At a New York Public Library panel discussion organized by the political and literary journal n+1 Tuesday night, Alex Gourevitch, a doctoral candidate in political theory at Columbia University (coincidentally, that same Columbia University where Dr. James Hansen works) questioned whether the Environmental movement premised on the "politics of fear", similar to the war on terror, by trying to unify people by scaring them with threats to their basic survival.

Mr. Gourevitch who did not portray himself as a skeptic of climate change explained his thesis.............

Environmentalism is a politics of fear. It is not a progressive politics. When I say it is a politics of fear, I don't mean that it just deploys hysterical rhetoric or that it exaggerates threats, which I think it does. I mean it in a much deeper sense.

Gourevitch quoted Al Gore as describing the climate change not only as the most urgent issue of our time, but also as a unique opportunity for current generations to affect the course of history. Gourevitch stated that this approach by Gore as "the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict that so often stifle the human need for transcendence."

Chad Harbach, the managing editor of n+1 disagreed with some of Gourevitch's arguments...."I would characterize this as the opposite of a politics of fear," Mr. Harbach said, saying that Mr. Friedman's arguments actually assuage fears even if they provide a "false security." Mr. Harbach warned that America's greatest fear is really not climatic catastrophe but rather a future without cheap fuel and constant economic expansion. Harbach noted the thoughts of NY Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, who has argued that investing in research and technology, along with developing new energy sources has the potential to create wealth and prosperity.

This is just a sampling of the one page article by Sewell Chan from the New York Times City Room, and I encourage you to read the rest of it right here.

Katie Fehlinger brings you part two of her interview with our hurricane and long range expert Joe Bastardi. You do not want to miss this one.

Katie also talks about a report dealing with the effects of global warming on children.

It seems like a lot of people are suddenly making trips to the polar regions of the earth. We recently had a large group of U.S. Senators and IPCC scientists go to Greenland. Remember that guy who went swimming in the arctic. Survivorman just had an episode from Labrador, while Man vs. Wild has been to Alaska and Iceland I recall. The NBC Today show is currently doing live broadcasts from opposite ends of the earth with Matt Lauer in Greenland and Ann Curie in Antarctica. We even had the NBC Sunday night football set go dark for the sake of energy conservation during the Dallas/Philadelphia game. Supposedly, the amount of power the studio saved was equivalent to the amount of energy an average household uses in one month.

I also came across this very interesting article from The Telegraph. In the article, explorer David Hempleman-Adams talks first hand about his recent expedition to Baffin Island, located within the Arctic Circle and the evidence of climate change that he and the locals have experienced. It is worth the read, no matter what your views on climate change are.

In about two weeks, the UN's intergovernmental panel on climate change will publish its final assessment of the impact of global warming, and according to an article from the Telegraph, the report will have some surprise conclusions.

According to the Telegraph article, the final IPCC assessment continues to say that the Arctic will be devastated by rising temperatures, but that the Antarctic will be spared the worst of global warming, as Antarctica's ice sheets will remain too cold for widespread melting before the end of the century and may even grow as more snow accumulates.

For the Arctic, the IPCC believes that the region will continue to see widespread loss of sea ice, similar to this year. Greenland's ice sheet is predicted to be almost gone by the end of the century and Arctic tundra will be replaced by forests, the final report will say.

Here is the latest sea ice anomaly chart (1979-current) from the Arctic region, courtesy of the Polar Research Group. Note, how far below normal the sea ice coverage area is now.

Here is the latest latest sea ice anomaly chart from around the Antarctic. Note, how the anomalies have been fairly consistent (up and down) since 1979, and if anything there has been a very slight shift toward a slightly higher than normal sea ice coverage anomaly since the mid-90's.

The widely accepted idea, based on climate modeling, that man-made global warming will accelerate itself (positive feedback) by creating more heat trapping clouds, such as cirrus is being challenged by a new study from the University of Alabama at Huntsville, which showed that individual tropical warming cycles, based on 30 to 60 day tropical temperature fluctuation data saw a decrease in coverage of heat trapping cirrus clouds (a strong negative feedback). As the tropical atmosphere warms, cirrus clouds decrease, which allows more infrared heat to escape from the atmosphere to outer space.

