Clive Cookson, Financial Times: A leading US team of climate researchers on Friday released “the most compelling evidence yet” that human activities are responsible for global warming. They said their analysis should “wipe out” claims by sceptics that recent warming is due to non-human factors such as natural fluctuations in climate or variations in solar or volcanic activity.
Scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California have been working for several years with colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to analyse the effects of global warming on the oceans. They combined computer modelling with millions of temperature and salinity readings, taken around the world at different depths over five decades.
Agence France Presse: Scientists have discovered dramatic changes in the temperature and salinity of deep waters in the Southern Ocean that they warn could have a major impact on global climate.
Expedition leader Steve Rintoul of Australia said his multinational team of researchers had found that waters at the bottom of the Southern Ocean were significantly cooler and less salty than they were 10 years ago.
He said the size and speed of the changes surprised scientists, who have long believed deep ocean waters underwent little temperature change, and could indicate a slowdown in the flow of deep water currents.
"Ocean circulation is a big influence on global climate, so it is critical that we understand why this is happening and why it is happening so quickly," Rintoul said after he and his team docked at Hobart on the Australian island state of Tasmania.
"The surprise was just how rapidly the deepest parts of the ocean are changing, at depths of four or five kilometers (13,200-16,500 feet) below the sea surface," Rintoul said.
Kelpie Wilson, www.truthout.org: Today the Kyoto Treaty on global warming goes into effect and for the first time the world has united (with the exception of the U.S. and Australia) to begin to address the greatest threat humankind has ever faced.
Tonight, in Los Angeles, former Vice President Al Gore will outline a plan for moral leadership to take on the climate change crisis and to re-engage the world's biggest polluter - the United States of America. He will call on George W. Bush to join "the coalition of the willing" and make a commitment to face the problem and take action.
In a preview of his remarks for the press, Gore called the Kyoto agreement "historic." While agreeing with the criticism that Kyoto itself falls far short of the measures that will ultimately be needed, Gore said that the value of Kyoto is that it sends a clear market signal. The cap and trade system for CO2 emissions is already in place in Europe and the response has been robust. He called the formal beginning of Kyoto "a great cause for hope," and said that it was just the beginning of a cascade of actions and policies that will quickly accelerate.
Gore believes that the market will respond because "Business has learned to watch out for bubbles that lead to warped decisions." Bubbles are inflated expectations based on wishful thinking - like the hope that oil will never run out or that pollution won't affect business. Gore said that President Bush inhabits an "un-reality bubble," created by his advisers in the oil and coal industries, that will soon burst.
In business, Gore said, those who are lulled into a false sense of security will lose out to competitors who see clearly and can adapt to new realities. Any firm that wishes to do business internationally will have to comply with Kyoto. Already, he said, companies doing business in China face more environmental restrictions than they do in the U.S.
Gore called Bush's climate change denial a "stunning display of moral cowardice," and said that Bush "has his head in the sand." Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and social security are two false crises that Bush has promoted while he abdicates any leadership on the real crisis of global warming.
‘Global warming real’ say new studies
>By Clive Cookson in Washington
>Published: February 18 2005 14:18 | Last updated: February 18 2005 14:18
> >
A leading US team of climate researchers on Friday released “the most compelling evidence yet” that human activities are responsible for global warming. They said their analysis should “wipe out” claims by sceptics that recent warming is due to non-human factors such as natural fluctuations in climate or variations in solar or volcanic activity.
Scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California have been working for several years with colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to analyse the effects of global warming on the oceans. They combined computer modelling with millions of temperature and salinity readings, taken around the world at different depths over five decades.
The researchers released their conclusions on Friday at the American Association of the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington. They found that the “warming signals” in the oceans could only have been produced by the build-up of man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Non-human factors would have produced quite different effects.
Tim Barnett, the Scripps project leader, said previous attempts to show that human activities caused global warming had looked for evidence in the atmosphere. “But the atmosphere is the worst place to look for a global warming signal,” he said. “Ninety per cent of the energy from global warming has gone into the oceans and the oceans show its fingerprint much better than the atmosphere.”
