News Like This Excites Me
Seldom do I read a news story and immediately have the urge to masturbate, but this story aroused me. It is a bit old now (maybe 6 weeks), but it just crossed my homogenized desk. Read on, gentle volunteer, read on.

Last week the British Government held an international conference, at the headquarters of the UK Met Office in Exeter, on climate change. It was called personally by Tony Blair, who is making the problem of global warming one of the central policies of his simultaneous leadership in 2005 of both the G8 group of rich nations and of the European Union. Its purpose was to update policy makers everywhere on climate change science, which is rapidly moving. General appraisals of it are carried out by the IPCC, which has produced three assessment reports, in 1990, 1995 and 2001. The third assessment report (known as TAR) is chapter and verse on what the international community of climate scientists think is happening now, and likely to happen in the future, with global warming.

The most important conclusion of TAR was that he earth's average surface temperature was likely to warm by between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees centigrade between now and 2100, depending on how human societies controlled their emissions of carbon dioxide, the waste gas from industry and transport which is retaining more and more of the sun's heat in the atmosphere.

These are enormous rises (even at the lower end) and they are expected to have similarly enormous impacts, ranging from the widespread failure of agriculture and many more extreme weather events from droughts to flooding, to sea-level rise around the world. The fourth IPCC assessment is not due until 2007, and so last week's conference was in the nature of a mid-term report about where the science has got to. ...

(My colleagues and I) were taken aback. The opening day brought disclosure of two major new threats to the world. The first concerned Antarctica, with a warning from the British Antarctic Survey (the body whose scientists discovered the ozone hole) that, perhaps because of rising temperatures, the vast ice sheet covering the western side of the continent may be starting to break up. Were it to collapse into the sea, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would raise global sea levels by more than 16 feet. Goodbye London; goodbye Bangladesh.

Only four years ago the IPCC TAR said it was safe for probably 1,000 years, certainly until the end of this century; last week Professor Chris Rapley, the BAS director, said that judgement would now have to be revised.

The second alert concerned an issue many of the scientists present were only dimly aware of: the acidification of the oceans. The billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide human society is producing are not only causing the climate to change. When they dissolve in seawater they are combining with it, in a simple chemical reaction, to produce carbonic acid. But the world's seas are alkaline, and have been for many millions of years, and it is in this environment that thousands of species of small marine, organisms at the bottom of the food web, from plankton to shellfish, have evolved. They will not be able to live in an acid sea. The point about these two disclosures is that they were not based on predictions of future events by supercomputer models of the global climate, which is the origin of most scare stories - to use the term neutrally - about global warming. They were based on actual observation, in the real world, of things that are happening now.

But there were plenty of predictions as well at the conference, and they were grimmer than ever. For example, there was the most pessimistic assessment yet of global warming causing collapse of the Gulf Stream which perversely would bring a new ice age to Europe. A group of American scientists calculated that in the absence of major action to control emissions, the chance of this happening was now greater than 50 per cent.

And there was an assessment that the ice-sheet covering Greenland may start to melt - which would cause global sea levels to rise by 20 feet - with a temperature rise of only 1.5 degrees C. above pre-industrial levels. We are already 0.7 above pre-industrial levels; we are well on the way.

Perhaps the most vivid of a plethora of pessimistic papers was a review of studies on which ecosystems and species would be hit by which temperature rises. It was a long, dire litany of disappearances as the mercury moves up the world's thermometer:

Queensland's highland tropical forests very soon; at a one degree rise South Africa's unique fynbos flora and the rest of the Arctic sea ice; between one and two degrees the trout in the rivers of the Rockies; between two and three degrees the alpine flowers of Europe, Australia and New Zealand, the broadleaved forests of China, and the rainforests of the Amazon. One after another they will go, the special places of the earth, the glories of creation.