Dr. Roy Spencer, a principle research scientist at UAH, was surprised by the results. "The big question that no one can answer right now is whether this enhanced cooling mechanism applies to global warming," said Spencer. According to the study, posted on ScienceDaily, the only way to see how these new findings impact global warming forecasts is to include them in those same computerized climate models.

"Right now, all climate models predict that clouds will amplify warming. I'm betting that if the climate models' "clouds" were made to behave the way we see these clouds behave in nature, it would substantially reduce the amount of climate change the models predict for the coming decades," said Spencer.

The results of this research were published recently in the American Geophysical Union's "Geophysical Research Letters" on-line edition.

A study from the University of Wisconsin at Madison determined that forest fires during a 60-year period had the greatest direct impact on carbon emissions from the boreal forest system, which is second in size among forests only to the tropical rainforests.

The study, posted in the journal Nature used a computer model to simulate the carbon balance of one million square kilometers of the Canadian forest over the past 60 years, to determine the relative impacts of climate and disturbance by wildfire. The researchers found that the effects of CO2 and climate (temperature/precipitation) varied from year to year, but generally balanced out over time and area.

According to The ScienceDaily version, the researchers believe that fires shift the carbon balance in multiple ways, a couple such as the burning of organic matter which quickly releases large amounts of CO2 and the fact that after a fire the forest canopy will allow more sun to reach and warm the ground, speeding decomposition and CO2 emission from the soil.

According to S. Tom Gower, a UW-Madison professor of forest ecology, the boreal forest has been thought as a carbon sink historically, but based on the new study the forest has become a smaller sink and may actually be shifting toward becoming a carbon source.

Though the model is not currently designed to forecast future conditions, Gower says, "Based on our current understanding, fire was a more important driver (of the carbon balance) than climate was in the last 50 years. But if carbon dioxide concentration really doubles in the next 50 years and the temperature increases 4 to 8 degrees Celsius, all bets may be off."

A very recent story posted on RealClimate.org explains that there is increasing evidence that the hypothesized carbon cycle positive feedback has begun based on analysis of the oceans and their CO2 uptake.

According to the article, the ocean has a tendency to take up more carbon as the CO2 concentration in the air rises, because of Henry's Law, which states that in equilibrium, more in the air means more dissolved in the water. But, if you have warming at the surface then there tends to be some stratification of the ocean water (more warm and cold layers, which create barriers to water mixing). Less mixing means less replenishing of the surface waters by deep waters, which will mean less CO2 absorption. As I have stated in earlier pieces, the combination of the land biosphere and the oceans take up more than 1/2 of the carbon emission on the planet, but if climate change were to slow the uptake or even reverse it, then, according to the RealClimate story, climate forcing from fossil fuels would accelerate (positive feedback).

A study done by Le Quere et al. from 2007 found that the southern ocean has begun to actually release carbon since about 1990. The researchers believe this could be due to a windier Southern Ocean, as the wind can open ventilation channels between the atmosphere and deep ocean. The ventilation channels would let the high concentrations of CO2 from the deep oceans to ventilated out into the atmosphere. But, these same ventilation channels could end up letting atmospheric carbon in as the atmospheric CO2 concentration supposedly gets higher (back to Henry's Law).

A decrease in the North Atlantic Ocean uptake is also shown by the recent study from Schuster and Watson (2007), which I recently blogged about on October 22nd. (You will have to scroll down to the 22nd to see it)

After reading the story, it is obvious that there are still a lot of unanswered questions about the impact of climate change on carbon cycle feedback. As the story says, it is still poorly understood.

