france24--2019-01-25--The Swedish teen holding world leaders accountable for climate change

It all began with a school strike in August, 2018. Since then, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg has taken the world by storm with her frank calls for action on climate change. This week, she told the world’s financial elite in Davos: “I want you to panic.”  While the majority of the delegates attending this year’s edition of the World Economic Forum made it to Davos by plane – 1,500 of them in private jets – Swedish teenager and environment activist Thunberg travelled by train – a journey that took her, and her father, a total of 32 hours.  “You have to practise what you preach, otherwise people won’t take you seriously,” she told reporters in what, along with her braids and flawless English, has become her hallmark matter-of-fact manner upon her arrival in the small Alps town on Wednesday.  Since arriving in Davos, where the cream of the world’s financial, political and social elite gather each year to shape global, regional and industrial agendas, Thunberg has wasted no time in putting her message out. She started by setting up camp with the activists at the “Arctic Basecamp Davos” where she spent her first night sleeping in freezing -18 degrees Celsius temperatures.  On Thursday, she immediately stole the show at a lunch discussion panel attended by hotshots including U2 frontman Bono, conservationist Jane Goodall and former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres, by bluntly telling the audience that they were to blame for the world’s climate crisis.  “Some people say that the climate crisis is something that we have all created, but that is not true. Because if everyone is guilty then no one is to blame, and someone is to blame. Some people, some companies, and some decision-makers in particular, have known exactly what priceless values they have been sacrificing to continue to make unimaginable amounts of money. And I think that many of you here today belong to that group of people,” she said in her impromptu speech, delivered without a moment’s hesitation.  Her crusade against greedy, climate-sacrificing moneymakers continued on Friday when she attended another panel. “Adults keep saying: ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope, I don’t want you to be hopeful, I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house was on fire. Because it is.”  Thunberg first shot into the international spotlight five months ago, when she planted herself in front of the Swedish parliament and staged a one-woman school strike (although she was often joined by other students, teachers and passers-by) to protest again the political inaction on climate change. The strike came after a particularly bizarre summer in Sweden climate-wise, in which the Nordic nation witnessed rampant wildfires in the wake of multiple heatwaves. Thunberg, who had initially planned to strike until the country’s parliamentary election on September 9, then decided to continue her strike action every Friday to demand that Sweden cuts its carbon emissions as per the Paris Agreement.  Thousands of students across the world have since joined Thunberg in her calls to fight global warming through strike action, and in December, TIME magazine named her one of the most influential teenagers of 2018.  In December, Thunberg was invited to speak at the COP24 climate meeting in Katowice, in Poland. And she gave it to them straight: "You only speak of a green eternal economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular. You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake. You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to us children," she told the world leaders gathered.  But Thunberg’s road to climate activism has not been easy. In a recent TEDx talk in Stockholm, she described how she became aware of the dangers of climate change at a very early age, and how this knowledge made her depressed.  “When I was about 8 years old, I first heard about something called climate change or global warming. Apparently that was something humans had created by our way of living,” she said. “I remember thinking that it was very strange that humans […] could be capable of changing the earth’s climate. Because if we were, and it was really happening, we wouldn’t be talking about anything else. […] But no one ever talked about it. If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before? Why were there no restrictions? Why wasn’t it made illegal? To me, that did not add up. It was too unreal,” she recounted.  At the age of 11, she stopped eating, and talking, and was eventually diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Selective Mutism.  “For those of us who are on the spectrum, almost everything is black or white,” she said, explaining why she never feels the need to sugarcoat her messages. “If the emissions have to stop then we must stop the emissions. To me, that’s black or white. There are no grey areas when it comes to survival. Either we go on as a civilisation or we don’t. We have to change.”  In 2013, Thunberg brought her internal struggle out into the world. Her mother, renowned Swedish opera singer Malena Ernman was returning from a job in Tokyo, to where she had travelled by plane, when Thunberg finally snapped. “It’s like you’ve killed 80 people!” she said, referring to the greenhouse gases emitted from her mother’s plane trip.  The outburst resulted in Ernman ending her international career due to the necessary flight travel, and the whole family converting to a more sustainable lifestyle, including a vegetarian diet.  Svante Thunberg, the teenager’s father and a famous Swedish actor, told French daily Ouest-France on the sidelines of the Katowice conference that his daughter’s reaction had come like “an electric shock”.  “We stopped working like crazy. We were part of the problem and we hadn’t even realised it,” he said.  As for his daughter’s wider climate cause battle, Thunberg in August told Swedish news agency TT that it was all her own doing. “We have never told her what to say. It’s her own words, her own brain and her own will,” noting that they, as her parents, might understand her concerns about climate change, but can’t fully support her skipping school.  Again, Thunberg, gave her own explanation to that in her TEDx talk: “Some people say that I should be in school instead. Some people say that I should study to become a climate scientist so that I can ‘solve the climate crisis’. But the climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is wake up and change. […] If a few children can get headlines all over the world by just not coming to school for a few weeks, imagine what we could do all together if we wanted to.”


france24--2019-03-15--Climate change forces Mongolias herders to move to the city

Climate change forces Mongolia's herders to move to the city

In Mongolia, nomadic herders are seen as the proud heirs of Genghis Khan and are nicknamed "the emperors of the plains". But in recent years, global warming has had dramatic consequences for their way of life. The "dzuds" in particular - harsh winters, which follow scorching summers - have done terrible damage. In the steppes, weakened by the cold and lack of food, animals die out one after the other. Nomads have seen their herds of livestock decimated - already a meagre source of income.  Last winter, 700,000 animals were killed by the snow and freezing cold. Another one million perished the year before. This climate phenomenon known as "dzud" is not new, but in the past few years it’s become more frequent and more intense. Mongolia’s climatologists and authorities are worried.  In order to avoid these extreme conditions, more and more herders are dismantling their yurts and abandoning the vast grasslands of the steppes to settle in the capital, Ulaanbaatar.  But in the city, living conditions are tough. The nomads have to deal with poverty, as well as shortages of water and electricity. Lack of space is also a major issue. Ulaanbaatar was created to accommodate hundreds of thousands of people at most. Today, it counts more than 1.5 million residents – that’s half the country's population.


france24--2019-06-27--Japan welcomes G20 leaders for summit centred on climate change

David Mareuil / POOL, AFP | France's President Emmanuel Macron (centre L) talks with Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (centre R) during a welcoming ceremony prior to the Japan-France summit at Abe's official residence in Tokyo on June 26, 2019.  G20 host Japan hopes world leaders will endorse a deal on marine plastic waste and find common ground on climate change, but its own environmental record is under increasing scrutiny.  Activists say Japan has fallen behind on reducing plastic consumption and is caving to US pressure to water down language on climate change to achieve a unanimous statement on the issue.  Japan, chair of this week's Group of 20 meeting in Osaka, has already secured agreement from environment ministers on a marine plastic waste deal that will be endorsed this week.  The deal commits G20 members to reducing plastic waste but includes few details on how that will be achieved, proposing only voluntary steps and yearly progress reports.  Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said last month the issue would be "one of the most important themes of the G20", adding that Japan "hopes to play a leadership role".  But while campaigners say the agreement -- the first on the issue bringing together rich and developing nations -- is a "first step", they argue it should be more ambitious.  "Legally binding international rules with clear timelines and goals" are needed, Yukihiro Misawa, plastic policy manager of environmental group WWF Japan, told AFP.  Experts welcomed part of the agreement that calls for research to better understand where plastic is coming from and how to tackle it.  "Scientific knowledge should be the foundation of an international deal, so that's good," professor Atsuhiko Isobe of Kyushu University's Centre for Oceanic and Atmospheric Research told AFP.  The agreement comes as campaigners criticise Japan for moving too slowly on reducing plastic consumption, particularly as the country produces more plastic waste per capita than any nation apart from the United States.  Japan touts an enviable waste management system, and 86 percent of its plastic waste is recycled.  But much of that "recycling" involves simply incinerating plastic, often to produce energy, a process that generates carbon dioxide and contributes to climate change.  Japan exports around 10 percent of its plastic waste for recycling overseas. But research by environmentalists shows the waste can end up in the ocean or being burned improperly, emitting harmful pollutants.  Last month, Japan announced a new strategy to reduce plastic waste, including plans to eventually require retailers to charge for plastic bags, but that still leaves it far behind nations that have simply banned plastic bags and other single-use plastic outright.  "What is expected of Japan is to behave as a role model," said Isobe.  Japan also faces growing scrutiny on climate change issues because of its continued use of coal.  It is one of nearly 200 nations that signed the Paris climate agreement, which commits signatories to efforts to cap global warming at "well below" two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit).  But earlier this month, it said it would continue to rely on coal-burning power plants and set its target date for carbon-neutral status after 2050.  Greenpeace said that showed Japan was "not truly serious about mitigating climate change".  And Tokyo will likely face additional pressure over the climate change portion of the G20 final communique.  A document described as a draft of the communique's climate language, seen by AFP, omits any reference to reducing use of fossil fuels and removes wording in previous G20 statements describing the Paris deal as "irreversible".  At last year's G20, that phrase was included but not endorsed by the United States, which added wording reiterating "its decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement".  The draft document, which could change substantially before adoption, suggests an attempt to find neutral language that Washington can endorse, but activists said it would dilute international efforts.  "The draft statement reflects how very weak is Japan's willingness to fight against climate change and this risks undermining global efforts," said Kimiko Hirata, director of Kiko Network Japan, an environmental group.  "For this G20, members have to show strong leadership by committing to ambitious actions," she told AFP.  And France's President Emmanuel Macron has already said he will not sign any statement that does not include ambitious climate language, calling the issue a "red line".


