Inuit: Life is very much out of synch

BEIJING, April 16 (Xinhuanet) -- So what do you think, will those who scoff at scientific proof global warming is harming the Earth's Arctic region listen to the people who have to live -- and die -- with its impact on their environment and culture?

Will they listen to Will Steger, a 62-year-old Minnesotan who has witnessed the effects during his 43 years of travel and living with the indigenous people of the Arctic?

"This is really ground zero for global warming," said Will Steger, speaking by satellite phone from a small Inuit village near Iqaluit about 200 miles south of the Arctic Circle. "This is where a culture has lived for 5,000 years, relying on a very delicate, interconnected ecosystem and, one by one, small pegs of that ecosystem are being pulled out."

Steger made the first journey to the North Pole by dogsled without resupply in 1986. He is now sledding with Inuit guides for three months across Baffin Island, the northeastern corner of Nunavut, with two teams of huskies and a cameraman.

He is charting his 1,200-mile adventure on his website, and making a documentary about how Inuit hunters are being forced to adapt to a warming Arctic Ocean and melting polar ice cap. In June, he will testify before a U.S. Senate committee on climate change.

Steger said hunters he meets are describing creatures they have no words for in their language, such as robins, finches and dolphins. He said hunters are falling through thinning ice and dying.

"All of these villages have lost people on the ice," Steger said. "When you have a small village of 300 or 400 people, losing three or four of their senior hunters, it's a big loss.

"A lot of the elders will no longer go out on the sea ice because their knowledge will not work anymore. What they've learned and passed on for 5,000 years is no longer functional," he continued. "They can't build igloos anymore; everything is just upside down up here."

Will they listen to Meeka Mike as she sits on the floor of her cedar house with friends while they sew a pair of caribou hunting pants she will wear on her next supply trip by snowmobile and wooden sled to Steger's expedition?

Mike says the thinning of the ice became noticeable about 10 years ago, forcing Arctic animals to migrate farther north.

"It takes longer now to get out to our hunting areas because we can't access it by ice," she explained. "The ice freezes much later and therefore it's thinner and breaks off during the full-moon tide."

Life, she says, is "very much out of sync."

"Unfortunately, you are the people who cause most of this climate change," she smiled gently and said to an American journalist.

Will they listen to a 47-year-old mother trekking on foot alone since March 6 on a 60-day journey across 475 miles of frozen ocean to reach the North Pole?

Rosie Stancer uses a compass, the sun and satellites to navigate and carries food, fuel and a shotgun to drive away polar bears on a sled she drags behind her.

If she makes it she will be the first woman to have walked solo to both Poles. She was the second woman to trek alone to the South Pole in 2004.

She is studying global warming effects for a polar research institute at Cambridge University.

"I'll be monitoring the temperatures, wind direction and comparing the ice conditions to 10 years ago," Stancer said in a telephone interview from Resolute Bay. "You know, everyone is going ooh-la-la and being indignant about our climate change. But what did they expect. Why are people surprised that this is a living, breathing planet?

"If I can come back as an ordinary person with a firsthand account, that message will hit home and awaken individual consciences about cleaning up our own back yard."

But will they listen?

(Agencies)

Global Warming: 20- 30% of Species at "high risk" of extinction

By Jeff Mason

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Climate experts were trying to agree on Friday on the bleakest U.N. warning yet about the impacts of global warming, foreseeing hunger and water shortages in Africa and Asia, extinctions of species and rising oceans.

Delegates from more than 100 nations in the U.N. climate panel were locked in overnight talks in Brussels, seeking to overcome differences about a 21-page summary for policymakers to allow planned publication at 0800 GMT.

The talks, which began on Monday, are to review and approve a report warning that climate change could lead to lower crop yields in Africa, a thaw of Himalayan glaciers and a rise in ocean levels that could last for centuries.

It will say climate change, blamed mainly on human emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, is no longer a vague, distant threat for the planet.

"The whole of climate change is something actually here and now rather than something for the future," Neil Adger, a British lead author of the report, said in a break from the late-night talks.

He said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) would make "a much stronger statement" about the regional impacts of climate change than in its previous report in 2001.

U.N. officials, who had hoped for the talks to be completed on Thursday, predicted that they might end around 2 a.m. (0000 GMT) on Friday.

EXTINCTIONS

Negotiators slightly watered down threats of extinctions.

"Approximately 20-30 percent of plant and animal species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if increases in global average temperature exceed 1.5-2.5 degrees Celsius (2.7-4.5 Fahrenheit)," an agreed text said.

The draft had said that 20-30 percent of all species would be at "high risk" of extinction with those temperature rises.

"There are very, very many (outstanding issues), and many of them are small," said Wolfgang Cramer, a delegate from Germany.

The report, which is approved by governments as well as scientists, will set the tone for policy making in coming years, including the effort to extend the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012.

Kyoto binds 35 rich nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions but has been undercut by a 2001 pullout by the United States, the top emitter. President George W. Bush says Kyoto would cost U.S. jobs and wrongly excludes developing nations such as China.

Friday's report will be the second by the IPCC this year -- in February, the first said it was more than 90 percent probable that mankind was to blame for most global warming since 1950.

Friday's report makes clear that developing nations are likely to suffer most even though they have done little to burn fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution.

Temperate countries nearer the poles, such as Canada, Russia or Nordic nations, may benefit for a while from factors including higher crop growth.

For Africa "reductions in the area suitable for agriculture, and in length of growing seasons and yield potential, are likely to lead to increased risk of hunger," the draft says.

And rising seas could threaten low-lying Pacific islands and large tracts of countries such as Bangladesh.

There is a theoretical chance that the IPCC could break up without agreement, something that has happened only once, in Geneva in 1995. The IPCC reconvened a few weeks later in Montreal and successfully signed off on the report

Climate Change Threat to 100s of Millions - IPCC

Scientists Gather For Climate Conference AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, Apr. 2, 2007

---

(AP) Climate change could threaten the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the decades to come, according to a draft of a major report being released this week. Changing weather patterns have already reshaped the world, but they will accelerate in the decades to come, says the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations network of 2,000 scientists.

Severe drought and devastating floods are among some of the threats to mankind unless action is taken to curb global warming. "We are going into a realm the Earth has not seen for a very long time ... over the past 800,000 years," said Camille Parmesan, a University of Texas biologist who reviewed the upcoming report. About 285 delegates from 124 countries are meeting in Brussels with more than 50 of the scientists who compiled the report. As governments will use the report to set policy, the final wording must be adopted by consensus among the diplomats, with the approval of the scientists. The report will be the second volume of a four-volume authoritative assessment of Earth's climate released this year.

The first in February updated the science of climate change, concluding with near certainty that global warming is caused by human behavior.

This week's closed-door talks in Belgium are likely to focus on predictions of how many people will be at high risk and whether such specific weather events like Hurricane Katrina should be attributed to global warming.

"Do you use examples? And do you use ones that are relatively positive or highly negative?" said Rik Leemans, a co-author from Wageningen University in the Netherlands. "You can tone it down or strengthen it by including examples, and that's always an issue in these discussions." Even the most optimistic forecasts say the climate will continue to change and the planet will be irrevocably damaged.

