Archive for November 2009

Written by fatih al-farahat in CRU e-mails, Gavin Schmidt

Gavin Schmidt, RealClimate: The CRU hack -- context

The CRU hack: Context

— gavin @ 23 November 2009; Real Climate blog

This is a continuation of the last thread which is getting a little unwieldy. The emails cover a 13 year period in which many things happened, and very few people are up to speed on some of the long-buried issues. So to save some time, I’ve pulled a few bits out of the comment thread that shed some light on some of the context which is missing in some of the discussion of various emails.

Trenberth: You need to read his recent paper on quantifying the current changes in the Earth’s energy budget to realise why he is concerned about our inability currently to track small year-to-year variations in the radiative fluxes.
Wigley: The concern with sea surface temperatures in the 1940s stems from the paper by Thompson et al (2007) which identified a spurious discontinuity in ocean temperatures. The impact of this has not yet been fully corrected for in the HadSST data set, but people still want to assess what impact it might have on any work that used the original data.
Climate Research and peer-review: You should read about the issues from the editors (Claire Goodess, Hans von Storch) who resigned because of a breakdown of the peer review process at that journal, that came to light with the particularly egregious (and well-publicised) paper by Soon and Baliunas (2003). The publisher’s assessment is here.

Update: Pulling out some of the common points being raised in the comments.

HARRY_read_me.txt. This is a 4 year-long work log of Ian (Harry) Harris who was working to upgrade the documentation, metadata and databases associated with the legacy CRU TS 2.1 product, which is not the same as the HadCRUT data (see Mitchell and Jones, 2003 for details). The CSU TS 3.0 is available now (via ClimateExplorer for instance), and so presumably the database problems got fixed. Anyone who has ever worked on constructing a database from dozens of individual, sometimes contradictory and inconsistently formatted datasets will share his evident frustration with how tedious that can be.
“Redefine the peer-reviewed literature!” . Nobody actually gets to do that, and both papers discussed in that comment – McKitrick and Michaels (2004) and Kalnay and Cai (2003) were both cited and discussed in Chapter 2 of the IPCC AR4 report. As an aside, neither has stood the test of time.
“Declines” in the MXD record. This decline was ~~hidden~~ written up in Nature in 1998 where the authors suggested not using the post 1960 data. Their actual programs (in IDL script), unsurprisingly warn against using post 1960 data. Added: Note that the ‘hide the decline’ comment was made in 1999 – 10 years ago, and has no connection whatsoever to more recent instrumental records.
CRU data accessibility. From the date of the first FOI request to CRU (in 2007), it has been made abundantly clear that the main impediment to releasing the whole CRU archive is the small % of it that was given to CRU on the understanding it wouldn’t be passed on to third parties. Those restrictions are in place because of the originating organisations (the various National Met. Services) around the world and are not CRU’s to break. As of Nov 13, the response to the umpteenth FOI request for the same data met with exactly the same response. This is an unfortunate situation, and pressure should be brought to bear on the National Met Services to release CRU from that obligation. It is not however the fault of CRU. The vast majority of the data in the HadCRU records is publicly available from GHCN (v2.mean.Z).
Suggestions that FOI-related material be deleted … are ill-advised even if not carried out. What is and is not responsive and deliverable to an FOI request is however a subject that it is very appropriate to discuss.

Further update: This comment from Halldór Björnsson of the Icelandic Met. Service goes right to the heart of the accessibility issue:

Re: CRU data accessibility.
National Meteorological Services (NMSs) have different rules on data exchange. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) organizes the exchange of “basic data”, i.e. data that are needed for weather forecasts. For details on these see WMO resolution number 40 (see http://bit.ly/8jOjX1).

This document acknowledges that WMO member states can place restrictions on the dissemination of data to third parties “for reasons such as national laws or costs of production.” These restrictions are only supposed to apply to commercial use, the research and education community is supposed to have free access to all the data.

Now, for researchers this sounds open and fine. In practice it hasn’t proved to be so.
Most NMSs also can distribute all sorts of data that are classified as “additional data and products”. Restrictions can be placed on these. These special data and products (which can range from regular weather data from a specific station to maps of rain intensity based on satellite and radar data). Many nations do place restrictions on such data (see link for additional data on above WMO-40 webpage for details).

The reasons for restricting access is often commercial, NMSs are often required by law to have substantial income from commercial sources, in other cases it can be for national security reasons, but in many cases (in my experience) the reasons simply seem to be “because we can”.
What has this got to do with CRU? The data that CRU needs for their data base comes from entities that restrict access to much of their data. And even better, since the UK has submitted an exception for additional data, some nations that otherwise would provide data without question will not provide data to the UK. I know this from experience, since my nation (Iceland) did send in such conditions and for years I had problem getting certain data from the US.

The ideal, that all data should be free and open is unfortunately not adhered to by a large portion of the meteorological community. Probably only a small portion of the CRU data is “locked” but the end effect is that all their data becomes closed. It is not their fault, and I am sure that they dislike them as much as any other researcher who has tried to get access to all data from stations in region X in country Y.