france24--2019-09-18--Teen activist Greta Thunberg tells US lawmakers to try harder on climate change

Mark Wilson, Getty Images, AFP | Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old climate change activist from Sweden, attends a Senate Climate Change Task Force meeting on Capitol Hill, on September 17, 2019 in Washington, DC.  Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg offered a blunt message to Congress on Tuesday as she brought her campaign for urgent action on climate change to the U.S. Capitol.  "I know you're trying," she told Democratic senators at an invitation-only forum, "but just not hard enough. Sorry."  Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey thanked the 16-year-old activist for her advice and her activism, which has gained worldwide attention by inspiring a series of protests and school strikes, including one set for Friday.  Thunberg and other young activists bring "moral clarity" to the fight against global warming, Markey said.  "We hear you," he told her, vowing that lawmakers "will redouble our efforts to make sure that we inject this issue into the politics of this building and this country because time is running out."  Markey and other lawmakers hailed Thunberg as a "superpower," noting that her activism has drawn a passionate following of children essentially challenging their elders to take action.  "Save your praise," Thunberg replied. "We don't want it," she added, especially if officials intend to talk about climate change "without doing anything about it."  Thunberg was in Washington ahead of a global strike planned for Friday.  Activists are calling for immediate action from the world's governments to halt global warming, reduce fossil fuel consumption and avert environmental catastrophe.  Instead of listening to her and other teenagers, lawmakers should invite scientists to the Capitol to listen to their expertise on ways to slow a rise in global temperatures, Thunberg said.  "This is not about us. This is not about youth activism," she said. "We don't want to be heard. We want the science to be heard."  Despite Thunberg's request, lawmakers bombarded her and other youth activists with praise, saying they had sparked a global movement that is already being felt in the 2020 presidential campaign and in the halls of Congress, where lawmakers are debating proposals such as the Green New Deal.  Markey is a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal, which would shift the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels such as oil and coal and replace them with renewable sources such as wind and solar power.  "We need your leadership," he told Thunberg and other activists. "It's creating a new X-factor" to boost efforts to fight climate change.  Last month, Thunberg crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a solar-powered boat, landing in New York City on Aug. 28. She's in Washington for several days of rallies and lobbying efforts ahead of Friday's global climate strike.  Thunberg will testify before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday and address the U.N. Climate Action Summit in New York next week.


france24--2019-12-02--Debate blazes in Australia over climate change role in bushfire crisis

Australia last month raised the fire danger alert to "catastrophic" for the first time ever, as devastating bushfires tore through the states of New South Wales and Queensland.  The crisis has killed at least six people, destroyed more than 600 homes and scorched more than two million hectares of land. As scores of blazes continue to burn, a fierce debate has erupted over whether the extreme weather is linked to global warming. Scott Morrison's conservative coalition government has dismissed climate concerns. Meanwhile, scientists and former fire chiefs have warned Australians to brace themselves for what could be the most dangerous fire season yet.  To watch this report by Sydney correspondents Richelle Harrison Plesse and Gregory Plesse from Australia, click on the video player above.


freedombunker--2019-01-22--Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Calls Climate Change Our World War II

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Calls Climate Change ‘Our World War II’

Speaking at an event held yesterday to honor Martin Luther King, Jr., Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) explained why she believes younger Americans are in favor of radical action when it comes to combating climate change:  She continued: "This is our World War II."  Ocasio-Cortez's 12-years-til-the-Apocalypse timeline is likely inspired by a United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released last fall which argued that unless carbon-based fuels were completely abandoned by 2030, global temperatures would increase more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels agreed upon in the Paris Climate Agreement. That report doesn't say the world will end if temperatures increase more than that, but it does estimate damage to global GDP (more on that in a moment).  Here's an interesting fact about World War II: We did in fact pay for it directly and in all sorts of ways, including rationing of goods, near-complete federal control of the economy and resources, massive tax hikes, and the sale of war bonds.  To a degree that will surprise many, the US funded its World War II effort largely by raising taxes and tapping into Americans' personal savings. Both of those avenues are nowhere near as promising today as they were in 1941. Current tax burdens are now much higher than they were before the War, so raising taxes today would be much more difficult. The "Victory Tax" of 1942 sharply raised income tax rates and allowed, for the first time in our nation's history, taxes to be withheld directly from paychecks. The hikes were originally intended to be temporary but have, of course, far outlasted their purpose. It would be unlikely that Americans would accept higher taxes today to fund a real war, let alone a pretend one. That leaves savings, which was the War's primary source of funding. During the War, Americans purchased approximately $186 billion worth of war bonds, accounting for nearly three quarters of total federal spending from 1941-1945. Today, we don't have the savings to pay for our current spending, let alone any significant expansions.  In 1944, writes Cecil Bohannon for the Mercatus Center, government spending accounted for a record-high 55 percent of GDP.  All of which might help explain why Ocasio-Cortez consistently shies away from talking about the cost of her big-ticket plans. Discussing her calls for Medicare-for-All, forgiveness of student debt, free college for all, and a federal jobs guarantee—a package estimated to cost $40 trillion over 10 years—Ocasio-Cortez brushed aside any serious discussion of costs in a recent interview with CNN's Jake Tapper and refused to explain where the money would come from. Last fall, in an interview with Jorge Ramos, she said:  When it comes to paying for her "Green New Deal," which would include government-financed projects to speed up and enforce the transition to renewable energy (though not nuclear) along with tag-along favorites such as a universal basic income, she is equally vague.  The draft text of her legislation includes a section answering the question "How will government pay for these investments?":  Quartz, which is sympathetic to Ocasio-Cortez's agenda, notes that "Green Party leader Jill Stein estimated that her version of the Green New Deal, which is less ambitious than the one presented by Ocasio-Cortez, would cost $700 billion to $1 trillion annually."  Ocasio-Cortez is hardly alone in not even pretending to care about paying for her favored plans. In the 21st century, both Republican and Democratic majorities have at various points hidden the costs of their spending and both parties are dedicated to endless borrowing to cover any year's expenses (call it "Government by Groupon"). Mounting debt is surely one of the factors in our generally slower-than-usual economic growth and the worst parts of the bill are still ahead of us.  If Ocasio-Cortez waves away questions of how to pay for her plans to avert the end of the world, she is also exaggerating the threat posed by the effects of climate change. Climate change is not World War II and we should resist and refute the analogy, with its strong implication not simply of massive increases in government spending and taxes but the regimentation of all aspects of day-to-day life.  As Ronald Bailey wrote last fall when the IPCC report came out, fears about the impact of sea-level rises, increases in extinctions and extreme weather events, and more have generally been overstated. So have the economic benefits of keeping global warming below 2°C:  So what, according the IPCC report, will it cost to transition from fossil fuels to wind and solar? "Global model pathways limiting global warming to 1.5°C are projected to involve the annual average investment needs in the energy system of around $2.4 trillion [in 2010 U.S. dollars] between 2016 and 2035 representing about 2.5% of the world GDP," states the report. For comparison, the International Energy Agency recently observed that "total energy investment worldwide in 2016 was just over $1.7 trillion, accounting for 2.2 percent of global GDP." Of that, only $297 billion was spent on renewable energy sources. So how much economic damage will pursuing the IPCC's fast transition to a no-carbon energy system spare us? The report asserts that if no policies aimed specifically at reducing carbon dioxide emissions are adopted, then average global temperature is projected to rise by 3.66°C by 2100, resulting in global GDP loss of 2.6 percent from what it would otherwise have been. Comparatively speaking, in the 2°C and 1.5°C scenarios, global GDP would only be reduced by 0.5 percent or 0.3 percent respectively. Concretely, the global GDP of $80 trillion, growing at 3 percent annually, would rise to $903 trillion by 2100. A 2.6 percent reduction means that it would only be $880 trillion by 2100. A 0.3 percent decrease implies a loss of $2.7 trillion resulting in a global GDP of $900 trillion. Note that the IPCC is recommending that the world spend between now and 2035 more than $45 trillion in order to endow $2.7 trillion more in annual income on people living three generations hence. Assuming the worst case loss of 2.6 percent of GDP in world with a population of 10 billion that would mean that they would have to scrape by on an average income of just $88,000 per year (the average global GDP per capita now is $10,500.)  Bailey further notes that since the Paris accords are voluntary, it's unlikely any signatory will stand by them in the face of economic adversity. Catastrophic climate change is possible and can be hedged against without cratering the economy or refusing to name the cost of one's preferred path forward.


freedombunker--2019-02-21--Its Time to Panic Over Climate Change Asserts New York Times Op-Ed

