Vancouver and Montreal could become flooded

CANADA - If Greenland's ice sheet melts (which a group of UK scientists predict will happen by 2014) the rising sea levels would flood Canadian coastal cities Vancouver and Montreal.

The data is relatively simple. If the Greenland ice sheet melts it will raise sea levels by 7 meters (23 feet). Melting ice in the antarctic could raise sea levels even more or faster. Due to the low proximity of much of Vancouver and Montreal they would experience excessive flooding. Approx 70% if Vancouver would be under water and approx. half of Montreal would be flooded too.

Canadian province Prince Edward Island would also be hard hit, with 30% of the island being lost to the sea and erosion (indeed the island would become two islands).

The United States would also be hard hit, with New Orleans, all of southern Louisiana and a large chunk of Florida would all be underwater.

Sarah Palin hates Polar Bears?

Palin fought safeguards for polar bears with studies by climate change skeptics

United States - The Republican Sarah Palin and her officials in the Alaskan state government drew on the work of at least six scientists known to be skeptical about the dangers and causes of global warming, to back efforts to stop polar bears being protected as an endangered species, the Guardian can disclose. Some of the scientists were funded by the oil industry.

In official submissions to the US government's consultation on the status of the polar bear, Palin and her team referred to at least six scientists who have questioned either the existence of warming as a largely man-made phenomenon or its severity. One paper was partly funded by the US oil company ExxonMobil.

The status of the polar bear has become a battleground in the debate on global warming. In May the US department of the interior rejected Palin's objections and listed the bear as a threatened species, saying that two-thirds of the world's polar bears were likely to be extinct by 2050 due to the rapid melting of the sea ice. Palin, governor of Alaska and the Republican nominee for US vice-president, responded last month by suing the federal government, to try to overturn the ruling. The case will be heard in January.

Though the state of Alaska has no polar bear specialists on its staff, the governor's stance has pitted it against the combined scientific fire-power of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the US Geological Survey, and world experts on the mammal.

In its lawsuit, Alaska said it opposed the endangered label partly because the listing would "deter activities such as … oil and gas exploration and development". Oil companies recently bid $2.7bn (£1.5bn) for rights to explore the Chuckchi sea, an established polar bear habitat.

The threatened species status might also impede the building of an Alaskan natural gas pipeline, which Palin has called the "will of God". In a letter last year to the US interior secretary, Dirk Kempthorne, she said she believed the polar bear population was "abundant, stable and unthreatened by direct human activity". She opposed the call for the listing because it "did not use the best available scientific and commercial information".

Her own Alaskan review of the science drew on a joint paper by seven authors, four of whom were well-known climate-change deniers. Her paper argued that it was "certainly premature, if not impossible" to link temperature rise in Alaska with human CO2 emissions.

The paper, entitled Polar Bears of Western Hudson Bay and Climate Change, has been criticized for relying on old research and ignoring evidence that Arctic sea-ice is melting at a quickening pace. Walt Meier, a world authority on sea ice, based at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre, said: "The paper doesn't measure up scientifically."

One co-author of the paper, Willie Soon, completed the study with funding from ExxonMobil — which has oil operations in Alaska's North Slope — as well as from the American Petroleum Institute. Soon was a former senior scientist with the George C Marshall Institute, which acts as an incubator for climate-change scepticism. The institute has received $715,000 in funding from ExxonMobil since 1998.

In May, ExxonMobil announced that it was no longer funding Marshall and other groups linked with climate-change denier views. It said this was to avoid "distraction from the need to provide energy while reducing greenhouse gas emissions" and stressed that the company did not "control the research itself".

Another co-author of the document was Sallie Baliunas. In 2003 she and Soon were criticized when it was revealed that a joint paper had been partially funded by the American Petroleum Institute. Thirteen scientists whom they cited issued a rebuttal and several editors of the journal Climate Research resigned because of the "flawed peer review". A third co-author of the polar bear study, David Legates, a professor at Delaware University, is also associated with the Marshall Institute.

The citation by Palin and her officials prompted complaints from Congress. One member, Brad Miller, dubbed the polar bear study phony science.
Palin told Miller: "Attempts to discredit scientists...simply because their analyses do not agree with your views, would be a disservice to this country." Miller now says that Palin's use of the paper shows she differs greatly from John McCain, the Republican presidential contender, who has pressed for scientific integrity. "Turning to the cottage industry of scientists who are funded because they spread doubt about global warming is not integrity," Miller said.

