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.

World's Fish Supply Running Out, Researchers Warn

World's Fish Supply Running Out, Researchers Warn

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 3, 2006; A01

An international group of ecologists and economists warned yesterday that the world will run out of seafood by 2048 if steep declines in marine species continue at current rates, based on a four-year study of catch data and the effects of fisheries collapses.

The paper, published in the journal Science, concludes that overfishing, pollution and other environmental factors are wiping out important species around the globe, hampering the ocean's ability to produce seafood, filter nutrients and resist the spread of disease.

"We really see the end of the line now," said lead author Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Canada's Dalhousie University. "It's within our lifetime. Our children will see a world without seafood if we don't change things."

The 14 researchers from Canada, Panama, Sweden, Britain and the United States spent four years analyzing fish populations, catch records and ocean ecosystems to reach their conclusion. They found that by 2003 -- the last year for which data on global commercial fish catches are available -- 29 percent of all fished species had collapsed, meaning they are now at least 90 percent below their historic maximum catch levels.

The rate of population collapses has accelerated in recent years. As of 1980, just 13.5 percent of fished species had collapsed, even though fishing vessels were pursuing 1,736 fewer species then. Today, the fishing industry harvests 7,784 species commercially.

"It's like hitting the gas pedal and holding it down at a constant level," Worm said in a telephone interview. "The rate accelerates over time."

Some American fishery management officials, industry representatives and academics questioned the team's dire predictions, however, saying countries such as the United States and New Zealand have taken steps in recent years to halt the depletion of their commercial fisheries.

"The projection is way too pessimistic, at least for the United States," said Steven Murawski, chief scientist for the National Marine Fisheries Service, which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "We've got the message. We will continue to reverse this trend."

The National Fisheries Institute, a trade group representing seafood producers as well as suppliers, restaurants and grocery chains, said in a statement that most wild marine stocks remain sustainable.

The group's spokeswoman, Stacey Viera, added that because the global demand for seafood has already outstripped the amount of wild fish available in the sea, her group's members are meeting the need in part by relying on farmed fish. "To meet the gap between what wild capture can provide sustainably and the growing demand for seafood, aquaculture is filling that need," she said.

But several scientists challenged that prediction and questioned why humanity should pay for a resource that the ocean had long provided for free. "It's like turning on the air conditioning rather than opening the window," said Stanford University marine sciences professor Stephen R. Palumbi, one of the paper's authors.

Oregon State University marine biologist Jane Lubchenco said the study makes clear that fish stocks are in trouble, even though consumers appear to have a cornucopia of seafood choices.

"I think people don't get it," Lubchenco said. "They think, 'If there is a problem with the oceans, how come the case in my grocery store is so full?' There is a disconnect."

The possible collapse of commercial fisheries could have a serious on the global economy, said Gerald Leape, vice president for the advocacy group National Environmental Trust. The industry generates $80 billion a year, Leape said, and more than 200 million people depend directly or indirectly on fishing for their main source of income. Worldwide, a billion people eat seafood as their main source of animal protein.

"This should be a wake-up call to our leaders, both internationally and domestically, that they need to protect our fish stocks. Otherwise they will go away," Leape said.

In order to reach their conclusions, the paper's authors looked at nearly three dozen controlled experiments and crunched the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's worldwide catch data going back to 1950. In some cases, they also surveyed ecosystem records -- including sediment cores and archival data -- going back a thousand years.

The researchers said the loss of so many species is eroding the viability of marine ecosystems and their ability to resist environmental stresses. In 12 marine ecosystems surveyed, they found that a decline in biodiversity of 50 percent or more cut the number of viable fisheries by 33 percent, reduced nursery habitats by 69 percent and cut the ocean's capacity to filter and detoxify contaminants by 63 percent.

This phenomenon is apparent in the Chesapeake Bay, where the collapse of the oyster fishery has reverberated across the ecosystem. In 1880, there were enough oysters to filter all the water in the bay in three days; by 1988, it took more than a year for the remaining oysters to accomplish the same task.

Hunter Lenihan, a marine ecology professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, said the mass dredging of oysters from the bay over the past century has transformed its ecosystem.

