Water Scarcity Compounds India’s Food Insecurity

      A woman carries firewood in Gujarat on Aug. 6, 2012, as others rest under a tree after they migrated because of a water shortage. Reuters photo: Ahmad Masood

Since India’s independence, the mammoth task of feeding its hundreds of millions, most of whom are extremely poor, has been a major challenge to policymakers. In the coming decades, the issue of food insecurity is likely to affect almost all Indians. However, for the poorest amongst us, it could be catastrophic. India ranks 65 of 79 countries in the Global Hunger Index. This is extremely alarming.

In the past few years, uneven weather patterns combined with over exploited and depleting water resources in various parts of India have wreaked havoc on food security, particularly for small and marginal farmers, as well as the rural poor.

The recently launched Global Food Security Index (GFSI) estimates that in 2012, there are 224 million Indians, around 19 percent of the total population, who are undernourished. The same report also estimates that while the Indian government has various institutions designed to deal with the impact of inflation on food prices, it only spends 1 percent of agricultural GDP on research to build food security for the poorest. Overall, India ranked 66th on the GFSI. It is estimated that one in four of the world’s malnourished children is in India, more even than in sub-Saharan Africa.

Water insecurity, further exacerbated by climate change, is arguably the most important factor for India’s food security. India’s total water availability per capita is expected to decline to 1,240 cubic metres per person per year by 2030, perilously close to the 1,000 cubic metre benchmark set by the World Bank as ‘water scarce’.

Factors such as increasing usage, poor infrastructure, and pollution have led to a decline of water quantity and quality in India. Climate change, meanwhile, is expected to cause a two-fold impact.

One, increasing temperatures have hastened the rate of melt of the Himalayan glaciers, upon which major Indian rivers like the Ganges, Indus and Brahmaputra depend.

Second, the effect of climate change on monsoons in India will cause them to become more erratic, arriving earlier or later and lasting for shorter, more intense periods of time. India’s farming communities depend overwhelmingly on the monsoon, as their cropping patterns are built around it. The combined effect of climate change and over exploitation is violating the water cycle, degrading aquifers and  eroding ground water resources.

Over 50 percent of agricultural land in India depends entirely on groundwater. In North and Northeast India, where perennial rivers (rivers that have water year round, i.e. glacier fed rivers in India, such as the Ganges) sustain the agricultural land, have to deal with issues such as flooding caused by climate change impacts such as speedier glacier melt and erratic monsoons.

Meanwhile, farmers in states in West and South India, where rivers are seasonal, have to depend heavily on rapidly depleting groundwater resources.

The worst affected by this type of water-fuelled food insecurity are the small farmers of India. Estimates suggest that between 1995 and 2010, over 2,50,000 farmers in India, mostly from states like Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, killed themselves. Most of these farmers were drowning in vicious cycles of debt caused by failed monsoons and increasing droughts.

Responses to this crisis, including the National Action Plan on Climate Change, lay out various solutions and intended interventions, but most focus on the long term. To secure the future of India’s water resources vis-à-vis its agriculture in the future, it is important that certain steps be taken immediately. First and foremost, authorities will have to remove the mindset that water is an endless resource and the solution to water woes is simply a further development of India’s fast depleting groundwater.

Indeed, Dr. Mihir Shah, co-Founder, Samaj Pragati Sahayog (SPS) and member of the Planning Commission of India has stated that the ‘era of further water development may be over’ and emphasized that we have to urgently introduce more efficient water management. In this regard, promotion of irrigation efficiency will be crucial in the future.

Systems such as drip irrigation and System of Rice Intensification (SRI) to farmers across India will be essential. It will also be necessary to promote water conservation methods such as rain water harvesting, which has been successful in urban India, in villages as well.

At the same time, reducing inefficiencies and water wastage through conveyance losses will require governmental and NGO support in actions such as replacing faulty pipes and pumps.  Hence, India needs to invest on improving its water productivity, and any capacity to produce more food like rice with less water will be an important contribution to sustainable water and food security.

In short, India is facing a bleak future of becoming water scarce and painfully food insecure. How exactly are the country’s hundreds of millions, who depend entirely on agriculture for their livelihoods, as well as those that depend on agriculture for their food needs, to make ends meet?

Delaying this issue is simply not an option for India as this could lead to increased instability, poor human development and enhance inter-generational poverty. India needs to ensure food security through sustainable development and create resilience amongst the most vulnerable in the country: the poor.


reuters.com

UK And US Newspapers Give Climate Sceptics Most Column Inches

Climate sceptics feature more prominently in newspapers in the US and UK than other countries, and their views are more likely to go unchallenged in right-leaning papers, an academic study has shown.

