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.