Gloom & doom

[lord khram]

And after 3 months of nice and sunny weather they most likely would welcome snow and ice again....

Yes thats the English way, whatever happens with the weather you will always hear people complaining.
But in the past that is exactly what the weather did, it changed through the year. Cold winters and summers with lengthy periods of warm settled weather. I do hope things return to that, my personal point of view is a preference to such weather than what we have been having now for a number of years.
Warmer winters with lots of dull wet and windy weather.
cooler summers with lots of dull wet and windy weather.
This was a big deciding factor in my move to Thailand 3 years ago.

 

[Bowmouth]

Standard of living is improving in many countries. Great. Now how do we support millions more who want to live like people in California?

Our life is improving but not our ideas.

We are all too tied up with the idea that "having things" is the best thing in life. And once we have the things we want we suddenly want a newer model, different color or just plain and simply more of it.

It's very difficult to "let go" of things and to be satisfied with a life that's simple and fairly "plain"

 

[Bowmouth]

This was a big deciding factor in my move to Thailand 3 years ago.

The weather was the single most deciding factor for me to move from the Netherlands to Thailand 20 years ago too.....

Now we have something in common....

 

[lord khram]

We are all too tied up with the idea that "having things" is the best thing in life. And once we have the things we want we suddenly want a newer model, different color or just plain and simply more of it.

It's very difficult to "let go" of things and to be satisfied with a life that's simple and fairly "plain"

Again we agree on something, your statement above is so true. Rid your life of all the unnecessary clutter and things become much more simple life is less complicated and much less stressfull, and generally much more enjoyable.
I see so many people on this treadmill at home living in everlasting debt in their constant quest for bigger and better houses and cars etc etc. What in my mind most fail to see is that when they are partaking in these futile transactions all they are doing is funding the governments coffers with the ever growing taxation system that is required to prop up our top heavy economies in the west.
In simple terms, I call it brainwashing, and it would appear that certainly the UK government has been very succesfull at it. The sad thing is that most dont realise what is going on untill it is too late.

 

[Bowmouth]

Arrogance' undid climate talks

By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News


The "disappointing" outcome of December's climate summit was largely down to "arrogance" on the part of rich countries, according to Lord Stern.

The economist told BBC News that the US and EU nations had not understood well enough the concerns of poorer nations.

But, he said, the summit had led to a number of countries outlining what they were prepared to do to curb emissions.

Seventy-three countries have now signed up to the non-binding Copenhagen Accord, the summit's outcome document.

The weak nature of the document led many to condemn the summit as a failure; but Lord Stern said that view was mistaken.

"The fact of Copenhagen and the setting of the deadline two years previously at Bali did concentrate minds, and it did lead... to quite specific plans from countries that hadn't set them out before," he said.

"The reality is different from half a year ago"


Gro Harlem Brundtland
UN special envoy on climate change
Still real, still a problem

"So this process has itself been a key part of countries stating what their intentions on emissions reductions are - countries that had not stated them before, including China and the US.

"So that was a product of the UNFCCC (UN climate convention) process that we should respect."

The former World Bank chief economist and author of the influential 2006 review into the economics of climate change was speaking to BBC News following a lecture at the London School of Economics (LSE), where he now chairs the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

During the lecture, he compared the atmosphere at the Copenhagen summit to student politics in the 1960s - "chaotic, wearing, tiring, disappointing" - and said it was one in which countries had little room for real negotiating.

However, he said, it was vital to stick with the UN process, whatever its frustrations.

Twin tracks

Having failed to agree a treaty to supplant or supplement the Kyoto Protocol, and having failed to set a timetable for agreeing such a treaty, opinions are inevitably split on how countries seeking stronger curbs on greenhouse gas emissions should move forward.

"It could have been much better handled by the rich countries"

Speaking in Brussels, Gro Harlem Brundtland - the UN's special envoy on climate change - suggested there would now be a twin-track approach, with some of the important discussions taking place outside the UNFCCC umbrella.

She also acknowledged that the talks had proved much more problematical than some governments - particularly in the EU - had anticipated.

"They got the message that it was much more complicated than [they had believed], and that they have to work with Brazil and China and others, not only in the broad framework of UN negotiations but also more directly and pragmatically," she said.

"The reality is different from half a year ago."

Lord Stern agreed that what he described as the "disappointing" outcome of the Copenhagen talks was largely down to rich nations' failure to understand developing world positions and concerns.

