Global Warming reaches "tipping point"

[irishgrl]

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Reuters
Global warming reaches 'tipping point': report

By Deborah Zabarenko Wed Mar 15, 4:38 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Human-fueled global warming has reached a "tipping point," according to a new survey of scientific research that found warming would continue even if greenhouse gas emissions halted immediately.

"It would keep on warming even though we have stopped the cause, which is greenhouse gases from the combustion of fossil fuels," David Jhirad of the Washington-based World Resources Institute said on Wednesday.

The rate of warming would be slower, Jhirad said in a telephone interview, but a kind of thermal inertia would ensure that global temperatures continue their upward trend.

He referred to a report released by the nonprofit institute this week that analyzed research reports on climate change for 2005.

"Taken collectively, they suggest that the world may well have moved past a key physical tipping point," the institute wrote.

Jhirad said there were actually two tipping points. The first is that there is no doubt human activities cause global warming; a more physical tipping point is that the effects of global warming are evident now.

The report, based on research published in journals including Science and Nature, also found the effects of climate change were so severe they should spur urgent action to prevent more damage and to combat damage that has already occurred.

"We can't assume this change is so far in the future that we can afford to delay," Jhirad said.

The World Resources Institute, founded in 1982, is a nonpartisan environmental think tank that works with industry and other ecological groups around the world.

CARBON TRADING

New policies should encourage companies to make technological and commercial innovations that will cut air pollution, Jhirad said, adding U.S. companies were also clamoring for political leadership.

Jhirad said he was "underwhelmed" by U.S. political leadership on this issue. In 2001, President George W. Bush pulled the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol, the United Nations' main plan to curb global warming. He denounced Kyoto as an economic straitjacket that would cost U.S. jobs and said it wrongly excluded developing nations.

The Kyoto agreement obliges some 40 industrial nations to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008 to 2012.

Jhirad said the United States should adopt a system of carbon trading, like one in place in much of Europe, where companies that emit few greenhouse gases get credits that can be traded with companies that emit a lot.

"The market has expanded tremendously in terms of the volume of trading and the value of the carbon credits," he said. "That's what we would like to see (in the United States): a market-friendly approach that would set incentives for technological innovation, which is going to be needed."

Also on Wednesday, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Civil Society Institute released a survey that found 83 percent of Americans wanted more leadership from the federal government to reduce the pollution linked to global warming.

The survey contacted 1,029 adults in the United States from February 23 through 26 and had an error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

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And then there's THIS:

Ice Retreats in Arctic for 2nd Year; Some Fear Most of It Will Vanish

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: March 15, 2006

For the second year in a row, the cloak of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean failed to grow to its normal winter expanse, scientists said yesterday. The finding led some climate experts to predict a record expansion of open water this summer.

"We keep looking for the ice to recover, but it isn't," said Mark C. Serreze, a senior scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., which monitors the region using satellites. "Unless conditions turn unusually cold this spring and summer, we may be looking at sea ice losses in 2006 that will rival what we saw in 2005."

The ice retreat recorded last September was the biggest since satellites began routine monitoring in 1979 and was probably the biggest in 100 years, according to Dr. Serreze's research group and an independent University of Illinois team.

The new findings on winter ice were first reported yesterday in the British newspaper The Independent.

Next week, when the Arctic begins six months of daylight, the warming trend is likely to be amplified by the shift from ice to water, since water absorbs sunlight that ice would otherwise reflect.

Scientists studying the region are divided over how much of the Arctic shift is from the region's large natural variations and how much is being driven by the global buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases emitted mainly by smokestacks and tailpipes.

Some experts on the region, including Jamie Morison of the University of Washington, say they remain convinced that the biggest force determining the extent of Arctic sea ice is wind patterns, which cause part of the ice cap to revolve like a giant turntable, propelling a steady river of floes out past Greenland into the North Atlantic.

When ice is purged that way, the resulting open water can absorb more heat from the air, then expel that heat through the winter, limiting the thickness and area of new ice.

"I have a feeling the temperature rise over the Arctic Ocean is more due to the loss of ice from wind-driven export, rather than the loss of ice being due to temperature rise," Dr. Morison said.

But Dr. Serreze and others disagree, saying it is hard to explain the changes in ice area without including the broader warming of the atmosphere and oceans that has been linked by almost all climate experts to the intensifying greenhouse effect.

Many experts agree that despite the short-term complexities, if emissions of greenhouse gases are not curbed the human influence will dominate and the region could well be nearly bereft of ice later in the century.

Yesterday, a NASA team reported that one of the greenhouse gases, ozone, which is also a component of smog, appeared to be having an outsize warming effect in the Arctic.

Carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from human activities, can last a century and tends to diffuse uniformly around the world, exerting its warming influence evenly.

Ozone generated in polluted cities and by industrial sources in the Northern Hemisphere tends to accumulate in the lower layers of the atmosphere over the Arctic in winter, when a lack of sunlight prevents natural chemical reactions from breaking it down.

As a result, it appears to be contributing to winter warming there, said Drew Shindell, the leader of the NASA research, which was conducted at the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan.

Dr. Shindell said the findings showed there was a double benefit to curbing this particular pollutant.

"Reducing ozone pollution can not only improve air quality but also have the added benefit of easing climate warming, especially in the Arctic," he said.

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well, we might as well be prepared for even more catastrophic weather.
Just one more reason to HATE BUSH. As if we needed another....

[Peestie]

Ah more good news

[David]

This is awful, but I just worry about tsunamis on the Western U.S. coastline once our subduction zone gives.

[DavidMn]

I know the movie The Day After Tomorrow was just a movie, but it makes you think.