2 pieces on global warming

The Independent (UK)
03 July 2003

In an astonishing announcement on global warming and
extreme weather, the World Meteorological Organization
signaled last night that the world's weather is going
haywire.

In a startling report, the WMO, which normally produces
detailed scientific reports and staid statistics at the
year's end, highlighted record extremes in weather and
climate occurring all over the world in recent weeks,
from Switzerland's hottest-ever June to a record month
for tornadoes in the United States - and linked them to
climate change.

The unprecedented warning takes its force and
significance from the fact that it is not coming from
Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth, but from an
impeccably respected UN organisation that is not given
to hyperbole (though environmentalists will seize on it
to claim that the direst warnings of climate change are
being borne out).

The Geneva-based body, to which the weather services of
185 countries contribute, takes the view that events
this year in Europe, America and Asia are so remarkable
that the world needs to be made aware of it
immediately.

The extreme weather it documents, such as record high
and low temperatures, record rainfall and record storms
in different parts of the world, is consistent with
predictions of global warming. Supercomputer models
show that, as the atmosphere warms, the climate not
only becomes hotter but much more unstable. "Recent
scientific assessments indicate that, as the global
temperatures continue to warm due to climate change,
the number and intensity of extreme events might
increase," the WMO said, giving a striking series of
examples.

In southern France, record temperatures were recorded
in June, rising above 40C in places - temperatures of
5C to 7C above the average.

In Switzerland, it was the hottest June in at least 250
years, environmental historians said. In Geneva, since
29 May, daytime temperatures have not fallen below 25C,
making it the hottest June recorded.

In the United States, there were 562 May tornadoes,
which caused 41 deaths. This set a record for any
month. The previous record was 399 in June 1992.

In India, this year's pre-monsoon heatwave brought peak
temperatures of 45C - 2C to 5C above the norm. At least
1,400 people died in India due to the hot weather. In
Sri Lanka, heavy rainfall from Tropical Cyclone 01B
exacerbated wet conditions, resulting in flooding and
landslides and killing at least 300 people. The
infrastructure and economy of south-west Sri Lanka was
heavily damaged. A reduction of 20-30 per cent is
expected in the output of low-grown tea in the next
three months.

Last month was also the hottest in England and Wales
since 1976, with average temperatures of 16C. The WMO
said: "These record extreme events (high temperatures,
low temperatures and high rainfall amounts and
droughts) all go into calculating the monthly and
annual averages, which, for temperatures, have been
gradually increasing over the past 100 years.

"New record extreme events occur every year somewhere
in the globe, but in recent years the number of such
extremes have been increasing.

"According to recent climate-change scientific
assessment reports of the joint WMO/United Nations
Environmental Programme Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, the global average surface temperature
has increased since 1861. Over the 20th century the
increase has been around 0.6C.

"New analyses of proxy data for the northern hemisphere
indicate that the increase in temperature in the 20th
century is likely to have been the largest in any
century during the past 1,000 years."

While the trend towards warmer temperatures has been
uneven over the past century, the trend since 1976 is
roughly three times that for the whole period.

Global average land and sea surface temperatures in May
2003 were the second highest since records began in
1880. Considering land temperatures only, last May was
the warmest on record.

It is possible that 2003 will be the hottest year ever
recorded. The 10 hottest years in the 143-year-old
global temperature record have now all been since 1990,
with the three hottest being 1998, 2002 and 2001.

The unstable world of climate change has long been a
prediction. Now, the WMO says, it is a reality.

http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=421166&host=3&dir=507

***

Published on Tuesday, July 1, 2003 by the Guardian/UK

Shadow of Extinction

by George Monbiot

It is old news, I admit. Two hundred and fifty-one million years old, to
be
precise. But the story of what happened then, which has now been told
for
the first time, demands our urgent attention. Its implications are more
profound than anything taking place in Iraq, or Washington, or even (and
I
am sorry to burst your bubble) Wimbledon. Unless we understand what
happened, and act upon that intelligence, prehistory may very soon
repeat
itself, not as tragedy, but as catastrophe. The events that brought the
Permian period (between 286m and 251m years ago) to an end could not be
clearly determined until the mapping of the key geological sequences had

been completed. Until recently, palaeontologists had assumed that the
changes that took place then were gradual and piecemeal. But three years
ago
a precise date for the end of the period was established, which enabled
geologists to draw direct comparisons between the rocks laid down at
that
time in different parts of the world.