The question is, how much? In the absence of action to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, the future looks bleak. The scientists predict that within 25 years, hunger from crop failure and death from diarrhea caused by drinking foul water will threaten countries where water has become scarce. Later in the century, warmer seas will likely destroy coral reefs and the fish that feed off them, and may lead to the poisoning of shellfish. Small islands will probably be submerged, and tens of millions of people in coastal cities and river basins will likely be affected by flooding from sea surges, the draft report says. Many more species will vanish. Beetles and other pests are expected to infest forests even more, with forest and wild fires more frequent and widespread. But parts of North America and northern Europe will see some benefits, at least in the short term, from longer growing seasons and milder winters. The IPCC's work will be presented at a summit in June of leaders from the world's richest countries. Global warming is caused in part by industrialized countries whose vehicles and factories contribute heavily to production of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. The last such assessment of climate change was in 2001. Since then, studies have tracked specific shifts on the ground to changing temperatures and weather patterns. "Many natural systems on all continents and in some oceans are being affected by regional climate changes, particularly temperature increases," the draft reads.

Parmesan said storms and floods have become more severe in some places, coastlines have eroded and deserts have expanded. Diseases common in the tropics have spread. In the northern hemisphere, spring is coming an average two weeks earlier, disrupting bird migrations and causing flowers and trees to bloom too early. At least 70 species have become extinct so far because of global warming, Parmesan said in a telephone conference with reporters. But scintists say people can avoid the worst-case scenarios. A third report due out in May will outline strategies for slowing global warming. "These are projections that many of us believe don't have to be the future; many of these can be avoided," said James J. McCarthy, a Harvard University oceanographer who was a main author of the 2001 assessment. He said he is optimistic the worst won't happen "because we can't be that stupid."

___ Associated Press Science Writer Seth Borenstein contributed to this report from Washington.

Global Warming: Political Breakthrough in Europe

Analysis: Breakthrough in Brussels

By STEFAN NICOLA
UPI Energy Correspondent

BERLIN, March 9 (UPI) -- European Union leaders Friday agreed to binding targets to push renewable energy sources and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, in a decision that puts the body in the worldwide lead to fight climate change.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel Friday, during her first leaders' summit as the EU's president, scored a huge victory when she managed to convince the 27 EU leaders to agree to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020, even if the world's biggest polluters, the United States and China, don't follow the European example.

Merkel also pushed through legally binding target to raise the share of renewable energy sources -- such as wind, solar, hydro and biomass energy -- to 20 percent of the body's overall energy consumption by 2020, and set the goal for biofuels to 10 percent of automobile fuel by the same date.

The third binding goal will be to increase energy efficiency by 20 percent, also by 2020.

"It's a breakthrough in the energy and climate policy of the European Union," Merkel, a former environment minister, said Friday in Brussels. She added the decision would put the EU in a pioneering role to fight climate change.

In a Friday news conference announcing the results of the two-day summit, Merkel appeared relieved, even cheerful, and understandably so: The EU's commitment puts Merkel in an excellent position for climate protection negotiations at this June's Group of Eight summit in Heiligendamm, Germany. Merkel, besides holding the rotating six-month presidency, also chairs the G8, and she intends to press the United States, but also emerging economies such as Brazil, India and China, to agree to a 30 percent global cut in greenhouse-gas emissions to replace the Kyoto protocol after 2012.

Fifty-two-year-old Merkel has had much persuading to do to get France and some of the Eastern European countries on board.

Warning that "it is closer to five past midnight than five to midnight" for measures to combat climate change, Merkel Thursday -- on the first day of the Brussels summit -- urged her colleagues to "deliver results for our grandchildren."

Yet France, led by President Jacques Chirac, had lobbied for nuclear energy to be included in the renewable energy mix as the source doesn't emit greenhouse gases.

France gets roughly 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants, and the energy source has experienced a revival in the wake of rising oil and gas prices and increasing concerns of whether Russia remains a reliable energy supplier.

The staunchest opposition, however, was directed against the binding nature of the renewable energy targets. Several Eastern European states argued it would be impossible for them to reach these targets.

Merkel, chairing her first EU summit, managed to convince the governments by putting a promise of "differentiated national overall targets" in the final agreement to allow some countries to achieve the goals slower than others.

There is light and shadow within the EU when it comes to renewable energy: Denmark gets nearly all of its electricity from wind and hydro power, while some of the Eastern European states still rely almost exclusively on oil and gas. Overall, renewables account for less than 7 percent of the EU's energy mix and the bloc is falling short of its existing 2012 targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The renewable energy industry, environmental groups and the European Parliament wanted the EU to go even further in its efforts to reverse climate change. EU lawmakers called on Merkel to set 30-percent targets, a goal that was torpedoed by European business leaders, who fear they will lose out to dirty but cheaper foreign-based energy sources.

"As for climate protection, of course 20 percent is not enough given the high level of emissions that has already accumulated in the atmosphere," Susanne Droege, energy and climate change expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, a Berlin-based think tank, told United Press International in a telephone interview Friday. "Politically, however, this is a success and a strong signal. It was not always clear that Merkel would be able to push this through in light of substantial pressure from the European industry."

--

(Comments to energy@upi.com)

Scorched earth an insecure place

Alan Dupont: Scorched earth an insecure place

* Climate change is eclipsing terror as the most likely cause of mega-death

* February 05, 2007

THE measured prose and bland title of the latest UN report on climate change belie the gravity and significance of its key message: that the earth will soon be a much hotter, drier and stormier place, and there is little doubt our way of life is the cause. This is not a naturally occurring cycle, as a dwindling band of sceptics maintains.

Of particular note is the growing belief among the world's top climate scientists that it will be virtually impossible to keep the rate of temperature increase below 2C, which is widely accepted as the threshold above which managing the risks becomes progressively more difficult and the consequences more dangerous. It is necessary to bear in mind the unprecedented rate at which the planet is heating up.

We have no experience of dealing with such rapid warming. Natural climate shifts of this magnitude typically occur over tens of millennia, not a few centuries. It is critical for governments, business and the public to understand this important difference. There is very little time to make the substantial adjustments necessary to bring down the rate of warming this century so that we can achieve climate equilibrium in the next.

Now that science has given us a better, though still imperfect, appreciation of the challenge ahead, it is time to focus on the consequences we can reasonably predict. The Stern review, published last October, shed much needed light on the economic dimension of climate change, including the cost of fixing the problem and how we might best manage the transition to a low-carbon global economy.

But there has been precious little thought about the foreign policy and security implications of climate change, which are equally profound and inseparable from the economic and environmental aspects.

Energy policy is illustrative. The domestic debate about the ramifications of global warming for Australia's future energy requirements has been far too siloed and parochial. Future policy on nuclear power and the export and processing of uranium should not be determined by environmental and economic considerations alone. We also need to think about our relations with other countries, our commitments to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the risk of proliferation.

The latter has been much exaggerated by opponents of nuclear power, but the point is we need to have a much wider debate about energy and climate change policy that includes, rather than ignores, foreign policy and national security.

