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Global warming could reduce rainforest tree growth by 50 percent

Total addiction to fossil fuels

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Ed Gardener;39144:
Forreal, lets get this straight: you are absolutely confident that we can base our entire economy, food supply, energy production on burning fossil fuels, we can emit 30,000 million tonnes and rising of greenhouse gases per year, and you reckon there is absolutely no risk attached to that? Total waste of time diversifying our energy sources and anybody who suggests altering the composition of the climate is risky is a traitor supporting genocide. I’m so pleased you are not in charge. I am guessing you are neither a scientist, business leader or politician i.e. somebody who should be relying on the best available scientific information to make decisions that affect billions of people. You don’t get your information from rightwing american economic thinktanks by any chance do you? What happened in 1936 does not affect the fact that greenhouse gases have a greenhouse effect: that is known from laboratory experiments not climate models or historical data.

If it is so cut and dried, why do so many climate scientists disagree?

] It’s the climate cat and dog fight of the decade. When Al Gore alleged that Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming, it set off a firestorm in the atmospheric science community. A few prominent experts disputed it and the websites and email campaigns took over from there. A trip of NASA/Goddard researchers say that storms may at least be impacted by global warming. Previous climate model studies have shown that heavy rainstorms will be more common in a warmer climate, but the model developed by researchers Tony Del Genio, Mao-Sung Yao, and Jeff Jonas is the first to successfully simulate the difference in strength between land and ocean storms and includes how the strength will change in a warming climate. It predicts that in a warmer climate, stronger and more severe storms can be expected, but with fewer storms overall. Simulating the weather is tricky business. If we could accurately do it, we would be able to predict the weather more than a week in the future. The NASA global computer model instead represents weather and climate over large areas and evaluates when conditions are conducive to the outbreak of storms of varying strengths. To help calibrate, they tested it against current climate conditions. It was found to represent major known global storm features including the prevalence of lightning over tropical continents such as Africa and, to a lesser extent, the Amazon Basin, and the near absence of lightning in oceanic storms. [url=http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_account/nasa_predicts_global_warming_will_lead_to_fewer_storms_but_more_severe_ones:
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] The Washington-based think tank’s Vital Signs 2007-2008 report points to global patterns ranging from rising meat consumption to Asian economic growth it said are linked to the broader problem of climate change. “I think climate change is the most urgent challenge we have ever faced," said Erik Assadourian, director of the Vital Signs project. “You see many trends in climate change, whether we are talking about grain production which is affected by droughts and flooding. Or meat production as livestock production makes up about 20 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions," he said before the report’s release. Mr Assadourian said the key message of the report was that unsustainable consumption patterns were responsible for climate change linked to carbon emissions and other ecological woes. He said of the 44 trends tracked by the report, 28 were “pronouncedly bad” and only six were positive. The trends range from the spread of avian flu to the rise of carbon emissions to the number of violent conflicts. The growing use of wind power is among the few trends seen as positive. [url=http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22416510-23109,00.html:
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] Though Tanzania is only one of many African suppliers of timber to China, which include Gabon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Mozambique, the country’s contribution has skyrocketed in recent years. This is indicative due to an increase in Tanzania’s timber export market by almost 1,400 percent in value between 1997 and 2005. According to a report released in May by TRAFFIC International, a joint program of the conservation nonprofit WWF and the World Conservation Union (IUCN), China accounted for all indigenous hardwood logs and three-quarters of sawn wood and raw material exported between July 2005 and January 2006. The report also found that Tanzania lost 58 million U.S. dollars annually during 2004 and 2005 in timber revenue due to poor governance and corruption in the forestry sector. These illegal activities include logging without documentation, logging in unauthorized areas, and the use of invalid export documentation. The report cited the “chronic nature of petty corruption whereby even timber trade activities involving legally-harvested timber products were affected by bribery." Other observers have noted that the government’s regulatory bodies have not been able to keep up with the swift growth of the timber sector. More [url:
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] From Brazil to central Africa to once-lush islands in Asia’s archipelagos, human encroachment is shrinking the world’s rain forests. The alarm was sounded decades ago by environmentalists—and was little heeded. The picture, meanwhile, has changed: Africa is now a leader in destructiveness. The numbers have changed: U.N. specialists estimate 60 acres of tropical forest are felled worldwide every minute, up from 50 a generation back. And the fears have changed. Experts still warn of extinction of animal and plant life, of the loss of forest peoples' livelihoods, of soil erosion and other damage. But scientists today worry urgently about something else: the fateful feedback link of trees and climate. Global warming is expected to dry up and kill off vast tracts of rain forest, and dying forests will feed global warming. “If we lose forests, we lose the fight against climate change," declared more than 300 scientists, conservation groups, religious leaders and others in an appeal for action at December’s climate conference in Bali, Indonesia. The burning or rotting of trees that comes with deforestation—at the hands of ranchers, farmers, timbermen—sends more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than all the world’s planes, trains, trucks and automobiles. Forest destruction accounts for about 20 percent of manmade emissions, second only to burning of fossil fuels for electricity and heat. Conversely, healthy forests absorb carbon dioxide and store carbon. [url=http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8UIB0O80&show_article=1&catnum=0:
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