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FROM The Guardian

Mass tree deaths prompt fears of Amazon 'climate tipping point'
Scientists fear billions of tree deaths caused by 2010 drought could see vast forest turn from carbon sink to carbon source

Billions of trees died in the record drought that struck the Amazon in 2010, raising fears that the vast forest is on the verge of a tipping point, where it will stop absorbing greenhouse gas emissions and instead increase them.

The dense forests of the Amazon soak up more than one-quarter of the world's atmospheric carbon, making it a critically important buffer against global warming. But if the Amazon switches from a carbon sink to a carbon source that prompts further droughts and mass tree deaths, such a feedback loop could cause runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences.

"Put starkly, current emissions pathways risk playing Russian roulette with the world's largest forest," said tropical forest expert Simon Lewis, at the University of Leeds, and who led the research published today in the journal Science. Lewis was careful to note that significant scientific uncertainties remain and that the 2010 and 2005 drought – thought then to be of once-a-century severity – might yet be explained by natural climate variation.

"We can't just wait and see because there is no going back," he said. "We won't know we have passed the point where the Amazon turns from a sink to a source until afterwards, when it will be too late."

Alex Bowen, from the London School of Economics and Political Science's Grantham research institute on climate change, said huge emissions of carbon from the Amazon would make it even harder to keep global greenhouse gases at a low enough level to avoid dangerous climate change. "It therefore makes it even more important for there to be strong and urgent reductions in man-made emissions."

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From the EWWWW YORK TIMES

What if Captured Carbon Makes a Getaway?
By FELICITY BARRINGER

The political clout of the fossil-fuel industries was driven home this year with the death of cap-and-trade legislation in Congress. Among those flexing their muscles was the coal industry, which is responsible for more than 45 percent of the country’s generating capacity.


Kevin Riddell for The New York Times

The AEP Mountaineer plant in New Haven, W.Va., which boasts new coal capture technology.
In August, the Department of Energy reported that coal-fired power generation was up 8.7 percent from a year earlier. Total generation rose somewhat less, about 7.4 percent. In the short term, at least, the more power we use, the greater the proportion will be coming from coal.

One leading solution to the problem to the fossil fuel emissions generated by a coal-fired plant is injecting it into underground storage areas thousands of feet below the surface, a technology known as carbon capture and sequestration. The Energy Department announced this summer that it would finance 15 separate projects to develop iterations of this technology.

But the technology may hold some unwelcome surprises if the carbon dioxide finds its way out and up to groundwater aquifers, a new study by Duke University researchers indicates. It could react with minerals there and increase levels of pollutants, perhaps so much that federal regulators would deem the water undrinkable, experiments suggest.

Two researchers took samples of dry sediments from groundwater aquifers that sit above likely sites for carbon storage in eastern Maryland, Virginia, northern Texas and Illinois and exposed them to a steady stream of carbon dioxide.

“The chemical composition of our groundwater experiments was significantly affected by the addition of CO2,” wrote the authors, Mark G. Little of Duke’s Center on Global Change and Robert B. Jackson, a biologist with the Nicholas School of the Environment. The hypothetical “groundwater” in the experiments became more acidic, which in turn had the effect of dissolving some of the minerals in the sediments.


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Alex Wissner-Gross has popularized the notion that the energy required for two google searches can power a kettle to make a cup of tea (equates to roughly 15 grams of CO2 produced). Cumulatively then, the 200 million plus searches a day are likley to have some negative impact on global warming, if that theory is proven correct. Its likely that this information is precedent to some sort of internet taxation ado with the environment (i.e. not the investment in alternative sources of energy that have been stunted in growth due to oligopical market forces) but a tax to ensure that you have to work more to consume the same amount.

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Canada’s dirty oil refuges are literally targets for sitting ducks! As the birds typically go plunge into the intoxicated waters to get a drink, only to get an intoxicating fix of pollutants instead!

The Alberta/ Saskatchewan method of tar sand oil extraction produces three times the greenhouse gas emissions (I.e. pollution) as conventional oil extraction. Output is expected to triple by 2020, as Canada begins to capitalize as the second largest oil surplus on the planet sandwiched between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The American owned Canadian industry uses 1-8 million liters of water a day. The conservative government in Canada doesn’t plan on meeting a UN climate agreement of a reduction by 20% by 2020, but is hoping that developing countries who consume 1/10th the amount should begin looking into cleaning up their act.

