BS: UN to look at impact of climate change

Subject: BS: UN to look at impact of climate change
From: beardedbruce
Date: 17 Apr 07 - 11:15 AM

First talk on DEALING with the impact of Climate change, rather than to claim they can make it go away. About time!


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U.N. to assess climate change as threat to security
POSTED: 10:28 a.m. EDT, April 17, 2007

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) -- Britain will try to convince reluctant U.N. Security Council members that global warming poses a threat to international peace and security when the body holds its first debate on climate change on Tuesday.

Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett chairs the meeting on an issue which remains contentious for many governments, including the Bush administration that has fought mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions that spur climate change.

Ministers from two or three impacted nations which are not on the 15-member council are expected to attend the debate. They include the Maldives, one of 37 small island states that fear they may disappear under the waves as the Earth warms up.

Many members, including Russia, China and some developing nations, question whether the issue belongs in the Security Council, which deals only with threats to international peace and security, as they feel the council is increasingly encroaching on the work of other U.N. bodies.

No resolution is planned in this first round of speeches.

"We are lukewarm because of where it is discussed," Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said. "The Security Council is not the right place for the debate. We didn't take a vote but there was not much enthusiasm."

Britain made its case in a "concept paper," distributed to U.N. members on April 5, that suggested large parts of the world risked being uninhabitable by rising sea levels, a shortage of fresh water or land suitable for agriculture.

"Some estimates suggest up to 200 million people may be displaced by the middle of the century," as a result of migration from rural areas to cities and across international borders, thereby increasing "the potential for instability and conflict," the paper said.

Provoking conflicts
Britain said conflicts were still likely to break out for a variety of other reasons, but said "the cumulative impacts of climate change could exacerbate these drivers of conflict, and particularly increase the risk to those states already susceptible to conflict."

Climate change is expected to complicate the existing competition for scarce energy resources, although if that change is gradual and managed it could lessen the risk of conflict, Britain said.

British officials have invoked the impact of the council's January, 2000 debate on AIDS, which had previously been viewed as a public health matter.

At that meeting, chaired by then-Vice President Al Gore, the United States said AIDS was changing the face of Africa and placed the issue in the context of U.N. peacekeeping operations, which the council authorizes.

The result was special AIDS awareness programs for peacekeepers, included in many council resolutions.

The U.S. Congress is thinking along similar lines. Senators Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, and Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, on March 31 introduced bipartisan legislation that would require an assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies of security challenges presented by climate change.

Subject: RE: BS: UN to look at impact of climate change
From: Barry Finn
Date: 17 Apr 07 - 12:53 PM

So this is what it takes to get their attention, an invasion by climate change.

Barry

Subject: RE: BS: UN to look at impact of climate change
From: Amos
Date: 17 Mar 09 - 05:44 PM

"...Scientists have long established that the Antarctic Peninsula is one of the most rapidly warming spots on Earth. Now, new research using detailed satellite data indicates that the changing climate is affecting not just the penguins at the apex of the food chain, but simultaneously the microscopic life that is the base of the ecosystem....The research was published in the March 13 edition of Science magazine by researchers with the National Science Foundation's (NSF) LTER (Long Term Ecological Research) program.

The LTER, which has 26 sites around the globe, including two in Antarctica, enables tracking of ecological variables over time, so that the mechanisms of climate change impact on ecosystems can be revealed. The specific findings were made by researchers with the Palmer LTER, using data collected near Palmer Station and from the research vessel Laurence M. Gould. Both Palmer Station and the Laurence M. Gould are operated by NSF's Office of Polar Programs.

Hugh Ducklow, of the Marie Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, the principal investigator for the Palmer LTER project, said that the new findings are scientifically significant, but they also are consistent with the climate trends on the Peninsula and other observed changes.

However, it took new scientific tools and analytical work by post-doctoral fellow Martin Montes Hugo to verify scientifically what scientists had been inferring from other changes for some time.

"I have to say the findings weren't a surprise; I think with the weight of all the other observations that we had on changes happening to organisms higher up in the food chain, we thought that phytoplankton weren't going to escape this level of climate change," Ducklow said. "But it took Martin to have all the right tools and the abilities to go in and do the analysis and prove what we suspected."

...

Over the past 50 years, winter temperatures on the Peninsula have risen five times faster than the global average and the duration of sea-ice coverage has decreased. A warm, moist maritime climate has moved into the northern Peninsula region, pushing the continental, polar conditions southward.

