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What A Week It Was: Apocadocuments from
View By Scenario:
Species Collapse:(3)
Plague/Virus:(2)
Climate Chaos:(14)
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Biology Breach:(4)
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This Week's Top Ten Very Scary Tags:
anthropogenic change  ~ contamination  ~ carbon emissions  ~ climate impacts  ~ global warming  ~ ecosystem interrelationships  ~ deniers  ~ efficiency increase  ~ hunting to extinction  ~ algal bloom  ~ falling fertility  



ApocaDocuments (10) matching "anthropogenic change" from this week
[see full week] ~ [see all stories tagged "anthropogenic change"]
Sun, Nov 21, 2010
from Guardian:
Global emissions of carbon dioxide drop 1.3 percent, say international scientists
Global emissions of carbon dioxide dropped by 1.3 percent in 2009 compared with the previous year, largely due to the effects of the economic crisis and an overall fall in GDP, according to an international team of scientists. The drop is smaller than the 2.8 percent fall predicted by many experts for 2009, however, because the reductions in carbon emissions per unit of GDP - a measure of efficiency called the carbon intensity - was smaller than expected in many emerging economies.... Despite the 1.3 percent overall drop, the 2009 global fossil fuel emissions - 30.8bn tons of CO2 - were the second highest in human history, just below the all-time high of 2008. The small overall decrease in global emissions masks some big regional shifts, according to the report published today in Nature Geoscience. Because the global financial crisis has mainly affected developed nations, this is where emissions dropped by the largest amounts: in the US by 6.9 percent, the UK by 8.6 percent, Germany by 7 percent, Japan by 11.8 percent, Russia by 8.4 percent and Australia by 0.4 percent. In the emerging markets, however, there were big increases: China rose by 8 percent, India by 6.2 percent and South Korea by 1.4 percent. ...


Big sale! 1.3 percent off $30 billion dollars!

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Sat, Nov 20, 2010
from TheEnergyCollective:
Oil industry insider exposé: what it took to wake some of them up on climate.
I've just read Challenged by Carbon: The Oil Industry and Climate Change, which was written by Dr. Bryan Lovell, a former senior executive at British Petroleum.... Lovell writes about how it came to be that the senior European oil executives backed Kyoto while Exxon-Mobil continued on with its denial campaign. In the process, he also shows us what he and his European counterparts believe about how dangerous climate change is. I was astonished.... The oil execs understand and believe that the amount of carbon that is being moved into the atmosphere as civilization accelerates its use of fossil fuels is going in at such a rate that the only comparable event in Earth's history is the PETM (Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum). They believe a recurrence of this event is not only possible but likely. They can't face being held responsible by history. The European senior oil execs, unlike their American counterparts, and perhaps only briefly, lost their nerve about the denial policy, backed Kyoto, and confronted the Americans. The science described by Lovell is why BP started its "Beyond Petroleum" campaign. The science hasn't changed. Obviously, BP has. ...


Hey, you think there'll even be any historians left? Ha! I'm safe.

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Thu, Nov 18, 2010
from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign via ScienceDaily:
As Arctic Temperatures Rise, Tundra Fires Increase
In September, 2007, the Anaktuvuk River Fire burned more than 1,000 square kilometers of tundra on Alaska's North Slope, doubling the area burned in that region since record keeping began in 1950. A new analysis of sediment cores from the burned area revealed that this was the most destructive tundra fire at that site for at least 5,000 years. Models built on 60 years of climate and fire data found that even moderate increases in warm-season temperatures in the region dramatically increase the likelihood of such fires. ...


You know you're in trouble when your tundra is on fire!

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Thu, Nov 18, 2010
from CNN:
Climate project calls for citizen scientists
An international team of climate scientists is calling on the public to help with a new initiative aimed at predicting how the climate will change during the 21st century. Using the collective power of ordinary home computers, scientists from the United Kingdom, United States and South Africa will run thousands of regional climate modeling tests which would otherwise take much longer to complete, even on the most up-to-date supercomputers... With the help of the public's PCs scientists will now start running regional climate models for the western United States, Europe and southern Africa. People interested in signing up to the project can visit http://climateprediction.net/weatherathome/ where they can download all the necessary tools to start running regional climate models from their own computers. ...


C'mon kids let's put on a show!

