Antarctica is likely to be the world's only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remains unchecked, the Government's chief scientist, Professor Sir David King, said last week.

He said the Earth was entering the "first hot period" for 60 million years, when there was no ice on the planet and "the rest of the globe could not sustain human life". The warning - one of the starkest delivered by a top scientist - comes as ministers decide next week whether to weaken measures to cut the pollution that causes climate change, even though Tony Blair last week described the situation as "very, very critical indeed".

http://www.g0lem.net/PhpWiki/index.php/AbruptClimateChange

Climate Change--Clash of the Corporate Titans
http://www.organicconsumers.org/corp/titans072304.cfm

Clash of the Titans
An excerpt from Boiling Point highlights a clash of interests over climate change
http://www.gristmagazine.com/books/books072104.asp?source=daily


Informant: Teresa Binstock

JAMES REYNOLDS
ENVIRONMENT CORRESPONDENT

The Scotsman
July 22, 2004

MANY of the world’s most spectacular high-mountain rock faces could start crashing down at alarming rates due to global warming, scientists are predicting.

As well as changing the very shape and appearance of classic mountains, some of the climbs themselves could also disappear as higher temperatures destabilise the rocks by thawing the permafrost beneath them.

In Europe, concerns about disintegrating rock faces were brought into sharp focus last year when at least 50 people died in the Alps as a result of collapsing escarpments.

In a year that saw some of the highest summer temperatures for decades, many mountain paths, including classic routes on Mont Blanc, were closed because of the increased risk to mountaineers.

On the Matterhorn, the collapse of part of the Hornli Ridge, the easiest and the most popular route up the mountain, stranded 80 climbers who had to be airlifted off by mountain rescue services.

Because there was no unusual snowfall or rainfall to trigger the incidents, geologists suspected that thawing of the permanently frozen interior of the rocks was to blame.

Now, a new computer model, developed at the University of Zurich, adds weight to this explanation, the journal New Scientist reports today.

The scientists abseiled on to 22 rock faces in the Alps three years ago, drilling small holes and inserting devices to record the temperature of the rock.

After a year, they recovered 14 of these devices and used the data to fine-tune a computer model which shows how variations in climate affect the temperature of the rocks.

Stephan Gruber, one of the researchers, said: "Our model suggests that higher summer temperatures will heat some rock faces to such an extent that the permafrost, which glues the cracks and joints together, will melt and decrease the stability of the rock face."

Michael Davies, from the University of Dundee, found from his own work that rock faces could become unstable well before permafrost melts completely.

Ice normally acts like glue and helps to hold rocks together, but experiments he carried out showed that, as it begins to warm, permafrost loses its strength, making the cracks and joints in a rock face less stable. "This means temperatures don’t have to rise above freezing to make a rock face become unstable," he said. "Global warming could have an effect sooner than we thought."

One-quarter of the Earth’s land surface is frozen, with some of this permafrost in mountain ranges.

If global mean temperatures rise by as much as 1.3C over the next 20 years, as predicted, geographers believe that mountain ranges from the Himalayas to the Andes will be affected as permafrost starts to thaw.

Ian Hey, the technical and safety officer for the British Mountaineering Council, said: "Last summer was an unusually hot year, and it did seem that there were a greater number of rock falls of all sizes round the Alps.

"I saw a couple on the Petit Dru, an imposing and beautiful rock pillar that towered over the French Alpine resort of Chamonix, when I was out there last year. But the largest and most publicised rock collapse happened on the Hornli Ridge on the Matterhorn, the standard and easiest route up and down the mountain.

"Fortunately, no-one was hurt, but anyone above the collapse had no easy way down, so the Swiss mountain rescue service had to helicopter about 80 people off the mountain."

He added: "If this proves to be a long-term threat, then obviously it will have consequences for the sport of mountaineering and climbing.

"There have been years going back where very bad rock fall was also experienced, so I think it might be a bit too soon to say that it is a major problem," he went on.