Prof Barnett added: “The debate over whether there is a global warming signal is over now at least for rational people.” He urged the US administration to rethink its refusal to join the Kyoto Protocol, which took effect this week.
The Scripps scientists also looked at the likely climatic effects of the warming they observed. They highlighted the impact on regional water supplies, which would be severely reduced during the summer in places that depend on rivers fed by melting winter snow and glaciers such as western China and the South American Andes.
The conference also heard a gloomy analysis of the way the North Atlantic Ocean is reacting to global warming from Ruth Curry of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. Her new study showed that vast amounts of fresh water more than 20,000 cubic kilometres have been added to the northernmost parts of the ocean over the past 40 years because the Arctic and Greenland ice sheets are melting.
According to Dr Curry, the resulting change in the salinity balance of the water threatens to shut down the Ocean Conveyor Belt, which transfers heat from the tropics towards the polar regions through currents such as the Gulf Stream. If that happened, winter temperatures in northern Europe would fall by several degrees.
The possible failure of the North Atlantic conveyor has been discussed for several years and was fictionalised last year in the film The Day After Tomorrow. Dr Curry said the accumulation of freshwater in the upper ocean layers since the 1990s meant that the risk should be taken seriously.
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Published on Thursday, February 17, 2005 by Agence France Presse
Scientists Find Dramatic Changes in Southern Ocean, Fear Climate Link
HOBART, AUSTRALIA - Scientists have discovered dramatic changes in the temperature and salinity of deep waters in the Southern Ocean that they warn could have a major impact on global climate.
Expedition leader Steve Rintoul of Australia said his multinational team of researchers had found that waters at the bottom of the Southern Ocean were significantly cooler and less salty than they were 10 years ago.
He said the size and speed of the changes surprised scientists, who have long believed deep ocean waters underwent little temperature change, and could indicate a slowdown in the flow of deep water currents.
"Ocean circulation is a big influence on global climate, so it is critical that we understand why this is happening and why it is happening so quickly," Rintoul said after he and his team docked at Hobart on the Australian island state of Tasmania.
"The surprise was just how rapidly the deepest parts of the ocean are changing, at depths of four or five kilometers (13,200-16,500 feet) below the sea surface," Rintoul said.
"Whether its a natural cycle that takes place over many decades, or it's climate change, it's an indication that the deep ocean can respond much more rapidly to changes that are happening near the surface than we believed possible," he said.
The expedition sampled 3,000 kilometers of the Southern Ocean basin during an eight-week expedition aboard the Australian Antarctic Division's research ship Aurora Australis.
Their findings added new urgency to the study of climate change, Rintoul said.
"It's another indication that the climate is capable of changing and is changing now," he said.
"What we need to do is sort out if this is human-induced change and if so, how rapidly is the climate going to change and what will the impacts of that change be?" he said.
The new findings emerged a day after the UN's Kyoto Protocol on climate change came into force. The treaty aims to cut production of so-called greenhouse gases believed responsible for a warming of the Earth's climate.
During its expedition, the Australian-led team released 19 free-floating ocean robots known as Argo floats, which are designed to drift with ocean currents to better measure temperature and salinity.
The floats, part of an international ocean-monitoring effort, drift about 2,000 meters (6,600 feet) underwater and surface every 10 days to deliver findings.
Rintoul said the Argos would provide a huge boost to climate research.
"They will revolutionize how we understand the ocean, in particular to determining climate change and shorter climate cycles," he said.
"One of the real challenges for us when we try to answer the question of 'is this climate change?' is that we only have measurements from a few southern snapshots," he said.
"We haven't measured it continuously in time so it's hard for us to tell the difference between a cycle, something moving up and down, and a long-term trend. That's the real challenge."
Copyright © 2005 Agence France Presse
###
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0217-08.htm
Al Gore, Global Warming and Moral Leadership
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 16 February 2005
Today the Kyoto Treaty on global warming goes into effect and for the first time the world has united (with the exception of the U.S. and Australia) to begin to address the greatest threat humankind has ever faced.
Tonight, in Los Angeles, former Vice President Al Gore will outline a plan for moral leadership to take on the climate change crisis and to re-engage the world's biggest polluter - the United States of America. He will call on George W. Bush to join "the coalition of the willing" and make a commitment to face the problem and take action.
