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Global Warming's Impacts Have Sped Up, Worsened Since Kyoto

2009-11-22T22:59:04Z

WASHINGTON — Since the 1997 international accord to fight global warming, climate change has worsened and accelerated – beyond some of the grimmest of warnings made back then.

As the world has talked for a dozen years about what to do next, new ship passages opened through the once frozen summer sea ice of the Arctic. In Greenland and Antarctica, ice sheets have lost trillions of tons of ice. Mountain glaciers in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa are shrinking faster than before.

And it's not just the frozen parts of the world that have felt the heat in the dozen years leading up to next month's climate summit in Copenhagen:

_The world's oceans have risen by about an inch and a half.

_Droughts and wildfires have turned more severe worldwide, from the U.S. West to Australia to the Sahel desert of North Africa.

_Species now in trouble because of changing climate include, not just the lumbering polar bear which has become a symbol of global warming, but also fragile butterflies, colorful frogs and entire stands of North American pine forests.

_Temperatures over the past 12 years are 0.4 of a degree warmer than the dozen years leading up to 1997.

Even the gloomiest climate models back in the 1990s didn't forecast results quite this bad so fast.

"The latest science is telling us we are in more trouble than we thought," said Janos Pasztor, climate adviser to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

And here's why: Since an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas pollution was signed in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, the level of carbon dioxide in the air has increased 6.5 percent. Officials from across the world will convene in Copenhagen next month to seek a follow-up pact, one that President Barack Obama says "has immediate operational effect ... an important step forward in the effort to rally the world around a solution."

The last effort didn't quite get the anticipated results.

From 1997 to 2008, world carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have increased 31 percent; U.S. emissions of this greenhouse gas rose 3.7 percent. Emissions from China, now the biggest producer of this pollution, have more than doubled in that time period. When the U.S. Senate balked at the accord and President George W. Bush withdrew from it, that meant that the top three carbon polluters – the U.S., China and India – were not part of the pact's emission reductions. Developing countries were not covered by the Kyoto Protocol and that is a major issue in Copenhagen.

And the effects of greenhouse gases are more powerful and happening sooner than predicted, scientists said.

"Back in 1997, the impacts (of climate change) were underestimated; the rate of change has been faster," said Virginia Burkett, chief scientist for global change research at the U.S. Geological Survey.

That last part alarms former Vice President Al Gore, who helped broker a last-minute deal in Kyoto.

"By far the most serious differences that we've had is an acceleration of the crisis itself," Gore said in an interview this month with The Associated Press.

In 1997, global warming was an issue for climate scientists, environmentalists and policy wonks. Now biologists, lawyers, economists, engineers, insurance analysts, risk managers, disaster professionals, commodity traders, nutritionists, ethicists and even psychologists are working on global warming.

"We've come from a time in 1997 where this was some abstract problem working its way around scientific circles to now when the problem is in everyone's face," said Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria climate scientist.

The changes in the last 12 years that have the scientists most alarmed are happening in the Arctic with melting summer sea ice and around the world with the loss of key land-based ice masses. It's all happening far faster than predicted.

Back in 1997 "nobody in their wildest expectations," would have forecast the dramatic sudden loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic that started about five years ago, Weaver said. From 1993 to 1997, sea ice would shrink on average in the summer to about 2.7 million square miles. The average for the last five years is less than 2 million square miles. What's been lost is the size of Alaska.

Antarctica had a slight increase in sea ice, mostly because of the cooling effect of the ozone hole, according to the British Antarctic Survey. At the same time, large chunks of ice shelves – adding up to the size of Delaware – came off the Antarctic peninsula.

While melting Arctic ocean ice doesn't raise sea levels, the melting of giant land-based ice sheets and glaciers that drain into the seas do. Those are shrinking dramatically at both poles.