Thanks to Steve Bloom for the link

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

While the price of oil continues to skyrocket, the price of coal continues to fall, making it increasingly attractive to consumers across the globe. In the article from Bloomberg, the coast of a ton of coal is now down to $47 and European utilities are now willing to pay 50 dollars to ship it across the Atlantic. About ten years ago the cost of coal and oil was about the same, but now, West Texas Intermediate crude is five times more expensive than coal.

Coal use worldwide has grown 27% since 2002, which is three times faster than crude, and the three biggest U.S. coal companies forecast the largest increase in exports in 20 years.

"Coal is by far the cheapest fuel because there's no price on how much damage it causes," said John Holdren, a Harvard University professor of environmental science and director of the Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts. "Unless you get policies to put a price on carbon dioxide and other emissions, no other plants can compete." Five months ago Al Gore said the U.S. should adopt a "complete moratorium" on new coal-fed power plants unless all of the CO2 from them can be buried underground. Based on what is going on now, it seems like Gore's proposal has little chance of getting enacted anytime soon.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, more than 1,000 coal-fed power plants will be built in the next 5 years, mostly in China and India. "If those 1,000 plants get built without any controls on carbon emissions, we will careen into unmanageable changes in our climate," said Holdren.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Exxon Mobil Corporation predicted that energy demand worldwide will grow an average of 1.3% annually through the year 2030, and that hydrocarbons such as oil, natural gas and coal will still answer about 80% of the world's energy demand by 2030, according to an article from CNN Money. That 1.3% increase is down from a 1.6% annual growth estimate issued in December 2006 as the company now has expectations that automakers and airlines will introduce more efficient engines during the next 20 years.

Based on that forecast, the company sees carbon dioxide emissions rising at a rate of 2% a year, which is mostly based on the expectation of developing nations' heavy reliance on coal to fuel their expanding industrial economies. I really can't argue with that forecast, especially when you consider the very high and growing populations in these developing countries and the coal situation, which I just blogged about in the last post.

The company also predicts a 9% increase per year in the demand for renewable sources of energy, such as wind, solar and biofuels. With that increase, renewable fuels will still hold a very small piece (only 2%) of the world's energy demand pie by 2030. Currently, alternative fuels account for about 0.5% of the world's energy demand.

I just filled up at my local Exxon......$3.09 a gallon. Doing a lot of coasting down these central Pennsylvania hills.

As many of you already know, Katie and a film crew visited Duquesne University in Pittsburgh a couple of weeks ago for the global warming debate featuring Dr. Charles Keller and noted skeptic Dr. Fred Singer. In this video, Katie shows you some clips from the debate. In her next video, she personally interviews both Dr. Singer and Dr. Keller and presents them with many of the questions that we received from you on the commentary part of this blog.

Katie also discusses Hillary Clinton's new energy proposal and that University of Alabama study regarding global warming and heat trapping clouds.

Scientists using GPS measurements from stations on the Greenland bedrock since 2001 have determined that Greenland is indeed floating upwards at up to 4 centimeters (~1.6 inches) per year, and that rise has dramatically accelerated since 2004.

What is causing this? According to the study, posted on NewScientist, it is the shrinking Greenland ice cap. "The Earth is elastic and if you put a load on top of it, then the surface will move down; if you remove the load, then the surface will start rising again," explains Shfaqat Khan of the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen.

Khan and his team have determined that the southeastern tip of Greenland is most definitely rising upwards and that rise has clearly accelerated over the past few years. Khan is still not quite sure what caused the acceleration, "but it could be that more melt water is flowing into crevasses which is making the glaciers flow into the ocean faster," said Khan. (Remember the moulin piece I blogged about recently.) They also calculated that some of the ice is also lost through melting.

I realize that this story has been talked about on the web and in a few media outlets for about a week now, but I still think that a large portion of the general public has not heard about the global warming comments from John Coleman, the founder of the Weather Channel. Here is a link to his commentary, courtesy of Icecap. What do you think of John's comments?

By the way, John Coleman no longer works at the Weather Channel and is employed at KUSI in San Diego.

No, we are not under imminent attack...............

