Climate Change, Peak Oil and other Limits to Growth Challenge our Models of

Perpetual Growth, Business as Usual, and Economics

Compiled information by Steven Muschalik

The History of Climate Change Science_______________________________________4

What Do Human Records and Proxy Data Tell us About Our Climate?____________10

What Does Ice Core Data Tell Us About Earth’s Climate History?________________12

What Climate Existed in the Carboniferous Period?____________________________15

Hows Does the Greenhouse Effect Work?____________________________________18

What Are Climate Forcings?_______________________________________________22

Is The Earth Out of Energy Balance With Space?_____________________________23

How do Milankovich cycles affect the sun-earth interaction?____________________26

Do Sun Cycles And Its Flares Cause Global Warming?_________________________29

What Are Positive or Negative Feedback Mechanisms?_________________________35

How Much Energy Is Required to Warm an Entire Planet?______________________37

What is the Carbon Cycle?________________________________________________38

Is The Carbon Cycle Out of Balance?_______________________________________40

Which Mode of Transport Produces Less C02?________________________________41

What Are Carbon Sinks?__________________________________________________42

How Much CO2 Equivalent Can Our Planet Absorb Naturally?__________________43

Does Climate Change Affect Precipitation?___________________________________45

Does Climate Change Affect Soil Moisture?__________________________________46

How Do Climate Models Work And Are They Reliable?_________________________47

Why Should We Be Worried About a Warming of Just 1-5°C?___________________49

What Caused The Cooling Phase Between 1940-1980 Whilst CO2 Was Rising?_____50

How Long Does C02 Last in the Atmosphere?_________________________________52

Is There Scientific Consensus on Climate Change?____________________________56

Is The IPCC Report Unbiased Or Is It Political?_______________________________57

Is There Evidence In the Past of Abrupt Climate Change?_______________________62

What Is The Younger Dryas?______________________________________________63

When Did Humans Begin to Change the Climate?_____________________________65

What Is The Probable Resulting Climate For Given Emissions?__________________67

What Are The Chances of Exceeding a Range of Temperatures at a Particular Level of CO2 Equivalent?________________________________________________________68

What Can Cause Sea Level Change?________________________________________72

How Does Recent Sea Level Rise Look Like Over Time?________________________73

How Does Sea Level Rise Relate to Temperature?_____________________________76

That's about four times faster than sea levels were rising most of the time during this period, and at least 20 times faster than the sea level is currently rising.____________77

What Kind of Sea Level Rise Can We Expect in The Future?____________________78

How Long Will It Take For The Climate to Respond to Forcings_________________80

How Long Will It Take to Stabilise The Climate, and Sea Levels?_________________81

What Constitutes Dangerous Anthropogenic Interference With Nature?___________82

What Are Tipping Points?_________________________________________________83

What Are The Uncertainties About Climate Change?___________________________85

What Is Happening To Our Species In Relation to Climate Change?______________88

Can Climate Change Cause Conflict and Civil Unrest Or Even War?______________92

What Can We Do To Save The Climate From Going Haywire?___________________94

What Are The Limitations of Coal and Geosquestration?________________________96

What Is Happening In The Arctic, and In the Oceans?_________________________98

Do We Need To Reconsider GDP Or Even Capitalism?________________________100

Is The Current Fossil Fuel Based Economy On a Crash Course With Nature?_____102

Will Environmental Policies Stifle The Economy?____________________________104

What Is Sustainable Development?________________________________________110

What Are The Costs of Inaction?__________________________________________111

What Opportunities Do Businesses See In Taking Action on Climate Change?_____113

What Surprises Can We Expect?__________________________________________116

What is Humanities Ecological Footprint?__________________________________118

How Do Entropy, Economy and Environment Relate?_________________________120

What Are the Equity Issues of Energy?_____________________________________122

Can Population Growth Be Mathematically Modeled?_________________________123

Are There Limits To Growth?_____________________________________________127

How Do We Know We Have Reached Overshoot?_____________________________141

What Does Human History Tell Us About Civilisation and Equilibrium?__________142

Can The (R/P) Ratio Predict The Lifetime of Fuels?___________________________143

What is Peak Oil?______________________________________________________144

How Long Does It Take To Prepare For Peak Oil?____________________________150

What Is The Creaming Curve?____________________________________________151

Does a Hydrogen Economy Make Sense?___________________________________152

Is It Possible to Replace Declining Oil Production With Alterative Fuels?_________153

How Vulnerable Is Australia To Petrol Prices?_______________________________156

Can Taxes Help Improve Signals to Businesses to Save Energy?_________________158

Does The Suburban Way of Life Have A Future?_____________________________160

Can New Technology Make Civilisation Sustainable?_________________________162

Net Energy Analysis with EROI___________________________________________165

Will We Have To Rethink Our Current Economic System In a Low-Energy World?_166

How Will Peak Oil Affect Food Supply?____________________________________168

How Will Climate Change Affect Food Supply?______________________________168

How Will Climate Change Affect Electricity Production?_______________________169

Is The Planetary Situation Urgent?________________________________________171

Can We Believe Climate Skeptics?_________________________________________172

What TV Channels May Show Documentaries With Evidence of Global Warming?_____________________________________________________________________173

The History of Climate Change Science

Here are some milestones in the history of climate change science.

1824 Joseph Fourier calculates that the Earth would be far colder if it lacked an atmosphere.

1859 Tyndall discovers that some gases block infrared radiation. He suggests that changes in the concentration of the gases could bring climate change.

1896 Arrhenius publishes first calculation of global warming from human emissions of CO2.

1897 Chamberlin produces a model for global carbon exchange including feedbacks.

1930s Global warming trend since late 19th century reported. Milankovitch proposes orbital changes as the cause of ice ages.

1938 Callendar argues that CO2 greenhouse global warming is underway, reviving interest in the question.

1945 U.S. Office of Naval Research begins generous funding of many fields of science, some of which happen to be useful for understanding climate change.

1956 Ewing and Donn offer a feedback model for quick ice age onset. Phillips produces a somewhat realistic computer model of the global atmosphere. Plass calculates that adding CO2 to the atmosphere will have a significant effect on the radiation balance.

1957 Revelle finds that CO2 produced by humans will not be readily absorbed by the oceans.

1958 Telescope studies show a greenhouse effect raises temperature of the atmosphere of Venus far above the boiling point of water.

1960 Downturn of global temperatures since the early 1940s is reported. Keeling accurately measures CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere and detects an annual rise. The level is 315 ppm.

1963 Calculations suggest that feedback with water vapor could make the climate acutely sensitive to changes in CO2 level.

1965 Boulder meeting on causes of climate change, in which Lorenz and others point out the chaotic nature of the climate system and the possibility of sudden shifts.

1966 Emiliani’s analysis of deep-sea cores shows the timing of ice ages was set by small orbital shifts, suggesting that the climate system is sensitive to small changes.

1967 International Global Atmospheric Research Program established, mainly to gather data for better short-range weather prediction but including climate. Manabe and Wetherald make a convincing calculation that doubling CO2 would raise world temperatures a couple of degrees.

1968 Studies suggest a possibility of collapse of Antarctic ice sheets, which would sea levels catastrophically.

1969 Budyko and Sellers present models of catastrophic ice-albedo feedbacks. Nimbus III satellite begins to provide comprehensive global atmospheric temperature measurements.

1970 First Earth Day. Environmental movement attains strong influence, spreads concern about global degradation. Creation of U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the world’s leading funder of climate research. Aerosols from human activity are shown to be increasing swiftly. Bryson claims they counteract global warming and may bring serious cooling.

1971 SMIC conference of leading scientists reports a danger of rapid and serious global climate change caused by humans, calls for an organized research effort.

1972 Ice cores and other evidence show big climate shifts in the past between relatively stable modes in the span of a thousand years or so.

1974 Serious droughts and other unusual weather since 1972 increase scientific and public concern about climate change, with cooling from aerosols suspected to be as likely as warming; journalists talk of ice age.

1975 Concern about environmental effects of airplanes leads to investigations of trace gases in the stratosphere and discovery of danger to ozone layer. Manabe and collaborators produce complex but plausible computer models which show a temperature rise of several degrees for doubled CO2.

1976 Studies find that CFCs (1975) and also methane and ozone (1976) can make a serious contribution to the greenhouse effect Deep-sea cores show a dominating influence from 100,000-year Milankovitch orbital changes, emphasizing the role of feedbacks. Deforestation and other ecosystem changes are recognized as major factors in the future of the climate.

Eddy shows that there were prolonged periods without sunspots in past centuries, corresponding to cold periods.

1977 Scientific opinion tends to converge on global warming as the biggest climate risk in next century.

1978 Attempts to coordinate climate research in U.S. end with an inadequate National Climate Program Act, accompanied by temporary growth in funding.

1979 U.S. National Academy of Sciences report finds it highly credible that doubling CO2 will bring 1.5-4.5EC global warming. World Climate Research Programme launched to coordinate international research.

1981 Hansen and others show that sulfate aerosols can significantly cool the climate, raising confidence in models showing future greenhouse warming. Some scientists predict greenhouse warming “signal” should be visible by about the year 2000.

1982 Greenland ice cores reveal drastic temperature oscillations in the span of a century in the distant past. Strong global warming since mid-1970s is reported, with 1981 the warmest year on record.

1983 Reports from U.S. National Academy of Sciences and Environmental Protection Agency spark conflict, as greenhouse warming becomes prominent in mainstream politics.

1985 Villach conference declares expert consensus that some global warming seems inevitable, calls on governments to consider international agreements to restrict emissions. Antarctic ice cores show that CO2 and temperature went up and down together through past ice ages, pointing to powerful biological and geochemical feedbacks. Broecker speculates that a reorganization of North Atlantic Ocean circulation can bring swift and radical climate change.

1987 Montreal Protocol of theVienna Convention imposes international restrictions on emission of ozone-destroying gases.

1988 News media coverage of global warming leaps upward following record heat and droughts plus testimony by Hansen. Toronto Conference calls for strict, specific limits on greenhouse gas emissions. Ice-core and biology studies confirm living ecosystems make climate feedback by way of methane, which could accelerate global warming. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is established. Level of CO2 in the atmosphere reaches 350 ppm.

1989

Fossil-fuel and other industries form Global Climate Coalition in US to lobby politicians and convince the media and public that climate science is too uncertain to justify action.

1990 First IPCC report says world has been warming and future warming seems likely. Industry lobbyists and some scientists dispute the tentative conclusions.

1991 Mt. Pinatubo explodes; Hansen predicts cooling pattern, verifying (by 1995) computer models of aerosol effects.Global warming skeptics emphasize studies indicating that a significant part of 20th-century temperature changes were due to solar influences. (The correlation would fail in the following decade.)Studies from 55 million years ago show possibility of eruption of methane from the seabed with enormous self-sustained warming.

1992 Conference in Rio de Janeiro produces UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, but US blocks calls for serious action.Study of ancient climates reveals climate sensitivity in same range as predicted independently by computer models.

1993 Greenland ice cores suggest that great climate changes (at least on a regional scale) can occur in the space of a single decade.

1995 Second IPCC report detects "signature" of human-caused greenhouse effect warming, declares that serious warming is likely in the coming century. Reports of the breaking up of Antarctic ice sheets and other signs of actual current warming in polar regions begin affecting public opinion.

1997 International conference produces Kyoto Protocol, setting targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions if enough nations sign onto a treaty.

1998 The warmest year on record, globally averaged (1995, 1997, and 2001-2006 were near the same level). Borehole data confirm extraordinary warming trend. Qualms about arbitrariness in computer models diminish as teams model ice-age climate and dispense with special adjustments to reproduce current climate.

1999 Criticism that satellite measurements show no warming are dismissed by National Academy Panel.Ramanathan detects massive "brown cloud" of aerosols from South Asia.

2000 Global Climate Coalition dissolves as many corporations grapple with threat of warming, but oil lobby convinces US administration to deny problem.Variety of studies emphasize variability and importance of biological feedbacks in carbon cycle, liable to accelerate warming.

2001

Third IPCC report states baldly that global warming, unprecedented since end of last ice age, is "very likely," with possible severe surprises. Effective end of debate among all but a few scientists.Bonn meeting, with participation of most countries but not US, develops mechanisms for working towards Kyoto targets.National Academy panel sees a "paradigm shift" in scientific recognition of the risk of abrupt climate change (decade-scale).Warming observed in ocean basins; match with computer models gives a clear signature of greenhouse effect warming.

2002 Studies find surprisingly strong "global dimming," due to pollution, has retarded arrival of greenhouse warming, but dimming is now decreasing.

2003 Variety of studies increase concern that collapse of ice sheets (West Antarctica, perhaps Greenland) can raise sea levels faster than most had believed.Deadly summer heat wave in Europe accelerates divergence between European and US public opinion.

2004 In controversy over temperature data covering past millenium, most conclude climate variations were substantial, but not comparable to the post-1980 warming.First major book, movie and art work featuring global warming appear.

2005 Kyoto treaty goes into effect, signed by major industrial nations except US. Japan, Western Europe, regional US entities accelerate work to retard emissions.Hurricane Katrina and other major tropical storms spur debate over impact of global warming on storm intensity.Level of CO2 in the atmosphere reaches 380 ppm.

http://www.livescience.com/environment/070131_climate_change_history.html

Our understanding of climate change began with intense debates amongst 19th century scientists about whether northern Europe had been covered by ice thousands of years ago. In the 1820s Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier discovered that "greenhouse gasses" trap heat radiated from the Earth's surface after it has absorbed energy from the sun. In 1859 John Tyndall suggested that ice ages were caused by a decrease in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide. In 1896 Svente Arrhenius showed that doubling the carbon dioxide content of the air would gradually raise global temperatures by 5-6C - a remarkably prescient result that was virtually ignored by scientists obsessed with explaining the ice ages.The idea of global warming languished until 1938, when Guy S Callender suggested that the warming trend revealed in the 19th century had been caused by a 10% increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. At this point scientists were not alarmed, as they were confident that most of the carbon dioxide emitted by humans had dissolved safely in the oceans. However, this notion was dispelled in 1957 by Hans Suess and Roger Revelle, who discovered a complex chemical buffering system which prevents sea water from holding on to much atmospheric carbon dioxide.The possibility that humans could contribute to global warming was now being taken seriously by scientists, and by the early 1960s some had begun to raise the spectre of severe climate change within a century. They had started to collect evidence to test the

idea that global temperatures were increasing alongside greenhouse gas emissions, and to construct mathematical models to predict future climates.In 1958 Charles Keeling began long-term measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii. Looked at now, the figures show an indisputable annual increase, with roughly 30% more of the gas relative to pre-industrial levels in today's atmosphere - higher than at any time in the last 700,000 years. Temperature readings reveal an average warming of 0.5-0.6C over the last 150 years.Climate change sceptics have pointed out that these records could have been due to creeping urbanisation around weather stations, but it is now widely accepted that this 'urban heat island effect' is relatively unimportant and that it doesn't explain why most of the warming has been detected far away from cities, over the oceans and the poles.Since the 1960s, evidence of global warming has continued to accumulate. In 1998 Michael Mann and colleagues published a detailed analysis of global average temperature over the last millennium known as the "hockey stick graph", revealing a rapid temperature increase since the industrial revolution. Despite concerted efforts to find fault with Mann's methodology, his basic result is now accepted as sound. Then, in 2005, just as the Kyoto Protocol for limiting greenhouse gas emissions was ratified, James Hansen and his team detected a dramatic warming of the world's oceans - just as expected in a warming world.There is now little doubt that the temperature increase over the last 150 years is real, but debate still surrounds the causes. We know that the warming during the first half of the last century was almost certainly due to a more vigorous output of solar energy, and some scientists have suggested that increased solar activity and greater volcanic emissions of carbon dioxide are responsible for all of the increase. But others point out that during the last 50 years the sun and volcanoes have been less active and could not have caused the warming over that period.By 2005 a widespread scientific consensus had emerged that serious, large-scale disruption could occur around 2050, once average global temperature increase exceeds about 2C, leading to abrupt and irreversible changes. These include the melting of a large proportion of the Greenland ice cap (now already under way), the reconfiguration of the global oceanic circulation, the disappearance of the Amazon forest, the emission of methane from permafrost and undersea methane hydrates, and the release of carbon dioxide from soils.This new theory of "abrupt climate change" has overturned earlier predictions of gradual change, and has prompted some scientists to warn that unmitigated climate change could lead to the complete collapse of civilisation. Fears have been fuelled by the possibility that smoke, hazes and particles from burning vegetation and fossil fuels could be masking global warming by bouncing solar energy back to space. This "global dimming" effect is diminishing as we clean up air pollution. As a result global average temperature could rise by as much as 10 degrees Celsius by the close of the century - a catastrophic increase.A more conservative assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001 indicated that with unabated carbon emissions, global temperature could rise gradually to around 5.8C by 2100. An increase of this nature would still threaten the lives of millions of people, particularly in the global south, due to sea level rise and extreme weather events. Although some people still deny that climate change is a problem we can do something about, last year the UK government indicated that it was on board. The Stern Review showed that without immediate and relatively inexpensive action, climate change would lead to severe and permanent global economic depression by 2050. There is now a strong scientific and economic consensus about the severity of the climate crisis.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/jan/08/climatechange.climatechangeenvironment

What Do Human Records and Proxy Data Tell us About Our Climate?Good weather records extend back less than 150 years in most places. In that time, the Earth's global average temperature has increased by approximately 0.5 degrees centigrade or 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit.

This figure shows direct observations of global temperatures since the 1850s.

Beginning in the 1970's, paleoclimatologists began constructing a blueprint of how the Earth's temperature changed over the centuries before 1850 and the widespread use of thermometers. Out of this emerged a view of the past climate based on limited data from tree rings, historical documents, sediments and other proxy data sources. Today, many more paleoclimate records are available from around the world, providing a much improved view of past changes in the Earth's temperature.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/jones2004/jones2004.htmlhttp://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/paleolast.html

What Does Ice Core Data Tell Us About Earth’s Climate History?

From paleo records, we know that the climate of the past million years has been dominated by the glacial cycle, a pattern of ice ages and glacial retreats lasting thousands of years. There have been four ice ages and intervening warmer periods during the past 400,000 years.

Atmospheric CO2 concentration is measured in parts per million by volume, or ppmv. The concentration has varied in the past, quite naturally. In fact, for the last several million years, during the transition of glacial conditions to interglacial, CO2 concentration typically increases from about 180 ppmv to about 280 ppmv.

It turns out that the current rate of increase is 2.1 ppmv/year. Recall that during a typical deglaciation, the rate is about 0.02 ppmv/year, and that the fastest single change measured in the last 400,000 years in the Vostok ice core date is an increase rate of 0.06 ppmv/year.This means that the rate of increase is 35 times faster than the fastest rate observed in the last 400,000 years — and probably a lot longer than that. In the past, CO2 concentration has changed quite naturally, and living systems have adapted to the changes. But the adaptation of living systems is a slow process, and when environmental changes happen very rapidly, many species can’t adapt in time to survive. Over the last 400,000 years, CO2 has gone up and down by as much as 100 ppmv, but never faster than 0.06 ppmv/year. During the modern industrial era, CO2 has already gone up (due to human activity) by 100 ppmv (from a pre-industrial value of 280 ppmv to the modern value of just over 380), but it has done so much faster.And it promises to continue to increase. At the current rate (2.1 ppmv/year) we’ll see another 100 ppmv increase in a mere 48 years; if the rate continues we’ll reach 480 ppmv by 2055, and 575 ppmv by the year 2100. But if we continue with “business as usual,” the rate won’t stay constant — it’ll get even faster.The same is true of temperature. During a deglaciation, global average temperature increases about 5oC. We don’t expect to see that much in the next century (although we

might!). But a deglaciation takes about 5,000 years, so the rate of temperature change is about 0.001oC/year. The current rate is 18 times faster.http://tamino.wordpress.com/2007/03/06/fast-co2/

Below is a schematic representation of recent climate trends and future projections in historical perspective. The 20th and 21st centuries are shown to the same (linear) scale. Earlier periods are shown in terms of increasing powers of ten years ago but are linear within each period. http://www.bom.gov.au/info/climate/change/gallery/77.shtml

Eighteen-thousand years ago, at the peak of the last ice age, scientists estimate that nearly 32% of the earth's land area was covered with ice, including much of Canada, Scandinavia, and the British Isles. These glaciers developed because the earth was in the midst of an ice age. Today ice coverage is about 10% of the Earth's land surface.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/primer_history.html

What Climate Existed in the Carboniferous Period?

Some 30 million years before dinosaurs appeared, known as the Carboniferous Period - 300 million years ago - a time when terrestrial Earth was ruled by giant plants and insects, average global temperatures in the Early Carboniferous Period were hot- approximately 20° C (68° F). Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Early Carboniferous Period were approximately 1500 ppm (parts per million).

Interestingly, the last half of the Carboniferous Period witnessed periods of significant ice cap formation over polar landmasses-- particularly in the southern hemisphere. Alternating cool and warm periods during the ensuing Carboniferous Ice Age coincided with cycles of glacier expansion and retreat.

Lycopsid stomatal indices from the fossil records show low CO2 levels during the Permo-Carboniferous glaciation are in agreement with glaciological evidence for the presence of continental ice and coupled models of climate and ice-sheet growth on Pangea. Moreover, the Permian data indicate atmospheric CO2 levels were low 260 Myr ago, by which time continental deglaciation was already underway. Positive biotic feedbacks on climate, and geotectonic events, therefore are implicated as mechanisms underlying deglaciation.

Late Palaeozoic evidence for ice and atmospheric CO2 concentrations reconstructed from paleosols and predicted by a geochemical model of the long-term global carbon cycle (solid line). Red boxes indicate CO2 estimates from the current study. The dashed horizontal line indicates the threshold atmospheric CO2 level above which theoretical studies predict deglaciation on Pangea and the maintenance of an ice-free state. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=130500

We can determine the past climate of the Earth by mapping the distribution of ancient coals, desert deposits, tropical soils, salt deposits, glacial material, as well as the distribution of plants and animals that are sensitive to climate, such as alligators, palm trees & mangrove swamps.http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm

Illustrated below is how geologists believe Earth's landmasses were arranged 306 million years ago, during the Late Carboniferous Period.

Following the Carboniferous Period, the Permian Period and Triassic Period witnessed predominantly desert-like conditions, accompanied by one or more major periods of species extinctions. CO2 levels began to rise during this time because there was less erosion of the land and therefore reduced

opportunity for chemical reaction of CO2 with freshly exposed minerals. Also, there was

significantly less plant life growing in the proper swamplands to sequester CO2 through photosynthesis and rapid burial. http://mysite.verizon.net/mhieb/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html

Our plucky planet has survived at least two runaway greenhouse events, one of them just barely. About 55 million years ago, a tremendous methane burp trapped enough sunlight to heat Earth by as much as 13° Fahrenheit (7° Celsius), disrupting the climate for more than 100,000 years. [NASA/Goddard EOS Project Dec 12/01]

An even bigger global warming hiccup occurred 250 million years ago, when a carbon-clogged atmosphere melted all of Earth’s ice and methane. The ensuing “Great Dying” nearly extinguished all life. When plants shrivel, says paleontologist and extinctions expert Peter Ward, “everything dies.” Aquatic creatures suffocated from lack of oxygen. As the ocean turned sterile, gasping land animals fled rapidly rising sea levels from a global meltwater tsunami. Over the ensuing 500,000 years, a few species struggled to find a foothold in Earth’s alien environment. It took another 20 million to 30 million years for the first coral reefs to re-establish themselves, and for forests to regrow. More than 100 million years passed before ecologies reached their former healthy diversity. [University Of Wyoming Jan 13/04]Ward’s team found no residues from a comet or asteroid impact. It looks like volcanism and methane releases caused this greenhouse cull. [Washington Post Jan 21/05] http://www.willthomas.net/Convergence/Weekly/Global_Warming.htm

Hows Does the Greenhouse Effect Work?The greenhouse effect, first discovered by Joseph Fourier in 1824, and first investigated quantitatively by Svante Arrhenius in 1896, is the process by which an atmosphere warms a planet. Earth, Mars, Venus and other celestial bodies with atmospheres (such as Titan) also have greenhouse effects.

Our sun, which is reasonably hot (surface temperature of 6.000 °C), sends us a mixture of various rays which is composed for (percentages represent the proportion of the total energy):

10% of ultraviolet 40% of visible light 50% of infrared

Our star, the sun, sends us every day a considerable amount of energy: the whole humanity's energy consumption for one year represents only 3% of what the Sun delivers to the surface of our planet every day.

Earth, which is not very hot (average temperature: 15 ° C), emits only infrareds (which are not the same than that of the sun).

Greenhouse gases allow sunlight to enter the atmosphere freely, but trap the heat in the atmosphere, like a greenhouse, hence the name. The earth's atmosphere is generally transparent to short-wave radiation, which means the sunlight enters the atmosphere freely. Hence most of this energy passes through the atmosphere and strikes the earth's surface. The portion of incoming solar radiation that reaches the Earth's surface, is either absorbed by the land and the oceans or is reflected back toward space by water, snow, ice, and other reflective surfaces (the measure of an object's reflectivity is called its albedo).

Energy absorbed at the Earth's surface is then re-radiated into the atmosphere as infrared radiation (heat). Some of this infrared radiation is in turn absorbed and re-emitted by "greenhouse gases", which acts as a blanket, resulting in a warming of the earth's surface and lower atmosphere.

Without greenhouse gases, over time, the amount of energy sent from the sun to the Earth’s surface should be about the same as the amount of energy radiated back into space, leaving the temperature of the Earth’s surface roughly constant. Without atmospheric absorption and reradiation of infrared energy the average surface air temperature of the Earth would be about 30° C lower.

This is a simplified diagram illustrating the global long-term radiative balance of the atmosphere. Net input of solar radiation must be balanced by net output of infrared radiation. About a third of incoming solar radiation is reflected and the remainder is mostly absorbed by the various components of our planet (continents, oceans, atmosphere). Outgoing infrared radiation is absorbed by greenhouse gases and by clouds keeping the surface about 33 °C warmer than it would otherwise be.

Reflected solar radiation accounts for 30% of the Earth's total radiation: on average, 6% of the incoming solar radiation is reflected by the atmosphere, 20% is reflected by clouds, and 4% is reflected by the surface.

The remaining 70% of the incoming solar radiation is absorbed: 16% by the atmosphere (including the almost complete absorption of shortwave ultraviolet over most areas by the stratospheric ozone layer); 3% by clouds; and 51% by the land and oceans.

Only about 6% of the Earth's total radiation to space is direct thermal radiation from the surface. The atmosphere absorbs 71% of the surface thermal radiation before it can escape. The atmosphere itself behaves as a radiator in the far infrared, so it re-radiates this energy.

The greenhouse gasesSome greenhouse gases occur in nature (water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide), while others are exclusively human-made (like gases used for aerosols). Water vapor (H2O) causes about 60% of Earth's naturally-occurring greenhouse effect. Other gases influencing the effect include carbon dioxide (CO2) (about 26%), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O) and ozone (O3) (about 8%). Collectively, these gases are known as greenhouse gases. The greenhouse effect due to carbon dioxide is specifically known as the Callendar effect.

It should be noted that the surface of the Earth is in constant flux with daily, yearly and age long cycles and trends in temperature and other variables for a variety of causes; thus these percentages apply on average only.

The sun plays a vital role in the earth's climate system, providing the energy which drives both atmospheric and oceanic circulation, and ultimately driving the climate system. This solar energy reaches the earth's atmosphere in the form of electromagnetic radiation (infrared radiation, radio waves, visible light, and ultraviolet rays)

Like the Sun, the Earth is a thermal radiator. Because the Earth's surface is much cooler than the Sun (287 K vs 5780 K), Wien's displacement law dictates that Earth radiates its thermal energy at longer wavelengths than the Sun. While the Sun's radiation peaks at a visible wavelength of 500 nanometers, Earth's radiation peak is in the longwave (far) infrared at about 10 micrometres.

www.geo.umn.edu/courses/1001/climate_human.html

The wavelengths of light that a gas absorbs can be modelled with quantum mechanics based on molecular properties of the different gas molecules. It so happens that heteronuclear diatomic molecules and tri- (and more) atomic gases absorb at infrared wavelengths but homonuclear diatomic molecules do not absorb infrared light. This is why H2O and CO2 are greenhouse gases but the major atmospheric constituents (N2 and O2) are not.

This diagram comprises two curves that represent the energy carried by each wavelength for incoming solar radiation of 6000 Kelvin and outcoming terrestrial radiation of 255 K as well as the absorption of these radiations by the greenhouse gases. The light that comes from the sun consists of fairly shortwave, i.e. high-energy light. A large part of this light is in the visible range of the spectrum, but some has a shorter wavelength, i.e. ultraviolet radiation, and some has a longer wavelength, i.e. near infrared light.

Water Vapour (H2O) Carbon dioxide (CO2) Ozone (O3) Methane (CH4) Nitrous protoxyde (N2O)

Between the absorptions of water vapor and those of carbon dioxide, there is an atmospheric window where, prior to the industrial era, no infrared radiation was trapped, lying between 8 and 15 micrometres. Compounds such as perflurocarbons (CF4, C2F6 etc.), chlorofluorocarbons, halons and SF6 absorb very strongly in this window. This means that they are extremely potent greenhouse gases, especially given the absence of natural sinks to remove them. Perfluorocarbons can have a lifetime of 50,000 years.

72% of the totally emitted greenhouse gases is carbon dioxide (CO2), 18% Methane (CH4) and 9% Nitrous oxide (NOx). Carbon dioxide emissions therefore are the most important cause of global warming. CO2 is inevitably created by burning fuels like e.g. oil, natural gas, diesel, organic-diesel, petrol, organic-petrol, and ethanol.

Water vapour in the troposphere, unlike the better-known greenhouse gases such as CO2, is essentially passive in terms of climate: the residence time for water vapour in the atmosphere is short (about a week) so perturbations to water vapour rapidly re-equilibriate. In contrast, the lifetimes of CO2, methane, etc, are long (hundreds of years) and hence perturbations remain. Thus, in response to a temperature perturbation caused by enhanced CO2, water vapour would increase, resulting in a (limited) positive feedback and higher temperatures. In response to a perturbation from enhanced water vapour, the atmosphere would re-equilibriate due to clouds causing reflective cooling and water-removing rain.

http://timeforchange.org/CO2-cause-of-global-warminghttp://www.downbound.com/Greenhouse_Effect_s/322.htmhttp://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/ggccebro/chapter1.htmlhttp://www.agu.org/eos_elec/99148e.htmlhttp://wuphys.wustl.edu/~mco//Phys171/Climate/files/L15_Notes.pdfhttp://www.manicore.com/anglais/documentation_a/greenhouse/physical.html

What Are Climate Forcings?The temperature of the Earth is determined by a balance of the energy entering the Earth-atmosphere system and the energy leaving the system. An energy imbalance imposed on the climate system either externally or by human activities is termed a climate forcing. Persistent climate forcing cause the temperature of the Earth to change until an energy balance is restored. The amount of change is determined by the magnitudes of the climate forgings and the feedbacks within the climate system that amplify or diminish the effect of the forgings. Climate during the last ice age, which peaked 20,000 years ago, was dramatically different than it is today. Global climate forcing was about 6 1/2 W/m2 less than in the current interglacial period. This forcing maintained a planet 5 °C colder than today, implying a climate sensitivity of 3/4 ± 1/4 °C per W/m2.http://naturalscience.com/ns/articles/01-16/ns_jeh2.html

Precise data are available for trends of the long-lived greenhouse gases (GHGs) that are well-mixed in the atmosphere, i.e., CO2, CH4, N2O and CFCs.

The growth rate of the GHG climate forcing peaked in the early 1980s at a rate of almost 0.5 W/m2 per decade, but declined by the 1990s to about 0.3 W/m2 per decade (Figure 8). The primary reason for the decline was reduced emissions of CFCs, the production of which was phased out because of their destructive effect on stratospheric ozone. http://naturalscience.com/ns/articles/01-16/ns_jeh4.html

Is The Earth Out of Energy Balance With Space?

Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) measurements show the reflected solar radiation (left) and emitted heat radiation (right) for January 1, 2002. In both images, the lightest areas represent thick clouds, which both reflect radiation from the Sun and block heat rising from the Earth's surface. Notice the clouds above the western Pacific Ocean, where there is strong uprising of air, and the relative lack of clouds north and south of the equator. The animation, created from daily data, shows how rapidly these measurements change. (Credit: NASA)

At present, planet Earth is out of energy balance with space by 0.85 watts per meter squared (W/m2) and will reach a new equilibrium by warming up another 0.6 degrees which is committed from past emissions. This is equal to a 1-watt light bulb shining over an area of one square meter or 10.76 square feet. Although seemingly small, this amount of heat affecting the entire world would make a significant impact. To put this number in perspective, an imbalance of 1 W/m2 maintained for the last 10,000 years is enough to melt ice equivalent to 1 kilometer (6/10ths of a mile) of sea level.http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/news/2005/story04-28-05.html

“The greatest danger of a positive planetary energy imbalance is its effects on the fringes of Greenland and West Antarctica. As these areas are softened by melt-water and rainfall, they begin to discharge icebergs into the ocean more rapidly. As warming continues the ice sheet area with surface snow-melt increases and the melt season becomes longer, bringing positive feedbacks into play, including reduced ice sheet albedo (wet ice is darker, absorbing more sunlight), warming coastal waters and rising sea level that remove grounded coastal ice shelves that previously had impeded movement of glacial iceberg streams to the ocean, and sinking of the ice sheet that increases the temperature at its surface. The potential result, if this process is allowed to proceed beyond a critical point, is much more rapid discharge of ice into the ocean.” http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/imbalance_release.pdf

How Sensitive Is our Planet’s Climate To Forcings?

NASA scientist James Hansen explains, “Climate sensitivity is the response to a specified forcing, after climate has had time to reach a new equilibrium, including effects of fast feedbacks. A common measure of climate sensitivity is the global warming caused by a doubling in atmospheric CO2 concentration. Climate models suggest that doubled CO2 would cause 3 °C global warming, with an uncertainty of at least 50%. Doubled CO2 is a forcing of about 4 W/m2, implying that global climate sensitivity is about 3/4 °C per W/m2 of forcing.”http://naturalscience.com/ns/articles/01-16/ns_jeh.html

"Paleoclimate data show that the Earth’s climate is remarkably sensitive to global forcings. Positive feedbacks predominate. This allows the entire planet to be whipsawed between climate states. One feedback, the ‘albedo flip’ property of water substance, provides a powerful trigger mechanism. A climate forcing that ‘flips’ the albedo of a sufficient portion of an ice sheet can spark a cataclysm. Ice sheet and ocean inertia provides only moderate delay to ice sheet disintegration and a burst of added global warming. Recent greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions place the Earth perilously close to dramatic climate change that could run out of our control, with great dangers for humans and other creatures. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the largest human-made climate forcing, but other trace constituents are important. Only intense simultaneous efforts to slow CO2 emissions and reduce non-CO2 forcings can keep climate within or near the range of the past million years. The most important of the non-CO2 forcings is methane (CH4), as it causes the 2nd largest human-made GHG climate forcing and is the principal cause of increased tropospheric ozone (O3), which is the 3rd largest GHG forcing. Nitrous oxide (N2O) should also be a focus of climate mitigation efforts. Black carbon (“black soot”) has a high global warming potential (~2000, 500, and 200 for 20, 100 and 500 years, respectively) and deserves greater attention. Some forcings are especially effective at high latitudes, so concerted efforts to reduce their emissions could still “save the Arctic”, while also having major benefits for human health, agricultural productivity, and the global environment."http://www.giss.nasa.gov/~jhansen/docs/RoyalSoc_16Jan2007.pdf

Hansen says "Climate forcing this century under business as usual (BAU) would dwarf natural forcings of the past million years, indeed it would probably exceed climate forcing of the Middle Pliocene, when the planet was not more than 2-3°C warmer and sea level 25±10 m higher (Dowsett et al. 1994). The climate sensitivities we have inferred from paleoclimate data assure that a BAU GHG emission scenario would produce global warming of several degrees Celsius this century, with amplification at high latitudes."