As a result, the prevalence of species that depend on sea ice, such as Adelie penguins, Antarctic silverfish and krill, has decreased in the Peninsula's northern region, and new species that typically avoid ice, such as Gentoo and Chinstrap penguins, and lanternfish are moving into the habitat.

The LTER researchers show that satellite data on ocean color, temperature, sea ice and winds, indicate that phytoplankton at the base of the food chain are also responding to changes in sea-ice cover and winds driven by climate change. However, there are contrasting changes in northern and southern regions, and the satellite and ground-based data provide insights into the forcing mechanisms for each region.

Subject: RE: BS: UN to look at impact of climate change
From: pdq
Date: 18 Mar 09 - 10:34 AM

Shallow science and its victims

Sunday, 15th March 2009

More from last week's International Conference on Climate Change in New York (which I wrote about here)-- the one that was supposed to have ben attended by just a handful of cranks who don't agree that it's environmental apocalypse now:

Willie Soon, a Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist with scores of peer-reviewed papers and books to his credit, said he is 'embarrassed and puzzled' by the shallow science in papers that undergird the proposition that the Earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming. Soon told the second International Conference on Climate Change here, 'We have a system (of peer reviewing scientific literature) that is truly, truly appalling.'

... [John]Sununu and Soon both said global warming alarmists, particularly the politicians and the few scientists who wrote the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, have captured the scientific paper process, and in Sununu's words, have been successful in 'taking control of who gets funding, who gets published, who gets acclaimed, and who gets demonized.'

And in a keynote address Lord Monckton delivered this impassioned if despairing plea for reason:

Last summer, just as the President of the Royal Society, the world's oldest taxpayer-funded pressure-group, was telling us, 'Global warming is happening now,' global temperatures had already been plunging for nearly seven years, at a rate equivalent to almost 4 Fahrenheit degrees per century. Has your favourite news medium reported that? Probably not. Maybe that's why the President of the Royal Society didn't know. He doesn't get his science from the learned journals. He gets it from the media.

Just as Tony Bliar [sic] was announcing on his blog that 'global warming is getting worse,' just as Al Gore was testifying before the Senate--during an ice-storm--that we face a 'climate crisis,' global temperatures plummeted still more. They have been plummeting at a rate equivalent to 11 Fahrenheit degrees per century throughout the four years since Gore launched his mawkish, sci-fi comedy horror B-movie. At this rate, by mid-century we shall roasting in a new Ice Age.

... Thirty years ago, the soi-disant 'Greens' agitated for DDT to be banned. They killed 40 million people of malaria, most of them children. Eventually, after a third of a century, the WHO at last caved in to humanitarian pressure from me and others and reversed the ban. Dr. Arata Kochi, announcing the end of that murderous ban, said, 'Usually in this field politics comes first and science second. Now we must take a stand on the science and the data.'

...Now the very same soi-disant 'Greens' are killing millions by starvation in a dozen of the world's poorest regions. Their biofuel scam, a nasty by-product of their shoddy, senseless, failed, falsified, fraudulent 'global warming' bugaboo, has turned millions of acres of agricultural land from growing food for humans to growing fuel for automobiles. If we let them, they will carelessly kill tens of millions more by pursuing Osamabamarama's stated ambition of shutting down nine-tenths of the economies of the West and flinging us back to the Stone Age without even the right to light fires in our caves. The prosperity of the West is not only our sustenance. It is also the very lifeblood of the struggling nations of the Third World. If our economies fail, we are inconvenienced, but they die.

Indeed; man-made global warming -- the indulgence of an intelligentsia for whom conscience is a fashion accessory – is not just an intellectual fraud but has consequences, already fatal, for the wretched of the earth.

 

Subject: RE: BS: UN to look at impact of climate change
From: Amos
Date: 18 Mar 09 - 01:51 PM

PDQ:
I think your man is spouting off at the mouth making assertions that would not stand up to close inspection. Either he's in the pay of someone with a vested interest, or his extreme ignorance is leading him into wild foolishness.

Over the past 50 years, winter temperatures on the Peninsula have risen five times faster than the global average and the duration of sea-ice coverage has decreased. A warm, moist maritime climate has moved into the northern Peninsula region, pushing the continental, polar conditions southward. is a factual statement. The observations on the softening of the rundra throughout the northern band of Russia and Alaska as reported in the NEw Yorker (cited in an earlier thread on this subject) are factual assertions.

Your arm-waving citation is just trash-talking. Wake thee up, mon!
A