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WASHINGTON — Climate change is already having detrimental effects in the United States, and those effects are probably going to get worse, a new federal study suggests.
The U.S. Global Change Research Program released the report, titled “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States,” June 16 during a White House-hosted press conference.
John P. Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said the report includes the most up-to-date scientific findings on the impacts of climate change. “It is clear that climate change is happening now,” he said.
The nation’s average annual temperature has risen about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit (0.83 degrees Celsius) over the past 50 years, said Thomas Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., and lead author of the report. During that time, extreme episodes of rainfall also increased; the amount of water falling in the heaviest 1 percent of downpours in 2007 was almost 20 percent more than it was in 1958.
Climate models hint that this trend will continue, with the heaviest downpours late this century containing about 40 percent more precipitation than they do now. Those heavier downpours will lead to more flooding and waterborne diseases and will increasingly disrupt transportation, the report notes.
Transportation could especially suffer in low-lying coastal areas vulnerable to increasing sea level, the report suggests. Along the Gulf Coast alone, more than 3,860 kilometers (2,400 miles) of major roadways will be permanently inundated if sea level rises about 1.2 meters (4 feet), as some studies estimate, Holdren said.
No part of the country will be spared, authors of the report say. In the Northwest, shrinking snowpacks will reduce summertime stream flow, straining water resources. In Alaska, summers will be hotter and drier, and as a result the number of wildfires and insect infestations will increase. In the Southeast, hurricanes and sea level rise will conspire to boost damages from storm surges. A large number of ecosystems, from trout-filled streams of the Northwest to coral reefs off the Florida coasts, will suffer, as will the tourism and recreation that they support, the report suggests.
“This report stresses that climate change has immediate and local impacts,” said Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “It literally affects people in their backyards.”
Found in: Climate Change and Environment
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The main cause of global warming appears to be change in solar activity and change in the earth’s orbit and tilt. Recent reductions in sunspots on the solar surface suggest that we may be entering into a cooling period.
Humans are responsible for only 2% to 5% of total carbon dioxide emissions and less than two-tenths of one percent (0.2%) of total greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere each year.
Higher temperatures increase non-human emissions of carbon dioxide from plant-life and the sea.
More than 17,000 scientists signed the Oregon Petition against the Kyoto Protocol because they saw "no compelling evidence that humans are causing discernible climate change."
The Kyoto Protocol would cost the U.S. economy $100 to $200 billion per year, as estimated by the Clinton Department of Energy.
Kyoto would restrain temperature increases by less than one degree and delay global warming by only six years.
Kyoto was rejected by the U.S. Senate 95-0.
It is very likely that the so-called scientists on the IPCC assumed beforehand that global warming was due to CO2 and then, instead of treating it as a hypothesis, they estimated a simple, incomplete, relationship between temperature change and CO2. A bad model can always be used to provide a desired result.
Would someone _please_ explain the Pacific Decadal Oscillation to Holdren and Lubchenco.
BTW, if you think it's the stupid Sun, there's also an update to the Livingston and Penn observations that continue to point to sunspots becoming invisible by 2015.
Fascinating stuff going on this cold and damp June (at least that's what it is in New Hampshire).
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/06/usgcrp-report-global-climate-change.html
Brian Moench, MD
As usual, the author looks at a temperature rise starting when US temperatures were coldest during the 1900's. If he had started in 1934, he could have shown a cooling trend. Everything else is pure conjecture. Australia is worried that global warming is causing a drought, yet it will cause flooding in the US?
Brian Moench - Do a Google search on Lawrence Solomon at the National Post, or read his book on the Deniers. If a politician can't solve problems, why is he in office? This is why so many governments accept global warming, it gives them an opportunity to get re-elected.
For an excellent discussion on past and future temperatures, see http://climatepolice.com/Past_Future_climate.pdf.
FIRST CAUSE
"If we regard the fulfilment of our purpose as contingent upon any circumstances, past, present or future, we are not making use of first cause, we have descended to the level of secondary causation, which is the region of doubts, fears and limitations, all of which we are impressing upon the universal subjective mind, with the inevitable result that it will build up corresponding external conditions."
Thomas Troward,
Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science 1904
I am quoting Troward because the current political climate of junk science zeitgeist is madness, or at least crazy making. History tells us that prosperity has always advanced as inflation permitted. A steady increase in the money supply leads to higher prices and wages to measure them, and more people able to participate. Adjusted for inflation, copper, iron, oil, and gas, e.g., are not much more expensive than they were in the early 20th century, and we have more supply available and more people have electricity and transportation. There are no shortages of resources; only the cautionary principle keeps resources from being elevated to economic reserves. The bleak Dickensian world has gotten a great deal smaller as the 'American Dream' expanded to Asia. The environmental impact also, adjusted for inflation, is less and society has generally progressed, as is reflected in human lifespan in the west.
A common web of fear links misguided environmentalism, peak oil and AGW. Environmental lobby groups (ELGs) since their inception has had a stronger inflationary effect than historical supply and demand pull and push. Witness the oil sands, for example, uneconomic in the early going but reaching ore grade by gradual steps and external (secondary) jumps, ratcheting upward to economic viability. In recent years, a number of ELGs have come to question the cost in CO2 and open pit mining. I will come back to that later.
Gradual inflation has allowed the development of oil sands and similar projects, and will lead to logical scientific and technical development of kerogen shale as it has already permitted the developments in unconventional shale oil and gas. Furthermore, there are vast areas untouched on continental shelves and in arctic Canada. How much hydrocarbon lies under the shelf off Bangladesh? I do not know, but I am willing to bet there is some. The Alaskan NWR could be drilled today from a platform of 2,000 acres.
Our situation in 2009, however, is that secondary causation (fear of the future) has disrupted the steady growth of prosperity. For instance, after 30 years of mining the oil sands footprint covers 0.072% (72 /100,000) of the total land area of Alberta and could ultimately reach 3,000 km2 (0.45%) without equilibrium reclamation (No reclamation has ever been approved by Alberta, so you see where that puts the companies; Syncrude has reclaimed over 23% but is vulnerable to not having that approved by bureaucrats in the thrall of ELGs). With reclamation, the proportion will shrink from 0.072% to zero. The annual CO2 contribution, moreover, is 4% of Canada's 2% of the global 2% or 16 ppm, a di minimis figure considering the CO2 seawater equilibrium; all but a few ppm will dissolve in the cooling oceans. That estimate is vanishingly small in the context that CO2 may not even be a greenhouse gas, and that water vapour moderates climate modulated by cosmic radiation. As I look out my Toronto window at the current downpour of rain, I realise I am in the Great Lakes cloud chamber and have been watching scenes like this for the past three years of the sunspot cycle. The sun, not CO2 , drives the climate and the weather.
Government in the thrall of ELGs is attempting the modify behaviour, based upon a deeply flawed secondary causation argument that resources and ingenuity are finite, and that CO2 is pollution. All this arises from fear; history shows that, in fact, prosperity is the best birth control. Without fear or doubt, peak hydrocarbon is 1,000 years away. There is even time to go nuclear.
Thanks
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