It’s ‘Time to Panic’ Over Climate Change, Asserts New York Times Op-Ed

Unabated man-made climate change would likely pose problems, many significant, for humanity during the course of this century. But is it "time to panic" about it, as David Wallace-Wells writes in a recent New York Times op-ed?  "The age of climate panic is here," declares the author of the forthcoming The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. Although he thinks it's not nearly enough, Wallace-Wells suggests that the newly proposed Green New Deal is "what the beginning of a solution looks like."  To support his call for panic, Wallace-Wells cites the so-called Doomsday report, which the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued last fall. That special report aimed to analyze the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. It projected that if no policies aimed specifically at reducing carbon dioxide emissions are adopted, average global temperature will rise by 3.66°C by 2100, resulting in a global GDP loss of 2.6 percent from what it would otherwise have been. (In the 2°C and 1.5°C scenarios, global GDP would be reduced by 0.5 percent or 0.3 percent, respectively.)  The global GDP currently stands at about $80 trillion. Growing at 3 percent annually, it would rise to $903 trillion by 2100. A 2.6 percent reduction means that it would only be $880 trillion by 2100. A 0.3 percent decrease implies a global GDP of $900 trillion. The IPCC report recommends that the world spend more than $45 trillion between now and 2035 in order to endow $2.7 trillion more in annual income on people living three generations hence.  Assuming the worst-case loss of 2.6 percent, that would mean that a world with a population of 10 billion would have to scrape by on an average income of just $88,000 per year. (The average global GDP per capita now is $10,500.)  Meanwhile, the worst-case scenario laid out in the appropriate chapter of the federal government's Fourth National Climate Assessment indicates that Americans living in 2090 would be about $500 billion poorer than they would have been without climate change. Citing the even more dire projections of outside researchers, the assessment suggested that at 10°F of warming, the U.S. economy would be about 10 percent smaller than it would otherwise have been. For context, consider that today's $20 trillion GDP, growing at a 3 percent rate, would rise to $226 trillion by 2100. Pondering both worst-case climate scenarios, GDP would instead rise to either $225.5 billion or $203 trillion. Americans living at the end of this century would be about 10 times richer on average than we are now, albeit in a much warmer world.  These numbers, derived from integrated assessment models that combine econometric and climate projections for the next eight decades, need to be eyed with enormous skepticism. Nevertheless, neither suggests that climate change will make the earth uninhabitable by the end of this century.  An intriguing sidebar to Wallace-Wells' op-ed helpfully provides three examples that aim to illustrate what happes when environmentalist rhetoric succeded in ratcheting up fear. These cases of panic promotion "marked turning points on major environmental issues and inspired change." The moments? Silent Spring, Love Canal, and Three Mile Island. The "inspired change" stemming from these cases has not, shall we say, been wholly beneficial.  "Fear can mobilize, even change the world. When Rachel Carson published her landmark anti-pesticide polemic Silent Spring, Life magazine said she had 'overstated her case,' and The Saturday Evening Post dismissed the book as 'alarmist,'" Wallace-Wells writes. "But it almost single-handedly led to a nationwide ban on DDT." He's quite right about the DDT ban, but as history has now shown that Life's assessment was largely correct.  In Silent Spring, Carson described the choice humanity faced as a fork in the road to the future. "The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress at great speed, but at its end lies disaster," she declared. "The other fork of the road—the one 'less traveled by'—offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth." As Wallace-Wells' op-ed amply shows, this kind of apocalyptic rhetoric is now standard fare in environmental policy debates.  Carson was correct that the popular pesticide DDT disrupted reproduction in some raptor species and that some insect pests were developing resistance to it, making it less useful for protecting crops and preventing insect-borne infections in people. But Carson's most worrying claim was that exposure to trace amounts of synthetic chemicals like DDT would set off a cancer epidemic. For a time, cancer incidence rates did indeed rise, but largely as a result of an increase of Americans living past age 65 and the residual effects of extensive tobacco use and hormone replacement therapy.  The most recent American Cancer Society report on cancer trends finds that U.S. cancer incidence and death rates have fallen to a 25-year low. Nevertheless, hypercautious Environmental Protection Agency regulations aiming to protect consumers from supposed cancer risks posed by slight exposures to synthetic chemicals continue to multipy. Whether the benefits outweigh the costs of EPA regulation is an ongoing controversy.  What about Love Canal? In 1978, residents of that neighborhood outside Buffalo, New York, found that their homes had been built on top of an area where a chemical company had sequestered and sealed tons of toxic wastes in an abandoned canal. The company, under threat of eminent domain, had sold the land for $1 to the local school board warning that it should never be developed. The chemicals began leaking out only after local and state agencies willfully breached the dump site's clay seal as part of a development scheme. Obviously, none of us wants toxic chemicals leaking into our basements, so it was entirely reasonable for the residents to react with alarm when that happened to them.  A local Environmental Protection Agency administrator declared this "one of the most appalling environmental tragedies in American history." Happily, it turned out not to be such an "appalling environmental tragedy" after all, at least with respect to the former residents' health. The New York State Health Department tracked about 6,000 former residents. In its last report issued in 2009, the agency found that their "overall mortality rates were similar to those of New York State and Niagara County." More specifically, the final report noted, "For cancer incidence, the results of the external comparisons indicated that the total number of cancers observed among Love Canal residents was within the range expected for New York State and Niagara County." The report also found that "rates of preterm and small-for-gestational age (SGA) births among [emergency area] women were similar to those in New York State and Niagara County, and the rates of low (LBW) and very low (VLBW) birth weight tended to be lower." The department did report a slight change in the sex ratio of births, favoring girls over boys.  "The nightmare led to the creation of the federal Superfund program to clean up Love Canal and other toxic waste dumps around the country," the Times sidebar notes. Like many policies driven by panic, this has proven less than optimal. The Superfund program has pleased neither environmentalists nor industry. The litigation that it sparks both boosts costs and slows cleanups. One 1999 study estimated that Superfund remediation would on average avert less than 0.1 case of cancer per site, and that the cost per cancer case averted is more than $100 million.  The third moment of panic that supposedly led to progress was the partial meltdown in 1979 of a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. "Thousands fled the area around the plant," notes the Times sidebar, "and though very little radiation escaped, the accident hurt the industry and raised public apprehension about nuclear power." Indeed it did.  The accident did release a very small amount of radionuclides into the environment. These consisted of radioactive isotopes of the noble gases krypton and xenon and a bit of iodine, all of which have half-lives measured in days. Whatever amount did escape decayed into background undetectability within a few weeks.  The Pennsylvania Health Department monitored the health of a cohort of nearly 60,000 local residents between 1982 and 1995. Its final report, released in 2011, found "no evidence of an increased risk for all malignant neoplasms." A more recent study using very subtle molecular techniques reports that a slight increase in thyroid cancer rates among former residents might be attributed to the radiation exposures.  Although the U.S. nuclear power industry was already pulling back, due largely to increasing regulatory pressure, the Three Mile Island accident basically ended the construction of new nuclear power plants in the U.S. for the next three decades. In the 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission had anticipated that more than 1,000 nuclear reactors would generating electricity in the United States by the year 2000. By now that number would have replaced all coal and natural gas power generation, and U.S. carbon dioxide emissions would be 34 percent lower than they are currently  The Australian economist Peter Lang calculates that nuclear power would have outcompeted most fossil fuel generation at one-tenth of nuclear's current cost. Folks concerned about global warming—and I include myself among them—may reasonably conclude that the panic over nuclear power did not result in overall environmental progress.  Wallace-Wells ends by asking, "What creates more sense of urgency than fear?" Nothing. But as those three examples of past panic suggest, fear doesn't produce clear thinking either. It thus may actually hinder rather than help environmental progress.


