Climate Change

Climate activists descended on Washington, D.C., on Sunday in what organizers boasted was the largest climate-change rally in American history, claiming more than 35,000 attendees. The Forward on Climate rally, as it was billed by environmental groups Sierra Club and 350.org, called for President Obama to take immediate action on climate change, with many calling for the government to block the construction of the oil pipeline known as Keystone XL. Protestors marched through the streets bearing placards and massed on the National Mall, where speakers addressed the crowd.

Exceedingly high summer temperatures, longer summers and related catastrophes, such as wildfire and drought, are poised to be the norm, and they are driven by climate change, according to a new research paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In an opinion article over the weekend in the Washington Post that previewed the findings , the paper's lead author, James E. Hansen wrote: “It is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change.

WASHINGTON -- At the Republican National Convention last week and in at least one stump speech over the weekend, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney used climate change as a laugh line ridiculing President Obama's priorities. But in comments to the Science Debate website Tuesday as part of an online debate organized by a consortium of scientific organizations, the Republican candidate took another position, similar to the more moderate stance he struck last year, when he conceded that the planet was getting warmer.

Emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide reached an all-time high last year, further reducing the chances that the world could avoid a dangerous rise in global average temperature by 2020, according to the International Energy Agency, the energy analysis group for the world's most industrialized states. Global emissions of carbon-dioxide, or CO2, from fossil-fuel combustion hit a record high of 31.6 gigatonnes  in 2011, according to the IEA's preliminary estimates, an increase of 1 Gt, or 3.2% from 2010.

Re “ Obama finally talks climate change; green industry wants more ,” Nov. 7 While the climate system has many tipping points, Superstorm Sandy may have marked one of the more important in terms of public opinion. At the very least, it has blown away the absurd political taboo against talking about a subject we can easily do something about. For instance, action in the form of a 100% revenue-neutral carbon fee, with all revenue recycled back to citizens, would reduce our dependency on foreign oil, help American businesses and boost the economy by putting money into the hands of the poor and the jobless.

WASHINGTON -- Some major U.S. corporations that support climate science in their public relations materials actively work to derail regulations and laws addressing global warming through lobbying, campaign donations and support of various advocacy groups, according to a new report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental and scientific integrity group. The multinational oil giant, ConocoPhillips, for instance, said on its website in 2011 that it “recognizes” that human activity is leading to climate change, the view supported by the overwhelming majority of scientific research.

Citizen scientists, environmentalists and anyone who lives near a power plant -- your services are requested. Climate change scientist Kevin Robert Gurney needs your help in a grand undertaking: the mapping of all the power plants in the world. It's a big job, and he and the people in his lab cannot do it alone. Gurney, an associate professor at Arizona State University, builds carbon dioxide emission data models that help him and others better understand how carbon moves around the planet and how it effects climate change.

Re "Atmospheric CO2 approaches a dire milestone," May 2 If astronomers had just discovered that a meteor would strike Earth in a few years and that its impact would make our world a radically different place than the one we have known, the article about it would be above the fold on the front page. But when scientists at UC San Diego tell us we are pumping carbon dioxide into our atmosphere at a rate that can, in a few decades, raise the Earth's average temperature and ocean levels to heights not seen in millions of years, this article only makes it to two brief columns on Page A-10 of The Times.

This week's Newsweek magazine features a couple of essays -- one about Jesus and one about climate change -- that demonstrate the difference between simple faith in the unknowable and blind faith that denies scientific fact. An article by Bart D. Ehrman, professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, discusses things that people believe about the birth of Christ that are actually not in the Bible. For instance, despite what the Christmas carols say, nowhere in the holy book does it mention an ox and ass beside the manger or the exact number of wise men following the star (a star that seems to be operating contrary to the laws of physics, by the way)

AMSTERDAM -- On an early morning flight coming out of the clouds above the North Sea, the first objects that come into view as the coast of the Netherlands approaches are the windmills. No, not the quaint, creaking, wooden windmills that, along with wooden shoes and the little boy with his finger in the dike, are the cliches of Dutch culture; these windmills are sleek and modern and so huge they dwarf the container ships passing by.  There are phalanxes of them just off the Dutch coast, and on land there are many, many more planted like daffodils along the wet rural stretches of this low-lying country that looks as if it could, at any moment, be inundated by the sea. In fact, the Dutch could be swamped as sea levels rise due to global climate change.