In relation to the IPCC, Hansen says its "analyses and projections do not well account for the nonlinear physics of wet ice sheet disintegration, ice streams, and eroding ice shelves, nor are they consistent with the paleoclimate evidence we have presented for the absence of discernable lag between ice sheet forcing and sea level rise."

How do Milankovich cycles affect the sun-earth interaction?Slow changes in the Earth’s orbit lead to small but climatically important changes in the strength of the seasons over tens of thousands of years. Climate feedbacks amplify these small changes, thereby producing ice ages. Milankovich cycles are cycles in eccentricity (the shape of the Earth's orbit around the Sun.), axial tilt (the inclination of the Earth's axis in relation to its plane of orbit with the Sun), and precession (the change in the direction of the Earth's axis of rotation relative to the Sun at the time of perihelion and aphelion) which influence the amount of solar radiation striking the Earth at different times. Taken in unison, variations in these three cycles creates alterations in the seasonality of solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface. These times of increased or decreased solar radiation directly influence the Earth's climate system, thus impacting the advance and retreat of Earth's glaciers.

The variation in the orbit, is the only one of the cycles that affects the actual amount of radiation reaching the Earth known as "eccentricity,'' has two cycles -- one every 100,000 years and one every 413,000 years.

The Earth's eccentricity varies primarily due to interactions with the gravitational fields of Jupiter and Saturn. Currently the difference between closest approach to the Sun (perihelion) and furthest distance (aphelion) is only 3.4% (5.1 million km). This difference amounts to about a 6.8% increase in incoming solar radiation. Perihelion presently occurs around January 3, while aphelion is around July 4. When the orbit is at its most highly elliptical, the amount of solar radiation at perihelion is about 23% greater than at aphelion. This difference is roughly 4 times the value of the eccentricity. "The eccentricity influences seasonal differences:  when the Earth is closest to the sun, it gets more solar radiation.  If the occurs during the winter, the winter is less severe. If a hemisphere has its summer while closest to the sun, summers are relatively warm."  

The variation in obliquity, due to the Earth's rotation axis wobbles, causes a slow 2.4° change in the tilt of the axis with respect to the plane of the Earth's orbit. Obliquity variation has the potential to have a fairly direct effect on seasonal extremes. After all, it is the obliquity that causes our seasons in the first place - if the Earth's axis were perpendicular to its orbital plane, there would be no seasons at all.

The difference in tilt affects where on the Earth receives the most and least solar radiation, but has global climatic consequences. Oscillations in the degree of Earth's axial tilt occur on a periodicity of 41,000 years from 21.5 to 24.5 degrees. Presently the Earth is tilted at 23.44 degrees from its orbital plane, roughly half way between its extreme values.

The more tilt means more severe seasons - warmer summers and colder winters; less tilt means less severe seasons - cooler summers and

milder winters.  For an increase of 1o in obliquity, the total energy received by the summer hemisphere increases by approximately 1%.  The cool summers are thought to allow for the yearly build up of snow and ice in high latitudes, possibly leading to the development of an ice sheet. Obliquity change also causes equator ward motion of the tropical circles and the pole ward motion of the polar circles. 

The variation in precession is the change in orientation of the Earth's rotational axis. The precession cycle takes about 19,000 - 23,000 years.  Precession is caused by two factors:  a wobble of the Earth's axis and a turning around of the elliptical orbit of the Earth itself. Precession affects the direction of the Earth's axis.  The change in the axis location changes the dates of perihelion (closest distance from sun) and aphelion (farthest distance from sun), and this increases the seasonal contrast in one hemisphere while decreasing it in the other hemisphere.

When the axis is aligned so it points toward the Sun during perihelion, one polar hemisphere will have a greater difference between the seasons while the other hemisphere will have milder seasons. The hemisphere which is in summer at

perihelion will receive much of the corresponding increase in solar radiation, but that same hemisphere will be in winter at aphelion and have a colder winter. The other hemisphere will have a relatively warmer winter and cooler summer. When the Earth's axis is aligned such that aphelion and perihelion occur during spring and autumn, the Northern and Southern Hemispheres will have similar contrasts in the seasons. At present perihelion occurs during the Southern Hemisphere's summer, and aphelion is reached during the southern winter. Thus the Southern Hemisphere seasons should tend to be somewhat more extreme than the Northern Hemisphere seasons.Currently, the Earth is closest to the sun in the Northern Hemisphere winter, which makes the winters there less severe. Another consequence of precession is a shift in the celestial poles. 5000 years ago the North Star was Thuban in the constellation Draco. Currently the North Star is Polaris in the constellation Ursa Minor. 12,000 years from now the Northern Hemisphere will experience summer in December and winter in June because the axis of the earth will be pointing at the star Vega instead of it's current alignment with Polaris.

These variables are only important because the Earth has an asymmetric distribution of landmasses, with virtually all (except Antarctica) located in the Northern Hemisphere.

At times when Northern Hemisphere summers are coolest (farthest from the Sun due to precession and greatest orbital eccentricity) and winters are warmest (minimum tilt), snow can accumulate on and cover broad areas of northern America and Europe. At present, only precession is in the glacial mode, with tilt and eccentricity not favourable to glaciation.

Milankovitch's work was an attempt at explaining the ice ages, and it built upon previous astronomical theories of climate variation postulated by Joseph Adhemar and James Croll in the 19th century. Although the Milankovitch theory is well-grounded astronomically, it remains controversial. The theory predicts different effects at different latitudes, and thus its use as a predictor of global (or at least hemispheric) climate change is not unambiguous. The exact mechanisms by which the relatively modest variations in the Earth's orbit and axis direction might result in such large effects as the ice ages are not well established.

http://geography.about.com/od/learnabouttheearth/a/milankovitch.htmhttp://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/seasons_orbit.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycleshttp://www.bbm.me.uk/portsdown/PH_731_Milank.htmhttp://www.homepage.montana.edu/~geol445/hyperglac/time1/milankov.htm

Do Sun Cycles And Its Flares Cause Global Warming?

For decades, scientists have tried to understand the link between winds and temperature and the Sun and its cycles. There were tell-tale signs of a connection. For instance, the Little Ice Age recorded in Europe between 1550 and 1700 happened during a time of very low solar activity. Solar scientists have long known that solar variability changes the distribution of energy in the Earth's atmosphere.

During the Sun's 11-year cycle, from solar maximum through solar minimum, the energy released by the Sun changes by only about a tenth of a percent. New studies have clarified that when the solar cycle is at a maximum, it puts out a larger percentage of high-energy radiation, which increases the amount of ozone in the upper atmosphere. The increased ozone warms the upper atmosphere and the warm air affects winds all the way from the stratosphere (that region of the atmosphere that extends from about 6 to 30 miles high) to the Earth's surface. The change in wind strength and direction creates different climate patterns around the globe. http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/FAQ2.html

NASA satellites have been measuring the Sun’s output since 1978, and while the Sun’s activity has varied a little, the observed changes were not large enough to account for the warming recorded during the same period. Climate simulations of global temperature changes based only on solar variability and volcanic aerosols since 1750—omitting greenhouse gases— are able to fit the record of global temperatures only up until about 1950. 

The only viable explanation for warming after 1950 is an increase in greenhouse gases. It is well established theoretically why carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases should heat the planet, and observations show that they have.http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/GlobalWarming/global_warming_update4.html

Solar irradiance changes have been measured reliably by satellites for only 30 years. These precise observations show changes of a few tenths of a percent that depend on the level of activity in the 11-year solar cycle. Changes over longer periods must be inferred from other sources. Estimates of earlier variations are important for calibrating the climate models. While a component of recent global warming may have been caused by the increased solar activity of the last solar cycle, that component was very small compared to the effects of additional greenhouse gases. According to a NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) press release, "...the solar increases do not have the

ability to cause large global temperature increases...greenhouse gases are indeed playing the dominant role..." The Sun is once again less bright as we approach solar minimum, yet global warming continues.http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/glob-warm.html

A new scientific study concludes that changes in the Sun's output cannot be causing modern-day climate change. It shows that for the last 20 years, the Sun's output has declined, yet temperatures on Earth have risen. It also shows that modern temperatures are not determined by the Sun's effect on cosmic rays, as has been claimed. Writing in the Royal Society's journal Proceedings A, the researchers say cosmic rays may have affected climate in the past, but not the present. "This should settle the debate," said Mike Lockwood, from the UK's Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory, who carried out the new analysis together with Claus Froehlich from the World Radiation Center in Switzerland.

Dr Lockwood initiated the study partially in response to the TV documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, broadcast on Britain's Channel Four earlier this year,

which featured the cosmic ray hypothesis.

"All the graphs they showed stopped in about 1980, and I knew why, because things diverged after that," he told the BBC News website. "You can't just ignore bits of data that you don't like," he said.

The scientists' main approach on this new analysis was simple: to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those trends with the graph for global average surface temperature, which has risen by about 0.4C over the period.

However, in about 1985, that trend appears to have reversed, with solar output declining. Yet this period has seen temperatures rise as fast as - if not faster than - any time during the previous 100 years. The IPCC's February summary report concluded that greenhouse gases were about 13 times more responsible than solar changes for rising global temperatures.http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6290228.stm

"Just how large [the sun’s] role is, must still be investigated, since, according to our latest knowledge on the variations of the solar magnetic field, the significant increase in the Earth’s temperature since 1980 is indeed to be ascribed to the greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide," says Prof. Sami K. Solanki, solar physicist and director at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research." http://www.mpg.de/english/illustrationsDocumentation/documentation/pressReleases/2004/pressRelease20040802/

Shown here is an image of the Sun in soft x-rays. The white (brightest) region on the right hand side showspost-flare loops, hot loops that remain after a solar flare.(Image from the Yohkoh Soft X-Ray Telescope)

Sunspots cause solar flares and, usually, the biggest flares come from the biggest spots. The effects on Earth were many: Radio blackouts disrupted communications. Solar protons penetrated Earth's upper atmosphere, exposing astronauts and some air travelers to radiation doses equal to a medical chest X-ray. Auroras appeared all over the world--in Florida, Texas, Australia and many other places where they are seldom seen.

Researchers rank solar flares according to their x-ray power output. C-flares are the weakest. M-flares are middling-strong. X-flares are the most powerful. Each category has subdivisions: e.g., X1, X2, X3 and so on.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2003/12nov_haywire.htm

Solar astronomer Peter Foukal of Heliophysics, Inc., in Nahant, Massachusetts, points out that scientists have pondered the link between the sun and Earth's climate since the time of Galileo, the famous 17th-century astronomer. "There has been an intuitive perception that the sun's variable degree of brightness—the coming and going of sunspots for instance—might have an impact on climate," Foukal said.

Sunspots are magnetic disturbances that appear as cooler, dark patches on the sun's surface. The number of spots cycles over time, reaching a peak every 11 years. The spots' impact on the sun's total energy output is easy to see. "As it turns out, most of the sun's power output is in the visible range—what we see as brightness," said Henk Spruit, study co-author from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany.

"The sun's brightness varies only because of the blemishes that are also visible directly on pictures: the dark patches called sunspots and the minute bright points called faculae. In terms of brightness changes, in large part, what you see is what you get."

Foukal is lead author of a review paper on sunspot intensity appearing in tomorrow's issue of the journal Nature. He says that most climate models—including ones used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—already incorporate the effects of the sun's waxing and waning power on Earth's weather.But, Foukal said, "this paper says that that particular mechanism [sunspots], which is most intuitive, is probably not having an impact."

If you run that back in time to the 17th century using sunspot records, you'll find that this amplitude variance is negligible for climate," Foukal said. The researchers obtained accurate daily sunspot measurements dating as far back as 1874 from institutions such as the Mount Wilson Observatory near Pasadena, California, and the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England. Older records exist all the way back to when the telescope was invented in the 17th century, though the data become increasingly patchy with age.The team also derived the sun's historic strength by looking at the presence or absence of isotopes, such as beryllium 10, in ice samples from Greenland and Antarctic that reflect the past contents of Earth's atmosphere. Such isotopes are formed when cosmic radiation penetrates the atmosphere. In periods of high activity, a brighter sun emits more magnetic and plasmatic particles that shield Earth from the galaxy's rays, resulting in fewer isotopes. Measuring the historical record of such isotopes from ice yields useful, though debatable, estimates of the sun's past power on Earth. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/09/060913-sunspots_2.html

Fore more information about the sun visit:

Science @ NASAhttp://hesperia.gsfc.nasa.gov/sftheory/flare.htm

And for data on sunspots for various sun cycles visit:

The Australian Space Weather Agencyhttp://www.ips.gov.au/Educational/2/3/2

As supplier of almost all the energy in Earth's climate, the sun certainly has a strong influence on climate change. Consequently there have been many studies examining the link between solar variations and global temperatures.The correlation between solar activity and temperature The most commonly cited study by skeptics is a study by scientists from Finland and Germany that finds the sun has been more active in the last 60 years than anytime in the past 1150 years (Usoskin 2005). They also found temperatures closely correlate to solar activity.However, a crucial finding was the correlation between solar activity and temperature ended around 1975. At that point, temperatures rose while solar activity stayed level. This led them to conclude "during these last 30 years the solar total irradiance, solar UV irradiance and cosmic ray flux has not shown any significant secular trend, so that at least this most recent warming episode must have another source."You read that right. The study most quoted by skeptics actually concluded the sun can't be causing global warming. Ironically, it's the sun's close correlation with Earth's temperature that proves it has little to do with the last 30 years of global warming.

Measurements of solar activityThis is confirmed by direct satellite measurements that find no rising trend since 1978, sunspot numbers which have leveled out since 1950, the Max Planck Institute reconstruction that shows irradience has been steady since 1950 and solar radio flux or flare activity which shows no rising trend over the past 30 years.Other studies on solar influence on climateThis conclusion is confirmed by many studies quantifying the amount of solar influence in recent global warming:Ammann 2007: "Although solar and volcanic effects appear to dominate most of the slow climate variations within the past thousand years, the impacts of greenhouse gases have dominated since the second half of the last century."Lockwood 2007 concludes "the observed rapid rise in global mean temperatures seen after 1985 cannot be ascribed to solar variability, whichever of the mechanism is invoked and no matter how much the solar variation is amplified."Foukal 2006 concludes "The variations measured from spacecraft since 1978 are too small to have contributed appreciably to accelerated global warming over the past 30 years."Scafetta 2006 says "since 1975 global warming has occurred much faster than could be reasonably expected from the sun alone."Usoskin 2005 conclude "during these last 30 years the solar total irradiance, solar UV irradiance and cosmic ray flux has not shown any significant secular trend, so that at least this most recent warming episode must have another source."Haigh 2003 says "Observational data suggest that the Sun has influenced temperatures on decadal, centennial and millennial time-scales, but radiative forcing considerations and the results of energy-balance models and general circulation models suggest that the warming during the latter part of the 20th century cannot be ascribed entirely to solar effects."Stott 2003 increased climate model sensitivity to solar forcing and still found "most warming over the last 50 yr is likely to have been caused by increases in greenhouse gases."Solanki 2003 concludes "the Sun has contributed less than 30% of the global warming since 1970".Lean 1999 concludes "it is unlikely that Sun–climate relationships can account for much of the warming since 1970".Waple 1999 finds "little evidence to suggest that changes in irradiance are having a large impact on the current warming trend."Frolich 1998 concludes "solar radiative output trends contributed little of the 0.2°C increase in the global mean surface temperature in the past decade"Ocean Thermal Inertia

Solanki also found that over 1150 years, temperature lagged solar activity by 10 years. Eg - presumably due to ocean thermal inertia, it took Earth's climate 10 years to catch up to changes in solar activity. This is exactly what's observed in the 20th century - in the early decades, solar activity rose sharply with temperature lagging a decade behind. When solar activity leveled out in the 40's, so too did global temperatures.Share this article:

What Are Positive or Negative Feedback Mechanisms?

http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/climate_change/media/20070712_king/king_presentation_20070712.pdf

Feedback is a word to describe a situation in which a part of the output of a process is added to the input and subsequently alters the output. In this way feedback can influence how the process operates. Feedbacks can either amplify (a positive feedback) or dampen (a negative feedback) the initial perturbation. A climate feedback is an internal climate process that amplifies or dampens the climate response to an initial forcing.http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/08/climate-feedbacks/http://rowland.worc.ac.uk/mec/Climate/Feedback/Index.html

Feedback in climate systems can take two forms:

Positive feedback in which the feedback reinforces the original input resulting in amplification of the output of the process. This means that small changes in the input to the system will be cause the system to produce larger and larger changes, resulting in instability.

Ocean warming provides a good example of a potential positive feedback mechanism. The oceans are an important sink for CO2 through absorption of the gas into the water surface. As CO2 increases it increases the warming potential of the atmosphere. If air temperatures warm it should warm the oceans. The ability of the ocean to remove CO2 from the atmosphere decreases with increasing temperature. Hence increasing CO2 in the atmosphere could have effects that exacerbate the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere.Similar examples can be drawn for warmer air temperatures increasing the rate of glacier and sea ice melting. As the ice melts it changes the surface characteristics of the surface as the underlying ocean or land will have a lower albedo than the ice and hence an enhanced ability to absorb solar radiation.Likewise, the increase in temperature would permit more water vapor to be stored in the atmosphere. The amount of water vapor the atmosphere can hold increases exponentially

with temperature so increases in temperature can yield increases in atmospheric water vapor. The increased water vapor, as a greenhouse gas, enhances the greenhouse effect and could lead to further warming as long as this positive feedback isn't modified by an increase in cloudcover that could lead to a negative feedback (bee below).

Negative feedback in which the feedback counteracts the original input resulting in reduction of the output of the process. This means that small changes in the input to the system will be cause the system to produce smaller and smaller changes, resulting in the output to the system becoming stabilised.

A good example of a negative feedback mechanism will be if the increase in temperature increases the amount of cloud cover. The increased cloud thickness or extent could reduce incoming solar radiation and limit warming.On the other hand it is not obvious that if additional cloud cover happens at what latitudes and at what times might it occur. Also it is not obvious what types of clouds might be generated. Thick low clouds would have a stronger ability to block sunlight than extensive high (cirrus) type clouds.Low clouds tend to cool, high clouds tend to warm. High clouds tend to have lower albedo and reflect less sunlight back to space than low clouds. Clouds are generally good absorbers of infrared, but high clouds have colder tops than low clouds, so they emit less infrared spaceward. To further complicate matters, cloud properties may change with a changing climate, and human-made aerosols may confound the effect of greenhouse gas forcing on clouds. With fixed clouds and sea ice, models would all report climate sensitivities between 2°C and 3°C for a CO2 doubling. Depending on whether and how cloud cover changes, the cloud feedback could almost halve or almost double the warming.http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange1/current/lectures/samson/feedback_mechanisms/

Here are some links between parts of the climate system including feedbacks that may accelerate climate change and its impacts. Observations suggest some of these feedbacks may already be operating.

How Much Energy Is Required to Warm an Entire Planet?

Here are a few estimates of the energy used to melt ice and warm the air, land and ocean in the past 50 years.

Ice melting: assume that the 10 cm rise in sea level between 1950 and 2000 was due to melting ice (thermal expansion of warming ocean water contributes about half of the rise, but this error is partly balanced by melting sea ice and ice shelves, which do not raise the sea level). If the initial temperature of the melted ice was –10 °C and its final temperature was that of the mean ocean surface (+15 °C), then the energy used is 105 cal/g (80 cal/g for melting). The heat storage is thus 10 g/cm2 × 105 cal/g × 4.19 J/cal × surface area of Earth (~5.1 × 1018 cm2) × ocean fraction of Earth (~0.71) ≈ 1.6 × 1022 J ≈ 1 watt-year.

Air warming: for a 0.5 °C increase in air temperature, the heat storage in the air is: 0.5 °C × the atmospheric mass of air (≈ mass of 10 m column of water ≈ 1000 g/cm2) × heat capacity air (≈ 0.24 cal/(g·°C) × 4.19 J/cal × surface area of Earth ≈ 0.26 × 1022 J ≈ 0.16 watt-year.

Land warming: The mean depth of penetration of a thermal wave into the Earth's crust in 50 years, weighted by ΔT, is about 20 m. If the Earth's crust has a density of ~3 g/cm3 and a heat capacity of ~0.2 cal/(g·°C), and the fractional land coverage of Earth is about 0.29, then the land heat storage is 2 × 103 cm × 3 g/cm3 × 0.2 cal/(g·°C) × 0.5 °C × 4.19 J/cal × surface area of Earth × 0.29 ≈ 0.37 × 1022 J ≈ 0.23 watt-year.

Ocean warming: Levitus found a mean ocean warming of 0.035 °C in the upper 3 km of the ocean. The heat storage is thus: 0.035 °C × 3 × 105 g/cm2 × 1 cal/g × 4.19 J/cal × surface area of Earth × 0.71 ≈ 16 × 1022 J ≈ 10 watt-years.

Note that 1 J = 1 W·s, the number of seconds in a year ≈ π × 107, and the surface area of the Earth ≈ 5.1 × 1018 cm2; therefore, 1 watt-year over the entire surface of the Earth ≈ 1.61 × 1022 J.

http://naturalscience.com/ns/articles/01-16/ns_jeh3.html#Box4

What is the Carbon Cycle?

Carbon is continuously cycled between reservoirs in the ocean, on the land, and in the atmosphere, where it occurs primarily as carbon dioxide. On land, carbon occurs primarily in living biota and decaying organic matter. In the ocean, the main form of carbon is dissolved carbon dioxide and small creatures, such as plankton. Carbon dioxide is removed from the air by green plants during photosynthesis, and some carbon dioxide dissolved in water to be used by many invertebrate marine organisms to build their calcium carbonate shells. The respiration of living organisms releases some carbon dioxide. As the marine organisms die, their shells may sink to the sea bed, mixed with mud, and eventually compressed to form sedimentary rocks. When plants and animals die their wastes are decomposed, and the carbon they contain is oxidised and returns to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Fossil fuels, comprising organic remains whose decomposition was arrested millions of years ago, release carbon dioxide when they are burned. (Green Facts – The Greenhouse Effect and Other Key Issues, Michael Allaby, 1990)The largest reservoir is the deep ocean, which contains close to 40,000 Gt C, compared to around 2,000 Gt C on land, 750 Gt C in the atmosphere and 1,000 Gt C in the upper ocean. The atmosphere, biota, soils, and the upper ocean are strongly linked. The exchange of carbon between this fast-responding system and the deep ocean takes much longer (several hundred years).

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/models/carbon_cycle/intro_global.html

Source: Mac Post (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/models/carbon_cycle/intro_global.html

Is The Carbon Cycle Out of Balance?

Since the industrial revolution, people have been putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than plants, soils and oceans have been able to absorb. People have strained the system. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen, and are continuing to rise. As a result of increased levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, global climate is changing.http://www.greenhouse.crc.org.au/about_greenhouse/carboncycle.cfm

The carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere is gradually and steadily increasing. The graph shows the CO2 concentration at the summit of Mauna Loa in Hawaii from 1958 through 1999.

The Mauna Loa atmospheric CO2 measurements constitute the longest continuous record of atmospheric CO2 concentrations available in the world. The Mauna Loa site is considered one of the most favorable locations for measuring undisturbed air because possible local influences of vegetation or human activities on atmospheric CO2 concentrations are minimal and any influences from volcanic vents may be excluded from the records.

The values are in parts per million (ppm). The seasonal fluctuation is caused by the increased uptake of CO2 by plants in the summer.http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/C/CarbonCycle.html#imbalance.http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/sio-mlo.htm

Which Mode of Transport Produces Less C02? It is also important to note that different carbon efficiencies exist between modes of transport. These differences can be explained by the different technology deployed, vehicle size and capacity, technical standards, or indeed topography or weatherconditions. Each mode is also restricted to a specific network, and each network (road, rail, sea and air) has its own unique characteristics that can affect vehicle operation and efficiency. Comparative figures are difficult to produce, given the variety of assumptions involved regarding average vehicle type, driving styles and occupancy rates. Figure 2.5 displays Government reporting guidelines using a set of assumptions found in Defra

http://www.cfit.gov.uk/docs/2007/climatechange/pdf/2007climatechange.pdf

What Are Carbon Sinks?The UNFCCC defines sinks as any process, activity or mechanism which removes a greenhouse gas, an aerosol or a precursor of a greenhouse gas from the atmosphere.Forests play an important role in the carbon cycle, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it as carbon in plant material and soil in a process known as sequestration. Half a tree's mass is carbon, so large amounts of carbon are stored in forests and they are the largest store of terrestrial carbon. Planting new forests, managing existing forests and reducing clearing can provide a relatively cost-effective way of combating climate change. However, forests can also turn into a carbon source. This might occur when a forest is burned in a bushfire or struck by disease. The factors that determine whether a forest or other ecosystem is maintained as a carbon sink include rainfall patterns, bushfires, vegetation changes, nutrients, soil composition, evaporation rates and the interactions between them.

Trees are very efficient at sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. A cubic meter of air contains about 0.117 grams of carbon, while a cubic meter of wood contains about 250 kg of carbon, This means that a cubic meter of wood contains the same amount of carbon as 1.4 million cubic meters of air. Trees are not only capable of fixing carbon but also of concentrating it to an incredible extent. A forest growing at the rate of 10 m3 wood per hectare per year is absorbing the carbon from 14 million m3 of air (a column of air 1400 meters high on one hectare). The combination of photosynthesis and a tree's ability to lay down wood (cellulose and lignin) acts as a powerful concentrator of carbon from the atmosphere into a fixed form. There is no parallel human technology that is capable of performing this kind of carbon concentration.http://www.kfoa.co.nz/faqs.htm#6

Some of the world's seawater, thought to absorb a quarter of all carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, has grown saturated with the gas and leaves more of it sitting in the atmosphere. Researchers reporting in the journal Science say at least one large ocean area -- the Southern Ocean around Antarctica -- is so loaded with CO2 that it's losing its ability to soak it up. The Southern Ocean alone accounts for 15 percent of the global carbon sink. The decline of Antarctica's Southern Ocean as a carbon sink may raise future CO2 levels and speed up global warming. Climate scientists have predicted this would happen. The trouble is that the changes appear to be happening some 40 years ahead of schedule. "We thought we would be able to detect these only in the second half of this century, say 2050 or so," lead researcher Corrine Le Quere told Reuters. Data from 1981 to 2004, however, show the waters have been saturated with carbon dioxide since at least the 1980s. "So, I find this really quite alarming," she said. Why is it happening now? Wind, says Le Quere. Increased winds over the past half-century churn the Southern Ocean, pulling naturally occurring carbon from deep in the ocean to its surface, where the human-caused carbon sits. The ocean surface becomes saturated with CO2 and stops absorbing it from the atmosphere. "Since the beginning of the industrial revolution the world's oceans have absorbed about a quarter of the 500 gigatons (500 billion tons) of carbon emitted into the atmosphere by humans," Chris Rapley of the British Antarctic Survey said. "The possibility that in a warmer world, the Southern Ocean -- the strongest ocean sink -- is weakening is a cause for concern."http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,483540,00.html

How Much CO2 Equivalent Can Our Planet Absorb Naturally?

http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/climate_change/media/20070712_king/king_presentation_20070712.pdf

In 1990, our CO2 emissions amounted to 6 to 7 billion tons carbon equivalent (often noted 6 to 7 Gtce, (giga=billion in scientific notation).

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calculates that the sinks on earth in biological and chemical activity in oceans, forests, and soils permanently remove around 4 billion tonnes of carbon from the carbon cycle each year. This, then, is our global emissions target; anything extra we put in the air remains there and increases the greenhouse effect. In practice emitting only 4 Gtce of CO2 per year means for 6 billion human beings, equitably allocated, that they can emit 666 kg carbon equivalent of CO2 per person and per year. The challenge is compounded by the fact that emissions are rising with a long-term trend of 1.5% per year. Furthermore, global population is likely to increase to 9 billion people or more, and income per capita is likely to increase by 100% or more by the end of the century.Climate change is very likely to reduce the capacity of natural processes to remove carbon. The capacity of oceans and soil to hold carbon falls as they become warmer. The Hadley Centre for Climate Change believes that within forty years the vast carbon sink of the Amazon will go into reverse; dying back and releasing its carbon stocks into the atmosphere.The first comprehensive study of the ocean storage of carbon dioxide derived from human activities - anthropogenic CO2 - determined that the oceans have taken up some 118 billion metric tons of this carbon dioxide between 1800 and 1994. Studies over the last decade have indicated that the land plants are taking up CO2 at rates comparable to the oceans, but scientists have determined that over a 200 year time frame, land plants have released more of the gas to the atmosphere than they have taken up.If the ocean had not removed 118 billion metric tons of anthropogenic carbon between 1800 and 1994, the CO2 level in the atmosphere would be about 55 parts per million greater than currently observed," said Christopher Sabine, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and the lead author of one of the papers.http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2004/2004-07-15-03.asp

Furthermore, we find that the current natural sinks for anthropogenic emissions, around 4

gigatonnes of carbon per year (or 4 GtC a-1) will be reduced to around 2.7 GtC a-1 in 2030. 2.7 GtC a-1 therefore, is the amount of greenhouse gases we will be able to emit in 2030, without increasing atmospheric concentrations. When this global emission limit is shared out between the projected world population of 8.2 billion people, we get a per capita emission limit of 0.33 tonnes of carbon per year. In the UK we currently emit around 3 tonnes of carbon equivalent per person per year, so we will require to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 90%, compared with current levels, by 2030. Further research by the Hadley Centre may have identified a major climate trigger point related to dieback of vegetation in Amazonia, which if confirmed, would require a further

tightening of these emission reduction targets. The time lag between a drop in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, and a corresponding fall in mean surface temperature, means that emissions stabilisation at 440 ppm may have to be achieved sooner than 2030.http://portal.campaigncc.org/files/THE_CUTTING_EDGE_CLIMATE_SCIENCE_TO_APRIL_05.pdf

Professor James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia Theory, says that "if we continue to inject CO2 into the atmosphere as we have been, we will have released in thirty years from now more than a million million tons of CO2. Moreover, the sun is now hotter than it was 55 Myears ago and we have disabled about 40% of Gaia’s regulatory capacity by using land to feed people. This is why climate scientists are so concerned that we have already set in motion damaging climate change. The history of global heating 55 million years ago suggests that the injection of gaseous carbon compounds took place over a period of about 10,000 years, much slower than we are now doing.In his paper, Professor Elderfield’s suggests that because of the slow rate of introduction CO2 rose by no more than 70 and 160 ppm. Compared with our present pollution with CO2 this is a small increase, we have already raised CO2 by 100 ppm with an injection of only 500 Gigatons. In thirty years, if we continue business as usual, we will have added 1000 Giga tons and raised CO2 by 200ppm, more than is thought to have been present in the early Eocene. The great rapidity of our pollution of the atmosphere with carbon gases is as damaging as is the quantity. The rapidity of our pollution gives the Earth system little time to adjust and this is particularly important for the ocean ecosystems; the rapid accumulation of CO2 in the surface water is making them too acid for shell forming organisms. This did not happen during the Eocene event because there was time for the more alkaline deep waters to mix in and neutralize the surface ocean."http://www.icheme.org/pr_and_media/latest_news/jclecture_transcript.pdf

To avoid the most dangerous consequences of climate change, the EU Heads of State at the EU Council agreed in March 2005 halt global warming below 2ºC above pre-industrial temperatures. To reach this goal, the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere needs to be stabilised below 450 ppm (possibly after some limited temporary overshooting of this value).www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/warmingfacts.pdf

Does Climate Change Affect Precipitation?

Over the last 100 years many dry areas have become even drier and wet areas have become wetter. Many long-standing weather records have been broken in recent years. In 1992, the Danube and Elbe rivers burst their banks in central Europe. The southern section of the Sahara desert suffered a serious, long-lasting drought in the 1990s. Droughts affect different parts of the western United States each year. In some locations the drought may last more than a year.

http://www.seed.slb.com/en/scictr/watch/climate_change/impact.htm

Does Climate Change Affect Soil Moisture?

The percentage of Earth's land area stricken by serious drought more than doubled from the 1970s to the early 2000s, according to a new analysis by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Widespread drying occurred over much of Europe and Asia, Canada, western and southern Africa, and eastern Australia. Rising global temperatures appear to be a major factor, says NCAR's Aiguo Dai, lead author of the study.

Dai and colleagues found that the fraction of global land experiencing very dry conditions (defined as -3 or less on the Palmer Drought Severity Index) rose from about 10-15% in the early 1970s to about 30% by 2002. Almost half of that change is due to rising temperatures rather than decreases in rainfall or snowfall, according to Dai.

To see how soil moisture has evolved over the last few decades, Dai and colleagues produced a unique global-scale analysis using the Palmer index, which for decades has been the most widely used yardstick of U.S. drought. The index is a measure of near-surface moisture conditions and is correlated with soil moisture content.

Since the Palmer index is not routinely calculated in most of the world, Dai and colleagues used long-term records of temperature and precipitation from a variety of sources to derive the index for the period 1870-2002. The results were consistent with those from a historical simulation of global land surface conditions, produced by a comprehensive computer model developed by scientists at NCAR, NASA, Georgia University of Technology, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Arizona. By factoring out rainfall and snowfall, Dai and colleagues estimated how much of the global trend in soil moisture was due solely to rising temperatures through the extra evaporation they produce. "The warming-induced drying has occurred over most land areas since the 1970s," says Dai, "with the largest effects in northern mid and high latitudes." In contrast, rainfall deficits alone were the main factor behind expansion of dry soils in Africa's Sahel and East Asia. These are regions where El Niño, a more frequent visitor since the 1970s, tends to inhibit precipitation.http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2005/drought_research.shtml

How Do Climate Models Work And Are They Reliable?