These restrictions end up by wasting resources and hurting everyone. The research community (CRU included) and the public are the victims. If you don’t like it, write to you NMSs and urge them to open all their data.

I can update (further) this if there is demand. Please let me know in the comments, which, as always, should be substantive, non-insulting and on topic.

Link: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack-context/

Written by fatih al-farahat in 2008 temperatures, 2009 temperatures

Combined Global Land and Marine Surface Temperatures: 1850-2008, & wrt October 2009

The time series shows the combined global land and marine surface temperature record from 1850 to 2008. The year 2008 was tenth warmest on record, exceeded by 1998, 2005, 2003, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2001, 2007 and 1997.

Link: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/

With respect to October 2009:

Link: http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/

Written by fatih al-farahat in Peter Laut, Stephen H. Schneider

Peter Laut, J. Atmos. Solar-Terr. Phys., 2003, Solar activity and terrestrial climate: An analysis of some purported correlations

Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics (Status of 28. February 2003: In press)

Solar activity and terrestrial climate: An analysis of some purported correlations

Peter Laut (Technical University of Denmark, Department of Physics, DK-2800 Lyngby, Denmark. e-mail: Peter.Laut@fysik.dtu.dk)

Received 14 February 2002; received in revised form 22. January 2003; accepted 4 February 2003.

Abstract

The last decade has seen a revival of various hypotheses claiming a strong correlation between solar activity and a number of terrestrial climate parameters: Links between cosmic rays and cloud cover, first total cloud cover and then only low clouds, and between solar cycle lengths and Northern Hemisphere land temperatures. These hypotheses play an important role in the scientific as well as in the public debate about the possibility or reality of a man-made global climate change. I have analyzed a number of published graphs which have played a major role in these debates and which have been claimed to support solar hypotheses. My analyses show that the apparent strong correlations displayed on these graphs have been obtained by an incorrect handling of the physical data. Since the graphs are still widely referred to in the literature and their misleading character has not yet been generally recognized, I have found it appropriate to deliver the present overview. Especially, I want to caution against drawing any conclusions based upon these graphs concerning the possible wisdom or futility of reducing the emissions of man-made greenhouse gases.

My findings do not by any means rule out the existence of important links between sol ar activity and terrestrial climate. Such links have over the years been demonstrated by many authors. The sole objective of the present analysis is to draw attention to the fact that some of the widely publicized, apparent correlations do not properly reflect the underlying physical data.

Key words: Solar activity, solar cycle lengths, cloud cover, galactic cosmic rays, global warming

Link to complete paper in pdf file format at the website of Dr. Stephen H. Schneider of Stanford University: http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Solar-ClimateLAUTPREPRINT.pdf

Written by fatih al-farahat in CRU e-mails, Joseph Romm, Spencer Weart

Spencer Weart, science historian, expresses his concern over attempts to slander entire community of climate scientists

Science historian Weart: “We’ve never before seen a set of people accuse an entire community of scientists of deliberate deception and other professional malfeasance. Even the tobacco companies never tried to slander legitimate cancer researchers.”

Climate Progress blog, November 29, 2009

Spencer Weart: My most interesting conversations were with historians who have been studying the history of the tobacco companies that did their best, and quite successfully for many years, to cover up the fact that smoking kills people by the million. Some interesting parallels, but…

The Discovery of Global Warming book cover image

So begins a fascinating interview of Weart on the illegally hacked emails by Capital Weather Gang’s Andrew Freedman. Dr. Weart is a physicist and science historian with the American Institute of Physics.

Weart’s website, “The Discovery of Global Warming,” is one of the places to start if you’re interested in getting the basics of climate science. Based on the comments posted on CP, RealClimate, WUWT, DotEarth, etc., I think it’s safe to say that the overwhelming majority of the self-proclaimed “skeptics” (aka those who’ve been duped by the professional disinformers) haven’t even bothered to look at the most basic scientific evidence on human-caused global warming.

And the majority of the professional disinformers simply have no regard whatsoever for basic science or an evidence-based search for the truth — which is why they keep pushing talking points that have long been debunked in the scientific literature (see, for instance, Scientists advising fossil fuel funded anti-climate group concluded in 1995: “The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of GHGs such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied”).

But as science historian Weart tells Freedman — spreading disinformation about science is nothing new. What is new is the slander of both individual scientists and the entire scientific community:

Andrew Freedman: What effects do you think this will have on public perceptions of climate science and climate scientists?

Spencer Weart: I don’t expect this to have much impact on public perceptions of climate and climate scientists. Opinions have become so fixed that it would take serious evidence to shift a significant number of people. Since the late 1980s, just about every year and sometimes almost every month, a group of people (mostly the same ones) have exclaimed, “Now in these latest (whatever) we finally have proof that there is no need to worry about climate change!” There is a segment of the public that has believed every new claim. The rest will continue to doubt such claims in the absence of truly solid proof.

AF: What do you think this story reveals about the conduct of climate science?

