Climate In The Capital  

The APEC conference has broken up with some meaningless spin about aspiring to "do something" about carbon emissions one day as the final puff of hot air emerging out of the deserted and over-policed canyons of downtown Sydney. The Herald Sun reports that the reception offshore was chilly even in the US - "APEC scolded for climate change 'fakery'".

APEC leaders flew out last night, leaving the legacy of the "Sydney Declaration", hailed by John Howard as a historic step in the global fight against climate change. However critics have attacked the lack of binding emissions targets for the 21 APEC nations, describing the summit as a missed opportunity. ...

"The weakness of the APEC Sydney declaration is a sober reminder to Australia that being one of only two developed countries refusing to ratify Kyoto carries the high cost," Australian Conservation Foundation director Don Henry said.

In a stinging editorial, the influential Los Angles Times said the declaration was vague, and described APEC as a "festival of fakery".

The LA Times article noted there was lots of "posturing on climate" but that this amounted to "little more than theatre".

And the nominees for best actor at an international summit are: President George W. Bush, Chinese President Hu Jintao and Australian Prime Minister John Howard. All are giving compelling performances in Sydney this week in the against-type role of leaders who give a fig about global warming.

Climate change tops the agenda at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, which wraps up Sunday. It's an unusual topic for a 21-nation club formed mostly to negotiate trade agreements -- amid all the talk about global warming, Malaysian International Trade Minister Rafidah Aziz noted archly that the "E" in APEC stood for Economic, not Environmental -- but many of the leaders present have political reasons for at least pretending to care about the issue.

Howard, who is fighting for his political life against a much greener opposition party leader, has the most at stake. Australia is suffering severe droughts and wildfires, and polls show that the environment is among Australians' top concerns. His goal is to persuade the U.S., China and Russia -- the world's three biggest polluters -- to sign an "aspirational" agreement for reducing greenhouse gases. For aspirational, read: voluntary, vague and useless for anything but padding a fading prime minister's environmental resume. The heads of state are expected to sign the agreement today.

Even before most of the world leaders arrived, Howard and Bush had signed their own joint statement on climate change, a 16-point plan in which the two countries announced their commitment to practical action without actually proposing any. Bush threw out a few platitudes about global warming during his speech Friday before quickly moving on to a subject with which he's more comfortable: fighting terrorists.

Hu, meanwhile, in the diplomatic tradition of Chinese leaders, politely told Howard to drop dead. He emphasized that the United Nations, not APEC, was the appropriate forum for negotiating climate deals, and that although he welcomed the discussion in Sydney, any agreement at this week's summit must acknowledge that different countries have "differentiated responsibilities." Translation: Don't expect much from China.

Unfortunately, the festival of fakery won't end Sunday. Bush is convening his own international meeting on climate change this month in Washington, and given his focus on voluntary measures and nonexistent technology to solve the problem, there's no reason to expect anything meaningful to come of it. The only hope of progress this year comes from Congress, which is debating energy bills that would crack down on automotive fuel efficiency and require that the nation get more of its power from renewable sources.

Bruce Schneier has a good roundup of news about the stupid security at APEC (combining extravagant waste of taxpayer funds, over the top repression of any sign of complaint and incompetence in the face of someone actually try to sneak inside the security perimeter - as opposed to middle aged accountants trying to cross the road, along with massive economic damage to businesses in the afflicted areas).

The APEC conference is a big deal in Australia right now, and the security is serious. They've blocked off a major part of Sydney, implemented special APEC laws allowing extra search powers for the police, and even given everyone in Sydney the day off -- just to keep people away.

Yesterday, a TV comedy team succeeded in driving a fake motorcade with Canadian flags right through all the security barriers and weren't stopped until right outside President Bush's hotel. Inside their motorcade was someone dressed up as Osama Bin Laden.

Excellent.

Most excellent:

The ABC later released a statement saying the team had no intention of entering a restricted zone and had been wearing mock "insecurity passes" that stated the convoy was a joke.

"It was a piece testing APEC security and the motorcade looked pretty authentic," the Chaser source said. "They approached the green zone, and they just waved them through ­ much to their amazement, because the sketch was meant to stop there with them being rejected.