"To understand how sunlight, air, water, and land come together to create Earth’s climate, scientists build climate models—computer simulations of the climate system. Climate models include the fundamental laws of physics—conservation of energy, mass, and momentum—as well as dozens of factors that influence Earth’s climate. Though the models are complicated, rigorous tests with real-world data hone them into robust tools that allow scientists to experiment with the climate in a way not otherwise possible. For example, when scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), NASA’s division spearheading climate modeling efforts, put measurements of volcanic particles from Mount Pinatubo’s 1991 eruption into their climate models well after the event, the models reported that Earth would have cooled by around 0.5°C a year or so later. The prediction matched cooling that had been observed around the globe after the eruption.

Mount Pinatubo’s 1991 eruption pumped volcanic gases high into the atmosphere. The gases interacted with water vapor to form a reflective shade of aerosol particles (top graph) that stretched far beyond the Philippines, where the volcano is located. The global average temperature dipped half a degree Celsius until the particles (sulfates) cleared a few years later. Scientists test and refine global climate models by comparing model predictions of temperature change after events like the eruption to actual observations (bottom graph). When models reliably match observations, scientists gain confidence that the models accurately represent Earth’s climate system. (NASA graphs by Robert Simmon, based on data from NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.)

As the models reconstruct events that match the climate record, researchers gain confidence that the models are accurately duplicating the complex interactions that drive Earth’s climate. Scientists then experiment with the models to gain insight into what is driving climate change. By experimenting with the models—removing greenhouse gases emitted by the burning of fossil fuels or changing the intensity of the Sun to see how each influences the climate— scientists can use the models to explain Earth’s current climate and predict its future climate. So far, the only way scientists can get the models to match the rise in temperature seen over the past century is to include the greenhouse gases that humans have put into the atmosphere. This means that, according to the models, humans are responsible for most of the warming observed during the second half of the twentieth century."

“Why do scientists trust results from climate models when models seem to have so much trouble forecasting the weather? It turns out that trends are easier to predict than specific events. Weather is a short-term, small-scale set of measurements of environmental conditions, while climate is the average of those conditions over a large area for a long time. The difference between predicting weather and climate is similar to the difference between predicting when a particular person will die versus calculating the average life span of an entire population. Given the large number of variables that influence conditions in Earth’s lower atmosphere, and given that chaos also plays a larger role on shorter and smaller scales of time and space, weather is much harder to predict than the averages that make up climate.

However, the longer the time scale, the harder it becomes to predict climate. Scientists understand how certain processes that drive Earth’s climate work now, and so they can accurately predict how events like Pinatubo’s eruption will cool the globe’s average

temperature. But they don’t understand how every aspect of the climate system will change as the planet warms. Feedback loops—in which change in one part of the climate system produces change in another part—make climate harder to forecast as scientists look farther into the future. For example, what will happen to clouds as Earth warms? Will high-flying, heat-absorbing clouds that would cause additional heating become more frequent than dense, sunlight-blocking clouds? Will changes be regional or global, and how will they affect global climate? As of now, scientists can’t answer these questions, and the uncertainties mean that global climate models provide a range of predictions instead of a highly detailed forecast.”

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/GlobalWarming/global_warming_update4.html

Why Should We Be Worried About a Warming of Just 1-5°C?

Most people do not realise that even small changes in the global average temperature can result in very significant impacts. When people hear scientists warn of 2°, 3° and 5°C increases in temperature they relate this to the changes in temperature that they feel on any day, which is always a range of temperatures larger than 2 to 5°C. The key to understanding is to look back to the last ice-age where the world and Australia were very different places, even though the global average temperature at that time was only about 5°C lower than today.http://www.iag.com.au/pub/iag/sustainability/publications/climate/media/Climatechange.pdf

When surface temperatures are averaged over the entire globe for extended periods of time, it turns out that the average is remarkably stable. Not since the end of the last ice age 20,000 years ago, when Earth warmed about 5°C, has the average surface temperature changed as dramatically as the 2°C to 6°C change that scientists are predicting for the next century.http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/GlobalWarming/global_warming_update5.html

Hansen says “The temperature change between full glacial and interglacial conditions is about 10ºC in Antarctica, about 3ºC at the Pacific Warm Pool on the equator, and 5±1ºC on global average. We know the change of surface conditions on the planet quite well, the ice sheet area being the dominant change.http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/keeling_talk_and_slides.pdf

Consider that 100 ppm is what separated the ice age from the warm, stable climate of the past several thousand years, and that the temperature transition from ice age to a warm climate took about a thousand years. By comparison, over the past 30 years nearly half the energy used in the history of the industrial revolution has been consumed, and global average temperatures are rising about 100 times faster than during transitions out of ice ages.http://globalpublicmedia.com/relocalization_a_strategic_response_to_peak_oil_and_climate_change

Oceanographer Wallace Broecker illustrates the danger of disrupting the climate with a metaphor, saying that “The climate is an angry beast, and we’re going to give it a big nudge.” He suggests “if we’re going to stop the CO2 rise, capturing it and putting it away is going to be a large part of it. The technologies being developed would transform it into a liquefied form, which could then be buried in saline aquifers, the deep ocean or remote deserts. But any way you solve this problem, it’s going to be a big deal, involving 20 percent of the energy budget. Still, it’s not going to cripple any country to pay 20-30 percent more for energy – We’ve gone through that already with the rise in oil prices.”http://www.weeklybeat.net/2007/03/30/pouvassarglobwarm.html

What Caused The Cooling Phase Between 1940-1980 Whilst CO2 Was Rising?

In 1981, the NASA and led by James Hansen reported that "the common misconception that the world is cooling is based on Northern Hemisphere experience to 1970." Just around the time that meteorologists had noticed the cooling trend, such as it was, it had apparently reversed. From a low point in the mid 1960s, by 1980 the world had warmed some 0.2°C.(32) Hansen's group looked into the causes of the fluctuations, and they got a rather good match for the temperature record using volcanic eruptions plus solar variations. Greenhouse warming by CO2 had not been a major factor (at least, not yet). More sophisticated analyses in the 1990s would eventually confirm these findings. From the 1940s to the early 1960s, the Northern Hemisphere had indeed cooled while temperatures had held roughly steady in the south. Some of the change certainly came from natural variations, probably including changes in the Sun's output and a modest spate of volcanic eruptions. More significantly, a sharp increase in haze from pollution such as sulfate aerosol particles had indeed helped to temporarily cool the industrialized Northern Hemisphere. After the 1960s, with pollution growing less rapidly while CO2 continued to accumulate in the air, warming resumed in both hemispheres.(32a)

The temporary northern cooling had been bad luck for climate science. By feeding skepticism about the greenhouse effect, while provoking a few scientists (and rather more journalists) to speculate publicly about the coming of a new ice age, the cool spell gave the field a reputation for fecklessness that it would not soon live down.

Any greenhouse warming had been masked by chance fluctuations in solar activity, by pulses of volcanic aerosols, and by increased haze from pollution. Furthermore, as a few scientists pointed out, the upper layer of the oceans must have been absorbing heat. These effects could only delay atmospheric warming by a few decades. Hansen's group boldly predicted that considering how fast CO2 was accumulating, by the end of the 20th century "carbon dioxide warming should emerge from the noise level of natural climatic variability." Around the same time, a few other scientists using different calculations came to the same conclusion — the warming would show itself clearly sometime around 2000.(33*)

The second important group analyzing global temperatures was the British government's Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, led by Tom Wigley and Phil Jones. Help in assembling data and funding came from American scientists and agencies. The British results agreed overall with the NASA group's findings — the world was getting warmer. In 1982, East Anglia confirmed that the cooling that began in the 1940s had turned around by the early 1970s. 1981 was the warmest year in a record that stretched back a century.(34*) Returning to old records, in 1986 the group produced the first truly solid and comprehensive global analysis of average surface temperatures (including the vast ocean regions, which most earlier studies had neglected). They found considerable warming from the late 19th century up to 1940, followed by some regional cooling in the Northern Hemisphere but roughly level conditions overall to the mid-1970s. Then the warming had resumed with a vengeance. The warmest three years in the entire 134-year record had all occurred in the 1980s.(35) Convincing confirmation came from Hansen and a collaborator, who analyzed old records using quite different methods from the British, and came up with substantially the same results. It was true: an unprecedented warming was underway, at least 0.5°C in the past century.(36)

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/20ctrend.htm

Real climate explains:

“Northern Hemisphere mean temperatures do appear to have cooled over that period, and that contrasts with a continuing increase in CO2, which if all else had been equal, should have led to warming. But were all things equal? Actually no. In the real world, there is both internal variability and other factors that affect climate (i.e. other than CO2). Some of those other forcings (sulphate and nitrate aerosols, land use changes, solar irradiance, volcanic aerosols, for instance) can cause cooling. Matching up the real world with what we might expect to have happened depends on including ALL of the forcings (as best as we can). Even then any discrepancy might be due to internal variability (related principally to the ocean on multi-decadal time scales). Our current 'best guess' is that the global mean changes in temperature (including the 1940-1970 cooling) are actually quite closely related to the forcings. Regional patterns of change appear to be linked more closely to internal variability (particularly the 1930's warming in the North Atlantic). However, in no case has anyone managed to show that the recent warming can be matched without the increases in CO2 (and other GHGs like CH4).

Secondly, through the copious use of station weather data, a number of single station records with long term cooling trends are shown. In particular, the characters visit Punta Arenas (at the tip of South America), where (very pleasingly to my host institution) they have the GISTEMP station record posted on the wall which shows a long-term cooling trend (although slight warming since the 1970's). "There's your global warming" one of the good guys declares. I have to disagree. Global warming is defined by the global mean surface temperature. It does not imply that the whole globe is warming uniformly (which of course it isn't). (But that doesn't stop one character later on (p381) declaring that "..it's effect is presumably the same everywhere in the world. That's why it's called global warming"). Had the characters visited the nearby station of Santa Barbara Cruz Aeropuerto, the poster on the wall would have shown a positive trend. Would that have been proof of global warming? No. Only by amalgamating all of the records we have (after correcting for known problems, such as discussed below) can we have an idea what the regional, hemispheric or global means are doing. That is what is meant by global warming.”

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=74

How Long Does C02 Last in the Atmosphere?

Lets look at how CO2 concentration decays, in the CO2 impulse response function of Bern SAR and Bern TAR models. The CO2 concentration is approximated by a sum of exponentially decaying functions, one for each fraction of the additional concentrations, which should reflect the time scales of different sinks. The coefficients are based on the pulse response of the additional concentration of CO2 taken from the Bern model (Siegenthaler and Joos, 1992).

r = concentrationCCO2 = constant (approximately 0.47 ppmv/GtC, but use this parameter to fine tune

your results)ECO 2 = emissions of CO2

tCO2,S = atmospheric exponential decay time of the sth fraction of the additional concentration (171.0, 18.0 and 2.57 years)

fCO2,0 = first fraction (0.152)fCO2,S = respective fractions (0.253, 0.279 and 0.316)

http://unfccc.int/resource/brazil/carbon.html

This C02 response function shows that even after 100 years 30% of the C02 remains in the atmosphere. Also noteworthy is that this rate only very slowly decreases thereafter.

Tim Flannery, Australian author and scientist, who wrote "The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth" sates that "One of the most important things we need to ponder about global warming is the long lasting effect of pumping carbon dioxide in to the atmosphere. Around 56% of all of the carbon dioxide produced by humans since we started using coal and oil as sources of energy is still present in the atmosphere today. Even if we quickly shift to safer forms of energy, over half of this carbon dioxide will still be in the atmosphere in a century’s time. http://www.calitreview.com/Interviews/flannery_8030.htm

Carbon dioxide has an atmospheric lifetime of between 50 - 200 years. This means that carbon dioxide will be present in the atmosphere for at least 50 years before it is absorbed by a sink or becomes part of another chemical reaction. Consequently, carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere today could cause global warming for two centuries to come. http://www.kfoa.co.nz/faqs.htm

What Is The Relationship Between CO2 and Global Mean Temperature?

When you look at the ice cores data covering the last 650,000 years the Earth can be seen to undergo natural changes from glacial conditions to warmer interglacial times like the present. We can observe that warming occurs rapidly, whereas cooling occurs slowly.

"The link between temperature and carbon dioxide, as well as methane concentrations in the past is surprisingly constant over time. Only through the impact of humans during the last centuries, atmospheric green house gases have been raised above their natural levels”, explains Dr Hubertus Fischer of the Alfred Wegener Institute.http://news.mongabay.com/2005/1125-climate.html

The CSIRO Atmospheric Research Greenhouse Information Paper explains that “concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane increased almost in phase with the glacial-interglacial warmings. Carbon dioxide concentrations lagged the coolings during glacial onset. However, the exact phasing of temperature and carbon dioxide changes is not the main issue. The important finding is that greenhouse gas variations caused up to half of the amplitude of the temperature changes over the glacial-interglacial periods.”http://www.cmar.csiro.au/e-print/open/greenhouse_2000c.htm

"During the exit from glacial periods (for example the transition from the last cold period, between about 18000 and 11000 years ago), both temperature and CO2 increased slowly and in parallel. Close analysis of the relationship between the two curves shows that, within the uncertainties of matching their timescales, the temperature led by a few centuries. This is expected, since it was changes in the Earth’s orbital parameters (including the shape of its orbit around the Sun, and the tilt of Earth’s axis) that caused the small initial temperature rise. This then raised atmospheric CO2 levels, in part by outgassing from the oceans, causing the temperature to rise further. By amplifying each other’s response, this “positive feedback” can turn a small initial perturbation into a large climate change. There is therefore no surprise that the temperature and CO2 rose in parallel, with the temperature initially in advance. In the current case, the situation is

different, because human actions are raising the CO2 level, and we are starting to observe the temperature response. “

http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/News_and_Information/news_stories/story.php?...

Is There Scientific Consensus on Climate Change?The evidence for human induced global warming is given in the recently published report “Climate Change 2007: The Physical Basis – Summary for Policy Makers” by Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdfThe report is authoritative as it is based on an extensive and rigorous review of the published results of thousands of scientific investigations carried out worldwide. It is trustworthy since the delegates of 113 nations, including those of climate sceptic nations, have challenged and approved its contents. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report concluded that, "Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations." The report defines "very likely" as a greater than 90% probability and represents the consensus of the scientific community.

IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years, all major scientific bodies in the US whose members' expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements. For example, the National Academy of Sciences report, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions, begins: "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise". The report explicitly asks whether the IPCC assessment is a fair summary of professional scientific thinking, and answers yes: "The IPCC's conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue". Others agree. The American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) all have issued statements in recent years concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling.http://scienceweek.com/2005/sc050121-2.htm

To read other scientific reports and international agreements which demonstrate this global consensus, please read:http://www.eesi.org/publications/Fact%20Sheets/Consensus%20on%20Climate%20Change.htm

In addition, the following institutions specializing in Climate, Atmosphere, Ocean and/or Earth sciences have published the same conclusions:

NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Academy of Sciences (NAS) State of the Canadian Cryosphere (SOCC) Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Royal Society of the United Kingdom (RS) American Geophysical Union (AGU) National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) American Meteorological Society (AMS) Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS)

The consensus is so strong that legally carbon dioxide is now considered a pollutant in the US. I am sure many countries will soon follow suit. The US Supreme Court recently decided due to overwhelming evidence that carbon dioxide is a pollutant under federal law and can be regulated because it traps heat around the earth.http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/news/environment/010728.html

Climate change is an issue which the UK Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King, described as “the most severe problem that we are facing today – more serious even than the threat of terrorism”

Is The IPCC Report Unbiased Or Is It Political?

In a SPIEGEL article in May 2007 “Is the IPCC Doing Harm to Science?” Uwe Buse explains that in drafting the SPM, or Summary for Policymakers, the two groups debating the issue had little in common except a mutual interest in reaching a consensus. On the one side were the authors of the report, all scientists, who have done little else in the last three years than work on this report. On the other side were the politicians, members of delegations from almost every country on earth. Sitting in alphabetical order in the chamber, their main concern was to adjust the report to suit their individual economic, environmental and foreign policies.http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,480766,00.html

Image: http://ucsaction.org/img/gv2/custom_images/ucsaction/2007-9.jpg

In January 2005 Christopher Landsea resigned from work on the IPCC AR4, saying that he viewed the process "as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound" because of Kevin Trenberth's public contention that global warming was contributing to recent hurricane activity Chris Landsea Leaves. Roger A. Pielke who published Landsea's letter writes: "How anyone can deny that political factors were everpresent in the negotiations isn't paying attention", but notes that the actual report "maintain[s] consistency with the actual balance of opinion(s) in the community of relevant experts.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_controversy#Criticism_of_IPCC

One weakness of the IPCC is that it has decided to exclude the contribution of "accelerated melting", where the disintegration of ice shelves and lubrication of glaciers by meltwater speeds up the flow of ice into the oceans, because it is difficult to model. However in the coming century it could have a big impact. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6321351.stm

On February 1st, 2007, the eve of the publication of IPCC's major report on climate, a new study was published in the peer-review journal Science, in which research by an international group of scientists suggests that temperatures and sea levels have been rising at or above the maximum rates proposed during the last IPCC report in 2001.[36] The study compared IPCC 2001 projections on temperature and sea level change with what has actually happened. Over the six year span of time, the actual temperature rise was near the very top (in the top 10%) of the "range" given by IPCC's 2001 projection. In the case of sea level rises, the actual rise was above even the top of the range IPCC had given.There are many additional examples of scientific research which has indicated that previous estimates by the IPCC, far from overstating dangers and risks, have actually understated them (this may be due, in part, to the expanding human understanding of climate, as well as to the conservative bias, noted above, which is built into the IPCC system).http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=1069http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6321351.stm

The Arctic sea ice is disintegrating "100 years ahead of schedule", having dropped 22% this year below the previous minimum low, and it may completely disappear as early as the northern summer of 2013. This is far beyond the predictions of the International Panel on Climate Change and is an example of global warming impacts happening at lower temperature increases and more quickly than projected. What are the lessons from the Arctic summer of 2007?

• Climate change impacts are happening at lower temperature increases and more quickly than projected.• The Arctic's floating sea ice is headed towards rapid summer disintegration as early as 2013, a century ahead of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections.• The rapid loss of Arctic sea ice will speed up the disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet, and a rise in sea levels by even as much as 5 metres by the turn of this century is possible.• The Antarctic ice shelf reacts far more sensitively to warming temperatures than previously believed.• Long-term climate sensitivity (including "slow" feedbacks such as carbon cycle feedbacks which are starting to operate) may be double the IPCC standard.• A doubling of climate sensitivity would mean we passed the widely accepted 2°C threshold of "dangerous anthropogenic interference" with the climate four decades ago, and would require us to find the means to engineer a rapid drawdown of current atmospheric greenhouse gas.• Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are now growing more rapidly than "business-as-usual", the most pessimistic of the IPCC scenarios.• Temperatures are now within ≈1°C of the maximum temperature of the past million years.• We must choose targets and take actions that can actually solve the problem in a timely manner.• The object of policy-relevant advice must be to avoid unacceptable outcomes and seemingly extreme or alarming possibilities, not to determine just the apparently mostlikely outcome.

• The 2°C warming cap is a political compromise; with the speed of change now in the climate system and the positive feedbacks that 2°C will trigger, it looms for perhaps billions of people and millions of species as a death sentence.• To allow the reestablishment and long-term security of the Arctic summer sea ice it is likely to be necessary to bring global warming back to a level at or below 0.5°C (a long-term precautionary warming cap) and for the level of atmospheric greenhouse gases at equilibrium to be brought down to or below a long-term precautionary cap of 320 ppm CO2e.• The IPCC suffers from a scientific reticence and in many key areas the IPCC process has been so deficient as to be an unreliable and dangerously misleading basis for policy-making.

http://www.carbonequity.info/docs/arctic.html

“Dozens of federal agencies report science but much of it is edited at the White House before it is sent to Congress and the public. It appears climate science is edited with a heavy hand. Drafts of climate reports were co-written by Rick Piltz for the federal Climate Change Science Program. But Piltz says his work was edited by the White House to make global warming seem less threatening. "The strategy of people with a political agenda to avoid this issue is to say there is so much to study way upstream here that we can’t even being to discuss impacts and response strategies," says Piltz. "There’s too much uncertainty. It's not the climate scientists that are saying that, its lawyers and politicians."

Piltz worked under the Clinton and Bush administrations. Each year, he helped write a report to Congress called "Our Changing Planet." Piltz says he is responsible for editing the report and sending a review draft to the White House. Asked what happens, Piltz says: "It comes back with a large number of edits, handwritten on the hard copy by the chief-of-staff of the Council on Environmental Quality." Asked who the chief of staff is, Piltz says, "Phil Cooney." Piltz says Cooney is not a scientist. "He's a lawyer. He was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, before going into the White House," he says. Cooney, the former oil industry lobbyist, became chief-of-staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Piltz says Cooney edited climate reports in his own hand. In one report, a line that said earth is undergoing rapid change becomes “may be undergoing change.” “Uncertainty” becomes “significant remaining uncertainty.” One line that says energy production contributes to warming was just crossed out. "He was obviously passing it through a political screen," says Piltz. "He would put in the word potential or may or weaken or delete text that had to do with the likely consequence of climate change, pump up uncertainty language throughout." http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/17/60minutes/main1415985_page2.shtml

Image: http://ucsaction.org/img/gv2/custom_images/ucsaction/2007-6.jpg

Is There Evidence In the Past of Abrupt Climate Change?

Professor Richard Alley, one of the world's leading climate researchers, tells the fascinating history of global climate changes as revealed by reading the annual rings of ice from cores drilled in Greenland. In the 1990s he and his colleagues made headlines with the discovery that the last ice age came to an abrupt end over a period of only three years. Here Alley offers the first popular account of the wildly fluctuating climate that characterized most of prehistory--long deep freezes alternating briefly with mild conditions--and explains that we humans have experienced an unusually temperate climate. But, he warns, our comfortable environment could come to an end in a matter of years. The record suggests that "switches" as well as "dials" control the earth's climate, affecting, for example, hot ocean currents that today enable roses to grow in Europe farther north than polar bears grow in Canada. Throughout most of history, these currents switched on and off repeatedly (due partly to collapsing ice sheets), throwing much of the world from hot to icy and back again in as little as a few years. http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6916.html

Scientists who read the history of Earth's climate in ancient sediments, ice cores and fossils find clear signs that it has shifted abruptly in the past on a scale that could prove disastrous for modern society. Peter B. deMenocal, an associate professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, said that about 8,200 years ago, a very sudden cooling shut down the Atlantic conveyor belt. As a result, the land temperature in Greenland dropped more than 9 degrees Fahrenheit within a decade or two. "It's not this abstract notion that happens over millions of years," deMenocal said. "The magnitude of what we're talking about greatly, greatly exceeds anything we've withstood in human history." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/28/AR2006012801021_pf.html

Fossil and ice core evidence shows that Earths climate can shift drastically within 10 years—establishing radically different temperatures and precipitation patterns that can persist for centuries or longer. “Even as the earth as a whole continues to warm gradually, large regions may experience a precipitous and disruptive shift into colder climates,” the Director of the prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution told world leaders. During the Younger Dryas about 12,700 years ago, average temperatures in the North Atlantic region abruptly plummeted nearly 8° F and remained that way for 1,300 years.http://www.willthomas.net/Convergence/Weekly/Global_Warming.htm

What Is The Younger Dryas?

The Younger Dryas was an event that occurred about 12,800 years before present (BP), termed the Younger Dryas (YD), is the canonical example of abrupt climate change. It is best seen in the Greenland ice cores, although it had very marked consequences over Europe, North America, and as far as New Zealand. The YD is an invaluable case study: it occurred recently enough so that records of it are well-preserved, and seems to have left traces all over the world. Let us look at the temperature over Greenland for the last 18,000 years:

Figure 1: The Younger Dryas event as an example of abrupt climate change. Source: Abrupt Climate Change; Inevitable Surprises

Around 15,000 years ago, the Earth started warming abruptly after ~ 100,000 years of an "ice age"; this is known as a glacial termination. The large ice sheets, which covered significant parts of North America and Europe, began melting as a result. A climatic optimum known as the "Bölling-Allerød" was reached shortly thereafter, around 14,700 before present. However, starting at about 12,800 BP, the Earth returned very quickly into near glacial conditions (i.e. cold, dry and windy), and stayed there for about 1,200 years: this is known as the Younger Dryas (YD), since it is the most recent interval where a plant characteristic of cold climates, Dryas Octopetala, was found in Scandinavia. The most spectacular aspect of the YD is that it ended extremely abruptly (around 11,600 years ago), and although the date cannot be known exactly, it is estimated from the annually-banded Greenland ice-core that the annual-mean temperature increased by as much as 10°C in 10 years.

There are many other examples of abrupt climate change in the last 50,000 years, which bear the rather cryptic names of Heinrich, and Dansgaard/Oeschger events. The picture below (figure 2) shows where Dansgaard/Oeschger (DO) events have been recorded. More details on those are provided on this link.

Figure 3: Locations of the main records of abrupt climate change in the last 40,000 years. The inserted curve is a proxy for the temperature of precipitated snow over Greenland. (Source: Wallace Broecker)

From this inserted panel, it is clear that the YD was a very strong event, yet it is also apparent that it was only the most recent of a series of large and abrupt climate swings that occurred repeatedly in the last ice age, and were recorded in many places around the globe, as attested by the number of red dots on the picture.Although they are of considerable theoretical interest, all these oscillations (including the YD) occurred at a time when parts of the Northern Hemisphere continents were covered by ice sheets, and the subpolar oceans where covered by sea-ice in winter. This makes such cases less relevant for understanding what might happen to our greenhouse world as a result of human activities. A better analog would be the Late Paleocene Thermal Maximum (about 55 million years ago, when the Earth was very warm), but the information about this period is frustratingly sparse because it is so remote in time.

http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/pi/arch/examples.shtml

When Did Humans Begin to Change the Climate?

William F. Ruddiman is a palaeoclimatologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia. He is known principally for his "early anthropocene" hypothesis, the idea that human-induced changes in greenhouse gases did not begin in the eighteenth century with advent of coal-burning factories and power plants of the industrial era, but date back to 8000 years ago, triggered by intense farming activities of our early agrarian ancestors. It was at that time that atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations stopped following the periodic pattern of rises and falls that had accurately characterized their past long-term behavior, a pattern which is well explained by natural variations in the earth’s orbit known as Milankovitch cycles. In his overdue-glaciation hypothesis Ruddiman claims that an incipient ice age would probably have begun several thousand years ago, but the arrival of that scheduled ice age was forestalled by the activities of early farmers. http://www.answers.com/topic/william-ruddiman

In his book “Plows, Plagues and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate” (2005), Ruddiman begins the book with a brief introduction to the science of climate change and the various individuals that have been key in influencing the field over the years. He also notes that the earth’s climate has been drifting toward cooler temperatures for the last 55 million years. The dominant hypothesis for this trend is that large volcanic eruptions have subsided while increasing amounts of carbon dioxide have been absorbed out of the atmosphere due to interactions between monsoon rains and ground up rock exposed by India pushing into Asia and creating the Himalayas. Additionally it is believed that the melting ice that produced higher sea levels resulted in the ocean absorbing more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. These two natural occurrences resulted in less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hence possibly producing the general cooling trend.According to Ruddiman beginning about 900,000 years ago the earth has begun to go through regular glacial cycles in which glaciers or ice have covered approximately one quarter of the earth’s total surface. These conditions typically last for about 100,000 years and are followed by brief interglacial periods of more temperate weather. Ruddiman cites various researchers in geology and astrology who pioneered the understanding of earth’s climate as a function of its orbit. The various cycles of earth’s climate seem to be explained by the eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession of the Earth's orbit as well as cycles in the amount of solar radiation. Ruddiman primarily relies on the groundwork by Milutin Milankovitch to explain the effects of solar radiation and earth’s orbit on the climate. By examining ice cores from around the world scientists have been able to link levels of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane to the various cycles of earth’s climate history. The discovery of carbon dating aided a great deal in developing this understanding. Upon investigating the levels of carbon dioxide and methane in the earth’s atmosphere in the most recent interglacial period-10,000 years ago- Ruddiman noticed that levels of carbon dioxide and methane were steadily rising despite the fact that the earth’s natural cycles determined that they should have been decreasing. It was this discovery that lead to Ruddiman’s search for an explanation and ultimately the creation of this book.Ruddiman’s central argument is that this most recent interglacial period has deviated from the natural cycle because of human activities, most importantly farming. Approximately 10,000 years ago the ice that once covered large portions of the northern hemisphere began to recede and gave rise to a new way of life for early humans. In the beginning these early humans had little impact on the environment because they were primarily hunter gatherer societies that moved from location to location allowing previously inhabited locations to be reclaimed by nature. However, about 8,000 years ago humans first developed agriculture and a domesticated lifestyle that allowed them to

continually inhabit regions and build large civilizations. Ruddiman claims that carbon dioxide emission records indicate that levels in the atmosphere began to rise at about this same time. This process was intensified as the centuries passed and new technologies such animal husbandry and the plow made their way into more and more cultures. These new technologies allowed for more efficient and methods of clearing forests and making room for increasing populations. According to previous interglacial periods the concentration of carbon dioxide should have fallen by about 20 parts per million instead of rising by 20 parts per million. Ruddiman uses estimates of population, forest cleared per person and carbon emitted per each square kilometer cleared to approximate the total impact and concludes that the magnitude is reasonably close to the extra carbon dioxide accumulated during the period.Ruddiman also attributes the rise of methane gas in the atmosphere to human related activities. The most notable of these activities is the cultivation of rice in artificial wetlands in Asia and increased animal waste due to increasing populations of domesticated animals. According to Ruddiman methane concentrations should have peaked about 11,000 years ago slightly above 700 parts per billion and then declined to about 450 parts per billion today. Methane levels followed this cycle at first, but about 5000 years ago they began to rebound and currently the concentration is about 275 parts per billion above the previous trends.According to Ruddiman farming and related activities resulted in large amounts of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide and methane) being released into the atmosphere at a time when natural cycles of the earth indicated they should have been falling. The result has been an unintended warming cycle that prevented the earth from entering into another ice age [3]. Ruddiman goes as far as to say that if these gases had not been released into the atmosphere, areas in northern Canada such as Hudson Bay and Baffin Island would currently be covered in ice today. The implications of this theory are wide ranging and most certainly worthy of further exploration.Throughout the record of carbon dioxide and methane emissions there are drops and rises in the amount of concentrations present in the atmosphere. Ruddiman explains these “wiggles” by claiming that they appear at times of major outbreaks of disease such as the bubonic plague in the 1,300’s and the prevalence of old world diseases in the Americas after the arrival of Columbus. Both of these events resulted in large numbers of people dying and the land they once inhabited being reclaimed by the forest. This resulted in increased amounts of carbon dioxide being taken out of the atmosphere, hence causing global temperatures to cool down. Ruddiman claims that the little ice age, starting in the 13th century and ending sometime in the early 19th century was caused by the decreased population and the re-forestation of previously cleared lands as a result from the diseases that killed off so many people.The last aspect of Ruddiman's discussion of climate change relates to the future of petroleum use on earth. It is commonly known that the world’s supply of fossil fuels is rapidly depleting and even conservative estimates claim that the supply will not last much more than 150-200 more years. Ruddiman claims that when this sources of natural fuels has been depleted, human kind will have to resort to using the large quantities of coal that still exist all over the planet. This, according to Ruddiman, will result in a continued warming trend that will only stop when technology either produces a new source of fuel or figures out a way to separate the carbon dioxide emissions prior to being released into the atmosphere. Ruddiman is quite skeptical of both scenarios in the near future because of the increased costs and technological advancements that would have to be made in such a short time. Eventually carbon and methane emissions will be controlled and lowered a great deal and Ruddiman asserts when this happens the earth will most likely begin an era of cooling temperatures.http://www.answers.com/topic/plows-plagues-and-petroleum

What Is The Probable Resulting Climate For Given Emissions?

This diagram is a very good graphic for understanding the relationship between: atmospheric levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases probabilities that certain levels of warming will occur, and the setting of emissions limits.

In 1997 Azar & Rodhe, using the best available information at the time, put together the model described in this slide.

You can see how atmospheric CO2 levels rose, using historical date up till about 1990, then 6 alternative stabilisation scenarios are generated using computer modelling. The scenarios show atmospheric levels of CO2 that grow, at least for a while, and then end up at 350 ppm, 450 ppm, 550 ppm, 650 ppm, 750 ppm and 1000 ppm of CO2 in the air. The 350 ppm stabilisation level is the closest to the pre-industrial maximum, 280 ppm, but nevertheless exceeds it by 25% and is even 18% over the highest CO2 level experienced in the last million years or more.Source: Azar, C., & Rodhe, H., 1997. Targets for Stabilization of Atmospheric CO2. Science 276, 1818-1819. . Dashed line a) refers to an estimate of the maximum natural variability of the global temperature over the past millennium, and dashed line b) shows the 2oC temperature threshold.

What Are The Chances of Exceeding a Range of Temperatures at a Particular Level of CO2 Equivalent?

We now have a compilation of more recently estimated probabilities in the report of the Stern Review, 2006 (Box 8.1, p. 195). This data has been re-laid out here to make it easier to see the relationship between atmospheric concentrations of CO2 equivalent and the probabilities of triggering a range of different temperatures. I have also added estimates of (a) expected species losses; (b) the likelihood of runaway warming; (c) a qualitative characterisation of the total impact associated with different temperature rises.http://beyondzeroemissions.org/files/GSI_Science_ghg_reduction_targets.ppt

http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/climate_change/media/20070712_king/king_presentation_20070712.pdf

In the Technical Summary of the Fourth Assessment report we find a similar table with C02 equivalent levels, and expected equilibrium temperatures resulting from these.

Now, if we remember what James Hansen says(1) In the last interglacial period, temperatures were around 1 degree higher than now and sea levels 5-6 m higher(2) Therefore, just 1 degree warming is dangerous climate change; 2-3 degrees warming is a different planet as at that temperature sea level were 25±10 m higher.(3) 1 degree warming will be caused by 450 ppm CO2 (4) The last time icesheets collapsed was during melt water pulse 1A at the beginning of our current warm period when sea levels rose 1 m every 20 years.(5) We still have to expect another 0.5 degree warming from past emissions because planet Earth is presently out of energy balance with space. It will come to a new equilibrium at that higher temperature, provided we do not enter a positive feed back loop with a run-away climate

The target is therefore to stay under the 450 ppm CO2 limit. It can be achieved by the Stern Review's stabilization path for 450 ppm CO2e (including other GHG emissions). In this path, emissions must be made to peak by 2010 and then be reduced by 60% by 2030 (not 2050).

Matt Muschalik argues, “Every Gt of CO2 we are from now on blowing into the atmosphere is 1 Gt too much. It will just increase the future equilibrium temperature.Let us assume that the threshold temperature at which our icesheets in Greenland and West Antarctica start an unstoppable disintegration (not just surface melting as assumed in the latest IPCC report) is 0.8 degrees then we can burn a maximum of oil, gas and coal equivalent to just 0.3 (=0.8 - 0.5) degree warming. Not even Hansen knows the exact figure as no reliable ice sheet model is available. But he says we are very close to a tipping point.”

