Climate Notes for Copenhagen

In less than a month we will complete the warmest decade in recorded history.

It dawned with the warmest winter on record in the United States. And when the sun sets this New Year's Eve, the decade of the 2000s will end as the warmest ever on global temperature charts.

Warmer still, scientists say, lies ahead.

Through 10 years of global boom and bust, of breakneck change around the planet, of terrorism, war and division, all people everywhere under that warming sun faced one threat together: the buildup of greenhouse gases, the rise in temperatures, the danger of a shifting climate, of drought, weather extremes and encroaching seas, of untold damage to the world humanity has created for itself over millennia.

As the decade neared its close, the U.N. gathered presidents and premiers of almost 100 nations for a "climate summit" to take united action, to sharply cut back the burning of coal and other fossil fuels.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told them they had "a powerful opportunity to get on the right side of history" at a year-ending climate conference in Copenhagen.

Once again, however, disunity might keep the world's nations on this side of making historic decisions.

"Deep down, we know that you are not really listening," the Maldives' Mohamed Nasheed told fellow presidents at September's summit.

Nasheed's tiny homeland, a sprinkling of low-lying islands in the Indian Ocean, will be one of the earliest victims of seas rising from heat expansion and melting glaciers. On remote islets of Papua New Guinea, on Pacific atolls, on bleak Arctic shores, other coastal peoples in the 2000s were already making plans, packing up, seeking shelter.

The warming seas were growing more acid, too, from absorbing carbon dioxide, the biggest greenhouse gas in an overloaded atmosphere. Together, warmer waters and acidity will kill coral reefs and imperil other marine life - from plankton at the bottom of the food chain, to starfish and crabs, mussels and sea urchins.

Over the decade's first nine years, global temperatures averaged 0.6 degrees Celsius (1.1 degrees F) higher than the 1951-1980 average, NASA reported. And temperatures rose faster in the far north than anyplace else on Earth.

The decade's final three summers melted Arctic sea ice more than ever before in modern times. Greenland's gargantuan ice cap was pouring 3 percent more meltwater into the sea each year. Every summer's thaw reached deeper into the Arctic permafrost, threatening to unlock vast amounts of methane, a global-warming gas.

Less ice meant less sunlight reflected, more heat absorbed by the Earth. More methane escaping the tundra meant more warming, more thawing, more methane released.

At the bottom of the world, late in the decade, International Polar Year research found that Antarctica, too, was warming. Floating ice shelves fringing its coast weakened, some breaking away, allowing the glaciers behind them to push ice faster into the rising oceans.

On six continents the glaciers retreated through the 2000s, shrinking future water sources for countless millions of Indians, Chinese, South Americans. The great lakes of Africa were shrinking, too, from higher temperatures, evaporation and drought. Across the temperate zones, flowers bloomed earlier, lakes froze later, bark beetles bored their destructive way northward through warmer forests. In the Arctic, surprised Eskimos spotted the red breasts of southern robins… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Common Dreams>

Up until this year, the US has been chief among the deniers, but at last, there’s a thaw at EPA.

After years of denial, suppression, and delay, the United States government has finally officially recognized that greenhouse gases are dangerous pollutants under the Clean Air Act. The Obama administration has slowly worked on the decision, first sent to the White House by the Environmental Protection Agency in March, then opened for months of public comment through the summer. Less than an hour after the United Nations Climate Change Conference completed its opening day in Copenhagen, Denmark, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson made the “significant climate announcement” at 1:15 pm that global warming pollution endangers the health and welfare of the American public:

This administration will not ignore science or the law any longer, nor will we avoid the responsibility we owe to our children and our grandchildren. Today, I’m proud to announce that EPA has finalized its endangerment finding on greenhouse gas pollution and is now authorized and obligated to make reasonable efforts to reduce greenhouse pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

In 1992, the United States signed an international treaty to “prevent dangerous human-induced interference with the climate system” from greenhouse gases. Seventeen years later, after the continued accumulation of greenhouse gases have decimated the world’s glaciers and Arctic ice cap, acidified the oceans, intensified hurricanes and droughts, increased smog and wildfires, and driven species to extinction, the Barack Obama administration is recognizing its legal obligation to begin regulating this deadly threat… [emphasis original]

Inserted from <Think Progress>

After such a radical turnaround, have you ever wondered what happened to the science-haters from the Bush/GOP EPA?  Here’s Rachel with the answer:

 

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For eight years we had the fox running the henhouse.  While Obama is in Copenhagen, I hope he will endorse a treaty that places strict limits on greenhouse gas emissions.  Let the Republicans scream.  They will scream no matter what he does, so he might as well do it right.  When the Republicans fight ratification, let them bear the shame.

Off topic, a reader was kind enough to inform me that the videos here were overrunning their boundaries.  I has actually just started making them larger than the default, because that looked good on my screen, which is 1280 x 800.  Today I cut back to the default.  Are either this video ore the one in the previous article overrunning their boundaries for you now?  Thanks for the help.