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Wed, Nov 17, 2010
from Climatewire:
The 'Fate of the World' Will Soon Be in Your Hands (Virtually Speaking)
...A British game designer is launching "Fate of the World," a climate change video game giving the gamer total control of the world's energy economy -- and a bird's-eye view of what happens if he or she flips the wrong switches. In a way, a computer game is the perfect medium for the topic. Part of the reason U.S. action is so lukewarm, environmentalists have complained, is that climate's too big to grasp. Carbon dioxide is invisible, and its consequences are too far away. The likely consequences -- future floods, drought, famine -- lack a personal touch. ...


Only problem is with most video games, it's most fun when you destroy things.

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Wed, Nov 17, 2010
from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration via ScienceDaily:
Earth's Lower Atmosphere Is Warming, Review of Four Decades of Scientific Literature Concludes
The troposphere, the lower part of the atmosphere closest to the Earth, is warming and this warming is broadly consistent with both theoretical expectations and climate models, according to a new scientific study that reviews the history of understanding of temperature changes and their causes in this key atmospheric layer.... The paper documents how, since the development of the very first climate models in the early 1960s, the troposphere has been projected to warm along with the Earth's surface because of the increasing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere....This new paper extensively reviews the relevant scientific analyses -- 195 cited papers, model results and atmospheric data sets -- and finds that there is no longer evidence for a fundamental discrepancy and that the troposphere is warming. ...


We now return you to your regularly-scheduled Apocalypse.

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Tue, Nov 16, 2010
from UC Berkeley News:
Dire messages about global warming can backfire, new study shows
Dire or emotionally charged warnings about the consequences of global warming can backfire if presented too negatively, making people less amenable to reducing their carbon footprint, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley. "Our study indicates that the potentially devastating consequences of global warming threaten people's fundamental tendency to see the world as safe, stable and fair. As a result, people may respond by discounting evidence for global warming," said Robb Willer, UC Berkeley social psychologist and coauthor of a study to be published in the January issue of the journal Psychological Science. "The scarier the message, the more people who are committed to viewing the world as fundamentally stable and fair are motivated to deny it," agreed Matthew Feinberg, a doctoral student in psychology and coauthor of the study. But if scientists and advocates can communicate their findings in less apocalyptic ways, and present solutions to global warming, Willer said, most people can get past their skepticism. ...


Dog-gone it! The world needs a humor site for global warming!

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Tue, Nov 16, 2010
from Climatewire:
Can Social Scientists Help Ease the Nation's Rift Over Climate Change?
Stop being so skeptical of climate skeptics, says one researcher who believes there's been a failure to understand the mounting cultural doubt around atmospheric warming. The national discussion on climate change is brimming with economic models, scientific findings and wonky plans to fix it. But something is missing: academic explanations of why people flout reams of scientific conclusions, bristle at the notion of cutting carbon and regard climate change as a sneaky liberal plot.... She came away with themes that will sketch an outline of the skeptical movement for future research: Adherents tend to be middle-aged, white males who resent government, are suspicious of scientists and their peer-reviewed protocols, and believe global warming is made up to hit them in the wallet. ...


They'll eventually die off... won't they?

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Tue, Nov 16, 2010
from The Daily Climate:
Feds understate the cost of climate disruption, critics contend
The Obama Administration has ignored wrenching climate impacts such as ocean acidification in its effort to estimate the cost of carbon emissions, making emissions limits disproportionately expensive, economists say... In February an inter-agency workgroup released the administration's best guess of what each ton of carbon dioxide dumped in the atmosphere costs society: $21, plus or minus, or roughly $121 billion worth of damages annually as a result of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions [pdf]... The lower the estimated cost of disruption - known as the "social cost of carbon" - the less action the Obama Administration can justify. And several economists and scientists fear that the Administration has low-balled the figure, handicapping its ability to curb emissions. ...


Somehow it seems like it's the president's job, whoever is in the position, to screw this up.

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Mon, Nov 15, 2010
from Reuters:
Climate science "under-reported" at 2009 U.N. summit
Less than 10 percent of the articles written about last year's Copenhagen climate summit dealt primarily with the science of climate change, a study showed on Monday. Based on analysis of 400 articles written about the December 2009 summit, the authors of the report for Oxford University's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) called for a re-think of reporting on future such conferences. Author James Painter concluded that "science was under-reported" as the essential backdrop to the drama when about 120 world leaders met in Copenhagen but failed to agree a binding treaty to slow climate change. Much coverage from Copenhagen instead focused on hacked e-mails from a British university that some skeptics took as evidence of efforts by scientists to ignore dissenting views. The scientists involved have since been cleared of wrongdoing. ...


If it ain't sexy or dramatic, it ain't worth reading!

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