Nature_and_Environment.7 - Global Climate Change

CLIMATE COLLAPSE
The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare

The climate could change radically, and fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues.

FORTUNE Magazine

Monday, January 26, 2004

By David Stipp

Global warming may be bad news for future generations, but let's face it, most of us spend as little time worrying about it as we did about al Qaeda before 9/11. Like the terrorists, though, the seemingly remote climate risk may hit home sooner and harder than we ever imagined. In fact, the prospect has become so real that the Pentagon's strategic planners are grappling with it.

The threat that has riveted their attention is this: Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world's climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a decade*like a canoe that's gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. Scientists don't know how close the system is to a critical threshold. But abrupt climate change may well occur in the not- too-distant future. If it does, the need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societies*thereby upsetting the geopolitical balance of power.

Though triggered by warming, such change would probably cause cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, leading to longer, harsher winters in much of the U.S. and Europe. Worse, it would cause massive droughts, turning farmland to dust bowls and forests to ashes. Picture last fall's California wildfires as a regular thing. Or imagine similar disasters destabilizing nuclear powers such as Pakistan or Russia*it's easy to see why the Pentagon has become interested in abrupt climate change.

Climate researchers began getting seriously concerned about it a decade ago, after studying temperature indicators embedded in ancient layers of Arctic ice. The data show that a number of dramatic shifts in average temperature took place in the past with shocking speed*in some cases, just a few years.

The case for angst was buttressed by a theory regarded as the most likely explanation for the abrupt changes. The eastern U.S. and northern Europe, it seems, are warmed by a huge Atlantic Ocean current that flows north from the tropics*that's why Britain, at Labrador's latitude, is relatively temperate. Pumping out warm, moist air, this "great conveyor" current gets cooler and denser as it moves north. That causes the current to sink in the North Atlantic, where it heads south again in the ocean depths. The sinking process draws more water from the south, keeping the roughly circular current on the go.

But when the climate warms, according to the theory, fresh water from melting Arctic glaciers flows into the North Atlantic, lowering the current's salinity*and its density and tendency to sink. A warmer climate also increases rainfall and runoff into the current, further lowering its saltiness. As a result, the conveyor loses its main motive force and can rapidly collapse, turning off the huge heat pump and altering the climate over much of the Northern Hemisphere.

This excerpt is only about a fifth of this informative article. Read the rest here:
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/print/0,15935,582584,00.html

Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us

·Secret report warns of rioting and nuclear war
·Britain will be 'Siberian' in less than 20 years
·Threat to the world is greater than terrorism

Mark Townsend and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday February 22, 2004
The Observer

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'

The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.

The report was commissioned by influential Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall, who has held considerable sway on US military thinking over the past three decades. He was the man behind a sweeping recent review aimed at transforming the American military under Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Climate change 'should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern', say the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.

An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is 'plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately', they conclude. As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.

Last week the Bush administration came under heavy fire from a large body of respected scientists who claimed that it cherry-picked science to suit its policy agenda and suppressed studies that it did not like. Jeremy Symons, a former whistleblower at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said that suppression of the report for four months was a further example of the White House trying to bury the threat of climate change.

Read the rest here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1153530,00.html

From Yahoo. (linked by Glen in the Old Nature forum, which I just read ;-) >>The person behind the leaked Pentagon report, Andrew Marsall, cannot be accused of the same partisan politicking. Marsall, 82, has been an advisor for the defense department for decades, and was described by The Observer as the author of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's plans for a major transformation of the US military.<<

I limit my energy consumption and try to impact my place of work toward that end. Course, I'm not working right now, but when I return to my position as CEO of a YMCA, I'll have the power to do that.

