You can add this one to your list of environmental concerns.
Billions of trees died in the record drought that struck the Amazon in 2010, raising fears that the vast forest is on the verge of a tipping point, where it will stop absorbing greenhouse gas emissions and instead increase them.
The dense forests of the Amazon soak up more than one-quarter of the world’s atmospheric carbon, making it a critically important buffer against global warming. But if the Amazon switches from a carbon sink to a carbon source that prompts further droughts and mass tree deaths, such a feedback loop could cause runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences.
If we lose the world’s largest forest then it doesn’t matter what we do or don’t do in terms of capping carbon emissions. Scientists tell us it would be too late to alter the events which would follow such a catastrophe. Can it become any clearer that we can no longer afford to sit around and idly debate this issue?
Trees in the western United States are dying twice as quickly as they did three decades ago and scientists think global warming is to blame.
Meanwhile, congressional Republicans have begun an all out assault on global warming – “Senate Republicans have proposed similar bills that would “delay regulations aimed at abating climate change, or … bar the government from using any environmental law to fight global warming pollution“, while their stooges at Fox relentlessly continue attacking global warming science – Bill O’Reilly has a call-in to Al Gore to have him explain the winter snow. Jackass.
Surveys indicate that half of all Americans are skeptical about climate change which surely has the boys at Exxon rejoicing with the knowledge that their multi-million dollar campaign of misinformation is paying dividends.
To those who still doubt climate change science, ask yourself this: what are the consequences if you’re wrong?
As for the 97% of climatologists who believe that humans do play a significant role in global warming, their answer would be: we end up with a cleaner and more environmentally friendly planet. Win-win.
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I’m from Louisiana.
I should be used to this, but with the recent cold snap they got, everyone back home is facebooking all about “yeah, where are all those global warning fools now” and “in your face Al Gore” and all kinds of really, really depressing stuff to read. I tried to comment some thing about how climate is different than weather and how here in Canada, the truth of global warming is more visible than when you live in a place that is nearly the same temperature year-round. They’re like the frog in a pot getting cooked and they don’t know it.
But I might as well be telling them I’m a communist.
I had consoled myself in thinking that at least these are the least educated demographic of my friends and eventually they may see the light. Now I’m depressed all over.
By the time these fools get a clue, we’ll all be cooked!
VP Gore answered Bill-O’s challenge to explain winter snow: http://bit.ly/gCw80A
(also, Stephen Colbert helps Bill-O double down on explaining the unexplainable: http://bit.ly/e6sNNR)
For those who aren’t up with the play, the cold snaps are the ultimate expression of global warming. They are happening because unprecedented amounts of air are decending on the Arctic pole in the Polar High Pressure system, and driving surface polar cold air towards the equator. This is the “open freezer door” effect. The real problems begin when the “freezer” (Arctic Zone) has largely thawed out. It is almost certain that next summers Arctic ice minimum will be another record low.
The Republicans do not yet realise that the commercial disruption (immense) caused by the cold snaps and the heat waves to follow is the beginning of the true cost of their failure to act on Global Warming over the last 2 decades. And the cost of this exceeds the cost of acting ten fold. Those Bible Bashers will soon realise that their inaction is bringing the entire US closer to God than they could ever have imagined, as the extreme weather in the process of being unleashed will become truly Biblical in proportion.
The little stream flowing through the Grand Canyon now is not what carved out that immense landscape. It was water flows many times that, and that is the weather to which we are moving at breakneck speed. Farmers in the mid west are reporting one in a thousand year rainfalls, three times in the same season, destroying their crops and making recovery nearly impossible. Look at what we have had in Australia this Summer. Floods every where…and bushfires. One sixth of the world’s coking coal for steel making comes, or rather did come, from the flood affect regions causing a five month halt to production.
So to those Republicans who are feeling smug about their little political coup last year, I say enjoy the glory while you can because it it will not be long at all before your life is snowed on, deluged on, heated to exhaustion, burnt in unprecedented fires, pounded to pieces with rock mellon sized hail, sucked up in tonadoes where they should not occur, blown away with extreme wind storms, perpetually disrupted with the frequency of these events,,,,. And this will occur far sooner now because of your actions, with weather that the US helped to create more than any other nation on earth. Enjoy.
Labeling people as deniers, skeptics, tree-huggers, etc. do not help in the resolution of the debate.
The issue is not about whether there is climate change or not; everybody knows the climate is constantly changing.
The debate here is not about climate change per se but whether human CO2 emissions is driving the climate to go crazy. The CO2 argument is doubtful because at only 350 ppm, there is no physics theory that will support that 350 ppm can drive up the temperature of the 999,650 ppm of nitrogen and oxygen. The laws of thermodynamics cannot allow the argument to be valid. In other words, scientists will have to show the physical mechanism by which CO2 quantity increase of .01 to .02% can indeed be the knob to bring about the warming up of the other elements on the atmosphere.
On the other hand, the argument relating to deforestation, which is another human activity, is not being referred to as the cause of the present behavior of the climate, instead, as in this article, the loss of the forests is presented as the result of climate change instead of being the primary cause of climate change. Why is that so, when the forests constitute the main part of the absorption side of the carbon and hydrologic cycles?
The loss of the forests is not due to CO2 but by harvesting and clearing activities of humans for the expansion of conventional agriculture, industrial development and human settlements.
Also, there is another element in the atmosphere that is more substantial than CO2, and that is H2O in the form of water vapor and as clouds. H2O is lighter than air while CO2 is heavier than air (CO2, therefore, sinks and cannot form part of the atmosphere for long). H2O has twice the capacity to absorb heat than CO2, and H2O at 5% of the atmosphere as against .350% for CO2, H2O can absorb solar radiation several times more than CO2. In other words, if there is anything that should be reduced in terms of atmospheric presence, it should be H2O.
And there is only one way to bring water down to the ground instead of in the atmosphere, and that is to restore or increase the hectarage or acreage of forests world wide. Doing so will not only bring down the waters it will also bring down the levels of CO2.
The other thing that bothers this writer is that climate history as determined in ice core studies, show that global temperatures historically have swung from ice ages to thermal maximums. We know today that we have just gone through the last Ice Age some 10,000 years ago, and that the ice have been retreating since then. Logically, therefore, if we have not yet reached thermal maximum, the ice should continue to retreat until we shall have reached the historical maximum of global temperatures. And if the ice will continue to retreat, it will mean that there will be more water going up in the atmosphere. And so it is likely, that from what could have been 0.0% water vapor in the atmosphere during the last Ice Age, and that it is now between 4% to 5%, we should therefore expect that with the continuation of the retreat of the ice, atmospheric water should go up to 10%. The climate scenario therefore will be different from previously experienced by humans, and it will have nothing to do with CO2, but solely on account of the increase in the quantity of water vapor in the atmosphere resulting from the continuing retreat from the Ice Age and the return to Thermal Maximum.
Scientists are not talking how far will temperatures go during thermal maximums.
Scientists are also misleading the public by not being forthright about the normal swings of the Earth’s temperatures from Ice Ages to Thermal Maximums; and that controlling industrial and vehicular emissions cannot stand against this natural developments.
Scientist are not saying that the real antidote to unwanted climate change is the climate stabilizing function of the forests, and thus the genuine solution should be the aggressive restoration of the forests and not anything else.