Measurements show that since 2000, Greenland has lost more than 1.5 trillion tons of ice, while Antarctica has lost about 1 trillion tons since 2002, according to two scientific studies published this fall. In multiple reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, scientists didn't anticipate ice sheet loss in Antarctica, Weaver said. And the rate of those losses is accelerating, so that Greenland's ice sheets are melting twice as fast now as they were just seven years ago, increasing sea level rise.

Worldwide glaciers are shrinking three times faster than in the 1970s and the average glacier has lost 25 feet of ice since 1997, said Michael Zemp, a researcher at World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich.

"Glaciers are a good climate indicator," Zemp said. "What we see is an accelerated loss of ice."

Also, permafrost – the frozen northern ground that oil pipelines are built upon and which traps the potent greenhouse gas methane – is thawing at an alarming rate, Burkett said.

Another new post-1997 impact of global warming has scientists very concerned. The oceans are getting more acidic because more of the carbon dioxide in the air is being absorbed into the water. That causes acidification, an issue that didn't even merit a name until the past few years.

More acidic water harms coral, oysters and plankton and ultimately threatens the ocean food chain, biologists say.

In 1997, "there was no interest in plants and animals" and how they are hampered by climate change, said Stanford University biologist Terry Root. Now scientists are talking about which species can be saved from extinction and which are goners. The polar bear became the first species put on the federal list of threatened species and the small rabbit-like American pika may be joining it.

More than 37 million acres of Canadian and U.S. pine forests have been damaged by beetles that don't die in warmer winters. And in the U.S. West, the average number of acres burned per fire has more than doubled.

The Colorado River reservoirs, major water suppliers for the U.S. West, were nearly full in 1999, but by 2007 half the water was gone after the region endured the worst multiyear drought in 100 years of record-keeping.

Insurance losses and blackouts have soared and experts say global warming is partly to blame. The number of major U.S. weather-related blackouts from 2004-2008 were more than seven times higher than from 1993-1997, said Evan Mills, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

"The message on the science is that we know a lot more than we did in 1997 and it's all negative," said Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. "Things are much worse than the models predicted."

___

On the Net:

U.S. government's 2009 report on climate change impacts: http://tinyurl.com/usimpacts

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 report on changes already observed:

http://tinyurl.com/worldimpacts

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate change: http://unfccc.int

David Barr's Antarctica: Leopard Seal, Elephant Seal and Penguins (PHOTOS)

2009-11-22T15:52:59Z

David Barr specializes in taking photographs underwater and in Antarctica.

From taking photos of dangerous leopard seals underwater to the whole fields filled with penguins, Barr seeks adventure with the use of his photographic lens.

Check out these incredible shots of Barr's time in Antarctica! Don't forget to vote for your very favorite.

All photos are copyright David Barr. For more amazing photography from David Barr, click here.

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Al Gore On "Saturday Night Live:" "I'm Just Going To Start Acting Crazy"

2009-11-22T15:36:09Z

This week on Saturday Night Live, Al Gore appeared with Seth Meyers on Weekend Update for a hilarious segment for NBC's Green Week. He announces that he's come up with a new tactic for getting people to care about green issues, which is to start acting crazy. One idea he has is to tape toy guns to trees so politicians know that the forest is coming to get them.

WATCH:

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Sacramento Fisherman Arrested In Sea Lion Shooting

2009-11-22T07:39:13Z

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Authorities arrested a Sacramento fisherman Saturday in connection to shooting a sea lion in the head.

California game wardens said they arrested Larry Allen Legans, 43, on misdemeanor charges of animal cruelty, negligent discharge of a firearm, and take of a marine mammal. Legans told authorities he grew tired of competing with the protected animals so he fired his 12-gauge shotgun at the sea lion, injuring the creature.

"He said he was tired of watching sea lions take his fish," said Warden Patrick Foy.

About a half-dozen sea lions have started to spend time farther up the Sacramento River, competing with anglers for fish as far inland as Rio Vista, just southwest of Sacramento.

