Bharat Rakshak

Atish wrote:My biggest complaint against NaMo and his govt has been his wholesale swallow of Al Gore's hypotheses.

wiki wrote:A global warming hiatus,[3] also sometimes referred to as a global warming pause[4] or a global warming slowdown,[5] is a period of relatively little change in globally averaged surface temperatures.[6] In the current episode of global warming many such periods are evident in the surface temperature record, along with robust evidence of the long term warming trend.[3]

Suraj wrote:

Atish wrote:My biggest complaint against NaMo and his govt has been his wholesale swallow of Al Gore's hypotheses.

Please support this argument with facts.

And it is a significant increase in output from Coal India that has led to a gradual tapering down of imports. But the fact that coal imports still amounted to almost 13 million tons in September is a scandal. India currently produces about 650 million tons of coal a year. The Modi government has publicly announced that it wants output to increase to 1.6 billion tons by 2019. Do remember, coal blocs have been allotted again to private players through a bidding process. Who knows, this might become a rare success story of a government policy?

India’s coal imports in September fell by 27.16 percent to 12.6 million tonnes (MT) from that in the same month a year ago on the back of rise in domestic production, the government said on Monday.

“With unprecedented increase in coal production by Coal India, import of coal comes down for third successive month,” Coal Secretary Anil Swarup tweeted.

“Coal imports down from 17.3 MT in Sept 14 to 12.6 MT in Sept 15. In value terms from Rs 8,598 crore to Rs 6,027 crore, a reduction of 30 per cent,” he said in another tweet.

State miner Coal India had recorded an output of 494.23 MT in the last fiscal, which fell short of the production target by 3 percent. The target for the current fiscal is 550 MT.

Solar rates in India touched a new low in the tender for a 500-Mw solar park in Andhra Pradesh issued by the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE). US-based SunEdison won the bidding round by quoting Rs 4.63 a unit.

In a close fight during the first reverse auction for solar projects held on the online platform, 10 bidders quoted below Rs 5 per unit. Around 15 companies quoted below Rs 5.5 a unit, which was hailed to be the average tariff for solar power this year by the government.

Solar power would be bundled with thermal power from state-owned National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC), which will further bring down the final sale price to Rs 3.5 a unit — the lowest ever — said a person close to the development.

Atish wrote:I have seen Modi asking everyone too see Al gore's film in an interview. We cannot look into anybody's mind. Maybe its just positioning on a controversial topic. But this issue creates pressure on us to lower our energy production.

What’s clear, then, is that we are looking at a significant scientific disagreement — one that turns on different technologies, methodologies, and adjustments. In such a situation, scientists will now need to hash this out and reconcile their understanding of what is happening to the gigantic snowy mass of East Antarctica in particular.

A_Gupta wrote:a. Denial of global warming is denial of basic science.
b. If you are a gardener, the reality of global warming will be apparent to you.

Scientists use four major datasets to study global temperature. The UK Met Office Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit jointly produce HadCRUT4 .

In the US, the GISTEMP series comes via the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Sciences (GISS), while the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) creates the MLOST record. The Japan Meteorological Agency ( JMA) produces a fourth dataset.

IN 10 years time it will be too late to reverse the effects of global warming, a climate change expert warned yesterday.

India industries have been pioneering cleaner production to maintain global competitiveness. While in the decade of the 1970s industrial output growth rate was equivalent to energy demand growth rate, in the current decade technology growth has decoupled activity growth and energy demand growth to such an extent that activity growth of 20 times can be delivered by energy growth of five times, thanks to energy saving technology.

In order for climate science to be settled, there are many requirements. I will list four for now, although I am sure you can think of many more. Then I will expand on those.

