Shifting The World To 100 Percent Clean, Renewable Energy As Early As 2030: Here Are The Numbers.
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A new study predicts that global warming will increase far faster over the next five years than previous predictions due to increased solar activity and the El Nino southern hemisphere oscillation cycle:
The world faces record-breaking temperatures as the sun’s activity increases, leading the planet to heat up significantly faster than scientists had predicted for the next five years, according to a study. [...]
The work is the first to assess the combined impact on global temperature of four factors: human influences such as CO2 and aerosol emissions; heating from the sun; volcanic activity and the El Niño southern oscillation, the phenomenon by which the Pacific Ocean flips between warmer and cooler states every few years. [...] The analysis shows the relative stability in global temperatures in the last seven years is explained primarily by the decline in incoming sunlight associated with the downward phase of the 11-year solar cycle, together with a lack of strong El Niño events. These trends have masked the warming caused by CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
As solar activity picks up again in the coming years, the research suggests, temperatures will shoot up at 150% of the rate predicted by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Lean and Rind’s research also sheds light on the extreme average temperature in 1998. The paper confirms that the temperature spike that year was caused primarily by a very strong El Niño episode. A future episode could be expected to create a spike of equivalent magnitude on top of an even higher baseline, thus shattering the 1998 record.
Of course, the sub-headline to this report in the Guardian also says:
New estimate based on the forthcoming upturn in solar activity and El Niño southern oscillation cycles is expected to silence global warming sceptics
I hate to disagree with whoever wrote that, but no one who receives funding from an industry that has a stake in denouncing global warming as a myth and a hoax (i.e., Big Oil) is going to change their public opinion on this matter regardless of how high the temperatures get. We saw the same thing from the “scientists” and spokespersons for the Tobacco Industry who denied for decades that there was any link between smoking and cancer and heart and lung diseases. We will continue to see the same folks from the same conservative think tanks like the Heartland Institute, AEI and the Competitive Enterprise Institute writing the same denunciations of humanity’s influence on climate change no matter how much evidence supports the scientific consensus that CO2 emissions are a significant contributor to global warming. Senator James Inhofe will continue to rail against respected and published climatological scientists as part of a grand conspiracy by the environmental movement and leftists in general to destroy our economy. In short, Big Oil and its conservative allies will continue to fiddle while the planet burns.
Why? Because there’s money to be made now from burning oil and coal, and in fifty years all of the senior managers and directors of these companies will be dead and the effect on the world’s climate from the continued use of fossil fuels will be someone else’s problem. They’ll have made their profits and passed them on to their heirs. And the rest of the world’s populace will be paying, many with their lives, for the selfish short sighted attitudes of those who are literally obstructing any possibility of reducing the effects of our continued use of their products.
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/environment/#141607
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Looming catastrophe: can the Gippsland Lakes be saved?
Leslie White
March 9, 2009
TIME has all but run out to save the iconic Gippsland Lakes from ecological ruin. LESLIE WHITE reports
On the Princes Highway near Warragul, Victoria, is a billboard that shows a picture of a smiling old man with his grandson fishing the pristine Gippsland Lakes.
“You are now entering the Gippsland Lakes catchment,” the Victorian Government-sponsored billboard says.
“Our lakes are precious. Pass them on.”
About 200km downstream at Duck Arm, off Lake Victoria, not a waterbird can be heard.
Sandworm, barnacles and mussels are largely gone; many aquatic plants are dead.
Until recently the water was pink in parts and blue-green in others as two colourful algaes lived together.
The Gippsland Lakes were in the grip of a toxic marine (saltwater) algal bloom for 15 months since flood followed bushfire in 2007.
The flood washed decades of phosphorus, nitrogen, other nutrient, herbicide and pesticide into the lakes – though the system had been degrading for decades.
Boatyard manager Peter Bull said it wiped 30-40 per cent off his maintenance business; retired fisherman Barry McKenzie says the lakes are being “stuffed up through lack of management and forethought”, and Barry’s Bait Supply owner Barry Barling says the flood put him “right out of business”.
“The lakes turned green, there were no crabs, no worms, no seagrass, everything died,” Mr Barling said.
The Gippsland Lakes is Australia’s largest inland waterway, made up of major Lakes Wellington, Victoria and King – a system 70km long and 10km across at its widest. Fresh water enters from the Latrobe, Thomson, Macalister, Avon, Mitchell, Nicholson and Tambo catchments, which drain a 20,600sq km area.
Major land uses include irrigation dairying, horticulture, and plantation forestry.
The Macalister Irrigation District, Melbourne Water via the Thomson Dam, the four major coal-fired power stations and the Maryvale Paper Mill take more than 400,000 megalitres from the system annually – 45 per cent of Lake Wellington’s fresh flows, more in some years.