SW: Back around 2000 leading climate scientists talked to each other mostly about their science–debating one another’s data and analysis and negotiating travel, collaboration and other administration–and a little bit about policy. As time passed they have had to spend more and more of their time answering criticism of the scientific results already established, criticism mostly based on ignorance, fallacious reasoning, and even deliberately deceptive claims. Still more recently they have had to spend far too much of their time defending their personal reputations against ignorant or slanderous attacks.
The theft and use of the emails does reveal something interesting about the social context. It’s a symptom of something entirely new in the history of science: Aside from crackpots who complain that a conspiracy is suppressing their personal discoveries, we’ve never before seen a set of people accuse an entire community of scientists of deliberate deception and other professional malfeasance.
Even the tobacco companies never tried to slander legitimate cancer researchers. In blogs, talk radio and other new media, we are told that the warnings about future global warming issued by the national science academies, scientific societies, and governments of all the leading nations are not only mistaken, but based on a hoax, indeed a conspiracy that must involve thousands of respected researchers.
Extraordinary and, frankly, weird. Climate scientists are naturally upset, exasperated, and sometimes goaded into intemperate responses… but that was already easy to see in their blogs and other writings.

Guess the tobacco companies just weren’t as clever and ruthless as the big fossil fuel polluters and their allies (see On the 150th anniversary of first commerical U.S. well, the oil industry is headed toward oblivion — and trying to take civilization down with it and Obama takes on the anti-scientific delayers, while Australia’s Rudd slams the “deniers” and the “gaggle” of “conspiracy theorists” opposing climate action).

AF: For a science historian such as yourself, how valuable are these e-mails? And what is your impression of them thus far?
SW: There would be a lot to learn if the owner of these e-mails (I suppose the University) would release them for analysis; for example, you could run up statistics on the types of interchanges and the structure of networks of discussion among researchers. Of course no scholar can make use of stolen material, and in particular one cannot legally or ethically quote a private message without the explicit permission of the writer.
Historians do often work with collections of letters that have been donated to archives. Typically we spend countless hours trying to understand the context; scholarly reputations have been ruined by interpretations that turned out to be mistaken. The risk of misinterpretation is far greater with e-mails, written so much more casually than letters. Our society is having difficulty dealing with this new form of communication. Look at last week’s verdict on the Bear Sterns hedge fund managers who were accused of misleading investors. The prosecuters based their case on a few seemingly incriminating sentences drawn from a mass of e-mails. When the jury saw the whole set of e-mails, they quickly found that there was no crime, just ordinary business chatter. From what I’ve seen, I expect that will be the verdict on the climate scientists’ e-mails.

Precisely — see Reuters: “ANALYSIS-Hacked climate e-mails awkward, not game changer.”
Related Post:

Written by fatih al-farahat in australia

Australian climate row highlights Copenhagen rifts

by Rob Taylor, Reuters, November 30, 2009

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Australia's major rivers are shrinking and farms are gripped by drought as scientists warn of climate change, but that has not convinced some skeptical politicians to back carbon-trade laws.
In a pointer to the difficulty of striking a pact to curb global greenhouse gas emissions at climate talks in Copenhagen, Australia's parliament is at an impasse over a scheme to slash carbon emissions blamed for global warming.

The main conservative opposition is split over whether to support the laws in an obstructive upper house of parliament, with its third-most senior member and high-profile Senate leader Nick Minchin convinced climate change is all a conspiracy.

"For the extreme left it has provided the opportunity to do what they've always wanted to do, to sort of de-industrialize the Western world," Minchin recently told Australian television.

"The collapse of communism was a disaster for the left. They embraced environmentalism as their new religion," Minchin said, sparking a blizzard of controversy.

Minchin's climate skeptic views are being echoed in other countries, like the United States, as they seek to reach agreement on climate policy ahead of Copenhagen next week.

Australia is already witnessing the effects of climate change, scientists say, with farmlands in the grip of a decades-long drought, drying riverbeds, record heatwaves and warnings of catastrophic bushfires as well as freak flash flooding in the north.

Large icebergs were also sighted recently near shipping lanes close to nearby New Zealand, much further north than usual.

AIMING TOO LOW
Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, whose government holds the rotating European Union presidency, warned in China on Monday that countries were not aiming high enough to reduce carbon emissions at Copenhagen.

Britain's Gordon Brown has put world leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama, on notice that they "cannot afford to fail" in Denmark, which British climate expert Nicholas Stern has called the "most important international gathering of our time."

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd hopes to land in Copenhagen after sealing passage of controversial laws setting up the largest carbon trading platform outside Europe.

But Rudd's carbon trade laws look doomed with climate skeptics like Minchin, who comes from a state where rivers are drying up, likely to reject or delay the laws.

A leading Nielsen opinion poll on Monday showed 66 percent of Australians back the introduction of an emissions trading scheme. Other surveys have shown support as high as 80 percent.

Rudd's problem, as opponents realize, is that many voters are also wary or even outright opposed to an emissions scheme if it comes at a high personal cost. Fresh elections are due late next year and the emissions row could yet yield a snap poll.

"Australia is not going to do anything that changes the course or nature of the temperature of the globe," said rural-based Senator Barnaby Joyce, who has become something of a maverick "pin-up" for climate skeptics.
"It's a gesture that will be reflected in a massive tax delivered to you from every corner of your house, from every power point, by the price of food, it will be in your fridge as it's going through the middle of the night," Joyce said.

