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| User: "abc" |
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| Title: Re: Paranoid Meglomania Re: "We are sentenced to life the spell we cast" |
29 Sep 2006 01:26:10 PM |
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"http://www.infowars.com/" <truth@r.us> wrote in message
news:bu3qh25ej3scmu6tgsjunij2dikn99vamh@4ax.com...
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_security_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org
THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY
GONE CRAZY.
And they didn't do a damned thing when George Bush rammed a missle into
the
Pentagon.
Missles are heavy. I doubt he could lift one to ram it in anywhere.
Plus, he was in Florida - unless you're talking about George Sr.
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| User: "http://www.infowars.com/" |
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| Title: "We are sentenced to life the spell we cast" |
29 Sep 2006 07:45:54 AM |
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'One degree and we're done for'
27 September 2006
From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
Fred Pearce
Climate change hotspots"Further global warming of 1 °C defines a critical
threshold. Beyond that we will likely see changes that make Earth a
different planet than the one we know."
So says Jim Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies
in New York. Hansen and colleagues have analysed global temperature records
and found that surface temperatures have been increasing by an average of
0.2 °C every decade for the past 30 years. Warming is greatest in the high
latitudes of the northern hemisphere, particularly in the sub-Arctic boreal
forests of Siberia and North America. Here the melting of ice and snow is
exposing darker surfaces that absorb more sunlight and increase warming,
creating a positive feedback.
Earth is already as warm as at any time in the last 10,000 years, and is
within 1 °C of being its hottest for a million years, says Hansen's team.
Another decade of business-as-usual carbon emissions will probably make it
too late to prevent the ecosystems of the north from triggering runaway
climate change, the study concludes (Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, vol 103, p 14288).
The analysis reinforces a series of recent findings on accelerating
environmental disruption in Siberia, northern Canada and Alaska, underlining
a growing scientific consensus that these regions are pivotal to climate
change. Earlier this month, NASA scientists reported that climate change was
speeding up the melting of Arctic sea ice. Permanent sea ice has contracted
by 14 per cent in the past two years (Geophysical Research Letters, vol 33,
L17501). However, warming and melting have been just as dramatic on land in
the far north.
A meeting on Siberian climate change held in Leicester, UK, last week
confirmed that Siberia has become a hotspot of global climate change.
Geographer Heiko Balzter, of the University of Leicester, said central
Siberia has warmed by almost 2 °C since 1970 - that's three times the global
average.
Meanwhile, Stuart Chapin of the University of Alaska Fairbanks this week
reported that air temperatures in the Alaskan interior have risen by 2 °C
since 1950, and permafrost temperatures have risen by 2.5 °C (Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0606955103).
In Siberia the warming is especially pronounced in winter. "It has caused
the onset of spring to advance by as much as one day a year since satellite
observations began in 1982," says Balzter. Similarly, Alaskan springs now
arrive two weeks earlier than in 1950, according to Chapin.
The Leicester meeting heard that the rising temperatures are causing
ecological changes in the forests that ratchet up the warming still further.
Vladimir Petko from the Russian Academy of Sciences Forest Research
Institute in Krasnoyarsk says warm springs are triggering plagues of moths.
"They can eat the needles of entire forest regions in one summer," he says.
The trees die and then usually succumb to forest fires that in turn destroy
soil vegetation and accelerate the melting of permafrost, Petko says.
In 2003 Siberia saw a record number of forest fires, losing 40,000 square
kilometres according to Balzter, who has analysed remote sensing images of
the region. Similar changes are occurring in Alaska. According to Chapin,
warming there has shortened the life cycle of the bark beetle from two years
to one, causing huge infestations and subsequent fires, which destroyed huge
areas of forest in 2004. "The current boreal forest zone could be so dried
out by 2090 that the trees will die off and be replaced by steppe," says
Nadezhda Tchebakova, also at the institute in Krasnoyarsk.
Melting permafrost in the boreal forests and further north in the Arctic
tundra is also triggering the release of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas,
from thick layers of thawing peat. First reports published exclusively in
New Scientist last year (13 August 2005, p 12) were recently confirmed by US
scientists (Nature, vol 443, p 71).
"Large amounts of greenhouse gases are currently locked in the permafrost
and if released could accelerate the greenhouse effect," says Balzter.
Hansen's paper concludes that the effects of this positive feedback could be
huge. "In past eras, the release of methane from melting permafrost and
destabilised sediments on continental shelves has probably been responsible
for some of the largest warmings in the Earth's history," he says.
“The release of methane from melting permafrost has been responsible for
some of the largest warmings in history”We could be close to unleashing
similar events in the 21st century, Hansen argues. Although the feedbacks
should remain modest as long as global temperatures remain within the range
of recent interglacial periods of the past million years, outside that range
- beyond a further warming of about 1 °C - the feedbacks could accelerate.
Such changes may become inevitable if the world does not begin to curb
greenhouse gas emissions within the next decade, Hansen says.
Meanwhile, another new study underlines that the boreal peat bogs,
permafrost and pine forests are not just vital to the planet as a whole,
they are major economic assets for the countries that host them. A detailed
study of the northern boreal forests by environmental consultant Mark
Anielski of Edmonton, Canada, puts the value of their "ecosystem services"
at $250 billion a year, or $160 per hectare.
“The value of the services this ecosystem performs is more than twice that
of the resources taken from the region each year”These benefits include
flood control, water purification and pest control provided by forest birds,
plus income from wilderness tourism and meat from wildlife such as caribou.
Anielski presented his findings to Canada's National Forest Congress in
Gatineau-Ottawa earlier this week.
The value of these ecosystem services is more than twice that of
conventional resources taken from the region each year, such as timber,
minerals, oil and hydroelectricity, Anielski says. "If they were counted in
Canadian inventories of assets, they would amount to roughly 9 per cent of
our gross domestic product - similar in value to our health and social
services."
You can add to that figure the value of having such a huge volume of carbon
locked away. "The boreal region is like a giant carbon bank account," he
says. "At current prices in the European carbon emissions trading system,
Canada's stored carbon alone would be worth $3.7 trillion."
And if Hansen is right that the carbon and methane stored in the boreal
regions has the potential to transform the world into "another planet", then
the boreal region may be worth a great deal more than that.
From issue 2571 of New Scientist magazine, 27 September 2006, page 8-9
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19125713.300-one-degree-and-were-done-for.html
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