An injured sea lion was first spotted on a dock in Sacramento on Nov. 12 with a wound near its right eye. A witness told authorities Legans fired on the sea lion a day earlier when it surfaced in the river near Verona.

Authorities arrested Legans at his home Saturday morning after the witness reported the suspect's license plate number to them. They recovered a shotgun from Legans' home during the arrest.

Foy said Legans has since admitted to the shooting. He allegedly told a fisherman in another boat that he "may not want to watch this," before loading the shotgun.

The animal has not been spotted since Nov. 12, but officials expect it to survive because sea lions tend to have thick skulls. Sea lions are protected by the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act.

There was no telephone number listed for Legans.

EPA: Uranium From Polluted British Petroleum Mine Found In Nevada Water Wells

2009-11-21T22:04:41Z

YERINGTON, Nev. — Peggy Pauly lives in a robin-egg blue, two-story house not far from acres of onion fields that make the northern Nevada air smell sweet at harvest time.

But she can look through the window from her kitchen table, just past her backyard with its swingset and pet llama, and see an ominous sign on a neighboring fence: "Danger: Uranium Mine."

For almost a decade, people who make their homes in this rural community in the Mason Valley 65 miles southeast of Reno have blamed that enormous abandoned mine for the high levels of uranium in their water wells.

They say they have been met by a stone wall from state regulators, local politicians and the huge oil company that inherited the toxic site – BP PLC. Those interests have insisted uranium naturally occurs in the region's soil and there's no way to prove that a half-century of processing metals at the former Anaconda pit mine is responsible for the contamination.

That has changed. A new wave of testing by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has found that 79 percent of the wells tested north of the World War II-era copper mine have dangerous levels of uranium or arsenic or both that make the water unsafe to drink.

And, more importantly to the neighbors, that the source of the pollution is a groundwater plume that has slowly migrated from the 6-square-mile mine site.

The new samples likely never would have been taken if not for a whistleblower, a preacher's wife, a tribal consultant and some stubborn government scientists who finally helped crack the toxic mystery that has plagued this rural mining and farming community for decades.

"They have completely ruined the groundwater out here," said Pauly, the wife of a local pastor and mother of two girls who organized a community action group five years to seek the truth about the pollution.

"It almost sounds like we are happy the contamination has moved off the site," she said. "But what we are happy about is ... they have enough data to now answer our questions."

"Prior to this, we didn't really have an understanding of where water was moving," said Steve Acree, a highly regarded hydrogeologist for the EPA in Oklahoma, who was brought in to examine the test results. "My interpretation at this stage of the process is yes, you now have evidence of mine-impacted groundwater."

The tests found levels of uranium more than 10 times the legal drinking water standard in one monitoring well a half mile north of the mine. Though the health effects of specific levels are not well understood, the EPA says long-term exposure to high levels of uranium in drinking water may cause cancer and damage kidneys.

At the mine itself, wells tested as high as 3.4 milligrams per liter – more than 100 times the standard. That's in an area where ore was processed with sulfuric acid and other toxic chemicals in unlined ponds.

Moving north toward the mine's boundary and beyond, readings begin to decline but several wells still tested two to three times above health limits.

"The hot spots, the treatment areas on the site, are places you totally expect to see readings like that," said Dietrick McGinnis, an environmental consultant for the neighboring Yerington Paiute Tribe. "But this shows you have a continuous plume with decreasing concentration as you move away from the site."

The new findings are no surprise to Earle Dixon, the site's former project manager for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which owns about half of the property.

An administrative judge ruled last year that the BLM illegally fired Dixon in 2004 in retaliation for speaking out about the health and safety dangers at the mine.

"The new data depicts the story that I had tried to hypothesize as a possibility," Dixon told the AP.

"It was speculation, because I didn't have the dramatic evidence they have now. You just had all the symptoms," he said from New Mexico, where he is now a state geologist.

