planted city

Panel: Confronting the Climate Disinformation Campaign

from Sustainability Now Radio:

Here is the video for the free presentation given on April 30, 2012 on Penn State’s University Park Campus. Penn State professors Michael Mann, Donald Brown, Janet Swim and Rick Schuhmann, and graduate student Peter Buckland spoke Monday evening at “Changing the Moral Climate on Climate Change,” a talk that focused on climate change denial. Mann is director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center and part of the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Susannah Barsom, with the university’s Center for Sustainability, moderated the event, which included a question and answer session.

Word Cloud: Visualizing the IPCC report on Climate Change & Extreme Weather 

You can check out the report and more here.

(Source: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change via RealClimate)

From The Guardian:

The inner workings of a libertarian thinktank working to discredit the established science on climate change have been exposed by a leak of confidential documents detailing its strategy and fundraising networks.

Desmogblog, which broke the story, said it had received the confidential documents from an “insider” at the Heartland Institute, which is based in Chicago. The blog monitors industry efforts to discredit climate science.

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The papers indicate that discrediting established climate science remains a core mission of the organisation, which has received support from a network of wealthy individuals – including the Koch oil billionaires as well as corporations such as Microsoft and RJR Tobacco.

The documents confirm what environmental groups such as Greenpeace have long suspected: that Heartland itself is a major source of funding to a network of experts and bloggers who have been prominent in the campaign to discredit established science.

Heartland is anxious to retain its hold over mainstream media outlets, fretting in the documents about how Forbes magazine is publishing prominent climate scientists such as Peter Gleick. “This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out,” Heartland documents warn.

Heartland operates on a range of issues besides the environment. But discrediting the science of climate change remains a key mission. The group spends $300,000 on salaries for a team of experts working to undermine the findings of the UN climate body, the IPCC.

Check out the rest of the article here. 

(Cartoon credit: Tom Toles via Go Comics)

From Yale e360:

A draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says there is a 2-in-3 probability that human-caused climate change is already leading to an increase in extreme weather events. The draft summary, obtained by the Associated Press, said that increasingly wild weather, such as the downpours that have caused recent extreme flooding in Thailand, will lead to a growing toll in lost lives and property damage, and will render some locations “increasingly marginal as places to live.” The report says that scientists are “virtually certain” that continued warming will cause not only an increase in extreme heat waves and drought in some regions, but also will generate more intense downpours that lead to severe flooding. 

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo credit: The Boston Globe)

From Eco-Business:

Farm chiefs have a narrowing chance to diversify vital crops at rising threat from drought, flood and pests brought by climate change, food researchers warned on Monday.

The world’s nearly 7 billion people are massively dependent on a dozen or so crops that, thanks to modern agriculture, are intensively cultivated in a tiny number of strains, they said.

When climate change gets into higher gear, many of these strains could be crippled by hotter and drier – or conversely wetter – weather and exposed to insects and microbial pests that advance into new habitats.

“Farmers have always adapted, but the pace of change under climate change is going to be much greater than in the past. There’s going to be a real need to move fast,” said Bruce Campbell, head of a research programme called Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).

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The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) estimates Earth’s surface will probably warm by between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius over the 21st century.

Campbell said many scientists suspect that climate change is already well on the march, as evidenced by shifts in rainfall patterns and growing seasons in many observed locations.

He cautioned against “waiting 10 years” before the world moves to diversify plant strains.

“There are two sorts of changes that are going to happen. One is a gradual temperature increase, the other is the extremes, extremes of heat and floods, and I think they are already here. In the meteorological records, there are so many extremes that are being beaten, although it’s very difficult to pin them to climate change.”

The adaptation strategies are being published in a compendium book, Crop Adaptation to Climate Change.

(Image credit: Treehugger)

Arctic sea ice hits new low; melting at its fastest pace in almost 40 years

From the Guardian:

Arctic sea ice has melted to a level not recorded since satellite observations started in 1972 – and almost certainly not experienced for at least 8,000 years, say polar scientists.

Daily satellite sea-ice maps released by Bremen university physicists show that with a week’s more melt expected this year, the floating ice in the Arctic covered an area of 4.24 million square kilometres on 8 September. The previous one-day minimum was 4.27m sq km on 17 September 2007.

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“Ice volume is now plunging faster than it did at the same time last year when the record was set,” said Axel Schweiger.

If current trends continue, a largely ice-free Arctic in the summer months is likely within 30 years –that is up to 40 years earlier than was anticipated in the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) assessment report.

The last time the Arctic was uncontestably free of summertime ice was 125,000 years ago, at the height of the last major interglacial period, known as the Eemian. 

“This stunning loss of Arctic sea ice is yet another wake-up call that climate change is here now and is having devastating effects around the world,” Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the Centre for Biological Diversity in San Francisco told journalists.

Arctic ice plays a critical role in regulating Earth’s climate by reflecting sunlight and keeping the polar region cool. Retreating summer sea ice is widely described by scientists as both a measure and a driver of global warming, with negative impacts on a local and planetary scale.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Image credit: University of Bremen via The Guardian)