They were then waved through into the red zone, but rather than go all the way through they made the call to turn around. Apparently that was the first time the police realised it was not authentic and they swooped in and arrested everybody. Eight members of the comedy team, including the film crew, were arrested, as well as three hire car drivers.

The fake motorcade ­ three cars and a motorcycle escort ­had Canadian identification. "We just thought Canada would be a country the cops wouldn't scrutinise too closely," said Chaser performer Chris Taylor.

I've written about these large-scale social engineering pranks before (although at this point I doubt that the Super Bowl prank was real). The trick: look like you fit in.

I've also written about the Australian comedy group before. They're from a television show called The Chaser's War on Everyhing, and they've tested security cameras and Trojan horses. And interviewed ignorant Americans.

And APEC security is over-the-top stupid:

On the same day police won a court battle to stop protesters marching down George Street through the APEC security zone, it emerged yesterday that at least one cafe near George Bush's hotel has been ordered by police not to set outdoor tables with silverware, lest it fall into the wrong hands.

And office workers in Bridge Street's AMP tower have been told to stay away from the windows, draw the blinds and not to look at helicopters.

* Video of the motorcade and the arrests. Photo of the fake security pass.

* Great video from The Chasers on APEC and security, including some very funny footage about what normal people are willing to do and have done to them in the name of security.

I read the second book in Kim Stanley Robinson's series on global warming last week - "Fifty Degrees Below" which seemed to be a lot more fun and faster paced than I remember the first one being (although I read that quite a few years back).

The book deals with the onset of abrupt climate change and mostly stays within the Washington DC setting, dealing first with the aftermath of the floods described in the first book, and then moving on to examine how the climate deteroriates over the next year or so.

The book features a mix of sciences (both climate science and various social and behavioural sciences), a thread on living rough (both as a form of extreme urban camping and for homeless Vietnam veterans) and a number of subplots involving the security / surveillance world (particularly the use of mobile phones and RFID devices for large scale data acquisition for tracking people and the rigging of elections using hacked voting machine software). I wish I'd read this one before I'd written my review of The Shockwave Rider, as the surveillance related stuff (especially the use of predictive markets to make decisions on who is worth actively spying on) would have fitted in very well.

A couple of geoengineering techniques are put into play over the course of the story as stopgap measures to try restart the Atlantic conveyor current (by dumping vast volumes of salt into the northern Atlantic, in an effort funded by the big European reinsurance companies) and by releasing a genetically modified lichen into the wild in Siberia (by the Russian governmentr, who find that climate change isn't a good thing for them after all, as a way of accelerating tree growth and thus carbon absorption).

I'll include somef snippets from interviews and reviews of the books as well - first from Locus.

“As each book comes out, I'm supposedly an expert on that particular topic -- Mars, Antarctica, Nepal, Buddhism, climate change. I'm interested in all those things, but fundamentally as a novelist. You have to find new stories in subjects that are comfortable and interesting to you. Sometimes I'm attracted to storylines that seem to contain implications everyone will have to deal with. Not always.

“I have always believed that science fiction is the best way to express modern American life, because everything is changing so fast and because we're in a gigantic techno-surround that we can never escape. Essentially, we are living inside a science fiction novel -- one of those giant collaborative monstrosities -- and that's what history is now. On the other hand, if you live inside a science fiction novel, what does the science fiction novel (per se) do? Thinking of the future becomes more and more difficult. The future really is unpredictable, yet if you're writing science fiction seriously you still have to try at least to build a plausible scenario. Even that's getting hard.”

“My climate change novels are pretty personal, because they're about America right now, so I decided to base a lot of it on what I've known and seen myself. I hadn't really done that since The Gold Coast and Pacific Edge. When I started the series in 2001, I wanted to take on Washington DC -- I admit I had the long knives out -- to stick the place for the things that oppressed me when I lived there. But in writing the novel, I found parts of it I had enjoyed, and managed to reinvent my relationship to the place. Seeing the whole city with a writer's eye, years later, memory retains what's important at the most basic emotional level of symbols and feelings. Writing about Washington DC, I began to like it more from that distance in time and space. Also, as the setting for a novel it seemed to work like a charm. Then I thought there were strands of my own life now that I could feed into it -- things like playing frisbee golf in a park where there are homeless people. I don't necessarily think that's the best way to go about writing novels (it's certainly not the only way), but if you're going to write a lot of novels, it's a good thing to try every once in a while!