Despite Copenhagen looming, climate fears have also failed to dent Australian consumption, with figures on Monday showing Australians are building the world's largest homes on average and filling them with air conditioning and appliances.

That can only add weight to the arguments of emerging giants like India and China in Copenhagen that they should not curtail economic growth ambitions over climate change, while countries like Australia remain on a path of comfortable consumption.

(Editing by Michael Perry) Link: http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE5AT11N20091130

Written by fatih al-farahat in Consequences of warming

Climate change: How global warming is having an impact

The Independent, London, Relax News, 30 November 2009

Armin Rose

Climate Conference 2009
Read all about the UN ClimateChange Conference 2009 here!
www.cop15.dk

From cautiously advising that man-made, heat-trapping carbon gases would disrupt Earth's climate system, mainstream scientists are increasingly convinced that the first signs of change are already here. Following are the main indicators, reported in the scientific press over past three years:

RISING SEAS: Sea levels have risen in tandem with global warming, according to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The global average sea level has risen since 1961 at an average rate of 1.8mm (0.07 inches) per year, but accelerated from 1991 to 3.1mm (0.12 inches) per year. The IPCC estimated sea levels would rise 18-59 centimetres (7.2-23.2 inches) by 2100. But added runoff from melting land ice is accelerating. According to Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), the global sea level is likely to rise at least twice as much as projected. If emissions are not curbed, "it may well exceed one metre (3.25 feet)."

SHRINKING GLACIERS: Mountain glaciers and snow cover in both hemispheres have widely retreated in the past few decades. One of the most closely-observed sites, the Cook glacier on the southern Indian Ocean island of Kerguelen, has shrunk by a fifth in 40 years. Around 1.3 billion people depend on the water that flows down from Himalayan glaciers, which in some places are falling back at up to 70 metres (230 feet) per year. The snows capping Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa's tallest peak, could vanish entirely in 20 years, US experts reported this month.

SHIFTING SEASONS: Some species of birds and fish are shifting habitat in response to warmer temperatures. The range of 105 bird species in France moved north, on average, 91 kilometres (56.5 miles) from 1989 to 2006. Average temperatures, however, shifted northward 273 kilometres (170 miles) over the same period, nearly three times farther. Twenty-one out of 36 species of fish in the North Sea migrated northwards between 1962 and 2001 in search of cooler waters. Anecdotal evidence from commercial fishermen says once-exotic species of fish from warmer latitudes now inhabit southern British waters.

OCEAN ACIDIFICATION: The acidity of the seas is rising as oceans absorb more carbon dioxide (CO2), with an impact on coral and micro-organisms, marine biologists say. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, the protective calcium shell of amoeba-like organisms living in the Southern Ocean called foraminifera, a vital link in the food chain, has fallen in weight by a third. "Within decades," acidification could severely affect biodiversity and fisheries, 150 marine scientists jointly warned last January.

ARCTIC ICE: The Greenland ice sheet has lost 1,500 billion tonnes of ice since 2000, contributing 0.75 mm (0.03 inch) annually to sea levels, according to a study published this month. In 2009, the Arctic summer sea ice pack thawed to its third smallest size on record, confirming a shrinkage trend seen over the past 30 years. Some experts believe the Arctic ice cap will disappear completely in summer months within 20 to 30 years.

ANTARCTIC WARMING: The Antarctic peninsula has warmed by 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) in the last 50 years, around six times the global average. In the past 20 years, Antarctica has lost seven ice shelves - huge floating ledges of ice, attached to the shore, that are fed by glaciers.

PERMAFROST RETREAT: Emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane were found to be soaring at sites investigated in 2006 by University of Alaska scientists at lakes in northern Siberia. The reason is thawing of the permafrost, causing the warmed soil to release gas that had been stored for thousands of years. Billions of tonnes of methane, which comes from natural sources such as decomposing vegetation and marshland, are stored in the frozen lands of Siberia, Canada and Alaska.

CHANGED PRECIPITATION: Patterns of rainfall or snowfall increased "significantly" from 1900-2005 in eastern parts of North and South America, northern Europe and northern and central Asia but declined in the Sahel, southern Africa and parts of southern Asia, says the IPCC. "Globally, the area affected by drought has likely increased since the 1970s," it adds.

STORMS: A mooted link between climate change and extreme events has little scientific consensus. A 2008 study by the Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre at University College London found that warmer seas accounted for 40 percent of a large increase (from six a year to eight a year) in the number of Atlantic hurricanes from 1996-2005. Other scientists say it is hard to say whether a drought, flood or cyclone is part of the longer trend which is climate change or simply just a one-off event, or series of them.

SOURCES: IPCC 4th Assessment Report (2007); Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Center (Australia); Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK); Nature; Science; Nature Geoscience; Laboratory for Studying Geophysics and Space Oceanography (France); French National Museum of Natural History; Pen Hadow Arctic expedition; US National Snow and Ice Data Center; British Antarctic Survey (BAS); University of Alaska at Fairbanks.

