Mind Mash

More climate change predictions from James Hansen, NASA Goddard, via Scientific American. Scary stuff. Better do something.

Apparently a battle is on the horizon between the climate change proponents and climate change sceptics due the the upcoming – February 2007 – release of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

It seems, however, that climate change sceptics are using underhand and non-scientific methods to discredit prominent climate change proponents, even trying to ruin their careers. Some energy companies and associations are funding attacks on scientists who publish research supporting climate change. Can these companies or associations do this ethically if they know that climate change probably exists, and probably is a serious threat? Are they opening themselves up to future legal action along the lines of the big tobacco suits?

There is an excellent article at New Scientist about the efforts of some to discredit scientists who publish research or opinions which support the notion of rapid and dangerous climate change.

The environmental movement of the 1980s (or earlier) had some success – at least in Britain: rivers were cleaned up, power station emissions reduced and motorway underpasses were constructed to allow frogs to access their breeding sites. These were good things: the Thames was not too long ago disgustingly poluted, but is now clean enough for fish, and I even read of a diver swimming up the Thames recently. The movement’s success was, however, limited by its marginalisation by the establishment, who managed to successfully portray environmental activists as unkempt tree huggers.

The stakes are even higher now, and climate change is a global problem which impacts everybody and will not be satisfactorally solved without action from more or less everybody. An important part of the solution is finding a way to tackle climate change within the framework of a capitalist world.

The British government recently commissioned a report on the economics of climate change, which will be published on 30th October 2006 (tomorrow). Judging from snippets reported by the BBC, it will make interesting reading.

I was trying recently to find out about the current extent of sea ice. Interestingly, Google Earth does not display sea ice at the north pole, so I had to resort to looking for images and maps in the wider web. A regularly updated report on the state of the cryosphere includes reports on sea ice at the poles and other areas.

Rapid melting of Greenland glaciers confirmed by NASA gravity studies – there was an idea recently that although Greenland is clearly losing ice at the edges, warmer air carrying more water vapor was leading to more snow falling inland and the two effects might balance. They do not. The gravity studies prove that Greenland is losing mass, with roughly 20% more water melting away from the glaciers than is being replaced by snowfall.