Cimate Crisis

Lessons of the Loess Plateau

What has been done in the Loess Plateau in China illustrates how we can restore damaged ecology system.

Time is running, fast...

If humanity is to keep the global rise of temperature to within 2 deg C, the atmospheric CO2 content needs to be kept at below 350 ppm. At this moment, it is at 390 ppm and still rising fast. Unless any new power plant using fossil fuel is stopped, the chances of humanity surviving this crisis is dangerously unacceptable.

Of course, we can only capture the current CO2 from the atmosphere using projects such as Greening the desert or Seawater farming (Eritrea). Unfortunately, due to political instability, Eritrea project has ended.

Is humanity really that dumb?

Honest reporting

If we continue to see more honest reporting of the effect of climate change, humanity may survive the coming catastrophe by starting to reduce green house gases right now.

Skeptic Scientist Richard Muller Reversed Position

The ultimate judge on a scientific issue is the unbiased observational data and respecting objective data is a good thing. One of the leading global warming skeptic has reversed his position after his own data confirming what everyone else has been reporting. [source]

Human has been walking on the Earth surface for about 100,000 to 200,000 years. Here is a long term temperature graph [source]

During the whole course of our evolution history, we are lucky to be living in a relatively stable temperature range. Conversely, the world we know has not been through a dramatic climate change. The plants that we domesticated, the infra-structure that we have built are based on a relatively stable temperature range. We have dumped huge amount of green house gases into the atmosphere in a short period (last 150 years is short in the geological time scale). Modern species would not be able to cope with such sudden temperature change. Man-made infra-structure would not be able to cope as well. Imagine a sea level rise of a few meters (as predicted by climate models), how can the largest cities with the most population cope? How can container shipping ports be moved together with other infra-structure such as the connecting roads cope with the rising water level? How fast can these ports be moved inland? How fast can we move population inland? What are the implications of moving massive number of people inland - food production, water supply,...

The most urgent question is how much time human still have before we pass the tipping point?

Climatologist James Hansen on InnerVIEWS with Ernie Manouse

The undue influence of special interest is blocking human's chance in solving the problem and the lack of political leadership.

Climate Change

This is one of the better explanation of the issues human are facing.

Climate change in USA politics

Here is some sanity (I would have preferred he did not refer Nature as "God's Earth")

Why don't we do this on a global scale?

The following videos show how, by restoring local vegetation and the ecosystem, the livelihood of the people is vastly improved. China can do it. Uganda can do it. Everyone can do it. Why don't we do this on a global scale?

Green house gas and the race to renewable energy

It strikes me as extremely short-sighted when climate deniers cannot see the great economic potential in adopting a renewable energy stance. Carbon cap and trade is an economic tool to jump start renewable energy sector. With it or without it, human civilisation needs to move to renewable energy. The question is not IF, just a simple WHEN. The earlier a country starts, the more the country will gain in the upcoming economic race.

The worry is human has passed the point of no return - when the climate will change so much that we cannot limit the average rise of temperature to within 2^oC. The science is telling us that we need to decrease the atmospheric CO₂. It is NOT limiting GHG, what is needed is to reduce GHG.

I am very disappointed at the result of at Copenhagen this week.

What is being destroyed by climate change?

Yes, the current known civilisation and way of lifes, million of species which would not be able to adapt quick enough (including us), many land will be immersed,....

BUT nature will go on with or without us. Climate change is not going to destroy the earth. Planet earth is not going to explode. Human is destroying ourselves unless we act and act quickly.

Who is responsible for fixing the climate problem?

Please spend 5 minutes to watch the video linked at the title of this post. Naomi Klein exposed the bullying tactics from USA. Denying global warming will be guilty of killing the current known human civilisation - that will only take a few more years to become so clear that we will have passed the point of no return. The global warming is caused by human economic activities - that should be no doubt. Just understand how the developed countries have burnt off all the stored fossil fuels. It does not take any deep reasoning to see how such a large amount of carbon dioxide would have contributed to the accumulation of green house gases. Of course, the clearing of forest is another main source of green house gases.