A large group of international oceanographers just recently finished deploying 3000 robots, which will observe the effect of climate change on the world's oceans in real time, according to an article from ABCNews in Australia.

The robots are called Argo floats. The Argo float, which is 1.5 meters tall, (~ 5 feet) is dropped to depths as much as of two kilometers (a little over a mile) below the surface and measures temperature, salinity and pressure. After the data is collected, the robot pops up to the surface and sends the data back via satellite to control centers in the U.S. and France. With the full deployment, data from every ocean on the globe will be available with average coverage of one robot per 3 degrees latitude and longitude.

According to professor Dean Roemmich from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California, Argo is similar to the real-time satellite analysis of the surface waters, which meteorologists such as yours truly depend upon during a regular basis. The difference is that Argo is looking at the sub-surface ocean, which gives scientists a better understanding of how global warming is affecting the world's oceans.

Argo data might also help scientists better predict intensity of tropical cyclones by improved measurements of the heat content of the waters that a storm is about to move over. Scientists in Australia also think that the Argo could help them predict upcoming drought.

Here is a link to a photo of Dean Roemmich (center), co-chair of the Argo International Steering Group showing off one of the Argo floats.

Interesting report just released from NASA Tuesday............

A team of NASA and University of Washington scientists have detected an ongoing reversal in the Arctic Ocean circulation which is triggered by atmospheric circulation changes that vary on decade-long time scales. What does this mean? It means that the scientists have determined that not all off the large changes in the Arctic climate that we have seen in recent years are a result of long-term trends associated with global warming.

The study was done by looking at data from 2002-2006 which measured changes in weight of columns of Arctic Ocean water from the surface to the bottom. The weight is influenced by factors such as the height of the ocean's surface and its salinity. A saltier ocean is heavier and circulates differently than one with less salt.

The results of the study suggested that the Arctic Ocean circulation (AO) changed from the counter-clockwise pattern exhibited in the 1990s to the clockwise pattern, which by the way was the dominant circulation prior to 1990. The authors of the study attributed the reversal to a weakened AO, which is a large atmospheric circulation pattern in the far northern hemisphere. The weakening AO reduced the salinity of the upper ocean near the north pole, decreasing its weight and thus changing the ocean's circulation.

"Our study confirms many changes seen in upper Arctic Ocean circulation in the 1990s were mostly decadal in nature, rather than trends caused by global warming," said team leader James Morison.

"The winter of 2006-2007 was another high AO year and summer sea ice extent reached a new minimum," he said. "It is too early to say, but it looks as though the Arctic Ocean is ready to start swinging back to the counterclockwise circulation pattern of the 1990s again."

Here is the link to the story on the NASA news website. It is worth the read, as I only touched on a few of the points.

In a new BBC article, environment correspondent Richard Black questions the validity of widespread claims that there is a bias in the scientific community against climate change skeptics. No doubt something we hear about in our comment section of this blog on a regular basis.

In an earlier article, Black invited skeptics to send him documentation or other firm evidence of bias. His new article talks about some of the responses he received. You can read about what he concluded here.

I expect to see plenty of comments on this one.

A new report from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program has determined that there is now a greater than three-to-one imbalance between the fossil fuel sources and the ability of vegetation to absorb carbon over North America, and that fossil fuel emissions for North America are greater than 25% of global emissions. The carbon absorption by vegetation, primarily in the form of forest growth, is expected to decline as maturing forests grow more slowly and take up less carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.The conversion of fossil fuels to energy is the single highest contributor with transportation second.

Report authors find it unclear how rapidly this carbon storage “sink” will decline and whether it might potentially become a source since changes in climate and atmospheric carbon dioxide could affect forest growth differently in different regions. Further warming, for example, could exacerbate drought, increasing carbon release through vegetation dieback and increased fire and insect disturbances.

Here is the link to the
North American Carbon budget. This particular chapter has some interesting graphs and figures.