1. We must know all variables that can affect climate.
2. We must know how all variables are changing over time.
3. We must know how each changing variable affects climate.
4. We must know about all non-linear changes that take place as a result of changes to variables.

main topics have an array of sub topics.
1. Earth’s Rotational Energy
2. Orbital Energy, Orbital Period, Orbital Spiral, Elliptical Orbits (Eccentricity), Tilt (Obliquity), Wobble (Axial precession) and Polar Motion
3. Gravitation
4. Solar Energy
5. Geothermal Energy
6. Outer Space/Cosmic/Galactic Effects
7. Earth’s Magnetic Field
8. Atmospheric Composition
9. Albedo
10. Biology
11. Chemical
12. Physics
13. Known Unknowns
14. Unknown Unknowns

As for points 2 and 3, for all of the items listed above, we need to know if the changes, if any, are linear, exponential, logarithmic, sinusoidal, random or some other pattern. For example, depending on who you talk to and the interval you are considering, our emissions of carbon dioxide could be exponential, but the increase in the atmosphere could be linear, but the effect could be logarithmic. Then there are asteroids which could be totally random. As for point 4 above, the easiest example would be to consider a ball with air at 30 C and a relative humidity of 90%. When this is cooled, the gas molecules do not simply slow down indefinitely. At a certain point, the water molecules move so slowly that the hydrogen bonds cause molecules to stick together after collisions to cause liquid water or ice to form. Further cooling causes the various gases to condense to their liquid states and then to freeze to their solid state.

Self-organization as a concept preceded Prigogene, but he quantified it and moved it from the realm of philosophy and psychology and cybernetics to the realm of physics and the behavior of nonlinear non-equilibrium systems.

To put it into a contextual nutshell, an open, non-equilibrium system (such as a gas being heated on one side and cooled on the other) will tend to self-organize into structures that increase the dissipation of the system, that is, facilitate energy transport through the system. The classic contextual example of this is the advent of convective rolls in a fluid in a symmetry breaking gravitational field. Convection moves heat from the hot side to the cold side much, much faster than conduction or radiation does, but initially the gas has no motion but microscopic motions of the molecules and (if we presume symmetry and smoothness in the heated surface and boundaries) experiences only balanced, if unstable, forces. However, those microscopic motions contain small volumes that are not symmetric, that move up or down. These small fluctuations nucleate convection, at first irregular and disorganized, that then “discovers” the favored modes of dissipation, adjacent counter rotating turbulent rolls that have a size characteristic of the geometry of the volume and the thermal imbalance.

The point is that open fluid dynamical differentially heated and cooled systems spontaneously develop these sorts of structures, and they have some degree of stability or at least persistence in time. They can persist a long time — see e.g. the great red spot on Jupiter. The reason that this is essentially a physical, or better yet a mathematical, principle is evident from the wikipedia page above — Prigogene won the Nobel Prize because he showed that this sort of behavior has a universal character and will arise in many, if not most open systems of sufficient complexity. There is a deep connection between this theory and chaos — essentially that an open chaotic system with “noise” is constantly being bounced around in its phase space, so that it wanders around through the broad stretches of uninteresting critical points until it enters the basin of attraction of an interesting one, a strange attractor. At that point the same noise drives it diffusively into a constantly shifting ensemble of comparatively tightly bound orbits. At that point the system is “stable” in that it has temporally persistent behavior with gross physical structures with their own “pseudoparticle” physics and sometimes even thermodynamics. This is one of the things I studied pretty extensively back when I did work in open quantum optical systems.

There is absolutely no question that our climate is precisely a self-organized system of this sort. We have long since named the observed, temporally persistent self-organized structures — ENSO, the Monsoon, the NAO, the PDO. We can also observe more transient structures that appear or disappear such as the “polar vortex” or “The Blob” (warm patch in the ocean off of the Pacific Northwest) or a “blocking high”. Lately, we had “Hurricane Joaquin”. Anybody can play — at this point you can visit various websites and watch a tiny patch of clouds organize into a thunderstorm, then a numbered “disturbance with the potential for tropical development”, then a tropical depression, and finally into a named storm with considerable if highly variable and transient structure.

