Climate study predicts 5C warming
09:54 Mon Dec 3 2012
AAP
Levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) are rising annually by around three per cent, placing Earth on track for warming that could breach 5C by 2100, a new study published says.
The figure - among the most alarming of the latest forecasts by climate scientists - is at least double the 2C target set by UN members struggling for a global deal on climate change.
In 2011, global carbon emissions were 54 per cent above 1990 levels, according to the research, published in the journal, Nature Climate Change, by the Global Carbon Project consortium.
"We are on track for the highest emissions projections, which point to a rise in temperature of between 4C and 6C by the end of the century," said Corinne le Quere, a carbon specialist at the University of East Anglia, eastern England.
"The estimate is based on growth trends that seem likely to last," she said in a phone interview, pointing to the mounting consumption of coal by emerging giants.
Other research has warned of potentially catastrophic impacts from a temperature rise of this kind.
Chronic droughts and floods would bite into farm yields, violent storms and sea-level rise would swamp coastal cities and deltas, and many species would be wiped out, unable to cope with habitat loss.
Developed countries have largely stabilised their emissions since 1990, the benchmark year used in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations, the study said.
But this achievement has been eclipsed by emissions by China, India, Brazil and Indonesia and other developing economies, which are turning to cheap, plentiful coal to power their rise out of poverty.
In 1990, developing countries accounted for 35 per cent of worldwide output of CO2, the principal "greenhouse" gas blamed for warming Earth's surface and inflicting damaging changes to the climate system.
In 2011, this was 58 per cent.
The temperature projections by the Global Carbon Project are at the top end of forecasts published by scientists ahead of the UNFCCC talks taking place in Doha, Qatar.
The study is based on national carbon dioxide (CO2) data and on estimates for 2011 and 2012. Between 2000 and 2011, CO2 emissions globally rose by 3.1 per cent annually on average; for 2012, the rise is estimated at 2.6 per cent.
Last year, Chinese CO2 rose by 10 per cent, or more than 800 million tonnes, equivalent to Germany's emissions in an entire year, said the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research - Oslo (CICERO), whose scientists took part in the paper.
"China is emitting as much as the European Union on a per-capita basis, about 36 per cent higher than the global average per-capita emissions," it said in a press release.
©AAP 2012
Australia rates among the world's highest per capita carbon dioxide emitters in new figures released by British researchers.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/world/122482/australia-among-highest-carbon-emitters
In 2011, Australia recorded 17.3 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per person, on par with the US, a team of specialist climate change researchers at the University of East Anglia has reported.
The figure is up from 16.3 tonnes per person in 2010 and takes Australia's total output to 392 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, representing 1.2% of the world's 2011 total.
"The United States, Canada and Australia are really the three (countries) that have much bigger emissions per person than any other," director of the University's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research Corinne Le Quere told AAP.
"There are a range of oil-producing countries, like Qatar, which are much higher in terms of tonnes per person, but in terms of population size, they cannot be considered in the same category."
The research team forecasts a record high of 35.6 billion tonnes of global emissions in 2012, but Prof Le Quere said it was too early to determine Australia's contribution as a part of that projection.
While Australia's overall and per capita carbon emissions were not at their highest in 2011 - greater amounts were recorded in 2008 (393 million tonnes) and 2009 (400 million tonnes) - Prof Le Quere called for very aggressive policy to combat future fossil fuel-related output.
"Some countries - Belgium, Denmark, France, Sweden, and the UK - have succeeded to reduce their energy usage by up to 5% and it's that sort of aggressive policy that's needed in other rich countries," Prof Le Quere said.
"One of Australia's greatest contributions of course is its use of coal and that I think will continue."
The team's report, to be published on Monday in online journal Nature Climate Change, named China (28%), the United States (16%), the European Union (11%), and India (7%) as the biggest contributors to global carbon emissions.
However, while emissions in China and India grew, the changes did not match booming population growth, while the US and EU posted a reduction on 2010 figures.
The projected 2.6 % rise in global emissions for 2012 takes output from burning fossil fuels to 58 % above 1990 levels, the baseline year for the Kyoto Protocol.
Last week, the Australian government announced it was ready to commit to limiting annual emissions to an average 99.5 % of 1990 levels (287 million tonnes) from 2013 to 2020 as part of its commitment to the second Kyoto period.
Copyright © 2012, Radio New Zealand
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2012 http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.co.nz/
Connecting the Global Cooling Dots
By Alan Caruba
Winter doesn’t officially begin until December 21, but winter has a mind of its own as does all of nature. While the United Nations charlatans gathered in Doha, Qatar to try to save its global warming hoax by first calling it “climate change” and then by fashioning a funding mechanism to transfer the wealth of developed countries to those who are not, winter has arrived “early” around the world.