As the oysters declined, the water became more cloudy, and sea grass beds, which are dependent on light, died off and were replaced by phytoplankton that does not support the same range of species.

"When you removed the oysters through overfishing, that's when you begin to see a rapid decline in water quality," Lenihan said. "What it's done is change the entire production of the bay."

But University of Washington fisheries professor Ray Hilborn said ascribing a decline in fisheries production to loss of biodiversity was a bit like deciding which came first, the chicken or the egg.

"Do more productive systems lead to more diversity, or is it more diversity leads to more productivity?" Hilborn asked.

Yesterday's report suggests it is possible to resolve this puzzle. The researchers analyzed nearly 50 areas where restrictions had been imposed to stop overfishing and found that, on average, the range of species in the water increased by 23 percent within five years. That provides reason for optimism, Worm said, because it means sound management can halt the decline of fish stocks worldwide.

"It's not too late to turn this around," he said. "It can be done, but it has to be done soon."

Marine advocates, such as chief scientist Michael Hirschfield of Oceana, said they hope the report would spur countries to reassess their practice of providing roughly $20 billion a year in subsidies for harmful fishing practices.

"The single biggest thing we can do to address this is to eliminate subsidies," said Hirschfield, adding that European Union countries alone account for 10 percent of these subsidies.

Andean Glaciers Gone by 2021 - 2031

Water for Millions at Risk

· Crisis threatens parts of South America and Asia
· Decline accelerates as global warming takes hold

David Adam, environment correspondent
Wednesday October 11, 2006
The Guardian

The world's glaciers and ice caps are now in terminal decline because of global warming, scientists have discovered. A survey has revealed that the rate of melting across the world has sharply accelerated in recent years, placing even previously stable glaciers in jeopardy. The loss of glaciers in South America and Asia will threaten the water supplies of millions of people within a few decades, the experts warn.

Georg Kaser, a glaciologist at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, who led the research, said: "The glaciers are going to melt and melt until they are all gone. There are not any glaciers getting bigger any more."

Loss of land-based ice is one of the clearest signals of global temperature rise, and the state of glaciers has become a key argument in the debate over climate change. Last year, New Scientist magazine published a letter from the television botanist David Bellamy, a renowned climate sceptic, which claimed that 555 of 625 glaciers measured by the World Glacier Monitoring Service have been growing since 1980. His claim was quickly discredited, but the perception that glaciers are both growing and shrinking remains.

Dr Kaser said that "99.99% of all glaciers" were now shrinking. Increased winter snowfall meant that a few, most notably in New Zealand and Norway, got bigger during the 1990s, he said, but a succession of very warm summers since then had reversed the trend. His team combined different sets of measurements which used stakes and holes drilled into the ice to record the change in mass of more than 300 glaciers since the 1940s. They extrapolated these results to cover thousands of smaller and remote glaciers not directly surveyed.

The results revealed that the world's glaciers and ice caps - defined as all land-based ice except the mighty Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets - began to shrink far more quickly in 2001. On average, the world's glaciers and ice caps lost enough water between 1961 and 1990 to raise global sea levels by 0.35-0.4 mm each year. For 2001-2004, the figure rose to 0.8-1mm each year.

Writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the scientists say: "Late 20th century glacier wastage is essentially a response to post-1970 global warming." Dr Kaser said: "There is very, very strong evidence that this is down to human-caused changes in the atmosphere."

Emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide trap heat in the atmosphere, warming the surface. One of the first impacts of glacier melting is likely to be in South America. In August, a report from 20 UK-based environment and development groups warned that Andean glaciers are melting so fast that some are expected to disappear within 15-25 years.

This would deny major cities water supplies and put populations and food supplies at risk in Colombia, Peru, Chile, Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina and Bolivia.

Other countries are noticing the effects. Studies show snow and ice cover in the eastern Himalayas has shrunk by about 30% since the 1970s. Melting glaciers have created lakes in the mountains which could burst and cause widespread flooding. Of 150 glaciers that once stood in Glacier National Park in the northern US, only 27 remain. The US Environmental Protection Agency says the biggest are a third the size they were in 1850. Continued warming could melt them completely by 2030.

The Antarctic Peninsula 1986-2002

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.