"The way the state has been telling the story and BP and Lyon County ... is this is mostly all natural. Well, no it's not," he said. "We now know for a fact that most of this uranium as far as 2 miles out from the mine comes from the mine.

"This site becomes a poster child for mining pollution."

Officials for BP, formerly known as British Petroleum, and its subsidiary Atlantic Richfield have insisted until now that the uranium could not be tied to the mine. They maintained the high concentrations were due to a naturally occurring phenomenon beneath Nevada's mineral-laden mountains.

The new discovery has Pauly, McGinnis and others renewing a call for the EPA to declare the mine a Superfund site – something the state and county have opposed despite a new potential source of money to help cover cleanup costs that could reach hundreds of millions of dollars.

Jill Lufrano, spokeswoman for the Nevada Department of Environmental Protection, said an investigation into the source of contamination is continuing but "the new finding does put scientific confirmation behind the theory that this would migrate off site."

She said the new evidence doesn't change the state's opposition to Superfund listing. Nevada has a long tradition of supporting mining and now produces more gold than anywhere in the world except China, South Africa and Australia.

Copper first was discovered around Yerington in 1865. Anaconda bought the property in 1941 and – fueled by demand after World War II – produced nearly 1.75 billion pounds of copper from 1952-78.

A mineral firm launched a then-secret plan to produce yellowcake uranium from the mine's waste piles in the 1970s. An engineer reported in 1976 that they weren't finding as much uranium as anticipated in the processing ponds. "Where could it be now?" he wrote. "Should we continue to look for it?"

Had they continued the search outside the processing area, Wyoming Mineral Corp. likely would have detected the movement of the contamination. But the market for uranium dipped and the company scuttled the venture.

Pauly never suspected the mine was leaking contamination when she and her husband finished building their home in 1990. They drank water from their well until 2003 – and used it to mix formula for a baby from 1996-98 – before becoming suspicious as rumors swirled about the contaminated mine.

"Everybody said it was fine," she said. "Legally they didn't have to disclose anything because technically there was nothing definitive then that showed the contamination was moving off the site."

BP and Atlantic Richfield, which bought Anaconda Copper Co. in 1978, have stopped claiming there is no evidence the mine caused any contamination, but they aren't conceding anything about how much.

"We know the mine has had an impact but to what extent is not really known at this time," Tom Mueller, spokesman for BP America in Houston, told The Associated Press in a recent e-mail. He said the sampling "remains inconclusive regarding relative impacts from the mine" compared with other potential sources.

Yerington Paiute Tribe Chairman Elwood Emm said he hopes the new findings help expedite cleanup. "In the meantime, we continue to lose our water resource," he said.

So who will pay for the cleanup?

"That is the million-dollar question," Dixon said. "Every Superfund site needs an advocate or two or three and in my view there are none for Yerington except for Peggy Pauly."

Regardless of who pays, Acree said, it likely will take decades to clean up.

(This version CORRECTS SUBS 4th graf to correct to BP PLC, sted British Petroleum. Minor EDITS.)

Who's Eating Madagascar's Lemurs?

2009-11-21T16:40:53Z

Bit by bit, the natural resources of Madagascar -- a biodiversity hotspot known for its unique vegetation and wildlife -- are being plundered.

Animals That Light Up (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

2009-11-21T14:28:18Z

Bioluminescence is an incredible thing. Take a look at these photos and videos of the coolest underwater and land animals that have the special ability of light up. Talk about inner glow!

Enjoy the slideshow, and vote for your favorite glowing critter.

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Michael Plank Strapped 15 Live Lizards To His Chest, Arrested At Airport: Authorities Say

2009-11-21T04:52:32Z

LOS ANGELES — Federal officials say they arrested a man who strapped 15 live lizards to his chest to get through customs at Los Angeles International Airport.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Friday that 40-year-old Michael Plank of Lomita, Calif., was returning from Australia when U.S. Customs agents found two geckos, two monitor lizards and 11 skinks – another type of lizard – fastened to his body Tuesday.

