Tsunamis and Global Warming

A huge number of people believe that global warming caused the recent tsunamis that wiped out a large part of Japan. However, in our opinion, that is not possible and based on the things that we have learned we knew that this is not possible. In any perspective that we tried looking at, it definitely has nothing to do with the tsunamis. To learn more about this subject, let us dig in deeper in topics concerning these things. We shall briefly discuss what causes tsunamis and global warming as well as its effects. If you are interested, read more.

Global warming could not possibly be the cause of these tsunamis. We based it on the following summaries of facts:

   1. Earthquakes cause tsunamis. Earthquakes that take place on water bodies could form a stronger tsunami like the one in Japan. In addition, underwater volcanic eruptions could also create tsunamis.
   2. Too much carbon gases in the atmosphere, which causes the global temperature to shoot up causes global warming. It has no direct relationship with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

We did a little research of our own and came up with these two conclusions. These conclusions came from the number of facts that we gathered from legitimate sources. However, as we were scanning through various resources, we came by a piece of article that contains a theory that global warming just might have something to do with tsunamis. Again, it is just a theory. Here it is:

Researcher Gary McMurty of University of Hawaii thinks that mega tsunamis happen often happens more or less once every hundred thousand years. They based this on a discovery that found marine fossils on top of a volcano named Kohala in Hawaii. The volcano is around several kilometers high. Anyone would wonder why a fossil of marine nature would end up there.

A tsunami that is about a quarter of a mile high once destroyed ancient Hawaii, hundreds of thousands of years ago, leaving marine fossils on volcano tops. They also are investigating and re - examining some evidences that they found supporting a mega tsunami that was presumed to have occurred around 420,000 years ago in the Atlantic, specifically in Bermuda. They came up with a mini - conclusion that these mega tsunamis tend to occur when the ocean level is high. We currently have a high ocean water level because of global warming.

However, this remains a theory, which could be wrong or right. What is important is that we all work for the better. Let us join the campaign against air pollution and global warming.

Brazilian beef industry blamed for Amazon deforestation

Boots and training shoes are not the first things that spring to mind when you think about the causes of rainforest destruction and climate change, but just because the connection isn’t obvious doesn’t mean it isn’t realm, says Greenpeace in a new report, "Slaughtering the Amazon".

But it's not only shoes. Products as diverse as handbags and ready meals, and companies as big as Tesco, BMW, IKEA and Kraft also rely on Amazon leather. Practically all Western world consumers have some by-product of Amazon destruction in our homes somewhere, whether we like it or not. Effectively, these brands are driving this destruction by buying beef and leather products from unscrupulous suppliers in Brazil points out the Greenpeace report.

The report says the cattle industry is the single biggest cause of deforestation in the world as trees are cleared to make way for ranches. And the Brazilian government is also fuelling the process by offering billions of dollars in loans to support the expansion of the cattle industry. President Lula de Silva has pledged to double his country's share of the global beef market by 2018. The report contrasts these investments with Lula da Silva's recent promise to cut deforestation by 72% by the same date and to set up an international fund for protecting the Amazon.

UK carbon offset schemes 'failing to reduce emissions'

Expansion of carbon offsetting and clean development mechanism is locking developing nations into a high-carbon path, report warns

Britain is the world centre of a multibillion dollar "carbon offset" industry which is failing to lower global greenhouse gas emissions, a major report from Friends of the Earth claimed today.

The authors urged governments meeting this week in Bonn for UN climate change talks to drop plans to expand offsetting schemes, which allow rich countries to invest in projects that reduce emissions in poor countries as an alternative to more expensive emission reductions in their own countries.

Offsetting is set to expand enormously if the 192 governments meeting in Bonn allow forests, nuclear power and other sources of "clean energy" to count towards emissions reductions as part of a UN climate treaty expected to be agreed in Copenhagen this December..

The problem, said the report, is that offset schemes are delivering much lower greenhouse gas cuts than the science says are needed to avoid catstrophic climate change. Offsetting supports the idea that the cuts can be made in either rich or in poor countries " ... when it is clear that action is needed in both," said the report. "Offsets are a dangerous distraction ... It is almost impossible to prove that offsetting projects would not have happened without the offset finance. Nor is it possible to calculate accurately how much carbon a project is saving," it added.

Offsetting has been promoted heavily by the UK government in Europe and the UN as a painless way of reducing global emissions. The idea has mushroomed in the last five years with the rapid growth of the UN's clean development mechanism (CDM) which attracts investment money to poorer countries in new projects. These are expected to deliver more than half of the EU's planned carbon reductions to 2020.

