Reduce carbon emissions or else, Nasa scientist warnsDisaster guaranteedBy Sylvie Barak: Monday, 07 April 2008, 12:48 PMWE’RE NOT DOING ENOUGH to cut carbon dioxide emissions and the Earth is doomed in even less time than we originally thought. That’s the message a leading climate scientist gave the European Union today, when he urged them to go back to the drawing board and pull a lower CO2 target out of their collective hat.Head of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, James Hansen, told the EU that their 550 parts per million of C02 was simply not good enough, and should be slashed down to 350 ppm. Europe’s 550 ppm target is already the world’s most rigorous, with countries like the US and China grumbling about even having to come close to that, but Hansen is convinced that levels need to be drastically reduced if, "humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed".The new figure of 350 ppm is a number boffins have produced after dredging up large amounts of gunk from the bottom of the ocean to study the levels of Co2 present in it. What they found was that 35 million years ago, at the beginning of the ice age, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was about 450ppm.The new study shows that at levels as high as 550ppm, the world would warm up by six degrees centigrade, three degrees warmer than previous studies had estimated. The previously low estimates were the fault of what Hansen calls " slow feedback" mechanisms which magnify the rise in temperature caused by increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases. To put it more simply, when ice and snow melts, they leave uncovered earth which absorbs even more heat. So, as the world’s glaciers and ice shelves melt, the warming effect is compounded.Hansen told the Guardian newspaper: “What we have found is that the target we have all been aiming for is a disaster - a guaranteed disaster”. The cheerful fellow added, “If we follow business as usual I can't see how west Antarctica could survive a century. We are talking about a sea-level rise of at least a couple of metres this century".
Scientist: Climate Change to Impact Beer ProductionApril 8, 2008 The price of beer is likely to rise in coming decades because climate change will hamper the production of a key grain needed for the brew - especially in Australia, a scientist warned Tuesday.Jim Salinger, a climate scientist at New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, said climate change likely will cause a decline in the production of malting barley in parts of New Zealand and Australia. Malting barley is a key ingedient of beer."It will mean either there will be pubs without beer or the cost of beer will go up," Salinger told the Institute of Brewing and Distilling convention. Similar effects could be expected worldwide, but Salinger spoke only of the effects on Australia and New Zealand. He said climate change could cause a drop in beer production within 30 years, especially in parts of Australia, as dry areas become drier and water shortages worsen.Barley growing parts of Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales would likely be harder hit than growing areas in New Zealand's South Island."It will provide a lot of challenges for the brewing industry," even forcing breweries to look at new varieties of malt barley as a direct result of climate change, Salinger said.New Zealand and Australian brewer Lion Nathan's corporate affairs director Liz Read said climate change already was forcing up the price of malted barley, sugar, aluminium and sugar.Read said that in addition to climate change, barley growers are grappling with competition from other forms or land use, such as the dairy industry.
It's hopeless. There's no way to stop it. There's no way the big polluters will be able to rally the kind of political clout they need to reduce emissions to where they need to be.They pollute and we (third world) will suffer. The only hope is that global warming isn't caused by emissions and rather by the natural ice age cycle. In which case all a dem go get shaft when they go under ice in a few centuries.
Quote from: Exar_Kun on April 08, 2008, 09:17:34 PMIt's hopeless. There's no way to stop it. There's no way the big polluters will be able to rally the kind of political clout they need to reduce emissions to where they need to be.They pollute and we (third world) will suffer. The only hope is that global warming isn't caused by emissions and rather by the natural ice age cycle. In which case all a dem go get shaft when they go under ice in a few centuries.I'm pretty sure they'll just build Levis galore and keep the water out save when storms hit and wipe out a state or two... wait that sounds familiar..
That's why NASA is planning to build Space Colonies on the Moon!!