A Science Daily report on the future of water supplies in the west: >>The reduction in Western mountain snow cover, from the Sierra Nevada range that feeds California in the south to the snowcapped volcanic peaks of the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest, will lead to increased fall and winter flooding, severe spring and summer drought that will play havoc with the West's agriculture, fisheries and hydropower industry. "And this is a best case scenario," said the forecast's chief modeler, L. Ruby Leung, a staff scientist at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash. Leung delivered the sobering report at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting, and the full results of her study will appear soon in the journal Climatic Change, now in press.<< http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/02/040217073823.htm

I think it's more accurate to say that there is something close to a consensus that this is one of the reasonable/possible scenarios, especially since there is good evidence of just such a sudden and dramatic shift happening before.

I've been reading about this particular prospect for a few years now, having first been introduced to it by William Calvin in this 1998 piece from The Atlantic Magazine.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98jan/climate.htm

It's an excellent introduction.

For those of you who want a lot of a little more, here is an outstanding page of related links from the folks at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution:

http://www.whoi.edu/institutes/occi/currenttopics/ct_abruptclimate.htm

CLIMATOLOGY Defusing the Global Warming Time Bomb Global warming is real, and the consequences are potentially disastrous. Nevertheless, practical actions, which would also yield a cleaner, healthier atmosphere, could slow, and eventually stop, the process By James Hansen Paradox in the notion of human-made global warming became strikingly apparent to me one summer afternoon in 1976 on Jones Beach, Long Island. Arriving at midday, my wife, son and I found a spot near the water to avoid the scorching hot sand. As the sun sank in the late afternoon, a brisk wind from the ocean whipped up whitecaps. My son and I had goose bumps as we ran along the foamy shoreline and watched the churning waves. That same summer Andy Lacis and I, along with other colleagues at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, had estimated the effects of greenhouse gases on climate. It was well known by then that human-made greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), were accumulating in the atmosphere. These gases are a climate “forcing,” a perturbation imposed on the energy budget of the planet. Like a blanket, they absorb infrared (heat) radiation that would otherwise escape from the earth’s surface and atmosphere to space....continued at Scientific American Digital "http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm? chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=000E3A5C-D9D8-101E-990A83414B7F0123" The article is worth the price of admission to Scientific American Digital, or you can pick up a copy of the March issue on the newsstand.

At the risk of having a few pies flown my way, I differ from these views on global warming. A key substantiation to the Gagosian article in the WHOI set, was that radical climatic shifts have occurred historically, long before human intervention was a twinkle in anyone's eye. The issues surrounding when and where the key ocean and atmospheric currents will change are nearly entirely random, and the randomness is only incidentally exagerated by human influences. What was described was that these large currents change, and only that they change, not any causative relationship between the two. Considering global warming from CO2 emissions to be a stimulus of that radical climate change is like thinking that rolling a pair of dice faster makes the outcome more random than if they were rolled naturally. All of the concerns around global warming that I've heard pale compared to the extreme climatic changes that the earth has experienced naturally, regularly in roughly 105,000 year cycles for the past 3 million years. 15,000 years ago, (a geologic blink) most of North America was under a mile-deep sheet of ice. The oceans were 300 feet lower than currently. Now that is climate change. The tragedy is that human society has structured itself to not be able to adapt to climate change, whether it is human induced or natural. We build in harms way, we have rigid property laws that restrict social movement, we have destroyed so large a % of the planet's viable habitat and overpopulated to such an extent that we are incapable of adapting. That is the tragedy, and should be the focus of what to oppose/support. Global warming is itself a symptom. The information that we could derive from inability to adapt to climate change (human exagerated and/or natural) is hidden from our view. Our exageration of the focus of global warming itself further hides it in many respects, rather than reveals it loud and clear. Toxins (heavy metals, new molecules, genetically modified entities, non-degradable materials) are more permanently damaging, and identifiable as strictly human "contributions".

I don't come close to presuming I have the least understanding about global warming. Maybe it's true, maybe not. But I can't help feeling that we are more like butterflies than redwoods. Our concept of change over time may be skewed.

