Earth on Fire: The Overheating Planet

Earth on Fire: The Overheating Planet

NOTE ON POPULAR POSTS

The reason some popular posts are tagged ‘no title’ is not because they have no title—they all do—but because the old Blogger embedded the title at the top of text, and the new software does not see that. You can see the titles in capitals at the start of each snippet. (It would be nice if Blogger introduced an upgrade program that could fix this little problem.)

Popular Posts

Friday 27 July 2007

YET MORE CLIMATE-CHANGE LEVERS FOUND

Oh dear! Just when optimists might have hoped that the news could not get worse, researchers have found a hitherto unknown driver of manmade climate-ruination, as this BBC News item shows.

That, on top of this research, also reported by the BBC, was enough to make this a most a joyous week for all the Earthlings that noticed and cared.

The report on the BBC World Service of that research on rainfall included an interview with one of the research team. He said they could not understand why the actuality was worse than the computer models had predicted. He said they would have to go back and look at the models.

Which underlines the point made so often in this blog. Things are worse than we are being told, and much worse than we know, so we are headed for a very nasty future on this planet.

Monday 23 July 2007

EUROPEAN MELTDOWN ANOTHER HARBINGER

This article in the New Zealand Herald, which shows Greece on a 'war-footing' to combat the effects of the present heatwave, is the right idea--about forty years too late. We should have put the whole planet on a war-footing long ago so as to get us off the black-stuff long before the carbon-dioxide buildup went past the point of no-return and headed for critical. As it now has and is.

Saturday 21 July 2007

GLACIERS & ICECAPS CAUSE MORE SEA RISE

A new University of Colorado at Boulder study (funded mainly by the National Science Foundation and NASA), reported in ScienceDaily, the ice-loss from glaciers and ice-caps is expected to cause more global sea rise this century than the massive Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheets.

The researchers concluded that glaciers and ice-caps are now contributing about 60% of the world's ice to the oceans and the rate has been markedly accelerating in the past decade, said Emeritus Professor Mark Meier of CU-Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, the lead author of the study. The contribution is about 415 cubic kilometres of ice annually--nearly the volume of water in Lake Erie--and is rising by about 12.5 cubic kilometres per year.

In contrast, the CU-Boulder team estimated that Greenland now contributes about 28% of the total global sea rise from ice-loss and Antarctica about 12%. Greenland is not expected to catch up to glaciers and ice-caps in terms of sea level rise contributions until the end of the century, according to the study.

The team estimated that the accelerating melt of glaciers and ice-caps could add 10-24cm of sea-level rise globally by 2100. That does not include the expansion of warming ocean water, which could double those numbers, to 20-48cm. A 30cm sea-level rise typically causes a shoreline retreat of 30 metres or more, and about 100 million people now live within a metre of sea level.

If the sea-level rise generated by melting glaciers and ice-caps is 60% of the total the total rise anticipated by 2100 by this study is 1.6 times the above numbers--i.e., up to 32-77cm. But the expected temperature-increase used in this study is not given. If it was only the IPCCC's modest figure, the change in sea-levels will obviously be far greater--even several times as much. Add what floods and storm-surges can contribute, and a very grim prospect is in store for all coastal cities and their ports and airports, and for low-lying countries, and thus for vast numbers of people.
ANOTHER BLOW TO JUNK-SCIENCE ADDICTS

Those who sneer at the massive amount of evidence for climate-change, and exist in deep denial of it, now have to put up with even more weighty disproof of their blind assertions, as this BBC News item shows.

On top of that is the news that this year is shaping up to be one of the warmest on record. The January-to-June data is now off the satellites and the numbers do not look good. Globally, for land, temperatures were the warmest on record, at an alarming 1.18 degrees Celsius above the baseline average. And for land and ocean combined they were the second warmest. Click here.

But don't worry about any of that, Junkheads. Just carry on driving your planet-trashers, and loving your coal-fired power-stations, and chopping down swathes of forest. Yay!