Friday’s report, which was published in the Environmental Research Letters journal, delved deeper into data that was first published last year. For the study, 2,064 newspaper articles from the US, UK, France, China, Brazil and India over two three-month periods in 2007 and 2009-10 were scrutinised for the quantity and type of climate sceptic voices featured on both news and opinion pages.

The authors examined in particular the political leanings of each newspaper and concluded that there was “little evidence” that this influenced coverage of climate sceptics in Brazil, India and China. However, in the US and UK, and to some extent France, the political leaning of the newspaper did affect coverage of climate sceptics.

“The strongest evidence for a distinction between left-leaning and right-leaning newspapers can be found in the opinion pages in France, the UK and the US, where right-leaning newspapers are much more likely to include uncontested [climate] sceptical voices,” concluded the authors.

There were some surprises in the data, though, said the authors, James Painter of the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) and Teresa Ashe of Birkbeck College. For example, they found that there were slightly more articles of all types – opinion pieces and news stories – containing sceptical voices in the left-leaning newspapers from the countries studied, than in the centrist or right-leaning newspapers. But, in the left-leaning papers, the views of climate sceptics were far more frequently countered within an article by an opposing view.

The data was first released last year in a report entitled Poles Apart, published by the RISJ. It limited its search to two key time periods of climate coverage: the publication ofthe UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2007, and the release online of the hacked “Climategate” emails in late 2009.

It also differentiated between three types of climate sceptic featured in the chosen newspapers: the “trend sceptics” (who deny the global warming trend); the “attribution sceptics” (who accept the trend, but question the contribution of mankind’s emissions); and the “impact sceptics” (who accept human causation, but claim impacts may be benign or beneficial, or that the models are not robust enough to know).

The authors refrained from trying to theorise about why climate sceptic voices featured more frequently in the newspapers published in Anglo-Saxon countries, but did observe that “the presence of organised sceptical groups or individual climate sceptics in [the US and UK], and their virtual absence in the other four countries, could have been just as important driver of media outcomes as editorial decisions [of newspapers]. They are adept at getting their voices heard in the media when the opportunities arise.”

Painter, the lead author, said: “These results are significant because they do seem to support those who argue that climate scepticism is much stronger in “Anglo-Saxon” countries, such as the US, UK, Canada and Australia, as measured by its presence in the media. The data would also suggest a lot of the uncontested climate scepticism is found not so much in the news reports but in the opinion pages of right-leaning newspapers in the US and the UK.”

Painter added that the study left some intriguing unanswered questions: “It would be interesting to know what has happened since 2010. Others have reported that climate coverage in the media has fallen since then, but has the incidence of climate sceptics appearing in newspapers remained the same, or even increased proportionately? Also, ideally, a wider range of countries needs to be studied, including the study of countries such as Australia, Canada, Norway and eastern Europe, where climate scepticism is known to be prevalent. There is anecdotal evidence, too, that climate scepticism is now on the rise in the Brazilian media.”

The newspapers chosen for analysis were the Guardian/Observer and the Daily/Sunday Telegraph in the UK, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal in the US, Folha de São Paulo and Estado de São Paulo in Brazil, People’s Daily and Beijing Evening News in China, Le Monde and Le Figaro in France, and The Hindu and Times of India in India.

Separately, insurance company Axa published a survey on Thursday which showed that a higher proportion of respondents in the UK, US and Japan said they doubted climate science than in the other 10 countries polled, which included Turkey, Indonesia, Germany, and Mexico.

More than 13,000 people over the age of 18 were asked in an online survey whether they considered that climate change has now been scientifically proven. “Even in countries where people are least convinced of the scientific reality of this phenomenon (Japan, UK, the US), [climate] sceptics are in the minority (respectively 42%, 37% and 35%),” said Axa. Agreement was highest in Indonesia (95%), Hong Kong (89%) and Turkey (86%).

By Leo Hickman@guardiannews.com

Earth’s Carbon Sink Downsized

                                                                           Plants need enriched soil to make use of increasing carbon dioxide

As carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continue to climb, most climate models project that the world’s oceans and trees will keep soaking up more than half of the extra CO₂. But researchers report this week that the capacity for land plants to absorb more CO₂ will be much lower than previously thought, owing to limitations in soil nutrients¹.

Because plants take up CO₂ during photosynthesis, it has long been assumed that they will provide a large carbon ‘sink’ to help offset increases in atmospheric CO₂ caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Some scientists have argued that the increase might even be good for plants, which would presumably grow faster and mop up even more CO₂. Climate models estimate that the world’s oceans have absorbed about 30% of the CO₂ that humans have released in the past 150 years and that land plants have gulped another 30%.

