CF / Sea Level Rise and Adaptation
Climate change is not debatable, it is an issue of science, facts and physics. It is happening, and debates will not change that. The physics of global warming progresses despite our opinion about it. That’s the message from professor Jim White, a geological and environmental scientist and director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research in Boulder, Colorado.
Climate change is progressing and easily observable in nature right now. Greenland’s ice sheets are melting. We may need to live with it, so we have to be more responsible with our money, and stop spending it on wars, and start planning for how we are going to adapt to climate change and sea level rise, if we can adapt at all. Our resources are finite, including finances to adapt to climate change. Sea Level rise is going to increase, and cities like Miami will be under water in 100 years or so.
This Climate File* is an interview with Professor Jim White, broadcast on KGNU radio’s show How on Earth, from August 3rd, 2010.
Professor Jim White directs the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, and he’s a professor of geological sciences and environmental studies at the University of Colorado.
Professor White is also a paleoclimatologist — in other words, he studies ancient climates in attempt to understand better how Earth’s climate system works. He has just journeyed back to Boulder from the Greenland ice sheet, where he has been part of an international science team working on the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling project, or NEEM.
After two summers of work, the NEEM team has drilled down more than 1.5 miles through the Greenland ice sheet, reaching bedrock just last week. And the ice core Jim White and his colleagues have recovered is from what’s known as the Eemian interglacial period, from 115,000 to 130,000 years ago.
Original show broadcast site.
It’s very interesting to me that this professor of environmental studies claims he is not pessimistic about the future. How is that possible? He is a teacher, so he is optimistic about the next generation of young people that he works with every day. That’s good to know. See more about this interview here, at CEJournal.
“White is a paleoclimatologist — he studies ancient climates to understand better how Earth’s climate system works. He has just journeyed back from the Greenland ice sheet, where he has been part of an international science team working on the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling project, or NEEM.”
*Climate Files, from now on, will consist of archived audio and video files on climate and the environment, from various sources. The purpose is for information and educational reasons and to get these lesser known files out to the public as examples of some of the best climate change and environmental information and science. We believe the public has a right to know as much as possible on this topic and that this information should be shared as widely as possible.
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Climate Files / Hansen Talks Climate in Sydney
Hansen speaking in Adelaide, March 2010
He speaks about energy policy too, and clearly feels frustrated with the bias against nuclear power. It’s not that he’s a big advocate of nuclear power, but Hansen realizes that we need carbon-free power and that it cannot all come from what he calls “soft renewables”. Here are a few other points he makes that are not widely known:
- The whole problem with our energy is that fossil fuels are cheap. So to get people to change their behavior, we need a gradually rising price on carbon. To get the public to accept the additional cost, we need to return this money to the public.
- The climate system is incredibly sensitive. We know from paleoclimate history that the climate has changed a lot in the past. To make predictions of coming climate, climate scientists are not depending on “climate modeling” so much as real data they are getting from the past and the present.
- Six other countries are developing 4th Generation nuclear plants, and China is building at least 24 new nuclear plants.
- We will not get rid of nuclear plants, so we should be making them safer.
- Renewable energy is what everyone wants to hear, but the fact is, they are still invisible on the graph. There is a renewable portion on the graph, but that is burning of biomass. The dream that soft renewable technologies will be enough is not supported by empirical evidence. India and china are planning on going with mainly nuclear for their future power.
- Hansen also expresses his disappointment and frustration with the Obama administration and politicians like Senator John Kerry, who want him to support the Obama administration’s plans for coal and CCS and oil drilling. Hansen won’t, for obvious reasons.
Hansen also wrote an article while he was in Australia in March. — “Only a carbon tax and nuclear power can save us”, claims The Australian. in its title of his article. He didn’t really say that, but that could be inferred from what he did say.
The video version of this podcast is in three parts from Blip TV here. This podcast contains all three parts in one episode.
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Climate Scientist James Hansen is known as the ‘grandfather of climate change’ and is perhaps the world’s leading authority on the science of climate change. He is director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and has for the last 30 years focused on climate research, publishing more than 100 scholarly articles on the topic. This talk was presented by Sydney Ideas and the United States Studies Centre, March 11, 2010.
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The Front Lines of Climate Change
This is a tragic video from Bangladesh, from Yale e360. Climate change is causing water to rise and people aren’t just losing their ability to support themselves; they are losing their very homes. Yet they are too poor to move, so what can be done? Governments will have to pay to relocate people in the near future, and in fact should be doing this now. I don’t know why these people have been abandoned by their government, but this is now their life. More about this video is below.
“Danish photographer and filmmaker Jonathan Bjerg Møller recently spent nine months in Bangladesh, chronicling the lives of people struggling to survive just a few feet above sea level. He traveled to the South Asian nation after hearing projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change about the millions of climate refugees that would be created this century by rising seas and more powerful storms. Møller wanted to put a human face on this issue, and decided there was no better place than Bangladesh, where 15 million of its 160 million people live less than three feet above sea level.