White House Denies Climate Policy U-Turn

White House Denies Climate Policy U-Turn
Administration Denies British Report that Bush Will Announce a Dramatic Change of Policy in His State of the Union Address
By BLAIR SODEN

Jan. 14, 2007 — - The State of our Union … is suffering from global warming?

The White House is flatly denying a British report today in The Observer newspaper in which British officials say they expect President Bush to reverse himself during his annual State of the Union address on Jan. 23 and commit to an agreement to curb greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States.

"[The story] is inaccurate on all fronts," a White House official said, "and especially regarding the State of the Union."

While the Bush administration denies the British report, there are signs at the White House that might fuel such speculation.

Just last month, the Bush administration recognized the effects of global warming by adding polar bears to the list of "threatened" animals under the Endangered Species Act. U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne acknowledged that the polar bears' environment was slowly deteriorating from melting ice sheets caused by global warming.

At the time, it was unclear whether the announcement was part of a larger plan to modify U.S. climate change policy, but British officials say it may have been the beginning of a strategic U-turn.

A source close to British Prime Minister Tony Blair told The Observer, "President Bush is beginning to talk about more radical measures. We could now be seeing the beginning of a consensus on a post-Kyoto framework."

Bush declined to sign the Kyoto protocol first proposed in 1997 and put into effect last year. The agreement among 160 countries, made under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), called for "industrialized countries to reduce their collective emissions of greenhouse gases by 5.2 percent compared to the year 1990."

President Bush agreed with the overall goal of Kyoto, but refused to sign an agreement he said is flawed.

"America's unwillingness to embrace a flawed treaty should not be read by our friends and allies as any abdication of responsibility," Bush said in 2001. "To the contrary, my administration is committed to a leadership role on the issue of climate change."

While the president has declined to abide by regulations imposed in the Kyoto protocol, the California legislature recently reached an agreement with Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to limit greenhouse-gas emissions.

California's Global Warming Solutions Act, passed on Aug. 31, 2006, proposes to reduce the state's greenhouse-gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020. Since California would rank as the 12th-largest emitter of greenhouse gases globally, the plan may signify a turn for the U.S. as a whole.

Schwarzenegger isn't the only politician taking climate change policy into his own hands. A bipartisan group of six U.S. senators recently introduced a revised Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act last week, pledging to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050.

Among the co-sponsors are several potential 2008 presidential candidates, including Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. Their proposal would put a mandatory cap on industrial emissions, something the president and former Republican Congress have adamantly opposed.

If President Bush does introduce a new climate proposal during his State of the Union speech, despite the White House denial of the British report, Thomas Graedel, a professor of industrial ecology at Yale University, fears it will be ineffective without enforcement.

"The fact that the president may announce a policy change is recognition of something that virtually everyone who's looked at the issue would find perfectly reasonable," Graedel said. "But without a commitment to take strong action through acknowledging the existence of the action really doesn't move us in the direction of doing anything about it."

President Bush addressed the global warming issue last January at his State of the Union address when he acknowledged the U.S. addiction to oil. He proposed the Advanced Energy Initiative as part of the 2007 budget. Congress has yet to vote on it.

According to The Observer, British officials speculate that a meeting in December 2006 between President Bush and Prime Minister Blair was a turning point for U.S. policy on global warming. While the details of the private talks were not released, the president acknowledged that greenhouse-gas emissions were discussed.

"The prime minister has put global climate change on the table," Bush said. "It's an issue that we, where there's been disagreement in the past … there is a consensus that we need to move forward together."

Senior White House officials say they won't discuss the content of the State of the Union address before it's given, but that the British report of a dramatic change simply isn't true.

The officials claim the president has repeatedly acknowledged the earth is warming, and that he's "put good, workable policies and significant scientific research dollars to work to drive technological innovation that will help lift developing nations out of poverty and decrease environmental effects of energy consumption."

Graedel and other supporters of policies to prevent global warming say they hope this year will be different.

"I hope the U.S. will make a major commitment to reducing not only it's rate of increase of greenhouse-gas emissions," Graedel said, "but the absolute amount of emissions."