All of these structures tend to dissipate a huge amount of energy that would otherwise have to escape to space much more slowly. They are born out of energy in flow, and “evolve” so that the ones that move energy most efficiently survive and grow.
Once again, one has to bemoan the lack of serious math that has been done on the climate. This in some sense is understandable, as the math is insanely difficult even when it is limited to toy systems — simple iterated maps, simple ODE or PDE systems with simple boundary conditions. However, there are some principles to guide us. One is that in the case of self-organization in chaotic systems, the dynamical map itself has a structure of critical points and attractors. Once the system “discovers” a favorable attractor and diffuses into an orbit, it actually becomes rather immune to simple changes in the driving. Once a set of turbulent rolls is established, as it were, there is a barrier to be overcome before one can make the number of rolls change or fundamentally change their character — moderate changes in the thermal gradient just make the existing rolls roll faster or slower to maintain heat transport. However, in a sufficiently complex system there are usually neighboring attractors with some sort of barrier in between them, but this barrier is there only in an average sense. In many, many cases, the orbits of the system in phase space have a fractal, folded character where orbits from neighboring attractors can interpenetrate and overlap. If there is noise, there is a probability of switching attractors when one nears a non-equilibrium critical regime, so that the system can suddenly and dramatically change its character. Next, the attractors themselves are not really fixed. As one alters (parametrically for example) the forcing of the system or the boundary conditions or the degree of noise or… one expects the critical points and attractors themselves to move, to appear and disappear, to get pushed together or moved apart, to have the barriers between them rise or fall. Finally (as if this isn’t enough) the climate is not in any usual sense an iterated map. It is usually treated as one from the point of view of solving PDEs (which is usually done via an iterated map where the output of one time step is the input into the next with a fixed dynamics). This makes the solution a Markov Process — one that “forgets” its past history and evolves locally in time and space as an iterated map (usually with a transition “rule” with some randomness in it).
But the climate is almost certainly not Markovian, certainly not in practical terms. What it does today depends on the state today, to be sure, but because there are vast reservoirs where past dynamical evolution is “hidden” in precisely Prigogene’s self-organized structures, structures whose temporal coherence and behavior can only be meaningfully understood on the basis of their own physical description and not microscopically, it is completely, utterly senseless to try to advance a Markovian solution and expect it to actually work!

Two examples, and then I must clean my house and do other work. One is clearly the named structures themselves in the climate. The multidecadal oscillations have spatiotemporal persistence and organization with major spectral components out as far as sixty or seventy years (and may well have longer periods still to be discovered — we have crappy data and not much of it that extends into the increasingly distant past). Current models treat things like ENSO and the PDO and so on more like noise, and we see people constantly “removing the influence of ENSO” from a temperature record to try to reductively discern some underlying ENSO-less trend. But they aren’t noise. They are major features of the dynamics! They move huge amounts of energy around, and are key components of the efficiency of the open system as it transports incident solar energy to infinity, keeping a reservoir of it trapped within along the way. It is practically speaking impossible to integrate the PDEs of the climate models and reproduce any of the multidecadal behavior. Even if multidecadal structures emerge, they have the wrong shape and the wrong spectrum because the chaotic models have a completely different critical structure and attractors as they are iterated maps at the wrong resolution and with parameters that almost certainly move them into completely distinct operational regimes and quite different quasiparticle structures. This is instantly evident if one looks at the actual dynamical futures produced by the climate models. They have the wrong spectrum on pretty much all scales, fluctuating far more wildly than the actual climate does, with the wrong short time autocorrelation and spectral behavior (let alone the longer multidecadal behavior that we observe).

