Rapid Warming Spreads Havoc in Canada

[KNOWTHIS]

Ice caps melting faster than forecast

`It's not a gradual change. It's like flipping a switch,' researcher says
New reports warn of sea levels rising up to 5 metres, extensive flooding

Global warming of only a couple of degrees Celsius projected by the end of this century is enough to trigger widespread melting of the massive Greenland ice cap and the partial collapse of Antarctica's ice sheets, prominent climate researchers warn in two studies published yesterday.

The findings are a stunning about-face from previous expert forecasts that such massive melting would take millennia to kick in, even with rising global atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

This new research, based on a comprehensive look at global warming in the distant past, says melting the two icy domains could eventually raise sea level worldwide by as much as five metres, enough to flood low-lying regions like the Netherlands and most Pacific atolls, as well push half a billion people inland.

The full five-metre rise could take several centuries but the world's oceans could easily be a metre higher by 2100, the researchers said.

"The melting is going to happen faster than we thought. It's already begun to happen," said University of Calgary ice researcher Shawn Marshall, the sole Canadian among the authors of the two studies published by the journal Science.

"We could be past the point of no return for Greenland this century," he said in an interview.

A 1998 federal government report rated most of P.E.I., the eastern coast of Nova Scotia and the Beaufort Sea shore in the Western Arctic as "highly sensitive" to a global sea level rise of under seven-tenths of a metre.

Marshall and the other researchers acknowledged they were taken by surprise by the breakneck escalation in the melting of glaciers and ice sheets in recent years. Since 1980 the portion of the Greenland ice cap experiencing annual melting has increased by 40 per cent.

"It's not a gradual change. It's like flipping a switch. Areas that haven't experienced melt in centuries suddenly do," said Marshall.

A widely quoted report in 2001 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that major melting was no threat in Greenland and Antarctica in this century.

But Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona, said the new research shows these massive ice sheets are much more sensitive to global warming than originally suspected.

"Once we're above two times the pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide we're in the danger zone," said Overpeck, who is lead author on one of the studies.

`The melting is going to happen faster than we thought. It's already

begun to happen.

We could be past the

point of no return for

Greenland this century.'

Shawn Marshall, University of Calgary

"Somewhere after that we'll pass a threshold where melting of the ice sheets and sea level rise is irreversible," he said.

Most experts agree that carbon dioxide concentrations double the pre-industrial level will be reached sometime after 2050 unless global emissions are at least cut in half. The current atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is about 380 parts per million compared to 280 parts per million before widespread burning of fossil fuels began around 1870.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, industrialized countries have pledged to reduce their overall emissions of greenhouse gases to 5 per cent below 1990 levels starting in 2008.

But soaring emissions from China and other developing countries — and the Kyoto boycott by Australia and the United States — mean that global carbon dioxide levels are expected to continue rising steadily.

The new warning is based on using climate extremes from the last major global warming to check the reliability of future climate conditions projected by complex computer models.

A prolonged hot spell began 129,000 years ago because natural orbital variations caused the Earth's northern axis to tilt more toward the sun producing much higher temperatures in the northern hemisphere, especially the Arctic.

A decade-long international research project gathered an evidence of climate change from that period, including the disappearance of glaciers in Canada's Arctic archipelago, halving of Arctic sea ice coverage, major shrinking of the Greenland ice cap and a northward march of the boreal forest.

Examination of Australia's Great Barrier Reef also indicated that sea levels were four to six metres higher than today.

A group of U.S. researchers then produced many of the same results by simulating increased sun on the northern hemisphere in an advanced climate model which Calgary's Marshall beefed up to handle glacier movements and ice melting.

"The model got it about right for the past which gives us more confidence in its forecasts," said Marshall.

A second research team, led by Overpeck, then used the souped-up model to project what would happen to the Earth's ice cover if global temperatures were raised by higher levels of carbon dioxide rather than a shift in the planet's tilt.

They found that tripling pre-industrial carbon dioxide levels by 2100 caused widespread melting in Greenland and the Arctic but didn't raise sea levels the five metres recorded in the Australia reefs. The Western Antarctic Ice Sheet must also melt, the scientists concluded.

Even a two degree Celsius rise in global average temperature would cause thermometers to soar as much as eight or 10 degrees in the Arctic and Antarctic, a feedback process known as polar amplification.

"All the things we were worrying about happening did happen and it didn't take that much warming," said Overpeck.

[KNOWTHIS]

www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=0007FA05-10BC-1423-90BC83414B7F0000

Climate Model Predicts Greater Melting, Submerged Cities

Over the past 30 years, temperatures in the Arctic have been creeping up, rising half a degree Celsius with attendant increases in glacial melting and decreases in sea ice. Experts predict that at current levels of greenhouse gases--carbon dioxide alone is at 375 parts per million--the earth may warm by as much as five degrees Celsius, matching conditions roughly 130,000 years ago. Now a refined climate model is predicting, among other things, sea level rises of as much as 20 feet, according to research results published today in the journal Science.

Modeler Bette Otto-Bliesner of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder and paleoclimatologist Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona matched results from the Community Climate System Model and climate records preserved in ice cores, exposed coral reefs, fossilized pollen and the chemical makeup of shells to determine the accuracy of the computer simulation. Roughly 130,000 the Arctic enjoyed higher levels of solar radiation, leading to increased warming in the summer and the retreat of glaciers worldwide. The model correctly predicted the extent of the resulting Arctic ice melt, enough to raise sea levels by roughly nine feet.
ADVERTISEMENT (article continues below)
"Getting the past climate change correct in these models gives us more confidence in their ability to predict future climate change," Otto-Bliesner says. "These ice sheets have melted before and sea levels rose. The warmth needed isn't that much above present conditions."

But sea levels rose as much as 20 feet 130,000 years ago and Overpeck speculates that may have been the result of additional melting in Antarctica. After all, the ice there is not all landlocked; some rests in the ocean and a little warming in sea temperatures could melt it or pry it loose. And this time around, the warming is global, rather than concentrated in the Arctic. "In the Antarctic, all you have to do is break up the ice sheet and float it away and that would raise sea level," he says. "It's just like throwing a bunch of ice cubes into a full glass of water and watching the water spill over the top."


Such a sea level rise would permanently inundate low-lying lands like New Orleans, southern Florida, Bangladesh and the Netherlands. Already sea level rise has increased to an inch per decade, thanks to melting ice and warm water expansion, according to Overpeck. And evidence that the Arctic is exponentially warming continues to accumulate. Indeed, in another paper in the same issue of Science, Goran Ekstrom of Harvard University reported a marked increase in so-called glacial earthquakes (seismic events recorded throughout the world when Greenland's glaciers slip past rock) since 2002. In fact, last year alone saw twice as many quakes as in previous years, with most of that increase coming during the summer months.

"We need to start serious measures to reduce greenhouse gases within the next decade," Overpeck says. "If we don't do something soon, we're committed to [13 to 20 feet] of sea level rise in the future." --David Biello

[altitudelou]

The cost of Global Warming in the short term.

today.reuters.com/investing/financeArticle.aspx?type=bondsNews&storyID=2006-03-23T164037Z_01_N23299938_RTRIDST_0_FINANCIAL-HURRICANE-UPDATE-1-REPEAT.XML

(Repeating for some subscribers) (Recasts, adds comments by Ceres and RMS, byline)
By Ed Leefeldt

NEW YORK, March 23 (Reuters) - Insured property losses from hurricanes in Florida and the Gulf Coast are likely to be 40 percent higher for at least the next five years, a leading consultant said on Thursday in one of the most forward-looking studies in the industry.

Losses for the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States will be 25 percent to 30 percent higher, according to Risk Management Solutions, a Newark, California-based group that predicts the severity of storms and their losses.

[KNOWTHIS]

The cost of Global Warming in the short term.

That's an interesting dynamic to this whole debate. On one hand you've got large industries that benefit from the costs saved by not having to deal with pesky government enforced regulations. They of course use their great lobbying pressure to help keep it that way for themselves. Yet there's another huge, highly profitable industry with its own interests in mind and that's insurance companies. This believe it or not could be one of our only saving graces. These insurance companies are finding out that global warming and the increasingly harsh weather conditions attributed to it like unusually powerful hurricanes are causing a sharp increase in claims being filed. You’re now seeing a push towards emissions regulations from some previously unexpected places because of this. Their own internal studies and projections are showing them that these natural disasters are going to cost them exponentially more and more dough over the years to come. Some say that it will only take on last major calamity in say California to completely send our country which is already in trouble as it is “down the drain” financially. Some say California will quite literally be disappearing down the drain. Of course there’s also lawsuits being filed against insurance companies that don’t want to pay out as well. It's sad that major issues like these only begin to be looked at seriously when someone's money is concerned. As the article hints at. Thousands of scientists with hard facts seem to have little or no impact. Throw money in to the mix, then you see action. Or no action, depending on which side of the global warming fence you sit on. If you're the CEO of Exxon, you don't want to hear it. If you're Bush or Cheney....I think you know the story there.

www.wsusignpost.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2006/03/20/441ee73662624

Earth insurance: Industry isn’t ignoring climate change

No matter how bad global warming gets, Omaha will stay high and dry. So why is Nebraska’s state insurance commissioner heading a national task force on the implications of climate change?