Copyright © 2007 ABC News Internet Ventures

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

Global Warming Blamed As Russian Winter Fails to Materialize

The brick grotto where Moscow zoo's bears live was today finally devoid of snuffling. After weeks of insomnia caused by the record mild winter in Russia, the six bears that live in the craggy enclosure have at last nodded off. Russia's famous winters may have scuttled the invasion plans of both Napoleon Bonaparte and Hitler but this year the winter has spectacularly failed to materialise in Moscow.

Meteorologists said that today was the warmest January day in Moscow since 1957, at 5.3C.

"Usually it's -18C by now," Tania Simyonova said, pushing her 18-month-old son Daniel past the empty bear enclosure. Nearby a polar bear dozed; in the next enclosure a dromedary jogged up and down.

"I think winter has been cancelled," Mrs Simyonova said, gazing at the drizzling sky and the zoo's stubbornly unfrozen duck pond. "If you want to see winter this year you have to go to Siberia or the Urals."

The non-sleeping bears are a tiny jigsaw piece in an alarming global puzzle of unseasonable weather. In recent months there have been erratic monsoons in Nepal, glaciers melting earlier than expected in the Himalayas, and rains heavier and more intense than usual in Malawi. In November, Australia experienced its worst drought for about 1,000 years.

In Europe, the mild temperatures have wreaked havoc on the skiing season, with Alpine resorts forced to fire up their snow machines. In Austria, hazel and alder trees have burst into flower. In Britain, the Met Office has predicted that global temperatures in 2007 have a 60% chance of becoming the hottest ever.

And it is not just Moscow's brown and Himalayan bears - one of them an unwanted gift to Russia's former president Boris Yeltsin - that have been suffering confusion. Two bears at a zoo on Bulgaria's Black Sea coast have also failed to go to sleep, staff said today.

"They are acting more like it is spring than the dead of winter," said Todor Hristov, zoo director in the port city of Varna, adding that temperatures had recently hit 13C.

In the snowy mountain regions of southern Europe it is the same story. Swallows are turning up in Spain 10 days earlier than 30 years ago, while beech and juniper trees have been creeping up the country's once barren mountains.

Over on the east coast of America, where by rights people should be hunkered down in eiderdown coats and fake fur hats, there has been a distinct touch of spring in the air.

The unseasonal climate is made apparent in visible peculiarities, from the cherry blossom in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, to the ice rinks in Manhattan that have been closed because they have turned to slush, and early budding of daffodils in the Bronx.

Today a brief flurry of snow was at last recorded in New York City - the latest of any winter in 129 years. It lasted just a few minutes and left barely a trace on the ground.

Federal weather experts say that temperatures across the US over the past month and more have been running six degrees above normal. Even in Denver, Colorado, which has had severe blizzards and heavy snowfalls, a monthly temperature in December of 1.7C above the average for the 30 years up to 2000 was recorded.

Most scientists agree that the exceptional weather patterns across America are due to a combination of the El Niño effect - the natural warming of the surface water in the eastern Pacific which happens every three to 10 years - and climate change.

Today the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recognised the global warming impact of carbon dioxide for the first time in its annual review of US climate trends, which found 2006 to have been the warmest year since records began in 1895.

Back in Russia meteorologists said January was set to break all records in what is supposed to be the world's coldest country.

"We are experiencing some of the warmest temperatures in Moscow since our records began back in 1870," said Dimitry Kiktyov, deputy director of Moscow's meteorological office.

Mr Kiktyov said the only parts of Russia's territory that were now properly cold were the eastern parts of Siberia and the remote Far East. "We expect it to get colder in February," he added.

By Guardian Unlimited © Copyright Guardian Newspapers 2006

Published: 1/10/2007

Seeing Through Exxon's "New Spots"

http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/01/11/exxon_climate_change/index.html

Exxon sees the light? Hardly...

In one solitary sentence in an article titled "Exxon Softens Climate-Change Stance" the Wall Street Journal today sums up how government and capitalism intersect in the United States. After quoting Kenneth Cohen, Exxon's vice president for public affairs, as acknowledging that "we know enough now -- or, society knows enough now -- that the risk is serious and action should be taken," the Journal's Jeffrey Ball stabs to the heart of the matter:

The question is what kind of action. The economic reality is that some companies will win from a carbon constraint and some companies will lose, depending on how the regulation is written.

