Author Archive for homer

Image from the BBC article

From Richard Black, BBC News:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in 2007 that sea levels would rise at least 28cm (1ft) by the year 2100.

But this is a global average; and now a Dutch team has made what appears to be the first attempt to model all the factors leading to regional variations.

Other researchers say the IPCC’s figure is likely to be a huge under-estimate.

Whatever the global figure turns out to be, there will be regional differences.

Ocean currents and differences in the temperature and salinity of seawater are among the factors that mean sea level currently varies by up a metre across the oceans – this does not include short-term changes due to tides or winds.

So if currents change with global warming, which is expected – and if regions such as the Arctic Ocean become less saline as ice sheets discharge their contents into the sea – the regional patterns of peaks and troughs will also change.

“Everybody will still have the impact, and in many places they will get the average rise,” said Roderik van der Wal from the University of Utrecht, one of the team presenting their regional projections at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) meeting in Vienna.

The certainty of rising waters increases steadily. What will be the energy cost and environmental impact of removing what can be made portable and leaving behind humanity’s huge physical plant close to current sea-level? What will be the parallel cost and impact of rebuilding a satisfactory physical plant on higher ground?

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From Bruno Berthon at Greener World Media via Reuters:

From one international summit to the next, I can’t help but notice a steady and discernible trend: National politicians are finding it ever harder to make their voices heard.

That’s partly because there are more of them at the table: Once it was the G7, now it’s the G20. Add the NGOs and the regional organizations, such as the EU and ASEAN, as well as all the emerging markets raising their voices. Don’t forget the world’s largest businesses that are rightly calling for a place at the negotiating table, too.

It’s no different here in Cancun at the COP16 global climate change talks –  except in one regard: Cities. We are now joined at climate summits by numerous mayors and metropolitan leaders, and in fact, the C40 group of mega-cities met in Cancun two weeks before the summit to claim a seat at the table and demonstrate their willingness to commit to emissions reductions, no matter what. I was speaking last weekend at the World Climate Summit alongside the Mayor of Technology and Environment from Copenhagen and a city councilor from Vancouver, both cities that are leaders in the Siemens Green City Index.

In 1800, 3 percent of the world’s population was living in cities. We’re well past the 50 percent mark now, and since last year’s climate talks in Copenhagen, approximately 44 million people have been added to the global total. Well over 300 million people will move from rural areas to cities in China by 2025, the equivalent of the entire population of the U.S. migrating in less than 15 years.

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Scientist Sergey Zimov says Siberia's total carbon storage is equivalent to all the world's rain forests. photo by Arthur Max / Associated Press

From Arthur Max, Associated Press, in the San Francisco Chronicle:

The Russian scientist shuffles across the frozen lake, scuffing aside ankle-deep snow until he finds a cluster of bubbles trapped under the ice. With a cigarette lighter in one hand and a knife in the other, he lances the ice like a blister. Methane whooshes out and bursts into a thin blue flame.

Gas locked inside Siberia’s frozen soil and under its lakes has been seeping out since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. But in the past few decades, as the Earth has warmed, the icy ground has begun thawing more rapidly, accelerating the release of methane – a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide – at a perilous rate.

Some scientists believe the thawing of permafrost could become the epicenter of climate change. They say 1.5 trillion tons of carbon, locked inside icebound earth since the age of mammoths, is a climate time bomb waiting to explode if released into the atmosphere.

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