More than 40 North Carolina Mayors signed the agreement. Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory, leader of the largest city in the state, was not one of them.
When Greg Nickels became Seattle’s mayor in 2002, global warming was hardly at the top of the municipal agenda.
On Friday, as outgoing president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, he announced that 1,000 mayors across the country had signed on to a pact to meet the Kyoto protocol targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. They also will urge the federal government and the states to cut emissions by 7% from 1990 levels by 2012.
“I [had] assumed that our federal government was working hard to make sure we were protecting our future. I was wrong,” Nickels said in overseeing the signature of Republican Scott Smith, mayor of Mesa, Ariz. The pair were joined by more than a dozen other U.S. mayors.
Thanks to lobbying by the mayors conference, the federal government this year authorized $2.7 billion in block grants to states, municipalities and native tribes for energy efficiency and renewable energy projects. The group also successfully lobbied to get those types of grants placed in the federal climate change legislation recently introduced by Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and John F. Kerry (D-Mass.)
“The 100 top metropolitan areas represent 75% of the [gross domestic product] of this country. This is where the economy is. This is where the energy is. And this is where the solutions need to come,” Nickels said.
Seattle was able to reduce its 1990 carbon footprint by 8% in 2005, largely through voluntary emissions reductions by households and businesses. Many of those switched from fuel oil to natural gas.
Read the entire L.A. Times article here.
Why didn’t McCrory sign? Good question. Here’s one clue:
By far the single biggest beneficiary of Duke Energy political largesse during the four years studied was Charlotte mayor and 2008 GOP gubernatorial nominee, Pat McCrory, who took in $96,900. McCrory might be called Duke’s man in the race, literally, having worked in Duke Energy management for 29 years before quitting to run for governor.
Read more about the connection between Duke Energy and North Carolina politics here.
Though, given the recent press that Duke Energy is looking for green alternatives in China and predictions that Charlotte will be a hub of green energy genius, this news is a little confusing.
But, maybe this will help you understand why, while Duke’s efforts in China are laudable, the company’s CEO is still considered to be a major greenwasher by environmentalists.
This article appears in Sep 29 – Oct 6, 2009.
Frank, you’re saying we should ignore science and believe you because you like to repeat yourself and SHOUT in text to strangers?
No thank you.
Has Earth’s fever broken?
Official government measurements show that the world’s temperature has cooled a bit since reaching its most recent peak in 1998.
That’s given global warming skeptics new ammunition to attack the prevailing theory of climate change. The skeptics argue that the current stretch of slightly cooler temperatures means that costly measures to limit carbon dioxide emissions are ill-founded and unnecessary.
Proposals to combat global warming are “crazy” and will “destroy more than a million good American jobs and increase the average family’s annual energy bill by at least $1,500 a year,” the Heartland Institute, a conservative research organization based in Chicago, declared in full-page newspaper ads earlier this summer. “High levels of carbon dioxide actually benefit wildlife and human health,” the ads asserted.
Many scientists agree, however, that hotter times are ahead. A decade of level or slightly lower temperatures is only a temporary dip to be expected as a result of natural, short-term variations in the enormously complex climate system, they say.
“The preponderance of evidence is that global warming will resume,” Nicholas Bond, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, said in an e-mail.
“Natural variability can account for the slowing of the global mean temperature rise we have seen,” said Jeff Knight, a climate expert at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter, England.
According to data from the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Ala., the global high temperature in 1998 was 0.76 degrees Celsius (1.37 degrees Fahrenheit) above the average for the previous 20 years.
So far this year, the high has been 0.42 degrees Celsius (0.76 degrees Fahrenheit), above the 20-year average, clearly cooler than before.
However, scientists say the skeptics’ argument is misleading.
“It’s entirely possible to have a period as long as a decade or two of cooling superimposed on the long-term warming trend,” said David Easterling, chief of scientific services at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
“These short term fluctuations are statistically insignificant (and) entirely due to natural internal variability,” Easterling said in an essay published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in April. “It’s easy to ‘cherry pick’ a period to reinforce a point of view.”
Climate experts say the 1998 record was partly caused by El Nino, a periodic warming of tropical Pacific Ocean waters that affects the climate worldwide.
“The temperature peak in 1998 to a large extent can be attributed to the very strong El Nino event of 1997-98,” Bond said. “Temperatures for the globe as a whole tend to be higher during El Nino, and particularly events as intense as that one.”
El Nino is returning this summer after a four-year absence and is expected to hang around until late next year.
