Planetsave

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For a long time now we’ve spoken about the continuing effort by US and other environmental and animal rights groups to get the polar bear listed on the United States Endangered Species Act.

Polar bear populations have been declining over the past few years, attributable, some claim, to man-made global warming. Al Gore helped the plight of the polar bear by including in his award winning An Inconvenient Truth a cartoon of a polar bear swimming, unable to find land. The cartoon was inspired by evidence that some polar bears had drowned – a hitherto unforeseen occurrence.

So it is good news that on Wednesday the Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne announced that the polar bear has finally been listed as “threatened” under the ESA. However he was certain to ensure in his announcement that the decision should not be “misused” to regulate global climate change.

“Listing the polar bear as threatened can reduce avoidable losses of polar bears. But it should not open the door to use of the Endangered Species Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles, power plants, and other sources,” said Kempthorne. “That would be a wholly inappropriate use of the ESA law. The ESA is not the right tool to set U.S. climate policy.”

Not surprisingly, the announcement has been met with mixed reviews.

Some environmental groups are expressing concern over the climate change caveats that have been placed on the decision.

“This decision is a watershed event because it has forced the Bush administration to acknowledge global warming’s brutal impacts,” said Kassie Siegel, climate program director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s not too late to save the polar bear, and we’ll keep fighting to ensure that the polar bear gets the help it needs through the full protections of the Endangered Species Act. The administration’s attempts to reduce protection to the polar bear from greenhouse gas emissions are illegal and won’t hold up in court.”

On the other hand however, there are those who are praising the decision.

“Today’s decision is a tremendous victory for one of the world’s most iconic and charismatic animals,” said Carter Roberts, president and CEO of World Wildlife Fund US on the group’s Web site. “The other big winner today is sound science, which has clearly trumped politics, providing polar bears a new lease on life.”

That the decision has finally been made is without a doubt a blessing, and will hopefully go a long way to ensuring the survival of one of this planet’s most majestic creatures. However it is hard to escape the fact that the US government simply failed to follow the rules in naming the polar bear on the ESA, presumably to secure the $2.7 billion lease of oil reserves in the Chuckchi Sea.

“Had the polar bear been listed prior to January 9 as the law required, that lease sale could not have moved forward without some substantial additional review of the impacts to polar bears,” said Siegel.

Either way, we can only hope that those fighting for the polar bear will make the most of this new ruling to provide a measure of safety and security.

Source

credit: mape_s at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

We spend a lot of our time looking at research and studies that focuses on one particular aspect of the planet. Rarely does anyone spend the time to look at a multitude of aspects, to acquire a look at the overall picture. It seems like science is all about proving the big picture by proving a small portion of that big picture.

However critics will be the first to tell us that the small picture does not necessarily reflect the big picture. Just like a jigsaw of the planet Earth, you might think that the whole planet is blue if they are the only pieces of the puzzle you saw, but look at it in total, and you’ll find a few solid bits as well!

So that is why a new study has assembled information never before gathered together in one spot. The study looked at a vast array of physical and biological systems across our planet, and looked at if and how they were being affected by global warming. The study appears in the May 15 issue of the journal Nature.

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Innovative solutions could very well be vital in the coming years, if we are to solve the worsening pollution of our planet. Whether or not you attribute its increase to global warming, carbon dioxide has long been on the rise and subsequent damages have been seen worldwide in flora and fauna ecosystems.

One of the principal sinks for the carbon we do produce, or that exists naturally, are trees. Naturally, as intelligent humans, we’ve decided to cut down as many of those trees as possible. We cut them down, we burn them, and we destroy entire ecosystems while also destroying our own future.

However a novel idea has been raised by Fritz Scholz and Ulrich Hasse from the University of Greifswald, and has been published in the journal ChemSusChem.

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A recent paper published in the prestigious Nature journal suggesting that over the next decade we could experience a temporary global temperature drop has naturally seen the climate skeptics announce that they were right all along. Of course, reality – a term long since forgotten to many – would suggest that global warming will still continue unabated in the background, but that would just kill a good story.

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The movie The Day After Tomorrow saw the planet globally affected by the cessation of the ocean conveyor belt, or, more precisely known as the thermohaline circulation (THC). The northern hemisphere suffered massive drops in temperature, rises in sea level and a variety of other climate conditions.

Putting aside the fantastical nature of the speed with which this happened, the base science is sound; that an increase in freshwater could slow or shutdown the thermohaline circulation, causing an unexpected and unhelpful ice age.

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If anyone ever thought climate sciences were anything but complex, they obviously weren’t looking hard enough. Recent research from prominent UK and Brazilian climate scientists have found a link between reducing sulphur dioxide emissions from burning coal, and the increase in sea surface temperatures in the tropical north Atlantic, that heightens the risk of drought in the Amazon rainforest.

The Amazon is without a doubt one of the planet’s most valuable and important ecological resources; and not for logging. The rainforest contains approximately one tenth of the total carbon stored in land ecosystems, and recycles much of the rain that falls upon its leafy canopy.

Thus, any major change to its vegetation has massive implications for the global climate system.

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Greenpeace, always good for stirring up trouble, have released a report entitled False Hope to coincide with the seventh annual Carbon Capture & Sequestration conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The report is said to be “…critically examining the status and promise of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.”

Needless to say, Greenpeace aren’t overly happy.

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There’s nothing quite as nice as a really catchy title that perfectly sums up your story. If you want to leave it at that, then you’ve probably got the whole of the story. However if you want to know just a bit more about how climate change is affecting our planet’s poles, then keep reading.

Speaking in a telephone briefing last Friday, Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said that the Arctic and Antarctic are exhibiting opposite effects to the climate change affecting our planet.

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Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have finally explained a mystery that fishermen in the California current of the Pacific Ocean have monitored over the past 70 years. Their discovery has resulted in the naming of a new climate pattern, one called the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation (NPGO).

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Every now and then one side of an argument or another will get a landfall win that just puts them over the top for awhile. In science, it doesn’t necessarily always hold, but just occasionally, this win does manage to help in the long run.

Well, for those of us who see man-made global warming as the backbone of our current climate change, that win has just been put in our laps.

A blog I had yet to hear about, DeSmogBlog, has managed to find at least 45 “outraged scientists” that once belonged to the famed Heartland Institute article entitled “500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares” that, in reality, don’t doubt anything.

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