Energy and Continuity of Environment

Energy and Continuity of Environment

(Global Warming Problem)

By Jacob Paradox

Modern society very to availability of energy. Almost in all activities sector, energy become requirement of fundamental which cannot be bargained again. Therefore, progress a state very related to the availibility of energy in state.

Justly Mention of nations go forward like America, Japan, and other European countries, even Korea. Availibility of energy in very adequate the nations to conduct activity in various area which can be pledged for the development of nation and his state. But in levying of energy of course have to pay attention factor continuity of environment. Because being place environment live this shade do not less important from requirement of other life. Destroy environment, is the same ill starredly ownself. Environment a state will very other state, because we remain is same under the sun. That cause also every state very is obliged to seriously pay attention and prevent things which can become cause of damage of environment.

Impact damage of environment like global warming, moment nowadays have started to be felt in various this hemisphere. Like the happening of improvement of air temperature, sea surface go up, what can engulf isles, and continent around coast, the happening of climate change, what nowadays have happened in some places of including in this country. All that because human being place environment and other life being have impure. Even according to source which can be trusted, ferocity of topan which recently like knocked over one part of the in American continent, prediction by all experts as effect of global warming. Other threat which do not fail the danger of for human life, are the happening of sour rain.

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Senin 25 February 2008)

Get More Subject Information In Global Warming:

Acid rain, air pollution, al gore, alternative energy, alternative fuel, an inconvenient truth, Biofuel, Carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide emissions, carbon emissions, carbon footprint, carbon neutral, carbon offset, carbon offsets, clean air, climate, climate change, conservation, Emissions, energy, energy conservation, energy efficiency, environment, environmental, environmental issues, environmentalist, environmentally friendly, Global climate change, globalwarming, greenhouse, greenhouse effect, greenhouse gas, greenhouse gas emissions, greenhouse gases, Hybrid, Inconvenient truth, Kyoto protocol, kyoto treaty, Peak oil, pollution, pollution control, Recycle, recycling, renewable energy, Save gas, solar,,solar panels, Water pollution, wind power

States ask SEC to require disclosure of climate risks (Global Warming Problem)

States ask SEC to require disclosure of climate risks

By Felicity Barringer

NEW YORK: Two environmental groups and the financial officers of 10 states and New York City are asking the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to require companies to disclose the risks that climate change could pose to their bottom lines. The petition was expected to reach the commission Tuesday, representatives of the groups said. The action by Ceres, a coalition of environmental activists and investors, along with Environmental Defense and investors managing $1.5 trillion in assets is the second in recent days to focus attention on the potential impact on Wall Street of climate change.

On Friday, Andrew Cuomo, the attorney general for New York, started an investigation of five energy companies to determine if they had adequately disclosed any financial risk they might face from their ownership stake in or operations of coal-fired power plants. Scientists believe that carbon dioxide, the main emission from these plants, is a leading cause of recent global warming. Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres, said in an interview, "We need this because right now more than half of the S&P 500 are not disclosing their climate risk, which we would consider a material risk in this day and age."

A fact sheet prepared by Ceres and Environmental Defense said that regional, state and local initiatives to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions apply in areas representing 58 percent of the country's gross domestic product and 54 percent of its population. The fact sheet also said that Allstate, one of the country's leading insurers, "did not mention climate change, global warming greenhouse gases or carbon dioxide" in its most recent annual report. Rich Halberg, a spokesman for Allstate, said he was puzzled by that statement. "The very first risk factor we report on Page 1 are significant losses we may face from catastrophes and severe weather," he said. He added that the company's social responsibility report, issued separately from the annual report, deals with climate issues.

Ceres has insistently raised the question of corporate financial disclosure of climate risk, usually in the context of shareholder resolutions, for about five years. This week's escalation comes as the Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress try to fine-tune a legislative approach to energy and climate-change issues. Lubber, when asked if it would be possible to quantify a risk that might arise from U.S. legislation that remained unapproved, echoed that point: "You don't have to put an exact number on it. If federal regulation puts a cap on carbon, it means businesses will have to change their technology, maybe buy new equipment. It needs to be noted."

Aside from Ceres and Environmental Defense, the petition was joined by Cuomo and the comptrollers of New York State and New York City; the California state comptroller and the huge California state government and teachers' pension funds; and Florida's chief financial officer. Others involved included financial officials from North Carolina, Oregon, Vermont, Rhode Island and Maine, and the New Jersey State Investment Council.