Those who woke up on the naive optimist side of the bed this morning might be inclined to see Exxon's new stance as a sign that the company has finally seen the light, has finally been been swayed by scientific data, and is at last ready to do what's necessary to ensure that humans don't make the planet unlivable. Cohen tries to spin it that way, arguing that only now have "climate-science models that link greenhouse-gas concentrations to global warming" become more "reliable."

But that's just insulting nonsense. Exxon is run by smart people whose goal is very simple -- to maximize stock price and profits. Their first line of defence was to do everything possible to delay any kind of action whatsoever that might make burning fossil fuels a more expensive proposition. Thus, the massive funding for climate skeptics, and the hardline stance that global warming isn't actually happening, or if it is, it's not because humans are doing anything wrong. But it was never a question of whether Exxon executives believed the data; it was always a matter of what strategy best served their corporate interests. A carbon tax or any other scheme that forced the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions would hurt Exxon's bottom line.

It's not the climate change modeling improvements that have changed Exxon's mind. It's the political reality. It's Barbara Boxer chairing the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee instead of James Inhofe. It's California passing one law after another aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. When California talks, oil companies have to listen.

But all this really means, as the Journal's article implies, is that the battlefield has moved to a new location, not that the war has been won. Now Exxon will use all its mighty resources to shape any ensuing federal legislation to suit its interests. In other words, it will attempt to gut it.

Does this constitute progress? Perhaps on some small level, it is a victory for rationality and civilization that Exxon has decided to stop funding the Competitive Enterprise Institute. But the money that isn't headed to CEI is likely headed to lobbyists just as craven in their eagerness to make sure Exxon's agenda is incorporated in the law of the land.

There is no victory in this war -- just an endless game of whack-a-mole. So keep your sledge-hammer ready.

-- Andrew Leonard

The Great Emergency: Global Warming, Mass Death and Resource Wars in the 21st Century

The Great Emergency: Global Warming, Mass
Death and Resource Wars in the 21st Century

by Juan Santos

"We are the watchers. We are the witnesses. We see what has gone before. We see what happens now, at this dangerous moment in human history. We see what's going to happen, what will surely happen unless we come together---we, the Peoples of all Nations---to restore peace, harmony and balance to the Earth, our Mother."

--Chief Arvol Looking Horse, from White Buffalo Teachings

At the Sundance Film Festival Al Gore declared, "We have a category five denial of this issue [global warming]. I believe our political system is broken, however, I have optimism and hope. A rebellion is gathering." But rebellion isn’t what Al Gore is fostering. Speaking at NYU against what one commentator called a “stately backdrop of American flags,” Gore’s comments were focused on “uplift,” and calls to action slathered in a “thick layer of patriotism” and good old capitalist know-how. He seemed oblivious to irony, saying of the US, “Our natural role is to be the pace car in the race to stop global warming."

The feel good approach Gore pushes is dead wrong: Economic growth and saving life on Earth are not compatible goals. Industrial civilization isn’t harming the Earth, it’s killing the Earth. The system has long since passed the limits of growth - it can’t be sustained.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a four-year analysis of the world's ecosystems sponsored by the Worldwatch Institute, showed that 15 out of 24 ecosystems essential to human life are "being pushed beyond their sustainable limits," toward a state of collapse that may be "abrupt and potentially irreversible." These ecosystems and the civilization that is killing them are both approaching an endpoint.

People are calling Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth the most terrifying movie you will ever see – but really, Gore’s film is a soft sell, one that underestimates the dangers we face and that veils not only the root causes of global warming, but the drastic military responses the US is planning in the event of an abrupt shift in the climate.

Call it Category 4 denial. Gore ignores the real problem. Global heating isn’t “caused” by CO2, it’s caused by industrial production and those that profit from it – capitalists in oil, gas, coal, electricity and automobiles, among others. And the system isn’t “broken,” no matter what Gore claims. The system is producing what it’s supposed to produce; power and profit and the corollaries of power and profit; denial and death.