But the latest study, by ecologists Peter Reich and Sarah Hobbie at the University of Minnesota in St Paul, suggests that estimates of how much CO₂ land plants can use are far too optimistic. Plants also need soil nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, to grow. But few studies have tested whether soils contain enough of these nutrients to fuel growth in proportion to rising CO₂.

“This work addresses a question that’s been out there for decades,” says Bruce Hungate, an ecosystem scientist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. "It's a hard question to answer, because it takes a long time to see how ecosystem carbon and nitrogen cycles change."

Long-term growth

In a 13-year field experiment on 296 open-air plots, the researchers grew perennial grassland species under ambient and elevated concentrations of both atmospheric CO₂ and soil nitrogen.

“Rather than building a time machine and comparing how ecosystems behave in 2070 — which is hard to do — we basically create the atmosphere of 2070 above our plots,” says Reich.

Reich and Hobbie found that from 2001 to 2010, grasses growing under heightened CO₂ levels grew only half as much in untreated as in enriched nitrogen soils.

Researchers do not have a firm grasp on the complexities of nitrogen and carbon cycle interactions, so “the vast majority of models do not adequately reflect nutrient limitation”, says Adrien Finzi, a biogeochemist at Boston University in Massachusetts. “The real strength in this study is that now we have this 13-year record of a single ecosystem. It provides a really strong case for the claim that soil resources and nitrogen limitation in particular can impose a major constraint on carbon storage in terrestrial ecosystems.”

A study published in March modelled nutrient cycling across the globe to predict how much carbon plants could sequester over the next 100 years when nutrient limitations are taken into account². Those simulations, which included nitrogen limitations in northern hemisphere soils and phosphorus limitations in the tropics, predicted that land plants will absorb 23% less carbon than is projected by other models.

Researchers say that much more work is needed to understand how nutrient dynamics will affect carbon uptake — particularly in forest ecosystems, which are expected to be important carbon sinks. Often, says Hungate, these ecosystems seem to offer a “partial, natural, easy solution” to the climate problem. “But it turns out that in reality, ecosystems are complex and only have limited flexibility.”

By Amanda Mascarelli@nature.com

Report Finds, Fox News Climate Coverage 93% Wrong

Primetime coverage of global warming at Fox News is overwhelmingly misleading, according to a new report that finds the same is true of climate change information in the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages.

Both outlets are owned by Rupert Murdoch's media company News Corporation. The analysis by the science-policy nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) finds that 93 percent of primetime program discussions of global warming on Fox News are inaccurate, as are 81 percent of Wall Street Journal editorials on the subject.

"It's like they were writing and talking about some sort of bizarre world where climate change isn't happening," study author Aaron Huertas, a press secretary at UCS, told LiveScience.

"It's clear that we're not having a fact-based dialogue about climate change," Huertas added.

The report, available online, focused on Fox News and the Journal because of both anecdotal and academic reports suggesting high levels of misleading climate chatter in each. UCS researchers combed through six months of Fox News primetime programs (from February 2012 to July 2012) and one year of Wall Street Journal op-eds (from August 2011 to July 2012), for discussions of global warming.

Fox's climate problems

The researchers found that Fox News and the Journal were consistently dismissive of the established scientific consensus that climate change is happening and that human activities are the main driver. For example, a statement aired on a primetime Fox News show on April 11 says, "I thought we were getting warmer. But in the '70s, it was, look out, we're all going to freeze."

The statement refers to some research in the 1970s that suggested a cooling trend, exacerbated by pollutants called aerosols (also known as smog). However, a greater number of papers, which represented consensus in the science community, in the 1970s predicted warming, according to Skeptical Science, a climate change communication website maintained by University of Queensland physicist John Cook. Temperature records have since improved, revealing the cooling trend was confined to northern landmasses. [10 Climate Myths Busted]

The most common climate mistakes on Fox News involved misleading statements on basic climate science, or simple undermining and disparaging of the field of climate science. For example, on March 23, one on-air personality referred to global warming as a "hoax and fraud." (The analysis did not look at non-primetime broadcasts or FoxNews.com.)

Misleading opinions

The misrepresentations in Wall Street Journal op-eds similarly twisted the science and disparaged the field, UCS said, though there were also examples of disparaging individual scientists, including calling NASA climate scientist James Hansen a "global-warming alarmist."

One March 9 column by Robert Tracinski called global warming a "bubble" and decried the "failure of the global warming theory itself" and "the credibility of its advocates."

Fox News and the Wall Street Journal did not respond to LiveScience's requests for comment. The organizations have not responded to UCS either, Huertas said, though they were informed of the report before it was made public.

The goal of the report, according to the UCS, is not to shut down legitimate debate on the appropriateness of various climate policies.

