Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Duis ligula lorem, consequat eget, tristique nec, auctor quis, purus. Vivamus ut sem. Fusce aliquam nunc vitae purus.
Global Warming Fast Facts
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Global warming, or climate change, is a subject that shows no sign of cooling down. Here's the lowdown on why it's happening, what's causing it, and how it might change the planet.
Is It Happening?
Yes. Earth is already showing many signs of worldwide climate change.
Average temperatures have climbed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius) around the world since 1880, much of this in recent decades, according to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
The rate of warming is increasing. The 20th century's last two decades were the hottest in 400 years and possibly the warmest for several millennia, according to a number of climate studies. And the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that 11 of the past 12 years are among the dozen warmest since 1850.
The Arctic is feeling the effects the most. Average temperatures in Alaska, western Canada, and eastern Russia have risen at twice the global average, according to the multinational Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report compiled between 2000 and 2004.
Glaciers and mountain snows are rapidly melting—for example, Montana's Glacier National Park now has only 27 glaciers, versus 150 in 1910. In the Northern Hemisphere, thaws also come a week earlier in spring and freezes begin a week later.
Coral reefs, which are highly sensitive to small changes in water temperature, suffered the worst bleaching—or die-off in response to stress—ever recorded in 1998, with some areas seeing bleach rates of 70 percent. Experts expect these sorts of events to increase in frequency and intensity in the next 50 years as sea temperatures rise.
An upsurge in the amount of extreme weather events, such as wildfires, heat waves, and strong tropical storms, is also attributed in part to climate change by some experts.
Cities around the world will briefly go dim Saturday evening as the lights of buildings and landmarks are shut off for one hour to raise awareness about climate change. Called Earth Hour, the event is organized by the conservation nonprofit WWF to encourage people to conserve electricity and reduce the greenhouse emissions that cause global warming.
Earth Hour started last year with one city, Sydney, Australia. The response was so strong that WWF decided to take the event global for 2008, said WWF spokesperson Leslie Aun. "We were trying to get a few people to participate, but we ended up getting 2 million people and some 2,500 businesses," Aun said. This year, Earth Hour will include 35 official partner cities, as well as dozens of smaller cities spread out across six continents. Partner cities in the United States include Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix, and San Francisco. "We have a city in every major U.S. time zone participating," Aun said. The event will take place from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. local time in each time zone.
(National Geographic Channel is the U.S. media partner for Earth Hour. National Geographic Channel and National Geographic News are both owned by the National Geographic Society.)
Commentary - Timothy Carney: Pepsi dives into dangerous global warming wars
Pepsi is the newest corporation to “go green,” earning media praise while promising to “do well by doing good.” But environmentalism for profit requires the tricky game of lobbying, which makes some PepsiCo investors worried that the corporation is in over its head.
PepsiCo makes Pepsi, Gatorade, Aquafina bottled water and other drinks, along with Frito-Lay snack foods. Recently, operating under the motto of “performance with purpose,” Pepsi has joined a green lobbying campaign pushing federal mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions.
The Free Enterprise Action Fund is a mutual fund (listed as FEAOX) that uses its power as a shareholder to influence corporate policies. While most “activist shareholders” push environmental, racial or labor rules on companies, FEAOX pressures companies to hold close to principles of free enterprise, and focus on their core mission of returning a profit for shareholders.
FEAOX portfolio manager Tom Borelli is distressed that Pepsi’s recent words on its actions on global warming will hurt the company and its shareholders while having no significant benefit for the planet.
Last spring, PepsiCo bought “renewable energy certificates” covering all the energy consumed in its manufacturing, distribution and corporate facilities. In effect, Pepsi is indirectly paying someone, anywhere, to generate electricity from windmills or solar panels.
But Pepsi is not just changing it’s behavior — it’s trying to use government to change everyone else’s too. Last May, PepsiCo joined the United States Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of environmental pressure groups and corporations united to lobby the federal government to impose regulations that curb greenhouse gas emissions in the form of a “cap-and-trade” scheme.
Borelli and other regulation opponents point out that cap-and-trade will impose huge energy costs on U.S. consumers, and that the energy sector profoundly affects the rest of the economy by driving up the price of manufacturing and shipping, all for minimal effect on climate.
A handful of corporations, including USCAP members such as General Electric, have positioned themselves to get rich off of these restrictions even while the rest of the economy suffers.
PepsiCo may think it can make a profit from these restrictions: The firm can seek CO2 credits for the renewable energy certificates it has bought; also the company outsources its bottling, including some to other countries that have no greenhouse restrictions. At the same time, new CEO Indra Nooyi is hoping the public image of Pepsi as an environmentally friendly company will generate good will and thus business.
