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What A Week It Was: Apocadocuments from
View By Scenario:
Species Collapse:(4)
Plague/Virus:(3)
Climate Chaos:(15)
Resource Depletion: (1)
Biology Breach:(11)
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This Week's Top Ten Very Scary Tags:
contamination  ~ faster than expected  ~ global warming  ~ anthropogenic change  ~ bad policy  ~ arctic meltdown  ~ climate impacts  ~ food safety  ~ smart policy  ~ methane release  ~ permafrost meltdown  



ApocaDocuments (7) matching "anthropogenic change" from this week
[see full week] ~ [see all stories tagged "anthropogenic change"]
Sat, Dec 20, 2008
from BBC:
Swiss glaciers 'in full retreat'
Swiss glaciers are melting away at an accelerating rate and many will vanish this century if climate projections are correct, two new studies suggest. One assessment found that some 10 cubic km of ice have been lost from 1,500 glaciers over the past nine years. The other study, based on a sample of 30 representative glaciers, indicates the group's members are now losing a metre of thickness every year. Both pieces of work come out of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. "The trend is negative, but what we see is that the trend is also steepening," said Matthias Huss from the Zurich university's Laboratory of Hydraulics, Hydrology and Glaciology. ...


And everyone knows, Swiss glaciers are the very best kind of glaciers.

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Sat, Dec 20, 2008
from The Economist:
Fiddling with words as the world melts
...At this pace, it seems hard to believe that a global deal on emissions targets (reconciling new emitters with older ones) can be reached next December at a meeting in Copenhagen, seen as a make-or-break time for UN efforts to cool the world. In the background of the Poznan meeting, there was mild optimism (and a reluctance by others to put fresh cards on the table) ahead of an expected change of stance by an Obama administration in America; resentment (among the poor and green) over the refusal of Japan and Canada to promise deeper cuts; and strong demands from China for the transfer of technology from the rich to others. In the final hours of the conference, the governments of small, sinking island nations were delighted to learn that they, and not some global body, would control a fund to help them adapt to a warming world. Their mood changed when it became known that no extra money had been set aside for this purpose. ...


If we don't stop squabbling about all this and get busy, we're screwed.

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Wed, Dec 17, 2008
from Queen:
Study links ecosystem changes in temperate lakes to climate warming
The scientists studied changes over the last few decades in the species composition of small, microscopic algae preserved in sediments from more than 200 lake systems in the northern hemisphere. These algae dominate the plankton that float at or near the surface of lakes, and serve as food for other larger organisms. Striking ecosystem changes were recorded from a large suite of lakes from Arctic, alpine and temperate ecozones in North America and western Europe. Aquatic ecosystem changes across the circumpolar Arctic were found to occur in the late-19th and early 20th centuries. These were similar to shifts in algal communities, indicating decreased ice cover and related changes, over the last few decades in the temperate lakes.... "The widespread occurrence of these trends is particularly troubling as they suggest that climatically-induced ecological thresholds have already been crossed, even with temperature increases that are below projected future warming scenarios for these regions," adds Dr. Paterson.... "We are entering unchartered territory, the effects of which can cascade throughout the entire ecosystem," concludes Dr. Smol. ...


Whattaya do if you discover a rogue fire? You put it out!

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Wed, Dec 17, 2008
from Oregon State University, via EurekAlert:
Some climate impacts happening faster than anticipated
A report released today at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union provides new insights on the potential for abrupt climate change and the effects it could have on the United States, identifying key concerns that include faster-than-expected loss of sea ice, rising sea levels and a possibly permanent state of drought in the American Southwest.... While concluding that some projections of the impact of climate change have actually been too conservative -- as in the case of glacier and ice sheets that are moving and decaying faster than predicted -- others may not pose as immediate a threat as some scenarios had projected, such as the rapid releases of methane or dramatic shifts in the ocean current patterns that help keep Europe warm.... The "overarching" recommendation of the report is the need for committed and sustained monitoring of these climatic forces that could trigger abrupt climate change, the researchers concluded. ...


"Sustained monitoring" is all well and good -- but let's also do some "sustained remediation," shall we?

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Tue, Dec 16, 2008
from Guardian (UK):
Emissions: Where do you draw the line?
Supporters of this system say that a cap-and-trade, market-based solution is the only realistic way a reduction in global emissions will ever be achieved. Carrots are always better than sticks, they say. But in such a world, it will be rare for a distinction to be made between why emissions were created in the first place. There will be a market-determined price to pay for emitting a tonne of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but no one will be asking why you emitted it as long as you pay the going rate. But is it beyond our collective wit to also judge our energy use against a set of criteria that gives extra weighting to our essential and most worthy needs?... But who is going to draw that line between essential and non-essential use? What, for example, would you place into the "essential" trolley? Two thousand miles' worth of petro-fuelled driving a year? Enough energy to heat your living room to 18C during winter? ...


Maybe... a benign tyrant? A philosopher-king? Do we have the collective wit?

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Tue, Dec 16, 2008
from Telegraph.co.uk:
Last decade is the warmest on record, scientists say
Global warming has pushed the world's temperature up by more than 1.26F (0.7C), said the Met Office, as they unveiled figures that show the dramatic effect human influence has had on the Earth's climate. They predict that this year will be the tenth warmest worldwide since records began in 1850, with a global mean temperature of 58F (14.3C). This would have been "exceptionally unusual" just a few years ago, but is now "quite normal," say climate scientists. Dr Peter Stott from the Met Office said: "Human influence, particularly emission of greenhouse gases, has greatly increased the chance of having such warm years." ...


Don't we read this story every year?

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Tue, Dec 16, 2008
from AP News:
More than 2 trillion tons of ice melted in Arctic since '03
More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming. More than half of the loss of landlocked ice in the past five years has occurred in Greenland, based on measurements of ice weight by NASA's GRACE satellite, said NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke. The water melting from Greenland in the past five years would fill up about 11 Chesapeake Bays, he said, and the Greenland melt seems to be accelerating.... A second study suggests even larger amounts of frozen methane are trapped in lakebeds and sea bottoms around Siberia and they are starting to bubble to the surface in some spots in alarming amounts, said Igor Semiletov, a professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. In late summer, Semiletov found methane bubbling up from parts of the East Siberian Sea and Laptev Sea at levels that were 10 times higher than they were in the mid-1990s, he said based on a study this summer. ...


Don'tcha hate it when they use numbers you can't understand? I mean, who can get their mind around "eleven Chesapeake bays"?

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