There are other, more pressing reasons for taking a holistic approach. Climate change is fast emerging as the security issue of the 21st century, overshadowing terrorism and even the spread of weapons of mass destruction as the threat most likely to cause mega-death and contribute to state failure, forced population movements, food and water scarcity and the spread of infectious diseases.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirms and adds greater certainty to what climate scientists have long predicted: that extreme weather events are set to increase in frequency and intensity. Rising seas, caused by thermal expansion and melting ice, will inundate many low-lying coastal areas, threatening cities and productive agricultural land. Some small Pacific islands will become uninhabitable but no country will be unaffected, as Hurricane Katrina demonstrated when it devastated New Orleans 18 months ago. Images of the US 82nd Airborne Division patrolling the deserted streets of the city seemed like surreal scenes from a B-grade Hollywood movie at the time, but they are a portent of the future.

Indeed, things could be a great deal worse if some of the more extreme climate forecasts come to pass, such as a further acceleration of glacial and icecap melt and temperature rises above 3C. Although the balance of probabilities suggests that the more manageable mid-range predictions of the IPCC will be borne out, the worst-case scenarios cannot be dismissed, given the lack of serious global action to date and the IPCC's reputation for conservative judgments. Already, events on the ground are calling into question some of these judgments. While the IPCC forecasts that the north polar icecap is likely to melt by the end of this century, many leading scientists believe this will occur much earlier, perhaps as early as 2040 and certainly by 2060. As greenhouse gases trapped beneath the frozen tundra are released and deforestation and land clearing continue unabated, the resultant carbon imbalance will exacerbate the warming trend, perhaps more than the IPCC allows.

Over time, the climate change issue will inexorably move to the centre of the foreign policy and national security concerns of all states. Only last month the European Union's commissioner for external affairs Benita Ferrero-Waldner revealed that her talks with Chinese leaders had focused on climate change and that efforts to contain greenhouse gases have already become a centrepiece of the EU's external policy.

Unless carefully handled, tensions between the developed and developing worlds over responsibility for a deteriorating climate, already in evidence, may escalate. Climate change will also raise anxieties about food and energy, and increase the likelihood of destabilising competition for scarce resources that could be a particular problem for our region because of Asia's high levels of energy dependence and growing demand for food and water.

Supply of key agricultural products such as wheat, rice and corn is set to drop by one-third in China because of forecast temperature rises.

Although these sobering statistics should be a wake-up call for action, complacency should not be replaced by alarmism or defeatism.

If climate change is human-induced, then the solutions can and must be found within our collective resources and wisdom.

As a first step, the Government needs to take a more comprehensive approach by developing a national strategy on climate change that considers all the consequences of a rapidly warming planet. For this is an issue that transcends the environment and goes to the heart of national and international security.

Alan Dupont is director of the Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney. He is co-author of a Lowy report titled Warming Up the Planet: Climate Change and Security (June 2006).

US answer to global warming: Smoke and giant mirrors

US answer to global warming: Smoke and giant mirrors

The United States government wants the world's scientists to develop technology to block sunlight as a last-ditch way to halt global warming, the Guardian has learned. It says research into techniques such as giant mirrors in space or reflective dust pumped into the atmosphere would be "important insurance" against rising emissions, and has lobbied for such a strategy to be recommended by a major United Nations report on climate change, the first part of which will be published on Friday. The US has also attempted to steer the UN report, prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), away from conclusions that would support a new worldwide climate treaty based on binding targets to reduce emissions -- as sought by British Prime Minister Tony Blair. It has demanded a draft of the report be changed to emphasise the benefits of voluntary agreements and to include criticisms of the Kyoto Protocol, the existing treaty that the US administration opposes. The final IPCC report, written by experts from across the world, will underpin international negotiations to devise a new emissions treaty to succeed Kyoto, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft of the report last year and invited to comment. The US response, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, says the idea of interfering with sunlight should be included in the summary for policymakers, the prominent chapter at the front of each IPCC report. It says: "Modifying solar radiance may be an important strategy if mitigation of emissions fails. Doing the R&D [research and development] to estimate the consequences of applying such a strategy is important insurance that should be taken out. This is a very important possibility that should be considered." Scientists have previously estimated that reflecting less than 1% of sunlight back into space could compensate for the warming generated by all greenhouse gases emitted since the industrial revolution. Possible techniques include putting a giant screen into orbit, thousands of tiny, shiny balloons, or microscopic sulphate droplets pumped into the high atmosphere to mimic the cooling effects of a volcanic eruption. The IPCC draft said such ideas were "speculative, uncosted and with potential unknown side-effects". The US submission is based on the views of dozens of government officials and is accompanied by a letter signed by Harlan Watson, senior climate negotiator at the US state department. It complains the IPCC draft report is "Kyoto-centric" and it wants to include the work of economists who have reported "the degree to which the Kyoto framework is found wanting". It takes issue with a statement that "one weakness of the [Kyoto] protocol, however, is its non-ratification by some significant greenhouse gas emitters" and asks: "Is this the only weakness worth mentioning? Are there others?" It also insists the wording on the ineffectiveness of voluntary agreements be altered to include "a number of them have had significant impacts" and complains that overall "the report tends to overstate or focus on the negative effects of climate change". It also wants more emphasis on responsibilities of the developing world. The IPCC report is made up of three sections. The first, on the science of climate change, will be launched on Friday. Sections on the impact and mitigation of climate change -- in which the US wants to include references to the sun-blocking technology -- will follow later this year. The likely contents of the report have been an open secret since the Bush administration posted its draft copy on the internet in April. Next week's science report will say there is a 90% chance that human activity is warming the planet, and that global average temperatures will rise another 1,5 to 5,8 degrees Celsius this century depending on emissions. The US response shows it accepts these statements, but it disagrees with a more tentative conclusion that rising temperatures have made hurricanes more powerful. -- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Global warming: the final verdict

Global warming: the final verdict

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1995348,00.html
A study by the world's leading experts says global warming will happen faster and be more devastating than previously thought

Robin McKie, science editor
Sunday January 21, 2007
The Observer

Global warming is destined to have a far more destructive and earlier impact than previously estimated, the most authoritative report yet produced on climate change will warn next week.

A draft copy of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, obtained by The Observer, shows the frequency of devastating storms - like the ones that battered Britain last week - will increase dramatically. Sea levels will rise over the century by around half a metre; snow will disappear from all but the highest mountains; deserts will spread; oceans become acidic, leading to the destruction of coral reefs and atolls; and deadly heatwaves will become more prevalent.

The impact will be catastrophic, forcing hundreds of millions of people to flee their devastated homelands, particularly in tropical, low-lying areas, while creating waves of immigrants whose movements will strain the economies of even the most affluent countries.

'The really chilling thing about the IPCC report is that it is the work of several thousand climate experts who have widely differing views about how greenhouse gases will have their effect. Some think they will have a major impact, others a lesser role. Each paragraph of this report was therefore argued over and scrutinised intensely. Only points that were considered indisputable survived this process. This is a very conservative document - that's what makes it so scary,' said one senior UK climate expert.