"[There was] less arrogance than in previous years - we have, I think, moved beyond the G8 world to the G20 world where more countries are involved - but [there was] still arrogance and it could have been much better handled by the rich countries," he said.

The EU limited its room for manoeuvre, he said, because too many of the leading political figures wanted to demonstrate that they were leading.

Brass from pockets

The most concrete part of the Copenhagen Accord is an agreement that richer countries should raise funds to help poorer nations adapt to climate impacts and "green" their economies.

Lord Stern is a member of the group set up by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to advise on how to raise $100bn (£66bn) per year by 2020 using various "innovative mechanisms" that could include taxes on international aviation and banking transactions.

But the immediate objective, he suggested, was to enact the short-term promise of providing $30bn over the period 2010-12 from the public purses of western nations.

If that money did not start to move fairly quickly, he said, that would further erode trust among developing countries.

Speaking in Brussels during a meeting with EU leaders, Mexico's environment secretary Juan Rafael Elvira endorsed the point.

"The developing world needs to see clear signals to have something in their hands at Cancun," he said.

The Mexican coastal city will host this year's UNFCCC summit.

"The developing countries want to see this money unblocked; the island nations especially are waiting for this funding," said Mr Elvira.

How and where these funds are to be disbursed has yet to be decided.

Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

 

[Bowmouth]

UN to look at climate meat link

By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News

UN specialists are to look again at the contribution of meat production to climate change, after claims that an earlier report exaggerated the link.

A 2006 report concluded meat production was responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions - more than transport.

The report has been cited by people campaigning for a more vegetable-based diet, including Sir Paul McCartney.

But a new analysis, presented at a major US science meeting, says the transport comparison was flawed.

Sir Paul was one of the figures launching a campaign late last year centred on the slogan "Less meat = less heat".

"I must say honestly that he has a point"

But curbing meat production and consumption would be less beneficial for the climate than has been claimed, said Frank Mitloehner from the University of California at Davis (UCD).

"Smarter animal farming, not less farming, will equal less heat," he told delegates to the American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting in San Francisco.

"Producing less meat and milk will only mean more hunger in poor countries."

Leading figures in the climate change establishment, such as Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chairman Rajendra Pachauri and Lord (Nicholas) Stern, have also quoted the 18% figure as a reason why people should consider eating less meat.

Apples and pears

The 2006 report - Livestock's Long Shadow, published by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) - reached the figure by totting up all greenhouse-gas emissions associated with meat production from farm to table, including fertiliser production, land clearance, methane emissions from the animals' digestion, and vehicle use on farms.

But Dr Mitloehner pointed out that the authors had not calculated transport emissions in the same way, instead just using the IPCC's figure, which only included fossil fuel burning.

"This lopsided 'analysis' is a classical apples-and-oranges analogy that truly confused the issue," he said.

One of the authors of Livestock's Long Shadow, FAO livestock policy officer Pierre Gerber, told BBC News he accepted Dr Mitlohner's criticism.

"I must say honestly that he has a point - we factored in everything for meat emissions, and we didn't do the same thing with transport," he said.

"But on the rest of the report, I don't think it was really challenged."

FAO is now working on a much more comprehensive analysis of emissions from food production, he said.

It should be complete by the end of the year, and should allow comparisons between diets, including meat and those that are exclusively vegetarian.

Different pies

Organisations use different methods for apportioning emissions between sectors of the economy.

In an attempt to capture everything associated with meat production, the FAO team included contributions, for example, from transport and deforestation.

By comparison, the IPCC's methodology collects all emissions from deforestation into a separate pool, whether the trees are removed for farming or for some other reason; and does the same thing for transport.

This is one of the reasons why the 18% figure appears remarkably high to some observers.

The majority of the meat-related emissions come from land clearance and from methane emissions associated with the animals' digestion.

Other academics have also argued that meat is a necessary source of protein in some societies with small food resources, and that in the drylands of East Africa or around the Arctic where crop plants cannot survive, a meat-based diet is the only option.

Dr Mitloehner contends that in developed societies such as the US - where transport emissions account for about 26% of the national total, compared with 3% for pig- and cattle-rearing - meat is the wrong target in efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

 

[Law5Guy]

Here in Florida, we could have used some of that so called "Global Warming" this winter.

[Coral-List] cold water coral kill

 

[Bowmouth]

Plankton decline across oceans as waters warm

Phytoplankton in its myriad varieties is essential for life in the oceans
The amount of phytoplankton - tiny marine plants - in the top layers of the oceans has declined markedly over the last century, research suggests.