GLOBAL WARMING "SCIENCE" INCONSISTENT, CONTRADICTORY Proponents of policies to control human-induced global warming cite science as the basis for their claims and proposals. There is only one problem -- as much as they claim otherwise, there is no scientific consensus for their theories, says H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis. No matter what the climate phenomenon, says Burnett, if it can in some way be presented as unusual by global warming alarmists, it is argued to be "further evidence of global warming," even if it contradicts earlier "evidence" pointed to by the same people. For example: o In late January, newspapers in England reported a study indicating ongoing global warming may plunge the world into the next ice age. o This is not the first study that has predicted a great freeze; indeed, some scientists were warning of the coming ice age as early as the 1970s. o The main difference is that those early predictions were based on supposed evidence the Earth was undergoing a significant cooling trend since the 1940s and that a naturally occurring ice age was overdue. This is the problem with trying to forge appropriate policy responses to possible threats posed by future climate change -- for what scenario do we plan? In the realm of climate change research, different models looking at the same phenomenon using the same principles of atmospheric physics often produce dramatically varied results, says Burnett The only thing clear concerning the many purported effects of the Earth's warmer climate is that, because they contradict each other, human-caused global warming cannot be causing all of them simultaneously and it may not be responsible for any. Source: H. Sterling Burnett, "Climate science or science fiction?" Washington Times, February 23, 2004. For text http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20040222-103504-1476r.htm For more on Global Warming Science http://eteam.ncpa.org/policy/Global_Warming/Science/

There's been a lot of ... shall we call it "dismissive PR" generated by the fossil fuel lobby and their "front groups". Follow the money. Look for smoke screens. Check the facts and then check again. Some folks are working hard to lie to us.

{Nature_and_Environment.7.20}: {kai} Wed, 25 Feb 2004 13:27:00 CST (0 lines)
{erased by kai Wed, 25 Feb 2004 13:28:38 CST}

> Some folks are working hard to lie to us.

Yes, they are.

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Petre: That's classic "greenwashing."

A simplistic piece from a Sun Myung Moon owned, unabashedly right wing newspaper, that gathers its information from the "National Center for Policy Analysis," which is a conservative, big business oriented "think tank" funded by

DaimlerChrysler Corporation Fund
El Paso Energy Foundation
ExxonMobil Foundation
Eli Lilly and Company Foundation
Lilly Endowment Inc.
Procter & Gamble Fund

...and others.

More info:
http://www.cspinet.org/integrity/nonprofits/national_center_for_policy_analysis.html

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The "National Center for Policy Analysis" site
http://www.ncpa.org/

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More, in their own words:

"The National Center for Policy Analysis is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy research institute that seeks innovative, private sector solutions to public policy problems. The NCPA works with scholars at colleges and universities and other think tanks in the United States and around the world. Its target audiences include policymakers, journalists, business and community leaders and the general public. Its mission is to develop and promote private alternatives to government regulation and control, solving problems by relying on the strengths of the competitive, entrepreneurial private sector."

http://www.ncpa.org/~ncpa/about/p1.html

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Want to learn more about think tanks and disinformation or greenwashing:
http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Think_tanks

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"http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=19990426&c=2&s=callahan"

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And finally, but perhaps I should list if first:

"http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=10242"

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I hope we won't be seeing more from this group quoted as credible information here.

...and these:

Excerpt of:
$1 BILLION FOR IDEAS:
CONSERVATIVE THINK TANKS IN THE 1990S
http://www.commonwealinstitute.org/ncrp.callahan.1.htm

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"How the polluters' lobby is using phony front groups and New World Order wackos to attack the Kyoto global warming treaty."
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/1997/12/gwrightwing.html

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"Plus: Meet the real interests behind the anti-enviro wingnuts."
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/1997/12/gw_chart.html

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The junkyard dogs of science
"In a special report, Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber expose the shady figures behind the dirty war that’s being waged by big business against environmental regulation."
http://www.newint.org/issue314/junkyard.htm

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Lots more out there, of course.