"You could also look at the concern over lack of snow cover in Scotland in winter that is affecting skiing, which is obviously also a problem, and this has impacted on ice-climbing in the area as well."

http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=836672004


Informant: NHNE

http://tinyurl.com/6nexl


Informant: NHNE

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1260750,00.html


Informant: NHNE

Electromagnetic Energy in a Glowing Spherical Shell

Weird Weather Warfare & "Energetics Weapons"
Letter by T.E. Bearden

http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/6583/project138.html

The first KGB weather engineering tests over the U.S., using their relatively new interferometers, produced signatures of anomalous perfectly round holes appearing in clouds. These experiments started in 1967 or thereabouts. The Russians gave us that very severe "deep freeze" winter of 1967, as an initial weather-engineering test of their energetics interferometry weapons.

The KGB communists do have a sense of historical dates, and they often do things on certain dates in symbolic fashion. Full-time Soviet weather engineering over North America started in earnest on July 4th, 1976 - our Independence Day and our bicentennial. This was the KGB's "gift" to the United States on such a historic occasion. Full-bore weather engineering over the Americas has continued to this day, and even increased. It was passed into the hands of the Yakuza and the Aum Shinrikyo upon their leasing of those interferometers on site in Russia at the end of 1989. In 1985 I produced a rather crude videotape 42 (40 minutes) with pictures of the giant radial cloud signatures etc, associated with such weather engineering operations since 1976.

The basic weather engineering method is simple. Use an L[ongitudinal] W[ave] interferometer (LWI) to reach through the earth and cool the air in a region and produce a high pressure area, due to the densification of the air. Use another interferometer to heat another area and form a low-pressure area, due to the expansion of the air. Then carefully steer those highs and lows by gradually and slowing rotating the distant antennae and slowly adjusting the interferometry range simultaneously, according to a calculated schedule.

By that means, the LWIs easily catch, entrain, and steer the jet streams largely responsible for our weather. Put sharp loops and twists in that steering, and the huge angular momentum of the jet streams developed in those sharp turns and circles will spawn tornadoes, violent weather, etc.

The first complete weather engineering system over North America in 1976 also used the Woodpecker's normal EM carrier signals with dimensioning and internal assemblage of the composite longitudinal EM wavepairs. A giant "interference grid" was established over much of North America. A great deal of local adjusting of the interferometry in the grid was necessary. These local grid readjustments caused "sudden popouts" of EM energy, creating many atmospheric booms, rumbles, and explosions.

To really stir up big weather trouble, the Russians--and now the Yakuza and Aum Shinrikyo--also heat or cool areas of the ocean where El Nine and similar "water engines" form. A dimensioned LW interferometer is required for this operation. By slowly and protractedly heating or cooling the water in one of the "warm water engines" fueling the weather, one causes a very significant, long-term, later effect on perhaps an entire continent.

One can create great droughts in some areas, great floods in others, etc. The KGB has been doing this extensively, since 1976. The great floods in Red China a few years ago are a direct example of KGBNakuza weather engineering, as is much of the extreme heat of 1998. In fact, thanks to the weather operations of the Yakuza under their KGB mentors, 1998 was the overall hottest year on record till then, since records were kept. At least for the summer of 2002, the record may have been broken again, with a significant season of giant forest fires burning away.

One purpose of the excess heating of the atmosphere, of course, is to do damage. An added "benefit" to the KGB is to furnish support to the environmentalists who are concerned about global warming. Understand, there is indeed such a thing as global warming. But by augmenting the atmospheric (and ice sheet) heating just a bit in a single year, the statistical analyses are skewed. The skewed analyses will show that the global warming problem is far more imminent than it really is, if the LWI engineering of it were suspended. Nobody on either side of the global warming debate seems aware of the LWI intervention that is ruining the results of their models and calculations.

In turn, the heightened global warming indications, detected as a result of the LWI interruptions, impel strong activist support for such things as the Kyoto treaty, which is specifically designed to the strategic detriment of the U.S. if and when the U.S. Senate ever approves it. The Kyoto treaty does not even apply to some 160 countries including Russia, China, etc. This focuses a certain proportion of our government time and effort in grappling with an inflated global warming problem, immediately. It directly fits the KGB strategy of "spreading" our government energy and attention all over the map, anywhere but upon the coming strategic energetics strike and upon energetics weaponry.