“My book is about global warming and what we can do about it. It's a mix of science fiction and present-day realism that all together is called Science in the Capital. You call it my climate manifesto, and if I have a manifesto for global warming action, I put it in there because I thought it would help make the novel stronger, not because I think I've got the final word on climate change. I tried to take what we all know already and put it into a story of what will happen next -- that's really just the standard work of making science fiction novels. So any manifesto within it is something the characters are doing: a kind of 'mission architecture,' as they describe it, a list of things that need to be done in order to combat global warming and achieve a decarbonization of civilization.”

Next from The Guardian.

In the wake of a tropical storm, a low-lying American city is drowning. Buildings are demolished and bridges knocked out; tens of thousands of people are without electricity or fresh water; hospitals are bursting at the seams with the sick and the dead.

Sound familiar? Of course it does. But this isn't a retelling of the last few weeks' events in the United States, it is the opening of Fifty Degrees Below, the second volume in science fiction maven Kim Stanley Robinson's latest trilogy on climate change. And the drowned city isn't New Orleans: it's Washington DC.

Set in an America of the almost-now, Fifty Degrees Below (and the first volume of the trilogy, Forty Signs of Rain) tells the story of the efforts of a loosely-connected group of scientists, campaigners and politicians to provoke a national response to the crisis of global warming. Unfortunately for them, as environmental aide Charlie Quibbler observes, it's "easier to destroy the world than to change capitalism even one little bit". It is not until the combination of two colliding storm systems and an unprecedented tidal surge causes Washington's Potomac river to bursts its banks and overwhelm the country's capital at the climax of book one that the world sits up and takes notice. But, by this point, the polar ice caps have already begun to melt in earnest, shutting down the warm waters of the Gulf Stream and creating environmental conditions that could usher in a new ice age. The last ice age, 11,000 years ago, took just three years to start.

These disturbingly convincing, exceptionally well-realised novels are the latest works from one of the undisputed leaders of the field in contemporary science fiction. Justly famous for his epic, award-winning trilogy on the colonisation of Mars, Robinson's brand of imaginative but grounded sci-fi, combined with his gift for riveting narrative, fine evocation of place and flair for acute personal and social observation, has brought him many devotees, from within the genre and beyond. The topical subject matter of his latest novel, particularly in light of its disturbingly prescient depiction of a US under siege from the weather, will no doubt bring him many more.

I phone Kim Stanley Robinson - Stan - at his home in California to talk about his latest novel, at the end of my day and the beginning of his. He sounds every inch the laidback Californian - charming, relaxed, more than happy to chat away about the trilogy and the ideas and political circumstances that gave rise to it. "I read years ago about the possibility of global warming leading to the West Antarctic ice sheet detaching, and the level of water displacement that would entail," he explains. "And I started thinking, well, what would we do? Would it be possible to do anything? And at that point you get into terraforming, and science fiction ... "

The concept of terraforming - transforming the landscape of a planet to acquire the characteristics of Earth - is central to Robinson's Mars trilogy, in which the characters attempt to effect climate change on a massive scale to warm the planet to habitable levels. In his latest books, Robinson turns this concept on its head: rather than shaping an alien landscape until it resembles Earth, he explores the possibility of manipulating our own environment to redress the damage we've done to it. But what seemed relatively straightforward on Mars's vast, uncomplicated canvas is infinitely trickier on a planet that already supports a complex, populous biosphere. Every proposed action (adding salt to the ocean to restart the Gulf Stream, shooting dust into the atmosphere to reflect light and heat back into space) is likely to produce not one but many reactions, most of them entirely unexpected, in what one ecologist in Fifty Degrees Below calls "the law of unintended consequences". The challenge in this trilogy - to which Robinson gleefully rises - is to work out how to operate within the constraints of a land already lived in.