"The clean development mechanism is supposed to be a way of making the same level of carbon cuts as would otherwise happen, but more cost effectively. At best it shifts a cut in a developed country to one in a developing one. In practice, it does not even do this," said Andy Atkins, executive director of Friends of the Earth UK.

Moreover, said the report, the CDM is locking in poor countries to a high-carbon path, with some big CDM projects approved for even major fossil fuel power stations. "A large part of CDM revenues are subsidising carbon intensive industries or projects building fossil fuel power stations."

Two previous analyses of the CDM suggested that companies routinely abuse the UN-backed offsetting scheme, wasting billions of pounds.

The UK government has already used offsetting as a way to justify high carbon investments in major projects like the expansion of Heathrow, it said. "Offsetting makes it far more likely that developed countries will continue on a high-carbon path, choosing to buy cheap permits rather than invest in low-carbon infrastructure," said the report's authors.

Nearly 30% of the world's 2,500 CDM projects originate in London, although not all the projects offset UK emissions.

Burger chain's climate change whopper

Tennessee outlets ended up eating humble pie after a local reporter spotted 'rogue' signs outside Burger King outlets

Burger King outlets in Tennessee calls global warming 'baloney'.

Would you like a side order of climate denial with your flame-broiled Triple Whopper? If so, then you need to get yourself over to Tennessee where a number of Burger King franchises in the US state that gave us Al Gore have been displaying "Global Warming is Baloney" signs outside their fast-food restaurants.

Chris Davis, a staff writer for the Memphis Flyer, a local newsweekly, noticed the signs outside two Burger Kings in the city last week and decided to put in a call to one of the restaurants to inquire whether such a view was now official Burger King policy. Here's his transcript of the call…

    Davis: Hi, I'm calling from the Flyer about your sign. Does Burger King really think global warming is baloney?
    BK: [Hang-up]
    Davis: [Calling back]: Your sign out front says global warming is baloney.
    BK: I don't see that, sir.
    Davis: Well, it does.
    BK: I don't see that sir... I change the signs and that sign's been up for a week.
    Davis: Well, I have pictures that I took this afternoon…So, there's no question that your sign said it and so did one in Midtown. I want to know if it was on purpose, or if it was a prank someone pulled on you.
    BK: Let me get the manager. [several minutes of dead air then the same or very similar voice picks up.]
    BK: Who were you holding for?
    Davis: A manager, about the sign. I have pictures of the sign and people have called me upset. I just want to know if it's a mistake or not so I can report it.
    BK: Let me go outside and look at the sign and I'll call you right back. [exchange of contact info]
    [Phone rings, Davis answers]
    BK: The sign was put up yesterday.
    Davis: And it's not a mistake?
    BK: No.
    Davis: It reflects the opinion of BK international?
    BK: Yes. Would you like to talk to the home office? I can give you a number.
    Davis: I've got the number, I've already contacted them. Thanks.

A few days pass before Davis hears back from someone higher up the food chain at Burger King. Last Friday, he finally received an email from Susan Robison, the vice president of corporate communications at the Burger King Corporation:

    This statement ["Global Warming is baloney"] does not reflect a Burger King Corp. (BKC) opinion or view. The two restaurants where these signs appeared are independently owned and operated and were not authorized to display this statement. The signs have since been removed. BKC believes in operating as a socially responsible company and is committed to making a positive impact in the communities where it lives and works.

One imagines that someone at Burger King realised that the "global warming is baloney" line didn't exactly chime with the views of John Chidsey, the company's CEO, who believes that climate change is "an overriding issue of importance for the global community, business community and people in general", as he stated in this short interview conducted at this year's World Economic Forum. (How he squares this concern with his company's drive-thru, meat-munching business model is another matter, though.)

Memphis Flyer readers have been contacting the paper since the story first appeared to say that they have noticed other restaurants across Tennessee displaying the same sign. It appears that they are all owned by a company called the Mirabile Investment Corporation (MIC) that owns more than 40 Burger Kings across Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi, as well as a handful of Popeyes and All In One franchises. Some readers have added that the signs are still up at some of the restaurants. Davis says he has requested a response from MIC, but has not yet received one.

I applaud their honesty, though. I think we should know what a restaurant's position is on the key issues of the day before we choose to step across their threshold. Let's go the full hog – I want to know their views on immigration, cap and trade, MPs expenses, schooling, the Middle East's roadmap, Susan Boyle and stem cell research before I even reach the menu board outside. Maybe there's room in the fast-food sector for a politically-themed chain of restaurants? How about we call it Hard To Swallow?