freedombunker--2019-05-31--How to Talk to Children about Climate Change

We smile at seeing those young faces waving placards out in the rain, urging action on the problem of climate change. But our smile is tinged with frustration, with the feeling that the youngsters live in another dimension and that we don’t know how to reach them intellectually.  The natural impulse is to want to explain how crushingly complicated this issue is. First, we point out, there is the uncertainty about the connection between human-released CO2 and storms, floods and fires, and all the other bad things that might happen. Then we want to explain that cutting down on CO2 is not easy, that everyone will have to make great sacrifices.  One has to weigh the different possible benefits that might come from stopping (or slowing) global warming against the costs of trying to counter it. This cost-benefit analysis involves a bundle of economic and moral questions. (For a good overview of the complexities of the climate change issue, read former NASA scientist Roy W. Spencer’s 2008 book Climate Confusion.) For example, would saving butterfly X from extinction (assuming we could guarantee it) counterbalance the harm done to the working poor by taking $1,000 a year from each of them in a carbon tax? And so on.  However, I think this impulse to debate the complexities of the issue is misguided. The activists do not base their position on reasoning and calculations. The Climate Kids don’t come to their demonstrations pushing wheelbarrows full of cost-benefit analyses. Most of them don’t even know what cost-benefit analysis is. More importantly, they don’t think they need to know about it.  Once it decides to act, they believe, government has all the expertise needed to make the correct calculations and the ability to craft policies that solve the problem without significantly hurting anybody—well, anybody except the very rich.  This is because, in their way of looking at the world, it is not their responsibility to fix society’s problems. That task belongs to a higher power, to government. Their mission is simply to beseech this higher power to act. Once it decides to act, they believe, government has all the expertise needed to make the correct calculations and the ability to craft policies that solve the problem without significantly hurting anybody—well, anybody except the very rich.  We should not be all that surprised by their deep, instinctive trust of government. It is a social predisposition, one that affects all of us to some degree. The belief in government’s wisdom and power is imparted to children very early in life as an article of faith, like the belief in Santa Claus. As children grow up, they begin to notice that government has flaws and that political leaders are not as wise as originally supposed. As a result, their faith in government declines somewhat, so that by age 30, as traditional wisdom has it, most people grow somewhat skeptical about government’s ability to cure the world’s problems.  But not everyone, and especially not today’s climate activists. Faced with a staggeringly complex cost-benefit analysis that has most of us (older) folks scratching our heads, they are brimming with certainty that catastrophe is coming, and government can fix whatever is wrong.  We were given a telling illustration of this simplistic faith earlier this year when 29-year-old US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez presented her “Green New Deal” proposal. This House resolution mentions dozens of dangers and problems that she believes to be connected with climate change, from mass migrations, wildfires, and the loss of coral reefs to declining life expectancy, wage stagnation, and the racial wealth divide.  How are these all problems to be solved? Ms. Ocasio-Cortez does not propose any specific law or regulation. She does not advocate, let’s say, a 16 percent carbon tax and assure us that, according to her calculations, this measure will save 61 percent of the coral reefs, and prevent 53 percent of wildfires while reducing the income of the poor by only 8.2 percent. Like the schoolchildren demonstrating in the street, she leaves the task of figuring out the specific answers to a higher power. Indeed, her resolution begins with this appeal to the higher power: “It is the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal.” Thus runs the thoughtless faith in government, a faith so deep that even an activist who literally is the government herself looks to “government” to solve problems she can’t begin to analyze.  We need to urge our young idealists to remember that government is not a god with magical powers to fix any problem we notice but an imperfect agency composed of fallible human beings.  If in coming years we hope to curb the naive governmental interventions that bring so much ruin to the world, we need to address this belief in the efficacy of government. We need to urge our young idealists to remember that government is not a god with magical powers to fix any problem we notice but an imperfect agency composed of fallible human beings. One way to begin this conversation is to pose this question: “Given what you know about the people who have been in charge of government, is it reasonable to expect, in the future, a high level of rationality and responsibility from government?”


freedombunker--2019-12-03--‘What They Haven’t Told You About Climate Change’ – According to the Co-Founder of Greenpeace

Mainstream media outlets and political organizations have been predicting doom and gloom, what seems to be end of the world type of scenarios when they bring up the topic of global warming and climate change. This type of perception is something humanity has been experiencing for decades, just take a look at this press release from 1989, which explained how United Nations officials predicted that entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth if the global warming trend was not reversed by the year 2000, it’s just one of many examples.  Furthermore, anybody who seems to question the official narrative of this issue that’s constantly pushed by mainstream media is made out to be a fool, and ridicule shortly ensues. Climate scientists have been ridiculed for even sharing their research and opinions suggesting that a doom and gloom scenario is not real, and that the issue of climate change is quite complex, and that man’s CO2 output is not playing the role that most have been made to believe it plays.  Based on my research, there are many academics, researchers and environmental activists who are not buying the official narrative that’s been dished out by politicians for a very long time now. We are told that the majority of climate scientists agree, but that doesn’t seem to be the case as, again, there are many who are emphasizing that C02 is not really a dominant factor, and that there are a myriad of other considerations when it comes to the climate of Earth one must consider. Why are they doing this? Clearly, the ‘science is not settled.’  We Need To Clean Up Our Planet, Big Time  Our planet is no doubt in need of great environmental care. Species extinction, deforestation and pollution are at an all time high. The air quality on planet Earth is embarrassing, and our planet needs a big time clean up/restoration attempt. All of these are not due to CO2, but rather due to industry, the dumping of toxic waste, pesticides, and much more. These are what we should be focusing on, not a carbon tax. What’s even more frustrating is that it’s not a matter of finding solutions, they’re already there, it’s a matter of overcoming elitist agendas, human greed and ego. It seems that a carbon tax is simply being used to put more profit into the hands of the global elite. Imagine if we spent as much time coming up with ways to clean up our oceans, develop new energy technology, stoping deforestation and animal agriculture, passing laws that make packaging without biodegradable substances illegal, and much more rather than simply focusing on C02. A lot more would get done. I go more in depth on C02 and why I believe it should not be the main focus when it comes to environmental awareness.  Again, just to reiterate, we are big time environmental activists, but we simply feel the important issues are not given as much attention as the intention behind C02 reduction is not to benefit the planet, but to benefit rich people who really have no concern for our planet.  Below is a video of Dr. Patrick Moore explaining some of his thoughts on the phenomenon. Dr. Patrick Moore has been a leader in the international environmental field for over 30 years. He is a founding member of Greenpeace and served for nine years as President of Greenpeace Canada and seven years as a Director of Greenpeace International. As the leader of many campaigns Dr. Moore was a driving force shaping policy and direction while Greenpeace became the world’s largest environmental activist organization.  People like Patrick are often criticized by the mainstream media. As I do with everyone else, I suggest you listen to what is being said, look it up, and focus on the information instead of character assassination attempts.  That being said, Moore also claimed that Glyphosate was completely safe and not harmful to humans. This is something we completely disagree with, he also seems to be a supporter of Genetically Modified Foods, something we do not support either. In fact, it was surprising to me to look into what he’s said about these two topics, and quite a head scratcher. In fact, we wrote about his ,what now clearly appear to be false/misinformed, comments on Glyphosate when he made them. You can read that article here.  We clearly do not agree with Moore on many topics, like the ones listed above, but that doesn’t mean he is working for corporations, or is completely misinformed. There is a division of opinion on a myriad of topics today, and again, it’s best to look at what’s being said and fact checking it ourselves instead of simply reverting to character assassination. When we looked and examined his comments on Glyphosate and GMO foods, we found them to be false. When we look at his comments regarding climate change, we find them to be valid or at least worthy of consideration. We completely disregard judgement and simply examine the claims being made, something we encourage more people to do. One thing is for certain, our right to explore and examine information openly and freely should not be taken away and censored.  I took a lot of information that I compiled in a recent article I wrote regarding Greta Thunberg, titled Greta Thunberg Wants You To Be Scared & Big Business Will Make A Killing off It, and pasted it below. But I didn’t go into Greta, who seems to be a good hearted young activist who really cares about the planet. If you want to go more in-depth, I suggest you read the article linked above as the information below is already in it, and a little more.  Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a natural and beneficial constituent of the atmosphere. By volume percentage, 99% of dry air is nitrogen (78%) and oxygen (21%). Most of the rest is argon (0.93%), with carbon dioxide amounting to only 0.04%, but slowly increasing. Even smaller amounts of other gases, neon, helium, methane etc., make up the remainder.  Atmospheric CO2 is a key to life on earth, this is because plants use sunlight to combine CO2 molecules from the air with H2O molecules to make carbohydrates (for example, sugar) and other organic compounds. In the process, oxygen molecules (O2) are released to the atmosphere. At CO2 levels less than 150 ppm (parts per million), most plants stop growing. Over most of the history of multicellular life on earth, CO2 levels have been three or four times higher than present levels. Current CO2 levels of 400 ppm are still much less than optimum for most plant growth.  Air also contains water vapor (H2O), from as much as 7% in the humid tropics to less than 1% on a cold winter day. Human exhaled breath typically contains 4% to 5% CO2 and about 6% H2O.Water vapor,  The climate is changing, and it has been changing for a very long time. In fact, the climate has always been changing, and there are a myriad of factors that influence climate change like solar activity and much more. If you’re not educated on climate science, it’s easy to adopt the “doomsday” perspective that’s often dished out by mainstream media. However, when you look at what actual climate scientists are saying, it doesn’t seem like anyone on either side agrees with the media’s “climate hysteria” narrative.  The main argument among those who ascribe to the hysteria perspective is that CO2 levels are the highest they’ve ever been since we started to record them, currently sitting at approximately 415 parts per million (ppm). It’s not like climate scientists disagree on the idea that C02 causes some warming of our atmosphere, that seems to be a fact that’s firmly established in scientific literature. But what’s never mentioned is the fact that CO2 levels have been significantly higher than what they are now; in fact, CO2 levels have been in the thousands of ppm and Earth’s temperature has been much warmer than it is now. The idea that human CO2 emissions are responsible for shifts and changes in climate is not scientifically valid, yet policy initiatives that do nothing for our environment are being produced and put forward, putting large sums of money in the pockets of some very powerful people.  CO2 causing a temperature increase is the backbone of the global warming argument, but does CO2 even cause the temperature to increase, or does an increase in temperature cause a rise in C02?  William Happer, American physicist and the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Princeton University, is one of what seems to be thousands of academics to go unheard by the mainstream media who shares the same perspective:  He also pointed out the major ice ages in Earth’s past when C02 levels were also extremely high, much higher than they are now, and did so to show how the correlation between C02 and temperature is “not all that good.”  In their paper on the Vostok Ice Core, Petit et al (1999), they show how CO2 lags temperature during the onset of glaciations by several thousands of years, but offer no explanation. They also observe that CH4 and CO2 are not perfectly aligned with each other, but offer no explanation. The significance is that temperature may influence C02 amounts. At the onset of glaciations, temperature drops to glacial values before CO2 begins to fall, suggesting that CO2 has little influence on temperature modulation at these times as well.  Since 1999, this theory has been discussed in numerous scientific papers, but not one shred of evidence exists to confirm that a CO2 increase causes ‘extreme warming.’  Another quote stressing this point:  A number of times, Lindzen and many others have been quite outspoken regarding the conclusions of this document that are drawn by politicians, not scientists. There will be more on that later in the article.  According to Dr. Leslie Woodcock, emeritus professor at the University of Manchester (UK) School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science, is a former NASA scientist:  In the IPCC documents, we can see how tenuous the link between climate change and CO2 emissions are, specifically in their findings titled ‘Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis.’ Here was one of their recommendations:  If we go back to the 1995 2nd Assessment Report of the UN IPCC, we can see how much the agenda overshadowed and muted the actual science. The scientists included these three statements in the draft: • “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed (climate) changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases.” • “No study to date has positively attributed all or part (of observed climate change) to anthropogenic (i.e. man-made) causes.” • “Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the natural variability of the climate system are reduced.”  The “Summary” and conclusion statement of the IPCC report was written by politicians, not scientists. The rules force the ‘scientists’ to change their reports to match the politicians’ final ‘Summary.’ Those three statements by ‘scientists’ above were replaced with this:  In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen told the US Senate that the summer’s warmth reflected increased carbon dioxide levels. Even Science magazine reported that the climatologists were skeptical.  The ‘Green New Deal (The Sunrise Movement) is already being adopted in the US, 104 members of Congress, and three of the four frontrunners for the Democratic nomination next year have endorsed it. The legislation promises to cut carbon emissions to zero by 2050 and gives the government large amounts of control over healthcare, wealth redistribution, transport, food production and housing. This movement has it’s roots in the financial elite, a bunch of neoliberal think-tanks and financiers.  This isn’t about the planet, it’s about money, period. Climate change is no different than using ‘the war on terror’ to create patriotism and to drive the population into accepting measures that hurt them, not benefit them. These ‘fear’ narratives are completely fake. We saw the same thing with Al-Qaeda:  In the 1980s, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund became the sole authority of the global warming agenda. The fund boasts of being one of the first major global activists by citing its strong advocacy for both the 1988 formation of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the 1992 creation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.  You can access the full report here. It was published by the Energy & Environmental Legal Institute in 2016.  What About The Other Side of The Coin?  A 2013 study in Environmental Research Letters claimed that 97% of climate scientists agreed with the ‘humans changing the climate’ narrative in 12,000 academic papers that contained the words “global warming” or “global climate change” from 1991 to 2011. Not long ago, that paper hit 1m downloads, making it the most accessed paper ever among the 80+ journals published by the Institute of Physics (as Lindzen mentions above, many of these papers are being published by scientists outside of climate physics), according to the authors.  A recent article that presents more scientific studies was published in the Guardian, titled ‘No Doubt Left About Scientific Consensus on Global Warming, say experts.’  But is this true? Do “97 percent of scientists” really agree as is so often promoted by the mainstream media?  This is a deep topic and there are many points to make. Here’s a great video by Alex Epstein, founder of the Center for Industrial Progress for Prager University, explaining the 97 percent myth and where it came from.  Obviously, there is an ongoing debate surrounding climate change, and many people still think something fishy is going on here. It’s similar to the vaccines argument, or a host of other issues that never receive any attention from the mainstream media. Instead of presenting the concerns of scientists from the other side, or the side often labelled ‘skeptics,’ these scientists are often heavily ridiculed by mainstream media.  A great example is this dialogue, which is quite old now, between Lindzen and Bill Nye. It’s not hard to see that Nye has no idea what he is talking about, and he’s simply being used because, at that time, he had a large following.  The reason why so many people are unaware of the arguments made by climate ‘skeptics’ is because their points are never presented by mainstream media in the same way the other side’s are. The media controls the minds of the masses, but thankfully this is changing.  We are not denying climate change, we are simply presenting the evidence showing that climate change has been happening for a long time, and that human CO2 output doesn’t seem to play a significant role at all, and that this is simply being used for profit, control, and to take more ‘power’ away from the people and put it into the hands of politicians and the global financial elite.  This is not about the planet.  We here at CE care deeply about our planet and creating harmony on it. Since we were founded in 2009, we’ve been creating massive amounts of awareness regarding clean energy technologies and the harmful industries polluting and destroying our planet. The issue is not with finding solutions, we already have those for the most part, the issue is with the systems we have that prevent these solutions from ever seeing the light of day. In fact, we have been heavily involved with multiple clean energy projects and assisting them in coming into fruition.  Opposing the ‘doom and gloom’ global warming narrative does not mean we do not care for our environment; in fact, it’s quite the opposite. We feel that politicians meeting every single year for the past few decades have done absolutely nothing to clean up our planet, and instead have been coming up with ways to simply make money off of green technology that cuts CO2 emissions.  If the people in power, with all of their resources, really wanted to change the planet, it would have happened by now.  While our focus is on CO2, not nearly enough attention and resources are going into re-planting our planet, cleaning up our fresh water lakes and oceans, and changing our manufacturing habits to cause less waste and less pollution. If anything, this should be our main focus, especially when it’s not really clear that C02 is an issue.  Environmental and species protection should be our first priority, but it’s not. I believe this green revolution is a distraction and, in many ways, further harms our environment by taking our focus off of what’s really important and putting it on something that is not impacting our planet in a negative way.  The post ‘What They Haven’t Told You About Climate Change’ – According to the Co-Founder of Greenpeace appeared first on LewRockwell.