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Jumat 22 February 2008)

Re-publish by Jacob Paradox from link (www.routers.com),(www.iht.com), (www.routers.com), (www.nytimes.com)

Get More Subject Information In Global Warming:

Acid rain, air pollution, al gore, alternative energy, alternative fuel, an inconvenient truth, Biofuel, Carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide emissions, carbon emissions, carbon footprint, carbon neutral, carbon offset, carbon offsets, clean air, climate, climate change, conservation, Emissions, energy, energy conservation, energy efficiency, environment, environmental, environmental issues, environmentalist, environmentally friendly, Global climate change, globalwarming, greenhouse, greenhouse effect, greenhouse gas, greenhouse gas emissions, greenhouse gases, Hybrid, Inconvenient truth, Kyoto protocol, kyoto treaty, Peak oil, pollution, pollution control, Recycle, recycling, renewable energy, Save gas, solar,,solar panels, Water pollution, wind power

We can combat climate change (Global Warming Problem)

THE MESSAGE FROM THE UN

We can combat climate change

By Ban Ki Moon

One day, we learn that the ice might be gone from Arctic sea by 2050. The next, we hear that world governments met in Montreal to accelerate a deadline for phasing out the ozone-depleting chemicals known as chlorofluorocarbons - a milestone in combating global warming. One day, we learn how cyclones are forming ever further north in the Indian Ocean, affecting the Seychelles for the first time in half a century, and that the island of Grenada, all but destroyed by Hurricane Ivan in 2004, was long deemed by Lloyds of London to lie outside the Caribbean hurricane belt. The next, world leaders in New York pledge their best efforts to tackle the problem that most agree has become a "defining issue of our era."'

These are the two faces of climate change - worsening cases of extreme weather on the one hand, accompanied by scientific evidence that humankind is the cause; on the other, clear signs that the world has awakened to the scale of the problem and, at long last, has decided to do something about it. This is the message from the recent high-level meeting on climate change at the United Nations. The idea was to spur conversation, to get global policy-makers together to make common cause in finding solutions to a common problem. In this, we succeeded beyond our expectations. Certain words ran like a thread through our discussions: "urgency," "action," "now."

It was the largest such meeting ever held, with more than 80 heads of state. And I sensed something remarkable happening, something transformative - a sea-change, whereby leaders showed themselves willing to put aside blame for the past and to pose to themselves more forward-looking questions. Where do we go from here? What can we do, together, in the future? President Michelle Bachelet of Chile put it bluntly, likening our fragile planet to an island in the universe: "We can destroy it, or save it."

There was no shortage of bad news. Fishermen in Mauritius blamed warmer weather for driving tuna into deeper waters, diminishing their catch and making it harder to earn a living. Unusually severe El Niño weather cost Peru 4.5 percent of its GDP last year.

We heard how melting glaciers in South Asia will mean severe shortages of water for half a billion people, and how much of northern China may become desert. Micronesia's delegate worried openly about his country sinking beneath the rising seas. "How do we explain to our people, to future generations, that we have nothing for them," he asked, meaning it literally. But there was good news, too. Brazil said it had reduced deforestation in the Amazon basin by 50 percent. India is devoting 2 percent of GDP annually to flood-control and food-security programs, as well as mandating tough energy efficiency standards. We heard how California, the cradle for generations of technological revolutions, is mobilizing both politically and entrepreneurially to fight climate change.

All this sets the stage for an advance at the December climate change summit in Bali. We need a breakthrough - an agreement to launch negotiations for a comprehensive climate change deal that all nations can embrace. It will be difficult but I am optimistic. We are in a different place, today, than yesterday. At our UN meeting, the international community made a clear commitment to change. Governments will pursue their own solutions - from mandatory emissions controls to market mechanisms like carbon-trading to new fuel efficiency technologies and conservation. This is as it should be; there are many paths to Rome. The important thing is that all agree: National policies should be coordinated within the United Nations, so that our work together is complementary and mutually reinforcing.

No less important is the shared sense of urgency. Henceforth, climate change will no longer be a primarily environmental concern. It has become a matter of strategic consequence - a core political issue for every government on earth. This represents a turning point, with enormous implications. As a political issue, climate change becomes closely linked to economic development. The World Bank and UNDP will begin to explore ways of financing energy efficiency and anti-pollution programs in developing countries. We spoke of an Adaptation Fund that supplements international aid with money for climate change projects that benefit the whole world, not merely the countries that initiate them.

Trade and technology transfer incentives will be part of the equation. Wealthy nations must help provide incentives to poorer ones to take steps that help us all. The lesson from Montreal and New York, one environmental expert noted, is that "curbing climate change may not be as hard as it looks."' With political will, he suggested, comes results. Our job is to translate the spirit of New York into deeds in Bali.

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Jumat 22 February 2008)

Re-publish by Jacob Paradox from link (www.routers.com),(www.iht.com), (www.routers.com), (www.nytimes.com)

Get More Subject Information In Global Warming:

Acid rain, air pollution, al gore, alternative energy, alternative fuel, an inconvenient truth, Biofuel, Carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide emissions, carbon emissions, carbon footprint, carbon neutral, carbon offset, carbon offsets, clean air, climate, climate change, conservation, Emissions, energy, energy conservation, energy efficiency, environment, environmental, environmental issues, environmentalist, environmentally friendly, Global climate change, globalwarming, greenhouse, greenhouse effect, greenhouse gas, greenhouse gas emissions, greenhouse gases, Hybrid, Inconvenient truth, Kyoto protocol, kyoto treaty, Peak oil, pollution, pollution control, Recycle, recycling, renewable energy, Save gas, solar,,solar panels, Water pollution, wind power

Climate change becomes urgent security issue in Australia (Global Warming Problem)

Climate change becomes urgent security issue in Australia

By Tim Johnston

SYDNEY: As the first bush fires of the year rage through Australia's national forests, concern over climate change is intensifying among Australians.