Can national parks be saved from global warming?

The federal government must take decisive action to avoid "a potentially catastrophic loss of animal and plant life," in the national parks, according to a new report that details the effect of global warming on the country's most treasured public lands.

The 53-page report from the National Parks Conservation Assn., a Washington-based advocacy group, contains a litany of concerns related to climate change in the parks, from the bleaching of coral reefs in Florida to the disappearance of high-altitude ponds that nurture yellow-legged frogs in California.

The group, which has offices in California and 16 other states, called on the National Park Service to come up with a detailed plan and funding to adapt to temperature-related ecosystem changes.

"Right now, no national plan exists to manage wildlife throughout their habitat, which often is a patchwork of lands managed by multiple federal agencies, states, tribes, municipalities and private landholders," wrote Tom C. Kiernan, president of the group.

A major climate bill passed by the House in June would allocate more than $500 million a year to natural resources adaptation under a proposed carbon-trading program. The Senate is drafting a companion bill, but the outcome of the legislation remains uncertain.

The survey by the conservation group reinforces recent testimony by President Obama's nominee for Park Service director, Jon Jarvis. "Climate change challenges the very foundation of the national park system and our ability to leave America's natural and cultural heritage unimpaired for future generations," Jarvis told a House subcommittee.

He suggested that "national park units can serve as the proverbial canary in the coal mine, a place where we can monitor and document ecosystem change without many of the stressors that are found on other public lands."

The report recommends adaptation strategies including the creation of wildlife corridors stretching from one park to another so that species can move unencumbered into cooler areas. It also urges more effective limiting of environmental hazards.

"Air and water pollution, development of adjacent wild lands, logging and mining and other forces are  harming national park wildlife now, and adding climate change to the mix could be disastrous," it said.

Pesticides from nearby farms and the spread of nonnative trout have decimated populations of yellow-legged frogs in Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks. With global warming, a rapid melting of high Sierra snowpacks could eliminate many shallow ponds and streams that the amphibians need for survival, leaving them  "high and dry," it said.

Salmon could disappear from Olympic, North Cascades and Mt. Rainier national parks, the report suggests. And grizzly bears, birds, fish and other species in Yellowstone and Rocky Mountain national parks could decline as bark beetles, drought and other climate-induced conditions increase.

The report suggests that park officials work with private landowners around Arches, Canyonlands and Capitol Reef national parks to create pathways for bighorn sheep, as precipitation and vegetation patterns change because of global warming.

Likewise, wildlife managers in Alaska's parks such as the Noatak and Bering Land Bridge national preserves, the Kobuk Valley National Park, and Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve will need to ensure a clear path for caribou herds as climate change renders traditional calving grounds and winter feeding areas unsuitable, the report said.

But adaptation to a changing climate may not be enough. Unless humans limit their emissions of greenhouse gases, the report concludes, some wildlife species "will not be able to endure much more change and could disappear from national parks and even go extinct if climate change is unchecked."

The impetus for federal adaptation plans comes as states such as California, which released a comprehensive plan this week, and cities such as New York and New Orleans are beginning to come to grips with expected climate effects such as rising sea levels and water shortages.

NOAA Confirms Presence of Global Warming

This is a welcome piece from NOAA.  It generally confirms that the global climate has warmed over the past three decades.  Presently it appears to be on a slight downtrend for the past decade, but still well above the preceding norms.  Enough to nicely eliminate the attempt to link it all to CO2 but not sufficient to claim that the general warming is now over.

We still have no particular comfort regarding causation but we do now have comfort that for the past thirty years we have been able to measure enough variables properly so that when the next cooling event come on, we will figure it all out.

I am more and more inclined to think that the global climate system if left undisturbed will rise to levels a half degree warmer than present.  We have been undisturbed many times for great periods of time.  Yet when disturbed, we are knocked back sharply.

The Arctic sea ice is now degrading heavily and we are losing huge swathes of freed multi year ice this year.  As posted before, mass loss has been consistent for three decades.  Because of that, I projected that the bulk would be gone by 2012 back in 2007.  I did this before NASA came out and said the same thing (likely because they did not want to say it first) .  The press has yet to pick up on all this

If we are now irretrievably losing a third or so of the remaining multi year ice this year alone then we are very much on schedule.  Commencing in 20012 we will have a decade of open late summer waters throughout the Arctic with only swathes of one and two year ice to knock though from time to time depending on winds.