Salt has invaded the once-fresh lakes since an entrance to the open ocean was created in 1889, and as fresh inflows have decreased with extraction by industry, and by drought.
Salt is killing reeds, freshwater plants and centuries old redgums 2km up the Latrobe River.
Lake Wellington often produces salt readings two-thirds that of seawater; nearby Lake Coleman has recorded readings double that of seawater.
Testing in 2008 showed nine dolphins found dead on the lake’s shores died of mercury poisoning – mercury allegedly coming from gold mining and the Maryvale Mill upstream.
A 1997 study by the Marine and Freshwater Resources Institute found all of 300 black bream sampled had elevated levels of pesticides.
A 2006 study found the Latrobe River had one of the highest levels of antibiotics detected on the planet.
The local towns of Bairnsdale, Lakes Entrance, Paynesville, Metung, Sale and Loch Sport are massively dependent on tourism, recreational and commercial fishing, boating and skiing.
Landowners say management practices have hit agriculture also – there is 20,000ha of useless land near Lake Wellington – and the MID also battles irrigation-induced salinity.
Duncan Malcolm, chairman of strategic planning body the Gippsland Coastal Board, said the management structure was working “as well as any management structure ever can”.
However, he conceded Lake Wellington would not be restored to its former state.
“It will not be fresh if the current levels of extraction continue,” Mr Malcolm said.
“There’s power generation, Melbourne Water and irrigation . . . we made a judgement some time ago that the likelihood of those quantities changing (was very small).”
In 2001, the Victorian Government assembled the Gippsland Lakes Taskforce, which brought together 11 groups all partly responsible for the health of the lakes and has overseen the spending of some $20 million.
A spokesman for the Government said it had placed a cap on water consumption in the Gippsland Lakes catchments in 2004 pending research into environmental water requirements, currently being undertaken.
“We are modernising outdated and inefficient infrastructure in MID to help improve the health of the Gippsland Lakes,” he said.
Duck Arm resident Ross Scott said he was “crushed”.
“We’ve been here for 48 years and we’re just heartbroken,” he said. Mr Scott said the lakes should be managed by a single body.
Gippsland Lakes Taskforce chairman Barry Hart did not return calls from The Weekly Times.
Source: http://www.weeklytimesnow.com.au/article/2009/03/09/59205_water.html
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I’m no expert on the environment, by which I mean our physical environment, not social. Currently, governments are concerned about climate change and carbon emissions.
But as I am in my 60s, I never knew about the environment until I was about 21 when I first heard the word “pollution”. Nevertheless, I think people had an intuitive idea way back when. I remember as a child holidaying at an island in Northern Queensland and being warned that the sun there was very different and very hot, so to be careful about sunbathing. No-one used sun-blockers in those days. The blacker you got, the better, no matter how leather-like your skin became. We didn’t know about the hole in the ozone layer above Australia and we didn’t know about ultra violet rays causing skin cancers.
As for air pollution, when we started to travel overseas you did notice it. London had those awful inversions of air (or whatever you call them) and it were always raining……acid rain, no doubt. The Thames was filthy but that has since been cleaned up. Europe was quite polluted especially Milan in Italy and Venice. Venice also has the other problem of water levels rising, due to ice caps in the poles melting. LA was incredibly polluted (air) on my first visit. It had that problem too of being in a lower sea level pocket which meant the air pollution just stayed there. My second visit showed a noticeable drop in air pollution there. My worst experience of air pollution though was New Delhi in India. You can actually see the black soot in the air. I immediately got bronchitis.
Australia has huge problems with soil salination and erosion and a lack of water mostly in the southern states.
The funniest quote I can tell you is that while we were in LA last time staying with friends, I was talking about the hole in the ozone layer over Australia and my host asked of her husband: “Why don’t we have one of those in America?” Astounding.
Please let me know if you are more of an expert than me at jencam1 [@] optusnet.com.au
I can make you a user of this blog and you can write more scientific proclamations.
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I have done my time being an activist for causes. I’m a baby boomer, so I’ve fought to end the Vietnam war, sexism, and racism. You’ll see more about me in the About page. I’ve also put in the work in my teacher union, being the president in most schools I worked in and going to all the conferences on the weekends and representing my colleagues to the principal of the schools.
I’m tired. I raised a child, had a full-time job and partner and on top was a member of various left-wing political groups.
Hi ASIO. You already have my name. But now I’m using a blog to disseminate ideas. You can’t stop the electronic spread of information via Twitter and YouTube now. Look at the Iranians.
I believe in the small phrase in the tagline of this blog and while I believe in social justice, I also believe in economic justice. And race, gender and other minority groups’ justice.
I’d like anyone who also wants to blog left wing ideas to let me know too. This is not a multi user blog but I can let you in as a user. Email to Jenny at jencam [@] optusnet.com.au if you are interested.
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