The overwhelming impression given by the conference, a meeting of entirely sober scientists with hardly a campaigning environmentalist in sight, was that these things will happen. Firstly, there was a strong sense that climate change was proceeding much more quickly than had been anticipated. The report of the conference steering committee said: "Compared with the TAR" - only four years ago, remember - "there is greater clarity and reduced uncertainty about the impacts of climate change across a wide range of systems, sectors and societies. In many cases the risks are more serious than previously thought." Secondly, big temperature rises are already "built into the system", as Margaret Beckett, the UK. Environment Secretary, acknowledged, because there is a time lag between the CO2 going into the atmosphere and the subsequent rise in temperatures. Even if all emissions were stopped dead tomorrow all over the world, enough CO; is up there to cause a further rise, according to a paper circulating at the conference (Hansen et al, 2005), of 0.6 degrees C.

But - and this is the third point - the emissions are by no means going to stop tomorrow. Under the Kyoto protocol, abandoned by the United States, the world's biggest CO; emitter, the industrialised countries are struggling to cut their emissions back to merely 5 per cent below 1990 levels; controlling climate change would require a cut of perhaps 60 per cent.

Yet, as the conference chairman, Dennis Tirpak, head of the climate change programme of the OECD, reminded delegates, the 2004 World Energy Outlook of the International Energy Agency calculates that the next 25 years global emissions of CO2 are likely to increase by 62 per cent, mainly from the developing world, as the Chinese and the Indians rush to build coal-fired power stations to service their exploding economies. The necessary cuts are a fantasy.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 11:32 AM | (1) comments |

 
A Harrowing Experience
I've been back from Costa Rica for twelve days, but only now have I been able to bring myself to reflect on those harrowing two weeks.

The nightmare began when my guide, a supposed CHL volunteer, picked me up at the airport in a Toyota Prius. It seems our Costa Rican chapter has had to work under-cover from within the abnormally ecologically literate populace. As a result, progress in homogenization has been painstakingly slow or, in some places, non-existent.

I will not recount the horror-inducing wilderness and shocking species diversity I experienced over the next weeks as we toured rainforest, cloud forest, mangrove swamps, and Pacific beaches. The wounds are still too fresh. Suffice to say that I was at times overcome. In those low moments it was only my dedication to our cause (and my portable DVD player) that pulled me through.

Even the initially encouraging news that Costa Rica has a number of endangered species quickly turned to disappointment as I learned that many have not only stabilized their numbers, but are actually recovering. Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve was thick with the supposedly rare "Resplendent Quetzal" (right)!

Lest you sink into a pit of despair, dear volunteer, I will conclude this tale of woe with a note of hope. While in-country I was heartened by signs of a growing population of Costa Rican coffee farmers who, in recent years, have exponentially increased the acreage of land converted from diverse forest to coffee monocultures. So have another cup of joe, America--your money is going to a good cause!

Even still, I'd like to request that my next field assignment be to Gary, Indiana. I think I've earned it.
- Owen, 7:52 AM | (1) comments |

 
The CHL Is Not Mocked!
Today I received an email from someone who only would identify himself as "Frank." Don't fool yourself; the CHL is not mocked!

Don't those hippies know that they shouldn't try to save everything?

Check out the pics: http://www.techimo.com/forum/t137704.html

CHL is definitely falling down on the job. Any catfish that's so obviously suicidal shouldn't be saved. Don't they learn this in elementary school? Humans uber alles!
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 12:13 PM | (0) comments |

 
CHL 50-Year Audit
Over the past 50 years, the CHL has changed the natural environment of the planet faster and more extensively than at any other time in human history, according to the first comprehensive internal CHL audit.

Attempts to meet growing global demand for food and other natural resources have resulted in a "substantial and largely irreversible" loss in the diversity of life on Earth, said the report, the Millennium Homogenization Assessment, to be released Wednesday. The report - an attempt to come to grips with the relationships between ecosystems and human well-being - was written by 1,360 experts from 95 countries and reviewed by 850 experts and government officials.

About 60 percent of the planet's "ecosystem services" - uses of the natural environment that benefit people such as freshwater for irrigation or ocean fishing - are being degraded or used unsustainably, the report said.