"It seems so easy on Mars, and looks so hard on earth, which is kind of ironic," Robinson agrees. "It's infinitely more difficult when there's already an established ecology. There's no room for error. And also, alas, there are some mistakes that we simply don't have the power to correct."

Such as?

"Reducing the acidity of the ocean. That's a problem I've become more aware of since I finished book two - it will definitely feature in the third volume. Much of the carbon dioxide we're putting into the atmosphere actually ends up in the ocean, increasing its acidity and making it harder for the little creatures to live. They represent the bottom of the food chain and we're at the top of it. Scientists have looked at whether we could de-acidify the oceans after the fact, and the answer is flatly no ...

How does Robinson respond to Martin Rees's chilling claim in his recent book, Our Final Century, that we have a 50/50 chance of making it to the end of the century?

"My sense of it," Robinson replies after a meditative pause, "is that the odds are better than that. It's likely that we'll cause a small mass extinction, but I believe that ultimately reason will prevail. If the amount of money going into the war economy were invested in landscape restoration, we would be in a far more positive position. It may get a little dire before we pull together, but I think when the prosperous nations, and in particular the US, realise they're wrecking their own kids' lives, there will be a mass change in value. It will be a difficult century, and ugly, but I don't think that in the end people are so stupid as to kill themselves off."

Ah, the US. Robinson is of course an American himself, and apart from the odd nod to the wider world, his books are set in and deal exclusively with America. As evidence for human-triggered climate change has mounted over the past decade, the US's continued policy of wilful ignorance has earned it considerable disapprobation from the international community. To what extent, I ask him, does he hold his country to blame for current levels of global warming?

"I think the US is in a terrible state of denial," he says firmly. "Worse than that, we seem to be caught in a kind of Gotterdammerung response: we'd rather have the world go down in flames than change our lifestyle or admit we're wrong. Even here in California, 50% of cars on the freeway are SUVs, and they're political statements: they say, we're going to take the rest of the world down with us because we don't give a damn. Essentially they're Republican vehicles: when you see an SUV go by, you know the driver voted for Bush. I do think the world has larger global warming problems, but if the US were actually engaged in dealing with them, there'd be a sense that the worst abuser had seen the light and the whole world was on the same page. There's a really sizeable minority here who back measures to reduce emissions, but the political process is controlled by the Republican administration, which is basically in thrall to the oil industry. So it'll come down to another election - and with the last two elections both in their different ways perhaps having been stolen, we can't even really count on democracy anymore. It's pretty scary here."

Robinson makes his disillusionment with the electoral process clear in Fifty Degrees Below, when he moves beyond speculating about whether earlier elections have been fudged to postulating the existence of computer programs capable of deliberately fixing results. A number of striking parallels between Robinson's Republican president (who, following the flooding of Washington, declares the country to be at "a state of war with nature") and the US's present incumbent led me to wonder to what extent the trilogy was intended as a satire on the current political situation there.

"Well, there is a bit of that," he admits, "but it's very hard to be funny about this stuff, except in the blackest sense. If people were to mess around with elections nowadays, you'd never know - with the disappearance of the paper trail in 2000, we've been thrown into a world of surreal semi-democracy. You just can't be sure anymore. I thought it had to be talked about.

"And in terms of the president, there are similarities, but I wanted mine to be much nicer. The current guy is worthless, probably the worst president in American history. There's a sort of stupid, small-minded meanness - a pathological assholery - to him. I think he likes doing bad things. And I think a fair amount of his base approves of that resentment - against the idea of progress, against the future, against the rest of the world ...

And lastly, from Jamais Cascio when he was at WorldChanging.

Fifty Degrees Below is the second in Kim Stanley Robinson's climate change trilogy, and in most respects builds solidly upon the foundation he laid out in Forty Signs of Rain. As is typical for the second book in a trilogy, much is left unresolved at the end of Fifty Degrees Below; nonetheless, it's clear by the end of the novel that a great change has taken place, and that we're about to see the repercussions. There's a lot more action in Fifty Degrees Below than in the previous book, and I suspect we'll see even more when the next in the series comes out.

