Report: Carbon removal has little impact

NF Reporter · 11-13-2007, 04:38 PM

AP - Only about a third of the climate-damaging carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere in North America is offset by carbon removing activities, a government report said Tuesday.

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waltky · 04-29-2008, 06:53 AM

Surprising CO2 study...

Will Carbon Emissions Be Irrelevant To Future Climate Change?
Monday, April 28, 2008 - Are climate change and carbon emissions inextricably linked? New research published in Carbon Balance and Management suggests that this may not be the case, although it may be some time before we reach this saturation point.

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The land and the oceans contain significantly more carbon than the atmosphere, and exchange carbon dioxide with the atmosphere. The amount of CO2 emissions absorbed by the land or the oceans vary in response to changes in climate (including natural variations such as El Nino or volcanic eruptions). So current theories suggest that climate change will have a feedback effect on the rate that atmospheric CO2 increases; rising CO2 levels in turn add to global warming.

The link between the carbon cycle, and human effects caused by emissions, energy use and agriculture, may only be relevant for the next 'several centuries,’ suggest Igor Mokhov and Alexey Eliseev from the A.M. Obukhov Institute of Atmospheric Physics RAS, in Moscow, Russia. The authors used a climate model known as IAP RAS CM to study how feedback between our climate and the carbon cycle changes over time. In their simulations, the authors assumed that fossil fuel emissions would grow exponentially with a characteristic timescale from 50 to 250years.

In their models, Mokhov and Eliseev found that although climate–carbon cycle feedback grows initially, it then peaks and eventually decreases to a point where the feedback ceases. If we succeed in slowing down the rate of emissions, the peak would be reached much later. However, a steep increase in emissions would bring the peak in coupling between climate and carbon emissions even closer. The authors suggest that we are heading inexorably towards the saturation peak, irrespective of how quickly we get there: “Even weak but continuing emissions lead to eventual saturation of the climate–carbon cycle feedback,” Mokhov and Eliseev explain.

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waltky · 08-20-2008, 11:44 PM

A Toxic Spew?

Worries grow about 'fracking' for oil
Aug 20, 2008 | Officials worry about impact of 'fracking' of oil and gas.

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Cathy Behr says she won't forget the smell that nearly killed her. An emergency-room nurse in Durango, Colo.'s Mercy Regional Medical Center, Behr was working the April 17 day shift when Clinton Marshall arrived complaining of nausea and headaches. An employee at an energy-services company, Weatherford International, Marshall, according to Behr, said that he was caught in a "fracturing-fluid" spill. [Fracturing chemicals are routinely used on oil and gas wells where they are pumped deep into the ground to crack rock seams and increase production.] The chemical stench coming off Marshall's boots was buckling, says Behr. Mercy officials took no chances. They evacuated and locked down the ER, and its staff was instructed to don protective masks and gowns. But by the time those precautions were enacted, Behr had been nursing Marshall for 10 minutes--unprotected. "I honestly thought the response was a little overkill, but good practice," says Behr, 54, a 20-year veteran at Mercy.

A few days later, Behr's skin turned yellow. She began vomiting and retaining fluid. Her husband rushed her to Mercy where Behr was admitted to the ICU with a swollen liver, erratic blood counts and lungs filling with fluid. "I couldn't breath," she recalls. "I was drowning from the inside out." The diagnosis: chemical poisoning. The makers of the suspected chemical, Weatherford, tell NEWSWEEK that they aren't sure if their brand of fracking fluid can be blamed for her illness.

Throughout the Rocky Mountain states, Behr's run-in with fracturing fluid is getting a lot of attention and exacerbating already frayed nerves. After nearly eight years of some of the most intense oil and gas development ever recorded in the American West, concerns over the environmental and health impacts are bubbling over. On Tuesday, Colorado's top oil and gas regulatory authority—the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC)—endorsed a sweeping set of rules that environmentalists call long overdue; industry warns of dire economic impacts.

More Oil & Gas Exploration: Is â€˜Frackingâ€™ Safe? | Newsweek Project Green | Newsweek.com

waltky · 10-20-2008, 04:31 AM

Global warming speeding up...

Climate change is 'faster and more extreme' than feared
20 Oct 2008 - Climate change is happening much faster than the world's best scientists predicted and will wreak havoc unless action is taken on a global scale, a new report warns.

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'Extreme weather events' such as the hot summer of 2003, which caused an extra 35,000 deaths across southern Europe from heat stress and poor air quality, will happen more frequently. Britain and the North Sea area will be hit more often by violent cyclones and the predicted rise in sea level will double to more than a metre, putting vast coastal areas at risk from flooding.

The bleak report from WWF - formerly the World Wildlife Fund - also predicts crops failures and the collapse of eco systems on both land and sea. And it calls on the EU to set an example to the rest of the world by agreeing a package of challenging targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions to tackle the consequences of climate change and to keep any increase in global temperatures below 2C.

The agency says that the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - a study of global warming by 4,000 scientists from more than 150 countries which alerted the world to the possible consequences of global warming - is now out of date. WWF's report, Climate Change: Faster, stronger, sooner, has updated all the scientific data and concluded that global warming is accelerating far beyond the IPCC's forecasts.

As an example it says the first 'tipping point' may have already been reached in the Arctic, where sea ice is disappearing up to 30 years ahead of IPCC predictions and may be gone completely within five years - something that hasn't occurred for a million years. It could result in rapid and abrupt climate change rather than the gradual changes forecast by the IPCC.

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