’m no expert in these issues. Next, I’m thinking of contacting them to see if they agree with IPCC’s latest report.

I thought I had heard a lot. But the latest news from the UN is just too much. Apparently, the UN Human Rights Council has made climate change a human right issue. At the same time the council also gave the green light for a study into the impact of climate change on human rights.

So what does that mean? Are we adding a new article to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

Article 3a.

Everyone has the right to a stable and unchanging climate.

The new resolution was initiated by the Maldives. The country’s Foreign Minister Abdulla Shahid says that climate change “violates all human rights” - from the basic to the fundamental. “In the case of Maldives, the right to life itself”, he adds.

It’s too bad stupidity isn’t painful.

The almost president and climate oracle talks to CBS News 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl in an interview to be broadcast this Sunday, March 30, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

When asked about people who still doubt man-made global warming, Gore says: “I think that those people are in such a tiny, tiny minority now with their point of view, they’re almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the world is flat. That demeans them a little bit, but it’s not that far off.”

Moon landing staged? Me. Earth flat? Me also. But Gore forgot to mention that we, the “skeptics” also believe in alien abductions.

Listen to the clip from CBS.

The ribbon seal and the walrus are expected to join the polar bear on the Soon-to-be-endangered Species list, according to The Daily Green. The ribbon seal is the fourth seal to get an Endangered Species Act review: bearded, spotted and ringed seal studies are ongoing.

Isn’t it strange how people assume that global warming will cause a great loss of biodiversity? Perhaps it’s time to tell them that the tropics are in fact the source of a majority of our planet’s biodiversity.

The Flood is near! A large chunk of the Wilkins ice shelf in Antarctica is hanging by a thread ready to collapse into the sea. A clear sign of global warming! Antarctica is a thermometer that can’t be ignored, states Times Online today. And I fully agree.

The thing is that the Wilkins ice shelf is hardly the same as Antarctica. It is a part of the Antarctic peninsula, the northernmost part of the mainland of Antarctica, and almost the only part of that continent that extends outside the Antarctic Circle. See the relation between the peninsula and the rest of the continent in the picture below.

Let me ask you, if you lose a hair, do you automatically assume you are going bald? Times Online obviously does.

But there is no longer any reasonable doubt that climate change is the cause; that it would take centuries of lower temperatures for these ice shelves to re-form; and that if they do not, the great ice sheets of the Antarctic interior will be the next to melt.

Times Online admits though that all the eight ice shelf collapses in the past 30 years have occurred on the Antarctic Peninsula and that there is evidence that mean temperature at the South Pole is actually falling. But Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, has seized on the Wilkins event to give warning of “irreversible and abrupt changes” including cataclysmic sea level rises.

In the light of world temperatures slightly falling I guess IPCC is desperately catching at every straw.

Roger A. Pielke Jr., an environmental policy expert at the University of Colorado at Boulder, argues global warming over the rest of this century will have a much smaller impact than most scientists think. He believes that it is cheaper and more effective to adapt to global warming than to fight it. So, instead of spending huge amounts of money to stabilize carbon dioxide levels across the planet, we should work on reducing current problems such as hunger, storm damage and disease.

Read the entire article in Los Angeles Times.

Do you have an account on Facebook? I had. I deactivated it today, after receiving this little email.

This Saturday we are shutting off all of our lights from 8-9pm!

Why are we doing this?
If all Where I’ve Been users turns off their lights for one hour, we can reduce this year’s carbon footprint by approximately 22,290,910 pounds. That’s equivalent to saving 400,000 trees or preventing 8.4 million pounds of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. WOW!!!

What can you do?
Turn off your lights!

Last year 2.2 million people shut off their lights for one hour to show their awareness towards global warming. If we can help to spread the awareness, we can become a part of a great cause that will help to preserve the earth!

Join Where I’ve Been in this Earth-saving crusade by visiting our page and signing up!

Let’s help fight global warming together and keep our Earth a spectacular place to travel!

—
Where I’ve Been
“The travel industry’s leading social networking application.” - Forbes

On the website I feel Al Gore breathing down my neck.

When AGW infiltrates social networking I feel sick.