Climate concerns are likely to dominate international politics next month. President Bush is to make the issue a part of his state of the union address on Wednesday while the IPCC report's final version is set for release on 2 February in a set of global news conferences.

Although the final wording of the report is still being worked on, the draft indicates that scientists now have their clearest idea so far about future climate changes, as well as about recent events. It points out that:

· 12 of the past 13 years were the warmest since records began;

· ocean temperatures have risen at least three kilometres beneath the surface;

· glaciers, snow cover and permafrost have decreased in both hemispheres;

· sea levels are rising at the rate of almost 2mm a year;

· cold days, nights and frost have become rarer while hot days, hot nights and heatwaves have become more frequent.

And the cause is clear, say the authors: 'It is very likely that [man-made] greenhouse gas increases caused most of the average temperature increases since the mid-20th century,' says the report.

To date, these changes have caused global temperatures to rise by 0.6C. The most likely outcome of continuing rises in greenhouses gases will be to make the planet a further 3C hotter by 2100, although the report acknowledges that rises of 4.5C to 5C could be experienced. Ice-cap melting, rises in sea levels, flooding, cyclones and storms will be an inevitable consequence.

Past assessments by the IPCC have suggested such scenarios are 'likely' to occur this century. Its latest report, based on sophisticated computer models and more detailed observations of snow cover loss, sea level rises and the spread of deserts, is far more robust and confident. Now the panel writes of changes as 'extremely likely' and 'almost certain'.

And in a specific rebuff to sceptics who still argue natural variation in the Sun's output is the real cause of climate change, the panel says mankind's industrial emissions have had five times more effect on the climate than any fluctuations in solar radiation. We are the masters of our own destruction, in short.

There is some comfort, however. The panel believes the Gulf Stream will go on bathing Britain with its warm waters for the next 100 years. Some researchers have said it could be disrupted by cold waters pouring off Greenland's melting ice sheets, plunging western Europe into a mini Ice Age, as depicted in the disaster film The Day After Tomorrow.

The report reflects climate scientists' growing fears that Earth is nearing the stage when carbon dioxide rises will bring irreversible change to the planet. 'We are seeing vast sections of Antarctic ice disappearing at an alarming rate,' said climate expert Chris Rapley, in a phone call to The Observer from the Antarctic Peninsula last week. 'That means we can expect to see sea levels rise at about a metre a century from now on - and that will have devastating consequences.'

However, there is still hope, said Peter Cox of Exeter University. 'We are like alcoholics who have got as far as admitting there is a problem. It is a start. Now we have got to start drying out - which means reducing our carbon output.'

Too Late to Avert Global Warming

by Tom Watkins

It's too late. Certainly it is time to start to fix the damage but it is too late to avert the coming climatic changes. India and China are just beginning their industrial revolution and are increasing their demand for power and transportation. And their populations are eight times that of the United States (over 2.4 billion people). Even if they were to cut their emissions to only 25 percent of what we produce now (very unlikely), that would still be more than twice the pollution the United States created. This doesn't even consider the billion and a half other people in Africa, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and many parts of Mexico, South and Central America (and growing by 80 million per year) that have yet to hit their peak of industrial pollution.

As the predominant contributor of the greenhouse gases and the richest economy in the world, you would think that our political leaders would want to lead the world by setting examples and investing in the technologies needed. That won't happen as long as our government is dominated by politicians who owe their allegiance to their largest campaign contributors.

We are now considering 7 percent to 9 percent emissions reductions over the next 10 years, but other occurring and developing events will drastically overwhelm that small effort. Here are a few events with tremendous momentum that won't stop without emission reductions of 80 percent or 95 percent:

14 percent of the permanent sea ice melted in only two years (Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 33, L17501); 16,200 square kilometers of ice shelves (Larsen, Wilkins and Larsen B) have broken off and are melting — more than any other time in recorded history; The Alaskan and Siberian tundras are melting. This has begun a process of runaway feedback heating effect caused by the heat absorbed by the darker exposed ground (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 103, p. 14288); When the tundra heats up just one more degree centigrade, it will release as much as 70,000 million of tons of methane from the thawing peat – the most powerful greenhouse gas. (Nature, vol. 443, p. 71). The northern latitudes of Canada, Alaska and Siberia are experiencing insect infestations (bark beetles, moths, etc.) that are wiping out thousands of acres of trees and creating forest fires on a scale not seen in modern times. Jet contrails, Pinatubo, El Chichon, Mount St. Helens and other contributors to high-level atmospheric light scattering have masked the actual warming of the troposphere for over 20 years. (LLNL Program for Climate Model Diagnosis, 1-1/2-8/2001) Each year, deforestation contributes 23 to 30 percent of all carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and we are losing the rainforests at a rate of one and a half acres per second – 1 percent per year. Twenty percent of the world's oxygen is produced by the conversion of carbon dioxide. An increasing cycle of unsustainable regeneration has begun that will push the rain forests to the point of no return in 10 to 15 years. (James Alcock, Geology Society of London in Edinburgh, June 2001) Most continuous or repeated global warming studies that date back more than a decade have resulted in corrections to the rate of warming, melting and other effects. Sea ice, glacier loss, sea-level rise, fresh water loss, insect populations, bird migrations and carbon loss rates have all been accelerated to a faster rate since their first studies. These and many more effects of global warming have physical and causation momentum that cannot be stopped or even slowed in the short term (less than 10 years). Given the inevitable future actions of the billions of people in the developing world, the total lack of will on the part of our political leaders and the disregard for our future from powerful commercial interests, it's already too late. Although we should strive to begin to move out of the discovery mode and into the correction phase, realistically, that will take decades. By then the effects will be upon us. If we do not begin to identify mitigating responses before they begin, we will suffer massively while we adjust to the changes after they create serious problems.

Nuclear, climate perils push Doomsday Clock ahead

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2162862.ece

Hawking warns: We must recognise the catastrophic dangers of climate change

By Steve Connor, Science Editor

Published: 18 January 2007

Climate change stands alongside the use of nuclear weapons as one of the greatest threats posed to the future of the world, the Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking has said.

Professor Hawking said that we stand on the precipice of a second nuclear age and a period of exceptional climate change, both of which could destroy the planet as we know it.

He was speaking at the Royal Society in London yesterday at a conference organised by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists which has decided to move the minute hand of its "Doomsday Clock" forward to five minutes to midnight to reflect the increased dangers faced by the world.

Scientists devised the clock in 1947 as a way of expressing to the public the risk of nuclear conflagration following the use of the atomic weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War.

"As we stand at the brink of a second nuclear age and a period of unprecedented climate change, scientists have a special responsibility, once again, to inform the public and to advise leaders about the perils that humanity faces," Professor Hawking said. "As scientists, we understand the dangers of nuclear weapons and their devastating effects, and we are learning how human activities and technologies are affecting climate systems in ways that may forever change life on Earth.

"As citizens of the world, we have a duty to share that knowledge. We have a duty, as well, to alert the public to the unnecessary risks that we live with every day, and to the perils we foresee if governments and societies do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and to prevent further climate change.

"We are here today to outline the results of the Bulletin's recent deliberations and to warn the public about the deteriorating state of world and planetary affairs by moving the hand of the clock," Professor Hawking said.

"Lord Rees of Ludlow, president of the Royal Society, said humankind's collective impacts on the biosphere, climate and oceans were unprecedented. These environmentally-driven threats ­ 'threats without enemies' ­ should loom as large in the political perspective as did the East-West political divide during the Cold War era.

Technology in the 21st century could offer immense opportunities to everyone but it would also present new threats that were more diverse and more intractable than those posed by nuclear weapons, Lord Rees said.

"To confront these threats successfully ­ and to avoid foreclosing humanity's long-term potential ­ scientists need to channel their efforts wisely and engage with the political process nationally and internationally.

"We shall need, in all fields of science, individuals with the wisdom and commitment of the atomic scientists who founded the Bulletin," he said.

The board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said the threat of nuclear apocalypse was now almost matched by the environmental threats posed by climate change.

"We stand at the brink of a second nuclear age. Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the world faced such perilous choices," the board said in a statement issued yesterday.

"North Korea's recent test of a nuclear weapon, Iran's nuclear ambitions, a renewed US emphasis on the military utility of nuclear weapons, the failure to adequately secure nuclear materials and the continued presence of some 26,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia are symptomatic of a larger failure to solve the problems posed by the most destructive technology on Earth.

"As in past deliberations, we have examined other human-made threats to civilisation. We have concluded the dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons. The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause drastic harm."

Nuclear, climate perils push Doomsday Clock ahead

Wed Jan 17, 2007 12:29 PM ET

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The scientists who mind the Doomsday Clock on Wednesday moved it two minutes closer to midnight -- symbolizing the annihilation of civilization -- adding the perils of global warming for the first time to acute nuclear threats.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which created the Doomsday Clock in 1947 to warn the world of the dangers of nuclear weapons, advanced the clock to five minutes until midnight. It was the first adjustment of the clock since 2002.

"We stand at the brink of a second nuclear age," the group said in a statement.

They pointed to North Korea's first test of a nuclear weapon last year, Iran's nuclear ambitions, U.S. flirtation with "bunker buster" nuclear bombs, the continued presence of 26,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia and inadequate security for nuclear materials.

But the scientists also said the destruction of human habitats wreaked by climate change brought on by human activities is a growing danger to humankind.

"Global warming poses a dire threat to human civilization that is second only to nuclear weapons," they said.

The announcement was made in news conferences held in London and Washington.

"We foresee great peril if governments and societies do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and to prevent further climate change," famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge, a member of the bulletin's board of sponsors, told reporters in London.

In 2002, the bulletin's scientists moved the clock two minutes forward in 2002, to seven minutes until midnight following the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

The bulletin was founded in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists who had worked on developing the first nuclear bomb, and it is now overseen by some of the world's most prominent scientists.

The bulletin created the clock in 1947, two years after the United States ushered in the nuclear age by dropping atomic bombs on two Japanese cities at the end of World War Two, to symbolize the urgent nuclear dangers confronting the world.

Greenland's Ice Sheet Is Slip Sliding Away

Greenland's Ice Sheet Is Slip Sliding Away
By Robert Lee Hotz
The Los Angeles Times

Saturday 24 June 2006

The massive glaciers are deteriorating twice as fast as they were five years ago. If the ice thaws entirely, sea level would rise 21 feet.

Jakobshavn Glacier, Greenland - Gripping a bottle of Jack Daniel's between his knees, Jay Zwally savored the warmth inside the tiny plane as it flew low across Greenland's biggest and fastest-moving outlet glacier.

Mile upon mile of the steep fjord was choked with icy rubble from the glacier's disintegrated leading edge. More than six miles of the Jakobshavn had simply crumbled into open water.

"My God!" Zwally shouted over the hornet whine of the engines.

From satellite sensors and seasons in the field, Zwally, 67, knew the ice sheet below in a way that few could match. Even after a lifetime of study, the raffish NASA glaciologist with a silver dolphin in one pierced ear was dismayed by how quickly the breakup had occurred.

Wedged between boxes of scientific instruments, tent bags, duffels and survival gear, Zwally had no room to turn inside the cramped passenger compartment of the twin-engine Otter. He passed the whiskey bottle over his shoulder to geophysicist Jose Rial from the University of North Carolina, squeezed on a jump seat between a surveyor and a sleeping climatologist.

Homeward bound - windburned, bone-chilled and greasy after weeks on this immense ice cap tilted like a beret flopped across the top of the world - they all had been in a celebratory mood.

Somber now, Zwally and Rial shared a drink in silence as the shadow of the plane slipped across azure meltwater lakes, rust-red tundra and silver tongues of ice.

The Greenland ice sheet - two miles thick and broad enough to blanket an area the size of Mexico - shapes the world's weather, matched in influence by only Antarctica in the Southern Hemisphere.

It glows like milky mother-of-pearl. The sheen of ice blends with drifts of cloud as if snowbanks are taking flight.

In its heartland, snow that fell a quarter of a million years ago is still preserved. Temperatures dip as low as 86 degrees below zero. Ground winds can top 200 mph. Along the ice edge, meltwater rivers thread into fraying brown ropes of glacial outwash, where migrating herds of caribou and musk ox graze.

The ice is so massive that its weight presses the bedrock of Greenland below sea level, so all-concealing that not until recently did scientists discover that Greenland actually might be three islands.

Should all of the ice sheet ever thaw, the meltwater could raise sea level 21 feet and swamp the world's coastal cities, home to a billion people. It would cause higher tides, generate more powerful storm surges and, by altering ocean currents, drastically disrupt the global climate.

Climate experts have started to worry that the ice cap is disappearing in ways that computer models had not predicted.

By all accounts, the glaciers of Greenland are melting twice as fast as they were five years ago, even as the ice sheets of Antarctica - the world's largest reservoir of fresh water - also are shrinking, researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Kansas reported in February.

Zwally and other researchers have focused their attention on a delicate ribbon - the equilibrium line, which marks the fulcrum of frost and thaw in Greenland's seasonal balance.

The zone runs around the rim of the ice cap like a drawstring. Summer melting, on average, offsets the annual accumulation of snow.

Across the ice cap, however, the area of seasonal melting was broader last year than in 27 years of record-keeping, University of Colorado climate scientists reported. In early May, temperatures on the ice cap some days were almost 20 degrees above normal, hovering just below freezing.

From cores of ancient Greenland ice extracted by the National Science Foundation, researchers have identified at least 20 sudden climate changes in the last 110,000 years, in which average temperatures fluctuated as much as 15 degrees in a single decade.

The increasingly erratic behavior of the Greenland ice has scientists wondering whether the climate, after thousands of years of relative stability, may again start oscillating.

The Theory at Work

Huddled inside a red cook tent atop 3,900 feet of ice, Zwally shoveled snow into a pot simmering on a two-ring propane camp stove.

He had to melt enough to boil lobster tails for dinner. Zwally, who works at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., had purchased them at Costco and lugged them to Greenland.