Because the warming of the Earth’s surface is already causing havoc far from any ice cap or coastline. Insurance companies have seen a 15-fold increase in insured losses over the last 30 years from floods, tornadoes, severe hailstorms, droughts and brushfires, in addition to hurricanes. That’s what prompted the National Association of Insurance Commissioners — the state officials who regulate the insurance industry — to embark on a hard look at how well insurance companies are prepared to meet the growing challenge.

They’re not alone. Some of the world’s heaviest of heavyweight investors, including the pension funds for California teachers and state employees, are demanding that the industries they invest in analyze how global warming will affect their value in coming years. The Investor Network on Climate Risk, whose two dozen members manage $3 trillion in assets, drew more than 200 participants, including a who’s who of Wall Street firms, to its 2005 summit.

All the scientists in the world, if they spoke with one voice, couldn’t generate that kind of clout.

As the investment gurus are quick to say, from a financial standpoint, global warming creates both risks and opportunities. Somewhere, someone is probably already dreaming up a marketable security based on carbon credits.

For most of us, though, the newfound interest in climate change on the part of institutional investors and insurance regulators is just one more sign — if we need any — that this issue won’t go away. Almost alone among Western nations, the Bush administration continues to hold out against calls for mandatory caps on carbon emissions.

But it will find the demands harder to resist when those making them represent the kind of green that lines our pockets rather than the kind that grows under our feet.

www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/14183691.htm

A storm of lawsuits
Banks, shippers, even oil companies under fire

Businesses are being hit with lawsuits related to Hurricane Katrina, and it's not just insurance companies that are defendants.

Oil companies, mortgage brokers, a shipping firm and a debris removal contractor have all been sued in federal court.

But one of the most interesting lawsuits sought to cover all the bases.

Gerald Maples, a lawyer based in New Orleans, filed a class action suit against all the insurance companies offering homeowner policies in Mississippi, all the mortgage companies in the state and all the oil companies. The oil companies allegedly increased global warming and produced the conditions where "a storm of the strength and size of Hurricane Katrina would inevitably form and strike the Mississippi Gulf Coast," the complaint states.

U.S. District Judge L.T. Senter Jr. dismissed the mortgage and insurance companies as defendants in a class action suit, saying the facts in each individual case would be too varied. However, they can be filed as individual suits.

The oil companies can still be defendants in a class action suit, Senter ruled, but he wrote in an opinion that he foresaw "daunting evidentiary problems" for anyone who sought to prove the degree to which global warming is caused by the companies.

Nevertheless, Maples said he plans to file an amended complaint early next week against those companies.

"It will have a great deal more information and science as well as admissions by certain oil companies," Maples said.

The lawsuit could break new legal ground.

"The problem is that until now it's been very difficult to quantify the man-made connections to global warming," Maples said. "Now, there is abundant science to do it, and we have this incredible catastrophe that everybody agrees was caused in part by water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico."

Many more lawsuits are likely to be filed in the months ahead. Several of these lawsuits were filed in state court, then moved to federal court. The complaints give one side of a legal dispute.

Regions Bank was sued by John and Angela Johns of Pike County for allegedly failing to pay their windstorm policy out of their escrow account. After filing a claim for damage that their home sustained during the hurricane, they learned that their policy had been canceled in February 2005 for non-payment. In February, U.S. District Judge William H. Barbour Jr. ordered that the couple submit their claims to arbitration.

Landsafe Flood Determination Inc. was sued by J. David Lee and Holly G. Lee of Jackson County. The couple contends that Landsafe failed to correctly designate their residential property as lying in a special flood hazard area.

Crowley Liner Services Inc. and Lloyd's of London are being sued by Royal Beach Hotel. The owner of the Gulfport hotel contends that Crowley breached its duty to secure its storage containers and damaged the property. Lloyd's of London has allegedly failed to promptly pay for business income loss and debris removal, according to the complaint.

Phillips & Jordan Inc. and Crowley Liner Services are being sued by another property owner in Gulfport's west beach neighborhood. Linda Westcott contends that Phillips & Jordan, a city contractor, began bulldozing her rental property even though she had not signed a right of entry form. She is accusing Crowley of being negligent for not removing a container from Woodward Avenue in a timely manner. During cleanup efforts, the container was allegedly pushed on top of the porch at her property, according to the complaint.

Silver Slipper

Casino Venture is taking pre-emptive legal action by asking a federal court to exonerate or limit its liability after Katrina "caused the President Casino Broadwater to be torn from its moorings and washed ashore and caused to collide with the Biloxi Beachfront Hotel."

[KNOWTHIS]

abcnews.go.com/Technology/GlobalWarming/story?id=1765362&page=1

Is It Too Late to Stop the Warming?
Scientists Talk of Possible 'Tipping Point'

"I used to think part of the changes we were seeing in the Atlantic were cyclical," says Kerry Emanuel of MIT, "but several of my colleagues and I have worked very carefully on the data."

A prime example: decayed vegetation in the Arctic, which contains massive amounts of carbon, used to be protected by the perpetual cold. As the climate warms — sped along by human beings burning fossil fuels that release carbon dioxide — scientists say the vegetation will dry out and break down, releasing even more carbon dioxide.

That carbon, escaping into the atmosphere, would cause more greenhouse warming.

"I feel very uncomfortable about it. I mean, it's not the way the Arctic should be," says Walter Oechel, a biologist from San Diego State University, as he stood on the tundra of Alaska's North Slope with ABC News' Bill Blakemore.


"Humans are putting about 6 [billion] or 7 billion metric tons of carbon in the atmosphere a year, and we're standing on 200 billion tons here," says Oechel. "Any significant portion comes out, that's worse than current human injection into the atmosphere. And once that runaway release occurs, there would be no way to stop it."

[KNOWTHIS]

www.livescience.com/environment/060324_glacier_melt.html

Glaciers Disappear in Before & After Photos

Gallery:
www.livescience.com/php/multimedia/imagegallery/igviewer.php?imgid=626&gid=42&index=0

[Swamp Gas]

www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2006/03/30/national/w110439S37.DTL


Air Warming Above Antarctica


Thursday, March 30, 2006


(03-30) 17:36 PST WASHINGTON, (AP) --


The air over Antarctica is warming even faster than in other parts of the world, according to an analysis of 30 years of weather balloon data.


While surface warming has been reported in parts of Antarctica, this is the first report of broad-scale climate change across the whole continent, the British Antarctic Survey says in Friday's issue of the journal Science.


The weather balloon data show a warming of 0.9 degree to 1.3 degree Fahrenheit per decade over the last 30 years. By contrast, the average worldwide temperature has risen 0.2 degree per decade in that time, according to the paper.


Detailed records from the weather balloons launched at nine stations around the continent, including Russian records, have only recently become available, the researchers said.


The research team led by John Turner reported that they could not provide a definite cause for the warming, but added that the observed increases are what would be expected as a result of warming caused by greenhouse gases trapping heat from the sun in the atmosphere.

[Swamp Gas]

Timeline of Human-Made Global Warming discoveries

www.aip.org/history/climate/timeline.htm

[Swamp Gas]

Besides Exxon/Mobil and The Bush Adminstration, look who else is behind destroying the environment and the environmental protection movement

www.theocracywatch.org/environment.htm

[thinkagain]

Life evolves.... that which manages to survive carry the instincts (tendencies toward behavior) to survive into the world that will be created. As far as nuclear waste, in particular from large nuclear explosions ... these are chain reactions, once one considers reactions as a distance it is easy to consider the possibility that all those chain reactions are not stopped, they can be occuring less frequently, i.e. at lower frequencies and greater distances. Those distant reactions can occur in our brains, randomizing our thinking processes, and making us more dependent on our emotions to guide us... which is associated with more myopic choices, which leads others to more myopia, reinforcing the spiral we are experiencing. The subtle way of moving beyond this is to avoid myopia when possible, and shifting consciousness towards more sustainable life.

Of course, this also means that those who want to experience the end times can accelerate that experience through encouraging more myopia.

To those who desire the apocalyse, i would suggest:

All fall short of the glory of God.. thus, nobody knows what God will do, nor how God has chosen for their future. So why pray to acclerate judgement when now may be your best times for all of eternity? If you will be saved (which only God knows if that will be) then wish for the well being of those who will not be, by praying the earth will survive a little longer

It seems foolish to desire that which has no upside, and only plenty of downside?

[Mech]

What I don't understand is WHY these idiots don't push FUSION reaction instead of FISSION reactions....You can't have a fusion reaction without certian elements which makes it 100% times safer minus the waste.

They say its "too expensive" but I doubt it.

just like how Pres. Carter inthe late 70's put solar panels on the White house and Ron Reagan took them down as soon as he took office.

[KNOWTHIS]

Of course, this also means that those who want to experience the end times can accelerate that experience through encouraging more myopia.

Self fulfilling prophecy is at work here. The strident belief of some that the Apocalypse is coming soon is so strong that they might actually help to manifest it when it otherwise wouldn’t have. Thought creates reality. Negative thoughts create negative realities. Why not focus on the positive and improving the present conditions on earth rather then working to speed up the process of destruction in hopes that Jesus will eventually fall out of the clouds to clean up our mess? What if he doesn’t show up? What if Rapture doesn’t sweep you away in to eternal glee? What if the Bible is just allegory, myth, fables, metaphors, symbolic stories containing basic principles not intended to be taken literally?