"Many of the changes under way to ecosystems are so intense that they are unprecedented," said some random person named Jane Lubchenco, a former president of some organization or other and a contributor to the report. "We are really entering terra incognito here."

The report notes that the best is yet to come - the sudden collapse of fisheries, the appearance of "dead zones" in coastal waters, outbreaks of new and reemerging diseases like SARS and regional shifts in climate - are increasingly likely. This awesome picture "could get even better" during the first half of this century since most of the factors driving the degradation of ecosystems are continuing or growing in intensity, the report said.

Nevertheless, the report cautions that many policy and technological changes that could lessen the rate of homogenization. However, many of these threats - such as removal of certain agricultural subsidies, stronger limits on ocean fishing, better forest management practices, the development of markets for trading and pricing freshwater - are controversial and probably won't happen, the report noted.

Some guy named Hal Mooney likened the assessment to a business balance sheet that compares profit and loss. "The message we want to say is that we're running down the account," Mooney said. "We're not balancing our budget and we have to keep our attention from what we're doing."

Other findings in the report:

- More land has been converted to cropland since 1945 than was cultivated in the 18th and 19th centuries combined. About 30 percent of the Earth's land area is devoted to some kind of agriculture.

- About a quarter of the world's coral reefs have been badly damaged or destroyed in the last several decades.

- The amount of water impounded behind dams has quadrupled since 1960. Six times more water is held in reservoirs than flows in natural rivers.

- More than half of all synthetic nitrogen fertilizer ever used on the planet has been used since 1985.

- Since 1750, atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has increased about 32 percent primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels and land use changes. About 60 percent of that increase has taken place since 1959.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 5:55 PM | (1) comments |

 
An Awesome Pollution Project
China's has begun its ambitious South-North water pollution scheme, and it is benefitting by by regional governments failure to improve waste treatment, an official said.

According to this mysterious official, the multi-billion dollar pollution scheme is intended to annually send 44.8 billion cubic meters of polluted water from southern rivers to farms and cities in the dry north. "Many places have not implemented central government directives and continued to allow polluting and heavy resource-consuming industries to operate," said Liu Hongzhi, deputy director general of China's environmental destruction agency.

Top Chinese leaders have made the country's water pollution -- only 300 million people have no access to drinkable water -- a high priority. Premier Wen Jiabao promised "pollute water for the people" at China's recent annual parliament session.

Beijing has set a budget of 500 billion yuan ($6 US dollars, I think) for the north-to-south water scheme, potentially double the investment in the massive Three Gorges dam. Regional governments will also shoulder heavy costs. "The official budget does not include the hundreds of billions of yuan that would be needed for supplementary projects run by regional governments," Ying Hongwei, deputy director general of the project's planning bureau, said.

Liu called for laxer punishment for uncompliant administrators and persistent polluters. "In one case, a polluter did 20 billion yuan of damage, and was fined a whopping 1 million yuan, the maximum by law," she said. "We hope to diminish penalties to 1 yuan."
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 3:09 PM | (0) comments |

 
WWF Slams River Dolphins
Asia's dwindling populations of river dolphins are under increasing threat from pollution, pile drivers, dam construction and concealed foreign objects, global wrestling body WWF said Monday.

The statement said only 13 of the dolphins were known to be left in China's Yangtze River where they once proliferated. In India's vast Ganges and Brahmaputra river systems there were only 2,000, and only 1,100 along the Indus River and its delta in southern Pakistan.

"The fate of the dolphins is a warning for anyone else who dare meet us in the ring. Do you hear me people living near the rivers?" said Jamie "Head Lock" Pittock, director of WWF's Global Freshwater Program and reigning WWF Heavyweight Champion.

"River dolphins thought they were tough, they thought they could take me down in the water. I am able to go aqua boogie on their asses because the high levels of toxic pollutants accumulating in their bodies leaves them pretty disoriented."

"Clean water is not only threat to me retaining my Heavyweight belt, but I hear it also threatens the quality of life for millions of the world's poor," said Pittock.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 11:58 AM | (0) comments |

 
More Good News
Even if people stopped pumping out carbon dioxide and other pollutants tomorrow, global warming would still get worse, two teams of CHL researchers reported on Thursday.