{ I like the way he says the below }
The second is me. I’m precisely a self-organized chaotic system. Here’s a metaphor. Climate models are performing the moral equivalent of trying to predict my behavior by simulating the flow of neural activity in my brain on a coarse-grained basis that chops my cortex up into (say) centimeter square chunks one layer thick and coming up with some sort of crude Markovian model. Since the modelers have no idea what I’m actually thinking, and cannot possibly actually measure the state of my brain outside of some even more crudely averaged surface electrical activity, they just roll dice to generate an initial state “like” what they think my initial state might be, and then trust their dynamics to eventually “forget” that initial state and move the model brain into what they imagine is an “ensemble” of my possible brain states so that after a few years, my behavior will no longer depend on the ignored details (you know, things like memories of my childhood or what I’ve learned in school). They run their model forward twenty years and announce to the world that unless I undergo electroshock therapy right now their models prove that I’m almost certainly destined to become an axe murderer or exhibit some other “extreme” behavior. Only if I am kept in a dark room, not overstimulated, and am fed regular doses of drugs that essentially destroy the resolution of my real brain until it approximates that of their model can they be certain that I won’t either bring about World Peace in one extreme or cause a Nuclear War in the other.

The problem is that this whole idea is just silly! Human behavior cannot be predicted by a microscopic physical model of the neurons at the quantum chemistry level! Humans are open non-Markovian information systems. We are strongly regulated by our past experience, our memory, as well as our instantaneous input, all folded through a noisy, defect-ridden, and unbelievably complex multilayer neural network that is chemically modulated by a few dozen things (hormones, bioavailable energy, diurnal phase, temperature, circulatory state, oxygenation…)

Conclusion
After reading this article, do you think climate science is settled? If not, do you think it will be settled in your lifetime?

[Karlen] In attempts to reconstruct the temperature I find an increase from the early 1900s to ca 1935, a trend down until the mid 1970s and so another increase to about the same temperature level as in the late 1930s.

A distinct warming to a temperature about 0.5 deg C above the level 1940 is reported in the IPCC diagrams. I have been searching for this recent increase, which is very important for the discussion about a possible human influence on climate, but I have basically failed to find an increase above the late 1930s.

[Trenberth] This region, as I am sure you know, suffers from missing data and large gaps spatially. How one covered both can greatly influence the outcome.

In IPCC we produce an Arctic curve and describe its problems and character. In IPCC the result is very conservative owing to lack of inclusion of the Arctic where dramatic decreases in sea ice in recent years have taken place: 2005 was lowest at the time we did our assessment but 2007 is now the record closely followed by 2008.

Anomalies of over 5C are evident in some areas in SSTs but the SSTs are not established if there was ice there previously. These and other indicators show that there is no doubt about recent warming; see also chapter 4 of IPCC.

[Karlen] In my letter to Klass V I included diagram showing the mean annual temperature of the Nordic countries (1890-ca 2001) presented on the net by the database NORDKLIM, a joint project between the meteorological institutes in the Nordic countries. Except for Denmark, the data sets show an increase after the 1970s to the same level as in the late 1930s or lower. None demonstrates the distinct increase IPCC indicates. The trends of these 6 areas are very similar except for a few interesting details.

[Trenberth] Results will also depend on the exact region.

This is hardly the first time environmental groups have tried end-arounds to cope with resistance to their policy proposals. Several decades ago, some environmental activists suggested that utilities that spent money on coal fired power plants could be charged with “imprudence” when carbon taxes were imposed, and forced to pass the subsequent losses onto their shareholders. Anyone who sold their utility stocks expecting such penalties would apparently have grounds for a case.

And then there are the global warming activists who warned of a possible Ice Age back during the brief cold spell of the 1970s. Should anyone who bought, say, timber holdings expecting to profit from rising demand for fire wood be able to sue? Every neo-Malthusian demographer or economist could be the target of investors and even the public for their foolishness. The peak oil crowd could be targeted as well—they told us oil prices would go to $200 to $300 a barrel in 2008. (Or resource optimists predicting a return to $30—no names.)

Ironically, a number of peak oil advocates called for legal action against the U.S. Geological Survey for supposed dishonesty in its resource estimates, a laughable charge which apparently resulted from misinterpretation of what they reported, which was then repeated ad nauseum by peak oilers without double checking its validity.