The core of the story is an abrupt climate change event pushing the Northern Hemisphere climate into the "cold, windy, dry" state of a persistent ice age. Winter temperatures across the Eastern Seaboard of North America and across Europe reach the titular -50°, a sufficient disruption to give the main characters (who all work for the American National Science Foundation) license to explore a variety of solutions -- from public education to political campaigns to rapid, extensive research into renewable energy and efficiency technologies. The greatest effort, however, goes into something almost unimaginable:

...it was the next slide, REMEDIAL ACTION NOW, that was the most interesting to Frank. One of the obvious places to start here was with the thermohaline circulation stall. Diane had gotten a complete report from Kenzo and his colleagues at NOAA, and her tentative conclusion was that the great world current, though huge, was sensitive in a nonlinear way to small perturbations. Which meant it might response sensitively to small interventions they could be directed well.

So, Diane concluded, this had to be investigated. How big a sea surface was critical to downwelling? How precisely could they pinpoint potential downwelling sites? How big a volume of water were they talking about? If they needed to make it saltier in order to force it to start sinking agin, how much salt were theyt alking about? Could they start new downwellings in the north where they used to happen?

Kenzo's eyes were round. He met Frank's gaze, waggled his eyebrows like Groucho. Pretty interesting stuff!

"We have to do something," Diane declared [...] "The Gulf Stream is an obvious place to look at remediation, but there are lots of other ideas for direct intervention, and they need to be evaluated and prioritized according to various criteria -- cost, effectiveness, speed, all that."

Edgardo grinned. "So--we are going to become global biosphere managers. We are going to terraform the Earth!"

"We already are," Diane replied. "The problem is we don't know how."

The notion of "terraforming Earth" in response to dramatic climate disruption is a familiar one to WorldChanging readers, and many of the concerns brought up in the novel -- do we know what we're doing? What kinds of unanticipated results will we face? Might we make matters worse? -- were common themes in the discussions following the Terraforming Earth posts I wrote last year. Robinson himself wrote a non-fiction piece on the idea, available as an inexpensive Amazon download.

The main terraforming method chosen by the protagonists is, as suggested in the excerpt, dumping large amounts of salt into the North Atlantic to restart the thermohaline circulation. But that's not the only one that happens, and it's likely that the third book will play out many of the possible results, both beneficial and dangerous, arising from the multitude of uncoordinated terraforming efforts.

Climate science and mitigaton efforts make up a recurring part of the novel, but are not the dominant element. Much of the book concerns the character Frank Vanderwal and his experiment in Paleolithic living. I wasn't entirely convinced by this aspect of the story, although I was amused by recurring references to the research of Dr. William Calvin, a University of Washington evolutionary neurophysiologist who, in the course of examining climate change as a driver for brain evolution, was the first to popularize the idea of abrupt (or, as he called it, "whiplash") climate change.

The book is also heavily political in a starkly partisan way. One of the main characters works for the Democratic candidate for President, who adopts a platform with climate as the key issue. The Republican incumbent bears a striking resemblence to George W. Bush, but is never mentioned by name (but pay close attention to the name of his scientific advisor...); much of the criticism leveled against the incumbent President in the book could be readily applied to the current real administration. Additional political subplots include hacked election machines, Total Information Awareness-style political markets, and (in a bit of prescience) illegal government surveillance of US citizens.

It won't surprise you to learn that I would have liked KSR to spend more time talking about the mitigation efforts and less time covering Frank's romantic entanglements and life as a scientist-by-day, caveman-by-night. Still, Fifty Degrees Below remains a highly readable and interesting story, one which could easily use WorldChanging as its "for more information..." reference. It is, in the end, a story in which scientists are heroes, denial is the greatest villain, and in the face of the greatest possible adversity, humankind is ready, willing and able to choose experimentation over resignation.

Fresh water from the melting glaciers of Greenland drove the stalled Atlantic conveyor current scenario in "Fifty Degrees Below", and these glaciers are melting very rapidly right now. The Guardian reports that scientists fear the ice caps melting faster than predicted

The Greenland ice cap is melting so quickly that it is triggering earthquakes as pieces of ice several cubic kilometres in size break off. Scientists monitoring events this summer say the acceleration could be catastrophic in terms of sea-level rise and make predictions this February by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change far too low. The glacier at Ilulissat, which supposedly spawned the iceberg that sank the Titantic, is now flowing three times faster into the sea than it was 10 years ago.