A telephone survey of more than 1,000 people released Wednesday showed that 40 percent of Australians thought that global warming was a greater threat to security than Islamic fundamentalism. Only 20 percent thought it was less serious. The survey, by the U.S. Studies Center, based at the University of Sydney, came a day after the government's top scientific body said that rising temperatures and reduced rainfall were inevitable in Australia.

The report brought calls for more resources to be focused on mitigating the effects of future climate change rather than the current policy of trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Extreme weather, including a drought that has persisted in some places for six years, has focused the Australian public on climate change, and it is shaping up as a major issue in general elections expected to be called in the next few weeks.

On Tuesday, Australia's most influential scientific research body, the government-funded Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, released a report that said an average temperature rise of 1 degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) was likely by 2030, along with many more days with temperatures of more than 35 degrees Celsius (95 Fahrenheit) and reduced rainfall over much of southern Australia, already the driest part of the driest inhabited continent on earth. "The message is that global warming is real, humans are very likely to be causing it and that it is very likely that there will be changes in the global climate system in the centuries to come larger than those seen in the recent past," the report said.

Recent events have made the subject even more urgent for many Australians. In the spring season, about 50 separate bush fires, fanned by unseasonably hot weather and strong winds, have already burned about 30,000 hectares, or 74,000 acres, of bush and national forest and destroyed a house. Large areas of the state of New South Wales, including Sydney, had a total fire ban in force Wednesday.

"It is very interesting to see how climate change has moved from the environmental field to the security sphere," said Alan Dupont, who heads the U.S. Studies Center, referring to the report released Wednesday. "Most of the government response has been about reducing greenhouse gas emissions rather than trying to manage the effects of the change."

The survey's results echo comments last week by the head of the Australian police, Commissioner Mick Keelty, that climate was a growing security concern. "We could see a catastrophic decline in the availability of fresh water," Keelty said. "Crops could fail, disease could be rampant and flooding might be so frequent that people, en masse, would be on the move. "Even if only some and not all of this occurs, climate change is going to be the security issue of the 21st century."

His comments provoked a sharp response from Prime Minister John Howard, who said terrorism was a more immediate threat to security than climate change. Howard was until recently a skeptic on climate change, and the opposition Labor Party has said that his recent attention on climate is driven more by polls than conviction. Australia has one of the world's highest per capita emissions of greenhouse gases. The government has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, saying it is meaningless because it does not impose restrictions on the two greatest emerging emitters, India and China.

Environmentalists say that the time to tackle climate change is running out and that the major global economies need to commit themselves to radical cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Both the United States and Australia have resisted efforts to set hard emissions targets and have encouraged the development of technologies like nuclear and "clean coal" in an effort to improve the efficiency of carbon-based fuel sources. The U.S. Studies Center survey relied on 1,213 phone interviews from July 13 to 29. It had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Jumat 22 February 2008)

Re-publish by Jacob Paradox from link (www.routers.com),(www.iht.com), (www.routers.com), (www.nytimes.com)

Get More Subject Information In Global Warming:

Acid rain, air pollution, al gore, alternative energy, alternative fuel, an inconvenient truth, Biofuel, Carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide emissions, carbon emissions, carbon footprint, carbon neutral, carbon offset, carbon offsets, clean air, climate, climate change, conservation, Emissions, energy, energy conservation, energy efficiency, environment, environmental, environmental issues, environmentalist, environmentally friendly, Global climate change, globalwarming, greenhouse, greenhouse effect, greenhouse gas, greenhouse gas emissions, greenhouse gases, Hybrid, Inconvenient truth, Kyoto protocol, kyoto treaty, Peak oil, pollution, pollution control, Recycle, recycling, renewable energy, Save gas, solar,,solar panels, Water pollution, wind power

China Says Rich Countries Should Take Lead on Global Warming (Global Warming Problem)

China Says Rich Countries Should Take Lead on Global Warming

By JIM YARDLEY

China said Tuesday that wealthier countries must take the lead in curbing greenhouse gas emissions and refused to say whether it would agree to any mandatory emissions limits that might hamper its booming economy.

Jiang Yu, a spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry, said China was willing to contribute to an international effort to combat global warming but placed the primary responsibility on richer, developed nations that have been polluting for much longer.

''It must be pointed out that climate change has been caused by the long-term historic emissions of developed countries and their high per capita emissions,'' she said, adding that developed countries have responsibilities for global warming ''that cannot be shirked.''

Ms. Jiang's comments, combined with another briefing on Tuesday by the country's leading climate expert, represented China's first official response to a landmark report issued last week by a United Nations panel of scientists that declared global warming is ''unequivocal'' and warned that immediate action must be taken to prevent harmful consequences.

China is the world's second largest emitter of the greenhouse gases contributing to climate change, trailing only the United States. Last November, the International Energy Agency in Paris predicted that China would pass the United States in emissions of carbon dioxide in 2009. China had been expected to surpass the United States as late as 2020, but its soaring consumption of coal has rapidly increased the country's emissions.

China derives nearly 70 percent of its energy from coal-fired power plants, many of them equipped with substandard pollution controls.

Chinese officials have long noted that China's per capita emissions remain well below the averages in wealthier countries, including the United States. Officials also argue that China remains a developing country without the financial resources or technological prowess to make a rapid shift to cleaner, more expensive energy technology.