If the developed nations are not willing to take responsibility, the result will be a total collapse. That's MAD - mutually assured destruction. If anything needs to be done, it would need money. If that burden is shifted to the developing or undeveloped countries, there will be no funding. By definition, developing and undeveloped countries are poor countries!

Playing brinkmanship makes no sense here as well. Who is going to lose more, the developed or the undeveloped?

Yes, when the first wave of sea level rise comes, the low lying regions - many of the undeveloped countries, will be hit first. BUT, major cities like New York, London, Sydney will ALL be totally immersed too.

Please, PLEASE ask our "leaders' to lead - agree to binding cuts of green house gases before it is too late for everyone!

What makes me sleepless?

Human civilisation is facing unprecedented challenge: over population, peak everything and climate change.

Over population, especially when the main growth will be coming from undeveloped and developing countries, is certainly a human tragedy. At the current population level, the hunger is caused mainly due to inequity. Just as an example, 5% of the world's population consumes 23% of world's energy. If that inequity is spread more equitably, many people would not have fallen under the poverty line. While a solution is not forthcoming any time soon, a reasonably effective solution is just a matter of political will.

Peak everything is a physical limitation which we should be aware of long time ago. Unfortunately, somehow, it has been under the radar for too long. The main economic driver was energy. In 2006, 36% of world's energy came from oil. As oil runs out, many traditional ways of life have to change. However, renewable sources will replace the portion currently supplied by oil. It is not a matter of "if", it is just a matter of "when". During the process, huge business opportunities are available. Imagine replacing all American's cars with electric cars. Imagine installing solar panels on every roof top in the world. Switching to renewable energy sources will NOT cost money. Switching to renewable energy actually helps to build a country's economy. Is there sufficient solar energy to meet the need? Yes, many many times over. It is estimated that the sun provides 8000 times the energy per year consumed in 2004. Even at a one percent conversion efficiency, the sun provides us with 80 times the energy we need (yearly averaged). [source]

Yes, oil is used to produce fertilizers. If we stop burning oil, it can be used to produce fertilizers. Better still, perma-culture has proven itself to be a more productive and sustainable technique - and in permaculture, the nature fertilises itself!

So, both over population and peak everything do not really make me sleepless. What has kept me awake at night is climate. The IPCC climate model has been too optimistic about the effect of the green house gases. In this fora.tv video, Dan Miller (chapter 2 in the video) shows the summer ice cover in the North pole. The IPCC model is way too optimistic. The satellite image indicates that the North pole will not be covered by ice in the summer as early as 2017. Do human still have sufficient time to prevent the run-away effect of global warming? Do we still have to argue whether human was responsible? What we need today is action. If we do not start removing CO₂ from the atmosphere, our grand children will not survive!

Climate skeptics take note...

This TED video shows you the amount of effort behind each paragraph in the IPCC report.

The Great Global Warming Swindle

A re-watch of The Great Global Warming Swindle prompted me to look at the evidence again. [I am not a practising Scientist. I am just trying to apply a rational mind on this important issue.] The skeptics pointed at the correlation between atmospheric CO₂ with the earth temperature and said that the earth temperature led the atmospheric CO₂ by about 800 years. They claimed that solar activities have much bigger impact on earth's temperature than atmospheric CO₂.

BBC weather presenter, Paul Hudson has written article on the issue: research published by the Royal Society two years ago seemed to rule out solar influences. Its approach was to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare them with changing global temperatures. The results were clear. "Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Beside climate change, there is the issue of exhausting the available fossil fuel. Fossil fuel is a limited resource. While according to wikipedia using 2005 estimates, there is 4x10²⁴J of remaining fossil fuels which at the rate of 2005 consumption may last up to 800 years. I believe cheap, easily extracted fossil fuel will be exhausted within no more than another 100 years because there has been no significant discovery of large reserve since the sixties.

The energy falling on Earth's surface from the Sun is about 120PW which is 8000 times the usage at 2004.

The Great Global Warming Swindle did point out an important equity issue - we should not be barring the developing countries from using cheap fossil fuel to drive their development.

