These days you never want a group of environmental scientists to get together because the news is rarely good.  The annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science met this last weekend and delivered more bad news.

It seems that it isn’t just the economy that’s in the toilet but the earth as well.  Truthout reports that the findings out of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University are frightening.  The dire warnings from last year are not only coming true but are worse than expected.

According to Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University,

We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model simulations.

In September of 2008, Blorge reported on the increasing loss of ice shelves and what that meant for the environment.  Ice holds CO2 rather well and the loss of ice means that the captured CO2 is being released.

The increased loss of ice and increase in the amount of CO2 being released is causing global warming to get worse.  This increase is resulting in more loss of ice and permafrost and more released CO2. 

Increasing the cycle are higher than expected fossil fuel emissions since 2000.  Most of increase comes from the heavy use of coal to generate energy in developing countries.

Scientists were looking towards the oceans and land plants to sequester greater amounts of carbon dioxide.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t look like these  ecosystems will be able to compensate for the loss of permafrost and ice.

The warmer weather is creating problems in the oceans.  Greater winds are reaching deeper levels and hampering CO2 collection.  The large amounts of CO2 already in the oceans are causing the oceans to become more acidic which in turn prevents the ocean from holding more CO2.

While plants are excellent, although slow absorbers of CO2 from the atmosphere, wildfires cause the rapid release of all sequestered CO2.  Wildfires like those in Southern California and Australia, quickly release yet more CO2 into the atmosphere.  Further hampering CO2 absorption are tree beetles.

Warmer weather, earlier snowmelt, drought and beetle infestations facilitated by warmer climates are all contributing to the rising number of fires linked to climate change. Across large swaths of the United States and Canada, bark beetles have killed many mature trees, making forests more flammable. And tropical rain forests that were not susceptible to forest fires in the past are likely to become drier as temperatures rise, growing more vulnerable.

The rapid loss of tropical forests so that biofuel crops can be planted is also wrecking havoc with the eco system.  As Peter Frumhoff, chief of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ climate program put it, this is the equivalent of “like weatherizing your house and deliberately keeping your windows open”. 

All in all, the news on global warming seems to only get worse.  All of the initiatives world wide have goals set for 2020 or 2030.  Since the environment seems to be deteriorating at a faster pace than predicted, those initiatives may be too little too late.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 12:56 am under Green Technology, Science and technology.

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