China has not disputed the scientific rationale behind global warming or denied the potential harm it could cause. Later this year, China is expected to release broad policy goals on how it can reduce emissions and respond to global warming. In December, it issued a report warning that climate change posed a serious threat to the country's agricultural output and economy.

''The Chinese government is taking climate change extremely seriously,'' Qin Dahe, chief of the China Meteorological Administration, told reporters at the briefing. ''President Hu Jintao has said that climate change is not just an environmental issue but also a development issue, ultimately a development issue.''

Indeed, even if Chinese leaders acknowledge the problem, they remain resistant to any sweeping measures that could threaten the country's development. Some efforts are already meeting with uneven results.

Mr. Qin, who served as a co-chairman of the United Nations panel that issued the global warming report last week, noted that China had set an ambitious five-year goal of improving energy efficiency by 20 percent. But last year, the country failed to meet the initial target in that schedule. China's standing as both a huge developing country and as one of the world's fastest-growing economies has given it prominence in the global warming debate. Along with India, China is exempt from the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol, the agreement that calls on industrial nations to reduce emissions by 2012. (The United States signed the agreement, but has not ratified it.)

Asked if China would agree to mandatory, specific targets to reduce emissions, Mr. Qin did not answer directly. ''As a developing country that's growing rapidly and has a big population, to thoroughly transform the energy structure and use clean energy would need a lot of money,'' Mr. Qin said, according to Reuters.

Ms. Jiang, the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said China recently ordered a shutdown of dirtier coal-fired power plants that emitted 5.4 million tons of sulfur dioxide a year.

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Senin 19 February 2008, 16.03 sore)

Re-publish by Jacob Paradox from link (www.nytimes.com)

Disappointments on Climate (Global Warming Problem)

Disappointments on Climate

(www.nytimes.com)

A week that could have brought important progress on climate change ended in disappointment.

In Bali, where delegates from 187 countries met to begin framing a new global warming treaty, America’s negotiators were in full foot-dragging mode, acting as spoilers rather than providing the leadership the world needs.

In Washington, caving to pressures from the White House, the utilities and the oil companies, the Senate settled for a merely decent energy bill instead of a very good one that would have set the country on a clear path to a cleaner energy future.

The news from Bali was particularly disheartening. The delegates agreed to negotiate by 2009 a new and more comprehensive global treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol. (Kyoto expires in 2012 and requires that only industrialized nations reduce their production of greenhouse gases.) They pledged for the first time to address deforestation, which accounts for one-fifth of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. And they received vague assurances from China — which will soon overtake the United States as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases — and other emerging powers that they would seek “measurable, reportable and verifiable” emissions cuts.

From the United States the delegates got nothing, except a promise to participate in the forthcoming negotiations. Even prying that out of the Bush administration required enormous effort.

Despite pleas from their European allies, the Americans flatly rejected the idea of setting even provisional targets for reductions in greenhouse gases. And they refused to give what the rest of the world wanted most: an unambiguous commitment to reducing America’s own emissions. Without that, there is little hope that other large emitters, including China, will change their ways.

There is some consolation in knowing that the energy bill approved last week included several provisions — among them the first significant improvement in automobile mileage standards in more than 30 years — that over time should begin to reduce the United States’ dependency on foreign oil and its output of greenhouse gases. The bill would have had much greater impact if the Senate had not killed two important provisions opposed by the White House and its big industrial contributors.

One would have required utilities to generate an increasing share of their power from renewable sources like wind. The other would have rolled back about $12 billion in tax breaks granted to the oil companies in the last energy bill and used the proceeds to help develop cleaner fuels and new energy technologies.

The decision to maintain the tax breaks was particularly shameful. Blessed by $90-a-barrel oil, the companies are rolling in profits, and there is no evidence to support the claim that they need these breaks to be able to explore for new resources. Yet the White House had the gall to argue that the breaks are necessary to protect consumers at the pump, and the Senate was craven enough to go along.

This Senate will have another chance to provide the American leadership the world needs on climate change. An ambitious bipartisan bill aimed at cutting America’s greenhouse gas emissions by 70 percent by midcentury has been approved by a Senate committee and may come to the floor next year. Though the bill is far from perfect and will provoke intense debate, it could offer a measure of redemption for the administration’s embarrassing failure in Bali.

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Senin 19 February 2008, 16.03 sore)

Re-publish by Jacob Paradox from link (www.nytimes.com)

Living in the Greenhouse (Global Warming Problem)

Living in the Greenhouse

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

EUREKA moments are rare in science. Achievements like the deduction of DNA's structure etch our imagination precisely because they are exceptional. In most fields, research is more akin to climbing a mist-shrouded mountain of unknown dimensions. Climate science, perhaps above all, has been a perpetual ascent toward understanding. A major achievement so far is a broad consensus that beginning in the industrial era humans, by burning ancient buried stores of carbon-rich coal and oil, have liberated billions of tons of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, warming earth.

Debate persists over the extent of human-driven warming and what to do about it. But recognition that in a short span our species has nudged the thermostat of a planet remains a momentous, and sobering, finding.

''The Discovery of Global Warming'' describes the intellectual journey toward that conclusion, with all of its false starts, flawed hypotheses, inventiveness and persistent uncertainties. It reveals the effort as one of the great exercises in collective sleuthing, with pivotal insights provided by experts in fields as varied as glaciology, physics and even plankton paleontology. Charting the evolution and confirmation of the theory, Spencer R. Weart, director of the Center for the History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics, dissects the interwoven threads of research and reveals the political and societal subtexts that colored scientists' views and the public reception their work received.

In many instances, he writes, researchers were pursuing knowledge for other purposes and only later were their data used to determine if humans had influenced the climate. He notes that much of the oceanographic and polar research that eventually helped point to human-driven warming was paid for by the United States Navy and other government agencies that were eager to exert American hegemony during the cold war.

The narrative starts with the 150-year-old notion that some trace gases are transparent to sunlight but opaque to infrared radiation, the radiant energy that pulses from a sun-warmed sidewalk long after dusk. This insulating property of the atmosphere prevents the planet from turning into an iceball. Weart uses excerpts from pivotal papers to let us glimpse the thinking of climatology's pioneers. Thus, in 1862, John Tyndall, a British researcher, wrote about infrared radiation, ''As a dam built across a river causes a local deepening of the stream, so our atmosphere, thrown as a barrier across the terrestrial rays, produces a local heightening of the temperature at the earth's surface.''

As the Industrial Revolution accelerated, scientists soon figured out that emissions of heat-trapping gases from burning coal and other fossil fuels might intensify that natural ''greenhouse effect.'' Chief among these gases was carbon dioxide. One omission from Weart's book is a prescient phrase written in 1896 by Svante Arrhenius, a pioneering Swedish chemist: ''We are evaporating our coal mines into the air.''

Still, the human contribution to climate was presumed to be far outweighed by the great cycles of ice ages revealed in fossil and geological records. The puzzle of those cycles remained the prime quarry of Arrhenius and others and has still not been completely solved.

A warm period in the 1930's brought the first specific predictions that humans could alter the climate, but then things cooled down for a few decades and the possibility of a human influence remained a fringe notion. (Later, Weart explains, it was shown that the temporary cooling could also have been caused by humans -- through the release of vast sun-reflecting plumes of sulfates and other tiny pollution particles in the industrial boom after World War II: one human emission was canceling out another until clean-air laws began removing the cooling veil.)

Weart next focuses on the great burst of geophysical research starting in the 1950's, when data started showing for the first time that humans were indeed changing the atmosphere. He describes how individual scientific obsessions, like Charles David Keeling's preoccupation with creating a precise record of carbon dioxide concentrations, produced vital puzzle pieces.

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Senin 19 February 2008, 10.32 pagi)

Re-publish by Jacob Paradox from link (www.nytimes.com)

Promising Vote on Global Warming (Global Warming Problem)

Promising Vote on Global Warming

(www.nytimes.com)

John McCain has failed in his first attempt to persuade his Republican colleagues in the Senate to give the issue of global warming the urgent attention it deserves. By a margin of 55 to 43 on Thursday, the Senate rejected a proposal he sponsored with Joseph Lieberman to impose mandatory caps on the emissions from utilities and other industries that scientists believe are heavily responsible for global warming. But Mr. McCain, as we know, does not give up easily. He started his quest for campaign finance reform in 1995 and prevailed six years later. He promises to be just as tenacious on this issue.

The outcome was heartening on several levels. Mr. McCain and Mr. Lieberman are now within striking distance of a majority. This reflects not only lobbying from environmental groups but a growing realization among governors, mayors and businesses large and small that the long-term costs of climate change could be far greater than the costs of bringing it under control.

The bill also found surprising support among Democrats and Republicans from big industrial and coal-producing states, where opposition to any legislation having to do with curbing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases usually runs high. This support materialized despite furious opposition from reactionaries like Oklahoma's James Inhofe, who stubbornly denies the science of global warming, and from the White House -- which, true to form, warned of an economic Armageddon.

The bill is in fact a modest version of the 1997 Kyoto accord, which President Bill Clinton embraced but Mr. Bush rejected. Kyoto would indeed have required big changes in how we use and produce energy, as any determined assault on global warming eventually must. But McCain-Lieberman aims merely to accustom the nation gently to doing business in a different way. One suspects that the Senate will someday wake up to the fact that the White House sees bogymen where none exist.

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Senin 19 February 2008, 10.32 pagi)

Re-publish by Jacob Paradox from link (www.nytimes.com)

How to Cool a Planet? (Global Warming Problem)

How to Cool a Planet?

(Maybe)

(www.nytimes.com)

In the past few decades, a handful of scientists have come up with big, futuristic ways to fight global warming: Build sunshades in orbit to cool the planet. Tinker with clouds to make them reflect more sunlight back into space. Trick oceans into soaking up more heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

The Energy Challenge

Articles in this series are examining the ways in which the world is, and is not, moving toward a more energy efficient, environmentally benign future.

Previous Articles in the Series »

Their proposals were relegated to the fringes of climate science. Few journals would publish them. Few government agencies would pay for feasibility studies. Environmentalists and mainstream scientists said the focus should be on reducing greenhouse gases and preventing global warming in the first place.

But now, in a major reversal, some of the world's most prominent scientists say the proposals deserve a serious look because of growing concerns about global warming.

Worried about a potential planetary crisis, these leaders are calling on governments and scientific groups to study exotic ways to reduce global warming, seeing them as possible fallback positions if the planet eventually needs a dose of emergency cooling.

"We should treat these ideas like any other research and get into the mind-set of taking them seriously," said Ralph J. Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington.

The plans and proposed studies are part of a controversial field known as geoengineering, which means rearranging the earth's environment on a large scale to suit human needs and promote habitability. Dr. Cicerone, an atmospheric chemist, will detail his arguments in favor of geoengineering studies in the August issue of the journal Climatic Change. Practicing what he preaches, Dr. Cicerone is also encouraging leading scientists to join the geoengineering fray. In April, at his invitation, Roger P. Angel, a noted astronomer at the University of Arizona, spoke at the academy's annual meeting. Dr. Angel outlined a plan to put into orbit small lenses that would bend sunlight away from earth — trillions of lenses, he now calculates, each about two feet wide, extraordinarily thin and weighing little more than a butterfly.

In addition, Dr. Cicerone recently joined a bitter dispute over whether a Nobel laureate's geoengineering ideas should be aired, and he helped get them accepted for publication. The laureate, Paul J. Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany, is a star of atmospheric science who won his Nobel in 1995 for showing how industrial gases damage the earth's ozone shield. His paper newly examines the risks and benefits of trying to cool the planet by injecting sulfur into the stratosphere. The paper "should not be taken as a license to go out and pollute," Dr. Cicerone said in an interview, emphasizing that most scientists thought curbing greenhouse gases should be the top priority. But he added, "In my opinion, he's written a brilliant paper."

Geoengineering is no magic bullet, Dr. Cicerone said. But done correctly, he added, it will act like an insurance policy if the world one day faces a crisis of overheating, with repercussions like melting icecaps, droughts, famines, rising sea levels and coastal flooding. "A lot of us have been saying we don't like the idea" of geoengineering, he said. But he added, "We need to think about it" and learn, among other things, how to distinguish sound proposals from ones that are ineffectual or dangerous.

Many scientists still deride geoengineering as an irresponsible dream with more risks and potential bad side effects than benefits; they call its extreme remedies a good reason to redouble efforts at reducing heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide. And skeptics of human-induced global warming dismiss geoengineering as a costly effort to battle a mirage. Even so, many analysts say the prominence of its new advocates is giving the field greater visibility and credibility and adding to the likelihood that global leaders may one day consider taking such emergency steps.

"People used to say, 'Shut up, the world isn't ready for this,' " said Wallace S. Broecker, a geoengineering pioneer at Columbia. "Maybe the world has changed." Michael C. MacCracken, chief scientist of the Climate Institute, a private research group in Washington, said he was resigned to the need to take geoengineering seriously.

"It's really too bad," Dr. MacCracken said, "that the United States and the world cannot do much more so that it's not necessary to consider getting addicted to one of these approaches." Martin A. Apple, president of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, said of geoengineering at a recent meeting in Washington, "Let's talk about research funding with enough zeroes on it so we can make a dent."

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Senin 19 February 2008, 10.32 pagi)

Re-publish by Jacob Paradox from link (www.nytimes.com)

Global Warming and the Courts (Global Warming Problem)

Global Warming and the Courts

(www.nytimes.com)

In a move that has caused both delight and apprehension among those who worry about global warming, the Supreme Court has agreed to rule next fall on whether the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The case is among the most important environmental disputes ever to come before the court.

The outcome will have much to say about whether the country will be able to act more aggressively on a problem with potentially grave consequences for the earth and its inhabitants. It could also determine whether states that have acted on their own to limit global warming emissions from vehicles — as California and 10 other states have done — can proceed without fear of a federal veto. President Bush has advanced many reasons for not pressing for strong controls on greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources. But his ace in the hole has been the claim that the federal government has no authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

The case turns largely on a simple reading of the Clean Air Act. The administration argues that the act mentions carbon dioxide only in passing, and that if Congress had been truly worried about global warming it would have given the gases that cause it more emphasis and instructed the E.P.A. to take aggressive steps to control them, as it did with sulfur dioxide and other pollutants. The administration argues further that the science on global warming is too "uncertain" to justify anything more than a voluntary effort to deal with it. The plaintiffs — a formidable collection of state governments and environmental groups — argue that the plain language of the Clean Air Act gives the government jurisdiction over "any air pollutant" that threatens "public health or welfare" and, further, that "welfare" specifically includes effects on climate and weather. This interpretation of the act was first set forth by President Clinton's E.P.A. and stood as agency policy until Mr. Bush reversed it (without consulting his own E.P.A.) in 2001.

As for the science that the administration finds so shaky, the plaintiffs will argue that the science has grown steadily more persuasive since the Clean Air Act was last revised in 1990; that the administration has cherry-picked arguments about details while ignoring the vast preponderance of the evidence; and that the consensus among mainstream scientists — a consensus reinforced by a recent National Academy of Sciences report — is that the earth is inexorably heating up and that industrial emissions are largely responsible.

This is a case of global importance, not least because America's failure to act decisively has discouraged the rest of the world from acting decisively. On the face of it, the law plainly gives the government the power to regulate greenhouse gases. A ruling that tells the administration that it has that power does not mean that it will actually use it. But it will no longer be able to hide behind a legal fiction.

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Senin 19 February 2008, 10.32 pagi)

Re-publish by Jacob Paradox from link (www.nytimes.com)

From Ozone Success, a Potential Climate Model (Global Warming Problem)

From Ozone Success,

a Potential Climate Model

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

In 1985, scientists studying the air over Antarctica stumbled on a gaping breach in the billion-year-old atmospheric radiation shield that makes Earth’s surface habitable. NASA, Satellite instruments monitoring the ozone layer are used to create images depicting ozone over Earth. The blue and purple show where there is the least amount of ozone; the green, yellow and red show where there is more.

The discovery of a seasonal “hole” in this veil of ozone molecules was so unexpected — “the surprise of the century,” one chemist later called it — that it was presumed to be a data glitch. It wasn’t. Soon other experts found a connection between the ozone hole and the use of chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, and similar synthetic chemicals in solvents, refrigeration, sprays and the like.

The chemical threat to the ozone layer had been identified in 1974, and industries and governments were planning to shift to safer substitutes. But it took the ozone hole, glaring from satellite images like a purple bruise, to make eliminating such chemicals a global imperative. On Sept. 16, 1987, an initial batch of countries signed the Montreal Protocol, a treaty that has since grown and led to bans on 95 percent of the ozone-eating compounds. On Sunday, diplomats, scientists and environmentalists gathered in Montreal to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the treaty and to spend a week discussing possible new steps to speed an end to remaining ozone threats.

Many are using the anniversary to bolster the idea that a similar success can be achieved with carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases linked to global warming (including some of the ozone-destroying chemicals and some of the replacements for them). Fresh international climate talks begin at the United Nations on Monday and at a meeting in Washington organized by the White House late next week. Some veterans of both the ozone and climate fights insist that the Montreal success is a model for climate action. “The lesson from Montreal is that curbing global warming will not be as hard as it looks,” said David D. Doniger, an early campaigner against ozone-damaging chemicals for the Natural Resources Defense Council who now directs the group’s climate work.

But many experts on the circumstances — scientific, diplomatic and economic — surrounding the 1987 treaty signing say that while some things are similar now, like the looming environmental risks revealed by evolving science, almost everything else is very different. Ozone molecules, tenuous trios of oxygen atoms, serve as a planetary sun block of sorts, limiting the bombardment of the Earth’s surface by ultraviolet radiation that can cause skin cancers and cataracts, and harm some plants and animals.

When F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario J. Molina first posited in 1974 that CFCs and similar chemicals could waft to the stratosphere and break up ozone, the threat quickly captured public attention. In 1977, long before the climate disaster movie “The Day After Tomorrow,” Hollywood released “Day of the Animals,” in which ozone destruction caused wildlife to run amok.

But it was cancer that really brought the issue home, said Susan Solomon, a senior scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who in 1986 led work linking CFCs and related chemicals to polar ozone losses. “Skin cancer is deeply personal, and virtually every person on the planet has either known someone who has had cancer or had it themselves,” Dr. Solomon said.

The risks from global warming are far different, said Dr. Solomon, who was the co-leader of the latest scientific report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “It is much less personal for most people, except perhaps if you’re in places like Vanuatu,” she said, referring to one of several low-lying island nations threatened by rising seas. “It’s mostly beyond our generation.” In the 1980s, despite persistent scientific uncertainties over the threat to the ozone layer, action to move away from ozone-damaging chemicals was swift, largely because there was little cost involved and alternatives were developed as the need arose, experts said.

To preserve the ozone shield, the United States, joined soon by Canada and Scandinavian countries, banned “nonessential” uses of CFCs — hair sprays, for example — in 1978, just three years after the theory was first described in the journal Nature. The Natural Resources Defense Council, seizing on an opening left by a proposed rule to limit CFCs that was written in the last days of the Carter administration, filed a lawsuit in 1984 that prompted the Environmental Protection Agency to seek broader bans. The domestic action helped set the stage for treaty talks.

“That N.R.D.C. suit was critical because it turned the burden of proof around from having to show there was a problem to proving there was not,” said Roger A. Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Still, $135 billion worth of air conditioners and other equipment in the United States, and billions more around the world, relied on the old chemicals, and the science remained murky. So DuPont and other companies waited to seek alternatives, according to company scientists. In 1985, the murk cleared somewhat. An international scientific assessment of CFCs and ozone created a near-worldwide consensus that the risks of allowing the long-lived chemicals to keep building in the atmosphere were unacceptable.

DuPont, while gaining less than 2 percent of its revenues from such compounds, saw a need to find substitutes and the prospect of new markets, and began a $500 million research effort that spawned a suite of alternatives. With global warming, in contrast, economists and climate experts say it will take billions of dollars a year in basic research, sustained over many years, to even have a chance of finding energy sources that can compete with fossil fuels but produce no greenhouse gases.