During the last Ice Age, when the earth was on average less than 10 degrees colder than today, the concentration of carbon dioxide was 190 parts per million (0.019 percent). At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, it was a rather stable 270 to 280 ppm. In the last 200 years, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 has risen to more than 350 ppm, the highest it has been in some 160,000 years, according to studies of air pockets trapped long ago in glacial ice. This increase is primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels, though other factors, including large scale forest fires have become a significant factor as well. http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/Dec97Tokar.htm

Last century's global warming of 0.6 degrees - 0.8 degrees in Australia - may sound small, but an extra 1.5 to two degrees will mean the loss of coral and other delicate ecosystems. It is the most rapid warming the planet has seen in 10,000 years. In that time, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere remained constant at around 280 parts per million. It is now nearly 380ppm, a level the earth has not experienced for at least 400,000 years.http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/11/26/1101219743320.html

A study by a former chief economist of the World Bank, Sir Nicholas Stern of Britain, called climate change is "the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen," with the potential to shrink the global economy by 20 percent and to cause economic and social disruption on par with the two world wars and the Great Depression.

We have to follow the 450 ppm CO2e stablization path from the Stern Review in which emissions must be made to peak around 2010 and then decline by 60% in just 20 years if we want to keep the climate within safe levels.

Matt Muschalik observes, “It seems we cannot even burn all oil and gas plus coal without wrecking our climate for good.”

Tony Blair said the Stern Review showed that scientific evidence of global warming was "overwhelming" and its consequences "disastrous". http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/987/6B/Slides_for_Launch.pdf

What Can Cause Sea Level Change?

As a result of global warming, the penetration of heat into the ocean leads to the thermal expansion of the water; this effect, coupled with the melting of glaciers and ice sheets, results in a rise in sea level. Sea-level rise will not be uniform globally but will vary with factors such as currents, winds, and tides-as well as with different rates of warming, the efficiency of ocean circulation, and regional and local atmospheric (e.g., tectonic and pressure) effects.http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc/regional/247.htm

There are basically four ways the sea level undergoes changes:(i) Volume change, as a response to the thermal content and salinity-density compensation of sea water. Also known as the steric effect, it mostly results fromatmosphere-ocean thermal interactions, and includes major processes of ENSO, NAO and other meteorological oscillations, and is influenced by deep thermohaline circulations.(ii) Mass change, due to a number of geophysical and hydrological processes that lead to water exchanges in the Earth-atmosphere-hydrosphere-cryosphere system. These include water exchange from polar ice sheets and mountain glaciers to the ocean, atmosphericwater vapor and land hydrological variations such as soil moisture and snow cover, and anthropogenic effects such as water impoundment in artificial reservoirs and extraction of groundwater.(iii) "Container" change, as a result of solid Earth vertical deformations due to tectonics, rebound of the mantle from past and present deglaciation, and other local ground motions. These affect the relative sea level. (iv) Dynamic changes, due to external forcings exerted on sea surface. These include waves (capillary, gravity, planetary, tsunami), tides, wind-driven circulations (with dynamic height), pressure-driven topography (via dynamic inverted-barometer effect),density-driven (thermohaline) currents, and geoidinduced sea level changes.http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/7969/22036/01024962.pdf

Changing sea-level is the result of processes occurring within the solid Earth, thecryosphere and the oceans, acting over timescales varying between 1 and 108 years.Many of these processes find their expression in the static and time-varying components of the gravity field. The geoid, or its proxy, mean sea level, has also been the reference system for most records of changes of land elevation with respect to sea level.An improvement in knowledge of the Earth’s gravity field may be expected to improve our understanding of sea level through providing reference surface through which distributed measurements of sea level may be compared, and through providing more detailed information on the solid Earth processes that affect sea level through changes inocean bathymetry, or changes in the geoid.Sea level is presently rising by 1-2 mm yr-1. The sources of these changes is not wellConstrained. They may have their origin in the ongoing isostatic rebound of the Earth following the deglaciation that marked the start of the Holocene, in the ongingadjustment to sea level and to climate of the Earth’s ice sheets and glaciers, and in theexpansion of the ocean as the climate warms.http://esamultimedia.esa.int/docs/Sea-Level_Study_12056_96.pdf

How Does Recent Sea Level Rise Look Like Over Time?

Rising or falling sea level can reshape the world’s coastlines and affect some of the most densely populated areas on Earth. Not surprisingly, scientists want to understand sea level as thoroughly as possible. They have discovered that the ocean’s behavior is not uniform all over the world; neither are the factors that affect sea level. When sea level rises, it can do so for a few reasons. It can rise due to thermal expansion—the tendency of warm water to take up more space than cooler water. It can rise due to the addition of water, for instance from melting glaciers. It can also rise due to changes in salinity; fresh water is less dense than salt water and therefore takes up slightly more space than an equal mass of salt water.Besides understanding the causes of sea level changes, scientist want to accurately gauge the rate of sea level rise. Relying on data from satellites and floats (mechanical devices drifting in the ocean), a group of oceanographers announced in June 2006 that sea level rose, on average, 3 millimeters (0.1 inches) per year between 1993 and 2005.http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17300

The rise in sea level is not the same in all parts of the world. In some places, sea level is actually falling, as shown in the map World Sea Level Rise and Fall.

http://www.seed.slb.com/en/scictr/watch/climate_change/impact.htm

This is the time-series of relative sea level for the past 300 years from Northern Europe: Amsterdam, Netherlands; Brest, France; Sheerness, UK; Stockholm, Sweden (detrended over the period 1774 to 1873 to remove to first order the contribution of postglacial rebound); Swinoujscie, Poland (formerly Swinemunde, Germany); and Liverpool, UK. Data for the latter are of “Adjusted Mean High Water” rather than Mean Sea Level and include a nodal (18.6 year) term. The scale bar indicates ±100 mm. (Adapted from Woodworth, 1999a.)

http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/fig11-7.htm

This graph shows the increase in mean sea level, measured in millimeters. Researchers attributed about half of that increase to melting ice and the other half to thermal expansion as the ocean absorbs excess energy.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17300

The following are predicted net sea-level change for Great Britain relative to 1961-1990 for the full range of global sealevel changes estimated by the IPCC, incorporating updated isostatic change data from Shennan and Horton (2002).

http://www.ukcip.org.uk/resources/publications/documents/124.pdf

How Does Sea Level Rise Relate to Temperature?

Climatologist James Hansen, Direcor of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, says "At the peak of the last interglacial period (100-120,000 years ago), temperatures were around 1 degree higher than now and sea levels 5-6 meter higher. This is from paleoclimate data, not from debatable models." He therefore concludes in his paper on Greenland Ice sheet disintegration "A Slippery Slope: How Much Global Warming Constitutes "Dangerous Anthropogenic Interference" that 1 degree more warming is dangerous climate change. http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/hansen_slippery.pdf

Here is reconstructed global sea level for the last 500 kyr by Richard Bintanja, Roderik S.W. van de Wal & Johannes Oerlemans

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v437/n7055/fig_tab/nature03975_F3.html

Hansen says, to find our planet at 2 or 3°C warmer than now, as it will be this century in “business-as-usual” scenarios, we must go back to the middle Pliocene, about 3 million years ago. At that time sea level was 25 ± 10 m greater than today.http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/keeling_talk_and_slides.pdf

These sea level rises can happen fast. The last 7000 years were relatively stable, however 14,000 years ago, sea level rose by about 25 m in some parts of the northern hemisphere, over a period of less than 500 years, in an event called meltwater pulse 1A. This was probably due to a collapsing ice shelf.

http://www.answers.com/topic/meltwater-pulse-1a

That's about four times faster than sea levels were rising most of the time during this period, and at least 20 times faster than the sea level is currently rising.

"This event happened near the end of the last Ice Age, a period of de-glaciation that lasted from about 21,000 years ago to 12,000 years ago," Clark said. "The average sea level rise during that period was about eight millimetres per year. But during this meltwater pulse there was an extremely rapid disintegration of an ice sheet and sea levels rose much faster than average."The amount of sea level rise that occurred during a single year of that period, Clark said, is more than the total sea level rise that has occurred in the past 100 years. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/03/020329072043.htm

What Kind of Sea Level Rise Can We Expect in The Future?

Stefan Rahmstorf, Professor of Physics of the Oceans Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and member of the Panel on Abrupt Climate Change and of the Advisory Council on Global Change of the German government, states that sea level appears to be rising about 50% faster than models suggest – consistently for the 1961-2003 and the 1993-2003 periods, and for the TAR models and the AR4 models in the IPCC report. This suggests that it is at least a plausible possibility that the models may underestimate future rise.http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/the-ipcc-sea-level-numbers/#bottom_line

In his semi-empirical relation he states, “sea-level rise is roughly proportional to the magnitude of warming above the temperatures of the pre–Industrial Age. This holds to good approximation for temperature and sea-level changes during the 20th century, with a proportionality constant of 3.4 millimeters/year per °C. When applied to future warming scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, this relationship results in a projected sea-level rise in 2100 of 0.5 to 1.4 meters above the 1990 level.” In another article he says “Even if warming were to be stopped at 3 ºC, sea level will probably keep rising by several meters in subsequent centuries in a delayed response”

“Ice sheets have the largest potential effect, because their complete melting would result in a global sea-level rise of about 70 m. Yet their dynamics are poorly understood, and the key processes that control the response of ice flow to a warming climate are not included in current ice sheet models for example, meltwater lubrication of the ice sheet bed, or increased ice stream flow after the removal of buttressing ice shelves.”http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/Publications/Nature/rahmstorf_science_2007.pdf

"Rahmsdorf (2006) has noted that if one uses observed sea level rise of the past century to calibrate a linear projection of future sea level, BAU warming will lead to sea level rise of the order of one meter in the present century. This is a useful observation, as it indicates that sea level change would be substantial even without non-linear collapse of an ice sheet. However, this approach cannot be taken as a realistic way of projecting likely sea level rise under BAU forcing. The linear approximation fits the past sea level

change well for the past century only because the two terms contributing significantly to sea level rise were (1) thermal of ocean water and (2) melting of alpine glaciers. Under BAU forcing in the 21st century, sea level rise undoubtedly will be dominated by a third term (3) ice sheet disintegration. This third term was small until the past few years, but it is has at least doubled in the past decade and is now close to 1 mm/year, based on gravity satellite measurements discussed above. As a quantitative example, let us say that the ice sheet contribution is 1 cm for the decade 2005-2015 and that it doubles each decade until the West Antarctic ice sheet is largely depleted. That time constant yields sea level rise of the order of 5 m this century. "For more information, read:http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/warmingfacts.pdf

Eric Rignot, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said that computer models used by the UN's International Panel on Climate Change have not adequately taken into account the amount of ice falling into the sea from glacial movements.Yet the satellite study shows that about two-thirds of the sea-level rise caused by the Greenland ice sheet is due to icebergs breaking off from fast-moving glaciers rather than simply the result of water running off from melting ice."In simple terms, the ice sheet is breaking up rather than melting. It's not a surprise in itself but it is a surprise to see the magnitude of the changes. These big glaciers seem to be accelerating, they seem to be going faster and faster to the sea," Dr Rignot said."This is not predicted by the current computer models. The fact is the glaciers of Greenland are evolving faster than we thought and the models have to be adjusted to catch up with these observations," he said.When previous studies of the ice balance are taken into account, the researchers calculated that the overall amount of ice dumped into the sea increased from 90 cubic km in 1996 to 224 cubic km in 2005.Dr Rignot said that there are now signs that the more northerly glaciers of Greenland are beginning to adopt the pattern of movements seen by those in the south. "The southern half of Greenland is reacting to what we think is climate warming. The northern half is waiting, but I don't think it's going to take long," he said. Global warming is causing the Greenland ice cap to disintegrate far faster than anyone predicted. A study of the region's massive ice sheet warns that sea levels may - as a consequence - rise more dramatically than expected. Scientists have found that many of the huge glaciers of Greenland are moving at an accelerating rate - dumping twice as much ice into the sea than five years ago - indicating that the ice sheet is undergoing a potentially catastrophic breakup.The implications of the research are dramatic given Greenland holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by up to 21ft, a disaster scenario that would result in the flooding of some of the world's major population centres, including all of Britain's city ports.Satellite measurements of the entire land mass of Greenland show that the speed at which the glaciers are moving to the sea has increased significantly over the past 10 years with some glaciers moving three times faster than in the mid-1990s.Scientists believe that computer models of how the Greenland ice sheet will react to global warming have seriously underestimated the threat posed by sea levels that could rise far more quickly than envisaged.The latest study, presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in St Louis, shows that rather than just melting relatively slowly, the ice sheet is showing all the signs of a mechanical break-up as glaciers slip ever faster into the ocean, aided by the "lubricant" of melt water forming at their base.Satellites show that the glaciers in the south of Greenland are now moving much faster than they were 10 years ago. Scientists estimate that, in 1996, glaciers deposited about 50 cubic km of ice into the sea. In 2005 it had risen to 150 cubic km of ice.

Details of the latest study, published in the journal Science, show that Greenland now accounts for an increase in global sea levels of about 0.5 millimetres per year - compared to a total sea level rise of 3mm per year.When previous studies of the ice balance are taken into account, the researchers calculated that the overall amount of ice dumped into the sea increased from 90 cubic km in 1996 to 224 cubic km in 2005.Dr Rignot said that there are now signs that the more northerly glaciers of Greenland are beginning to adopt the pattern of movements seen by those in the south. "The southern half of Greenland is reacting to what we think is climate warming. The northern half is waiting, but I don't think it's going to take long," he said. http://www.countercurrents.org/cc-connor170206.htm

Should the Greenland ice sheet melt completely, as models suggest it could, that would result in a sea level rise of about twenty-three feet (seven meters). Reductions in sea ice extent and snow cover cause a reduction in surface reflectivity, meaning that more energy is absorbed at the surface and less is radiated, causing further warming, which in turn leads to further melting: what scientists refer to as a 'positive feedback'. At the same time, melting arctic ice, combined with increased precipitation and river runoff, may lead to a freshening of the ocean in the North Atlantic, disrupting the critical salinity balance and leading to a collapse in the ocean circulation pattern that brings warm water to Europe from the tropics. As a consequence, global warming could lead to regional cooling in the Northeast Atlantic region.http://www.projectthinice.org/warming/impact_global_consequences.php

How Long Will It Take For The Climate to Respond to Forcings

In an article published in Science in 2005, called “In a Earth's Energy Imbalance: Confirmation and Implications” the authors state “The lag in the climate response to a forcing is a sensitive function of equilibrium climate sensitivity, varying approximately as the square of the sensitivity (1), and it depends on the rate of heat exchange between the ocean's surface mixed layer and the deeper ocean (2–4). The lag could be as short as a decade, if climate sensitivity is as small as 0.25°C per W/m2 of forcing, but it is a century or longer if climate sensitivity is 1°C per W/m2 or larger (1, 3). Evidence from Earth's history (3–6) and climate models (7) suggests that climate sensitivity is 0.75° ± 0.25°C per W/m2, implying that 25 to 50 years are needed for Earth's surface temperature to reach 60% of its equilibrium response (1).”Link to www.sciencemag.org

The five warmest years since the late 1880s, according to NASA scientists, are in descending order 2005, 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2006. Goddard Institute researchers used temperature data from weather stations on land, satellite measurements of sea surface temperature since 1982 and data from ships for earlier years.http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2006/2006_warm.html

How Long Will It Take to Stabilise The Climate, and Sea Levels?Even after we have stabilised C02 emissions temperature and sea level will continue for centuries, or even several millennia.

A report, from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, claims Britain could look radically different with sea levels rising as much as 11.4m by the year 3000 if greenhouse gas emissions are not sharply reduced. The worst-case scenario would see global and regional warming, raising the world's average surface temperature by 15C and lifting sea levels by more than 11m. Even in the "business as usual", middle scenario, increased emissions would probably precipitate abrupt climate change events, such as the weakening and shifting of currents in the Atlantic Ocean. Sea water acidity would also increase dramatically, posing a major threat to marine organisms. Dr Tim Lenton, the UEA lead author on the paper and a climate change modeller, said: "If we follow business-as-usual then we will commit future generations to dangerous climate change, and if we exploit unconventional fossil fuels we could return the Earth to a hot state it hasn't seen since 55 million years ago. "The best-case scenario, keeps the temperature rise in the year 3000 at 1.5 degrees of warming and sea level rise to under a metre, because it has avoided the Greenland ice sheet melting." "The main result is that the choices we make in the coming decades have implications that play out over the next thousand years and beyond. If we start to make a serious reduction in emissions, then we could avoid dangerous climate change thresholds and leave a stable climate in the year 3000."http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4720104.stm

"If human beings follow a business-as-usual course, continuing to exploit fossil fuel resources without reducing carbon emissions or capturing and sequestering them before they warm the atmosphere, the eventual effects on climate and life may be comparable to those at the time of mass extinctions. Life will survive, but it will do so on a transformed planet. For all foreseeable human generations, it will be a far more desolate world than the one in which civilization developed and flourished during the past several thousand years." http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19131

What Constitutes Dangerous Anthropogenic Interference With Nature?

James Hansen says “The Earth’s history provides our best indication of the levels of change that are likely to have deleterious effects on humans and wildlife, and constitute “dangerous anthropogenic interference” with nature. The Earth’s temperature, with rapid global warming over the past 30 years, is now passing through the peak level of the Holocene, a period of relatively stable climate that has existed for more than 10,000 years. Further warming of more than 1ºC will make the Earth warmer than it has been in a million years. “Business-as-usual” scenarios, with fossil fuel CO2 emissions continuing to increase ~2%/year as in the past decade, yield additional warming of 2 or 3°C this century and imply changes that constitute practically a different planet. I present multiple lines of evidence indicating that the Earth’s climate is nearing, but has not passed, a tipping point, beyond which it will be impossible to avoid climate change with far ranging undesirable consequences. The changes include not only loss of the Arctic as we know it, with all that implies for wildlife and indigenous peoples, but losses on a much vaster scale due to worldwide rising seas. Sea level will increase slowly at first, as losses at the fringes of Greenland and Antarctica due to accelerating ice streams are nearly balanced by increased snowfall and ice sheet thickening in the ice sheet interiors. But as Greenland and West Antarctic ice is softened and lubricated by melt-water and as buttressing ice shelves disappear due to a warming ocean, the balance will tip toward ice loss, thus bringing multiple positive feedbacks into play and causing rapid ice sheet disintegration. The Earth’s history suggests that with warming of 2-3°C the new equilibrium sea level will include not only most of the ice from Greenland and West Antarctica, but a portion of East Antarctica, raising sea level of the order of 25 meters (80 feet).Contrary to lethargic ice sheet models, real world data suggest substantial ice sheet and sea level change in centuries, not millennia.“http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/keeling_talk_and_slides.pdf

What Are Tipping Points?

Systems can be found in various states. The diagrams below illustrate some states such as stable, untable, steady, and threshold states.

Stable Unstable Steady Threshold

If we push a stable system with any forcing it quickly returns to its initial state, however hard we push it. This allows us to easily predict the outcome. Unstable systems are very vulnerable to changes, and can sometimes change irreversibly when forced in a certain direction. One may be able to predict the outcome, but it is very sensitive to inputs. Steady systems, if forced, do not change much, because they are fairly insensitive to forcings. Linear systems change proportionally to forces, and are predictable. Threshold systems in contrast are non-linear and can be difficult to predict because they can cope with certain amounts of forcings, however after reaching a certain tipping point, rapid change can occur.

When the writer Malcolm Gladwell unleashed the idea of tipping points on the popular imagination in his book of the same name1, he was comparing the way aspects of life suddenly shift from obscurity to ubiquity to effects normally studied in epidemiology. Gladwell's tipping points were manifestations of the catchiness of behaviours and ideas.The Tipping Point is the name given by epidemiologists for the dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once. The flu, for example, can be held in check for a long time without being an epidemic. But suddenly, once some threshold is crossed in terms of number of people infected, things get much worse very quickly. Gladwell’s premise is that in addition to applying to viruses, this type of pattern is observed in many other situations.http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7095/full/441802a.htmlhttp://www.fabtime.com/tippingpoint.shtml

John Rundle, Professor of Physics, Geology and Engineering says “Complex systems are observed to undergo sudden changes in behavior when the system “tips” from one dominant dynamical pattern to another. The transition in system dynamics is associated with the nucleation and growth of fluctuations, together with a threshold in the state space of the system. The threshold can be characterized as a “tipping point”. Tipping points, or first-order transitions, can be associated with stock market crashes, earthquakes, hurricanes, and epidemics.”http://cse.ucdavis.edu/public/files/courses/PHYS_250II.pdf

In nonlinear models, rapid changes resulting from crossing a threshold in some forcing function are common. Data on a number of aspects of the climate system suggest that it also has thresholds, multiple equilibria, and other features which can result in episodes of rapid change [ Broecker et al., 1985; Mayewski et al., 1993; McElroy, 1994]. The behavior of the thermohaline circulation of the oceans (THC) is one of the most frequently cited examples of nonlinear dynamics in the earth climate system and a potential source of rapid future change.http://www.agu.org/revgeophys/schime01/node14.html

Peter Smith, a professor of sustainable energy at the University of Nottingham, says “The scientific opinion is that we have a ceiling of 440 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric carbon before there is a tipping point, a steep change in the rate of global warming," Professor Smith said. "The rate at which we are emitting now, around 2ppm a year and rising, we could expect that that tripping point will reach us in 20 years' time. That gives us 10 years to develop technologies that could start to bite into the problem."http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1864802,00.html

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

(IPCC) told 114 government representatives in Mauritius in 2005 that our planet has “already reached the level of dangerous concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere” that could cause the climate to abruptly flip. Rather than causing gradual changes over many centuries, Fortune belatedly reported, “growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world’s climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a decade.” Like a trigger that is pulled without effect until the climate change cannon suddenly fires at us point-blank, a severe climate flip could occur within the next 25 years. “If it does,” Fortune feared, “the need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societies.” [Fortune Jan/04]http://www.willthomas.net/Convergence/Weekly/Global_Warming.htm

Earth this century could cross a climate threshold or "tipping point that could lead to intolerable impacts on human well-being," says the 166-page report prepared for the United Nations. It was written by 18 experts in climate, water, marine science, physics and other disciplines, seven of them Americans. "It is still possible to avoid an unmanageable degree of climate change, but the time for action is now," says panelist John Holdren, a Harvard University professor of environmental policy. Without action, the panel says, a litany of harmful consequences awaits: the spread of disease, less fresh water, more and worse droughts, more extreme storms and widespread economic damage to farming, fishing and forests. In the USA, which emits about 25% of the world's carbon dioxide, it could mean more intense hurricanes, heat waves, wildfires and droughts.The two-year study, issued by the U.N. Foundation, says the risk of tipping over that climate threshold rises sharply if Earth's temperature increases 3.6 to 4.5 degrees above what it was in 1750 (it is 1.2 degrees above that point now). http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2007-02-27-global-warming_x.htm

What Are The Uncertainties About Climate Change?

Although models have indicated gradual change, evidence suggested that abrupt change could occur due to internal feedbacks and thresholds within the climate system which could shift it into a dramatically different mode of operation. One such example often cited is the possibility that the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation – the Gulf Stream – may collapse with the effect of dramatically cooling Scotland’s climate. Witnesses to the inquiry suggested that the Gulf Stream was not at present thought likely to be subject to sudden change24. Some evidence raised the issue of the possible die-back of the Amazon forest after a certain level of warming, removing its vast capacity to absorb carbon and turning it into a net carbon source25. Similarly, warming soils could cease to be carbon sinks and emit more carbon. The ocean’s capacity to remove CO 2 from the atmosphere may also decrease significantly.http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/business/committees/environment/reports-05/rar05-05-vol01-01.htm

Dr. Hermann Ott is the director of the Berlin office of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, one of Europe's leading climate policy research organizations. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, he says that global warming is inevitable and mankind must take steps for the softest landing possible. It will also mean fundamental changes in the way we live. He says if we do not act decisively, I would assume an increase of between 3 and 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. But it could easily be 6 degrees. That's a little bit greater than the difference between now and the last ice age. Europe will look very different, but of course, the effects are not going to be the same everywhere. In some parts of the world you'll have a change of 10 degrees or 11 degrees. In others you will have only an increase of 1 or 2 degrees. If we talk about skepticism among scientists, it's not about whether or not man-made climate change exists, it's more about what the impacts are going to be. http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,342431,00.html

What Changes Can We Expect In Terms of Climate Change and Its Implications?

A 40-page consultancy report written for the Australian Business Roundtable on Climate Change said:

"Australia is one of the many global regions experiencing significant climate change as a result of global emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) from human activities. The average surface air temperature of Australia increased by 0.7 °C over the past century – warming that has been accompanied by marked declines in regional precipitation, particularly along the east and west coasts of the continent. These seemingly small changes have already had widespread consequences for Australia.

Such changes in climate will have diverse implications for Australia’s environment, economy, and public health. The biodiversity, ecosystems, and natural habitats of Australia are world renowned, yet potentially the most fragile of the systems that will be exposed to climate change. For example, the Great Barrier Reef, a UNESCO World Heritage area, has experienced unprecedented rates of coral bleaching over the past two decades, and additional warming of only 1 °C is anticipated to cause considerable losses or contractions of species associated with coral communities.

Australian crop agriculture and forestry may experience transient benefits from longer growing seasons and a warmer climate, yet such benefits are unlikely to be sustained under the more extreme projections of global warming. Furthermore, changes in precipitation and, subsequently water management, are particularly critical factors affecting the future productivity of the Australian landscape. The declines in precipitation projected over much of Australia will exacerbate existing challenges to water availability and quality for agriculture as well as for commercial and residential uses.

For example, limiting future increases in atmospheric CO2 to 550 ppmv, though not a panacea for global warming, would reduce 21st century global warming to an estimated 1.5–2.9 °C, effectively avoiding the more extreme climate changes. Lower stabilisation levels, such as 450 ppmv CO2 would reduce future warming even further, to approximately 1.2–2.3 °C. For Australia, such constraints on global warming would give natural ecosystems and their associated species greater time to adapt to changing environmental conditions, reduce the likelihood of major adverse consequences for agriculture and forestry, help ensure Australia’s public health infrastructure can keep pace with emerging health challenges, and reduce the chance of large-scale singularities. Nevertheless, even with a 350 ppmv stabilisation level, the Earth will not be able to avoid its current commitment to additional future warming. Therefore, prudence dictates that GHG mitigation activities be pursued in conjunction with adaptive responses to address the residual risks posed by this commitment." http://www.csiro.au/resources/pfbg.html

According to Dr. Geoff Love, Director of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology "Since the middle of the 20th century, Australian temperatures have, on average, risen by about 1°C with an increase in the frequency of heatwaves and a decrease in the numbers of frosts and cold days. Rainfall patterns have also changed - the northwest has seen an increase in rainfall over the last 50 years while much of eastern Australia and the far southwest have experienced a decline." http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/

"Studies predict Australia will be ravaged earlier and more severely by climate change than almost anywhere on Earth. Declining rainfall has cost Perth two-thirds of its surface water supply, and in 1998 the rainfall deficit began to spread east, parching the western plains. Now Sydney's dams are at an all-time low.

So, what would Australia look like in a world that is two degrees warmer? Two degrees of additional warming is sufficient to kill about half the world's coral reefs. Above that we're looking at a world without substantial coral reefs, making the Federal Government's protection of one-third of the Great Barrier Reef futile.

In 1988 Australia proclaimed the Wet Tropics World Heritage area in north-eastern Queensland. Extinctions of its unique fauna will start at one degree of warming, and after two degrees will accelerate rapidly.

After surviving for millions of years, creatures such as golden bowerbirds, green ringtail possums and mountain frogs will be no more, having gone extinct on our watch. Kakadu is the jewel in the crown of Australia's top end. Predictions are that with two degrees of warming its World Heritage wetlands will be destroyed by rising oceans and storms.

At two to three degrees of warming, Australia's alpine zone will become restricted to six peaks, and many of its species will become extinct. At two degrees of warming two-thirds of the 98 species of dryandra (a banksia relative from Western Australia) will be extinct, as will many other Western Australian plant and animal species. And this is a small sample of the changes in store.

Why should we care about our biodiversity? First it's of great economic importance. Imagine tourism without the reef, rainforests and Kakadu. Imagine the world without the $30 billion yielded each year by coral reefs. Of course, biodiversity is much more important than that, for it feeds and clothes us, gives us clean air and water, and protects us from illness. Who knows, for example, where the next cancer cure is coming from?" http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/06/14/1087065079591.html?from=storyr...

What Is Happening To Our Species In Relation to Climate Change?

Terry Root, who begun a study of the effects of climate on passerine birds in North America says that “For any given animal, the thermal neutral zone is the temperature range in which the animal doesn't have to raise its metabolism to cool or warm itself. The animal can also live in the wings of this distribution, outside of its optimal range, where it needs to expend energy to warm or cool itself. But when the temperature gets hotter or colder than the zone of tolerance for that animal, it will die or move. This shows that temperature is very important to animal ranges. Species abundances are also highly determined by this curve, as a species will be most abundant in the optimal temperature range, less abundant in the wings, and not exist at all outside of its zone of tolerance.Species ranges are largely determined by vegetation, which is itself strongly related to climatic variables. For yet other species, their ranges are associated with both temperature and vegetation. The possibility exists that with global warming, as the temperature rises, species whose ranges are related primarily to temperature are going to move north. But those related to both temperature and vegetation cannot move until the vegetation moves. So communities may be torn apart and some species may be driven to extinction. But when the temperature gets hotter or colder than the zone of tolerance for that animal, it will die or move. This shows that temperature is very important to animal ranges. Species abundances are also highly determined by this curve, as a species will be most abundant in the optimal temperature range, less abundant in the wings, and not exist at all outside of its zone of tolerance. For some species, the absolute minimum temperature is the key factor, while for others, it's other measures. This is species-dependent for many reasons. One reason is that microclimate effects impact species differently. Another is that one species may simply not be able to physically survive below a certain temperature, while another's survival is based upon whether it has stored up enough fat to last through a cold spell. In some species of reptiles, temperature determines sex ratios.”http://www.agci.org/publications/eoc96/AGCIEOC96SSSII/AGCIEOC96RootSSSII.html

Studies in Europe and America have shown that there are changes occurring. In general flowering and leafing is earlier by 10 days, although some species have commenced flowering up to 55 days earlier!! (Fitter and Fitter 2002). Some migratory birds, e.g. the Pied Flycatcher, are also arriving "late" from their overwintering grounds - spring has advanced in their breeding grounds. This is impacting on their ability to successfully rear as many offspring as in the past because they have missed the peak of their food supply (Sanz et al. 2001). Some butterflies and plants are changing their distribution (Hughes 2000). In the United Kingdom phenological variables are recognised by the government as a valid method of monitoring climate (Sparks et al. 2000).

http://www.dow.wau.nl/msa/epn/index.asp

In an interview with news magazine Spiegel, Hansen comments “studies have found that 1,700 species have already moved poleward at a rate of six kilometers per decade in recent decades. But climate zones are moving poleward at a faster rate, about 50 km per decade, and it will become 100 km per decade with business as usual. Combine that with the fact that so many species have been confined to certain areas due to humans having taken over so much of the planet, and you'll see it may be very difficult for them to migrate. So it's likely that a large fraction of the species could go extinct.”http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,476275,00.html

So our estimates show that species extinction rates are 1,000 to 10,000 times higher than in the past. This makes current rates of species loss at least equivalent to the mass extinctions of the past - and in as short a time. We do seem to be on the brink of a large-scale extinction spasm. But a major difference now is that almost all extinctions are due to the impact of human activities. People now so dominate the earth that very few species are completed unaffected by our existence. http://www.peopleandplanet.net/doc.php?id=914

The Holling 4-Box Model of ecosystem succession (Holling 1992) represents four basic ecological states common to all complex systems with respect to connectedness (x-axis) and stored capital (y-axis). This general concept model illustrates the phase shifts following significant perturbation (disturbance) to reorganization (microbial scale), exploitation (pioneer/opportunistic species), and conservation (climax).

Exploitation. In this state, opportunistic species are able to colonize in places that were previously inhospitable or unattainable. This state usually follows some sort of perturbation, or threshold (ecological or physical), that allows for the introduction of new species and communities.Conservation. In this ecological state, the communities that have established footholds following perturbation, have matured and exhibit climax ecological conditions. Ecological networks (or webs) have been well-established and tend to function efficiently. Small perturbations and oscillations between states can occur; however, primary functions and communities are relatively stable.Release. Significant physical or ecological events result in an often catastrophic system alteration. These events include fires, storms, disease, or invasion by pests or competing species.Reorganization. Finally, as a consequence of these significant perturbations, the ecosystem reorganizes. Reorganization can result in ecosystems that are similar to their previous states or they can end up being quite different (Costanza and others, 1993).

The degree to which an ecosystem can retain stability in the face of extreme perturbation is called resilience. Ecosystems possessing high resilience can be pushed to extremes without reorganizing into a different form of stable state. Systems lacking resilience can be “pushed” into an alternative stable state, of which there may be more than one. Perturbations need not be sudden events, such as hurricanes and fire. They are often gradual and cumulative, such as the processes of eutrophication, grazing pressure, or climate change. In these cases, the system is slowly pushed to the capacity to retain its stability and goes through a release phase, as shown in Figure 1. However, in reorganizing, the key components of the original ecosystem are either removed or substituted with alternative components. Keystone species are those on which a large number of other species in the ecosystem depend. During release and reorganization, keystone species that formed the basis for the original ecosystem structure are replaced by others (opportunists). The new configuration provides a new organizational trajectory and thus a new stable state. In some cases, this shift in stable state can be irreversible. Alternatively, if the perturbation is removed or reversed (e.g., by a reduction in nutrient

load), the system may follow a nonlinear response and ultimately may only approximate the original state. The new state can have a significantly different response relationship to the original perturbation. This process of nonlinearity in stressor-response behavior is called hysteresis. Hysteresis describes the potential difference between an ecosystem’s response to a perturbation and its removal, or reversal, over time.http://www.csc.noaa.gov/coastal/economics/irreversibility.htm

Climate change is now worsening the danger to Australian animals, writes Tim Flannery. “Australia has the worst record of animal extinction of any continent. Since European colonisation began, about one tenth of our mammals - 23 species in all - have vanished. The victims are a diverse lot, ranging from obscure native rats and mice, to bandicoots, wallabies and the thylacine.The computer models used by scientists to predict how species will fare as our planet warms indicates that between two in 10 and six in 10 of all species alive on Earth today will become extinct if our planet warms by just three degrees. And our Earth is likely to warm by that much this century if we just continue as we are. Once, nature conservation looked easy. We just had to proclaim national parks, or fund scientists to conduct recovery programs, and all would be well. The threat of global warming has changed all of that. Now, the key to the survival of countless species lies in the way you use your electricity and car, and in the way you vote.”http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/we-can-all-fight-the-threat-to-our-rare-species/2007/01/14/1168709612195.html

I an article entitled "Butterfly Lessons" Elizabeth Kolbert follows a trail of butterflies, mosquitoes and frogs to show how much our climate has changed already and how dramatic the coming change may yet be. Her series looked at how these delicate creatures are moving into new habitats as the planet warms. Her real point was that all life, from microorganisms to human beings, will have to adapt, and in ways that could be dangerous and destabilizing. She concluded her series last year with this shattering thought: "It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing."