[Swamp Gas]

mech said:

What I don't understand is WHY these idiots don't push FUSION reaction instead of FISSION reactions....You can't have a fusion reaction without certain elements which makes it 100% times safer minus the waste.

They say its "too expensive" but I doubt it.

just like how Pres. Carter in the late 70's put solar panels on the White house and Ron Reagan took them down as soon as he took office.

It's probably because the concept of Fusion meaning "Come together" (John Lennon), while Fission is "Blowing Up" (GW Bush). There always is some allegorical connection to technologies.

Interesting that we saw some Lyndon LaRouche people handing out info on some Fusion technology that had near zero waste. Fusion power could have potential if we could take the danger out of it.

Solar, Wind, and Hydrogen is still the most environmental and human friendly though.

[KNOWTHIS]

seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1155AP_Global_Warming_States.html

10 states sue EPA over global warming

Ten states fired a new legal salvo at the federal government Thursday in a long-running court battle over global warming and pollution from power plants.

The states, joined by environmental groups, sued the Environmental Protection Agency over its decision not to regulate carbon dioxide pollution as a contributor to global warming.

New York, California, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin filed the lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The states, led by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, want the government to require tighter pollution controls on the newest generation of power plants.

"We feel it's incumbent on EPA to regulate carbon emissions from those power plants now in order to help us get our arms around global warming," said Spitzer spokesman Marc Violette.

Also joining the lawsuit are the cities of Washington and New York, as well as Environmental Defense, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Sierra Club.

[KNOWTHIS]

Bush of course not happy with the results is calling for more studies. Presumably until he gets one that he likes.

www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/3836693.html

Study finds consensus on global warming

A scientific study commissioned by the Bush administration concluded Tuesday that the lower atmosphere was indeed growing warmer and that there was "clear evidence of human influences on the climate system."

The finding eliminates a significant area of uncertainty in the debate about global warming, one that the administration has long cited as a rationale for proceeding cautiously on what it says would be costly limits on emissions of heat-trapping gases.


But White House officials said that though the finding was important, the administration's policy remained focused on studying the remaining questions and using voluntary means to slow the growth in emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide.

Sandstorms

Tibetan Glacier Melt Leading To Sandstorms In China

Global warming is melting glaciers in China's Tibetan region at a rate of 7.0 percent annually, triggering drought, desertification and sandstorms in other regions, state press reported Tuesday.

Data collected over four decades has shown that glaciers on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau, known as the "roof of the world," are shrinking at an unprecedented pace, Xinhua news agency said.

"The melting glacier will ultimately trigger more droughts, expand desertification and increase sandstorms," the report quoted Dong Guangrong, a specialist at the China Academy of Sciences, as saying.

[KNOWTHIS]

www.breitbart.com/news/2006/05/03/D8HCH8VO2.html

Global Warming Cited in Wind Shift

An important wind circulation pattern over the Pacific Ocean has begun to weaken because of global warming caused by human activity, something that could alter climate and the marine food chain in the region, new research suggests.

It's not clear what climate changes might arise in the area or possibly beyond, but the long-term effect might resemble some aspects of an El Nino event, a study author said.

[KNOWTHIS]

news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060516/ap_on_re_us/warm_april_2

U.S. Has Warmest April on Record

Last month was the warmest April on record for the United States, offering many Americans a pleasant spring month.
ADVERTISEMENT

For the 48 contiguous states the average temperature was 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit above normal for the month, the National Climatic Data Center reported Tuesday.

That made it the nation's warmest April since record keeping began in 1895.

Worldwide it was also an above-normal month, but not a record breaker, finishing as the seventh warmest April worldwide, according to the Data Center, a branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The warmth led to below normal home energy demand for the month, the agency added.

The warmth was particularly noted in Texas and Oklahoma which had their warmest April on record.

For New Mexico, Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri and Tennessee it was the second warmest April.

None of the 48 contiguous states was cooler than average, but it was below normal for the month in Alaska.

Drought persisted across large portions of the southern and southwestern United States, the Center said, but nationwide rainfall was near normal for the month.

And it noted there was a series of tornado outbreaks during the first half of the month affecting parts of the Midwest and central Plains as well as the Deep South.

___

[KNOWTHIS]

............

[Swamp Gas]

www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2006/05/22/national/w153413D46.DTL


Bush Snubs Gore Film on Global Warming

By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent

Monday, May 22, 2006


(05-22) 15:34 PDT WASHINGTON, (AP) --

Is President Bush likely to see Al Gore's documentary about global warming? "Doubt it," Bush said coolly Monday. But Bush should watch it, Gore shot back. In fact, the former Democratic vice president offered to come to the White House any time, any day to show Bush either his documentary or a slide show on global warming that he's shown more than 1,000 times around the world.

"The entire global scientific community has a consensus on the question that human beings are responsible for global warming and he has today again expressed personal doubt that that is true," Gore said in an Associated Press interview from France where he attended the Cannes Film Festival.

Bush and Gore have had bitter disagreements about the environment and other issues. Bush defeated Gore in a disputed presidential election that was finally settled by the Supreme Court in 2000.

Gore's documentary chronicles his efforts to bring greater attention to the dangers of climate change.

"New technologies will change how we live and how we drive our cars, which all will have the beneficial effect of improving the environment," Bush said. "And in my judgment we need to set aside whether or not greenhouse gases have been caused by mankind or because of natural effects and focus on the technologies that will enable us to live better lives and at the same time protect the environment."

Gore said the causes of global warming should not be ignored.

"Why should we set aside the global scientific consensus," Gore said, his voice rising with emotion. "Is it because Exxon Mobil wants us to set it aside? Why should we set aside the conclusion of scientists in the United States, including the National Academy of Sciences, and around the world including the 11 most important national academies of science on the globe and substitute for their view the view of Exxon Mobil. Why?"

"I'm a grandfather and he's a father and this should not be a political issue," Gore said. "And he should ask the National Academy of Sciences ... whether or not human beings are contributing to global warming."

The White House said Bush already has acknowledged the impact of human behavior on global warming.

"The president noted in 2001 the increase in temperatures over the past 100 years and that the increase in greenhouse gases was due to certain extent to human activity," said White House deputy press secretary Dana Perino.

"Since then he has committed tens of billions of dollars to the science and technology programs that he initiated and we are well on our way to meeting the president's goal of reducing greenhouse intensity by 18 percent by 2012," she said.

Gore's movie debuted at last winter's Sundance Film Festival and opens in U.S. theaters Wednesday.

[thinkagain]

I'm a little late in this dicussion, yet feel a need to add my thoughts;

First - in does not make a difference what is scientifically "true" (actually there are no scientific truths, only regularities that can be quantitatively modelled with useful predictive accuracy), politicians and marketing can spin them in whatever is necessary to induce a fear response.

Second - your brain and body are not totally your own, as part of a larger ecosystem (which includes the world economy) it is influenced by more than just our thoughts and ideals, in much the same way individual cells in our body are not completely self-determining.

Third - Worship can mean conscious structured honoring of an important power in life, or it can mean compulsive, dellusional ritualizations. It is important to avoid having an habituated negative response to words, else that becomes how others can manipulate your emotions, thoughts and behavior

Fourth - It is important to remember that lack of evidence of something occuring is not the same as evidence that it is no occuring. Human activity does effect the environment (is the environment of manhattan island the same as it was in 1400?), the question is to what extent we provoke catastrophic change - catastrophe has a negative connotiation, but its denotation is one discrete large and quick change, like punctuated equilibrium in evolution.

Finally - at the core of science is the controlled experiment, that the scientist has precise control over some variables. You can not have modern science without assuming that humans effect nature. The issue is not whether we do influence nature, its how we choose to influence it. Native Americans (as far as I understand) recognized the importance of not pusing the earth too far, to keep the web of life stable enough to be able to adapt, that humans are part of that web as well. The dominant industrialized culture we live in tends to believe that only by manipulating nature (producing things) is value created and that our lives can have meaning. The problem is not that there is techonology, it is that many decision makers do not take into account the effects on the 'seventh generation' - as the world becomes more uninhabitable for humans, the more myopic humans tend to become and hence the more likely that are to make decisions to make the world more uninhabitable. Humans are expericencing at lot of self-hatred now, in much the same way that an addict who has made a mess of their lives goes through self-loathing. It tends to reinforce the compulsion for self-punishment and self-destruction.

Getting out of the mess were in may require letting go of the desire to punish the 'evil doers' at whatever cost, and embracing an investment in prerseving life. A frequent motto I see is, "no aid to the enemy, no way'.... what if the only way to avoid our extinction is to not force our enemy to kill us first? Maybe we need to stop seeing nature as our enemy, as something to be subdued and disempowered ... sometimes we do need to be reminded that our lives and our experiences are an outgrowth of the natural world. For some that can take on a form of nature worship.

If global warming is not a product of human intervention, it may yet be accelerated by our behavior. If in fact we have no influence over it, it makes in more a crisis since we would have no idea how to influence its outcome.

ok,,, enough of my rants

mech said:

Are you LISTENING JEANIE?

Man-made global warming is a HOAX to get the people UNDER CONTROL....PERIOD!!!!