"It is entirely appropriate to disagree with specific actions or policies aimed at addressing climate change while accepting the clearly established findings of climate science," the authors wrote. "And while it is appropriate to question new science as it emerges, it is misleading to reject or sow doubt about established science — in this case, the overwhelming body of evidence that human-caused climate change is occurring."

The organization called on News Corp. to examine their climate-change reporting standards and to help their staff differentiate between opinions on global warming and scientific fact.

"This is happening no matter what, so we can have a sober adult conversation about it and figure out what to do, or we can turn it into another hot-button ideological issue," Huertas said. 

"Frankly, we already have enough hot-button ideological issues. I don't think we need another one."

Stephanie Pappas@livescience.com

Global Warming to Disrupt Arctic Species Migration

It’s very likely that human-caused global warming will disrupt the natural cycles of glaciation that have prevailed in recent millennia, and that could spell trouble for species that have relied on bridges of sea ice to maintain genetic diversity.

That includes Arctic foxes that were able to colonize Iceland during the Little Ice, according to research by scientists at the UK’s Durham University, who said that Arctic foxes were able to migrate to Iceland from Russia, North America and Greenland when such a bridge formed, between 200 and 500 years ago.

Iceland’s population of about 10,000 arctic foxes is not at risk, the researchers said, but explained that increasing isolation from the rest of the Arctic, caused by warmer temperatures and a lack of sea ice, could further differentiate the island’s population from their mainland relatives.

“During the Little Ice Age there was a great deal more sea ice in the North Atlantic than there is today and during the late 18th and 19th centuries sea ice routinely grounded on Iceland,” said Dr, Greger, Larson, of Durham University’s Department of Archaeology.

“Even today arctic foxes routinely travel hundreds of miles across sea ice and once the ice bridge was in place, they easily crossed the North Atlantic and were able to arrive on Iceland, increasing the genetic diversity of the population,” Larson said.

The multi-disciplinary approach used for this project could also be used to track the migration of other animals found on remote islands, the researchers said.

Ancient arctic foxes also crossed sea ice during previous ice ages to reach Iceland well before human settlement in the 9th Century. Warmer temperatures then melted the sea ice and isolated the ancient foxes on the island before the Little Ice Age reconnected Iceland to the mainland.

The Little Ice Age saw temperatures plummet in the 16th to 19th Centuries across large parts of Europe and North America in particular, and rivers such as the Thames were frequently frozen enough to support ice skating and winter festivals.

The researchers analysed DNA samples from ancient remains of Icelandic arctic foxes dating from two late 9th to 12th Century archaeological sites and compared the findings to DNA data from their modern successors.

They found that the ancient foxes shared a single genetic signature, while the modern population possesses five unique signatures.

The researchers were able to rule out different explanations for the increase in the amount of variation of the ancient foxes, including geographic reasons and breeding between farmed and wild arctic foxes.

The team concluded that the most likely explanation for the boom in genetic diversity among arctic foxes was migration across sea ice that formed during the Little Ice Age.Larson said the potential for animal migration decreased significantly during the 20th Century, a trend which global warming had accelerated.

“Without the sea ice, there will be no new fox migrants and thus the Icelandic population will continue to diverge from their mainland relatives,” he said.

Dr Larson added that the model the research used to determine the genetic diversity of the arctic fox could also be used to track the historical migration of other animals such as reindeer that are also found on Iceland.

By Bob Berwyn@summitcountyvoice.com

Too Much Advocacy? Scientists and Public Policy

James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, recently wrote in the New York Times that if Canada continues to pump oil from its tar sands, "it will be game over for the climate." This from the same climate scientist who warned three years ago, "We're toast if we don't get on a very different path."

Hansen may be a scientist, but neither statement is scientific. It's not clear what "game over for the climate" means -- either for the climate or for humans. His statement doesn't take into account that Canada's oil sands are a tiny fraction of the world's supply of fossil fuels. And the ramifications of climate on human life and industry lie well outside Hansen's expertise.

Hyperbolic and emotional as they are, these statements are examples of a scientist speaking not as a scientist, but as an advocate. They address policy, not science. And for these kinds of proclamations, Hansen is embraced by environmentalists and excoriated by climate-change deniers.

But what about all the people in the middle? People who may be willing to accept that the globe is warming, that humans are probably responsible, but still wonder what we might do about it?

Most likely, their bullshit detectors just went on high alert.

First, so you know, I am not a climate-change skeptic. Or a science skeptic. I believe most of what James Hansen says and that science offers a uniquely profound way to understand the world.

But by advocating policy positions -- overtly or by stealth -- scientists may be forfeiting their privileged positions as scientists and becoming just ordinary guys with opinions, and in the process, undercutting the credibility of their scientific work.