globalresearch--2019-01-29--A Revision of Future Climate Change Trends

As the Earth continues to heat, paleoclimate evidence suggests transient reversals will result in accentuating the temperature polarities, leading to increase in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events. Pleistocene paleoclimate records indicate interglacial temperature peaks have been are consistently succeeded by transient stadial freeze events, such as the Younger Dryas and the 8.5 kyr-old Laurentide ice melt, attributed to cold ice melt water flow from the polar ice sheets into the North Atlantic Ocean. The paleoclimate evidence raises questions regarding the mostly linear to curved future climate model trajectories proposed for the 21st century and beyond, not marked by tipping points. However, early stages of a stadial event are manifest by a weakening of the North Atlantic overturning circulation and the build-up of a large pool of cold water south and east of Greenland and along the fringes of Western Antarctica. Comparisons with climates of the early Holocene Warm Period and the Eemian interglacial when global temperatures were about +1oC higher than late Holocene levels. The probability of a future stadial event bears major implications for modern and future climate change trends, including transient cooling of continental regions fringing the Atlantic Ocean, an increase in temperature polarities between polar and tropical zones across the globe, and thereby an increase in storminess, which need to be taken into account in planning global warming adaptation efforts.  Reports of the International Panel of Climate Change (IPCC[1]), based on thousands of peer reviewed science papers and reports, offer a confident documentation of past and present processes in the atmosphere[2], including future model projections (Figure 1). When it comes to estimates of future ice melt and sea level change rates, however, these models contain a number of significant departures from observations based on the paleoclimate evidence, from current observations and from likely future projections. This includes departures in terms of climate change feedbacks from land and water, ice melt rates, temperature trajectories, sea level rise rates, methane release rates, the role of fires, and observed onset of transient stadial (freeze) events[3]. Early stages of stadial event/s are manifest by the build-up of a large pool of cold water in the North Atlantic Ocean south of Greenland and along the fringes of the Antarctic continent (Figure 2).  Figure 1.Time series of global annual mean surface air temperature anomalies relative to 1986–2005 from CMIP5 (Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project) concentration-driven experiments. Projections are shown for each RCP for the multi model mean (solid lines) and the 5–95% range (±1.64 standard deviation) across the distribution of individual models (shading).[4]  Hansen et al. (2016) (Figure 2) used paleoclimate data and modern observations to estimate the effects of ice melt water from Greenland and Antarctica, showing cold low-density meltwater tend to cap increasingly warm subsurface ocean water, affecting an increase ice shelf melting, accelerating ice sheet mass loss (Figure 3) and slowing of deep water formation (Figure 4). Ice mass loss would raise sea level by several meters in an exponential rather than linear response, with doubling time of ice loss of 10, 20 or 40 years yielding multi-meter sea level rise in about 50, 100 or 200 years.  Linear to curved temperature trends portrayed by the IPCC to the year 2300 (Figure 1) are rare in the Pleistocene paleo-climate record, which abrupt include warming and cooling variations during both glacial (Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles; Ganopolski and Rahmstorf 2001[5]; Camille and Born, 2019[6]) and interglacial (Cortese et al. 2007[7]) periods. Hansen et al.’s (2016) model includes sharp drops in temperature, reflecting stadial freezing events in the Atlantic Ocean and the sub-Antarctic Ocean and their surrounds, reaching -2oC over several decades (Figure 5).  Figure 2. 2055-2100 surface-air temperature to +1.19oC above 1880-1920 (AIB model modified forcing, ice melt to  1 meter) (Hansen et al. 2016)[8]  Figure 3.Greenland and Antarctic ice mass change. GRACE data are extension of Velicogna et al. (2014)[9]gravity data. MBM (mass budget method) data are from Rignot et al. (2011)[10].Red curves are gravity data for Greenland and Antarctica only; small Arctic ice caps and ice shelf melt add to freshwater input.[11]  Figure 4. AMOC (Sverdrup[12]) at 28◦ N in simulations (i.e., including freshwater injection of 720 Gt year−1 in 2011 around Antarctica, increasing with a 10-year doubling time, and half that amount around Greenland). (b) SST (◦C) in the North Atlantic region (44–60◦ N, 10–50◦ W).  Temperature and sea level rise relations during the Eemian interglacial[13]about 115-130 kyr ago, when temperatures were about +1oC or higher than during the late stage of the Holocene, and sea levels were +6 to +9 m higher than at present, offer an analogy for present developments. During the Eemian overall cooling of the North Atlantic Ocean and parts of the West Antarctic fringe ocean due to ice melt led to increased temperature polarities and to storminess[14], underpinning the danger of global temperature rise to +1.5oC. Accelerating ice melt and nonlinear sea level rise would reach several meters over a timescale of 50–150 years (Hansen et al. 2016)  Figure 5.Global surface-air temperature to the year 2300 in the North Atlantic and Southern Oceans, including stadial freeze events as a function of Greenland and Antarctic ice melt doubling time  Portents of collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Ocean Circulation (AMOC)  The development of large cold water pools south and east of Greenland (Rahmstorf et al. 2015[15]) and at the fringe of West Antarctica (Figures 1 and 5) signify early stages in the development of a stadial, consistent with the decline in the Atlantic Meridional Ocean Circulation (AMOC) (Figure 4). These projections differ markedly from linear model trends (Figure 1). IPCC models mainly assume long term ice melt[16], stating “For the 21st century, we expect that surface mass balance changes will dominate the volume response of both ice sheets (Greenland and Antarctica). A key question is whether ice-dynamical mechanisms could operate which would enhance ice discharge sufficiently to have an appreciable additional effect on sea level rise”[17]The IPCC conclusion is difficult to reconcile with studies by Rignot et al. (2011) reporting that in 2006 the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets experienced a combined mass loss of 475 ± 158 Gt/yr, equivalent to 1.3 ± 0.4 mm/yr sea level rise.”[18]. For the Antarctic ice sheet the IEMB team (2017) states the sheet lost 2,720 ± 1,390 billion tonnes of ice between 1992 and 2017, which corresponds to an increase in mean sea level of 7.6 ± 3.9 millimeter[19]  A non-linear climate warming trend, including stadial freeze events, bears significant implications for planning future adaptation efforts, including preparations for transient deep freeze events in parts of Western Europe and eastern North America, for periods lasting several decades (Figure 5) and coastal defenses against enhanced storminess arising from increased temperature contrasts between the cooled regions and warm tropical latitudes.  Climate model projections for the 21stto 23rdcenturies need to take paleoclimate evidence more fully into account, including the transient stadial effects of ice melt water flow into the oceans and amplifying feedbacks of global warming from land and oceans. Radiative forcing[20], increasing with concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases and rising by about 0.04 Watt/m2/year over the last 50 years[21], totaled by more than 2 Watt/m2, equivalent to ~3.0°C (~1.5°C per W/m2)[22]. The rise of mean global temperatures to date by 0.9°C since 1880[23]therefore represents lag effect, pointing to potential temperature rise by approximately two degrees Celsius. A further rise in global temperatures would be enhanced by amplifying feedbacks from land and oceans, including exposure of water surfaces following sea ice melting, reduction of CO concentration in water, release of methane and fires. Climate change trajectories would be highly irregular as a result of stadial events affected by flow of ice melt water into the oceans. Whereas similar temperature fluctuations and stadial events occurred during past interglacial periods (Cortese et al. 2007[24]; Figure 6), when temperature fluctuations were close to ~1oC, further rises in temperature in future would enhance the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events, entering uncharted territory unlike any recorded during the Pleistocene, rendering large parts of the continents uninhabitable.  Figure 6. A. Evolution of sea surface temperatures in 5 glacial-interglacial transitions recorded in ODP 1089 at the sub-Antarctic Atlantic Ocean. Lower grey lines – δ18O measured on Cibicidoides plankton; Black lines – sea surface temperature. Marine isotope stage numbers are indicated on top of diagrams. Note the stadial temperature drop events following interglacial peak temperatures, analogous to the Younger Dryas preceding the onset of the Holocene (Cortese et al. 2007[25]).B. Mean temperatures for the late Pleistocene and early Holocene.  Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.  Dr Andrew Glikson, Earth and Paleo-climate science, Australia National University (ANU) School of Anthropology and Archaeology, ANU Planetary Science Institute, ANU Climate Change Institute, Honorary Associate Professor, Geothermal Energy Centre of Excellence, University of Queensland. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  [12] Sverdrup:Unit of flow – 1 Sv equal to 1,000,000 cubic metres per second  [20] Radiative forcing – the difference between incoming radiation and radiation reflected back to space


greenwichtime--2019-10-10--Audubon study: Climate change to destabilize hundreds of bird populations

After a report went viral in September that North America has lost nearly 2 million birds, new data released Thursday from the society finds that these numbers will only increase if no action is taken to reduce the human activity impacting climate change.  The effects of climate change threaten extinction for hundreds of birds in North America, according to the study, “Survival by Degrees: 389 Bird Species on the Brink.”  But if people and policy makers take steps to mitigate the effects of climate change to keep down global temperatures, about 76 percent of these at-risk birds could be saved, the report states.  “The lack of bird song in the 1950s alerted us to the dangers of the pesticide DDT,” Corrie Folsom-O’Keefe, director of bird conservation for Audubon Connecticut said. “Now birds are forewarning us of the impacts of climate change, from increased storm frequency and intensity to sea level rise.”  Bringing together 140 million observations from bird-lovers and biologists over the last five years, Audubon scientists studied 604 North American bird species and how their habitat range would change geographically based on different warming patterns. Birds were determined vulnerable if the amount of habitat they would lose, due to rising sea levels, deforestation, urbanization, heavy rains and/or increased fires, would be greater than the habitat they would gain by flying and settling elsewhere.  Audubon also launched a zip code-based Audubon’s Birds and Climate Visualizer, which people can use to see how the birds in their area could be impacted.  “Audubon’s new report emphasizes that climate change is local, it is personal, and it will require visionary and fast-moving action to achieve a more favorable future for birds and people,” Tavares said.  The scientists behind “Survival by Degrees” based their calculations on three models put forth by the 2014 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for 1.5, 2 and 3 degrees Celsius of global warming. An increase of 1.5 degrees represents action taken to reduce the warming, while 3 degrees represents a conservative estimate of how much the Earth would warm if no action is taken, said Ana Paula Tavares, executive director of Audubon Connecticut.  In Connecticut specifically, species that are most threatened by a combination of climate change and climate-related threats under 3 degrees C of warming include the Brown Thrasher, Eastern Towhee, Scarlet Tanager, Wood Thrush and Saltmarsh Sparrow. Seventy-one species total are climate-vulnerable in summer under this scenario.  At the highest warming scenario of 3 degrees C, 305 bird species face three or more climate-related impacts.  In 2014, Audubon published its first Birds and Climate Change Report. The study showed that more than half of the bird species in North America could lose at least half of their current ranges by 2080 due to rising temperatures. Audubon’s new findings are more expanded, and more precise: Where the closest users could zoom in on the first interactive impact map was to 10 square kilometers, users can now drill down to one square kilometer — literally down to people’s neighborhoods and backyards, Tavares said.  With Audubon New York, Audubon Connecticut is working to conserve 200,000 acres of northeastern forest, 5,000 acres of salt marsh and 5,000 acres of beach and island habitat, Tavares said.  “We invite everyone to join us in this effort,” she said. “We need conservation champions to act and inspire to others to act now and act boldly. There is great hope for the future if we act now.”  Conserving forested land will help sequester carbon emissions, control flooding and protect watersheds, she said.  In Connecticut, the society is training foresters in bird-friendly forest management, so they can work with private landowners, who own the large majority of the state’s forested areas, Folsom-O’Keefe said.  To scale this effort up, the society is working on training and endorsing foresters so that they can engage larger audiences than the society’s staff could do alone, she said.  Additionally, the society is developing a forest-bird certification program that will work with large organizations, Folsom-O’Keefe said. Landowners and organizations can apply to be certified for having bird-friendly practices that meet certain requirements for being beneficial to birds and their habitats.  Audubon Connecticut also is urging state lawmakers to developing legislation to support coastal communities, which will be the first to feel the impacts of climate change, and to support the development of wind and solar energy sources.


hitandrun--2019-12-01--Climate Change: How Lucky Do You Feel?

Climate Change: How Lucky Do You Feel?