And if the claim is that ExxonMobil was dishonest and should be penalized for that, where do I start? How about Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” which was found to have numerous errors. Maybe global warming activists should sue Al Gore for discrediting them? And frankly, while an effort to criminalize ExxonMobil’s activities will sound really good to the “core” audience, but more likely Americans will view it with distaste. Especially since it seems so hypocritical that it should feature on the Daily Show on Comedy Central (just to show they’re unbiased!).

Purpose of Petition

The purpose of the Petition Project is to demonstrate that the claim of “settled science” and an overwhelming “consensus” in favor of the hypothesis of human-caused global warming and consequent climatological damage is wrong. No such consensus or settled science exists. As indicated by the petition text and signatory list, a very large number of American scientists reject this hypothesis.

Publicists at the United Nations, Mr. Al Gore, and their supporters frequently claim that only a few “skeptics” remain – skeptics who are still unconvinced about the existence of a catastrophic human-caused global warming emergency.

It is evident that 31,487 Americans with university degrees in science – including 9,029 PhDs, are not "a few." Moreover, from the clear and strong petition statement that they have signed, it is evident that these 31,487 American scientists are not “skeptics.”

These scientists are instead convinced that the human-caused global warming hypothesis is without scientific validity and that government action on the basis of this hypothesis would unnecessarily and counterproductively damage both human prosperity and the natural environment of the Earth.

The current list of petition signers includes 9,029 PhD; 7,157 MS; 2,586 MD and DVM; and 12,715 BS or equivalent academic degrees. Most of the MD and DVM signers also have underlying degrees in basic science.

All of the listed signers have formal educations in fields of specialization that suitably qualify them to evaluate the research data related to the petition statement. Many of the signers currently work in climatological, meteorological, atmospheric, environmental, geophysical, astronomical, and biological fields directly involved in the climate change controversy.

Newly released research, primarily from NASA and the GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences, indicates that melting of selective Greenland Glaciers is related to geologically induced heat flow, and not manmade atmospheric global warming.

Previous articles posted here and here have documented the effect of geologically induced geothermal heat flow on the West Antarctic continent and Arctic Ocean Ice Sheets. In both cases relatively recent research was used to show natural variations in climate, climate-related events, and warmed from geothermal heat. You can learn more about plate climatology and global warming here.

A summary of the very extensive NASA Greenland Ice Sheet Study shows that Greenland Glacier dynamics are very complex. Certain glaciers are retreating, others are unchanged, and still others are expanding. Additionally, individual glacier dynamics change with time, e.g., advancing for years, then suddenly retreating. In some cases the retreating rates are astounding.

NASA also noted that glaciers melt from both beneath (bottom melting) and on top (surface melting). Extensive bottom melting is thought to be lubricating several glaciers and thereby greatly increasing surface velocity rate. In other words, they flow much quicker, and in many cases, extremely fast.

The area of greatest and most recent glacier retreat is located in the northeastern portion of Greenland and is associated with a very linear NNE trending bedrock valley termed the Jacobshavn Glacial Valley (see locator map above).

A newly published bedrock topography map of Greenland (see below) shows the prominent Jacobshavn valley topographic low. This valley extends miles into the Greenland continent and is shown as a fault-controlled valley due in large part to its very narrow and linear geometry. Additionally the NNE trend of this valley mimics the NNE trend of known Greenland fault trends such as those shown in the Nuuk Region.

The northeastern quadrant of Greenland, and most importantly the Jacobshavn Valley, is in close proximity to the southern terminus of the Mid Arctic Rift System (see Locator Map). Other scientists have taken this as strong evidence that this part of Greenland is faulted and more tectonically active than most other portions of Greenland. Recent seismic activity in this region supports this notion.

