Urgent action call on US climate

Ten leading US climate scientists spoke on Tuesday of the need for more urgent action to tackle global warming.

They warned that climate models might have grossly underestimated the rises in temperature that will soon occur.

The team called for a major shift to cleaner fuel technologies to constrain the rapid growth in greenhouse gases.

'We're in the middle of a large, uncontrolled experiment on the only planet we have,' said Don Kennedy, the editor-in-chief of Science magazine.

'Global warming has taken place and at our present rate of doing business, there is going to be a lot more of it and it will have serious consequences,' added the co-organiser of the open gathering of researchers in Washington DC.

Room for doubt?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, has reported a 0.6C rise in the Earth's mean global surface temperature during the 20th Century - with a much greater rise expected in the coming decades.

'It's time for politicians to sit up, take notice and actually start to act on the problem.'

I just saw a PBS thing on Alaska warming. No anthropogenic claims but a conclusion that it is warming a bit. So the question is one that I've asked before and went without an answer.

If there is no anthropgenic warming of any consequence, is it incumbant upon civilisation to combat global climate change?

If you just want to say 'but it is anthropogenic' never mind. Otherwise I would like to hear an opinion.

Really? I wouldn't have though they would have TV out there in them hillbilly shacks. Is PBS the only channel you get so you manage not to watch most of the time?

That is a *serious* understatement.
http://www.wohlforth.net/whaleandsupercomputer/ whaleandsupercomputer.... From Preface: 'But now science, too, took notice. Average winter temperatures in Interior Alaska had risen 7 degrees F since the 1950s. Annual precipitation increased by 30 percent from 1968 to 1990. Alaska glaciers were shrinking, permanently frozen ground was melting, spring was earlier, and Arctic sea ice was thinner and less extensive than ever before measured. Winter was going to hell.' 'The Iñupiaq elders of the Arctic noticed first. Sustained for a thousand years by hunting whales from the floating ice, they had developed fine perception of the natural systems around them. Scientists predicted that global climate change would come first and strongest in the Arctic and went there to learn how the sky, ice, snow, water and tundra interacted to drive changes in the world's environment. Fascinating discoveries accumulated along that path. But the Iñupiat already knew the patterns in the system and how they changed through time, a sense of the whole the wisest researchers recognized and envied. Some sought access to that culture and way of seeing. Others studied how the Iñupiat were adapting to the new world, knowing that the rest of the mankind would eventually (have to) follow.'

Oh, you have been answered _over_ and _over_. You are just *permanently ignorant*

Yup. The principle is 'don't foul your own nest'. It is very simple and most children are taught it. The ones that don't and tend to squat in their own shit are sent to mental institutions. P.S. how do you manage to post from there?...

Beyond that there is self interest as most of our investment in infrastructure, dependence on farm produce, and exploitation of natural resources _depends_ on a *stable* climate, regardless of cause.

Actually, it is a good point. See first part above.

Only to add more empty wind to the debate as you have done for years now, never learning a thing but industriously adding smoke where you can.

NOT urgent. If it was,,, the EU, Japan, Canada, would take meaningful actions to to do something. They have not. The Kyoto conference was in late 1997.

Nope. Another lie.

Fixing natural climate change has nothing to do with fouling your own nest idiot. To answer your question though, I burn lotsa coal here Ian. It heats my home, it runs the generator for my PC and it burns rather nicely in my

BBC article

We 'know how' to make hydrogen fuse too. Doesn't mean commercial fusion is just around the corner.

Screw with the air supply on a space ship and you get throw out the airlock without a suit.

Clear enough.

josh halpern

Let's hope you're right. But who pays for this? It seems the payment should be directly dependent on emissions, if not retroactively, then as soon as possible.

That's a bit of an irony, don't you think? The whole reason we use fossil fuels is because they are still cheaper to dig up than solar energy is to gather. So if you want to burn fossil fuels and use solar energy to sop up the mess, does that mean there's a net energy loss in the process?

If the 'extraction equipment' can't be powered by conventional fuels, that means there's a net energy loss, which menas that replacing the fossil fuels with solar power immediately would have the same effect, right?

Anyway, it certainly seems fair that if we are going for a mop-up policy, each additional release of carbon should be taxed to pay for its own cleanup. This seems not only to be fair, but has the added value that it would improve the competitive status of non-fossil-fuel alternatives almost immediately.

Thanks for this encouraging suggestion.

The USA is a pretty big CO2 sink. It's not even clear that we're a net contributor to the recent atmospheric CO2 rise. I see no need to budget nor assess for ambient CO2 extraction yet.

I don't know of any energy source without a bevy of disadvantages. The one you here cite for solar is accompanied by many more, including other price factors. I find it more 'fitting' than ironic that the deserts provide excellent combination of solar plenty and vegetative minimum to be promising candidate sites for very efficient ambient CO2 extractors.

If a solar-powered device gathers sunlight in the desert, the notion of it representing a net energy loss doesn't seem like even a trifling concern. What would you have us do with that 7.5 W/m3 we'd otherwise let hit the ground?

Not that I can see. But I'm not entirely sure what you're proposing, so I can't describe otherwise. I'm all for using appropriate technology. And I'm truly excited at the R&D advances like the 'printable solar cells' featured in the July/August issue of Technology Review

Gosh, I don't even agree with your characterization of CO2 as a pollutant. But if we do find it desireable to optimize atmospheric CO2 levels in the future, we're not the helpless victims of the CO2 experiment.

I guess I don't see the up side of the kind of price increases you desire.

I'm glad you're not beyond encouragement. I hope there's much more to encourage the alarmed real soon.