Robert Correll, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, said in Ilulissat today: "We have seen a massive acceleration of the speed with which these glaciers are moving into the sea. The ice is moving at two metres an hour on a front 5km [3 miles] long and 1,500 metres deep. That means that this one glacier puts enough fresh water into the sea in one year to provide drinking water for a city the size of London for a year."

Prof Correll is visiting Greenland as part of a symposium of religious, scientific, and political leaders to look at the problems of the island, which has an ice cap 3km thick containing enough water to raise worldwide sea levels by seven metres. Today leaders of Christian, Shia, Sunni, Hindu, Shinto, Buddhist and Jewish religions took a boat to the tongue of the glacier for a silent prayer for the planet. They were invited by Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of 250 million Orthodox Christians worldwide.

Prof Correll, director of the global change programme at the Heinz Centre in Washington, said the estimates of sea level rise in the IPCC report were conservative and based on data two years old. The predicted rise this century was 20cm to 60cm, but it would be at the upper end of this range at least, he said, and some believed it could be two metres. This would be catastrophic for European coastlines. He had flown over the Ilulissat glacier and "seen gigantic holes in it through which swirling masses of melt water were falling. I first looked at this glacier in the 1960s and there were no holes. These so-called moulins, 10 to 15 metres across, have opened up all over the place. There are hundreds of them."

He said ice-penetrating radar showed that this melt water was pouring through to the bottom of the glacier creating a lake 500 metres deep which was causing the glacier "to float on land. These melt-water rivers are lubricating the glacier, like applying oil to a surface and causing it to slide into the sea. It is causing a massive acceleration which could be catastrophic."

Increasingly powerful storms monstering the US mainland are also a feature of Robinson's climate series - Mother Jones has a report on "A Hundred Katrinas: Climate Change and the Threat to the U.S. Coast" - "If you thought Katrina was the big one, wait till you see what's coming to your neighborhood".

It's relatively easy to prepare for a high tide. The far less predictable threat from rising seas will be storms. Not every hurricane is a Katrina, but rising sea levels increase the likelihood and the intensity of flooding even from smaller tropical storms and nor'easters. If there's an extra foot or two of water near your home, floods will be deeper, and high water that once came along just once every century may instead happen once a decade. If that weren't enough, many atmospheric scientists are now saying that a hotter planet will also add to hurricane strength, meaning more major storms, massive storm surges, and higher winds.

New Orleans is the American city most vulnerable to this threat, but it's far from the only one. Galveston, Houston, Tampa, Charleston, and even New York are also exposed, and residents all along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, from Maine to Texas, will face increasing risks. Most of those risks have yet to be studied and quantified, in part because of the uncertainties involved, and in part because few scientists and government agencies have taken up the challenge.

In some sense, we had it coming. Ever-expanding shoreline development has steadily increased the size and costs of disasters—there is simply more stuff to be destroyed along the coast than there used to be. Worldwide, the number of major catastrophes each year has increased from two in the 1950s to about seven now, according to a study by Munich Re, the global reinsurance company. A 2006 paper by Yale economist William Nordhaus estimated that global warming would double the average annual cost of U.S. hurricane disasters—about $8 billion a year in 2005 dollars. Nordhaus also concluded that Katrina-sized disasters would occur more often due to global warming—once every 28 years on average, instead of once every 86 years. Another recent study generated an even more pessimistic number, estimating that by 2050, climate change could more than double annual hurricane losses worldwide. The threat of climate change has understandably set off alarm bells in the insurance industry. A United Nations task force composed of representatives of leading reinsurers and financial service companies concluded back in 2002 that "the increasing frequency of severe climatic events, coupled with social trends, has the potential to stress insurers, reinsurers and banks to the point of impaired viability or even insolvency."

National Geographic has a look at one proposed geoengineering technique for trying to temporarily mitigate the effects of rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere - ""Volcano Cure" for Warming? Not So Fast, Study Says".