The die-hard section of the KGB strategists are chess players. They will come at you anyway, anyhow, and anywhen that they can. Everything that can be impressed to serve or support the overall objective, will be impressed and used. That is the overriding principle when analyzing Russian KGB strategy.

Khrushchev meant every word of it when he said to Nixon in their famous Kitchen Debate: " ~Ye will bury you! " Interestingly, to this day Americans and their government officials have continued to be deceived as to exactly what Khrushchev meant. He meant it literally.

http://www.gaiaguys.net/bearden.weathwars.htm

By Julianna Kettlewell

BBC News

Monday, July 12, 2004,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3879841.stm

Strange things are happening in the North Sea. Cod stocks are slumping faster than over-fishing can account for, and Mediterranean species like red mullet are migrating north.

Several sea birds are also in trouble. Kittiwake numbers are falling fast and guillemots are struggling to breed.

And, earlier this summer, hundreds of fulmar (a relative of the albatross) corpses washed up on the Norfolk coast, having apparently starved to death.

Scientists suspect these events are linked and they are trying to work out how.

Nothing is certain yet, but some believe a dramatic change in North Sea plankton is responsible. And, what is more, they blame global warming.

Global changes

Plankton are microscopic free-floating marine organisms. Globally they are of vital importance.

Phyto-plankton (tiny plants) are behind 50% of the Earth's photosynthesis. And, along with zoo-plankton (tiny animals), they form the base of the whole ocean food web.

But, over the last 20 years, these little organisms have been undergoing a radical shake-up in the North Sea.

Everybody working in the North Sea is seeing big changes Sarah Wanless, Nerc Centre for Ecology and Hydrology Broadly speaking, as global temperatures rise, cold water species are moving out and warm water species are moving in.

"The North Sea was a cold temperate ecosystem in the 1980s, but since the 1990s it has changed into a warm temperate ecosystem," explained Martin Edwards, of the Sir Alistair Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science (SAHFOS), Plymouth, UK.

"So all the cold water species of plankton have moved much further north, and they are being replaced by more sub-tropical species."

Kittiwakes are declining rapidly

The decline of a particular species of phyto-plankton, which blooms in early spring, is key to changes further up the food chain.

Many small animals feed on this spring bloom - and even time their own emergence to match it. Now it is going, they are dying.

Dr Edwards said: "The spring bloom is declining, and the cold water zoo-plankton that feed on the spring bloom are declining as well - and so are the fish larvae that feed on the zoo-plankton."

And so - presumably - are other fish that feed on those larvae and the birds that feed on the fish.

Over the edge

Martin Edwards and bird expert Sarah Wanless, from Nerc Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, have got together to try to pinpoint how this is happening.

"We have already shown that kittiwakes are declining and declining quite rapidly - but at the moment we don't know the mechanisms," said Dr Wanless.

"And that is why we are joining up the bird work with the plankton work, so we can see how these links actually operate.

Amazingly the role of plankton has not been extensively studied in the past
"What Martin Edwards and his colleagues are showing is that there is a profound difference in the plankton in the North Sea, and we are seeing a decline in the sand eels that many birds feed on."

She continued: "We speculate these are climate driven changes, which are working their way right through the food chain. And we are seeing signals emerging from the birds.

"In some cases we are finding a whole lot of adult birds dead and in other cases that the birds are abandoning their chicks."

And there might be worse to come. Because sea birds are generally long lived, changes happen rather slowly. So what we are seeing now could be, some fear, the tip of the iceberg.

"Some species might decline to the extent where they are no longer present," said Dr Wanless. "And kittiwakes might well be one of the first to disappear."

Emerging picture

Amazingly the role of plankton, and how they are affected by climate, has not been extensively studied in the past.

"Work on plankton is hugely important," said Dr Chris Reid, the Director of SAHFOS.

"The world's oceans make up more than 70% of the world's surface and 50% of the primary production in the world comes from phyto-plankton, but as yet we have very little idea about how this changes regionally or with time."

Now, the story behind some of the North Sea mysteries is beginning to unfold.

Dr Wanless said: "Everybody working in the North Sea is seeing big changes, but what we need to do now is get everybody together, to try to piece the whole jigsaw together."


Informant: NHNE

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/resources/climate/2004-07-02-warming-bill_x.htm


Informant: NHNE