Palin's submission consulted J Scott Armstrong, a specialist in forecasting, who regards the global warming issue as "public hysteria".

Two other climate change deniers were cited. One was Syun-Ichi Akasofu, formerly director of the International Arctic Research Centre, in Alaska, who argues that climate change could be a hangover from the "little ice age". He is a founding director of the Heartland Institute, a thinktank that has received $676,500 from ExxonMobil since 1998.

Timothy Ball, a retired professor from Winnipeg, is cited for his climate and polar bear research. He has called human-made global warming "the greatest deception in the history of science". He has worked with both Friends of Science, and the Natural Resources Stewardship Project, which each had funding from energy firms.

Kert Davies, research director at Greenpeace US, said the state of Alaska under Palin's leadership had relied on scholars who argue the opposite view to that of the overwhelming consensus in the scientific community. "It shows that she is completely out of touch with the urgency of the climate crisis."

Last month Palin agreed that the Alaskan climate was changing but added: "I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made." She later tried to retract the statement.

University of Calgary working on CO2 Scrubber

University of Calgary climate change researchers say they are close to figuring out how to commercialize the capture of carbon dioxide directly from the air with a simple system that could be set up anywhere in the world.

If they can make it work, it would allow greenhouse gas to be removed from ambient air and reduce the effect of emissions from transportation sources such as cars and airplanes.

"That's the excitement about it. It's a tool for dealing with diffuse CO2 emissions from transportation that account for roughly half of emissions," physicist and climate change scientist David Keith said Tuesday in a phone interview from his Calgary office.

That's important given how conventional systems for capturing CO2 work. Most involve installing "scrubbing" equipment at, for example, a coal-fired power plant to capture carbon dioxide produced during the burning of coal. But a system that can take CO2 out of ambient air is attractive because cars and airplanes aren't equipped with such scrubbers.

"You could do it wherever labour or capital costs are the cheapest and wherever you can best put the CO2," said Keith.

Over the summer, Keith and his team conducted an outdoor test of its seven-metre CO2 capture tower at the University of Calgary sports stadium.

The tower acts as a scrubber, with sodium hydroxide, also known as caustic soda, reacting with air blown into its base. A metal honeycomb system inside the tower slows down the flow of caustic soda, allowing it to efficiently scrub CO2.

While Keith said the technology isn't new — it's been used since the 1950s in industrial processes that call for carbon dioxide-free air — he believes his team has surmounted one of the two biggest obstacles to CO2 capture.

For the system to be effective, it must remove more carbon dioxide from the air than it emits as a byproduct of the energy used to run the scrubber. This summer's experiment showed that can be done, said Keith.

He estimates that if the electricity used to run the ambient air scrubber were to come from a coal-fired power plant — a heavy emitter of CO2 — he could capture 10 times more CO2 than the coal plant emitted.

The second catch, of course, is finding somewhere to store the CO2.

While some scientists have suggested storing it deep underground or at the bottom of the ocean, it's not yet clear how effective or affordable that would be on a large scale.

Marlo Raynolds, executive director of the Pembina Institute, an Alberta-based environmental think tank, said Keith's system merits the research effort.

"But while we advance technology like this, we need to deploy current technology that we know works now — conservation, hybrid vehicles. And we have to have the right policies in place to promote that, such as a price on carbon," Raynolds said.

"I think David Keith would be the first to admit it will be a long time before we see these things on street corners."

Indeed, Keith stresses that point, saying, "The steps between this and building an engineering company that gets a lot of smart people working on this project are pretty big."

Other researchers — most notably at Columbia University in New York City and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California — are also working on ambient air scrubbing technology, and Keith said he'd like to investigate potential commercial partnerships with them.

Certainly there is incentive beyond doing the environment a good turn.

Richard Branson, head of Virgin Group, has made a standing offer of $25 million US for anyone who can come up with a system to remove the equivalent of one billion tonnes of carbon dioxide or more every year from the atmosphere for at least a decade.

The University of Calgary's scrubber tower experiment will be featured in January on an episode of Discovery Channel's new Project Earth series.