Last month we asked our viewers to present questions for Dr. Charles Keller, an internationally known scientist specializing in atmospheric conditions and climate change and Dr. Fred Singer, a noted skeptic and president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project. In part one of this segment, Katie presents Dr. Keller with some of your questions. Next week it's Dr. Singer's turn. These are the same two men that participated in the global warming debate last month in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which was featured in one of Katie's Headline Earth segments.

October 2007 was the sixth warmest on record globally for surface temperature, according to a news release from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Here are some of the U.S. highlights from October......

--The average temperature for October in the contiguous U.S. was 2.1 F (1.2 C) above
the 20th century mean, making it the 9th warming October on record, based on
preliminary data.

--Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island had their warmest
October on record. For the entire Northeast, it was the second warmest October.

--Energy demand across the nation was 15% below average. I can vouch for that
after being pleasantly surprised with my $68 electric bill for October.

--Rainfall across the country was slightly above normal, which really does not mean
much, since you really need to break those numbers down regionally.

--The 2007 fire season was the second worst on record in the U.S., 2006 was the worst.

I just received this press release with my email, but their link to the story has not been posted as of this writing. When it is I will include the link.

Also, I realize we have had some issues with global warming site, especially slowness. I have forwarded some of the concerns from you, including myself, to our techs and they are looking at the problem.

Here are some of the more major points from the fourth and final assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was released over the weekend. Remember, the IPCC shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.

--The report concludes that it is "unequivocal" that Earth's climate is warming.

--The report finds that it is "very likely" (that's >90% likelyhood based on the chart) that emissions of heat-trapping gases from human activities have caused most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century, which is a stronger statement than the prior assessments.

--Studies confirm that current carbon dioxide and methane (heat trapping gases) exceeds by far the natural range over the last 650,000 years.

--11 of the last 12 years rank among the 12 hottest years on record (since 1850).

--Tropical cyclone intensity has increased over the past 30 years and this correlates to increases in tropical sea surface temperatures.

--There have been longer and more intense droughts, especially in the tropics and subtropics.

--Since 1900 the northern hemisphere has lost 7% of the maximum area covered by seasonally frozen ground.

--Sea levels continue to rise.

The future?

According to the story from the Union of Concerned Scientists, the IPCC assessment said that if we take no action to reduce emissions there will be twice as much warming over the next two decades than if we had stabilized heat-trapping gases and other climate revelent pollutants in the atmosphere at their year 2000 levels.

--The full range of the predicted global temperature increase by the end of the century has been expanded. The new predicted full range is (+2 to +11.5 F increase in temperature). Wow, they covered themselves pretty well there!

--The best estimate for the temperature increase by the end of the century is (+3.1 to +7.2 F)

--Most of the warming will be over land and at most high northern latitudes.

--Expect more frequent and severe tropical cyclones and heat waves.

--Increasing carbon dioxide concentration will lead to increasing acidification of the oceans.

You can read more about the IPCC fourth Assessment here.

We would love to hear your comments on this!

Researchers are proposing a new method of reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), according to an article from ScienceDaily. It involves the large-scale construction of water treatment plants which would enhance the ability of the ocean to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. The researchers from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania believe that 100 of these plants could cause a 15% reduction in CO2 emissions over many years, while 700 plants could offset all CO2 emissions.

How would this work? The water treatment plants would remove hydrochloric acid from the ocean by electrolysis and neutralize the acid through reactions with silicate minerals or rocks. This reaction increases the alkalinity of the ocean and its ability to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere.

The journal article, "Electrochemical Acceleration of Chemical Weathering as an Energetically Feasible Approach to Mitigating Anthropogenic Climate Change," is scheduled to appear in the Dec. 15 issue of ACS' Environmental Science & Technology.

I wonder how big these treatment plants would have to be, certainly not on the scale of your ordinary home town treatment plant.

According to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Polar Research Group, northern hemispheric sea ice continues to make a solid comeback as we head toward winter. The sea ice area in the northern hemisphere has almost reached the level it was last year at this same time. At the end of October, the sea ice anomaly was almost 3 million sq. km below normal, now it is about 1.2 million sq. km below normal, but that number seems to be stabilizing now, similar to last year.