A controversial theory proposes mimicking volcanoes to fight global warming. But throwing sulfur particles into the sky may do more harm than good, a new study says. The temporary solution would pump particles of sulfur high into the atmosphere—simulating the effect of a massive volcano by blocking out some of the sun's rays. This intervention, advocates argue, would buy a little time to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But as well as cooling the planet, the sulfur particles would reduce rainfall and cause serious global drought, a new study says. "It is a Band-Aid fix that does not work," said study co-author Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. It's just one of several drastic measures proposed to combat global warming, now that most scientists are in agreement that carbon dioxide, primarily from burning fossil fuels, is changing Earth's climate.

Trenberth and NCAR colleague Aiguo Dai studied worldwide rainfall and streamflow records for the world's largest rivers between 1950 and 2004. During this period three major volcanic eruptions occurred: Mount Agung in Indonesia in 1963, El Chichón in Mexico in 1982, and Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991.

It's well known that particles thrown into the atmosphere by volcanic eruptions cause a global cooling effect by reflecting back sunlight. In the case of Mount Pinatubo, global temperatures dropped by an average of 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit (0.5 degrees Celsius) the following year. But until now, no one had been able to pin down the effect that these volcanoes might have had on rainfall.

By carrying out statistical analysis on rainfall and streamflow records, the researchers were able to detect a significant drying effect after Mount Pinatubo's eruption. There was less rainfall over land, and a record decrease in runoff and ocean discharge into the ocean from October 1991 to September 1992, the scientists report this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The Energy Blog points to a NASA report showing that global warming is causing more severe thunderstorms and tornadoes.

Global warming will make severe thunderstorms and tornadoes a more common feature of U.S. weather, NASA scientists said today (Aug. 30). . . .

Researchers ran the model for a future climate scenario where carbon dioxide levels were double their current level and the Earth's surface was 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it is now. The model's projections showed that continents warm more than oceans (a result which is expected because water needs to absorb more heat than land to raise its temperature) and that lightning occurs at a higher altitude where storms are usually more vigorous.

These effects would combine to cause more continental storms to be of the strongest kind we see today, though there would be fewer storms overall. These conclusions are particularly bad news for the storm-prone portions of the central and eastern United States, where strong winds are a major source of weather-related casualties.

The western United States won't catch a break either—while it is expected to get drier, the storms that do form are likely to have more lightning, which could then trigger more wildfires.

Links:

* BBC - APEC deal 'muddies the climate waters'
* LA Times - APEC leaders set goals on climate change; protesters march in Sydney
* SMH - APEC: Identity parade of the secret police
* SMH - Kyoto is the only way, Hu tells Howard
* AFP - Global warming to decimate China's harvests
* SMH - Climate change may wash away China's dream
* Joseph Romm (Climate Progress) - NASA’s Hansen: Implications of ‘Peak Oil’ for Atmospheric CO2 and Climate
* The Press Telegram - Pacific, Atlantic storms set a new record
* CNN - Scientists: Dramatic sea ice loss by 2050
* Reuters - Islands emerge as Arctic ice shrinks to record low
* The Australian - Retreat of the penguins
* AP - Polar bear population seen declining
* Wired - NOAA Affirms Predictions of Sea Ice Loss
* The Independent - US National parks hit by global warming
* National Geographic - Glacier National Park: Crown of the Continent. "By 2030, Glacier National Park may have lost all its glaciers"
* The Guardian - Indian Ocean Haze Adds to Global Warming
* IHT - Global warming could mean more heart problems, doctors warn
* Jan Lundberg (Grist) - Climate can't wait for techno-fixes
* NBC - Long Term Drought Effects In Alabama
* Beyond The Beyond - Macedonian Sky Is Color of Analog Television
* Rolling Stone - The Secret Campaign of President Bush's Administration To Deny Global Warming
* Kent's Imperative - Predictive markets in futures studies
* Google Blog - Putting crowd wisdom to work At Google
* AP - Thousands of GIs Cope with Brain Damage
* Beyond The Beyond - Arphid Watch: Arphid Cancer
* Cryptogon - FBI Data Mining Reached Beyond Initial Targets