ARCTIC SEA-ICE ON A DEATH-SPIRAL?

Some think so, after it shrank to the smallest area on record this year. The US National Snow & Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) says the minimum extent of 4.13 million square kilometres was well under the previous record low of 5.32 million square kilometres set in 2005. See the BBC report.

But that is hardly surprising, given the temperatures shown at this Website for this August. Look at the hotspot at the top of the world in the ENSO SST Analysis graphic, and look at how far it is above the baseline average. At this rate NOAA-NCDC will have to add a new colour to the right of the scale underneath. Funereal black?

CO2 WILL MAKE OCEANS ILLEGAL BY 2050

If carbon-dioxide emissions are not cut drastically, they will have so altered the chemistry of the oceans by the middle of the century that the water-quality criteria set by the US Environmental Protection Agency will have been violated. Not to mention creating a serious risk for what lives in them. Click here for the Science Daily article.

MORE NASTY SNIPPETS FROM GOH RESEARCH

Global-overheating research and news items keep delivering more and more nasty stuff. Here are some more snippets.

Because we are making the planet warmer, the amount of moisture in the atmosphere has increased by 0.41 kilograms per cubic metre per decade since 1988. Details in this report from
Science Daily. A report three weeks later on the BBC's site on an article in Nature underlined the point.

A British-led study has offered the first evidence that climate-change has weakened the Southern Ocean carbon-sink . Click here for details

Then there's this report in
Science Daily to cheer you up, which says that the mortality of plants could increase 40% if land temperatures increase by up to 4 degrees Celsius, which modelling predicts for this century--unless you take the less conservative models which predict far higher rises.

Ex-president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, rightly worries about the world's water-supply. Creatures that are 80% water should. You would think.

Then there's the methane from bogs, which will obviously worsen the feedback-loop.

Meanwhile, over the US of A, a judge washes his hands in front of the world. It's political, not legal, he tells the State of California, dismissing its case against carmakers--see the BBC report. There are none so blind...

BUSH AIDE SAYS NO SAFE TEMPERATURE RISE

Professor John Marburger, the US chief scientist and an advisor to President Bush, said
in this BBC interview that global-overheating is man-made and that there is no safe temperature increase.

GREENLAND ICECAP TREMBLING WITH APPREHENSION

Mini-earthquakes and the acceleration of glaciers on the Greenland icecap are signs that global-overheating is speeding up, reports
Science Daily.

Estimates of the consequent rise in sea-levels by 2100 now range up to 2 metres, far more than the 20-60cm in IPCC's prognosis.

As if that were not bad enough, the Arctic sea-ice is getting thinner and thinner, as this report, also in Science Daily, makes alarmingly clear. Down to a metre, a 50% drop from what it was in 2001.

INSIGHT ON THE WORKING OF THE BRAIN NOW PROVED

This blog has from time to time gone right off the topic of energy to publish ideas about DNA, cellular proteins and the detailed workings of neurons. It is gratifying to see that empirical research has now shown those ideas to have been correct--see this report in
Science Daily.

The point was underlined by another report that came out a month later, also in Science Daily.

For the earlier postings click here, and here, and here.

CLIMATE-CHANGE HELPS GOBBLE HUMAN FLESH

Just when you thought it might be safe to come out of your climate-change bunker and stop living on slimmer's soybean and freeze-dried lawn-cuttings, you get this cheerful little item in
Science Daily.

CORAL AND ARCTIC SEA ICE VANISHING FAST

Research reported on the BBC shows that coral is vanishing from the earth faster than predicted. The UN expects 60% of it to have gone by 2030.

Arctic sea ice is also vanishing at a great rate of knots, and this year is expected to set a record for minimum cover. Click for the BBC's story.

MUCK IN ASIAN AIR OVERHEATS EARTH TOO

Tiny particles from burning wood and fossil-fuels in Asia are another significant contributor to regional overheating. Details in this BBC News report.

As if we needed another cause of global overheating.

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.

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.

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!

YET MORE PROOF OF THE TRUTH ABOUT DNA

This BBC story again underlines the truth of what this blog first daringly postulated in November 2006 and reiterated in May 2007--i.e., that the traditionalists' notions about DNA are as much junk as the moniker they have long attached to most of our DNA.

Why did it take them so long to see it? How could they be so blind or arrogant or both and just dimiss what they did not understand, but which had for some reason been there for aeons, as junk? From the time I first heard the phrase 'junk DNA' I thought we would one day find out that it was not junk, and I said so to a DNA researcher way back in 1994, although it was not till November 2006 that I realised what it was. My first vague thoughts had been that it was like the comments in a program--which was nowhere near the truth that it is the machine that processes the program. The whole thing is a continuum, with all parts being necessary.

What is incredible is that such superlative intelligence can be built into and contained in what seems nothing but strings of chemicals, albeit rather complex ones, built of such simple fundamentals. It is enough to make you ponder on the real nature of life, the universe and everything. It is certainly enough to make you realise that Darwin et alia hardly knew/know a blind thing.

One wonders how much intelligence is built into DNA, and whether it has sufficient processing power to experiment, and thus to play an active role in improving an organism or in producing offshoot organisms. We no know that bacteria can 'vote' and that the preponderant chemically-communicated 'opinion' rules, so perhaps the preponderance of a particular genetic luggage in an organism's DNA, due to the survival of the fittest, causes more than just weight of numbers giving rise to certain offspring. It also causes joint processing and thus a greater refinement in the direction pointed to by those numbers. In other words DNA plays an active role not a passive one.

