Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

In other words: the warming trend has not gone away and it looks likely that warmer temperatures will boomerang back.

Again, cane ethanol in Brazil produces 30% of their fuel needs on 2% of the cropland (and that 2% actually produces sugar too, since the ethanol is made from the waste stalks).

SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS THAT GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL AND ANTHROPOGENIC CONTINUES TO GROW. ANOTHER FORMER SKEPTICAL SCIENTIST, CONFRONTED BY EVIDENCE, CONVERTS.

...
Overland said he used to be among those skeptical about the effects of global climate change. The new findings, which he termed "startling," were developed at a recent workshop, he said.

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.SenateReport#report

26.

March 9, 2007
The Downside of Brazilian Ethanol

Ethanol is in the news with President Bush touring Latin America and forming an ethanol alliance with Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Brazil is a world leader in ethanol production, using sugar cane as the source of much of the nation's transport fuel.

We've talked about Brazilian ethanol here before and some readers have raised questions about damage to the Amazon rain forest - not because rain forest is being cut to grow sugar cane, but because sugar cane is pushing other crops into the rain forest region. Protection of the Amazon has been highlighted this week in the run-up to President Bush's trip.

Brazil slowed the loss of the rain forest by 11 percent last year, but if the region's soybean market expands, growers will push into the Amazon region. Farmland farther south in Brazil has largely moved to sugar cane production.
LINK

Ethanol accounts for 40 percent of total fuels used by non-diesel powered vehicles in Brazil and represents a 30 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from the transport sector, the Cane Industry Association (Unica) said.

But not even the global stars of renewable fuels are free of critics who fear that increased ethanol use worldwide will hasten deforestation in the Amazon and other tropical rain forests in order to produce sugar cane.

"In 20 years, I doubt there will be a gasoline car on the Brazilian market. They will all be powered by ethanol," Unica President Eduardo Pereira Carvalho said during the Reuters Global Biofuel Summit.
Brazil began its ethanol program 30 years ago when it was importing nearly 90 percent of oil needed for domestic use.

During its growth to maturity, the cane stalk absorbs the same amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as is eventually emitted during combustion of the ethanol distilled from its juices.

But this is not so for ethanol made from corn in the United States or wheat in Europe. These primary materials must first be turned into sugars before fermentation, which requires the use extra fossil fuels and adds to carbon gasses emitted in the production process.

Brazilian cane mills are also powered by leftover cane stalks that heat caldrons to generate steam and electric energy, an extra advantage that corn and wheat don't have.

Unica estimates that Brazilian cane ethanol on average yields more than 8 times more energy than is used in the production process, compared with U.S. corn ethanol production that yields between 1.1 to 1.7 times as much energy.

This advantage should improve with the use of state-of-the-art technologies in Brazilian mills.

EUROPEAN TRADE RESTRICTIONS

The European Union, which just proposed the use of 10 percent biofuels for transport by 2020, signaled it will demand proof from suppliers that the product was made in a sustainable manner, a requirements that may rule out U.S. ethanol.
LINK

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.SenateReport#report

27.
Anton Uriarte, a professor of Physical Geography at the University of the Basque Country in Spain and author of a book on the paleoclimate, rejected man-made climate fears. "It's just a political thing, and the lies about global warming are contributing to the proliferation of nuclear energy," Uriarte said according to a September 2007 article in the Spanish newspaper El Correo. "There's no need to be worried. It's very interesting to study [climate change], but there's no need to be worried," Uriarte wrote. "Far from provoking the so-called greenhouse effect, [CO2] stabilizes the climate." Uriarte noted that "the Earth is not becoming desertified, it's greener all the time." Uriarte says natural factors dominate the climate system. "The Earth being spherical, the tropics always receive more heat than the poles and the imbalance has to be continually rectified. They change places because of the tilt of the earth's axis. And, moreover, the planet isn't smooth, but rough, which produces perturbations in the interchange of air masses. We know the history of the climate very well and it has changed continuously," he wrote. "It's evident that the Earth is a human planet, and that being so, it's quite normal that we influence the atmosphere. It's something else altogether to say that things will get worse. I believe that a little more heat will be very good for us. The epochs of vegetational exuberance coincided with those of more heat," he explained. "In warm periods, when there are more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere - more CO2 and water vapour - climate variability is less. In these periods greenhouse gases, which act as a blanket, cushion the differences between the tropics and the poles. There is less interchange of air masses, less storms. We're talking about a climate which is much less variable," he added.