Here is the link to the latest sea ice area chart for the northern hemisphere. Here is the latest anomaly chart that goes back to 1979.

Now to the southern hemisphere

Total southern hemisphere sea ice area continues to shrink as the summer approaches down there. Sea ice area is now averaging close to normal, but is still running a little bit higher than last year at this time. At the beginning of October there was about 1 million sq. km more sea ice compared to normal, while that number is closer to 200,000 sq. km now.

Here is a link to the latest southern hemispheric sea ice area chart and the anomaly graph.

I hope everyone has a safe and happy Thanksgiving!

Fall leaf colors were once again delayed in parts of the U.S. and Europe this year, which is becoming a common theme. Many blame the Earth's rising temperatures, but the correlation between rising temperatures and leaf color change is not as strong as it is for spring bloom, according to an article from Live Science. A new study from the University of Southhampton in England says that rising levels of carbon dioxide have been delaying the transformation of green leaves, at least in Europe for a few decades now.

Researchers conducted two large forest experiments in which poplar trees were separated into two plots, with one plot exposed to ambient levels of carbon dioxide and the other exposed to elevated levels. (The elevated concentration was 550 parts per million—the predicted atmospheric level for 2050—while current ambient levels of carbon dioxide are 375 parts per million.)

The researchers found that trees exposed to elevated levels of carbon dioxide retained their leaves and stayed greener longer than those exposed to ambient levels. Study author Gail Taylor said that the research data provided compelling evidence that leaf color change in forest ecosystems will be delayed as the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide continues to rise, independent of increased temperatures.

The results are detailed in an online edition of the journal Global Change Biology.

In part two of Katie Fehlinger's interview series, noted global warming skeptic Dr. Fred Singer responds to some of your questions. Feel free to comment on both Dr. Singer's and Dr. Keller's responses, we would love to hear your opinion!

Katie also talks about the IPCC's fourth assessment on climate change.

I know, some of you are probably saying, "Oh no, not another polar bear story!" Actually, this story, which was posted on Nature.com seems to provide the strongest evidence yet that there is a link between early sea ice melt and the increased rate of starvation and drownings of old and young polar bears.

Scientists from the United States and Canada studied 20 years of data from polar bears captured along the coast of Hudson Bay and determined that fewer of the youngest and oldest bears survived in years when the sea ice broke early.

"Survivorship has dropped in the cubs, subadults and very old animals and is directly related to the date of break-up," says Ian Stirling, a biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service in Edmonton, Alberta, and an author on the report.

Historically, ice has filled Hudson Bay 8 months each year, now the ice is clearing nearly 3 weeks earlier than it did 30 years ago.

Here is the link to the short article. The 'Missing Cubs' section of the article outlines the study and the results.

A group of wealthy nations have apparently broken a promise to pay more than a billion dollars to help developing countries cope with the effects of climate change.

According to The Guardian, the EU, Canada, Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and New Zealand in particular said that they would jointly pay developing countries 410 million dollars each year from 2005-2008 under the terms of the Climate Adaptation Agreement made at a UN meeting in 2001 at Bonn, Germany. So far, only 177 million of the 1.2 billion due by the end of 2007 has been paid into the funds. Another 106 million has been pledged by specific countries, but has not yet been paid. I say we send out Tony Soprano and his boys to collect!

Monday meeting...........

Also, I just read that Al Gore was invited to the White House by President Bush for the first time since 2001. Bush had a 40-minute meeting with Gore discussing climate change and celebrated Gore's Nobel Peace Prize. Do you think Bush is having a change of heart in regards to global warming?

With predictions that more than 3.5 billion people could be living in areas with severe water shortages by 2025 because of climate change, desertification and overpopulation there will need to be a more efficient and less expensive way to remove the salt from seawater. A group of scientists from India believe that nuclear desalination is the answer.