Thomas E. Lovejoy, who heads the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, fears that changes in the Amazon's ecosystem may be irreversible. Scientists reported last month that there is an Amazonian drought apparently caused by new patterns in Atlantic currents that, in turn, are similar to projected climate change. With less rainfall, the tropical forests are beginning to dry out. They burn more easily, and, in the continuous feedback loops of their ecosystem, these drier forests return less moisture to the atmosphere, which means even less rain. When the forest trees are deprived of rain, their mortality can increase by a factor of six, and similar devastation affects other species, too. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/17/AR2006011700895.htmlhttp://www.desmogblog.com/all-hail-elizabeth-kolbert

Can Climate Change Cause Conflict and Civil Unrest Or Even War?

Thomas Homer-Dixon is Director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto and Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Homer-Dixon teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on environmental security; causes of war, revolution, and ethnic conflict; international relations; and complexity theory. In 1999 he received the University of Toronto’s Northrop Frye Teaching Award for integrating teaching and research.http://www.speakers.ca/homer-dixon_thomas.aspxhttp://homerdixon.com/ingenuitygap/home.html

He is briefing UN Security Council members about his theories of "synchronous failure", a much in-demand author of a bestseller warning of impending catastrophe, The Upside of Down. Homer-Dixon believes "major volatility" in nation-states and in the international order is the inevitable outcome of climate change. His theory rests on the premise that many nation-states are highly stressed and hopelessly addicted to energy, what he terms the "master resource". Climate change will be the factor that pushes many vulnerable states to the edge, and over it. Some nations will find their resources overwhelmed as they struggle to cope with massive internal movements of people displaced as fertile land becomes unproductive and water shortages emerge.And as governments become incapable of discharging their basic responsibilities of statehood, the vacuum will be filled by chaos and conflict. "Highly stressed states are already more violent, in all types of different ways. From crime to insurgencies, ethnic clashes and terrorism," Homer-Dixon told the Herald this week. "The impact [of climate change] will vary from state to state, from region to region, depending on pre-existing flaws and the particular impact of climate change in that area. It's impossible to predict precisely how they will unfold."http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/climate-wars/2007/04/13/1175971351656.html

He writes “Climate change will help produce the kind of military challenges that are difficult for today’s conventional forces to handle: insurgencies, genocide, guerrilla attacks, gang warfare and global terrorism. In the 1990s, a research team I led at the University of Toronto examined links between various forms of environmental stress in poor countries - cropland degradation, deforestation and scarcity of fresh water, for example - and violent conflict. In places as diverse as Haiti, Pakistan, the Philippines and South Africa, we found that severe environmental stress multiplied the pain caused by such problems as ethnic strife and poverty.Rural residents who depend on local natural resources for their livelihood become poorer, while powerful elites take control of - and extract exorbitant profits from - increasingly valuable land, forests and water. As these resources in the countryside dwindle, people sometimes join local rebellions against landowners and government officials. In mountainous areas of the Philippines, for instance, deforestation, soil erosion and depletion of soil nutrients have increased poverty and helped drive peasants into the arms of the Communist New People’s Army insurgency.Other times, people migrate in large numbers to regions where resources seem more plentiful, only to fight with the people already there. Or they migrate to urban slums, where unemployed young men can be primed to join criminal gangs or radical political groups.

Climate change will have similar effects, if nations fail to aggressively limit carbon dioxide emissions and develop technologies and institutions that allow people to cope with a warmer planet.The recent report of Working Group II of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identifies several ways warming will hurt poor people in the third world and hinder economic development there more generally. Large swaths of land in subtropical latitudes - zones inhabited by billions of people - will experience more drought, more damage from storms, higher mortality from heat waves, worse outbreaks of agricultural pests and an increased burden of infectious disease.The potential impact on food output is a particular concern: in semiarid regions where water is already scarce and cropland overused, climate change could devastate agriculture. (There is evidence that warming’s effect on crops and pastureland is a cause of the Darfur crisis.) Many cereal crops in tropical zones are already near their limits of heat tolerance, and temperatures even a couple of degrees higher could lead to much lower yields.By weakening rural economies, increasing unemployment and disrupting livelihoods, global warming will increase the frustrations and anger of hundreds of millions of people in vulnerable countries. Especially in Africa, but also in some parts of Asia and Latin America, climate change will undermine already frail governments - and make challenges from violent groups more likely - by reducing revenues, overwhelming bureaucracies and revealing how incapable these governments are of helping their citizens.”http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/24/727/

Population, Economic Development, and the Environment, edited by Lindahl-Kiessling and Landberg explains that classical economics' reliance on the market as the key to solving all societal ills is flawed, and it concludes that the market mechanism cannot be permitted to operate alone. Certain patterns of environmental deterioration are caused not by market failures but by government policies, and it follows that the causes of these failures increasingly should be sought, and addressed, in the context of institutional analyses. The contributors to the Lindahl-Kiessling and Landberg volume are concerned about the several negative trends we today witness on a global level. They argue that the rapidly increasing stress on the world's natural resource base can, especially in the overpopulated areas of the world, create social tensions and conflicts between as well as within nations, and furthermore that such conflicts likely will occur before there is an ecological breakdown. Towards understanding this, they examine a wide array of issues, ranging from the connections between population size and growth, environmental degradation, and poverty. They take into account the increasing competition for natural resources by social structures on several levels, including on the household level.http://jpe.library.arizona.edu/volume_5/soeftestadvavol5.htm

What Can We Do To Save The Climate From Going Haywire?

Robert Socolow, an engineering professor, and Stephen Pacala, an ecology professor, who together lead the Carbon Mitigation Initiative at Princeton, a consortium designing scalable solutions for the climate issue, argued in a paper published by the journal Science in August 2004 that human beings can emit only so much carbon into the atmosphere before the buildup of carbon dioxide (CO2) reaches a level unknown in recent geologic history and the earth’s climate system starts to go “haywire.” The scientific consensus, they note, is that the risk of things going haywire — weather patterns getting violently unstable, glaciers melting, prolonged droughts — grows rapidly as CO2 levels “approach a doubling” of the concentration of CO2 that was in the atmosphere before the Industrial Revolution.

David Zink explains "There is no single answer; no magic bullet to deliver us into an energy-sustainable society. Visualize an interlocking, coordinated grid of wind farms, solar panels and towers, biofuel processing plants and outlets, more and better public transportation, and other elements. That’s what we’ll need: many pieces to put this puzzle together. And, we’ll need something that is anathema to the “market solutions” clique such as the automotive and gas corporations and their cronies who got us into the predicament of poorly planned suburbs, the car-dependent culture, and long commutes in single-occupant vehicles." http://www.newday.com/films/Taken–for–a–Ride.htmlhttp://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/view/5042/1/250/

According to Pacala: If we basically do nothing, and global CO2 emissions continue to grow at the pace of the last 30 years for the next 50 years, we will pass the doubling level — an atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide of 560 parts per million — around midcentury. To avoid that — and still leave room for developed countries to grow, using less carbon, and for countries like India and China to grow, emitting double or triple their current carbon levels, until they climb out of poverty and are able to become more energy efficient — will require a huge global industrial energy project.To convey the scale involved, Socolow and Pacala have created a pie chart with 15 different wedges.

Some wedges represent carbon-free or carbon-diminishing power-generating technologies; other wedges represent efficiency programs that could conserve large amounts of energy and prevent CO2 emissions. They argue that the world needs to deploy any 7 of these 15 wedges, or sufficient amounts of all 15, to have enough conservation, and enough carbon-free energy, to increase the world economy and still avoid the doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. Each wedge, when phased in over 50 years, would avoid the release of 25 billion tons of carbon, for a total of 175 billion tons of carbon avoided between now and 2056.Here are seven wedges we could chose from: “Replace 1,400 large coal-fired plants with gas-fired plants; increase the fuel economy of two billion cars from 30 to 60 miles per gallon; add twice today’s nuclear output to displace coal; drive two billion cars on ethanol, using one-sixth of the world’s cropland; increase solar power 700-fold to displace coal; cut electricity use in homes, offices and stores by 25 percent; install carbon capture and sequestration capacity at 800 large coal-fired plants.” And the other eight aren’t any easier. They include halting all cutting and burning of forests, since deforestation causes about 20 percent of the world’s annual CO2 emissions.“There has never been a deliberate industrial project in history as big as this,” Pacala said. Through a combination of clean power technology and conservation, “we have to get rid of 175 billion tons of carbon over the next 50 years — and still keep growing. It is possible to accomplish this if we start today. But every year that we delay, the job becomes more difficult — and if we delay a decade or two, avoiding the doubling or more may well become impossible.”http://www.kunstler.com/Grunt_Friedman_green.htmlhttp://www.eenews.net/special_reports/climate_repair/

What Are The Limitations of Coal and Geosquestration?

In a speech in 2006 on peak oil, climate change, and the daunting arithmetic of carbon fuels, Jeremy Leggett explains, “We need a mass withdrawal from carbon emissions. We must leave the coal in the ground. The bottom line is that coal is the killer. We have plenty of it, and we do have the option of seeing if every Government research lab IN THE WORLD is wrong. If we panic and use coal it will be our epitaph.”

http://transitionculture.org/2006/08/24/jeremy-leggett-peak-oil-and-climate-change/

To read more about Jeremy Leggett’s epiphany which led him from the oil industry to Greenpeace, read:http://www.carbonwar.co.uk/chapter1.htm

James Hansen suggests that within the next 10 years or so that we will realise that we have no choice but to bulldoze our old style coal fired power plants. He says "we can burn coal, provided we capture the CO2 and sequester it but in the meantime we should be emphasizing energy efficiency so that we don't need new old style coal fired power plants". http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2007/s1870955.htmhttp://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/wsf_09nov2006f.pdf

In an interview with Tony Jones on the Lateline program Tim Flannery said coal exports are no longer in Australia's national interest. “The social licence of coal to operate is rapidly being withdrawn globally, and no government can protect an industry from that sort of thing occurring. We've seen it with asbestos. We'll see it with coal. The reason is that, when you look at the proportion of the damage being done by coal now, it is significant, but that grows greatly in future. We have to deal with that issue if we want a stable climate.”http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2006/s1842715.htm

Geosequestration means we keep using coal, but instead of pumping carbon dioxide into the air, capture it in the power station, compress it into liquid CO2, pipe it to a suitable location, then inject it deep underground in rock formations where it would remain trapped for thousands of years. But can such an extraordinary idea work and will it work in time? The Australian government hopes it will. It's investing hundreds of millions of dollars into geosequestration research, support the renewable energy industry can only dream of. Geosequestration research is still in its early days and maybe in the next five to 10-15 years we will be having demonstrations and potential commercial applications of various capture technologies. Dr Iain MacGill recommends we should really be seeing action on those other abatement options such as energy efficiency, renewables and gas generation that are proven. We know they work and we know that they are at reasonable cost.http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s1195633.htm

Germany's Green party demanded a halt to plans in to build new coal-fired power stations. Baerbel Hoehn, the leader of the parliamentary committee for agriculture in Germany recently queried the viability of plans to extract CO2 from exhaust gases and to store it indefinitely. As a result, new coal-fired plants were "economic and political nonsense," Hoehn said. http://rawstory.com/news/dpa/German_aid_organization_warns_clima_04062007.html

Experts funded by industry to work on geosequestration have argued that only 25 per cent of total annual emissions could realistically be captured and sequestered (Allison & Nguyen 2004) at the very significant cost of between US$65–105 per tonne (Cook et. al. 2000). This would add around A$0.7–0.12 per kWh to coal electricity costs. To bring these figures alive, Energy Australia charges domestic customers in Sydney approximately $0.10 per kWh for electricity, so on these estimates, sequestration could more than double the price of electricity.http://www.australianreview.net/digest/2004/09/lovegrove.html

Given that geosequestration is economically feasible only for new electricity generation plants, this means that only 3 per cent of our electricity needs can use this technology by 2010, and only 25 per cent by 2020. And since the electricity sector contributes only a third of our overall greenhouse gas emissions, geosequestration could only reduce the total by at best 1 per cent by 2010 and 8 per cent by the year 2020. So even if we take that path, rising energy demands mean that by 2020 Australia's emissions will still be at least about 118 per cent of 1990 levels. http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=2801

What Is Happening In The Arctic, and In the Oceans?

In November of 2004, a report by 250 scientists warned that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the global average, which threatens to wipe out several species including polar bears, and melt summer ice around the North Pole by 2100. One of the reasons for the increased warming is that the dark water and ground in the arctic soak up more heat from the atmosphere than ice or snow. The levels of carbon dioxide today are about 379ppm and increasing, a comparable level to 55 million years ago when there was no ice on the planet due to the warmth of the atmosphere. http://www.colby.edu/sts/st215/projects/stations/nuuk/index.html

In November 2005, Rutgers-led team shows rising ocean levels are tied to human-induced climate change. Global ocean levels are rising twice as fast today as they were 150 years ago, and human-induced warming appears to be the culprit, say scientists at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and collaborating institutions. Using core samples of sediments along the New Jersey coast, the scientists found that rates of sea level change have climbed significantly over the past 200 years, coinciding with the beginning of the industrial revolution when carbon dioxide emissions began to dramatically increase.http://news.mongabay.com/2005/1125-climate.html

Mark Lynas, author of 'Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet' says "At one degree we would likely see the extinction of most of the world's tropical coral reefs, which are already very close to their thermal tolerant threshold, and of course we've been seeing bleaching events in the Caribbean and also on the Great Barrief Reef. So that could happen by 2020, 2030 that most of those are gone. We would also see the disappearance of the ice-cap on Kilimanjaro, and we might even see new deserts spreading across the western half of the United States, which would have a big impact on the agricultural production there obviously.

At two degrees probably the most significant thing is the eventual loss of the Greenland ice sheet, that's all it will take to melt the entire thing and that will eventually raise global sea levels by seven metres or so. One of the main conclusions of the book is that we should try and peak global emissions of greenhouse gases within the next 10 to 15 years, because that's what we need to do if we are to avoid going over the two-degree threshold. And at three degrees we face the increasing likelihood of positive feedbacks which could tip, tipping point if you like which could make global warming run out of control. The most significant of those is the die-back of the Amazonian rainforest which many scientists are now predicting which would release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and that would then give us another degree of warming.

So we'd then be straight onto four degrees, which would probably melt most of the permafrosts in Siberia and give us even more positive feedback from all of the methane that would come out of that. So the tipping points are the real concern I think amongst the scientific community now and in order to avoid crossing some of these very crucial thresholds we do have to probably reduce greenhouse gases within the next 10 to 15 years."

FLAMER: In your book you mentioned that the same phenomenon, this six degrees of warming happened 251-million years ago. Is this maybe mother nature restoring the balance?

LYNAS: There has been previous greenhouse warming episodes in earth's history, and that's in fact in my later chapters, that gives me an idea of what would happen to the

planet if we made it happen again. In previous times these have been associated with very long term volcanic outgassing of carbon. So these are natural events obviously which had nothing to do with humankind. What's happening now is that we're sort of short-circuiting this whole process by digging up coal, oil and gas, burning it and all very rapidly, much more rapidly than has ever happened before in geological history and just dumping it all into the atmosphere. So we've changed the chemistry of the atmosphere already completely beyond what it seen for probably 10 or so million years. So this is a very big change beyond what the earth naturally experiences and the most likely outcome if we don't get off this track is as you suggest of mass extinctions. http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/asiapac/programs/s1891755.htm

Do We Need To Reconsider GDP Or Even Capitalism?

In 1995, Redefining Progress created a more accurate measure of progress called the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI). It starts with the same accounting framework as the GDP, but then makes some crucial distinctions: It adds in the economic contributions of household and volunteer work, but subtracts factors such as crime, pollution, and family breakdown.

http://www.rprogress.org/newprograms/sustIndi/gpi/index.shtml

Despite sustained economic growth throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s many Australians seem unaware of any increase in their welfare. Many are disgruntled, fractious and suspicious of the claims by politicians that the economy is doing well. There is a widespread perception, confirmed by social researchers such as Hugh Mackay and Richard Eckersley, that life in Australia is not improving, but is in fact deteriorating. If growth is so good for us, people are asking, how come it seems that things are getting worse?

Undoubtedly, one reason for this divergence between the performance of the economy and the perceptions of ordinary people has been the fact that the growth of income has been skewed towards the wealthy. But the problem runs much deeper than the age-old one of maldistribution of income. The problem lies in how we define and measure prosperity in Australia. Our official statistics provide a profoundly misleading picture of changes in national well-being. The national accounts that generate GDP fail to recognise that the growth process produces 'ill-being' in addition to well-being, 'bads' as well as goods.

The major problems with using GDP as a measure of changes in national well-being are:

the incorrect counting of 'defensive' expenditures as positive contributions to GDP (eg counter terrorism, fire fighting, desalination, welfare payments, medical costs)

the failure to account for changes in the value of stocks of both built and natural capital.

the failure to account for the way in which increases in output are distributed within the community;

the failure to account for the contribution of household work;

The way in which the GPI attempts to overcome these shortfalls is outlined in What is the GPI?

http://www.gpionline.net/NSsite/rethink.htm

Sir John Whitmor, Executive Chairman of Performance Consultants International Limited, writes in the Resurgence Magazine that “capitalism is an obscene failure. We have a world in which 40,000 people die every day for lack of basic needs although surplus exists; our habitat and countless species are being destroyed at an alarming rate by commercial exploitation; wars are fought over the desire to control natural resources. Capitalism makes lethal weaponry available to all, tears down our rainforests and deprives the thirsty of their water rights - all for profit. Furthermore, a recent survey showed us that six out of every ten people who work within the capitalist system are miserable. Yes; let's face it, capitalism is a failure, a miserable failure. However, horrendous as those things are, they are but the short-term manifestations of an even more serious long-term malaise. All-consuming consumerism has brought the psycho-spiritual evolutionary journey of Western man and woman to a standstill, or even into regression, in a few decades. Through the glorification of material excess as the ultimate goal in life, and by rewarding effort for gain rather than for good, people are led into the 'never-enough' disappointment trap. The illusion of progress, the numbing and dumbing of human development, and the diminishing of the human spirit have been foisted on us, and especially on our children, by the priests and profits of capitalism. We are stuck at the level of quantitative material gain, and neglect qualitative living and learning. We have acquired much technical knowledge from and for our material advancement, but we have lost the wisdom to deploy it well. Unscrupulous Western businesses promote the pointless acquisition of excess, of the frivolous, of over-priced branded goods manufactured in far-away places by children working punitive hours in shocking conditions for a pittance. More alarming still is that it may be the best job they can get. To secure a market, poorer countries are compelled to sell their natural resources abroad too cheaply, and those that toil to harvest them go hungry, while comparable growers in the rich countries receive government subsidies. These are nothing less than crimes perpetrated by the arrogant upon the ignorant and innocent. Political and corporate leaders, along with the silent majority by whose apathy their actions are condoned, suffer from a blend of myopia and denial of epidemic proportions.”http://www.resurgence.org/2005/whitmore233.htm

In her book ‘The Real Wealth of Nations’ Riane Eisler writes “The greatest problems of our time--poverty, inequality, war, terrorism, and environmental degradation--can be traced to flawed economic systems that fail to value and support the most essential human work: caring for people and the planet.” http://www.bkconnection.com/ProdDetails.asp?ID=9781576753880

In “Natural Economic Order” Silvio Gesell, once Finance minister in the short-lived Bavarian Republic uses a story of Robinson Crusoe to explain how the interest-based economic system is flawed. RC meets a Stranger who wants use his food and other supplies, however, RC requests that the Stranger pays interest. However, the stranger’s religion forbids him from paying or receiving interest, so the Stranger proposes to RC that he will help with keeping the food and supplies intact, as he is very knowledgeable about how to preserve food and cloths in the conditions on the island. RC soon realizes that the Stranger could prove to be a very valuable companion who can help him manage living on the island, and allows him to use his food and tools without interest. In the discussion about money that he has with the Stranger, RC eventually gives up his belief in Marxist theory about money, and fully embraces the economic practice of the Stranger.http://www.systemfehler.de/en/crusoe.htm

For further information on “The GDP Myth - Why "growth" isn't always a good thing”, read: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/1999/9903.rowe.growth.html

Is The Current Fossil Fuel Based Economy On a Crash Course With Nature?

Oystein Dahle, former Vice President of Esso in Norway said "Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth." That's a lot of wisdom distilled into those two sentences. http://www.planetfriendly.net/business.html

Capitalism tends to downplay the full dimensions of the ecological crisis and even of capitalism’s impact on the environment in the process of trying to force everything into the locked box of a specific economic crisis theory. Capitalism’s tendency to displace environmental problems (the fact that it uses the whole biosphere as a giant trash can), means that the earth remains in large part a “free gift to capital.” Nor is there any prospect that this will change fundamentally, since capitalism is in many ways a system of unpaid costs.

In his book, The Enemy of Nature, Joel Kovel, refers to ecological crisis arising from capital’s degradation of its own conditions of production on an ever increasing scale.” He remarks that, “This degradation will have a contradictory effect on profitability itself …either directly, by so fouling the natural ground of production that it breaks down, or indirectly,” through the reinternalization of “the costs that had been expelled into the environment.”http://www.monthlyreview.org/0902foster.htm

A company that opts to dispose of chemical wastes as effluent into a nearby river over seeking to recycle such wastes or send them to a disposal facility clearly does so because it is the least cost option; acting in that manner is a rational action motivated by a desire to maximize profits. The question that needs to be asked is why is pollution the least-cost action? It is because the value of the river is unaccounted for by the capitalist system. http://home.earthlink.net/~jhadler/pegs.html

In an interview with American Scientist, award-winning scientist, environmentalist and broadcaster David Suzuki says that one of the most important messages the media does not cover properly is that “there is not enough of a critical analysis of the fact that the way the economists see the world is destructive. Economists "externalize" most of the natural world—biodiversity, ozone layer, fossils, water, topsoil and so on. The "services" performed by nature are not accounted for in our economic system, so that a tree, for example, is seen as having no value until money is spent to watch it (ecotourism) or cut it down. Economics is based on the enormous creativity and productivity of human beings, and so it is assumed that steady growth is possible (which it is not) and necessary! No one asks the important questions, such as what is an economy for, how much is enough, is it providing what people really need.”

http://www.americanscientist.org/template/InterviewTypeDetail/assetid/29529;jsessionid=baa9...

In an article “Can Capitalism go Green?” Andy Gianniotis argues that “Corporate competition is a fundamental cause of the global environmental crisis. Corporations that use the cheapest - usually the dirtiest - production processes are at a competitive advantage and can increase profits and/or market share.” He believes “it is the capitalist system which is at fault. Free use and pollution of the environment have been key to business profits since capitalism emerged. If polluting companies were forced to pay the

full environmental and social costs, they would go out of business.” In conclusion he argues, there is no "win-win" scenario: it is capitalism OR the environment.http://wusa.uow.edu.au/files/u3/articles/green_capitalism.pdf

Some of the public health costs of air pollution include: high rates of school absenteeism, lost work time and wages, rising health insurance costs, lower work productivity, and millions of dollars spent in direct costs for medical and hospital care, medication and treatment. http://www.mass.gov/dep/air/community/airhealt.htm

Will Environmental Policies Stifle The Economy?

As this figure illustrates, the economy exists entirely within society, because all parts of the human economy require interaction among people. However, society is much more than just the economy. Friends and families, music and art, religion and ethics are important elements of society, but are not primarily based on exchanging goods and services. Society, in turn, exists entirely within the environment. Our basic requirements -- air, food and water -- come from the environment, as do the energy and raw materials for housing, transportation and the products we depend on. Finally, the environment surrounds society. At an earlier point in human history, the environment largely determined the shape of society. Today the opposite is true: human activity is reshaping the environment at an ever-increasing rate. The parts of the environment unaffected by human activity are getting smaller all the time.http://www.sustainablemeasures.com/Sustainability/ABetterView.html

In a Nature Article “The Value of the World's Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital” (May 1987), it was calculated that for the entire biosphere, the value (most of which is outside the market) is estimated to be in the range of $16 - 54 trillion/yr., with an average of $33 trillion/yr. Because of the nature of the uncertainties, this must be considered a minimum estimate. As a comparison, global GNP is around $18 trillion/yr.The services of ecological systems and the natural capital stocks that produce them arecritical to the functioning of the earth's life support system. They contribute significantly to human welfare, both directly and indirectly, and therefore represent a significant portion of the total economic value of the planet. Because these services are not fully captured in markets or adequately quantified in terms comparable with economic services and manufactured capital, they are often given too little weight in policy decisions. This neglect may ultimately compromise the sustainability of humans in the biosphere.https://admindb.nceas.ucsb.edu/projects/2058/nature-paper.pdf

The following is a conceptual model of how patterns of human and ecological responsesemerge from the interactions between human and biophysical processes and how these patterns affect ecological resilience in urban ecosystems. For example, population growth in an area (driver) leads to increased pavement and buildings (patterns), leading to increased runoff and erosion (processes), causing lower water quality and decreased fish habitat (effects), which may lead to a new policy to regulate land use (driver).

http://www.biology.duke.edu/wilson/EcoSysServices/papers/AlbertiEtal2003.pdf

The following framework addresses the question of how we can incorporate the importance of ecosystem goods and services in economic decisions.

http://statistics.defra.gov.uk/esg/reports/ecosystem/mainrep.pdf

It therefore seems obvious that we need to protect the environment with policies to sustain our societies, and ideally our economy as well. However, some major changes may be necessary to change our societies to more sustainable ones. We may also have to sacrifice our energy-intensive, highly mobile, carbon-based lives so that we stay within the limits of our planets coping capacity.

We need to ask ourselves critical questions such as: What do we need economic growth for? Do we want fuel or food? Can we forgo short-term profit for longer-term benefit? When a country is stressed environmentally, can we afford more immigration? Is unlimited economic growth and population growth sustainable on a limited

planet?

Even if the necessary policies stifle the economy it will be better for the long-term future of mankind to learn to live within the limits imposed by nature.

Some people believe our economy need not suffer from new policies and that with the right incentives business can profit from being greener. Others see our narrowly focused capitalist societies on a crash course with nature.

In February 2007 Prof. John P. Holdren and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, explained that “well-being has environmental, sociopolitical, and cultural dimensions as well as economic ones, and the goal of sustainable well-being entails improving all of these dimensions in ways and to end

points that are consistent with maintaining the improvements indefinitely. This challenge includes not only improving sustainably the standard of living in developing countries, but also converting to a sustainable basis the currently unsustainable practices supporting the standard of living in industrialized ones.” He also stresses that for civilization to meet this immense challenge business, government, and law, as well as on the societal wit and will to integrate all of these elements in pursuit of the sustainable-well-being goal will be necessary. Holdren suggested that addressing such challenges effectively to improve the overall well-being of humanity will require a radical reconfiguration of policy and economies—and daily life—on a global scale. Holdren described a world poised at an unprecedented moment of decision: Without swift and urgent action, he said, the problems could spiral toward disastrous, permanent changes for all of life on Earth.http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2007/0216am_holdren_address.shtmlhttp://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/315/5813/737

Ehrlich and Holdren (1971) investigated the effects of population on resource use and environmental impact and proposed a simple relationship to describe the effect. The impact (I) of any population can be expressed as a product of three characteristics: the population's size (P), its affluence or per-capita consumption (A), and the environmental damage (T) inflicted by the technologies used to supply each unit of consumption.

In equation form this is represented as:I = PAT

A decrease in population or affluence can reduce environmental impact, or, bettertechnology can moderate the effects of growth in either of population or affluence. Theuse of inappropriate technologies can exacerbate the problem.

Schulze proposed to modify the formula to include a behavioural aspect (B) so thatI = PBAT

http://dclh.electricalandcomputerengineering.dal.ca/enen/2006/ERG200611.pdf.http://dieoff.org/page112.htmhttp://www.population-growth-migration.info/essays/IPAT.htmlhttp://www.jstor.org/view/00063568/ap040391/04a00090/0

Secretary general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, in stated in Nov 2006 that climate change is now an economic threat, but that there is still time for all our societies to change course. He suggests that low emissions need not mean low growth or stifling a

country's development aspirations. Indeed the savings can buy time for solar, wind and other alternative energy sources to be developed and made more cost-effective. This may be a path to a safer and sounder model of development. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/07/AR2006110701229.html

At the Climate Change Conference, 15 November, Kofi Annan said “It is increasingly clear that it will cost far less to cut emissions now than to deal with the consequences later. And let there be no more talk of waiting until we know more. We know already that an economy based on high emissions is an uncontrolled experiment on the global climate.”http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2006/sgsm10739.doc.htm

Due to the realities of climate change and resource depletion, some jobs will decline or disappear entirety, however, other jobs and industries will also be created. It will soon be realised that we have to re-industrialise our economy based on renewable energies. This can actually create new jobs, new demand, and a system that is actually more sustainable and kind to our planet and future generations. Voters in Washington have opted for a “Clean Energy Initiative (I-937)” which requires the largest electric utilities to get 15 percent of their electricity from renewable energy sources by 2020. The reduction in air pollutants will be like taking two million cars off Washington’s roads. Similar legislation has been enacted in 20 other states. Backers of I-937 included a broad coalition of utilities, businesses, labor (the United Steelworkers, SEIU, and Aerospace Machinists played a leading role), farmers, the League of Women Voters, the Audubon Society of Washington, even a group calling itself the Republicans for Environmental Protection. Supporters hope that the initiatives will kick-start energy efficiency and renewable energy projects across the state. That will help create thousands of family-wage jobs in engineering and construction, especially in rural areas, and provide crucial additional income to rural landowners. Farmers hosting wind projects will earn more than $5,000 a year per wind turbine, helping keep family farms alive. http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/view/5042/1/250/

Flannery, Australia's current Man of the Year, says "Implementing CO2 reduction measures means opposing entrenched interests and in the short term some possible loss of

jobs and export dollars, though these would quickly be made up as investments in emerging technologies kick in. If approached properly, these measures have the potential to grant the Australian economy a "pioneer advantage" in a world market for sustainable technologies and goods." http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/06/14/1087065079591.html?from=storyr...

So, there are multiple reasons for taking action against climate change, by reducing pollution, greenhouse gases, deforestation etc. There are also strong reasons to preserve coastal fisheries, air sheds, aquifers, and the like. We have to stop experimenting with the earth's climate and using the atmosphere as our dumping ground for greenhouse gases.

What Is Sustainable Development?

For a policy to be sustainable, it must respect all five principles. We want to live within environmental limits and achieve a just society, and we will do so by means of sustainable economy, good governance, and sound science.

http://www.sustainable-development.gov.uk/what/principles.htm

In discussions of sustainability, the relationship between the economy and the natural environment is often framed as a “balance.” This connotes the idea that somehow more of the economy means more of the environment too. After all, if two things are in balance, they are of equal weight. But any empirical study of what economic growth means today discovers that it intrudes on the environment. Wealthy and purportedly environmentally-responsible nations are sometimes touted as examples of how economic growth and stewardship of the planet go hand in hand. However, while local measures of air quality, forest cover, and water cleanliness may be high, the damage is simply occurring elsewhere. All wealthy nations are importers of much of their environmental carrying capacity, whether it is raw materials or finished industrial products, and these imports are possible because of fossil fuels used to mine, harvest, manufacture and transport goods. Wealthy nations protect their own environment while outsourcing the harm caused by over consumption to other places.http://globalpublicmedia.com/relocalization_a_strategic_response_to_peak_oil_and_climate_change

What Are The Costs of Inaction?

Everyone has heard of the saying "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure", however, many fail to apply this advice to global warming. Look at the pain and expense of treating groundwater contamination, rather than avoiding it; or of trying to restore forest ecosystems decimated by acid rain, rather than halting acidification; or of treating cancers, rather than emphasizing prevention. Trying to fix climate change after the fact is even more difficult.

"We are now at a crucial point. As the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution stated, “If we go for business as usual … we are destined for something unimaginable.” http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/business/committees/environment/reports-05/rar05-05-vol01-01.htm

Climate changes can result in catastrophic costs to nations, argues Dr Epstein, so says that insurers already estimate that health-related and environmental restoration claims over the next 30 years may reach US$50 to $125 billion.http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/twr125g.htm

According to preliminary estimates, natural and man -made catastrophes during 2005 resulted in 112,000 deaths and total financial losses were of the order of US$225 billion of which some US$80 billion was insured, making 2005 the costliest year ever for insurers.

A new report from the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) predicts that climate change will cost Germany a staggering €800 billion by 2050 -- with higher energy costs, declining tourism, increased insurance costs and damage caused by extreme weather. The DIW study is based on the assumption that the average global temperature will increase by 4.5 degrees Celsius. That is the upper level of the forecast by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report warns: "If there is not an appreciable intensification in climate protection, then by 2100 the resulting costs of climate change could reach €3 trillion. http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,471762,00.html

Greens leader Bob Brown has warned that over 700 thousand Australian homes and businesses are threatened by climate change. "This is a huge threat on the Australian nation and its economy and its social well-being and Mr Howard's got his head in the sand," Senator Brown said in Hobart. As many as 711,000 Australian homes will be in peril from rising sea levels, and vulnerable wildlife species could begin to disappear by 2030, according to the report released last night in Brussels and containing the work of 2,500 scientists. Bob Brown said 20,000 to 30,000 houses and businesses in Tasmania alone would be at risk from climate change. "That's probably a modest calculation of where the risk is going to hit this century," he said, adding the endangered area stretched from Sandy Bay, near Hobart, all the way up the west coast. "The Howard government simply does not understand the crisis, it does not see how great it is for this nation and the important structural changes that need to be made to our economy if we are going to meet the urgent need for changes in reductions in greenhouse gases within the next decade." He predicted a "massive loss of security" for people who have invested in and live by the coast, notably in tourism and fisheries, and said it would be impossible for property owners to insure against sea level rises in the future. In response to the crisis, the senator urged the federal government and the Labor opposition to ditch policies supporting coal exports and coal-fired power generation and get behind renewable energy. http://www.worldnewsaustralia.com.au/region.php?id=136126&region=7

What Opportunities Do Businesses See In Taking Action on Climate Change?

The LOHAS Journal ("Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability") estimates green enterprise as a $229 billion market sector. CleanEdge.org reports clean/green technology as the third largest venture capital investment category in 2006. In California alone, investments in clean tech could create up to 114,000 new jobs by 2010. http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/01/23/creating_greencollar_jobs.ph...