On one hand, I believe human is causing the current climate crisis. On the other, we should respect the wish of people in the undeveloped or developing countries to pursuit a better life.

It only took about 150 years for the developed countries to switch from the traditional renewable biomass fuel to fossil fuel. With the rapid technology development, it is possible to switch to renewable energy in much shorter period. The technological capability of the developed countries was developed based on exhausting fossil fuel. On the basis of equity, the technology of renewable energy should be shared with the developing and undeveloped countries to provide energy source for these countries. China and India have a proposal on the table:
"Developed countries should pay at least 0.5 percent of their economic output to help less wealthy nations build wind turbines, solar plants and use other clean technologies," and "industrialized nations reduce their greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2020, such cuts would make room for the developing countries to 'modernize their economies'".

Worrying times

It is a no brainer. Fossil fuels are stored carbon that lived up to 300 million years ago. Burning almost half^* of these fuel in the last 50 years (releasing 21.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere each year) released all these stored carbon in a very short period (50 years is nothing compared with 300 million years) obviously will have a tremendous effect on the environment. You don't need a PhD in Climatology to figure out how bad it would be.

Unfortunately, very unfortunate indeed, one of the independent senator, Steve Fielding, was still "unconvinced* after a 2-hour meeting with our Australia's Chief Scientist that human activity is the main cause of climate change. [source]

I echo strongly with Orion77 the concern of such attitude from our politician. Here is a little background of Senator Steve Fielding (from his own website): He has 15 siblings, an engineering degree from RMIT and has worked mostly in management. Here is the interview from Lateline:
Part 1:

Part 2:


It sounds GOOD for him to say that he was trying to listen to both sides of the argument - including the skeptics. However, as a politician, he should not be so naive to ignore efforts of vested interests to discharge a large volume of mis-information and pseudo-science.

^*Everyone has a different opinion on how much of the stored fossil fuel has been burnt. The last major oil field discovered is in 2006 which would supply 2 year worth of consumption for USA alone. I may be over optimistic already!

cross-posted to Atheist Bible Reading and Forum

7 years window for stablising the climate

[Image from TreeHugger]

Here’s Rajendra K. Pachauri’s [Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ] panic-inducing assertion: We have a window of seven years to stabilize CO₂ at today’s levels if we are to limit our global mean temperature increase to around 2.4⁰C. A world this hot would be a very unpleasant place to be. Pachauri lays out unequivocal” evidence of climate change, and describes how extreme precipitation events, heat waves and other natural catastrophes will become more frequent, endangering vast swaths of humanity. We stand to lose 20-30% of species if warming exceeds 1.5 to 2.5 ⁰C. Pachauri also notes this “scary prospect”: the rapid loss of ice sheets on polar land, leading to sea level rises of several meters, and the flight of large populations in response.

Atmospheric Carbon Removal Wanted

It is now commonly agreed that man-made green house effect is causing major climatic disruption to the world. Unfortunately the politicians and big polluters still remain in the stage of denial. As a result, international agreement is still focusing on limiting the green house gas emission to 'the XXXX year level'. According to climate scientists Ken Caldeira and Damon Matthews, it is not going to be enough.

“Most scientific and policy discussions about avoiding climate change have centered on what emissions would be needed to stabilize greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” says Caldeira. “But stabilizing greenhouse gases does not equate to a stable climate. We studied what emissions would be needed to stabilize climate in the foreseeable future.”


The scientists investigated how much climate changes as a result of each individual emission of carbon dioxide, and found that each increment of emission leads to another increment of warming. So, if we want to avoid additional warming, we need to avoid additional emissions.

With emissions set to zero in the simulations, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere slowly fell as carbon “sinks” such as the oceans and land vegetation absorbed the gas. Surprisingly, however, the model predicted that global temperatures would remain high for at least 500 years after carbon dioxide emissions ceased. [my emphasis]

It is now time to start thinking of taking some of the carbon back from atmosphere, help nature to repair our damages!

Al Gore's new thinking on climate crisis