Carbon taxes originally a Conservative idea

Canada is in the midst of a new federal election and the biggest thing on the agenda is a proposed new carbon tax and income tax cut the Liberal Party is pushing for.

But here's the rub: Its not originally a Liberal idea. Its a Conservative one. Stephen Harper's Conservative Party commissioned a Conservative think tank to make a study into what ways the government could cut carbon emissions in Canada and NOT harm the economy. They spent several million dollars on the study and the conclusion was: Tax carbon omissions and there will be no detrimental effect to the Canadian economy.

But the oil industry in Alberta didn't like the report's conclusions, so they have since pressured Stephen Harper to ignore the findings and to simply do nothing about greenhouse gases.

However the Liberal Party saw the report and said "Hey, tax carbon omissions... not a bad idea. Why aren't we doing this?" And it has since become party policy and no doubt will some day pass in parliament.

So if carbon taxes was originally a Conservative idea, why not just run with it? Well the answer is simple. The Alberta oil industry is funding the new Conservative Party and they're not about to bite the hand that feeds them.

The NDP, the Green Party and the BLOC also support the carbon tax. Indeed according to a poll conducted last march 72% of Canadians support taxing greenhouse gases.

Heck, if we held a Referendum on the topic of carbon taxes (and lowering income taxes simultaneously), its pretty much guaranteed to pass.

Lets pretend for a moment that the Conservatives win a minority government, which could happen. The opposition parties could join together and vote in a referendum on the topic and then let Canadians decide what they want.

At which point Stephen Harper would be wise to flip-flop on this issue again and suddenly remember "Oh yeah, carbon taxes was originally our idea!" just so he can get the credit for it.

Environmental Blabble

If you're a fan of Facebook you'll probably like this new Facebook application called Blabble. Loads of fun for you and your friends.

European Union calculating the cost of fighting climate change

How much will it cost the European Union to fight global climate change? Clearly the answer depends on what your target is, how you propose to get there and the size of the EU's contribution compared with those of the US, China and so on. But a new report from the Centre for European Policy Studies offers some useful estimates.

It assesses six recent studies, from the UK's Stern review of the economic impact of climate change and a World Bank analysis to research prepared by Vattenfall, the Swedish energy company. In these reports, the average annual global costs for mitigating and adapting to climate change are put at anything from €230bn to €614bn, based on 2006 data.

The EU is not, these days, one of the world's great polluters. In 2004, the global economy emitted about 49bn tons of greenhouse gases (measured in carbon dioxide equivalent). The share of the 27-nation bloc was only 5.2bn tons, or 10.6 per cent.

However, as western Europe is one of the world's richest areas, and as Europe has historical responsibility for the CO 2 emissions of its industrial heyday, the EU will surely have to pay more than 10.6 per cent of the global costs of fighting climate change.

According to the CEPS study, the smallest bill the EU could expect to pick up is €24.4bn a year, while the biggest is €194.3bn. The think-tank's own estimate, based on what it calls "the limited likelihood of a global burden-sharing according to current emissions", is that the EU will face annual costs of at least €60bn.

This figure is close to the forecast provided by the European Commission last January, when it published its all-encompassing proposals on energy and climate change policy. At the time, the Commission said €60bn - or about 0.5 per cent of the EU's annual gross domestic product - might seem a lot of money, but the cost of doing nothing would be even higher.

Has the message got through to Germany's car manufacturers and their friends in the European Parliament?

This week, the legislature's industry committee tried to weaken a Commission proposal for capping CO2 emissions from new cars. Rather than imposing a target of 130 grammes per kilometre on all new cars by 2012, the committee voted to apply it to only 60 per cent of new cars and to delay full introduction of the target until 2015. The vote was unmistakably aimed at helping German carmakers, whose models are bigger and less green than those of France and Italy.

This is, of course, hardly the last word on the subject. The parliamentary committee's vote isn't binding. But when it comes to converting the EU's high-sounding principles on climate change into concrete legislation, the devil is always in the detail.

Learn more about Eco-Friendly Cars.

McCain ignores environment and climate change

In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention Thursday night, presidential candidate John McCain mentioned climate change and global warming exactly zero times. He never even uttered the "E" word (environment).