Having done so, they made a shattering discovery. In China, South
Africa,
Australia, Greenland, Russia, and Svalbard, the rocks record an almost
identical sequence of events, taking place not gradually, but relatively

instantaneously. They show that a cataclysm caused by natural processes
almost brought life on earth to an end. They also suggest that a set of
human activities that threatens to replicate those processes could exert
the
same effect, within the lifetimes of some of those who are on earth
today.
As the professor of paleontology Michael Benton records in his new book,

When Life Nearly Died, the marine sediments deposited at the end of the
Permian period record two sudden changes. The first is that the red or
green
or gray rock laid down in the presence of oxygen is suddenly replaced by

black muds of the kind deposited when oxygen is absent. At the same
time, an
instant shift in the ratio of the isotopes (alternative forms) of carbon

within the rocks suggests a spectacular change in the concentration of
atmospheric gases.

On land, another dramatic transition has been dated to precisely the
same
time. In Russia and South Africa, gently deposited mudstones and
limestones
suddenly give way to massive dumps of pebbles and boulders. But the
geological changes are minor in comparison with what happened to the
animals
and plants.

The Permian was one of the most biologically diverse periods in the
earth's
history. Herbivorous reptiles the size of rhinos were hunted through
forests
of tree ferns and flowering trees by saber-toothed predators. At sea,
massive coral reefs accumulated, among which lived great sharks, fish of
all
kinds, and hundreds of species of shell creatures.

Then suddenly there is almost nothing. The fossil record very nearly
stops
dead. The reefs die instantly, and do not reappear on earth for 10
million
years. All the large and medium-sized sharks disappear, most of the
shell
species, and even the great majority of the toughest and most numerous
organisms in the sea, the plankton. Among many classes of marine
animals,
the only survivors were those adapted to the near-absence of oxygen.

On land, the shift was even more severe. Plant life was almost
eliminated
from the earth's surface. The four-footed animals, the category to which

humans belong, were nearly exterminated: so far only two fossil reptile
species have been found anywhere on earth that survived the end of the
Permian. The world's surface came to be dominated by just one of these,
an
animal a bit like a pig. It became ubiquitous because nothing else was
left
to compete with it or to prey upon it.

Altogether, Benton shows, some 90% of the earth's species appear to have

been wiped out: this represents by far the gravest of the mass
extinctions.
The world's "productivity" (the total mass of biological matter)
collapsed.

Ecosystems recovered very slowly. No coral reefs have been found
anywhere on
earth in the rocks laid down over the following 10 million years. One
hundred and fifty million years elapsed before the world once again
became
as biologically diverse as in the Permian.

So what happened? Some scientists have argued that the mass extinction
was
caused by a meteorite. But the evidence they put forward has been
undermined
by further studies. There is a more persuasive case for a different
explanation. For many years, geologists have been aware that at some
point
during or after the Permian there was a series of gigantic volcanic
eruptions in Siberia. The lava was dated properly for the first time in
the
early 1990s. We now know that the principal explosions took place 251
million years ago, precisely at the point at which life was almost
extinguished.
The volcanoes produced two gases: sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide.
The
sulphur and other effusions caused acid rain, but would have bled from
the
atmosphere quite quickly. The carbon dioxide, on the other hand, would
have
persisted. By enhancing the greenhouse effect, it appears to have warmed
the
world sufficiently to have destabilized the super-concentrated frozen
gas
called methane hydrate, locked in sediments around the polar seas. The
release of methane into the atmosphere explains the sudden shift in
carbon
isotopes.

Methane is an even more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The

result of its release was runaway global warming: a rise in temperature
led
to changes that further raised the temperature, and so on. The warming
appears, alongside the acid rain, to have killed the plants. Starvation

then killed the animals.

Global warming also seems to explain the geological changes. If the
temperature of the surface waters near the poles increases, the
circulation
of marine currents slows down, which means that the ocean floor is
deprived
of oxygen. As the plants on land died, their roots would cease to hold
together the soil and loose rock, with the result that erosion rates
would
have greatly increased.
So how much warming took place? A sharp change in the ratio of the
isotopes
of oxygen permits us to reply with some precision: 6 degrees C. Benton

does not make the obvious point, but another author, the climate change
specialist Mark Lynas, does. Six degrees is the upper estimate produced
by
the UN's scientific body, the intergovernmental panel on climate change
(IPCC), for global warming by 2100. A conference of some of the world's

leading atmospheric scientists in Berlin last month concluded that the
IPCC's model may have underestimated the problem: the upper limit, they
now
suggest, should range between 7 and 10 degrees. Neither model takes
into
account the possibility of a partial melting of the methane hydrate
still
present in vast quantities around the fringes of the polar seas.

Suddenly, the events of a quarter of a billion years ago begin to look
very
topical indeed. One of the possible endings of the human story has
already
been told. Our principal political effort must now be to ensure that it
does
not become set in stone.
� George Monbiot's book The Age of Consent: a Manifesto for a New World
Order is published by Flamingo. His website is www.monbiot.com.

Guardian Unlimited � Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
-- -Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
http://www.anaphoria.com
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