The movement of the Jacobshavn Glacier in the Jacobshavn Valley is of great interest. NASA’s Study shows that this glacier was flowing very slowly down the valley and at the same time started gaining ice mass until 1998. At that point, it quickly started flowing down the valley while simultaneously losing large amounts of ice mass.

his rapid change in Jacobshavn Glacier flow rate is illustrated on the NASA map above as a unique and a very linear trend that fits the topographic expression of the Jacobshavn Valley.

It is clear that the Jacobshavn Valley is geologically fault bounded, and has recently become geothermally active. All the data and observations fit this notion, so a sudden increase in fault-related heat flow would cause bottom melting of the glacier.

In addition to bottom shrinking of the glacier and thereby down-faulting (sliding) into the valley, this bottom melting also generates a basal layer of liquid water that acts as a lubricant to speed up the glacial flow.

Also of significant relevance to the geologically induced geothermal heat flow of Greenland is a recently published research project by the GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences.

“At the Earth’s surface, heat fluxes from the interior1 are generally insignificant compared with those from the Sun and atmosphere2, except in areas permanently blanketed by ice. Modelling studies show that geothermal heat flux influences the internal thermal structure of ice sheets and the distribution of basal melt water3, and it should be taken into account in planning deep ice drilling campaigns and climate reconstructions4. Here we use a coupled ice–lithosphere model driven by climate and show that the oldest and thickest part of the Greenland Ice Sheet is strongly influenced by heat flow from the deep Earth. We find that the geothermal heat flux in central Greenland increases from west to east due to thinning of the lithosphere, which is only about 25–66% as thick as is typical for terrains of early Proterozoic age5. Complex interactions between geothermal heat flow and glaciation-induced thermal perturbations in the upper crust over glacial cycles lead to strong regional variations in basal ice conditions, with areas of rapid basal melting adjoining areas of extremely cold basal ice. Our findings demonstrate the role that the structure of the solid Earth plays in the dynamics of surface processes.”

The recent discovery of two Sub-Glacial Freshwater Lakes beneath the Greenland Continental Ice Sheet is highly significant.

Although not interpreted as being related to geothermal heat by the authors, it is clear that geothermal heat is the most likely cause. The two lakes are located in the north central portion of Greenland beneath 1500 feet of ice and 30 miles from the ice-free edge. They each cover an area of five square miles, and most importantly, are oriented in the NNE linear trend, a fault-riddled area.

The evidence for geologically induced geothermal heat flow on the Greenland continent shows that recent reports from NASA on Greenland ice melt from global warming are premature and ill informed. Consider this:

- Glaciers do not melt uniformly as would be expected from atmospheric global warming, rather the melting and advancing of the glacial is complex and therefore more likely associated with geological forces.

- The most significant and most recent glacial melting occurs in what is likely a geologically faulted linear valley that is theorized to have increased heat flow.

- Sub-glacial freshwater lakes have been identified.

- Newly released research by other scientists agree that geothermal forces are active in Greenland

James Edward Kamis is a Geologist and AAPG member of 40 years and has always been fascinated by the probable connection between Geology and Climate. Years of research / observation have convinced him that the Earth’s Heat Flow Engine, which drives the outer crustal plates, is also an important driver of the Earth’s climate.

The Chandigarh Administration’s ‘model solar city project’ has been selected as India’s solar theme at the 21st meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21) to be held in Paris from November 30 to December 11.

The decision was taken in a meeting in Delhi today. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will lead India’s delegation to the UN’s climate change summit.

It might seem obvious that in a warming world, the Greenland ice sheet will melt. But, what seems obvious and simple can be more complex when investigated more deeply. With respect to Greenland, it is expected that warmer temperatures increase melting but warmer temperatures can also mean more snowfall, as there is more moisture in warm air which can then fall as snow. So, it has been a question of which of these two competing processes would win out. Would Greenland get smaller because of melting or would it grow as more snow fell?

Over the past few years, the verdict has become clear. The Greenland ice sheet is losing mass at an increasing rate. In fact, Greenland currently contributes twice as much as the Antarctic to rising sea levels.