"I'm not saying that natural scientists aren't entitled to be people," says Jon A. Krosnick, professor of humanities and social sciences at Stanford University. "They are. Of course they have opinions about what they want government to do. They're entitled to express those opinions, to become activists, pressure government.

"However, bear in mind other people may be less convinced of your science after you do that."

Krosnick recently conducted an experiment that demonstrates that people are willing to trust a scientist who presents evidence for global warming and discusses the nature of a warmer Earth. But as soon as that same scientist urges listeners to write their politicians, people immediately began to suspect his motives and discount the accuracy of his scientific message.

If scientists realized as much, says Krosnick, "they may decide, you know what, it's not worth it. I'd rather maintain my scientific credibility and have someone else speak to the policy."

Advocacy -- overt and covert

"Scientists increasingly seem to be joining the political fray by equating particular scientific findings with political and ideological perspectives," writes Roger Pielke, professor of environmental science at the University of Colorado. "From the perspective of the public or policymakers, scientific debate and political debate on many environmental issues already have become indistinguishable."

At least Hansen's flag is flying in the breeze for all to see. Other advocacy masquerading as science is harder to recognize -- so difficult that scientists themselves may not see it.

George Wilhere of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife calls it "inadvertent advocacy" and labels it "professional negligence." Robert T. Lackey of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calls it "stealth policy advocacy."

The trend is particularly widespread in environmental fields. "Advocating personal positions on ecological policy issues has become widely tolerated as acceptable professional behavior and is even encouraged by a substantial fraction of the scientific community," Lackey writes in Conservation Biology.

A common example, Lackey says, is the widespread use of the innocent-sounding term "ecosystem health." But the phrase means nothing in science; it's just a metaphor to equate human health with a certain kind of ecosystem. But what kind? The writers who use the phrase usually mean a community of animals and plants that most resembles the ecosystem before white settlers plundered Eden.

"One person's damaged ecosystem is another person's improved ecosystem," writes Lackey. "Should a healthy ecosystem be defined as the ecological state that existed a thousand years ago, just prior to 1492, or at the end of last week? The answer is a value judgment, a policy choice, perhaps the product of political deliberations, but it is not solely a scientific decision."

Erica Fleishman, researcher at John Muir Institute of the Environment, University of California, Davis, had noticed stealth advocacy in the research papers submitted to Conservation Biology after she was hired as editor a bit more than two years ago. It didn't occur often -- in perhaps one paper in 10. But she began asking authors to strike unsubstantiated opinions and policy statements, or at the very least, identify them as opinions.

"In the scientific papers themselves I encouraged authors to use value-neutral language. Stick to the facts rather than emotion," Fleishman says. "I really wanted the journal to be seen as an honest broker of science to anyone who cares to use science regardless of their politics."

This spring, the Society for Conservation Biology gave Fleishman the boot. She was told that some authors and the governing board were, as Fleishman recalls, "unhappy with your insistence that policy preferences and value statements either not be included or be clearly identified as opinion in research papers."

Making meatloaf

So what? Scientific findings are just reflections of scientists' personal agendas, right?

Well, no. But that is a conclusion people easily come to. And once they do, they lose faith in science.

Michael Shellenberger, founder of the environmental Breakthrough Institute, pointed out a couple of years ago that a Gallup survey showed increasing numbers of Americans believe global warming has been hyped. And not just Republicans, but others, too. "Apocalypse talk is great red meat for the green base," Shellenberger writes, "but as Gallup shows, it is backfiring even among Democrats."

Jon Krosnick's recent experiment suggests why. In research not yet published, Krosnick recruited a national sample of nearly 800 American adults. Group one, the control, watched a video about making meatloaf. Group two watched a scientist talk about the science of climate change. And the third group watched the same scientist give the same talk, but with an added appeal to demand action from elected representatives. Then the viewers filled out a survey on their attitudes toward global warming.

Krosnick found that subjects who listened to the scientist discuss science scored the same on climate change as the group that learned to make meatloaf.

"In other words," says Krosnick, "the American public has heard a lot from natural scientists for a long time about their findings on climate change, and these particular participants did not manifest any changes in their opinion as a result of hearing yet another scientist say the kinds of stuff they're used to hearing."

But the third group, who heard the political appeal, were turned off. "First of all, people were less trusting of the scientist and of natural scientists in general after they heard the political statement," says Krosnick. "People were less supportive of government policies to address climate change than they had been if they hadn't heard that statement. In fact, people were less likely to say they even believed that climate change had been happening."

So what?

So, if more environmental scientists are willing to spout off or sneak policy opinions into their research -- what of it?

