Forest fires can help to reduce global warming, despite generating tonnes of carbon dioxide, a study has found. Scientists looking at the effect of fires in boreal (northern coniferous) forests found that in the long term the loss of trees means that more sunlight is reflected away from the Earth. This is because more snow, which is highly reflective, is able to cover the ground.
There is a similar effect when new trees start growing their light green leaves, which reflect better than dark foliage. "The reflectivity effect in the long run is larger than the carbon effect," Michelle Mack, of the University of Florida, said.
Boreal forests, which account for 14.5 per cent of land surface, are thought to contain 30 per cent of all the CO2 held by plants and soils. It had been feared that dryness caused by global warming would increase the frequency of fires. The findings, the researchers say, mean that plans to cut CO2 emissions by planting trees and preventing fires need to be reassessed
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Journal abstract follows:
The Impact of Boreal Forest Fire on Climate Warming
J. T. Randerson et al.
We report measurements and analysis of a boreal forest fire, integrating the effects of greenhouse gases, aerosols, black carbon deposition on snow and sea ice, and postfire changes in surface albedo. The net effect of all agents was to increase radiative forcing during the first year (34 ~ 31 Watts per square meter of burned area), but to decrease radiative forcing when averaged over an 80-year fire cycle (-2.3 ~ 2.2 Watts per square meter) because multidecadal increases in surface albedo had a larger impact than fire-emitted greenhouse gases. This result implies that future increases in boreal fire may not accelerate climate warming.
Al Gore rains on his own party
Andrew Bolt comments, from Victoria, Australia
Al Gore flies in to warn about global warming and -- he's done it again! -- Victoria gets snow in November. Call it the Gore Effect -- the uncanny ability of the world's most famous global warming alarmist to cool any place he tours. You see, this has happened to the former US vice-president and narrator of An Inconvenient Truth rather a lot.
It was first noticed in Boston in 2004, when Gore was due to give a big speech in Boston on the imminent danger of the world frying. Bingo! The city had its coldest temperatures in almost 50 years. Same story with his speech that year in New York -- delivered in near-record low temperatures.
Or look over at New Zealand, which has just finished hosting another Gore tour. It's bad enough that the place was just emerging from one of its wettest and coldest winters on record. Now the local papers report: "An unusually cold October has left Southland dairy farmers struggling."
Of course, it's not just Gore who can bring a chill just by talking about global warming. A fortnight ago we read this in a Sydney newspaper: "Thousands of people have marched through central Sydney, ignoring wet and windy weather to protest against global warming." Of course, I won't make the mistake of the alarmists and claim one freak of weather disproves or proves an entire theory. Weather changes, and always has, which is a truth so many city people seem to have forgotten in this frenzy of fear.
But long-term, there is some good news. Since the big scare of 1998 -- said to be the hottest year since the Middle Ages -- the world's temperatures have fallen slightly and stayed there. Australia's temperature this year is lower than last year's. Now there are some facts to warm you.
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Greenie madness metastasizes: They now want to CREATE pollution
If the sun warms the Earth too dangerously, the time may come to draw the shade. The "shade" would be a layer of pollution deliberately spewed into the atmosphere to help cool the planet. This over-the-top idea comes from prominent scientists, among them a Nobel laureate. The reaction here at the U.N. conference on climate change is a mix of caution, curiosity and some resignation to such "massive and drastic" operations, as the chief U.N. climatologist describes them.
The Nobel Prize-winning scientist who first made the proposal is himself "not enthusiastic about it." "It was meant to startle the policy makers," said Paul J. Crutzen, of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. "If they don't take action much more strongly than they have in the past, then in the end we have to do experiments like this."
Serious people are taking Crutzen's idea seriously. This weekend, NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., hosts a closed-door, high-level workshop on the global haze proposal and other "geoengineering" ideas for fending off climate change.
In Nairobi, meanwhile, hundreds of delegates were wrapping up a two-week conference expected to only slowly advance efforts to rein in greenhouse gases blamed for much of the 1-degree rise in global temperatures in the past century. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol requires modest emission cutbacks by industrial countries - but not the United States, the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, because it rejected the deal. Talks on what to do after Kyoto expires in 2012 are all but bogged down.
When he published his proposal in the journal Climatic Change in August, Crutzen cited a "grossly disappointing international political response" to warming. The Dutch climatologist, awarded a 1995 Nobel in chemistry for his work uncovering the threat to Earth's atmospheric ozone layer, suggested that balloons bearing heavy guns be used to carry sulfates high aloft and fire them into the stratosphere. While carbon dioxide keeps heat from escaping Earth, substances such as sulfur dioxide, a common air pollutant, reflect solar radiation, helping cool the planet.
Tom Wigley, a senior U.S. government climatologist, followed Crutzen's article with a paper of his own on Oct. 20 in the leading U.S. journal Science. Like Crutzen, Wigley cited the precedent of the huge volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991. Pinatubo shot so much sulfurous debris into the stratosphere that it is believed it cooled the Earth by .9 degrees for about a year. Wigley ran scenarios of stratospheric sulfate injection - on the scale of Pinatubo's estimated 10 million tons of sulfur - through supercomputer models of the climate, and reported that Crutzen's idea would, indeed, seem to work. Even half that amount per year would help, he wrote. A massive dissemination of pollutants would be needed every year or two, as the sulfates precipitate from the atmosphere in acid rain. Wigley said a temporary shield would give political leaders more time to reduce human dependence on fossil fuels - the main source of greenhouse gases. He said experts must more closely study the feasibility of the idea and its possible effects on stratospheric chemistry.
