Planetsave

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There is a person who’s columns I regularly read, because I often find it fun to disagree with him. This person is George Will, conservative commentator and phony-baloney. I call him a phony-baloney, because it seems to fit with the old-fashioned bow tie he sometimes chooses to wear on television programs like Sunday’s political talk show on ABC, This Week. Why is he a phony-baloney? Well, most of all because he is one of the few members of the mainstream press who still perpetuates the myth that global warming might not exist, even though approximately 99% of the scientific community agrees that it is occuring and that it is most likely a phenomenon urged on by the human race. My primary case in point against phony-baloney, is his attack today in The Washington Post on the listing of polar bears as a threatened species. Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s note: Is planting trees a valuable tool for fighting climate change? Or is it a feel-good activity without much effect? Our friends at Eco-Libris point to another study which argues tree-planting can work in sequestering carbon dioxide. This post was originally published on Friday, May 16, 2008.

There is an ongoing debate on the effectiveness of trees planting operations as a tool mitigate global warming. A new research from Australia adds more input into it, showing that agroforestry and reforestation are an important carbon sink.

The research, as reported on The Age, was conducted by researchers from Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA), Queensland Climate Change Centre of Excellence, and Queensland Department of Primary Industries & Fisheries. It was presented to an agriculture, greenhouse gases and emissions trading conference on the Gold Coast.

Dr. Beverley Henry from MLA, who presented the research, showed that different forms of land management had a variety of effects on soil carbon. She said, according to the article, that researchers, analysing data from 74 publications on land-use changes, had made several conclusions:
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Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth did a lot of good for the awareness of environment, but in so doing it also created a few misconceptions. Probably the largest was the link between hurricanes and a warming planet, a link that Gore made clear when he tied Hurricane Katrina to global warming.

In reality, climatologists and scientists alike are all unanimous in reiterating their number one rule; single events do not prove anything.

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With their recent addition to the US Endangered Species Act list, polar bears have sent a wake-up call to water managers in South Florida.

Added to the ESA list on Wednesday, the polar bears will finally receive a measure of official attention and protection, albeit a little late. However, joining the environmental awareness last Wednesday, South Florida water managers agreed to spend a year looking at how the melting ice that is doing in the polar bear, may be a similarly dangerous problem for South Florida.

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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.

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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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