“If El Nino continues to strengthen as projected, expect more (high temperature) records to fall,” said Thomas Karl, who’s the director of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville.
“At least half of the years after 2009 will be warmer than 1998, the warmest year currently on record,” predicted Jeff Knight, a climate variability expert at the Hadley Centre in England.
John Christy, the director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who often sides with the skeptics, agreed that the recent cooling won’t last.
“The atmosphere is just now feeling the bump in tropical Pacific temperatures related to El Nino,” Christy said in an e-mail. As a result, July experienced “the largest one-month jump in our 31-year record of global satellite temperatures. We should see a warmer 2009-2010 due to El Nino.”
Christy added, however: “Our ignorance of the climate system is still enormous, and our policy makers need to know that . . . We really don’t know much about what causes multi-year changes like this.”
In addition to newspaper ads, the Heartland Institute sponsors conferences, books, papers, videos and Web sites arguing its case against the global warming threat.
The skeptics include scientists such as Richard Lindzen, a meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who thinks that climate science is too uncertain to justify drastic measures to control CO2. He calls the case for action against global warming “silly” and “grotesque.”
Others go further. For example, Don Easterbrook, a geologist at Western Washington University in Bellingham, thinks the world is in a 30-year cooling phase.
“The most recent global warming that began in 1977 is over, and the Earth has entered a new phase of global cooling,” Easterbrook said in a talk to the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in San Francisco in December.
Government scientists strongly disagree. “Claims that global warming is not occurring . . . ignore this natural variability and are misleading,” said NOAA’s Easterling.
In reality, global warming “never ceased,” said Karl, the climate data center director.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/74019.html
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Home » Global Warming » Global Warming Science and Impacts » Science
Global Warming FAQ
1. How do we know that humans are the major cause of global warming?
2. Why does CO2 get most of the attention when there are so many other heat-trapping gases (greenhouse gases)?
3. What is the latest climate science?
4. Does air pollution—specifically particulate matter (aerosols)—affect global warming?
5. How does the sun affect our climate?
6. Is there a connection between the hole in the ozone layer and global warming?
7. What is the best source of scientific information on global warming?
8. Will responding to global warming be harmful to our economy?
9. What are the options for the vast stores of coal around the world?
10. Is global warming already happening?
11. More questions?
How do we know that humans are the major cause of global warming?
The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states: it is a greater than a 90 percent certainty that emissions of heat-trapping gases from human activities have caused “most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century.” We all know that warming—and cooling—has happened in the past, and long before humans were around. Many factors (called “climate drivers”) can influence Earth’s climate—such as changes in the sun’s intensity and volcanic eruptions, as well as heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.
So how do scientists know that today’s warming is primarily caused by humans putting too much carbon in the atmosphere when we burn coal, oil, and gas or cut down forests?
* There are human fingerprints on carbon overload. When humans burn coal, oil and gas (fossil fuels) to generate electricity or drive our cars, carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, where it traps heat. A carbon molecule that comes from fossil fuels and deforestation is “lighter” than the combined signal of those from other sources. As scientists measure the “weight” of carbon in the atmosphere over time they see a clear increase in the lighter molecules from fossil fuel and deforestation sources that correspond closely to the known trend in emissions.
* Natural changes alone can’t explain the temperature changes we’ve seen. For a computer model to accurately project the future climate, scientists must first ensure that it accurately reproduces observed temperature changes. When the models include only recorded natural climate drivers—such as the sun’s intensity—the models cannot accurately reproduce the observed warming of the past half century. When human-induced climate drivers are also included in the models, then they accurately capture recent temperature increases in the atmosphere and in the oceans. [4][5][6] When all the natural and human-induced climate drivers are compared to one another, the dramatic accumulation of carbon from human sources is by far the largest climate change driver over the past half century.
* Lower-level atmosphere—which contains the carbon load—is expanding. The boundary between the lower atmosphere (troposphere) and the higher atmosphere (stratosphere) has shifted upward in recent decades. See the ozone FAQ for a figure illustrating the layers of the atmosphere. [6][7][8]This boundary has likely changed because heat-trapping gases accumulate in the lower atmosphere and that atmospheric layer expands as it heats up (much like warming the air in a balloon). And because less heat is escaping into the higher atmosphere, it is likely cooling. This differential would not occur if the sun was the sole climate driver, as solar changes would warm both atmospheric layers, and certainly would not have warmed one while cooling the other.
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/science/global-warming-faq.html#How_do_we_know_that_humans_are_the_major