Investment banks and fund managers are starting to invest money into tackling climate change. For instance, The Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) has up to 80 million euros (US$106.5 million) invested in green businesses, versus its total assets of 29 billion pounds (US$56.78 billion).Nick Robins, head of Sustainable and Responsible Investment (SRI) funds at Henderson Global Investors, says “New policies need to do a better job attracting short term investors into technologies like energy efficiency, widely seen having a big impact on climate change”http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/41201/story.htm

Read about how 50 businesses, and more specifically a certain strain of imaginative, entrepreneurial business, that has found the upside in addressing global malfunction and still are able to make a profit while saving the world. For instance, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's market-based approach to confronting global warming will create huge new markets across California. Read more here: http://www.fastcompany.com/fast50_07/

Don Henry, executive director of the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), said, "Business must ensure it is at the cutting edge of the move to a clean, green economy to ensure Australia gets its share of the future jobs and the economic benefits that will flow from it".http://wusa.uow.edu.au/files/u3/articles/green_capitalism.pdf

A few corporations are even demanded regulation. In January the chairman of Shell, Lord Oxburgh, insisted that "governments in developed countries need to introduce taxes, regulations or plans ... to increase the cost of emitting carbon dioxide". He listed the technologies required to replace fossil fuels, and remarked that "none of this is going to happen if the market is left to itself". In August the heads of United Utilities, British Gas, Scottish Power and the National Grid joined Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace in calling for "tougher regulations for the built environment" http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1574003,00.html

What Can We Learn From Leading Countries, and What Can We Learn From Past Failures?

Lester R. Brown suggests we take Sweden as a role model, where they are not increasing taxes but rather restructuring taxes. "They are systematically reducing income taxes and raising taxes mostly on energy-related things. It could be automotive fuel or carbon emissions more broadly. Electricity. Taxes on automobiles, and so forth. They are now talking about being the world's first oil-free economy within 15 years. Oil will be out of the economy entirely. "

In Lester R. Browns book "Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble" he states that "Each year the world’s taxpayers provide an estimated $700 billion of subsidies for environmentally destructive activities, such as fossil fuel burning, overpumping aquifers, clearcutting forests, and overfishing. An Earth Council study, Subsidizing Unsustainable Development, observes that “there is something unbelievable about the world spending hundreds of billions of dollars annually to subsidize its own destruction.” Iran provides a classic example of extreme subsidies when it prices oil for internal use at one tenth the world price, strongly encouraging car ownership and gas consumption. The World Bank reports that if this $3.6-billion annual subsidy were phased out, it would reduce Iran’s carbon emissions by a staggering 49 percent. It would also strengthen the economy by freeing up public revenues for investment in the country’s economic development. Iran is not alone. The Bank reports that removing energy subsidies would reduce carbon emissions in Venezuela by 26 percent, in Russia by 17 percent, in India by 14 percent, and in Indonesia by 11 percent. Some countries are eliminating or reducing these climate-disrupting subsidies. Belgium, France, and Japan have phased out all subsidies for coal. Germany reduced its coal subsidy from $5.4 billion in 1989 to $2.8 billion in 2002, meanwhile lowering its coal use by 46 percent. It plans to phase out this support entirely by 2010. China cut its coal subsidy from $750 million in 1993 to $240 million in 1995. More recently, it has imposed a tax on high-sulfur coals. A study by the U.K. Green Party, “Aviation’s Economic Downside,” describes the extent of subsidies currently given to the U.K. airline industry. The giveaway begins with $17 billion in tax breaks, including a total exemption from the federal tax. External or indirect costs that are not paid, such as treating illness from breathing the air polluted by planes, the costs of climate change, and so forth, add nearly $7 billion to the tab. The subsidy in the United Kingdom totals $391 per resident. This is also an inherently regressive tax policy simply because a substantial share of the U.K. population cannot afford to fly very often if at all, yet they help subsidize this high-cost mode of transportation for their more affluent compatriots. Eliminating environmentally destructive subsidies reduces both the burden on taxpayers and the destructive activities themselves. A world facing the prospect of economically disruptive climate change, for example, can no longer justify subsidies to expand the burning of coal and oil. Shifting these subsidies to the development of climate-benign energy sources such as wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal power is the key to stabilizing the earth’s climate. Shifting subsidies from road construction to rail construction could increase mobility in many situations while reducing carbon emissions. Many subsidies are largely hidden from taxpayers. This is especially true of the fossil fuel industry, whose subsidies include such things as a depletion allowance for oil pumping in the United States. Even more dramatic are the routine U.S. military expenditures to protect access to Middle Eastern oil, which were calculated by analysts at the Rand Corporation before the most recent Iraq war to fall between $30 billion and $60 billion a year, while the oil imported from the region was worth only $20 billion.

A 2001 study by Redefining Progress shows U.S. taxpayers subsidizing automobile use at $257 billion a year, or roughly $2,000 per taxpayer. In addition to subsidizing carbon emissions, this also means that taxpayers who do not own automobiles, including those too poor to afford them, are subsidizing those who do. One of the bright spots about this subsidization of fossil fuels is that it provides a reservoir of tax deductions that can be diverted to climate-benign, renewable sources of energy, such as wind, solar, and geothermal energy. To subsidize the use of fossil fuels is to subsidize crop-withering heat waves, melting ice, rising seas, and more destructive storms. Perhaps it is time for the world’s taxpayers to ask if this is how they want their hard-earned money to be spent." http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/Seg/PB2ch04_ss7.htm

Lester R. Brown says that "It may well be that the leadership will come from individual countries just deciding to go ahead and do things, realizing that the Kyoto Protocol is just not anywhere near enough. What Sweden is doing could emerge as a role model for other countries to follow it." http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,70455-0.html

In Germany renewable energies are becoming an increasingly important job creation engine. Between 2004 and 2005 alone, the number of jobs in this sector rose from157,000 to 170,000. In addition to the steady expansion in Germany, increasing exports of German technology are generating enormous growth rates. Exports account for 80% of the industry’s revenues. In 2005, the German wind power industry was responsible for roughly half of the total world market volume of more than twelve billion euros. Solar cells from Germany have a world-market share of 16%. Germany is near the top of the international league table. The German solar industry is also booming. It achieves sales of three billion euros and the market is growing by 20% a year. When it comes to wind energy, Germany is already a world champion: 18,000 megawatts of wind power are installed in the country. No other renewable energy source supplies more electricity than wind power. Roughly one third of the world’s wind turbines and half of the wind power plants in the European Union are located in Germany. Wind power generates almost twice the amount of electricity that the capital city Berlin consumes in a year. Wind energy’s share of Germany’s total electricity supply will significantly grow from 2008 onwards: in two years’ time, the construction of more than 30 offshore wind farms will commence in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. It is envisaged that they will supply 25,000 megawatts of electricity by the year 2030.Practically no other industry in Germany offers growth prospects as high as those of renewable energies. According to figures published by Bundesverband Erneuerbare Energien, 300,000 new jobs will be created by 2020. This development is largely due to Germany’s Renewable Energy Law. This legislation lays down government-guaranteed minimum remuneration for electricity from renewable energy sources. The law aims to increase renewable energies’ share of overall electricity production in Germany to at least 12.5% by 2010 and at least 20% by 2020.http://www.germanembassy.org.au/en/economy/aktuelles_en/FS_Energy_E_180906.pdf

What Surprises Can We Expect?One consequence of our manipulation of the climate that has become more apparent in recent years is a rise in the risk of unexpected effects. It is easy to think in terms of average values and gradual, steady processes. But there are many indicationsthat the climate, like most complex systems, has certain threshold values. Changes may take place gradually – but once a certain limit is passed major changes could take placein a short time. The following are examples of such non-linear effects thatare being discussed:

ocean currents, which are driven by differences in temperature between different parts of the world, may stop or change direction, resulting in a change in climate

the natural carbon cycle could partially collapse, causing the concentrations of greenhouse gases to rise faster than the models suggest

the West Antarctic ice sheet could slide out into the sea, resulting in a relatively rapid rise in the sea level

the greenhouse gas methane, which is chemically bound in large amounts in the seabed, could be released into the atmosphere if the water warms up

Because of feedback mechanisms the consequences could be very long lasting – perhaps permanent.http://www.acidrain.org/pages/publications/AirAndTheEnvironment/AE_chp4.pdf

New evidence from satellites now indicates that aerosols—pollution made up of fine, airborne particles—have a dampening effect on rainfall. Cloud physicist Daniel Rosenfeld writes in the Science Magazine ("Aerosols, clouds and climate"; June 2006): "Because pollution aerosols act as cloud condensation nuclei, clouds forming in a more polluted atmosphere contain a larger number of drops that are slower to merge and fall as precipitation". Air pollution more easily stifles rain from short-lived tropical clouds than from the longerlasting clouds common in northern latitudes, says Rosenfeld. This may explain why rainfall in the tropics has decreased despite predictions that global warming would make the area wetter, he says.http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20000311/fob1.asp

Whenever rising temperatures thaw the polar icecaps to any significant degree, the fresh melt-water pools on the surface, inhibiting the driving mechanism that runs the global circulation system.

There is now strong evidence to suggest that on some occasions in the recent past those huge gyres shut down entirely. When this occurred, the hydrates disintegrated, releasing their methane into the atmosphere in a series of gigantic ‘burps’. Some of these methane burps appear to have been large enough to raise the global temperature by 5–10°C in just a few decades.

This appears to have been the case about 55 million years ago at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary when the release of some 1,200–2,500 gigatons of hydrate methane generated a sea-temperature rise of 4°–5°C, triggering a mass extinction of marine species. The global temperature spike of 8°–10°C that occurred at this time appears to have been vastly greater and more abrupt than could possibly have been generated by the gradual rise in atmospheric CO2 that preceded it.

http://www.mnforsustain.org/energy%20punctuation%20marks%20morrison.htm

What is Humanities Ecological Footprint?

The Ecological Footprint is a tool used to measure the impact of human activities on the environment. It estimates the surface area required to produce everything that an individual or population consumes (transport, accommodation, food, etc.) and to absorb the resulting waste. It is expressed in hectares (ha) per person per year or in planets.

The concept of an ecological footprint was put forward by Matthias Wackernagel and William E Rees in their 1996 book 'Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth'. It has come to embrace a range of ideas. Their preferred definition of sustainability can be summarised as ‘delivering quality of life for all within the means of nature’. The aim is to quantify our use of nature, and compare this with the carrying capacity of our ecosystems, so that we can assess environmental sustainability.http://www.geography.btinternet.co.uk/ecoprint.htm

Your ecological footprint includes area for: Crops to grow your vegetables, cereals and fibres Pasture to grow your animal products Forest to grow your timber and paper products Sea and estuary to grow your seafood and absorb pollutants Bushland to absorb your carbon dioxide and other pollutants Land covered by the roads and buildings and dam water you use

http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/education/ecologic/bigfoot/low/

Worldwide, there exist 1.8 biologically productive global hectares per person.http://www.earthday.net/footprint/index.asp

Australia's Ecological Footprint in the Living Planet Report 2004 was 7.7 global hectares (gha) per person. [A global hectare refers to one hectare (approximately soccer field size) of biologically productive space with world-average productivity.] This is over 3 times the average global Footprint (2.2 gha), and well beyond the level of what the planet can regenerate on an annual basis - an equivalent of about 1.8 global hectares per person per year.The most significant factor contributing to the Australian Ecological Footprint is carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels (constituting approximately half of the total Australian Footprint).http://www.epa.vic.gov.au/ecologicalfootprint/ausFootprint/default.asp

As Catton (1986) observes: "The world is being required to accommodate not just more people, but effectively 'larger' people . . ." For example, in 1790 the estimated average daily energy consumption by Americans was 11,000 kcal. By 1980, this had increased almost twenty-fold to 210,000 kcal/day (Catton 1986). As a result of such trends, load pressure relative to carrying capacity is rising much faster than is implied by mere population increases.http://dieoff.org/page110.htm

http://www.321energy.com/editorials/chefurka/chefurka051207.html

Humanity’s Ecological Footprint appears to have breached ecological limits and is thus unsustainable. We must address both our population size and the size of our Footprints in order to keep our planetary use of natural resources in balance.http://www.rprogress.org/footprint/ecolFoot.shtmlhttp://www.rprogress.org/newprojects/ecolFoot/faq/index.shtml#food4

Here are the basic components that are used in various ecological footprint calculators:

Santiago de Chile RP Calculator(12 questions)

BFF Calculator (11 questions)

Food vegetarian animal products water

Food type of diet amount food waste food 'miles'

Food type of diet food 'miles' and

freshness

Housing & furniture Housing number of people house size electricity source energy efficiency

Housing number of people house size heating/cooling bills electricity source energy efficiency

Transport road rail air coastal/water-ways

Transport car mileage ride sharing fuel efficiency air travel

Transport main travel mode vacation distance and

travel mode

Goods paper nonsynthetic clothes tobacco others

Waste volume of waste recycling habits

(Note: waste is used as a proxy for commodities)

http://www.prosus.uio.no/english/sus_dev/tools/oslows/Use%20of%20EF%20for%20SGA%20-%20Main%20Report.doc

How Do Entropy, Economy and Environment Relate?

William E. Rees, from the School of Community and Regional Planning at The University of British Columbia says, “Beyond a certain point, the continuous growth of the economy can be purchased only at the expense of increasing disorder or entropy in the ecosphere.

.

This is the point at which consumption by the economy exceeds natural income and would be manifested through the continuous depletion of natural capital --reduced biodiversity, air/water/land pollution, deforestation, atmospheric change, etc. In other words, the empirical evidence suggests that the aggregate human load already exceeds, and is steadily eroding, the very carrying capacity upon which the continued humane existence depends. Ultimately this poses the threat of unpredictable ecosystems restructuring (e.g., erratic climate change) leading to resource shortages, increased local strife, and the heightened threat of ecologically induced geopolitical instability.”http://dieoff.org/page110.htm

Once natural capital is exhausted or degraded to a critical level, either resources become scarce, or our waste stream becomes detrimental. Economic throughput, it is argued, requires a source of natural capital regardless of the size and efficiency of human capital. Because throughput in economic systems originates from a stock of natural capital and ultimately requires ecosystem functions to “recycle” or renew exhausted throughput, the economy becomes a subset of the world’s ecosystem (Daly 1996).

Herman Daly proposed two views of the world's natural capital supply and economy: empty world and full world.

The empty world view assumes a near limitless reserve of natural capital, because the rate of consumption (i.e., the size of the economy) is relatively small compared with the rate of resource renewal or the total supply of nonrenewables. In the full world view, resources are scarce or consumed at rates nearing the natural capacity to renew. These views illustrate how as growth occurs, the economic system eventually becomes limited by the supply of natural capital. Under this model, the global carrying capacity is limited by the ability of natural capital to support a minimum level of sustainable resources. One factor that may affect this difference in perspective is that, historically, extraction and materials utilization costs are directly paid by the firms engaged in the activity; thus, there has been unremitting economic pressure to reduce extraction costs and minimize material use. In contrast, disposal and recycling of wastes has been a “free” service of the environment, so it is not surprising that it has often met or gone beyond its true biological limit.

http://www.csc.noaa.gov/coastal/economics/irreversibility.htm

What Are the Equity Issues of Energy?

In an artile “Energy 21: Making The World Work” by Walt Patterson, energy expert and author of twelve books and hundreds of papers, articles and reviews, on nuclear power, coal technology, renewable energy, energy systems, energy policy and electricity writes “Why talk about energy and purpose? The short answer is that we’ re making a mess of it. The world isn’t working well enough. More than two billion people One third of humanity have no access to the kinds of energy benefits the rest of us take for granted; and the proportion of ‘energy have-nots’ is increasing, not decreasing. Worse still, the key fuels and energy technologies of the ‘energy haves’, like us fossil fuels, large dams, nuclear power all face problems that may become insuperable.”http://www.waltpatterson.org/Energy21.pdfhttp://www.waltpatterson.org/aboutwaltpatterson.htm

Can Population Growth Be Mathematically Modeled?

The logistic equation of population growth occupies a unique and fascinating position in the development of ecological thinking. Proposed in the first half of the nineteenth century by the Belgian mathematician Pierre-François Verhulst (1838) as a potential solution to the dilemma of Malthusian exponential growth, it was rediscovered and imposed to biologists as a simple model of population self-regulation in the early twentieth century by the American biologist Raymond Pearl and his colleagues (Kingsland, 1985).

The logistic equation has since inspired and stimulated much ecological work, including modeling, experimental and field research. Nowadays, the concept of carrying capacity can hardly be dissociated from the model.doi:10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2004.10.009

The logistic model was originally introduced as a demographic model by Pierre François Verhulst. At a conceptual level, the equation allows us to predict variation in population based on only two factors: 1. the average number of offspring per adult (a constant), and 2. the initial population.

The population will be described between a value of zero and one – zero signifying extinction, and 1 signifying carrying capacity. The population growth rate will remain a constant. We will develop an iterative equation, meaning that having calculated one year’s population, that value is input back into the equation to predict the next year’s, and so on. When the population becomes too big for the local ecosystem to support it, the feedback factor dampens the population. When it is smaller, the feedback ‘encourages’ higher future populations. Mathematically the Logistic Equation can be written as:

where:

xn is a number between zero (extinction) and one (carrying capacity), and

represents the population at year n, and hence x0 represents the initial population (at year 0)

r is a positive number, and represents a combined rate for reproduction and starvation.

As we can see by varying the parameter r, the following behaviour is observed:

With r between 0 and 1, the population will eventually die, independent of the initial population.

Consider how the population of bass changes as described by the logistics equation.Assume a near-zero population initially (near-extinction) and an average 2.0 offspring peradult. The figure below shows the results. Notice that the population of bass rises to a constant value, year after year remaining the same.

With r between 1 and 2, the population will quickly stabilize on the value

, independent of the initial population.

With r between 2 and 3, the population will also eventually stabilize on the same value

, but first oscillates around that value for some time.

The rate of convergence is linear, except for r=3, when it is dramatically slow, less than linear.

With r between 3 and 1+√6 (approximately 3.45), the population may oscillate between two values forever. These two values are dependent on r.

With r between 3.45 and 3.54 (approximately), the population may oscillate between four values forever.

With r slightly bigger than 3.54, the population will probably oscillate between 8 values, then 16, 32, etc. The lengths of the parameter intervals which yield the same number of oscillations decrease rapidly; the ratio between the lengths of two successive such bifurcation intervals approaches the Feigenbaum constant δ = 4.669.... This behavior is an example of a period-doubling cascade.

At r = 3.57 (approximately) is the onset of chaos, at the end of the period-doubling cascade. Slight variations in the initial population yield dramatically different results over time, a prime characteristic of chaos. Most values beyond 3.57 exhibit chaotic behaviour, but there are still certain isolated values of r that appear to show non-chaotic behavior; these are sometimes called islands of stability. For instance, around 3.82 there is a range of parameters r which show oscillation between three values, and for slightly higher values of r oscillation between 6 values, then 12 etc. There are other ranges which yield oscillation between 5 values etc.; all oscillation periods do occur.

Beyond r = 4, the values eventually leave the interval [0,1] and diverge for almost all initial values.

The bifurcation diagram below summarizes all the possible results of different growth rates in the logistic equation and is itself a fractal. The horizontal axis shows the values of

the parameter r while the vertical axis shows the possible long-term values of x.

Several features of this graph are worth mentioning.

First, it illustrates the phenomenon of "bifurcation," which is what happens when a smooth stream of output data suddenly splits into two paths. This happens when the value of r passes the critical values of approximately 3.0, 3.4, and 3.56.

Second, you will notice small bands of white space in the midst of the cluttered chaotic region on the right side of this graph. In fact, these are "windows" of order that emerge when the outer-edge "shadows" cast by each cascading branch converge with the "shadows" of other branches. The broadest such "window" is where a stable three-cycle pattern briefly prevails, and then cascades into a 6-cycle, 12-cycle, etc.

Third, you will notice that the width of the interval of each cycle is successively smaller. In fact, as physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum discovered, the intervals diminish at a constant rate -- which he calculated to be 4.6692016090 -- for ANY such system, regardless of the specific input values! This newly-discovered irrational constant number, like pi (3.1416...) or the natural logarithm e (2.71828...) was clear evidence that chaotic behavior in a wide variety of situations was an aspect of nature that was universal in scope. Feigenbaum's proof that chaos was universal brought the various strands of research into nonlinearity into a more or less coherent whole, marking the true emergence of "chaos theory."

http://www.answers.com/logistic%20maphttp://www.arcytech.org/java/population/facts_math.htmlhttp://mail.colonial.net/%7Eabeckwith/chaos.htmlhttp://www.andrewclem.com/Chaos.html#Logistic.htmlhttp://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/acsc/97-0229.pdf

Are There Limits To Growth?

More than 30 years ago, a book called The Limits to Growth created an international sensation. Commissioned by the Club of Rome, an international group of businessmen, statesmen, and scientists, The Limits to Growth was compiled by a team of experts from the U.S. and several foreign countries. Using system dynamics theory and a computer model called "World3," the book presented and analyzed 12 scenarios that showed different possible patterns —and environmental outcomes— of world development over two centuries from 1900 to 2100. The original “Limits to Growth” report forecasted that the current rate of growth and patterns of consumption could continue for another 50-80 years before things begin to go seriously wrong. It suggested that population must stop growing, and we must change our cultural habits of consumption, because we cannot continue to make today’s claims on the environment.

Here is the “business as usual” scenario:

The authors do suggest a few general guidelines for what sustainability would look like, and what steps we should take to get there:

• Extend the planning horizon. Base the choice among current options much more on their long-term costs and benefits.

• Improve the signals. Learn more about the real welfare of human population and the real impact on the world ecosystem of human activity.

• Speed up response time. Look actively for signals that indicate when the environment or society is stressed. Decide in advance what to do if problems appear.

• Minimize the use of nonrenewable resources.• Prevent the erosion of renewable resources.• Use all resources with maximum efficiency.• Slow and eventually stop exponential growth of population and physical capital.

http://www.mnforsustain.org/meadows_limits_to_growth_30_year_update_2004.htmhttp://www.chelseagreen.com/2004/items/limitspaper/Reviews

Population Limits

In an article “The End of World Population Growth” in science magazine Nature, the authors calculate that “there is around an 85 per cent chance that the world's population will stop growing before the end of the century. There is a 60 per cent probability that the world's population will not exceed 10 billion people before 2100, and around a 15 per cent probability that the world's population at the end of the century will be lower than it is today. For different regions, the date and size of the peak population will vary considerably.” http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v412/n6846/full/412543a0.html;jsessionid=A87F90156EA6EE113CF9B448AAF9A402

Journalist Ross Gelbspan in his book "The Heat is On: the Climate Crisis, the Cover-up, the Prescription" he states that the impacts of overpopulation, peak food, climate change and other limits to growth threaten to combine into a severe test of the ability of civilization to continue. Gelbspan's website http://www.heatisonline.org is one of the best sources for understanding these issues.

World population is increasing exponentially. The gap between rich and poor is widening, in China now 60% of the wealth is controlled by 1% of the population. Our ecological footprint was overshot in the 1970s. Wackernagel developed the ecological footprint model, not perfect but the best seen yet. We are now at 120% of global capacity, and can’t go much higher. Some indicators of overshoot are the deterioration in renewable resources, surface and ground water, forests, fisheries, agricultural land, rising levels of pollution. Also growing demand for capital, resources and labour by military and industry to secure, process and defend resources, and rising levels of personal debt. Insurance company losses are also rising. Climate has already peaked, global food production will peak in the next 15 years, even with no energy crisis, water is nearing its peak, oil being just one peak of many.http://www.energybulletin.net/19773.html

Deteriorating environmental conditions do not affect all populations in the same way, nordo they affect all households of a given population in the same manner. Even within a household, the effects may differ by age and gender. Key determinants of vulnerability are poverty, health status, institutional arrangements, and education.Poverty, which has been defined as a lack of means to protect oneself against all kinds ofthreats to health and personal integrity, by definition implies a lack of protection against the adverse consequences of environmental change. Some 800 million people go hungry every day, and over one billion live on less than a dollar a day. Without social, economic, and scientific progress, a third of the world’s expected population of some 9 billion, in the second half of the 21st century, could be living in extreme poverty. The food insecurity and poverty affecting a fifth of the world’s current population is a sad indictment of the world’s failure to respond adequately in a time of unprecedented plenty. The challenge of poverty reduction cannot be avoided in a world of interdependence, reciprocity and interpenetration. Health status is another important determinant of quality of life and protection againstthreats. Environmental degradation of various sorts is likely to cause additional problems for persons already in weak health, as well as pose increasing health risks for the rest of the population. In this context local environmental problems such as lack of clean water may pose even more serious health threats than global climate change. Those local environmental problems already exist now, have serious health consequences and could with some effort be removed soon. They also tend to affect the poorest, the least educated and hence the most vulnerable. In this context poor women of reproductive age and their youngest children are particularly vulnerable to non-hygienic conditions and maternal

and infant mortality tend to be very high under such conditions. Improving reproductive health and family planning services can not only contribute to improve the health status and reduce the vulnerability of poor women and their young children but also contribute to a decline in the incidence of unplanned pregnancies and health-threatening short birth intervals.Migration, including urbanization and movements to coastal areas, is an important issuein this context since it can be both a coping strategy in response to environmental change as well as a cause of environmental degradation. At the societal level the vulnerability to environmental change depends on the efficiency of institutions, including social and political organizations, infrastructure and markets. In order to cope effectively with environmental degradation it is important to have real choices through knowledge and education on the one hand, and the material means on the other, with good governance being one of the most decisive factors. There does not seem to be a universal remedy against vulnerability. The best candidateseems to be investment in human capital formation and education. With appropriate skills and education comes better access to information as well as better health status, lower risk of poverty and lower population growth in the case of high fertility conditions. A higher educational status of the general population makes it also more likely to have efficient control over public affairs and contribute to good governance. More educated populations tend to have more efficient and more responsible governments that can more effectively deal with environmental vulnerability.The progress in science and technology, including the knowledge revolution andenvironmentally sound management of natural resources, have the potential to reshape and manage the emerging challenges of the 21st century. But in order to be effective they must adequately address differential needs and be aware of differential vulnerability.http://www.populationenvironmentresearch.org/papers/GSP_Statement.pdfJacques Cousteau, a French, explorer, ecologist, filmmaker, scientist, photographer and researcher who studied the sea and all forms of life in water says “We must alert and organise the world's people to pressure world leaders to take specific steps to solve the two root causes of our environmental crises - exploding population growth and wasteful consumption of irreplaceable resources. Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today." http://www.betterworld.net/quotes/population-quotes.htm

Richard Heinberg makes the point that “unless we scale back the operation of human society so that it exists within the limits of the biosphere, we are destined to crash into those limits sooner or later.”http://www.riverreview.org/RH%20interview.htm

The problem of transferring the cost of environmental damage to the third world has consequences for developed and underdeveloped states.

For underdeveloped states - A rapidly growing youthful population with diminished quality of life. Short term exploitation of natural and human resources, a serious decline in both social and environmental asserts.

For developed states - A declining and aging population in the developed world. Dependence on guest workers, economic refugees, and a global diminution of social and natural capital. Increased political conflict, terrorism and high security.

http://hps.arts.unsw.edu.au/hps_content/courses/courses_content/hpsc2550/legacy/Sus_Dev_Golbal/L6.%20Population%20&%20Sust%20Dev.ppt

In the Journal of Mammalogy, an article “Population Cycles In Small Mammals: The Α-Hypothesis” gives possible explanations for population cycles. “In the peak population phase, density is high and competition among individuals for resources, which may be of low quality or in short supply, increases. Individuals respond to crowding, resource shortages, and competition for resources by altering spacing, aggression, and social dominance. The changes described for the peak phase continue during the early decline phase, and the downtrend in population size should accelerate. Toward the end of this phase, quality of the social and ecologic environment begins to improve. Behavioral and physiologic responses to the stressful environment should thus decline. Consequently, population parameters, primarily age at maturity and juvenile survival, begin to improve.When the population enters the low (or trough) phase, density is lowest in the cycle, resources are recovered, and most of the animals raised, born, or conceived during stressful environments have been replaced by those conceived or born in an improved environment. Because of these improvements, age at maturity declines, juvenile survival increases, and mean age of reproductive individuals decreases. Generation time should decrease, and reproductive life span and recruitment of adults should increase, leading to increase in population size. Changes in population parameters lag behind changes in quality of ecologic and social environments, and changes in population size lag behind changes in population parameters.”http://www.bioone.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1644%2F1545-1542(2001)082%3C0573%3APCISMT%3E2.0.CO%3B2

Resource Limits

Let us look at the arithmetic of growth so we can understand growth limits. Al Bartlett draws on the work of M. King Hubbert, who developed a concept for forecasting the nationwide or worldwide production of non-renewable fossil fuel resources: in short, that they can be expected to follow a bell-shaped curve.

As an example let us take a known quantity of a finite nonrenewable resource. Let us assume we have 20,000 tonnes of this resource, and that with a consumption of 100 tones per year, the resource will last for 200 years at a steady consumption rate. Growth in consumption is thus is 0% per year. If we plot the consumption over time, we get a rectangle. The area under the curve gives us the total quantity of the finite resource.

Now, what if we introduce production growth? We assume that the Gaussian Error Curve is a reasonable approximate scenario for the curve of rate of production P(t) is growing at some fractional rate k > 0, P(t) = P(0) exp(kt), where P(0) will be assumed to be 100 tonnes/y, the time t is expressed in years, and ó is the standard deviation of the Gaussian curve in years.

Now, if we consume this resource at a faster rate, say with a constant growth in consumption of 1% per year, we will reach the end of the lifetime of this resource quicker. Similararly scenarios with a higher steady growth of 2%, 3%, 4% and 5% are depleted even faster. The graphs for consumption look like this. Note the four curves all have the same area of 20,000 tonnes.

Even though it is consistent with accepted economic goals, it is unrealistic to imagine that an economy could maintain a constant unchanging P(t) until the last bit of a resource has been extracted.

To be more realistic we note that positive rates of growth of P(t) will cause the graph of P(t) vs. t to pass through the maximum after which P(t) will decline and approach zero. We can model this behavior mathematically with the following formula:

P=P(0)(-0.5(t/ó)2)

Let us look at the Gaussian scenarios for values of standard deviation ó of curves of 10y, 15y, 20y, 30y, 40y, 50y, 60y, 70y, and 80y. Curves all have same area of 20,000 tonnes. The graph for the production rates look like this:

The smaller the value of sigma, the higher and narrower is the Gaussian peak and the more rapid is the decline of the R/P Ratio.

Bartlett then draws a line that envelopes the whole family of curves: whatever the actual production curve is in real life, it should basically sit somewhere inside the envelope curve.

The envelope of the family of Gaussian curves divides the (P, t) plane into “allowed” and “forbidden” areas. The declining exponential curve divides the “allowed” area into an upper area that is “terminal” and a lower area that is “sustainable.”

What this demonstrates is that there is no way to grow infinitely into the future, in other words growth itself is unsustainable. So if growth can’t be sustainable, then what can? Well, in short, decay.

If a resource will last R(0)/P(0) years at present rates of production, and if the rate of production of the resource follows the curve that starts at P(0) and has a constant fractional decrease per unit time whose magnitude is greater than or equal to P(0)/R(0) per year, then the production can be truly said to be sustainable.

For example, if R(0)/P(0) = 200 years, then the sustainability coefficient k(s) = P(0)/R(0) = 1/200 = 0.005 per year (half a percent per year). If R(0)/P(0) = 100 years,then a curve of P(t) that declines 1% per year is sufficient to allow the resource to last forever!

If a nation mines its fossil fuels at an ever-decreasing rate, it is possible to ensure that there will always be some resources available to future generations, except that every generation will have fewer resources left to them than the previous one (such is the nature of mining, oil production and resource depletion in general).

Here’s how it works. Imagine you have $1000 of savings, and you use $100 of this each week. At that rate of consumption, you have 10 weeks left - in other words, if you continue to use $100 a week, you will be broke in 10 weeks. But if after the first week you can drop your weekly spendings to $90 a week, then you will still essentially have 10 weeks left. And if after the second week (when you’re down to $810), you drop to $81 a week, you will still have 10 weeks left. If this trend continues, you can ensure that you always have 10 weeks left, and you can claim to be spending your savings at a ‘sustainable’ rate.

The mathematics dictate that economic, business, and government policies must be radically reformed to match the exponential decay scenario if humans are to continue to base our existence on the consumption of non-renewable fuels and claim that it is sustainable. Bartlett’s work highlights the deception of terms like ‘sustainable growth’.

As far as our energy goes, a more desirable approach would be to consume our regular “income” (i.e. from renewable sources) rather than eat into nature’s “savings” (i.e. non-renewable fuel deposits). Basing the very notion of “progress” on ever-increasing consumption of non-renewable fuels is a recipe for ruin.http://www.energybulletin.net/29145.html

Fossil fuels, metals, and electricity are all intricately connected. Each is inaccessible - on the modern scale - without the other two. Any two will vanish without the third. If we imagine a world without fossil fuels, we must imagine a world without metals or electricity. What we imagine, at that point, is a society far more primitive than the one to which we are accustomed.http://www.countercurrents.org/po-goodchild290906.htm

Matthew Simmons is the CEO of the world’s largest Energy Investment Bank, Simmons & Company International. He recently wrote that he had reread Limits to Growth and was amazed at its accuracy. Limits to Growth began in the 1970s with the Club of Rome, a group who sought to raise awareness of environmental problems. The first conclusion was a view that if present growth trends continued unchanged, a limit to the growth that our planet has enjoyed would be reached sometime within the next 100 years. This would then result in a sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity. The second key conclusion was that these growth trends could be altered. Moreover, if proper alterations were made, the world could establish a condition of "ecological stability" that would be sustainable far into the future. The third conclusion was a view that the world could embark on this second path, but the sooner this effort started, the greater the chance would be of achieving this "ecologically stable" success.Simmons suggests some natural break will undoubtedly stop the economic progress which devours a precious and dwindling energy supply. He also reminds us that gap between rich and poor cannot continue to grow without finally creating massive civic turmoil. History shows if the gap gets too great, the poor will finally "come over the walls of prosperity" and attempt to redistribute this wealth.http://greatchange.org/ov-simmons,club_of_rome_revisted.html

Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover gave an amazingly prescient speech called “Energy Resources and Our Future” in on May 14, 1957 delivered to a meeting of the Annual Scientific Assembly of the Minnesota State Medical Association in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Some excerpts from his speech are provided here:

The earth is finite. Fossil fuels are not renewable. In this respect our energy base differs from that of all earlier civilizations. They could have maintained their energy supply by careful cultivation. We cannot. Fuel that has been burned is gone forever. Fuel is even more evanescent than metals. Metals, too, are non-renewable resources threatened with ultimate extinction, but something can be salvaged from scrap. Fuel leaves no scrap and there is nothing man can

do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy 500 million years ago and took eons to grow to their present volume.

In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuel reserves are finite, the exact length of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect: the longer they last, the more time do we have, to invent ways of living off renewable or substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift.

Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring will fare.

Engineers whose work familiarizes them with energy statistics; far-seeing industrialists who know that energy is the principal factor which must enter into all planning for the future; responsible governments who realize that the well-being of their citizens and the political power of their countries depend on adequate energy supplies - all these have begun to be concerned about energy resources. In this country, especially, many studies

have been made in the last few years, seeking to discover accurate information on fossil-fuel reserves and foreseeable fuel needs.