Global warming is 'undeniable', says NOAA

The 2009 State of the Climate report, issued on 28 July by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is unequivocal: the past decade was Earth's warmest on record, continuing a 50-year trend.
The report is "an annual scorecard for the climate system", incorporating every type of measurement from around the world, says Tom Karl, transitional head of NOAA's proposed Climate Service.
In a conference call briefing for reporters, Karl said the 218pp report has 303 authors from 48 countries, all of whom worked under extreme time pressure to complete it in a timely manner.
Deke Arndt, of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, described the report as normally like the annual check-up one might receive at a doctor's office, "but because 2009 was the end of a decade, we wanted to take stock of a longer term view", just as one might at one's medical check-up in a decadal birthday year. To do so, the authors focused on 10 key indicators of climate change, using multiple data-sets to track each indicator over several decades.
The climate-indicators project was led by the UK Met Office. Peter Thorne, then at the Met Office and now with the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites, told reporters that it is difficult to keep track of the massive amount of climate data arriving daily, so scientists decided to step back and look at the proverbial forest, rather than at individual trees. They identified the key indicators as:

·                              Near-surface (tropospheric) temperature
·                              Specific humidity
·                              Ocean heat content
·                              Sea level
·                              Sea-surface temperature
·                              Temperature over the ocean
·                              Temperature over land
·                              Snow cover
·                              Glaciers
·                              Sea ice

 "Together with colleagues from around the world, we then went out and found, to our knowledge, every existing scientific analysis of global-scale changes in these indicators," Thorne said.
"These produced a compelling picture of our changing climate. Each indicator is changing as we would expect if the world truly were warming," continued Thorne. "The bottom-line conclusion that the world has been warming is simply undeniable."
Scientists at the briefing emphasized the role of the ocean, which absorbs over 93% of Earth's warming and, in particular, the role of the Arctic in determining global climate. The decline of Arctic summer sea ice over three decades, and especially 2000–2009, has been "dramatic", said Walt Meier of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and National Snow and Ice Data Center. In addition, accelerated glacial loss, especially in Greenland, was the major contributor to sea-level rise over the past decade, he said.
"Greenland has actually been quite a surprise for us, because of these new measurements, in terms of how fast it has been moving mass," said Meier. In short, he said: "The Arctic is not at all like Las Vegas. What happens in the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic, and that's one of the reasons why the Arctic is a big concern and why it's an indicator of what we expect to see in the future."
Asked whether human activity is the cause of the observed warming, Karl said that this annual report has traditionally been limited to observations, including of atmospheric composition. It does not seek "to make the link between the cause and what we observe," he said, "but this is the basis for the next step, because without this data, it's impossible to take the next step".

Flower Power Made Our Climate Grow

This is a startling and completely unexpected result. I am totally cognizant of the powerful role of transpiration in sustaining rainfall over ecology.  The great tropical rainforests are convincing demonstrations.  It is core to my proposal to restore the Sahara and the Asian dry lands.

That it was way more difficult before flowering plants was not obvious at all.

This suggests that upland habitat was typically dryer and way more extensive everywhere except local wetlands.  Suddenly Northern Australia looks like home for dinosaurs and the whole remnant ecosystem.

This also suggests that flowering plants are way more proficient at absorbing carbon.

The rainforests would likely have been hugely constrained to their best drainage and wetlands with intervening dry highlands.  The deserts may not have been much larger but plenty of land would have been seriously marginal.  Again think about Australia.

Flower Power Makes Tropics Cooler, Wetter

ScienceDaily (July 19, 2010) — The world is a cooler, wetter place because of flowering plants, according to new climate simulation results published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The effect is especially pronounced in the Amazon basin, where replacing flowering plants with non-flowering varieties would result in an 80 percent decrease in the area covered by ever-wet rainforest.

The simulations demonstrate the importance of flowering-plant physiology to climate regulation in ever-wet rainforest, regions where the dry season is short or non-existent, and where biodiversity is greatest.

"The vein density of leaves within the flowering plants is much, much higher than all other plants," said the study's lead author, C. Kevin Boyce, Associate Professor in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. "That actually matters physiologically for both taking in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for photosynthesis and also the loss of water, which is transpiration. The two necessarily go together. You can't take in CO2 without losing water."

This higher vein density in the leaves means that flowering plants are highly efficient at transpiring water from the soil back into the sky, where it can return to Earth as rain.