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.SenateReport#report

28.
Professor David F. Noble of Canada's York University authored the book "America by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism" and co-founded a group designed to make scientific and technological research relevant to the needs of working people. Noble, a former curator at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and a former professor at MIT, is a committed environmentalist and a man-made global warming skeptic. Noble now believes that the movement has "hyped the global climate issue into an obsession." Noble wrote a May 8, 2007 essay entitled "The Corporate Climate Coup" which details how global warming has "hijacked" the environmental left and created a "corporate climate campaign" which has "diverted attention from the radical challenges of the global justice movement." Noble wrote,"Don't breathe. There's a total war on against CO2 emissions, and you are releasing CO2 with every breath. The multi-media campaign against global warming now saturating our senses, which insists that an increasing CO2 component of greenhouse gases is the enemy, takes no prisoners: you are either with us or you are with the 'deniers.' No one can question the new orthodoxy or dare risk the sin of emission. If Bill Clinton were running for president today he would swear he didn't exhale." Noble added,"How did scientific speculation so swiftly erupt into ubiquitous intimations of apocalypse?"

The reason this thread has degenerated is that there is no dispute any more. Just as we accept the earth orbits the sun and that life is the result of evolution...so its settled. The earth's climate is changing and its anthropogenic. The debate has moved on.

The debate has moved on only for the environmental religionists. It doesn't bother you at all that billions of dollars that could be utilized for better infrastruture or to adapt to natural (and/or irreversible) climate change could be diverted to useless concepts that could actually hurt people and ill prepare us to cope with reality?

Foxfyre wrote:

The debate has moved on only for the environmental religionists. It doesn't bother you at all that billions of dollars that could be utilized for better infrastruture or to adapt to natural (and/or irreversible) climate change could be diverted to useless concepts that could actually hurt people and ill prepare us to cope with reality?

Which "billions of dollars" are you talking about Fox?

Please provide us of some evidence of these "billions of dollars" and then tell us how they could be better used.

It is so easy to make statements in the abstract but when you want to claim there is no evidence on the global warming side you better be able to provide MORE evidence than what you are arguing against.

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.SenateReport#report

29.
Award-winning quaternary geologist Dr. Olafur Ingolfsson, a professor from the University of Iceland who has conducted extensive expeditions and field research in the both the Arctic and Antarctic, chilled fears that the iconic polar bear is threatened by global warming. Ingolfsson was awarded the prestigious "Antarctic Service Medal of the United States" by the National Science Foundation. "We have this specimen that confirms the polar bear was a morphologically distinct species at least 100,000 years ago, and this basically means that the polar bear has already survived one interglacial period," Ingolfsson said according to a December 10, 2007 article in the BBC. The article explained, "And what's interesting about that is that the Eeemian - the last interglacial - was much warmer than the Holocene (the present)." Ingolfsson continued, "This is telling us that despite the on-going warming in the Arctic today, maybe we don't have to be quite so worried about the polar bear. That would be very encouraging." Ingolfsson is optimistic about the polar bears future because of his research about the Earth's history. "The polar bear is basically a brown bear that decided some time ago that it would be easier to feed on seals on the ice. So long as there are seals, there are going to be polar bears. I think the threat to the polar bears is much more to do with pollution, the build up of heavy metals in the Arctic. This is just how I interpret it. But this is science - when you have little data, you have lots of freedom," he concluded.

Some truth about climate change

Two weeks ago, as North America emerged from its coldest and snowiest winter for decades, the US National Climate Data Center, run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a statement that snow cover in January on the Eurasian land mass had been the most extensive ever recorded, and that in the US March had been only the 63rd warmest since records began in 1895.

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.SenateReport#report

30 + 100 = 130.

Over 100 Prominent International Scientists Warn UN Against 'Futile' Climate Control Efforts in a December 13, 2007 open letter. "Attempts to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity's real and pressing problems[… NOTE …]

The scientists' letter continued: "The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued increasingly alarming conclusions about the climatic influences of human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2), a non-polluting gas that is essential to plant photosynthesis. While we understand the evidence that has led them to view CO2 emissions as harmful, the IPCC's conclusions are quite inadequate as justification for implementing policies that will markedly diminish future prosperity. In particular, it is not established that it is possible to significantly alter global climate through cuts in human greenhouse gas emissions." "The IPCC Summaries for Policy Makers are the most widely read IPCC reports amongst politicians and non-scientists and are the basis for most climate change policy formulation. Yet these Summaries are prepared by a relatively small core writing team with the final drafts approved line-by-line by ¬government ¬representatives. The great ¬majority of IPCC contributors and ¬reviewers, and the tens of thousands of other scientists who are qualified to comment on these matters, are not involved in the preparation of these documents. The summaries therefore cannot properly be represented as a consensus view among experts," the letter added.

[… NOTE … Only 52 scientists participated in the UN IPCC Summary for Policymakers in April 2007, according to the Associated Press. ...]

The letter was signed by renowned scientists such as Dr. Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists;

[… LIST OF THE REST OF THE SIGNATORIES …]