First, a lot of people will become not just skeptical, but unreasonably so. People are always looking for ways to avoid challenging information -- Al Gore's movie is called "An Inconvenient Truth," after all. By being able to suspect the motives of the messenger, listeners can discard the whole unpleasant message.

Second, not only will individual scientists lose credibility, but the whole scientific endeavor will become just another story, a narrative concocted for dramatic effect or self-serving motives. Science will become just another advocacy group -- in a lab coat.

Third, a collapse in credibility means that science will play an even less constructive role in public-policy debates. And when "stealth advocacy" enters the debate dressed up as science, it will become a proxy for clearly expressed values so that the values themselves are never discussed. As Wilhere puts it, "Inadvertent policy advocacy undermines the rational political discourse necessary for the evolution of society's values."

Finally, while scientists have plenty to contribute to public debate as "honest brokers" of scientific knowledge, they are not particularly good at staking out policy. This is why we elect politicians and hire regulators.

James Hansen (not to pick on him, but he's handy) is a climate scientist, but that's no reason to think he knows much about the economics of the carbon tax he has advocated. (Instead, one might look to an economist such as William Nordhaus, whose research has indeed supported the efficacy of a carbon tax, among other measures.)

Not to say that advocacy on the part of scientists is the sole cause of the nation's skepticism toward science in general and climate change in particular. More influential by far has been the terrific sum invested by fossil-fuel industries and their allies in challenging any science that the Earth is warming.

And Americans' religious beliefs and populism have inoculated them against even such basic, policy-neutral science as evolution.

But scientists' advocacy in politically charged debates does give opponents an opportunity to impeach their credibility and turn the conversation from science, which is hard to argue, to motives and doubt, which are a lot easier.

By GREG BREINING@startribune.com

Climate System Versus Weather: Extreme Events Narrow the Doubts

Heatwaves, drought and floods that have struck the northern hemisphere for the third summer running are narrowing doubts that man-made warming is disrupting Earth's climate system, say some scientists. 

Climate experts as a group are reluctant to ascribe a single extreme event or season to global warming. 

Weather, they argue, has to be assessed over far longer periods to confirm a shift in the climate and whether natural factors or fossil-fuel emissions are the cause. 

But for some, such caution is easing. 

A lengthening string of brutal weather events is going hand in hand with record-breaking rises in temperatures and greenhouse-gas levels, an association so stark that it can no longer be dismissed as statistical coincidence, they say. 

"We prefer to look at average annual temperatures on a global scale, rather than extreme temperatures," said Jean Jouzel, vice chairman of the UN's Nobel-winning scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 

Even so, according to computer models, "over the medium and long term, one of the clearest signs of climate change is a rise in the frequency of heatwaves", he said. 

"Over the last 50 years, we have seen that as warming progresses, heatwaves are becoming more and more frequent," Jouzel said. 

"If we don't do anything, the risk of a heatwave occurring will be 10 times higher by 2100 compared with the start of the century." 

The past three months have seen some extraordinary weather in the United States, Europe and East and Southeast Asia. 

The worst drought in more than 50 years hit the US Midwest breadbasket while forest fires stoked by fierce heat and dry undergrowth erupted in California, France, Greece, Italy, Croatia and Spain. 

Heavy rains flooded Manila and Beijing and China's eastern coast was hit by an unprecedented three typhoons in a week. 

Last month was the warmest ever recorded for land in the northern hemisphere and a record high for the contiguous United States, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). 

Globally, the temperature in July was the fourth highest since records began in 1880, it said. 

James Hansen, arguably the world's most famous climate scientist (and a bogeyman to climate skeptics), contends the link between extreme heat events and global warming is now all but irrefutable. 

The evidence, he says, comes not from computer simulations but from weather observations themselves. 

In a study published this month in the peer-reviewed US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Hansen and colleagues compared temperatures over the past three decades to a baseline of 1951-80, a period of relative stability. 

Over the last 30 years, there was 0.5-0.6 C (0.9-1.0 F) of warming, a rise that seems small but "is already having important effects", said Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. 

During the baseline period, cold summers occurred about a third of the time, but this fell to about 10 percent in the 30-year period that followed. 

Hot summers which during the baseline period occurred 33 percent of the time, rose to about 75 percent in the three decades that followed. 

Even more remarkable, though, was the geographical expansion of heatwaves. 

During the baseline period, an unusually hot summer would yield a heatwave that would cover just a few tenths of one percent of the world's land area. 

Today, though, an above-the-norm summer causes heatwaves that in total affect about 10 percent of the land surface. 

"The extreme summer climate anomalies in Texas in 2011, in Moscow in 2010 and in France in 2003 almost certainly would not have occurred in the absence of global warming with its resulting shift of the anomaly situation," says the paper. 