UC Physics Professor Says Global Warming Not Real

[KNOWTHIS]

www.newwest.net/index.php/city/comment/9136/C396/L396

Climate Change Hits The American West

No longer dismissed as an invention of Chicken Littles, climate change is upon us and Americans are addressing it head on. Consider this possible view of the West in the year 2056.

In the summer of 1976, a family of four piled into a Ford Gran Torino station wagon, filled up the tank with regular gasoline paying less than $6, and pointed the steering wheel west. On the morning after the country staged mass fireworks displays to commemorate this nation's 200th birthday, the Minnesota tourists set out on a great American pilgrimage, joining a traffic flow of others in route.

Our destination was Glacier National Park in northern Montana. I will never forget the gleaming white, almost metallic, reflection of the snow-crested Rockies visible hundreds of miles away through the windshield as we crossed the Hi-Line and arrived for the night in Browning.

My brother and I scrambled across the Sperry and Grinnell glaciers where we found grizzly bear tracks. Back in Lake Wobegon, I coveted my "Go Hike A Glacier" t-shirt, a treasure brought home from my first personal encounter with primordial post-Pleistocene ice.

Our vacation 30 years ago cemented a lifelong love affair with our national parks but it also imprinted in my mind glaciers as symbolic natural landmarks. Back then, few people could fathom that the essential emblems of Glacier could possibly be gone in 100 years. It turns out, in a rapidly accelerating age of climate change punctuated by rising global temperatures, that these massive sheets of frozen, compressed ancient water could disappear long before that.

In 2000, Al Gore the presidential candidate who did not fair well at the polls in Montana, stood in front of the rapidly disappearing Grinnell in the same spot where I had trekked as a teen. He used the thawing backdrop to talk about the effects of humans pumping greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through our burning of fossil fuels.

Gore did not win the White House, though his supporters said he would have been the best environmental president ever. The victors, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, promptly dismissed climate change as a serious concern. Their administration rejected the Kyoto Protocol and resisted for much of its first term acknowledgment that humans were any more of a catalyst for global warming than normal fluctuations in nature. Melting ice, they said, happens.

Even if Homo sapiens were the primary cause, they argued, it would cost too much for America if government mandated a shift quickly away from an economy built on fossil fuels.

In Montana, we have heard from commentators at two Bozeman-based free-market think tanks, whose views are respected in the White House, that the best course of action is simply to learn to live with any climatic change and adapt down the road if we need to.

Ordering automakers to produce smaller, hybrid cars with better mileage for consumers, rather than continuing to churn out gas guzzling SUVs, is a strike against personal liberty, profits, and freedom, they say. Subsidizing ethanol production is a waste of tax dollars. "Climate change is global in scale and we're already committed to future warming, for carbon dioxide is a long-lived atmospheric resident," writes Pete Geddes of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE). "It's clear: whether anthropogenic or natural, climate change is inevitable. Our challenge is to deal with it responsibly".

Some argue that Montana and the rest of the West with rich deposits of oil, natural gas, and coal beneath them should be entitled to exploit those fuels as a way of stimulating economic growth and helping to wean America off its dependence on Middle Eastern crude.


Low water years in reservoirs across the West could become the norm, not the anomaly. If true, it will not bode well for millions living in thirsty desert cities downstream. One expert from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicts that armed conflicts and climate-related refugees could erupt from battles over water. Photo by Todd Wilkinson.
Most experts, however, say America will never become less dependent on foreign oil especially when we in this country, who account for five percent of the global population, consume 25 percent of the black liquid gold coming out of the ground.

Receiving funding from organizations linked to the energy industry, the climate change downplayers and the free-market thinktankers have positioned themselves at the forefront of a small crowd of skeptics who, in the face of irrefutable scientific evidence, deny that we should worry much about climate change.

With deep stacks of scientific research papers and studies surrounding me at the moment I write these words, I hope they are right, but are they?

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Time Magazine put the following headline on its April 3, 2006 cover issue: "Be Worried. Be VERY Worried. Climate change isn't some vague future problem -- it's already damaging the planet at an alarming pace."

Climate experts say the glaciers of Montana are not merely touchstones. They are crystal balls foretelling our future. Between 1850 and today, the vast majority of glaciers in the Rockies, from Colorado to Canada, have lost at least 70 percent of their icy mass. "The best estimate, though it's not a Biblical truth, is that most of those ice fields will be completely gone by 2030 or shortly thereafter," says Greg Pederson, a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey.

A large percentage of Earth's 160,000 glaciers are also winnowing away. Last February, a dozen conservation groups from the U.S. and Canada asked the World Heritage Committee to place Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park on the list of endangered protected areas because of the impacts caused by climate change. Of the 150 glaciers that covered Glacier in modern times, only 27 still remain.

"The effects of climate change are well-documented and clearly visible in Glacier National Park," asserted Erica Thorson, a professor at the Lewis & Clark Law School, "and yet the U.S. has not taken action to protect the world heritage of the park by reducing its greenhouse gas emissions pursuant to its obligations under the World Heritage Convention."

In a small office on the campus of Montana State University in Bozeman, Lisa Graumlich, a globally- renowned climate ecologist, sits beneath a set of shellacked tree rings on the wall. Cut from the trunks of centuries-old whitebark pine trees, they, like ice cores harvested from the glaciers of Alaska, Antarctica and Greenland, reveal a story and confirm that change is human-caused.

As executive director of the Big Sky Institute, Graumlich is in constant communication with other climate gurus around the world. Her quarters at MSU serve as a local clearinghouse for research that has been accumulating since the 1970s and she works with colleagues to extrapolate the implications for Montana. I ask Graumlich and Pederson to fast forward half a century.

What will Montana and other Western states be like in the year 2056?

"By then, we may be well on our way to experiencing dramatic changes in the landscape and we will likely lose the kind of stability we have known in Montana throughout the 20th century," Graumlich says. "Because of climate, it will be a lot different around here."

The operative word is "stability" which has given civilization in the West its foundation for predicting weather, building economies, assessing nature, and deciding how we spend our leisure time.

Graumlich and Pederson say that Americans, no matter where they live, need to differentiate between what qualifies as "weather" and the long-term trend line of "climate". A deep legendary snow year at the Big Sky Resort in 2005-2006 is WEATHER; decades of documented diminishing snowpack is CLIMATE. A single scorching summer is weather; seven years of drought in farm and ranch country, set among decadal records showing higher average summer temperatures, is climate.

"Hypothetically, imagine the Dust Bowl years," Graumlich says, "but with the strong possibility that the so-called regular normal climate didn't come back." To some, such description is fear mongering but experts say Montanans need to ponder the trajectory.

There's an old saw in the Rockies (repeated in every region of the country): "The only thing we can count on besides death and taxes is dramatically changing weather." So why, then, does there appear to be so much resistance to accepting the preponderant evidence that imminent change in climate, borne out of changes occurring high in the sky, is actually happening?

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Let's put some things in perspective. A few days before I met with Graumlich, I was 1,500 miles away from Montana, sitting inside an auditorium at Georgia State University waiting to watch the premiere of "Too Hot Not To Handle," an HBO television documentary now airing about climate change. It's a hard-hitting piece assembled by executive producer Laurie David, who is a mother of two daughters, activist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, former talent coordinator for the Late Night With David Letterman Show, and wife of comedian Larry David, best-known for creating the TV sitcom, Seinfeld.

This was no pow-wow of radical greenies and there's nothing funny going on. David, who is architect of a national dialogue called the "Virtual March On Washington", says that many scientists are convinced we are approaching a tipping point with climate. The upshot is that the American public thanks to Hurricane Katrina, David suggests, is also at a critical tipping point of awareness that could result in political action.

Assembled together for a panel discussion along with David were Mike Finley, former superintendent of Yellowstone and presently president of the Atlanta-based Turner Foundation; Dr. Michael McGeehin, director of the division of Environmental Hazards and Health Effects for the much-respected federal Centers for Disease Control & Prevention; and Dr. Peter Webster, a professor at George Tech who, like MSU's Graumlich, is a veteran of climate change research.

Webster says that despite what the denialists suggest, there is no longer any debate about the cause of climate change. 2005 went down in the books tied with 1998 as the hottest on record. The next three hottest years in U.S. history were 2002, 2003, and 2004. The rest of the top 10 have been notched since 1995.

Webster says the intensity of hurricanes has increased by 50 percent over the last few decades. The $100 billion in damage to the U.S. caused during last year's Atlantic hurricane season might seem an anomaly today, but big powerful events like Katrina and Rita will be common in the years ahead. At the same time those storms were pounding the Gulf Coast, six Midwestern states were reeling from a drought that cost more than $1 billion in failed corn and soybean crops.

Extreme weather events, Webster says, are an expression of what's happening in the atmosphere and in the West's future he sees clouds of smoke. One of the experts featured in Too Hot Not To Handle is Michael Oppenheimer, a professor at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, prominent thinker on climate, and advisor to the group Environmental Defense. He and several prominent scientists assembled a paper titled "Setting the Record Straight on Climate Change."

Professor Oppenheimer has a special fondness for the Northern Rockies. In the western U.S., 75 percent of the water we use comes from melting snowpack. "Our civilization is dependent upon having water when we want it, how we want it and when we need it," Oppenheimer says. "But everything we set our clocks by is changing."

Yes, he says, warmer climate will mean a longer growing season for carrots and pumpkins in the backyard garden. It will mean an expanded hiking season. It means fewer frozen pipes. It may mean lower winter heating costs, at least in the short term, until we need to more often switch the air conditioner on.