Nairobi conference participants agreed. "Yes, by all means, do all the research," Indian climatologist Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the 2,000-scientist U.N. network on climate change, told The Associated Press. But "if human beings take it upon themselves to carry out something as massive and drastic as this, we need to be absolutely sure there are no side effects," Pachauri said.
Philip Clapp, a veteran campaigner for emissions controls to curb warming, also sounded a nervous note, saying, "We are already engaged in an uncontrolled experiment by injecting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere." But Clapp, president of the U.S. group National Environmental Trust, said, "I certainly don't disagree with the urgency."
In past years scientists have scoffed at the idea of air pollution as a solution for global warming, saying that the kind of sulfate haze that would be needed is deadly to people. Last month, the World Heath Organization said air pollution kills about 2 million people worldwide each year and that reducing large soot-like particles from sulfates in cities could save 300,000 lives annually. American geophysicist Jonathan Pershing, of Washington's World Resources Institute, is among those wary of unforeseen consequences, but said the idea might be worth considering "if down the road 25 years, it becomes more and more severe because we didn't deal with the problem."
By telephone from Germany, Crutzen said that's what he envisioned: global haze as a component for long-range planning. "The reception on the whole is more positive than I thought," he said. Pershing added, however, that reaction may hinge on who pushes the idea. "If it's the U.S., it might be perceived as an effort to avoid the problem," he said. NASA said this weekend's conference will examine "methods to ameliorate the likelihood of progressively rising temperatures over the next decades." Other such U.S. government-sponsored events are scheduled to follow.
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AN ASSESSMENT OF KYOTO: EUROPE'S PERFORMANCE, CALIFORNIA DREAMING, TRADE WARS AND WAITING FOR GODOT
For non-literary people, the reference to Godot is a reference to a play by Samuel Beckett, called "Waiting for Godot". Godot never turns up
In late October 2006 the European Commission issued a report, "Greenhouse Gas Emission Trends and Projections in Europe 2006". This most-recent in a series, issued coincident with the annual Kyoto Protocol negotiations, revealed continued worsening of Europe's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions profile, and announced that the "EU must take immediate action on Kyoto targets". This report is the best source for tracking Europe's Kyoto progress, and provides critical insight into the ever-changing numbers and official assumptions underlying EU claims to be the "world leader" in addressing the issue of climate change. This Policy Note assesses its meaning.
Europe's Kyoto promise, as originally ratified by the EU-15 individually, was to lower each of the nations' GHG emissions to 8% below 1990 levels by 2010. Making the most of the 1990 baseline that they insisted guide Kyoto, the EU subsequently modified these promises with a "Burden Sharing Agreement" (BSA). This internal understanding collectively capitalized on and distributed emission reductions arising from two political decisions preceding and unrelated to Kyoto: the UK's "dash to gas", and shutting much inefficient East German manufacturing capacity after German reunification.
Despite such internal arrangements, other built-in advantages described, infra, and Kyoto's "mechanisms", Europe is struggling to meet even its re-engineered promise of an 8% overall collective reduction. Possibly as a result of such looming problems, Europe appears to have finally turned a corner from routine issuance of triumphalist rhetoric about its purported success, to tempering such claims and offering exhortative calls for expedited action. The October EU report represents a new, positive step in that direction.
This most recent report is also important, however, for what it shows about the internal numbers constituting such an assessment, given Europe's growing emission increases and fading chances to comply under Kyoto in a straightforward manner.
In this context, the following Policy Note addresses emerging topics likely to take the stage at the "COP-12" talks in Nairobi, Kenya this month. Europe's performance is unlikely to suddenly become a hot topic at these talks, which generally are directed at specific haggling over terms such as "Supplementarity" and the rhetoric aimed at the non-Party U.S. Regardless, Europe's self-proclaimed role as "world leader" in climate change policy demands that this Note provide an updated assessment of Europe's emissions.
The topics addressed herein likely to emerge in Nairobi include idea of a "privileged partnership" for California so as to allow the UK/Europe to purchase GHG "credits" from a Kyoto non-Party - and the political accommodation this would require. Also addressed is Europe's idea of imposing border adjustments on energy intensive products from countries that do not ration CO2 emissions, thereby starting a "climate" trade war. Finally, this Note comments on the UNFCCC proposal of delaying talks seeking deeper "post-2012" Kyoto commitments, purportedly to wait for a different U.S. administration though long-expected as an inevitable result of Kyoto's own troubles.
FULL ANALYSIS here
Snow falls in subtropical Queensland, Australia
Drat that global warming!
Snow has fallen in southern Queensland. Granite Belt residents say snow flakes and sleet fell for between 10 and 15 minutes at about 10:30am along the border between Queensland and New South Wales. Mobile Mechanic Paul Verri has lived in the Stanthorpe area for 28 years and says he has never seen snow this late in the year. "More sleet and light rain," he said. "We've got a couple of cars parked outside and there's flakes on the cars, just an odd isolated scutter. "I guess I've never seen it before this time of the year." Senior forecaster with the Bureau of Meteorology, Craig Mitchell, says cold air from Victoria and New South Wales triggered the snow. He says such cold temperatures in November are rare. "I think it's pretty unusual, especially now that we're nearing summer time," he said. "To get that cold outburst with temperatures to the extreme that we're currently seeing at the moment would put it down to a pretty unusual sort of weather event." The Bureau of Meteorology says the last time snow or sleet was reported this late in the year was in early October 1941.
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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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