"Nuclear energy seawater desalination has a tremendous potential for the production of freshwater," according to Meenaleshi Jain of CDM and Environmental Services and Positive Climate Care Pvt. Ltd in Jaipur.

How would this work?

Floating nuclear plants would represent a way to produce electrical energy, with minimal environmental pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Plants could be sited well offshore anywhere there is dense coastal population. In addition to providing cheap electricity, the nuclear plants would also power a desalination plant with their excess heat, according to S.S. Verma from SLIET.

The article from Water Online also noted........

A. Raha and colleagues at the Desalination Division of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, in Trombay, point out that Low-Temperature Evaporation (LTE) desalination technology utilizing low-quality waste heat in the form of hot water (as low as 50 Celsius) or low-pressure steam from a nuclear power plant has been developed to produce high-purity water directly from seawater. Safety, reliability, viable economics, have already been demonstrated. BARC itself has recently commissioned a 50 tons per day low-temperature desalination plant.

Co-editor of the journal, B.M. Misra, formerly head of BARC, suggests that solar, wind, and wave power, while seemingly cost effective approaches to desalination, are not viable for the kind of large-scale fresh water production that an increasingly industrial and growing population needs.

Using NASA satellite data, a research team from the University of New Hampshire has estimated that Hurricane Katrina killed or severely damaged 320 million large trees in forests along a portion of the Gulf Coast. The widespread damage led to these forests releasing large quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Young forests play an important role in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by photosynthesis. A major hurricane like this can kill large numbers of trees, and thus temporarily reduce photsynthesis. All dead wood will be consumed by decomposers, resulting in a large carbon dioxide release to the atmosphere, as the ecosystem exhales it as forest waste product for years to come, according to the NASA article.

The research team studied Landsat 5 satellite data before and after the hurricane to get a good sampling of tree deaths. The team calculated total carbon losses to be equivalent to 60-100% of the net annual carbon sink in the U.S. forest trees! "It is surprising to learn that one extreme event can release nearly as much carbon to the atmosphere as all U.S. forests can store in an average year," said Diane Wickland, manager of the Terrestrial Ecology Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Update

Patrick J. Michaels, a senior fellow in environmental studies and author of Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians and the Media, just wrote a piece disputing the Christian Science Monitor's claim that Katrina was the largest ecological disaster in U.S. History because it killed or damaged around 320 million trees, which is based upon the above story. Here is the link to Michaels piece, via the CATO Institute. The CATO institute basically a libertarian think tank.

NASA scientists from the Goddard Space Flight Center have been working for several years to create and refine a satellite map of long-term temperature change in Antarctica.

The above new image, from the NASA earth Observatory website, shows the long-term changes in yearly surface temperature in and around Antarctica between 1981 and 2007. Places that have warmed are red, while places that have cooled during the period are blue. (Note: most of you should be happy that there are no big red or blue dots on this map!) The darkest red areas may be linked to major iceberg calving events, which exposed new areas of open water.

How were these measurements taken? They were made by using thermal infrared heat observations made by a series of NOAA Satellite sensors. The image shows trends in skin temperatures, which are the temperature measurements from the top millimeter of the land, sea ice or sea surface, but not the air temperature. Unfortunately, according to the article, each sensor has its own quirks and may measure temperatures a bit different, which is part of the reason why scientists estimate the level of uncertainty in the measurements is between 2 and 3 degrees celsius, which is pretty high and does not give me a lot of confidence in the accuracy of this map.

On a related note, U.S. and U.K. researchers have recently stitched together more than 1000 views of Antarctica to make a new high-definition polar panorama using U.S. Landsat spacecraft, according to the BBC News article. The resolution is quite impressive at 15 meters per pixel, or half the length of a tennis court. It took over 100 billion pixels to cover Antarctica. This map is ten times more detailed than any other done previously.

Both images courtesy of NASA

In part three of Katie Fehlinger's four-part interview series, Climate expert Dr. Charles Keller answers more questions from some of our viewers. Feel free to comment on any of Dr. Keller's responses in our comment section.