Some places, he says, might be statistically wetter at certain times of the year with climate change than they are now but in regions like the West the precipitation deposited during winter and spring will dry out and evaporate earlier due to withering summer heat. There's a very real chance that much of mountainous Montana will lose not only its glaciers but its regular snowpack, which fuels the ski industry and serves as a natural reservoir for dryland farming worth more than $1 billion to the state, will be fundamentally challenged.

Montana is connected to climatic change that is being registered around the world. In Holland, the once-normal and predictable staging of long-distance skating competitions along that nation's canal system has become rare as the waterways seldom freeze over long enough in winter.

Across the high plains, if you ask farmers, they can tell you that their kids aren't able to skate on ponds in the Back 40 nearly as often as they did when they grew up in the 1950s. This latter observation, Graumlich notes, is where changes in the weather adds up more than anecdotally to the presently almost imperceptible changes in climate. What is actually being observed by us just scratches the surface of what's likely to be in store.

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Every year, Colorado College produces a report called State of the Rockies that focuses on issues central to the eight Rocky Mountain states. Climate was highlighted in 2006.

The State of the Rockies 2006 Report Card made headlines because its modeling strongly shows that with more greenhouse gases, linked to the burning of fossil fuels, pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, precipitation patterns and temperatures will dramatically change. The Northern Plains of Montana is expected to experience the most extreme rise in average annual temperature between 1976 and the year 2085, climbing about 6.5 degrees CELSIUS. Only the shortgrass prairie ecoregion of eastern Colorado and the Great Basin will warm an equal or greater amount.

"From the middle of this century and beyond, parts of lower elevation Montana during the summer could feel more like the present weather around Las Vegas," she says. "That's pretty hot." Pederson adds something that should make every farmer perk up: For every rise in degree Celsius, experts say agriculture will need a 25 percent increase in snowpack or rainfall to make up for drying.

"Certainly the viability of dryland farming will be greatly challenged by the fact that we're seeing warmer temperatures increasing the water stress in soil and plants. Even if snowpack remains the same, the timing of the meltoff is progresively moving earlier, earlier, earlier," adds Graumlich. "The result is a longer period of evapotranspiration and drying out of the soils. On top of that, there will be less water available for irrigation. As a Montanan, I see huge problems for agriculture in a state which is normal dry times is already marginal in giving people an ability to make a living."

Graumlich notes that the number of 90 degree days in Montana already has increased from a handful every summer a couple of generations ago to nearly 30--or equal to a full months' worth--today. At the same time, meteorologists have witnessed a reduction in the number of days where the temperature falls below 0 degrees F.

The number of severe heat waves across the U.S. lasting four days or longer has tripled in the last 50 years, experts say. At the climate discussion in Atlanta, Dr. McGeehin of CDC says heat is a subtle killer. Hundreds died in Chicago in a recent heat event; tens of thousands perished in Europe. McGeehin says human health effects caused by global warming have been treated as secondary issues but he believes they will be brought to the forefront.


As sea levels rise from melting glaciers and ice caps, millions living along low-lying coastal areas will be forced to flee inland, abandoning their former way of life. Civilization as we know it is going to change, Lisa Graumlich says. Photo by Todd Wilkinson.
Mountainous areas will warm up with effects more profound, equal to those in the Arctic north, the State of the Rockies Report notes. Most high elevation areas that had snowpack on April 1, 1976 are forecast to lose snow by 2085. Snowpack still is expected to dwindle if steps are taken to slow CO2 emissions into the atmosphere but the effects would be only half as extreme.

If it seems like the lilacs and crocus are blooming earlier every spring, they are. Tepid temperatures have thrown nature into flux. It is affecting hibernating animals, including yellow-bellied marmots emerging from their dens 23 days earlier than they did 30 years ago. Because ecosystem components are inter-dependent upon one another, the rapid shift of one species, with the corresponding shift of species it depends on, can lead to a breakdown of ecosystem function," the State of the Rockies Report explains, citing the ripple effect of plants flowering ahead of schedule.

"While a small change in bloom timing may not be disastrous for ecosystems, shifts of several days or week scan impair ecoregional health. If flowers begin blooming earlier and pollinators do not adjust to climate change in a similar manner, then both species become imperiled. Furthermore, changes in bloom and pollination timing can be detrimental not only to the survival of plants and insects, but also up the food-ladder to birds and mammals."

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The survival of some species is plant specific and some plants may not be able to survive rising temperatures. Others, such as weeds, are going to proliferate. "As the natural world goes into a state of flux, other things will be getting synchronized which are destructive to the things we value," Graumlich says. Exotic plants are outcompeting native species and crops grown to benefit people, wildlife and livestock; exotic flowers that bloom send adrift pollen that is threatening the health of asthmatics; beetles that kill our native forests set the stage for massive wildfires; outbreaks of West Nile virus, carried by mosquitoes, could intensify.
Ecologists say that one-fourth of all plant and animal species could face extinction in the coming century. Not to mention, warming can throw a monkeywrench into the economy. Never mind the big "charismatic" species that people swarm to wildlands and zoos to see. How important are just a few species of insects?

Bees pollinate alfalfa, fruit trees and gardens. California alone depends upon bees to pollinate billions of dollars worth of crops. If their timing is off just a little bit in reaching plants, they won't produce fruit and reproduce.

As pollinators of commerce, tourists, too, have come to rely on elements of timing. Within decades, ski areas could be reduced to a narrow window of snow on the mountains. "As industries go, the ski industry in the West has been among the most forward thinking," the USGS's Pederson says. "It has embraced the science and tried to incorporate the information into their business plans to maintain profitability in the future. "

Places like the Moonlight Basin Resort in the Madison mountains of Montana no longer adhere to the classic model of starting the lifts when the snow flies and stopping them when it begins melting. Moonlight is looking at the big picture, making investments in conservation easements and real estate and cultural resources. Rather than one day being left high and dry with the old ski industry paradigm, it is transitioning into a more viable recreation model where a potentially changing landscape remains an asset that will be in demand with society down the road.

In Wyoming, the state just spent $250,000 on a hydrology analysis looking at the impacts on downstream water users when the legendary glaciers in the Wind River Mountains eventually disappear. The Wind Rivers hold 36 square kilometers of glacial ice that could be gone.

Desert states that are part of the Colorado River Compact Agreement are fearful with tens of millions of people downstream dependent upon the amount white stuff that is deposited in the mountains hundreds of miles away. McGeehin of CDC said he anticipates that armed conflicts will be spurred in the future by lack of access to freshwater in a climate-changed world.

In Montana, seventy percent of the water used goes to crops and lawns. On the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, tribal officials already are examining the landscape, planning ahead for ways to catch and retain more rainwater in the absence of snow.

Anglers, as an anchor to Montana's nature-based tourism industry, need to ponder the prospect of drastically reduced fishing seasons. Nationwide, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency commissioned a study that predicted a 4.5 degree spike in temperature—computer models actually anticipate a higher rise—would negatively harm as much as a third of the fishes' habitat in the U.S.

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Only a decade ago when climatologists began preparing computer models designed to help forecast the future, differing scenarios were presented ranging from minor effects to severe ones. Skeptics loved to paint the severe models as examples of Chicken Littles attempting to scare people. Implying that climate change is akin to the much ado about nothing made by the Y2K computer scare.

Even novelist Michael Crichton bought into this theory and created a fictional plot based on the premise. To show how bizarre the politics of climate change during the present Congress are, U.S. Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma (where the economy is driven by energy production), called Crichton to testify as "an expert witness" before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that rejected calls to address climate change. Famously, Inhofe declared on the Senate floor: "With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that man-made global warming is THE greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people? It sure sounds like it."

In a grandstanding 2003 speech, Inhofe said that any federal policy foremost should "rely on the most objective science." Were Inhofe to follow the objective conclusion reached by the vast majority of credible scientists who have subjected their findings to rigorous peer review, he would know that the computer models forecasting severe consequences from climate change have been embraced as likely possibilities.

"We would fall into the category of being somewhat skeptical because the dangers seem to be exaggerated and they lead to regulatory controls that may not be appropriate," says Jane Shaw, a public policy specialist with PERC—The Center For Free Market Environmentalism, a think tank, in Bozeman. "It's not a matter of whether the science is irrefutable. It's the degree to which climate change is actually a problem. There are a lot of problems worse than global warming and we should be looking at those. Frankly, these disaster scenarios seem really questionable. It isn't just enough to say the temperature in 100 years will be four, five or six degrees higher. We suddenly have all of these predictions of sea levels rising. We are skeptical and we do understand how incentives work. Scientists have an incentive to drum up fear."

The dig against PERC and FREE is that their free-market, anti-regulation posture reflects the self-interested industries that fund the foundations supporting them and have spent large sums of money attempting to discredit climate change scientists.

This summer, former Vice President and presidential candidate Gore is featured in a documentary entitled "An Inconvenient Truth" that is being shown in cinemas across the country. In a movie review that appeared in The Washington Post, Richard Cohen writes: "You cannot see this film and not think of George W. Bush, the man who beat Gore in 2000. The contrast is stark. Gore -- more at ease in the lecture hall than he ever was on the stump -- summons science to tell a harrowing story and offers science as the antidote. No feat of imagination could have Bush do something similar -- even the sentences are beyond him."