Writing in the journal Nature, scientists say the decline appears to be linked to rising water temperatures.

They made their finding by looking at records of the transparency of sea water, which is affected by the plants.

The decline - about 1% per year - could be ecologically significant as plankton sit at the base of marine food chains.

Algal blooms can be imaged from space. This is the first study to attempt a comprehensive global look at plankton changes over such a long time scale.

"What we think is happening is that the oceans are becoming more stratified as the water warms," said research leader Daniel Boyce from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

"The plants need sunlight from above and nutrients from below; and as it becomes more stratified, that limits the availability of nutrients," he told BBC News.

Phytoplankton are typically eaten by zooplankton - tiny marine animals - which themselves are prey for small fish and other animals.

Disk record
The first reliable system for measuring the transparency of sea water was developed by astronomer and Jesuit priest Pietro Angelo Secchi.

Asked by the Pope in 1865 to measure the clarity of water in the Mediterranean Sea for the Papal navy, he conceived and developed the "Secchi disk", which must be one of the simplest instruments ever deployed; it is simply lowered into the sea until its white colour disappears from view.

Phytoplankton... produce half of the oxygen we breathe, draw down surface CO2, and ultimately support all of our fisheries”

Professor Boris Worm
Dalhousie University
Various substances in the water can affect its transparency; but one of the main ones is the concentration of chlorophyll, the green pigment that is key to photosynthesis in plants at sea and on land.

The long-term but patchy record provided by Secchi disk measurements around the world has been augmented by shipboard analysis of water samples, and more recently by satellite measurements of ocean colour.

The final tally included 445,237 data points from Secchi disks spanning the period 1899-2008.

"This study took three years, and we spent lots of time going through the data checking that there wasn't any 'garbage' in there," said Mr Boyce.

"The data is good in the northern hemisphere and it gets better in recent times, but it's more patchy in the southern hemisphere - the Southern Ocean, the southern Indian Ocean, and so on."

The higher quality data available since 1950 has allowed the team to calculate that since that time, the world has seen a phytoplankton decline of about 40%.

Ocean cycling
The decline is seen in most parts of the world, one marked exception being the Indian Ocean. There are also phytoplankton increases in coastal zones where fertiliser run-off from agricultural land is increasing nutrient supplies.

However, the pattern is far from steady. As well as the long-term downward trend, there are strong variations spanning a few years or a few decades.

Father Secchi's simple disk has been used for more than 100 years
Many of these variations are correlated with natural cycles of temperature seen in the oceans, including the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the North Atlantic Oscillation and the Arctic Oscillation.

The warmer ends of these cycles co-incide with a reduction in plankton growth, while abundance is higher in the colder phase.

Carl-Gustaf Lundin, head of the marine programme at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), suggested there could be other factors involved - notably the huge expansion in open-ocean fishing that has taken place over the century.

"Logically you would expect that as fishing has gone up, the amount of zooplankton would have risen - and that should have led to a decline in phytoplankton," he told BBC News.

"So there's something about fishing that hasn't been factored into this analysis."

The method of dividing oceans into grids that the Dalhousie researchers used, he said, did not permit scrutiny of areas where this might be particularly important, such as the upwelling in the Eastern Pacific that supports the Peruvian anchovy fishery - the biggest fishery on the planet.

Absorbing facts
If the trend is real, it could also act to accelerate warming, the team noted.

Photosynthesis by phytoplankton removes carbon dioxide from the air and produces oxygen.

In several parts of the world, notably the Southern Ocean, scientists have already noted that the waters appear to be absorbing less CO2 - although this is principally thought to be because of changes to wind patterns - and leaving more CO2 in the air should logically lead to greater warming.

"Phytoplankton... produce half of the oxygen we breathe, draw down surface CO2, and ultimately support all of our fisheries," said Boris Worm, another member of the Dalhousie team.

"An ocean with less phytoplankton will function differently."

The question is: how differently?

If the planet continues to warm in line with projections of computer models of climate, the overall decline in phytoplankton might be expected to continue.

But, said, Daniel Boyce, that was not certain.

"It's tempting to say there will be further declines, but on the other hand there could be other drivers of change, so I don't think that saying 'temperature rise brings a phytoplankton decline' is the end of the picture," he said.

The implications, noted Dr Lundin, could be significant.

"If in fact productivity is going down so much, the implication would be that less carbon capture and storage is happening in the open ocean," he said.

"So that's a service that humanity is getting for free that it will lose; and there would also be an impact on fish, with less fish in the oceans over time."

Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk