Climate 411

Part 1 of 5: More Acidic Oceans

By / Bio / Published: April 5, 2007

The second installment of the IPCC’s 4th Assessment on Climate Change, titled “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”, will be released on April 6, 2007. In recognition of this report, I’m doing a weekly series called “Climate Dangers You May Not Know About“.

1. More Acidic Oceans
2. Drinking Water and Disease
3. Shifts in Lifecycle Timing
4. Drought and Violence
5. Melting of the North Pole

Everyone knows that carbon dioxide (CO2) warms the globe. But many people don’t know about its other dangerous effect. The build-up of CO2 is undermining ocean life through “ocean acidification”. I’ll start by explaining why our oceans are becoming more acidic, and then illustrate why this is so dangerous to ocean life and our entire food chain.

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Also posted in Oceans / Read 5 Responses

Can We Engineer Our Way Out?

By / Bio / Published: April 5, 2007

Yesterday I talked about the phenomenon of "global dimming", where pollution particles suspended in the atmosphere reflect sunlight back into space. Because they cause less sunlight to hit the Earth, these particles also cool the planet.

So here’s an idea for fighting global warming. Instead of trying to reduce greenhouse gas pollution – the root cause of the problem – why not use technology to counteract the effect of the pollution? For example, we could artificially add to the planet’s reflectivity so that the warming is cancelled by the cooling.

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Also posted in Geoengineering / Read 5 Responses

Drought Haiku

By / Bio / Published: March 30, 2007

Warming of planet
Shifts global winds and rain clouds.
Land parched, people starve.

Dry river bed in Eritrea – northern East Africa. Photo courtesy WFP/Brenda Barton.

Also posted in Extreme Weather / Comments are closed

Part 4 of 4: Green Technologies

By / Bio / Published: March 28, 2007

This is the fourth installment of a four-part series published each Wednesday on Action Needed to Stop Global Warming.

1. How Warm is Too Warm?
2. Worldwide Emissions Target
3. U.S. Emissions Target
4. Technologies to Get Us There

In Part 1 of this series, I defined the global tipping point as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which could cause sea levels to rise 20 feet. In Part 2, I showed that to avoid this tipping point, global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) must start to decline around 2020. In Part 3, I showed what the U.S. must do to help the world meet these targets.Meeting these targets will require significant changes in how we produce and use energy, and this makes many people nervous. They worry that the cost will wreck the economy, and they’ll have to give up their cars and air conditioning. Not true!

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Also posted in Basic Science of Global Warming, Energy / Read 11 Responses

Part 3 of 4: U.S. Emissions Target

By / Bio / Published: March 21, 2007

This is the third installment of a four-part series to be published each Wednesday on Action Needed to Stop Global Warming.

1. How Warm is Too Warm?
2. Worldwide Emissions Target
3. U.S. Emissions Target
4. Technologies to Get Us There

In Part 1 of this series, I defined the global tipping point as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which could cause sea levels to rise 20 feet. In Part 2, I showed by how much global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) must drop to avoid this tipping point. They must start to decline around 2020, drop 50 percent by 2050, and drop at least 75 percent by the end of the century.

Meeting these global emissions targets will require a global effort. Even if the U.S. and other developed countries were to cut their emissions to zero, global emissions would likely exceed the targets by mid-century. This is because of the rapid rise in emissions from China and other developing countries.

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Also posted in Basic Science of Global Warming, Greenhouse Gas Emissions / Read 8 Responses

Coral Reef Haiku

By / Bio / Published: March 16, 2007

Coral reef brilliance
Bleached white by loss of algae,
Killed by warming sea.


Left: Healthy corals (iStockphoto). Right: bleached corals (Ray Berkelsman, CRCReef, Townsville).

Also posted in Oceans / Comments are closed