The beating wings of a 30-mph wind slapped against the tent fabric. Every 15 minutes, a gust sucked open the door and frosted the room.

The tent - buried in drifts and entered by a ladder through a hatch in the roof - was part of Swiss Camp, located 155 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

For those assessing the effect of global warming, there may be no more perfect place than this warren of red tents on the Northern Hemisphere's largest ice cap. Here, the theoretical effects seen in computerized climate models take tangible form.

University of Colorado climatologist Konrad Steffen set up Swiss Camp in 1990 to study the weather along the equilibrium line. As a precaution, Steffen, 54, built the camp on a plywood platform to keep it afloat when the ice turns into summer slush and open lakes before refreezing in the fall.

Even so, Steffen and Zwally often spent days chiseling out tables and chairs had frozen in floodwater into a single block of ice.

Zwally joined his colleagues there on May 8 in the regular spring migration of scientists to the Arctic.

He has been coming to Swiss Camp every year since 1994 and has been studying the polar regions since 1972, monitoring the polar ice through satellite sensors.

Eventually he realized he had to study the ice firsthand.

The ice sheet seemed such a stolid reservoir of cold that many experts had been confident of it taking centuries for higher temperatures to work their way thousands of feet down to the base of the ice cap and undermine its stability.

By and large, computer models supported that view, predicting that as winter temperatures rose, more snow would fall across the dome of the ice cap. Thus, by the seasonal bookkeeping of the ice sheet, Greenland would neatly balance its losses through new snow.

Indeed, Zwally and his colleagues in March released an analysis of data from two European remote-sensing satellites showing the amount of water locked up in the ice sheet had risen slightly between 1992 and 2002.

Then the ice sheet began to confound computer-generated predictions.

By 2005, Greenland was beginning to lose more ice volume than anyone anticipated - an annual loss of up to 52 cubic miles a year - according to more recent satellite gravity measurements released by JPL.

The amount of freshwater ice dumped into the Atlantic Ocean has almost tripled in a decade.

"We are clearly seeing the effects of climate change starting to kick in," Zwally said.

Since Steffen started monitoring the weather at Swiss Camp in 1991, the average winter temperature has risen almost 10 degrees. Last year, the annual melt zone reached farther inland and up to higher elevations than ever before.

There was even a period of melting in December.

"We have never seen that," Steffen said, combing the ice crystals from his beard. "It is significantly warmer now, and it happened quite suddenly. This year, the temperatures were warmer than I have ever experienced."

At this time of year, the sun never sets, and at Swiss Camp, the pace of field work slackens only for dinner.

Layered in fleece, the field researchers gathered around a makeshift plywood table littered with heels of whole grain bread, pots of raspberry jam and crumbs of granola. A ridge of ice 6 inches high encased an electrical cable running between their feet.

Their cheeks were coarse with stubble. Their hair rose in waxy spikes. Their eyes had reddened from insomnia and too much midnight sun.

While one researcher spooned out the first course - pasta in a sauce of sun-dried tomatoes - another opened the last bottle of the 2003 Cotes du Rhone.

Zwally tended the pot on the stove.

The Greenland ice sheet was in the same predicament as his frozen lobsters, steaming in meltwater.

Getting Into the Ice

The pilot refused to land. There were too many crevasses.

Steffen waved him on to fly farther inland. He checked their position by satellite every few hundred yards.

After 34 years in the Arctic, Steffen was attuned to its subtleties. Where a novice could only see a monochromatic plain stretching to the horizon, Steffen could discern the undulating outlines left by seasonal lakes and riverbeds.

Clear of the hazard, the Otter touched down and glided on its skis to a halt on an inviting featherbed of snow.

Steffen and his crew unloaded crates of equipment and began drilling into the ice. Zwally, stripping wires with bare fingers in the biting wind, hooked up a satellite receiver.

Within the hour, they erected a tall mast festooned with monitoring instruments.

They continued to hopscotch by air across the ice sheet, planting sensors at every stop.

As spring comes earlier each year, alpine glaciers recede, hurricanes gather power and other signs of climate change accrue, the research team tries to understand how the Greenland ice sheet can respond so quickly to rising temperatures.

"How does climate change get into the ice?" Zwally asked.

Most of the computer models on which climate predictions are based did not take the dynamics of the glaciers into account.

Contrary to appearances, the monolith of ice is constantly on the move, just as Southern California, driven by plate tectonics, inches every year toward Alaska.

In that sense, the Swiss Camp is a measure of shifting property values.

The camp has been rafting on the ice stream toward the sea, on average, at about 1 foot every day. Since Steffen pitched the main tents, the camp has moved about a mile downhill.

When Zwally started tracking the velocity of the ice with Global Positioning System sensors in 1996, the ice flow maintained a steady pace all year.

But he soon discovered that the ice around Swiss Camp had abruptly shifted gears in the summer, moving faster when the surface ice started to melt. By 1999, the ice stream had almost tripled its speed to about 3 feet a day.

In an influential paper published in Science, Zwally surmised that the ice sheets had accelerated in response to warmer temperatures, as summer meltwater lubricated the base of the ice sheet and allowed it to slide faster toward the sea.

In a way no one had detected, the warm water made its way through thousands of feet of ice to the bedrock - in weeks, not decades or centuries.

So much water streamed beneath the ice that in high summer the entire ice sheet near Swiss Camp briefly bulged 2 feet higher, like the crest of a subterranean wave.

"This meltwater acceleration is new," Zwally said. "The significance of this is that it is a mechanism for climate change to get into the ice."

To better track the seasonal movements, Zwally and Steffen set up two new GPS stations around Swiss Camp, while a team led by University of Vermont geophysicist Tom Neumann erected an additional 10 GPS sensors to map the changing velocity of the local ice.

At the same time, University of Texas physicist Ginny Catania pulled an ice-penetrating radar in a search pattern around the camp, seeking evidence of any melt holes or drainage crevices that could so quickly channel the hot water of global warming deep into the ice.

To her surprise, she detected a maze of tunnels, natural pipes and cracks beneath the unblemished surface.

"I have never seen anything like it, except in an area where people have been drilling bore holes," Catania said.

No one knows how much of the ice sheet is affected.

Since 2002, Greenland's three largest outlet glaciers have started moving faster, satellite data show.

On the eastern edge of Greenland, the Kangerlussuaq Glacier, like the Jakobshavn, has surged, doubling its pace. To the west, the Helheim Glacier now appears to be moving about half a football field every day.

In all, 12 major outlet glaciers drain the ice sheet the way rivers drain a watershed, setting the pace of its release to the ocean. If they all slide too quickly, there is a possibility that, perhaps decades from now, they could collapse suddenly and release the entire ice sheet into the ocean.

"They are like the buttresses of the high cathedral," said Rial, the North Carolina geophysicist. "If you remove the buttress, the cathedral will collapse."

The accelerating ice flow has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in seismic activity, as the three immense streams of ice shake the Earth in their wake.

The lurching ice has generated swarms of earthquakes up to magnitude 5.0, researchers at Harvard University and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University reported in March.