Meanwhile the ‘developing’ country of China is already making electric vehicles, as India makes ones that run on air… Yet we are told that the technology is not feasible! And don’t challenge the notion at all, because we prefer to have to keep working to buy more gas! Yippie! Just keep shaking fist at gas pump when the price creeps up again like raging caveman, between talking about the fkn weather!

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650 leading scientists who criticize the idea of global warming are going to be heard at a united nations climate change conference. It should be noted that this is 12 times the amount of scientists who authorized the official IPCC 2007 report. I don’t like to play into this distracting debate for reasons outlined in last weeks FadStomp but here is what these ‘nobodies’ are saying:

"I am a skeptic .… Global warming has become a new religion."
--- Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.

"The [global warming] scaremongering has its justification in the fact that it is something that generates funds."
--- Award-winning Paleontologist Dr. Eduardo Tonni

"The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn't listen to others. It doesn't have open minds ... . I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists."
--- Geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia

Could it be that environmentalists are having their efforts devoted to something that is completely fabricated in an attempt to divert them from things of more impending ecological importance? Yes the Icecaps are shrinking, but what is causing it? The global warming argument implies that we will destroy ourselves, it uses fear… Why should this be the motive we need, much less one so riddled in controversy. How about this for a motive… Because its cheaper, cleaner and just makes fucking sense! The environment shouldn’t need to be factor in reaching this sensible conclusion. So what does this mean then? Well if enough doubt is cast on the issue we may as well keep making gas powered vehicles right? Never mind the ‘practicality’ of doing otherwise! If we prove global warming is a scam, then how will I get my muscle car to make me look like the rebellious person I apparently... am not!



Meanwhile Its snowing in Las Vegas, and southern California…

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Millions of libertarian activists persist in wasting their timecards protesting the concept of global warming, which is an effectively distractive debate which has been devised in order to distract people away from the fact that we don’t need oil anyway… Global Warming deniers righteously insist, and in a misguided renegade haste, that humans are not causing the rise in CO2. They use this as a foundation for their rightful challenging of the proposed carbon tax, which they insist is another mechanism of social control, while inadvertently supporting the idea of the free market. Although it is true that trying to regulate peoples behavior will never diminish the underlying problem of greed. However in partaking in this distraction their efforts are leeched by right wing corporate ass whores who think that in discounting the theory of what’s causing global warming it completely makes up for things like:

Oil spills, resource extraction practices, legitimates consumerism, biomagnifications of toxicants in our foods, sedimentation, over fishing, destruction of wildlife’s natural habitats, toxic waste from industry, consumption based waste, depleting forest which absorb CO2, non-renewable resources which are being extracted, soil erosion, extinct species and shrinking species diversity, contamination of waterways, pollution, genetically modified food nutrient deficiencies and the ecological imbalances they create ETC.

Nonetheless they are expected to carry on playing into the debate which seeks to focalize ecological efforts on worrying about being taxed, because that’s what they have been conditioned to care about, money and self-preservation! Instead of these VERY REAL ecological threats which we are currently facing, they focus on the one which seek to compromise the fake money in their pocketbooks.

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Obama reveals his plan for a ‘cap-and-trade’ system approach to cutting green house gases, which his handlers claim will force a reduction in emissions to their 1990 levels by get this…2050! In spite of speculation as to the cause of global warming this liberal pipe dream claim that they will somehow bring levels down to that of 1990 (Which still entails a deathly release of Carbon monoxide according to people who purport this belief coupled with depleting natural forests, which should be mostly cut down by then) is monetary driven. His puppet masters are not expecting people to enhance their environmental ethics, rather they are going to tax people (most of which are merely at the whim of what’s given to them by the fake economies engineers) into complying! Which will drive even more greedy capitalists into poor countries… as intended, so to make the USA entirely reliant on international ‘free trade’!!! Yippie Toyotas for all! (not sarcastic at all…)

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