In a preview of his remarks for the press, Gore called the Kyoto agreement "historic." While agreeing with the criticism that Kyoto itself falls far short of the measures that will ultimately be needed, Gore said that the value of Kyoto is that it sends a clear market signal. The cap and trade system for CO2 emissions is already in place in Europe and the response has been robust. He called the formal beginning of Kyoto "a great cause for hope," and said that it was just the beginning of a cascade of actions and policies that will quickly accelerate.
Gore believes that the market will respond because "Business has learned to watch out for bubbles that lead to warped decisions." Bubbles are inflated expectations based on wishful thinking - like the hope that oil will never run out or that pollution won't affect business. Gore said that President Bush inhabits an "un-reality bubble," created by his advisers in the oil and coal industries, that will soon burst.
In business, Gore said, those who are lulled into a false sense of security will lose out to competitors who see clearly and can adapt to new realities. Any firm that wishes to do business internationally will have to comply with Kyoto. Already, he said, companies doing business in China face more environmental restrictions than they do in the U.S.
Gore called Bush's climate change denial a "stunning display of moral cowardice," and said that Bush "has his head in the sand." Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and social security are two false crises that Bush has promoted while he abdicates any leadership on the real crisis of global warming.
When asked if he would be getting back into politics to provide the leadership he is calling for, Gore said he would not be a candidate but that he would be very active in other ways. Tonight he will announce a campaign to get U.S. automakers to drop their lawsuit against California and a number of Northeastern states that are regulating automobile CO2 emissions.
"We are going to call on U.S. automakers to innovate, not litigate, to stop suing the future and start building the future," Gore said.
The McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act came in for praise, as did Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, a former Kyoto detractor (he called Kyoto a "kooky idea" back in 1999) who now wants to introduce his own legislation to address the problem. Hagel is an example of how minds that were formerly closed could be opened to admit the problem and deal with it.
Gore also mentioned the growing willingness of evangelical Christians to look at the moral issues involved. "It is unconscionable to condemn future generations to accelerated climate change," he said.
While emphasizing the moral dimension, Gore insists that market forces have the power to generate creative solutions for climate change problems. Many environmentalists are uneasy with a reliance on market forces. For example, UK Guardian columnist George Monbiot said in a recent column:
"The denial of climate change, while out of tune with the science, is consistent with, even necessary for, the outlook of almost all the world's economists. Modern economics, whether informed by Marx or Keynes or Hayek, is premised on the notion that the planet has an infinite capacity to supply us with wealth and absorb our pollution. The cure to all ills is endless growth. Yet endless growth, in a finite world, is impossible. Pull this rug from under the economic theories, and the whole system of thought collapses."
But promoting market solutions may be the cleverest method of proceeding. Monbiot is correct that global warming denial is powered by the almost religious belief in a growth economy. Yet, anyone who has studied the way that human beings alter their belief systems has discovered that new beliefs are much more easily adopted if they inhabit the shell of the old. The old Pagan religions of Europe were subverted by a Christianity that built its churches and cathedrals on top of the ancient sacred sites.
To speak of market (read: economic growth) solutions to a problem caused by markets (economic growth) may not be as contradictory as it seems. It all comes down to how one defines growth. It is possible to envision a growth economy that is not based on material growth but rather on cultural and spiritual growth. Services are as much a part of the economy as goods, and a cleaner environment is the most valuable service of all.
Al Gore's recipe for leadership recognizes that the initial step toward redefining the economy will take moral leadership and action. In this way, his current campaign draws on the ideas he first presented in his book, Earth in the Balance. There, he said that the preservation of the environment should become the new organizing principle for society. In other words, the new morality.
Unfortunately, Al Gore was denied the chance to exercise moral leadership as President of the United States. As he attempts, nonetheless, to pilot a new moral direction for this country, he deserves our help and support.
________________________________________
Kelpie Wilson is the t r u t h o u t environment editor. A veteran forest protection activist and mechanical engineer, she writes from her solar-powered cabin in the Siskiyou Mountains of southwest Oregon.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/021605A.shtml