Cohen adds: "But it is the thought that matters -- the application of intellect to an intellectual problem. Bush has been studiously anti-science, a man of applied ignorance who has undernourished his mind with the empty calories of comfy dogma."

I have Inhofe's warning about so-called "phony science" and Shaw's skepticism in mind as I meet with Greg Pederson of the U.S. Geological Survey at MSU. I ask Pederson if he has an incentive to make people afraid. He grins and calls the assertion ridiculous.

Since John Wesley Powell helped found the USGS in the 19th century, this legendary federal agency has developed a well-deserved reputation for generating "science in the public interest." During the petroleum age, USGS also has been closely allied as a service provider to the oil and gas industry, helping engineers know where and how much energy resources lie in the ground. On that front, its science and the people working for the agency have been acclaimed.

In recent years, USGS and a sister agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also have lead the way in studying climate change from the perspective of the atmosphere and expressions on the ground. Pederson is among a prestigious team of USGS experts working on glaciers.

Three forces shape our regional climate: the El Nino Southern Oscillation (related to warming seas off the coast of South America); the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (also related to ocean temperature); and the North Atlantic Oscillation. Such oceanic phenomena also shape the conveyor belt that delivers storms through the Jet Stream around cells of high atmospheric pressure.

The combination of warming surface temperatures in the ocean and more fresh water caused by melting ice are likely to disrupt ocean currents and the way weather is manifested in the Rockies. "There's a scenario widely discussed in the scientific community and not far fetched that truly does wake me up in a cold sweat at night," Graumlich says. "Based upon the acceleration of warming and possible feedback loops that speed it up more than we anticipate, there is a very real prospect that we could see a melting out of the Arctic Ice Sheet."

Ice reflects the sun back into space and acts as an air conditioner for the planet. As it melts it gives way to exposed rock and earth that absorbs warming light. Once the process of melting begins, it can accelerate. Ninety-nine percent of the glaciers in Alaska are melting, some at dramatic rates. Were all of them to liquefy, it could raise sea levels by up to a foot. If the ice in Greenland melted it could raise sea levels by several feet, threatening millions of coastal dwellers in the U.S.

"We can imagine that by 2056 we will have climate refugees that are not just inhabitants of low-lying Pacific Islands," Graumlich says. If Montanans and others blanch at the thought of Californians pouring into the state as second homeowners, imagine how society might react with thousands of uprooted refugees fleeing into the Rocky Mountain region like the displacement that occurred in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina?

During the last decade, travelers heading west on Interstate 90 up and over Homestake Pass have noticed a rapid shift in arboreal color as they crest the Pass and drop down into Butte, which is surrounded by national forests. Today, in nearly ever direction that one looks outward from the Mining City, the vast carpet of evergreens has taken on a reddish patina, the result of spruce beetles boring into the trunks and killing the trees, leaving the needles dry and limp.

Fire experts and silviculturists know what is coming. Short of felling all the spruce and pine in what would represent the Mother of All Logging Operations in the Butte and Anaconda areas, little can be done. The dead trees have primed the national forest for huge wildfires. It's not a matter of if, but when.

How and why did this happen? Insect infestations are part of the natural cycle of life. They may be perceived as a loss of revenue opportunity for timber towns, but they serve an ecological function in nature.

Bug outbreaks have been documented well into prehistoric times by core rings in trees. And beetle killed trees were observed back in the twilight of the 20th century. Typically, they've been halted by weather AND climate. Beetles thrive and advance in years of warm dry summers and mild winters. They are beaten back when there are consecutive years of cooler rainy weather in spring, summer, and fall and then weeks of below zero in winter.

Their current advance, experts say, should serve as a wake up call. According to entomologists, what's disturbing is that rising average temperatures have enabled beetle outbreaks not only to persist longer, but since the 1990s the lack of cold winters, like those remembered by the pioneers, has allowed beetles to complete an entire life cycle (adults eating trees, laying eggs that hatch, and turn produce more adults) in a single year that traditionally took two years.


In 2056, elements of national parks like Yellowstone will still exist but John Varley, the park's former chief scientist, says that humankind's way of relating to the natural world could be dramatically altered and with it, the focus of global conservation and what we call today "tourism." Photo by Todd Wilkinson.
The view from Butte is likely to be repeated across the state and no epic aerial spraying campaign of insecticides, no Bunyanesque logging operation, no federal Healthy Forest Initiative is going to halt it. Only climate can, and the trend line is going in the opposite direction of a solution.

Outbreaks of beetles killing forests are only the first scene in the story of landscape alteration. After native forests die and are burned by fire, the successional regime of trees replacing them will be different. Arboreal varieties that have typically replaced them—lodgepole pine, spruce, and fir—thrived in cooler, moister times. Instead of forests rising up, the best guess of silvilcurists is that the slopes will be covered by brushy species that climb to the tops of ridgelines and through the river drainages currently populated in places by trees with big ancient trunks. "Old growth trees in Montana are going to become increasingly rare," Graumlich says. "The kind of 'forests' that our grandparents grew and that we've shared with them will be remembered in history books by our grandkids and great grandkids, but the massive kinds of trees we've known and associated with our experiences in the backcountry will be few and far between."

Which brings us to another point, Graumlich notes. Where does conservation fit into the equation? The entire preservation movement has been based on an aesthetic and biological premise that KINDS of landscapes can be spared if they are put off limits to development. But by and large, climate change transcends the artificial boundary lines of national parks, protected business lands and personal property.

Graumlich says the aesthetic foundation that our generation holds in its mind, as an idea handed down from John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt, of glaciers, and grizzly bears prowling the dark moist shadows of forest canopies, and the image of anglers casting artificial flies on trout waters in July, will be altered.

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Climate change has the net effect of making places in higher latitudes feel like places now in lower latitudes. "Montanans know how it feels," John D. Varley says. "For those of us who remember the 1970s and the heavy snows and frigid temperatures, who the hell would have ever wanted to move here? The answer is that not many people did. We're the equivalent today of a more southern place and that's one the reasons why we're more attractive."

Varley retired to Bozeman in 2006 after spending 43 years in government service as a biologist. Thirty-three of those years were in Yellowstone and much of them as the chief park scientist overseeing research. Varley is internationally regarded as one of the modern pioneers of applied "ecosystem management". During his tenure in the park, the forest fires of 1988 occurred, grizzly bears rebounded, wolves were reintroduced, his office unleashed the largest ongoing effort of field research of any public land in the U.S., and microbes in the park's geothermal waters were identified and used in groundbreaking biotechnology projects.

During those years, Varley says, he and his colleagues witnessed a steady and dramatic yet subtle change in the physical environment that largely escaped the watchful eye of millions of visitors.

"I try to puzzle through what climate change means for a place like Yellowstone and it's really complicated. Will it be warmer and drier or warmer and wetter?" he asks. "I think those are the most commonly held views."

Is there overwhelming consensus in the scientific community that big changes will occur in Yellowstone? "Big changes have ALREADY happened," he notes.

Consider: A warmer and drier climate means a continuation of trends that started in the 1970s. "Everybody can identify with the loss of glaciers but in Yellowstone the decrease in lakes and ponds and wetlands has been astounding," Varley says. "What were considered permanent bodies of water, meaning reference was given to them in the 1850s, '60s and '70s, and bestowed with a name as a lake, are now gone. Some wetlands that were considered permanent ponds are no longer there. Some lakes have become ephemeral."

Warmer and drier translates into a loss of biological diversity in the park. It also signals the elimination of whitebark pine trees which produce seeds that are a major source of sustenance for grizzly bears.

A benefit of a warmer and wetter scenario is that a richer array of succulent plants will be available for bears and game animals to eat, and that the number of wetlands COULD actually increase, meaning more biodiversity. For example, warmer and wetter might bring an expansion of Yellowstone's Northern Range, today often compared to Africa's Serengeti Plain for the variety and number of large mammals that range across it.

But the sobering reality is that warmer, whether accompanied by increased moisture or dryness, also means the arrival of diseases and organisms that were repelled from finding a home in the northern Rockies by colder temperatures. He points to hookworm parasites that are fatal to canids -- wolves, coyotes, foxes, and yes, domestic dogs. During the past few decades, the presence of hookworms had steadily been moving up in elevation out of lower valleys. To land in the wolf population could have devastating consequences.

[KNOWTHIS]

"The greatest challenges will not be created by the presence or absence of things we already know about," Varley explains. "They will probably come from things more insidious and harder to predict. It could mean warmer waterways creating hospitable conditions for a mudsnail that turns a trajectory of what is known to an outcome that is not known. It will affect that proportion of animals present in a place that will be different than what we now experience."

Pausing, Varley says the notion of predictability, upon which civilization has been built (and, by extension, tourist economies, farm towns, recreational pursuits, ways of life) will need to be restructured.

"Preservation as we have known it for over 100 years has been associated with protection of a given piece of land. The way you provide protection is you use your police powers and that got the job done. I think for present-day managers, that approach is still needed against evildoers, but with climate change there's going to be an increasing level of helplessness when the problems they face are not caused by poachers but by auto or factory emissions originating in the Peoples' Republic of China. You can't protect the boundaries of special places any more. It's out of your hands."