Statistics involving the human factor are, of course, never exact. The size of usable reserves depends on the ability of engineers to improve the efficiency of fuel extraction and use. It also depends on discovery of new methods to obtain energy from inferior resources at costs which can be borne without unduly depressing the standard of living. Estimates of future needs, in turn, rely heavily on population figures which must always allow for a large element of uncertainty, particularly as man reaches a point where he is more and more able to control his own way of life.

Current estimates of fossil fuel reserves vary to an astonishing degree. In part this is because the results differ greatly if cost of extraction is disregarded or if in calculating how long reserves will last, population growth is not taken into consideration; or, equally important, not enough weight is given to increased fuel consumption required to process inferior or substitute metals. We are rapidly approaching the time when exhaustion of better grade metals will force us to turn to poorer grades requiring in most cases greater expenditure of energy per unit of metal.

…..For more than one hundred years we have stoked ever growing numbers of machines with coal; for fifty years we have pumped gas and oil into our factories, cars, trucks, tractors, ships, planes, and homes without giving a thought to the future. Occasionally the voice of a Cassandra has been raised only to be quickly silenced when a lucky discovery revised estimates of our oil reserves upward, or a new coalfield was found in some remote spot. Fewer such lucky discoveries can be expected in the future, especially in industrialized countries where extensive mapping of resources has been done. Yet the popularizers of scientific news would have us believe that there is no cause for anxiety, that reserves will last thousands of years, and that before they run out science will have produced miracles. Our past history and security have given us the sentimental belief that the things we fear will never really happen - that everything turns out right in the end. But, prudent men will reject these tranquilizers and prefer to face the facts so that they can plan intelligently for the needs of their posterity.

Looking into the future, from the mid-20th Century, we cannot feel overly confident that present high standards of living will of a certainty continue through the next century and beyond. Fossil fuel costs will soon definitely begin to rise as the best and most accessible reserves are exhausted, and more effort will be required to obtain the same energy from remaining reserves. It is likely also that liquid fuel synthesized from coal will be more expensive. Can we feel certain that when economically recoverable fossil fuels are gone science will have learned how to maintain a high standard of living on renewable energy sources?

…. Transportation - the lifeblood of all technically advanced civilizations - seems to be assured, once we have borne the initial high cost of electrifying railroads and replacing buses with streetcars or interurban electric trains. But, unless science can perform the miracle of synthesizing automobile fuel from some energy source as yet unknown or unless trolley wires power electric automobiles on all streets and highways, it will be wise to face up to the possibility of the ultimate disappearance of automobiles, trucks, buses, and tractors. Before all the oil is gone and hydrogenation of coal for synthetic liquid fuels has come to an end, the cost of automotive fuel may have risen to a point where private cars will be too expensive to run and public transportation again becomes a profitable business.

… Reduction in automotive use would necessitate an extraordinarily costly reorganization of the pattern of living in industrialized nations, particularly in the United

States. It would seem prudent to bear this in mind in future planning of cities and industrial locations.

…Our civilization rests upon a technological base which requires enormous quantities of fossil fuels. What assurance do we then have that our energy needs will continue to be supplied by fossil fuels: The answer is - in the long run - none.http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2724

One way to look at natures declining economy, and increasing human economy is to imagine the Earth starting off with Nature’s economy – that is – all the natural habitats, marine and terrestrial. Then beginning perhaps 8 thousand years ago humans started removing parts of nature’s Economy (the natural environment) to make room for their own economic sectors – the first being primary production. Then a bit over 250 years ago another sector of the human economy started to expand dramatically and that was the secondary sector – manufacturing. This was the start of the industrial revolution and from, then on, and increasingly so, the human sectors of the economy started to grow.So now we have a clear picture of Nature’s economy being increasingly rapidly removed and the human economy increasingly rapidly expanding.

The overwhelmingly negative impact of the growing human economy on the quality or health of Nature’s economy is that the ratio of indirect costs of producing products in the human economy (externalities) versus the direct costs is a hyper-exponential function.The ratio goes from being less than one (direct costs are perceived by people to exceed the indirect costs) to all of a sudden switching massively so that, seemingly, in the blink of an eye the indirect or external costs are the overwhelmingly important cost.It is now clear that we very recently reached this inflection point and in fact have probably just gone past it – which is why we are now deluged with more and more information suggesting that we are in deep trouble over the environment.http://beyondzeroemissions.org/files/GSI_Science_ghg_reduction_targets.ppt

Conversion of Nature’s economy to the Human economy

In 1992 The U. S. National Academy of Science and the Royal Society of London have presented a joint statement which warns: "There is an urgent need to address economic activity, population growth, and environmental protection as interrelated issues, and as crucial components affecting the sustainability of human society." The statement notes that the contribution of science to dealing with these problems is only "mitigating”. "If current predictions of population growth prove accurate and patterns of human activity remain unchanged, science and technology may not be able to prevent either irreversible degradation of the environment or continued poverty for much of the world."It urges the adoption of "global policies" aimed at "more rapid economic development throughout the world, more environmentally benign patterns of human activity, and a more rapid stabilization of world population." http://www.jstor.org/view/00987921/di962024/96p0052i/0http://www.cep.unt.edu/ISEE/ns3-3-92.htmhttp://www.spinninglobe.net/cousteau.htm

"More fundamentally, our present economic system is based on the illusion of endless “growth”. Banks lend (and thus effectively create) money on the understanding that it will be paid back with interest. This can only continue as long as the economy continues to “grow”. Yet “growth” is intimately linked to growth in the use of fossil fuels. It always has been, and recent attempts to demonstrate “decoupling” of the two are far from convincing. Nor are we persuaded by the view that a move to renewables will create new economic opportunities – it will, but not nearly enough to compensate for the increasing redundancy and irrelevance of large parts of the economy in a post-oil age."http://www.eafl.org.uk/default.asp?topic=OilEconomy

James Howard Kunstler, American author and social critic writes in his book The Long Emergency that as we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era “the circumstances will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.” Kunstler also writes that wishful notions about rescuing our way of life with "renewables" are also unrealistic due to the enormous problem of scale and the fact that the components for renewable systems require substantial amounts of energy themselves.http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/7203633/the_long_emergency/

Data from the EIA shows energy consumption in the United States from 1635-2000 by source.

Annual consumption of petroleum and natural gas exceeded that of coal in 1947 and then quadrupled in a single generation. Neither before nor since has any source of energy become so dominant so quickly.http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/eh/frame.html

Stern tested for causality between GDP and energy use in a multivariate setting using a model of GDP, energy use, capital and labour inputs. He measured energy by both its thermal inputs and by the Divisia aggregation method discussed above. The model took account of changes in energy use being countered by substitution with labour and/or capital. Weighting for changes in energy composition showed that a large part of the economic growth effects of energy were due to the substitution of higher quality energy sources such as electricity for lower quality energy sources such as coal.

The following GDP/Energy Ratio shows the diminishing returns to high quality energies. Historical increases in the real GDP/E ratio are associated with shifts in the type of energies used and the types of goods and services consumed and produced.

The law of diminishing returns implies that the first uses of high quality energies are directed at tasks best able to make use of the physical, technical, and economic aspects of an energy type. See the data at the end of paragraph 2.2. As the use of a high quality energy source expands, it is progressively used for tasks less able to make use of the attributes that confer high quality. This implies that the amount of economic activity generated per heat unit diminishes as the use of high quality energy expands.

Brian Fleay concludes that there are no alternative transport fuels in sight that can replace the performance of petroleum products as we have used them for the past 60 years, nor are these likely to emerge. This era will be seen by future generations as unique, a period created and so far sustained by oil primarily from the giant oil fields. Up-to-date information on EPR’s is unlikely to alter the relative relationships of the fuels shown in Figure 8. We have been picking the eyes out of a large hydrocarbon resource base.http://www.stcwa.org.au/papers/data/Energy_Quality.pdf

William Stanton (2003), in his book "The Rapid Growth of Human Populations 1750-2000. Histories, Consequences, Issues Nation by nation." states that 'All human history is of populations expanding when resources are available and shrinking when they are not'. Stanton speculates that 'political correctness', 'civilized standards', current ideas about 'human rights', and the concept of 'the sanctity of human life' will disintegrate in the face of resource conflicts and massive movements of refugees from lands whose carrying capacity has been reduced by combinations of soil depletion/erosion, desertification, sea level rise and the lack of continued access to non renewable energy stores.

Jared Diamond, Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, attempts to analyse why some past and present day societies have collapsed.In his prologue, Diamond indicates his considered view of the train of events which often underlie collapse, when of past collapses he writes: “Population growth forced people to adopt intensified means of agricultural production” “and to expand agriculture from the prime lands” “onto more marginal land,” “Unsustainable practices led to environmental damage ”resulting in agriculturally marginal lands having to be abandoned again”.He lists consequences for societies as including “food shortages, starvation, wars among too many people fighting for too few resources” and the overthrowing of government elites “by disillusioned masse”. “Eventually, population decreased through starvation, war, or disease, and society lost some of the political, economic, and cultural complexity that it had developed at its peak”

http://www.population-growth-migration.info/reviews.html#Bartlett

How Do We Know We Have Reached Overshoot?

Falling resource stocks and rising pollution levels are the first clues. Here are some other symptoms: * Capital, resources, and labor diverted to activities compensating for the loss of services that were formerly provided without cost by nature (for example, sewage treatment, air purification, water purification, flood control, pest control, restoration of soil nutrients, pollination, or the preservation of species). * Capital, resources, and labor diverted from final goods production to exploitation of scarcer, more distant, deeper, or more dilute resources.* Technologies invented to make use of lower-quality, smaller, more dispersed, less valuable resources, because the higher-value ones are gone.* Failing natural pollution cleanup mechanisms; rising levels of pollution.* Capital depreciation exceeding investment, and maintenance deferred, so there is deterioration in capital stocks, especially long-lived infrastructure.* Growing demands for capital, resources, and labor used by the 176 World3: The Dynamics of Growth in a Finite World military or industry to gain access to, secure, and defend resources that are increasingly concentrated in fewer, more remote, or increasingly hostile regions.* Investment in human resources (education, health care, shelter) postponed in order to meet immediate consumption, investment, or security needs, or to pay debts.* Debts a rising percentage of annual real output. * Eroding goals for health and environment. * Increasing conflicts, especially conflicts over sources or sinks. * Shifting consumption patterns as the population can no longer pay the price of what it really wants and, instead, purchases what it can afford.* Declining respect for the instruments of collective government as they are used increasingly by the elites to preserve or increase their share of a declining resource base. * Growing chaos in natural systems, with "natural" disasters more frequent and more severe because of less resilience in the environmental system.http://www.energybulletin.net/693.html

http://www.johnbutlertrio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2433

What Does Human History Tell Us About Civilisation and Equilibrium?

Duncan first presented the Olduvai theory more than 11 years ago at a meeting of the American Society of Engineering Educators in Binghamton, New York, as follows:The broad sweep of human history can be divided into three phases.

1. The first, or pre-industrial phase was a very long period of equilibrium when simple tools and weak machines limited economic growth.

2. The second, or industrial phase was a very short period of non-equilibrium thatignited with explosive force when powerful new machines temporarily lifted alllimits to growth.

3. The third, or de-industrial phase lies immediately ahead during which time theindustrial economies will decline toward a new period of equilibrium, limited by the exhaustion of nonrenewable resources and continuing deterioration of the natural environment. (Duncan, 1989)

Can The (R/P) Ratio Predict The Lifetime of Fuels?The reserve/production (R/P) ratio is often used as a shorthand way of indicating how long current reserves will last at current production rates. However this ratio fails to take growth into account.

For example, at present the U.S. has about 270,000 million short tons (MMst) of coal, and a production rate of about 1,000MMst per year. Dividing, we obtain an R/P ratio of about 270. This is where the sound bite "we have more than 200 years of coal left" comes from.

If we want to take production growth into account, the following table can help determine when the reserve will run out. This table gives answers to questions such as, "If a non-renewable resource would last, say 50 years at present rates of consumption, how long would it last if consumption were to grow say 4 % per year?"

Example 1.  If a resource would last 300 years at present rates of consumption, then it would last 49 years if the rate of consumption grew 6 % per year.

Example 2.  If a resource would last 18 years at 5 % annual growth in the rate of consumption, then it would last 30 years at present rates of consumption. (0 % growth).

Example 3.  If a resource would last 55 years at 8 % annual growth in the rate of consumption, then it would last 115 years at 3 % annual growth rate.

This table involves using the formula for the EET where:R = known size of the resourcer0 = current rate of consumptiont = time in years

e = base of natural logarithmsk = fractional growth per year

EET  =  Te  =  ( 1 / k )  ln ( k R / r0   + 1 )

This equation is valid for all positive values of  k  and for those negative values of  k  for which the argument of the logarithm is positive.

http://www.mnforsustain.org/bartlett_forgotten_fundamentals_of_the_energy_crisis_partI.htmhttp://www.mnforsustain.org/bartlett_forgotten_fundamentals_of_the_energy_crisis_partII.htm

0 % 10 30 100

300 1000 

3000

10,000

1 % 9.5 26 69 139  240  343 462

2 % 9.1 24 55 97   152 206  265

3 % 8.7 21 46 77    115  150 190

4 % 8.4 20 40 64    93 120 150

5 % 8.1 

18 36 56    79 100 124

6 % 7.8 17  32 49    69 87 107

7 % 7.6 16 30 44   61 77 94

8 % 7.3 15 28 40    55 69 84

9 % 7.1 15 26 37   50 62 76

10 % 6.9 14 24 34    46 57 69

What is Peak Oil?

Every oil field goes through a production cycle of increase-peak-decline, that is at the beginning production from any oil field rises sharply, then reaches a plateau before falling into a terminal decline. The peaking of oil production is caused by a combination of geological limitations in oil wells (fluid mechanics) and economic drivers (maximization of profits). When oil is first pumped, it’s under pressure and comes out easily – production rises. But over time, oil pressure drops. Water is pumped in to maintain pressure. At the half way point, it reaches peak oil, then decline sets in. Usually the peak happens when 50 per cent of the field’s oil is produced (“Hubbert’s Peak”). Advanced technology can push the peak up to 60 per cent but the decline after the peak is then steeper. Soon, the oil field goes into decline as the deeper oil takes more energy to extract, and is more expensive to process. Once the light sweet crude is gone from a well one is left with the heavy crude. Over the lifetime of a oil well one moves from a growing output of cheap oil to a decreasing output of poor quality oil.

When oil fields in a region are aggregated you can tell if the area has peaked or is in decline by looking at past statistics. Peak Oil happens in every oil field, in every oil province, in every country and finally in the whole world.http://www.brushtail.com.au/july_04_on/oil_running_out_of_time.htmlhttp://eclipsenow.blogspot.com/

When we mine our minerals and fossil fuels from the Earth's crust. The deeper we dig, the greater the minimum energy requirements. Of course, the most concentrated and most accessible fuels and minerals are mined first; thereafter, more and more energy is required to mine and refine poorer and poorer quality resources. New technologies can, on a short-term basis, decrease energy costs, but neither technology nor “prices” can repeal the laws of thermodynamics.http://dieoff.org/page175.htm

Although half of the oil remains at the peak in production, the other half of the oil isharder to extract, it becomes more and more filled with water and requires more and moreenergy to pump it out. Enormous effort has gone into trying to discover more oil and to extract more from the reserves that remain. Eventually as wells are abandoned the region becomes less and less important and other regions are used. National oil supplies can be examined to see how they appear in this cycle of oil depletion.

Each litre of petrol that we burn in our cars is the distilled residue of some 23 tonnes of ancient organisms, and the oil products consumed by modern civilisation in a single day cost the entire planet some 13 months of continuous photosynthesis to produce and store. Thanks to the Earth’s generous reserve of fossil hydrogen, we have had a free ride into the twenty-first century. But our good fortune is about to run out.

Peak Oil, or Hubbert’s Peak (named after oil geologist Marion King Hubbert), is now upon us. In 1956 Hubbert predicted that American oil production would peak in the early 1970s.

http://www.bu.edu/cees/people/faculty/kaufmann/index.html

He was criticised by the oil industry but his forecast proved accurate. US production has declined ever since 1971. Hubbert also predicted that global oil production would peak around the year 2000. He appears to have erred slightly in this case, yet if it were not for the huge production losses caused by the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, Hubbert’s global prediction would also have been accurate.

Hubbert based his predictions primarily on the declining rate of oil discovery. Despite massive exploration and improved technology the last major oil discoveries were made in the 1970’s. All the world’s major oilfields are between 50 and 70 years old and oil is now being consumed about four times faster than it can be found. Global oil discovery peaked in the 1960s.

http://hubbert.mines.edu/news/Ivanhoe_96-1.pdf

Since the mid-1980s, oil companies have been finding less oil than we have been consuming.

The Hubbert curve H is given below:

http://www.tsl.uu.se/uhdsg/Publications/Sivertsson_Thesis.pdf

The global oil production curve is the superimposition of many country production curves which are at various stages of growing, peaking and declining production

Matt Muschalik, Member of ASPO, has used world crude production data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) showing that various countries are at various production stages, with terminal decline, recent peak, flat production, or growing production. Currently, world crude production is a flat peak that is still benign with an undulating plateau.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/ipm/supply.html

Dr Campbell, is a former chief geologist and vice-president at a string of oil majors including BP, Shell, Fina, Exxon and ChevronTexaco. He explains that the peak of regular oil - the cheap and easy to extract stuff - has already come and gone in 2005. Even when you factor in the more difficult to extract heavy oil, deep sea reserves, polar regions and liquid taken from gas, the peak will come as soon as 2011, he says.http://www.countercurrents.org/howden150607.htm

We can also look at oil production in terms of whether it came from onshore or offshore, rather than by country. We can see that world onshore crude already peaked in the late 70ies. Currently, 120% of oil supply growth comes from offshore crude.

Peak oil theories are about calculating the timing of the global peak and the decline rates thereafter. ASPO (Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas) predicts a peak around 2010. www.peakoil.net

Most independent energy analysts agree that ‘Peak Oil’ is now upon us, and some believe that the peak has already passed.http://www.mnforsustain.org/energy%20punctuation%20marks%20morrison.htmhttp://www.mnforsustain.org/oil_%26_gas_factsheet_thompson_b.htmhttp://www.energybulletin.net/primer.php

Matt Simmons, explains that peak oil “in the starkest possible terms, means that we are no longer going to be able to grow. It’s like with a human being who passes a certain age in life. Getting older does not mean the same thing as death. It means progressively diminishing capacity, a rapid decline, followed by a long tail.” He also alluded to the idea that peak oil may lead to a diminishing ability to care for the environment because “there is no better friend of the environment that economic prosperity.”http://www.oilcrash.com/articles/blackout.htm

Retired oil geologist Colin Campbell, founder of Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO), with 40 years of experience in the industry estimates oil production decline is as follows:2010:  90 mb/d2015:  85 mb/d2020:  75 mb/dhttp://www.peakoil.ie/newsletter/en/htm/Newsletter73.htm So from 2010 to 2020: (75-90)/90 = -17%

Retired senior consultant to the National Iranian Oil Company, Dr Ali Samsam Bakhtiari forecasts even steeper decline rates. In his presentation to the Senate hearing “Australia's future oil supply and alternative transport fuels” in July 2006 he stated that we may face 32% decline rates by 2020 according to his WOCAP model.http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard/senate/commttee/S9515.pdf

Data from the BP Statistical Review shows decline rates in 17 oil producing countries

The graph shows decline rates for 17 countries in terminal decline (peak in 1999). Despite modern technology, decline could not be stopped. Neither will oil prices change oil geology. Production peaked in the US (1970), in UK (1999), Australia (2000) and Norway (2001).

If this is a model for the world we can expect decline rates between 1 - 2 % for the first 3 years after peak oil, then increasing to 5 % in the 3 years thereafter.

For business and political reasons, there have been very misleading reports of sizes of stocks of oil. Seven major oil-extracting countries have for years reported unchanged reserves, as well as had spurious reserve revisions beginning in 1980s

C.J.Campbell, explains: · Kuwait added 50% in 1985 to increase its OPEC quota, which was based partly on reserves. No corresponding new discoveries had been made. Nothing particular changed in the reservoir. · Venezuela doubled its reserves in 1987 by the inclusion of large deposits of heavy oil that had been known for years. · It forced the other OPEC countries to retaliate with huge increases · Note too how the numbers have changed little since despite production.. · Some of the increase was justified but it has to be backdated to the discovery of the fields concerned that had been found up to 50 years before. http://www.hubbertpeak.com/de/lecture.html

http://www.hubbertpeak.com/campbell/images/com12.gif

No theory (e.g. Hubbert) can accurately predict the year in which global production will peak because both reserve and production data are unreliable, if not manipulated for strategic reasons. IEA and EIA statistics can differ by 1 mb/d.

However, with time peak oil facts can be proven with statistics retrospectively. To complicate matters, there can be multiple peaks (bumpy production plateau in transition phase) due to complex feed back loops between capacities, production, demand and prices. There are also logistical limitations (drilling rigs, offshore platforms, refineries, pipelines, tankers), climate change impacts and geo-political problems. Due to these uncertainties it may take several years after the global peak to detect it with certainty. Therefore preparation for peak oil before the peak is necessary to allow for a smoother transition to other alternatives. If peak oil occurs later than predicted, we can expect steeper declines as depletion in mature, giant fields (app. 1/3 of the total) in the next years will overwhelm the whole production system.

How Long Does It Take To Prepare For Peak Oil?

Released in Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), and titled "Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management," the report examines the likely consequences of the impending global peak. It was authored principally by Robert L. Hirsch http://www.counterpunch.org/heinberg07302005.html

Robert Hirsch concluded that it will take the USA 20 years to prepare properly for peak oil with a crash program. The report's Executive Summary begins with the following paragraph:“The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking.”Indeed, the U.S. and other industrialized countries rely on petroleum as a key component in transportation, agricultural, chemical and plastics industries. As pointed out in the Hirsch Report, a decline in production will reshape the way we live and trigger economic crisis that may resemble the economic crisis following the 1973-1974 embargo (p. 27). Hirsch estimates that the economic loss to the U.S. could be measured on a trillion dollar scale. And unlike other energy transitions -- such as the move from wood to coal, or from coal to oil -- Hirsch points out that the peaking of oil “will be abrupt and revolutionary.”http://www.daverollo.com/peakoilres0607

What Is The Creaming Curve?

If the cumulative wildcats are plotted against the cumulative discovery, a creamingcurve is obtained. It can be fitted with a hyperbola, the creaming curve hyperbola.The hyperbola models the amount of oil discovered per drilled wildcat. The discoveryper drilled wildcat can be approximated by this hyperbola under the assumption thatthe largest fields are found first. Extended to e.g. twice as many wildcats as thepresent number, the hyperbola can give a good estimate of the amount of oil that willultimately be produced by a country or region.

http://www.tsl.uu.se/uhdsg/Publications/Sivertsson_Thesis.pdf

This is the so-called creaming curve. 

It plots discovery against exploration wildcats. They are the wells that either do - or do not - find a new field.

The largest fields are usually found first for obvious reasons, being too large to miss.

The curve flattens until new discoveries are too small to be viable. It gives a good idea of how much is left to find.

We have produced almost half what is there, and we have found about 90%http://www.hubbertpeak.com/de/lecture.html

Does a Hydrogen Economy Make Sense?

Ulf Bossel who has a Diploma Degree in fluid mechanics and thermodynamics has calculated that ‘It takes about 1 kg of hydrogen to replace 1 U.S. gal of gasoline. About 200 MJ (55 kWh) of dc electricity are needed to liberate 1 kg of hydrogen from 9 kg of water by electrolysis. Steam reforming of methane (natural gas) requires only 4.5 kg of water for each kilogram of hydrogen, but 5.5 kg of CO2 emerge from the process. One kilogram of hydrogen can also be obtained from 3 kg of coal and 9 kg of water, but 11 kg of CO2 are released and need to be sequestered. Even with most efficient fuel cell systems, at most 50% of the hydrogen HHV energy can be converted back to electricity.’http://www.resfc-market.eu/download/docsexternos/Hydrogen%20Economy.pdf

Let us have a look at how these hydrogen calculations pan out for a city like Frankfurt in the case of aircraft, according to The European Fuel Cell Forum:

‘It has been suggested to use liquid hydrogen as aircraft fuel. On average, 520 passenger air planes leave Frankfurt Airport every day. About 50 of them are Boeing 747 ("Jumbo Jets"), each loaded with 130 metric tons (about 160 m3) of kerosene. To carry the same amount of energy each Jumbo has to be loaded with 50 metric tons (because of the much lower density 720 m3) of liquid hydrogen. In total, 2,500 metric tons (36,000 m3) of liquid hydrogen are needed every day to serve the 50 Jumbo Jets. Also, about 22'500 m3 of water and the continuous output of 8 (eight!) 1 GW electric power plants are needed every day for hydrogen production, liquefaction, transport, storage and transfer. If all passenger planes leaving Frankfurt Airport would use hydrogen, about 25 full-size power plants had to be built. Also, the water consumption would be comparable to the water needs of the city of Frankfurt with (650 000 inhabitants). This simple example reveals that we urgently need a thorough discussion about a sustainable energy future. Visions and wishful thinking cannot provide lasting solutions. Energy problems are not solved by hydrogen visionaries.’ …They warn ‘Physical arguments speak against a hasty implementation of hydrogen as energy carrier. However, the laws of nature must be respected not only by scientists and engineers, but also by parliaments and political leaders. The future cannot be built on wishful visions.’http://www.efcf.com/e/media/ep050718.shtml

Is It Possible to Replace Declining Oil Production With Alterative Fuels?

No alternative fuel can fill such gaps. Biofuels will make a couple of percent at best. See the documentation prepared by the biofuels taskforce:http://www.dpmc.gov.au/biofuels/index.cfm

All Australian sugarcane distilled into ethanol will just yield 5 litres per week per car.http://www.pc.gov.au/inquiry/energy/subs/sub004appendices4-11.pdf.

A conversion to electric or hydrogen cars at a massive scale is completely unrealistic.In a seminar “Science on the way to the hydrogen economy”, at a Shine Dome Annual Symposium, Prof Trimm (“The hydrogen economy is a long way away”) calculated for a global hydrogen economy: “To achieve adequate supply of hydrogen we will need an extra 6,000 chemical plants. Alternatively 9,000 nuclear plants would be needed – and in the USA that means about one at every 100 kilometres around the coast – or about 220,000 square kilometres covered in solar cells.”http://www.science.org.au/sats2006/trimm.htm

In NSW we are already running out of cooling water for our dirty coal fired power plants and power shortages of -14% can be expected end of next year.

This comes from a report "Potential Drought Impact on Electricity Supplies in the NEM" which the MCE commissioned NEMMCO to provide in 2007. http://www.nemmco.com.au/nemgeneral/900-0001.htm

Our grid would collapse if any attempt were made to convert to electric cars in sizeable numbers even if they were available.

In order to get a feeling what it will mean to replace oil please visit this site:http://spectrum.ieee.org/jan07/4820/ncmo01

The world would need to build 52 nuclear power plants each year for 50 years to replace the world's annual crude production of 26 Gb ( = 1 cubic mile of oil).

Dr F E (Ted) Trainer, who researches limits to growth, sustainability, globalisation, and the environment, calculates:

There are difficulties and major costs in solar electricity. Let us assume: Sydney is to be supplied in winter by electricity from photovolltaic cells located in

the inland of Australia. Solar energy collected in winter 4.25 Watts per square metre per day.

Solar energy converted to electricity at 13% efficiency (typical figure for cells in the field today.)

Electricity converted to hydrogen for storage of the energy, at 70% efficiency.Assume 15% of stored energy lost in transmission of the energy from inland to Sydney.

Conversion of hydrogen delivered to Sydney back to electricity, via fuel cells that are 40% efficient

Overall energy efficiency of the system is .13x.7x.85x.4 = .029 i.e., about 3 %

Therefore one square metre of collector would deliver .03x4.252.kWh per day in winter, i.e.127 kilowatt-hours.Therefore a plant capable of delivering the electricity that a large coal or nuclear electricity generating plant delivers, i.e., 1000mW, (i.e.,1000x 1 million x 24 watt-hours per day) would have to have an area of 190 million square metres.(Note that electricity delivered when the sun is shining might not have to be transformed into hydrogen but might be delivered via high voltage lines. There would be losses but less than via hydrogen.)

Dollar costs.Present cost of photovoltaic panels is , approximately $5 per watt (wholesale). The other costs, e.g., including supports, wiring, installation ("balance of system" costs) are about $5 per watt. A panel delivers about 70 watts and is about .5 square metres. Thus present

plant cost is approximately 140Wx$10 = $1400 per square metre.Thus cost of 190 million square metres of PV collection area = $226 billion.However the cost of a 1000MW coal or nuclear power station plus fuel for 20 years would be about $2.8 billion. Thus the solar plant would cost about 100 times as much as a coal fired plant.

What difference might technical advance make?

Assume cell efficiency rises to 20%, and fuel cell efficiency rises to 60%, then overall system efficiency rises from 3% to 7%, i.e., multiplies by 2.1. Thus total cost of plant would fall to $115 billion.

One tonne of biomass (cellulosic material) will probably yield methanol equivalent to 150 l of petrol after processing and paying the energy cost of production. If Australia's present oil plus gas consumption (2500 PJ) were to be replaced by methanol from biomass,505 million tonnes of biomass would have to be harvested each year and processed. Yields per ha? Some crops grow at very high yields per ha (e.g., sugarcane grows at 60-70 t/ha/y) but the production of energy from biomass will require very large areas if this source is to be a major contributor. High yields are not likely from large areas.  Plantations might yield on average more than 7 t/ha/y, but native US forest growth averages 3t/ha/y. World native forest growth averages 1.5-2t/ha/y. Australian fodder, i.e., from cropland, averages 3.5 t/ha. If Australian yield over very large areas is assumed as (an implausibly high) 7t/ha/y3 t/ha/y, Australia would need to plant and continually harvest 70 m ha. All Australian forest is 41 million ha (harvested beyond sustainable rates, even though we only produce 2/3 our timber consumption.) All Australian cropland is 22 million ha. All our pasture is about 22 million ha. http://socialwork.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/06b-Limits-Long.html

Muschalik says “we'll be lucky if we can manage to set aside oil to run our essential services (including for agriculture) and provide enough power to run electric trains and replace our dirty coal fired power plants. It should be crystal clear that peak oil -  in combination with the limitations of using fossil fuels due to global warming - is the beginning of the end of using cars, trucks and planes the way we know it.”http://www.dpmc.gov.au/umpner/submissions/121_sub_umpner.pdfhttp://www.aph.gov.au/senate/Committee/rrat_ctte/oil_supply/submissions/sub69.pdf

"One key threat in relation to peak oil is an increase in the use of coal, tar sands, methane hydrates etc. The world does have considerable reserves of coal – at current rates of use the world has around 200 years’ reserves, the UK about 50 . But burning more coal will only add to greenhouse gases. Coal is more “carbon-intensive” than oil (ie releases about 13% more per unit of energy than oil), but the more important point is that coal’s current contribution of about 17% of UK energy is about the level to which we need to reduce greenhouse emissions. That is, if we stopped burning oil and gas but kept coal use at the present level, that would be about the level which the world could sustain. Worldwide coal accounts for about 25% of energy needs, which again is about right or possibly too high. (Also, of course, if we sought to use coal for all of our energy needs, the UK reserve would be exhausted in 10 years – and we shouldn’t expect anyone else to sell us theirs!).Oil recovered from tar sands is again more carbon-intensive, particularly because of the huge amounts of energy (currently natural gas) needed to extract it. Exploiting methane hydrates, proposed by some as a “magic-bullet” cure to the world’s energy shortage, could be catastrophic in terms of global warming...."http://www.eafl.org.uk/default.asp?topic=OilEnergy

How Vulnerable Is Australia To Petrol Prices?In an article “Shocking the Suburbs: Urban location, housing debt and oil vulnerability in the Australian City”, Jago Dodson & Neil Sipe from the Griffith University in Brisbane undertook a study of locational ‘vulnerability assessment for mortgage, petrol and inflation risks and expenses’ (VAMPIRE) to assess how potential adverse impacts from rising fuel costs would likely be distributed across Australian cities. The vulnerability index identifies areas of greatest risk, and conversely, those areas where the impacts of rising fuel costs are likely to be less extensive. In looking at Sydney they write,

“Sydney is structured around a central business district that is situated to the mid-south of the Sydney harbour. The urban area surrounding the CBD is extensive, and extends far to the north, west and south. Two urban corridors extend northwest and southwest. Like Brisbane, Sydney’s urban geography is strongly patterned in terms of mortgage and oil vulnerability, as revealed by our analysis (Figure 6). Two broad areas display low or moderate levels of vulnerability. These include an area broadly described as inner northern Sydney that extends from the harbour mouth in the inner northeast to a broad area from north of the CBD to Hornsby in the north. A further area of low vulnerability is apparent around and to the east of the Sydney CBD and this area also extends through the suburbs approximately 15 km south and west of the CBD. The highest concentration of low vulnerability is immediately around the Sydney CBD and North Sydney. Higher levels of mortgage and oil vulnerability are found in areas beyond 20 km from the Sydney CBD to the north, south and in particular to the west. This effect is particularly pronounced in the greater western Sydney region, from Baulkham Hills in the north of this region to south of the urban area, and in the south west and north west corridors. Sydney’s most concentrated areas of mortgage and oil vulnerability are located in the outer north and south of the western region. A higher proportion of households in these locations are likely to be at high social and financial risk from fuel and mortgage and price increases than elsewhere in the Sydney region.”http://www98.griffith.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/10072/11502/1/Dodson2006ShockingTheSuburbs_ATRF.pdf

The key point to note for Sydney is the divergence in private motor vehicle use betweenresidents of the city’s affluent inner and northern eastern suburbs and those in the middleand outer western areas. Private motor vehicles are used less and driven shorter distancesby households in Sydney’s east compared to those in the west and these patterns arediverging. Those in the west increased their daily travel distances by around 23 percentbetween 1991 and 2001, while daily kilometres of travel declined by 10 percent for thosein the east. More than 50 percent of eastern Sydney residents walk, cycle or use publictransport to get to work, compared to less than 25 percent in the city’s west.

The differences in motor vehicle use imply divergent capacity to absorb the impact ofrising transport energy costs. Households in inner areas with limited car dependence arealready insulated against rising petrol prices and can easily switch to alternative modes ifseeking further relief. In the outer suburbs where travel choices are much more constrained residents face much tougher travel and financial decisions when faced withrising fuel costs.

Dr Jago Dodson suggests that “greater public awareness of energy issues is becoming increasingly critical because we as a society are likely to face some important decisions about how we manage our economic and social affairs in relation to energy. It is also important that we fully comprehend energy issues in all their scope, not solely in terms of scientific or technical knowledge but in the broader context of our social, economic and environmental practices.”http://www.griffith.edu.au/centre/urp/urp_publications/presentations/Adelaide_Address_4_Web.pdf

Can Taxes Help Improve Signals to Businesses to Save Energy?Let us look at the fuel taxes that various countries pay according to the 2003 IEA data.

We can see that in industrialized countries like USA, Canada, and Australia have among the lowest taxes in the world.