That might just have something to do with the cooling cycle that has been active for the past sixteen years, “inconveniently” blowing a big hole in the global warming lies we’ve been hearing and reading since the late 1980s.
From IceAgeNow.info, a site by Robert W. Felix, the author of a book about ice ages (the Earth has been through quite a few in its 4.5 billion years), here are some recent news stories:
On December 1, “Heavy snowfall severs Russia” told of “Hundreds of drivers (who) were caught by surprise in a 40km traffic jam after an unexpected snowfall and heavy winds.”
On November 30, “Finland snowstorm causes blackouts” reported that “Tens of thousands of households were without electricity on Friday as the result of a storm that dumped heavy snow across southern Finland and sent winds gusting up to 27 meters per second, felling trees and downing power lines.” That same day, across the former land bridge between Russia and North America, “Fairbanks – Coldest back-to-back November on record” was a news item what reported “The mercury hit 30 below for the first time this winter at Fairbanks International Airport…”
On November 29, the news was about a “Severe snow storm hits northern Japan” during which it was “blasted by an intense snow storm causing widespread havoc to residents of Hokkaido and Northern Honshu.”
On November 28, “Snowfall paralyzes life in China” was the headline of a report that “China has experienced the biggest snowfall in 52 years. Snow caused power outages in 57 villages, brought down thousands of trees and killed numerous domestic animals. Temperatures fell by as much as 14 degrees below zero in some areas.”
You don’t have to be a meteorologist to connect the dots. It is getting colder in the northern hemisphere of the world. To those who would dismiss this, saying that Russia has always been famous for its winters, that is the equivalent of whistling past the graveyard.
In England, a November 29 report in The Telegraph, reported that “Councils are geating up for what could be Britain’s coldest winter in 100 years, as sub-zero temperatures and snow follow days of downpours that have devasted large parts of the country.” The Met Office, England’s equivalent of the U.S. Weather Bureau, warned that “The forthcoming cold snap, caused by clear skies and northerly winds, could herald the start of a freezing winter.”
This was not unforeseen, however. In late January 2012, the British daily, The Mail, reported that “The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planning has not warmed for the past 15 years. The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th century.” England and much of the northern Europe and North America was gripped by a mini ice age that lasted from 1300 to 1850.
It is no secret to climate scientists that the sun is in what they call a “grand minimum” by way of describing relatively few magnetic storms, also known as sun spots. Few storms means less solar radiation and, since the sun is the primary source of heat for the Earth that means things get colder here. This is worth keeping in mind when the Secretary General of the United Nations or any other lying politician or alleged scientist tells you otherwise.
In a new book worth reading, “The Whole Story of Climate” by E. Kirsten Peters, the author brings a wealth of knowledge to the subject from the standpoint of a geologist. As to the claim that carbon dioxide emissions are the “cause” of a warming that is not happening, she points out that “The fact is, if human beings had remained hunter-gatherers throughout our entire history, never producing a single molecule of greenhouse gases through agriculture or industry, climate today would still be changing. It would be lurching toward higher temperatures, crashing toward vastly colder temperatures, or at least swinging toward something different from what has been. That’s just the nature of Earth’s climate.”
Preceding the introduction and rise of humans was an age known as the Pleistocene Epoch about 1.8 million years ago. It “was not a time of only monotonous cold. In fact, it alternated between long periods of cold—lasting roughly 100,000 years—and short periods of considerably warming times—lasting about 10,000 years.”
We humans are the result of the Holocene Epoch, a much more temperate, warmer period that followed the Pleistocene and, writes Peters, “From the Earth’s point of view, the Holocene is no different at all from other brief, warm intervals in the Pleistocene…” We are now about 11,500 years into this warmer cycle and, if the current cooling cycle continues and gets colder, we are knocking on the door of the next ice age.
Nor is this a problem for the northern hemisphere. Southern hemisphere polar sea ice expanded in September 2012 to its greatest extent since satellites began measuring the Antarctic ice cap in 1979.
That’s what Robert W. Felix has been warning about in his book, “Not by Fire, But by Ice”, published initially in 2005. He’s not alone. Habibullo Abdusamatov of the Pulkovo Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences predicts that there will be a sharp drop in the temperature of the Earth starting in 2014. He’s predicting it will last about 200 years.
We are well past when the next ice age—mini or not—should have begun and, if all the global warming charlatans are right, we can actually THANK heightened levels of carbon dioxide for delaying it! However, the truth is that higher or lower levels of carbon dioxide show up centuries after any shift in the Earth’s temperature.
Just as the recent weather reports indicate, lower temperatures, greater snowfall, and other miseries of a colder Earth are in the future of the billions who live in the northern hemisphere. Bundle up.
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