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Snows of Kilimanjaro Are Melting

Posted by Atlantis Thursday, November 5, 2009 View Comments

Source:http://www.allgov.com   Thursday, November 05, 2009

Mt. Kilimanjaro
When Ernest Hemingway wrote “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” he inadvertently crafted a perfect metaphor for the modern problem of global warming now threatening the famous icy peak in Tanzania that inspired the story early in the 20th century. In Hemingway’s 1936 tale, the main character dies having lived a life that was all about the present, with no regard for the future—much the same way modern industrial societies have done without concern for the long-term impact of pouring volumes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere just to meet immediate economic gains. That approach has resulted in noticeable changes to the earth’s landscape, including atop Africa’s highest peak, which within two decades will lose its picturesque glacier, scientists predict.
 
A new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says the top of Kilimanjaro—which has been capped by a glacier for 12,000 years—will be ice-free in about 20 years, thanks to global warming. Eighty-five percent of the glacier has melted away since 1912, with 26% having disappeared just within this decade.
 
Researchers from Ohio State University, who drilled into the rock beneath the ice as part of their research, noted that even a drought of 300 years was unable to do the damage humankind has done in less than one century.
-Noel Brinkerhoff

Source: http://www.sidewaysnews.com

Al Gore has published a new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis
Al Gore has published a new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis
Climate change crusader Al Gore says campaigners need more than facts to encourage people to tackle climate change.
The Nobel Prize winner and former US vice president - praised for his film An Inconvenient Truth - has stated that to stop global warming, more needs to be done to ensure that facts are presented in ways that relate to a person's spiritual or moral compass.
Speaking with Newsweek to promote his new book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, Gore explained that he is talking to religious leaders to create new ways to showcase the arguments over climate change. He added that a Christian version of his slideshow featuring scriptural references is "probably his favourite".
However, the interview also revealed that Gore has accepted new evidence thatcarbon emissions are not the only issue affecting global warming, as the likes of methane and soot also have a great impact.
"A comprehensive plan to solve the climate crisis has to widen the focus to encompass strategies for all.""Over the years I have been among those who focused most of all on CO2, and I think that's still justified," he explained.

By Channel 4 News


A charity warns that the biggest health threat to children in the 21st century is global warming. Band Aid's Midge Ure travelled back to Ethiopia and speaks to Krishnan Guru-Murthy.

A charity is warning that the biggest health threat to children in the twenty first century is global warming.

Save the Children says that up to a quarter of a million children could die in the next year because of the effects of climate change.

The musician Midge Ure, who co-wrote the Band Aid single "Do They Know It's Christmas" 25 years ago, travelled to Ethiopia with his daughter recently to see how changes in the climate have caused food shortages there.

The Save the Children ambassador and two-time Ivor Novello award winner spoke to Channel 4 News.


Source: www.economictimes.indiatimes.com

India needs to play a leadership role to adapt and mitigate the adverse impact of global warming as it is the most "vulnerable" country to climate change, Union environment minister Jairam Ramesh said. 

"We cannot afford to ignore the threats of climate change as four areas of vulnerabilities exist only in India and nowhere in the world. For instance, if monsoon fails our economy will come to a standstill," Ramesh said at a function to launch the "Climate Change Agenda for Delhi 2009-2012." 
Similarly, he said the vast stretch of coastal lines, Himalayan glaciers in the Northern regions and thick forests in Central India were under threat. 

"Without being told by the world what we should do, we have to be very proactive and take a leadership role and show the global communities how to adapt and mitigate the adverse impact of climate change," the minister added. 

Appreciating the Delhi Government's effort in becoming the first State to prepare the domestic action plan to tackle global warming caused by green house gas emissions, he said, it is in keeping with the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's call all the States to come out with such points. 
He also appreciated the government's 'green initiatives' such as taking solar energy in the households through power tariffs, preparing a map for carbon footprints of the city and greening the capital by setting up urban forests across the city. 

What Will The Climate Be Like in 2100?