European countries pay considerably more.

2003 Daily Gasoline Consumption Per Capita By Country.

Now, if we look at consumption, we find that the countries with the least tax seem to drive the most. The US, Canada, Australia, and Japan all consume high amounts per person per day. Mexico is a notable exception however it may be explained by not being as industrialised as the other top countries.

Here is a comparison of price per gallon in China, U.S, Brazil, U.K., and Norway.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121010625118671575.html

Kaufman and Cleveland argue that the market mechanisms will not receive adequate signals (resource price increases) in time to bring on alternative options to replace oil; they argue that depletion will not occur in an orderly and smooth pattern but will manifest itself via sharp rises in oil prices.http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/Committee/rrat_ctte/Oil_Supply/Submissions/sub96.pdf

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9430924

The cost of filling up a Honda Civic's 50-litre tank varies hugely around the world. Where some countries subsidise, others tax heavily. Pity Turkish drivers, who fork out $93.83, according to Gerhard Metschies in Foreign Policy magazine. Re-nationalised oil companies and heavy subsidies keep Venezuelan motorists happy, though those in Turkmenistan fare even better, paying only $1.06 a tank. Despite protests over rising prices, filling up in America is relatively cheap at $31.06. Indeed, this may explain the country's enormous daily petrol consumption, which in 2003 was more than the next 20 biggest consumers combined.

Peter Newman, Director of the Institute for Sustainability and Technology at Murdoch University, Perth and Chair of the Western Australian Sustainability Roundtable writes, “The car is the technology which involves the biggest number of employees, the highest advertising budget, the largest annual accidental death rate and the biggest contribution to global warming. How do you begin to approach managing something so popular and yet so destructive? There are three ways: technology (civilizing the car), economics (pricing it) and planning (reducing the need to travel and providing other options).”http://www.abc.net.au/science/explore/climatechange/experts/peternewman/http://www.newint.org/issue313/exit.htm

Transport price signals - Monitoring changes in European transport prices and charging policy in the framework of TERMhttp://reports.eea.europa.eu/technical_report_2004_3/en/Technical_report_3-2004_web.pdf

Does The Suburban Way of Life Have A Future?

The documentary film "The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream" produced by the Post-Carbon Institute (see www.postcarbon.org), explores why we need to adapt cities, transport choices and lifestyles to living with less and more expensive oil. 'End of Suburbia' is a thought-provoking documentary looking at how oil underpins suburban development and vulnerability to the approaching end of the era of cheap oil.http://www.envict.org.au/inform.php?menu=8&submenu=660&item=896

Thomas Wheeler, in his review of the documentary writes "The End of Suburbia" marshals an impressive array of evidence that the growing energy demands of the "American dream" in suburbia will eclipse our planet's ability to provide it. The suburban way of life will soon become economically and ecologically impossible to maintain. We will see the inevitable collapse of the suburban lifestyle and the end of the American Dream. And it will happen within our lifetimes. How bad will it get? Put it this way. We are looking at the mother of all downsizings. For those who are familiar with the issues of peak oil and resource depletion, the usual suspects are here. They include Richard Heinberg, Michael Klare, Matthew Simmons, Michael C. Ruppert, Julian Darley, Dr. Colin Campbell, and Kenneth Deffeyes, among others. All of these individuals provide valuable information and insights concerning the coming energy crisis and the impact it will have on the lives of people on the North American continent.

But the standout star of the film is author and critic of contemporary culture, James Howard Kunstler. The sometimes humorous and always entertaining presence of Kunstler is prominent throughout the documentary--and for good reason. He grabs your attention. He explains in refreshingly blunt, easy-to-comprehend language that suburbia is screwed. His undiluted, tell-it-like-it-is style is a potent mix of George Carlin humor and wit wrapped around an incisive Chomsky-like comprehension and understanding. With Kunstler you get an intellectually penetrating person armed with a functioning bullshit detector wrapped up in an intensely candid New York attitude. Kunstler has a blog on the web he calls "The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicles" (kunstler.com). Need I say more?

Kunstler calls the project of suburbia "the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world" and says "America has squandered its wealth in a living arrangement that has no future." You immediately get the idea he's not exactly a fan of suburbia. How and why did this happen?"The End of Suburbia" outlines the seemingly rational and logical impulse behind the project of suburbia, tracing the beginnings to the late 19th century when it was originally envisioned as an antidote to city life and an escape from the hideous aspects of industrialism. Modern suburbia traces its beginnings to just after World War II when the suburban project took off with a massive housing boom and the increasing dominance of the automotive industry. This car-centered suburban project ended up being the template for the massive development of the second half of the 20th century. That project was wrapped up, packaged, and sold to the American public as "The American Dream.""The End of Suburbia" points out that the rise of the suburbs was made possible by abundant and cheap oil. It allowed for the creation of a system of habitation where millions of people can live many miles away from where they work and where they shop for food and necessities. And there is no other form of living that requires more energy in order to function than suburbia. But the voracious and expanding energy needs of our industrial society, our insane consumer culture, and the affluent suburban lifestyles are brushing up against the disturbing reality of finite energy resources.

The biggest impact will be felt by those who currently live in the sprawling suburbs of North America. The end of cheap oil will signal the end of their way of life. Frankly, many of the things we take for granted will come to an end. "The End of Suburbia" makes clear that the effects of energy depletion go way beyond paying more at the pump. It will literally get down to the question of how you will feed yourself and your family.Although the documentary mostly avoids the gloom and doom of some peak oil theorists, it does occasionally touch on some of the darker aspects of fossil fuel depletion, notably how it will impact food production. The film briefly looks at the energy-intensive process needed to bring food to supermarkets. Our modern industrial agriculture relies heavily on petroleum for pesticides and natural gas for fertilizer, not to mention the energy used in planting, growing, harvesting, irrigating, packaging, processing and transporting the food. It stands to reason that if suburbia is going to collapse, it also means this centralized model of agriculture will collapse too.

"The End of Suburbia" shows how the suburban way of life has become normalized and reveals the enormous effort currently put forth to maintain it. On a foreign policy level, it means continued aggressive attempts to secure access to the remaining reserves of oil on the planet in order to prop up and maintain the increasingly dysfunctional and obscene suburban lifestyle. But "The End of Suburbia" makes it crystal clear that suburban living has very poor prospects for the future. Any attempt to maintain it will be futile. There will eventually be a great scramble to get out of the suburbs as the global oil crisis deepens and the property values of suburban homes plummet. Kunstler asserts that the suburbs will become "the slums of the future."

What about alternative sources of energy? "The End of Suburbia" points out that no combination of alternative fuels can run and maintain our current system as it is now.What about hydrogen, you ask? The film does a great job of shooting down the hysterical applause for hydrogen. The idea of a hydrogen economy is mostly fantasy. Hydrogen is not a form of energy. It is a form of energy storage. It takes more energy to make hydrogen than you actually get from hydrogen. Same with ethanol. It is a net energy loser. It takes more gasoline to create and fertilize the corn and convert it to alcohol than you get from burning it. When you look at all the conceivable alternatives the conclusion is there is no combination of any alternatives that will allow us to continue consuming the way we do.

What is in our future? The consensus is the suburbs will surely not survive the end of cheap oil and natural gas. In other words, the massive downscaling of America--voluntary or involuntary--will be the trend of the future. We are in for some profound changes in the 21st century. The imminent collapse of industrial civilization means we'll have to organize human communities in a much different fashion from the completely unsustainable, highly-centralized, earth-destroying, globalized system we have now. There will need to be a move to much smaller, human-scale, localized and decentralized systems that can sustain themselves within their own landbase. Industrial civilization and suburban living relies on cheap sources of energy to continue to grow and expand. That era is coming to an end. One of the most important tasks right now is to prepare for a very different way of life.

While "The End of Suburbia" doesn't provide any easy answers, it does provide a much-needed look at the reality of the situation many in North America will be facing in the coming years. For that reason, "The End of Suburbia" is one of the most important must-see documentaries of the year.

http://baltimorechronicle.com/080304ThomasWheeler.shtml

Can New Technology Make Civilisation Sustainable?

Politicians believe the solution to thermodynamic, or resource, limits is to become moreefficient. But the evidence from the recent past suggests that this does not happen in practice because the rate of efficiency seldom equals the overall rate of growth. Where significant advances do generate large efficiency gains the evidence from studies over thelast two centuries suggest that these efficiency savings just increase the rate of growth, and energy consumption. For example, Britain has become more efficient in its use of energy and resources since the 1950s, but in that time actual consumption has grown by a factor of two (or, if we take account of the change in efficiency, it's nearly a factor of four). There have been three major developments in the study of the conflict between growth and efficiency. They show that efficiency, against a background of economic growth, does not reduce consumption:

Jeavon's Paradox (1830s) – Jeavon discovered that more efficient stream engines led to more coal being used in more/larger engines; Rebound Effect (1960s) – the discovery by various economists that the financialbenefits of efficiency savings are re-spent buying more “stuff”, so re-consuming anysavings of energy or resources made by the efficiency measures;Khazzom-Brookes Postulate (1980s) – the greater efficiency, e.g. informationand communications technology, results in cheaper services and the greateruse/consumption of those services. For these reasons efficiency will never deliver a saving of energy or resources. In any case, the Second Law of Thermodynamics limits what efficiency measures can achieve, and how they operate over time:

Efficiency measures can only take place once – when the market has become saturatedwith an efficiency measure, e.g. an efficient fridge, there will be no further savings delivered (growth takes over again); and Each successive efficiency gain generally produces less of a saving than previous ones – this is because it becomes harder to save the same amount of energy with each improvement as the decline in the difference between the work done and the energy consumed creates a thermodynamic barrier to further reductions in consumption.If the measures that economists use to reconcile economic growth and Thermodynamics do not work, the only logical conclusion is that at some point economic growth must hit a ceiling, at which point it must cease – then the system will be forced to change.

The Earth does not have an inexhaustible supply of many other critical commodities – fuels/energy are just one of these limited resources. At the moment we are using energy to solve resource problems – by pumping water long distances, or ferrying wood and food around the globe. What Peak Energy means is that we just won't have thecheap, plentiful energy to do this any more. Eventually, one critical limit or another will be breached and we will be unable to compensate for this loss. The problem today is that energy depletion and climate change are accelerating this process by drawing thecritical limits – such as water, farmland or fish – ever tighter. At this point a collapse will be unavoidable. The only way to avoid an enforced contraction following overshoot is to begin, voluntarily, a growth must hit a ceiling, at which point it must cease – then the system will be forced to change.http://www.fraw.org.uk/download/ebo/08-limits_to_growth.pdf

An Interview with Dennis Meadows - co-author of ‘Limits to Growth’, Dennis says “There are 4 ways you respond to an energy shortage - deprivation, efficiency, alternative fuels, and cultural change. Overwhelmingly the most attractive options open to us are non-technical. They are ethical, cultural, social and psychological. Will we manage to do them? I don’t know about that, but my attitude is acknowledge the problem, start doing those things you can do technically to cope with it, being careful not to take technical solutions that will damage the environment, and cause a lot more damage through conflict and income distribution, things like that, and then get busy with the social, cultural and psychological change which is where the real solutions lie. Can you support 6 billion people on this planet under any circumstances? I’m not sure, but certainly not with our current culture we can’t.”http://transitionculture.org/?p=457

Hailed as the philosopher poet of the ecological movement, best-selling author Derrick Jensen returns with a passionate forecast of how industrial civilization, and the persistent and widespread violence it requires, is unsustainable. Jensen's intricate weaving together of history, philosophy, environmentalism, economics, literature and psychology has produced a powerful argument that demands attention in the tradition of such important books as Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization and Brigid Brophy's Black Ship to Hell. In Volume I: The Problem of Civilization, Jensen lays out a series of provocative premises, including “Civilization is not and can never be sustainable” and “Love does not imply pacifism.” He vividly imagines an end to technologized, industrialized civilization and a return to agragrian communal life. If Volume I lays insightful framework for envisioning a sustainable way of life, Volume II: Resistance catapults this discussion into a passionate call for action. Using his premises as guidelines for exploring real-world problems, Jensen guides us toward concrete solutions by focusing on our most primal human desire: to live on a healthy earth overflowing with uncut forests, clean rivers, and thriving oceans that are not under the constant threat of being destroyed.http://www.endgamethebook.org/

Endgame – Volume II begins with 20 premises. Here are a few:

Premise One: Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization.

Premise Two: Traditional communities do not often voluntarily give up or sell the resources on which their communities are based until their communities have been destroyed. They also do not willingly allow their landbases to be damaged so that other resources – gold, oil, and so on – can be extracted. It follows that those who want the resources will do what they can to destroy traditional communities.

Premise Three: Our way of living – industrial civilization – is based on, required, and would collapse very quickly without persistent and widespread violence.

Premise Six: Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilisation will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilisation, and probably the planet) collapses. The effects of this degradation will continue to harm humans and nonhumans for a very long time.

Premise Seven: The longer we wait for civilisation to crash – or the longer we wait before we ourselves bring it down – the messier the crash will be, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who live during it, and for those who come after it.

Premise Eight: The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system. Another way to put Premise Eight: Any economic or social system that does not benefit the natural communities on which it is based is unsustainable, immoral, and stupid. Sustainability, morality, and intelligence (as well as justice) require the dismantling of any such economic or social system, or at the very least disallowing it from damaging out landbase.

Premise Ten: The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.

Other great reviews of his books and comments about the author can be found on Amazon.

One reviewer wrote, “Jensen believes "this culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living." Civilization, he says in volume II, is killing the planet, so "civilization needs to be brought down now." Jensen dwells through several chapters on the need to destroy tens of thousands of river dams, whether with pickaxe-wielding citizen armies or through the use of well-placed explosive charges; other chapters consider how simple it would be to paralyze the American capitalist system if small activist cells were to disrupt railway, highway, pipeline and other elements of commercial infrastructure.”http://www.amazon.com/Endgame-Problem-Civilization-Derrick-Jensen/dp/158322730X

In an article “Techno-Fix And Sustainability: Grappling With illusions”, Milo Clark, a writer and researcher focused on strategic issues, argues on Swans that there are two major illusions clouding our judgement. “One says we'll figure out technologies to fix things -- Techno-fix. The other says we'll figure out how to work with it or to restore balances -- Sustainability. Both assume we can fix what we have already done, are doing or will do.”

“All the techno-fix strategies are substitution strategies. All sustainability strategies are also substitution strategies. Substituting reprocessed used cooking oils for diesel fuel substitutes only one tiny component of the overall system which produces and runs the vehicle. Substituting hydrogen or hybrid technologies similarly deals only with small components of a very complex, very global extractive and earth exploitive system.

Whether hybrid, hydrogen or hallucination drives our techno-fix transportation, the vehicles involved continue to use and to expand use of metals and other irreplaceable or non-biodegradable materials. Lighter bodies and engine blocks use aluminium which is produced by horrendous amounts of electricity. More sophisticated technologies require more exotic metals, whether platinum or palladium used in catalytic converters, or others needed for hybrid or hydrogen systems. Anything dug out of earth anywhere reduces the amount of that resource available later.

A simple formula for minimally exploitive systems reads: Use local resources processed by local people primarily for local uses in ways which generate surpluses for local reinvestment. With this litmus test, any system can be tested. Every one will flunk, even rigorous Permaculture.”http://www.swans.com/library/art10/mgc125.html

Net Energy Analysis with EROI

One technique for evaluating the costs of energy systems is net energy analysis, which compares the quantity of energy delivered to society by an energy system to the energy used directly and indirectly in the delivery process, a quantity called the energy return on investment (EROI).

Biophysical and ecological economists argue that net energy analysis has several advantages over standard economic analysis. First, net energy analysis assesses the change in the physical scarcity of energy resources, and therefore is immune to the effects of market imperfections that distort monetary data. Second, because goods and services are produced from the conversion of energy into useful work, net energy is a measure of the potential to do useful work in economic systems. Third, EROI can be used to rank alternative energy supply technologies according to their potential abilities to do useful work in the economy.

The overall decline in the EROI for petroleum extraction in the U.S. suggests thatdepletion has raised the energy costs of extraction. This is generally consistent with the overall pattern of oil extraction, i.e., both extraction and the EROI for extraction show a decline since the early 1970s. There is no single measure of the quality of the oil and gas resource, but a number of such indicators describe its physical deterioration. These include a decline in field size, depletion of natural drive mechanisms, and more enhanced oil recovery that is extremely energy intensive. To the extent that the EROI does reflect the scarcity of petroleum in some meaningful way, then energy quality is an important consideration. The ultimate limit to an energy resource’s usefulness to society is the energy break-even point, i.e., where the energy delivered to society is equaled by the energy used in the delivery process. But not all “units” of energy are equally useful to society, particularly in regards to their ability to perform specific tasks in the production of goods and services. A more appropriate indicator is a quality-corrected EROI that reflects the net availability of energy to actually produce goods and services that reflects choices people make about how to use energy. These choices are based on perceived differences in what Zirnkau et al. call the form-value of different energy types. The quality-corrected EROI is consistently lower than the uncorrected version. This suggests that in a more meaningful economic sense, petroleum I more scare than we might otherwise think. It also suggests that the transition to alternative energy sources, which is driven in part by the scarcity of conventional fuels, may be triggered sooner than is suggested by conventional net energy analyses. http://www.bu.edu/cees/people/faculty/cutler/articles/Net_%20Energy_US_Oil_gas.pdfhttp://www.eoearth.org/article/Net_energy_analysis

Will We Have To Rethink Our Current Economic System In a Low-Energy World?

In an article called “Can Peak Oil Save Us?” on a website “Eat the State - A Forum For Anti-Authoritarian Political Opinion, Research And Humor”, Colin Wright says “The biggest challenge may be convincing people that our current economic system, after a century of state and corporate propaganda, is not the only option. In fact, I would argue that the current system is one which supported a growing population and a growing GDP during the up phase of the energy curve. (And that is why the working classes went along with it, bought off with the trickle-downs.) In a world of diminishing energy, we will need to rethink our economy--and that implies our relations to one another. Peak Oil will provide us with that opportunity, perhaps sooner than we expect.”

Over 70 years ago, in a country using little oil, Bertrand Russell wrote in In Praise of Idleness that we could meet all our needs with less than four hours of work per dayhttp://eatthestate.org/11-14/CanPeakOil.htm

In an article called ‘The Global Economy: A Flawed Ecosystem’, Louis Michon, a professional communicator working for the Canadian Space Agency writes “In his work entitled Living Systems (1978), researcher James Grier Miller of the University of California establishes a hierarchy of the planet’s living systems. From living cells to human groups to supranational systems, Miller shows the structural continuity between living organisms, ecosystems and human society. Humanity, its infrastructures and its activities, in short the global economy, form a vast system fuelled by a measurable quantity of energy, matter, time and information, just as ecosystems.Natural systems are wonders of balance and stability resulting from millions of years of evolution. The global economy, which is barely 500 years old, has not achieved this level of refinement. Our economic system is embryonic and unrealistic, with a goal to achieve continual growth rather than balance. Growth creates wealth, but it can also result in major social and ecological imbalance.” […] “In today’s world, promoting uncontrolled economic growth is also a matter of greed. Achieving wealth is much easier in a booming economic system than in a stable one. But as capital flows in the same way as fluids, increased wealth entails loss somewhere else in the system. The impoverishment of the world’s poorest populations, national debt and the devastation of ecosystems are the direct consequences of unsustainable development and unrestrained growth. Ecosystems are more sustainable than the economy because their growth potential is finite. No ecological system has developed to the point of swallowing up all others. The limited lifespan of living beings, adaptation to a specific environment (water, desert or other), dependence on light, and geographical distance are all factors that limit the expansion of ecological systems. Constant growth is by definition unsustainable. Ecosystems maintain their stability by recycling most of the energy and matter they use, allowing only diversity and complexity to grow. Uncontrolled economic growth benefits mostly the rich. By upholding major differences between the energy use, material consumption, infrastructures and population density of rich and poor regions of the world, growth breeds inequality.” […] “Growth also leads to the concentration of economic activities in time and space, resulting in agriculture, industrialization and urbanization that are intensive and polluting. Rich nations have consumed a disproportionate quantity of matter and energy over the past few centuries. They have also polluted a large portion of the earth’s land, air and oceans. If excessive growth is one of the causes of unsustainable development, its main indicator is pollution. Here again, greed is the culprit. To save on production costs, the private sector often

transfers waste and toxic materials into the environment—where they become anonymous and collectively owned. Obviously, it is more profitable for polluters to let the community and future generations pay for the clean-up.” […]

“In the economic system, pollution and unsustainable activities relate to incomplete equations. Truncated equations allow producers to hide costs, which they otherwise would have to transfer to consumers or pay themselves.” […]

“In a sustainable development context, all inputs and outputs, whether matter, energy, time or knowledge, must be calculated. Sustainable development also requires that the entire biosphere and several generations to come be taken into account when calculating the societal cost-benefit ratio of both private and public economic decisions. In 1920, in The Economics of Welfare, British economist A.C. Pigou formulated an economic model by which all social costs were included in the market prices. More recently, in his acclaimed essay The Ecology of Commerce, American author Paul Hawken demonstrates how toxic and non-sustainable our present economy is. He proposes a form of industrial ecology, based on the market economy and on the private sector, to foster sustainable development.”http://www1.worldbank.org/devoutreach/fall02/textonly.asp?id=177

How Will Peak Oil Affect Food Supply?

Jeremy Leggett, author of Half Gone (titled The Empty Tank in the US), makes the following points: A quarter of the US’s daily need for oil (five million barrels) comes from the highly volatile Middle East. “The US government could wipe out the need for all their five million barrels, and staunch the flow of much blood in the process, by requiring its domestic automobile industry to increase the fuel efficiency of autos and light trucks by a mere 2.7 miles per gallon.” Instead, between 1987 and 2001, US average US vehicle fuel efficiency fell by 1.8 miles per gallon, noting that during the period 1975 to 2003 SUV market share grew from 2% to 24%. And what’s this to do with our food supply? Jeremy cites National Geo as estimating you could drive a car from LA to NYC on the oil required to farm and bring to market just one cow. This is not to say we don’t need an economy based on oil. No, the Soil Association also include a calculation from the Irish organisation the Foundation foe the Economics of Sustainability or Feasta who suggest that a 40 litre (11 gallon) fill-up at a petrol (gasoline) station is the equivalent of about four years of human manual work and therefore “a human-muscle-power-based economy would therefore be between seventy and a hundred times less productive than the present fossil-fuel powered one.” http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/05/jeremy_leggett_1.php

The dominant models of intensive agriculture and the global food trade depend on vast inputs of oil. In a post peak oil world, the combination of higher transport costs, climate change and increased conflict will necessitate us all relying far more on re-localised food supplies. Even though it requires far lower amounts of oil, organic farming is not exempt from the need to adapt.http://www.soilassociation.org.uk/web/sa/saweb.nsf/ed0930aa86103d8380256aa70054918d/782258a29fab0530802571960046dd25!OpenDocument

How Will Climate Change Affect Food Supply?

Lester Brown says "Recent research at the International Rice Research Institute looking at the precise relationship between temperature and crop yields indicates that each 1°C rise in temperature above the optimum during the growing season leads to a 10 percent decline in grain yields—wheat, rice, and corn. Those results have been confirmed by crop ecologists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Falling water tables and rising temperatures are two of the key reasons why the world grain harvest has not increased at all over the last eight years". “Within the next few years, rising food prices may be the first global economic indicator to signal serious trouble in the relationship between us now, 6.3 billion, and the Earth's natural systems and resources on which we depend”http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/worldbalance/voic-brow.html

And, he adds, there is an 'even more troubling limit - the physiological capacity of existing crop varieties to use fertilizer'. As more and more artificial nutrients are added, a law of diminishing returns sets in until they fail to bring any meaningful rise in production. This is the 'principal explanation' for the recent stagnation in yields. http://www.unep.org/OurPlanet/imgversn/84/brown.html

An internet site that promotes environmental vegetarianism says "An average 25000 litres of water are needed to produce 1 kg of beef. For 1 kg tomatoes 290 litres are needed and for 1kg soya beans 4800 litres. It is worth noting that soya beans contain more protein than beef."

http://www.futurefood.org/globalbenefits/environment_en.php

How Will Climate Change Affect Electricity Production?

Mother nature’s self-regulating system is already directly reducing the supply of electricity through coal by reducing the water supply available for cooling the power stations in some parts of Australia. It seems our planet is trying to scale back our energy and resource hungry economy and it should be seen as a wake-up call to humanity. This may be the last warning before we reach a tipping point, if it has not been reached already. “The Revenge of Gaia” that James Lovelock speaks about is close ahead. It may require a radical change in the whole way our society is politically and economically organised.

Rio Tinto will cut 160 contractor and employee jobs at the mine over the next two months. If irrigators were to be cut off from water supplies after June 30 it would be economically devastating to the 50,000 farmers in the basin, who accounts for about 41% of Australia’s agricultural output, 90% of the country’s irrigated crops and $22 billion worth of agricultural exports. The resulting cutback in crops for domestic supply would cause massive direct and indirect job losses in the basin’s towns and in the country’s food-processing industries, and a possible four-fold increase in retail food prices across Australia.http://www.greenleft.org.au/2007/711/36915

Coal and hydro power generation require very large amounts of water, and the Snowy scheme depends on it for 86 per cent of its generation capacity. The head of the CSIRO's Australian climate change science program, Paul Holper, said: "Lack of water could become a problem for power generation. "You've got to find a supply of water to set aside for power generation, but there is already a shortage of water for agriculture. So this is going to become more of a problem."The stock market has already sent an alarm signal. The price of electricity futures has almost doubled so far this year.In January the price of a megawatt hour for delivery to NSW in 2008 was $38. This week the price rose to just over $72, a 90 per cent rise in less than five months. The electricity price in Queensland has more than doubled. The volume of trading in electricity futures has roughly quadrupled this year.According to a market assessment from the Sydney Futures Exchange, it ranks as one of the biggest commodity price increases ever seen, and is not driven by market speculation but is caused by the convergence of several negative trends, dominated by the water shortage.http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,21758983-1702,00.html

Greenpeace energy campaigner Mark Wakeham said the five power stations in the Latrobe Valley used the equivalent of almost a third of Melbourne's total water use."This week it was reported that three Latrobe Valley coal-fired power stations — Loy Yang A, Loy Yang B and Yallourn — are using 96.5 billion litres of water a year at a subsidised cost," he said. "The decision to invest Victorians' money in a new coal-fired power station, which will fuel climate change, was a bad one but is one that can be reversed given that no approvals have been granted and no contracts signed."The calls come after Rio Tinto said this week that water shortages meant it would have to halve production of coal-fired energy and cut 160 jobs at its Tarong mine in Queensland.http://www.theage.com.au/news/business/green-groups-fear-water-going-up-in-steam/2007/05/17/1178995324339.html

NSW Greens MP John Kaye said the NSW Government should abandon any idea of building another coal-fired power station, after it last week commissioned an inquiry into the construction of a new plant. "NSW and the eastern seaboard of Australia faces

brownouts, largely because many of the state's coal-fired power stations are running out of water," he said. "Building another coal burner would only increase our vulnerability to droughts and increase the risk of electricity brownouts because of water shortages." Some energy experts believe NSW will face power brownouts next year, because its main emergency generator, the water-powered turbines of the Snowy Hydro, may have to sit idle as dams drop to record lows. The NSW Government is apparently contemplating how it can guarantee baseload capacity, without privatising the rest of the electricity industry. Dr Kaye said renewable energy technologies and energy efficiency would continue to operate through droughts and reduce the risks of brownouts. Wind generation, solar photo-voltaic panels and energy efficiency took almost no water to operate while hot rocks geothermal, biomass and solar thermal used some but could be designed to be less thirsty than coal, he said.Greens leader Bob Brown said 30 per cent of the eastern seaboard's energy need could be met with better efficiencies and renewable energies that didn't need water. "What we are seeing here is that the very core of the climate change problem, burning coal, is now being hit itself by climate change," Senator Brown said. http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21758983-31037,00.html

Nuclear power engineer Professor John Price of Monash University in Melbourne says "gigantic" amounts of water are required to cool a nuclear power station."I'm talking about tonnes per second," says Price, who has designed nuclear power stations in the UK. According to the taskforce, headed by nuclear physicist Dr Ziggy Switkowski, nuclear power plants are less efficient than coal-fired plants and thus require more cooling. One estimate, from a recent report to the Queensland government, suggests a 1400 megawatt nuclear power station would use around 25 gigalitres of water a year.This is about 1.26 times the water used by an equivalent coal-fired power station, says the report by Dr Ian Rose of Roam Consulting, a Queensland-based company with expertise in energy modelling.http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/2006/1794871.htm

Senator Brown states that both the Howard Coalition nor Rudd Labor will tackle our biggest cause of climate change – burning coal. Both the parties support burning more, not less. “This is an extreme position considering the massive economic and environmental crisis the world is facing. The nation should rapidly transform to being the world’s largest exporter of solar power technology, other renewable energy options and energy efficiency technology – creating thousands of jobs and a multi-billion dollar export income in tandem with the replacement of coal,” Senator Brown said. “Australia can no longer put its head in the sand. Even if we do nothing to phase out coal exports, our customers will. The Europeans are already talking about sanctions and restrictions on coal imports. The issue is not just what we think the future of coal is, but what our customers think the future is. Business in Europe is not going to accept the Australian government freeloading with coal,” Senator Brown said. http://webdiary.com.au/cms/?q=node/1839/print

The MIT report into the future of coal clearly outlines the size of the problem. It says fossil fuel sources today account for 80 per cent of world energy demand, with coal representing 25 per cent, gas 21 per cent, petroleum 34 per cent and nuclear power 6.5 per cent. Only 0.4 per cent is met by renewable sources of energy such as geothermal, solar and wind. http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21476590-7583,00.html

In the end, we'll see that renewable energies will be cheaper, easier and faster to implement and with less risk. We are now wasting precious time by assuming that the concept of "clean coal" will allow us to continue business as usual.

Is The Planetary Situation Urgent?

Ross Gelbspan, a 30-year-journalist, is author of The Heat Is On (1998) and Boiling Point (2004), believes so. He explains, “Planetary changes which were supposed to occur toward the end of the century, according to scientific computer models, are actually happening today. Dr. Paul Epstein, a leading climate researcher at Harvard Medical School, citing the rapid intensification of storms around the world, said: "We are seeing [storm] impacts today that were previously projected to occur in 2080." Other examples include:  * The Greenland ice sheet, one of the largest glaciers on the planet, is melting from above and losing its stability as meltwater from the surface trickles down and lubricates the bedrock on which the ice sheet sits. Should that ice sheet slide into the ocean, it would raise sea levels on the order of 20 feet. The rate of sea level rise has already doubled in the last decade as a result of melting glaciers and the thermal expansion of warming oceans. * The proportion of severely destructive hurricanes that have reached category 4 and 5 intensity has doubled in the past thirty years, fueled by rising surface water temperatures. * Oceans are becoming acidified from the fallout of our fossil fuel emissions. The ph level of the world's oceans has changed more in the last 100 years than it did in the previous 10,000 years. Those troubling signals are made all the more disturbing by the fact that climate change does not necessarily follow a linear, incremental trajectory.  As the climate system crosses invisible thresholds, it is capable of large-scale, unpredictable leaps. "[T]here are tipping points out there that could be passed before we're halfway through the century," said Tim Lenton, an earth systems modeller at Britain's University of East Anglia. That reality is compounded by the fact that carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas, stays in the atmosphere for at least 100 years. Some of the impacts that are surfacing today were likely triggered by carbon emitted in the 1980s, before the recent burst of carbon-powered development in China, India, Mexico, Nigeria and other developing countries. And then there is the problem of "feedback loops," which means that small changes caused by warming can trigger other much larger changes.           For example, the Siberian and Alaskan tundras, which for centuries absorbed carbon dioxide and methane, are now thawing and releasing those gases back into the atmosphere.  A rapid release of greenhouse gases from these regions could trigger a spike in warming.          Scientists recently detected a weakening of the flow of ocean currents in the Atlantic basin because of an infusion of freshwater from melting sea ice and glaciers. At a certain point, they say, the change in salinity and water density could change the direction of ocean currents, leading to much more bitter and severe winters in northern Europe and North America.

http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=5896&method=full

James Lovelock, 84-year-old scientific originator of the Gaia Hypothesis says that because of human interference, Earth can no longer maintain the homeostasis resulting from the counterbalancing of chemistries exuded by all life-forms: “What makes global warming so serious and so urgent is that the great Earth system, Gaia, is trapped in a vicious circle of positive feedback. Extra heat from any source, whether from greenhouse gases, the disappearance of Arctic ice or the Amazon forest, is amplified, and its effects are more than additive. It is almost as if we had lit a fire to keep warm, and failed to notice, as we piled on fuel, that the fire was out of control and the furniture had ignited. When that happens, little time is left to put out the fire before it consumes the house. Global warming, like a fire, is accelerating and almost no time is left to act. “We do not have 50 years; the Earth is already so disabled by the insidious poison of greenhouse gases that even if we stop all fossil fuel burning immediately, the consequences of what we have already done will last for 1,000 years. Every year that we continue burning carbon makes it worse for our descendants and for civilization.”http://www.willthomas.net/Convergence/Weekly/Global_Warming.htm

Can We Believe Climate Skeptics?

George Monbiot, who has received the United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement, explains that "Climate change denial has gone through four stages. First the fossil fuel lobbyists told us that global warming was a myth. Then they agreed that it was happening, but insisted it was a good thing: we could grow wine in the Pennines and take Mediterranean holidays in Skegness. Then they admitted that the bad effects outweighed the good ones, but claimed that it would cost more to tackle than to tolerate. Now they have reached stage 4. They concede that it would be cheaper to address than to neglect, but maintain that it's now too late. This is their most persuasive argument." http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1574003,00.html

Monbiot says we must be extremely wary of the groups and self-appointed experts campaigning against “risk-aversion” or “compensation culture” or “junk science” or “eco-fascism”. The chances are that someone is paying them to do it.

In and interview with Time, James Hansen said of climate deniers “Incredibly, there are still staunch deniers who would prefer to listen to a science fiction writer [Michael Crichton, author of "State of Fear," which challenges global warming science] rather than a real scientist. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the strongest deniers among the politicians have connections to the fossil fuel industry.”http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1176828,00.html

It is true that you can find lines of evidence which appear to support global warming critics and, in most cases, professors who will speak up in their favour. But this does not mean that any of them are correct. You can sustain a belief in these propositions only by ignoring the overwhelming body of data and science.

"Climate sceptics in Australia function to promulgate these essentially dodgy kinds of studies. And I don't think that is too strong language to say they are dodgy," says Dr James Risbey, a climatologist at Monash University's School of Mathematical Sciences.http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/11/26/1101219743320.html

What TV Channels May Show Documentaries With Evidence of Global Warming?

Watch PBS, Nova, Frontline, The Discovery Channel, National Geographics, and Animal Planet. Hardly a week goes by that one of these channels does not show evidence of global warming. Most of these programs are not even about global warming, but the evidence is there for all to see.