Last year alone, the Harvard and Columbia researchers detected as many ice quakes as the total recorded from 1993 through 1996, with five times as many in the summer as in the winter months.

"Instability is the key," Rial said.

In the Swiss Camp laboratory tent, Rial moved his finger along the jagged seismic trace displayed on his iBook screen.

The signal had been detected by the 10 sensors he had placed around the camp six days before.

The ice sheet was trembling."It is significantly warmer now, and it happened quite suddenly. This year, the temperatures were warmer than I have ever experienced."

Konrad Steffen, University of Colorado climatologist who set up Swiss Camp in 1990.

Bush set for climate change U-turn?

Bush set for climate change U-turn?
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1989997,00.html


Downing Street says that belated US recognition of global warming could lead to a post-Kyoto agreement on curbing emissions

Gaby Hinsliff, Juliette Jowit and Paul Harris
Sunday January 14, 2007
The Observer

George Bush is preparing to make a historic shift in his position on global warming when he makes his State of the Union speech later this month, say senior Downing Street officials.

Tony Blair hopes that the new stance by the United States will lead to a breakthrough in international talks on climate change and that the outlines of a successor treaty to the Kyoto agreement, the deal to curb emissions of greenhouse gases which expires in 2012, could now be thrashed out at the G8 summit in June.

Article continues
The timetable may explain why Blair is so keen to remain in office until after the summit, with a deal on protecting the planet offering an appealing legacy with which to bow out of Number 10.

Bush and Blair held private talks on climate change before Christmas, and there is a feeling that the US President will now agree a cap on emissions in the US, meaning that, for the first time, American industry and consumers would be expected to start conserving energy and curbing pollution.

'We could now be seeing the beginning of a consensus on a post-Kyoto framework,' said a source close to the prime minister. 'President Bush is beginning to talk about more radical measures.'

The move will be seen as part of a wider repositioning of the Bush government after its comprehensive defeat in last autumn's mid-term elections.

A change of heart on the environment was signalled earlier this month when the US administration unexpectedly announced that polar bears were now an endangered species because their habitat in the US state of Alaska had suffered from melting ice sheets caused by global warming. The government is now required to act on threats to the bears' survival. The EU has its own so-called cap and trade scheme, under which industries are given a quota of carbon dioxide emissions: if they exceed the limits, they must pay for extra credits that can be bought from cleaner industries - an incentive to firms to go green.

Downing Street is increasingly confident that the arguments pushed by Sir Nicholas Stern, author of the recent Treasury report on the cost of global warming, that doing nothing will eventually prove more costly than trying to avert catastrophe are now gaining in momentum. However, Stern warned: 'The US will work it out for itself. Nobody will be telling them what to do, and nobody should.'

Downing Street now expects a broad agreement between EU countries on a successor treaty to Kyoto to be thrashed out at the EU spring council, paving the way for an agreement at the G8.

Blair was also told in meetings with senior senators late last year that they would seek to push through measures on global warming which had been repeatedly blocked by the Republicans before the mid-term elections cost Bush's party control of both Houses of Congress.

But another source close to the negotiations warned that Bush had previously appeared to give ground on climate change, only to fail to make real concessions. The best hope could lie with a post-Kyoto deal for 2009, the source said - by which time Bush will be out of office.

Kurt Davies, research director on climate change for Greenpeace USA, said climate change was now expected to be one of the keynotes of the State of the Union address.

'The sands are clearly shifting on climate change for this administration, but there has to be a concrete follow-up,' he said. 'We were shocked last year when he talked about the US being addicted to oil, but then there was no follow-up to that.'

Big Coal's Dirty Move

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/13159559/national_affairs_big_coals_dirty_move

Big Coal's Dirty Move

As the world heats up, the coal industry is racing to build more than 150 new power plants before Congress decides to crack down on global warming

JEFF GOODELL

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, a suicidal act is one that is "dangerous to oneself or to one's interests; self-destructive or ruinous." By this standard, the coal boom that is currently sweeping America is the atmospheric equivalent of a swan dive off a very tall building. At precisely the moment that scientists have reached a consensus that we need to drastically cut climate-warming pollution, the electric-power industry is racing to build more than 150 new coal plants across the United States. Coal is by far the dirtiest fossil fuel: If the new plants are built, they will dump hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year for decades to come -- virtually guaranteeing that the U.S. will join China in leading civilization's plunge into a superheated future.

Like most stories about energy, corruption and greed, this one is centered in Texas. TXU, an electric-power company based in Dallas, has announced plans to build eleven new coal plants in Texas by 2011 -- a move that a trade publication calls "one of the most ambitious generation capacity expansions in recent power industry history." Texas already dumps more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any other state in the nation. TXU's new fleet of coal plants would more than double the company's current pollution, spewing 78 million tons of planet-heating pollution each year -- the equivalent of 11 million SUVs.

In an industry that usually counts its profits in pennies, coal is the new green. Power companies in Texas can make upward of twenty dollars per megawatt-hour by burning coal, which produces electricity far more cheaply than natural gas. Indeed, hefty profits from coal plants are a big reason why TXU's net income in the third quarter of 2006 was more than $1 billion -- nearly as much as Google and Apple combined.

But coal is only profitable because its pollution-related costs -- blasted mountains, increases in asthma and heart attacks, neurological damage from toxic mercury, environmental chaos caused by global warming -- are all offloaded onto the public. That's why TXU is rushing to build so many new coal plants: In the next five years, Congress is widely expected to crack down on global warming by placing limits on carbon-dioxide emissions, making coal less profitable. If TXU can sneak its plants in under the regulatory wire, it could be exempt from new regulations -- allowing the company to dump massive amounts of carbon for free. John Wilder, the company's CEO, said recently that he expects TXU's new coal plants to generate profits of $1 billion a year.

In 2001, the energy task force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney used the threat of blackouts to justify a call for up to 1,900 new coal-fired power plants. In Texas, the playbook is the same. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which runs the state's power grid and which, until recently, was headed by a TXU executive, has warned that starting around 2009, the state's power supplies will be running low. According to TXU, the solution is simple: Burn more coal.

"We believe wind, solar and nuclear power are all important," says Kimberly Morgan, a company spokeswoman. "But all these sources have problems -- the wind doesn't blow all the time, solar is still very expensive, and nuclear power, which we're a strong supporter of, takes too long to get permitted. Conservation is also necessary, but on its own, it's not enough. We're already too dependent on natural gas. So that leaves coal as the best, most affordable way to generate power in Texas."

But building old-fashioned coal-fired plants to meet rising power needs is a nineteenth-century solution to a twenty-first-century problem. The projected power shortage in Texas, for example, is mostly an issue on hot days when AC usage spikes -- a problem that could largely be handled by getting serious about energy efficiency (per-capita energy use in Texas is among the highest in the nation) or by pushing alternative sources of power (the state has plenty of sun and wind). "Texas may be where we find out how much the world has changed in recent years," says Dan Dudek, chief economist for the advocacy group Environmental Defense. "Are we serious about dealing with global warming, or are we just messing around?"