While he was in Bangladesh, Cyclone Aila struck, killing roughly 200 people and leaving thousands homeless. Møller proceeded to document the devastation from that 2009 storm, as well the impact of subsiding land and rising seas on other Bangladeshis, many of whom earn less than $1 a day. In this Yale Environment 360 report, we present two videos by Møller – “Aila’s Victims” and “Wahidul’s Story.”
A Bangladeshi man who is the subject of one of his videos, Wahidul, lives in the town of Kuziartek, which was once home to 40,000 people. Now, the island on which Kuziartek was located is underwater.”
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Climate Files 56 / Answering Skeptics
Dead coral and sea shells washed up on beach, Mexico, 2007.
We know that CO2 causes climate change, but how? Believe it or not, credit card debt can help explain how CO2 causes global warming, even if the graphics show CO2 kind of non-synchronized with temperatures, at times. Hear Richard Alley talk about CO2 causing global warming at the AGU Annual Meeting. (Full video with graphics is here)
Also hear Stephen Colbert talk about mountaintop removal with Dr. Margaret Palmer, and the latest crock of the week, the claim of a petition with 32,000 signatures on it from scientists. It’s a hoax, of course. From Peter Sinclair of the Greenman’s Climate Crock video series. Sinclair is a longtime advocate of environmental awareness and energy alternatives and he runs Greenman Studio from his home in Midland, Michigan.
Richard Alley is an American geologist and Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences at the Pennsylvania State University. He has authored more than 170 refereed scientific publications about the relationships between Earth’s cryosphere and global climate change, and is recognized by the Institute for Scientific Information as a “highly cited researcher.” (wikipedia)
More information on how to speak to deniers and skeptics that should be useful to everyone is here and here.
New climate change meetings/conferences after COP15:
In Abu Dhabi, the World Future Energy Summit.
Another climate change meeting is coming up on January 24th. Read about it here.
“…key groups of developing countries will meet to try to explore ways to get to agree a legally binding final agreement. As the dust settles on the stormy Danish meeting, environment ministers from the so-called “Basic countries” – Brazil, South Africa, India and China – will meet on January 24 in New Delhi. No formal agenda has been set, but observers expect the emerging geopolitical alliance between the four large developing countries who brokered the final “deal” with the US in Denmark will define a common position on emission reductions and climate aid money, and seek ways to convince other countries to sign up to the Copenhagen accord that emerged last month.”
You have to wonder what the carbon footprint is of all these meetings, especially given what they accomplish.
Transportation emissions information from Science Insider:
“. . . . projections spelled out in a new report reviewing the issue by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change suggests that by 2050 the total amount of carbon pollution from these sources could increase tenfold, depending on population, economics, and technology trends. Were that to happen, emissions would be as high as the entire transportation sector, which takes up 14% of global greenhouse emissions, currently dominated by pollution from cars and trucks.
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Music dedicated to all skeptics and deniers at the end: Pants on the Ground, by ‘General’ Larry Platt.
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Climate Files 55 / Drop the Nuke Bias
Being antinuclear is like a religion to many environmentalists. But solving climate change will be a compromise of what is possible and needed. We are not going to get a green utopian world to emerge and solve climate change with windmills. Even environmentalists want to be able to charge their cell phones and laptops. Should we throw it all away, or find out a realistic way to power it all once the coal plants are gone? We should be supporting nuclear plants over CCS any day. The last thing we want to do is spend billions locking in coal for another 50 years, something that could kill us all.
The Clean Air Act is under attack by Republicans with new legislation trying to block EPA again again. You can help save it by contacting your Reps. here.
Some news discussed in this episode includes information on and quotes from the books Storms of My Grandchildren by James Hansen and the Vanishing Face of Gaia by James Lovelock. Hansen’s letter to Obama is here (PDF). The UK must raise its CO2 emissions target to a 42% cut, says a new report. Read why our endless consumerism needs to be replaced with sustainable living here. The story about Bell Labs greening the internet by 2015 is here. There is a lot more in this episode including an audio description of what a thorium reactor is and how it works.
Read another interview with Stewart Brand, whose interview is played in this episode, here at e360.
More info on thorium reactors:
- How a Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) works
- Energy from Thorium blog
- Uranium is so Last Century
Contact CF using the contact form at the top or email CF at news @ climatefilesradio (dot) com
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Music at end: Nuclear Power Plant by Zen Eyes
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Climate Files 40 / History of Global Warming Science
The history of the discovery of global warming/climate change goes back much farther in time than people think.
And no, global warming was not invented by Al Gore. NASA scientist James Hansen didn’t discover it either, despite his 1988 testimony before Congress. Global warming theory has been around for a long time, since before industrialization. In fact, it started with observations in 300 B.C.!
How did the idea for global warming and climate change start?
Find out in this episode, with a global warming history timeline assisted by Mother Jones and other news sources. It brings you right up to the present.
This was NaPodPoMo (National Podcast Post Month) episode #6, the 6th installment of my podcast marathon for the month of November.