But Pepsi is learning that the environmental game — both on its PR front and its lobbying front — is full of pitfalls. Pepsi has firmly come down in support of the notion that industrial activity contributes to harmful climate change — the very argument that lies behind the current crusade against bottled water products.
Pressure groups have started anti-bottled-water campaigns, and the mayor of San Francisco has prohibited city employees from buying bottled water. The top-selling brand of water in the United States — and thus the chief target — is Pepsi’s Aquafina.
The regulatory front is more treacherous. Any cap-and-trade legislation will be complex and nuanced, with the details determining who gets rich and who suffers, meaning he who has the best lobbying team usually wins.
Just looking at Pepsi’s cohorts in USCAP, it’s easy to see the soda maker is not the biggest kid on the block. Pepsi spent $1 million on lobbying last year, compared to GE’s $23.6 million, General Motors’ $6.4 million and Alcoa’s $1.6 million.
More specifically, PepsiCo has not lobbied on environmental issues in more than three years, according to federal filings.
This is enough to make a shareholder worry that Pepsi is in over its head in this high-stakes game of global warming regulation, especially when PepsiCo acknowledged in its annual filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that high energy prices could have a serious effect on profits. FEAOX has filed a shareholder resolution calling on the company to describe just how their lobbying, PR and voluntary efforts — while putting profit at risk and slowing the economy — will help slow global warming.
There’s a lot of money to be made in the global warming lobbying game, but there will also be plenty of losers. Will those losers include PepsiCo’s shareholders?
Possible U.S. carbon tariff may affect growth: report
The West's next weapon in the fight against global warming may be a carbon tariff on imports from the developing world, a strategy that could have a profound impact on the global economy, a new report argues.
Not only will new charges for carbon emissions trim growth in developed countries, but carbon tariffs could boost inflation and reverse the march toward offshoring as manufacturers who have relocated to countries such as China move to more energy-efficient environments back home, CIBC World Markets said in a report released yesterday.
"As OECD countries begin to tax their own economies by charging growing fees on carbon emissions, their tolerance for the carbon practices of their trading partners will diminish rapidly -- particularly when the painful cuts made by North America, Western Europe and a handful of other OECD countries are dwarfed by the emission trail spewing from China and the rest of the developing world," Jeff Rubin, chief economist at CIBC WM, said in the report with Benjamin Tal. "The response is likely to involve a carbon tariff -- an equalizing force that will tax the implicit subsidies on the carbon content of imports that come from carbon non-compliant countries."
In an interview, Mr. Rubin said it looks increasingly likely the United States will join Europe in imposing a charge on carbon emissions either through a tax or a "cap and trade" system, where companies are allowed to emit a certain amount of carbon but must pay to go over the limit.
"If you look at the McCain platform, the Obama platform or the Clinton platform, irrespective of who captures the White House, the next administration is going to impose a price on carbon," Mr. Rubin said.
That would be the precursor for the United States to attempt to impose a carbon tariff on developing-world imports, he said. In effect, a carbon tariff would be similar to a countervailing trade duty, imposing a charge for unfair energy subsidies that Chinese exports reap from their cost-free carbon emissions, Mr. Rubin said.
At US$45 per tonne of carbon dioxide -- about the going rate under current European trading schemes -- such a tariff would raise roughly US$55-billion a year from Chinese exports to the United States or equivalent to an average 17% tariff, almost six times bigger than the current 3% effective tariff on Chinese goods.
"At least initially, before other carbon-compliant sourcing can be found, it will be U.S. consumers who will have to bear the bulk of the tariff burden in higher import prices," Mr. Rubin wrote. Based on China's share of U.S. imports alone, that would raise the annual U.S. consumer price index by more than 0.6 percentage points.
Canada would likely face a similar increase, and costlier goods prices would hit growth as well.
Mr. Rubin estimates U.S. efforts to curb emissions will shave 0.6 percentage points off growth in real gross domestic product per year for the next five years, and that is if emissions are only cut by 10%.
The inflationary impact may be mitigated however, if North American industries shift production back home, a trend Mr. Rubin fully expects to materialize as companies try to escape the tariff and improve their energy efficiency.
Given that Kyoto is not enforceable on its own terms (Article 18), those who argue that we must ratify it because “everyone is doing it” must face the difficult fact that, actually, they aren’t doing it. Europe hasn’t had to pay for its broken promises and shifting emissions-reduction targets. The U.S. is the only nation whose courts could have forced the government to meet the terms of the treaty. That threat surfaced thanks to an earlier decision by the Court — which caused great distress to conservatives — under which treaties were considered not merely on a par with domestic laws, but superior to them in cases where the two conflict. Under Medellin, it now seems feasible that the U.S. could ratify Kyoto and, if lawmakers lacked the political will to adopt implementing legislation, green pressure groups could not sue their way to compliance.