Perversely, it was Hurricane Katrina that spurred TXU's push for more coal. For many Americans, Katrina was a wake-up call to the dangers of global warming. After all, scientists have convincingly demonstrated that warmer oceans contribute to the intensity, if not the frequency, of hurricanes. For John Wilder, however, Katrina represented an opportunity. When the hurricane disrupted energy production in the Gulf and drove up the price of natural gas -- which is used to generate seventy percent of all electricity in Texas -- Wilder went looking for another source of power. But instead of turning to solar or wind or even nuclear, he decided to burn more coal.

Wilder, who worked for years at Royal Dutch Shell, is known in the industry as a brilliant numbers guy and a fierce advocate of deregulation. When he took the top job at TXU three years ago, the company was near bankruptcy, having lost $4 billion investing in overseas power generation. Wilder sold the art at corporate headquarters, spun off assets, outsourced 2,700 jobs and refocused TXU on generating power for its 2.2 million Texas customers. In his first year on the job, the company's stock price tripled. Wilder did pretty well himself: He was the eleventh-highest-paid executive in America in 2005, raking in over $55 million -- more than twice the compensation of former ExxonMobil boss Lee Raymond.

To get around regulations for new coal plants, Wilder cultivated a key ally in Texas: Gov. Rick Perry, a conservative who has long carried the water for big business in the state. A month or so after Katrina hit, the Galveston Daily News reported, a TXU senior executive met with Perry's chief of staff. The governor was concerned about rising electricity rates in the aftermath of Katrina, especially with an election coming up. TXU agreed to delay some of its price hikes until after voters went to the polls -- and two weeks later, Perry issued an executive order fast-tracking permits for the new power plants that TXU and other coal companies want to build. The decree means that instead of submitting to lengthy regulatory scrutiny and public comment, TXU's plants could be slipped through in a matter of months. TXU and other coal-industry interests repaid the favor by donating heavily to Perry's re-election campaign, contributing more than $130,000.

Not surprisingly, TXU's plan has kicked up a shit storm in recent months -- and not just with environmental activists. More than thirty cities and towns representing nearly 7 million people in President Bush's home state have joined forces to fight the new coal plants. There have been prayer vigils and hunger strikes. TXU shareholders, disturbed by the financial risks of the project, have raised concerns about the rapid coal expansion. Big investment banks like CitiGroup and Morgan Stanley have been warned by environmental groups of the "reputational risks" of financing the project. It has even split Texas' clubby business establishment: Albert Huddleston, a Dallas oil baron and a major Republican donor, has filed a lawsuit to stop the plants.

"If TXU hadn't been so audacious, nobody would have paid much attention to their plans," says Laura Miller, the mayor of Dallas. "But the way they've pushed these plants is so brazen, so in-your-face, that it made people realize they've got to do something."

Pissing off Miller was not a smart move. A former investigative journalist who got elected mayor by campaigning against her city's billionaire boys club, she is now taking aim at Big Coal. Miller, a mother of three, spends many of her evenings and weekends traveling to small towns in rural Texas near the sites of the proposed plants, urging residents to join the Texas Clean Air Cities Coalition, which she formed to make sure that citizens have a voice in the permit process. She has also raised more than $500,000 to study how the new plants would affect the state's already miserable air quality. Dallas is currently the eighth-most-polluted city in the nation, and Houston is fourth. And because many power companies in the state burn low-grade Texas coal, the state ranks first in the nation in mercury emissions from power plants. Mercury, a potent neurotoxin, can damage the brains and nervous systems of fetuses and small children.

TXU tries to greenwash these concerns away. They ferry toxicologists to city council meetings, where they claim that mercury isn't really so dangerous. They talk about the hundreds of millions of dollars they are investing in "clean coal" research. They make vague proclamations about voluntarily cutting smog-causing emissions by twenty percent across the board in Texas, but fail to mention that federal law will soon require those cuts anyway. When pressed, TXU executives respond that much of the criticism levied against them is unfair or ill-informed. "I think a lot of the negative reaction to our plan is from people who don't fully understand the issues, or simply have a knee-jerk reaction against coal," says Morgan, the TXU spokeswoman.

More infuriating to Miller and others is the fact that the company plans to use old technology in its new plants, rather than embrace the newer and cleaner method known as coal gasification. "If they're going to burn coal, at least they could do it right," says Tom Smith, who heads the Texas office of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. Although gasification is slightly more expensive -- about ten percent -- the advantages are many: better efficiency, less water consumption, less air pollution. And because the process removes pollutants before the coal is burned, it's much simpler to capture and store carbon dioxide before it reaches the atmosphere.

A dozen or so gasification plants are in the works around the nation, and the technology is championed by a number of industry heavyweights, including Bechtel, Siemens, Shell and GE. But Wilder dismisses this new technology as "a gleam in someone's eye." Instead, TXU touts the possibility of one day being able to capture carbon dioxide from conventional plants -- an idea that, at the moment, is decades away from being ready for commercial deployment. It's a common rhetorical trick in the industry: Ignore technology that is here today -- and keep churning out pollution -- while touting solutions that may never exist.

The irony is, TXU's plan to build more coal plants may not only wreck the environment -- it could also wreck the company. Although the plants would be obscenely profitable if they were up and running today, Wall Street analysts point out that TXU's business model includes a number of risky financial assumptions about future power demand and plant construction costs. But the biggest gamble may be the company's view that it will be able to dump carbon dioxide from the plants into the atmosphere for the next fifty years without paying any significant penalty. But what if, instead of being exempted from future regulations, the plants are forced to pay for all 78 million tons of pollution they generate each year? And what if the rapid advance of global warming drives up the price of carbon dioxide far beyond the projected range of five dollars to twenty dollars a ton? No wonder venture capitalists like Vinod Khosla, a Silicon Valley pioneer who is now investing in biofuels and solar thermal technology, see conventional coal plants like the ones TXU is building as an unwise financial risk. "You've got to be crazy to build a traditional coal-fired power plant these days," Khosla says.

So far, though, TXU executives don't seem worried. They expect to get approval for its eleven new plants this summer and begin construction soon after. And they're already talking about expanding beyond Texas with another fleet of new coal plants in other states. By pushing ahead so heedlessly, they are essentially betting the company on the belief that most Texans -- and most Americans -- would prefer to risk epic storms, droughts, crop failures and polluted air rather than fight to save the planet. It's a deeply cynical move, and one that exposes the need for new federal laws and institutions to keep politically influential corporations like TXU from strip-mining the future for their own short-term gain.

A few weeks ago, Jim Marston, the director of state climate initiatives for Environmental Defense, met with Mike McCall, the senior executive in charge of the coal-plant expansion for TXU. Marston hoped to find some common ground with McCall, some acknowledgment that TXU is willing to address the growing public concerns about the new coal plants. It never came. "He basically patted me on the head and said, 'We have this all figured out,' " Marston recalls.

Afterward, Marston realized that he had encountered such breathtaking arrogance in a power-company executive only once before. It took him a while to remember who it was: the former CEO of Enron, Jeff Skilling, now serving twenty-four years in federal prison.

Posted Jan 12, 2007 9:56 AM