"That whole recycling process is dependent upon transpiration, and transpiration would have been much, much lower in the absence of flowering plants," Boyce said. "We can know that because no leaves throughout the fossil record approach the vein densities seen in flowering plant leaves."

For most of biological history there were no flowering plants -- known scientifically as angiosperms. They evolved about 120 million years ago, during the Cretaceous Period, and took another 20 million years to become prevalent. Flowering species were latecomers to the world of vascular plants, a group that includes ferns, club mosses and confers. But angiosperms now enjoy a position of world domination among plants.

"They're basically everywhere and everything, unless you're talking about high altitudes and very high latitudes," Boyce said.

Dinosaurs walked the Earth when flowering plants evolved, and various studies have attempted to link the dinosaurs' extinction or at least their evolutionary paths to flowering plant evolution. "Those efforts are always very fuzzy, and none have gained much traction," Boyce said.

Boyce and Lee are, nevertheless, working toward simulating the climatic impact of flowering plant evolution in the prehistoric world. But simulating the Cretaceous Earth would be a complex undertaking because the planet was warmer, the continents sat in different alignments and carbon- dioxide concentrations were different.

"The world now is really very different from the world 120 million years ago," Boyce said.

Building the Supercomputer Simulation

So as a first step, Boyce and co-author with Jung-Eun Lee, Postdoctoral Scholar in Geophysical Sciences at UChicago, examined the role of flowering plants in the modern world. Lee, an atmospheric scientist, adapted the National Center for Atmospheric Research Community Climate Model for the study.

Driven by more than one million lines of code, the simulations computed air motion over the entire globe at a resolution of 300 square kilometers (approximately 116 square miles). Lee ran the simulations on a supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center in Berkeley, Calif.

"The motion of air is dependent on temperature distribution, and the temperature distribution is dependent on how heat is distributed," Lee said. "Evapo-transpiration is very important to solve this equation. That's why we have plants in the model."

The simulations showed the importance of flowering plants to water recycling. Rain falls, plants drink it up and pass most of it out of their leaves and back into the sky.

In the simulations, replacing flowering plants with non-flowering plants in eastern North America reduced rainfall by up to 40 percent. The same replacement in the Amazon basin delayed onset of the monsoon from Oct. 26 to Jan. 10.

"Rainforest deforestation has long been shown to have a somewhat similar effect," Boyce said. Transpiration drops along with loss of rainforest, "and you actually lose rainfall because of it."

Studies in recent decades have suggested a link between the diversity of organisms of all types, flowering plants included, to the abundance or rainfall and the vastness of tropical forests. Flowering plants, it seems, foster and perpetuate their own diversity, and simultaneously bolster the diversity of animals and other plants generally. Indeed, multiple lineages of plants and animals flourished shortly after flowering plants began dominating tropical ecosystems.

The climate-altering physiology of flowering plants might partly explain this phenomenon, Boyce said. "There would have been rainforests before flowering plants existed, but they would have been much smaller," he said.

Updating the Global Middle Class

This item is a fresh reminder of the shear power of the S curve.  Largely everyone on the Globe today is actually on the curve at some point or another. A huge mass of Chinesse are entering the full acceleration phase and will create a huge internal demand.  The same is also true for India and possibly now Brazil.


There is one practical effect.  The supply excess US currency denominated credit out there will be sponged up far faster than anticipated and the damage caused by the first global financial crisis will be quickly repaired outside the USA.


It is noteworthy that foreign investors are now focused on resources because of this.  The world needs a number of huge copper mines to be commissioned.  Little of that will also flow into the US because the states are mostly viewed unfriendly to mining at all.  To start with, most lands are still managed under the original 1877 mining law and is a huge problem.  The rest of the world has mostly learned to welcome major mining companies, not least because artisan miners pay no taxes and massively damage the environment.

An inevitable billion man middle class will need a ten fold increase in raw material availability.

The Emerging Middle Class in Developing Countries by Homi Kharas of the Brookings Institute Middle class definition used is those spending $10-100 per day. Some interesting things to notice is that the projection is for the world economy to get to 200 trillion in 2005 dollars by 2036 up from about 70 trillion now. Asia will be over half of the world economy. North America will go from about 26% now to about 12%, which will be the same as central and south America. By 2024-2030, the dominant share of the middle class economy from India and China and the rest of Asia will established according the Kharas forecast. It would then be a shift from the lower end of the middle class range to the upper part.