For those addicted to power and profit, who are “winning” at the expense of all life, global warming is business as usual.

Try telling an abusive alcoholic he’s taken one drink too many, that animals and plants, even other people, are not objects, that he’s beaten his wife one too many times, or that, as Brother Malcolm put it, the chickens are coming home to roost. Unless he’s hit bottom, he’s not listening. Even George Bush has publicly acknowledged the obvious: the system is addicted to oil. But he’s not listening.

The analogy to addiction is not facile and the denial of the crisis we face is no accident; it is both conscious and deliberate. In this system, denial of suffering is the key to success. The ability to distance themselves from the meaning of their actions is what put those who are on top on top in the first place.

Look at Exxon and its global warming disinformation campaign. They’ve spent millions on propaganda to consciously deceive us about the reality of global warming and the impending mass death it implies, much like the Nazis told their victims they were heading for a shower, not a gas chamber, like the cigarette capitalists told us smoking carries no harm. But the genocide the Nazis perpetrated was not this extreme. This is different. This is not ethnocide or genocide. This is omnicide. Life on Earth is in the balance.

The stakes, the costs of this crime and its coverup, could not be higher. World renowned paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey tells us, “Whatever way you look at it, we're destroying the Earth at a rate comparable with the impact of a giant asteroid slamming into the planet, or even a shower of vast heavenly bodies."

Within 50 years a million species will be extinct. Within 100 years 50% of all species now living - 5 million forms of living beauty - will be gone forever. Within a mere 30 years, a quarter of all mammal species may be gone.

Today, bears are no longer hibernating in the north of Spain. With the melting of polar ice, the Polar Bear is on its way out. The Orangutan has ten years left.

Fish are starving to death in the Great Barrier Reef – the unthinkable equivalent of primates starving in the jungle. In the meantime, the jungle, the Amazon Rainforest, which provides 20% of the world’s oxygen, will be a savannah, or perhaps a desert, by 2100.

Forty percent of the world’s species will die with the Amazon.

The new Age of Extinctions is being driven by global heating, ozone depletion, toxic chemicals, habitat destruction, and invasive or infectious species. The cause isn’t just CO2, it’s our whole way of life. The Earth is in its most profound crisis since the mass extinctions of the Eocene period, 54 million years ago.

Before that, two hundred and fifty million years ago at the end of the Permian era, 95% of all species perished due to runaway global warming, warming that occurred due to the same kind of positive feedback loops that we see emerging in today’s heating trends. Scientists call it The Great Dying, a period in which life on Earth was all-but wiped out.

The Permian mass extinction was apparently caused by a series of gigantic volcanic eruptions, triggering a runaway greenhouse effect. Geologists have said the impact of this "post apocalyptic greenhouse" was so severe that only one large land animal was left alive. 100 million years would pass before species diversity returned to its former levels.

In light of such potentials, how many people are willing to wager that the world scientific community is wrong and that George W. Bush – the idiot savant of the Christian Fascists – is right when he claims the verdict is still out on global warming? How many will be willing to leave the fate of the Earth, of their children and their children’s children, in the hands of propagandists for ExxonMobile? The impact of global heating - on humans alone - would be almost beyond imagining.

James Lovelock, who developed the Gaia Theory – the scientific theorem that Earth acts as a single self-sustaining, self-balancing organic system – tells us that by 2100 there will only be 500 million humans left on Earth. The Earth, he says, will no longer be able to sustain more than that. There are 6.5 billion of us now; by 2050 that number will rocket to 8.9 billion, then drop precipitously. If Lovelock is right, only one out of 18 people will be left alive at the century’s end. 95% will be dead. And Lovelock is only looking at global warming. He isn’t counting the threats posed by Peak Oil or nuclear resource wars over oil, water and arable land that, if current trends continue, will become all but inevitable.

The glaciers of the Himalayas are disappearing. Forty percent of the people in the world draw their water from sources directly fed by the regular summer melting cycles of Himalayan ice and snow. Their sources of food will melt with the glaciers. With mass starvation in Asia, the probabilities of war over water and arable land - and of mass death - grow exponentially.

By the summer of 2040 all of the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean will be gone. That means that theromohaline circulation in the North Sea – the Gulf Stream, which carries vast amounts of heat from the equator to the North Atlantic - will cease. Even as the planet heats, northern Europe will freeze. In Britain, for example, the Gulf Stream provides 27,000 times more heat than all current power supplies can generate, warming that nation by 5-8C. Warm winds from the Gulf Stream eventually reach the Himalayas, where they play a role in stimulating and regulating the East Asian monsoon system.

With the collapse of the Gulf Stream, temperatures in Europe could fall by 20 or more degrees Fahrenheit, creating an ecological nightmare as farmland turns to frozen tundra, with temperatures dropping to below -20C. Europe is currently self sufficient in agriculture, feeding its 600 million inhabitants, an obvious impossibility under such devastating new conditions.

Would Europe, with its vast armaments and its history of colonization, genocide and global wars aimed at re-dividing world resources and markets, slip quietly into a frozen death - or would it find war, even a Third World War, preferable to collapse and relentless famine at home?

The question is far from academic. Ice sheet melting from the Greenland ice cap into the Greenland Sea and the melting of floating ice during the 1980s caused the Gulf Stream to diminish by 80%. A recent report shows that the Gulf Stream came to a dead halt for ten days in 2004. The melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet and the Arctic Sea’s ice all but guarantees the end of the Gulf Stream before mid century.

Which lands a frozen Europe might target in order to feed itself could eventually pose an all-but insoluble problem for the sub-continent’s rulers. A recent study by the British government shows that if current trends continue, a third of the planet will be desert by 2100. According to their calculations, areas susceptible to moderate drought will double to 50% of the Earth’s surface. Areas susceptible to severe drought will more than triple to 30% of the Earth’s surface.

Exxon-Bush Inc. would have us believe these impacts and their causes are debatable. Republican Senator James Inhofe would have us believe that the world scientific community is perpetrating an elaborate anti-capitalist hoax – the biggest hoax in human history, with the highest stakes. Rush Limbaugh says global warming is just another way to make civilized white people and capitalists feel guilty, the moral equivalent of a commie plot. The Right wants to cast doubt on climate science and the impending realities of climate chaos, because by pretending that there is a debate, they can defer action and continue to profit. For these men, the world itself can end, but not profit.

The fossils of our time sit in Washington, apparently inured by the pleasures of power and wealth to the realities before us. But, appearances notwithstanding, the ruling elites understand that we are on an irreversible path to global heating, caused largely by the burning of fossil fuels for the sake of production and profit. The question is what they plan to do about it.

As resources of petroleum peak and begin to expire, the Bush regime offers no alternative other than resource wars – war, not to end the use of the fuels that are destroying the Earth – but to get more of them, the last of them. Their aim is not to save the world, but to ensure their continued ability to dominate it by controlling the rapidly dwindling sources of oil. This, after all, is what the war in Iraq is about, and this is the meta-madness that guides the imperial preparations to attack Iran.

The ruling elites know exactly where we are heading and exactly what they are doing. Quietly, they call global warming a “national security threat.”

A 2004 Pentagon report, "An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security," cautions US strategic planners that in a scenario of abrupt climate change “Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.” The report predicts that Third World countries will develop their own nuclear threat to secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. By 2020, the report concludes, “catastrophic” shortages of water, food and energy will plunge the planet toward war. The United Nations identifies some 150 flash points where wars may be fought over water, alone.

The Pentagon report suggests that there could be global economic depression, destruction of technological infrastructure on a global scale, nuclear war, mega-droughts, famine, mass migrations from Third World countries, and widespread rioting around the world.

“Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,” the Pentagon says. “…warfare would define human life.”

The report calls for the development of what it calls “no-regrets strategies” by the U.S. Department of Defense.

Welcome to the apocalypse. This is the Great Emergency. The future of all Life on Earth is in our hands, in the hands of this generation. We have two choices: stop them, or prepare our children and grandchildren to be among the 5% who might be so fortunate – or unfortunate – as to survive.

From Part 3 of Apocalypse No! The Law of Life and the Law of Death

Read More

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Juan Santos is a Los Angeles based writer and editor. His essays from 2006 can be found at: http://the-fourth-world.blogspot.com/.