[update - CM1] bumping because this deserves a second look even if it is a quick post.

China correspondent Stephen McDonell

The Chinese Government has described the view that climate change is not man-made as a marginal and "extreme" outlook.

According to Xie Zhenhua, a deputy director at China's powerful National Development and Reform Commission, climate change is a fact based on long-term observation in many countries.

At the annual session of China's National People's Congress, he said that those who advocate that climate change is not man-made are holding an extreme and marginal view.

He said that the majority of the world's scientists believed that climate change has been caused by burning fossil fuels.

He and other officials said that more work needed to be done to ensure that scientific data on climate change was watertight, but the world had no choice but to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels.

Mr Xie said climate change is not only something that ordinary Chinese people can feel and experience every day, but that it may soon have a huge impact on China's food security and even its economic stability.

They also stated that there is some differing of opinion on what is causing this, however that sensible policy is to recognize and begin to take steps to mitigate the risk.

Bumped and promoted. Posted 2010-02-06 05:52:18 -0500. -- GH

Arctic ice melt could cost $24tln by 2050: report

Arctic ice melting could cost global agriculture, real estate and insurance anywhere from $US2.4 trillion ($2.8 billion) to $US24 trillion by 2050 in damage from rising sea levels, floods and heat waves, according to a report released on Friday.

The research project involved more than 370 scientists from 27 countries who collectively spent 15 months, starting in June 2007, aboard a research vessel above the Arctic Circle. It marked the first time a ship has stayed mobile in Canada's high Arctic for an entire winter.

"It's happening much faster than our most pessimistic projections," said University of Manitoba Prof. David Barber, the lead investigator of the Circumpolar Flaw Lead study. A flaw lead is the term for open water between pack ice and coastal ice.

On a daily basis there are louder and louder calls for us to begin to act on Climate disruption. With stories about sea-ice almost completely gone, Australia's food bowl continues to dersertify, temperature rise threatening the Barrier Reef one could get overwhelmed with the sheer scale of these challenges to even contemplate doing anything at all. Couple this up with the denialosphere and its easy to get paralyzed in fear.

I have a different idea.

In two articles I've written HERE and HERE I have laid out the importance of energy in our everyday lives and how where we obtain the primary energy we use, governments around the world do have an input in. I have also shown that decision making on how and what form of energy systems we will have has been kept behind closed doors without transparency for a number of years which has resulted in behavior which politicians ought not partake in if they truly have free market principles and public good at heart.

With the research I have conducted one of the things which I have often questioned is why countries such as Spain and Germany have such a strong renewables sector, when Australia with more wide open country, uninhabited sunny areas than almost any other, we have not developed a strong domestic solar industry. Equally strange is lack of offshore wind, geothermal or wave power resource utilization.

In a diary back in February, FishOutofWater wrote of the beginning of what would come to be known in Australia as the Black Saturday Bushfires.

Australia Fires Kill 128

Twenty-five people are confirmed to have died in fires north of Melbourne and this morning there are unconfirmed reports of bodies being found in cars overtaken by the fires in Gippsland in the state's east.

This morning Mr Brumby said 26 fires were still burning and up to a dozen of them are still very serious.

"Every effort is being thrown at the fires," he said.

"This is not over yet. Tragically I think there will be more bad news.

By the time the smoke had cleared, 173 people had perished in these fires. Two days ago I went to see some of the first responders, firefighters and police, who are currently sacrificing once again to raise funds for a good cause.

Back in February of this year in Victoria, Australia we had terrible heat waves taking the lives of many people, over taken in the news by the most destructive bushfire, wildfire in terms of lives and property, in Australia's history.

Another dust storm hits Australia -- bad news for those of us who are still breathing. Drought (and IMO global deforestration) have created really serious dust storms that have blanketed Australia and hit other places as well. But all of the consequences are not so negative. See this piece in Bloomberg News last week.

How Can You Question Climate Change Now?