Plank has been released on $10,000 bond and will be arraigned in federal court on Dec. 21.

Authorities say the lizards' value totals more than $8,500. All Australian reptiles are strictly regulated and Plank did not have a permit for them.

Top 25 Reasons To Care About Climate Change

2009-11-20T23:14:34Z

For some people, climate change is a tough cause to rally 'round--even those who understand that it's happening and that it's human-caused get distracted by things like eating, working, having sex, watching TV, or watching people on TV have sex.

While social scientists ponder the best ways to get the message out and motivate the masses--and since we're gearing up to cover December's climate talks in Copenhagen--we've devised a Grist list of good reasons to care about this global crisis.

The World's First Green Surfboards

2009-11-20T23:12:45Z

In San Clemente, a start-up company called Green Foam Blanks is out to change a half-century of surfboard-making tradition. Its founders, Joey Santley and Steve Cox, have created what is thought to be the world's first recycled polyurethane blank -- the foam core of a surfboard.

Get Inspired By 10 Amazing Examples Of Eco Art

2009-11-20T23:04:42Z

Maybe it's time we tap into our inner child-artist and try some more creative and open-minded approaches like, as a first step, using green art to convey the urgency without the ideology.

But...what the hell is green art?

The gang at Eco-Art.org offers this list of how environmental artists often work.

Regifting: Green Giving This Holiday Season

2009-11-20T23:01:15Z

Before you flash the plastic, consider shopping at home for the holidays this year. Shop your closets, cabinets and plastic storage bins. Browse your basement, your attic, and the space under your beds. All that accumulated clutter that isn't right for you? It may be perfect for someone else. Yes, it's time we added a word to the "reduce, reuse, recycle" mantra: "regift."

Electric Rolls-Royce Could Be Out By Christmas 2010, Rumors Report

2009-11-20T22:19:01Z

Rumors of an electric Rolls-Royce Phantom are back, with the word being the super-luxe automaker could have one on the road within 12 months.

Climate Depot: Everything You Need To Know About 'ClimateGate'

2009-11-20T20:26:47Z

A group of hackers recently broke into the email system at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), one of the leading climate research centers in the world.

The emails have been leaked to the public, and are being touted by global warming deniers, including the website Climate Depot, as evidence of an alarmist global warming conspiracy.

Climate Depot is an anti-global-warming website, which promotes skepticism and disbelief about the realities of climate change. The website is similar in format to The Drudge Report, and has a particular focus on criticizing former Vice President Al Gore.

One reputable group of scientists, Real Climate, has posted a response on its blog to the allegations about what information is actually contained in the hacked emails:

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to 'get rid of the MWP', no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no 'marching orders' from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Some computer security experts, such as Graham Cluley, who was interviewed by the BBC, speculate that this hack was carried out now due to the increased worldwide focus on climate issues and global warming in advance of the UN climate talks in Copenhagen this December.

Check out our recent slideshow on the most dangerous climate change deniers.

You can read more about "ClimateGate" at Think Progress.

-- Filed By Katherine Goldstein

30 Rock Goes Green, Al Gore Makes Cameo (VIDEO)

2009-11-20T18:09:22Z

As part of NBC's Green Week, many programs are incorporating environmental themes into their shows. On this week's 30 Rock, Jack Donaghy gives Kenneth the task of reducing TGS's carbon footprint by 5%.

Kenneth first confronts Jenna about her energy-guzzling habits.

WATCH:

Kenneth then asks Liz to give up her mini-fridge, and watch as she calls out NBC for only doing token green things for Green Week, like making the NBC peacock Green.

WATCH:

Watch as Kenneth declares Frank The Greenest Person at TGS for his interesting habits.

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Watch this hilarious cameo by Al Gore.

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