LINK

•   good news: There’s momentum, finally. Thanks to Al Gore and others, global warming has gone mainstream. An issue that floated around the peripheries of policy-making for far too long is now triggering unheard of levels of media attention and a rash of legislative proposals. The presidential candidates–at least the Democrats–are now one-upping each other to outline the most ambitious climate policy. Emissions cuts of 80 percent by 2050? Bah, says Bill Richardson. I’ll see your 80 percent and raise you to 90.
• According to an analysis by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, even the relatively modest bipartisan climate bill introduced in the Senate by Joe Lieberman and John Warner would decrease the gross domestic product by half a percent in 2015 and by almost a full percentage point in 2030

• As one climate policy insider says, “The environmental community has a tendency to run their leaders off a plank; that’s what they’re setting up right now with this 80 percent reduction by 2050.”

   

•   The more moderate approach of the Lieberman-Warner bill is to reduce capped emissions (and not all emissions are included) by 70 percent by 2050.

LINK

•   ”The alarm clock that all the plants and animals are listening to is running too fast,” Stanford University biologist Terry Root said. 
• What’s happening is so noticeable that scientists can track it from space. Satellites measuring when land turns green found that spring “green-up” is arriving eight hours earlier every year on average since 1982 north of the Mason-Dixon line.
• In much of Florida and southern Texas and Louisiana, the satellites show spring coming a tad later, and bizarrely, in a complicated way, global warming can explain that too, the scientists said. 
•  There are winners, losers and lots of unknowns when global warming messes with natural timing. People may appreciate the smaller heating bills from shorter winters, the longer growing season and maybe even better tasting wines from some early grape harvests. But biologists also foresee big problems.

•  Such changes have “implications for the animals that are dependent on this plant,” Weltzin said, as hestood beneath a blooming red maple in late February. By the time the animals arrive, “the flowers may already be done for the year.” The animals may have to find a new food source.

   

       “It’s all a part of life,” Weltzin said. “Timing is everything.” 

Jenny Rosen

Corrine Bell

Spoorthi Tata

ME! ( Jacquelyn Terry)

Climate Change:

• Human activities are producing increasingly large quantities of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide
• The magnitude of such damage remains highly uncertain. But there is growing recognition that some degree of risk exists for the damage to be large and perhaps even catastrophic.
•     Employing incentive-based policies to reduce CO₂ emissions would be much more cost-effective than using more-restrictive command-and-control approaches (such as imposing technology standards on electricity generators).
• Rising concentrations of greenhouse gases are gradually warming the global climate, contributing to an increase of about 1.4°F in the average global temperature since the middle of the 19th century.
• At present, however, global emissions are rising rapidly, and depending on the growth of emissions and the climate’s response, the global climate could warm by another 2°F to 12°F or even more over the next century.

 A flexible approach to dealing with climate change could include three different policy strategies:

     • Researching the problem and developing technologies to address it,

     • Adapting to a warmer climate, and

     • Reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

1.) Prevention

2.) Is it Real?

3.) What is it?

4.) Affects on our generation

5.) Effects of Global warming

Climate Change: Just Deal With It.

Roger A. Pielke Jr., an environmental policy expert at the University of Colorado Belives that we can adapt to global warming and it won’t be a big deal. Hans von Storch, director of the Institute of Coastal Research in Germany, belives that our world problems are already big enough we don’t need a bigger burden so we shouldn’t worry about it and just adapt.

Stephen H. Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University belives that we can’t adapt to the melting sheet of ice in Greenland and you can’t adapt to extinct species, he also believes that if we could adapt we would of already adapted and there wouldn’t be so many starving people or homless people. He thinks that Global warming is something that can’t be adapted to.

LINK!

• Roger A. Pielke Jr., an environmental policy expert at the University of Colorado at Boulder research has led him to believe that it is cheaper and more effective to adapt to global warming than to fight it.
• Hans von Storch, director of the Institute of Coastal Research in Germany, said that the world’s problems were already so big that the added burdens caused by rising temperatures would be relatively small.
•  ”You can’t adapt to melting the Greenland ice sheet,” said Stephen H. Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University. “You can’t adapt to species that have gone extinct.”

     Other scientists say that time is running out to control carbon dioxide emissions and that the call to adapt is providing a potentially dangerous excuse to delay. If adaptation were so simple, they say, it would have already been done. But the developing world remains wrought with hunger and disease and vulnerable to natural disasters.

ANOTHER LINK

the feared increase in ground level UVB radiation has also failed to materialize. Keep in mind that ozone depletion, in and of itself, doesn’t really harm human health or the environment. It’s the concern that an eroded ozone layer will allow more of the sun’s damaging UVB rays to reach the earth that led to the Montreal Protocol.