January 11, 2008

(Click for Larger image)


     Ominous Arctic Melts Worry Experts: An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years.

http://ecoble.com/2008/01/11/how-can-you-question-climate-change-now/

Last Friday, on a whim, I created an open thread called Winds of Change, Comfortably Numb. Like the song from the video, the winds of change are blowing -- quite literally, too: the climate is changing, in social & political ways as well as ecological terms.¹

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The future's in the air
I can feel it everywhere
Blowing with the wind of change
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New studies were published over the weekend that serve to reinforce some previous data about the issue of global climate change. In his piece Warming and Storms, Uncertainty and Ethics, Andrew C. Revkin writes about how those studies may impact our approach to human-induced global warming:

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Over the weekend, a pair of very different climate studies — one physical, one social — illustrated two uncomfortable, and related, realities confronting society as it grapples with possible responses to human-driven global warming.
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Revkin is right: both studies, particularly when combined, leave us with some disturbing things to mull over.

From the Wall Street Journal,

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Global-Warming Study Weighs Impact of Human Action

By GAUTAM NAIK

May 15, 2008; Page A10

A new study says humans have changed the world's environment more by warming the climate than by directly encroaching on habitats.

The research, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, also establishes a link between climate change and narrower, continental changes such as the earlier spring flight of butterflies in California, the earlier release of pollen in the Netherlands and the increased growth of pine trees in Mongolia.
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An international team of over a dozen scientists, led by Cynthia Rosenzweig of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Center for Climate Systems Research at Columbia University in New York, showed very strong indications based on studies done on a continental scale.

In other news,

Posted in full by permission of Nick Benton, owner/editor of the Fall Church News Press. Take a look at the new format of the online version of his weekly newspaper--recognized as the best local paper in Northern VA.

In the cover story of the April 2008 edition of National Geographic magazine, “Africa’s Ragged Edge: Journey Into the Sahel,” author Paul Salopek, photographer Pascal Maitre and the editors do a terrific job introducing readers to perhaps the most important region of the world that no one, almost, has heard about.
The Sahara is known, the Sahel is not.

Yet the Sahel is perhaps the largest contiguous arable region on the planet, dwarfing the entire continental United States in scale. From coast to coast, from Dakar on the west to the Red Sea on the east, it is at least one-and-a-half times the width of the U.S. Presently, despite its dry and undeveloped condition, it is home to an estimated 55 million mostly poverty-stricken and ethno-politically divided people.

As the National Geographic article points out, the Sahel’s dimensions have shifted over the centuries due to the amount of rainfall. Just as the arable land in the U.S. plains can devolve from agriculturally-fertile to dust bowls, so it goes for the Sahel. The Sahara Desert can encroach on its land under drought conditions, or it can recede when there is rain. At one point a thousand years ago, much of it was fertile and lush, and in that era Timbuktu on the Niger River in modern Mali was the seat of a rich and powerful regime.

"Climate" is a word with several definitions. From Answer.com, here's the dictionary definition:

1. The meteorological conditions, including temperature, precipitation, and wind, that characteristically prevail in a particular region.
2. A region of the earth having particular meteorological conditions: lives in a cold climate.
3. A prevailing condition or set of attitudes in human affairs: a climate of unrest.

For additional clarity (at risk of exceeding "fair use" restrictions), here's the thesaurus listing:

1. The totality of surrounding conditions and circumstances affecting growth or development: ambiance, atmosphere, environment, medium, milieu, mise en scène, surroundings, world.
2. A prevailing quality, as of thought, behavior, or attitude: mood, spirit, temper, tone.

So, to truly address "climate change" in today's world, should we not address both functional definitions -- namely, not just the meteorological but also the social/political?

Is Gore our Gort?

An Op-Editude

Al Gore’s real and riveting message about global warming may seem alien to many, especially the world’s behemoth energy producers who envision their day of reckoning if they obey his admonitions and follow his teachings. And to political knuckleheads like President Bush, who steadfastly refuse to watch his award-winning call-to-arms film for reasons that defy logic and who, like a befuddled ship’s captain afraid to change course for fear his crew would criticize him for setting bad compass headings to begin with, prefers the pride of self-righteousness as he and his Panglossian world view down with the ship.

In his speech yesterday in the Oslo, Norway, where he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize shared with Mr. Pachauri, the Chairman of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Mr. Albert Arnold Gore told his audience there and those of us watching from afar that unless we, the inhabitants of Planet Earth, change our profligate energy ways, and soon, the tiny spherical blue ball we live on will reach a point from which returning to the safety we once knew will only be accomplished with the greatest of efforts of the human race working together.

And since we don’t have a great track record in that department, there is, in my view, cause for worry.