The Holy Grail for conservationists has been the vision of pristinity as expressed by native species, native ecosystems, Varley says. "But like ecosystems everywhere, even those without a huge presence of humankind, our ecosystems are now on a new trajectory. It's like somebody pulled the rug out from under us. Baring a volcanic explosion, Yellowstone will always be there in some form that is recognizable. But it won't be the same place that we worked so hard to protect the last 135 years."

Climate change, although created by human hands, challenges the conventional mindset of land managers who were taught to believe they could achieve precise preferred outcomes based upon the application of certain management prescriptions. All of this goes out the window and along with it, possibly, the human hubris of believing that nature can be controlled.

Wishful thinking, vehement denial, kicking and screaming, trying to paint it as a partisan conspiracy, praying for a miracle; these acts may serve a cathartic function but they do not erase the significant and growing body of science that makes the certainty of dramatic climate change in our lifetime irrefutable.

"What allows me to get back to sleep after I wake up in a cold sweat is that there's promise in a re-organized global world," Graumlich says. "There is the potential to harness the business community on the same scale in which IT [information technology) has been harnessed and used as a tool to transform. It can become an engine for prosperity. The pressing need to confront climate change will force a huge unprecedented reaction, even if the outcomes are for the better."

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It's true: Undeniably, there's a lot that scientists still don't know. But that absence of a clear distillation of the future does not mean there is an abscence of consensus that we are in store for dramatic changes which will push humanity beyond the cocoon of a comfort zone it has enjoyed and grown accustomed to. Scientists, after all, are an ilk of bright minded skeptics who devote their lives to the pursuit of disproving and debunking things before they are embraced as fact.

Author Tim Flannery, who wrote the recent critically acclaimed book about climate change, titled The Weather Makers, echoes the belief of many scientists that humans have roughly a decade, give or take a few years, to confront carbon dioxide emissions in a meaningful way. Such action could blunt the worst effects of warming down the road when all of us adults reading these words are no longer living. Along with Flannery, two others have written excellent eminently-readable books on the subject: New Yorker Magazine staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes From A Catastrophe; and Eugene Linden's The Winds of Change.

Is it still possible for politicians to think and act and create policies that are balanced between the rational self—read economic—interests of constituents living in the here and now and the best interests of citizens who are not yet born?

Just as society can no longer ignore the truth of evidence relating to climate change, so, too, must it recognize that wallowing in despair is equivalent to taking no action.

So here is the good news.

As fate would have it, the Rockies and western plains, where I reside and where the glaciers are vanishing and the temperatures heating up, also sit at one of the ground zeros for a possible American revolution in alternative energy. A key player is businessman, conservationist, and bison rancher Ted Turner who is fast gaining an international profile for his environmental and humanitarian work.

Devoting his autumn years and contributing millions upon millions of dollars to ending nuclear proliferation and addressing climate change, Turner believes the linchpin solution is segueing the fossil fuel economy into alternative energy. He believes vast new fortunes can be made by those who re-tool their business strategies and embrace innovation that is geared to sustainable energy sources. Turner is planning to put wind turbines on some of his ranches in the southern Rockies and he's looking at ways that the companies he runs can serve as an example of doing more with less. Many of the brightest minds have joined Turner and former Yellowstone superintendent Finley (head of the Turner Foundation) at Turner's Flying D Ranch outside of Bozeman to think about how to engage corporate America in solutions.

Together, Turner and Finley have played crucial roles in establishing the Energy Future Coalition that is making huge inroads with the business community, labor leaders and environmentalists to bring about change in U.S. energy policy. Six working groups with prominent politicians and business executives were formed around the topics of transportation, bioenergy, agriculture, the future of coal, end-use energy, and safeguarding the power grid as a national security issue. A pilot project of EFC is 25 X 25, which aims to have agricultural products produce 25 percent of the total energy consumed in the U.S. by the year 2025.

"CEOs in business are starting to get it," Finley says. "From the executives at Wal-Mart to the senior partners at Goldman Sachs, they recognize the huge business opportunities."

If carried out, analysts say investments in biofuels, conservation, and energy efficiency as suggested by 25 X 25 would in a fairly short amount of time reduce U.S. oil consumption by three million barrels A DAY or about 15 percent of current consumption annually. It would create 1 million new jobs by 2015, add another 500,000 jobs in the staggered U.S. auto industry, spawn more than 500,000 jobs in clean-coal technology (where Montana could position itself as a leader), and perhaps most importantly it would help households save money on their monthly power and gas bills and enable the U.S. to reduce emissions of carbon by 180 tons per year or about 10 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2001. Montana and other western states could be at the head of the pack.


Stunning mountain ranges like the Snowcrest peaks along the Continental Divide in western Montana may cease to have snowpacks which could have severe consequences for agriculture, tourism, the survival of wildlife, and ultimately, the amount water that reaches the tap. Photo by Todd Wilkinson.
Mike Phillips, a candidate for the Montana House from Bozeman and director of the Turner Endangered Species Fund, has made as part of his campaign a promise to champion alternative energy when the legislature meets again in Helena in 2007.

In announcing his candidacy, Phillips was the first state candidate in the West to throw his support behind 25 X 25. The initiative has won enthusiasm not only from Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who was the first western governor to endorse the program, but it received heavyweight backing in the form of the American Farm Bureau, one of the most powerful lobbying entities in Congress. Schweitzer also empanelled a special task force on climate change.

Like Turner, the governor supports the notion of the federal government initiating a massive R & D effort with alternative fuels modeled after the Apollo space program that would function as a partnership between the state and federal government and the business community.

In 2005, Montana Senate Majority Leader John Tester, a candidate for U.S. senator, introduced a bill which became law, mandating that by 2015 at least 15 percent of all energy in the state be produced through renewable resources. Tester's opponent, incumbent U.S. Senator Conrad Burns says that he, too, is committed to investing federal dollars in ethanol production.

Next to solar, Montana's most abundant sustainable resource is wind. In part because of the incentives offered in the legislation, wind farms began springing up almost immediately in the state, most noticeably in the Judith Gap. New construction of propellered-windmills catapulted Montana from ranking 50th in the nation of wind energy to 15th.

The chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality recently told a reporter that the Bush Administration is spending $10 billion annually on climate change research. That's one-tenth the amount spent to fund a year's worth of the war in Iraq. Society will spend billions more to rebuild New Orleans and billions more after that to try and keep the city from being inundated again by hurricanes and rising seas.

Are scientists incentivized to fear monger, as PERC's Shaw claims? "As a society we have some really hard questions to face. Status quo won't work any more," government scientist Pederson says. "Scare tactics only turn people off. We prefer to re-frame the Time Magazine cover another way. Instead of 'Be Worried. Be VERY Worried,' people should 'Think Hard. Think VERY Hard about the decisions they are making, where and how they are living, what they are buying, and who they are voting for. The personal actions we take are the investment we make."

I think back to the sense of patriotism that was infused in me as a teenager as I watched the fireworks show on America's 200th birthday and helped my parents pack the family station wagon for our trip the next morning to Glacier Park. In the New York Times, Pulitizer Prize-winning columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that being green is the new red, white and blue.

That might be hard for some westerners who subscribe to the cowboy myth of maverick independence and geographic isolation to swallow. We are separate from the rest of the world. We are where the world wants to come and relax. But potentially we can also position ourselves at the center of the world.

"Sorry, but being green, focusing the nation on greater energy efficiency and conservation, is not some girlie-man issue," Friedman writes. "It is actually the most tough-minded, geostrategic, pro-growth and patriotic thing we can do. Living green is not for sissies. Sticking with oil, and basically saying that a country that can double the speed of microchips every 18 months is somehow incapable of innovating its way to energy independence - that is for sissies, defeatists and people who are ready to see American values eroded at home and abroad."

Across America, hundreds of thousands of citizens—Republicans, Democrats independents, business people, grandparents, school teachers, NASCAR and Indy drivers, religious leaders, country- western and rock musicians, and young people have signed on to the Virtual March on Washington, D.C. at www.stopglobalwarming.org. One of the signees is Republican John McCain.

Nearly 250 mayors of large and mid-sized cities also have come together to form a unified front in tackling climate change, part of it prompted by inaction on the federal level from Washington, D.C. The city of Portland, Oregon, for example, is leading the way in trying to get both government and private business to lower CO2 emissions by adopting energy conservation measures and opportunities for carbon sequestration.

"If we have the brainpower in this country to put a man on the moon and remove someone's heart and replace it with a new one, then I believe establishing a new paradigm for how we create our energy is definitely doable," says Phillips. "It's the states and the individual businesses that get out ahead that will be best positioned to enjoy the rewards of the change that has to occur."

Climate change is the greatest challenge to modern civilization, Ted Turner tells me. Addressing it with courage and conviction and an entrepreneurial spirit can yield unprecedented opportunity. "This is the only thing that has left me thinking like an optimist," he adds. "Otherwise, if you care about the future your kid's grandkids are going to inherit, you realize how dire it could be. It is our only chance to literally make a difference in shaping a world worth saving."