Posted by Atlantis Wednesday, November 4, 2009 View Comments

Source: www.knowledge.allianz.com
Stanford University climatologist Stephen Schneider discusses what we know and don’t know about the future of the Earth’s climate, and whether it is worth spending trillions of dollars to fight climate change.

What will the Earth's climate be like at the end of this century?
What's the old joke? Prediction is hard, especially about the future. What do you have to do to predict the climate of 2100? Well, you have to know how much CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, aerosols - that's dust and smoke - are going to be there, because that changes what we call the forcing - the pressures on the climate system - to be warmer or colder. We know it's going to be warmer. That's virtually certain.

But you don't know what those are going to be on the basis of any history. There's never been a time before when there was six to ten billion people on the Earth, when they're demanding dramatic increases in their standards of living, and when they're using the cheapest available technology - usually coal and oil burning, big cars - to get there. So, before you can forecast how warm it will be in 2100 - and whether it's worth a trillion-dollar investment not to have that outcome - you've got to know a bunch of social factors.


What kinds of social factors?
How many people are in the world? What standards of living do they have? That's population times GDP per capita - a typical measure of standard of living. Then you have to multiply that by how much energy per unit of GDP they consume. We call that energy intensity. It's critically important. And how do we know if people are going to take this problem seriously?

What are the possible climate scenarios for the end of this century?
Greenhouse gas concentrations double pre-industrial levels and then come down like a steep ski slope because we've invented our way out of the problem with new high technology, and we deploy it starting in 2020. By the end of the century we mearly increased carbon dioxide by, say, 80 percent of pre-industrial levels. That, I'm sorry to say, is a good scenario.

The bad scenario is business as usual. We keep getting richer as fast as we can. We do what we did in the Victorian Industrial Revolution in the rich countries: sweat shops, coal-burning internal combustion engines. Well, what do you think China and India are doing?


Which scenario is likely?
The estimate (for increased temperatures) is between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius during the next 25 years. Very recently, the IPCC narrowed it to between 2 and 4.5 degrees. They call that "likely." Well, likely means two-thirds to ninety percent. So, that still means there's a 5-7 percent chance it could be "lucky" - below two degrees - or "really unlucky" - above 4.5.

The worst of all worlds is an increase of more than seven degrees. That's an astronomically large number, because an ice age is about six degrees cooler than an interglacial that we're now in. And we're talking about a ten-percent chance it's as large a temperature difference as an ice age to an interglacial cycle, but happening in a century; not in five thousand years.

That's an easy prescription for a catastrophic outcome with regard to species extinction, coastal damage, fires, heat waves, droughts, and floods. As Bill Clinton said when I first presented this in the White House in 1997, "all the biblical stuff."


editor: Valdis Wish

publishing date: June 2, 2008

Source: www.knowledge.allianz.com
Seen from space, our atmosphere is but a tiny layer of gas around a huge bulky planet. But it is this gaseous outer ring and its misleadingly called greenhouse effect that makes life on Earth possible – and that could destroy life as we know it.

The sun is the Earth’s primary energy source, a burning star so hot that we can feel its heat from over 150 million kilometers away. Its rays enter our atmosphere and shower upon on our planet. About one third of this solar energy is reflected back into the universe by shimmering glaciers, water and other bright surfaces. Two thirds, however, are absorbed by the Earth, thus warming land, oceans, and atmosphere.

Much of this heat radiates back out into space, but some of it is stored in the atmosphere. This process is called the greenhouse effect. Without it, the Earth’s average temperature would be a chilling -18 degrees Celsius, even despite the sun’s constant energy supply.

In a world like this, life on Earth would probably have never emerged from the sea. Thanks to the greenhouse effect, however, heat emitted from the Earth is trapped in the atmosphere, providing us with a comfortable average temperature of 14 degrees.

So, how does it work? Sunrays enter the glass roof and walls of a greenhouse. But once they heat up the ground, which, in turn, heats up the air inside the greenhouse, the glass panels trap that warm air and temperatures increase.

Our planet, however, has no glass walls; the only thing that comes close to acting as such is our atmosphere. But in here, processes are way more complicated than in a real greenhouse.