Link: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-how-global-warming-is-having-an-impact-1831332.html

Written by fatih al-farahat in Arctic amplification, Arctic ice melt, Arctic Ocean

Arctic warming spike predicted for February 2010

Arctic Global Warming Spike Imminent (Republishing)

Apr.05, 2009

THE ARCTIC SHOULD PREPARE FOR A BLAST OF HEAT IN 2010

UK Met Office Arctic Temperature Feb 2009

The respected UK Met Office Hadley Centre has put up some striking maps on Google Earth Outreach: Environment and Science. The one showing projected temperature increase in the Arctic region by next year is surprising and very alarming.

UK Met Office Arctic Temperature Feb 2010

Simplified Instructions:

To view these maps on Google Earth Outreach, first download the latest version of Google Earth. The click on Climate Change in Our World to enter through the Met Office portal. Below the thumbnail image of a mustard-coloured map of Europe, click on “Open this KML.”

An interactive globe showing the Arctic region will load. The only feature presented on this interface is that of temperature increase from 1999 to 2099, but you should have no trouble making out the shape of Greenland, with yellow and some orange colour marking its shoreline. Scientific data determines the colouring of the map, with deepening shades of yellow to orange, and as time progresses, to red. These colours show temperature anomalies, or above-normal temperatures.

You can use your cursor as a hand or a pointer. You can grab the globe to turn it around. Try using your pointer to move the toggle on the white time-line bar above. You can toggle in ten year increments, flash back and forth from the beginning to the end, or carefully move the toggler year by year.

Moving the toggler a slight bit from 2009 to 2010, you will see the spike in the Arctic temperature that is projected by the beginning of next year. This may make you instinctively lean back from away your computer. Seeing this abrupt change almost like being hit by a blast of heat from your monitor.

As most of you know, the temperature of the air and waters surrounding Greenland is of special significance. Warmer temperatures are causing the ice sheets and glaciers of Greenland to melt and slide into the sea, forcing a global sea-level rise that is now twice as much as was predicted just two years ago by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Moreover, the melting of the floating Arctic sea ice is exposing more and more of the ocean to the heat of the sun and driving more warming for the entire planet. Wind and water currents are being affected, causing unstable climatic conditions and extreme weather.

Through Google Earth Outreach, we are looking at a forceful image of Dangerous Climate Change and a warning to world leaders of the urgency of taking immediate action to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

These projections by the Met Office Hadley Centre are in the median range; they don’t show the worst-case scenario. If you toggle all the way to the end of this century, you will see what will happen if we don’t change our way of living on our planet. RIGHT NOW.

Admin

For more information, click here to go to the Met Office Hadley Centre website.

To watch a video about the features of Google Earth Outreach, with much more information, click here to go to the Alternative Energy News website.

Also see Google Earth Warms at the excellent Climate Feedback site.

Update: West Coast Climate Equity has left a new comment on your post "Arctic warming spike predicted for February 2010":

Tenney, we've just updated this post with a link to a December 10 article in The Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-confe/6780685/Copenhagen-climate-conference-Met-Office-predict-2010-will-be-warmest-on-record.html.

There are more articles on this subject, deserving of a separate post. Right now, it looks as if we're still on track for this warming increase, as the water temperatures in the South Pacific have reached record levels.

[Readers, for the sea surface temperature anomalies that show the intense heat in the middle of the south Pacific Ocean, go to this site: http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/ml/ocean/sst/anomaly.html

Pick the date you want and select "full global" to get the big picture.]

Link: http://westcoastclimateequity.org/?p=2767

Written by fatih al-farahat in

Boreal Forests Carbon Kings

One must also appreciate that all this stored carbon has been accumulated only in the past ten thousand years since the ice age ended and the land was exposed. I wonder were it all came from? It represents 22% of surface carbon and must have been stored somewhere besides the ocean.

Another aspect of tropical forests is that carbon is degraded quickly. This is why nutrients are released so quickly and the soils are so poor. So perhaps the bulk of the carbon is possibly in the living biomass itself.

This is hardly true in the boreal forest. Peat is been continually produced and sequestered in an oxygen free environment. This process has little natural limits. So with permafrost doing additional preservation we can expect extraordinary amounts of carbon to be stored.

This also suggests that the living biomass is a very small fraction of the total. In temperate forest it is typically half above ground and half below. This is not possible in the boreal forest because of both permafrost and the advent of peat. In fact peat tends to suppress tree growth.

We can state that since the ice age 22% of global forest carbon has been sequestered after been created anew.

Boreal Forests Store More Carbon Than Tropical Forests

by Staff Writers

Ottawa, Canada (SPX) Nov 17, 2009

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Boreal_Forests_Store_More_Carbon_Than_Tropical_Forests_999.html

When the world thinks of forests and their value to offset global warming, tropical forests come to mind. A new report shows that the global impact of Canada's boreal forest, which stores nearly twice as much carbon per hectare as tropical forests, has been vastly underestimated.

"The Carbon the World Forgot" identifies the boreal forests of North America as not only the cornerstone habitat for key mammal species, but one of the most significant carbon stores in the world, the equivalent of 26 years of global emissions from burning fossil fuels, based on 2006 emissions levels. Globally, these forests store 22 percent of all carbon on the earth's land surface.

"Past accounting greatly underestimated the amount and depth of carbon stored in and under the boreal forest," said Jeff Wells, an author of the report. In addition to carbon storage in trees, organic matter accumulated over millennia is stored in boreal peatlands and areas of permafrost. Some of this boreal carbon has been in place for up to 8,000 years.

The boreal forest's status as the most intact forest left on earth also offers a unique opportunity for plants and animals forced to adapt to shifting habitats. Most other habitats today are highly fragmented by human activity, creating a variety of additional obstacles for species survival.

In light of these findings, the report urges that international negotiations on carbon and forest protection consider ways to account for and protect the boreal.

"Any effective and affordable response to climate change should include preserving the world's remaining, carbon-rich old-growth forests," said Steve Kallick, director of the Pew Environment Group's International Boreal Conservation Campaign.

"This report makes clear that nations must look not just at the tropics but at all the world's old-growth forests for climate change solutions."

"Keeping that carbon in place by protecting boreal forests is an important part of the climate equation," said Dr. Andrew Weaver, "If you cut down the boreal forest and disturb its peatlands, you release more carbon, accelerating climate change."

Dr. Weaver of the University of Victoria is a lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change, which was awarded the Nobel Prize.

"The collision of climate disruption and massive human degradation of ecosystems is seriously worrying globally," said leading conservation biologist Dr. Stuart Pimm of Duke University. "These changes are surely novel in earth's history." Maintaining the boreal forest's intactness will be critical to slowing ecosystem shifts and to providing migratory corridors for displaced wildlife.

"Conservation can be an important tool in the fight to mitigate climate change" said Larry Innes, Director of the Canadian Boreal Initiative.

"International protocols and legislation need to create opportunities to maintain the carbon stored in intact boreal forest soils, peatlands, and wetlands while enabling indigenous and local communities to take a leadership role in determining how to best conserve not only carbon, but the full suite of ecological, cultural and economic values that the boreal forest represents."

More than 1,500 international scientists led by authors for the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommended in 2007 that at least half of Canada's boreal forest be protected from further disturbance - in large part to keep both the boreal forest carbon bank and internationally significant wildlife habitats intact.

Despite the current lack of international protocol, several Canadian First Nation, provincial, and federal governments have taken important steps to protect hundreds of millions of acres of Canada's carbon rich boreal forest. In all, scientists are recommending that at least 300 million hectares be protected.

Written by fatih al-farahat in

Dubai Bust

Financial crisis never end quickly because the market to absorb product contracts sharply leaving oodles of poorly underwritten deals stranded. These deals need credit enhancement at the least just to roll over or they need a completely new ownership structure with a much stronger player.

Dubai was the king of the scary deal. It was never hard to imagine a ghost town in the desert. Now it must regain lender’s confidence as fast as possible. The comment is made here that Abu Dhabi can solve the problem and obviously not risk itself. That also puts several other rescuers in mind. So perhaps this one will blow over quickly.

However, the remarks here on the CDS market continue to be true. It must be unwound and we see little sign of the will to do so.

Let me make this a little clearer. I do not think that the CDS market can withstand any defaults because it has turned out that the actual insurer is the US fed. Yet defaults must take place because the credit standard necessary is not reached by one hundred percent of the participants.

In fact these facilities were in place for AAA clients. The rating system was subverted and the financial system loaded with toxic paper. More important, we still do not know the extent of the fraud.

With a still contracting market we must have more such failures until the weak are eliminated.

The Dubai shock can and must end with Abu Dhabi providing a credit facility at a steep price. This all part of ongoing the credit contraction.

Financial Crisis in Dubai: Towards a Nightmare Scenario?

By Mike Whitney

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16310

Global Research, November 28, 2009

The default in Dubai is not the beginning of Financial Meltdown 2. Don't look for dominoes here. Yes, it does raise serious questions about the vast debt-overhang in emerging economies--particularly East Europe. But, this is not a "sovereign default" in the strict sense, nor is there any great risk of contagion. Oil-rich Abu Dhabi is loaded with liquid assets, possibly as much as $800 billion. They could pay off Dubai World's measly $60 billion debt without batting an eye. But Abu Dhabi wants to send its wastrel younger brother a wake-up-call by forcing Dubai to restructure its debt. That means that banks, bondholders and contractors will have to take a haircut, which is not surprising given the abysmal condition of the commercial real estate market.

Dubai World owners were caught up in the same heady debt-fueled commercial construction-binge that swept across the United States. The problem can be traced back to lax lending standards and low interest rates. Now demand has fallen off a cliff and credit is getting tighter. Dubai World can't roll over its debt or meet its obligations. That's what typically happens when credit bubbles burst.

On Thursday, Bank of America analysts issued a statement: “One cannot rule out — as a tail-risk — a case where this would escalate into a major sovereign default problem, which would then resonate across global emerging markets in the same way that Argentina did in the early 2000s or Russia in the late 1990s.”

This is nonsense. There will be no sovereign default. Abu Dhabi is not going to send global markets into a nosedive to save a few billion dollars. B of A is blowing smoke. Oil has already slipped $3 per barrel since the crisis began. There will probably be a tentative resolution by the time the markets open on Monday. That doesn't mean that there aren't important lessons to be learned from this latest financial calamity. There are.

First, it illustrates that the financial crisis is not over---households, businesses and countries are still deleveraging. This ongoing process will slow spending and increase defaults, bankruptcies and foreclosures. Government guarantees and stimulus programs will not reverse prevailing trends. More incidents like Dubai World should be expected. These "credit events" will disrupt the recovery and spur greater risk-aversion which will push stocks downward.

Arnab Das of RGE Monitor sums it up like this: "We're bound to see a rise in risk aversion. The Dubai situation signifies that although the major central banks around the world have stabilized the financial system, they can't make all the excesses simply disappear. We still have to work out those balance sheet stresses. The recovery is proceeding, but significant challenges still lie ahead.” (Bloomberg News)

Second, when these incidents take place, there's likely to considerable collateral damage from the unregulated insurance policies (credit default swaps) which underwrite the bonds. These CDS derivatives are not sold on a public exchange so no one knows who holds them, in what amount, or whether the issuer has sufficient capital reserves to pay off claims. We should expect a repeat of AIG over and over again (although smaller) until the system is either regulated or CDS are banned.

The bottom line, is that the current financial architecture is not designed to work; it is designed to make a handful of speculators very rich. These speculators own congress, the White House and the financial media, which is why there has been no meaningful change in regulations. Dubai is not Argentina. There will be a resolution and contractors will get paid, although not "in full." There will be losses. Big losses. But no contagion.

News of Dubai's payment "standstill" roiled global markets where investor confidence was already thin. The dollar and yen strengthened and US Treasurys surged. The "flight to safety" is making it doubly hard for the Fed to reflate asset prices. Dubai-like credit events make investors jittery and they pull in their horns. That extends the slump and deepens the recession.

If the Dubai crisis drags on, the dollar will get stronger and the flourishing carry trade will crash. That means that the maxed-out banks (which are heavily invested in high-risk positions) will get clobbered once again. That's the nightmare scenario.

The Fed has wrapped its arms around the financial system and provided unlimited guarantees on trillions of dollars of dodgy collateral. But that might not be enough.

Written by fatih al-farahat in

Hydrogen Xenon Formed

The headline for this item is terribly premature. What has been discovered is that under extreme pressure that hydrogen will form up with other atoms to form a stable crystalline substance. In this case, xenon was worked with but is not thought satisfactory. How this may be commercially used escapes me in view of process pressures.

We are learning to form important solids with unusual attributes. We will see more of this.

The most important lesson, hinted at before, is that extreme pressure can produce stable compounds whose characteristics are as yet unmapped.

Now suppose the earth’s core is rich in hydrogen. What effect does that have on the core’s behavior? We have just eliminated the necessity for the hydrogen to leach away. Now we have an Iron Nickel Hydrogen core to investigate.

I was not expecting this but am also not surprised at all. It was an obvious question and we now know that the hydrogen is likely to be bound.

Hydrogen-Economy on the Way? New Hydrogen-Storage Method Discovered

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091122161751.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/images/2009/11/091122161751.jpg

ScienceDaily (Nov. 25, 2009) — Scientists at the Carnegie Institution have found for the first time that high pressure can be used to make a unique hydrogen-storage material. The discovery paves the way for an entirely new way to approach the hydrogen-storage problem.

The researchers found that the normally unreactive, noble gas xenon combines with molecular hydrogen (H₂) under pressure to form a previously unknown solid with unusual bonding chemistry. The experiments are the first time these elements have been combined to form a stable compound. The discovery debuts a new family of materials, which could boost new hydrogen technologies.

The paper is published in the November 22, 2009, advanced online publication of Nature Chemistry.

Xenon has some intriguing properties, including its use as an anesthesia, its ability to preserve biological tissues, and its employment in lighting. Xenon is a noble gas, which means that it does not typically react with other elements.

As lead author Maddury Somayazulu, research scientist at Carnegie's Geophysical Laboratory, explained: "Elements change their configuration when placed under pressure, sort of like passengers readjusting themselves as the elevator becomes full. We subjected a series of gas mixtures of xenon in combination with hydrogen to high pressures in a diamond anvil cell. At about 41,000 times the pressure at sea level (1 atmosphere), the atoms became arranged in a lattice structure dominated by hydrogen, but interspersed with layers of loosely bonded xenon pairs. When we increased pressure, like tuning a radio, the distances between the xenon pairs changed-the distances contracted to those observed in dense metallic xenon."

The researchers imaged the compound at varying pressures using X-ray diffraction, infrared and Raman spectroscopy. When they looked at the xenon part of the structure, they realized that the interaction of xenon with the surrounding hydrogen was responsible for the unusual stability and the continuous change in xenon-xenon distances as pressure was adjusted from 41,000 to 255,000 atmospheres.