Footnote (23/07/2007): This article in ScienceDaily, which overturns traditional notions of proteins, shows that the functioning of the body is at base molecular. Myriads of molecular engines make up a cell (and not just proteins, obviously); myriads of cellular engines make up an organ; many of organic engines make up an organism. The high-speed internal action of the molecular engines will always be beyond our analytical capabilities, so the so-called 'designer drugs', which were predicated on the notion that proteins were static in shape, will remain a mirage.

HALF A DEGREE TO GLOBAL CATASTROPHE

'Confronting Climate-Change: Avoiding the Unmanageable, Managing the Unavoidable', written by an expert panel (SEG) organised by Sigma Xi, the scientific honour society, and sponsored by the United Nations Foundation, is outlined in the May/June issue of Update, the magazine of the New York Academy of Sciences. The report says accumulating evidence suggests that climate-change may not be gradual. Several major tipping-points, such as the collapse West Antarctic ice-shelf, major melting of the Greenland ice-cap, desertification of the Amazon rain-forest, and changes in the frequency of strong El Nino oscillations could cause sudden and catastrophic changes over a few years rather than a few centuries. The authors conclude that allowing the global surface temperature to rise more than 2 to 2.5 degrees Celsius over the next hundred years would sharply increase the risk those catastrophic impacts. Greenhouse gases now in the atmosphere have already committed the planet to a rise of about 1.5 degrees.

We are therefore only 0.5-1.0 degrees away from the risk of swift catastrophe.

To stay within the recommended range, the researchers say greenhouse-gas emissions must stablise at not much more than present levels by 2015 at the latest, then fall to no more than a third of present levels by 2100.

Fat chance!

The sea is rising at about 3mm a year and Antarctic glaciers are surging along, which the IPCC report did not factor in.

For the full Sigma Xi SEG report, click here.

CHARMING ANSWER TO CLIMATE CHANGE IN SOIL?

Is this is a magic, climate-fixing triple bullet? Does the answer, literally, lie in the soil? Is a little charring all we need? Can we just 'char'm the global mess away with three simple steps?

You pyrolise biomass, which (1) generates renewable energy, and (2) makes 'agrichar' a material that reduces greenhouse gases, and (3) makes your soil far more productive (the only problem is that at the moment the supply of agrichar is miniscule). For details, go to this ScienceDaily article.

(Agrichar is a black-carbon byproduct of pyrolysis, in which green waste or other biomass is heated without oxygen to generate renewable energy.)

BUSINESS AS USUAL MAKES EARTH UNUSUAL

China shows itself to be as incredibly stupid about the planet as America in this BBC report. What a wonderful way to mark World Environment Day!

Business-as-usual condemns the planet to become increasingly unusual, i.e., decreasingly good for human life. This NZ Herald cartoon says it all.

NASA SAYS CLIMATE TIPPING-POINT CLOSE

NASA's Goddard Flight Centre and Columbia University's Earth Institute say that the Earth's climate is dangerously close to a number of tipping points. Just 1 degree Celsius more above the average global temperature we had in 2000 will be enough to send things over the edge. Read the report on their latest research in Science Daily. Another report on the same research is here and the May 30 NASA article is here.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that we will be there soon. Nations are banking their futures on oil, huge investment is being put into oil pipelines, coal-fired power-stations are being built at a furious rate in China, America is tearing mountains to pieces to get vast quantities of coal to feed its power-stations, tens of millions of planet-trashing Black Stuff cars are being added annually to the 900 million already infesting the planet, etc., etc.

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC'S ICE MELTDOWN SHOCK

The cover story in the latest edition of the National Geographic magazine (June 2007) is 'The Big Thaw.' It should be required reading for every in-denial-prat of a politician and petrol-head, every pusher of the Black Stuff (oil and coal), and every pusher of fossil-fuelled machines.

It talks of projections of ice-cover, which predict huge reductions, and the consequent rise in the sea-level, but it also says that the meltdown is happening far faster than former projections ever expected. Greenland and West Antarctica and glaciers all over the world are melting at an alarming rate.

Excerpts: 'But lately, the ice loss has outstripped the upward creep of global temperatures.'

'Eric Rignot, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who has measured a doubling in ice loss from Greenland over the past decade, says: "We see things today that five years ago would have seemed completely impossible, extravagant, exaggerated." '

'At the rate the Arctic is now warming [temperatures three to five degrees Celsius higher could be back soon]--"by mid-century, no problem," says Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona, who has studied the ancient climate [130,000 years before the last ice-age]. "There's just unbelievable warming in the Arctic. It's going much faster than anyone thought it could or would." '

'The latest signs from Greenland have persuaded many ice researchers that sea level could rise three feet [a metre] by 2100. Rignot, who has measured the rush of glaciers to the sea, says even that figure may turn out to be an underestimate. Greenland, he notes, could ultimately add ten feet to global sea level. "and if this happens in the next hundred years instead of the next several hundred years, that's a very big deal."

Indeed. Enjoy your coal-fired electricity. Enjoy your fossil-fuelled life-destroying vehicle. Enjoy the remains of Earth as we have known it for all of human civilisation. Enjoy your share of trashing the only planet we can live on in the entire universe.

SMITHSONIAN WATERS DOWN CLIMATE SCIENCE

If you want to keep your funding, you don't upset the politicians, even at the expense of scientific facts, and even if you are the prestigious Smithsonian. The full report can be read in the
International Herald Tribune.

Money and the maintenance of old habits and institutions are always more important than the planet and the people who live on it. Well done, Smithsonian! You've junked science.