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Climate Files 39 / Science & Tech News
Robot Fish?
This was NaPodPoMo5, the fifth installment of this podcast’s marathon.
Covered in this episode: Deep-sea Ecosystems Affected By Climate Change.
Trees in the desert, maybe the Sahara, might solve climate change? Well, it’s a plan.
Liquid Granite and the hunt for a carbon-neutral cement, Foldable 3D Solar Cells, robot fish and more, in some science and tech news for this episode.
Some Futurism in this interview at CleanTech, too.
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Climate Files 28 / Climate Engineering & Hazy Air
The very air we breathe is causing us health problems. Aerosols and other things in our air are still making us sick. The military might be putting something in it, to fight climate change, or for reasons much worse. What’s in the air? Whatever it is, it’s killing people. Chem trails, global dimming, global hazing and pollution are quite dangerous to our health. The air we breath even contains microscopic plastic, which enters our bloodstreams. Apparently, the military is adding things to the atmosphere, but we don’t know why. And then there’s climate change. . . . . and the problem with the media not covering it. And to top it off, we all have to deal with climate change skeptics and deniers.
It’s almost too much to handle, but we have to act before it’s too late. Copenhagen is coming up fast!
Studies are homing in on which particles polluting the air are most sickening — and why, from Science News.
Global dimming is explained here.
Our Last Chance to Preserve Life on Earth is here.
Glaciers are disappearing fast — The Sermilik fjord in Greenland: a chilling view of a warming world.
Glaciers are now melting so fast in Greenland that their movement can be seen with the naked eye.
Most of this episode is a recording of a radio show about Climate Engineering, with clips from the documentary, from Pacifica’s WBAI radio in New York. It’s also about militarization of weather, chem trails and what it is that we are breathing, and how bad for us it?
“Weather as a force multiplier — Owning the weather in 2025″ is strange, but true, and you can find the Website here.
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Here is the NY Skywatch website with more information about the Climate Engineering DVD and the 2-part chem trails show from WBAI radio.
Music from Moby and Defying Gravity on ABC.
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FN05 / Burn Unit pt. 1
This is a presentation of the latest science on climate change, as presented before the U.S. Senate Environmental and Public Works committee, one of our new “Burn Units”. The planet is burning up and our government is ready to get to work.
This is part one, and part two will only be on here on this site. This podcast starts with a message about PowerShift09 from scientist James Hansen.
Here are the facts: this is the only planet we have, so let’s all work together to solve this climate problem. It truly is a crisis — more so than the banking crisis, but the government keeps bailing out banks while keeping action on global warming a lower priority. If there is any fire to put out, it’s climate change.
On February 4 2009 Energy Secretary Stephen Chu told the Los Angeles Times:
“I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen,” he said. ‘We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California,” He sees education as a means to combat this threat.
The testimony Hansen gave to the House Ways & Means Committee is available at
this site (pdf)
Much of the Senate hearing is played in this episode, but it was very long so I’m splitting it in two. The Full Committee was titled, “Update on the Latest Global Warming Science.” I didn’t see any major American media cover this, and it should have been big news. After all, this is the latest science on climate change, straight from the scientists. More of the scientists will appear in part II — Part I contains the Senate panel’s member comments and the statements of two of the scientists, Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Nobel Prize-winning IPCC, PhD, and Christopher Field PhD, Director, Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford University, Co-chair of Working Group II (continued in part II)
Climate change is the biggest threat to life on this planet, and I can’t stand by and watch it happen while our mainstream media treats it like no big deal, certainly less of a big deal than banks collapsing, so I’m asking people to spread the word. Our media is once again letting us down and even worse, treating this like a debatable political issue, which it absolutely is not.
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FN03 / Coaled and Carbonated
Are you kidding me?
Fight the recession or fight global warming? We can do both. This episode covers Carbon news, carbon basics, what we’re facing, cap and trade versus cap and dividend, coal and a portion of an interview with Ted Nace about coal. Join me for fascinating climate info.
Solar did pretty well in the stimulus package, as described by Vote Solar.
Cap and dividend vs. cap and trade — it’s a confusing issue. This episode attempts to explain the difference with some help from Peter Barnes of CapandDividend.org. According to the experts, you could make money from conservation combined with cap and dividend in the form of a monthly check from the government, if it’s ever implemented. New legislation on cap and return, or cap and dividend, from at least 3 members of Congress, is in the works.
Link to Washington Post Article on how they like cap and dividend too is here.
Includes 14 minutes of an episode of an Electric Politics podcast called “Of Coal and Corporations”. You can listen to the whole episode on George Kenney’s EP website. He did a good interview with Ted Nace, who started the immense Coalswarm website. Nace is also the author of the book Gangs of America which you can download free.
Weigh in on Obama’s trip to Canada on Feb. 19th and sign the petition against the Alberta tar sands oil. http://www.obama2canada.org/
Music: 20 seconds of Enya, and 10 seconds of Moby — “Find My Baby” and at end– “What” by Ian France.
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