One might argue: if two-thirds of the Senate were to approve a Kyoto-type treaty, that would demonstrate the political will to actually impose the restrictions that such a treaty calls for. I suggest that these steps remain quite different animals: the first involves feel-good press releases announcing bold action to join an international consensus for the sake of our children and grandchildren; the second — the implementing legislation — involves pesky Congressional Budget Office public estimates of the extraordinary costs.
Remember, Congress has had the option of imposing Kyoto-type legislation sans treaty for a decade — and certainly for the past 14 months while a Democratic majority has held the reins. When they were in the minority, Democrats bayed incessantly about how hearings were an irresponsible delay tactic and waste of time and that we must act now! Their present-day muttering about test-votes and gestures in anticipation of next year speak for themselves.
Apologists claim that fear of a Bush veto is the reason for Congressional Democrats’ inaction on climate-change legislation — an argument I’ve answered here; their real fear is advertising the costs of their preferred climate action.
In sum, Medellin offers no threat and possibly some succor for us anti-Kyoto types.
Believe it or not, there are some people believe that global warming is not real. But scientists have developed a technique to prove that it is real and it is a matter of serious concern. Scientists are able to prove that the man is responsible for these global changes.
Proof global warming An example is the scientific evidence examined and analyzed more over 7 million reading of the temperature of the oceans, the land around the world, and they discovered that the ocean temperature gradually increased by about 1C annually starting in 1960, they attributed to a warming Rising sea levels. As the oceans are rising because it is now melting the ice somewhere for adding water and oceans. Over the past 40 years, or if the climate is warming and 90 percent of global warming can be found in the ocean. When the climate and the warming of the ice into the ocean and energy which caused warming is now trapped in the atmosphere and had no where to go.
Proof global warming is active in our world Energy is trapped because levels of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide absorbed by radiation in the atmosphere is expected to evaporate in the space, but with the gas polluting the atmosphere of the new gas that form can not go anywhere.
Proof that global warming is here Even the Bush Administration does not believe in global warming, in their opinion, the reason why the climate is changing is because they believe it is a natural event. Remember the movie Day After Tomorrow, the same idea, but he did not bet hotter and colder. Al Gore exposes the idea, effects and causes of global warming in his movie called The Truth Disadvantage.
Global warming is perhaps the most important environmental problem in the world today. Levels of greenhouse gases are increasing in the atmosphere due to human activities, and are changing the composition of the atmosphere and global warming. Climate scientists agree that human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels contribute to the problem. What is global warming - Clearly detailed
Scientists have predicted the phenomemon of global warming for decades. Unfortunately, some of the adverse effects of global warming, they have also predicted begin to occur throughout the world, including:
growing incidence of droughts in some areas, floods in others;
The rising temperatures of oceans and the sea level;
increase extreme weather events such as tornadoes and hurricanes;
The melting of mountain glaciers and the reduction of snow cover;
Global warming is the increase in the average temperature of the Earth's near-surface air and oceans since the mid-twentieth century and its projected continuation.
The global average air temperature near the Earth's surface rose 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.33 ± 0.32 °F) during the hundred years ending in 2005. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes "most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-twentieth century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations" via the greenhouse effect. Natural phenomena such as solar variation combined with volcanoes probably had a small warming effect from pre-industrial times to 1950 and a small cooling effect from 1950 onward. These basic conclusions have been endorsed by at least thirty scientific societies and academies of science, including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries. While individual scientists have voiced disagreement with some findings of the IPCC, the overwhelming majority of scientists working on climate change agree with the IPCC's main conclusions.
Climate model projections summarized by the IPCC indicate that average global surface temperature will likely rise a further 1.1 to 6.4 °C(2.0 to 11.5 °F) during the twenty-first century. The range of values results from the use of differing scenarios of future greenhouse gas emissions as well as models with differing climate sensitivity. Although most studies focus on the period up to 2100, warming and sea level rise are expected to continue for more than a thousand years even if greenhouse gas levels are stabilized. The delay in reaching equilibrium is a result of the large heat capacity of the oceans.
Increasing global temperature will cause sea level to rise, and is expected to increase the intensity of extreme weather events and to change the amount and pattern of precipitation. Other effects of global warming include changes in agricultural yields, trade routes, glacier retreat, species extinctions and increases in the ranges of disease vectors.