"The age of climate panic is here," declared David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (Tim Duggan Books), in a February 2019 New York Times op-ed. He's certainly right about the panic. University of Cumbria Professor of Sustainability Leadership Jem Bendell predicts that man-made climate change will result in a "collapse in society" in about 10 years. Novelist Jonathan Franzen has warned that it will soon produce "massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought."  Are they right?  My first article in Reason related to global warming appeared in 1992. It was a report on the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, where the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was negotiated. By signing the treaty, I noted, the "United States is officially buying into the notion that 'global warming' is a serious environmental problem" even as "more and more scientific evidence accumulates showing that the threat of global warming is overblown."  But in subsequent decades, as I continued to cover the science and policy of global warming, I began slowly—too slowly for some—to change my mind. In 2006, I wrote that "I now believe that balance of evidence shows that global warming could well be a significant problem."  I have spent the last several months revisiting the question, trying to figure out if the current level of "climate panic" is scientifically justified. The earth is indeed warming. Climate researchers uncontroversially agree that the average global surface temperature has increased by about 1 degree Celsius since the 19th century. About half of that increase has occurred during the last 30 years. As the planet has warmed, mountain glaciers around the world have been shrinking, Arctic sea ice has been declining, rainstorms have become somewhat fiercer, the area affected by extreme droughts has been expanding, the amount of heat being absorbed by the world's oceans has been increasing, and the global sea level has been rising.  Past those points of scientific consensus, intense disputes begin straightaway. Researchers disagree about how much of the warming can be attributed to increases in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. They clash over which temperature records are more accurate with respect to how fast the earth is warming. They debate whether or not the sea level is rising at an accelerated rate that threatens to inundate many of the world's biggest cities. And they argue about whether the predictions generated by complicated climate computer models can be trusted enough to guide policy.  I have unhappily concluded, based on the balance of the evidence, that climate change is proceeding faster and is worse than I had earlier judged it to be. There are still big scientific uncertainties, such as just how sensitive the global climate is to a given increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. And the proper public policy remains far from clear. Still, most of the evidence points toward a significantly warmer world by the end of the century—probably more than 2 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial level. Such a temperature increase will definitely have substantial impacts on human beings. (For a more detailed review of current climate science, visit reason.com/climatedata.)  Man-made climate change is a global open-access commons problem. Since no one owns the atmosphere, no one has the incentive to expend effort protecting it from plundering. The "tragedy of the commons" occurs because every individual has an incentive to use the unowned resource before someone else does. The result is overconsumption, underinvestment, and ultimately depletion of the resource. This is happening around the world as many fisheries are declining, tropical forests shrinking, water shortages spreading, and rivers and airsheds growing more polluted. In this case, the resource being depleted is a (more or less) stable global climate.  It's time for market-oriented folks to recognize these facts and figure out the best way to handle them. If we don't offer solutions to the public, the only ones on the table will be those proposed by people who misunderstand economic principles or are unfriendly to market capitalism.  In an October Yale Climate Connections podcast, the Case Western Reserve University law professor (and Volokh Conspiracy blogger) Jonathan Adler explained it well. "A lot of the expected and predictable consequences of climate change are things that we recognize to be violations of property rights and have recognized as violations of property rights for centuries," he said. "If we accept that climate change is a problem, [and] if we accept that it's causing the sorts of rights violations that libertarians normally think justify government intervention, that should shift our discussion from whether there's a case for government intervention to what type of intervention and how do we maximize the likelihood that that intervention produces the sorts of results that we're trying to get."  There are three ways to handle overexploitation in an open-access commons: privatize it, regulate it, or ignore it. All of those choices are inherently political decisions. "The science" does not tell us what must be done.  Most economists generally think of climate change resulting from the emission of greenhouse gases as a "negative externality." These occur when production and/or consumption of a good or service imposes uncompensated costs on third parties.  Nobelist Ronald Coase showed years ago that when there are well-defined property rights and minimal transaction costs, the party creating an externality and the party affected by the externality can negotiate with each other to bring about the socially optimal market quantity—in this case, a mutually agreeable level of emissions that takes into consideration the environmental harm being done without stopping economic growth and development. In addition, Coase found, it does not matter who holds the property rights, as long as someone does.  In the case of carbon dioxide emissions, the lack of assigned property rights in the atmosphere forestalls the sort of market transactions that balance costs with benefits. The price an individual pays for electricity for his home or gasoline for his car includes the monetary costs to extract, refine, and transport those fossil fuels—but it does not include the environmental costs of burning them. In a functioning market, users are obliged to internalize (i.e., pay for) the environmental costs they impose on others.  Europe's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) represents a kind of atmospheric privatization effort. Under the ETS, private companies are allocated tradable permits authorizing them to emit a ton of carbon dioxide for each allowance. Companies that can be productive while emitting less carbon sell their extra permits to other firms that find it more costly to make emissions cuts.  The aim of the ETS is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, so the number of permits declines over time. Recent research suggests, however, that the ETS has so far been only modestly effective at encouraging emissions reductions. It seems European political authorities allocated so many permits that prices have remained too low to prompt much cutting by emitters.  Another way to try to put a price on the external costs of carbon dioxide emissions is to impose a carbon tax. In January 2019, nearly 3,600 economists endorsed the "Economists' Statement on Carbon Dividends," which explicitly supported such a plan.  "A carbon tax will send a powerful price signal that harnesses the invisible hand of the marketplace to steer economic actors towards a low-carbon future," the group declared. It "will encourage technological innovation and large-scale infrastructure development" while accelerating the spread "of carbon-efficient goods and services."  A huge plus for a carbon tax is that it would replace the current host of onerous and more costly top-down regulations and subsidies aimed at reducing emissions. Moreover, the revenue from the tax could "be returned directly to U.S. citizens," the economists wrote, "through equal lump-sum rebates. The majority of American families would benefit by receiving more in 'carbon dividends' than they pay in increased energy prices."  Under the carbon dividend proposal, the tax would increase predictably over time. But economist Robert Litterman, the former head of risk management at Goldman Sachs, argues that the possibility of very unhappy surprises occurring as climate change proceeds over the course of the century constitutes an "undiversifiable risk" that should command a high risk premium. Consequently, Litterman's analysis suggests that an initially high (but revenue-neutral) carbon tax that declines as climate uncertainties are resolved would a better way to mitigate climate risk.  In February 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) introduced a resolution urging Congress to adopt the Green New Deal (GND), a sweeping plan to totally remake the American economy to address the climate crisis. The GND sets the goal of "meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources" by 2030.  Three of the leading Democratic candidates for president—Sens. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), and Kamala Harris (D–Calif.)—have endorsed the GND resolution, and each has proposed spending trillions of dollars over the next 10 years to implement comprehensive proposals addressing the problem of climate change. These include such steps as "dramatically expanding and upgrading renewable power sources," building "'smart' power grids," overhauling the U.S. transportation system by subsidizing electric-powered vehicles and public transit systems, and "upgrading all existing buildings in the United States and building new buildings to achieve maximum energy efficiency."  One obvious problem with the GND is its assertion, without evidence, that tackling climate change requires, among other things, guaranteeing every American a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, retirement security, and the right to unionize, plus access to high-quality health care and affordable housing. But the effectiveness of even the climate-related aspects of the GND is dubious. For example, in a 2017 study, Swiss researchers calculated that a carbon tax rebated to taxpayers would cut the same amount of carbon dioxide emissions at about one-fifth the cost of the sort of top-down, command-and-control regulations and subsidies envisaged by the GND.  A more defensible suggestion would involve government support for new technologies that reduce emissions. "The paramount goal of climate policy should be to make the unsubsidized cost of clean energy cheaper than fossil fuels so that all countries deploy clean energy because it makes economic sense," the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation argued in a 2014 report. Instead of rushing to deploy current expensive and inefficient low-carbon energy production methods, the ITIF researchers recommended that governments spend $70 billion annually on research and development seeking technological breakthroughs aimed at achieving dramatic cost reductions for nuclear power, carbon capture, fuel cells, smart grid technologies, electric vehicles, solar photovoltaics, wind power, and other forms of energy efficiency.  A downside of such a tech-push strategy is that energy breakthroughs are often unpredictable and governments don't have a great track record of seeing into the future. They also may not materialize fast enough to ameliorate the problems caused by climate change.  The basic premise of most climate agreements is that to prevent temperatures from increasing to possibly dangerous levels, all the countries of the world would have to agree to—and then abide by—a plan to dramatically cut their emissions. But this is probably both politically and economically unachievable. According to the nonprofit Climate Analytics group, if all countries meet all of their current pledges under the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, the average global temperature in the year 2100 would still increase by 3 degrees Celsius.  In October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued Global Warming of 1.5 °C, a document that has come to be known as the Doomsday Report. It found that the world would have to cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 40 to 50 percent by 2030 and entirely eliminate such emissions by 2050 in order to keep the global average temperature from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100.  What would be gained by making such steep immediate cuts in emissions? Citing the results of integrated assessment models that combine climate and econometric data, the report noted, "Under the no-policy baseline scenario, temperature rises by 3.66°C by 2100, resulting in a global gross domestic product (GDP) loss of 2.6%." Meanwhile, under a 1.5 degree scenario, GDP would be reduced by 0.3 percent, and under a 2 degree scenario it would be reduced by 0.5 percent.  Different models come up with different estimates, and the IPCC noted that 3.66 degrees of warming could possibly reduce global GDP by anywhere from 0.5 percent to 8.2 percent. In other words, if humanity does nothing whatsoever to abate greenhouse gas emissions, the worst-case scenario is that global GDP in 2100 would be 8.2 percent lower than it would otherwise be.  Let's make those GDP numbers concrete. Assuming no climate change and a global real growth rate of 3 percent per year for the next 81 years, today's $80 trillion economy would grow to just under $880 trillion by 2100. World population is expected to peak at around 9 billion, so divvying up the total suggests that global average income would come to about $98,000 per person. Today, in comparison, that number is just $11,300.  Under the worst-case scenario, global GDP would be $810 trillion, and average income would be $90,000 per person. Folks two generations from now will be about eight times richer, giving them more wealth and better technologies with which to cope with the problems stemming from a much warmer planet.  Of course, any calculation projecting economic and climate outcomes nearly a century hence needs to be taken with a vat of salt. We can't be sure exactly what will happen—but there is a case for letting global warming run its course and letting markets figure out how to respond.  Continued economic growth and technological progress would surely help future generations to handle many—even most—of the problems caused by climate change. At the same time, the speed and severity at which the earth now appears to be warming make the wait-and-see approach increasingly risky.  Will climate change be apocalyptic? Probably not, but the possibility is not zero. So just how lucky do you feel? Frankly, after reviewing the scientific evidence, I'm not feeling nearly as lucky as I once did.  For more detailed climate change and temperature trend analysis, please visit reason.com/climatedata.