Why was the compound so stable? "We were taken off guard by both the structure and stability of this material," said Przemek Dera, the lead crystallographer who looked at the changes in electron density at different pressures using single-crystal diffraction. As electron density from the xenon atoms spreads towards the surrounding hydrogen molecules, it seems to stabilize the compound and the xenon pairs.

"Xenon is too heavy and expensive to be practical for use in hydrogen-storage applications," remarked Somayazulu. "But by understanding how it works in this situation, researchers can come up with lighter substitutes."

"It's very exciting to come up with new hydrogen-rich compounds, not just for our interest in simple molecular systems, but because such discoveries can be the foundation for important new technologies," commented Russell Hemley, director of the Geophysical Laboratory and a co-author. "This hydrogen-rich solid represents a new pathway to forming novel hydrogen storage compounds and the new pressure-induced chemistry opens the possibility of synthesizing new energetic materials."

This research was funded by the Department of Energy, Basic Energy Sciences hydrogen storage, and the National Science Foundation, Division of Materials Research.

Story Source:

Adapted from materials provided by Carnegie Institution, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Journal Reference:

1. Maddury Somayazulu, Przemyslaw Dera, Alexander F. Goncharov, Stephen A. Gramsch, Peter Liermann, Wenge Yang, Zhenxian Liu, Ho-kwang Mao & Russell J. Hemley. Pressure-induced bonding and compound formation in xenon-hydrogen solids. Nature Chemistry, 2009; DOI: 10.1038/nchem.445

Written by fatih al-farahat in Sea level rise

Rising sea level poses risk to Qatar, neighbours

Rising sea level poses risk to Qatar, neighbours
Web posted at: 11/28/2009 1:25:6
Source ::: The Peninsula . / BY SATISH KANADY

DOHA: Sea Level Rise (SLR) is posing big risk to Qatar. Like most other Arab countries, the bulk of Qatar’s economic activity, agriculture and population centres are in the coastal zone, making the country highly vulnerable to a possible rise in the SLR.

A remote sensing study ‘On the impacts of Global warming on the Arab region,’ released by the Arab Forum for Environment and Development (AFED) revealed that a sea level rise of mere 1 meter would directly impact 41,500 km² of the Arab coastal lands. Qatar has been enlisted in the potential threat-facing countries. Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria are the other countries included in the ‘endangered’ list.

The risk can be in the form of both coastal region inundation and increasing salinity of soil and available fresh water resources such as aquifers. The report revealed that the SLR of 1 metre would directly affect 3.2% of the population in these countries, compared to a global percentage of about 1.28%.

The study that used remote sensing techniques to depict the consequences on the Arab world of various climate change impact scenarios said Global warming is one of the most serious challenges facing the region today.

The report, second of a series of annual reports produced by the AFED, says that the past century had witnessed a 17 cm rise in the sea level at a mean rate of 1.75 mm per year. A report published by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007 predicted seal-level rise of up to 59 cm by 2100.

Taking into account the full “likely” range of predicted increase in temperature, the SLR could even be amplified to up to 1.4 m by the year 2100. Other researches have predicted between 5-6 m SLR in the event of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapse.

“The coastal zone of the Arab world is no exception to the threat of SLR. Similar to many parts of the world, capital cities and major towns of Arab countries lie along the coast or on estuaries. Their expansions are extremely rapid and, therefore, these metropolises are at great risk of SLR,” the report said.

The potential impacts of SLR, however, are not uniformly distributed across the Arab region. Egypt will be by far the most impacted in the Arab world.

The current analysis indicates that Bahrain and Qatar would experience a significant reduction of about 13.4% and 6.9%, respectively, of their land as a result of the 5 m SLR scenario.

Link: http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/Display_news.asp?section=Local_News&month=November2009&file=Local_News200911281256.xml

Global Warming

Archive for November 2009

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Spencer Weart, science historian, expresses his concern over attempts to slander entire community of climate scientists

Science historian Weart: “We’ve never before seen a set of people accuse an entire community of scientists of deliberate deception and other professional malfeasance. Even the tobacco companies never tried to slander legitimate cancer researchers.”

Australian climate row highlights Copenhagen rifts

Australian climate row highlights Copenhagen rifts

Climate change: How global warming is having an impact

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Arctic warming spike predicted for February 2010

Arctic Global Warming Spike Imminent (Republishing)

THE ARCTIC SHOULD PREPARE FOR A BLAST OF HEAT IN 2010

Boreal Forests Carbon Kings

Dubai Bust

Hydrogen Xenon Formed

We are learning to form important solids with unusual attributes. We will see more of this.

The most important lesson, hinted at before, is that extreme pressure can produce stable compounds whose characteristics are as yet unmapped.

Now suppose the earth’s core is rich in hydrogen. What effect does that have on the core’s behavior? We have just eliminated the necessity for the hydrogen to leach away. Now we have an Iron Nickel Hydrogen core to investigate.

I was not expecting this but am also not surprised at all. It was an obvious question and we now know that the hydrogen is likely to be bound.

Hydrogen-Economy on the Way? New Hydrogen-Storage Method Discovered

Rising sea level poses risk to Qatar, neighbours

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