The Onion reports on US President George W. Bush’s solution to global warming: the $100 trillion National Air Conditioner Initiative. This initiative would cover 90% of North Dakota with massive air conditioning unit which would devastate Canada.

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Most climate change forecasts are pretty grim: drought, disease in some of the world’s poorest areas, loss of species, famine. Some forecasts of climate change are, for the US and Europe… not so bad. More rain. Longer growing seasons. Instead of having to move to Zone 4 for gardening, Zone 4 is coming to me.

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There’s lots of bad news on the climate change front. Links at the end.

• New Scientist reports that worldwide carbon dioxide emissions are growing even faster than predicted. This is bad news because carbon dioxide is implicated as the primary greenhouse gas implicated in climate change. Our industrialized society produces a certain amount of carbon dioxide and the planet is capable of absorbing back a certain amount.

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Recently in climate change:

• Scientific American talks about fixing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and what it will cost
• And apparently stabilizing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would cost between 0.2% and 3.0% of the GDP. I say go for it and then we can stop arguing about whether that’s the cause of warming.
• Summer temperatures in the US may rise by 10 degrees by 2080. Looking on the bright side, if rosemary becomes a perennial for my zone I’ll be happy.

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I’ve been busy enough with movies and bees that I haven’t touched on climate change for a while. The reality of it is that it gets boring having the same old apocalypse day-in and day-out, so it’s more fun to shake things up a bit (until I realize that I’ve written about zombies for two weeks running, at which point it’s well past time to move on to something else).

Links are all at the bottom of the article. I’ll be back on Friday with more on…zombies.

This is an old one but a good one - Canada’s former defense minister Paul Hellyer thinks that we should fix climate change using technology from UFO’s.

A letter to the Arkansas Democrat Gazette caused an uproar when the writer suggested that making daylight savings time start earlier in the year was contributed to climate change by adding an hour of daylight (and warmth) to the day. Apparently people online aren’t the only ones who need to use smiley faces in order to indicate humor.

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Okay, probably not, but now scientists are forecasting that global warming will make the Earth spin faster, shortening the day. See, the distribution of mass on the Earth’s surface affects its rotational speed, a la a figure skater. And global warming… it has something to do with carbon, but, well, you’ll have to pay $4.95 to find out what, which I didn’t do.

Via: Global warming will make Earth spin faster - 07 April 2007 - New Scientist
[tags]global warming, climate change, earth, rotation[/tags]

There’s a lot of climate change news recently, so I’m going to try to round it up in one article.

First, there’s the report itself. This is the “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” (IPCC) that’s been in the news a lot lately - written by 120 nations. Leaving aside the quality of anything produced by committee, it’s also the subject of an immense amount of political wrangling. The report itself ended up being 20 chapters and 1572 pages. This week produced a 21 page summary “for policymakers”.

The thing that bugs me about this is how anyone can present something that has been held up for negotiation as fact. I’m not disputing climate change… I tend to believe that even our dependence on petroleum isn’t the cause of it, it would really be for the best for us to no longer depend on petroleum the way that we do… but you don’t negotiate over something you claim to be scientific fact. You don’t negotiate over something you claim to be a logical consequence of observed phenomenon. It is, or it isn’t.

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New Scientist reports on pressure placed on climate scientists by the Bush administration and editing done on climate reports to increase uncertainty and tone down statements on consequences of climate change.

US fudging of climate science - details revealed - earth - 20 March 2007 - New Scientist Environment
[tags]us government, bush administration, climate, global warming[/tags]

Apparently global warming is causing sharp divisions in the National Association of Evangelicals, with some feeling that it distracts from “great moral issues of our time”, some feeling that “to harm this world by environmental degradation is an offense against God”, and some feeling that it’s part of a leftist agenda to divide evangelical unity (because, after all, everything is about them).

Via: Global warming gap among evangelicals widens - CNN.com
[tags]evangelicals, global warming[/tags]

The climate report from the “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” has been out for a bit now and perhaps a few people have had a chance to take it in.

The report predicts that the areas suffering the most from climate change will also be the poorest - Africa and parts of Asia. What we should expect over the next few decades is the spread of tropical diseases, starvation, flooding, extinctions and the displacement of hundreds of millions of people.

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