In March, an IPCC special report said there was mounting evidence of a shift in patterns of extreme events in some regions, including more intense and longer droughts and rainfall. But it saw no increases in the frequency, length or severity of tropical storms. 


Agence France-Presse

The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic

 

RICHARD A. MULLER

Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.

These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming. In its 2007 report, the I.P.C.C. concluded only that most of the warming of the prior 50 years could be attributed to humans. It was possible, according to the I.P.C.C. consensus statement, that the warming before 1956 could be because of changes in solar activity, and that even a substantial part of the more recent warming could be natural.

Our Berkeley Earth approach used sophisticated statistical methods developed largely by our lead scientist, Robert Rohde, which allowed us to determine earth land temperature much further back in time. We carefully studied issues raised by skeptics: biases from urban heating (we duplicated our results using rural data alone), from data selection (prior groups selected fewer than 20 percent of the available temperature stations; we used virtually 100 percent), from poor station quality (we separately analyzed good stations and poor ones) and from human intervention and data adjustment (our work is completely automated and hands-off). In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome effects unduly biased our conclusions.

The historic temperature pattern we observed has abrupt dips that match the emissions of known explosive volcanic eruptions; the particulates from such events reflect sunlight, make for beautiful sunsets and cool the earth’s surface for a few years. There are small, rapid variations attributable to El Niño and other ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream; because of such oscillations, the “flattening” of the recent temperature rise that some people claim is not, in our view, statistically significant. What has caused the gradual but systematic rise of two and a half degrees? We tried fitting the shape to simple math functions (exponentials, polynomials), to solar activity and even to rising functions like world population. By far the best match was to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured from atmospheric samples and air trapped in polar ice.

Just as important, our record is long enough that we could search for the fingerprint of solar variability, based on the historical record of sunspots. That fingerprint is absent. Although the I.P.C.C. allowed for the possibility that variations in sunlight could have ended the “Little Ice Age,” a period of cooling from the 14th century to about 1850, our data argues strongly that the temperature rise of the past 250 years cannot be attributed to solar changes. This conclusion is, in retrospect, not too surprising; we’ve learned from satellite measurements that solar activity changes the brightness of the sun very little.

How definite is the attribution to humans? The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect — extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does. Adding methane, a second greenhouse gas, to our analysis doesn’t change the results. Moreover, our analysis does not depend on large, complex global climate models, the huge computer programs that are notorious for their hidden assumptions and adjustable parameters. Our result is based simply on the close agreement between the shape of the observed temperature rise and the known greenhouse gas increase.

It’s a scientist’s duty to be properly skeptical. I still find that much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. I’ve analyzed some of the most alarmist claims, and my skepticism about them hasn’t changed.

Hurricane Katrina cannot be attributed to global warming. The number of hurricanes hitting the United States has been going down, not up; likewise for intense tornadoes. Polar bears aren’t dying from receding ice, and the Himalayan glaciers aren’t going to melt by 2035. And it’s possible that we are currently no warmer than we were a thousand years ago, during the “Medieval Warm Period” or “Medieval Optimum,” an interval of warm conditions known from historical records and indirect evidence like tree rings. And the recent warm spell in the United States happens to be more than offset by cooling elsewhere in the world, so its link to “global” warming is weaker than tenuous.

The careful analysis by our team is laid out in five scientific papers now online at BerkeleyEarth.org. That site also shows our chart of temperature from 1753 to the present, with its clear fingerprint of volcanoes and carbon dioxide, but containing no component that matches solar activity. Four of our papers have undergone extensive scrutiny by the scientific community, and the newest, a paper with the analysis of the human component, is now posted, along with the data and computer programs used. Such transparency is the heart of the scientific method; if you find our conclusions implausible, tell us of any errors of data or analysis.

What about the future? As carbon dioxide emissions increase, the temperature should continue to rise. I expect the rate of warming to proceed at a steady pace, about one and a half degrees over land in the next 50 years, less if the oceans are included. But if China continues its rapid economic growth (it has averaged 10 percent per year over the last 20 years) and its vast use of coal (it typically adds one new gigawatt per month), then that same warming could take place in less than 20 years.

Science is that narrow realm of knowledge that, in principle, is universally accepted. I embarked on this analysis to answer questions that, to my mind, had not been answered. I hope that the Berkeley Earth analysis will help settle the scientific debate regarding global warming and its human causes. Then comes the difficult part: agreeing across the political and diplomatic spectrum about what can and should be done.

Richard A. Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former MacArthur Foundation fellow, is the author, most recently, of “Energy for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines.” The New York Times Opinion Pages

One needs to note the date this video was recorded.