A new study, just published in Nature Geoscience, makes an important new contribution to our understanding of the forces at play in Greenland. Dr Samuel Doyle and an international team captured the wide-scale effects of an unusual week of warm, wet weather in late August and early September, 2011. They found that cyclonic weather led to extreme surface runoff – a combination of ice melt and rain – that overwhelmed the ice sheet’s basal drainage system. This drive a marked increase in ice flow across the entire western sector of the ice sheet that extended 140 km into the ice sheet’s interior. According to Dr. Doyle,

It wasn’t just rainfall. We saw 10 to 15% of the total annual surface melt occur in this event in late summer 2011. When this water reached the bed, the ice sheet lifted up and moved faster towards the sea.

The cyclonic weather system delivered heat and rain to the western edge of the Greenland ice sheet and under these warm, wet, cloudy conditions the way that the ice sheet receives energy for melt is very different to that under the more typical clear sky conditions. As we all know from a cloudy day, clouds block a certain amount of sunshine, but under certain conditions they can absorb the outgoing longwave radiation and re-radiate it back to the surface. This is why a cloudy night is often warmer than when the sky is clear. The same thing happens on the ice sheet.

In fact during the August 2011 weather event, melt continued throughout both day and night creating exceptionally high daily melt totals for this time of year. Moisture in the atmosphere also reduces the rate at which the air cools as it rises over the ice sheet, allowing warm temperatures and therefore melt and rain to attain abnormally high elevations. The heat released by condensation and by rain refreezing in the snowpack enhanced melt even further.

If the precise timing of rainfall/melt events is critical to the ice sheets flow response, predicting the future of the Greenland ice sheet may therefore be a more difficult task than was originally thought.

"Seaweed grows at 30 to 60 times the rate of land-based plants, so it can draw out lots of CO2," Flannery told E360 in a recent interview.
"If you cover 9% of the world's oceans in seaweed farms, you could draw down the equivalent of all our current emissions -- more than 40 gigatons a year."

Flannery said that such a gigantic geo-engineering project could grow enough protein to feed a population of 10 billion people- a huge opportunity.

Seaweed farms can also reverse ocean acidification. Off the coast of China, there are about 500 square kilometers of seaweed farms producing edible seaweed for the food market. PH levels have been shown to rise as high as 10 around these seaweed farms. At the moment with an acidified ocean it is 8.1.

"You could buffer oceans," he said. "They are fantastic places for growing fish, shellfish, or prawns, just because of that buffering impact."

Renewable energy supply in eight major economies will collectively more than double by 2030 due to new national climate and energy plans, according to a study by the think tank World Resources Institute (WRI).

Total clean energy supply from eight of the world’s 10 largest greenhouse gas emitters – Brazil, China, the European Union, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico and the United States – will jump to 20,000 terawatt hours (TWh) from around 9,000 TWh in 2009.

That is equivalent to India’s current energy demand. “These new renewable energy targets send strong signals to energy markets and investment circles,” said Jennifer Morgan, Global Director, Climate Program, WRI.

A_Gupta wrote: a. Denial of global warming is denial of basic science.
b. If you are a gardener, the reality of global warming will be apparent to you.

a. If you are sitting (in a room) next to an active fireplace, the reality of room warming will be apparent to you
b. Denial of room warming is denial of basic science

A working paper from the US National Bureau of Economic Research has found one hot day, defined as over 26 degrees, lead to 1100 fewer babies nine months down the track.

The US currently experiences on average 30 days over 80 degrees Farenheit, or 26 degrees Celcuis, in a year, but climate researchers believe with climate change that number could rise to up to 90 such days a year.

This would mean 100,000 <shouldn't it be only 11k few babies assuming he means fewer babies?> babies would be born each year in the US alone.

johneeG wrote:OK, so how long will it take for the apocalypse to arrive according to global warming theory? At what point will we clearly know one way or other?

A_Gupta wrote:Grow seaweed as a carbon sink:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/clayton-b ... 86822.html