It used to be that McCain's bipartisan work combating global warming was a point of pride for the GOP senator. That was before he selected VP candidate Sarah Palin, who is a global warming denier and is passionate about drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The closest McCain got to the climate was in talking about energy:

We'll produce more energy at home. We will drill new wells off-shore, and we'll drill them now. We'll drill them now.

We'll -- we'll -- my friends, we'll build more nuclear power plants. We'll develop clean-coal technology. We'll increase the use of wind, tide, solar, and natural gas. We'll encourage the development and use of flex-fuel, hybrid and electric automobiles.

Senator Obama thinks we can achieve energy independence without more drilling and without more nuclear power. But Americans know better than that.

We must use all resources and develop all technologies necessary to rescue our economy from the damage caused by rising oil prices and restore the health of our planet.

Asian pollution may cause American climate shift

WASHINGTON - Pollution from Asian coal power plants could create summer hot spots in the central United States and southern Europe by mid-century, US climate scientists reported on Thursday. The full report is available online at www.climatescience.gov and was released by the US Climate Change Science Program.

Unlike the long-lived greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, the particle and gas pollution cited in this report only stays in the air for a few days or weeks but its warming effect stays over the long term.

"We found that these short-lived pollutants have a greater influence on the Earth's climate throughout the 21st century than previously thought," said Hiram Levy of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"By 2050, two of the three climate models we use found that changes in short-lived pollutants will contribute 20 percent of the predicted global warming. By 2100, that figure goes up to 25 percent."

The short-lived pollution that can cause long-term warming comes from soot, also known as the black carbon particles that result from fires, and sulfate particles, which are emitted by power plants. Soot particles are dark and absorb heat; sulfates are light and reflect heat, actually cooling things down.

Asian soot and sulfate pollution is likely to make for hotter, drier summers in the American Midwest and the Mediterranean region of southern Europe, Levy said, adding that heating and drying effects are not expected to hit Asia.

The reason for the expected pollution-related warming trend is that sulfate pollution, which has been linked to respiratory problems, is expected to decrease dramatically while soot pollution is forecast to continue increasing in Asia.

Ground-level ozone emitted by US transport vehicles is also a factor, the scientists said.

These pollutants have usually been dealt with as threats to air quality, but should also be considered for their impact on climate change, said Drew Shindell, a climate expert at NASA.

Carbon dioxide, which spurs global warming and is emitted from natural and human-made sources, still is going to dominate the climate change picture in the coming century, but because modern societies are built to emit lots of this substance, change is likely to be slow, Shindell said.

Targeting these air pollutants now makes sense, because of their role in the quality of the air people breathe as well as their impact on global warming, he said.

"It's no substitute for targeting CO2 (carbon dioxide), which in the long run is the main contributor to global warming and has to be tackled, but ... the shorter-term pollutants can have a very large impact," Shindell said.

Climate change could dramatically hurt the US economy.

Conservatives fail in climate change report

OTTAWA - A new report card by the Sierra Club of Canada gives the Liberal Party high marks for its green shift plan, while failing the Conservatives for their lack of effort and commitment on climate change.

In its report card released today, the Sierra Club of Canada took the Conservative government to task, giving it an “F+” for setting emission reduction targets that amount to nothing more than “regulating the status quo.” Meanwhile the Liberal Party was lauded for having “a credible plan to achieve significant reductions in greenhouse gases and received a “B+,” second only to the Green Party.

The report is an eye opener for Canadians who think that the Conservative government is actually concerned about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Economists, scientists and environmentalists alike have repeatedly stated that allowing Stephen Harper to implement his ‘Turning the Corner’ plan is a recipe for failure.

While more than a dozen independent analysts have determined that the Harper plan will not meet its already meager targets, the Sierra Club noted that “the way forward really is to have a carbon tax regime such as the Liberal green shift plan.”

Canadians have a choice in the coming election: Elect Harper who will maintain the status quo, or they can choose a party that understands the scope of the problem and has a credible plan to address it.

Global droughts resulting in Wheat Shortage

Droughts caused by global climate change have led to a drop in wheat production, a worldwide shortage and high food prices around the world.

The global wheat supply is at its lowest point in 50 years, with wheat reserves so low that some countries will simply run out of wheat and flour. This has been one factor pushing the prices of bread, beer and other wheat-containing foods steadily higher. In Canada alone the price of flour has more than doubled over the past eight months.