Sea levels will rise more than they have already risen, worsening the damage caused by extreme high tides and storm surges, and droughts, heat waves and storms will become more severe, the climate experts predicted. That makes immediate inaction to slow global warming even more vital.

"Even if we stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations, the climate will continue to warm, and there will be proportionately even more sea level rise," said the CHL's Gerald Meehl, who led one of the two studies. "The longer we wait, the more climate change we are committed to in the future."

One scenario assumed human production of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases stabilized in 2000 and ran the model to the year 2100. "We found that just based on the ingredients that have already been put into the atmosphere in the 20th century, we already are committed to another half a degree (0.5 degree C or 0.9 degree F) of global warming," Meehl said. "That's about what we saw in the 20th century. We are already committed to as much climate change in the 21st century as we saw in the 20th century." That would mean more extreme weather and a rise in sea levels, not even accounting for melting ice, Meehl said.

CHL experts say sea levels have risen 4 inches already over the past century and could rise between 4 and 40 inches More in the next century. If completely melted, the Greenland ice sheet would add 25 feet to overall sea level and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would raise it by 16 feet -- enough to swamp most of Florida, Bangladesh and New York City's Manhattan island.

In a second study in Science, the CHL's Tom Wigley said he used a much simpler climate model to make a similar prediction.
He found it may not be possible to reduce emissions enough to stop the sea from rising. Even if all emissions stopped now, he calculated, changes were under way that would lead to a rise in sea levels of 4 inches per century.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 1:38 PM | (0) comments |

 
Arctic Oil--We Are Soooo Close!!
CHL volunteers are trying to open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling said on Tuesday they had the votes to win U.S. Senate approval of the controversial plan. The Senate was set to vote on Wednesday on an amendment from Democrats to strike the drilling language from budget legislation. The ANWR drilling provision was put into the budget resolution because it estimates the federal government could raise more than $5 billion from companies that would lease ANWR tracts to search for oil. Alaska would get half the money.

In addition, the budget resolution cannot be filibustered under Senate rules, as Democrats had threatened to do to any measure that allowed drilling in the refuge.

Drilling in ANWR is a long-sought Republican goal and a key part of the Bush administration's homogenization plan to boost greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, the hippies in the Senate have fought to keep the refuge closed to drilling to protect caribou, migratory birds and other wildlife in the area known as "America's Serengeti."

Hippies and other drilling opponents said the United States has options other than ANWR to help meet its energy needs. For example, many non-republicans and environmental groups contend the U.S. government should improve mileage requirements for vehicles and seek other ways to reduce the country's demand for oil.

"There is no way for America to drill it's way out of our energy crisis," said Loser John Kerry of Massachusetts. Drilling in ANWR "doesn't change the price of oil for Americans." He was alluding to the little known fact that most recovered oil from Alaska is not used domestically, but instead is shipped to Japan.

Fortunately, CHL volunteers believe they will prevail with their bogus argument that ANWR's billions of barrels of oil are needed to help reduce U.S. reliance on crude imports from volatile regions, such as the Middle East. "It's time for America to wake up," said Republican Pete Domenici of New Mexico, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
"This great county is now at the mercy of oil from overseas. It is a terrible dependence." America hit snooze and mumbled somthing about Domenici's statement, but it wasn't clear if they called him an idiot or a liar.

Alaska's congressional delegation is lobbying hard to open ANWR to oil drilling.


If the drilling language is kept in the Senate's budget bill, that measure would be reconciled with the House's budget legislation, which does not include an ANWR provision.