Like a radiator in space
Only about half of all solar energy that reaches the Earth is infrared radiation and causes immediate warming when passing the atmosphere. The other half is of a higher frequency, and only translates into heat once it hits Earth and is later reflected back into space as waves of infrared radiation.

This transformation of solar radiation in to infrared radiation is crucial, because infrared radiation can be absorbed by the atmosphere. So, on a cold and clear night for example, parts of this infrared radiation that would normally dissipate into space get caught up in the Earth’s atmosphere. And like a radiator in the middle of a room, our atmosphere radiates this heat into all directions.

Parts of this heat are finally sent out in the frozen nothingness of space, parts of it are sent back to Earth where they step up global temperatures. Just how much warmer it gets down here depends on how much energy is absorbed up there– and this, in turn, depends on the atmosphere’s composition.

The switch from carbon dioxide to oxygen

Nitrogen, oxygen, and argon make up 98 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere. But they do not absorb significant amounts of infrared radiation, and thus do not contribute to the greenhouse effect. It is the more exotic components like water vapour, carbon dioxide, ozone,methane, nitrous oxide, and chlorofluorocarbons that absorb heat and thus increase atmospheric temperatures.

Studies indicate that until some 2.7 billion years ago, there was so much carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane in our atmosphere that average temperatures on Earth were as high as 70 degrees. But bacteria and plants slowly turned CO2 into oxygen and the concentration of CO2 in our current atmosphere dropped to just about 0.038 percent or 383 parts per million (ppm), a unit of measurement used for very low concentrations of gases that has become a kind of currency in climate change debates.

Minuscule changes – global impact

But while we are still far from seeing major concentrations of CO2 in our atmosphere, slight changes already alter the way our celestial heating system works. Measurements of carbon dioxide amounts from Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii show that CO2 has increased from about 313 ppm in 1960 to about 375 ppm in 2005.

That means for every million particles in our atmosphere, there are now 62 CO2-particles more than in 1960. Even if this does not seem like much, scientists say this increase – most probably caused by human activities – is mainly responsible for rising global temperaturesthroughout the last decades.

Even if the term “greenhouse effect” is somewhat of a misnomer, it still might be a useful handle from which the public can grasp an otherwise intricate natural process. Most people can relate to how hot and stuffy a greenhouse can get. Now that the Earth has started to heat up, we realize that our own global greenhouse has no window that we can open to catch some fresh air.

editor: Thilo Kunzemann
last updated: August 20, 2009

Source: www.knowledge.allianz.com

Global Warming is defined as the increase of the average temperature on Earth. As the Earth is getting hotter, disasters like hurricanes, droughts and floods are getting more frequent.

Over the last 100 years, the average temperature of the air near the Earth´s surface has risen a little less than 1° Celsius (0.74 ± 0.18°C, or 1.3 ± 0.32° Fahrenheit). Does not seem all that much? It is responsible for the conspicuous increase in stormsfloods and raging forest fires we have seen in the last ten years, though, say scientists.

Their data show that an increase of one degree Celsius makes the Earth warmer now than it has been for at least a thousand years. Out of the 20 warmest years on record, 19 have occurred since 1980. The three hottest years ever observed have all occurred in the last eight years, even.


Earth should be in cool-down-period 

But it is not only about how much the Earth is warming, it is also about how fast it is warming. There have always been natural climate changes – Ice Ages and the warm intermediate times between them – but those evolved over periods of 50,000 to 100,000 years.


A temperature rise as fast as the one we have seen over the last 30 years has never happened before, as far as scientists can ascertain. Moreover, normally the Earth should now be in a cool-down-period, according to natural effects like solar cycles and volcano activity, not in a heating-up phase.


All these facts lead scientists to infer that the global warming we now experience is not a natural occurrence and that it is not brought on by natural causes. Man is responsible, they say. What did we do? Read more about the man-made causes and impacts of global warming in the following articles.


editor: Karin Lindinger

latest update: August 20, 2009