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Study says natural factors, not humans, behind West Coast warming
The rise in temperatures along the West Coast over the past century is almost entirely due to natural forces — not human emissions of greenhouse gases, according to a major new study. But that doesn’t refute the idea that humans are contributing to global climate change, the authors say.

http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/ ... dyxml.html

This year the world will enjoy its greatest grain crop on record. Let me say that again. This year the world will enjoy its greatest grain crop on record. After the world food security crisis of 2007, which saw civil unrest in some countries, it is fantastic to see that in just 7 years we are producing record amounts of food for a growing world population. The US Department of Agriculture recently raised global crop predictions for corn, soy and wheat. Yet the World Bank indicates that over the last 10 reporting years, the percentage of agricultural land worldwide has not changed.

So what is driving this world food production boom?

Carbon dioxide. Plants are thriving on the extra CO2 in the atmosphere. A recent study showed that climate modelers over-estimated the amount of carbon dioxide that would remain in the atmosphere. Lo and behold, they have now discovered that plants are soaking up the additional carbon dioxide and growing more vigorously. Plants and trees and crops will absorb 130 billion tonnes more carbon dioxide this century than expected. It’s called the ‘carbon dioxide fertilisation effect’. This is not just a benefit to food crops – it is a boon to native vegetation, from the ancient forests to desert scrub that environmental activists have been trying to preserve for decades. Then there is the latest science on how the oceans are absorbing carbon dioxide with plankton growing faster than previously thought.

So why is the Abbott government spending billions of dollars to reduce this airborne saviour of vegetation and food crops? I am stunned by the number of politicians who are either ignorant or wilfully misleading the public on this topic. A whole political industry has developed around new arcane language to describe what we have known for centuries about producing food and improving our environment. A whole false economy has developed, fuelled by taxpayer funding through an Emissions Reduction Fund, An Emissions Trading Scheme, Renewable Energy Targets, The Renewable Energy Agency, The Climate Change Authority, Climate Change Departments and more.

THERE’S a lot of hand-wringing about our warming planet, but billions of people face a more immediate problem: They are desperately poor, and many cook and heat their homes using open fires or leaky stoves that burn dirty fuels like wood, dung, crop waste and coal.

About 3.5 million of them die prematurely each year as a result of breathing the polluted air inside their homes — about 200,000 more than the number who die prematurely each year from breathing polluted air outside, according to a study by the World Health Organization.

There’s no question that burning fossil fuels is leading to a warmer climate and that addressing this problem is important. But doing so is a question of timing and priority. For many parts of the world, fossil fuels are still vital and will be for the next few decades, because they are the only means to lift people out of the smoke and darkness of energy poverty.

More than 1.2 billion people around the world have no access to electricity, according to the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook for 2012. Most of them live in sub-Saharan Africa and in Asia. That is nearly four times the number of people who live in the United States. In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, excluding South Africa, the entire electricity-generating capacity available is only 28 gigawatts — equivalent to Arizona’s — for 860 million people. About 6.5 million people live in Arizona.

dead man walking wrote:the carbon market has been responding for years. not a solution by itself, but better than naysaying

http://www.cleancookstoves.org/resource ... atalog.pdf

and there's this too, fighting bad indoor air while providing safe water (merely one example)

http://cleantechnica.com/2012/12/16/cle ... -thousand/

dead man walking wrote:improving their health, enabling children to attend school more regularly, mothers to work regularly, etc.

In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) warned that imminent sea-level rises, increased hurricanes, and desertification caused by “man-made global warming” would lead to massive population disruptions. In a handy map, the organization highlighted areas that were supposed to be particularly vulnerable in terms of producing “climate refugees.” Especially at risk were regions such as the Caribbean and low-lying Pacific islands, along with coastal areas.

The 2005 UNEP predictions claimed that, by 2010, some 50 million “climate refugees” would be frantically fleeing from those regions of the globe. However, not only did the areas in question fail to produce a single “climate refugee,” by 2010, population levels for those regions were actually still soaring. In many cases, the areas that were supposed to be producing waves of “climate refugees” and becoming uninhabitable turned out to be some of the fastest-growing places on Earth.

dead man walking wrote:ddt addresses a different problem.