mercurynews--2019-04-22--How climate change widens gap between haves and have-nots

Climate change is widening the world’s gap between the haves and have-nots, worsening economic inequality between rich and poor countries, according to a new analysis by Stanford scientists.  The difference between the economic output of the world’s cool wealthy nations and hot struggling nations is 25 percent larger today than it would have been without global warming, according to researchers Noah Diffenbaugh and Marshall Burke.  “Our results show that most of the poorest countries on Earth are considerably poorer than they would have been without global warming,” said climate scientist Diffenbaugh. “At the same time, the majority of rich countries are richer than they would have been.”  Much of the debate over climate change focuses on future risks of flooding and other disasters. But this analysis, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows the price that many countries have already paid.  Previous work found that during warm years, northern nations like Norway, Sweden and Iceland get an economic boost, while tropical and subtropical nations like India, Nigeria and Brazil suffer from slowed productivity.  The new study takes a much broader and longer look at the impact of climate change. Although economic inequality between countries has decreased in recent decades, the gap would have narrowed faster without the problem, according to the research,  Agriculture explains much of the difference. In cool regions, warming lengthens the growing season and allows a greater diversity of crop species. In warm regions, heat reduces yield of commodity crops like corn, soybeans and wheat.  But there are other contributors. Cool nations need to spend less money on energy to stay warm, while warm nations spend more money to stay cool.  “Labor productivity declines when temperatures are high, “said Diffenbaugh. “There’s a decline in cognitive performance, as proven by student performance on standardized tests. There’s greater interpersonal conflict.”  The research combines two approaches: A statistical analysis of the impact of temperature fluctuations on economic growth and 20 climate models created by research centers around the world and used by  the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which advises the world’s governments under the auspices of the United Nations.  The team calculated that what each country’s economic output might have been had temperatures not warmed.  For any particular nation, the annual impact is small, said Diffenbaugh.  “But it is like a retirement account,’ he said. “Small differences in what’s contributed 30, 40 or 50 years ago compounds, and creates a big differences in what is available when you retire.”  For instance, India’s GDP — the aggregate value of the economy’s goods and services – is about 30 percent lower today than it would have been if there hadn’t been global warming, they found.  While the biggest emitters enjoy on average about 10 percent higher per capita GDP today than they would have in a world without warming, the lowest emitters have been dragged down by about 25 percent.  Such a drag “is on par with the decline in economic output seen in the U.S. during the Great Depression,” said Burke, Stanford assistant professor of Earth system science.  “It’s a huge loss compared to where these countries would have been otherwise,” he said.


naturalnews--2019-01-19--Climate change on Earth is significantly impacted by solar activity profound new study confirms

Climate change on Earth is "significantly" impacted by solar activity, profound new study confirms

(Natural News) Fluctuations in the sun’s activity may hold clues to the tangible changes in the planet Earth’s climate, Swiss scientists found. Research funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation indicated that human-induced global warming may show a slight decline over the next few decades as the Sun’s current activity is expected to eventually dwindle. This decrease in solar activity may result in a minute decline in the planet Earth’s temperature, the researchers added.  A team of researchers from the Physical Meteorological Observatory Davos (PMOD), the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, ETH Zurich, and the University of Bern have developed a calculation model to quantify certain effects that the Sun’s activity will contribute to the planet’s temperature change in the next century.  According to the researchers, the calculation model indicated that following a high solar activity in the 1950s, the planet’s temperature is expected to drop by up to 0.5 decrees Celsius once the Sun’s activities dwindle to a minimum.  PMOD director and project lead Werner Schmutz said such temperature decrease would be significant, but will otherwise do little to taper off the human-induced global warming.“We could win valuable time if solar activity declines and slows the pace of global warming a little. This will be no more than borrowed time since the next minimum will inevitably be followed by a maximum,” said Schmutz.  A team of experts took a closer look on the effects of solar activity on the planet’s past climate. In order to come up with an efficient climate effect model, PMOD researchers have calculated the Sun’s radiative forcing, accounting electromagnetic and particle radiation in the process. Researchers at ETH Zurich then studied the effects of radioactive forcing on the planet’s atmosphere. On the other hand, researchers at the University of Bern examined the interaction between the atmosphere and the ocean.  Get CLEAN FOOD and help support our mission to keep you informed: The Health Ranger Store lab verifies everything we sell with accredited testing for heavy metals, microbiology and food safety. Certified organic facility, ISO-accredited on-site laboratory, no GMOs or synthetic ingredients. The world's #1 source of lab-verified clean foods and superfoods for nutritional healing. 600+ products available. Explore now.  The research team then inferred a greater radiation fluctuation striking the planet. Their assumption was more intense compared with previous models. According to Schmutz, examining other effects such as a volcanic eruptions prove to be less conclusive and that using the current model “is the only way that we can understand the natural fluctuations in our climate over the last few millennia.”  The Sun’s activity over the following years remains to be observed. However, Schmutz pointed out that useful data have only been made available in the past few decades, and that the said studies do not indicate a current fluctuation in solar activity. “To that extent, our latest results are still a hypothesis. But since we have been observing a consistently strong phase since 1950, it is highly likely that we will experience another low point in 50 to 100 years’ time. It could be every bit as intense as the Maunder Minimum, which brought particularly cold weather during the 17th century,” said Schmutz.  In 2011, a team of more than 100 experts in solar physics, geomagnetism, climate modelling or atmospheric chemistry collaborated to determine the effects of solar activity on the planet’s climate. The team assessed current climate models and identified certain mechanisms where variations in solar activity affected climate variability per region. the researchers did not identify certain solar activities that may trigger global warming.  However, the team was able to determine how solar activities impact certain regions in the planet. For example, the study revealed that variations in ultraviolet radiation may spur changes in the stratosphere near the equator and across the polar regions.  Research data also showed that solar winds impact the planet’s global electric field, which in turn affects aerosol formation and subsequent rainfall.


newyorkpost--2019-01-16--Climate change is causing waves to get bigger and more powerful

Surf’s up — but not in a good way.  A new study theorizes that as climate change continues to disrupt the oceans around the world, waves are becoming stronger and more powerful.  “The upper-ocean warming, a consequence of anthropogenic global warming, is changing the global wave climate, making waves stronger,” the study’s abstract, published in the scientific journal Nature, reads. “This identifies wave power as a potentially valuable climate change indicator.”  The study found that waves have increased in strength by 0.41 percent per year since 1948. It also found that there are “long-term correlations” with sea surface temperatures, in the most energetic region in the globe, defined as the tropical Atlantic, while adding that “wave power in high south latitudes” was also concerning.  Borja Reguero, Iñigo Losada and Fernando Méndez were the authors on the study.  In a statement accompanying the study, Losada said that wave power is a good indicator of global warming.  “This study shows that the global wave power can be a potentially valuable indicator of global warming, similarly to carbon dioxide concentration, the global sea level rise, or the global surface atmospheric temperature,” Losada said in the statement.  The 0.41 percent increase is an average, with some other parts of the world experiencing significantly stronger waves, including the Southern Ocean. “Our results show 2 [percent] increases per year in many regions of the Southern Ocean (Fig. 6, south of 40 degrees South), for an average 0.58 percent per year across the basin,” the researchers wrote in the study.  Understanding the impact of ocean waves is important because not only do they determine where people build infrastructure, such as ports, harbors or levees, but they also provide a level of intelligence where to put other types of coastal defenses.  Méndez said the effects of climate change are likely to be felt more at the coast than inland, citing the results of the study.  “Our results indicate that risk analysis neglecting the changes in wave power and having sea level rise as the only driver may underestimate the consequences of climate change and result in insufficient or maladaptation,” he said.  Earlier this month, a separate study shed light on how much energy that has been put into the Earth’s oceans over the past 150 years — the equivalent of an atomic bomb explosion every second for 150 years.