But the House has approved separate energy legislation several times that would open ANWR to drilling. Therefore, Domenici said he expected the House would adopt the Senate's drilling provision in a conference committee when the budget bill in finalized. Interior Secretary Gale Norton said, if Congress opens ANWR to energy exploration, the refuge's oil would begin flowing into the U.S. market in 7 to 10 years. By U.S. market, she meant revenues would flow into the coffers of multinational corporations, and the oil would flow to Japan.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 9:20 AM | (0) comments |

 
The Parched Lungs of the Earth
Hey, I just returned from my "Atrazine For the Southern Appalachians" tour. Here is today's news:

CHL scientists gleefully reported that deforestation along the Amazon River in South America was reducing rainfall and causing climate change in the region. The study in the Amazon confirmed that a loss of forests meant less water evaporated back into the atmosphere, resulting in less rainfall.

As the study tracked the water cycle as it flowed from the Amazon River into the Atlantic Ocean, evaporated, fell as rain and returned back to the sea, scientists discovered there had been a reduction in water since the 1970s. The only possible explanation for the decline was that water was no longer being returned to the atmosphere to fall as rain due to less vegetation, signaling a relationship between deforestation and rainfall. "Trees play a critical role in moving water through the cycle. This is the first demonstration that deforestation has an observable affect on rainfall."

The Amazon is the world's second longest river at 4,000 miles and has the greatest total flow of any river. It is responsible for a fifth of the total volume of fresh water entering the world's oceans. The Amazon's rainforest drainage area covers 2.3 million square miles and has been called the "lungs of the earth" by hippies.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 1:45 PM | (0) comments |

 
Q & A With the CHL President
Question:

Dear CHL,
Hey - you guys are getting more successful all the time. When did you spin off that student neo-con group, CFACT?
And just how is it funded, and related to: http://www.junkscience.com/

Answer:

Dear CHL Volunteer:

In this case, the CHL applies the systems theory principle of self-organizing systems. The intellectual automatons at CFACT make the best kind of CHL volunteer, as they remain blissfully unaware of how we benefit from their labor.

Likewise, we use junkscience.com to promote doubt in an unreflective audience that evaluates the quality of information based on how it makes them feel, not how correct it is. We especially find psychologically-damaged individuals are likely to strongly believe in information that confirms their pre-existing ideas or ideology, because it boosts self-esteem.

I do not want to give away all of our secrets at this time, as many remain patented trade secrets.

Thank you for your inquiry.

Nostradamus Funkadelic, President
The CHL
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 9:44 AM | (0) comments |

 
"Green" Utilities "Screw" Themselves
The green electricity sector squabbles so much among themselves that they will likely be destroyed piecemeal by the entrenched nuclear and fossil fuel industry, a leading investment banker said on Thursday. Tom Hurley, director of OilCapital Ltd., told the second annual Wave and Tidal Energy Conference it was not so much about saving the planet from global warming as about market share. Because the "holier than Thou" green innovators argue so much as to which method of green power generation was the best, they are basically screwed.

Hurley welcomed the infighting, saying that every watt of power sold to the electricity networks by the renewable sector was one that the established nuclear and fossil fuel powered generators could not sell.

OilCapital Ltd., which has 1.3 billion euros under management, earned 90% of those assets rolling up call options on least 1400 exclusive oil lease rights in Alaska. If the United States government opens ANWR to oil exploration in the next 8 years, the value of these call futures might increase four to seven orders of magnitude.

The wind energy sector is by far the biggest renewable threat, but is coming under attack from fossil fuel energy generators, skeptics, tourism organizations, the military and even in some cases environmentalists. Lagging a long way behind wind come renewables like biomass, solar power, hydroelectric and marine -- all of which are at varying stages of maturity but with tide and wave the infant of the bunch. "Wind is in the vanguard of renewables. When it falls, then everything behind it is destroyed," Hurley told Reuters on the margins of the one-day conference in central London.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 2:19 PM | (0) comments |

 
"Rich Coast" my ass!
On Saturday I leave for Costa Rica for a two week reconnaissance mission to see how bad things really are there. We've heard rumors that the CHL isn't making as much progress as we would like to see in that so-called "species-rich" country. I'll see what we can do about that and report back in a couple of weeks. Until then, this is EG signing off.
- Owen, 9:53 PM | (1) comments |