In addition, the ozone treaty gave developing countries a decade-long grace period on CFC phaseouts and compensated them for the cost of shifting to safer chemicals. Talks over strengthening climate agreements have stumbled repeatedly over efforts to get concrete commitments on emissions cuts from the United States, and the involvement of developing countries, particularly giants like China. The final momentum for the Montreal treaty was provided by the discovery of the ozone hole, which served as kind of wake-up call, for the first time bringing home the realization that humans could have a direct effect on the planet’s future.

Environmental campaigners have for years been seeking a comparable icon for climate change, be it drowning polar bears, Hurricane Katrina or the deadly European heat wave of 2003. But the incremental nature of the threat posed by building greenhouse gases is for many still trumped by concerns like Iraq and health care.

Mack McFarland, the chief atmospheric scientist for DuPont, said the surprise appearance of the ozone hole should serve as a warning to anyone waiting for stronger evidence of danger before acting to cut emissions of greenhouse gases. “The science of ozone is so simple compared to the global climate system,” Dr. McFarland said. Referring to the discovery of the polar hole, he added: “If we missed something so fundamental with ozone, what are we missing with the climate system? Admittedly, it can go either way. But do we want to take that chance?”

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Senin 19 February 2008, 10.32 pagi)

Re-publish by Jacob Paradox from link (www.nytimes.com)

Imagine Everyone Was Equal, in Emissions (Global Warming Problem)

Imagine Everyone Was Equal,

in Emissions

By Andrew C. Revkin

China’s industrial growth hinges on burning coal from mines like this one in Shenmu, Shaanxi Province, behind a village store. (Credit: Chang W. Lee/The New York Times)

In a three-day summit at the United Nations on global warming this week, a parade of representatives from developing countries expressed growing discontent with the lack of action by rich ones to start curbing emissions of greenhouse gases that, in the long run, are likely to exact the most harm in the world’s poorest places. India, China, and other poorer countries with fast-growing economies said they were ready to limit their own emissions, keeping them lower, on a per person basis, than those in the already-industrialized North. This Associated Press story conveyed their stance:

Chinese envoy Yu Qingtai told The Associated Press that China would try to keep a lid on its growing gas emissions when compared to U.S. per capita emissions. “I cannot accept the argument that I, as a Chinese, am only entitled legally to one quarter of what you are entitled to,” he told AP. But, he added, “being equal to an American when it comes to per capita emissions would be a nightmare for the Chinese.”

So that keeps the ball in the court of the industrial powers. One of the grand challenges in the climate debate remains clarifying the different responsibilities of countries that have already built their prosperity and quality of life on coal (and to a smaller extent oil) and those on the verge of doing so. On a per-person basis, responsibility for greenhouse-gas emissions is no contest. The rich dominate. Right now, the average United States citizen generates about 20 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year through the use of electricity, heating and cooling, vehicles, manufacturing and the other energy-intensive facets of modern daily life. For various reasons, Japan and Europe have far lower emissions, with Japan and Britain, for example, just under 10 tons per person per year. In China, the number is about 3.8 tons. In India, it’s 1.2 tons per person.

This gets back to a central question here on Dot Earth — how much is too much?

Some libertarian critics have implied I’m supporting a Draconian push back to sweaters and bicycles (see Ron Bailey’s recent critique of my “Unnecessary Things” post). [UPDATE: Draconian by some of their standards, not mine.] Some environmentalists say I’m too gloomy about the chances that humanity will resolve to share responsibility for limiting climate risks. In the end, my goal is to be an equal-opportunity explorer of ideas as various as the need for more global governance to protect the commons and the free-market mantra that all will be well if people are left to pursue prosperity and comfort by whatever means they can afford.

But getting back to that baseline question, if everyone gets to emulate the established emitters, what will the atmosphere be like? I did a brief thought experiment last night. Where would carbon dioxide emissions be if everyone on Earth was using fossil fuels at the same pace, per capita, as the United States is now? Or let’s take, say Britain, as a kind of middle case, presuming that the United States will find ways to trim its emissions (a 50-percent cut taking us to Europe’s level).

It’s simple multiplication. Right now, the sum of global emissions of carbon dioxide by 6.6 billion very-unequal humans is about 29 billion tons a year. (An excellent database is here on historic and current emissions, from energy and cement making.) If everyone was emitting at the British level, it’d be 66 billion tons a year. Okay, let’s try the United States. That’d be 132 billion tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere each year, if everyone on Earth had an equal carbon footing. So clearly something has to give, presuming the countries of the world are serious about accepting the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which they all did, ostensibly, last year).

Vaclav Smil, a reality-based energy expert at the University of Manitoba who has studied this issue long and hard, said the following in an email when I was working on my 2006 story on declining research on new energy options:

“We have the know-how to consume, in rich countries, only half as much [energy] as we do without lowering our REAL quality of life (REAL does not include unlimited SUVs, 15,000 sq. ft. custom-built houses etc, etc), and to provide everybody, even in the most desperate parts of Africa with enough for a decent life. But we prefer to waste enormously, and Africans prefer endless bouts of civil wars. This is not primarily a technical problem…. This is primarily an ethical, moral problem (i.e., we have only one biosphere).”

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Senin 19 February 2008, 10.32 pagi)

Re-publish by Jacob Paradox from link (www.nytimes.com)