EDITOR'S NOTE: Todd Wilkinson, based in Bozeman, is currently writing a book about Ted Turner's work as a global environmentalist and his ownership of two million acres of private land in the U.S. A shorter version of the story appears this summer in the journal Montana Quarterly, currently on news stands. Color photos by Todd Wilkinson

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[KNOWTHIS]

In the future, climatologists see most areas of the West becoming hotter, drier, smokier. In 50 years, portions of the high plains could experience summers kindred to those currently experienced in Las Vegas. Forests, too, will burn and likely not be replaced with the usual complement of sub-alpine species. East of the Rockies, for every rise in temperature Celsius, experts say that agriculture will need a 25 percent increase in moisture. Photo by Todd Wilkinson.



Low water years in reservoirs across the West could become the norm, not the anomaly. If true, it will not bode well for millions living in thirsty desert cities downstream. One expert from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicts that armed conflicts and climate-related refugees could erupt from battles over water. Photo by Todd Wilkinson.



As sea levels rise from melting glaciers and ice caps, millions living along low-lying coastal areas will be forced to flee inland, abandoning their former way of life. Civilization as we know it is going to change, Lisa Graumlich says. Photo by Todd Wilkinson.



In 2056, elements of national parks like Yellowstone will still exist but John Varley, the park's former chief scientist, says that humankind's way of relating to the natural world could be dramatically altered and with it, the focus of global conservation and what we call today "tourism." Photo by Todd Wilkinson.



Stunning mountain ranges like the Snowcrest peaks along the Continental Divide in western Montana may cease to have snowpacks which could have severe consequences for agriculture, tourism, the survival of wildlife, and ultimately, the amount water that reaches the tap. Photo by Todd Wilkinson.

[Swamp Gas]

www.commondreams.org/views06/0604-22.htm

Welcome to the Climate Crisis[/size][/b]

Elected officials can no longer avoid talking about global warming — but how many of them grasp the urgent need for action? Here's how to tell the difference between those who 'get it' and those who don't

by Bill McKibben

For those who have been working for decades to raise awareness about climate change, this is a moment charged with opportunity — and with peril.

A series of events — beginning with Hurricane Katrina and continuing through the release of Al Gore's new movie — has finally pushed the issue near the forefront of the public agenda. It doesn't yet rank quite up there with the war on terrorism or the high price of gasoline, but it's clear that the next bad storm season or prolonged drought will seal the deal; even as things stand now, there's no chance that it will simply be ignored in the next presidential campaign, not with evangelical leaders and Greenpeace activists taking turns pressing the question.

But here's the danger: Twenty years of inaction, and especially the Bush administration's stupendous record of ignorance and neglect, have set the bar so low that any legislation at all may look like real progress. The utilities, the coal companies and Detroit may find themselves able to easily set the terms of any deal that will, in turn, set policy for the next 20 years — and if it's a deal that's too modest in attempting to rein in carbon emissions, then it may be worse than no deal at all. Precisely because we've wasted the past two decades, we need real, not token, action now.

So here's how to tell if your politicians really get global warming:

• Is it just one more issue on their list of topics, somewhere between trade policy and failing schools — or do they understand it for what it really is: the first civilization-scale challenge that humans have yet faced? Newly emerging science (including some that the Bush administration tried to force NASA climatologist James Hansen to suppress) shows that we have underestimated the scale and urgency of the crisis. Everything frozen on Earth is melting fast, for instance, threatening to produce an inhospitable planet in the decades ahead and an unbearable one in the lifetime of those being born. Political rhetoric needs to reflect the stark fact that this is an emergency.

• Do their proposals come with big numbers — 50 percent reductions in carbon emissions, say? They don't need to achieve those numbers overnight (the various European countries aim for them in the 2030-2050 range), but real reductions, as opposed to slower growth rates of emissions, need to begin within the next few years, according to the most recent science. This implies Defense Department-scale budgets for technology development and for implementation of those technologies we already know how to use — wind turbines, say.

• Do they avoid a fixation with any one technology? The idea that nuclear or "clean coal" or, for that matter, wind, will by itself solve our energy gap is nonsense, and it usually masks an ideological argument from one side or the other. There are no silver bullets, only silver buckshot. Given the scale of the problem, the cheapest solutions (beginning with reducing the massive energy waste in our system) make the most sense. This implies a large role for markets — but only once government policy has made the cost of fossil fuels truly reflect the damage they do.

• Do they understand that technological change alone cannot achieve the 70 percent reductions in fossil fuel use needed to stabilize climate? We'll also need real shifts in attitude, behavior and habit. These changes are possible (the average Western European uses half as much energy as the average American while leading a quality life), but they will take real political leadership on issues ranging from mass transit to sprawl to the size of cars.

• Do they avoid the temptation to scapegoat China and the rest of the developing world? This has been the safety hatch for politicians who wanted to avoid even baby steps such as the Kyoto treaty: They piously insist that the Chinese cut their carbon emissions alongside ours. But this makes no moral sense: The Chinese, who use an eighth as much energy per capita, are only beginning to burn fossil fuel in large quantities, and they're using it to pull people out of poverty, not indulge their taste for Lincoln Navigators. And it's politically hopeless: The Chinese, and the rest of the world, simply will not accept the idea that the atmosphere belonged to us, we filled it with carbon, and now they need to find a new strategy for development. Our only hope — and the only just solution — is a massive transfer of technology and resources to the global south so that those countries can develop differently.

There are schemes that would make all these items possible, even affordable: big taxes on fossil fuel rebated to citizens to reward lower energy use; small taxes on currency speculation to underwrite the cost of building windmills in China; a switch of subsidies from fossil fuel to future fuel.

It's not ideas we're lacking; it's a prevailing sense of the mortal danger that we've wandered into, a danger that demands leadership willing to set the bar high.

Bill McKibben, a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, is the author of "The End of Nature," a book about global warming.

[Swamp Gas]

news.yahoo.com/s/ap/global_warming;_ylt=Av2PHd6wuyEavpKhfHTDiWNrAlMA;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl


Study says Earth's temp at 400-year high[/b]

By JOHN HEILPRIN, Associated Press Writer
44 minutes ago



WASHINGTON - The Earth is the hottest it has been in at least 400 years, probably even longer. The National Academy of Sciences, reaching that conclusion in a broad review of scientific work requested by Congress, reported Thursday that the "recent warmth is unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia."


A panel of top climate scientists told lawmakers that the Earth is heating up and that "human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming." Their 155-page report said average global surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rose about 1 degree during the 20th century.

This is shown in boreholes, retreating glaciers and other evidence found in nature, said Gerald North, a geosciences professor at Texas A&M University who chaired the academy's panel.

The report was requested in November by the chairman of the House Science Committee, Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (news, bio, voting record), R-N.Y., to address naysayers who question whether global warming is a major threat.

Last year, when the House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, Rep. Joe Barton (news, bio, voting record), R-Texas, launched an investigation of three climate scientists, Boehlert said Barton should try to learn from scientists, not intimidate them.

Boehlert said Thursday the report shows the value of having scientists advise Congress.

"There is nothing in this report that should raise any doubts about the broad scientific consensus on global climate change," he said.

Other new research Thursday showed that global warming produced about half of the extra hurricane-fueled warmth in the North Atlantic in 2005, and natural cycles were a minor factor, according to Kevin Trenberth and Dennis Shea of the Commerce Department's National Center for Atmospheric Research. Their study is being published by the American Geophysical Union.

The Bush administration has maintained that the threat is not severe enough to warrant new pollution controls that the White House says would have cost 5 million Americans their jobs.

Climate scientists Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes had concluded the Northern Hemisphere was the warmest it has been in 2,000 years. Their research was known as the "hockey-stick" graphic because it compared the sharp curve of the hockey blade to the recent uptick in temperatures and the stick's long shaft to centuries of previous climate stability.

The National Academy scientists concluded that the Mann-Bradley-Hughes research from the late 1990s was "likely" to be true, said John "Mike" Wallace, an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Washington and a panel member. The conclusions from the '90s research "are very close to being right" and are supported by even more recent data, Wallace said.

The panel looked at how other scientists reconstructed the Earth's temperatures going back thousands of years, before there was data from modern scientific instruments.

For all but the most recent 150 years, the academy scientists relied on "proxy" evidence from tree rings, corals, glaciers and ice cores, cave deposits, ocean and lake sediments, boreholes and other sources. They also examined indirect records such as paintings of glaciers in the Alps.

Combining that information gave the panel "a high level of confidence that the last few decades of the 20th century were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years," the academy said.

Overall, the panel agreed that the warming in the last few decades of the 20th century was unprecedented over the last 1,000 years, though relatively warm conditions persisted around the year 1000, followed by a "Little Ice Age" from about 1500 to 1850.

The scientists said they had less confidence in the evidence of temperatures before 1600. But they considered it reliable enough to conclude there were sharp spikes in carbon dioxide and methane, the two major "greenhouse" gases blamed for trapping heat in the atmosphere, beginning in the 20th century, after remaining fairly level for 12,000 years.

Between 1 A.D. and 1850, volcanic eruptions and solar fluctuations were the main causes of changes in greenhouse gas levels. But those temperature changes "were much less pronounced than the warming due to greenhouse gas" levels by pollution since the mid-19th century, it said.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private organization chartered by Congress to advise the government of scientific matters.

___

HEATING UP: The Earth is the hottest it has been in at least 400, maybe more.

SCIENTISTS AGREE: The National Academy of Sciences studied tree rings, corals and other natural formations, in part, to conclude that the heat is unprecedented for potentially the last several millennia.

HUMAN FAULT: Human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming, the Academy says.