Usually prices are more seasonal, going up or down 10%. But due to the worldwide drought its created a huge shortage of wheat, resulting in prices to double in countries that export wheat, and to be significant worse in countries that don't.

Also to blame for the global wheat shortage is rising population, coupled with increasing meat consumption worldwide. This has led to the increasing diversion of grain to animal feed.

Analysts anticipate that the shortage may be resolved within 12 months, when more farmers are expected to cash into wheat production. But even when the shortage resolves, food prices are only expected to keep climbing above the norm due to other factors, such as high energy and shipping costs.

Public health experts have expressed concern about the effect that rising food prices have on the poor. The United Nations recently reported that in 2007, the cost of food imports in the world's neediest countries increased 24 percent, to a total of $107 billion. Large populations will simply go without...

At which point some idiot in Washington will likely say "Let them eat cake."

Greenland ice melting faster than expected

When scientists make a prediction they usually make several: A conservative estimate and a seemingly wilder number which is frequently more accurate. The conservative estimate is really more the press and the naysayers, and the more other number is either scary or delightfully good news, depending on the situation.

So when a group of scientists comes forward and says that Greenland's ice sheet is melting faster than expected, you have to ask... were they comparing it to the conservative estimate or the supposedly-more-accurate one? As you will see below scientists don't agree all the time.

A group of NASA and university scientists are warning the steady loss of the Greenland ice sheet could raise sea levels three times higher than estimated. In a report in the journal Nature Geoscience, the study challenges current predictions about the rate at which the massive ice sheet is predicted to melt over the next century as greenhouse gases rise and temperatures warm.

The report's authors say the loss of the ice mass could raise global sea levels by up to five millimetres a year – almost three times the current estimates set by an international authority on the issue. (Basically its one group of scientists saying the other group was using a really conservative estimate.)

"We're showing that the geologic record shows that in the past, ice sheets have melted much faster than we're predicting at the end of this century," Anders Carlson, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The team of researchers, including scientists from NASA and the University of British Columbia, used geologic data to study the Laurentide ice sheet, the last massive ice dome to cover much of the northern hemisphere.

Faron Anslow, a glaciologist at UBC in Vancouver, said they studied marine and terrestrial records to determine how fast the Laurentide sheet melted and if it might predict the fate of the Greenland sheet.

The team discovered that the ancient ice cap, which spanned 1.7 million square kilometres, went through two periods of rapid melting. The first occurred about 9,000 years ago and again about 7,600 years ago, when there was increased solar radiation.

"The ice sheet was existing in a pretty warm climate and what we show is that that sunlight was enough to melt the ice sheet away very rapidly," he said.

They also found that the melt led to a speedy rise in sea levels of almost two centimetres a year.

Anslow said the temperatures at the time of the Laurentide melt are similar to what's expected for Greenland by the end of this century, suggesting it could undergo an equally rapid melt.

The Laurentide sheet, which was almost twice the size of its Greenland cousin, was at its largest about 22,000 years ago when it began its slow decline due to warming temperatures.

It virtually disappeared about 6,000 years ago.

Carlson says that if the Greenland sheet completely disappeared, it would raise sea levels by seven metres, adding that even the slightest increases could threaten hundreds of millions of people in coastal communities.

"The word 'glacial' used to imply that something was very slow," co-author Allegra LeGrande of the New York-based NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies wrote in the report. "This new evidence ... indicates that 'glacial' is anything but slow.

"This finding shows the potential for ice to disappear quickly, given the right push."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a maximum sea level rise over the next 100 years of up to 10 centimetres, based mainly on the expansion of the oceans through warming.

Anders said it doesn't take into account contributions from ice sheet melt.

"They now predict a half-metre sea level rise with most of that coming from the expansion of the ocean due to warming and very little of that coming from ice sheet melting," he said.

"Ice sheet melting could be a much bigger component, so these values should be seen as low estimates."

Anders said science hasn't been able to get an accurate picture of how fast ice sheets melt as a result of climate change until now. The scientific team used sophisticated computer modelling and terrestrial records to track the sheet's disappearance, linking it in time to warming temperatures.

In 2006 a huge iceshelf snapped in northern Canada, surprising scientists at the sheer speed it disappeared. In 2007 the Greenland ice sheet retreated by a record amount and that record will likely be broken again in the future.