This year is on track to be one of the hottest, if not the hottest, year on record, a U.N. agency reported Wednesday, citing preliminary estimates.
The estimates were released by the World Meteorological Organization to coincide with annual climate change negotiations taking place in Lima, Peru. . . .
"What is particularly unusual and alarming this year are the high temperatures of vast areas of the ocean surface, including in the Northern Hemisphere," said World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Michel Jarraud. . . .
If the rest of 2014 plays out as expected, this year will be the hottest on record, ahead of 2010, 2005 and 1998.
"The provisional information for 2014 means that 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have all occurred in the 21st century," Jarraud said. "There is no standstill in global warming."

It's official: 2014 was the hottest year ever.

Two separate analyses by NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that temperatures across the globe last year were the warmest since 1880. The 10 warmest years, with the exception of 1998, have occurred since 2000.

The contiguous United States set its temperature record in 2012. But, mainly because of the unusual chill in the East last year, 2014 was only the 34th warmest year on record for the lower 48 states.

Stefan Rahmstorf, head of earth system analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “However, the fact that the warmest years on record are 2014, 2010 and 2005 clearly indicates that global warming has not ‘stopped in 1998,’ as some like to falsely claim.”

Researchers have come up with a new and improved way of measuring the rise in the sea level, and the news is not good: The seas have risen dramatically faster over the last two decades than anyone had known.

dead man walking wrote:and explain this away

Researchers have come up with a new and improved way of measuring the rise in the sea level, and the news is not good: The seas have risen dramatically faster over the last two decades than anyone had known.

Shafpocalypse Now wrote:What's wrong with the old way?

Old sea measurements came to their conclusions by dividing the world’s oceans into sub regions. Then they determined the height of those regions with something called tide gauges — “essentially yard sticks used to measure ocean tides,” a release said. Then researchers would take those numbers, create estimates for each region, and average them out to come to a global estimate.

But that system was rife with problems. “These simple averages aren’t representative of a true global mean value,” Hay said in a statement. “Tide gauges are located along coasts, therefore large areas of the ocean aren’t being included in these estimates. And the records that do exist commonly have large gaps.” The tide gauges were unevenly distributed, or just skipped whole sections of the planet. Only the United States and Europe were measuring the oceans for decades. Then there was the issue of tectonic activity, which would suddenly cause a rise or fall in local sea levels, and skewed the numbers.

So the scientists realized they needed a whole new method. Soon, they arrived at what they call a “completely new perspective.”

“We know the sea level is changing for a variety of reasons,” Hay said. “There are ongoing effects due to the last ice age, heating and expansion of the ocean due to global warming, changes in ocean circulation, and present-day melting of land-ice, all of which result in unique patterns of sea-level change. These processes combine to produce the observed global mean sea-level rise.”

So they had all the puzzle pieces. Now they just needed to put them together.

To do so, the researchers looked for what they called “fingerprints” and “underlying patterns,” putting each factor through advanced statistical models to determine a more accurate sum figure. “What we were interested in — and remain interested in — was whether we can detect the sea-level fingerprints we predicted in our computer simulations in sea-level records,” Morrow said. “Using a global set of observations, our goal has been to infer how individual ice sheets are contributing to global sea-level rise.”

So they took the sum of those contributions from the ice sheets, and added in the rate for how much oceans are rising because of thermal expansion due to global warming to determine a “global mean of sea-level change.” And what that mean ultimately showed was that the rate of sea-level rise has increased much more dramatically than earlier estimates. “Unfortunately,” Hay said, it “is really much larger than anyone thought.”

To do so, the researchers looked for what they called “fingerprints” and “underlying patterns,” putting each factor through advanced statistical models to determine a more accurate sum figure.

Terrence McCoy writes on foreign affairs for The Washington Post's Morning Mix.