Richard Muller of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project discusses his recent Wall Street Journal article in that has caused a stir in the debate about climate change. Muller stands by the article but says the Journal gave the piece a misleading headline. Muller goes on to say that in his opinion, the earth is definitely warming but says skeptics bring up good points and criticizes Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." He also says some scientists are to blame for the confusion among the public on what the truth really is. Interviewed by Rob Nikolewski of Capitol Report New Mexico, 10/31/11.

Will Fire and Brimstone Help in the Fight Against Climate Change?

Leave it to some good ol’ hellfire to get the American public believing again in climate change. According to polling done last week by the University of Texas, 70 percent of Americans now believe that the climate is changing, compared to 65 percent just a few months back, and up from a low of 52 percent during the record winter snowfalls of 2010.

These changes, of course, come in the wake of record heat across the United States and a widening drought now afflicting 29 states and covering 61 percent of the continental U.S. With the drought damaging crops and driving grain prices up, food prices are likely to rise in the coming months.

If this isn't enough to alarm even the most hardened climate change denialists among us (who, for the moment, account for just 15 percent of the American public), then how about the fact that the average temperature for the month of June across the continental United States was a full 2 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the average for all of the 20^th century?

This increase made the 12 months ending in June the warmest stretch since recordkeeping began in 1895.

But here's more: Over the past two decades, winter-time droughts have become increasingly common across the Mediterranean region, a change that cannot be explained by natural variability alone; the earth is warming faster than previous models had predicted, the planet’s 10 warmest years have occurred since 1998, and 2012 is likely to be the hottest on record; and, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, 2012 in the Arctic saw the “largest June ice loss in the satellite record.”

So, will the seeming shift in American public opinion, fickle as it may be, lead to renewed vigor on the part of President Obama and other world leaders to save the planet for our children and our children’s children? If the Obama administration’s record on climate change is any indication, then the answer for now is likely to be no.

To be fair, the current administration has made minor yet significant progress. More efficient fuel economy standards are set to reduce oil consumption and greenhouse gas emissions for new vehicles. Plus, investment in alternative energy sources may someday wean us off our addiction to oil and other fossil fuels. The White House has even convened a Climate Change Adaptation Task Force, whose mission is to provide “recommendations on how Federal policies, programs, and planning efforts can better prepare the United States for climate change.” While I understand the need for such recommendations, I receive little comfort from them given the glacial pace (a phrase whose meaning is surely changing given retreating glaciers) of the broader federal effort to slow warming’s effects.

The president himself has had little to say on climate change, and, according to a Brown University study, has instead begun speaking in terms of “energy independence” and “clean energy.” As Maxwell T. Boykoff at the University of Colorado at Boulder pointed out recently, with such a shift “we wind up missing a thorough understanding of the breadth of the problem and the range of possible solutions.” Boykoff reminds us that “the way we talk about the problem affects how we deal with it.” “And though some new wording may deflect political heat, it can’t alter the fact that, 'climate change' or not, the climate is changing,” he concludes.

In terms of leadership, the president has been a failure on this issue, both domestically and globally. James Hansen, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA and one of the world’s leading climate scientists, agrees. "President Obama speaks of a 'planet in peril,'” Hansen wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed, "but he does not provide the leadership needed to change the world’s course."

It’s hard not to feel indignant at the negligence of the U.S. government to take real action on this issue, to be furious at the failure of the news media to report on our changing climate, and to feel exasperated at the failure of regular people, you and me, to do something about it.

So what can we do? Well, for one, we can keep talking about humanity’s impact on the changing climate regardless of last week’s heat wave, the current drought, or a snowy winter. Writing letters to the editor demanding coverage of the human and ecological impacts of climate change can make a difference. Call, write, or e-mail your elected representatives, too.

Last week in The Daily Beast, Mark Hertsgaard framed the problem as one of parents needing to protect their children. He’s helped organize a group called Climate Parents, and calls on parents to come together to “get politically active, employing the only language politicians respect: removing them from office if they don’t serve the public good.” Parents can address climate change first “by changing their family’s consumption patterns,” says Hertsgaard, recognizing that such changes, while limited in their overall impact, “make us think about how our individual actions affect our collective future.” More importantly, he writes, parents must agitate to change “the government policies and corporate practices that push greenhouse-gas emissions ever higher.”

Write and demand action from President Obama or, if you prefer, Mitt Romney (himself once a champion of action to combat climate change). If 70 percent of the public believes that climate change is occurring, that's a pretty persuasive force for any politician of any party. The trick, however, is not just to believe it but to do something about it. Our collective futures – our kids' futures – are up to us.

By Michael Yudell@philly.com Health